👋 Hello friend,
In this edition I want to share my favorite books, apps and quotes I discovered in 2022.
Maybe you can add some to your reading list or must-buy list for 2023.
🎤 New Podcast Episodes Released
I had a great interview with coach and mediator Bernd Cürten.
In this episode we talk about the (potential) way to wisdom and the difference between wisdom and knowledge.
The latest podcast episodes are in German. However, I will soon publish transcripts in English.
📖 My favorite books of 2022
4.17 ⭐ with over 16.000 ratings on Goodreads
Make it Stick: The Best How-to Study Book Currently Out There Summarizing 10 years of research on how to learn. A must-read for every lifelong learner.
4.15 ⭐ with over 5.000 ratings on Goodreads.
Building A Second Brain: Building your own Second Brain frees up mental space for your actual brain - to think, create ideas and focus on the essential things in life. A Second Brain is so much more than just a note-taking system.
4.21 ⭐ with over 18.000 ratings on Goodreads.
A Mind For Numbers: This book is for those struggling with science and maths. The author, Barbara Oakley, also created the most successful course on how to learn on Coursera, with over 3 million attendees.
📱 2 Apps I used to capture and resurface my best highlights of 2022
Notion: This is my go-to note-taking app.
The toggle feature, in particular, is an excellent way to incorporate active recall into your studying.
An example of using testing + spaced repetition in Notion.
Readwise: This powerful read-later app captures your highlights from ebooks and articles.
You can quickly review the best parts through a daily email and app. This totally changed the way I read.
💬 The Best Quotes of 2022
🌻 Quotes on Life and Mindset
"According to scientists who have studied the five Blue Zones, the keys to longevity are diet, exercise, finding a purpose in life (an ikigai), and forming strong social ties—that is, having a broad circle of friends and good family relations."
(Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, Ikigai)
"The happiest people are not the ones who achieve the most. They are the ones who spend more time than others in a state of flow."
(Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, Ikigai)
"Short-term pain has more impact on most people than long-term benefits do, which is why it’s so important for you to amplify the long-term benefits of not quitting. You need to remind yourself of life at the other end of the Dip because it’s easier to overcome the pain of yet another unsuccessful cold call if the reality of a successful sales career is more concrete."
(Seth Godin, The Dip)
"In other words, you are not the product of your circumstances so much as your circumstances are the product of your thinking."
(As A Man Thinketh by James Allen)"
🚀 Quotes on How to Learn
"Harking back to an example from sports (Chapter 4), a baseball player who practices batting by swinging at fifteen fastballs, then at fifteen curveballs, and then at fifteen changeups will perform better in practice than the player who mixes it up. But the player who asks for random pitches during practice builds his ability to decipher and respond to each pitch as it comes his way, and he becomes the better hitter."
(Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick)
"By abstracting the underlying rules and piecing them into a structure, you go for more than knowledge. You go for knowhow. And that kind of mastery will put you ahead."
(Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick)
"Students generally are not taught how to study, and when they are, they often get the wrong advice. As a result, they gravitate to activities that are far from optimal, like rereading, massed practice, and cramming."
(Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick)
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe" (fs.blog, Thought Experiment: How Einstein Solved Difficult Problems - Farnam Street)
"The thoughts of others imprison us if we’re not thinking for ourselves. Reasoning from first principles allows us to step outside of history and conventional wisdom and see what is possible.
When you really understand the principles at work, you can decide if the existing methods make sense. Often they don’t.
Reasoning by first principles is useful when you are
(1) doing something for the first time,
(2) dealing with complexity, and
(3) trying to understand a situation that you’re having problems with.
In all of these areas, your thinking gets better when you stop making assumptions and you stop letting others frame the problem for you."
(fs.blog, First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge - Farnam Street)
📚 Quotes on Broad Knowledge
"One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities."
(David Epstein, Range)
"Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly."
(David Epstein, Range)
🧠 Quotes on Thinking and Mental Models
"If you are trying to understand or figure out something new, your best bet is to turn off your precision-focused thinking and turn on your “big picture” diffuse mode, long enough to be able to latch on to a new, more fruitful approach."
(Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers)
A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks."
(fs.blog, Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained) - Farnam Street)“
🌊 Quote on Flow
"Second, our implementation of TTS includes accurate word mapping enabling a form of reading sometimes referred to as immersion reading. This refers to simultaneously reading and listening to the same document. It's a kind of sensory deprivation technique enabling you to quickly ramp into a flow state which would otherwise take 15 to 20 minutes of focused reading to attain."
(Daniel Doyon, Getting Started With Reader)
I wish you a good night, or a good day.
All the love, all the power,
xx Lukas