Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe. Values are your core principles in life—they might be excellence and generosity, freedom and fairness, or security and integrity. Basing your identity on these kinds of principles enables you to remain open-minded about the best ways to advance them. You want the doctor whose identity is protecting health, the teacher whose identity is helping students learn, and the police chief whose identity is promoting safety and justice. When they define themselves by values rather than opinions, they buy themselves the flexibility to update their practices in light of new evidence.
Think Again
Adam Grant
Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.
Atomic Habits
James Clear
It follows from Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. If you set off in a spaceship at nearly the speed of light, and came back after your onboard calendar told you you’d been away 12 months, you would have aged only one year while all your friends back on Earth had died of old age. The world would be hundreds of years older, but you would be only one year older. Time itself on the spaceship, including all clocks and calendars on board, as well as the ageing process, would slow down as far as people on Earth were concerned. But not as far as everyone in the spaceship was concerned.
Outgrowing God
Richard Dawkins
Alas, there is no free lunch. It turns out that caffeine only appears to give us energy. Caffeine works by blocking the action of adenosine, a molecule that gradually accumulates in the brain over the course of the day, preparing the body to rest. Caffeine molecules interfere with this process, keeping adenosine from doing its job – and keeping us feeling alert. But adenosine levels continue to rise, so that when the caffeine is eventually metabolised, the adenosine floods the body’s receptors and tiredness returns. So the energy that caffeine gives us is borrowed, in effect, and eventually the debt must be paid back.
The Invisible Addiction: Is It Time to Give Up Caffeine?
theguardian.com
When you do that, you suddenly realize that her choice wasn’t between Choo shoes and non-Choo shoes. It was a choice between Choo shoes and non-Choo shoes plus lunch with a friend, groceries, a bottle of wine, lipstick, her daughter’s swim class registration, a tank of gas in her car, and saving $150 in her TFSA towards a dream trip to Italy. Because that’s an example of what Buddy-Lou could have done with the $520 instead. Economists refer to this as opportunity cost.
Wealthing Like Rabbits
Robert Brown