Reading Material – Page 3 – Curious Pursuit

Baby Steps to a Better Life

“Baby steps get on the bus, baby steps down the aisle, baby steps …” – Bill Murray as Bob Wiley in “What About Bob?” If you suffer from work paralysis, your problem might be that you don?t know how to take “baby steps”. Just like you can’t eat an entire Thanksgiving dinner in one bite, or weed your yard with a single pull … you also can’t get to where you want to be in a single moment. In “Getting More” the author, Stuart Diamond writes … An analogy: If you are a .280 hitter in baseball, and you get …

The Paradox of Choice

I’m just finishing a skim read of Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice. I’m sure if I read the entire book it would be very good. But appropriately, with everything going on in life right now … I chose not to really dive into this particular book. Instead, I did my usual “skim” method on the book … Speed read the first chapter to get a feel of the writing style and perspective of the author Bold type “skim” until the last chapter (or summary chapter) Read the last chapter As far as I can tell, it was a …

Olympic Lesson on Success

I was impressed by this recent article on American athlete’s success at Vancouver (from the Wall Street Journal of all places). A few things impressed me … 1. How little money was spent to target a “medals race” and yet how much success the team is having … particularly in events not usually dominated by American athletes. 2. How Bode Miller is crediting the ski team’s successful run with a more aggressive and exciting attitude toward their sport. He says, “The inspiration level is climbing. They see teammates on the podium and they want that, too. It’s not necessarily the …

Will Curiosity Kill My Brain?

I was listening to a podcast recently that mentioned the number of books in the Library of Congress in relation to what we can actually take in. The numbers were a bit old and a bit off. As best as I can tell there are now over 30 million cataloged books ? but over 140 million total items. You would have to read well over 5,000 of those items every day for 70 years to consume it all. Insane. Reading one book every week (close to my current average) for 50 years (close to what?s left of my current life …