Warren Buffett: “What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things. In the 58 years we’ve been running Berkshire, I’d say there has been a great increase in the number of people doing dumb things.” More: “You should write your obituary and then try to figure out how to live up to it.”
Technology Review: “A growing group of experts and educators are trying to figure out what the relationship should be between digital technology and reading instruction. Both reading and digital tech are world-expanding human inventions, and laptops and smartphones have arguably given humans unending opportunities to read more; you can access pretty much anything in print within a few seconds. In terms of “raw words,” the cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham has said, kids read more now than they did a decade ago. But many reading experts suspect that the technology may also be changing how they read—that reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading on the page.”
WSJ: “The tools of our lives, from car dashboard screens to buzzing phones, fracture our attention while promising that we can do it all, all the time. Except we can’t. “You can’t multitask,” says Earl K. Miller, a neuroscience professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Our brains are wired to do just one cognitively demanding thing at a time, he says. We tell ourselves we’re multitasking, when what we’re actually doing is task-switching, rapidly shifting from one thing to the next. As we toggle, our minds stumble as we try to recall where we were and what we were doing, he says. Juggling tasks makes us less creative and more prone to errors; the quality of our work suffers…Our brains aren’t wired to juggle tasks.”
WaPo profiles Dean Koontz: “Author of more than 110 books…he’s sold more than 500 million books, writes two novels every year, lives like a prince and keeps his manuscripts in the fridge in case of fire.” More: “Koontz is billed as the “international best-selling master of suspense,” though he eschews labels and writes in multiple genres — supernatural, science fiction, young adult, manga, dog. Frequently, his books fuse several and are dusted with humor. “You can’t tie him down,” his friend and fellow best-selling author Jonathan Kellerman says. “He just works all the time. He has a lot of anxiety but manages to channel it into fiction.” Ten hours a day, six days a week — more nearing the end of each book, “when momentum carries me like a leaf on a flood.” He revises constantly, an average of 20 times before he proceeds to the next page. “When the writing is working, nothing stops me,” he says.”
