WSJ: “Creative blocks aren’t exclusive to famous authors, or even to people we think of as being creative. We all get stuck.We make strides on a project—whether it’s mastering a sport, changing careers or building a company—and then, we just don’t…In “Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most,” [Adam Alter], the New York University marketing professor draws on research studies, anecdotes and interviews to reveal the self-imposed barriers that thwart our progress—and the actions we can take to surmount them. The first step, according to Mr. Alter, is to reframe our perception of failure. Bombarded by success stories, we often overlook the struggles and obstacles that came before them. The truth is that we all encounter roadblocks—Thomas Edison famously tried out more than 1,600 filament materials for his light bulb before finding the right one. We’re better served, Mr. Alter tells us, by recasting a barrier as “a feature rather than a bug on the path to success.””
NYTimes: ““Gentle parenting,” an approach that steers away from punishment and focuses instead on helping children become more self-aware, is the term that has caught on, but it’s sometimes used as a catchall for a set of emotionally-focused parenting styles. The prevailing ethos is that it’s important to acknowledge and understand a child’s feelings while maintaining boundaries, and that parents, in turn, benefit from recognizing their own feelings. “It’s a generation that takes learning and self-growth seriously,” said Becky Kennedy, 40, a clinical psychologist known as Dr. Becky to her nearly two million Instagram followers, and who Time magazine called the “millennial parenting whisperer.”…“Things like feelings not being soft, feelings being the core of who you are — there’s more acceptance of that,” she said. “I think it’s a generation that feels like, I have one life. I want to understand myself. I want to feel good.””
Atanu Dey: “The world is a complex place and we cannot hope to understand it without a good deal of effort. We cannot rely on just looking at the world superficially. We have to examine the evidence and reach our own conclusions. We have to be careful not to simply swallow whatever is presented to us uncritically. We should learn how to think. That’s hard. It is easier to just go along with what people tell us. They are telling us what to think, and what to believe. They want power over us to lead us to their preferred destination. We have to learn how to think and not be told what to think.”
Alexandra Samuel: “Whether you write a newsletter, post a lot or a little on social media, or just need occasional ideas for reports, finding something to write about is often the hardest part of the job. All too often, I think of something to write that I’m sure I won’t forget…only to forget it. That’s why it’s essential to set up a system for capturing all the different ideas you have, or even to capture little phrases or comments you might want to use in a future report, article or presentation. I used to keep all these random ideas in a tiny paper notebook, but flipping through page after page of scrawled writing made it hard for me to find the right idea when I needed it. So about 15 years ago, I committed to putting all my random ideas into a digital notebook instead…I have found that the more religiously you capture your ideas, the more the ideas will come!”
