"Once you're wired for distraction you crave it" — Cal Newport

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." — Albert Einstein

We all have different life experiences. Different strengths, weaknesses, and perspectives. I think a great trajedy in our modern algorithmic world is us losing sight of this. Algorithms that try to neutralise our differences and create uniformity towards artificial "perfection".

"Don't just read, interrogate." — my take from Arthur Schopenhauer's On Reading and Books

As Schopenhauer says, "When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process." An author's ideas are not infallible; they can often have incentives beyond truth-telling (such as financial, political, etc.); so it is important that you read critically. You shouldn't be aiming for "30 books a year"; instead, optimise for depth of knowledge, which may result in a single book taking months (or even a year) to finish.

"Attack the morning." — my paraphrase

In Meditations, Book V, Marcus Aurelius writes about rising in the morning to "the work of a human being." Cal Newport touches on a related idea (in Deep Work)through his discussion of attention residue: as the day progresses, parts of our attention remain attached to previous tasks, conversations, notifications, unfinished work, and things we have bookmarked (mentally or physically), analogous to computer RAM. In the morning, before much of this has accumulated, the mind is freshest.

"The morning is the youth of the day." — Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

Schopenhauer argues that the morning is the proper time for serious intellectual effort, when things feel fresh and our faculties are most fully at our disposal. For me, work feels substantially easier soon after waking than later in the day (I probably lie more on the extreme end— I genuinely cannot focus on tasks later during the day, yet I may find the same task trivial when done in the morning or soon after waking up). It took me years to figure out this was the problem; I didn't know why I couldn't focus on tasks.