Forever Grateful

 My reading journey of Nir Eyal's Indistractable reintroduced me to these three powerful tools available to a writer: anecdotes, mythology, and tracing origin of words. Eyal starts a chapter with what is supposed to be a father-daughter quality time.  the set of activities, according to Ayal, included solving sudoku puzzles and building paper airplanes.  One of the questions that was part of this parent-daughter quality time was "if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you like to have?"  Eyal tells us that he never knew what his daughter answered because he became more engaged with his smartphone.  by the time he looked up, his daughter was gone. As I listened to this anecdote, I was reminded of a Ted Talk by Neil Connors.  In that talk, Connors asks how does a child spell love and answers "T-I-M-E".  As a reader, I can empathize both with Eyal's daughter's reaction as well as Eyal's deep sense of regret.  Indeed, this anecdote pr...

 Spent a bulk of the weekend  gooing through chapters from different audio books.  My favorites for this weekend are the beginning chapters of David Epstein's Range.  in these early chapters, Epstein contrasts the way Tiger Woods and Roger Federer built their dominance in theri respective sports. Tiger is an archetype for the early start as well as maintaining focus on one career track.  on the other hand, Roger Federer did a lot of sampling before settling for tennis.  Epstein then pursuade us that Roger's approach is a better fit for most of the career domains out there. Quoting Hogarth, Epstein gives us two learning environments: kind versus wicked. Golf is a good example of a kind learning environment.  It is a structured game whereby athletes can benefit from an early start.  Tennis, in contrast, furnishes an example of wicked learning environment. Roger Federer played sports including badminton, soccer, and other sports before settling for t...