Photographed in Hong Kong.
Author: Rebecca Toh
new education
Watching Outlier with intense interest. Might even take one or two of their courses and earn some college credits in the process. Just for fun!
habit stacking
… really works.
Right after lunch every day, I study French.
French-studying is the habit I want to maintain, and lunch is the habit that I’m stacking French-studying on.
I’ll never forget to study French, since I’ll never forget to eat lunch.
Read more about habit stacking in James Clear’s words.
ten recent thoughts
1. Passive reading is not learning.
2. Resist the mind’s default of wanting to do easy things. (Easy is often greasy + unhealthy.)
3. Constraints create the conditions for freedom.
4. “Be grateful 1,000 times a day”. – Wahe Takeda
5. Peace of mind… is the true cure. And the holy grail.
6. Circumstances > thoughts > emotions > actions > our life. To change our life, we change our thoughts about our circumstances (since we often can’t change our circumstances).
7. Fill your life with the things that make you happy.
8. Be kind about the things you say about yourself to yourself.
9. To know yourself, keep failing.
10. We’re more than good enough – we are enough. =)
I like today.
It’s wonderful. This table I’m sitting at. This laptop I’m typing on. This view of the trees outside my apartment. My two cats sleeping on the couch. The fan whirling above my head. My fingers moving across this keyboard. The slightly overcast sky today. I’m happy to be where I am, and a little more.
Tomorrow might never come, and yesterday is over. Today is all I have. All the cliches in the world are true.
It’s wonderful to be here today.
after a break
I fell off the (blogging/writing) grid for a bit because I was in a don’t-feel-like-doing-anything mode. But I’m back, re-energised!
Talk/write more later!
a magical formula
1. Work hard (do the hard stuff).
2. Get 1% better every day.
finding
“You don’t put yourself online only because you have something to say — you can put yourself online to find something to say. The Internet can be more than just a resting place to publish your finished ideas — it can also be an incubator for ideas that aren’t fully formed, a birthing center for developing work that you haven’t started yet.”
– Austin Kleon
make a mess of life
Learning to tear down my own walls, disintegrate, reintegrate, learning to become child-like again, to play, to be messy, creative, uninhibited, to live without rules, to be fully myself, truly myself, to be honest, to roll through this world without guilt, to make things and break things and dream up things and fail at things, to live, to simply live… in this mess that we call life.
a forgotten blaze
“At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.”
– G. K. Chesterton