The Best Minute: On mistakes, being an expert, and what we mean by “busy”
2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS
I. Gretchen Rubin on rebounding from mistakes:
“Instead of feeling that you’ve blown the day and thinking, ‘I'll get back on track tomorrow,’ try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoon, evening. If you blow one quarter, you get back on track for the next quarter.
Fail small, not big.”
II. Niels Bohr on how to be an expert:
“An expert is a person who has found out by painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.”
2 IDEAS FROM ME
I. When we say we are “busy,” we typically mean one of four things:
I’m reactive, not proactive, with my time
I don’t prioritize things well
I don’t have the courage to be honest (i.e. I never tell people “no” so I have too much going on)
Look at how important I am
Saying “I’m really busy” is easier than admitting these truths, so we prefer to use the ambiguous word busy.
II. God always responds to repentance with grace.
1 RANDOM FACT
The tea bag was an accidental invention.
In 1908, New York tea merchant Thomas Sullivan sent samples of tea leaves to some of his customers in small silken bags. Many of the recipients assumed that the bags were supposed to be used in the same way as the metal infusers. So, they put the entire bag into the teapot, rather than emptying out its contents.
After such positive feedback from the happy accident, Sullivan designed intentional teabags for commercial production. In the 1920s, his sachets made of gauze—and later, paper—included the string with the tag hanging over the side so the bag could be easily removed.
Source: Best Life
1 QUESTION TO LEAVE YOU WITH
If I only had half the time to accomplish this, what would I do differently?
