I started reading this book as a means to re-establish a healthy
relationship with my work after going through a rough patch during my PhD.
Below are quotes from most of the chapters that I thought summarize the
chapter and its teachings well.
Chapter 1: It's worse than you think (On the liberation of defeat)
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not
being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is
what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be
lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
-- Eugene Gendlin
When this sort of confrontation with limitation takes place, (Sasha)
Chapin writes, "a precious state of being can dawn... You're not seeing
the landscape around you as something that needs to transform. You're
just seeing it as the scrapyard it is. And then you can look around
yourself and say, okay, what is actually here, when I'm not telling
myself constant lies about what it's going to be one day?" With this
comes the bracing understanding that you might as wll get on with life:
that it's precisely because you'll never produce perfect work that you might
as well get on with doing the best work you can ... and see what happens.
There are no guarantees - except the guarantee that holding back from life
instead is a recipe for anguish.
Chapter 2: Kayaks and Superyachts (On actually doing things)
Almost nobody wants to hear the real answer to the question of how to
spend more of your finite time doing things that matter to you, which
involves no system. The answer is: you just do them.
Because the irony, of course, is that just doing something once today,
just steering your kayak over the next few inches of water, is the only way
you'll ever become the kind of person who does that sort of thing on a
regular basis anyway. Otherwise ... you're merely the kind of person who
spends your life drawing up plans for how you're going to become a different
kind of person later on.
Chapter 3: You need only face the consequences (On paying the price)
The conservative American economist Thomas Sowell summed things up with
a bleakness I appreciate, insisting that there are no solutions, only
trade-offs.
It was a central insight of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that
there's a secret comfort in telling yourself you've got no options,
because it's easier to wallow in the 'bad faith' of believing yourself
trapped than to face the dizzying responsibilities of your freedom.
Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of
facing consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that
finite humans ever get to enjoy it. Not freedom from limitation, which
is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in
limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs -- because there will
always be trade-offs -- and then to opt for whichever trade-off you
like.
Chapter 4: Against productivity debt (On the power of a 'done list')
As Marie Curie understood, our default stance is to measure our
actual accomplishments against all the things we could, in
principle, still do. But that's a yardstick against which we're
doomed to find ourselves perpetually wanting.
When you start to view each day not as a matter of paying off a
debt, but as an opportunity to move a small-but-meaningful number of
items over to your done list, you'll find yourself making better choices
about what to focus on.
Actions don't have to be things that we grind out, day after day,
in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally
getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be
enjoyable expressions of the fact that that's what we already are.