926 quotes from books that matter
We talk about their objectives, and the science underpinning our strategy. When it comes to specific tactics, I give them direction to help them create their own playbook. I almost never write out a prescription for them to follow blindly.
Decompression sickness isn’t just a danger during accidents; it’s an issue any time you use a pressure suit.
The Two-Minute Rule states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”
There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.
These onetime actions are a straightforward way to employ the 3rd Law of Behavior Change. They make it easier to sleep well, eat healthy, be productive, save money, and generally live better.
We needed to get him to say, “That’s right.” At the time, I didn’t know for sure what kind of breakthrough it was going to give us. I just knew we needed to trust the process.
My parents were no strangers to this hospital. Ten years earlier, they had entered the same building on the ground floor after my sister was diagnosed with leukemia at age three.
Don’t ask questions that start with “Why” unless you want your counterpart to defend a goal that serves you. “Why” is always an accusation, in any language.
Remember the amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear in reaction to threats? Well, the faster we can interrupt the amygdala’s reaction to real or imaginary threats, the faster we can clear the road of obstacles, and the quicker we can generate feelings of safety, well-being, and trust.
“No” is often a decision, frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo. Change is scary, and “No” provides a little protection from that scariness.
We all watched you. You sucked it all up and gave it all out.
There’s always somethin’ good even when it seems like there ain’t. It just lightens your heavy heart, is what it does.
Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop that involves four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.
For someone my size, that maximum amount would be nearly 300 grams per day, or the equivalent of seven or eight chicken breasts.
Our techniques were the products of experiential learning; they were developed by agents in the field, negotiating through crisis and sharing stories of what succeeded and what failed. It was an iterative process, not an intellectual one, as we refined the tools we used day after day.
Never forget that a loss stings at least twice as much as an equivalent gain.
Incredibly, my writing was read by over eight million people that year. Coaches in the NFL, NBA, and MLB began reading my work and sharing it with their teams.
Getting to Mars may require beautiful science and elegant engineering, but paying the rent? Only reality TV can do that.
The only way that we would be able to fight this was to adopt the philosophy of a decathlete—and apply it to aging.
I visualize my distress tolerance as a window that opens and closes vertically. The narrower this window becomes, the more likely I am to become dysregulated.
Emotions drive behavior. Every decision is an emotional decision at some level. Whatever your logical reasons are for taking action, you only feel compelled to act on them because of emotion.
The implementation intention formula is: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].
Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.
The very concept of Alzheimer’s prevention is still relatively new; we have only begun to scratch the surface of what might be accomplished here.