I can’t remember where I got this recipe from, but it’s a fall favorite.

• 8 cups beets, cubed
• 4 cups yellow fleshed potatoes, cubed
• 3 cups carrots, sliced
• 4 cups kale/beet greens/cabbage, sliced thinly 
• 2 cups onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbs olive oil
• 8 cups veggie stock and water
• 1 lemon, juiced
• Salt and pepper to taste 
• 1-2 tbs dill
• 1 cup raw cashews 
• 1/4 cup water
• Juice of more lemon

Prepare the garlic, onions, beets, potatoes, greens and carrots. Cut the beets, potatoes and carrots to be bite-sized chunks.

Heat the olive oil in a large soup pot over medium heat. Sauté the onions and garlic until the onions are translucent (about 5 minutes).

Add the potatoes, beets and carrots and sauté for another 5 minutes

Add the vegetable stock and salt and bring the soup to a boil for 10 minutes.

Add the shredded greens, reduce heat and cover. Simmer for 30-40 minutes.

Purée the soup.

Blend cashews, water, dill and lemon juice, stir into soup

from Charlie Warzel in the Atlantic

“But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not.”

and

“What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality.”

Varied Thrush and Pacific Wren singing this morning, recorded via the Merlin App.

I’ve thought about this lovely post from Wil Wheaton the past month as the garden leaps to bloom.

“There are so many metaphors in my garden: the bits I tried so hard to grow that never took root. The plants I have cared for season after season that have reached the end of their natural lives and will be cleared away for new plants. The flowers I pollinate myself. The scars where I pruned dead or dying stems. The new, delicate, hopeful growth.”

Finished reading: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport 📚

One of the main obstacles to doing deep work is the urge to turn your attention toward something more superficial.

A 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister found that people fight desires all day long; the lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong -their subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time.

“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.”

Decide on Your Depth Philosophy

• Monastic: avoid all distractions constantly (see: Neal Stephenson)

• Bimodal: divide time with defined stretches of deep work; the balance for everything else

• Rhythmic: daily or weekly regular habit of dedicated time

• Journalistic: fit deep work whenever you can

Ritualize your approach based on your philosophy. Location, environment are key.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution

1. Focus on the Wildly Important: Identify goals, and measure success

2. Act on the Lead Measures: Hours spent working deeply, for instance

3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

4. Create a Cadence of Accountability: Weekly review

Be Lazy - ensure adequate time for unstructured rest time that allows your unconcious mind to sort through your deep work. directed attention is a finite resource; if you exhaust it, you will struggle to concentrate. Rest allows you to replenish attention.

“…for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.”

“To succeed with this strategy, you must first accept the commitment that once your workday shuts down, you cannot allow even the smallest incursion of professional concerns into your field of attention. This includes, crucially, checking e-mail, as well as browsing work-related websites.”

Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus. Schedule in advance when you will use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times.

Work like Teddy Roosevelt. Estimate how long you would normally put aside for a deep work goal, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity—no e-mail breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee machine.

Meditate Productively: Think in a structured fashion while walking or some other physical “autopilot” activity.

Memorize a Deck of Cards: intensive memory development improves cognitive performance across the board, particularly directed attention. Practice using a deck of cards, utilizing the “remember scenes” approach:

“To prepare for this high-volume memorization task, White recommends that you begin by cementing in your mind the mental image of walking through five rooms in your home. The second step in preparing to memorize a deck of cards is to associate a memorable person or thing with each of the fifty-two possible cards. To make this process easier, try to maintain some logical association between the card and the corresponding image. White provides the example of associating Donald Trump with the King of Diamonds, as diamonds signify wealth. Practice these associations until you can pull a card randomly from the deck and immediately recall the associated image. Once you can easily recall this mental walkthrough of a well-known location, fix in your mind a collection of ten items in each of these rooms. White recommends that these items be large (and therefore more memorable), like a desk, not a pencil. Next, establish an order in which you look at each of these items in each room. For example, in the front hallway, you might look at the entry mat, then shoes on the floor by the mat, then the bench above the shoes, and so on. Combined this is only fifty items, so add two more items, perhaps in your backyard, to get to the full fifty-two items you ill later need when connecting these images to all the cards in a standard deck. Once these steps are done, you ire ready for the main event: memorizing as quickly as possible the order of fifty-two cards in a freshly shuffled deck. The method here is straightforward. Begin your mental walk-through of your house. As you encounter each item, look at the next card from the shuffled deck, and imagine the corresponding memorable person or thing doing something memorable near that item.”

Quit Social Media. Utilize the Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection, if a network adds significant value, keep it; otherwise ditch it.

Structure activities around the Law of the Vital Few: similar to 80/20 power law - invest in the highest-return activities vs. the balance of the rest.

Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself

“Put more thought into your leisure time. In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your “day within a day”

“If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you will end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.”

Drain the Shallows: to the extent possible, eliminate meetings, non-productive activities in favor of investment in the 20% of activities that move you towards your goals.

Schedule Every Minute of Your Day.

“A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it is not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.”

Finished reading: Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf 📚

Deep Reading helps us develop and exercise empathy. It does this by helping us visualize others:

“Drama makes more visible what each of us does when we pass over in our deepest, most immersive forms of reading. We welcome the Other as a guest within ourselves, and sometimes we become Other. For a moment in time we leave ourselves; and when we return, sometimes expanded and strengthened, we are changed both intellectually and emotionally”

When we read fiction closely, we activate regions of the brain that literally place us in the world of the Other. Reading shallowly online, we lose that capability. Empathy is also dependent on our own background knowledge. The more we read deeply, the more we add to that knowledge.

“The quality of our thought depends on the background knowledge and feelings we each bring to bear. Albert Einstein said that our theories of the world determine what we see. So also in reading. We must have our own wheelhouse of facts to see and evaluate new information, whatever the medium”

Deep Reading improves our analytical processes.

“From the standpoint of the reading brain, critical thought represents the full sum of the scientific-method processes. It synthesizes the text’s content with our background knowledge, analogies, deductions, inductions, and inferences and then uses this synthesis to evaluate the author’s underlying assumptions, interpretations, and conclusions”

Deep Reading helps us develop insight, but requires a high quality of attention, which is impossible with digital distraction.

“…if information is continuously perceived as a form of entertainment at the surface level, it remains on the surface, potentially impeding real thinking, rather than deepening it.”

How we read is critical. Reading online negatively impacts our ability to process sequencing of information and memory for detail:

“…our increased reliance on external forms of memory, combined with the attention-dividing bombardment by multiple sources of information, is cumulatively altering the quality and capacities of our working memory and ultimately its consolidation in long-term memory”

We need to read with a “quiet eye” - with a high quality of attention. This requires cognitive patience, and reading with intention.

“The atrophy and gradual disuse of our analytical and reflective capacities as individuals are the worst enemies of a truly democratic society, for whatever reason, in whatever medium, in whatever age. "

“So also the experience in the third life of the good reader: to be continuously engaged in trying to reach and express our best thoughts so as to expand an ever truer, more beautiful understanding of the universe and to lead lives based on this vision”

Five notions to consider as you look at your life in relation to time and “getting things done”:

1. Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment.

2. Are you holding yourself to or judging yourself by impossible standards? Drop them.

3. In what ways have you yet failed to accept the fact that you’re who you are and not the person you think you ought to be?

4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? Everyone’s just winging it, you might as well get on with it.

5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your action reach fruition?

Ten Tools for Embracing your Finitude

1. Adopt a fixed-volume approach to productivity. e.g. Keep two to-do lists one that contains everything you want to do, and a second which contains things you’re actively working on, which should be limited to a small number of items (at most ten). Or, establish time limits for your daily work.

2. Serialize! Focus on one big project at a time and see it to completion before moving on.

3. Decide in advance what to fail at. Accept that you’ll do a poor job at things which you aren’t currently focusing on, and that should diminish the shame of failing.

4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete. Celebrate your daily achievements, since you’ll never finish everything that’s left. Keep a “done” list of what you’ve completed in the day.

5. Consolidate your caring. There are lots of problems in the world, but you only have a finite amount of attention. Pick a few causes and work towards them.

6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology. Make your devices as boring as possible: delete social-media apps and switch your devices to grayscale. Read on a kindle instead of your phone.

7. Seek out novelty in the mundane. Avoid routines when possible, walk a new way, etc. Experience each moment in greater detail, pay more attention.

8. Be a researcher in relationships. Adopt an attitude of curiosity in which your goal isn’t to achieve any particular outcome or successfully explain your position, but “to figure out who this human being is.” Curiosity is satisfied regardless of the outcome. Choose wonder over worry whenever you can.

9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity. Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind, act on it right away. Don’t wait until later when you can “do a better job.”

10. Practice doing nothing. Stop trying to evade how reality feels, calm down and make better choices with your time.

“One lives as one can. … The individual path is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other. … Quietly do the next and most necessary thing.” - Carl Jung

From Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf 📚

Summary: we need to look closely at how different mediums impact the acquisition and maintenance of the reading brain.

Like Kurt Vonnegut’s artist-as-canary-in-the-coal-mine, Wolf argues that the reading brain (i.e. deep reading) is the canary in the coal mine of our brain. If we compromise our ability to be contemplative, we lose the facility to think, collaborate, and create at the highest level individually, and as a culture.

The deluge of digital information around us is shallowing our reading; this fools us into believing that we’re thinking when we are not (at least at the same level).

Highlights:

“Systematically examine - cognitively, linguistically, physiologically, and emotionally - the impact of various mediums on the acquisition and maintenance of the reading brain is the best preparation for ensuring the preservation of our most critical capacities.”

“In a milieu that continuously confronts us with a glut of information, the threat temptation for many is to retreat to familiar silos of easily digestible, less dense, less intellectually demanding information. The illusion of being informed by a default deluge of eye-byte-sized information can trump the critical analysis of our complex realities.”

“Kurt Vonnegut compared the role of the artist to that of the canary isn’t he coal mines: both alert us to the presence of danger. The reading brain is the canary in our minds. We would be the worst of fools to ignore what it has to teach us.”

“I will suggest that the future of the human species can best sustain and pass on the highest forms of our collective intelligence, compassion, and wisdom, by nurturing and protecting the contemplative dimension of the reading brain."