Note to self - Age gracefully

1. Start moving towards impersonal goals. Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life ( from Bertrand Russel)
2. Watch your Ego - Ego is ok but wrap it up with outcomes than yourself. Learn to change decisions and accept directions from others.
3. Enrich your life with literature(reading) , Music and art .
4. Increase your tribe - Re-estabish your connections with old friends .Make new friends and develop a support system which is independent of your family . Because your family is soon going to be busy.
5. Collect experiences and never miss any chance to get new experiences and live intentionally everyday.
6. Listening : Move Speak- to- listen Ratio towards 1:2. see if you can improve further once you attained this.
7. Think about death -Think deeply about death once in a while .

Things learned in last 10 years - Justin Kan

It’s been a wild ten years for me. Here’s a bunch of things I’ve learned in the last decade:

1. Things that seem disastrous at the time can happen for a reason.
2. Some of my most important learnings came from failures that I thought were the end of the world in the moment. 
3. The most important success factor in your work is who you choose to work with.-This has been more important to my success than having the right idea, the right resources, or anything else. Having the right people around you is the difference between success and failure. 
4. No matter where you are at, you are probably giving up too early. Big things take time to succeed at. 
5. No one does everything well. You are not an exception.
6. Focus on your one superpower and be excellent at that, and the universe will take care of the rest. 
7. There is an endless treadmill of goals.-10 yrs ago we had a small startup called Justin.tv. I thought if I could just make a little $ I’d be set. Thus followed a decade of trying to raise more money, achieve skyrocketing valuations, start bigger cos..it never ends 
8. Achievement of goals won’t deliver lasting happiness.-After hitting many of the goals I set for myself, some beyond the wildest dreams I had 10 years ago, the satisfaction never lasted. It was there in the beginning, but never created a permanent state change. 
9. You can be anxious no matter what your situation is.-I thought my anxiety and fear was situational, but it turns out I’d just map the same level of fears on to whatever difficult experiences I was going through at any given time. 
10. There is no antidote to your fears.-I tried to escape from my fear lots of ways (alcohol, travel, tv). None of those methods delivered anything other than temporary distraction. I learned instead that meditation is key to sitting with your fear and accepting it. 
11. I don’t need to attract people to me to connect.-All my life I longed to connect meaningfully to others, but felt I didn’t know how. Instead I tried to be successful to attract other people to me. But that’s not necessary: I‘ve learned to start with vulnerability and curiosity 
12. Lasting happiness comes from connection to other people, gratitude, and the release of self-tortured striving.

Nothing else. 

Resonating with the Author

 How to get more out of a book - Carver Mead's great metaphor 

In physics , there is a theory that states atoms exchange energy by resonating with each other.Before this energy exchange to happen ,the two atoms must be phase-matched, oscillating in almost perfect synchrony with each other.

If we extend this to reading before the material can resonate, before energy can be exchanged between the author and reader, the reader must already have available a mode of vibration at the author's frequency. This doesn't mean that the reader is already thinking the author's thought; it means the reader is capable of thinking it.

The author and reader must share a close-enough worldview, viewpoint, vocabulary, set of mental models, sense of aesthetics, and set of goals. For any particular concept in the material, if not enough of these are sufficiently matched, no resonance will occur and no energy will be exchanged.

Perhaps, as a reader, one way to get more out of more material is to collect and cultivate a diverse set of resonators, to increase the probability of a phase-match.

Perhaps this explains why only certain books click for us

Inspired from a reading tip on http://worrydream.com/