Minutes of a Monday #19
Brain Food > Cultivating Rationality
“You like to imagine yourself in control of your fate, consciously planning the course of your life as best you can. But you are largely unaware of how deeply your emotions dominate you. They make you veer towards ideas that soothe your ego. They make you look for evidence that confirms what you already want to believe.
They make you see what you want to see, depending on your mood and this disconnect from reality is the source of bad decisions and negative patterns that haunt your life.
Rationality is the ability to counteract these emotional effects, to think instead of react, to open your mind to what is really happening, as opposed to what you are feeling. It does not come naturally. It is a power we must cultivate, but in doing so we realise our greatest potential.”
Robert Greene on mastering the emotional self from his book The Concise Laws of Human Nature.
Soul Food
“I tried to break America, but they wouldn’t let me.”
Rare Air
“The inspiration born of a feeling is the grandchild of a judgement! – and in any event not a child of your own! To trust one’s feelings – means to give more obedience to one’s grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods which are in us: our reason and our experience.”
Appendix
“the great challenge and the fun for me is to try and look at the design of the movie and try to make the performance work within the design – rather than try to make the whole thing come to me.”
Matt Damon talks about what he learned from working with Steven Spielberg on Saving Private Ryan.
LOL
Earthquake on Aretha’s long goodbye:
AOB
Hope 2023 has got off to a flyer for you - Niall