Monday Inspiration: Brené Brown, Derek Sivers, Sheryl Sandberg, and More

Monday Inspiration: Brené Brown, Derek Sivers, Sheryl Sandberg, and More

Happy Monday! Or not so happy Monday. I don’t know about you, but I usually need pick-me-ups on Mondays, something inspiring to boost up the week and get me excited about the possibilities that this week can bring. If you’re feeling kind of “meh” today, here are my Monday inspirations! Links and quotes that will inspire you throughout the week. Bookmark them, or consume them in one sitting, up to you. These are the stuffs that have inspired me recently. Enjoy!

Brené Brown

This is an interview with Brené Brown with Chase Jarvis on his 30 Days of Genius series. Incredible conversation on emotional intelligence.

 

Derek Sivers

On Success Habits and Billionaires with Perfect Abs. An episode from The Tim Ferriss Show where Derek answers questions from fans. The last 3 minutes of this are glorious!

 

 

Sheryl Sandberg

A courageous commencement speech at UC Berkeley by Sheryl Sandberg where she talks about facing griefs after her husband’s death last year and learning gratitude. It’s a tear-jerker.

 

 

Inspiring Quotes

“Finding your calling will not happen without the aid and assistance of others. Every story of success is, in fact, a story of community.”Jeff Goins from The Art of Work

“Stand in your God-given personality. Be no other person’s shadow.”  – Ellen White in Mind, Character, and Personality Vol. 1

“You’re more powerful than you think you are. Act accordingly.”  – Seth Godin

Now have a courageous and inspired week!

Photo credit: Unsplash.com

Reading and the Life of the Mind

Reading and the Life of the Mind

From the stunning last chapter and ending of Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, here are inspiring excerpts on reading and the life of the mind:

If you are reading in order to become a better reader, you cannot read just any book or article. You will not improve as a reader if all you read are books that are well within your capacity. You must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn.

A good book does reward you for trying to read it. The best books reward you most of all. The reward, of course, is of two kinds. First, there is the improvement in your reading skill that occurs when you successfully tackle a good, difficult work. Second–and this in the long run is much more important–a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable–books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.

There is a strange fact about the human mind, a fact that differentiates the mind sharply from the body. The body is limited in ways that the mind is not. One sign of this is that the body does not continue indefinitely to grow in strength and develop in skill and grace. By the time most people are thirty years old, their bodies are as good as they will ever be; in fact, many persons’ bodies have begun to deteriorate by that time. But there is no limit to the amount of growth and development that the mind can sustain. The mind does not stop growing at any particular age; only when the brain itself loses its vigor, in senescence, does the mind lose its power to increase in skill and understanding.

Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And when we cease to grow, we begin to die.

 

Reading well, which means reading actively, is thus not only a good in itself, nor is it merely a means to advancement in our work or career. It also serves to keep our minds alive and growing.

 

Read well, friends.

 

See also The Art of Reading and Quotes on the Magical Power of Books.

 

Mortimer Adler: The Art of Reading

Mortimer Adler: The Art of Reading

Without external help of any sort, you go to work on the book. With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more. Such elevation, accomplished by the mind working on a book, is highly skilled reading, the kind of reading that a book which challenges your understanding deserves.

 

Thus we can roughly define what we mean by the art of reading as follows: the process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The skilled operations that cause this to happen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading.

– Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book

 

See also Quotes on the Magical Power of Books and Reading and the Life of the Mind.

 

 

Image credit: HDWallpapers