References

I. Philosophical Foundations

1. See Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living, Random House, 2017, p. 18l; and the film Hamlet. Dir. Michael Almereyda. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venora. 2000. Miramax, 2001.

2. Arendt, Hannah, and Jerome Kohn. The Promise of Politics. Schocken Books, 2007, p. 203: “In the last analysis, the human world is always the product of man’s amor mundi, a human artifice whose potential immortality is always subject to the mortality of those who build it and the natality of those who come to live in it. What Hamlet said is always true: ‘The time is out of joint; O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!’”

3. Jim Morrison. “Riders on the Storm,” L.A. Woman. Elektra Records, 1971.  Martin Heidegger. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Being and Time. Harper & Row, 1962.

4. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition: Second Edition. University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 7: “Action, the only activity that goes on directly between me without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”

5. Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press, 2006.

6. The Dhammayut Order in the United States of America. “Five Subjects for Frequent Recollection,” A Chanting Guide: Pāli Passages with English Translations, p. 25. See online: https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/ChantingGuide/Section0007.html

7. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. On the Path: An Anthology on the Noble Eightfold Path Drawn from the Pali Canon. The Abbot Metta Forest Monastery, 2017, p. 125.  Thanisarro explains the interactions between these two principles by way of systems theory.  Together, they create a complex non-linear system, even if the principles themselves are relatively simple. Scientists have found that many complex non-linear systems, including physical and social systems, exhibit behavior similar to the causal interactions related to suffering and the path to ending suffering. These systems often contain feedback loops, which can be positive, intensifying the original event, or negative, working in opposition to each other to maintain balance. The presence of these loops in the causes of suffering can make it difficult to discern the causal patterns and can also make it hard to predict how quickly the effects of actions will be seen. This unpredictability can be discouraging for those trying to bring about change. However, the advantage of a system containing many feedback loops, such as those found in human patterns of behavior, is that it is neither strictly deterministic nor totally chaotic. This allows for the possibility of creating desired outcomes by applying knowledge of the principles underlying the system to push it in a particular direction. In particular, skillful feedback loops in the mind, created through appropriate attention, can amplify throughout the system and push it towards ending suffering.

8. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Reprint edition, Random House Publishing Group, 2014, 3-4, 32.

9. Patrick McKee and Clifton Barber. “On Defining WISDOM.” The International Journal of Aging and Human Development, vol. 49, no. 2, 1999, p. 149–64. SAGE Journals, https://doi.org/10.2190/8G32-BNV0-NVP9-7V6G.

10. George E. Valiant. Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study. 1 edition, Belknap Press, 2012.201. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. “Why the Breath,” Gather ’Round the Breath: Dhamma Talks Cited in With Each & Every

     Breath, 62.

II. The Principles Behind Keeping Principles

1. Bernard Williams. “Ethical Consistency,” Problems of the Self.  Cambridge University Press, 1973. See Williams’ example from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: “Agamemnon at Aulis may have said 'May it be well', but he is neither convinced nor convincing. The agonies that a man will experience after acting in full consciousness of such a situation are not to be traced to a persistent doubt that he may not have chosen the better thing; but, for instance, to a clear conviction that he has not done the better thing because there was no better thing to be done. It may, on the other hand, even be the case that by some not utterly irrational criteria of 'the better thing', he is convinced that he did the better thing: rational men no doubt pointed out to Agamemnon his responsibilities as a commander, the many people involved, the considerations of honour, and so forth. If he accepted all this, and acted accordingly: it would seem a glib moralist who said, as some sort of criticism, that he must be irrational to lie awake at night, having killed his daughter. And he lies awake, not because of a doubt, but because of a certainty. Some may say that the mythology of Agamemnon and his choice is nothing to us, because we do not move in a world in which irrational gods order men to kill their own children. But there is no need of irrational gods, to give rise to tragic situations,” p. 173.

2. For perspectives on the laws of physics in this context, see: Richard Feynman. The Feyman Lectures on Physics. The New Millenium Edition. Vol. 1: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat. California Institute of Technology, 2010, p. 1-2: “We said that the laws of nature are approximate: that we first find the “wrong” ones, and then we find the “right” ones. Now, how can an experiment be “wrong”? First, in a trivial way: if something is wrong with the apparatus that you did not notice. But these things are easily fixed, and checked back and forth. So without snatching at such minor things, how can the results of an experiment be wrong? Only by being inaccurate. For example, the mass of an object never seems to change: a spinning top has the same weight as a still one. So a “law” was invented: mass is constant, independent of speed. That “law” is now found to be incorrect. Mass is found to increase with velocity, but appreciable increases require velocities near that of light. A true law is: if an object moves with a speed of less than one hundred miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in a million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law. So in practice one might think that the new law makes no significant difference. Well, yes and no. For ordinary speeds we can certainly forget it and use the simple constant-mass law as a good approximation. But for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the speed, the more wrong we are. Finally, and most interesting, philosophically we are completely wrong with the approximate law. Our entire picture of the world has to be altered even though the mass changes only by a little bit. This is a very peculiar thing about the philosophy, or the ideas, behind the laws. Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in our ideas.”

III. Human Cognition, Intelligence, and Rationality

1. See Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow. 1st edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, and Keith E. Stanovich. What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. Yale University Press, 2009.

2. Robin M. Hogarth Educating Intuition. 1st edition, University Of Chicago Press, 2001.

3. Keith E. Stanovich. What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. Yale University Press, 2009, p. 41.

4. Ibid., p. 63-66.

5. Andy Clark. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 1st edition, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. xviii, 207, 217, 222. 10. See also Heidegger, Being and Time.

IV. Questions Concerning Technology

1. See Martin Heidegger for his discussion of modern technology in the 20th century through his concept of “enframing” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. Marting Lovitt, Garland Publishing, 1977. “Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object. Yet an airliner that stands on the runway is surely an object. Certainly. We can represent the machine so. But then it conceals itself as to what and how it is. Revealed, it stands on the taxi strip only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure the possibility of transportation. For this it must be in its whole structure and in every one of its constituent parts, on call for duty, i.e., ready for takeoff,” p. 17.

2. Peter-Paul Verbeek,. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Illustrated edition, Penn State University Press, 2005, p. 195.

3. Max Tegmark. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Vintage, 2018. As Max Tegmark notes, each of these stages should be viewed as being on a spectrum. If bacteria are Life 1.0, mice are somewhere in the middle, say, 1.1. They have the ability to learn during the course of individual lives, but without complex linguistic representation, they can't pass much learned knowledge onto their offspring.  And, humans are probably best categorized as something close to Life 2.1. We've made modest strides in modifying our biological hardware – think artificial teeth, knee replacements, and cardiac pacemakers.  But, we cannot today extend life indefinitely or recreate our bodies on the scale of Godzilla. 

4. Let's imagine you instruct your new AI chef to prepare a meal 'fit for a king,' and find yourself served a swan pie - a dish beloved by monarchs in the Middle Ages but less appealing to modern sensibilities. If you cry out, "But I wanted a steak!" it might retort, "You asked for royal cuisine!"  You would not likely get the same misfire with a highly accomplished human chef. 

5. Ben Shneiderman. Human-Centered AI. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

6. Ethan Mollick. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. New York: Portfolio, 2024, p. 24-25, 27.

V. Mindfulness

1. Bhikkhu Nanamoli. “MN19, Two Kinds of Thought,” The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi, Wisdom Publications, 1995.

2. Hanson, Rick Ph D., and Forrest Hanson.Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness. Harmony, 2018: “The brain naturally and routinely scans for bad news out in the world and inside the body and mind. When it finds what it is looking for, it focuses tightly on it, often overreacting to it. It fast-tracks the experience into emotional, somatic, and social memory, becomes sensitized through repeated doses of the stress hormone cortisol, and thereby becomes even more reactive to negative experiences, which bathe the brain in even more cortisol, creating a vicious cycle.”

3. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. “The Arrows of Emotion,” Gather ’Round the Breath : Dhamma Talks Cited in With Each & Every Breath, p. 281.

4. Seligman, Martin E. P. Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Reprint edition, Vintage, 2006. For the introduction of predictive styles alongside Seligman’s original concept of explanatory style, see also, Seligman, Martin E. P., et al. Homo Prospectus. 1st edition, Oxford University Press, 2016: “Explanatory style is the past and present side of the coin, however, and the future side has been neglected. To appreciate the shortcomings of explanatory style theorizing and to appreciate why predictive style is an advance, we must return to the scientific atmosphere of the late 1970s. Behaviorism was just giving way to cognitive psychology, but cognitive psychology was exclusively about memory (past) and perception (present), and it was deliberately silent about expectations of the future. When explanatory style was formulated (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978), theorizing about mental life had just become acceptable, but only if the mental life was about the present and the past. This unstated premise of avoiding future-oriented cognitions plagued both explanatory style theory and Beck’s theorizing as well” (285).

5. Thanissaro Bhikkhu. On the Path: An Anthology on the Noble Eightfold Path Drawn from the Pali Canon. The Abbot Metta Forest Monastery, 2017.

6. Thanissaro Bhikkhu. With Each & Every Breath - A Guide to Meditation. Thanissaro Bhikku, 2012.

7. Bhikkhu Nanmoli. “The Removal of Distracting Thoughts,” The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi, Wisdom Publications, 1995.

8. Matthew Walker. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Reprint edition, Scribner, 2018, p. 14-18, 30, 91-97 143-46.

9. Jordan Metzl. The Exercise Cure. Rodale Books, 2014.

10. Rippetoe, Mark, and Andy Baker. Practical Programming for Strength Training. 3rd edition, The Aasgaard Company, 2014.

VI. The Grit to Persevere Through Difficulties That Mature Our Coping Mechanisms and Broaden Our Perspectives on the World

1. Personal correspondence, my friend Mahyar Mofidi, June 21, 2020.

2. On this last point, see George Eliot, Middlemarch. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000: “Character too is a process and an unfolding” with “virtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding,” p. 96.  See also Daniel Gilbert, The Psychology of your Future Self. TED Talk, 2014: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been.”  

3. Allen, David, and James Fallows. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Revised edition, Penguin Books, 2015.

4. Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. 1st edition, Scribner, 2016.

5. Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. 1st edition, Penguin Books, 2011. Studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly with the level of performance. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes: “Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces. The best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered. Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.”  One way to do that is to put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you’re trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems: “Benjamin Franklin was apparently an early practitioner of this technique. In his autobiography, he describes how he used to read essays by the great thinkers and try to reconstruct the author’s arguments according to Franklin’s own logic. He’d then open up the essay and compare his reconstruction to the original words to see how his own chain of thinking stacked up against the master’s. The best chess players follow a similar strategy. They will often spend several hours a day replaying the games of grand masters one move at a time, trying to understand the expert’s thinking at each step. Indeed, the single best predictor of an individual’s chess skill is not the amount of chess he’s played against opponents, but rather the amount of time he’s spent sitting alone working through old games,” p. 171-172.

6. Ericsson, Anders, and Robert Pool. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. 1 edition, Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

7. Josh Waitzkin. The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance. 2nd edition, Free Press, 2008.  Waitzkin, the subject of the child chess prodigy film Searching for Bobby Fischer who later became world champion of Tai Chi Chun Push Hands, describes the challenge beginning students of the martial art often have letting go of their ego in practice and investing in losses to learn: “If a big strong guy comes into a martial arts studio and someone pushes him, he wants to resist and push the guy back to prove that he is a big strong guy. The problem is that he isn’t learning anything by doing this. In order to grow, he needs to give up his current mind-set. He needs to lose to win. The bruiser will need to get pushed around by little guys for a while, until he learns how to use more than brawn. William Chen calls this investment in loss. Investment in loss is giving yourself to the learning process,” p. 107.

8. Ibid., p. 130-33

9. Ibid., p. 140-43.

10. Ibid. p. 141-42.

11. Munger, Charles T., Warren Buffett, and John Collison. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. Edited by Peter D. Kaufman. South San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2023, p. 487.

12. Epstein, David. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Riverhead Books, 2021, p. 11-13, 20-21.

13. Ronald A. Heifetz, et al. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World. 1 edition, Harvard Business Review Press, 2009. P. 69-72.

14. Robert Kegan, and Lisa Laskow Lahey. Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization. 1 edition, Harvard Business Review Press, 2009.

15. Carol S. Dweck. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Illustrated edition, Ballantine Books, 2007.

16. Jeff Bezos. Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson. 1st edition, Harvard Business Review Press, 2020, p. 142-43.

17. Michael Lewis. The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. 1st edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017. p. 329-333.  Kahnemann and Tversky may be correct about how people typically make decisions and how they feel before making them, but not about how they actually feel about the result of those decisions, especially over the long term.  They may anticipate feeling worse about an action they have taken than an inaction, but according to Daniel Gilbert this affective forecasting is often faulty.  See Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness. Vintage, 2007, p. 197.  See also Jeff Bezos, in Invent and Wander, p. 9: “To make the decision [to start Amazon], Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk-calculation process. He called it a “regret minimization framework.” He would imagine what he would feel when he turned eighty and thought back to the decision. “I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have,” he explains. “I knew that when I was eighty, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”

18. Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness, p. 118-19. As one example, the anticipated pain experienced from a delay in waiting for an object of desire for today until tomorrow is much greater than the anticipated delay in waiting for an object of desire for 365 days instead of 364.

19. Tim Ferris. Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. Illustrated edition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, p. 200-1: “3. Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. Ask yourself: if this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to “knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” 4. “For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” 5. Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions.  6. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow.  7. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. 8. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.”

20. Benjamin Hardy. Willpower Doesn’t Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success. Hachette Books, 2019, p. 85-88.

21. Cal Newport. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Grand Central Publishing, 2016.

22. Cal Newport. The Time-Block Planner: A Daily Method for Deep Work in a Distracted World, Portfolio, 2020, p. 2.

23. James Clear. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Illustrated edition, Avery, 2018, p. 16.

24. Ibid, p. 18.

25. Charles Duhigg. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. 1st ed, Random House, 2012.

26. James Clear, Atomic Habits, p. 34-35.

27. Ibid., p. 36-41.

28. Ibid., p. 47-53.

VII. Technological Determinism (And Freedom).

1. Cal Newport. A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. Portfolio, 2021, p. 228-29.900. Nanamoli, Bhikkhu. “MN21, The Simile of the Saw,” The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi, Wisdom Publications, 1995.

2. Cal Newport.  Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, Portfolio, 2019, p. 386-89.

VIII. The Capacity to Love and Be Loved

1. Daniel Goleman. Emotional Intelligence. Bantam, 1995.

2. Lewis Hyde, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” American Poetry Review. Quoted and brilliantly explicated by David Foster Wallace in “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Reprint edition, Back Bay Books, 1998: “This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function.  It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing.  Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it.  But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks…Third world rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but they seem less great at the mundane, non-negative task of then establishing a superior governing alternative,” 67.

3. Edgar H. Schein. Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. 1 edition, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013.

IX. Coaching Others, Leading Others

1. Henry Kimsey-House. Co-Active Coaching: Changing Business, Transforming Lives. 2nd edition, Nicholas Brealey, 2007. p. 13, 20-21, 38-40.

X. Personal Information Management

XI. Human-Centered Design

XII. Antifragility

1. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Reprint edition, Random House Publishing Group, 2014.

2. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a New Section: “On Robustness and Fragility.” 2 edition, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2010.

3. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. 2 Updated edition, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005.

XIII. Personal Finances

1. J. L. Collins.  The Simple Path to Wealth: Your Road Map to Financial Independence and a Rich, Free Life. 1st edition, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.

2. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005.

XIV. Leading Change, Leading Teams

1. J. P. Kotter. Leading Change. Harvard Business, 1996. See also Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. 1 edition, Crown Business, 2010

2. William Bridges. Transitions: Making Sense Of Life’s Changes. Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2004.

3. Richard Rumelt. Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. Illustrated edition. New York: Crown Currency, 2011.

4. Patrick Lencioni. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Jossey-Bass, 2002, p. 195-22.

5. Munger, Charles T., Warren Buffett, and John Collison. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. Edited by Peter D. Kaufman. South San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2023. 

XV. Strategic Thinking

1. Richard Rumelt. Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. Illustrated edition. New York: Crown Currency, 2011, p. 93.

2. Michael D. Watkins. The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking: Leading Your Organization into the Future. Harper Business, 2024.

XVI. Systems Thinking

1. Donella H. Meadows. Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller. Edited by Diana Wright. White River Junction, Vt: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

2. Munger, Charles T., Warren Buffett, and John Collison. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. Edited by Peter D. Kaufman. South San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2023, p. 63.

XVII. Statistical Thinking