Shame and pride are useful motivators in getting you to be who you most want to be. If you don’t care what others think, you don’t get these boosts. The person with a phone screen “blinder” understands his addled cycles of e-mail to weather to news to messages is shameful… but has opted out of shame-based boosts.

take easy wins. Why?

There is something in me that revolts at taking help when it’s the type of help everyone else would take. “Here, this is the way to study…” If nobody was going to take this advice, or if it required real effort to gain this advice, I would be open to it. But if a bunch of kids are raising their hands and asking the same question, I can’t stand being seen alongside them. You need help, but not me!

It’s fine to hold yourself to a higher standard if you can actually win under normal conditions. But if you are finishing 7th by your “higher standard,” you might wanna check if that standard is truly higher. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism that guarantees you never have to take a loss.

A lot of this comes back to wanting so badly to be different from everyone else. Different needs. Different desires. Different standards. Hard vs. soft. Overindexed on all this stuff.

1. Always take the stairs
2. Twenty-min workouts matter
3. Daily smoothie
4. Deprioritize Uber: you shouldn’t be in such a rush that you can’t take the more natural route (e.g., walking, train). Seeing how a population moves as actually more important than seeing some tourist attraction you are rushing to see.

We need freedom from freedom in a world brimming with a level of temptation no human was evolved to navigate. Of course every student *feels* the endless buzz of electronic distraction, and nobody seems to dispute the literature declaring the superiority of handwritten notes, and yet we still can’t help ourselves in continuing to employ electronics. So please save us from ourselves and ban electronics in class. You will help us learn better, gain more of our attention—currently wasted on iMessage, YouTube, etc—and maybe even assist us in finding some peace in a world increasingly devoid of it.

But maybe you find this unpersuasive. After all, this is America, land of the free, home of the brave, and these are smart adults using their own free will however they damn well please—if they want to sabotage their attention, so be it. Yet this is not a victimless crime. Consider how a single cell phone lighting up in a dark movie theater draws attention from more than a single person. So just as people can’t “choose” to avoid breathing in secondhand smoke, diligent non-laptop students can’t well “choose” to avoid the TikTok video that crosses their vision due to the single laptop student and his inability to focus on your lectures.

willing to bear the child of a man who uses one of those plastic ball throwers to play fetch with a dog.

carry a bag (or whatever) for one person a week. Easy to do in an airport.

“right” to end sentences. More annoying than “um.”

In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.

The more elite the college, the more lenient the standards. At Yale, for example, 80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses. But the problem is also prevalent at less selective colleges. Across all four-year colleges in the United States, the most commonly awarded grade is now an A.

Here

To detect your own shortcomings, it can be helpful to witness them in others. You start with judgment: Look at that kid next to me on a plane switching between iPad games every three minutes; he can’t even finish a single level in a maximally stimulating artificial world before jumping to something new. You feel better than. You are right to despise this behavior. And then. And then. Wait a second… Don’t I do something like that too? Maybe not as egregious, but categorically similar. I start a podcast and jump to a different one. Or start in a podcast and decide to go with music instead. I’m in such a rush to pierce the silence that I click buttons before thinking.

1. Let’s start pausing before acting
2. Let’s force ourselves to stick with our decisions
3. Doing either #1 or #2 habitualizes both items

Boy how nice it is to be in an establishment where no music is being played. Just the sounds of humanity.