June 30, 2024 | #583 | read on the web | Free Version

Welcome to Sunday Brain Food, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and actionable insights you can use in life and work.

FS

“Think of these levels as reading to entertain, reading to inform, reading to understand, and reading to master. When you learned to read in elementary school, you were taught to read for entertainment. If you made it to high school and college, you learned to read to inform. This is where most people stop. But most of the value comes at the last two levels.”

— A summary of Mortimer Adlers’ Classic How to Read a Book

Insights

“I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea. I am supposed to be one of the more fertile inventors of big ideas, but in my long career as a copywriter I have not had more than 20, if that. Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you.”

— David Ogilvy

**

“It's so simple, yet makes such a difference. Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, 'Make me feel important.'”

— Mary Kay Ash

***

“Have maximum financial flexibility to face both hazards and opportunities.”

— Charlie Munger

Tiny Thoughts

“It's tough to be good at something you're not interested in. It's nearly impossible to be great at something you're not obsessed with.”

**

“The difference between great success and bitter failure is often found in consistently applying the fundamentals.”

***

“Give people what they want in a way they're not expecting.”

Clear Thinking

The three pillars of my book Clear Thinking:

1. Position yourself to play on easy mode
2. Manage the circumstances that tend to think for you
3. Think independently

TKP Podcast

In the last episode on parenting for a while, I talked to Michaeleen Doucleff about what we can learn from other cultures about parenting.

"If you could just change one thing in your child’s life, it would be to give them autonomy. Humans spent 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers. That’s where our brains evolved. That’s where we evolved in this context. If you look on lots of different continents, children have enormous amounts of autonomy in these communities, which implies that that’s how the child evolved, right? The child’s brain evolved. ... It wasn’t that long ago in Western society that we had autonomy. The evolutionary perspective says that we need it. Then there’s this data that shows that kids that don’t have it are more anxious, more prone to depression. There’s tons of data showing that we need autonomy. Children need autonomy, but I think parents don’t know what it looks like."

— Listen and learn on YouTube (see the latest video), Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or read the transcript.

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