Books excerpts to inspire

[milkway-snippets]

The Girl in The Tower

by Katherine Arden

"...carve things of wood because things made by effort are more real than things made by wishing."

"What immortal ever knew what it was like to number his days? Yet I can feel"

"Long ago, men dreamed a sword into my hand. Gods diminish, but they do not change."

"If you want something, it means you do not have it, it means that you do not believe it is there, which means"

"The fire is or it is not. That which you call magic is simply not allowing the world to be other than as you will it."

"She had a fleeting taste of winter: smoke and pine and deadly cold, and then there was warmth, too, and a swift, impossible sweetness."

"Vasya looked her gratitude at him. I did not know I was lonely, she thought, until I was no longer alone."

"Her tears lanced some of the poisoned wound of memory;"

"'To small minds,' she told him, spine very straight, 'any skill must look like sorcery.'"

"'I want freedom,' she said at length, almost to herself. But I also want a place and a purpose...am not sure I can have either, let alone both."

"And I do not want to live a lie."

"Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen. Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet."

[milkway-snippets]

The Bear and The Nightingale

By Katherine Arden

"In the space between one breath and the next, the wind told him a tale: of life and death together, of a child born with the failing year."

"...I must be old, Pyotr thought to himself, if my son is being kind to me."

"I do not understand “damned.” You are. And because you are, you can walk where you will, into peace, oblivion, or pits of fire, but you will always choose."

"'You are too attached to things as they are,' said Morozko, combing the mare’s withers. He glanced down idly. 'You must allow things to be what best suits your purpose. And then they will.'"

"'Nothing changes, Vasya. Things are, or they are not. Magic is forgetting that something ever was other than as you willed it.'"

"'All my life,' she said, 'I have been told ‘go’ and ‘come.’ I am told how I will live, and I am told how I must die. I must be a man’s servant and a mare for his pleasure, or I must hide myself behind walls and surrender my flesh to a cold, silent god. I would walk into the jaws of hell itself, if it were a path of my own choosing. I would rather die tomorrow in the forest than live a hundred years of the life appointed me."

"Despair is even better than fear."

"We who live forever can know no courage, nor do we love enough to give our lives."

[milkway-snippets]

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

By Carol S. Dweck

"What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated"

" Robert Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence, writes that the major factor in whether people achieve expertise 'is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement.'"

"Or, as his forerunner Binet recognized, it’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest."

"...that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life."

"This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others."

"Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown(and unknowable);"

"Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?"

"Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow?"

"The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset."

"In fact, it’s startling to see the degree to which people with the fixed mindset do not believe in putting in effort or getting help."

"In fact, studies show that people are terrible at estimating their abilities."

"But it was those with the fixed mindset who accounted for almost all the inaccuracy."

"And it was exactly the kind of perseverance and resilience produced by the growth mindset."

"Benjamin Barber, an eminent political theorist, once said, 'I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures….I divide the world into the learners and nonlearners.'"

"So children with the fixed mindset want to make sure they succeed. Smart people should always succeed. But for children with the growth mindset, success is about stretching themselves. It’s about becoming smarter."

"I think intelligence is something you have to work for…it isn’t just given to you….Most kids, if they’re not sure of an answer, will not raise their hand to answer the question. But what I usually do is raise my hand,"

"...because if I’m wrong, then my mistake will be corrected. Or I will raise my hand and say, ‘How would this be solved?’ or ‘I don’t get this. Can you help me?’ Just by doing that I’m increasing my intelligence.'"

"Certainly, they didn’t want people who would pick on them or undermine their self-esteem, but they did want people who would foster their development."

"Clearly, people with the growth mindset thrive when they’re stretching themselves. When do people with the fixed mindset thrive? When things are safely within their grasp. If things get too challenging—when they’re not feeling smart or talented—they lose interest."

"'[When] I work on something a long time and I start to figure it out.' For them it’s not about immediate"

"...perfection. It’s about learning something over time: confronting a challenge and making progress."

"Isn’t that what school is for, to teach? They’re there to learn how to do these things, not because they already know everything."

"'Becoming is better than being.' The fixed mindset does not allow people the luxury of becoming. They have to already be."

"Many of the most accomplished people of our era were considered by experts to have no future. Jackson Pollock, Marcel Proust, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Lucille Ball, and Charles Darwin were all thought to have little potential for their chosen fields."

"But isn’t potential someone’s capacity to develop their skills with effort and coaching over time?"

"People with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower."

"As a New York Times article points out, failure has been transformed from an action (I failed) to an identity (I am a failure). This is especially true in the fixed mindset."

"Even in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn’t define you. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from."

"John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them."

"...means there’s a lot of intelligence out there being wasted by underestimating students’ potential to develop."

"...shows that even checking a box to indicate your race or sex can trigger the stereotype in your mind and lower your test score."

"But just put more males in the room with a female before a math test, and down goes the female’s score."

"So in the fixed mindset, both positive and negative labels can mess with your mind."

"...the mark of a champion is the ability to win when things are not quite right—when you’re not playing well and your emotions are not the right ones."

"They were people who worked hard, who learned how to keep their focus under pressure, and who stretched beyond their ordinary abilities when they had to."

"Those with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and improving. And this is exactly what we find in the champions."

"...that personal success is when you work your hardest to become your best—"

"Those with the growth mindset found setbacks motivating. They’re informative."

"...wish to have as my epitaph: ‘Here lies a man who was wise enough to bring into his service men who knew more than he.’"

"Hierarchy means very little to me. Let’s put together in meetings the people who can help solve a problem, regardless of position...."

"Genius is not enough; we need to get the job done."

"In the early 1970s, Irving Janis popularized the term groupthink. It’s when everyone in a group starts thinking alike. No one disagrees. No one takes a critical stance."

"Groupthink can occur when people put unlimited faith in a talented leader, a genius."

"'I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here….Then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.'" "We now have a workforce full of people who need constant reassurance and can’t take criticism."

"What would this feedback look or sound like in the workplace? Instead of just giving employees an award for the smartest idea or praise for a brilliant performance, they would get praise for taking initiative, for seeing a difficult task through, for struggling and learning something new, for being undaunted by a setback, or for being open to and acting on criticism. Maybe it could be praise for not needing constant praise!" "...managers do not believe in personal change. These fixed-mindset managers simply look for existing talent—they judge employees as competent or incompetent at the start and that’s that. when employees do improve, they may fail to take notice, remaining stuck in their initial impression."

" Although managers, of course, want to find the right person for a job, the exactly right person doesn’t always come along. However, training and experience can often draw out and develop the qualities required for successful performance."

"Presenting skills as learnable • Conveying that the organization values learning and perseverance, not just ready- made genius or talent • Giving feedback in a way that promotes learning and future success • Presenting managers as resources for learning"

"Think seriously about how to root out elitism and create a culture of self-examination, open communication, and teamwork."

"Remember, people can be independent thinkers and team players at the same time. Help them fill both roles."

"Bullying is about judging. It’s about establishing who is more worthy or important."

"We always hear the term constructive criticism. But doesn’t everyone think the criticism they give their children is constructive? Why would they give it if they didn’t think it was helpful? Yet a lot if it is not helpful at all. It’s full of judgment about the child. Constructive means helping the child to fix something, build a better product, or do a better job."

"The great teachers believe in the growth of the intellect and talent, and they are fascinated with the process of learning."

"'Success is not coming to you, you must come to it.'"

"'Did I win? Did I lose? Those are the wrong questions. The correct question is: Did I make my best effort?'If so, he says,...'You may be outscored but you will never lose.'"

"(We don’t want them to just try harder with the same ineffective strategy.)"

"What are the events or situations that take us to a place of judgment rather than to a place of development?"

"Whether they’re aware of it or not, all people keep a running account of what’s happening to them, what it means, and what they should do."

"'You’re in charge of your mind. You can help it grow by using it in the right way.'"

"'That I have to be more patient because learning takes a great deal of time and practice.'"

"Sometimes the problem with a child isn’t too little effort. It’s too much. And for the wrong cause."

"You may have felt devalued and disrespected when your spouse shirked the tasks or broke your rules—as though they were saying to you, 'You’re not important. Your needs are trivial. I can’t be bothered.'"

"When you feel yourself losing it, you can learn to leave the room and write down your ugliest thoughts, followed by what is probably really happening"

"You can also learn to loosen up on some of your rules, now that each one is not a test of your partner’s respect for you. With time, you might even gain a sense of humor about them."

"It’s a reminder that you’re an unfinished human being and a clue to how to do it better next time."

[milkway-snippets]

On Confidence

By The School of Life

"One of the most charming books written in early modern Europe was In Praise of Folly (1509), by the Dutch scholar and philosopher Erasmus."

" Bruegel and Erasmus’s work proposes that the way to greater confidence is not to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to come to peace with our inevitable ridiculousness." "We grow timid when we allow ourselves to be overexposed to the respectable sides of others."

"We would grow free to try things by accepting that failure was the norm."

"We start out in life with a very strong impression that competent and admirable people are not like us at all."

"...institutions as they actually were: occasionally well-meaning, but frequently lazy, casual, corrupt or indifferent." "...but in private, over the ensuing months, we simply cannot dismiss their judgements, because we have accorded them a status logically prior to our own in our deep minds."

"Success isn’t simply a pleasant prize to stumble upon when we enjoy a subject or a task interests us; it is a psychological necessity, something we must secure in order to feel we have the right to be alive."

"We should keep in mind a confident distinction between the hater and the critic, aim to correct our genuine flaws, and otherwise forgive the injured, roaring winds that seek to punish us for pressures that have nothing to do with us."

"We should not worry so much about the latter, nor complain quite so bitterly about the former. We should accept from the start, with good grace and dark premonition, the sheer randomness and amorality of fate."

"We should come to terms with, and help others to see, just how hard and unnerving it can sometimes be to get close to the things we truly want."

"Our lack of confidence in confidence may allow degraded versions of self-assertion to thrive."

"It might be brutishness, not confidence, that we hate."

"We should take care not to dress up our base deficiencies as godly virtues."

"Unfortunately it isn’t enough to be kind, interesting, intelligent and wise inside: we need to develop the skill that allows us to make our talents active in the world at large."

"Confidence is what translates theory into practice. It should never be thought of as the enemy of good things; it is their crucial and legitimate catalyst."

[milkway-snippets]

The Keeper of Lost Things

by Ruth Hogan

"But he, that dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose." "A hush is a dangerous thing. Silence is solid and dependable, but a hush is expectant, like a pregnant pause; it invites mischief, like a loose thread begging to be pulled." "Thinking was something she did slowly. She was quicker at feeling. She could feel happy or sad, or angry or excited in a wrinkling of the eye."