Record the important ideas you come across, whether they’re original or from other sources. Attribute significance to the ideas you find profound.
Appreciate when you feel the spark of interest, curiosity, or awe. Don’t discount these experiences. Take note of them, follow up on them, allow them to inspire you to action.
Always be on the look-out for wise, relevant, meaningful thoughts and voices.
Collect these thoughts in your Knowledge Management System, where you can easily call on them when needed. You may want to arrange them by topic: “On Happiness,” “On Work,” etc. And/or in different tiers of importance: wisdom that deserves daily remembrance, weekly, monthly.
Words of wisdom, the meaning of life … all of these may wash over us every day, but they can do little for us unless we savor them, engage with them, question them, improve them, and connect them to our lives. …
We might already have encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we … taken it to heart … [Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Basic Books, 2006, pp. xiii, ix]
Ritual can be defined as the structured repetition of important concepts, made resonant through the help of formal pageantry and ceremony. Ritual takes thoughts that are known but unattended and renders them active and vivid once more in our distracted minds. Unlike standard modern education, ritual doesn’t aim to teach us anything new; it wants to lend compelling form to what we believe we already know. It wants to turn our theoretical allegiances into habits. [Alain de Botton et al., The School of Life: An Emotional Education, The School of Life, 2019, p. 14]
There are signals from inside, there are voices that yell out, “By gosh this is good, don’t ever doubt it!” This is a path, one of the ways that we try to teach self-actualization and the discovery of the self. The discovery of identity comes via the impulse voices, via the ability to listen to your own guts, and to their reactions and to what is going on inside of you. [Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 1971, Penguin, 1993, p. 171, https://www.slideshare.net/imbangjtrenggana/abraham-h-maslow-the-farther-reaches-of-human-nature-penguin-nonclassics-1993]
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the fi rmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 1841, Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Square Press, 1965, p. 240]
Persons of low self-esteem tend to discount the productions of their mind. It is not that they never get worthwhile ideas. But they do not value them, do not treat them as potentially important, often do not even remember them very long—rarely follow through with them. In effect, their attitude is, “If the idea is mine, how good can it be?” [Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Bantam, 1994, p. 47]
Your professors will give you some fine books to read, and they’ll probably help you understand them. What they won’t do, for reasons that perplex me, is to ask you if the books contain truths you could live your lives by. When you read Plato, you’ll probably learn about his metaphysics and his politics and his way of conceiving the soul. But no one will ask you if his ideas are good enough to believe in. … No one, in short, will ask you to use Plato to help you change your life. …
That will be up to you. …
And you will have to be tough if the professor mocks you for uttering a sincere question instead of keeping matters easy for all concerned by staying detached and analytical. (Detached analysis has a place—but, in the end, you’ve got to speak from the heart and pose the question of truth.) [Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, Bloomsbury USA, 2013, pp. 64-65]