One week to go until #Bittersweet, an @OprahsBookClub selection, is available in paperback! Don’t forget to preorder and complete this form (woobox.com/5ks65y) before 6/19 to get your signed bookplate!

Gustav Klimt Pond at Attersee Castle, 1910

The man! Proud of you Eli! One of the top K/Ps in the country! 2028

Le carnet de croquis de Turner

Vienna, Corner Cafe. Debbies Journey

‘28 K/P @EliCain28 3.9 uw GPA ready for camp szn 🏕️ @CRHFootball @coach_spinnato

I think about this Seinfeld interview all the time.

RIP to the great Gary Bunt

I think the new trend will be disappearing into a life of offline solitude, rather than oversharing your entire life in a desire to be a famous influencer

Matisse, Henri (1869-1954) Conversation

"Trees are poems that Earth writes upon the sky." Khalil Gibran Ralph Emerson art

”Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence.” - Kahlil Gibran This sounds like such a forbidding statement. It speaks of closed doors, and finality. But I find this idea so comforting. Here’s why. thequietlife.net/p/on-becomi…

The older I get, the clearer it becomes: people don’t disappear into gardening, baking, books, and long walks because life got boring. They do it because peace became priceless.

Life is a balance: grief for what's lost, gratitude for what remains, and excitement for what's next.

Zhou Yansheng（Chinese, b.1942）

Thank you @Johnubacon and Teddy!

It may be the answer to happiness

Logo for Paris Tennis School

A Hungarian-American psychologist spent 40 years proving that the noise in your head when you try to focus is not a failure of willpower, it is a design feature of your brain, and almost no manager on earth has implemented what he found. His name was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It started when he was 10 years old, locked in an Italian prison camp during World War II. His relatives were being killed. One brother died in combat. Another was shipped to a labor camp in Siberia. The whole world he grew up in was gone. Then he found chess. The moment he sat down at the board, the war disappeared. For hours he forgot the camp, the fear, the hunger, all of it. He was not escaping reality. He was more inside it than ever, just pointed at one thing. He spent the rest of his life trying to explain why. What he found is that your brain has a hard ceiling. It can only process about 110 bits of information per second. That sounds like a lot until you learn that just following someone talking eats 60 bits. That is why you cannot listen to two people at once. Your bandwidth is full. This noise in your head is not weakness. It’s remaining bandwidth with nothing to grab. When a task is hard enough to require almost everything you've got, there's no room for anything else. No room to be hungry. No room to see time. No time to repeat this morning’s argument or to worry about money. The chatter stops, not because you made it stop, but because there is no power left to run it. He called this state “Flow.” And he showed it wasn’t a fluke. It is driven by formula. The task has to be at the edge of your ability. Too easy and you will get bored and drift off. Too hard and you get anxious and freeze up. The sweet spot is a narrow band just beyond what you can comfortably do. And that band is where your best work and your best moments actually live. And you need a clear goal and instant feedback. A chess player always knows where the board is. A climber knows exactly where the next handhold is. Most office work feels like walking through mud. The goal is vague and the feedback is weeks away in a meeting, if you get feedback at all. He did something no one had tried to prove all of this. He gave people electronic beepers in the 1970s and buzzed them at random times during the day. When the beeper sounded, they wrote down what they were doing and how they felt at the time. Real life, caught in the moment, thousands of times. The data revealed something that should have changed every company on the planet. People experience flow much more often at work than in their leisure time. TV, couch, weekend scrolling, not much flow at all. They became energised at work, with tasks that had goals and feedback. But there was a catch that dashed his own hopes. Those same people in flow at work said they wished they were somewhere else. It was the best mental experience a human can have and they hated it every minute. And the reason was obvious. When you pick the challenge, the flow feels incredible. When it is forced on you by someone , it feels like a trap . Same mental state. Conflicting meaning. This is the part that has been lost for 40 years. The science was right there. People are most happy when they are asked to do something hard, when the ask is just beyond their skill, and when they decide to rise to the occasion. Give people a clear goal, fast feedback, real control and a challenge matched to their ability and you don’t get drained employees. You get people doing their best work and feeling most alive. Instead we built open offices with interruptions. We buried goals in vague slogans. We put feedback in the annual review. We robbed people of their agency and then wondered why no one could pay attention. Before the age of 12, a scared boy in a prison camp found the cure for a distracted mind. The rest of us are still building lives and workplaces that make it impossible.

Was true then, still true today