"[My brain] was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it — and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check email, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected."
"[P]eople naturally seek out [user-friendly] software tools and Web sites that offer the most help the most guidance—and shun those that are difficult to master. We want friendly, helpful software. Why wouldn't we? Yet as we cede to software more of the toil of thinking, we are likely diminshing our own brain power in subtle but meaningful ways. When a ditchdigger trades his shovel for a backhoe, his arm muscles weaken even as his efficency increases. A similar trade-off may well take palce as we automate the work of the mind."
"It can thus be fruitless to try to examine the adaptive unconscious by looking inward. It is often better to deduce the nature of our hidden minds by looking outward at our behavior and how others react to us, and coming up with a good narrative. In essence, we must be like biographers of our own lives, distilling our behavior and feelings into a meaningful and effective narrative. The best way to author a good self-story is not necessarily to engage in a lot of navel-gazing introspection, trying to uncover hidden feelings and motives.
In fact there is evidence that is can be counterproductive to look inward too much.... The key is the kind of self-examination people perform, and the extent to which people attempt to know themselves solely by looking inward, versus looking outward at their own behavior and how others react to them."
"The first skill to learn is the art of letting go the human inclination to judge ourselves and our performance as either good or bad."
"[L]etting go of judgments does not mean ignoring errors. It simply means seeing events as they are and not adding anything to them. Nonjudgmental awareness might observe that during a certain match you hit 50 percent of your first serves inot the net. It doesn't ignore the fact. It may accurately describe your serve that day as erratic and seek to discover the causes. Judgment begins when the serve is labeled "ad" and causes intereference with one's playing when a reaction of anger, frustration or discouragement follows. If the judgment process could be stopped with the naming of the event as bad, and there was no further ego reaction, the the intereference would be minimal. But judgmental labels usually lead to emotional reactions and then to tightness, trying to hard, self-condemnation, etc. This process can be slowed by using descriptive but nonjudgmental words to describe the events you see."