On patience, from Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman:

. . . more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen dramatises this deep truth about the power of patience with a parable about Helsinki's main bus station. There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one — and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops. Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction — perhaps you start working on platinum prints of nudes — and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you're dismayed to be told that your pictures aren't as original as you thought, because they look like knock-offs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn's bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else's path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialise. But a few bus stops later, the same thing happens: you're informed that your new body of work seems derivate, too. Back you go to the bus station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognised as being truly your own.

What's the solution? 'It's simple,' Minkkinen says. 'Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.' A little further out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki's bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That's where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage — the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills and accumulating experience.

An interesting musing on society:

The modern condition is mostly trying to do things on your own that people have historically achieved with a large support network and wondering why you're tired all the time.

Sam Harris on boredom:

It is true we encounter boredom less and less, with all of our gadgets and the totality of human knowledge and artistic output available to us. You can always listen to your favorite song, or watch a great film, or read a great book, or text your friend because you can do these things with a device you have by your side 24 hours a day. You might successfully avoid boredom for the rest of your life. But you might also not discover what is on the other side of boredom. And you might not be aware of the price you pay for being compelled to distract yourself, for having lost, or simply never acquired, a capacity for doing nothing—a productive capacity, for doing nothing. Once you learn to meditate, you realize that boredom is simply a failure to pay attention. If something as simple and repetitive as breathing can become a source of blissful contemplation—and it can—and if the feeling of boredom itself can become an object of intense interest—and it can—there is no way to be bored, if you're paying close attention to your experience. So, training in meditation is the true cure to boredom. It is a kind of permanent inoculation—once you learn to meditate, you will never be truly bored again. Now this isn't to say that you won't make choices in life: some activities might still seem like a waste of time—and they might be a waste of time, given the other things you could do. So you might still walk out of a movie or stop reading a book because it is "boring". But when you are left alone with yourself, how do you feel? Are you desperate to be distracted by some stimulus? Or can you find an intrinsic feeling of well-being, as an intrinsic property of just being conscious? The gulf between these two conditions is enormous. And in my experience, only meditation allows us to reliably span it.

Amishi Jha (from an article in The Guardian):

Working memory is like a mental whiteboard with disappearing ink.

Sam Harris (he did not say this verbatim, but whatever):

Death makes a mockery of time spent in negative mental states.

I am not sure where this quote is from, but I like it:

If you have a one-hour–long meeting with 10 attendees, it is a ten-hour–long meeting.