What I’ve been reading:
Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis by Erich Fromm, D. T. Suzuki, and Richard De Martino
The book consists of lectures given by Fromm, Suzuki, and De Martino at a Zen Buddhism seminar in 1975.
So far, I’ve read only Fromm’s part of the book.
Fromm, unsurprisingly, did a great job emphasizing what is most useful in the original ideas of Sigmund Freud, giving a concise overview of psychoanalysis, and then exploring how all of this maps onto Zen Buddhism.
I have high hopes for Suzuki’s part of the book, as he remains to this day one of the most important Zen masters who wrote for the Western audience. He was influential to and admired by some of the West’s brightest minds of the last century. One of them, Carl Jung, said about Suzuki:
"Suzuki's works on Zen Buddhism are among the best contributions to the knowledge of living Buddhism. We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the author, first for the fact of his having brought Zen closer to Western understanding, and secondly for the manner in which he has achieved this task."
What I’ve listened to:
How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset - Huberman Lab podcast
Once again, Andrew Huberman overdelivers.
I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but the amount of value this man delivers and the way in which it is organized and presented are second to none.
With that being said, some of his podcast episodes, or a lot of them, will not be interesting to someone who is not at least a little bit of a science geek.
This episode is not one of them.
If you are one of those who are fed up with the word "mindset" because of how overused and misused it is in the online space, I can relate. But don’t let that deter you from listening to this episode.
I can’t imagine a person for whom it wouldn’t be extremely useful to listen to Huberman’s detailed breakdown of the Growth Mindset which he calls one of the most fascinating and important discoveries in the recent history of psychology.
One group of people that I especially recommend listening to this—I even urge them to do so—are parents (or those who plan on becoming parents).
Watch/listen here or on any other podcast streaming platform.
What I’ve been thinking about:
The importance of mistakes.
How could life give you any feedback, how could you ever learn what your weaknesses and flaws are and how to fix them, if you never failed, never made mistakes, never did anything wrong?
Thank you for reading.
Stay strong, love life, and never feel sorry for yourself.
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My free ebook: The Lost Art of Reading
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