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Maria Popova

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2024-06-13
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2024-06-13
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  1. “You know, Amazon's own thing that says add note, read, read in this location, delete note. And so it all merges it and becomes just hideous. It's just impossible to read.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “The problem with that, I did try that once, but when you remove the style, it makes all the metadata look the same as the text. So on every highlighted passage, I also have my own notes.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Email thread. It's like an email thread, except there's no actual hierarchy. These are all, you know, and so if you want to go fix it, you have to do it manually within Evernote. And on the Werner Hertzog book, for example, which is 600 pages, I have thousands of notes. So imagine thousands of tabulations. Until the last one is so narrow and long that it's just like unreadable. So hence my point about just there is no viable solution that I know.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “And then email that's grain grab into my Evernote email because Evernote has, as you know, optical character recognition. So. When I searched within it, it's also going to search the text in that image. I don't have to wait until I finish the book and explore all my notes. And also the formatting is kind of shitty on the Kindle notes on the desktop where you can see all your notes. So if you copy them, they paste them to Evernote with this really weird formatting. So it tabulates each next node's indented to the right. So it's sort of this long cascading thing that shifts more and more to the right.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Honestly, I feel like that problem has not been solved at all in any kind of practical way. So the way that I do it is basically a bunch of hacks using existing technologies. But I don't think, or perhaps I'm just unaware, but I don't think there's anybody designing tools today for people who do serious heavy reading. There just isn't anything that I know. And so what I do is I highlight in the Kindle app and the iPad. And then Amazon has this function that you can basically see or Kindle notes and highlights on the desktop, on your computer. I go to those, I copy them from that page and I paste them into an Evernote file to sort of just have all of my notes in a specific book in one place. But sometimes I would also take a screen grab of a specific iPad, Kindle apple page with my highlighted passage.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I completely disagree. I agree with the notion that those are connotations today and people have a resistance, but I think that's all the more reason to use it heavily and to use it intelligently and to reclaim it and to get people to understand that philosophy Whatever form it takes is the only way to figure out how to live. Everything else that we take away from anything is a set of Philosophies essentially”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “With us perhaps the best manifesto, and I hate this modern word sort of buzzword, but I use it intentionally. So the best manifesto for our current struggle with this very notion of productivity versus presence and how much are we really mistaking the doing for the being, it's amazing that somebody wrote this millennia ago before there was internet, before there was the things we call distractions today. And yet he writes about the exact same things just in a different form. Yeah.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Were five or six hyperlink references removed from something I was reading, which I'd make to something else, which I'd make something else, which led me to this great other thing. So I think that's kind of a beautiful practice.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “The work, or just no letter if I just want to flag a quote from something else that I know of. And I think that's actually very important because the phenomenon itself, not my annotations of it, because literature is really, and I say this all the time, it is the original internet. So all of those references and citations and illusions even, they're essentially hyperlinks that that author placed to another work. If you follow those, you go into this magnificent rabbit hole where you start out with something that you're already enjoying and liking, but follow these congential references to other works that perhaps you would not have come across that way, I mean, directly. And in a way, it's a way to push oneself out of the filter bubble in a very incremental way. And I've often found amazing older books that”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Thank you. But yeah, so I do these tearing the pathogens from literature with a thematically matched song. And so sometimes as I'm reading a book, I would come across a passage that I think would be great for that and maybe a song comes to mind. And so I would put LJ next Jet. But I want to go back to what you said about the external quotes, I guess, the author quoting another work. I think those are actually really important. And that goes back to your question about how I find what to read. I mark those types of things. So for the annotations that are specific to that particular book, all of my sticky tab notes are on the side of the pages. But there's an external quote, something referencing another work. I put a tab at the very top with the letter F, which stands for find if I am not.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “One that is, I guess, not so much about the contents of that passage, about its purpose is LJ, which is, I have a little sort of labor of love side project called Literary Jukebox, right?”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Oh, they wouldn't make sense. They're just very private. It's like too long to get into what they stand for. There's really my own system.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “I've sort of hacked some systems of doing it electronically, but they're imperfect. And on the very last page of each book, which is blank, usually, right before the end cover, I create an alternate index. So I basically list out as I'm reading the topics and ideas that seem to be important and recurring in that volume. And then next to each of them, I start listing at the page numbers where they occur. And on those pages, I obviously highlighted the respective passage and I have a little sort of sticky tab on the side so I can find it. But it's an index based not on keywords, which is what a standard book index is based on, but based on key ideas. And I use that then to sort of synthesize what those ideas are once I'm ready to write about the book.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “So with digital, it's very simple. I just highlight passages and I write myself little notes underneath each that have acronyms that I use frequently for certain topics or shorthand that I have developed for myself. Understanding really, which is what reading should be a conduit to, is a form of pattern recognition. So when you read a whole book, you kind of walk away with certain takeaways that are thematically linked and they don't usually occur sequentially. So it's not like you walk away with one insection from the first chapter, one insect from the second chapter. It's just sort of this pattern of the writer's thoughts that permeate the entire narrative of the book. And so especially if you read as a writer, so somebody who not only needs to walk away with that, but ideally wants to record what those patterns and themes are, that sort of reading is very different. So what I end up doing with analog books in particular, and it's”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Well, I prefer electronic, so I use the Kindle app of the iPad or any PDM viewer because I read a lot of archival stuff. But the challenge, of course, is that because I read so many older books that are out of print, let alone having digital versions, that's not always possible in case it's rarely possible. Unlike I'm writing about something fairly new. And so in that case, I just go there with my big tome and my sticky notes and pens and sharpies and various annotation analog devices. And I just do that.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Think the title sounds cheesy, but it is not cheesy. I think it's called Smile Meditation. And I'm sure she has repeated it in various forms through the years in other recordings. It just happens to be the one that I have on. on my broken 3G iPhone without any internet or cell service, which I just use as an iPod that's on it.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “And it's interestingly, I mean, she puts one out every week, but I've been using the exact same one from the summer of 2010. It's just one that I like and feel familiar with and it sort of helps me get into the rhythm. So every day I listen to the exact summer.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Spell her a last name B-R-A-C-H And she's based out of DC, and she was trained as a cognitive psychologist, then did decades of Buddhist screening and lived in an ashram. And now she teaches mindfulness, but with a very secular lens. So she records her classes and she has a podcast, which is how I came to know her. And every week she does a one-hour lecture on sort of the philosophies and cognitive behavioral wisdom of the agers. And then she does a guided meditation. I used her meditations and she has changed my life perhaps more profoundly than anybody in my life. So I highly recommend her.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “I don't have people disruptions, I guess. So anything social. And then I take a short break. I'm a believer in sort of pacing, creating a sort of rhythm where you do very intense focused work for an extended period and you take a short break and then cycle back, you know. And then I deal with any sort of Admin stuff like emails and just taking care of Aaron and whatnot. And I resume writing and I write my other article or articles. Through the evening, I try to have some private time just later in the day, either with friends or with my partner or just time that is unburdened by deliberate thought, although you can never unburden yourself from thought in general. And then usually later at night, I either do some more reading or some more writing or a combination of the two.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “act that in my own life by being very disciplined about my sleep, at least as disciplined as I am about my work, because the latter is a product of the capacities cultivated by the former. So in any case, so I get up eight hours after I have gone to bed. I meditate, I go to the gym where I do most of my longer form reading. I get back home, I have breakfast, and I start writing. I usually write between two and three articles a day. One of them tends to be longer. And when I write, I need uninterrupted time. So I try to get the longer one done earlier on in the day when I feel much more alert. So I don't look at email or anything really external to the material I'm dealing with, which does require quite a bit of research usually. So it's not like I can cut myself off from the internet or from other books.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Exactly eight hours after I've gone to bed. So it varies. I'm a huge proponent of sleep. I think when I write, because when I, I guess, try to think, what I do is essentially make associations between seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts. And in order for that to happen, you know, those associative chains need to be firing. And when I am sleep deprived, I feel like I don't have full access to my own brain, which is certainly, I'm not unique in that in any way. There's research showing that our reflexes are severely hindered by lack of sleep. We're almost as drunk if we sleep less than half the amount of time we normally need to function. And I think ours as a culture where we wear our ability to get by and very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that the speaks work ethic or toughness or whatever it is, but really it's a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect. And I try to students.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Just the fulfillment we feel in our own lives and the presence that we take in the day to day. And that's something I've become more and more apparent to me. So I'm a little bit reluctant to discuss a routine of some sort of holy grail creative process because it's just really, it's a crutch. I mean, routines and rituals help us not feel like this overwhelming mesh in the show of just day-to-day life with consumers. It's a control mechanism, but that's not all there is. And if anything, it should be in the service of something greater, which is being present with one's own life. So with that in mind, my day is very predictable. I get up in the morning. I meditate for between 15 to 25 minutes before I do anything else.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Well, I'll answer this with a caveat. The one thing I have struggled with or tried to solve for myself in the last few years maybe is this sort of really delicate balance between productivity and prejudice and especially in a culture that seems to measure or worse or marriage or our value through our efficiency and our earnings and our ability to perform.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “That's so wonderful that you do that because I think so much of the cultural crap that is out there, not just on the internet, just in general, comes from people who fail to understand that they should be making the kind of stuff they want to exist. So if you're a writer, write the things you want to read, if you're an artist, paying the goals you want to see painted. And I think the commercial aspect is really warping that. And one thing I really admire about your work and all of its permutation is from your books to this podcast, the site, everything is that there's just this sort of sense that you just want this to exist. It doesn't exist for any other reason than you want it to exist. And I think that's wonderful.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “As it's an ad supported medium, the motive will be to perfect the commercial interest, so perfect the art of the BuzzVealistical, the endless slideshow, the infinitely paginated article, and not to perfect the human spirit. Of the reader or the writer, which is really what I'm interested in.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Perhaps Lerner Herzog put in best. I just finished reading those kind of 600 page interview with him, essentially. It's a conversation that a journalist named Paul Croonin had with him over the course of 30 years. And in one passage, Herzog says something like, you know, it's always been important for me to have my films reach an audience. I don't necessarily need to hear what those audience reactions are just as long as they're out there, that they're touching, that the films are touching people in some way. And I feel very similarly. So with that in mind, I guess to answer your question rather circuitously, I don't feel quote unquote tempted to make listicles or to make anything that I feel compromises my experience of what I stand for. In part, I think the beauty of the web is that it's a self-perfecting organism. But for as long as”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “And sort of performed to it, right? I think that's a pretty cynical interpretation, I think rather than hypocrisy, it's just this very human struggle to be seen and to be understood, which is why all art comes to be, because one human being wants to put something into the world and to be understood for what he or she stands for, who here she is. And so with that lens, I do think it's hard to say, well, you know, I don't care about what happens to it out there, even though I write for myself and think for myself. The awareness of the other really does change things. But I think”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Well, you know, it's interesting because I think anybody who thinks in public, which is what writing is, which is even what art is. It's some sort of putting a piece of oneself out into the world. Anybody who does that struggles with this really irreconcilable kind of tug of war between wanting to really stay true to one's experience and being aware that as soon as it's out in the world, there's this notion of the other audience. And Oscar Wilde, he very memorably said that a true artist takes notice whatever of the public and that the public are to him non-existent. And it's very easy to say, especially for somebody as wild who is very prolific, very public, almost performative in his public presence. It's very easy to call this out as a kind of hypocrisy and say, well, you can't possibly not care about the audience given you make your living through it.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Congratulations, by the way. Thank you. And I'm not sort of number dropping for fail or anything like that, but just to. Try to articulate how surreal it feels to me that I still feel like I'm writing to one person, one very sort of inward person. But there's also now the awareness that there are people looking on and interpreting and just relating to this pretty private act. And it's a strange thing to live with and in no way a bad thing. I'm not complaining about it, obviously, but it's just interesting to observe how one relates to oneself when being looked on by a few million people, you know?”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “It is very much the case. I still write for an audience of one, and that's myself. Like I said, it's just a record of my thought process, my way of just trying to navigate my way through the world and understand my place in it, understand how we relate to one another, how different pieces of the world relate to each other and sort of create a pattern of meaning out of seemingly unrelated, meaningless information. And this sort of transmutation of information into wisdom, really, which is what learning to live is. It's about wisdom. And that's interesting too, because when I started bringing, like I said almost eight years ago, it started very much as a private record of my own curiosity. And I shared it with seven co-workers that I had at the time, just as a little sort of email newsletter thing. And now to think that there are about 7 million people, strangers, reading it every month.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “I know, I heard your semicolon quote. I think it was either the interview did with Kevin Kelly or with Sam, but I actually have a counterpoint to the semicolon.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Well, I guess it goes back to that question, well, let me backtrack. I can just say that I write about a very wide array of disciplines and eras and sensibilities because that's what I think about. So anything from art and science to philosophy, psychology, history, design, poetry, you name it. But the common denominator for me is just this very simple question of does this illuminate some aspect, big or small, of that grand question that I think we all tussle with every day, which is how to live well, how to live a good, meaningful, fulfilling life. Whether that's Aristotle's views on happiness and government or beautiful, art from 12th century Japan or Sam Harris' new book, anything.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “They always do, which is why I actually don't do interviews very frequently because I find that they sort of. Tend to kind of cast us as the static thing to just stay there, some sort of reference point while we're really just the fluid process and we're constantly evolving. But in any case”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “You're very kind. It's just the volume of time, really. It's been, you know, I've been doing this for eight years coming up actually exactly a month from today. It'll be eight years. It's just the accumulation, you know.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “And I wrote about it because it's lovely and sort of profound and challenges our existing ideas about sort of sensor experience. And I like things that take something very superficial and find something deeper and something unusual in it. But in any case, so I wrote about that book and that particular piece on brainpicking seemed to do pretty well. And I think perhaps that warbler Chris's idea of how much Contemporary books, I really sort of am interested in. I would say that my.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Well, first of all, you're very kind to put it that way as a Chris. But I think one big caveat to all of that is that the majority of books that I read and write about are very old, out of print, things that are not competing for New York Times bestseller. In fact, I don't even know if I ever really, I mean, perhaps, I don't know if the books that I read have any overlap in the Venn diagram of things with the New York Times bestsellers, but I suspect that the reason Chris asked that question is actually that I met him through his wife who collaborated with Wendy McNaughton, the illustrator, whose work I love and I love Wendy on a book about wine and...”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “It's just the record of that thinking, my personal subjective private thinking that takes place between my reading and the writing and takes form in writing.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Well, I've answered it differently over the years, in part because I think inhabiting our own identity as kind of a perpetual process. But right now, I would say I read and I write in that order. And in between, I do some thinking and I think about. How to live a meaningful life, basically”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Oh, yeah, I call this reader syndrome as somebody who spends the majority of her waking hours reading. You run into that a lot, especially with sort of cultural icons, last names, first names that are sold differently than very differently than they're pronounced. It's kind of tragic comic when you actually find out how they're pronounced.”

    2024-06-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT