Everyone On The New York City Subway Smells Bad, Everyone, All Of Them, Every Last Soul, BUT I Got One

Everyone on the New York City subway smells bad, everyone, all of them, every last soul, BUT I got one of those lady conductors who opens up her door and straight-up chastises people who are being disruptive and horrible to the other commuters and I?? Love??? These conductors???

Every time I get one of them I love it. I love the old school, “I don’t play, be polite or get out,” attentive af(usually black or latinx) women of the MTA. I love when they tell people to mind their damn manners. I love when they evict screaming men from their trains. I love when they stare down rude dudes who are creeping on commuters. I love when they shout from their train windows, “yo!! You got a crazy person on your train!! I kicked him off mine, now he’s on yours!!” because they have the other conductors’ backs.

Everyone has a different spirit of New York but these women are the truest. May they all get raises, may their union be strong, may they look that new British MTA president — you know, the one with the whimsical New Yorker profile — dead in the eye and frighten and awe him with what they have witnessed and triumphed over. They are good elements, the women of the MTA. I. Love. Them.

Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than “laziness” is the real reason you find it hard to get started.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig  (via witch-lyfe)

I love gift wrapping and if I could quit my job for two weeks just to wrap gifts I would do it.

“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”

—

Ursula K. Le Guin

Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones. What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed: and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail. However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not; that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually. The good news is that mindsets can be taught; they’re malleable. What’s really fascinating is that Dweck and others have developed techniques that they call ‘growth mindset interventions’ which have shown that even small changes in communication or seemingly innocuous comments can have fairly long­-lasting implications for a person’s mindset. For instance, praising someone’s process (‘I really like how you struggled with that problem’) versus praising an innate trait or talent (‘You’re so clever!’) is one way to reinforce a growth ­mindset with someone. Process­ praise acknowledges the effort; talent­ praise reinforces the notion that one only succeeds (or doesn’t) based on a fixed trait.

Salman Khan, “The Learning Myth: Why I’ll Never Tell My Son He’s Smart” (via conceptual-a)