Continuous Productivity

Awesome Quote

I found this quote on the always wonderful EconLog. In discussing the Flynn Effect, James Flynn writes:

There is one way an individual can walk a personal path to enhanced cognitive skills. He or she must internalize the goal of seeking challenging cognitive environments -- seeking intellectual challenges all the way from choosing the right leisure activities to wanting to marry someone who is intellectually stimulating. Better off still are those who develop a certain kind of character formation -- a character such that I carry about within myself a stimulating mental environment I myself create. Then I would be relatively free of needing good luck to enjoy a cognitively enriched environment throughout life. I would have instant access to a portable gymnasium that exercises the mind. Books and ideas and conversation are easier to transport than a basketball court. No one can keep me from using mental arithmetic so habitually that my arithmetical skills survive.

I love this quote on so many levels. Put concisely, one has to put himself in a position to exercise the mind. If not, just like the body without exercise, the mind turns to mush.

I Agree

Thanks to Kedrosky, another wonderful quote.  This is in reference to Vonnegut (emphasis mine):

The unhappiest times in his life were those months and sometimes a whole year when he couldn't write, when he was "blocked." He'd try just about anything to get unblocked, but he was very nervous and suspicious about psychiatry. In my early-to-mid-twenties he let it slip that he was afraid that therapy might make him normal and well adjusted, and that would be the end of his writing. I tried to reassure him that psychiatrists weren't nearly that good.

Like I said, I agree completely. 

Quote

Via another must-read, Kedrosky:

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
-- Evelyn Waugh, Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)

Couldn't have said it better myself.  That's my excuse and I am sticking with it.