Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg, r. Mar. 2024

 Location 134 When starting a dialogue, it helps to think of the discussion as a negotiation where the prize is figuring out what everyone wants.

Location 1645 The emotionally intelligent person is often a pleasure to be around and leaves others feeling better. The emotionally intelligent person, however, does not mindlessly seek pleasure, but rather attends to emotion in the path toward growth.

Location 3508 “Before there were dysfunctional families, I came from one,” Camille wrote in 1994, when he was seventy-five. But he had managed to escape that legacy, he continued, by changing “into the person I’ve slowly become: Comfortable, joyful, connected and effective.”

Location 3578 ...and found that “a higher degree of social integration was associated with lower risk” of illness and death at every stage of life. Social isolation, the researchers wrote, was more dangerous than diabetes and a host of other chronic diseases.

Endure by Alex Hutchinson, r. Feb. 2024

 Location 2999 Burke and others published a pair of studies in 2016 using a protocol dubbed “sleep low,” which involved a high-quality carbohydrate-fueled workout in the late afternoon, followed by a carbohydrate-free dinner; then, the next morning, a carbohydrate-depleted moderate workout before breakfast. Repeating this cycle just three times, for a total of six days, produced a 3 percent improvement in 20-kilometer cycling times.

Location 3188 Pacing, in Tucker’s formulation, is the process of comparing the effort you feel at any given point in a race to the effort you expect at that stage—an internal template that you develop and fine-tune from experience. If the start of a race feels like a 10 out of 20 effort on the Borg scale, and you expect to hit 20 by the end, then halfway through the race the effort should feel like a 15. If, instead, you’re at 16 halfway through the race, you’ll feel a powerful urge to slow down—even though you’re still far from the max of 20.

Location 3333 I thought back to what Marcora had told me about the difference between effort and pain. We often think of races as “painful,” but physical pain is completely distinct from the sense of effort—the struggle to keep going against a mounting desire to stop—that usually limits race speed.

Location 3410 The goal, Paulus explains, is to cultivate “non-judgmental self-awareness”: for a marathoner, leg pain and shortness of breath become neutral sources of information, to be used for pacing, rather than emotionally charged warnings to panic about. “You learn to monitor how your body actually feels, while suspending judgment about it,” he says.

Location 4070 The answers to important questions are often elusive, but in the process of chasing them, we sometimes get a better handle on which questions are worth asking.

Location 4082 You can certainly improve your physiological fitness, albeit by margins that get ever smaller the longer you train. And there may also be shortcuts to upping your brain game, like zapping your motor cortex. But I’m not sure that’s any more satisfying than wearing faster shoes. The ultimate goal, it seems to me, is to dig deeper of your own volition—to be better than you were by leaving the tank a little emptier. That’s why, no matter what future research tells us about neat ideas like brain stimulation, the best answer I have for that nagging question about how to alter your limits is still humble, unsexy self-talk.