The Sunday supplement: #36
Some favorite reads with some uncanny advice, a good book for longterm couples, and an explainer I didn't skim (for once)
Two favorite reads from the week. First, thanks to subscriber G.B., a charming profile in Quanta Magazine of high school dropout June Huh, who just won the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, at 39. (He dropped out of school to become a poet.) It’s a good article and I love this next bit – at first I was confused by it, then I totally agreed with it, yet I don’t practice it much in my life:
He finds that forcing himself to do something or defining a specific goal — even for something he enjoys — never works. It’s particularly difficult for him to move his attention from one thing to another. “I think intention and willpower… are highly overrated,” he said. “You rarely achieve anything with those things.”
Also:
For Huh, when he is working, there’s something almost subconscious going on. In fact, he usually can’t trace how or when his ideas come to him. He doesn’t have sudden flashes of insight. Instead, “at some point, you just realize, oh, I know this,” he said. Maybe last week, he didn’t understand something, but now, without any additional input, the pieces have clicked into place without his realizing it. He likens it to the way your mind can surprise you and create unexpected connections when you’re dreaming. “It’s just amazing what human minds are capable of,” he said. “And it’s nice to admit that we don’t know what’s going on.”
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