Pevear and Volokhonsky, who are married, work in an unusual fashion. She, a native Russian speaker, renders each book into entirely literal English. He, who knows insufficient Russian, then works on the rendering with the intention of keeping the language as close to the original as possible. What results from this attempt at unprecedented fidelity is a word-for-word and syntax-for-syntax version that sacrifices tone and misconstrues overall sense.

Further, the group three dogs who believed they had no control over their suffering exhibited symptoms very similar to clinical depression in humans, suggesting that a major cause of depression may be a sense of helplessness in our life situation.

The underlying motivation for all of these beliefs is called “learned helplessness.” In short, it’s a mental state where, as a result of past experiences, we believe we can’t do anything about a certain stimulus.

I save the things I read online, too, in a digital research library. I’ve long used Evernote to clip the full text of articles I find and gather them in various digital notebooks, separated into categories for easy reference. I can full-text search everything that I've saved over the past decade, to find the citation really quickly. The combination of my physical library and my note-taking softwares act as a kind of external brain—in other words, my memory gets me to the original source of what I’ve read by searching my notebooks, Evernote, or Pinboard.Recently I’ve been migrating this clip-taking to Pinboard, inspired by a Superorganizers post. Pinboard is much like Evernote, but allows you to tag clipped articles into multiple categories. Pinboard automatically saves a full-text version of each page you clip, so you can search and reference the text even if the website is removed or the page is no longer available. 

Book selection is a huge factor. If you read a lot and you get through a book at least every week or two, there’s a big opportunity cost to each book you pick. Namely, every other book you’re not reading at that moment. So how do you assess which books to read? The method I’ve settled on now is their potential impact on my mental models (unless I’m trying to solve a very specific problem). The latest business book is unlikely to provide and valuable mental model, or if it does, it’ll be one idea spread out over 250 pages, 200 of which you can skip.

Every account I read reflected a rigidly packed day where the layer of people around the HSPs acted as an attentional filter, only bringing the most important piece of information into the focus of the celebrity. I don’t care for being rich, but I really care for being focused. Not all of us have a personal chef who switches the nutrition every ten days and attends to all our dietary needs. Hence in the absence of the swarm of people who act as a second brain, it is upon us to build our own.