Happy Birthday, Brain Pickings: 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living – The Marginalian

I share these here not because they apply to every life and offer some sort of blueprint to existence, but in the hope that they might benefit your own journey in some small way, bring you closer to your own center, or even simply invite you to reflect on your own sense of purpose.

我在这里分享这些，并不是因为它们适用于每一个生命，并提供某种存在的蓝图，而是希望它们能够以某种微小的方式有益于你自己的旅程，让你更接近你自己的中心，甚至只是邀请你反思你自己的目的感。

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates.

允许自己改变主意，这是一种令人不舒服的奢侈。培养“消极能力”的能力。在我们生活的文化中，最大的社会耻辱之一就是没有自己的观点，因此我们经常根据肤浅的印象或借用他人的想法来形成我们的“观点”，而没有投入培养真正信念所需的时间和思想。

We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality.

然后，我们四处宣扬这些陈旧的观点，并坚持将它们作为我们现实的锚。

It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

简单地说“我不知道”会让人非常迷失方向。但理解比正确更有价值——即使这意味着改变你对某个话题、一种意识形态，或者最重要的是你自己的看法。

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy.

不要仅仅为了声望、地位、金钱或认可而做任何事情。正如保罗·格雷厄姆所说，“声望就像一块强大的磁铁，甚至会扭曲你对自己喜欢的事物的信念。

It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

它让你不再专注于你喜欢的事情，而是专注于你想要喜欢的事情。”这些外在激励因素很好，可以让你在当下感到对生活的肯定，但它们最终不会让你早上起床时感到兴奋，晚上入睡时感到满意——事实上，它们常常会分散注意力和注意力。从那些确实提供更深层次回报的事情中。

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator.

慷慨一点。慷慨地投入你的时间和资源，并给予信任，尤其是你的言语。成为批评者比成为庆祝者容易得多。

Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

永远记住，每一次交流的另一端、每一件受到批评的文化艺术品背后都有一个人。理解和被理解，这些都是生命中最伟大的礼物，每一次互动都是交换它们的机会。

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

让你的生活充满宁静。幽思。去散步。骑自行车去任何特别的地方。做白日梦，甚至是为了无聊，都有一个创造性的目的。当我们停止积极地试图诱使缪斯显现出来，让经验的碎片在我们的潜意识中漂浮，以便点击进入新的组合时，最好的想法就会出现。如果没有这个无意识处理的重要阶段，整个创作过程的流程就会被打破。

Most importantly, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities.

最重要的是，睡觉。睡眠除了是最有创意的催情剂外，还影响我们醒着的每一个时刻，决定我们的社交节奏，甚至调节我们的负面情绪。像对待工作一样，对睡眠保持虔诚和自律。我们往往把自己靠着很少的睡眠过日子的能力视为某种荣誉勋章，以证明我们的职业道德。但事实上，这是自尊和优先事项的严重失败。

What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

还有什么比您的健康和理智更重要呢？其他一切都源于您的健康和理智？

5. When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

当人们告诉你他们是谁时，玛雅·安杰卢（Maya Angelou）提出了著名的建议，相信他们。然而，同样重要的是，当人们试图告诉你你是谁时，不要相信他们。你是自己正直的唯一守护者，那些误解你是谁和你代表什么的人所做的假设暴露了很多关于他们的信息，但绝对没有透露关于你的信息。

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that.

存在感是一门比生产力更复杂、更有价值的艺术。我们的文化通过我们的效率、我们的收入、我们做这做那的能力来衡量我们作为人类的价值。

The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

对生产力的崇拜固然有它的地位，但每天在它的祭坛上崇拜却剥夺了我们获得快乐和奇迹的能力，而正是这些能力让生活变得有价值——因为，正如安妮·迪拉德（Annie Dillard）所说的那样，“我们如何度过我们的日子，当然，我们如何度过我们的一生。”

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossom_ing_. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

“凡是有价值的事情都需要花很长时间。”这是从聪明而出色的黛比·米尔曼那里借来的，因为在我们的即时文化中，很难更好地捕捉如此基本但又如此不耐烦地忽视的东西。一夜成功的神话只是一个神话，同时也提醒我们，我们目前对成功的定义需要认真重新调整。正如我在其他地方所反映的那样，花朵不会一下子从花蕾到开花，然而，作为一种文化，我们对开花的乏味不感兴趣。但这才是塑造一个人的性格和命运的真正魔力所在。