A nurse has recorded the most common regrets of the dying, and among the top ones is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'. What would your biggest regret be if this was your last day of life?

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. …

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.
…

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. …

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. …

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier."

[See also: http://www.inspirationandchai.com/Regrets-of-the-Dying.html and later http://www.paulgraham.com/todo.html

"Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy."]

Notes here by @tealtan:

"unusual contexts in writing / reading text

“In a hyperliterate society, the vast majority of reading is not consciously recognized as reading.”

“What readers expect is more important than what readers want.”

Bill Buxton: “every tool is the best at something and the worst at something else”

skills, path-dependency, learning effects

“…we actually like constraints once we're in them.”"

And notes from @litherland:

"11:40: “I do things like … just obsess about weird little details. So, for instance … like, how do you do text entry in a Netflix app on the Wii? You know? I think about this a lot.” Your many other talents notwithstanding, Tim, you may have missed your calling as a designer. /

18:30: “I think it’s a tragedy that we have not been able to figure out a good interface for pen and ink on reading devices.” Holy grail. My dream for years. I would give anything. I would give anything to be smart enough to figure this out."

"Young people should have the right to control and direct their own learning, that is, to decide what they want to learn, and when, where, how, how much, how fast, and with what help they want to learn it. To be still more specific, I want them to have the right to decide if, when, how much, and by whom they want to be taught and the right to decide whether they want to learn in a school and if so which one and for how much of the time.<br />
 <br />
No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than this…<br />
 <br />
We might call this the right of curiosity, the right to ask whatever questions are most important to us. As adults, we assume that we have the right to decide what does or does not interest us, what we will look into and what we will leave alone. We take this right largely for granted…"

"If I’ve done my job…you won’t be happy w/ anything you write for the next 10 years…not because you won’t be writing well, but because I’ve raised your standards for yourself. Don’t compare yourselves to each other. Compare yourself to Colette, Henry James, or Edith Wharton. Compare yourselves to classics. Shoot there.<br />
<br />
She paused here…another of her fugue states. & then she smiled. We all knew she was right.<br />
<br />
Go up to the place in the bookstore where your books will go, she said. Walk right up & find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there, & then go every time.<br />
<br />
In class, the idea seemed ridiculous. But at some point after the class ended, I did it. I walked up to the shelf. Chabon, Cheever. I put my finger between them & made a space. Soon, I did it every time I went to a bookstore.<br />
<br />
Years later, I tell my own students to do it. As Thoreau, someone she admires very much, once wrote, “In the long run, we only ever hit what we aim at.” She was pointing us there."

"When thinking about moving I asked myself: Which is the city that inspires me most? Where are the people who dare to live their life in their very own personal way? The people who don’t care about what “the matrix says”. The people for whom money-making is a consequence of following their heart & way of living…<br />
<br />
Frankfurt in my opinion is more about maximizing everything. It’s more about moving things forward w/in structures, along the lines. It’s not about questioning structures or creating something new.<br />
<br />
But choosing Berlin in the end wasn’t only a decision between Frankfurt & Berlin. I’ve also lived in Hamburg & Munich. I chose Berlin because it is so different to any other city. Elsewhere life is much more structured: You have to adapt to lots of rules & live up to somebody else’s expectations. In Berlin, you just do it, whatever that may be. & you do it the way you want to do it."

"Hamlet said, ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’

"I think we imagine on some level that our children are weaker than we were. In 2004, I was working in a tech startup...We took on a Harvard undergrad as intern; I asked her whether she used IM, which was how most of office shared info. Her answer was:

"Former teacher & ed researcher Dr Kevin Eames says pressures of job are very intense & draining. "It's exciting...adrenaline burn from classroom is like nothing else..."Teachers I've worked w/ who have come in from law, finance & journalism have commented that it is most demanding, tiring & busy thing they have ever done." Teachers have always had to get up in front of class & put on performance. But things seem to be getting tougher for teachers...very little down-time to re-charge & re-energise themselves."...But there is something else. Dr Eames says there has been a change in culture in recent years, which has turned students into consumers of ed services. "If something goes wrong - it's the teacher's fault. If the exam results are not what are expected it is also the teacher's fault. "It's this shift from pupils learning from someone who has the knowledge - to becoming consumers who are judging the providers of that knowledge - it's like a beauty contest into 'edutainment'""

Great piece by Tim Carmody that starts with "We’ve got a bunch of con­ven­tions about the ways we read and write which don’t have as much to do with how we read and write as we thought they did." I'm tweaking it to "We’ve got a bunch of con­ven­tions about the ways we learn which don’t have as much to do with how we learn as we thought they did."

"I found the word "eustress" on a page from an online book or workshop about Stress Management page by a professor named Wes Sime, whom I was reading about in Steven Johnson's book Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life. He distinguishes two kinds of stress:

"Any effort to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty begins with education. Four decades of research has found that the single best thing one can do for a low-income student is give her a chance to attend a middle-class school. The landmark 1966 Coleman Report found that the most important predictor of academic achievement is the socioeconomic status of the family a child comes from, and the second most important predictor is the socioeconomic makeup of the school she attends. A low-income student given the chance to attend a middle-class school is likely to be surrounded by peers who are academically engaged and less likely to act out; a set of parents who volunteer in the classroom and know how to hold school officials accountable; and high-quality teachers who have high expectations."

"We parent on the theory of lowered expectations: if they don't know what they're missing, they won't get upset about it until they're already old enough to resent us for a whole host of other reasons. Disneyworld is, I'm sure, a totally magical pain in the ass. But when your kid has never seen a Disney movie and doesn't know Florida even exists, places like Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati will do in a pinch."

"Expectations are resentments in advance." AND "School heads face three roads to failure. Sex is the most dangerous. Alcohol is the most painful. But strategic planning is the most certain."

"what matters in the age where, for example, South Korean popular television shows hours of Starcraft competitions, all moderated by a trio doing color, stats and play-by-play? Who are our cultural heros? What are our the aspirations of digital kids as defined by their peers? By their parents?"

"The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why."

"# What can schools do better to help children define happiness? # What can families do better to help children at school define happiness? # What can friends do better to help their friends at school define happiness? # What can school students do better

"In what way am I delayed by paying attention to more, different, inarguably interesting stuff? Gratifying stuff?"..."Called a flighty dreamer all too often, I think increasingly that I stand on the side of realism. I will be finished when I’m dead."

"What disturbs me most is that the CBS 5 story moves to the question of what kind of "higher standards" we hold teachers to and is more than willing to keep raising the bar to create wildly unrealistic standards of off-duty conduct."

"So I've been thinking about messes and why messy learning makes people so uncomfortable. Especially the corporate types."

"In a culture where work can be a religion, burnout is its crisis of faith."

"Experts say young people are more likely to experience burnout than older persons, and a single person is more likely to feel it than a person who takes care of four kids and ailing parents. But what is burnout? Guests discuss the three kinds of burnout