Why Your Brain Turns The Miraculous Into The Mundane—And How To Fix It | Maria Popova
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2024
⏱️ 79 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Smart and practical strategies for living, in Maria's words, wonder-smitten by reality.
Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning — sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children's books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials, author of Figuring, and maker of the live show The Universe in Verse — a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, which is now also a book.
In this episode we talk about:
- Wonder as a tool for improving all of your relationships
- The tyranny of the word should
- How the hardest thing in life is not getting what you want, it's knowing what you want
- Why she doesn't believe in making meditation a tool, even though she's been practicing for 14 years
- The illusion of certainty
- The immense value of intellectual humility
- Strategies for outgrowing your old habits
- Her new book, The Universe in Verse, which is a combination of science and poetry
From The Marginalian: How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty
Related Episodes:
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- The Science Of Getting Out Of Your Head | Annie Murphy Paul
- George Saunders on: “Holy Befuddlement” and How to Be Less of a “Turd”
- The Profound Upside of Self-Diminishment | George Saunders
- A Radical Approach to Productivity, Self-Compassion Series | Jocelyn K. Glei
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wundry Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. |
| 0:05.0 | Join Wundry Plus in the Wundry app or on Apple Podcasts. |
| 0:08.0 | This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody how we doing it is |
| 0:27.0 | how we doing it is very easy when you're stuck in your head or just trying to get by checking things |
| 0:35.2 | off your to-do list anxious scrolling stressed about the news it is very easy in |
| 0:40.8 | your everyday life to forget how miraculous and mysterious it is that you are alive in the first place. |
| 0:48.0 | What is this experience we're having? |
| 0:50.0 | The deadening effect of habit and routine which numb us to the magnificent |
| 0:55.9 | it really should be resisted. The cultivation of awe the research shows can lead to |
| 1:02.3 | all sorts of benefits improved mood |
| 1:04.0 | reduced stress and anxiety increased creativity and open-mindedness not to mention |
| 1:09.0 | increases in immune function and cardiovascular health my guest today has made it her life's work to cultivate awe. |
| 1:16.0 | In fact, she believes it's a responsibility |
| 1:18.0 | and she has some really smart and practical strategies for living and these are her words |
| 1:23.1 | wonder smitten by reality. |
| 1:25.8 | Although to be very clear and you'll hear her say this, |
| 1:28.3 | she does not consider herself to be an advice giver. |
| 1:31.3 | Nonetheless I have to say the strategies she's come up with for |
| 1:34.0 | herself are I think extremely practical and smart. Anyway just some background here I've |
| 1:39.5 | been trying to get Maria Popova on this show for years. This speaks very well of her because she's |
| 1:45.4 | unlike me not a publicity hound. I've been reading her website the |
| 1:49.7 | marginalian for many years in which she discusses the books she's reading and what they can tell |
... |
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