Mindfulness A practical guide finding peace in a frantic world - Mark Williams and Danny Penman

• You are not your thoughts.
• You come to profound understanding that thoughts and feelings (including negative ones) are transient.
• When you start to feel a little sad, anxious, or irritable it's not the mood that does the damage but how you react to it.
• The mind is constantly trawling through memories to find those that echo our current emotional state.
• A few sad thoughts can en up triggering a cascade of unhappy memories.
• You can't stop the triggering of unhappy memories, self-critical thoughts and judgmental ways of thinking, but you can stop what happens next.
• Most of us know only the analytical side of the mind.
• But the mind is also aware.
• Meditation creates greater mental clarity.
• The act of smiling can itself make you happy.
• The evidence is clear: brooding is the problem, not the solution.
• Pure awareness transcends thinking.
• "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking out new landscapes but in having new eyes." (Marcel Proust)
• Mindful awarenesses - or mindfulness - spontaneously arises out of this Being mode when we learn to pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgement, to things as they actually are.
• How to double your life expectancy: If you are thirty years old, then with a life of around eighty, you have fifty years left. But if you are only truly conscious and aware of every moment for perhaps two out of sixteen hours a day (which is not unreasonable), your life expectancy is only six years and three months. If you could double the number of hours that you were truly alive each day then, in effect, you would be doubling your life expectancy.
• The seven characteristics of "Doing" and "Being" modes of mind:
1. Automatic pilot versus conscious choice
2. Analysing versus sensing
3. Striving versus accepting
• The Doing mode involves judging and comparing the "real" world with the world as we'd like to be in our thoughts and dreams
4. Seeing thoughts as solid and real versus treating them as mental events
• Mindfulness teaches us that thoughts are just thoughts; they are events in the mind. They are often valuable but they are not "you" or "reality".
5. Avoidance versus approaching
6. Mental time travel versus remaining in the present moment
7. Depleting versus nourishing activities
• When people are emotionally upset - wether angry, anxious or depressed - a part of the brain known as the right pre-frontal cortex lights up more than the equivalent part of the brain on the left. When people are in positive mood - happy, enthusiastic and bubbling with energy - the left pre-frontal cortex lights up more than the right.
• The insula and the empathy
• The longer the person has meditated, the more highly developed is the insula.
• Scientific research using brain imaging (fMRI) has shown that the insula energized through meditation.
• Control, commitment and challenge.
• A sense of coherence: comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness.
• They found that their lives had more meaning and that challenges should be seen as opportunities rather than threats.
• By meditating on the sounds around you, you'll come to learn that "the mind is to thought what the ear is to sound."
• The habit releasers break down the habits that can trap you in negative ways of thinking.
• You won't find the time, you have to make it.
• It's tremendously liberating to realize that your thoughts are not "real" or "reality". They are simply mental events. They are not "you".
• "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." W.H. Murray

Mindfulness week one: waking up to the autopilot

• The first stage of regaining your innate mindfulness involves returning to basics. You need to relearn how to focus your awareness on one thing at a time.
• Firstly, you need a way to train the mind to focus.
• Secondly, you need to find ways of dissolving the habits that drive much of your routine behavior.
• Seeing her mind like as a lake, Hannah saw how often it had become disturbed by a passing storm.
• Hannah was discovering something profound: that none of us can control what thoughts rampage through our minds, or the "weather" they can create. But we do have some control over how we relate to it.
• We confuse the mind's thoughts with reality and we identify ourselves far too closely with our minds.

Mindfulness week two: keeping the body in mind

• The body is acutely sensitive to even the tiniest flickerings of emotion that move constantly across the mind.
• It's clear - far more so than any of us would like to admit - that the judgments we make from moment to moment can be significantly affected by the state of our bodies at the time that we make them. For some, this will make disturbing reading, but it's also heartening because it means that simply altering your relationship to your body can profoundly improve your life.
• To cultivate mindfulness truly, we need to become fully integrated with our body once more.
• The process of building a capacity for sustained mindful concentration and awareness.
• Although you can't stop the unsettling thoughts from arising in your mind, you can stop what happens next.
• The characteristics of “Doing” mode: they include judging everything, comparing the ways things are with the way you want them to be and striving to make them different to how they actually are.
• The elegant shift from Doing to Being.

Mindfulness week three: the mouse in the maze

• The spirit in which you do something is often as important as the act itself.
• Compassion - particularly for yourself - is of overwhelming importance.
• Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple and a keen meditator, learned this after a brush with cancer: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - all these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
• Your current state of mind is not a solid fact, but is instead governed by interlinked thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and impulse to act.

Mindfulness week four: moving beyond the rumor mill

• We don't see the world as it is, but as we are.
• We often give far more credence to emotionally charged stories than to logic, no matter how rational are the arguments.
• Our thoughts are like rumors in the mind. They might be true, but then again, they might not be.
• We might start to feel angry, sad, anxious, stressed or bitter, just because a thought triggered an avalanche of associations.
• The breathing space is not a break or diversion from reality, but a way of re-engaging with it.
• Approaching the next moment more mindfully may mean prioritizing your time, rather than frantically trying to do everything at once.
• Practice Interfering Thoughts (PITs): they undermine your enthusiasm for taking action.

Mindfulness week five: turning towards difficulties

• It's often far easier and more effective in the long run to live with our difficulties than to pour resources into battling and suppressing them.
• You will come to learn that everything changes: even the worst-case scenarios imagined in your darkest moments.
• Utile en cas de blessure lors des courses: Are you trying to get rid of them, or are you able to give them your full attention, breathing with them, accepting them, letting them be?
• Faire le lien entre la difficulté mentale et la sensation physique qui s'y rattache : Once the troubling thought or situation has been brought to mind, allow it to rest on the workbench of the mind, then let your attention drop into the body, and tune in to any physical sensations that the difficulty is evoking.
• It's the sensing of your body's reaction that's of importance. You are learning how to dissolve the first step in the chain that drives negative spiral.
• Leaving it on the workbench of the mind.
• I was exploring the sensations, not wanting to make them go away.
• It was a fear and not a fact.
• Cross-checking thoughts with reality is a powerful antidote to negativity in all its form.
• You should gently and seamlessly 'drop into' the body to explore any physical sensations that arise as difficulties appear in the mind.
• Your awareness should follow the usual hourglass shape.
• Nurturing a plant, or sowing some seeds, are among those very simple things in life that can have a surprisingly big benefit. It might even save your life.
• I am alive. I am well. I continue to challenge myself to be fully here for now. What about you?

Mindfulness week six: trapped in the past or living in the present?

• The difficulty in letting go of the past, the brooding about things that did or didn't happen or worrying about things that haven't yet happened.
• Fear that if we relax, we'll begin to fail.
• Research has found that if we've experienced traumatic events in the past, or if we are depressed or exhausted or locked into a brooding preoccupation about our feelings, then our memory shows a different pattern. Very often, the result is what psychologists call an "over-general memory".
• Our minds are always desperately trying to make sense of the world, and they do this in the context of baggage accumulated over many years together with the mood of the moment.
• You over-generalize, especially, if you are tired or preoccupied with your own problems.
• The Raisin meditation, the breath, the Body Scan, the Mindful Movement, the learning to relate to thoughts as you relate to sounds, the exploration of the difficult by working through the body, each of these has contributed that there is, for you, a new possibility.
• May I be free from suffering. May I be as happy and healthy as it is possible for me to be. May I have ease of being.
• Loving-kindness to all beings.
• I'm harming myself. I think that I need to be busy; this is really old pattern for me.
• How can I nourish myself?
• How can I slow down in the midst of my rushing?
• Can I stand back?
• How can I make choices?
• How can I be kind to myself?
• She saw at the moment when she was lying in her bed, she was actually in bed, not at work.
• They teach us to feel guilty for not working hard enough.
• Brain research shows that part of the brain that is activated when we are feeling genuine empathy for another is the same part that we saw being activated by mindfulness meditation: a part called the insula.
• We don't have to do anything more than just be there.
• Although in the early stages, the Befriending meditation might seem a little difficult, remember that is has already begun its work. Brain-imaging research has shown that within a few minutes of beginning the meditation, the parts of brain governing the "approach" qualities of kindness and empathy begin to fire.
• How your thoughts can trap you by shouting their bad advice, often based on memories that are over-general, so that you often only get a biased summary of events that have happened to you.
• Albert Einstein, along with countless scientists and philosophers throughout the ages, always emphasized the importance of kindness, compassion and curiosity in daily life. Although Einstein viewed such qualities as good in themselves, he also knew that they led to clearer thinking and a better, more productive way of living and working. He did not fall into the trap of being harsh on yourself and others leads to success. Einstein knew that this view arose because we all tend to mis-attribute success to the harsh, driving voices in our heads, rather than the quieter, more reasonable ones.
• Albert Einstein wrote: "A human being is a part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is itself a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security."

Mindfulness week seven: when did you stop dancing?

• Those of us who continue downward furthest are likely to be those who are the most conscientious, those whose level of self-confidence is closely dependent on their performance at work, i.e. those who are often seen as the best workers, not the lazy ones.
• What pulls you down, drains away your energy, makes you feel tense and fragmented?
• When did you stop dancing?
• This was one of the most annoying part of the job: waiting for someone else to reply.
• Take a tea break every two hours.
• Eat one less takeaway each week and cook a meal instead.
• Or you might decide to finish work in a different way, turning off your computer a quarter of an hour earlier to give you time to consider what is on the agenda for tomorrow, rather than answering emails up to the last minute, then suddenly realizing you are late for whatever it is you planned to do after work. 
• If you know which activities nourish you, you can do more of them should you start to feel unhappy or unduly stressed or tired.
• When mood is low, motivation follows action, rather than the other way around. When you put the action first, motivation follows.
• Do something pleasurable.
• Do something that gives you a sense of mastery, satisfaction, achievement or control.
• Act mindfully.
• Tiny actions can fundamentally alter your relationship to the world for the better.
• Everyday life offers endless opportunities for you to stop, to focus, to remind yourself to be fully awake and present to what is happening right now.

Mindfulness week eight: your wild and precious life

• From 'Hokusai says', Roger Keyes:
• It matters that you care
• It matters that you feel.
• It matters that you notice.
• Anxiety, stress, unhappiness and exhaustion are often symptoms of a wider and deeper malaise. They are not free-floating affections, but symptoms arising from the way we relate to each other, ourselves, and to the world itself. They are signals that there is something wrong in our lives. They are signs to which we need to pay attention.
• Well, here it is: now is the future that you promised yourself last year, last month, last week. Now is the only moment you'll ever really have. Mindfulness is about waking up this.
• But what we really need to weave is a parachute to use when life starts to become difficult or begins to fall apart.
• Week eight is the rest of your life.
• Weaving your own parachute: using mindfulness to maintain your peace in a frantic world:
• Start the day with mindfulness.
• Use breathing spaces to punctuate your day.
• Maintain your mindfulness practice.
• Befriend your feelings.
• When you feel tired, frustrated, anxious, angry or any other powerful emotion take a breathing space.
• Mindful activities.
• Increase your level of exercise.
• Remember the breath.
• What is it that is most important to me in my life that this practice could help with?
• Body Scan and Exploring Difficulty meditation.
• "Meditation" actually means "cultivation" in the original pali language.
• Practise as if your life depended on it, as in many ways, it surely does. For then you will be able to live with the life you have, and live it as if it truly mattered.

The Unicorn project Gene Kim

• Always good to give more than you get - you never know who can help you in the future. Networking matters.
• You can get rid of loops entirely using iterators, it's an easier, and much safer, way to write a loop.
• Learning Clojure, her favorite programming language, was the mots difficult thing she had overdone, because it entirely removes the ability to change (or mutate) variables.
• How executives are so disconnected from the daily work. It was not helpful for Sarah to remind everyone of how "saving the universe" depends on Phoenix. And it was not helpful for John to appel to their "moral sense of correctness". The job of the bridge crew is to ensure the company strategy is viable, not to remind them of the strategy or to micromanage everyone to death. Their job should be to ensure everyone can get their work done.
• There is nothing so rewarding as providing something to someone who really needs your help. She needed help and she received it.
• The satisfaction of helping people must be reward enough, right?
• Its' such a pain to get things from Operations through normal channels.
• I remember your group. You were one of the best-prepared in the whole company.
• A different way of working, bypassing the normal organizational lines of communication.
• Incredible perseverance, focus, and never taking "no" for an answer.
• I can't believe how the bureaucracy and silos have taken over.
• And that is what an effective network is all about - when you can assemble a group of motivated people to solve a big problem, even though the team looks nothing like the official org chart.
• The lack of trust and too much information flowing around is causing things to go slower and slower.
• I really think this group can make a big difference.
• It's your job to safeguard the most important projects in the company.
• Technical debt is what you fell the next time you want to make a change.
• First ideal of locality and simplicity in our code and organizations.
• Think about the engagement scores of the technology employees versus the rest of the business and ponders the different.
• The last place we want complexity is internally in our processes.
• The first ideal - Locality and Simplicity
• The second ideal - Focus, Flow, and Joy
• The third ideal - Improvement of daily work
• The fourth ideal - Psychological safety
• The fifth ideal - Customer focus
• No one talks about the real problem. Most people aren't brave enough to say what they think or to do the right thing.
• Being able to test and push code to production is more productive, makes for happier customers, creates accountability of code quality to the people who write it, and also makes the work more joyful and rewarding.
• It can be fun to be at the center of everything, but it's certainly not sustainable. Down the road, only chronic wakeup calls, exhaustion, cynicism and burnout await.
• We're going to need a lot more clarity from leadership on this.
• Amazon likely spent over $1 billion over six years rearchitecting all their internal services to be decoupled from each other.
• It is ignorance that is the mother of all problems, and the only thing that can overcome it is learning.
• TWWADI: The Way W've Always Done It.
• The famous Andon cord is just one of their many tools that enable learning. When anyone encounters a problem, everyone is expected to ask for help at any time, even if it means stopping the entire assembly line.
• Each adds to the coordination cost for everything we do, and drives up our cost of delay. And because the distance from where decisions are made and where work is performed keeps growing, the quality of our outcomes diminish.
• For the leader, it no longer means directing and controlling, but guiding, enabling, and removing obstacles.
• Inspirational communication, personal recognition, and supportive leadership.
• Fourth ideal of Psychological safety: no one will take risks, experiment, or innovate in a culture of fear, where people are afraid to tell the boss bad news.
• The fourth ideal asserts that we need psychological safety, where it is safe for everyone to talk about problems.
• If you see something that could hurt someone, you must fix it as quickly as possible.
• Third ideal of improvement of daily work and the fourth ideal of psychological safety.
• The QA team uses a different ticketing system, we don't have access to it.
• We've been waiting almost a year for anonymized customer data.
• We're in a relay race, and we need to get the baton handed to you.
• Small batch sizes, like in manufacturing, create a smooth flow of work, with no jarring disruptions or catastrophes.
• So we need a ticketing system to manage those complex flows of work. But it's so easy for people to lose sight of what the purpose of all this work is.
• This fast and frequent feedback is such a big part of achieving the second ideal of focus, flow and joy.
• How to deliver better value, sooner, safer, and even happier.
• Knowing that you may only need the smallest nudge to buy.
• We have to synchronize with everyone else's release schedules.
• Years of over-promising and under-delivering.
• Unless, of course, there's an urgent business need with a powerful sponsor.
• What about 'don't rock the boat' and 'stay in your lane' do you not understand?
• They think that we are the bottleneck, but we 're always waiting for them.
• Long before the feature ever gets to development, it goes through the funding approval process, which often takes over a year.
• We don't have a fast value stream.
• I need product managers who are working side by side with the teams who are building what will achieve our most important business objective.
• "World as imagined" colliding violently with the "world as it actually is".
• Fostering a culture of psychological safety.
• How tenuous and fleeting the conditions that enable psychological safety can be.
• Needing a nudge to complete their work.
• In order to speak clearly, you need to be able to think clearly. And to think clearly, you usually need to be able to write it clearly.
• Including conflicting definitions of data across all the enterprise.
• Lots of unanticipated problems now that they're working directly with the data scientists and analysts.
• FAANGs: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google
• Tuckman phases of team going through form, storm, norm and perform.
• And them names help create an identity for the entire group, not just for individuals, and they reinforce the notion that team goals are more important than individual goals.
• But we can't buy back the trust we lost.
• It's important to have a sustainable work pace and to limit our work in process to make sure that work keeps moving through the plan.
• Whenever you have a team of people who are passionately committed to achieving a mission and who have the right skills and abilities, it's dangerous to bet against them.
• Able to navigate the organization in a way very different than the official org chart would suggest.
• A NoSQL database won’t enforce relationnel integrity like most databases.
• It was trying to create a unified vocabulary and taxonomy that they could use, because almost every business system had different names for similar things.
• Daily engineering team standups
• With blockers being urgently handled by the team leads.
• This is what you get for waiting too long to invite the day scientists to the engineering meetings.
• 2004 Google Map/Reduce research paper was published, which described the techniques Google used to massively parallelise the indexing of the entire internet on commodity hardware. This led to the invention of Hadoop, Spark, Beam.
• This new scheme would allow a massive decoupling of services and data.
• Data is the lifeblood of the company.
• Understanding our customers and providing what they need.
• Sounds like a great plan
• Everyone, we have a plan. Let’s make it happen.
• When everyone knows what the goals are, teams will self-organise to best achieve the goals.
• Creating a culture where people felt safe to experiment, to learn and make mistakes, and where people make time for discovery, innovation, and learning.
• The future requires creating a dynamic, learning organisation where experimentation and learning are a part of everyone’s daily work.
• Suggestions were put into production to improve safety, to reduce toil, to increase quality, and to increase flow.
• The more parochial goals that they don’t care about, wether it’s your internal plans of record or how your functional silos are measured.
• Net Promoter Score to rate customer satisfaction. We ask our customers, on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely it is that they would recommend our stores to their friends. The 9s and the 10s are promoters, the 7s and 8s are neutral, and the rest are detractors from the percentage of promoters. An NPS score of thirty is considered good, and above fifty is great.
• Improvements in employee engagement and morale.
• Employee engagement and customer satisfaction are the only things that matter.
• Dr. Geoffrey Moore “Crossing the Chasm”
• Lead time from idea to market offerings matters.
• Almost all business investment now involves software.
• What if psychological safety is as much of a precondition to dynamic, learning organisations as physical safety?
• Those successful efforts that she is so proud of are now going to cause a bunch of innocent people to lose their jobs.
• Asking everyone to do more with less.
• A plan to eliminate $2 million from the IT organisation, that’s about fifteen people across all of your groups.
• Long term, we don’t want to manage our dependencies, we want to eliminate them.
• Cores are the central competencies of our organisation. Context is everything else. It’s the cafeterias, shuttles between buildings, and the thousands of things companies must do to operate. They’re often mission-critical, such as HR, payroll and email. Bu t our customers do not pay us for the great payroll services we provide to our employee.
• Fifth ideal, of being truly customer-centric instead of being silo-centric.
• Those middle managers are your interface between strategy and execution.
• The HIPPO effect (or Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), referring to people’s unhealthy tendency to only care what the highest-level decision-maker thought.
• ODB-II
• Blameless post-mortem.
• What’s needed is focus and urgency, and the modern methods of managing the value creation process.