Work

Overview

We perceive soreness in our muscles when they are growing after a workout. Work, as an ideal or virtue, has three components: order, intensity, constancy.

Key Claims

• The ideals of work are how we materialize any ideal.
• The materialized ideal is called a virtue.
• Virtues are ways of describing mastery.
• Virtues are formed with an image of the kalon used as basis for strategy.

Q&A Claims

• Mindfulness means deliberately attending to a present sensation.
• Mindfulness activates your parasympathetic nervous system.
• Parasympathetic activation can be seen in the respiratory sinus arrhythmia, in which your heart rate slows as you exhale and raises as you inhale in a sine-wave pattern.
• Mindfulness is an act of the power of memory.
• The object of memory, and therefore mindfulness, is being.
• Hope perfects mindfulness by bringing the Eternal Being of God into present awareness.
• Making the first step of a task as small and simple as possible reduces the perceived effort required to engage it.
• Strategies for a task give you traction within a task.
• Email causes over-activation of your default mode network.
• Attention-deficit is not a character trait.
• Attention-deficit is a state of training.
• Attention-deficit is closely related to being in threat mode.
• Dread puts your amygdala into an alert state.
• The amygdala has three states of activation: quiet, alert, and alarmed.
• Being distractible is a key feature of threat mode.
• Being impulsive is a key feature of threat mode.
• Having a negative processing bias is a key feature of staying in threat mode.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10; especially St Thomas’s Commentary)