Flip a coin if it doesn't matter
If you’re trying to decide between two things that sound equally good, like which place to have lunch, flip a coin. When the coin picks one for, you often feel happy or sad about what it picks. If you notice that, do the thing that makes you happy instead of the thing the coin picked. (If you don’t notice that, just do what the coin picks, since either outcome is probably fine, and you won’t have to think about the decision any more.)
burrito
The wrap burrito is first found in print in English in Erna Fergusson’s Mexican Cookbook, published in 1934 in New Mexico. However, the burrito described in this cookbook is more like what we’d call a tostada today.
In Mexico, the term seems to have arrived at its modern meaning in the late 1800s; an 1895 dictionary lists the modern usage as one of its meanings, with the other being a regional slang term for “taco”. In Mexican Spanish, burrito originates from a diminutive of burro (donkey). The food is probably so named because it resembles a rolled-up pack often found on the back of a donkey.
The Spanish word burro descends directly from the Latin burricus, meaning small horse, which itself is named after the color burrus, meaning reddish-brown. Latin burrus is a borrowing from Greek πυρρός (purros), meaning flame-colored, yellowish-red, or tawny. The Greek color is clearly named after its root πῦρ (pur), meaning fire, like we see in the borrowed English prefix pyro-.
Knowing a concept's name is really useful
We live in an age of wonders where learning an entity’s truename allows anyone to pull up a practically limitless pool of information on it. I feel like I appreciate this much more having experienced growing up in a world where this was not true. This is relevant because many educational resources continue to assume the world is like the way it was in 1999 and try to overstuff you with information about a concept, because where else are you going to find more information about the concept?
I think it’s much more effective in 2024 to pique someone’s curiosity by describing the concept in a single, punchy example and giving its truename. Then they will know whether they want to learn more and how to do that. For example, Benford’s Law is the observation that in many real-world data sets, like a list of the altitude of every US city in feet, the number 1 occurs significantly more than 10% of the time, with the number 2 being second-most frequent, and so on. You are now free to do with that information what you will.
Get back onto the horse
Sometimes, things are difficult and your skillset and personality exacerbate your current challenges, or you’ll have an off week, and it might feel like nothing’s working and everything is terrible forever.
Every time this has happened to me so far, the feeling eventually passes, and then the most important thing that I can do is put one foot in front of the other again and get back onto that horse, even if I don’t feel like it, because sometimes action can lead to emotion. If you’re trying to get out of feeling this way, uninspired action leading to positive emotion is probably what you need most right now.
The world is more complicated than you think
The world is more complicated than you think, even if you already think the world is really complicated. That linked example doesn’t even begin to touch on the complexity created by things that are alive, let alone things that are conscious. I feel like this belief is something that’s easy to memorize and recite, but much harder to really know in your bones.