“Underlying health conditions like obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are the real pandemic here. Obesity alone doubles your risk of being hospitalized for COVID-19 and raises your risk of death anywhere from 3.68 times to 12 times, depending on your level of it. Processed food (loaded with industrially processed vegetable oils) and soft drinks (chock-full of sugar) are key culprits in the development of chronic disease, and therefore have a key role to play in COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths as well.”

Excerpt From: Joseph Mercola. “The Truth About COVID-19.”

“At its most basic level, MMT is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carb diet that is built on eating the highest-quality foods available. It is quite a shift from the typical American diet—which is notorious for its excessive refined grains, sugars, and low-quality fats.”

Excerpt From: Joseph Mercola. “Fat for Fuel: A Revolutionary Diet to Combat Cancer, Boost Brain Power, and Increase Your Energy.”

“But there is really no reason to suffer. The only reason you suffer is because you choose to suffer. If you look at your life you will find many excuses to suffer, but a good reason to suffer you will not find. The same is true for happiness. The only reason you are happy is because you choose to be happy. Happiness is a choice, and so is suffering.”

Excerpt From: Don Miguel Ruiz. “The Four Agreements.”

“sometimes, to solve a hard problem, you have to stop looking for solutions to it. Instead, you must turn your attention to the problem itself—not just to analyze it, but to shift the way you frame it.”

Excerpt From: Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg. What’s your Problem ?

“In humans the situation is somewhat different. The human brain comes into the world with some amount of genetic hardwiring (for example, for breathing, crying, suckling, caring about faces, and having the ability to learn the details of their native language). But compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, human brains are unusually incomplete at birth. The detailed wiring diagram of the human brain is not preprogrammed; instead, genes give very general directions for the blueprints of neural networks, and world experience fine-tunes the rest of the wiring, allowing it to adapt to the local details.”

Excerpt From: Eagleman, David. The Brain

“The federal deficit, which was expected to top $1 trillion before the virus became a threat, will likely skyrocket beyond $3 trillion in the months ahead. If history is any lesson, anxiety over rising budget deficits will lead to pressure to reduce fiscal support in order to wrestle deficits lower. That would be an unmitigated disaster. Right now, and in the months ahead, the most fiscally responsible way to manage the crisis is with higher deficit spending.”

Excerpt From: Stephanie Kelton. The deficit Myth

“At first sight,” the writer Arthur C. Clarke noted in the late 1950s, “when one comes upon it in its surprisingly rural setting, the Bell Telephone Laboratories’ main New Jersey site looks like a large and up-to-date factory, which in a sense it is. But it is a factory for ideas, and so its production lines are invisible.”Some contemporary thinkers would lead us to believe that twenty-first-century innovation can only be accomplished by small groups of nimble, profit-seeking entrepreneurs working amid the frenzy of market competition. Those idea factories of the past—and perhaps their most gifted employees—have no lessons for those of us enmeshed in today’s complex world. This is too simplistic. To consider what occurred at Bell Labs, to glimpse the inner workings of its invisible and now vanished “production lines,” is to consider the possibilities of what large human organizations might accomplish.”

Excerpt From: Gertner, Jon. “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.”

“Emperors, with their ziggurats and pyramids, were often made possible by trade. Throughout history, empires start as trade areas before they become the playthings of military plunderers from within or without. The urban revolution was an extension of the division of labour.”

Excerpt From: Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist

“To state that we have problems is not particularly helpful. More to the point is the fact that most of our energy day after day is used in decision making. Patients frequently say: I can’t make up my mind, tell me what to do, I’m afraid I’ll make the wrong decision; or, in the face of inability to decide: I am always on the verge of going to pieces, I hate myself, I can never seem to accomplish anything, my life is a succession of failures. Though these statements can be said to express problems, they all originate in the difficulty that surrounds decision making. The unsettling nature of indecisiveness is sometimes expressed in the indiscriminate plea: Do something – anything – just do something.”

-“I’m OK-You’re OK” by Thomas Harris

“As the head is continuous with the spine, so is focus continuous with self-discipline. If you are focused on what you need to do, self-discipline will naturally follow. Likewise, if you are self-disciplined, it will be easier for you to focus on what needs to be done and avoid distractions. Self-discipline, like the spine, keeps you upright so you don’t slump into a mess.”

Excerpt From: Peter Hollins. “Finish What You Start“