Week #5

People are more likely to enjoy something they’re good at

Hi, dear readers!

(Dear lawyers, I’m just kidding, **not financial advice**)

(Dear algorithm, please, don’t make me end up in the spam because of this)

🪐 Various cool stuff

• Starship Animation (>5 minutes)

  🚀

• Effective selfishness (~15 minutes)

  Interesting snippets:

  • […] if you care about orangutans, you could fly to Sumatra and go to the rainforest and then, like… help? But it’s probably more effective to get a job and donate some money to an orangutan sanctuary.

🧘 Life

• Money and Confidence are interchangeable (~10 minutes)

  

  Interesting snippets:

  • Confidence allows you to change your current life entirely and instantly, without the need to change anything – because you’re just rearranging the feelings in your mind.
  • Are you selling off your current years of youth to The Firm, and putting off your happiness because in just another decade or so, once the kids are grown and things settle out, then you’ll give yourself permission to be happy?
  • Most people work too much on the money and use it to compensate for a lack of confidence. To get to the next stage in life, you will need to stop doing that.
• Don’t do what makes you happy. Do this instead (~10 minutes)

  Interesting snippets:

  • People are more likely to enjoy something they’re good at.
  • The only way to get good at something is to spend time being bad at it. You make mistakes, learn from them, improve, and repeat.
  • You must stick with something through the shitty parts and learn from necessary mistakes. […] However, in frustration, you give up on every new thing you try. […] What’s crazy is that this response to the pain makes sense because you—like most people who listen to conventional wisdom—believe that love never has painful moments. The general idea is incorrect […] When you make learning more important than passion, you’re more likely to find something you feel passionately about. You’re more likely to fall in love.
  • A new learning curve is steep, but if you don’t endure the initial suffering, you will never be good at anything.
  • Cal Newport […] believes that: “Matching your job to a preexisting passion does not matter […] Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.”
  • Purposeful work requires curiosity and grit.
  • To be a happier person, don’t do what makes you happy. Instead, try your hand (or mind) at something challenging.
• How to Make Smart Decisions Without Getting Lucky (~15 minutes)

  tl;dr

  Mental Models: Your Mind is a Pattern Matching Machine.

🧮 Learning

• Accelerated Learning: Learn Faster and Remember More (~15 minutes)

  The ultimate guide on learning how to learn. I’m very freaking impressed how this article includes, one way or another, basically every tip and technique about learning I’ve ever heard of.

📝 Writing

• So you’re thinking about writing on the internet (~15 minutes)

  Interesting snippets:

  • The whole idea of writing is crazy: You have a pattern in your brain-meat, which you try to encode into a linear series of words. Then someone else reads those words and tries to reconstruct the pattern in their brain-meat. But in this dance, how much of the work is being done by the words versus the lifetime of associations each person has built up around them?

    Rather than a full blueprint for an idea, writing is often more like saying “Hey, look at concept #23827! Now, look at concept #821! Now, look at concept #112234! Are your neurons tingling in the way mine are? I hope so because there’s no way to check, bye!”

  • There’s an argument that most writing has no value. It goes like this: Every hour, more text is produced than you could read in a lifetime. If you can write the best piece on a given topic, great, but otherwise we don’t need more content. And don’t kid yourself—to write the best piece, you’d need to pick a single topic, become a world expert, and spend months polishing the writing. Most writing is just people yelling over each other for their own reasons.

    The standard response is to gesture towards Pareto optimality: There’s no “best” article on a given topic because there are many dimensions of quality, which people prioritize in their own ways. Unless another article is better than yours in every dimension simultaneously, you have the potential to be the best article for someone.

  • It’s easier to understand writing by people you’re familiar with. They can get to it without wasting time establishing context.

🕵️ Subjectiveness and objectiveness

Nothing can be objective either: the only way we experience the world is through our own individual senses and consciousness so we literally filter everything personally.

(I know this is not formally consistent, the aim of this is to make you think)

🎧 Songs I had on repeat this week

(and their beautiful music videos)

• Nightcall
• Pretty Little Fears
• Slowly
• Pressure to Party
• Slowdancinginamerica
• Palm Trees

🦉 Quotes of the week

100% of employees are people. 100% of customers are people. 100% of investors are people. If you don't understand people, you don't understand business.— Simon Sinek

There are some things you can't share without ending up linking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.— Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling