📪 Hello again my stoical existential impressionist friends ! Your Sunday medicine is here. Stop doom-scrolling on Instagram, get some energy.
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Tell me, have you ever thought about what is your biggest regret ?
As always, I will make sure that there is not a second wasted here. Before we continue, I am adding and deleting some parts of my post structure, so if you ever want to share your thoughts and/or suggestions for me please leave a comment, shoot me an email, or a DM on LinkedIn.
✨ Interesting Find/Fact/Graph
Here is some good advice from the writer and painter Henry Miller. We are our habits after all, you need some unbreakable rules to follow to master your craft.
Find your first, first. He chose writing above else, everything is secondary. How about your first ? Don’t you have any first to make your everything else second ?
🐦1 Tweet Thread
We talked about inversion in this newsletter. Mental Models are one of my beloved issues. There will be a pdf in the near future focusing on mental models. Free for subscribers of course.
In order to achieve something in life, there are 4 steps to apply the inversion mental model.
- Write down your "intuitive question"
- Ask the opposite of that question
- Analyze the root of having the opposite to be true
-Invite others to contribute your belief
📘 1 Book:
DECISIVE:
- 4 Villains of Decision Making:
We face a choice, but we narrow it down to our own frame. This leads to missing better options.
We analyze options and collect facts but we favor the information that we would like to be true. This creates a self-serving cycle, leading you to pick what is already on your mind. According to the book, a recent meta-analysis of the psychology literature concluded that we are more than twice as likely to favor confirming information than disconfirming information.
As human beings, we always tend to be more affected by our short-term emotions. That decision you have just made probably will not feel right once you look back after 6 months.
We are generally over-confident. We like the idea of being always right.
2- So what to do against these conditions ? Glad you asked:
We have to widen our options.
We must always test our options against the harsh reality.
We better get some distance before we decide on that.
We need to prepare to be wrong.
3- Widen the options :
Scientist Nutt analyzed the decisions made in big companies. His analysis concluded that ‘whether or not’ decisions failed 52% of the time over the long term, versus only 32% of the decisions with two or more alternatives.
Which means, you have to avoid giving decisions based on binary options.
Should I move to Miami or stay in SF you ask ? How about New York ?
Always ask yourself, what am I missing here ? What would other options be ? Is there a better way?
Try the Vanishing Options Test: What if your current options
disappeared?Try to ask a friend about the question. Or employ the tactic of What would my dad/mum do in this situation ? Insert here your role model. Just try to see your situation from different angles.
4-Multitracking: Consider more than 2 or 3 options at the same time.
Ask your designers to come up with 3 different options instead of one. Then choose 2 ask them to improve and then made the final decision. To employ multitracked decision making will help you and your employees to bring out creativity.
Over one particular 18-month period, the archives revealed that the executive board had debated and resolved 83 major decisions. Decisions never involved more than three alternatives, and 95% were either a “whether or not” decision (40%) or a two-alternative choice (55%).
5- Ooching: Try small experiments.
This idea can be likened to MVP or A/B testing of the modern world. Before you make that decision think of small ways to test the idea.
For example, if you’d like to live in Paris for work, just book a 7-day holiday and try to pretend like you work there. Get up early, prepare for work, use the subway, etc. Does it really feel good ? Is Paris the one for you?
6- Do a Pre-Mortem
A premortem is like a postmortem — except you do it at the beginning instead of the end . You ask, “it’s a year (or such) from now. Our plan failed. Why?
The whole post is close to the max email lenght. So you can continue reading the whole summary. Superb book, grab and read it.
📝 1 Article:
This article/podcast focuses on the business model of social media:
“The whole machinery, this whole business model has an effect: Every time you pick up Facebook and scroll, they make money. And every time you put it down, their revenue streams disappear. So all of their algorithmic power, all of their engineering genius, some of the cleverest people in the world are dedicated toward one goal: “How do I get them to pick up their phone more often and scroll as long as he possibly can?”
“We also have pretty good evidence, although there isn’t a consensus, that we sleep significantly less than we used to. Only 15 percent of Americans wake up feeling refreshed. The figures for the US are staggering. I go through them in the book for the lack of sleep in the United States. I think the figure, if I remember rightly, is something like 37 percent of Americans sleep less than seven hours a night.”
🎨 1 Painting:
This week we are continuing with our love of Japanese art.
👯 How about some FUN ?
📺 1 Video:
David Perell is a good storyteller I followed through Twitter. I really like his longform essays and last week I bumped into this video. Certainly worth your time.
Even Picasso was a copycat, copying realism and naturalism.
Quentin Tarantino is also famous for copying the scenes he likes from other films.
Tarantino : “I steal from every single movie ever made.”
Nurture your unique voice by creating again, editing, imitating, changing, deleting, starting from scratch and not giving up.
📽️ 1 SERIES / FILM or DOCUMENTARY:
This week’s film is Encanto. It is the story of a Colombian teenage girl who has to face the frustration of being the only member of her family without any magical powers. Her time comes, there is no magic given to her. The lessons?
You are the gift yourself, do not search for the magic in the things you can do or the things you may have.
You should not compare yourself to anyone. Comparison kills your spark.
Do not let one thing define you. You are more than your abilities, actions and possessions.
There is no perfect. No need to be trying to be perfect.
Why should we try to be our best
When we can just get by and still gain? - Louder Than Words
📜 2 Quotes:
For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
You can do it like it's a great weight on you, or you can do it like a dance.
― Ram Dass
📼 1 Playlist:
Here is a superb playlist METU put together, brace yourself for some nostalgia.
Song of the week:
I think that every moment survived while walking
and every second of uncertainty,
every moment of not knowing, they are the exact key
of that tissue that I'm carrying under my skin,
so I protect you; you're still inside. - Hasta la Raiz
📱 1 Useful App/Website/Tool
Today’s useful website will help you feel like you are somewhere else. Is not that all we looking for ? Somewhere else. Not this place. Not this time. But that time, that place. Knowing the possibility that someone else can be there and you are stuck at this, is a killer for your happiness.
The website is window-swap. It is great with some hot coffee and lo-fi music.
✔️ Read the issues you might have missed:
Until next time,
Forward, always.
Ratip.