🧠 1 Quote of the Week
📚 2 Books
This issue’s first suggestion is Rilke. I was late learning about him, but I absorbed multiple of his books in a couple of weeks. Great mind.
This is by far the best explanation of marriage and how it can help transform the people. You as a partner has to show the utmost respect for your partner solitude. Merging into one being is an “impossibility”. It is sad maybe but even between the closest people infinite distances exist.
“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”
I felt the urge to rush to my comfort zone when I felt a little bit unease at all. Maybe you can relate. Time told me a lot of times the rose gardens were never promised for me. There was always someone in a bitter situation. There will always worse thing that will happen in near future. There is no end to bad things. But it is good. You cannot escape that. You cannot predict that. You are in the midst of transitions. You are always becoming something other than you.
“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
Second suggestion is from one of my best authors: Daniel Klein. This is the first book that inspired me to write my own book.
SO MANY EXCELLENT QUOTES:
“Epicurus makes it a centerpiece of his philosophy by counseling us to cease from always wanting something more than or different from what we have right now. Marcus Aurelius hits this idea even more forcefully by advising us to act as if every action were our last. Millennia later, Henry David Thoreau articulates it with both simplicity and passion in his admonition to “launch yourself on every wave.” And the idea is catapulted into the transcendental realm in Wittgenstein’s breathtaking declaration, “[E]ternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
“Epicurus said something similar when he wrote, “Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not
“When all is said and done, this Existentialist precept resonates with me more than any other philosophy of life I know. The idea that life’s meaning is not something to look for but something to create myself feels right to me. In fact, it seems absolutely essential.”
“According to Sartre, we are historically prone to thinking of ourselves as objects due to the Judeo-Christian credo that God stamped us with our essence from the beginning; it is His prerogative. So to think that we are able to stamp ourselves is a sacrilege.”
“Everydayness” is a key concept in Existentialism. It describes the way we get so immersed in the routines and roles of our daily lives that we never experience full consciousness of who we are and what choices are available to us.”
“Niebuhr was also concerned with man’s place in the immanent world, the world of cultures and societies and political creeds. After the rise of Nazism, he began to focus on the “herd mentality” that Nietzsche had so abhorred. Niebuhr brooded over man’s weakness in the face of conformist human behavior. Also like Nietzsche, he believed that as long as we remain a product of our culture, we cannot rise above its values.”
📽️ 3 Films / Series / Documentaries:
Milk is a strong candidate to your arsenal of films that you have to watch more than once. The film tells the story of Harvey Milk who got elected and became the first openly gay man in the public office in the United States. Rest is the history. A must-watch film to fuel your desire to do everything you can to reach your goals and fight.
My name is Harvey Milk and I'm here to recruit you!
Without hope, life's not worth living.
I love movies that make you think as you watch and make you watch as you think. After Life by Kore-eda Hirokazu was definitely one of them.
Let me ask you this: What is the single most valuable memory you would like to take with you after you die? Hit reply.
I was looking for a series to watch with my wife. Generally we have different tastes she loves Bridgerton, my stomach hurts when I think about watching it. I am more into Person of Interest, Fringe, DareDevil guy, if you know what I mean.
The Counterpart came to the rescue. I suggest you to try it but be a little bit patients. Story takes it time to grow.
“Maybe we don’t love someone for who they really are. Maybe love is seeing them for who they’d rather be.”
“Genetics, childhood… Doesn’t matter. We’re helpless to our experience. Difference between you and me could be a single moment, one little thing gone wrong.”
📹 3 Videos:
Ryan Chapman is one of my recent finds. Do you think you know what Socialism is? Think again.
If you are fond of existential philosophy like me this video is for you:
In order to be master at something you do not need to spend 10.000 hours.
You need urgent feedback on you repeated attempts
Valid Environment
Timely feedback
Don’t get too comfortable
📝 4 Articles:
Normally success habits articles come shallow but this one is good:
Listen intently.
“The goal is to make each engagement more personal, and to engage in each conversation as if it were the foundation which to build a relationship. This focus on fostering personal connections has enabled me to have strong relationships at work, which yield trust and collaboration”
“When that alarm clock goes off, hit snooze, but don’t go back to sleep. Instead, use those nine minutes to do a body/mind/spirit scan.
“You can’t control what happens in life just how you respond to what happens. The only thing permanent in life is change. And change is guaranteed. We have to embrace the ebbs and flows, by responding with adaptability. That’s one of the virtues that helps us get in front of anxiety, because anxiety is all about control and the fear of losing control.”
Ryan Holiday published a new book and a new blog post on the book. It is well-crafted again.
Speak little. Robert Greene puts it perfectly: “Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.” They have the discipline and this discipline creates a powerful presence.
Stay in the saddle. There is an old German word sitzfleisch which means basically sitting your butt in the chair and not getting up until the task is complete. Even as it goes numb, even as one by one, the people around you call it a day. Showing up yourself, day after day, until your back aches, your eyes water, and your limbs turn to mush. Many a great conqueror in the days of horseback were called “Old Iron Ass” for their ability to stay in the saddle.
The tail end is a superb article I go back to every once in a month. Memento Mori. Remember death. Just this many squares. If you are over 30, third of it is gone already.
It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
This is not a surprise for me, we waste a lot of time at work. You may want to pass this article to your manager.
“People have 250 percent more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic,” says Mary Czerwinski, research manager of the Human Understanding and Empathy group at Microsoft.
🐦 6 Tweets/Threads:
No need to be that strict but there are multiple good suggestions in this thread:
Use a pre-made playlist. Loop it. The songs should be familiar, non-distracting. Remember: the aim is flow.
News: Avoid mainstream media.
Any Decision: Always ask whether you can make it a one-time decision When automating your decisions, consider this: “When you live your life on principle, 99% of your decisions are already made.”
I think this initiative must be known by everybody. Thanks Ocean Cleanup you raised my hopes for the future.
Love The Cultural Tutor tweets. When I visited Mona Lisa, I could not understand why it is that it gets the most attention but I was stroke by the beauty of it.
Sfumato: Leonardo blurred parts of the Mona Lisa's face by melting the colors and contours together; there was no clear outline. This technique he called sfumato, and here is how he described it:
"without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane."
Listicles… I cannot just get enough of them. 15 life lessons from Ross.
Be ready to pivot:
Things change, plans fall through and life happens Be ready and willing to pivot when chasing your goals according to what feedback you’re getting.
Nobody knows what they’re doing.
Consistency always wins.
Learnt the way barcode works, not disappointed.
Some terms for non-technical product managers. The more you understand the technologies your developers use, the more you can have influence and added value.
Containers:
Applications are pieces of code using modules and libraries of different versions. There are a lot of dependencies.
So applications need environments to know what dependencies to rely on.
These environments are put in containers to avoid having mega-environments.
Rainbow in Istanbul, just perfect timing:
🦋 1 Aesthetically Pleasing Instagram Account:
Whenever I would like to lose myself in the beauty of the world, Sam is the first place I check. He puts extra details on everything around him. Watching the videos and looking at the photos are like meditation to me.
🐬1 Fun Video of the Week:
What a year in terms of hits, huh ? Fergie, Timberlake, Sean Paul, Akon ft. Eminem. Wow.
📜 1 Nugget from Me While We are Parting:
I am very skeptical when it comes to this kind of generalizations. Actually, I am also against therapy, but that's a topic for another time. If you ask me, the problem is this: no matter what part of our lives we are in, we can indeed have terrible times. We can think that this life should end, or we can rebel against who threw us here. However, we cannot define ourselves by any of these things. We are beyond each and every memory of us. Also, we are not a sum of all our memories. It depends on which ones we would like to cling on. Science would say that childhood is very influential. But apart from that you have years and years and years. Instead of taking credit for the past and justifying things by saying that my childhood was like this, create a new story for yourself. Your past is done with you, it has no value anymore. Your future is turning into the past second by second. You must act before you have less future than the past.
Join 50k+ smart people on Refind and get 7 new links every day that make you smarter, tailored to your interests, curated from 10k+ sources.
Sample is a newsletter recommendation tool that gives you one great newsletter advice every day. My go-to tool for new quality editions that worth my time.
Now the sixth subscriber profile will be my thin and tall bowling-lover friend Ezgi Evler.
What is your biggest fear in life?
Losing people I love.
What is one thing you never get bored of doing?
Driving a car.
If you could get a sentence as a tattoo on your arm, what sentence would it be?
Everything ends.
What is the thing you regret the most that you didn't do/try?
Trying to be a soldier.
Who would you like to have dinner with and talk about life?
I would like to have a life talk with General Iroh (a character in Avatar The Last Airbender) over jasmine tea.
You have one wish, you can do anything, what's the first thing you'll do?
Fly. Just fly.
If money wasn't a problem for you, what would you be doing?
Living on a farm with my dogs and spending time in my music studio.
What is something that people are obsessed with but you just don’t get the point of?
Doing everything impossibly perfect.
If you had the chance, what would be the city and time you like to be born and live in?
London, 1960’s.
If you had to listen to 10 songs until you die, which 10 would it be?
Our Spotify list is growing. Check it out. Use this link to add your 10 , please no more than 10 :)
If you can recommend only 10 books to your loved ones, which 10 would it be?
What is the one movie you keep re-watching?
Lion King.
What is the definition of “happiness” for you?
Peace of mind.
What do you know and want everyone else to know about life ?
Everyone is bad until they prove they are good.
If you would like to add something to the questions or answer these questions to be published in the coming months hit reply to this email.