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✨1 Fact or Graph
Elon Musk has made an offer to buy all of Twitter for $54.20 per share. His proposal detail is interesting since he claims to make Twitter more democratized by enforcing free speech. He believes this cannot be done with the current structure of the company.
He already acquired 9.2 percent of the shares in the last weeks. Seeing him acquiring all the company is interesting to me. He moves quickly, he realizes he made a mistake by not buying all of it and immediately takes action.
He aims at making Twitter one of the most useful social platforms for information and he seems dedicated.
Read the full offer here.
🐦3 Tweet Threads
First one is not a thread but a good reminder. When you have just one person supporting you no matter what, you have an unstoppable power. Think to yourself, to whom you can be that person? Give your full support to someone you love for a project she is trying to accomplish. Succeed with her, not wanting anything in return.
Second thread includes good lessons for a founder/leader. My favorites:
Test & Iterate. Your job is try fast and break things. You do not have to be right all the time.
Always Be Open To Feedback
Focus On One Thing at a Time
Third one is coming from Sahil Bloom again, I consider myself lucky that I can read his wisdom for free. He shared some harsh truths, my notes:
You'll only see your loved ones a few more times.
Most of your friends aren’t really your friends
You'll literally never know what you want to be when you grow up. Ah this one hurts.
📝 2 Articles:
This article nicely sums up the real reason behind procrastination: emotions.
My highlights:
Emotions are the ones that put obstacles in your way. The task we are delaying to complete has some hardship, boredom or worry associated with it.
Experts like Tim Pychyl at Carleton University in Canada and his collaborator Fuschia Sirois at the University of Sheffield in the UK have proposed that procrastination is an issue with managing our emotions, not our time. The task we’re putting off is making us feel bad – perhaps it’s boring, too difficult or we’re worried about failing – and to make ourselves feel better in the moment, we start doing something else, like watching videos.
Procrastination can be a root cause for a lot of health problems, most important of which are anxiety and depression.
Research by Fuschia Sirois has shown chronic procrastination – that is, being inclined to procrastinate on a regular, long-term basis – is associated with a host of adverse mental and physical health consequences, including anxiety and depression, poor health such as colds and flu, and even more serious conditions like cardiovascular disease.
It seems difficult until you start it. Just push yourself harder to start. Divide the task into small pieces and do a bit of the challenge. This will generate the first momentum you require.
The next time you’re tempted to procrastinate, “make your focus as simple as ‘What’s the next action – a simple next step – I would take on this task if I were to get started on it now?’”. Doing this, he says, takes your mind off your feelings and onto easily achievable action. “Our research and lived experience show very clearly that once we get started, we’re typically able to keep going. Getting started is everything.”
This article tells the importance of feeling uncomfortable.
My highlights:
Discomfort is expected when you grow. Even if you feel anxious, you have to remember that this is part of the process. You are growing and feel some inertia against the grow.
Discomfort is expected when taking on new challenges. Our research suggests that seeing discomfort as a sign of progress and actually seeking it out can boost your motivation in these situations. While a sharp physical pain is often a good reason to quit what you’re doing, a moderate muscle ache is a signal you’re getting in shape.
Take short-term discomfort for long-term gains. Try to make yourself love the pain. When you are in love with your pain you are in your growth-mindset mode. Push the limits.
The path to self-growth often involves short-term discomfort in the service of long-term gains. You might only learn to love your class, workout, or new job after trying it a few times. When people can positively spin otherwise negative cues—reappraise their discomfort as a sign of achievement—those cues become more motivating.
📺 1 Video + Book Summary:
I was going to share the summary of this book but I liked the video and storytelling seemed more sincere. Plus listening is preferred when it comes to nonfiction content as I see among my friends. Put it on while you are preparing dinner.
Some notes from the book:
Seeking pleasure is the root of our suffering. We are never satisfied. Like Socrates said “Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.” We overestimate how much happiness material things or our goals will bring.
One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more. We spend our time looking for the next gratifying thing—the next powdered-sugar doughnut, the next sexual encounter, the next status-enhancing promotion, the next online purchase. But the thrill always fades, and it always leaves us wanting more.
Natural selection does not care if we are happy or not. It wants us to pass our genes to next generation. Whenever you do not feel happy do not take blame for yourself, you are just no designed to be happy.
Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.
There is no fixed self, ego. The control machine of you is always changing. Accepting selfless self will be liberating.
In human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show–and, in a sense, seizing control of the show. If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life. I’m not aware of a better way to do that than mindfulness meditation.
We aren't always aware that we are making the decision to identify with our thoughts and feelings, which means we can fail to realize that this identification is optional
Our intuitive conception of the “self” is misleading at best. We tend to uncritically embrace all kinds of thoughts and feelings as “ours,” as part of us, when in fact that identification is optional. Recognizing that the identification is optional and learning, through meditation, how to make the identification less reflexive can reduce suffering.
Emotions are there to serve us, in a bad or good way. As long as they help us stay out of trouble, survive and pass the genes they are ok.
Our feelings weren’t designed to depict reality accurately even in our “natural” environment. Feelings were designed to get the genes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors into the next generation. If that meant deluding our ancestors—making them so fearful that they “see” a snake that isn’t actually there, say—so be it.
“Default mode network” is a brain network that is active when people are doing nothing, not talking, not working, not reading a book or watching a movie. Our minds focus on the past and future when we are “mind wandering.” However, what the default mode network is not doing is focusing on the present moment.
I was beginning to observe the workings of what psychologists call the “default mode network. As for where the mind wanders to: well, lots of places, obviously, but studies have shown that these places are usually in the past or the future; What you’re generally not doing when your mind is wandering is directly experiencing the present moment.
Learn the three marks of existence:
The first is impermanence.
The second is dukkha–suffering, unsatisfactoriness.
The third “not-self,” selflessness.
Everything is perception and interpretation. Things lack essence, they only gain essence after we give significance to them.
This sounds quite like the view from Buddhism: everything, from spinach to football games, is empty of inherent existence; things—forms—come into existence in our consciousness only after we have taken some combination of elements in our perceptual field and imposed a collective meaning on them. Hastorf and Cantril wrote, “An ‘occurrence’ on the football field or in any other social situation does not become an experiential ‘event’ unless and until some significance is given to it.” And this significance, they said, comes from a kind of database of significances, a database that resides “in what we have called a person’s assumptive form-world.”
Underlying all of this is the "happiness delusion": the belief that we can find lasting satisfaction by making ourselves feel better. The Buddha emphasized this theme in his teachings thousands of years ago, noting that when "better" ends, it is often followed by "worse"—an unsettled feeling, a thirst for more. Psychologists have described this phenomenon as the hedonic treadmill.
📽️ 1 SERIES / FILM or DOCUMENTARY:
This week’s film suggestion is the Hunt, or Jagten in the original name.
In The Hunt, the relationship between truth and lies is examined, a little bit disturbingly. A lie becomes a truth thanks to its social acceptance. Thus the line between truth and lies becomes a subjective matter of social acceptance. “Then time blurs and loses shape, making it difficult to distinguish between event and non-event.”
Your friends, social status, beliefs, truths and materials are fragile. Everything can be taken from you in an instant based on a lie. You will be stripped out of your skin.
The world is full of evil but if we hold on to each other, it goes away.
💃 HOW ABOUT SOME FUN?
This was a treasure when I first saw it. It is still good.
Reddit is really good at providing you with unique content.
50 Times People Took A Photograph And Realized It’s “Accidental Renaissance” is one of them.
📜 2 Quotes:
“We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
— Anaïs Nin
When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out, know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice.”
— Ernest Hemingway
📼 1 Playlist:
This playlist is new addition to my sacred vault. Italian classics. I really liked the vibe. It brings summer whenever you listen to it and you are finding yourself making pasta unconsciously.
Song of the week:
My favorite from the above playlist:
📱 1 Useful App/Website/Tool
Searching for quality film to watch? agoodmovietowatch got you covered.
You are a Netflix fan ? Try this or this.
How about some Indie films?
Try some for your mood.