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✍️ Stoic Lesson of the Week:
“Make it a systematic practice to consider how all things change into one another, pay constant attention to the changing, and train yourself in this respect. Nothing is more conducive to objectivity. A man who looks at things objectively divests himself of his body. He knows that very shortly he’ll have to leave all this behind when he departs from the world, and so he commits himself wholly to justice in his own actions and entrusts himself to universal nature when it comes to events that are beyond his control. It never occurs to him to wonder what people will say or think about him, or what they’ll do against him, but he’s content, first, if he always does what is right and, second, if he embraces his lot in its entirety. He gives up every distraction and diversion, and all he wants is to continue straight on the path of law and thereby to follow God.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Notebook 10, 11
Lesson 2: Everything changes, make it a practice to remember that everything you hold dear can disappear at any instant. You are a flowing river too, do not stick to the old beliefs or values and embrace the changes that shape your character. Changes and sufferings are an essential part of who you are and what you will become.
Now comes the second part of the quote “our life is what our thoughts make it.” There are no truths, only perceptions of us. We create our own perceived reality. Only filters created by every one of us, more than 8 billion. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” Be careful with what you think all day. You are not your once-in-a-life-time experiences. You are not some thought that pops up along the way. You are what you think constantly. Everyday. You have to increase your awareness by applying metacognitive techniques. You need to think about your thinking. Observe your bodily reactions. Also you have to be more conscious about the things that occupy your attention.
🐦6 Tweets/Threads:
Best career advice:
Only take advice from people who have already seen the specific success you're trying to achieve.
It’s ok to not know what you want to become. You can always figure it out and do it all over again, if you change your mind. Keep in mind: if you don’t know where you’re going, don’t be surprised if you end up somewhere else. In both a negative *and* positive way.
When I was looking to change jobs, Dan Ginsberg, former CEO of Red Bull North America told me: make sure you’re running towards something, not away from something. And it’s never let me down.
Take the action. Fear will disappear.
Some productivity hacks:
My favs:
Write down the 3 most important tasks every day
Stop being a perfectionist
Stop multitasking
Have meaningful goals to pursue
Batch tasks
Great info. You know there is a conception that the more you read the more articulate you become while you are talking. One reason is reading uses the same muscles as speech:
Fabulous art example from AI:
My fav:
This much freedom anybody? It sure must feel good:
🏣 1 Post Squeezed into the Week
You may have missed the post of Every Brilliant Things. I am sure everybody will have some sort of value to think about what brings them joy in this life.
What are your brilliant things which are giving you the energy to go forward and fight with every obstacle? Meet me at the comments or hit reply to this email.
If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.
Hearing a beautiful song for the first time
My curiosity
Asking questions
Sharing what I know with the world
Being cooked for, love that feeling
Coffee
Discovering a new book, not knowing that it is the one you were subconsciously looking for
Grinding coffee first thing in the morning
Smell of coffee
Smell of grass after rain
Smell of my wife’s neck
Doing absolutely nothing but just hugging for hours with my wife
Knowing that your partner thought and took care of a thing that you must have done already
…
📝 3 Articles:
Solitude does not equal to loneliness. I am a huge believer of that.
Yet solitude is another thing altogether. To be solitary is to retreat into yourself, and to take great pleasure in your own company. When we’re solitary we reach into a communion with the self, and we can think as freely, and be as honest, as we like. It’s only when we are cut off from all other distractions, and other people, that we have the space to meditate on life, and to discover great things.
In our lives, should we strive for creating something that will last forever, or maybe for 100 years or so after we die. This author suggests it is a futile attempt and I believe this stems from the fact that we have larger ego than the Earth itself. We want to mean something. I am more on the Woody Allen side here: “I do not want to live in the hearts of my fans, I want to sit on couch in my home.”
At some point in life, we come to realize that we exist in a context. If you are a scientist, you might make a small but useful contribution in your subfield, a subfield that is impossible to explain to anybody else. If you write short stories for literary magazines and exist in that ecosystem, you may not really exist to people outside of it. And — for most of us — our lives form part of the circumference of that context. We live a little while and then we go into the ground. Our children, if we have them, remember us, their children remember us a little less, their children even less, and so on until we are part of a school genealogy project.
Human works mean nothing outside a human frame of reference. None of them can stand up to the sun blowing up and all life dying, because nothing can mean anything then; “meaning,” as such, will not exist. And part of that frame of reference is death and transience.
For those of you are interested in design, this article sums up good suggestions all together:
Try to minimize redundant tasks when it comes to longer forms.
📺 3 Videos:
This is one of my strongest motivation videos.
Here you can find the full letter.
Dear Eva,
It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don’t! Learn to say “Fuck You” to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just,
DO.
This video sums up why we need some supernaturality in our lives:
Realization of our own mortality brings about our desire for supernatural things.
“I have some spiritual essence that transcends my mortality” (good consolation)
We want to make sense of our lives and supernatural explanations can ease this process for us, making us feel worthier.
Supernatural beliefs help us deal with grief. Believing that our loved ones did not disappear but we will meet them in near future in a different world soothes us.
How about some short films? I love the creativity that comes with the short timespan constraint. Take yourself to adventures:
🦩 Some Fun?
📽️ What to Watch
I am digging deeper into French films nowadays, especially the films directed by Godard. First suggestion is Vivre Sa Vie.
The below conversation almost took my breath away:
The Old Man: Have you read, "The Three Musketeers"?
Nana: No. But, I saw the movie. Why?
The Old Man: Because in it, Porthos - actually, this is from "Twenty Years Later" - Porthos is tall, strong, and a little dense. He's never had a thought in his life. He has to place a bomb in a cellar to blow it up. He does it. He places the bomb, lights the fuse, and starts to run away. But just then he begins to think. About what? How it's possible to put one foot in front of the other. I'm sure that's happened to you. So he stops running. He can't move forward. The bomb explodes and the cellar caves in around him. He holds it up with his strong shoulders. But after a day or two, he's crushed to death. So the first time he thought, it killed him.
I wish there are a lot of you who feel the same with me on the quote below:
Nana: Suddenly I don't know what to say. It happens to me a lot. I think first about whether they're the right words. But when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it. Why must one always talks? I think one should often just keep quiet, live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean.
📜 3 Quotes:
“The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
― Alvin Toffler
“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time”
― Jack London
📱 1 Useful App/Website/Tool
Whenever I am trying to publish a presentation or a visual, I am almost always aware that there is something wrong. ColorHunt comes to the rescue. It suggests you color palettes which you can give to your text, headline, background etc. I like the results. The quote above was produced with the help of the color palette on ColorHunt.
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