Ruggets #48
What would you do if you have lived your life already and this is your second and last chance?
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1️⃣ How to make difficult decisions by Ali Abdaal is full of easy-to-implement tactics for your decision making process.
The parts of the video are enough for your decision-making questions.
What would my mental board of advisors say?
You must have real or hypothetical consultants to whom you can ask “What would you do in this kind of situation?”
What is the risk of doing nothing?
Whenever we are facing a problem, we are always stuck between two options, do or do not, A or B. However there is third option: Do nothing. Consider that “what would you lose if you do nothing at all”
What core value am I optimising for?
Values are important as we have touched upon multiple times here. Whenever you try to decide on something, consider your values. At least five of the most important ones. Are you optimising for what is most important to you?
When I'm on my deathbed, what will I regret having or not having done?
This one is a little bit cheesy. I think I will regret not having done everything when I am in my deatbed. However it may come handy in some decisions.
How might I treat this like an experiment?
It is useful to check the temperature with the tip of your foot before diving in.
The Quitting Framework
2️⃣ Roger Martin is a Canadian business thinker, author, and educator known for his work in the field of strategic management and design thinking. Martin has written several influential books, including "The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking" and "Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works," co-authored with A.G. Lafley, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble. I strongly suggest you to read “Playing to Win” if you are fan of applied strategy.
In this post he summarizes what strategic thinking really means:
The company controls lots of variables: how many employees to hire, how much office space to rent, how much advertising to run, how much to invest in R&D, and so on (scientists would call these the dependent variables). But it doesn’t control the customer (the independent variable). The customer does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, however it wants. Great strategic thinking produces choices that compel the customer to do what the strategist hopes and wishes.
Strategic thinking is omnivorous when it comes to information, whether qualitative, quantitative, metaphorical, or analogic. It assumes that non-statistically significant data of all sorts can and should be rigorously considered to come up with decisions about the future.
Students are not taught abductive logic, which is the inference to the best explanation — i.e., what is the most probable conclusion we can reach based on the data at hand. My date is checking his/her iPhone all dinner long (data on hand). This date isn’t going very well (best explanation).
3️⃣ I think the world will be a much better place if everyone starts not taking things personally. One of the first rules of life is to accept that “nobody cares about you.” The world is not spinning around you and you got to relax by detaching your emotions from you ego.
Great summary at the end of the article:
Distinguish your feelings from your thoughts. While your feelings are not debatable, your self-critical thoughts can be challenged, revised or replaced.
Look for signs that you are personalising or mind reading. When you experience a difficult emotion, consider whether it followed the thought that you’re at fault or that someone thinks unfavourably of you.
List the evidence for and against your thoughts. Try writing down your difficult feeling, the situation that caused it, and how you explain what happened. What supports your explanation? What challenges it?
See if there’s an explanation that isn’t just about you. Consider whether it makes more sense to adopt an alternative account of what happened.
Ask yourself, what’s useful? Proactively anticipating the risk of biased thoughts and committing to useful social behaviours helps reduce the tendency to take others’ words and actions too personally.
Accept a reasonable amount of uncertainty. You can’t always know what people are thinking about you, but you can decide how you’d like to conduct yourself.
4️⃣ This is a great post with informative graphs that depicts the state of the world. My fav graphs:
Close friendship ties are harder to establish
Market for obesity drugs keep going up exponentially:
I have shared this graph here before, it is one of the most fascinating graphs about our human race, look at how little happened for thousands of year and how much happened in tens of years.
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen". —Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
5️⃣ Sad, fun, informative and enlightening work:
6️⃣ It is weekend again, thanks God. Here is a good collection of films for you to watch.
7️⃣ This is a hard read considering the author has passed away and describes his thoughts on death and life here. Ugh, some sentences hurt:
the importance of gratitude. During my worst moments – the shock of cancer diagnosis, the mental lows and debilitating symptoms of chemotherapy – it was difficult to picture any future moments of joy, closeness or love. Even so, at those times I found comfort in remembering what I have: an amazing family, the friends I’ve made and times I’ve shared with them, the privilege of the life I’ve had.
it’s important to let yourself be vulnerable and connect to others. We live in a society that prizes capability and independence, two things that cancer often slowly strips away from you. This was naturally a very difficult pill to swallow for a healthy, able late-twentysomething male, but having to allow myself to be vulnerable and accept help has given me the best two years of my life, which was pretty inconceivable at the time of diagnosis.
After the gut-punch of cancer diagnosis, I’ve really struggled to define a purpose for my own life. I found in time this came naturally. Life is for enjoyment. Make of it what you can.
8️⃣ Ryan Holiday shared 24 regrets he has had, my highlights:
This line from Bruce Springsteen captures, in retrospect, almost every argument or grudge I’ve held onto: We fought hard over nothin’ / We fought till nothin’ remained / I’ve carried that nothin’ for a long time. There are very few arguments I’ve had with my wife that I care that much about anymore.
I look back at stuff I was so worked up about, things I fretted about, fought about, took personally, held onto, and now think, WHAT? If I had to go back and give a younger version of myself one word of advice it would be: “Relax.”
There are many books I regret powering through, far fewer that I regret quitting. Life is too short to put up with bad writing—bad anything really. If the food sucks, don’t finish it. If the speaker is boring, get up and leave. If the party is no fun, go home. Stop powering through crap.
It’s clear to me in retrospect that my desire for approval, for being seen, for being a part of something important or newsworthy or exciting, blinded me to the character of certain people I worked for. Of course, this was something those people understood and exploited in me and lots of other more vulnerable victims, but it’s still on me. You have to wake up to the ways that the wounds you experienced as a kid make you a mark, or create patterns in your life. It’s not your fault things happened to you, it is your fault if you don’t learn how to adjust accordingly.
I should have taken care of my skin more when I was younger. I should have worn sunscreen more. So should you.
9️⃣ Are we doomed to be sad?
“…evolution has shaped our minds so that we are almost inevitably destined to suffer psychologically: to compare, evaluate and criticise ourselves; to focus on what we’re lacking; to be dissatisfied with what we have; and to imagine all sorts of frightening scenarios, most of which will never happen. No wonder humans find it hard to be happy!”
“Our brains were shaped to benefit our genes, not us… Natural selection does not give a fig about our happiness.”
7 primal emotions of us:
Anger
Fear
Panic/grief
Maternal care
Lust
Play
Seeking
Out of these seven, seeking is cited as the most important by Jaak Panksepp. The seeking system is driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked to pleasure and reward. This means that we are constantly seeking new information, plans and goals, and we can never feel like all of our desires have been met, which means that our pursuit of happiness will never be over.
🔟 You cannot find a good Youtube video worth your time again right? I got you covered:
Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, has a unique way of thinking.He believes that if you can explain your idea in 30 seconds or less, it's already derivative and not truly original.
Pixar embraces ideas that don't make sense initially because they have the potential to be breakthrough films.
Introducing voluntary hardship helps develop mental skills and coping mechanisms.
Stress testing oneself through activities like cleaning the house or going for a run when not feeling motivated builds trust and resilience.
Embracing small moments of voluntary hardship frames life as an adventure with obstacles that can be overcome.
Embracing multi-dimensionality can lead to more nuanced conversations and understanding among diverse groups.
1️⃣ 1️⃣ McConigal describes here a future-oriented decision-making process called episodic future thinking.
“Episodic future thinking” or EFT is often described as “mental time travel” — your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.
According to the book, episodic future thinking involves several key components:
Mental Time Travel: It allows individuals to mentally transport themselves to a future time and place, imagining themselves engaged in various activities or situations.
Autonoetic Consciousness: This refers to the self-awareness and self-reflective component of episodic future thinking, where individuals not only envision the future event but also consciously identify themselves as the protagonist within that event.
Prospection: It involves the ability to anticipate and plan for possible future outcomes, which can influence decision-making, goal-setting, and behavior.
Contextual Details: Episodic future thinking often includes specific details such as locations, people, emotions, and sensory experiences, making the imagined future event feel vivid and realistic.
1️⃣ 2️⃣ Seth Godin talks about why the soft skills are not soft at all and why the companies’ success mostly depend on so-called soft skills rather than vocational ones.
We call these skills soft, making it easy for us to move on to something seemingly more urgent.
We rarely hire for these attributes because we’ve persuaded ourselves that vocational skills are impersonal and easier to measure.
The skills cited in the article are the ones that put someone at the top of the game or out of the game. The utmost skill set for me is:
Adaptability to changing requirements
Alacrity and the ability to start and stop quickly
Authenticity and consistent behavior
Bouncing back from failure
Coach-ability and the desire to coach others
Conscientiousness in keeping promises
Honesty
Decision making with effectiveness
Innovative problem-solving techniques
Listening skills
Troubleshooting
Mentoring
Ability to deliver clear and useful criticism
Charisma and the skill to influence others
1️⃣ 3️⃣ Here is a good argument against the emptiness of social media.
We try to solidify our experiences in today’s world. Taking photos, sharing on social media, limiting the experience. Author suggests that more creative people try different things. How about next time you see an arousing scene, you go write about it? Or you go picture it with your limited pen skills? How about a poem? You do not need to certify what has happened instead you need to try new creative ways of describing it.
“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.” - Susan Sontag, “On Photography,”
Social media, like photography, is an attempt to “certify our experience.” By capturing a moment, we aim to validate it for ourselves and others. But we do so in a fleeting, empty way.
Meanwhile, we could be writing a poem. Or drawing a picture, choreographing a dance, composing a musical piece. Art is the other way to understand what we experience and share it with others. (And yes, art can certainly include photography, although Sontag disagrees.) Creating something with our experience is our best option for validating it, regardless of whether other people see what we create or not.
1️⃣ 4️⃣ Love this kind of genius architecture, am I getting old?
1️⃣ 5️⃣ Here is a provocative title : The best decision-making is emotional.
So, you know how sometimes you feel different things, like happiness or nervousness? Well, it turns out these feelings aren't just random reactions. They're actually your brain's way of understanding what's happening inside your body and connecting it to what's going on around you.
Picture this: something happens around you, and it makes you feel good or not so good physically. Then, a part of your brain called the insula checks out this feeling and compares it to what's happening. This helps your brain figure out what emotion you're experiencing.
In simpler terms, when you call something an emotion, it's like a combination of how your body feels and what's happening in your surroundings. So, when your heart races while presenting your business idea to a big investor, you might think of it as fear. But if you were in a different situation, like introducing a new product to the public, those same body signals could feel like excitement instead. It's all about how your brain puts together what you feel and what's going on.
Joe Hudson, goes a step further with what he calls the “Golden Algorithm.” It’s the idea that any problem you’re experiencing has a corresponding emotion you’re trying to avoid. By evading that feeling, you’re actually more likely to amplify it.
1️⃣ 6️⃣ You can lose tens of hours in this website that collects historical photos. Some of my favs:
1️⃣ 7️⃣ One of the best music discovery apps out there. Free for most of the functionality, but I would support if I were you. The world keeps spinning because of good people like you.
1️⃣ 8️⃣ Here is my playlist full of songs I discovered partially using radioo too.
📚 Book Summary of the Week
He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.”
“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”
See the world. It’s more fantastic that any dream made or paid for in factories.
‘Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic that any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,’ he said, ‘shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.'”
Make the brains of people sleep. Do not let them think. Give her every distractions so that she cannot find a time to think.
“If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.”
We need to have ourselves some concerns. We need to be worried over somethings. Otherwise we are not taking chances. We are not evolving or trying to enlarge our boundaries.
“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
We forgot how to listen. Everybody wants to be heard. There is no one listening.
“Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me, I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.”
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In the future, drug overdose will be so common that there are machines handling patients at their home.
They had this machine. They had two machines, really. One of them slid down into your stomach like a black cobra down an echoing well looking for all the old water and the old time gathered there. It drank up the green matter that flowed to the top in a slow boil. Did it drink of the darkness? Did it suck out all the poisons accumulated with the years? It fed in silence with an occasional sound of inner suffocation and blind searching. It had an Eye. The impersonal operator of the machine could, by wearing a special optical helmet, gaze into the soul of the person whom he was pumping out. What did the Eye see? He did not say. He saw but did not see what the Eye saw. The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one's yard. The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had reached. Go on, anyway, shove the bore down, slush up the emptiness, if such a thing could be brought out in the throb of the suction snake. The operator stood smoking a cigarette. The other machine was working too.
Books are there to make you genius while making you feel all stupid.
‘The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.”
“What is there about fire that’s so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?’ Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. ‘It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did.”
“‘And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual.”
Every event has its scheduled time. Do not push. Try to enjoy process.
“To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes, all that.”
Doesn’t it ?
“I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it?”
🦋 Poem of the Week
TELESCOPE There is a moment after you move your eye away when you forget where you are because you’ve been living, it seems, somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky. You’ve stopped being here in the world. You’re in a different place, a place where human life has no meaning. You’re not a creature in a body. You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity. Then you’re in the world again. At night, on a cold hill, taking the telescope apart. You realize afterward not that the image is false but the relation is false. You see again how far away each thing is from every other thing.