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SD#78: Happy songs, sleep and hair powder

December 31, 2023

Welcome to the 78 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

It’s the end of the year and also the festive period. A time to celebrate with family and reflect on the whole year. It’s natural (at least for me) to think I could’ve done more, picked up more skills, completed more projects, sent out more newsletters… But it’s also an opportunity to celebrate what we’ve achieved this year, that we’ve gone through another year, brought many smiles to those around, and simply enjoyed ourselves for another 365 days. Thank you to all those who read this newsletter this year and I wish you a great bloody time!

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. The world is dyed by the colour of your thoughts

Marcus Aurelius said “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes the colour of your thoughts.” He also said, “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” If you see the world as a negative, horrible place, you’re right. If you look for shittiness, you will see shittiness. If you believe that you were screwed, you’re right. But if you look for beauty in the mundane, you’ll see it. If you look for evidence of goodness in people, you’ll find it. If you decide to see the agency and power you do have over your life (which is largely in how we think), well, you’ll find you have quite a bit.

👉 Ryan Holiday
2. Intelligent people understand technical details, smart people understand emotional details

Some people are intelligent but don’t have a lick of smarts. Their ability to succeed in the world might surprise you on the downside. Others lack intelligence but gush smarts. Their potential will surprise you on the upside. On rare occasions, you meet people who are both intelligent and smart. They run laps around everyone.

Intelligence: Good memory, logic, math skills, test-taking ability, rule-following. Smart: High degree of empathy, bullshit detection, organisation, communication skills, persuasion, social awareness, understanding the consequences of your actions. Both are important. But there’s a critical difference in how each is valued. Schools are good at teaching and measuring intelligence, so that’s what people tend to value and aspire to. But in almost any field, smarts is what gets rewarded long term.

And it’s why the world is filled with intelligent jerks who have gone nowhere, and middling students who struggled through calculus but go on to live successful, happy lives. The most important decision most people will ever make is whether, when, and whom to marry. But that’s never taught in schools – how could it be? You can’t distil it down to a formula, or a one-size-fits-all answer. It’s a decision that requires lots of smarts and very little intelligence.

👉 Morgan Housel
3. When people listen to happy songs, the market outperforms

Alex Edmans of London Business School and three coauthors gathered data on the average positivity of songs that people in 40 nations listened to on Spotify. The researchers then compared that data with the performance of each country’s national stock market over the same period. They wanted to see if there was a correlation between mood, as reflected by the music played, and financial returns. There was. The conclusion: when people listen to happy songs, the market outperforms.

While that sounds like a wacky study, they were trying to raise a serious economic question: is the market driven by fundamentals or by emotions? The efficient-markets hypothesis holds that stock returns should reflect only relevant factors, such as interest rates and unemployment figures. It’s the irrelevance of music that makes the study interesting. In a rational model, factors that don’t affect economic fundamentals — such as investor sentiment — should have no impact on stock returns. 

👉 Harvard Business Review
 
4. If you sleep less than six hours per night for three nights in a row, your judgement becomes impaired just like you’re drunk

Regularly getting less than six hours of sleep a night could cause the same long-term damage as alcohol abuse, according to a worrying new study. For the body, sleep deprivation results in an increased risk of obesity, depression, heart attacks and strokes – causing experts to dub it the ‘modern ill’. However, the most worrying consequences are rooted in the brain and new research suggests the effects are far more destructive than previously thought.

Research suggests that being awake for 18 hours results in the same cognitive impairment people get from being drunk. This is so severe that driving while sleep-deprived could be as dangerous as driving when drunk, researchers found. Researchers from Quebec-based digital health company Medisys found people who regularly got less than six hours of sleep a night could suffer terrible cumulative health effects they may be oblivious to. Although the odd night of sleeping just six hours or less will not have a significant effect, frequently not sleeping enough is very dangerous.

👉 Mail Online
5. You don’t have to be the best at any one thing. But if you can get pretty good at a few things, you can avoid the pitfalls of trying to be #1 and the status battles that can go along with it

Different communities value different things when it comes to conferring status. For example, if you are a competitive powerlifter, your status is determined by how much you can lift (strength) and how many competitions you have won (competitiveness). If you are a VC, your status is determined by what companies you have invested in (network) and how well those companies have performed (money). Status is relative to the context in which it is being evaluated. In other words, VCs don’t care how much you can bench and weightlifters don’t care about your investment returns. Both groups have their standards for judging members of their community and they care much less about everything else.

This is why you have to choose your status game wisely. Because whatever status game you choose in life ultimately determines what you optimise for. Choose money and you’ll end up working all the time. Choose beauty and you’ll always want to look better. Choose fame and you’ll constantly be seeking attention. Though the pursuit of status is a hard temptation to fight off, there is a simple way to prevent it from controlling you — play multiple status games at once. Instead of linking your entire identity to a single status game (i.e. richest, smartest, etc.), have multiple things going for you. In other words, diversify what brings you status.

👉 Of Dollars and Data
6. There are never just two choices. There’s always a third choice and it’s always creative

Back in 1795, British Prime Minister William Pitt instituted a powder tax in hopes of raising some bread for the Napoleonic Wars. At the time, powdered hair was all the rage, worn primarily by the wealthy families of Great Britain to signal just how rich they were. Pitt’s powder tax divided the nation overnight as hair powder became a political statement. 

Those who chose to powder their hair signalled that they were in support of the Napoleonic War. Those who chose not to powder their hair signalled they were against the war and wearing “human blood”. While all this was going on, a playboy by the name of Richard Barry was blowing through his inheritance while pursuing an education at Eton College. Barry was gambling his socks off, screwing everything that wasn’t nailed down and drinking like a man stranded in the desert who just happened upon a fully-stocked saloon. An avid sportsman, Barry played cricket, boxed and raced horses. 

In the heat of The Powder Wars, Barry and his two brothers showed up in public one day with short-cropped hair that couldn’t take any powder at all. To express the level of shock this had on Great Britain, I’d liken it to the time Britney Spears went crazy and shaved her head. Because of Barry and his band of brothers, powdering one’s hair went out of style overnight and short-cropped hair took its place. All that to say, there are never just two choices. There’s always a third choice and it’s always creative.

👉 Cole Schafer
7. Our mental energy doesn’t need to juggle between professional and personal life, we can nurture both

It seems like we need to make a constant choice between our personal and professional and personal growth. If you want to achieve your entrepreneurial dreams or build a successful career, then your personal development will take a backseat. Or, if you want to get to know yourself better and expand your consciousness, you should disconnect from work. But is it truly a zero-sum game?

Recent studies suggest that after an initial burst of effort, people’s motivation shifts from control to reward. This indicates that we don’t necessarily experience a depletion of mental energy, but a change in focus. Let’s say you have a bucket of water and use it to water the plants in a garden. The traditional view of ego depletion suggests that every time you use mental energy, it’s like drawing from the bucket to water the plants. Over time, the bucket will eventually be empty. The newest research offers a different perspective. Instead of a bucket, imagine that you have a hose. After using some water for watering the plants, you may use the hose for something more immediately gratifying, like filling a kiddie pool.

Instead of seeing your mental energy as a limited resource you need to ration, breaking free from this scarcity mindset can help you create a virtuous circle where your day jobs and side projects both fuel your productivity and creativity, where your personal relationships inspire you to solve professional challenges and where learning and growth permeate all areas of your life.

👉 Ness Labs

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”

Confucious

🎁 Fun things to click on:

Hoodmaps is a crowdsourced map that divides cities up into areas and labels. Experience the dedication of Wikipedia’s contributors through a captivating symphony of sound and graphics (it shows real-time changes with music). Want to hear how a comet or a black hole or a planet sounds? You can listen to the Sounds of Space. 10 charts that capture how the world is changing. 12 questions for life. What does the entire Universe look like? …using cereal. How well can you read emotions of others just by looking at their eyes?

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

Newsletter

SD#77: Mastery, procrastination, and multitasking

December 10, 2023

Welcome to the 77 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Mastery and genius. Topics studied and overstudied by scholars from west to east. It’s natural to be so obsessed with successful people, after all, we all want to be successful and finding out the recipe to that success seems like the (elusive) dream. Malcolm Gladwell shot to popularity with his 10,000-hour rule to mastery. While now debunked, it promised a way to success and we chewed on it, taking every bite of advice we could. Are we more obsessed with the search for the shortcut rather than the skill we’re trying to master? After all, most experts emerged by immersing themselves into the deep dark end of a subject and… enjoying it.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. A simple definition for genius is: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters

When you look at the lives of people who’ve done great work, you see a consistent pattern. They often begin with an obsessive interest in something that would have seemed pointless to most of their contemporaries. One of the most striking features of Darwin’s book about his voyage on the Beagle is the sheer depth of his interest in natural history. His curiosity seems infinite. Ditto for Ramanujan, sitting by the hour working out on his slate what happens to series. It’s a mistake to think they were “laying the groundwork” for the discoveries they made later. There’s too much intention in that metaphor. They were doing it because they liked it.

To put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters. The paths that lead to new ideas tend to look unpromising. If they looked promising, other people would already have explored them. How do the people who do great work discover these paths that others overlook? The popular story is that they simply have a better vision: because they’re so talented, they see paths that others miss. But if you look at the way great discoveries are made, that’s not what happens. Darwin didn’t pay closer attention to individual species than other people because he saw that this would lead to great discoveries, and they didn’t. He was just really, really interested in such things.

👉 Paul Graham
2. In putting something off until a later point in time, we’re also failing to consider how much our future self will want to avoid the same negative emotions that we’re trying to avoid right now

Across the globe, about 20 percent of people are chronic procrastinators. And, while estimates of exactly how many people procrastinate to some extent are a little hard to nail down, one informal survey found that 85 percent do so in a way that bothers them. Procrastination isn’t just about putting something off until tomorrow that you could just as easily take care of today. It’s also about knowing that even as you delay, you’re harming yourself.

When we’re faced with an unpleasant task — say, folding the laundry or finally making that appointment with the cardiologist — and we decide not to do it, we prioritise our present self’s desire to avoid negative emotions. We get anchored on our feelings in the present. But procrastination presents an additional wrinkle: in putting something off until a later point in time, we’re also failing to consider how much our future self will want to avoid the same negative emotions that we’re trying to avoid right now.

Note that it’s not as if we’re simply failing to consider our future selves. When we procrastinate, we do think about the future and our future selves but not in a particularly deep or meaningful manner.

👉 The behavioral scientist
3. When you relax that part of you and accept, for a moment, that the universe is much larger than your judgements, and will continue with or without your consent, Awareness happens

You enjoy meditating. At some point, during your meditation, you bump into this thing, this fundamentally different way of experiencing reality. It almost feels as if you were in a thick forest your whole life, and then you burst into a twilit clearing. It’s not your normal painful way of being, which is so grippy and harsh. It’s more expansive, more lush, more beautiful. You hear that people call it Spirit, or Awareness, and that sounds really cool. You’re not the only one who knows about this. A lot of people access it in prayer, for example. And most people are comfortable with brief glimpses of this thing, knowing it’s there, communing with it occasionally. But you really crave it. You want more! So you become an effective seeker of this thing. You learn how to access it in more situations — when you’re driving, when you’re cooking. More and more, you can do this neat mental gesture, where you surrender what feels like a “small” self into a “big” self.

You notice that Spirit, or Awareness, is what’s happening when you release your compulsive need to protect yourself from reality with thinking and planning. Like, there is this part of your brain, this scared animal part that says, “I need to be judging everything right now, or thinking about how to guard my reputation, or planning for some weird fantasy of how the future will go, or I will die.” It’s not exactly the inner monologue, but it drives a fair amount of the inner monologue. And when you relax that part of you and accept, for a moment, that the universe is much larger than your judgements, and will continue with or without your consent, Awareness happens.

👉 Sasha Chapin
 
4. Humans tend to do whatever it takes to keep busy, even if the activity feels meaningless to them

Dr Brené Brown from the University of Houston describes being “crazy busy” as a numbing strategy we use to avoid facing the truth of our lives. We are scared of idleness because stopping would mean having to really consider what we want out of life and what we currently have. Sometimes, the gap feels so wide, that we’d rather stay on the hamster wheel. 

Being busy is a defence mechanism. It’s a way to avoid just being. Having responsibilities, deadlines, a long task list… Overloading our senses can make us believe we are moving in the right direction, or at least in a direction. But the constant cycle of tasks we tackle without ever thinking often leaves us stagnant.

Instead of measuring progress by the quantity of work we produce, we should consider the quality of our work. Not just the quality of the output, as usually measured by externally-designed metrics, but the quality of the impact it has on our mental and physical well-being. “Did the work feel intellectually stimulating, did I learn something new, did it help me cultivate my curiosity, did it allow me to connect with interesting people?” are sensible questions to ask when work represents such a huge chunk of our lives.

👉 Ness Labs
5. Constantly switching context between different tasks has a terrible effect on attention, try mindful context switching

Psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell described multitasking as a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one.” Mindful context switching is a strategic approach to task management that emphasises the importance of staying focused on a single task while maintaining an acceptable level of responsiveness.

It involves defining your necessary level of responsiveness based on external demands, breaking tasks into achievable chunks that fit within these response intervals, and scheduling dedicated time slots for them.

It was inspired by the work of Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, authors of Algorithms to Live By, who wrote: “You should try to stay on a single task as long as possible without decreasing your responsiveness below a minimum acceptable limit. Decide how responsive you need to be — and then, if you want to get things done, be no more responsive than that.”

👉 Ness Labs
6. Art isn’t so much inspiration as it is the compounding of repetition over days and weeks and months and years at a time. It’s finding so much joy in the process that the process itself is enough to sustain the artist’s soul

Soetsu Yanagi was a philosopher, art historian, aesthete, poet and the originator of the Japanese folk crafts movement known as mingei. In The Beauty of Everyday Things, Yanagi describes mingei as common, ordinary objects sturdily and intentionally made by lesser-known (and often under-appreciated) artisans and craftsmen. This, Yanagi explains is made possible through repetition:

“They have become one with the task at hand, free of all self-awareness and thoughts of artistic manipulation, effortlessly applying themselves to the job at hand. They may be cheerfully talking and laughing as they work, but most surprising is their speed. Speed is necessary if they are to make a living. Thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, it is this repetition that frees their hands from thought. It is this freedom that is the mother of all creation. When I see them at work in this way, I am astonished beyond words. They have complete faith in the power of their hands. There is not a smidgen of doubt.”

👉 Cole Schafer
7. Status symbols change: idleness and leisure were considered virtues in the ancient world, whereas today being busy is a badge of honour

Owning a car used to represent freedom. We’re now transitioning to a world where not having a car is freedom. In the past, going online was a luxury. Now, going offline is a luxury. There was a time when a feed full of selfies was cool. Now it’s lame. One of the most fascinating things about Poparazzi is that it shot itself to the #1 spot in the App Store (and, ironically, closed doors this year) by building its entire product around one of Instagram’s least important features: tagged photos. Status symbol changes represent new product opportunities.

👉 Check your pulse

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.”

Matthew Walker

🎁 Fun things to click on:

A website where you can find lots of things explained in sketches. Hoodmaps is a crowdsourced map that divides cities up into areas and labels. The 100 best movies of the past 10 decades according to the TIME’s film critics. A smart game that will teach you statistical concepts useful in life and machine learning. What does the entire Universe look like? …using cereal.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

Newsletter

SD#76: Strange world, empty offices and time billionaires

November 26, 2023

Welcome to the 76 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

It’s nearly winter time, trees are losing colour as their rainbow leaves scatter into the air leaving branches naked for the upcoming winter harshness. Have you stopped for a moment to breathe in here and now? Not the future checklist of things to do before the week ends. Nor the memories of past guilt-tripping us to wonder ‘what if’. What if the future and the past didn’t matter for one moment? Would you sit down on a bench to watch the world go by? Or pet a cat to feel the warmth of her purr? 

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. The world is far stranger and more absurd than it normally seems. Most of the time, however, we ascribe a kind of logic and order to the world that it doesn’t have, so that we’re not constantly bewildered by it

If aliens came to earth and saw people walking dogs, they would assume the dogs are the leaders. The dog walks out front, and a gangly creature trailing behind him picks up his faeces and carries them for him. Let’s consider how strange streets are: flat strips of artificial rock embedded in the earth so that our travelling machines don’t get stuck in the mud. Everything else seems strange too. Metal poles bending over the road, tipped by glowing orbs. Rectangular dwellings made of lumber and artificial rocks. The background noise is always the hum of distant travelling machines, and all of this stuff was built and operated by a single species of ape.

The world is far stranger and more absurd than it normally seems. Most of the time, however, we ascribe a kind of logic and order to the world that it doesn’t have, so that we’re not constantly bewildered by it. Sometimes we momentarily lose track of that logic, and the true strangeness of life is revealed. In these moments, we see the world as it is when it’s been “stripped of any of the prejudices and stabilising assumptions lent to us by our day-to-day routines.” In other words, we occasionally see the world as if for the first time, which could only be a very strange experience indeed.

Embracing the weirdness takes the edge off of everything, even death. Whenever you’re worried about “big picture” ideas, such as war, climate change, crime, corporate greed, you can remember that this whole weird thing called life just happened, and it’s always fresh and interesting, even though nobody really asked for it. And in that light, the thought of it ending one day doesn’t seem distressing at all—when your time comes, all you can do is say, “Wow, that was odd.”

👉 Raptitude
2. When you stop trying to nail down your narrative and focus only on the most obvious relationships, life becomes a giant sandbox where we can learn anything, grow in any direction, and connect with anyone

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Adults often ask this question when chatting with a kid. We keep doing this to each other as adults too. “What do you do for a living?” and “Where do you work?” are some of the most common conversation starters when meeting someone for the first time. When you’re a kid, the world is full of possibilities. Nothing seems to be impossible. No question or topic seems trivial enough not to wonder about it. It’s a wonderful exploratory phase. You may want to try a different sport every week. You have a new best friend every month. You’re into board games and then realize that painting is more your thing. For now. So why do we later insist on this fabricated idea of having one calling in life?

Often, as soon as you start showing a sustained interest in a specific area, adults push you to practice and improve. To make it your thing. It comes from a good place, of course, but it stems from the idea that the more “defined” you are as a person, the better. The pyramid of life normally works in this order: as a child, you explored; as a student, you specialised; now, as an adult, you can easily define who you are to yourself and other people. Why should we look for our one true calling in the first place? Why not invert the pyramid? As a child, we are full of potential. As a student, we can explore our affinities. As an adult, we open up a world of opportunities. Maybe then, instead of asking, “So, what do you do for a living?” we’ll start asking: “So, what makes you feel alive these days?”

👉 Ness Labs
3. Do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged right now? – a framework for responding to a loved one in a way that can resonate with the needs of the moment

Your daughter comes home with a troubled brow and downcast hazel eyes. You ask her how her day at elementary school went. She tells you about mean girl shenanigans and atrocities. Indignation builds, and you find yourself laying out a plan of defence for her, followed by some lines of counterattack. Your daughter looks up at you with confusion. She says But Dad, those girls are my friends. The hairpin turn is vertiginous, and you are left as confused as she is. Perhaps you should have refrained from offering reactionary, guerrilla/gorilla solutions, and instead said something like this:

Sounds like you had a tough day. Do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged right now?

Most of the time we can default to first listening, and then intuitively offering support. But other times, when emotions are really swirling, our own discomfort compels a response that seems best to us. Instead, we might first take a breath, and then figure out what this person really wants back from us. Asking works. Used judiciously this can be transformational.

👉 Examined
 
4. Happiness appears to love company more so than misery

A little while ago I focused an entire newsletter around the concept of proximity to friends and the benefits it brings. I’m glad Bloomberg is catching up on the trend.

When it comes to friendship, closeness matters. Emotional closeness, sure, but also — whether we like it or not — physical proximity. Researchers talk about an ideal “friendship radius” that even the internet hasn’t made obsolete. It can vary by person and location, but at a basic level, the closer you are, the better. A happy friend living within a mile of you is enough to increase your chances of being happy by 25%. If your neighbour is happy, that ups your chances by 34%. An article on the findings in the Harvard Gazette sums it up well: “Happiness appears to love company more so than misery.”

There are unique benefits to living close by to a friend. Being neighbours can build comfort through the regularity of your hangs. It can also make them more spontaneous. It’s a lot different to bump into somebody frequently because they happen to live on your street, and you can sort of see them on a random day without planning. Any time you have to plan, there’s more possibility that the planning itself is going to thwart getting together.

👉 Bloomberg
5. Could we turn empty office space into farms?

Although the COVID-19 pandemic drove workers out of their offices over three years ago, many office buildings remain deserted. According to data gathered in 10 major US cities, office usage rates just crossed 50 percent of pre-pandemic levels in late January, and these numbers seem to be stalling only a few months later. Nearly 20 percent of office space is empty across the United States, and some projections suggest that more than 300 million square feet of US office space could be obsolete by 2030. The pandemic has shown that people can work in a remote setting.

Modifying an existing building is less expensive than rebuilding, turning offices into residential space can be costly, as most office spaces are laid out differently from residential buildings. But there are other options for these empty offices — such as farms. 

👉 Modern Farmer
6. We don’t relate to ourselves as the “Time Billionaires” that we really are. Most of us fail to realise the value of this asset until it is gone

A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is slightly over 31 years. In our culture, we’re so obsessed with money. And we deify dollar billionaires in a way. What about time billionaires? When you see 20-year-olds, the thought should be that they probably have two billion seconds left. But they aren’t relating to themselves as time billionaires. The central point is – time is our most precious asset.

When you’re young, you are literally rich with time. At age 20, you probably have about two billion seconds left (assuming you live to 80). By 50, just one billion seconds remain. But we don’t relate to ourselves as the “Time Billionaires” that we really are. Most of us fail to realise the value of this asset until it is gone.

👉 Sahil Bloom
7. Mundane brands and products can achieve surprising levels of success and thrive far beyond their inherent life expectancy with the advantage of aesthetic distinction

Very ordinary people shrouded in extraordinary beauty have been able to maintain control of our most powerful institutions. The power of artistry in creating the perception of holiness and authority is so strong that over the centuries millions have been willing to give their lives for the glory of the most unexceptional of kings and spiritual leaders. Even the popes and kings didn’t recognise the role that aesthetics have played in bestowing the illusion of virtue and authority on them.

For twenty years or more, the advertising industry has been steadily devaluing the importance of aesthetics in our business in favour of rational and easily measurable characteristics. It ought to be clear to marketers that without the benefit of swords, harnessing the power of the creative arts is among the most effective ways to maintain relevance and market dominance.

But most marketers don’t see it that way. They are under the delusion that their products are unique and can stand and thrive on the strength of their rational attributes – their utility, their practical benefits, and their “brand meaning.” Very few understand the power of artistry in market competition. When they are faced with the reality of deteriorating customer loyalty, marketers have a hard time understanding it. If they appreciated the role that aesthetics play they might recognise the powerful relationship between creativity, human connections, and market power.

👉 Bob Hoffman

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“A healthy man wants a thousand things; a sick man only wants one.”

Confucius

🎁 Fun things to click on:

The Public Domain Review is a free website that features fascinating material discovered in the public domain. A lot of it is curious illustrations, vintage images, oddball visuals, but also forgotten literature, weird poems, and excellent essays. How to slow down. Some fun and easy-to-use tools like font detector, URL summarizer or privacy policy generator.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

Newsletter

SD#75: Discipline, emotions, and intelligence

November 12, 2023

Welcome to the 75 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Wu wei means – in Chinese – non-doing or ‘doing nothing’. It sounds like a pleasant invitation to relax or worse, fall into laziness or apathy. Yet this concept is key to the noblest kind of action according to the philosophy of Daoism – and is at the heart of what it means to follow Dao or The Way. According to the central text of Daoism, the Dao De Jing: ‘The Way never acts yet nothing is left undone’. This is the paradox of wu wei. It doesn’t mean not acting, it means ‘effortless action’ or ‘actionless action’.

Imagine the shape of water. If pushed, water bends around the object. With an obstacle in the way, it moves around it, effortlessly. Confined to small spaces, it will shape itself accordingly. With a constant stream, it is as effortless as a feather falling from the sky yet as powerful as gravity glueing us all to the ground.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. Young men are failing, and we are failing them

Nowadays every segment of society, except the wealthiest, can point to setbacks compared to years ago. One group’s slide is particularly steep, and its decline presents a threat to the commonwealth and our prosperity: young men are failing, and we are failing them. Boys start school less prepared than girls, and they’re less likely to graduate from high school and attend or graduate from college. One in seven men reports having no friends, and three of every four deaths of despair in America — suicides and drug overdoses — are men.

Alienation and disaffection drive despair and violence. By age 27, high school dropouts are four times more likely to be arrested, fired by their employer, on government aid, or addicted to drugs than their peers who graduated. We face declining household formation, reduced birth rates, and slowing economic growth just as baby boomers enter decades of nonproductive retirement. The lack of an open dialogue about these issues has created a void filled by voices espousing thinly veiled misogyny, demonisation of vulnerable groups, and a vision for masculinity that wants to take non-whites and women back to the fifties and Old Spain, respectively.

👉 No Mercy / No Malice
2. Without our “irrational” emotions, we would be unable to make even basic day-to-day choices

Research in recent decades has shown that emotions are a crucial component of our decision-making process. And running a startup requires making constant choices. Famed neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s so-called “somatic marker” hypothesis posits that emotion registers in the body through phenomena like a racing heart, frowning forehead, butterflies in the stomach, etc. These sensations help us consciously and subconsciously filter data sets of information. 

We then make choices based on what we think will allow us to feel good in the future. Without these “somatic markers,” even the most basic decisions are overwhelming. This theory gives a whole new meaning to common aphorisms like “trust your gut” or “follow your heart.”

👉 Every
3. When it comes to intelligence, some personality traits seem to be more helpful than others

Recently researchers in Minnesota published a colossal meta-analysis on personality traits and intelligence. They synthesized over 1,000 studies to find the link between various personality traits and cognitive abilities.
 
There were several findings. Certain personality traits seem to be generally beneficial across a wide range of cognitive abilities. Those “helpful” traits are self-esteem, internal locus of control, compassion, industriousness, order, independent-mindedness, openness (to experience & ideas, especially), activity (i.e. doing lots of stuff). On the flip side, there were a few personality traits that were negatively correlated across a wide range of cognitive abilities. These unhelpful traits include neuroticism, anxiety, uneven temper (i.e. becoming easily upset or disturbed).

👉 From Stew’s Letter
 
4. Discipline is beautiful when it allows you to make the most of a given moment, but loses its utility when you only think of who you might one day be

Discipline is often touted as a great virtue, as it’s the only way for us to fight the forces of disorder. Attention is a famously fragmented thing, so our ability to unify it is the core tenet of productivity culture. Focus is nothing more than a concerted effort to push back against entropy, and discipline is the glue that holds it all together. Knowing this, it makes sense that discipline is held in such high regard. But the absurdity of the situation questions what all this discipline is for. If the ultimate goal is freedom, can’t we simply embody that now instead of using ambition to get there? By doing whatever the moment calls for, aren’t we living examples of the freedom that we so desperately want to achieve?

The Daoists summarise their response to this question through the concept of wu-wei, which roughly translates to “effortless action.” The belief is that the world we occupy is already in harmony, but this equilibrium is disturbed by our endless desires and wants. So to restore this balance, we are to navigate the world according to how it already is, instead of attempting to bend it to our will. It’s to swim with the current of the river to see where it takes us, rather than fighting against it to go to a destination we already have in mind. The reason why wu-wei is compelling is because it doesn’t discount the importance of action. You still have to show up and be present for whatever experience you are entering, and if anything, the awareness of your mental state is elevated. But the difference here is that your action isn’t driven by a self-interested motive; rather, you are simply easing into the fluidity of the moment and seeing what happens.

Discipline is beautiful when it allows you to make the most of a given moment, but loses its utility when you only think of who you might one day be. Discipline can be used to show up regularly for what matters, but it’s only through acceptance that you can be content with whatever the current moment has to offer.

👉 More to that
5. How problems are communicated to us impacts our ability to solve them

When information is conveyed to us, our semantic memory is activated and brings forth the many related associations we have about what’s being presented. How many things — and what types — enter our awareness can be limited by the kind of stimuli presented. This process appears to be particularly pronounced if we are primed with visual stimuli. The opposite, however, appears to be the case with verbal stimuli. While our semantic associations are still activated, our thinking behaves differently: it fixates less quickly and stays a little more fuzzy.

The researchers found that while people had no difficulty generating typical and alternate uses for objects, those presented with the verbal (name only) primer tended to generate more divergent and uncommon uses than those presented with a visual primer. (The ‘picture + name’ condition was somewhere in-between.) Most interestingly, stimuli type led to differences in the type of cognition used: when primed visually, participants showed a bias towards ‘top-down’ processing in their idea generation, and when primed verbally participants showed a bias towards ‘bottom-up’ processing.

As we learn about how stimuli-information processing influences our cognition, we come to understand the extent to which “out-of-the-box thinking” is contingent on how the ‘box’ itself is presented.

👉 Medium
6. The proof you can do hard things is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself

When a precocious yet nonconformist teenager asks why they need to learn calculus, what should you say? You could say, “It’ll help you get into college,” but then they’re left wondering why college cares if you know calculus. And once they’re in college, maybe you could say, “To get a good job,” but why would a potential hirer care how you did in multivariate calculus if your job doesn’t require any knowledge of calculus? 

Calculus is a great way to prove you can do hard things if you have no other proof to show. And the proof you can do hard things is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself.

And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume. Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be. If you can run marathons or throw double your body weight over your head, the sleep deprivation from a newborn is only a mild irritant. If you can excel at organic chemistry or econometrics, onboarding for a new finance job will be a breeze.

👉 Nat Eliason
7. There is a price tag for anything you want to achieve in life. Every single thing you want is an output that requires certain inputs to buy or earn

Extraordinary success has a price (a very steep one at that). In a basic sense, our lives are shaped by three factors: 1) the things we want – financial success, healthy relationships, physical and mental health, etc. 2) The price of those things – the obvious and non-obvious inputs required to buy or earn those outputs. 3) The willingness to pay those prices – whether we are willing to pay the price to buy or earn those things we want, or if we try to go “bargain hunting” for cheaper alternatives. Most people focus on (1) but very rarely think about (2) and (3). If they do think about them, it’s in vague, high-level terms.

But failing to consider the price of the things you want is a recipe for never getting them—or, even worse, getting them and realising you shouldn’t have been willing to pay that price. There is a price tag for anything you want to achieve in life. Every single thing you want is an output that requires certain inputs to buy or earn.

👉 Sahil Bloom

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

🎁 Fun things to click on:

Embrace mindless fun, 11 ways to microdose joy. An online collection of motivational videos made by artist Michelle Ellsworth. They are unedited and around 2-5 minutes long, not all videos load, but it’s worth a look. A website exclusively dedicated to historical and rare photographs.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

Newsletter

SD#74: Carbonara, failure and social status

October 29, 2023

Welcome to the 74 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Is it just me or is there more and more information available at our fingertips but fewer ideas on what to do with it? Wasn’t it easier 20 years ago when you didn’t know how to make a carbonara and your only options were to buy a book, pay someone to teach you or try and improvise? Now there are 50 different recipes on how to cook it on YouTube, Google, ChatGPT. If you Google it once, you’ll be followed by ads serving you Italian cooking lessons for the next month. How do you choose the right recipe? Is there one? How many videos do you need to watch to decide that you know enough? We’re all trying to find the best one and if we do, what happens with the next 49 recipes that have been passed on through generations? The treadmill for a fully optimised life seems to have no end.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. How to drop out

This piece is a bit further from what I subscribe to usually, but I still value exposing myself to different ideas and different this was.

Getting free of the system is more complex than we’ve been led to believe. Here as in so many places, our thinking has been warped by all-or-nothingism, by the Hollywood myth of the sudden overwhelming victory: quit your corporate job this minute, sell all your possessions, and hop a freight train to a straw bale house in the mountains where you’ll grow all your food and run with the wolves! In reality, between the extremes, there’s a whole dropout universe, and no need to hurry.

The path is different for everyone. Maybe you’re already intuitive and decisive and know how to have fun, but you don’t know how to manage money or stay grounded. Maybe you’re using wealth or position or charm to keep from having to relate to people as equals, or you’re keeping constantly busy to avoid facing something lurking in the stillness. Whatever weaknesses keep you dependent on the system, you have to take care of them before you break away from the system, just as you have to learn to swim before you escape a ship. How? By going out and back, a little farther each time, with persistence and patience, until you reach the skill and distance that feels right.

To drop out is to become who you are. Do not feel guilty about using strengths and advantages that others do not have. That guilt is a holdover from the world of selfish competition, where your “success” means the failure or deprivation of someone else. In the dropout universe, your freedom feeds the freedom of others — it’s as if we’ve all been tied up, and the most agile and loosely tied people get out first and then help the rest.

👉 Ran Prieur
2. If you see life as a giant experiment where your goal is to explore as much as you can to obtain answers to your questions, failure becomes an investment to get closer to these answers

In the words of Seth Godin: “The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.” Scientists often repeat experiments thousands of times to get a conclusive answer. And more often than not, the answer they get is that their initial hypothesis was wrong. Not performing the experiment would have allowed them to stay in a cosy limbo of being not wrong, but then we wouldn’t have any science.

This is why approaching failure like a scientist is so powerful. By making decisions that will let you learn something new, you are guaranteed to be successful — where success is learning, evolving, and growing as a human being. Failing becomes a way to cultivate aliveness.

👉 Ness Labs
3. It always takes longer than you think it will

There is this law called Hofstadter’s Law which says it always takes longer than you think it’s going to take. Even when you think it’s going to take a long time. Even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account. Waiting is not the hardest part. It’s the not knowing when the waiting is going to end. But that’s life. That’s how success works. It takes longer than you want. It takes longer than you expect. It takes longer than you’re willing to wait. In any case, it takes however long it takes.

Talk to parents who had trouble conceiving. Talk to people waiting for their immigration papers to come through. Talk to scientists taking a drug through clinical trials and regulatory approvals. This isn’t to say there isn’t good news along the way, that there aren’t trending signs and little hits that keep you going. There will be. But it’s going to take a while to get what you want.

👉 Ryan Holiday
 
4. Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t?

Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anaesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century. The first public demonstration of anaesthesia was in 1846. In those days, even a minor tooth extraction was excruciating. Without effective pain control, surgeons learned to work with slashing speed. Attendants pinned patients down as they screamed and thrashed until they fainted from the agony. Nothing ever tried had made much difference. Nonetheless, a surgeon agreed to let a local dentist demonstrate his claim that he found a gas that could render patients insensible to the pain of surgery. The idea spread like a contagion, travelling through letters, meetings, and periodicals. 

Sepsis — infection — was the other great scourge of surgery. It was the single biggest killer of surgical patients, claiming as many as half of those who underwent major operations, such as a repair of an open fracture or the amputation of a limb. Infection was so prevalent that suppuration — the discharge of pus from a surgical wound — was thought to be a necessary part of healing. Yet, it struggled to catch attention for years and even decades despite clear benefits.

So what were the key differences? First, one combatted a visible and immediate problem (pain); the other combatted an invisible problem (germs) whose effects wouldn’t be manifest until well after the operation. Second, although both made life better for patients, only one made life better for doctors. Anesthesia changed surgery from a brutal, time-pressured assault on a shrieking patient to a quiet, considered procedure. Listerism, by contrast, required the operator to work in a shower of carbolic acid. Even low dilutions burned the surgeons’ hands.

👉 New Yorker
5. People are bad at predicting how they’ll act in the future

The empathy gap describes the tendency to underestimate the role our current emotions play in decision-making. It’s related to the projection bias, which refers to our tendency to overestimate how much our future self will share the same tastes and preferences as our current self.

Sometimes referred to as the “hot-cold” empathy gap, when people are in a ‘cold’ state — not feeling any negative emotions — they assume they’ll make rational decisions in the future. Yet, when in a ‘hot’ state — such as being hungry, tired, afraid, sad, jealous, etc. — those negative emotions can drive them to make poor decisions.

If you’ve ever committed to eating healthier and then gone grocery shopping hungry, you’ve likely experienced the empathy gap.

👉 Customer Camp
6. Apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behaviour

Nobel Laureate economist, John Harsanyi, said that “apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behaviour.” The more noticeable status disparities are, the more concerned with status people become. Of course, status differences are not simply relevant to economic standing, but they appear to be on our minds at all times. As renowned neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga has noted, “when you get up in the morning, you do not think about triangles and squares and these similes that psychologists have been using for the past 100 years. You think about status. You think about where you are in relation to your peers.” Between CEO and employee, quarterback and wide receiver, husband and wife, status looms large.

Ongoing efforts to maintain a positive view of oneself despite economic and social hardships can engage psychological defence mechanisms that are ultimately self-defeating. Instead of ingratiating themselves to those around them – this is the successful strategy for status attainment – low-status individuals may be more prone to bullying and hostile behaviour, especially when provoked. Research identifying factors that lead to successful status-seeking provides some optimism, though. Individuals capable of signalling their worth to others rather than being preoccupied with signalling their worth to themselves may be able to break the self-defeating cycle of low-status behaviour.

👉 Scientific American
7. Connection between laziness and productivity

Writer Hanif Abdurraqib on The Stephen Satterfield Show: “I constantly sit on a lot of ideas. So what that means for me is that I have to be disciplined and kind of thoughtful. I’m very lazy! I think there are multiple kinds of people in the world: There are people who are hard-working and disciplined. There are people who are hard-working but pretty un-disciplined — so there’s a scattershot way their work appears in the world. And me, I’m pretty lazy, but I’m very disciplined. Perhaps more disciplined, I would guarantee, than anyone you know.

They act in opposition to each other, right? So the laziness is kind of inherent. Which means that I know that left to my own devices, I would do nothing. I was an athlete. I played basketball, I played soccer in college. So I had to learn a type of discipline, because my love for what I was doing propelled me towards that discipline. Suzan-Lori Parks, a playwright who I adore, says this thing about how discipline is simply a love for your big self. And that’s kind of the path that I follow, because I’m driven to get the things I’m excited about out of my head. Because I don’t know how good they do me — just me in the world — if they’re only in my head.

And that isn’t saying that everyone needs to see them, it just means that there has to be some kind of extraction process that fuels and excites me. Writing does that. Writing about music, specifically, does that. I can be in opposition to my inherent laziness, and build a discipline around, not even the work of writing, but the work of joyful extraction. And to present it like that, and to put it like that, offers me a better runway to it. And I cannot stay in bed, because I would much rather be in pursuit of some revelation that might arrive to me in the process of doing this work. So that’s how I act in opposition to my own laziness.”

👉 Austin Kleon

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”

Albert Camus

🎁 Fun things to click on:

GigaBrain scans billions of discussions on reddit and other online communities to find the most useful posts and comments for you. How to be happier: eleven of the most popular approaches. Stable Doodle converts simple doodles into detailed art using generative AI.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

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SD#73: Masculinity, expectations debt, and AI

October 15, 2023

Welcome to the 73 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

It’s not my usual style to be covering masculinity or gender issues within my newsletter, but the article is too important to be missed. There’s a clear void in today’s society of what healthy masculinity looks like and some people are brave enough to highlight it. My beloved Scott Galloway highlighted several times how it pushes young men to extremism, and how the dating scene is driving division rather than unity. These topics are not trying to take away the spotlight from feminism. Can’t we speak about both and strive for a better society and better parents? It’s less of a ‘learning’ than most ideas shared in this newsletter, but it’s something I care about and hope I can inspire a few more to care too.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness

Long, thoughtful articles can be tricky to summarise, but this topic was too good to be missed. So here we go:
 
Young men might be in an identity crisis. In the 4chan-fueled 2016 campaign for Donald Trump, in the backlash to #MeToo, in amateur militias during the Black Lives Matter protests. Misogynistic text-thread chatter took physical form in the Proud Boys, some of whom attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Young men everywhere are trying on new identities, many of them ugly, all gesturing toward a desire to belong.
 
What does good masculinity look like these days?
 
Deindustrialization, automation, free trade and peacetime have shifted the labour market dramatically, and not in men’s favour — the need for physical labour has declined, while soft skills and academic credentials are increasingly rewarded. Growing numbers of working-age men have detached from the labour market, with the biggest drop in employment among men ages 25 to 34. For those in a job, wages have stagnated everywhere except the top.
 
Meanwhile, women are surging ahead in school and the workplace, putting a further dent in the “provider” model that has long been ingrained in our conception of masculinity. Men now receive about 74 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 awarded to women, and men account for more than 70 percent of the decline in college enrollment overall. In 2020, nearly half of the women reported in a TD Ameritrade survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husbands or partners — a huge jump from fewer than 4 percent of women in 1960.
 
And while the past 50 years have been revolutionary for women — the feminist movement championed their power, and an entire academic discipline emerged to theorise about gender and excavate women’s history — there hasn’t been a corresponding conversation about what role men should play in a changing world. At the same time, the increasing visibility of the LGBTQ+ movement has made the gender dynamic seem less stable, and less defined.
 
The BAPs and Hawleys find ways to celebrate aspects of the male experience — from physical strength to competitiveness to sex as a motivator — that other parts of modern society have either derided as “toxic” or attempted to explain aren’t specific to men at all.
 
At their best, these influencers highlight positive traits that were traditionally associated with maleness — protectiveness, leadership, emotional stability — and encourage them, making “masculinity” out to be a real and necessary thing, and its acquisition something honourable and desirable.
 
What would creating a positive vision of masculinity look like? Recognizing distinctiveness but not pathologizing it. Finding new ways to valorize it and tell a story that is appealing to young men and socially beneficial, rather than ceding ground to those who would warp a perceived difference into something ugly and destructive.
 
If a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes. It’s on young men themselves to take responsibility, embrace masculinity and redefine it. For all their problems, the strict gender roles of the past did give boys a script for how to be a man.

👉 The Washington Post
2. Expectations are like a debt that must be repaid before you get any joy out of what you’re doing

There’s a stoic saying: “Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune.” Expecting nothing but good feels like such a good mindset – you’re optimistic, happy, and winning. But whether you know it or not you’re very likely piling up a hidden debt that must eventually be repaid.
 
When Amazon was on top of the world in 2021 – reputation gleaming, stock price booming – you could feel the pride and prosperity. You could practically smell it. That was Amazon in 2021. Then Jeff Bezos left, the stock fell 50%, 10,000 employees were laid off, and hundreds of thousands more fear they’re next. What do you call the top-of-the-world status Amazon had in 2021? Was it a gift? A reward for hard work? The natural swings of capitalism? Yes, all of those. But there’s another way to look at it: An expectations debt. Expectations were so high in 2021 that investors and employees had to achieve extraordinary things just to break even. When results were merely good, they felt terrible. Expectations are like a debt that must be repaid before you get any joy out of what you’re doing.

👉 Collab fund
3. When practice doesn’t make perfect

In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published his popular book Outliers, exploring why some seemingly extraordinary people achieve much more than others. “Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years.” Malcolm branded this the 10,000-hour rule. Study whichever topic for 10,000 hours, and you will master it.
 
There were a few things wrong with the approach. First, the study wasn’t about studying a topic for a specific amount of time. It was about deliberate practice. Finally, and maybe the biggest problem with the 10,000-hour rule, there is absolutely nothing in the study that suggests that anyone can become an expert in any given domain by putting in 10,000 hours of practice, even deliberate practice. To show this, the researchers would have had to take a random sample of people through 10,000 hours of practice and see if the results were statistically significant.
 
In fact, a research study from Princeton shows evidence that practice accounts for just a 12% difference on average in performance in various domains, specifically 18% in sports, 21% in music, and 26% in games.

👉 Ness Labs
 
4. We tend to see others as internally motivated and responsible for their behaviour. Yet when we judge ourselves, we look at the whole picture

Fundamental Attribution Error was coined by Lee Ross some years after the now-classic experiment by Jones and Harris. Ross (1977) argued in a popular paper that it forms the conceptual bedrock for the field of social psychology. We tend to see others as internally motivated and responsible for their behaviour – if they’re late to a meeting, that tells us everything we need to know about them. Yet when we judge ourselves, we look at the whole picture – it’s not a big deal that you forgot about your meeting. And it’s not your fault Zoom decided to install a new update.
 
What does it mean for businesses? Service businesses are built on systems. It’s the only way to scale. These systems make sense internally. But, externally, they may feel slow and clunky. Don’t let your clients think it’s because your business is slow and clunky. Tell them what’s going on behind the scenes. Once they can see why you’re doing things a certain way, they can understand it’s situational…not a character flaw.

👉 Why we buy
5. The way to get ideas is to do something boring. They fly into one’s head like birds

Neil Gaiman’s advice for writers? Get bored. “[Ideas] come from daydreaming, from drifting, that moment when you’re just sitting there… The trouble with these days is that it’s really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment…it’s really hard to get bored. I’m much better at putting my phone away, going for boring walks, actually trying to find the space to get bored in. That’s what I’ve started saying to people who say ‘I want to be a writer,” I say ‘Great, get bored.‘”
 
And Nicholas Carr, expanding “We don’t like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus, but boredom is valuable because it requires us to fill that absence out of our own resources, which is the process of discovery, of doors opening. The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it’s pain we’re happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom. That’s dangerous for everyone, but particularly so for kids, who, without boredom’s spur, may never discover what in themselves or their surroundings is most deeply engaging to them.”

👉 From Austin Kleon
6. If you can’t write, design, create, etc.… find someone who can and make a fortune with them

Charles Bukowski, the infamous underground poet and writer, died with a net worth of $4 million. Surprising, considering that despite his tremendous talent, he was a dirt poor drunk who jumped from job to job at nearly the same alarming pace he changed beds. His unlikely fortune can be almost entirely attributed to John Martin. John Martin was first and foremost an entrepreneur. But, not unlike most entrepreneurs, he was a voracious reader.
 
One day, whilst thumbing through an indie magazine, Martin stumbled upon a fairly unknown LA poet and writer by the name of Charles Bukowski, who wrote almost entirely about drinking and having sex but did so in such a poetic way that it left the reader flipping violently through the pages as if each sentence were a bump of cocaine. Martin was certain that Bukowski was the next Walt Whitman. So much so that he sold his collection of D.H. Lawrence’s first editions to raise $50,000 to fund a publishing house created with the sole intention of bringing Bukowski to the masses.
 
“I believed in him as much as he believed in himself.” John Martin and Black Sparrow Press is a lesson in taste. If you can’t write, design, create, etc… find someone who can and make a fortune with them. While everyone wants to be the next Picasso, it pays to simply have good taste. And, perhaps the hustle to bring that taste to the masses.

👉 Honey Copy
7. AI won’t take your jobs

Here are a few reasons why: 1) Most companies are about power more than efficiency, and power typically comes from having big internal budgets and employing more staff. Both of which are more powerful than the case to be made for automation. Power is what drives company dynamics, not profit.
 
2) Companies have a terrible track record of using even basic technology to improve how they do things, mostly because companies are made up of people and people are strange. I’ve known places where booking a meeting room took phone calls and ages because it was just ‘how things were done around here”. Many people today still use paper calendars not shared digital ones. If companies care about AI, why didn’t they care about using Excel properly or training staff on how to use email better?
 
3) AI won’t be as good as people think it will be. So far it’s mainly a way to do things badly but fast and free, most processes in business should ultimately be about better, not easier or cheaper. Yes, Zapier can automatically cancel a meeting, but what if it emails someone who is grieving a lost family member with the same tone as everyone else? Life is more complex than we make out, relationships matter too much to outsource feeling to machines.

👉 Tom Goodwin

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis—getting out of your comfort zone—and forcing your brain or your body to adapt.”

K. Anders Ericsson

🎁 Fun things to click on:

An interactive starter guide for anyone building an app for the first time. Histography is an interactive timeline that covers 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015. Every dot is a historic event from the Wikipedia. What the web looks like to someone who is colorblind.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

Newsletter

SD#72: Conversations, money, and change

October 1, 2023

Welcome to the 72 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Have you ever parted ways with someone and thought ‘That was a great conversation’? Have you had the opposite? We interact with others on a daily basis, conversations occur whether we actively seek them or not. We are social creatures after all. But how often do we look at how we could make those conversations better, more meaningful, open? 

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. The most important factor in determining a person’s future is when and where they are born

People embellish their origin stories, as it’s the only thing others have to go on — from potential employers and friends to potential mates. We are the product of our circumstances, personally and professionally, and a good origin story confers meaning to our life and career. We should recognise that and embrace it … but also be honest about it. Each of us, born into any other situation, would experience a different outcome. Just as the market trumps individual performance, so does circumstance.

This isn’t just true across continents and centuries — it’s also evident at a micro level. Being born one year earlier or later can make a big difference. People who graduate into a recession earn less for 10 to 15 years than those who graduate amid prosperity. Fate also changes block to block: One of the strongest signals of life expectancy (and much else) is the ZIP code where you’re born. Within the same city, life expectancy can vary by 30 years based on ZIP code.

This all confirms a basic point: The cards you’re dealt matter … a lot. Your income is the clearest indicator of how much money your kid will make when they’re 30. Churn is increasingly a rare-earth element in the U.S. Per a Georgetown analysis, “It’s better to be born rich than smart … The most talented disadvantaged children have a lower chance of academic and early career success than the least talented affluent children.”

👉 No Mercy / No Malice
2. Is money up for an upgrade?

Money needs an upgrade. Money should be programmable. It should be able to apply taxes, pay royalties and manage refunds. That’s all possible today, but not with the currencies, banks, and apps people trust. Digital technology and a global world didn’t exist when money was invented. The invention of money solved another problem entirely. Money was a solution to barter. In barter, everything is tradeable for some other quantity of item or service, but there’s a glaring problem. It’s hard to know how many pigeons are worth one cat. How many bushels of wheat are worth a new plough?

Money is an efficient way to exchange value, store it and account for it. Coins and paper money become a simple way for a farmer to exchange their value (e.g., wheat) and receive the value they can also exchange for other staples like tools from the blacksmith. They can also sell all of their wheat in one transaction and store that value for later, in a measurement we can all agree on (or account for). That’s why central bankers spend so long saying the three tests of money are it must be a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. That’s how it adds value, but not why. 

Money is memory. It remembers the value you’ve created and can grow over time in a way perishable assets struggle to (e.g., the grain goes stale). Money is also a fuel for action. If you want something to happen, it usually takes money. Want to build a school, travel to work, or have a place to live? You either have to buy or pay for that. Money incentivises others to act to meet your need (or for you to meet theirs) because they can exchange, store, and account for it. But money is dumb. It is a legacy technology. So how do we upgrade it?

Tokenization’s impact will be monumental, according to Blackrock. Citi says $4 trillion in assets will be tokenized by 2030. Starting with the thesis that all cash (and assets) will be tokenized, the next question is how? Some of that will live on Blockchain networks, and most will reference some classic database like a central bank or stock market, but much of it might reference new, digital-only assets.

👉 Fintech brain food
3. Making normal conversations better

Most conversations between people who’ve just met, or loose acquaintances, are pretty shitty. And it’s not for lack of desire. The majority of people want to connect with people and open up about something. Almost everyone is full of some vital matter they’d like to express but that exceeds the capacity of the average conversational venue. But many conversations can be nudged in the direction of openness, spontaneous complexity, and shared emotionality. And a surprising number of conversations, thus encouraged, can become quite connective.

Here are some ways to make normal conversations better: 1) small talk is vital. Some people get frustrated with small talk because the words themselves are not enlightening. But they’re focusing on the wrong thing. The spoken content of small talk is, it’s true, mostly vapid. However, the relevant information underneath the spoken content is fascinating if you learn to care about it. What you’re doing is mutually establishing tone and finding boundaries. 2) Extending the invitation. If small talk is going well, you might be able to increase the depth of the conversation. 3) Give the right attention. People love attention, almost more than anything. Part of what makes people open up, conversationally, is the sense that someone is paying them more attention than normal. 4) Don’t be afraid of silence. 5) Avoid and end autopilot. Good conversations often contain moments that, on paper, look like monologues, which is to say, one person divulging something for some time, or telling a story. But the key thing is that they can’t feel like monologues. 6) Let yourself surprise and be surprised.

👉 Sasha’s Newsletter
 
4. Every industry seems to be caught up in the pervasive narratives of fear of ‘inevitable’ change

That things are changing faster than ever, that everything is different now. That what you know is no longer enough. That tech X and Y will take your job and that every new startup will eat any company that happens to have thrived for decades or centuries, by default. These things are largely not true at all, but there is more money to be made by the business media, consulting industry, analyst reports, and more speaking slots to be had by chaos creation, not context and balance.

The last two decades have seen an interesting shift. For the first fifteen years, the world of advertising largely ignored the internet, data, and new behaviours and technology, and found this all a bit beneath them. For the last five years, as a way to restore the balance, the industry talks about little else other than every new shiny new technology and big data. The pendulum has swung too far. Tech is fast becoming THE idea, not the enabler of the idea. We seem more keen to talk about technology in great detail, using buzzwords, more to signal to others in the industry that we get it, and to create barriers than to make better marketing.

👉 Nowism
5. To be yourself, fully, is to open to the free flow of love — and thus to power

What does it mean to be “in” one’s power? It can happen in situations where we’re trying to earn someone’s approval or acceptance, where we try to be “good.” There is a sense, in these moments, that we are trying to be somebody for somebody else. Rather than being ourselves, we are trying to contort ourselves into who we think someone else wants us to be. We are trying to fit into their definition of “good” — rather than our own. And that is where the power leaks out — in thinking that we should be looking anywhere else, to anyone else, to understand how to be ourselves. In thinking that there’s a way to get it “right.” Which, by extension, means there’s a way to get it wrong.

A wise being once told that power is the free flow of love. To be yourself, fully, is to open to the free flow of love — and thus to power. To not block that flow by trying to be somebody for somebody else. To not block that flow by trying to be “good” by someone else’s standards. To not block that flow by trying to contort yourself into an unnatural shape to fit in. You must give yourself the approval you need. You must choose yourself. No one else can do it for you.

👉 Hurry Slowly
6. People will not remember your thing unless it’s connected to a narrative

We use stories to make sense of the world. What that means is that when events occur that don’t fit neatly into a narrative, we can’t make sense of them. As a consequence, these sorts of events are less salient, which means they’re less real. Scott Hershberger speculated in Scientific American along similar lines about why historians paid little attention to the Spanish Flu epidemic, even though it killed more people than World War I:

“For the countries engaged in World War I, the global conflict provided a clear narrative arc, replete with heroes and villains, victories and defeats. From this standpoint, an invisible enemy such as the 1918 flu made little narrative sense. It had no clear origin, killed otherwise healthy people in multiple waves and slinked away without being understood. Scientists at the time did not even know that a virus, not a bacterium, caused the flu. The doctors had shame, it was a huge failure of modern medicine. Without a narrative schema to anchor it, the pandemic all but vanished from public discourse soon after it ended.”

👉 Surfing Complexity
7. Boredom is telling you what you’re doing right now is not working. It’s uncomfortable but not necessarily negative

There is a kind of cultural stigma attached to boredom, particularly in the United States. Regardless of education, income or race, parents believed children who are bored should be enrolled in extracurricular activities. Yet, guarding kids from ever feeling bored is misguided in the same way that guarding kids from ever feeling sad, or ever feeling frustrated, or ever feeling angry is misguided. 

What can you and your children learn from feelings of boredom? 1) Boredom is telling you what you’re doing right now is not working. It’s uncomfortable but not necessarily negative. 2) Boredom offers children an opportunity to experiment with the kinds of pursuits that feel fulfilling and interesting to them. 3) Phones and devices require little effort, so children and adults often turn to them as a way to soothe feelings of boredom. It makes complete sense, but obviously, that doesn’t mean that’s what’s best for them in that situation.

Almost all advice for kids doubles as advice for adults. When was the last time you let yourself get bored?

👉 NY Times

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

Neils Bohr

🎁 Fun things to click on:

You’re in a space elevator. As you scroll, you ascend and learn about the wonderful world between solid ground and outer space. How to be a better movie watcher, according to film critics. AI emoji search engine. 

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

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SD#71: Innovation, tears and creativity

September 17, 2023

Welcome to the 71 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

I’ve written extensively about innovation and technological change in the past, arguing that the pace is slower than we like to think. Yes, we’re getting faster phones, more efficient cars, fridges, planes, better-suited tools. But is there anything actually new that’s disrupting our world? Aside from smartphones, there’s been very few innovations in the past few decades and that’s because improving the efficiency of a car’s fuel consumption is a more cost-effecting risk-free way to reap profit. I can’t tell you how we’ll escape this mindset nor when we might do that, but it’s worth noticing when we think the world is flying at a million miles per hour.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. Innovation doesn’t have to be disruptive

For the past 20 years “disruption” has been a leading battle cry in business: Disrupt this. Disrupt that. Disrupt or die. Whether it comes from the low end—the basis of Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation—or from the high end, the way commercial jet travel overtook ocean liners and Apple’s iPhone dominated mobile phones, corporate leaders have continually been told that the only way to innovate and grow is to disrupt their industries or even their own companies. Not surprisingly, many have come to see “disruption” as a near-synonym for “innovation.”

But the obsession with disruption obscures an important truth: market-creating innovation isn’t always disruptive. Disruption may be what people talk about. It’s certainly important, and it’s all around us. But it’s only one end of what we think of as the spectrum of market-creating innovation.

👉 Harvard Business Review
2. Isn’t it strange that in 2023 we consider a man weak when he loses control of his feelings and cries but somehow the opposite is true when a man loses control of his temper and breaks something or hurts someone?

When Marcus Aurelius (the Roman emperor) was young, it was said that he wept so violently over the loss of a beloved tutor that the palace servants went to admonish him. Marcus’s stepfather intervened. “Let him be only a man for once,” he said, “for neither philosophy nor empire takes away natural feelings.” A real man doesn’t give way to anger and discontent, Marcus wrote. The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.

There is another tale about Marcus. In this one, he’s now much older and more or less ruling the known world. While judging a court case, he broke into tears after hearing one of the lawyers reference the human devastation of what has come to be called the Antonine Plague. Marcus wrote in his Meditations that people are arrogant, deceitful, and ungrateful but that we have to put up with them, love them, and take care of them. The pandemic was an opportunity to practice that in front of our children. Sure, it was sad to miss out on some parties and events, and it’s not fun to get a shot, but this is our job.

👉 Men’s Health
3. Creativity is finite so spend it wisely

The creative energy we have each day is finite. Even the best, most focused writers claim to only be able to write for 4-hours each day. Because of this, it’s really important to consider creative leverage. When we find the right project or pursuit to focus our creativity, leverage happens and overwhelming change is made possible. 

It was Archimedes who said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Creativity is finite so spend it wisely.

👉 Honey Copy
 
4. Maximise the small moments throughout the day to learn things you’ve always wanted

Rajiv Surendra created a video explaining how he goes about his day and uses small breaks of downtime to focus on learning something he wants to. It can be a 20-minute journaling session to summarise your day, a small notebook to sketch the lamppost in front of you while you’re waiting for your friends to arrive, a moment to knit a line in your future hat, or an opportunity to practice a musical instrument. 

It’s at the end of the video that he left the shiniest nugget of learning – if you’re waiting at the grocery store line, or your dentist, or to pick up your kids from school, why not spend that few extra moments thinking? Think about how you feel, what you see, how you feel about what you see, what thoughts are in your head. And once that’s done, why not take notice of your breath? We forget how important our breathing is and these small moments throughout the day give us a magical opportunity to take a deep breath and feel the effects.

👉 YouTube
5. When someone tells you something is wrong (with your writing), they’re right. It’s not working for them

Does that mean they know how to fix it? No. Or even that you should fix it? No, it may well be that they’re not the audience you’re aiming for. But you cannot — with your writing, with your kids, with anyone — tell them that their reaction is incorrect. Hear what they are saying, respect it, then decide what you’re going to do about it (which may well just be letting them know that you heard them and you appreciate the time they took to say it).

👉 Ryan Holiday
6. Almost all new technology not only fails to save time, but ends up wasting it

McKinsey & Company said generative AI could add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion worth of annual productivity globally, which feels sensible, especially compared to the time they said the Metaverse would add $5 trillion by 2030. There are a few issues with this. 

What is AI exactly? Like all new technologies, what starts as something quite specific, such as connected sensors or bigger databases, rapidly becomes a meaningless marketing term, such as “the Internet of things” or “big data.” As a result, these concepts become bigger, more interesting, and more profound, but ultimately impossible to define. In the same way that “big data” meant knowing more things, AI is rapidly becoming “doing smarter things,” which is generally impossible to measure the impact of.

We use tech wrong. Recent history suggests that almost all new technology not only fails to save time, but ends up wasting it. While smartphones can be used to teach us French, they can also be a source of distraction with funny videos and social media. In fact, tools that can have a massive impact on productivity, such as Excel, collaborative documents, and better use of digital calendars, are often overlooked because implementing change takes time.

👉 Nowism
7. Those who are chasing after money aren’t doing it for the money

A great example of this comes from How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis, an incredibly honest account of what it feels like to get wealthy. As Dennis states: “Still let me repeat it one more time. Becoming rich does not guarantee happiness. In fact, it is almost certain to impose the opposite condition — if not from the stresses and strains of protecting wealth, then from the guilt that inevitably accompanies its arrival.” While the data suggests that those who make more money are happier than those who make less, we don’t know which way the causality runs between money and happiness. Did the money cause the happiness or did the happiness cause the money?

Perhaps those people who are happier make more money because they are doing something they love. After all, if you’re doing something that you find fulfilling, you probably would be willing to work more (and would likely earn more) as a result. It shows that those who are chasing after money aren’t doing it for the money. So why should we? Even if we get the wealth we so desire, it won’t make us feel whole. It won’t provide us with a deeper sense of meaning. No, we will be right back where we started. So what should we do instead of solving for wealth? We should solve for purpose. We should solve for substance. We should solve for the things that make life worth living. Because no one ever asks: If you’re so fulfilled, why aren’t you rich?

👉 Of Dollars and Data

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“All experience happens in the now. Even to remember the past or anticipate the future is a present-moment event.”

Deepak Chopra

🎁 Fun things to click on:

The world’s biggest collection of obsolete sounds. Bees teach their babies how to dance. How flip-flop art helps clean Kenya’s beaches. A 13-year-old girl asks a question to Warren Buffett. 

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

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SD#70: Harmony, growth, and luck

September 03, 2023

Welcome to the 70 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Opposites. Do they attract? Or do they repulse? Like magnets with different fields, the nature of opposition can be beneficial and detrimental to what we do. Only after compiling today’s newsletter, I realised two pieces describe similar things from completely different sides. I’ll let you make your own view on which one to believe. After all, F. Scott Fitzgerald said “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. Reform movements bring out two types of bad actors within them – Baptists and Bootleggers

Historically, every new technology that matters, from electric lighting to automobiles to radio to the Internet, has sparked a moral panic – a social contagion that convinces people the new technology is going to destroy the world, society, or both. The fine folks at Pessimists Archive have documented these technology-driven moral panics over the decades; their history makes the pattern vividly clear. It turns out this present panic is not even the first for AI. It is certainly the case that many new technologies have led to bad outcomes – often the same technologies that have been otherwise enormously beneficial to our welfare. So it’s not that the mere existence of a moral panic means there is nothing to be concerned about. But a moral panic is by its very nature irrational – it takes what may be a legitimate concern and inflates it into a level of hysteria that ironically makes it harder to confront serious concerns.

Economists have observed a longstanding pattern in reform movements of this kind. The actors within movements like these fall into two categories – “Baptists” and “Bootleggers” – drawing on the historical example of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920’s “Baptists” are the true believer social reformers who legitimately feel – deeply and emotionally, if not rationally – that new restrictions, regulations, and laws are required to prevent societal disaster. For alcohol prohibition, these actors were often literally devout Christians who felt that alcohol was destroying the moral fabric of society. For AI risk, these actors are true believers that AI presents one or another existential risks – strap them to a polygraph, they really mean it.

“Bootleggers” are the self-interested opportunists who stand to financially profit by the imposition of new restrictions, regulations, and laws that insulate them from competitors. For alcohol prohibition, these were the literal bootleggers who made a fortune selling illicit alcohol to Americans when legitimate alcohol sales were banned. For AI risk, these are CEOs who stand to make more money if regulatory barriers are erected that form a cartel of government-blessed AI vendors protected from new startups and open source competition – the software version of “too big to fail” banks.

👉 A16z
2. Pursuing a goal is more fulfilling than attaining it

During the Trojan War, the Warrior King Odysseus left his cushy life in Ithaca and sailed to Troy. The entire voyage took him a decade and he hit every red light, pothole and traffic jam you can think of. Shit hit the fan when Odysseus was nearing the end of his voyage. He was so close to Ithaca and his beloved wife Penelope that he could literally see the smokestacks from his family’s bonfires. So, Odysseus decided to lie down for a snooze. 

Somewhere along the way on Odysseus’ journey, a god by the name of Aelous gifted him an oxhide sack that housed the adverse winds. While the king was counting sheep, a jack-ass got the bright idea to open Odysseus’s oxhide sack, certain the King was stashing away gold. And so the moron slashed open the oxhide and the adverse winds whipped out like sprawling serpents, sending the sleeping Odysseus and his crew skirting back across the planet to Troy. 

Imagine waking up from your nap, thinking you’re about to make love to your wife whom you haven’t seen in a decade, only to find you are thousands of miles away, back at the place where you had first begun your journey on the other side of the planet? When deep in the throes of a creative endeavour, it’s only human to let off the gas when the finish line is in sight. The reason we do this can be explained through psychology. Psychologists have found that pursuing a goal is more fulfilling than attaining it.
Artists, writers, creatives, musicians and entrepreneurs are notorious for taking a project 70%, 80% and sometimes 90% to the finish line and then abandoning it suddenly for another project. We can’t simply shrug this behaviour off as “quitting”. There’s more at play than this. The reason creative people struggle with finishing creative projects isn’t because they’re “quitters” but because they are more incentivised by the process than the completion.

👉 Honey Copy
3. From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony. The cosmos works by the harmony of tensions

If a guitar string is wound too slack, it buzzes and makes no note. If it’s wound too tight, it’ll snap. Either way, no music. There is a proper tension that makes the string sing. And so it is with tension in creative work: we can’t avoid it, we can only find the proper tension.

“Paradox” is a term that has, surprisingly, been used more in business books than creativity books. In Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis’s book, they differentiate and define tensions, dilemmas, and paradoxes. They see most of the dilemmas we come across as made up of tensions that are the result of underlying paradoxes. The way to get through these dilemmas is to set aside the forced choice of either/or thinking and embrace “both/and” thinking, by acknowledging the tension and understanding the paradox beneath it.

They had two metaphors that are interesting solutions to some dilemmas. First is the mule: you take two opposites and breed them together to produce a weird hybrid. Second, is the tightrope walker, who moves forward by shifting ever so slightly in opposite directions. Sometimes these two overlap: while tightrope walking, you discover a mule, etc. 

👉 Austin Kleon
 
4. Don’t let good luck put you on a pedestal, but don’t let bad luck knock you down either

Stephen King used to write some of his books under a different name. They barely sold until his secret got discovered and the books skyrocketed in sales. King’s foray into undercover writing reveals (as well as J.K. Rowling’s) a harsh truth about success and social status — winners keep winning. This idea is formally known as cumulative advantage, or the Matthew effect, and explains how those who start with an advantage relative to others can retain that advantage over long periods of time.

This effect has also been shown to describe how music gets popular, but applies to any domain that can result in fame or social status. The Matthew effect explains how two people can start in nearly the same place and end up worlds apart. In these kinds of systems, initial conditions matter. And as time goes on, they matter more and more.

When you realise the magnitude of happenstance and serendipity in your life, you can stop judging yourself on your outcomes and start focusing on your efforts. It’s the only thing you can control.

👉 Of Dollars and Data
5. Meeting strangers and experiencing novel environments is fundamental to human growth

The comfortable and the familiar are the harbingers of weakness and fear. Without rejection and awkwardness, you won’t experience victory or true satisfaction … that you’ve achieved something. Greatness is in the agency of others, as is true reward.

A common saying in youth: “Nothing good happens after 2 a.m.” This was mostly true, as the “after” part usually involved (more) alcohol and chasing a high and an environment that peaked at midnight. The chase, if repeated too often, can begin to impair your ability to register progress during the day, which is key to your success at night. Simply put … it’s all about what you do during the day. I believe this should be modified for a post-Covid world to “it’s all about what you do outside of the home.” The point of differentiation between those making a living and those having a significant impact will, I believe, be a function of their success in the physical presence of others.

The only way you will be loved by others, get to love them, and live the life you deserve is to take uncomfortable risks. Today the risks are mundane but offer greater returns. Say yes, go to the second place, and be promiscuous when it comes to expressing your regard, interest, and love for others. You will experience disappointment, sore muscles, hangovers, and awkward moments. And looking back, you will regret none of it. Say yes.

👉 No Mercy / No Malice
6. Is it too safe?

When most people think about war, they think about senseless killing, brutality, violence and horror. But when journalist Sebastian Junger thinks about war — even though he has witnessed first-hand how war is all of those things — he also thinks about meaning, purpose, brotherhood and community. It’s why, he posits, so many veterans miss war when they return home. As Junger argues, war gives people all of the things that religion aspires to impart to people and often fails. War, he says, delivers.

Junger was a war correspondent for many decades. His reporting on the front lines of Afghanistan was captured in his best-selling book, War, and was made into an Academy Award winning documentary, Restrepo, which follows a platoon of U.S. soldiers in one of the bleakest, most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan. Through his raw, unfiltered, on-the-ground reporting, perhaps no one has done more to illuminate the full picture and reality of war. One of those realities is that men seek and need danger. They have a deep desire to prove their valour. They find community and meaning in crisis. And yet, much of the Western world lives without any kind of high-stakes, high-risk danger at all. It is, of course, a great blessing we don’t live in constant crisis. But our comfort, safety and affluence, he argues, come with unexamined costs.

👉 The Free Press
7. Some of the most vicious traps occur when two admirable traits mix in the wrong way and create something dangerous

A little cool air from the north is no big deal. A little warm breeze from the south is pleasant. But when they mix together over Missouri you get a tornado. Two calm water currents are not a problem. But if opposing currents meet, you get a deadly whirlpool. This same thing happens with personality traits. Bubbles happen when confidence (a good trait), optimism (a good trait), and trust (generally good) mix to form greed and delusion. The reason bubbles are so common is that the inputs are mostly innocent, even if the output is lunacy and destruction.

So many things are like that. Some of the most vicious traps occur when two admirable traits mix in the wrong way and create something dangerous. They’re the hardest flaws to identify and fix. Take patience and confidence. They both sound great. But mixed together they often form stubbornness, which is a disaster. Confidence that you’re right permits you to ignore signs that you’re wrong, and patience gives you permission to extend that denial indefinitely. Or curiosity and boldness. They are wonderful on their own, but combined can easily create impulsiveness.

👉 Collab fund

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.”

Ozan Varol

🎁 Fun things to click on:

A web of musings on the slow life. New footage of two of the planet’s biggest icebergs released. A two minute burnout checkup.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

Loving this newsletter? Then why not share it with your friends.

Speak soon,

Tom

in:

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SD#69: Isolation, creative process, and success

August 20, 2023

Welcome to the 69 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You deserve your own: Subscribe here.

Hi friends,

Isn’t it weird that we place imaginary constraints within our heads that limit what we do? I’m not talking about things that break the law or harm others in some way. But simple things have been done that way for ages and we accept it. While those processes are important for a set number of professions (a surgeon, a lawyer), for the majority of us there is no predefined path to action. We have actors who become presidents, while others are working tirelessly through the parliament. Alvin Toffler said, “The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:

1. The people who invented AI are full-time catastrophists. But they’re hyping the wrong catastrophe. There’s less concern about SkyNet declaring war on the species or being turned into a paperclip than an epidemic that causes more death, disease, and disability than Covid-19: loneliness

The U.S. faces an epidemic of isolation. Loneliness among young adults has been increasing since 1976. (The increase has been steeper among those with lower incomes.) Teen depression would be at similar levels, given its trajectory, with or without the pandemic. Put another way, Covid didn’t inspire social distancing … social media did. A more honest moniker for the sector is “asocial” media. Studies find that when people reduce or eliminate social media from their lives, their self-esteem and sense of connection often improve. AI-driven assistants present a similar risk.

A reliable indicator of how much a new tech product will drive us apart is the intensity of the founder’s promise to bring us together. Facebook’s mission statement has become less recognizable than an ’80s pop star’s face, but the Zuck and Sheryl promised (repeatedly) they would “connect people.” They then built algorithms that send images of nooses and razor blades to 14-year-old girls experiencing suicidal ideation. Tinder aims to spark relationships but increasingly results in sadness and anxiety.

AI assistants are the ultimate helicopter parent, bulldozing obstacles and the risk inherent in establishing new relationships. We are breeding a generation of asocial people who don’t know what it means to be rejected, forget a name, miss a flight, and find unexpected joy. AI, and mobile technology, have strip-mined a key component of what it means to be human, what it means to be a mammal. Happiness is a function of your willingness to take an uncomfortable risk and have something wonderful … really wonderful … happen in person. Technology offers productivity and prosperity. However, joy is in the agency of others. The most important skills are forged, not taught.

👉 No Mercy / No Malice
2. You can’t reach the brain through the ears

We spend our lives learning hard things the hard way: what it feels like to fall in love, how to forgive, what to say when a four-year-old asks where babies come from, when to leave a party, how to scramble eggs, when to let a friendship go, what to do when the person sitting next to you on the bus bursts into tears, how to parallel park under pressure, and so on. But it isn’t easy. You warn them that holding a grudge will only weigh them down; they refuse to let it go. You explain how to parallel park; they end up jammed into a spot at a 45-degree angle with a line of cars honking behind them.

Unfortunately, when we want to transmit wisdom, words are often all we have. How else can you convince someone that, for example, it’s better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all? An interpretive dance? A sculpture made out of chewing gum? A breakup-themed escape room? If you’re sitting there with a broken heart, what are you going to believe: a string of phonemes, or the ache in your chest?

👉 Experimental History
3. Most everyday people construct guardrails from ingesting imaginary rules that we ingest and start believing in over time, and those guardrails keep us smaller than we have the potential to be. Ultra-successful people do not live by imaginary rules that govern the majority of people

Time to do some unlearning. Five breakers to imaginary rules: 1) Permission is not required. People are often…waiting. Waiting for their opportunity. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting to feel ready. As a result, the average person will spend years of their life waiting, biding their time, and holding onto ideas, dreams, or aspirations. But waiting is often a form of looking for “permission”, to get the nod from someone. However, the truth is that the people who rise to the top do not look for permission to move. They do their homework, see their angle, and move. 2) Common process is not essential. We are taught that there is a “way of doing things” that must be respected. For those who make it to great heights, this is tossed out the door. 

3) Speed over caution. Big players are not reckless, but they are not cautious. Parse this out for yourself and what that means. Caution will have you nipping at the edges of your ambition when you should be pushing harder or taking the risk. 4) Social approval is not important. Very important people are not wasting their time on things that do not meet a certain standard. Social validation does not meet that standard unless popularity is required for what they do for a living. 5) Expectation is not calibrated. Small players calibrate their ambition and expectations. You can hear it when they speak. Reduced ambitions, parameters on their earnings, etc. They use qualifiers and minimisers, and they seem to set their own (and your) expectation very small. They build their small containers for what they feel they can do. Big players – and often *future* big players – do not play small and actively dislike when others try to force them to be limited or play smaller. They often find it offensive and unacceptable.

👉 Ultra Successful
 
4. We have the power to reframe the events of our lives, and to perceive them in a way that empowers us. While circumstances may be outside of our control, our interpretations can be consciously shaped. And nowhere is this more salient than the distinction between pain and suffering

What’s fascinating about the awareness of our mortality is the myriad of ways we respond to that knowledge. Some people respond by doing everything in their power to avoid death, viewing it as something that needs to be defeated through technology. Others view death as something liberating, as the starting point to an eternity in heaven where they can be reunited with their loved ones. Others simply accept it and don’t make much of it. The potential responses to the awareness of our mortality are, ironically enough, quite endless.

What this means is something profound. When faced with a biological fact, we can choose how we interpret it. The mind has the power to frame the inevitability of entropy in a way that aligns with one’s values and perceptions. When we call someone an optimist, for example, we’re referring to someone that takes the reality of pain and perceives it as an opportunity for something better. The optimist doesn’t deny the existence of pain, but instead sees it as a gateway to growth.

👉 More To That
5. While it’s undeniable that our past influences our future, we tend to place more rigid limits on ourselves than actually exist

If you ever applied for a job, you probably did the little retrospective dance of editing your resume so it followed a consistent narrative. When you get a job interview, you may get asked: “Where do you see yourself in five years?” and you’re supposed to have a coherent vision that’s aligned with your current self. This is the self-consistency fallacy at play: the misguided assumption that “I have always acted in a certain way; therefore, I must continue to act in this way.” It’s an invisible yet powerful force that affects our path whenever we find ourselves at a crossroads.

We can’t deny that our previous choices and current beliefs form an important part of our identity, but they should not become an artificial boundary that guides our choices. As John Maynard Keynes puts it: “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.” You are a dynamic being capable of change and growth. You are a verb, not a noun. When exploring potential paths forward, you can ask yourself the following questions to let go of preconceived expectations and allow yourself to expand your horizons beyond who you have been so far. Are there opportunities that I have dismissed because they don’t fit my existing trajectory? What new paths might I be able to explore if I were not bound by my past choices? What would my ideal career look like if I could start from a blank slate?

👉 Ness Labs
6. The creative process is a delicate dance between the creative and the inner critic

In Hilde Østby’s lovely book on creativity, she writes that children begin to develop their inner critic around the age of six. That it’s here, where a child creates their standard for what a good drawing is and then evaluates their work regardless of what their parents say about it. Before the age of six, children will show pictures they have drawn to anyone and everyone who will pay them mind, without considering the response they might get. But, eventually, they become concerned with feedback and experience self-doubt. 

Contrary to common belief, possessing an inner critic is a good thing. The French novelist, polemicist and physician Louis-Ferdinand Céline has a fabulous line on the correlation between great art and self-doubt… “The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.” Writers and artists who don’t doubt their work are either delusional or lying through their teeth. However, while an inner critic is necessary for us to develop taste and create art that exceeds it, we must learn to turn it off during the creative process.

👉 Honey Copy 
7. Success always comes with liabilities

An American investment banker was taking a much-needed vacation in a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. The boat had several large, fresh fish in it. The investment banker was impressed by the quality of the fish and asked the Mexican how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, “Only a little while.” The banker then asked why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican fisherman replied he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked: “But what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman replied, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos: I have a full and busy life, señor.”

The banker, looking a bit puzzled, says “But, if you catch more fish, then you could sell them and earn enough to buy a bigger boat. And with that bigger boat you could catch even more fish and then hire a crew. Eventually, you could buy a few boats and have many fishermen working for you catching more fish than you ever dreamed of. And if you keep doing this, you could eventually sell your business for millions and retire rich.” The fisherman asks, “And then what?” To which the investment banker replied “Then you can sleep late. Fish a little. Play with your kids. Take a siesta with your wife. And every night you could go into the village, have some wine, and play guitar with your friends.”

There are a lot of people who talk about the story of the Mexican fisherman as they scramble to do more, more, more. But, some of us actually get the lesson—success always comes with liabilities. Choose yours wisely.

👉 Of Dollars and Data

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:

“It is easier to hold your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold them 98% of the time.”

Clayton Christensen

🎁 Fun things to click on:

A Twitter thread of true facts that blow your mind. NASA’s Webb Telescope captures a star right before a supernova. Exhausting dialogue and conversational shortcuts.

Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

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Speak soon,

Tom

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