SD#64: Making friends, purpose anxiety, and truffle oil
June 11, 2023
Welcome to the 64 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 once heard that to become truly niche at what you do you have to combine several specialisms into your unique one. Say you do finance and love football. Are there ways you could take inspiration from how football teams manage their youth academies as an investment for future success into your financial modelling? Or perhaps the way teams look at match statistics and compute winning probabilities can give you an edge as you compare yourself to your business competitors? Today’s newsletter takes inspiration from a variety of sources, can we crossmatch it to what we do every day?
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. Do the more difficult thing Whenever we come to a little crossroad — a decision about how to do things and what things to do — Marcus Aurelius said to default to the option that challenges you the most. He writes in Meditations about holding the reins in his non-dominant hand as both an exercise to practice and a metaphor for doing the difficult thing. Jump into the colder pool. Walk instead of drive. Pick up the book instead of your phone. Take responsibility instead of hoping it goes unnoticed. In matters big and small, courage is choosing the more difficult option. Make it a habit. Iron sharpens iron, after all. You’ll be better for it — not only for the improvement that comes from the challenge itself but for the willpower you are developing by choosing that option on purpose. 👉 Ryan Holiday |
2. Instead of treating satisfaction as a consequence of particular outcomes, leaving it to the whims of unhealthy correlations with things like wealth, status, or more trophies (I’ll be satisfied when…), we should treat it like a skill, a learned behaviour (I’ll be satisfied because…). In essence, we need to see success and satisfaction as independent variables Many successful professionals struggle to enjoy their accomplishments. For example, one study found that 72% of successful entrepreneurs suffer from depression or other mental health concerns. And CEOs may be depressed at more than double the rate of the public at large. And when it comes to fuelling our obsession with acquiring more money, expensive toys, professional successes, or prestige, we have help. Our brains’ reward system, especially the neurotransmitter dopamine, drives us to achieve goals and rewards us with a great sense of pleasure when we do. But that pleasure is short-lived, as our brains are hardwired to also seek balance from extreme emotional states. That leaves us with an empty longing to repeat whatever experience brought us that pleasure in the first place. This ostensibly addictive cycle throws our “enoughness” barometers completely out of whack, preventing us from being able to objectively gauge if what we’ve achieved is, in fact, satisfying. That’s why, although most of us intuitively know that happiness isn’t realised from the pursuit of money, status, or fame, we can’t stop ourselves from trying. If you’re prone to dissatisfaction in moments when you expect to be satisfied, only to then double down on the same choices that made you dissatisfied in the first place, you must redefine your relationship with satisfaction. Learning to be satisfied, then, must begin by dismantling your dissatisfaction apparatus. You must reformulate your enoughness gauges so that they collect and measure the right data. 👉 Harvard Business Review |
3. Never put truffle oil in the microwave Quality is an actual thing that has value. We are obsessed with quantity over quality but ask yourself what you remember. The number of ads that ran or the impression they made? Cadbury Gorilla first ran 13 years ago. And we still remember it. What is that worth? Making something of quality matters. And I think it matters today more than ever. Quality is a massive factor for the products we sell. It should also be true for the communications we make about those products. Consumers can tell when you have cut corners. 👉 One of the 11 immutable laws of advertising from Damon Stapleton. |
4. Treat success and failure the same Some days, Marcus Aurelius wrote, the crowd cheers and worships you. Other days, they hate you and hit you with brickbats. You get a lucky break sometimes — get more credit and attention than you deserve. Other times you’ll get held to an impossibly unfair standard. They’ll build you up, and then tear you down — and act like it was your fault you got way up there in the first place. They’ll criticise you in public and privately tell you it’s all for show. There will be good years and bad years. Times when the cards fall our way, times when the dice keep coming up snake eyes. That’s just the way it goes. The key, Marcus said, is to assent to all of it. Accept the good stuff without arrogance, he writes in Meditations. Let the bad stuff go with indifference. Neither success nor failure says anything about you. A rock thrown in the air gains nothing by going up, Marcus said, and nothing by falling down. 👉 Ryan Holiday |
5. We overestimate our short-term ability but underestimate our long-term ability We overestimate our short-term ability. We think we’re capable of doing far more in a short space of time. But the reality is, life is busy! We have so many commitments, and creative deadlines will inevitably get missed or scrapped entirely. But we underestimate our long-term ability. Working out is something you can’t do a ton of all at once without severe physical repercussions — you have to pace yourself. But the effects quickly build, and the changes are really noticeable. 👉 Paavan Design |
6. The fear of not knowing your purpose in life can lead to existential distress which is known as purpose anxiety There is no magic bullet to finding a purpose in life, but we can make the search a lot less excruciating by applying simple strategies to minimise purpose anxiety. When searching for a purpose in life, it can be tempting to compare ourselves to others, especially if we’re surrounded by people who seem to have found their calling. However, social comparison may inflate negative emotions and lead to purpose anxiety. Instead, practice self-reflection to understand your intrinsic motivations and explore the inner questions that fuel your curiosity. Embrace the liminal. Our time between life and death is an extended liminal space. It can be scary to not know where we’re going, which may lead us to desperately cling to a ladder of linear goals, where each next step is clearly defined to achieve success. But this liminal space can also be seen as a playground, full of opportunities for growth and discovery. Enjoy the journey by exploring different paths and learning about yourself along the way. Practice deliberate experimentation. Purpose is action-oriented. Even if you don’t know yet what your purpose in life is, you can take steps towards investigating potential sources of purpose. Just like a scientist, design short experiments where you try working on a new project, meeting new people, or learning a new skill. Use metacognitive strategies to document the process and how it makes you feel so you can keep on adapting your experiments until you find a direction that feels stimulating and fulfilling. 👉 Ness Labs |
7. It’s possible to be acquaintances with someone for years, but never actually become friends. You need to spend serious time with people, over a compressed period. As it turns out, it’s not simply time spent together, but rather “Time Density” that is key Now that you’re older, wiser, and more emotionally intelligent, it should be easier to connect with people. But it’s not. Since the 1950s sociologists have considered three things crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down. Knowing how crucial time together is for building friendships, you can probably see why children have a much easier time making friends. We simply don’t have long stretches of time as adults. The research suggests that — we need to spend 33 hours/week, for 6 weeks straight — to build a strong relationship. How are you supposed to do that with a 40+ hour a-week job? If time was the whole story, we would be best friends with all of our coworkers. A turning point in every relationship is the context switch. If you go to a run club each week — but the only time you see the people there is during your run — you will not become friends. Until you change the context, the relationship is stuck. As children, we did this all the time. We would connect to people through school, but would change the context by hanging out at each other’s houses, having dinner with their families, joining sports teams together. This leads us to the last reason it’s harder for adults to make friends – fear. As a child, asking an acquaintance from school to go to the mall with you was not a big deal. But somewhere along the line, our adult brains broke and we became fearful and guarded. 👉 Startup Social |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“When we tune out the opinions, expectations, and obligations of the world around us, we begin to hear ourselves.”
Jay Shetty
🎁 Fun things to click on:
15 people on the most important question they’ve ever been asked. Vacation & Travel Chat Assistant – this AI-assistant can design a custom trip, give you inspiration on where to go, and even generate local recommendations for hotels, restaurants, and attractions. Qigong: moving meditation for creatives who can’t sit still.
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