SD#66: Curiosity, banking and Right Now Lists
July 9, 2023
Welcome to the 66 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.
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Hi friends,
Is all stealing bad? What if it’s someone else’s work that didn’t succeed but you have ideas for improving it? It’s a fine line. Even my newsletter has taken inspiration from many other newsletters or ideas. Do I aim to copy my way to success? Absolutely not, I’m creating my own thing and success is what I define myself but there is skill in taking inspiration from others.
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. In other words, despite the common saying, imitation is not flattery. It’s the transformation that is flattery: taking what you’ve stolen and turning it into something new. If it feels cheap or wrong to you, it probably is. I advocate an “elevator gut check” for one’s own work: If you met the artist you’re stealing from in a stalled elevator, would they shake your hand or punch you in the face? 👉 Austin Kleon |
2. What you hate in others is usually what you hate most in yourself. The people who drive you crazy do so because they reflect at you the worst aspects of yourself that you have either tried to deny or overcome If you measure your life by your family relationships, then you will measure others by the same standard – how close their family is to them. If they’re distant from their family or don’t call home enough, you’ll judge them as deadbeats, ungrateful or irresponsible, regardless of their lives or their history. If we believe that we’re hard workers and we earned everything we have, then we will believe that everyone else earned what they have. And if they have nothing, it’s because they earned nothing. This isn’t to say that judging is wrong. There are plenty of values worth judgment. We judge people who are violent and malicious. But that is a reflection of who we are. We judge violence and malice within ourselves too. A big part of our development is to recognise our fixation, to recognise how we measure ourselves and consciously choose our metric for ourselves. But another big part of development is to recognise that everyone has their metric. And that metric is likely not going to be the same as ours. And that’s (usually) fine. Most metrics people choose are fine. Even if they’re not the same metrics you would choose for yourself. 👉 Mark Manson |
3. Banking, and by extension the economy, is not built on gold, labour, machinery, or spreadsheets, but on trust. Trust that deposits will be there when needed Banks need your trust because they don’t actually have your money. When you deposit cash at the bank, it loans it to someone else. In fact, banks loan out more than they take in. It is a miracle and the cornerstone of our economy — turning short-term deposits into long-term loans. This is a good thing: Money sitting dormant does not fund startups, expand existing companies, or encourage consumers to … consume. It’s not useful. Every bank is vulnerable to a run if enough people ask for their money on the same day. If Bank of America’s 67 million customers simultaneously withdrew their funds, in the same day/week/month, it would fail. 👉 No Mercy / No Malice |
4. Green hydrogen could be a solution to reduce carbon emissions in heavy industries like steel making, shipping and cement Perhaps one of the most important science experiments on the planet is happening in a remote stretch of the Australian outback, 100 miles away from the nearest town. A consortium of energy companies led by BP plans to cover an expanse of land eight times as large as New York City with as many as 1,743 wind turbines, each nearly as tall as the Empire State Building, along with 10 million or so solar panels and more than a thousand miles of access roads to connect them all. But none of the 26 gigawatts of energy the site expects to produce, equivalent to a third of what Australia’s grid currently requires, will go toward public use. Instead, it will be used to manufacture a novel kind of industrial fuel: green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is made by using renewable electricity to split water’s molecules (currently most hydrogen is made by using natural gas, a fossil fuel). The hydrogen is then burned to power vehicles or do other work. Because burning hydrogen emits only water vapour, green hydrogen avoids carbon dioxide emissions from beginning to end. It is widely seen as a potential solution to reduce carbon emissions in heavy industries like steel making, shipping and cement. 👉 NY Times |
5. Curiosity helps you learn, keeps you young, and fosters better relationships Children have an incredibly inquisitive mind. “Why?” they keep asking. They explore new things for no other reason except that they just want to know. Researchers tried to figure out how often kids ask questions. Turns out, a lot: on average, children ask 107 questions per hour! But it seems that as adults we tend to fall into fixed and convenient cognitive patterns. Susan Engel’s, author and senior lecturer in psychology, research shows that what she calls “episodes of curiosity” — such as asking direct questions, manipulating objects, or intent and directed gazing — occurred 2.36 times in two hours in kindergarten and only 0.48 times in a fifth-grade classroom. Some evidence suggests that this dramatic decrease in curiosity could be caused by our increase in knowledge as we grow up. Once we feel like there’s no gap between what we know and what we want to know, we just stop being and acting curious. However, there are a few simple activities that will help you foster your curiosity and by extension increase your creativity: ask questions; read outside of your field; be inquisitive with people; practice saying less; immerse yourself in a topic; write; carry a notebook; learning about yourself – are all valuable things to do to foster it. 👉 Ness Labs |
6. Writing prompts that are actually unique A few American poet Bernadette Mayer’s famous writing prompts to students: – Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index. – Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial. – Find the poems you think are the worst poems ever written, either by your own self or other poets. Study them, then write a bad poem. – Choose a subject you would like to write “about.” Then attempt to write a piece that absolutely avoids any relationship to that subject. Get someone to grade you. – Set yourself the task of writing in a way you’ve never written before, no matter who you are. – Write a work that intersperses love with landlords. 👉 Subtle Maneuvers |
7. Use a Right Now List to trick your inner procrastinator Lazy solutions can be smart. Light switch, remote control, escalators, smart speakers… Laziness has been the source of many innovations. Frank Gilbreth Sr. famously said: “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”. Unproductive time helps us manage our stress and makes us less prone to burnout. Research suggests that procrastinating away from work and spending unproductive time can help us cope with stress. It is particularly true of teenagers. Activities (or lack thereof) that may be perceived as lazy by adults are necessary for the mental health of young people. Lazy time also encourages diffuse thinking. Our mind has two modes of thinking: the diffuse mode and the focused mode of thinking. We need to maintain constant oscillation between the two modes to be our most creative and productive. Mind wandering, a form of diffuse thinking, is a useful mechanism for our brains to process information — sometimes leading to non-obvious solutions. When manipulated as a tool — with caution and control, but no unnecessary shame — laziness can be used to be more productive and more relaxed over the long run. Being lazy can lead to smarter decisions, innovative solutions, and better mental health. 👉 Ness Labs |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“Stillness is not an excuse to withdraw from the affairs of the world. Quite the opposite – it’s a tool to let you do more good for more people.”
Ryan Holiday
🎁 Fun things to click on:
A breathing infographic describes different breathing practices to help master your nervous system and down-regulate anxiety. Learn history visually through maps. The biggest stock market crash I’d never heard of.
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