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.
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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.
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Speak soon,
Tom