#52: treasure your friends

Dec 08, 2022

👋 Welcome to the 52nd issue of Out of Curiosity, a weekly newsletter promoting ideas to help get 1% better everyday.

My name is Reza, and every week, I go through nearly 100 pieces of content (from books and podcasts to newsletters and tweets), and bring you the best in this newsletter.

In my work, I live and breath startups! Currently, I lead all things marketing at On Deck, where we bring together ambitious founders and their earliest supporters to help them build and scale impactful companies.

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How conscious are you of your posture?

Do you keep your photos in albums or shoeboxes?

Do you engage strangers in conversations on planes?

What famous landmark have you found specially disappointing?

During which phase of your life did you acquire the bulk of your friends?

When a friend begins telling a story he’s already told you, do you let him go, or let him know?

Take a few of these questions and ask yourself each day…

Now, let’s dive into this week’s ideas!

In this issue:

📚 The need to read

💭 40 unconventional pieces of advice

😌 Treasure your friends

🪜 Ambition & contentment

➖ The art of negativity

📚 The Need to Read

Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you'll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.
You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things.

→ 2-min read

💭 40 unconventional pieces of advice

Progress isn’t linear. Self-help wants you to believe that you always need to be improving. This idea sells more self-help, but it’s not how life works. Progress isn’t linear. Sometimes what you need most is to do nothing & chill.
No one knows what they’re doing. People come up with fancy stories about their lives, but no one has life figured out. If you’re confused or uncertain about your life, that’s how it’s supposed to be.
Careers don’t exist. Don’t worry about the narrative of your “career.” Pursue your interests. Take care of your needs. Adapt to new circumstances. And be willing to reinvent yourself at any age.

→ 6-min read

😌 Treasure your friends

This is the magic number of 150, Dunbar’s number, and it reflects the fact that, on average, the maximum size of an individual’s social network is stable at 150.
The nature of your social network, and the strength and health of the relationships within it, is the biggest single factor influencing your health, happiness and longevity. They are your survival.

→ 14-min read

🪜 Ambition & contentment

In the Buddhist view, the underlying cause of all suffering is desire—or actually, it’s perhaps better conceptualized as craving. We naively think we can cure a craving by acquiring the thing we crave, but when we do, our minds just move on to the next craving. The only way to break the cycle is to attack the problem at the root, by training our minds, via meditation, to crave less aggressively.
Or maybe it’s all just a question of how we define ambition. We code things like pursuing a career as ambitious, not so much things like building community or trying to become a more moral person. But the latter are still accomplishments, and they’re often harder. For me at least, becoming an open and vulnerable communicator has been much harder than raising a round of venture capital ever was.

→ 6-min read

➖ The art of negativity

The work of negation, indeed the very act, is a process which remains productive in a sense – a deconstruction rather than a wholly violent act of destruction.
The act of being negative is a process of ‘working through’ – a struggle.

→ 8-min read