#58: keeping promises
👋 Welcome to the 58th 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 this issue:
🤝 Keeping promises to myself
🧘♂️ Meditating for 15 hours a day
✍️ Make your own rules
🌻 Stock and flow
🔗 etc. etc.
🤝 Keeping promises to myself
The most important thing is to find the balance between your external commitments and your internal promises. Maybe that means boundaries, more active choices. Maybe that even means more heart, less reasoning. But most of all it means looking deep inside yourself — not turning away. Attempting to understand what you value and why. What does the most authentic, whole version of yourself look like?
Love, deep within, is an expensive thing to live for. But I’m also driven by it. And I’ll keep looking for it everywhere.
Trusting yourself is both the hardest and most rewarding thing in the world because it’s the only relationship you can’t walk away from.
🧘♂️ Meditating for 15 hours a day
I meditated 15 hours a day for 6 months straight with one of the toughest Buddhist monks on the planet. What I learned:A sign of growth is having more tolerance for discomfort. But it’s also having less tolerance for bullshit.
Desires that arise in agitation are more aligned with your ego. Desires that arise in stillness are more aligned with your soul.
The belief that there is some future moment more worth our presence than the one we’re in right now is why we miss our lives.
Sometimes we need to get out of alignment with the rest of the world to get back into alignment with ourselves.
✍️ Make your own rules
Here are the cues for all 12 rules. Each rule has to conform to a theme.
A rule about breaking relationships
A rule about committing to lifelong relationships
A rule about compromises in work/effort
A rule about making and creating things
A rule about your relationship to history
A rule about your relationship to wealth and status
A rule about your deepest grow-together relationships
A rule about your physical body
A rule about how you science
A rule about what your life is a measure of
A rule about how you appear in public
A rule about irreversible public action
🌻 Stock and flow
Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: oh man. I’ve got nothing here.
But flow is ephemeral, while stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein.
And the real magic trick is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. The hybrid strategy.
🔗 etc. etc.
📋 Eightify is a video summarizer that gives you a little button on your YouTube video play page. The output? a very usable text summary of the video content broken into different parts with timestamps.
🧠 The Smarter Brain shares bite-sized ideas for better habits. I like how short and concise each edition is.
🎶 I played this remix on repeat this week, thanks to
for the recommendation he dropped in his fresh newsletter .
✨ One last thing…
When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say.
Most people never listen.
Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out, know everything that you saw there and not only that.
If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.
Try that for practice.
— Ernest Hemingway👋 Until next week,
