#65: prioritization principle

Mar 17, 2023

👋 Welcome to the 65th 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:

📝 40 lessons from 30 years

🖼️ This is how to master your life

📊 The prioritization principle

📝 40 lessons from 30 years

So many of these lessons deeply resonated with me (29 to be exact). Here’s a couple of them:

Many of the best changes in life are unknown until you make them. Feeling “fine” is a dangerous attitude. You might have no idea how much better you could feel, how much happier you could be, how much fuller your life could be. Changes like exercising regularly, cleaning up your diet, doing psychedelic therapy, it is impossible to convey the change in perspective to someone who has not experienced it. Sometimes you just need to trust the zealots.
Advice only works in retrospect. You usually have to have experienced a failure or loss to understand the relevant advice. Hearing some piece of advice will rarely stop you from making the related mistake.
Trust your negative gut, not your positive gut. If you have a great feeling about something, you might just be excited or gullible or not thinking it through, so take your time. But if you have a bad feeling about something, you’re almost certainly right about it.

→ Nat Eliason | 7-min read

💬

Three rules for a career:

Don't sell anything you wouldn't buy yourself.
Don't work for anyone you don't respect and admire.
Work only with people you enjoy.

—Charlie Munger

🖼️ This is how to master your life

Incredible interview with David Goggins. One of the two he’s done since publishing his latest book. And there won’t be another one, at least for now. Lots of good nuggets of wisdom:

People don't get that. Your mind has to always be clear. That's why I meditate two hours every single night. Because I refresh. I reorganize the garage, which is my mind every night. So then discipline’s in there, organization, everything is in this right spot. So if I wake up, I'm ready to go.

If you go to whatever company they had this mission statement on how we want to run our company. I made one for myself on how I want to be. And that is why if people can make up a mission statement, an ethos in which they want to live by. And every morning you wake up, you hold yourself accountable to that mission, not a company's, your own.
Make up your own mission statement. What do you want to be in life? And once you do that, now you can work with somebody to get better. You can work with yourself to get better. But until you know what you want to stand for, you always just be sitting down. You'll never stand for anything.

→ Modern Wisdom | 115-min listen

📊 The prioritization principle

No matter how much I regularize my life, it still feels overwhelming. Too many bodies and ambitions and hills to climb. Too many notifications and tabs and slack messages. The curse of modernization: we have agency at our fingertips, but forget the softness of the world. My computer is still luminescent as the world settles into violet dusk, the gloaming outside.
It makes sense, then, that what attracts me to people is their principles: those who have strong values and do not falter. And prioritization is the most principled act of all. I want you to tell me what version of you I’m seeing. What lingers on your mind first thing in the morning. The thought you fall asleep to. In the crevices of your silence, what grows.
Our priorities flow according to the version of ourselves we’re becoming. I’m glad that things change and what’s important to us changes too. If I internalize this, I give myself more grace to move with the seasons. More faith. What matters to me will make itself known in time.

→ Starting from Nix | 4-min read