#68: a harmonious life
👋 Welcome to the 68th 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:
🧶 How to craft a harmonious life
♟️ Playing a career game you actually want to win
📝 A blog post is a search query to find your people
🧶 How to craft a harmonious life
The good news is that neither work nor leisure time must satisfy all your psychological needs. Instead, each role in life you have plays an important part in an orchestra. Coordination of these different roles, and satisfaction of needs via active engagement in these roles, results in what we call ‘life domain harmony’ – the symphony of your life.
Psyche | 15-min read
♟️ Playing a career game you actually want to win
Our careers are different. The games we play with our working hours also come with their own values and metrics that matter. Success is measured by how much money you make—for your company and for yourself. Promotions, bonuses, and raises mark the path to success, like dots along the Pac-Man maze.
These metrics are seductive because of their simplicity. You might have a nuanced personal definition of success, but once someone presents you with these simple quantified representations of a value—especially ones that are shared across a company—that clarity trumps your subtler values. In other words, it is easier to adopt the values of the game than to determine your own. That’s value capture.
If you could get the thing you supposedly want, but couldn’t tell anyone that you got it, would you still want it? Maybe this question alone will help you recognize the game you’re playing, and determine whether it’s one you want to win.
Every | 5-min read
📝 A blog post is a search query to find your people
A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox.
If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people. It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.
You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
Escaping Flatland | 14-min read
✨ One last thing…
The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself...
That is the moment, you might be starting to get it right.
— Neil Gaiman👋 Until next week,
