#74: spark of madness

May 19, 2023

👋 Welcome to the 74th 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:

📚 As a Man Thinketh

🏀 Play your own game

📝 What should you work on

🧘‍♀️ Tactical mindfulness

📚 As a Man Thinketh

This book is one of my all-time favourites. The main idea behind it is nothing you haven't heard of before: our thoughts play a huge role in shaping our lives, including our character, circumstances, health, and accomplishments. It highlights the importance of nurturing focused thoughts and taking charge of our thinking.

Man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors; that which it loves, and also that which it fear.

A man is not rightly conditioned until he is a happy, healthy, and prosperous being; and happiness, health, and prosperity are the result of a harmonious adjustment of the inner with the outer, of the man with his surroundings.

The Vision that you glorify in your mind, the Ideal that you enthrone in your heart—this you will build your life by, this you will become.

→ Goodreads | 80 pages

🏀 Play your own game

If you view investing as a single game, then you think every deviation from that game’s rules, strategies, or skills is wrong. But most of the time you’re just a marathon runner yelling at a powerlifter. So much of what we consider investing debates and disagreements are actually just people playing different games unintentionally talking over each other.

Told through the lens of an investor, Morgan Housel goes on to explain why we often assume wrongly that everyone else has the same goals that we do. His advice is to:

Judge less
Figure out what game you’re playing, then play it (and only it).

→ Collab Fund | 3-min read

📝 What should you work on

Too many of our top people aren’t putting their differentiated skill-sets to work. They graduate from the best schools in the world only to burn their attention on standardized checklists and the high school cafeteria game theory of corporate politics. Of course, this doesn’t apply to every person I know at big companies. But there are too many talented people who sleepwalk through their workday.
Right now, in order to do something truly innovative, you need to drop out of the system entirely or be so independent-minded that people call you a lunatic. In a time when it’s easier than ever to start a company, we should encourage people to identify the important problems society ignores and find scalable solutions to them.
Paradoxically, ambitious and differentiated goals are sometimes easier to achieve than mundane ones. Ambitious people attract other ambitious people. In positive-sum areas, they find ways to work together and help each other. That’s why inspiring goals make it easier to hire, raise money, and meet the kinds of people who can move the world with a single phone call.

→ David Perell | 4-min read

🧘‍♀️ Tactical mindfulness

I liked this distillation of mindfulness practices outlined in this article:

Self-Compassion - cultivating a state of kindness toward one’s inner experience
Loving-kindness - cultivating a state of non-attached love toward expanding circles of beings
Exposure - intentionally bringing to mind difficult thoughts and feelings so we can learn to relate to them in new, more skillful ways
Observer Self - bringing awareness to who we are beyond our conceptualized self, focusing on awareness itself as the anchor for practice
Future Self - visualizing one’s future self and asking questions or seeking guidance and compassion from that future self
Discernment - bringing questions into meditation practice, asking the same question over and over again and seeing what arises (i.e. “What do I want?”)
Five Invitations - bringing awareness to death and aging through a series of visualizations (used as a memento mori)
Informal Mindfulness - bringing mindfulness into our lives in less formal ways, such as taking 20 mindful breaths before each meal

→ Every | 4-min read

✨ One last thing…

Developing tenderness towards yourself allows you to see both your problems and your potential accurately.

You don’t feel that you have to ignore your problems or exaggerate your potential. 

– Chögyam Trungpa

👋 Until next week,

Reza