No. 478 — June 26th, 2022 — Read on FS

Brain Food is a weekly newsletter full of timeless insights you can use.

FS

Mental Models applied to Parenting

“There is a difference between speed and velocity. With speed, you move, but with velocity, you move somewhere. You have direction. As many have said of parenting, the days are long but the years are short. It’s hard to be focusing on your direction when homework needs to be done and dinner needs to get made before one child goes off in the carpool to soccer while you rush the other one to art class. Every day begins at a dead run and ends with you collapsing into bed only to go through it all again tomorrow. Between their activities and social lives, and your need to work and have time for yourself, there is no doubt that you move with considerable speed throughout your day. But it’s useful to sometimes ask, ‘Where am I going?’ Take a moment to make sure it’s not all speed and no direction.”

TKP Insights

TKP Insights is a new occasional series combining guests from multiple episodes around a single theme. In the first episode of Insights, we combine the wisdom of pasts guests around sex and relationships.

How do we find our mate? What are the important conversations to have in a relationship? How important is sex and what are the different kinds of sex? What's the difference between arousal and desire? What is the one thing we can do to stay connected and keep our relationship strong?

→ Listen and Learn on FS (with show notes), Apple Podcasts, Spotify, watch on YouTube, or read the transcript.

Insight

Luke Burgis on comparison:

"There’s a reason why going to a high school reunion is so awkward, and in some cases so terrifying: we are re-engaging with people with whom we shared a baseline, with whom we were (and still are) close to in age, and with whom we shared a common social environment at one point in our lives. our lives. That is why it is all the more mortifying to see the disparities, and why the urge to compare is far stronger than it would be with someone who went to high school in a different state or who graduated in a different year. We’re less likely to think of ourselves as their rival."

I've said before, the greatest killer of happiness is comparison. I'll leave readers to ponder a few nuances, but you can find some of them in the comments.

Tiny Thought

The position you find yourself in determines the options available.

Almost all the options available are positive when you put yourself in a good position. When your position is bad, however, almost all the options available are negative. That's not to say good outcomes can't come from a bad position, but there are no points for playing on hard mode.

There is always something you can do to improve your position. While this seems deceptively simple, there is a lifetime of wisdom behind it.

You can’t predict what will happen tomorrow, but you can improve your position by sleeping, eating healthy, and working out. You can’t predict what the stock market will do tomorrow, but you can improve your position by ensuring you are never a forced seller. You can’t predict what will happen in your job or life, but you can improve your position by always having a little bit of money on the side. You can't predict if you will get a promotion, but you can put yourself in a position to get it by acquiring the skills you need before it becomes available.

Good positioning lets you control your circumstances. Poor positioning lets your circumstances control you.

When you are forced to act by circumstance, a chain reaction of increasingly poor choices follows.

(Share this Tiny Thought on Twitter)

Etc.

Stolen Attention → "The factors harming our attention are not all immediately obvious. I had been focused on tech at first, but in fact the causes range very widely – from the food we eat to the air we breathe, from the hours we work to the hours we no longer sleep."

Interior Logic → "You have to be content when a path that you’re pursuing turns out not to be rewarding. It’s a journey in that sense."

Eating → What to eat for a longer and healthier life.

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Stay safe,
— Shane

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