Hello amigos,

you should grab a hot cup of coffee and be ready to savor another edition of powernotes. Because it’s cold outside 🥶 let’s start with some comforting hot soups that you can easily prepare yourself.

Before diving into the topics, just a little update related to the thread “your opinion matters.” Based on the results, it seems that everyone likes the newsletter just the way it is. And that’s very good news. 😊

This week’s tech, culture and philosophy notes :

TECH 👨‍💻

1. Don’t know if you already saw it or not, but here is Mark Zuckerberg’s intense, and ..maybe a little bit disturbing…? …..vision of the future in the Metaverse. Click here to watch it. Or if you’ve already seen it, watch it again.

2. A very interesting short video. Intelligent robots, full of helium, are floating daily in a London Museum. Watch.

3. Scanner Pro. The best scanning app out there. Not kidding. For IOS only.

4. A very cool and useful application that erases backgrounds from photos. Check it out.

5. Are you working from home and you feel more stressed, and have difficulties to adapt? In this case, this website can be useful.

CULTURE 🧬

1. Enhance your photography and video skills with these curated educational resources. Shutterstock Academy.

2. Did you know that bees can count from 1 to 4 and are capable of understanding the concepts of “more” and “less”? Read more.

3. Here are The 25 Most Iconic Book Covers in History.

4. One of the most confusing illusions i’ve seen. Why do the dots disappear?

5. This November, find your magic. On Thanksgiving. Encanto.

PHILOSOPHY 📜

1. Here’s a great website where you can find Philosophy Comics. My favourite is : Sun Tzu vs. Machiavelli.

2. A nice list with the best Stoicism Books.

3. New York Times best-selling author David Brooks speaks about his book “The Second Mountain” and explains there are two metaphorical mountains we must climb to live a moral life. He describes the “first mountain” life, which is self-centered, vs. the “second mountain” life, which is others-centered. If you are interested, listen to the podcast episode.

4. Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca offers timeless advice for how we can face up to the fleeting nature of existence and live our lives without fear. Seneca On Coping with the Shortness of Life.

5. A beautiful science video, but there’s also something philosophical about it. Richard Feynman - Nature of Nature.

Two great books to discover this week. In bite-sized fashion, as we like it. The first book is: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead.

Here are five notes from the book:

1. There is too much of the world and too little of life.

2. We are confined to the present, but this moment we're living now has, for all of history, been the future. And now, forever more, it will be past. Everything we do sets off unforeseeable, irreversible chain reactions.

3. Some people are rotten inside, and the rottenness will never go away.

4. Sometimes, beginnings can be simple.

5. The world unfurls and unfurls, and there is always more. A line, a circle, is insufficient. I look forward, and there is the horizon. I look back. Horizon. What's past is lost. I am already lost to my future.

Our second book of the week is: The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck by Mark Manson

Here are five notes from the book:

1. The more you desperately want to be happy and loved, the lonelier and more afraid you become, regardless of those who surround you.

2. Say “fuck it” to everything unimportant in life.

3. Nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror and tell himself that he’s happy.

4. Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems.

5. We are responsible for everything in our lives. We always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.

Former hostage negotiator Richard Mullender on the ability to listen:

Unless you can't listen well, then it doesn't matter how well you can talk. Because you must understand your audience. And you can only ever understand your audience by listening to what they've got to say. Not what you want to say. So it's the key skill of communication but it's just never taught.

Psychology professor Laurie Santos on the misconceptions about happiness:

I think the biggest misconception about happiness is that it comes from our circumstances. That if we were just rich or beautiful or had the perfect job or material possessions that we'd be happy. The research suggests that this is simply not the case. Happiness comes from making sure you have the right mindsets and the right behaviors.

Shaolin master Shi HengYi on how ancient philosophy can help build a sustainable business:

In Shaolin we say "You as a whole body can only be healthy if all aspects that you're consisting of are also healthy. So the human being - the body must be healthy, which means the organs must be healthy. Your bones, your muscles, your attendance, all body liquids, everything must be healthy. Than also your mind must be healthy, your emotions must be healthy. If you look at the organisation, you see there is department A, department B, department C. In every department you've again employees who are making the department. You have teams below it. And the main idea is that a successful business can only be really sustainable if everybody who is involved inside this business is also successful. That means you cannot run a successful business on exploiting the employees. It's not gonna work like this.You cannot have a healthy body, when you only stress the body.

We read a lot of stuff from all over the web. Here are this week’s interesting articles :

🟪 Being alone with your thoughts is a skill you can practise. When you are alone, what if instead of doing something else, you chose to retreat into your own mind and entertain yourself with pleasurable thoughts? How hard could it be?

🟩 The Dunning-Kruger Effect - We’re all biased! We humans are not rational beings capable of always putting emotion aside so as to process information and take the best decisions for our company. We are biased.

🟨 The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver. With only a single breath, Alexey Molchanov, history’s most daring freediver, is reaching improbable depths—and discovering a new kind of enlightenment as he conquers one of the world’s wildest sports.

This week’s finds that we want to share with you :

🟣 The 13th annual report of the World’s Most Attractive Employers. You can download the report here.

🟢 The Flutterflow platform promises you can now build apps without code, only with drag and drop. What will you build? You can create an account here.

🟡 For all art lovers. If you install Daily Art App, you get one piece of fine art with a short story about it every day. HERE.

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Wish you all a great week ahead. Take care of yourselves. Until next monday. Bye ! 🍁 Oh, and….please share powernotes. Thanks a bunch!

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