H⭐️ Quotes
"Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines."
— Robert H. Schuller
A problem on your journey isn't a sign to give up. It feels uncomfortable only because it’s new and will require effort.
But you can look at it in a more positive light. A problem is an indicator of the direction you must pursue to learn, grow, and reach your next level.
"When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it - this is knowledge."
— Confucius
Recognizing what you don't know is equally as important for knowledge as knowing things.
Identify what you know so that you can confidently use it to your advantage. Identify what you don’t know to be open to learning new things.
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📜 Articles
You Can Only Maintain So Many Close Friendships
This article features an interview with Robin Dunbar; he's the researcher famous for coining Dunbar's Number, which is the number of stable friendships that a person is typically able to maintain, 150. In the interview, Dunbar discusses other numbers that are related to friendship and the concepts of friendships in general. Some interesting points from the article:
- We can typically have up to 150 friends, but many more acquaintances, even up to 500. On the flip side, we tend to have fewer close relationships. "Good friends" are marked at 50, close friends at 5, and "EGO", which refers to you and potentially your significant other, 1.5
- Of course, it's all a spectrum in reality. Introverts tend to have less friends but invest more in each one whereas extroverts have more friends but feel more comfortable dividing their time among the many. There's also a corelation that people with big families tend to have less "friends" because all of their friendship slots has been filled up by family members
- Throughout your life, it's normal to have "friend churn" where you lose some old friends and gain some new ones. This is perfectly natural as your personality and interests change over time. Churn is highest when we're younger as we are changing much more frequently
- In Dunbar's new book, he presents the 7 pillars of friendship. When a friendship happens, people typically line up on 3 or more of the pillars. For closer relationships like a significant other, more pillars are required. The 7 pillars are: language, place of origin, education, interests, worldview, musical taste, sense of humour
All in all an interesting interview. I've added Dunbar's new book to my reading list: Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships.
Motivation is Over-Rated: Here's What Works Instead
The typical advice for motivating people is to "get inspired," "find your passion," and "think positively." That's all sound advice, but the author of this article proposes a more practical method:
"A more accurate representation of the relationship between motivation and action is this: you don’t need to feel good to get going—you need to get going to give yourself a shot at feeling good."
If you're in a negative state of mind, turning it around is not easy. An often suggested solution is meditation, but that takes a lot of time and effort to become good enough at to see results. Getting inspired and finding your passion might work, but what happens if your inspiration fades or your passions change?
The solution is to flip the order. In the typical way, the first step is to get motivated and the second step is to take action. But when we flip it, action comes before motivation. The action itself motivates you, inspires you, and positively pushes you forward. In this way, you're never stuck and always moving forward.
Just remember all the times that you didn't want to do something, but once you started doing it you forgot about the trouble and just did it: completing chores, studying, working out, or finishing a project. Taking action gives you momentum, which is plenty of motivation for you to get the job done. All you have to do is make that first commitment.
Practical takeaway: Whenever you're hesitant of doing something, just do it immediately. You can decide later if you want to stop, but take action first then worry about your feelings later.
📚 Books
Stillness is the Key
A wonderful book (and audiobook) by Ryan Holiday about how to cultivate more stillness into your life.
Stillness is a state of being that encompasses presence, clarity, focus, peace, and freedom. It's a feeling of aliveness where you're living in a way that is true to yourself. You're not worrying about the future or beating yourself up over the past. You're not getting dragged around by your emotions or societal expectations. You're living life how you want to live it and giving your all at every moment without regret, worry, or stress.
Holiday encourages us to have more of this in our lives. We don't need more work, more accomplishments, or more pleasure to enjoy life. We need more stillness because it's the best way to fully capture the value of life. As he says in the book: "human being, not human doing!"
The book has many short chapters, each of which focuses on a particular theme, mindset, or action to have in your life in order to cultivate more stillness. There are many, so I've picked out and summarized the best ones from the book:
- Slow Down -- You don't always have to do things super quickly. Taking the extra time to pause, absorb everything, and think will help you to avoid making impulsive decisions and figure out what's truly important
- Journaling -- The exercise of journaling allows you to take the thoughts that are in your head and offload them to paper. It reduces your stress and helps you look at your thoughts from a more objective, third-person perspective
- Balance -- Working too much makes you vulnerable to vices because you need to relieve stress. Playing too much makes you soft and unable to do good work. You don't have to make the two exactly equal, but you need to find a way to live well with both
- Knowing When It's Enough -- It's a great idea to define what your "enough" is, in every aspect of life: money, fitness, status, goals, accomplishments, all of it. The media and society are constantly telling you to do more more more. The only way to take control of your life and not let it spin away is to have well-defined limits
- Build a Routine -- With a world that's constantly moving and demanding things of you, your routine is your source of stillness. You always know it's there, it's structured, and it won't ever run away from you. Build a healthy routine that you can always rely on for thinking and doing. You can always lean on it when there's too much noise in your life
There are many other great ones in the book so I totally encourage you to check it out: limit your inputs, empty the mind, cultivate silence, find confidence and avoid ego, let go, choose virtue, heal the inner child, enter relationships, conquer your anger, say no, take a walk, get rid of your stuff, be a human being, go to sleep, act bravely.
🎥 Videos
How to Start a Movement
A short but sweet TED Talk by Derek Sivers titled How to Start a Movement; but more specifically it's about leadership. The Talk showcases a funny video that went viral a while back where one guy starts doing a goofy dance. At first, everyone stares and laughs at him. But then another person joins in and they start dancing together. Then another person comes.... and another.... and another. Eventually, it's a big crowd of people dancing! The first shirtless guy successfully started a movement.
The most obvious, surface level lesson from this is that it takes courage to be a leader and that you will be laughed at at first. But Sivers stresses the importance of a second, deeper lesson. Although the person who started gets most of the credit because they supposedly took on most of the risk, we shouldn't forget about the contributions of the second person, or the third, or the fourth, or really any of the early starters. It took courage for them to join the first person when they were clearly being ridiculed. They may not have been the first starter, but they were the first or an early follower.
To be a leader, you don't always have to be the first one. You can also be a follower leading a group of followers. That's equally as valuable and courageous as you are inspiring others. Not everyone can follow the one first leader. You need sub-leaders, where sub- is not a bad thing, it's just a different leader. Either way, you lead by example and help people join in.
Weird, or just different?
Another fun one from Derek Sivers! This time, he demonstrates how different people see and understand things differently. If you have a disagreement or confusion with someone, it's not necessarily that one of you is wrong or weird, you're probably just different.
In the United States and Canada, we have streets; so if you were giving someone directions you would tell them about an intersection of two streets. In Japan they have blocks and each block has a number... but there are no street names! Both of these systems work and help people navigate the cities. Neither is right or wrong, they're just different.
Next time you disagree with someone about a concept, idea, issue, think again that you probably just have different understandings of the same things. Both can work and no one is crazy. We're all just doing the best we can to live happy and successful lives. Use your viewpoint to excel, but also keep in mind other viewpoints to have a more holistic understanding of the world.
🖼️ Beautiful Picture
Beautiful rolling hills of Switzerland
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
