THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "Don't identify with your beliefs, because if you do, you'll start to see challenging or interesting new information as a threat." ~ Andy Norman
TOPIC OF INTEREST: Meal Timing Recommendations Refresh
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Local vs. Global Optima
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger (My full Kindle notes)
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (My full Kindle notes)
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: The perceptions we layer onto objective reality define our felt experience.
MORNING MANTRA OF THE WEEK: All Matter, So Far As We Know It, Is a Mental Condition
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Narrative Instinct
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Article - UMass Student Life: Motivational Interviewing - Definition, Principles, and Approach
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "In each moment, consciously or unconsciously, you choose. It’s your choice. It’s your life. Your awareness can lead you or you can lead it. And that choice is with you here and now." ~ Rick Carson
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Opportunity Costs
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way by Rick Carson (My full Kindle notes)
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world... When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process." ~ Robert Pirsig
TOPIC OF INTEREST: Decision Calculus for Moving Back to The City
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Catalysts
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert Pirsig (My full Kindle notes)
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "We each have a calling. Do it or don’t do it." ~ Steven Pressfield
TOPIC OF THE WEEK: My Mental Health Reminders for Fighting Internally Generated Creative Blockage
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Gresham’s Law
MOST FAVORITE RECENT CONTENT: Book - Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon (My full Kindle notes)
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield (My reduction)
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "All you have to do, if you want everything in life from everybody else, is first pay attention; listen to them; show them respect; give them meaning, satisfaction, and fulfillment. Convey to them that they matter to you. And show you love them. But you have to go first." ~ Peter Kaufman
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Emergence
MOST FAVORITE RECENT CONTENT: Book - Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick by Wendy Wood (My full Kindle notes)
MOST FAVORITE RECENT CONTENT: Speech - The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking by Peter Kaufman
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - The Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald Reinertsen (My reduction of full Kindle notes)
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly." ~ Paul Graham
TOPIC OF INTEREST: Reflections on Q1 2021 Ritual Realization
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Forcing Function
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Blog Post - The Acceleration of Addictiveness by Paul Graham
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live." ~ Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
TOPIC OF INTEREST: My (Validated) Key Levers for Sleep Improvement
MENTAL MODEL FUNDAMENTALS: Scientific Method
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "[A] Scientist knows that the truth is always buried somewhere in the wrinkles of nuance, and that a satisfying, clean-cut, one-sided viewpoint is almost always wrong or incomplete." ~ Tim Urban
FRIEND PLUG: Aaron Rothstein's recent writing - Covid-19 and the Erosion of Civic Trust, Death in the Young, and Little Data, Big Headlines
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Compounding
MOST FAVORITE RECENT CONTENT: Podcast - Making Sense #241: Final Thoughts on Free Will by Sam Harris
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Blog Post - Wait But Why: The Thinking Ladder by Tim Urban
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "The person across the table is never the problem. The unsolved issue is. So focus on the issue. This is one of the most basic tactics for avoiding emotional escalations." ~ Chris Voss
TOPIC OF INTEREST: My (Amateur) Key Levers for Sleep Improvement
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Fermi Problem (Fermization)
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "Anyone can hit excellence for a day, even a week or a month. That’s easy. But a high performer is one who does it consistently for years over the course of a career." ~ Mark Verstegen
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Multiplying by Zero
MOST FAVORITE RECENT CONTENT: Book - The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - Every Day Is Game Day: The Proven System of Elite Performance to Win All Day, Every Day by Mark Verstegen
Read More
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "If you don't have the right thinking tools, you, and the people you seek to help, are already suffering from your easily removable ignorance." ~ Charlie Munger
TOPIC OF INTEREST: Failing Into Serendipitous Success
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Probabilistic Thinking
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Charles T. Munger and Peter E. Kaufman
Read MoreTHE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "We pay a very high price for our self-ignorance. Feelings and desires that haven’t been examined linger and distribute their energy randomly across our lives." ~ Alain de Botton
TOPIC OF INTEREST: Enabling Healthy Conflict in Relationships
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Proximate vs Root Cause
MOST FAVORITE RECENT CONTENT: Podcast - Modern Wisdom #285: The Freemans - How To Have Better Arguments With Your Partner by Chris Williamson
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - An Emotional Education by The School of Life
Read MoreTHE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "To be intellectually humble doesn’t mean giving up on the ideas we love and believe in. It just means we need to be thoughtful in choosing our convictions, be open to adjusting them, seek out their flaws, and never stop being curious about why we believe what we believe." ~ Brian Resnick
TOPIC OF INTEREST: Cultivating My Values
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Technology Adoption Lifecycle
MOST FAVORITE RECENT CONTENT: Television - The Sopranos by David Chase
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Article - Vox: Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong by Brian Resnick
Read MoreTHE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: A very simple equation for happiness - spend time with people you care about, preferably outside, preferably in nature, preferably moving.
TOPIC OF INTEREST: Retiring My Hiking Boots
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Confidence Interval
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book Excerpt - Model Business Plan from Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Read MoreTHE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "Without understanding, I was at the mercy of blind habit; with understanding, I could develop my own rules for living and find out which of the conflicting exhortations of a changing civilization was appropriate to my needs." ~ Marion Milner
TOPIC OF INTEREST: My Nutritional Supplement Stack
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Occam’s Broom
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Blog Post - Brain Pickings: A Life of One’s Own: A Penetrating 1930s Field Guide to Self-Possession, Mindful Perception, and the Art of Knowing What You Really Want by Maria Popova (via Marion Milner)
Read MoreTHE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "The key to understanding the limits of our knowledge is to check the results of our decisions against what we thought was going to happen and why we thought it was going to happen." ~ Sam Kyle
TOPIC OF INTEREST: Your Amazing Replies to Last Week's Topic of Interest (Struggling with the Question "Do I Want to Have Kids?")
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Scenario Analysis
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - The Decision Checklist: A Practical Guide to Avoiding Problems by Sam Kyle
Read MoreTHE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?" ~ Esther Perel
TOPIC OF INTEREST: Struggling with the Question "Do I Want to Have Kids?"
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Leverage
MOST FAVORITE RECENT CONTENT: Twitter Thread - George Mack: Rules of thumb that simplify decisions
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Book - Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic by Esther Perel
THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA: "It is randomness plus a simple iterative rule (or rules) that makes the complexity of the world." ~ John Gribbin
MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: Systems Thinking
MOST FAVORITE RECENT CONTENT: Book - Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity by John Gribbin
MOST FAVORITE PAST CONTENT: Podcasts - Nutrition Debate Double Feature - Joe Rogan Experience #1175 - Chris Kresser & Dr. Joel Kahn & Joe Rogan Experience #1176 - Dom D'Agostino & Layne Norton by Joe Rogan
Read More
