💖 March Favourites 2023
Speechify Proofreading, Escaping Meta-Twitter, Mindfulness Meditation, Balance in Baselines, The Pressure of Turning it into a Side Hustle...
🍿 My Favourite Movies of the Month
Promising Young Woman
Come Play
Tetris
📺 My Favourite Shows of the Month
Erased
WeCrashed
Devs
Loot
The Night Agent
📚 My Favourite Read of the Month
Dharma-Vision • 🔗 /
/ Post /Do you soak in a moment at full-saturation, forgetting it forever? Or do you reach for your device, knowing your future self will want to relive it?
🖥 My Favourite Website of the Month
Squardle • 🔗 / link /
Squaredle is a daily word building game where you swipe connected letters in the grid to create as many words as you can find.
🛠️ My Favourite Tools of the Month
Perplexity.ai • 🔗 / link /
Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine I’ve been using to help me with research for my posts.
✏️ My Favourite Personal Creations of the Month
Dear Mind Wanderers, Reminders of Resolve, The Non-Space Paradox, & Leaving Legacies • 🔗 / My Substack /
Reminders of Resolve: A Quick Fix for Focus, The Paradox of Non-Places: A Cure for Culture Shock, Land of Legacies: Where to Preserve Your Soul…
Dear Voyeurs, The Curiosity Gap, Anatomy of Creepy Places, & Objectifying Vampires • 🔗 / My Substack /
The Curiosity Gap: Spaces Designed to Lure our Gaze, Sensing Psychopathy & the Anatomy of Creepy Places, Objectifying Vampires: Finding Motivation by Identifying our Energy Assets & Liabilities…
💪🏽 My Favourite Practices of the Month
Speechify Proofreading • 🔗 / Link /
My inner voice loves filling in blanks. I re-read my writing multiple times, only to finally hit publish and discover missing words in sentences.
So I'm starting an experiment where I listen to my longer posts in Speechify, in order to auditorially proofread them more easily.
Escaping Meta-Twitter
I accidentally got lost in meta-twitter.
I started using twitter more consistently at the start of this year and I wanted to understand how other people use it as a tool, what benefits they get from it, and how I can best take advantage of it.
So I followed people who tweeted about how to twitter and wrote about how to write.
My entire feed turned into a revolving door of the same advice from bigger creators and trends slightly reworded in dozens of different ways.
A lot of it was helpful advice. But it was my first time experiencing the inner world of an echo chamber. Where what starts as a bigger creator saying “this worked for me” quickly translates into a smaller creator definitively prescribing what works to their peers.
I realized that I had immersed myself in this community of tweeters and writers, because that’s technically the new hobby I was playing with. But, to them twitter and writing was a lifestyle. And, it took me some time to realize it, but to me they were really nothing more than tools to help me communicate and find people with similar interests.
I decided to take a step back and reflect on exactly what I want from Twitter right now and which of the accounts I followed were fulfilling that need.
In the end, I realized that right now my favourite accounts are the ones:
within a main area of my interest (ex: environmental psychology, environment design, personal psychology, lifestyle design, education, futurism, imagination/creativity),
which offer unique insights,
which ask thought provoking questions,
which value originality and creativity, or
whose authors I could see myself befriending.
I created a new twitter list of my favourite accounts, so that I have a go to aspiration column. These are some of the accounts in my favourites right now:
https://twitter.com/theKevinShen
https://twitter.com/david_perell
https://twitter.com/nathanbaugh27
https://twitter.com/AdamMGrant
https://twitter.com/george__mack
https://twitter.com/OzolinsJanis
https://twitter.com/SystemSunday
💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month
Quote
On Meta Cognition
“We are not people looking out at nature. We are nature reflecting on itself” — Then & Now
Concept
Semantic Satiation
A psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.
Unschooling
Unschooling is a form of homeschooling, which is the education of children at home or other places rather than in a school. It involves teaching children based on their interests rather than a set curriculum.
Tweet
🧨 My Favourite Sparks of Motivation & Inspiration
Optimizing for Non Regrettable Minutes • 🔗 / Danny Miranda Podcast #323 /
How much better would our world be if the people who were creating things wanted people to not regret using them, consuming them, or living in them by the end of it.
Interesting to think about the ones that don’t focus on this: fast/junk food products, wasted time on bad social content, wasted money on degrees that don’t lead to a job…
Details vs Perfectionism
I’m really vibing with the idea that being detail-oriented doesn’t necessarily mean being a perfectionist. Not sure how this looks yet, but I’m pretty confident it’s possible and it sounds like something worth attempting.
Metaphor Responses
It’s a great experience when you’re telling someone about something you’ve learned and they respond with “ooh so it’s kinda like…”. Introducing you to a fun new metaphor you hadn’t considered.
🖼️ My Favourite Visuals of the Month
My favourite photos of the month
🤔 My Favourite Realizations of the Month
Mindfulness Meditation
I don’t believe mindfulness is the only powerful psychological state.
There are so many discussions and studies on the benefits of mindfulness meditation. There are also just as many different meditation practices. And just as many different anecdotal descriptions of people's mindfulness experiences.
And just as many people claiming to have tried mindfulness meditation, only to be disappointed by or confused about what they were “supposed” to experience.
In my opinion, it's been a game of broken telephone. People started touting it as a life-changing practice, so it became a popular concept, and everyone started to add their own little nuances to its description, to the point where it's now a poorly defined method.
Its popularity has also pushed it into one of my biggest pet peeves — one size fits all solutions.
Assuming that we all have unique goals, points of view, and baseline states of mind, then I can’t believe that something like mindfulness meditation is going to be beneficial for everyone.
Long story short, I want to see more people talking about how they’ve created practices around other beneficial psychological states. Where are the discussions on practices that elicit joy, bliss, flow, wonder, comfort, nostalgia, pronoia, optimism…?
Balance in Baselines
This month I spent a lot of time reminding myself about how the key to balance can be found in the basics.
I pride myself on being a creative person. When I meet a new topic I want to explore I make it a habit of trying to ask 50 questions about it, so that I’m bound to find a unique perspective.
One of my most tightly held values is uniqueness. And one of my biggest pet peeves is someone doling out one size fits all advice as gospel.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest drawbacks of my mindset is overlooking and neglecting the obvious in favour of the complex.
Balance is one of my biggest ambitions.
It’s something that I’ve had to put a lot of work into. Its practice doesn’t come naturally to me. There have been way too many times where I’ve neglected baseline parts of my life in favour of optimizing another. For example, not allowing myself to date or socialize until I was able to reach a certain degree of success in my career.
So I’ve implemented a new practice into my routine to ensure that I’m not skewing my scales too sloppily to one side. The baseline checkup.
The idea behind baseline checkup is that by figuring out the most basic cause of happiness in each of the major areas in my life, I’ll be able to recognize and react more easily if one of them gets neglected.
Having a baseline checklist is a way to remind ourselves to confirm that our baseline needs are being met, before attempting to strategize new solutions.
The question I’m now making more of a habit asking myself: “what is the minimum viable requirement for…”
my healthy life blocks (mind, body, environment, social, finance, recreation, and operations),
effortless consistency,
a good day,
…
💭 My Favourite Reflections of the Month
Questions over Answers
Reminder to self: you don’t aspire to be a person with all of the answers. You aspire to be the person with all the most interesting questions.
Intentional Experiences
How do I create the best experience for myself and for other people at {insert event}?
The Pressure of Turning it into a Side Hustle
I need to start internalizing the goal of exploration, experimentation, and fun when it comes to Mind Your Step.
I need to start thinking about it within my recreation block, as opposed to a potential future contender of my finance block.
I want to stop thinking about long term goals and focus on short term joy. And I want to drastically reduce the amount of content I consume about creators aiming to make a living off of their work. It’s aspirational, but clouds my true current goal of playing and exploring within my niche.
I’d love to stop thinking about posting as a goal and start thinking about it as a byproduct of my explorations.
I really want to figure out how to re-cultivate the curious, playful, and adventurous spirit of my inner child. And completely forget about the trending goal of positioning oneself as an expert.
The Art of Introductions
Introducing yourself is a skill. And I’d like to brainstorm a quality way to do it better.
When Revisiting Goals
When restarting hobbies and goals (ex going to the gym) try asking yourself why you never fully succeeded with it in the past, so you can avoid the same frictions.
Embodying Wholesome
What does it look / feel like to embody the word wholesome?
Pre Interviewing Authors
Consider conducting a fake interview with a non-fiction author before reading their book, so you can prime yourself with what you hope to gain from reading it. Find what you’re looking for by having an idea of what you’re looking for.
Who Do You Want To Be
When thinking about your ideal future, try out the statement: “I’m the kind of person who…”.
Rather than “I want…”
🎥 My Favourite YouTuber of the Month
🎬 My Favourite Videos of the Month
🧠 My Favourite Innovative Ideas of the Month
Our Second Brain 3.0
What if we could train an ai throughout our life to replicate our brain. 15 minute conversation everyday, with prompts from an ai, so that it can learn about how we think.
What if we could send out this copy of our brain to engage with social media, so that it filters in only the most interesting information for us.
What if all of the writing we put out into the world (text messages, newsletter posts, tweets…) can be used after death as a search engine for our thoughts and opinions.