💖 April Favourites 2023
Nutrition Diversification, Savouring a Moment, Tools vs Traits, Multiverse of Our Minds, Attaining Integrity
🍿 My Favourite Movie of the Month
No One Lives
📺 My Favourite Shows of the Month
Ted Lasso
Physical
Defending Jacob
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
✏️ My Favourite Personal Creation of the Month
Are Super Spaces the New Super Foods? • 🔗 / Mind Your Step Issue 10 /
The more I learn about the subliminal influences of our spaces and about the mental health benefits of things like park prescription programs and schnozelen rooms, I wonder if there will be an increase in environmental medical interventions — place prescription programs.
📚 My Favourite Read of the Month
I Created My Own Meditation • 🔗 / George Mack’s Newsletter /
“I tried every meditation and gratitude exercise.
It was ok but nothing game-changing.
So I designed my own via first principles -- I find it 10x better.
Here's how it works…”
🏋️ My Favourite Practices of the Month
Nutrition Diversification
Asking myself: what’s one more ingredient I can add to this meal?
I’ve listened to some podcasts about nutrition recently and one piece of advice I’ve heard come up a few times is that we should strive to consume at least 30 different natural foods per week.
It seems like a daunting task, but “natural foods” includes all spices, plants, grains, etc. So it’s surprisingly a lot more achievable than it seems.
Spring Aromatherapy
Paying attention to the smells of spring.
There are a couple of magnolia trees outside of my window and they smell amazing. It’s convinced me to take the time to appreciate the springy smells around me. It’s even got me treating myself to flowers lately.
💪🏽 My Favourite Words of Encouragement of the Month
Assume There Are Others Like You
Darkness Mindset Shift • 🔗 / Sahil Bloom Tweet /
“Sometimes when you are in a dark place, you think you have been buried, but actually you have been planted.”
The Hidden Value in Our Ideas • 🔗 / Janis Ozolins Tweet /
💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month
Our Unique Smartness • 🔗 / TedTalk /
“It’s not about how smart you are. It’s about how you’re smart.”
Life is a Pen, Not a Pencil • 🔗 / Bits of Wonder / No bitterness, no sneering, no cynicism /
Paradox of Effort • 🔗 / Sahil Bloom Tweet /
You have to put in more effort to make something appear effortless.
On Fighting Back • 🔗 / Ted Lasso /
Don’t fight back. Fight forward.
🖼️ My Favourite Visuals of the Month
🤔 My Favourite Realizations of the Month
Savouring a Moment Like Food
We savour our food in the moment because we don’t really have many options for preserving and reliving its taste in the future, aside from attempting to recreate the moment itself. I wonder how can we appreciate the rest of the world that way?
💭 My Favourite Reflections of the Month
Life Blocks & Natural Rhythm Cohesion
How can you neatly organize your days into the flow of your natural rhythms?
In my case, I’ve noticed that my mind is most active before I eat breakfast at 3pm. So I’ve been scheduling all of my dense thinking tasks in the morning and early afternoon.
I also know that social activities tend to tire me out. So I’ve been starting to think about them as part of my optimal sleep routine and scheduling them in the second half of my day. So that I’m nice and tuckered out by bedtime.
Tool vs Trait
Do you care about the tool or what the tool enables you to do?
I’ve noticed that I can save myself a ton of time by asking this question. When I first started to learn to code, I watched introduction to computer science videos. It felt like the logical place to start. But the reason I wanted to learn to code was because I had an idea I wanted to build. I didn’t actually care about how computers work. So I didn’t remember most of what I learned from those videos. The only time my programming skills improved was when I started building.
I think this can be applied to most skills we want to learn. We don’t need to know how a camera works to take a good picture. We don’t need to read great writing in order to write well.
Sure, learning the basics can help. But I think formal school systems have misled me into believing that prerequisites should be religiously adhered to. When in reality, we can often create our own paths to our goals.
Our Goal Compliments to Get
What would be on your list of goal compliments to get? What compliments would you love to receive?
20 Questions to Help You Figure Out Your Next Step
A pretty consistent theme in my life is stressing over the ambiguity of my potential future paths. What should I be focusing on now? Am I setting myself up for a success I’ll want in the future?…
Usually I come out of these panic periods with some intense spark of motivation and inspiration, so I tend not to let the weight of the stress reach soul crushing proportions. And this time was no different. I’ve been on a question appreciation binge lately, so I decided to come up with a list of questions to help me find clarity in the fogginess of my future.
🎬 My Favourite Videos of the Month
👭 My Favourite Societal Reflections of the Month
Against Optimization • 🔗 / The Long Game by Mehdi Yacoubi / Issue 148 /
“When you get a kid, the vast majority of the focus on yourself disappears automatically. My unpopular guess is that the rise of extreme optimization is a consequence of people delaying/not having kids”.
Multiverse of Minds
I feel like we’re already living in an undeniable multiverse. Every person and every creature living in their own version of reality. Each slightly different from each other. Whenever two people have a fight, Person A believes Person B is at fault and Person B believes Person A is at fault. Each person experiencing a slightly different branch of reality unfolding in unique ways.
Media vs Our Worries vs Reality • 🔗 / George Mack’s Tweet /
Click into the link above for a really interesting data viz on the discrepancy between the focus of our worries vs the focus of the media vs reality.
🧠 My Favourite Innovative Ideas of the Month
Confronting the Harsh Realities We Benefit From • 🔗 / Michael Ligier’s Youtube video /
I watched this video and I love what an awe-inspiring experience it looks to be.
What truly inspired me was an idea at 6:18. The idea of embracing hypocrisy to make a meaningful difference.
“The act of literally freeing a caged chicken in order to enjoy your dish, while images of tons of caged birds are all around you is actually quite powerful.
Look at this chicken leg. We’ve freed it from the cage. Now we have to eat it.”
It reminds me of an episode of Malcom in the Middle, where Malcom swore at his dad. And as punishment, his dad wrote up pages of insults about himself and forced Malcom to look into his eyes and read those insults to his face. The idea being that we can be truly repulsed by our negative instincts if we confront them through intense immersion.
I think that the path to true integrity is confronting the harsh realities that we blindly benefit from.
I like to think of integrity as the alignment between our actions and our beliefs. The opposite of hypocrisy. In my opinion, both the hero and the villain of a story are people of integrity if they live in harmony with their internal code of ethics.
I think most people would think of themselves as having integrity. But I don’t know if we’re being honest with ourselves if we don’t attempt to acknowledge or mitigate how our utopias benefit from and contribute to dystopias.
Unless we can abstain from or guiltlessly take an active role in the dark realities we contribute to, then I don’t know if we can claim the label of integrity.
In the case of food, for example, perhaps the only ways to honestly claim we have integrity are by either distancing ourselves from the animal cruelty dystopia by becoming plant-based or by showing that we have the ability to kill an animal for food without feeling guilty about it.
Bespoke Match Holders
Ted Lasso restores my faith in humanity