💖 August Favourites 2023
Frequency Dictionaries, Value Tradeoffs, Language Personas, The Bunker Problem...
🍿 My Favourite Movies of the Month
📺 My Favourite Shows of the Month
🛠️ My Favourite Tools of the Month
Frequency Dictionaries
Frequency dictionaries showcase an ordered list of the most used words in a language.
Arguably, one the most effective tools for learning a new language. So I’m surprised it was never a recommended book in any of the dozens of language courses I’ve taken in my life.
Megastudies
🔗 / Pete Judo Video /
Megastudies as a way of solving for the fraud that’s been going on in research. Megastudies are collaborative projects targeting a certain outcome.
A team of dozens of different researchers propose different study designs to test different related hypotheses. Then each of those studies are pooled into a single megastudy.
💪🏽 My Favourite Lifestyle Change of the Month
Feedback Reception Audit
What if every time we got feedback, we rated ourselves on how well we took the feedback.
When someone gives us feedback, they’ve already evaluated us.
The main thing they’re judging post feedback is how well we’ve taken it.. whether we were open or defensive.
💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month
Knowledge
🔗 / Socrates /
“All I know is that I know nothing”
Value Tradeoffs
🔗 / My First Million Podcast /
“A value is useless without acknowledging it’s tradeoff”.
Consider Facebook’s “Move fast and break things”. It acknowledges the sacrifice it’s willing to make.
Perhaps our list of personal values should, at the very least, be ranked in terms of which ones we’d be willing to sacrifice over the others.
CIA’s MICE Framework
🔗 / Show: Painkiller /
According to the show Painkiller, when the CIA wants to flip someone they attempt to figure out their core motivation using some combination of MICE:
Money: how much do they want
Ideology: what do they believe in
Coercion: what scares them
Ego: what makes them feel powerful
Punctuality
🔗 / Movie: After the Dark /
“Isn’t punctuality the virtue of the lonely?”
💡 My Favourite Fun Fact of the Month
Infinite Monkey Theorem
🔗 / Movie: After the Dark /
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare.
🧨 My Favourite Sparks of Motivation & Inspiration
Just In Time vs Just In Case Learning
🔗 / Ali Abdaal Video /
Just In Case Learning: When we learn something just in case it becomes useful further down the line.
Just In Time Learning: When we learn something at the moment it becomes useful and necessary.
Just in case learning is like the first day of school. It’s the orientation where we gain a general overview of what’s to come.
But some of us get trapped there, spending too much time trying to anticipate what we’ll need.
Surface vs Deep Lexicon
🔗 / Joseph Tsar Video /
When it comes to the words we use, we all rely on a surface lexicon and a deep lexicon.
Surface Lexicon: the words we instinctively default to. It’s comprised of approximately 1500-3000 unique words.
Deep Lexicon: the words that we recognize, but rarely use. The average native English-speaking adult has a deep lexicon of approximately 20,000-35,000 unique words.
Assuming that a more robust surface lexicon would give us the ability to communicate more accurately, creatively, and effectively, how can we increase our surface lexicon?
According to Joseph’s video,
A study from Yale found that it takes using a word 38 unique times for our brain to instinctively default to that word in our speech. In other words, 38 times in order for that word to register in our surface lexicon.
Show & Tell Opportunities
Step 1: Show & Tell the world what you’re interested in.
Step 2: Look & Listen out for the random opportunities it sends you.
Success Patience
🤔 My Favourite Realizations of the Month
Heavy Baths
You ever remain seated in a bathtub as the water drains out?
The lower the water gets, the heavier we feel.
I like to think of it as a symbolic reminder of the weight we were carrying before the bath and how effectively a good bubble bath can relieve us of that weight.
Second Brain Laziness
There’s a popular second brain credo that claims that our minds are meant for coming up with ideas, rather than for storing them.
I’ve noticed myself operating under the limiting belief that our cognitive capacity has a limit. But what if we’re more limitless than we believe?
I used to always take a lot of pleasure from memorizing things for fun. It’s something I want to return to again, rather than succumbing to my current default of delegating memorization to my Notion.
Language Persona
🔗 / Iñaki Godoy Interview /
In this interview with Iñaki Godoy about his role in the new One Piece live action series, he mentions how the depth of his voice changes depending on whether he’s speaking English or Spanish.
Other people describe how their personality changes with the language they’re using.
I’ve never thought about language as a path to deeper self-discovery, but perhaps a new piece of our personality puzzle can be found in every language we learn.
💭 My Favourite Reflections of the Month
Predictable Questions
A question worth asking ourselves: What predictable questions should a person with my goal expertise be able to answer with ease?
Becoming Untethered
I’ve been feeling very anchored in reality lately. I want to figure out some strategies for becoming a little more untethered.
Replication Crisis
Context
A growing number of studies in psychology are now being denounced as either fraudulent or flawed because their results have not been replicable by other scientists.
My assumptions
Research psychologists are falling victim to pressures from:
Fame: they want the book deals, the Ted Talks, the business, the media tours.
Corporate sponsors: they feel pressure from the organizations sponsoring their research; they research biased questions with favourable results and they manipulate the data to support their investors’ vested interests, in order to increase the likelihood that they’ll finance future studies.
Academic institutions: the more their research brings attention to their school, the more money they’re likely to make.
My thoughts
Fields like social psychology, behavioural economics, and UX essentially ask the questions “I wonder if most people would do this thing in this scenario?” and “to what degree?”
It’s rare to come across a study that finds conclusive results for 100% of its participants. So the research-based advice that we often hear in public discourse only applies to a subset of us.
If we put too much emphasis on the majority, aren’t we constantly neglecting findings that apply to individuals in the minority?
The Bunker Problem — What do you bring to the bunker?
It's an apocalypse. There's a bunker that can only hold 10 people. You are one of 20.
Everybody in the group must go around one by one naming the three biggest assets and the three biggest liabilities that they would bring to the bunker.
What would your three assets and three liabilities be?
Your Best Characteristic
What’s your best characteristic?
Perfect Match Curiosity
In a world where the perfect algorithm for finding a romantic match exists, would you use it (or would you crave to use it) even if you were already happily married?
🎥 My Favourite YouTuber of the Month
🔗 / Rian Doris /
Rian Doris is the Co-Founder & CEO of Flow Research Collective, the world’s leading peak performance research and training institute focused on decoding the neuroscience of flow states and helping leaders and their teams unlock flow states consistently.
🥗 My Favourite Foods of the Month
Nerds Gummy Clusters
