WELCOME TO MIND YOUR STEP - ISSUE 8!

Are you aware of just how awesome you are?

Because, you’re literally the absolute best.

I’ve seen your future and there’s a 100% chance you’re going to conquer your dreams.

There is nothing you can’t do 👏

When was the last time you gave yourself permission to deep dive into delusions of grandeur?

I started a new reflection practice, which I’m calling bombastic branching. It’s where I visualize the most audacious and impressive best-case potential branches in my future.

I noticed recently how all of my reflection practices focus on my most immediate timeline.

How did my last day/week/month go?

What can I do today to contribute to my next level?

What goals do I want to accomplish this coming month?

But I hadn’t been giving myself any space to daydream about the big picture — what my most ideal future branches might look like.

What if I were to become some sort of world-renowned environmental mentalist with unparalleled ability to elicit any emotion, thought, or behaviour through the spaces I’ve conceptualized.

What if I lived in a world where I’d help build the virtual reality ecosystem that gave people the ability to live out their most fantastical and surreal daydreams.

What if I could not just have a hand in improving the world, but help to improve someone’s entire perspective on the world — thus altering the course of their life — which snowballs into a never-ending sequence of positive butterfly effects.

Honestly, I’ve been feeling next-level motivated since I’ve started.

Here’s to thinking outrageous thoughts and to pushing our dreams and aspirations to the brink of reality. Because, that’s what world building is all about.

Your fellow daydreamer,

Lamar ✌️👽

DEAR MIND WANDERERS

Reminders of Resolve: A Quick Fix for Focus

How’s your focus been lately? Do things in your environment distract you from your work?

If yes, then have I got the product for you!

Say goodbye to noise cancelling headphones and 1000x your focus with this bad boy instead 💁🏽‍♂️

The Isolator, a concentration helmet developed by Hugo Gernsback in 1925.

Though it takes a brutalist aesthetic to productivity hacking, it could be argued that it’s not too far off from the concentration tactics that we use today.

Strategies for designing an environment for focus generally fall under one of two categories:

Removing distractions, like leaving your phone in a drawer somewhere or locking yourself away in a quiet room,
And blocking out distractions, like listening to music or putting on soundproof headphones.

But perhaps my favourite strategy for designing concentration into our spaces is to add reminders of resolve.

Reminders of resolve are emotional triggers that tap into the heart of our pursuits.

Last week, I shared a discussion I found on Twitter. It asked people what physical reminders they have in their spaces to keep them centred on their goals and values — how they designed reminders of resolve into their spaces. Here are my favourites:

We’re all mind wanderers.

We have visions in our mind of the world we want to live in. And whether we have the resolve or not, we want to be the version of ourself who works toward being the best version of ourself.

Maybe it’s time to reconnect with your north star.

Bring that dream destination of yours into reality. Think about what creative compasses you can add to your space. Make it easy for yourself to remember what it feels like to yearn.

FEATURED PLACE: NON-PLACES

The Paradox of Non-Places: A Cure for Culture Shock

Limbo gets a bad rap for being eerily liminal. To most who are just passing through, it’s a non-place. But for me it was home.

Non-places are the limbo-like locations we pass through in life.

They are the airports, the hospitals, and the malls where we would feel lonely and creeped out if we weren’t surrounded by other people. They are the places where we blend into the background in anonymity and would feel overly exposed if isolated.

Now that I’m stuck here in the land of the living, I find comfort in immersing myself in places that remind me of home.

And I’m not alone.

The paradox of non-places is that they’re so universal that when we feel homesick while travelling, they’re also the places where we can most feel at home.

FEATURED THEORY: ENVIRONMENTAL LEGACIES

Land of Legacies: Where to Preserve Your Soul

There’s a reason why ghosts are see through.

The Harry Potter franchise was onto something when it introduced the concept of horcruxes — objects that serve as containers where a person can preserve pieces of their soul in order to survive after the death of their body.

In reality, we call horcruxes by another name — legacies.

Our:

inventions
artful masterpieces
bags of money
brands
music
memories
children
…

Before we die, we leave behind a medley of mementos. And the more we break off pieces of our soul to store in legacies, the more transparent we’ll be as ghosts.

The most transparent ghosts I used to escort through Limbo were the ones who left behind an environmental legacy. The ones whose spirits can still be felt by their loved ones in the room they used to occupy, the park they used to frequent, and the neighbourhood they once lived in.

When you conjure up an image in your mind of a loved one you’ve lost, where are they?

For the people close to us, it’s often the spaces they used to live in and frequent where we home their spirits in our memories.

When I think about the people I’ve lost, I can close my eyes and imagine meeting them at their front door, walking through their halls, and sitting on their sofa. Their chosen spaces are so strongly linked to them that they become the most memorable environmental legacies that they leave behind.

Are the spaces that you frequent worthy of enshrining your soul?

Our homes and our hangouts aren’t just the places where we live. They’re they places where we’ll likely die. And the places where we’ll live on after death.

What would it look like if you were to design your ideal environmental legacy from scratch? Where do you want your loved ones to remember and feel you?

RECOMMENDED WEBSITE: Shade Map →

Shade map

Attention adrenaline junkie vampires. I’ve got a fun challenge for you!

Here's an app that shows where & when the sun falls: https://shademap.app/

Your mission: Survive shadow surfing through your town without getting burnt ☀️

And to you humans out there. Maybe you can use that app to challenge yourself into chasing down a good tan or to find the best spots to hide your car in the shade 🤷🏽‍♂️

RECOMMENDED VIDEO

Rewatching these clips from Courage the Cowardly Dog makes me realize that there’s a difference between scary and creepy.

Where some places make us feel afraid, there are others that make us feel uneasy — the "something’s not quite right here" feeling.

Creepiness lingers. It makes our skin crawl.

Creepiness is to horror, what cringe is to humour.

CHALLENGES WORTH TRYING

Part 1: Project Place with a Face

If you watched the 2020 psychological horror The Night House, then you’re probably familiar with the concept of face pareidolia.

It’s our ability to see faces in everyday objects.

And once you start noticing it, you’ll see it everywhere.

Part 2: Operation Googly Eyes

The movie Everything Everywhere All At Once revived the long forgotten power of googly eyes.

These little cuties are a super easy hack for almost literally adding life to any space.

REMINDER: DARE TO DAYDREAM ABOUT DISTANT DIMENSIONS

The worlds we dream of may seem audacious in this reality.

Most of my daydreams teleport me into realities where superpowers exist. And I’m envious of that version of me who gets to live his life with the abilities I crave.

But then I remind myself how there’s a space in this reality for any dream we can come up with.

We can translate our worlds into books, and music, and comics, and art.

We can create games, and virtual realities, and videos.

Anything we imagine can be real ✨

FEATURED WORLD BUILDER: DEMI LOVATO • YouTube Short →

I've never gotten high.

But sometimes I'll vibe so well with a kaleidoscopically psychedelic song that it's what I'd imagine a good trip would be like.

I’m obsessed with the idea that spaces can be designed to manipulate minds. And Demi Lovato's shroom room is a non-drug drug I'd love to try 😵‍💫

GET FEATURED

Want a chance to be featured as world builder of the week?

Connect with me on Twitter @LamarElimbo and tell me about your vision for the world that you’re craving to create. I’m pretty much a space travelling alien at this point, so I’d love to be invited as a guest in your world!

ENJOYED THIS ISSUE?

Research shows that people who click the ❤️ button are 20,000 times less likely to slip on a banana peel in their lifetime. I’d personally recommend being extra cautious 🚧

🎪 Dear Mind Wanderers, Reminders of Resolve…