May 26, 2020

🧠 Proof of Learning 04: Take Your Medicine

By Jamie Sutton • Issue #4 • View online

Hello. I’m still alive. I didn’t click on many links this week so there’s not many included below. Enjoy!

💭 On my mind

💊 Take your medicine. There are things you already know that, if you started doing them consistently, would dramatically improve your quality of life. Things that would chip away at your greatest problems and insecurities. These ‘things’ are your medicine. Take your medicine: it’s going to taste awful at first, but it’s going to progressively heal you. Start with small doses and don’t take too much medicine at once.
📗 Avoid information with an expiry date. There is an infinite supply of news. Something is always happening and somebody is always ready to tell you about it. News feels important as it’s happening but that perceived importance quickly fades away as the information ages and becomes stale. Seek information you can build on by learning about things that don’t change often.
✏ The notes you take. I’ve started to realize that the notes I text to myself (to expand upon later) reflect my thoughts. Later, when I sit down with a mug of hot green tea to build off those thoughts, the notes reflect my thinking. There’s an important distinction here (system 1/system 2 thinking for Kahneman readers) that I’d like to think more about.
💔 Feel better about missing someone. Miss somebody? Just one person? Probably not. When you take a moment to think of all the people you miss, in such a way that you’re grateful you spent time with them, it will lessen the impact of missing any one particular person.
😫 Optimal learning is uncomfortable. To be in a state of learning is to be in a state of not knowing. 'Not knowing’ is uncomfortable, especially when you consider that we can resolve 90% of our uncertainties instantly with a quick Google search. Google spoon-feeds us answers on-demand to questions that previous generations would have had to accept as wisdom they would never acquire. Will having easy access to most answers affect our willingness to seek difficult answers in the long-term?

📚 Books of the week

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski. I wasn’t sure if I was brave enough to talk about this book here, but here we are! This book is more about “mental models for better understanding arousal” than it is “the secret to better sex”, despite the sensationalist title. The author wants readers to better understand how the process of arousal works and how it varies on an individual level. David MacIver wrote a good summary of one of the central points here: the accelerator/brake model. David also wrote this excellent post on male sexuality. There’s a lot of fat to skim through, but the insights are worth it.
Follow-up: Last week I was about 40% through reading Why Buddhism is True. The first half of this book (which I already wrote about) was extremely thought provoking. The second half, which dove into topics like enlightenment, lost my interest. The most interesting part of Buddhism to me is how emotions are viewed as responses triggered by parts of your brain acting in accordance to your survival.

👋 See you next Tuesday!

Thanks for reading. Here’s a quote I’ve been thinking about this week, from Dating:

It is deeply reassuring to witness vulnerability well-worn and madness confidently understood; to see someone mature enough to talk about their immaturities in a non-defensive and serene way.

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By Jamie Sutton

Bite-sized ideas for curious minds, every Tuesday.

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