Jun 30, 2020

🧠 Proof of Learning 09: Ideas worth remembering

By Jamie Sutton • Issue #9 • View online

Hello. I’m still alive.

2020 is 50% over, as of tomorrow.

Here’s what I’ve thought about this past week:

💭 On my mind

✍ 30 days of publishing daily: done. Today is the final day of my (kind of) self-imposed publish every day of June writing streak. I posted really short blogs everyday but it was still a really challenging exercise. I’d like to experiment with other writing challenges, but first I’m taking a break from scheduled writing.
📱 How COVID-19 contact tracing works. This comic was helpful in explaining how all contact tracing works. It turns out there are privacy-friendly methods of contact tracing.
👷‍♂️ You always answer to someone. It doesn’t matter how independent you are, you always answer to someone. Bosses, clients, friends, family, whomever. Therefore, your priority shouldn’t be to seek independence for the sake of independence, but to maximize the overlap between what you want and what the people you answer to want.
💪 A source of linear progress. Productivity is not linear. There are days where weeks get done, and weeks where nothing gets done. Exercise is linear. You will be rewarded in direct relation with the amount of hours you put into your body. Linear progress is rare, so take advantage of it.
💡 Ideas worth remembering are difficult to ignore. We read books hoping to be stopped in our tracks by ideas with potential to change the way we think. I’ve grown to favor sticky ideas over moment of epiphany.

📚 Book of the week

Now reading: Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson. This book was recommended in a Twitter thread of non-fiction books that read like fiction. My favorite book that meets this criteria is American Kingpin. Anyways, I’m 100 pages into this one and it’s getting good. It turns out deep sea shipwreck driving is extremely dangerous. Enter narcosis: the longer and deeper a diver stays underwater, the more nitrogen accumulates in his tissues. Some compare the effects of narcosis to being drunk: emotions are heightened and judgement is impaired. Hearing “jungle drums” isn’t uncommon in this state, but it gets worse. Panicked divers dealing with an equipment malfunction, under the amplifying effects of narcosis, have been known to slash their knives at would-be rescuers in delirium. This is why, among even scarier reasons, the professionals adopt a philosophy of independence and self-rescue.
Also reading: Soul Without Shame by Byron Brown. A book on self-compassion and managing your inner critic. Not many books that claim to be effective at this are very good, but this was also recommended to me on Twitter. I’ll give it a chance.

👋 See you next Tuesday!

Thanks for reading. Here’s a quote from Shadow Divers, the book mentioned above:

Upstairs, they found piles of decades-old newspapers, still unfolded, and they sat on splintery crates and read the stories aloud to each other, tales of strange people from another time who had concerns that didn’t entirely make sense today.

Did you enjoy this issue?

By Jamie Sutton

Bite-sized ideas for curious minds, every Tuesday.

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