Aug 11, 2020

🧠 Proof of Learning 15: Arguments, habits, etc

By Jamie Sutton • Issue #15 • View online

Hello. I’m still alive.

My hockey team was eliminated from the playoffs this weekend. I don’t want to talk about it.

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

💭 On my mind

🙈 Don’t worship habits. You have as many habits working against you as you have working for you. So much of our behavior relies on how we acted in the past. It takes a lot of effort to consciously change that, but it’s possible.
🔮 You’re bad at reading minds. Some are better than others at reading people… the problem is that everybody believes they’re better than average. You can save yourself a lot of trouble by being direct and asking people for more information about what they want.
👻 It’s you versus your shadow. Outsmart, outstrength, and outwit your ghost of yesterday.
🧐 Gurus everywhere. We can easily mistake people who have answers for people who are wise. I forget where I read that this week, but it resonated. I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter because it can feel like everybody is posing as an expert. There’s a lot of ‘faking it until you make it’ going on, making it difficult to filter wisdom from the noise. Then again, maybe this mindset is too restrictive. Who’s to say what defines wisdom? The same paragraph that triggers an 'aha’ moment for me could be meaningless to you.
🥰 Treat yourself. It feels as though many insecurities can be soothed by being a better friend to yourself.

📚 Books of the week

📗 Finished: Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement by Buster Benson. I felt this book was lackluster.

I got excited when the author spoke about the art of productive disagreement as metaskill, a skill that compliments all your other skills. After that… nothing really resonated with me.

Most of the book could be summarized with “Seek first to understand, then to be understood”. I still read the whole thing. It’s a light read and the tone is that of someone who has experience writing online.

👋 See you next Tuesday!

Thanks for reading.

Here’s a quote I like about changing your mind from Why Are We Yelling?:

A mind is more like a pile of millions of little rocks than a single big boulder. To change a mind, we need to carry thousands of little rocks from one pile to another, one at a time. This is because our brains don’t know how to rewire a full belief in one big haul.

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By Jamie Sutton

Bite-sized ideas for curious minds, every Tuesday.

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