The most interesting people defy categorization

Live an interesting enough life, and you’ll never be easy to describe

If you're feeling down lately, here's a quick test to figure out why:

👇

💖 Have you met up with your friends IRL this week?

🏋️‍♀️ Have you exercised today or yesterday?

🎨 Are you working on stuff that's meaningful to you?

🤝 Have you helped someone today with something you're good at?

Convo between @tferriss & @naval on modern loneliness:

Naval: In India there's this concept of the extended family where you basically live with your tribe at all times, so when we were young, at our grandmother's place with my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my grandparents,

everyone was there, and it was a warm night so we went out to the backyard and put all these comforters and these little cots out and everyone would sleep in this giant pile with fifteen people underneath the stars...

it was amazing...so there's two things that were great about it: the noise level didn't bother you, if someone's foot was in your face it didn't bother you. When it's family and you're young it all just works and you feel very safe and very happy.

Another thing is that it reinforces how important the tribe is. Modern society gives us incredible flexibility in that we can get away from our crazy family members, we're not destined to die where we are born or to do what our parents did. So we have incredible freedom.

But coming with it is this tremendous loneliness that we try to cover up either through drugs, alcohol, partying, even trying to find a mission like putting people on mars. But the reality is that a lot of that loneliness comes from being disconnected from growing up in your

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In the passion economy, the real risk is that your job has to earn a living and meet the needs of your soul.

Six questions to consider if you’re thinking of leaving your job to pursue your passion.

A thread 👇🏽

1/ Will you use this opportunity to grow and evolve or will you use it to beat yourself up?  

The best way to control your emotional capital is to fine tune your internal monologue and replace your hunger for approval with a desire to grow.

2/ How will you avoid insecurity work? 

Insecurity work doesn't move the ball forward, but you can do it multiple times a day without realizing.

Deep work requires being unencumbered by the day to day.

Your objective is to ride the waves of your business with serenity.

3/ Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself?

You have to fight the temptation to strip the future of its surprises.

4/ Will you default to the norms of your industry, or will you be original? 

Your business exists in the context of a marketplace, but also in the context of your life.

You have to be willing to overcome the defaults and orient your business around the things that define you.

1/ A different way to think about life.

Our lives are all too often governed by living up to other people's opinion of us. We have this fear of appearing foolish, fear of being seen as unsophisticated, fear of missing out on things, fear of losing face.

Prestige is a trap.

2/ Prestige is a trap we set for ourselves. Those are the worst kind of traps.

Liberation is getting out of those traps.

We get a sense of security from those traps. It is a false security.

After all, who amongst us is 100% certain of surviving the pandemic?

3/ In reality this very life itself is uncertain and could be snatched from us at any moment.

Deeply understanding that is liberation.

Once we achieve that liberation, we quit seeking that false security that mental traps provide.

Our actions are now untainted by fear or ego.

4/ That liberation is itself the biggest gift life can bestow us.

We don't seek the liberation to be able to achieve wealth or prestige or status. They may come to us and they may not. In a true sense, we are not slaves to those. We become masters of ourselves.

5/ we can make it easier on ourselves to achieve that liberation.

One time honored way, as religious saints have shown us, is to physically move ourselves out of the grasp of those traps.

Cities are full of prestige and ego traps. Moving ourselves *may* help with liberation.

Life gets better when:

You understand that grades never mattered but how you grade yourself does

You learn from disagreements, you don't get upset

You keep your private life private

You often have your phone in DND mode

10 ideas that changed my life: (thread)

Illustrations by @visualizevalue.

1/ Get more done by doing less.

2/ You can't get better unless you get started.

3/ Zoom out. It's getting better. (IP via @behaviorgap)

4/ 'Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.' — Charles Addams

Why you need to be selfish: (thread)

I have had countless conversations with people looking for a way to build a brand/audience/community online.

Here's the one thing I think everyone asking that question should be thinking about.

You need to be selfish.

Why?

Because (at a high level) if it helps you, it will eventually help others.

At a tactical level, it's provides the motivation to keep going.

The lack of instant feedback on what we share publically is enough to extinguish most projects before they even get moving.

But allow me to reframe the idea:

You need to do things that benefit you even if no one sees them.

Did posting @visualizevalue images into a void 18 months ago do anything for my career as a designer?

Yes.

Would I have kept going if there wasn't some selfish drive to be more competent? (and make more money, work with better clients, etc)

No.

@naval returned to @tferris show to talk about science, happiness, reducing anxiety, and crypto

Key Takeaways:

Sequels suck because they cost 3x as much and have less time to come up with a good idea

1/20

Loves Richard Feynman because he did science and serious work but was a character who didn’t take himself to seriously. “A full stack intellectual hacker of life”

“Believing in science” is misguided. Science doesn’t need belief. If it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science.

2/20

“If there was no truth to it, it wouldn’t hurt at all. If I said Tim Ferris is fat, that would just bounce right off of you. If I said Tim Ferris and Naval are fake gurus, that might hit us because we kind of suspect at some deep level, there’s a part of that that’s true.”

3/20

“Individuals can search for truth but groups search for consensus...The moment you make science about large groups and about voting and about consensus, you’re not really practicing science anymore.”

4/20

“In an ideal scientific world, you don’t go and survey 10,000 scientists. You pick the one smartest scientist.”

Jargon is useful when it is a compressed way of communicating knowledge. Jargon is not useful when it becomes a substitute for fundamental understanding.

5/20