Ideas I've been collecting #2

Grocery list of ideas, from my notes app to you

Art by Maria Medem (I love all of her art, you should check it out)

I first tried out this newsletter format in November, with ideas I’ve been collecting, part 1. My collection has kept growing since then, so I’m back with another issue; hopefully you will stumble upon something insightful or inspiring, that prompts you to think or research further! I’ll be publishing issues like this one every couple of months, amidst the regularly scheduled essays. It’s a collection of random ideas that I found interesting or useful, that expanded my thinking or made me question my mindset or myself in a way.

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The Japanese concept of Yutori:

“Here in Japan, we have a concept called Yutori: it is spaciousness; it is leaving early enough to get somewhere, so when you get there, you have time to look around.”

Yutori is the conscious slowing down in life, to savour every moment and take in the world around us. It is intentional act of creating ‘breathing space’ to experience and appreciate the moments that usually slip by unnoticed; as most of them do, because we all naturally struggle with being present. It can be explained as ‘the space to have peace of mind’. Its main goal is contentment. It’s a word to describe the state of being able to enjoy the small part of life with no rush or urgency.

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Marcus Aurelius: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. The obstacle is the way.”

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Bias for action: A bias for action is the trait where you favour action over inaction. Simply put, it means that you’re more likely to do things and are good at getting yourself out of the overthinking cycle because you recognize that action is better than inaction. Especially in business/entrepreneurship, it’s the trait that helps you get things done. While researching entrepreneurship and success, and learning from my own experiences running a startup, I am realizing more and more how having a bias for action seems to be one of the very primary indicators that show whether someone will be successful. It’s very “lean startup”, tried and tested - and experience shows me that it’s true. Being able to just go from 0 to 1 and take some type of action towards what you want to do, will set you apart from anyone that gets stuck in the loop of analysis paralysis and delays taking action, which is most people. Simply having a bias for action can be a great advantage.

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I absolutely loved this essay on building agency. Cate Hall (who has been a Supreme Court advocate, the number 1 female poker player in the world, and a startup founder, among other things) wrote about how she intentionally dialled up her agency; very similar to the idea above regarding having a bias for action, but with actual strategies that help you take on more agency in your life and thus have more responsibility in creating the outcomes you want to create. Some of the examples she mentions:

• Courting rejection: Consciously testing whether what you deem reasonable and unreasonable is actually so; putting yourself out there in ways where you’re very likely to be rejected, getting used to that, and increase the possibility of getting lucky in the process.

• Seek real, anonymous feedback from people. Anonymity is the only way to receive real feedback without social dynamics getting in the way. If you think of how often we’re actually given fully open and honest feedback about things we do, giving us the opportunity to fix patterns/issues, it’s really not often at all.

• Increase your surface area of luck by putting yourself in situations where the chance for serendipity is statistically higher. More new situations, higher chance for luck.

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Lately I’ve been on a journey to make more decisions intuitively; based on the heart rather than based on ego. Our intuition is a massive asset, and I had grown disconnected from mine. I loved this piece on how to practically learn to listen to your heart.

“All indigenous cultures know this and place equal value on both — if not more on the wisdom of the heart. Modern society has become addicted to the ego and its thought patterns. At the same time, emotional restraint has become a virtue of emotional maturity. This fundamental disconnection has produced a society in which a large share of the population finds itself trapped in the two most common states of ego consciousness - contemplation of the past (depression) and the future (anxiety).”

What we often don’t recognize is that it’s not always easy to distinguish when it’s the ego talking and when it’s the heart. If we take as a fundamental belief that it’s better to be led by the heart than by the ego, then learning to discern when one is ruling us over the other can be extremely useful in evaluating decisions.

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Rainer Maria Rilke: “Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Similarly, Dostoyevsky’s quote in The Idiot: “What matters in life, life alone, is the continuous and infinite process of discovering it, not the discovery itself.”

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I hope you enjoyed reading this quick issue, and as always I’d love to hear your thoughts. Let me know if anything stood out to you or if you’d like to see more/less of this format!