Just three *little* things
A visual meditation, aspirational scheduling, & reverse engineering your ideal world
Hi!
I haven’t had much time to write this week but wanted to share just three little things that I loved and have been thinking about a lot this week (listed in order from shortest to longest time to consume).
A 60-second meditation tool to help you clear your mind.
Surprisingly high impact for something so simple. Try it!
The Problem with Aspirational Scheduling (and Stretch Goals)
This is my problem! I always do this! And then I fail or get burned out! This blog post is from a coach named Kathryn who I met in Flow Club and regularly writes on topics I find very helpful and relevant. Always grateful for a reminder that “no person and no company has time or resources to do all the things.”
Okay this one is a bit of a journey (The Law of Accelerating Returns, AI, The Singularity) but I’m copying/pasting the most important takeaway here from an interview between Lex Friedman & Ray Kurzweil:
Fridman: You’ve talked about how you use lucid dreaming to think, to come up with ideas as a source of creativity. Can you maybe talk through that? You’ve invented a lot of things. You’ve come up with and thought through some very interesting ideas. What advice would you give, or can you speak to the process of thinking, how to think creatively?
Kurzweil: Sometimes I will think through in a dream and try to interpret that, but I think the key issue that I would tell younger people is to put yourself in the position that what you’re trying to create already exists. And then you’re explaining…
Fridman: …how it works?
Kurzweil: Exactly.
Fridman: That’s really interesting. You paint a world that you would like to exist, you think can exist, and reverse engineer that.
Kurzweil: And then you actually imagine you’re giving a speech about how you created this. Well you’d have to then work backwards about how you created it to make it work.
Fridman: That’s brilliant, and that requires some imagination, too, some first principles thinking. You need to visualize that world. That’s really interesting.
Kurzweil: And generally when I talk about things that we’re trying to invent, I would use the present tense as if it already exists. Not just to give myself that confidence, but everybody else that’s working on it. We just have to do all of the steps to make it actual.
❗️❗️❗️
I’ll just be over here, painting my ideal world.
Pssst. Next week I will (most likely) be launching the rebrand of this newsletter so you might see an unfamiliar email in your inbox. Don’t be alarmed! But stay tuned 🙃