Potent Pocket Grab Bag
Potent Pocket Grab Bag
Treasure Trove of Random Findings Across the Interwebs
Twenty-Five Useful Thinking Tools
Professions are defined by what they do, but the tools they use within their professions can be applied anywhere. Economics is about money, but it can also be used to understand crime or social norms. So don't be afraid to think outside the box. And make use of another profession’s mental models to help your own.
How to Live Life to the Fullest, When There’s So Much Disconnection?
I have shared Nick Cave’s beautiful Red Hand Files before. This one is particularly potent to me because my eldest daughter is 12 years old. This is a beautiful response to a 13 year old posing a challenging question about how to show up in the midst of so much bad news and suffering. Read the whole thing, but excerpt here:
Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude.
How to Break a Habit
Making a new habit is what most of my coaching clients are working towards. Whether it’s building a writing practice, or generating sustainable headway on a major side hustle, or redesigning how they orient to their unique calling, showing up to the work is all about making a habit of something hard. And often, given limitations on time and resources, before we can make a new habit, we need to break an old one.
“Any habit needs all its parts in order to function. If some parts are missing, the habit is disassembled.” — Carlos Castaneda
So, to free up some of your time and resources: look at a habit you have, break it down into its smallest pieces, and remove or break one small part of that habit, and the whole thing crumbles. Remove the app that hogs your attention. Put a downtime block on your phone. Habits are a house of cards waiting for you to pull the right card out.
Matt Mochary is one of the most potent and prolific coaches working today. He supports the heads of Silicon Valley tech investment firms and companies, offering guidance on how to be the best leaders and build the best organizations possible. His philosophy and the entirety of his methodology are available in the massive google doc repository linked above, which is worth bookmarking and exploring for self-coaching.
As a side note, Matt Mochary was the coach to renowned entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant. One of Naval’s razor-sharp decision-making insights goes like this:
If you have a choice to make between path A or path B, and after thoughtful consideration it’s become clear that it's 50/50 on whether to choose A or B, take the path that’s more painful in the short term.
Photo by Ashin K Suresh on Unsplash
That’s all for now, dear reader. Have a great weekend.
Griff