#10: Let Them be Crabs

#productivity #therapy #work #life #growth

Mar 17, 2023

👋 Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Pursuit. In a world where we are drowning in information but starving for wisdom, I spend over 10 hours each week learning about living a fulfilling life, productivity, and building great products. I feel grateful to bring the highlights of my findings to you, saving you time in your search for wisdom. So go ahead, give it a try, and subscribe now if you haven’t already.

This week’s discovery:

⭕ Against Ikigai #meaning
🎲 Playing a Career Game You Actually Want to Win - #career
❤️ The Importance of Doing What You Love - #work
📒 P.A.R.A — A System for Building Your Second Brain - #productivity
🦀 The Importance of Letting Go #story
⭐ A Random quote and music tracks…

⭕ Against Ikigai

Although searching for one's life purpose in work can be a noble pursuit, the popularized notion of Ikigai that locates meaning only in work is misguided. It has diluted the term to the point where we've lost the script. We often think that we should invest in activities only if we find them meaningful, but I believe the causal relationship more often goes the other way: we find activities meaningful through our investment in them. We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflection on experience.” The same can be said for meaning-making—we make meaning through reflection.

📖 7-min

🎲 Playing a Career Game You Actually Want to Win

It is easier to adopt the values of the game than to determine your own. That’s value capture. There are countless examples of value capture in daily life. You get a Fitbit because you want to improve your health but become obsessed with maximizing your steps. You become a professor in order to inspire students but become fixated on how often your research is cited. You join Twitter because you want to connect with others but become preoccupied by the virality of your content. Naturally, maximizing your steps or citations or retweets is good for the platforms on which these status games are played.

Asking yourself the following question is a great way to determine if you are playing the career game you actually want to win:

If you could get the thing you supposedly want, but couldn’t tell anyone that you got it, would you still want it?

📖 5-min

🏠 The Importance of Living Well Within Your Means

Live within your means. When we chase after excessive wealth, we often find ourselves pulled in different directions, losing sight of what truly matters. Instead, focus on creating value for the world and finding fulfillment in the little things in life. Take a moment to appreciate the world around you and the people in it. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, "when life is sweet, pause and look up at the sky and say, if this isn't nice, then what is?”

🎧 5-min

📒 P.A.R.A — A System for Building Your Second Brain

This article introduces the P.A.R.A. system. It’s a system that is designed to help individuals organize all types of information encountered in work and life. P.A.R.A. stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. Projects are tasks linked to a goal with a deadline, areas are spheres of activity with a standard to be maintained over time, resources are topics or themes of ongoing interest, and archives include inactive items from the other three categories. I recently began organizing my notes using this system. My aim is to create a second brain that will help me find and retrieve information more efficiently.

📖 12-min

🦀 The Importance of Letting Go

I found this episode of Radiolab to be truly enjoyable to listen to. It is about the story of a woman who successfully bred hermit crabs, something that scientists had been unable to do until that point. She accomplished this by embracing chaos and letting go of the pursuit of perfection. The lesson here is: Allow the chaos to benefit everyone a little bit. The turbulence that you resist may be the very thing that will help you survive. Our love can only do so much. You're not responsible for saving everyone. Let them be crabs 🦀.

🎧 25-min

⭐ A Random quote and music tracks…

You don’t have to be good at everything. But become exceptional at something. “The reason why it's so important to be exceptional at one thing is that people will come to you with more opportunities because they know that you’re phenomenal at a particular thing, and that's how you get more responsibility. That's how you have more impact.”

🎧 You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, and Organic Electronic here: