#13: Practice vs. Ritual

#intention #feedback #life #health #conflict #AI

Apr 07, 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:

✨ Practice vs. Ritual #intention
👂🏼 How to Ask for Feedback Effectively #feedback
💫 40 Lessons From 30 Years - #life
🥕 Is There Evidence That Anticipation Helps Digestive Functions? - #health
😠 The Rubber Band Theory: Navigating Organizational Conflict - #conflict
⭐ A quote, ChatGPT, and music tracks…

✨ Practice vs. Ritual

A practice is simply something you do to achieve a desired outcome, but a ritual is an offering of your attention and time to something beyond yourself. Take a walk in nature, for example. You could approach it as a disciplined practice, aiming to get your steps in and improve your physical health. Or, you could approach it as a devotional ritual, allowing the woods to invite you into something deeper and more meaningful. The choice is yours. Remember, it's not just about what you do, but how you do it. So, choose to approach your everyday routines and activities with devotion and intention, and watch as your life becomes more vibrant and alive.

🎧 6-min

👂🏼 How to Ask for Feedback Effectively

If you want to get better at receiving feedback, start by asking the right question. Instead of asking if someone has feedback for you, ask what you can do or stop doing to make it easier to work with you. Embrace the discomfort that comes with hearing honest feedback, and listen with the intent to understand rather than to respond. When you receive feedback, reward the candor by fixing the problem and asking the person if you overcorrected or undercorrected. If you disagree with the feedback, find the 5 or 10% that you can agree with and give voice to that. Then, have a respectful disagreement and remember to listen, challenge, and commit.

🎧 4-min

💫 40 Lessons From 30 Years

Couldn’t make this one short…

It’s never the right time. Any time you catch yourself saying “oh it’ll be a better time later,” you’re probably just scared. Or unclear on what to do. There is never a right time for the big things in life: having kids, changing jobs, breaking up, getting engaged, married, moving in together. And no it’s never an amount of money, either. Your conception that it’s too early is just your fear, and once you dive in you’ll figure it out. Old people tend to regret the things they didn’t do, or didn’t do earlier. Not the things they did.
You have more time to build a career than a family. You can complete great work well into your 80s and 90s. If you want to know your grandkids as adults, you only have until your mid 30s to start a family. Every year you spend waiting is another year you lose with your future family.
Money is a tool for freedom. The best reason to accumulate wealth is to buy yourself freedom from anything you don’t want to do, and the freedom to do the things you do want to do. Money is not an end in itself. If you sit on it and never use it, you’ve wasted your life.
Trust your negative gut, not your positive gut. If you have a great feeling about something, you might just be excited or gullible or not thinking it through, so take your time. But if you have a bad feeling about something, you’re almost certainly right about it.

📖 7-min

🥕 Is There Evidence That Anticipation Helps Digestive Functions?

If you want to optimize your digestion, it's important to be consistent with your eating schedule. Our bodies have an anticipatory signal that helps us prepare for meals, so switching up meal times can throw off our digestive system. In fact, eating healthy food at the wrong time can be just as harmful as eating junk food. Additionally, our digestive system has natural rhythms that slow down at night, so eating late can lead to poor digestion and even a "food hangover" the next morning. To avoid these issues, stick to a consistent eating schedule and try to eat earlier in the evening to give your body time to properly digest your food. Remember, consistency is key when it comes to optimizing your health and well-being.

🎧 4-min

😠 The Rubber Band Theory: Navigating Organizational Conflict

Approaching conflict with the mindset that it will bring ideas, perspectives, and people together, including strengthening relationships, is very powerful. It reframes conflict not as a problem with one solution but as an opportunity to generate new solutions that meet the needs or criteria of multiple people.

Here’s how you can reduce and redirect tension during conflict:

Understand perspectives and name assumptions
- I might be missing something. Can you help me understand how you arrived at this conclusion?
Identify and explicitly name the source(s) of conflict
- What’s most important to you about this decision?
Generate all possible outcomes
- What do you see as the best possible outcome?
(Re)Establish a shared external goal you both agree on
- What’s the big goal that we both agree on?
Clarify the criteria for how you’ll make a short-term resolution
- What information might we be missing that would help each of us move forward?
Actually commit to the decision

📖 13-min

⭐ A quote, ChatGPT, and music tracks…

I think it was George Saunders who wrote stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more. We only start to make real relationships when we stop hiding, when we open up

ChatGPT Plugins: This video is mind-blowing. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has the potential to become the dominant attention grabber on the internet. If they get the business model right, they could become a significant threat to Google and Meta. If you want to geek out further, read this long essay (28-min read).