👋 Welcome to this week's Pursuit. My name is Amir, and each week I go over 10 hours of content in pursuit of living a meaningful, fulfilling and balanced life. I'm grateful to share my findings with you and hope I can have a tiny impact on your life. Subscribe now if you haven't already!
This week’s discovery:
🏆 Ambition: The Illusion of Arrival
👭 The Power of Spending More Time with Friends
👶🏼 Fun Facts About Babies
👨🏼🔬 How to Do Great Work | Part I
😶 Inaction Costs a Fortune
🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On
🎵 Music I'm Listening To
🏆 Ambition: The Illusion of Arrival
Ambition has its merits and pitfalls, but the key thing to consider is the texture of restlessness that accompanies it. If your mind is constantly occupied by what you have to do next, then you are always living for some imagined state. Simply put, you will never “arrive,” and any belief that reaching a goal will bring lasting peace will prove to be illusory. But if your ambition is directed to a pursuit that has no concrete end state, that means that the endeavor itself is meaningful on its own. The restlessness you feel is the result of a challenge you deem worthwhile, as partaking in it allows the boundaries of your mind to expand with each attempt. Your ambition is not directed toward a future state, but rather toward making the most out of the moment you occupy now.
In one of the earliest editions of my newsletter (#8: Don't Force Anything), I shared a video of Alan Watts discussing the concept of wu-wei. I came across it again in this article, and this time it resonated with me more. After reading this, you almost feel a weight being lifted from your chest.
The Daoists summarize their response to this question through the concept of wu-wei, which roughly translates to “effortless action.” The belief is that the world we occupy is already in harmony, but this equilibrium is disturbed by our endless desires and wants. So in order to restore this balance, we are to navigate the world according to how it already is, instead of attempting to bend it to our will. It’s to swim with the current of the river to see where it takes us, rather than fighting against it to go to a destination we already have in mind.
📖 4-min (reshared)
👭 The Power of Spending More Time with Friends
In the pursuit of connection, it is important to recognize that the quality of relationships holds more weight than their quantity. Instead, focus on cultivating meaningful connections with your closest friends. Engage fully in these interactions by setting aside distractions like your phone and dedicating an entire day to immersing yourself in their company. Embrace the power of intentionality and consider embarking on adventures to breathtaking locations as a way to deepen your bond. Additionally, make a conscious effort to maintain contact with your friends through various communication channels and consistently express your appreciation and gratitude for their presence in your life. Remember that being busy should never serve as an excuse for neglecting these connections. Let friendship guide your decisions and invest wholeheartedly in the people who enrich your world.
🎧 5-min
👶🏼 Fun Facts About Babies
Babies have giant heads. I made this visual thinking it was gonna emphasize how big baby heads are, but after looking at the big-headed guy on the right for a while, it started to look normal to me, and the normal-headed guy suddenly looked like he had a ridiculously small head. So now I’m realizing that the big takeaway is that baby heads are normal and the rest of our heads are tiny.
Babies have intensely irregular sleep patterns.
And this one is about picking a life partner:
When you choose a life partner, you’re choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner and someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100 vacations, your primary leisure time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you’ll hear about 18,000 times. Intense shit!
📖 10-min
👨🏼🔬 How to Do Great Work | Part I
This is a rather lengthy essay by Paul Gram (yes, it's a 45-minute read 😬). I will share my highlights in two parts. If you are genuinely struggling to find meaningful work or strongly dislike your job, you would be remiss if you don't read the entire article.
The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going. You'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that's fine. It's good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields. Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your part of it.
What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for. You need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.
Ambition comes in two forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and the more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what to do.
📖 45-min
😶 Inaction Costs a Fortune
If you see someone failing to take action, it tells you they don’t know the cost of inaction. Just because the cost of inaction is invisible doesn’t mean it’s not real. What happens if you don’t take action? Nothing. The cost of inaction is the status quo. If you’re ok where you are, then you don’t need to do anything. But if you want to get to the next level, you need to understand the cost of doing nothing. Action is expensive, but inaction costs a fortune.
📖 2-min
🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On
Most of the life-changing, critical turning points in life are a direct result of building up adequate volume of a) nerve, b) effort, c) persistence. In that order.
🎵 Music Tracks I'm Listening To
🎧 You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, Disco, and Organic Electronic here:
Previously on Pursuit: