#39: 5 Japanese Concepts For Life

#GreatWork #YouthAge #BigGoals #WorkofLove #JapaneseConcepts

Oct 06, 2023

👋 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:

👨🏼‍🔬 How to Do Great Work | Part II
🧗🏼 You Can Handle Much More Than You Think
🪶 The Work of Love
㊗️ 5 Japanese Concepts For Life
🪴 Random Tips for Better Life
🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On
🎵 Music I'm Listening To

👨🏼‍🔬 How to Do Great Work | Part II

A field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you. Don't worry if you find you're interested in different things than other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste for work means you'll be productive. And you're more likely to find new things if you're looking where few have looked before.
Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of the latter when young and keep some of the former when old.

📖 45-min

🧗🏼 You Can Handle Much More Than You Think

Some people shy away from going after big goals or life changes because they see people who are in those states and get scared. They see the family with four kids on vacation, and they think, “Oh my god having four kids looks so hard,” but they don’t consider how that family had at least four and probably more like ten years to get used to the four kid life. Big changes take time. And during that time, you adjust. Don’t avoid going after big goals because the life that comes with it scares you. Start the business. Publish the articles. Have the kids. Yes, it will be hard, stressful, and a big adjustment, and you can’t imagine what life will look like once you have all those new obligations and worries and fears on you. But you’ll get used to them. You can handle much more than you think.

📖 4-min

🪶 The Work of Love

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

㊗️ 5 Japanese Concepts For Life

In learning and appreciating other cultures, we can learn to see our own culture through their lens and become empathic. These are 5 Japanese concepts that resonated with me in this article:

Omoiyari means caring and showing sincere consideration for others.
Ikigai is the Japanese term for the state of well-being induced by devotion to enjoyable activities, which leads to a sense of fulfillment.
Wabi-sabi is a concept that encourages us to embrace our imperfections and accept the natural cycle of life.
Mottainai means respecting the resources we have, not wasting them, and using them with a sense of gratitude.
Kaizen is a method of continuous improvement based on the theory that small, ongoing positive changes can be significant.

📖 5-min

🪴 Random Tips for a Better Life

Things you use for a significant fraction of your life (bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in.
You can improve your communication skills with practice much more effectively than you can improve your intelligence with practice. If you’re not that smart but can communicate ideas clearly, you have a great advantage over everybody who can’t communicate clearly.
You listen to successful people talk about their methods, remember that all the people who used the same methods and failed did not make videos about it.
How you spend every day is how you spend your life.
Selfish people should listen to advice to be more selfless, selfless people should listen to advice to be more selfish. This applies to many things. Whenever you receive advice, consider its opposite as well. You might be filtering out the advice you need most.
Understand people have the right to be tasteless.
Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment.

📖 11-min