👋 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:
❤️🩹 The Three Types of Empathy
🏀 Nike's Revolutionary Deal with Michael Jordan
🎨 The Intricacies of Taste
🛣️ Falling in Love with the Process
🤷🏼♂️ Find Delight in Unknown
🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On
🎵 Music I'm Listening To
❤️🩹 The Three Types of Empathy
There are three types of empathy. Most people are familiar with emotional empathy, where you feel what the other person is feeling. However, there are two other types of empathy that often get overlooked: cognitive empathy and empathic concern. Cognitive empathy is the ability to diagnose what is causing someone distress and offer solutions, while empathic concern is the desire to help another person. These three types of empathy don't necessarily correlate within individuals, so it's important to value and cultivate all three. Additionally, if you're someone who rates high on the emotional empathy scale, it's important to be selective about the kind of empathy you're investing in to avoid burnout. Instead, focus on cultivating cognitive empathy and empathic concern, which have been shown to be protective against burnout.
🎧 6-min
🏀 Nike's Revolutionary Deal with Michael Jordan
Unlike traditional shoe deals of the time, Jordan's deal was structured as a 5% royalty on gross revenue from the sales of Air Jordans, including the shoes and merchandise. In its first year, the Air Jordan line sold an incredible $126 million worth of products, which made up about 15% of Nike's entire revenue for the year. What's even more mind-blowing is that Jordan made his entire seven-year contract with the Bulls in his first year through the Nike deal, earning a whopping $6.3 million in royalties. Talk about a slam dunk!
🎧 2-min
🎨 The Intricacies of Taste
There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. The development of taste requires experimental consumption and a commitment to intentionality. That takes you from randomness to discernment. From liking things just because everyone else likes them, to knowing exactly why you find something intriguing, why it feels immersive. It is appreciating particularity. Picking up little signals of what you like: a little +/- imbued in everything.
Lean into spikiness. Learn all you can about a particular domain of your life. Experiment frequently. Dig deeper in what you like. Whether it be books, people, art, cuisine, fashion, interior decoration, ideas. Qualify it internally. You don’t need to explain it to others. Track what draws you in, captivates, catches in the crevices of your mind long after consumption. The colors, the heat, the longing, the taste, the tension, the feeling. Sooner or later, it’ll be clear, it’ll be instinctive: why you keep choosing the things you do. How to improve those choices. At some point it is vital to really make your own decisions. You can take input and opinions from other people, but really, maturity is owning your choices and not diverting responsibility. The challenge for me is choosing well, and not questioning myself so relentlessly.
📖 4-min
🛣️ Falling in Love with the Process
Focus can only occur when we have said yes to one option and no to all other options. In other words, elimination is a prerequisite for focus. As Tim Ferriss says, “What you don’t do determines what you can do.” Focus is the key to productivity because saying no to every other option unlocks your ability to accomplish the one thing that is left. If you look at the people who stay focused on their goals, you start to realize that it’s not the events or the results that make them different. It’s the commitment to the process. They fall in love with the daily practice, not the individual event. What’s funny, of course, is that this focus on the process is what will allow you to enjoy the results anyway. If you want to become significantly better at anything, you have to fall in love with the process of doing it. You have to fall in love with building the identity of someone who does the work, rather than merely dreaming about the results that you want.
📖 12-min
🤷🏼♂️ Find Delight in Unknown
Unexpected changes can be scary, but they also have the potential to unlock growth and expansion. By reducing the need for cognitive closure, we can find joy and beauty in the unknown, which can change what we value. Anchoring our identity to what energizes us can help us weather the storm of unexpected challenges. When facing something unexpected, we can ask ourselves three questions: how might this change expand what we're capable of, change what we value, and change how we define ourselves. By doing so, we can loosen our grip on our current identity and see change with more possibility.
🎧 3-min
🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On
You can’t enjoy the highs without experiencing the lows. Ride the wave.
🎵 Music Tracks I'm Listening To
🎧 You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, Disco, and Organic Electronic here:
Previously on Pursuit: