#5: Healing from Grief

Importance of forgiveness, fear-setting, grief, finding love, and product strategy

Feb 10, 2023

👋 Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Pursuit. I spend over 10 hours each week learning about building great products and living fulfilling lives. I created "Pursuit" to share these discoveries with a larger community and connect with others who share similar interests.

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I hope you're doing well. I just wanted to let you know that I switched things up last week and decided to publish on Fridays instead! That's why you didn’t receive last week's edition on Saturday.

This week’s discovery:

The Importance of Forgiveness - #death
Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month - #fear
The Science & Process of Healing From Grief - #grief
This KEEPS 99% of People Single! Fix This to Find Love - #love
Amazon’s Same-Day Delivery Experiment with Uber (Bill Gurley) - #business
What Does It Mean to Be Strategic? - #strategy
The Product Strategy Stack - #product-strategy

The Importance of Forgiveness

How can you prepare yourself for death? Here’s Siddhartha Mukherjee’s advice to his patients that are near the end of their lives:

I mean, the advice I give people is think about forgiving someone. Think about being forgiven. And think about something that you'd like to do that you haven't done yet, because I can't stop time. No one can. But I can slow time and I can correct time. And by correct time, I mean, when people die and I see this every day, you know, it's part of my practice… I say to people, what's hankering you? And the answer is often that they haven't told someone that they love them. They haven't forgiven someone and they haven't been forgiven by someone, just three simple things. And I say, okay, yeah, there's a phone next to you. Pick up the phone and call someone that you haven't forgiven… Just say, I forgive you. Or pick up the phone and say to someone, I'm really sorry… I did something. Can you please forgive me? And pick up the phone and say to someone, I love you. And that's okay. There is a spiritual burden that lifted from you when you say those three things and you make yourself ready to die. It's already in yourself. You know, you can crash a plane, you can land a plane. I want people to land a plane.

🎧 59-min

Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month

What strategies can you use to effectively define your fears and avoid mistakes? In this TED video, Tim Ferriss explains how his exercise of "fear-setting" has been essential in achieving both personal and professional success. Through this exercise, Tim encourages people to face their fears head-on and to define their "nightmare" scenarios in order to realize the worst case is not that bad and that they can take steps to prepare and mitigate potential risks. He also emphasizes that inaction is the greatest risk of all and encourages readers to do something they fear every day.

Here are my favorite highlights:

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, ‘Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything,’ and an optimist who says, ‘Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine any way.’ Either way, nothing happens.
You have comfort. You don’t have luxury. And don’t tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort.

📺 13-min

The Science & Process of Healing From Grief

Last week, I heard the horrible news of the sudden death of a family member. I went back to my archive to get some advice on healing from grief.

The relationship of memory to grief

Huberman discusses the concept of mapping relationships in the brain and body through the dimensions of the proximity of space, proximity in time, and proximity of attachment. When someone or an animal is taken away, the grief process becomes the process of uncoupling and reordering the understanding of the person in space and time. This can be very difficult and, for some people, almost impossible to do, especially at the outset of grief. This can lead to a stage of denial as the brain continues to make predictions about the person's presence and behavior based on the rich catalog of experiences and ideas about the person.

🎧 2-hours

This KEEPS 99% of People Single! Fix This to Find Love

One of the biggest misconceptions about love is that it will magically appear when you're not actively searching for it. This notion is a romantic fantasy, but the reality is that finding love requires effort, just like finding anything else in life. This includes putting in the effort to work on yourself, finding the right person, and creating a loving relationship. The idea that love will magically appear without effort can lead to disappointment and keep people single. In contrast, understanding that love takes constant effort, not just when starting a relationship but also throughout its duration, can help set the right expectations and maintain a healthy relationship.

🎧 58-min

Amazon’s Same-Day Delivery Experiment with Uber (Bill Gurley)

Jeff Bezos has exceptional entrepreneurial skills that have contributed to the success of Amazon. One of his key traits is the ability to instill a culture of experimentation and risk-taking within the company. This allows Amazon to continuously test new ideas and drive innovation, even at its current scale. Bezos believes that an experiment should only be killed when the last person with good judgment gives up, which is a mindset that sets Amazon apart from other big companies. Startups can compete with big companies because they don't give up easily and take more shots at success by continuously experimenting and pivoting until they find what works.

Listen to the snip below to find out how Amazon used Uber to launch same-day delivery:

🎧 4-min

What Does It Mean to Be Strategic?"

Being strategic is a sort of practice, a thinking hygiene. Simply put, being strategic means that the outcomes produced by our actions are not at odds with our intentions.
Strategic work means having a perch to observe what’s happening across a broad swath of the organization and industry and providing a stream of insights. It also means engaging with various teams and helping them wrangle with their strategy challenges. And often, strategic work is about creating conditions for the right thing to happen as opposed to direct action, so the behind-the-scenes influence is involved.

📖 8-min

The Product Strategy Stack

Difficulty prioritizing is often a strategy issue, not an execution issue. It is impossible to make rigorous prioritization decisions when the guidance on how to do so is missing, unclear, or disconnected from what you are trying to do.

Some symptoms of a lack of product strategy are: difficulty prioritizing, miscommunication within teams, muddied UX, lack of coordination across teams, diminishing returns, product-market fit saturation, and a negative impact on morale.

This article by Ravi Mehta (Chief Product Officer @ Tinder and EIR @ Reforge, previously @ Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Xbox) is probably one of the most important articles on setting up product strategy at a company. I highly recommend reading the whole article if you’re interested in this topic.

📖 20-min

3 Lessons from a Great Book:

I added this new section to Pursuit to share my favorite three lessons from the books I enjoyed reading in the past. Hope you like it 😊

“Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" by Oliver Burkeman

Learn to manage your energy levels, not just your time. For example, if you know you are most productive in the morning, schedule your most important tasks for the morning, and save less important tasks for later in the day when your energy levels might be lower.
Embrace uncertainty and learn to be comfortable with ambiguity. For example, instead of getting frustrated when plans change, try to see it as an opportunity to try something new.
Recognize that time management is not about being busy but about being intentional with your time. For example, instead of filling your day with as many activities as possible, choose a few important things to focus on, and make sure you have time for rest and relaxation.