October Favourites 2021
Table of Contents
- October Favourites 2021
- 🍿 My Favourite Movies of the Month
- 📺 My Favourite Shows of the Month
- 📚 My Favourite Reads of the Month
- 💪🏽 My Favourite Lifestyle Changes of the Month
- 💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month
- Quotes
- Concepts & Definitions
- 💡 My Favourite Fun Fact of the Month
- 🧨 My Favourite Sparks of Motivation & Inspiration
- 🎨 My Favourite Art of the Month
- 🤔 My Favourite Realisations of the Month
- 🎬 My Favourite Videos of the Month
- 🎸 My Favourite Music of the Month
🍿 My Favourite Movies of the Month
The Uninvited
The Descent Part 1
It Follows
Nightbooks
The Descent Part 2
Twitches Part 2
Greta
Twitches Part 1
Battle Royale
Wishmaster
📺 My Favourite Shows of the Month
Squid Game
Community
📚 My Favourite Reads of the Month
The End of Average
By Todd Rose
The average doesn’t just influence how we see ourselves—our entire social system has been built around this average-size-fits-all model. Schools are designed for the average student. Healthcare is designed for the average patient. Employers try to fill average job descriptions with employees on an average career trajectory. Our government implements programs and initiatives to serve the average person. For more than a century, we’ve believed that the best way to run our institutions is by focusing on the average person. But when you actually drill down into the numbers, you find an amazing fact: no one is average—which means that our society built for everyone is actually serving no one.
💪🏽 My Favourite Lifestyle Changes of the Month
Quote Habit
I'm thinking of starting a new habit that should encourage me to pay more attention and be more reflective of the things that I consume. The habit would simply involve me trying to find one quote I'd like to takeaway from everything I watch.
Checkpoint Check-In Best & Worst
In addition to ending my days by summarising the best and worst moments, I've been doing the same thing with each of my daily checkpoint check-ins. I'm hoping that by doing this I'll become more attune to the smaller things in life that I appreciate and detest.
New Job
Speaking of major lifestyle changes, this month I got a new job as a frontend developer at a mental health and wellness startup. I'm still learning how to balance the lines between personal and work time as a remote worker, but hopefully all will fall in line in time.
💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month
Quotes
"I'd like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor insignificant preamble to something else." — Dazed and Confused (1993)
"Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films." — Bong Joon-ho (77th Golden globe Awards Jan 2020)
Concepts & Definitions
The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias that can make it harder for experts to teach beginners. Sometimes the more you know about a thing, the harder it is to explain. An expert in a field often struggles to teach beginners because the expert assumes that certain things that are obvious to them are also obvious to the beginners.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: people who know very little about a subject tend to overestimate how much they know, because they don't know how much they don't know.
💡 My Favourite Fun Fact of the Month
- There's a new EU ruling for the standardisation of adapters for new phones and other small devices that is hoping to reduce waste.
🧨 My Favourite Sparks of Motivation & Inspiration
Option Q
"If you think about it, every time you make a choice, you're not just making it on your own. You're selecting from a list, a menu, of choices that was designed by someone or something else. And whatever freedom you have in that choice is necessarily constrained by social structures, customs, and history that provide the context for that selection" [8:55-9:22]
This one is a fun naming convention, where we can call "off the beaten path" options "option Q". The shape of the Q is symbolic of thinking outside of a confined option set.
In how many of our daily decisions aren't we even considering that there could be a potentially more beneficial option Q?
Example 1: Ordering outside of a menu at a restaurant.
Example 2: Desire paths in urban planning as an analogy for the potential advantages of not defaulting to being compliant with the clear paths set out for us — we might be able to find a more optimal path on our own.
🎨 My Favourite Art of the Month
Yens Wood Work
🤔 My Favourite Realisations of the Month
YouTube Million Dollar Listings
I've realised that I'm no longer a fan of the YouTube trend showcasing million dollar properties. I don't understand why we tend to put these unaffordable properties on such a pedestal. Wouldn't it be better to showcase more accessible homes that people can feel inspired by?
The Joy of Crafting
Looking around my room and considering which things bring me joy, I realise that most of the items on that list are things that have been crafted. It makes me recognise that crafting is a practice that I should probably be intentional about doing more often.
Sensory Literacy
The immense value that we place on visual data, while neglecting our other senses (we hear about visual literacy, but rarely about sensory literacy).
🎬 My Favourite Videos of the Month
- "You can make an argument that if you want to be an activist helping catch criminals, one of the best things you can do is encourage everyone you know to be tested and put in a database." [23:40-23:50] Referring to DNA databases that help to identify criminals of heinous crimes.
- Most interesting takeaway for me was about how we'll never know the full scope of all of the dinosaurs and animals that have existed in the past.