Promising Young Woman

Come Play

Tetris

Erased

WeCrashed

Devs

Loot

The Night Agent

Dharma-Vision

🔗 / Michael Dean’s Substack /

Do you soak in a moment at full-saturation, forgetting it forever? Or do you reach for your device, knowing your future self will want to relive it?

Squardle

🔗 / link /

Squaredle is a daily word building game where you swipe connected letters in the grid to create as many words as you can find.

Perplexity.ai

🔗 / link /

Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine I’ve been using to help me with research for my posts.

Dear Mind Wanderers, Reminders of Resolve, The Non-Space Paradox, & Leaving Legacies

🔗 / My Substack /

Reminders of Resolve: A Quick Fix for Focus

The Paradox of Non-Places: A Cure for Culture Shock

Land of Legacies: Where to Preserve Your Soul

Dear Voyeurs, The Curiosity Gap, Anatomy of Creepy Places, & Objectifying Vampires

🔗 / My Substack /

The Curiosity Gap: Spaces Designed to Lure our Gaze

Sensing Psychopathy & the Anatomy of Creepy Places

Objectifying Vampires: Finding Motivation by Identifying our Energy Assets & Liabilities

Speechify Proofreading

🔗 / Link /

My inner voice loves filling in blanks.

I constantly re-read my writing multiple times, only to finally hit publish and discover missing words in sentences.

So I'm starting an experiment where I listen to my longer posts in Speechify in order to auditorially proofread them more easily.

Escaping Meta-Twitter

I accidentally got lost in meta-twitter.

I started using twitter more consistently at the start of this year and I wanted to understand how other people use it as a tool, what benefits they get from it, and how I can best take advantage of it as a tool for myself.

So I followed people who tweeted about how to twitter and wrote about how to write.

My entire feed turned into a revolving door of the same advice from bigger creators and trends slightly reworded in dozens of different ways.

A lot of it was helpful advice. But it was my first time experiencing the inner world of an echo chamber. Where what starts as a bigger creator saying “this worked for me” quickly translates into a smaller creator definitively prescribing what works to their peers.

I realized that I had immersed myself in this community of tweeters and writers, because that’s technically the new hobby I was playing with.

But, to them twitter and writing was a lifestyle.

And, it took me some time to realize it, but to me they were really nothing more than tools to help me communicate and find people with similar interests.

I decided to take a step back and reflect on exactly what I want from Twitter right now and which of the accounts I followed were fulfilling that need.

In the end, I realized that right now my favourite accounts are the ones:

• within a main area of my interest (ex: environmental psychology, environment design, personal psychology, lifestyle design, education, futurism, imagination/creativity),
• which offer unique insights,
• which ask thought provoking questions,
• which value originality and creativity,
• whose authors I could see myself befriending.

I created a new twitter list of my favourite accounts, so that I have a go to aspiration column. These are some of the accounts in my favourites right now:

https://twitter.com/theKevinShen

https://twitter.com/david_perell

https://twitter.com/nathanbaugh27

https://twitter.com/AdamMGrant

https://twitter.com/george__mack

https://twitter.com/dltnio

https://twitter.com/OzolinsJanis

https://twitter.com/SystemSunday

On Meta Cognition

“We are not people looking out at nature. We are nature reflecting on itself” — Then & Now

Semantic Satiation

A psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.

Unschooling

Unschooling is a form of homeschooling, which is the education of children at home or other places rather than in a school. It involves teaching children based on their interests rather than a set curriculum.

Optimizing for Non Regrettable Minutes

How much better would our world be if the people who were creating things wanted people to not regret using them, consuming them, or living in them by the end of it.

Interesting to think about the ones that don’t focus on this: fast/junk food products, wasted time on bad social content, wasted money on degrees that don’t lead to a job .

🔗 / Danny Miranda Podcast #323 /

Details vs Perfectionism

I’m really vibing with the idea of a scenario where being detail-oriented doesn’t necessarily mean being a perfectionist. Not sure how this looks yet, but I’m pretty confident it’s possible and it sounds like something worth attempting.

Metaphor Compensation

Great experience when you’re telling someone about something you’ve learned and they respond with “ooh so it’s kinda like…”. Introducing you to a fun new metaphor you hadn’t considered.

https://twitter.com/LamarElimbo/status/1667316729154772992?s=20

One of my favourite experiences in conversation is when I tell someone about something I’ve learned and they respond with “ooh so it’s kinda like…”.

Introducing me to a fun new analogy I hadn’t considered.

The ability to connect random dots is such an impressive skill to me.

Those of us with our eyes on self development often hear the advice:

"surround yourself with people who are smarter than you".

But I love that there's still so much benefit to having convos with people who haven't delved into our domains of expertise.

Mindfulness Meditation

Hot take: Mindfulness isn’t the only powerful psychological state.

There are so many discussions and studies on the benefits of mindfulness meditation.

There are also just as many different meditation practices.

And just as many different anecdotal descriptions of people's mindfulness experiences.

And just as many people claiming to have tried mindfulness meditation, only to be disappointed by or confused about what they were supposed to experience.

In my opinion, it's been a game of broken telephone. People started touting it as a life-changing practice, so it became a popular concept, and everyone started to add their own little nuances to its description, to the point where it's now a poorly defined method.

It’s popularity has also pushed it into one of my biggest pet peeves — one size fits all solutions.

Assuming that we all have unique goals, points of view, and baseline states of mind, then I can’t believe that something like mindfulness meditation is going to be beneficial for everyone.

Long story short, I want to see more people talking about how they’ve created practices around other beneficial psychological states.

Where are the discussions on practices that elicit joy, bliss, flow, wonder, comfort, nostalgia, pronoia, optimism…

https://twitter.com/LamarElimbo/status/1638360539897159681?s=20

Mindfulness is great, but...

There are sooo many powerful and positive states of mind.

I want to hear more people talking about the practices they have for other beneficial psychological states.

Bring on the routines that elicit bliss, flow, wonder, nostalgia, optimism…

Balance in Baselines

This month I spent a lot of time reminding myself about how the key to balance can be found in the basics.

I pride myself on being a creative person. When I meet a new topic I want to explore I make it a habit of trying to ask 50 questions about it, so that I’m bound to find a unique perspective.

One of my most tightly held values is uniqueness. And one of my biggest pet peeves is someone doling out one size fits all advice as gospel.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest drawbacks of my mindset is overlooking and neglecting the obvious in favour of the complex.

Balance is one of my biggest ambitions.

It’s something that I’ve had to put a lot of work into. It’s practice doesn’t come naturally to me. There have been way too many times where I’ve neglected baseline parts of my life in favour of optimizing another. For example, not allowing myself to date or socialize until I was able to reach a certain degree of success in my career.

So I’ve implemented a new practice in my routine to ensure that I’m not skewing my scales too sloppily to one side. The baseline checkup.

The idea behind baseline checkup is that by figuring out the most basic cause of happiness in each of the major areas in my life, I’ll be able to recognize and react more easily if one of them gets neglected.

Having a baseline checklist is a way to remind ourselves to confirm that our baseline needs are being met, before attempting to strategize new solutions.

The question I’m now making more of a habit asking myself: “what is the minimum viable requirement for…”

• my healthy life blocks (mind, body, environment, social, finance, recreation, and operations),
• effortless consistency,
• a good day,
• …

Questions over Answers

Reminder to self: you don’t aspire to be a person with all of the answers. You aspire to be the person with all the most interesting questions.

Intentional Experiences

How do I create the best experience for myself and for other people at {insert event}?

The Pressure of Turning it into a Side Hustle

I need to start internalizing the goal of exploration, experimentation, and fun when it comes to Mind Your Step.

I need to start thinking about it within my recreation block, as opposed to a potential future contender of my finance block.

I want to stop thinking about long term goals and focus on short term joy. And I want to drastically reduce the amount of content I consume about creators aiming to make a living off of their work. It’s aspirational, but clouds my true current goal of playing and exploring within my niche.

I’d love to stop thinking about posting as a goal and start thinking about it as a byproduct of my explorations.

I really want to figure out how to re-cultivate the curious, playful, and adventurous spirit of my inner child. And completely forget about the trending goal of positioning oneself as an expert.

The Art of Introductions

Introducing yourself is a skill. And I’d like brainstorm a quality way to do it better.

When Revisiting Goals

When restarting hobbies and goals (ex going to the gym) ask yourself why you never fully succeeded with it in the past, so you can avoid the same frictions.

Embodying Wholesome

What does it look / feel like to embody the word wholesome?

Pre Interviewing Authors

Consider conducting a fake interview with a non-fiction author before reading their book, so you can prime yourself with what you hope to gain from reading it. Find what you’re looking for by having an idea of what you’re looking for.

Who You Want To Be

When thinking about your ideal future, try out the statement: “I’m the kind of person who…”.

Rather than “I want…”

Our Second Brain 3.0

What if we could train an ai throughout our life to replicate our brain. 15 minute conversation everyday, with prompts from an ai, so that it can learn about how we think. How could we use this to improve our thinking today.

What if we could send out this copy of our brain to engage with social media, so that it filters in only the most interesting information for us.

What if all of the writing I put out into the world (text messages, newsletter posts, tweets…) can be used after my death as a search engine for my thoughts and opinions. Related to grief tech.

https://twitter.com/LamarElimbo/status/1668062380247351298?s=20

The Future of the Second Brain

What if we could train an AI to replicate our opinions and ways of thinking.

We've seen the AI prompts in the form of:

• What would {person} say about {topic}

and

• Generate a pic in the style of {artist}

What if our AI-powered Second Brain prompted us with questions?

We could have a 15 minute conversation everyday, where it could learn how we think.

And, even cooler, learn to predict how we'd think.

We'd be able to send out this copy of our brain to engage with social media, so that it filters in only the most interesting information for us.

We'd be able to give it to our loved ones after our death.

We'd be able to have it interact with other people's AI Brains and let us know who we'd be most compatible with.

We'd be able to ask it which projects, skills, hobbies, careers, topics, places, games, etc would spark our interest the most.

We'd be able to have it interact with other people's AI Brains and let us know who we'd be most compatible with.

We'd be able to ask it which projects, skills, hobbies, careers, topics, places, games, etc would spark our interest the most.

Experts would be able to rent out their AI Brains to people looking for a consultation or conversation.

What'd happen if we completely offloaded the process of discovery?

If all of our input was filtered for things we'd enjoy?

Is part of the joy of discovery the fact that we dug through a bunch of dirt to get to the treasure?

Or is that a lie we've grown to believe?