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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 053 (Mar 14, 2021) — Early Retirement Extreme, Brain Insights, Plato’s Cave, & More
Hi friends,
Sloww Sunday is a free newsletter delivering the latest from Sloww along with the most interesting things I came across last week.
New News
🤔 Ever wonder why Sloww is named “Sloww”? This Twitter thread explains why.
🤯 Want to go deeper? Here’s a Twitter thread outlining why it’s likely independent thinking doesn’t exist.
Sloww Stuff
New Public & Premium Posts:
Wow! Where to begin? This is not your average book about money, or even your average book about financial independence. This is something you’ve probably never seen before: systems thinking + lifestyle design. Jacob is a real-life example of truly thinking—and acting—differently. Fair Warning: This book will make you question everything about your day-to-day existence. It’s societal deprogramming on an entirely different level. I’m not sure I’ve ever come across someone else who is a true living and breathing “Renaissance man” in the modern world. Jacob seems to have mastered key elements of the physiological, intellectual, emotional, social, economic, technical, and ecological aspects of living.
🔒 “Early Retirement Extreme” Synthesis: How to Build a Lifestyle Design Strategy & System (+ Visuals)
This Premium synthesis includes content from all the following sources:
- ERE book
- ERE blog
- ERE wiki & forum
- Jacob’s appearances on a few recent podcasts
- Jacob’s 10-year update posted on Get Rich Slowly
Modern Knowledge
🧠 My Stroke of Insight
(20 mins | YouTube)
This fascinating talk has been viewed 30+ million times and was the first TED Talk to ever go viral! Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist, author, and speaker. When she was 37 years old, a blood vessel exploded in the left half of her brain. Over the next few hours, she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. And, for the next 5 weeks, she experienced life in just the right side of her brain. It took her the next 8 years to fully recover.
Her work is helping to advance the knowledge on the two hemispheres of the brain—they are structurally separate and functionally independent from one another, but they communicate together.
Left Brain Hemisphere:
- “doing,” past & future, thinks in language, detailed, scheduled, judges, critically analyzes, logical, linear, knows you are an individual
Right Brain Hemisphere:
- “being,” present moment, thinks in pictures, open, expansive, big picture, intuitive, sees life as energy, knows no boundaries
“I’m often asked: ‘How do I know which hemisphere I’m in at any moment?’ This is the litmus test: Our left brain would rather be right than happy, and our right brain would rather be happy than right. I wish for you the perfect balance.” — Jill Bolte Taylor
Timeless Wisdom
⛰️ Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
(YouTube)
Early Retirement Extreme relates modern industrialized consumerism to the allegory of the cave from The Republic by Plato. It’s worth understanding—it’s one of the most famous ideas in philosophy. After watching 10+ videos to find the best explanations, I narrowed it down to these 3 for you. I’d watch them in order below to get the gist in under 20 minutes. Enjoy!
“Let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened.” — Plato (quoting Socrates)
💭 Deep Quote
“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” — Thomas Sowell
Bonus from Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less:
“Essentialists see trade-offs as an inherent part of life, not as an inherently negative part of life. Instead of asking, ‘What do I have to give up?’ they ask, ‘What do I want to go big on?'” — Greg McKeown
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Have an essential week!
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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