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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 101 (Apr 10, 2022) — New Product Sneak Peek, Adult Development, Polarity Thinking, & More
Happy Sunday!
Here’s the latest from Sloww along with the most interesting things I discovered last week.
To respect your time and attention, every newsletter can be read in under 5 minutes. If you enjoy it, please take 5 seconds to forward the email version to some friends and family. 🙏
🌀 Sloww Stuff
New Product Sneak Peek
My latest product will be launching this week! Mini Mind: 365 daily emails of bite-size brain food. Every single day for a year, I’ll send you a short email introducing you to a new cognitive concept.
How did we get here? Over the last year, I’ve ventured down the rabbit hole of mental models and cognitive biases. I read the books The Great Mental Models, Super Thinking, The Art of Thinking Clearly, Seeking Wisdom, and Poor Charlie’s Almanack. I also read the Wikipedia lists of cognitive biases, psychological effects, eponymous laws, and many (many) more.
Then, I compiled everything into the 🔒Mental Mastery Cheatsheet. But, a massive spreadsheet of 650+ rows sorted alphabetically can be quite overwhelming. So, I went a couple steps further and paired similar concepts together (650+ concepts organized into 365 emails) and grouped them into themes (12 themes with ~30 emails each). Here’s a teaser of the Mini Mind year-long roadmap:
🧠 Modern Knowledge
Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development
Various Sources
Robert Kegan is a psychologist who teaches, researches, writes, and consults. His work spans 40+ years and explores ongoing psychological transformation and its implications for supporting adult learning and professional development. While I’ve read a bit about his work before, I wanted to hear more about it in his own (recent) words, so here’s what I explored:
Sources:
- Most Recent Podcast with Robert Kegan (Growing as Grown-Ups | 2021)
- Overview of 5 Stages of Adult Development (Emerge | 2020)
- The Evolution of the Self (Rebel Wisdom | 2019)
Highlights:
- Stages 3-5: Stage 3 (Socialized Mind) is “being written upon by your culture’s values.” Stage 4 (Self-Authoring Mind) is “picking up the psychological pen in your own hand” and being the “author of your own meaning-making system.” Stage 5 (Self-Transforming Mind) is a “more fluid internal psychology” that can “create an even bigger self that can hold onto multiple systems.”
- Two Human Endeavors: “The first big endeavor is to honor the gift of our potential to grow. A caterpillar is not meant to just become and bigger and stronger caterpillar—it has the potential to evolve wings and transcend its earth-bound captivity … Our second endeavor, our need to protect ourselves and defend ourselves from what feel like unacceptable losses, is a tremendously important part of the human experience.”
- Dark Side of Development: “You must also have a powerful way of engaging the fearful side of development. The loss or imagined losses that are inherent in the whole project of leaving behind a whole way of knowing oneself and knowing one’s relationship to the world. All of which has to undergo a death before a rebirth—some kind of dramatic shift which is initially experienced as a loss. What feels truest to me is the need to be holding on not just to the miracle of development but to a bit of the agony of it.”
- The Developmental Bridge: “Think of developmental transition like a bridge—one stage at one side of the bridge and the next stage at the other side of the bridge. We cannot just stand on the further side of the bridge and tell all the people on the other side, ‘It’s great over here! Come on over.’ when they aren’t even sure there’s a bridge.”
- The Present Need: “Finding some way to better appreciate the loss that people are experiencing from the push for them to develop faster than they’re ready to is absolutely the present need in this country and on the planet.”
Pair with: An Introduction to “Ego Development Theory” by Susanne Cook-Greuter (EDT Summary)
“Robert Kegan‘s work on orders of consciousness is probably some of the most widely respected anywhere. As is the sophisticated theory and research of Jane Loevinger on the stages of self development. One of Loevinger’s main students and successors, Susanne Gook-Greuter, has done significant research on the highest or third-tier levels of self development.” — Ken Wilber (The Integral Vision)
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
Polarity Thinking: Are You Thinking In Pairs?
80 mins | Integral Life (YouTube)
Beena Sharma from the Vertical Development Academy (VeDA) walks through the concept of “polarity thinking”—which also happens to be featured as one of my 10 most life-changing ideas I’ve ever discovered.
“Polarities show up everywhere. It’s my most exciting topic … There’s a big relationship between polarity thinking and developmental thinking.” — Beena Sharma
What is a polarity? Here’s an intro and visualization:
“Our most basic picture of the interdependent pair includes two poles and an energy system that flows between and around them in the form of an infinity loop” — Barry Johnson
Perhaps the most obvious version of that in real life is breathing:
Learn more: Polarity Thinking 101: An Introduction to the Power of Polarities (+ Visuals)
🤯 Mind Expanding
Buff-Tip Moth
Reddit
Nature is nuts! This moth resembles a broken twig when at rest. You have to see it to believe it, so here’s a photo and video.
It’s probably not at all surprising that almost all the 🔒mind-expanding highlights from the last 50 newsletter issues can be categorized under the topics of: universe, life, and perspective.
💡 New Learning
Arete
Wikipedia
· Concept in ancient Greek thought that refers to “excellence” or “moral virtue.”
· In its earliest appearance, this notion of excellence was ultimately bound up with the notion of the fulfillment of purpose: the act of living up to one’s full potential.
💭 Deep Thought
Find the intersection.
In “Let Your Life Speak” (Book Summary + 🔒Premium Summary), Parker J. Palmer says:
“True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’ Buechner’s definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world.”
Does this remind you of anything? It’s a critical component of Ikigai 2.0! Have you found your intersection yet?
💬 Wise Words
Enough is abundance to the wise.
— Euripides
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Have an alive week!
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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