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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 139 (Apr 2, 2023) — Extended Mind, Just World, Quality vs Quantity, & More
Sloww Sunday shares creations from Sloww along with curations of fascinating finds to 10,000+ students of life. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding the email version of this newsletter to other lifelong learners.
📚 Lifelong Learning
The Extended Mind
I just finished The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul (Book Summary). Highlights include:
- Thinking with our bodies: sensations, movements, gestures
- Thinking with our surroundings: natural spaces, built spaces, idea spaces
- Thinking with our relationships: experts, peers, groups
- Bonus: why take notes, neural synchrony, music and thinking, gesture gap in children, and the final page of the book highlights John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” thought experiment!
“As it is, we use our brains entirely too much—to the detriment of our ability to think intelligently. What we need to do is think outside the brain … Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us—drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these ‘extra-neural’ resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively—to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone … That’s where this book comes in: it aims to operationalize the extended mind.” — Annie Murphy Paul
🌎 Lighter Living
What matters most to you?
Here’s some inspiration about priority, focus, and trade-offs that I revisited this week:
- “To do two things at once is to do neither.” — Publilius Syrus
- “One who chases two rabbits catches none.” — Confucius
- “To follow, without halt, one aim: that’s the secret of success.” — Anna Pavlova
- “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” — Stephen Covey
- “Until you know what is important right now, what is important right now is to figure out what is important right now.” — Greg McKeown
- “What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” — Gary Keller
- “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” — Ron Swanson
Explore more: How do I design a lighter life? (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Deeper Purpose
Quality is a byproduct of Quantity
Find the thing you love so much, that you’re deeply passionate about, that you need/want to do all the time, that you can’t not do…and quality will come as a byproduct of quantity over time.
How do you find that thing in the first place? Same process of quality through quantity. Try a bunch of stuff you think you love over the years. Most projects will be abandoned as the passion dwindles, but they will lead you to what matters most.
My journey over the course of 10+ years:
- 100+ business ideas brainstormed
- 5 ideas pursued over the years
- 1 still going (Sloww)
Explore more: How do I find higher purpose (Sloww Stage 2)?
Get the eBook: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook)
🧠 Mental Wealth
Just-World Fallacy
So, I ran two polls on Twitter: Did you choose to be born? & Do you have past-life memories? While I don’t have any personal, direct, lived experience of any of this, 31% of people claimed they chose to be born, and 16% said they have past-life memories. This prompted a number of replies about memories, karma, reincarnation, and more. So, I’m looking into all this a bit more because I want a holistic perspective and to better understand the arguments on all sides.
My first thought as a counter to karma was the “just-world fallacy” (or “just-world hypothesis”) which is in the book Super Thinking (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary) and my cognitive bias cheatsheet. The just-world fallacy assumes that “people get what they deserve”—that actions will have morally fair and fitting consequences for the actor. It’s the tendency to attribute consequences to—or expect consequences as the result of—either a universal force that restores moral balance or a universal connection between the nature of actions and their results. This belief generally implies the existence of cosmic justice, destiny, divine providence, desert, stability, order, or karma.
“It can be challenging to acknowledge that a good portion of your success stems from luck. Many people instead choose to believe that the world is completely fair, orderly, and predictable. This view is called the just world hypothesis, where people always get what they deserve, good or bad, because of their actions alone, with no accounting for luck or randomness. This view is summed up as you reap what you sow.” — Gabriel Weinberg & Lauren McCann (Super Thinking)
Explore more: How do I master the mind (Sloww Stage 3)?
Get Mini Mind: 365 Daily Emails of Bite-Size Brain Food
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
Life in a Nutshell
If everything is just happening and the meaning of life is just to be alive…
- “The so-called outside world and the so-called inside world come together. They are a happening. Your thoughts are happening, just like the sounds going on outside and everything is simply a happening and all you’re doing is watching it.” — Alan Watts
- “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” — Alan Watts
And, if everyone’s experience is valid and no experience is bad/wrong…
- “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.” — Eckhart Tolle
And, if everything in the universe is coherent including incoherence…
- “The universe as a whole is coherent, and anything incoherent we do is just part of the coherence of the universe.” — David Bohm
And, if we aren’t making our hearts beat, breaths breathe, or minds think…
- “There are trillions of cells in your body that are doing what they’re supposed to do, all of nature, everything. And, you wake up and you realize, ‘I’m not doing any of this. I didn’t make my body, I didn’t make my mind think, I don’t make my heart beat, I don’t make my breath breathe.” — Michael Singer
What could there possibly be to worry about?
- “Don’t worry. You don’t know enough to worry. That’s God’s truth. Who do you think you are that you should worry, for crying out loud?” — Terence McKenna
Explore more: How do I embody wisdom (Sloww Stage 4)?
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Go with the Sloww,
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur
