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Sloww Sunday Summary: 50 Highlights from Newsletter Issues 1-50
🧠 Modern Knowledge
1. Essentialism Explained: How to Focus on What Matters (Issue #018):
“Only once you give yourself the permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.” — Greg McKeown
Pair with: 🔒“Essentialism” + “Atomic Habits” Synthesis: How to Pick a Path & Make Progress (+ Infographic)
2. Digital Minimalism: Unplugging the Static (Issue #028):
“The Digital Minimalist Philosophy: Technology put to use for intentional purposes in intentional ways. That’s digital minimalism.” — Cal Newport
Pair with: Thoughts on Cal Newport’s Digital Declutter Experiment
3. Financial Independence Retire Early: My Life with FIRE (Issue #003):
“For me, FI has simply been the freedom to pursue a higher purpose – to grow spiritually, to learn, to create and to serve … I don’t see financial independence as the ultimate goal. I see it as just a ticket to the greatest show on earth – the earth itself with all her beauty, complexity, critters and currently crises. The opportunity to ask the Mary Oliver questions: What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life? I’m writing this to invite you to look past the numbers to the meaning of life.” — Vicki Robin
Pair with: FIRE 101: A Beginner’s Guide to FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early)
4. Early Retirement Extreme: A Systems Approach to Resilient Lifestyle Design (Issue #049):
“ERE will give you the tools to become financially independent in 5 years … The key to success is to run your personal finances much like a business, thinking about assets and inventory and focusing on efficiency and value for money. Not just any business but a business that’s flexible, agile, and adaptable.” — Jacob Lund Fisker
Pair with: 🔒“Early Retirement Extreme” Synthesis: How to Build a Lifestyle Design Strategy & System (+ Visuals)
5. Blue Zones: Secrets For Longevity & Happiness (Issue #009):
“To find the Blue Zone, you need to go into peoples’ homes. You need to stop long enough to see detail and to get a feel for what it’s like to live in these places. To see how they cook, to see how they downshift, to see how they live out their purpose, to see how they connect socially.” — Dan Buettner
Pair with: All 150+ Longevity Ingredients from The Blue Zones Kitchen Cookbook (+ Spreadsheet Summary)
6. Flourishing: A New Understanding of Well-Being (Issue #043):
“Relieving the states that make life miserable … has made building the states that make life worth living less of a priority. The time has finally arrived for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the ‘good life.’” — Martin Seligman
7. The Purpose of Purpose (Issue #045):
“We are obsessed with the ‘Why?’ question as a species. We humans are obsessed with purpose.” — Richard Dawkins
8. The Hedgehog Concept (Issue #006):
“There’s a big difference between what you’re good at and what you’re genetically encoded for…” — Jim Collins
Pair with: What is the Hedgehog Concept by Jim Collins? (& How Does it Compare to Ikigai?)
9. Theory of Multiple Intelligences: What Does It Mean to Be Intelligent? (Issue #048):
“All human beings have these intelligences … but no two humans—not even identical twins—have exactly the same profile because even if we have the same genes we don’t have the same experiences.” — Howard Gardner
Pair with: A Look Inside “A Synthesizing Mind” by Howard Gardner (Book Summary)
10. Mental Models: Upgrade Your Thinking and Make Better Decisions (Issue #016):
“A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks. Whether we realize it or not, we then use these models every day to think, decide, and understand our world.” — Shane Parrish
11. What are Memes and Temes? (Issue #026):
“A meme is that which is imitated, or information which is copied from person to person.” — Susan Blackmore
12. Sensemaking & The Consilience Project (Issue #037):
“It’s fairly rare to encounter real thinking. Mostly we encounter meme propagation … Real thinking means ideas come in and then I actually process them … I have my own depth of sensing an experience.” — Daniel Schmachtenberger
Pair with: 🔒The Consilience Project Synthesis: How to Think Clearly in the midst of Information Warfare
13. The History of Philosophy: Summarized and Visualized (Issue #020):
“Contemporary philosophy is dialectical in its method: new arguments necessarily make reference back to earlier positions which provide the background for understanding the commitments which the arguments seek to challenge … The relation of present arguments to past debate provides by itself good enough reasons for regarding the continuation of such debates as the only way of improving our understanding.” — Thomas Baldwin
14. What is Self Actualization? (Issue #005):
“Self-actualization means the making real of the inner self … what you love, what you’re interested in, what excites you … and that is the cause outside yourself which paradoxically then becomes a defining characteristic of the self.” — Abraham Maslow
Pair with: 🔒Self-Actualization Synthesis: How to be a Healthy Self-Actualizer (+ 2 Infographics)
15. Why Self-Actualization is Nonsense (Issue #025):
“Self-actualization can only fall into your lap automatically once you have fulfilled a concrete meaning … Then, you actualize yourself as a byproduct.” — Viktor Frankl
Pair with: 🔒How to Find Meaning in Life with “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl (+ 2 Infographics)
16. What is Vertical Development? (Issue #044):
“A good metaphor to describe this whole process (of vertical development) is a ladder. The ladder rungs represent the stages of development. The climber (on the ladder) is the ego that is navigating reality and stepping into newer and more expanded perspectives. The view (of the climber) from each stage is distinctly different.” — Beena Sharma
17. An Introduction to Ego Development Theory (Issue #037):
“You have to develop a mature ego before you can transcend and let it go.” — Susanne Cook-Greuter
Pair with: An Introduction to “Ego Development Theory” by Susanne Cook-Greuter (EDT Summary)
18. An Introduction to Spiral Dynamics (Issue #034):
“The psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change.” — Clare W. Graves
19. An Introduction to Integral Theory (Issue #046):
“You can keep growing. There truly are higher stages of consciousness—stages of development—that are available to you. And, if you don’t know about those, you’re actually being cheated out of your own higher humanity.” — Ken Wilber
Pair with: An Intro to Integral Theory: “A Theory of Everything” by Ken Wilber (Book Summary)
20. An Introduction to Spiritual Intelligence (Issue #047):
“Spiritual intelligence is the ability to behave with wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace regardless of the situation.” — Cindy Wigglesworth
Pair with: What is Spiritual Intelligence? The Twenty-One Skills of “SQ21” by Cindy Wigglesworth (Book Summary)
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
21. How to do Nothing (Issue #008):
“What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.” — Gilles Deleuze
22. The Goal of Life is Meaning, not Happiness (Issue #023):
“All humans by nature are meaning-seeking, meaning-creating individuals.” — James Hollis
23. How Will You Measure Your Life? (Issue #004):
“Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.” — Clayton Christensen
24. Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (Issue #039):
“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” — Randy Pausch
Pair with: 25 Life Lessons from “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch (Book Summary)
25. Thinking Out Loud (Issue #007):
“I now know with the resources we’ve already mined and the knowledge we already have, it’s highly feasible to take care of all of humanity at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known.” — Buckminster Fuller
Pair with: “Call me Trim Tab” — Buckminster Fuller & The Impact of an Individual on Society
26. The Golden Rule of Thinking (Issue #013):
“Counter-intuition was Darwin’s specialty. And the reason he was so good was he had a very simple habit of thought … He paid special attention to collecting facts which did not agree with his prior conceptions. He called this a golden rule … So we see that Darwin’s great success, by his own analysis, owed to his ability to see, note, and learn from objections to his cherished thoughts.” — Shane Parrish
Pair with: Darwin, Munger, & More: “Seeking Wisdom” by Peter Bevelin (Book Summary)
27. The “Lost” Interview (Issue #041):
“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” — Bruce Lee
28. This is Water (Issue #002):
“The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water.’ ‘This is water.'” — David Foster Wallace
Pair with: 🔒How to Adjust your Unconscious Default Setting with “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace (+ Infographic)
29. The Inner Landscape of Beauty (Issue #001):
“No conversation we’ve ever done has been more beloved than this one. The Irish poet, theologian, and philosopher insisted on beauty as a human calling. He had a very Celtic, lifelong fascination with the inner landscape of our lives and with what he called ‘the invisible world’ that is constantly intertwining what we can know and see.” — Krista Tippett (On Being)
30. Building Pockets of Stillness Into Your Life (Issue #001):
“In all the things that I write about…I try to find some little piece that helps us answer, or helps me answer at least, directly or indirectly that grand question of how to live and what it means to live a meaningful life.” — Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
31. The Power of Myth: The Hero’s Adventure (Issue #030):
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” — Joseph Campbell
32. Life Is Not Short, We Just Waste Most of It (Issue #013):
“So it is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition. They do not look for an end to their misery, but simply change the reason for it.” — Seneca
Pair with: Learning to Live before you Die: “On the Shortness of Life” by Seneca (Essay Summary)
33. What Awakening Means (Issue #043):
“If this one wakes up (yin) and this one wakes up (yang)—which is called ‘awakening’ in Buddhism—they realize they are one. In other words, they go together. They are inseparable from each other. And this realization is that experience which is called in Zen ‘satori’ or in Buddhism ‘bodhi’ or awakening.” — Alan Watts
Pair with: 35+ Alan Watts Quotes on the Meaning of Life, Knowing Yourself, Slowing Down, & More
34. Living From a Place of Surrender (Issue #012):
“If we pay attention, we will realize that every moment around us there is a world that we do not create—that’s been there for 13.8 billion years—and 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—yet I have this notion that I have to make things happen. Yet, all throughout the universe things are happening everywhere, and I’m not doing them. So, why exactly am I the one that’s in charge of what’s unfolding in front of me?’ And, what you realize at some point, is that you’re not. That the moment in front of you that’s unfolding is no different than all the zillions of other moments that aren’t in front of you that are unfolding in accordance to the laws of nature, the laws of creation. So, you start to practice saying, ‘I don’t want to check inside of me first to see what I want and what I don’t want. I want to pay attention to what the universe is creating in front of me—just like it’s creating everywhere I’m not—and let me see how I can participate in that, be part of that, instead of interfering with it with my desires and my fears.’ That’s living from a place of surrender.” — Michael Singer
Pair with: 🔒How to Start Growing Spiritually with “The Untethered Soul” by Michael Singer (+ Infographic)
35. WAKE UP & Rediscover Life (Issue #008):
“The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. How much are you ready to take?” — Anthony de Mello
Pair with: 🔒How to Wake Up with “Awareness” by Anthony de Mello (+ 3 Infographics)
36. What is Simplicity? (Issue #017):
“The outward exhibition of simplicity is not necessarily inward simplicity. That is quite a different thing. Simplicity there is to have no conflict, no burning desires and ambitions. You see, we always want simplicity outwardly, and inwardly we are boiling, burning, destroying … Simplicity implies honesty, so that there is no contradiction in oneself. And when there is such a state of mind there is real simplicity.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
37. An Introduction to Zen (Issue #029):
“There is an infinite well-being in the heart of every moment.” — Henry Shukman
Pair with: On Enlightenment: 3 Meanings of the “Chop Wood, Carry Water” Zen Quote
38. Taoism & the Art of Flow (Issue #032):
“Can you coax your mind from its wandering and keep to the original oneness? … Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light? Can you love people and lead them without imposing your will? Can you deal with the most vital matters by letting events take their course? Can you step back from you own mind and thus understand all things? … This is the supreme virtue.” — Lao Tzu (Stephen Mitchell translation)
Pair with: 10 Life-Transforming Themes & 25 Top Quotes from “Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tzu (Book Summary)
39. How Mindfulness Can Bring Balance to Your World (Issue #021):
“What does Shakespeare mean when he says, ‘Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’? So, your very essential spiritual lesson, is to be able to differentiate between a situation that you are experiencing and your mental commentary about the situation that you are experiencing.” — Eckhart Tolle
Pair with: 🔒Eckhart Tolle Synthesis: How to Live a Life of Presence & Purpose with “The Power of Now” + “A New Earth”
40. The Enneagram: Nonduality and the Vulnerable Heart (Issue #025):
“The closer you get to living truth, the more reality presents itself as paradox. Our ego mind wants to have it this way or that way, and it’s kind of both.” — Russ Hudson
Pair with: Personality meets Spirituality: “The Wisdom of the Enneagram” by Riso & Hudson (Book Summary)
🤯 Mind Expanding
41. The Overview Effect Experienced by Astronauts (Issue #003):
“Many of the great wisdom traditions of the Earth have pointed to what we’re calling ‘the Overview Effect.’ That is to say, they have realized this unity—this oneness—of all life on Earth and of conciousness and awareness.” — Frank White
Pair with: What is the Earth Overview Effect that Inspires Astronauts?
42. Powers of Ten (Issue #048):
“Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward—into the hand of the sleeping picnicker—with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.”
43. Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds (Issue #009):
“The truth of who you are does not need an answer because all questions are created by the egoic mind. You are not your mind. The truth lies not in more answers but in less questions.”
44. How Language Shapes the Way we Think (Issue #036):
“The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is. Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000.” — Lera Boroditsky
45. Baraka Documentary (Issue #038):
“The goal of the film was to reach past language, nationality, religion and politics and speak to the inner viewer.” — Mark Magidson
46. Human Nature Documentary (Issue #035):
“Human Nature tells the story of CRISPR genome engineering with a gripping mix of science and heart. It gives audiences a front row seat to a technological revolution that could reshape our planet and humanity itself. As we embark on a global conversation about an uncertain future, this film is essential viewing.” — Jennifer Doudna
47. Unnatural Selection Docuseries (Issue #050):
“We know very well from human history we’re not going to put this back in the bottle. The technology is there. It’s going to be used.” — Leeor Kaufman, film-maker of Unnatural Selection (The Guardian)
48. Do We See Reality As It Is? (Issue #014):
“For the first time that I know of, we have a mathematically precise theory of consciousness on the table in which consciousness itself is fundamental … And, it leads naturally to a theory of infinite consciousnesses. So, for the first time, we have a precise theory of what we may call spirituality.” — Donald Hoffman
49. Free Will Thought Experiment (Issue #036):
“You as the conscious witness of your inner life are not making these decisions. You can only witness these decisions.” — Sam Harris
Pair with: Does Free Will Exist? The Latest Thinking from Sam Harris
50. The Egg (Issue #006):
“I wanted to come up with some way to look at the world such that life was fair. A way where everyone came out even in the end. This is what I came up with.” — Andy Weir
Pair with: 10 Mind-Expanding Thoughts on “The Egg” by Andy Weir for its 10th Anniversary (Short Story Summary)
Learn anything new? What was your favorite? Where do you want me to explore more? Please let me know in the comments!
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