Listening to our personal little "advisors" 💎 Issue #57
Plus: Rules for a better life and better hot sauce.
Happy Friday👋
What’s up? 👼👿
This week I was supposed to tell you about the third exercise of the Leadership Step by Step book, but I think I failed by not giving it a real try. You see, the third chapter is all about your inner monologue, the voice only you can hear, and often portrayed by a little angel and a little demon on Saturday-morning cartoons.
The book provides a little trick to help you identify what is, and what is not inner monologue:
Comparing your inner monologue with how you might answer “What are you thinking?” helps clarify it. A typical answer like “I’m thinking about what to eat” is what you’re thinking about rather than what you’re thinking. Your inner monologue is what you’re thinking at the word level. It goes more like this: “I’m hungry... wonder what I’ll eat. Is it 12:30 yet? Oh no, it’s only noon, it’s too early to eat now... but I’m hungry…. Man, I’ve been eating too much lately…”
The challenge for us is to be as aware as possible, and dare I say as little as needed, of that ongoing dialogue in order to:
understand when we are being led off the rails by it;
investigate our motives to see what we are really about;
The exercise was to write these inner dialogues a few times a day for some days. You would be able to compare what you “said” in different situations and times of the day.
The reason, that I’m convincing myself, why I didn’t do it is that every time I became aware of the monologue I immediately crashed the train of thought and reminded myself of this exercise. Like “I’m hungry... wonder what I’ll eat… Wait! I should be writing this. Oh no!”
The real reason, I suspect, is that this is too uncomfortable to complete. It’s the mix of having something to write with at all times and that doesn’t distract you, with the weird feeling of writing what the tiny cartoons are saying.
In the end, I replaced the exercise with this tiny reflection about it. Hope it’s ok.
And now on to what were the best things I found on the Internet this week.
New to me 💡
100 Very Short Rules for a Better Life | 5 min read
💯 A few great, non-obvious, ones: “Practice the art of negative visualization.”, “Belief in yourself is overrated. Generate evidence.” and “Make haste, slowly.”.
How to build a great life (17 things I’ve learned)(Thread) | 5 min read
📈 Everyone can win every day if the goals are adjusted: “13/ Baby steps + compounding apply to everything. Even the biggest of goals can be broken into a series of small steps. Play the long game, making small daily deposits & progress will add up faster than you think. Even on bad days, you'll take comfort in taking just 1 baby step.”
Huy Fong's Sriracha hit revenue of $150m+ a year...with no sales team, no trademark and $0 in ad spend. (Thread) | 4 min read
🌶️ Imagine buying a sketchy hot sauce from the back of a van of some random guy: “He filled recycled baby jars and sold product out of a Blue Chevy Van, making $2.3k the first month.” Think about that next time you think some idea doesn’t what it takes to work.
Please help me grow this newsletter! I’d love if you shared it with your more curious friends.
A most motivating tweet 📝
This week in a gif 🍺
High note ⚡
This issue cover picture comes from here.
Last issue most clicked link was Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice
I hope you enjoyed these last minutes as much as me putting this together.
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Until next week,
Filipe