Good morning all,
I hope you’re having a lovely start to your weekend.
Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of what I’ve been testing, learning and exploring over the past few days.
So glad you’re here to start your weekend. Let’s dive in.
✍️Quote I’ve been thinking about:
I wanted to include two different quotes that narrate a similar idea.
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
– Rumi (Ancient Persian poet)
“To a disciple who was forever complaining about others, the Master said, ‘If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth.’”
— Anthony de Mello
Peace in life comes from focusing on what you can control and letting go of what you cannot. Paradoxically, one of the best ways to change the external world is to change your internal state.
This message is tangential to Jordan Peterson’s idea of “cleaning your room” in his book “12 Rules for Life”. Some people try to impinge their views and beliefs on others, with the implicit assumption they are 100% correct, without first fixing themselves at an individual level and making sure those views and beliefs are correct in the first place.
In a similar lens, Tony Robbins talks about how, as a young person, it’s best to invest in your personal learning and growth as much as possible . As you accumulate more knowledge, you make yourself valuable as you can then provide value to other people.
📖Book passage I loved:
“Often we imagine that we will work hard until we arrive at some distant goal, and then we will be happy. This is a delusion. Happiness is the result of a life lived with purpose. Happiness is not an objective. It is the movement of life itself, a process, and an activity. It arises from curiosity and discovery.”
— Rules for a Knight, Ethan Hawke
This reminds me of an idea from Paul Kalanithi’s exceptional book “When Breath Becomes Air”. He describes his life as a constant pursuit towards the asymptote of perfection. Knowing it’s not a destination one can ever reach, but rather it’s the constant pursuit of excellence which makes his life meaningful.
Everyone has heard that you should enjoy “the journey not the destination”. But Paul stretches this idea to suggest that the destination doesn’t even exist. It’s not something that can be reached, it’s not real.
Through this realization, you free yourself up to just enjoy the act of pursuit and live in the present moment.
“You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
🎥What I’m watching:
Dr. Andrew Huberman is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His laboratory studies neural regeneration, neuroplasticity, and brain states such as stress, focus, fear, and optimal performance. Additionally, Huberman Lab is the #1 health and fitness podcast on Spotify.
In this talk, Andrew breaks down the concept of neuroplasticity in really digestible terms and provides a scientifically backed approach to increasing neuroplasticity and fostering accelerated learning. In other words, how to learn as effectively and quickly as possible. He then demonstrates how this framework can be applied to a classroom setting.
Generally, it’s exciting to see the latest discoveries about the human brain being applied to improve education. It seems that many of the ways that schools teach haven’t changed much over time and can even run counter opposite to what science tells us about optimal learning.
For any history buffs, the U.S. and Canadian school system was actually developed in the early 1900’s based on Soviet Russia’s protocol for developing new soldiers. This made sense at the time as school’s main function in society was to prepare young people to work in the factory line, as this was during the boom of the Industrial Revolution.
A good assembly line worker shares many of the same qualities as a good soldier. However, the function of school has changed considerably since then as young people seek to become engineers or doctors or entrepreneurs.
Although I don’t fully subscribe to the idea that our school system is egregiously outdated, I have seen places, especially in university, where the application of more scientific approaches to learning could drive substantial improvements.
Given how much we’ve discovered about optimal learning, it feels silly not to adopt any of it.
However, in line with our quotes above, changing the school system is both a vague and monstrous task. As such, I’m trying to apply more scientific methods in my own learning and pursuit of curiosities, whether that’s books, online courses or in the classroom.
If you’re interested in how the brain learns and how to accelerate learning, I’d highly recommend you listen to Dr. Huberman’s talk.
🎨Picture I loved:
That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.
If you have any feedback or thoughts, I’d love to hear from you.
Have a great rest of your weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Thomas