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Obvious Choice Podcast Episodes:

*If you only listen to one, make it this one.

 


Money

1.

 A useful exercise:

Take two weeks, in two weeks.

Choose a day two weeks from now where you take off two weeks from work.

In preparation, you'll be forced to delegate, automate, and systematize.

Once done, you’ll be freed from the fear of taking time off while simultaneously learning what holes exist in your systems based on what broke when you were gone.

2.

“There is no such thing as work-life balance.” Wrote the philosopher Alain De Botton. “Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”

 


Health

1.

Building a strong body requires intense effort. Maintaining a strong body requires consistency.

If you put in the dedicated work to build strength and resilience one time, you’ll be able to put up with more over time.

2.

Many years ago, the physicist Richard Feynman noticed a line of ants walking around the rim of the bathtub in his house in Pasadena. The ants formed a straight path to their destination, which got him curious.

Feynman then placed a lump of sugar away from the ant’s path.

One ant found the treat and returned back to its nest. Feynman tracked the ant’s path with a colored marker and noticed that the path was wiggly, full of errors.

The path of the next ant back to its nest was traced with a different color marker. It wasn’t straight, but had fewer errors than the first.

Feynman traced ten ants, noting that the last few formed a neat line along the rum of the bathtub to the sugar, and back to the nest.

“It’s something like sketching,” he said. You draw a lousy line at first, then you go over it a few times and it makes a nice line after a while.”

James Danoff-Burg, an entomologist, was asked about Feynman’s theory. “All things optimize in nature, to some degree.” He said.

Danoff-Burg was then asked if there was a book to read to learn more about this to which he replied that yes, there is: The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

 


Relationships

1.

“Anxiety isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom,” writes Dr, John Deloney. “It’s the alarm system letting people know that things are off of the rails. If your house is on fire, and the alarm is going off, it’s not the alarm that’s the problem. It’s the house.”

Boredom exists because the clock created artificial time and removed the seasonality we’ve been hardwired to crave. This, combined with too much stimulus of the same kinds: the same work, the same people, the same pleasures––extended over long enough periods of time, leads to daily doldrums and a lack of appreciation for even the greatest things.

We’re not wired for boredom. We’re wired for seasons. We’re wired to have stops and starts: periods of intensity, followed by periods of rest. Going all-in, then not at all.

 


A Few Good Quotes from a Great Book

"The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know."

" I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest."

"Getting lost like that seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way."

" Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery."

-Rebecca Solnit (from A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

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Just ate lunch. My fingers still smell like lunch. Which is making me hungry for a second lunch. That ever happen to you?
-Jon

P.S. The truest thing to ever true


No promo today. Hope you're awesome.


Jonathan Goodman
Coach. Author. World explorer. But mostly, Dad.
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