Cheap Tricks...
🧠Cheap Tricks are like Sticks and Stones Aka The Power of Cheap Tricks 🧠
“Understanding how things came to be frees us to imagine new possibilities” is a great example of a cheap trick.
How do you make someone laugh? Use a cheap trick. Change your voice, repeat something a couple times, or add some physicality. Violate some norm in a minor benign way or break out the rule of threes.
We all use cheap tricks. They are a key part of how we interact and live in the world. They can be as simple as a pause before answering a question, playing a song to change our emotions or taking three breaths if we notice our heart rate rising. These cheap tricks are cheap in the sense that they don’t take a lot of bandwidth and tricks because they happen automatically. We trick an outcome with limited effort.
Staying on our path means we always need some cheap tricks that serve us and some cheap tricks to discard. Having some questions like “What are you excited about currently?” is a great cheap trick. Trying to negotiate everything, getting angry, or resorting to simple pleasantries and nothing more are cheap tricks to discard.
If we step back and take inventory of our cheap tricks, we can become aware of them when we use them. There are the algorithmic tricks, we run unconsciously. Then there are our go to cheap tricks that bubble up organically depending on the situation. Notice your cheap tricks and ask if they serve you. Are there tricks you want to do more of, tricks you want to add or tricks you want to stop doing?
Oblique Strategies as a Cheap Trick
I pulled a card (cheap trick) from my Brian Eno Oblique Strategies deck this week.
Shortly there after I ran into the sign below.
Roger that. Will try not to suck and that is an easy thing to forget.
️ 📰Articles
#1 Bullshit and the Art of Crap Detection is Neil Postman on why language matters
Each person’s crap-detector is embedded in their value system; if you want to teach the art of crap-detecting, you must help students become aware of their values.
Reflections on one’s mortality curiously makes one come alive to the incredible amounts of inanity and fanaticism that surround us, much of which is inflicted on us by ourselves. Which brings me to the next point, best stated as Postman’s Third Law:
“At any given time, the chief source of bullshit with which you have to contend is yourself.”
The reason for this is explained in Postman’s Fourth Law, which is;
“Almost nothing is about what you think it is about–including you.”
#2 Peaking and Professional Decline breaks down how it happens sooner than you think and most people aren’t ready for it. This essay has some great points and reminds me of Paul Graham’s keep your identity small and Shinzen Young’s formula that “suffering = pain x resistance”. Remember we choose the games we play and the we changes with time. Relax, enjoy the moment because that is all we have. Be Bach not Darwin.
What’s the difference between Bach and Darwin? Both were preternaturally gifted and widely known early in life. Both attained permanent fame posthumously. Where they differed was in their approach to the midlife fade. When Darwin fell behind as an innovator, he became despondent and depressed; his life ended in sad inactivity. When Bach fell behind, he reinvented himself as a master instructor. He died beloved, fulfilled, and—though less famous than he once had been—respected.
The lesson for you and me, especially after 50: Be Johann Sebastian Bach, not Charles Darwin.
📚Books to Read
This is the final installment to his fictional trilogy based on the Mexican Cartels. His book The Force (not part of the trilogy) was one of my favorite fiction reads last year.
#2 Last Tango in Cyberspace by Steven Kotler
Kotler takes his work with Flow and technology wrapping it into this sci-fi thriller where cyberpunk meets neuroscience.\
#3 Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of US Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery
This one I give a don’t read
as the key points are:
Listen to your body
Rest and recovery
Float Tanks / Meditation!
Most other stuff might be placebo, might just make you feel good (feelings matter people!) and the science behind (massage, foam rolling, hot / cold, tight clothes, supplements) most stuff isn’t there yet
🎙️ Podcasts
Eliot Pepper on The History of Technology and the Future of Society - Future Fossils Podcast
“You can’t tell history without the history of technology”
“Congress writes laws about what’s going on, not what might be going on ten years from now. Policymaking is largely a reactionary measure.”
“I’m not a big believer in unitary self as an idea. I think we are all made up of MANY selves. We have these competing elements within us, and part of what it means to be human is to stitch these together into a coherent narrative. And we do that on the fly all the time.”
“Your solution is going to create new problems, and the best way to best way to deal with that knowingly is to try to keep an open mind, try to maintain your beginner’s mind, maintain your state of awareness about the world and continually challenge your own assumptions.”
“We are living in an age of acceleration – and yet, we have ALWAYS been confronted by a universe that defies our limited ability to make sense of it.”
Third Eye Drops - The Thin Line Between Enlightenment and Bullshit
Using technology to try to hack our conscious!
Party at the end of the world isn’t enlightenment
Lose of structure, boundary and discipline but we are trying to build a new culture
Everything is perfect, everything is broken, and everything is just how it is suppose to be 🔥
Complexity layers of society
Rob Reid - The Dark Side of Gene Editing with Kevin Rose
Rob gave the Ted talk how synthetic biology could wipe out humanity (and how we can stop it and this podcast discusses it
Chip Conley on The Tim Ferriss Show
Despair = Suffering - Meaning
Anxiety = Uncertainty x Powerless
Disappointment = Expectations - Reality
Happiness = wanting what you have / having what you want
Chip’s wisdom book is taking 30mins each Friday to write down what he learned
Chip’s book Wisdom at Work, the making of a modern elder, should be read by everyone. This book goes really well with the professional decline article above and a way to thread that needle.
Chip wrote his first book with the guy whose podcast is below
Akimbo By Seth Godin - Who is Banksy?
The show notes include the comment that Issac Newton was a loon.
Paul Graham wrote another article noting that biographies of Newton focus on physics skipping the alchemy and theology part which made up a big part of his life. Smart people are often crazy but that fact is conveniently cut out of the story.
📖Quotes From Books 🌟
Waking Up by Sam Harris
“There is now little question that how one uses one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds-and lives-are largely shaped by how we use them.”
How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon
“Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you'll never become that person.”
The Peripheral by William Gibson
"Conspiracy theory's got to be simple. Sense doesn't come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy."
Influence by Robert B. Cialdini PhD
“A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.”
These four things—your experiences, attention, theories, and judgments—form a foundation that reduces the unknowable to a kind of map or model that is simple enough to understand and use in daily life. In essence, as people, we simplify reality to reduce its infinite complexity, in order to make it easier to understand.
NLP by Steve Andreas, and Charles Faulkner
There are three ways that people become aware of their deep values. The most common way of becoming aware of your values occurs when they are violated. When something happens that makes you uncomfortable, upset, or incongruent in any way, there is a value present in your experience.
👋Thanks for hanging out. That’s a wrap.
Please reach out with any comments / thoughts / ideas and forward this along to anyone that you think would find it useful.
🙏
Namaste,
Christian