Portals and Projects
🔥Welcome to volume 006!🔥
🚀Portals and Projects 🎆
In this video, Eric Weinstein, expounds on his concept of a PORTAL. This is where we enter our own Hero’s Journey and find a portal that transforms us when we exit. Someone is trapped, a portal enters their life and they change. Eric asked himself, why is it the same story over and over and over again? He believes it is because in real life people learn to stop looking for the portal and most don’t find them.
How do we find portals? How do we keep looking for the portals? How do we step into the portals when we find them? The Hero’s Journey is the recipe for most movies and books. How can we make it a recipe for our lives and step into new portals?
This idea of portals and our own Hero’s Journey lead me to thinking about projects. One of the keys for unlocking portals is to have new projects. These projects have tangible moments of learning where in the end you get transformed into a new you. New portals are out there. We can surround ourselves with people younger or older than we are, pick up a new hobby or skill. Hanging around any unfamiliar subculture and doing the thing with folks from that discipline pushes us to a new place, into and out of a portal.
What projects are potential portals currently exist in your life? Let me know.
📰Articles📰
How Tyler Cowen practices. Practice is another form of a portal.
Lever Points - Thinking in systems is another super power
“PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM
(in increasing order of effectiveness)
12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
3. The goals of the system.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.”
Bryan Johnson on his Burning Man Experience (since the event is coming up at the end of the month - If you can GO!
“Overall, it was unquestionably one of the best weeks of my life. For someone with insatiable curiosity, it was remarkable. I met some of the most amazing people I’ve ever encountered on planet Earth, something made possible by the unique culture of the event.”
📚 Books to Read 📚
The Samurai’s Garden (Book / Audible) reminds us how complicated life can be and why being open to possibilities is so powerful.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami (Book / Audible) is Haruki’s account of why running is essential for his writing and for his life.
“The end of a race is just a temporary marker without much significance. It’s the same with our lives. Just because there’s an end doesn’t mean existence has meaning. An end point is simply setup as a temporary marker, or perhaps an indirect metaphor for the fleeting nature of existence. It’s very philosophical —not that at this point I’m thinking how philosophical it is. I just vaguely experience this idea, not with words, but as physical sensation.”
Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society (Book) by Zac Stein and Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside of Conventional Classrooms by Kerry McDonald (Book / Audible)
Both of these books explore the world of education, what it is trying to accomplish and what works, doesn’t work and what might work.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
John Vervaeke’s Awaken from the Meaning Crisis (Spotify / Youtube) is highly recommended. In Episode 8 he mentions the power of the Middleway, a radical reformation and transcending self indulgence and self denial according to Vervaeke.
Krista Tippet w/ Esther Perel or the transcript
“My book and my work is about eroticism. It is about how people connect to this quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of vitality, of renewal. And that is way beyond the description of sexuality. It is mystical. It is actually a spiritual, mystical experience of life. It is a transcendent experience of life, because it is an act of the imagination. And that is spirituality, as well.”
Tyler Cowen w/ Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite authors, or the transcript
Eric Weinsten w/ Peter Thiel or the Video - "An Era of Stagnation & Universal Institutional Failure” or just read the notes from the podcast
Casey Neistate video This is the End documenting him moving from New York to Los Angeles.
Diseases of Abundance - All of our problems today relate to abundance —> News, Sugar, Technology. The struggle of modern life is too much not too little.
📖 Quotes 🔥
Trillion Dollar Coach - Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle
Perhaps the most important currency in a relationship—friendship, romantic, familial, or professional—is trust.
Influence - Robert B. Cialdini PhD
There is a principle in human perception, the contrast principle, that affects the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another. Simply put, if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more different than it actually is.
Creativity - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
WHAT IS ENJOYMENT? In order to answer that question, many years ago I started to study people who seemed to be doing things that they enjoyed but were not rewarded for with money or fame. Chess players, rock climbers, dancers, and composers devoted many hours a week to their avocations. Why were they doing it? It was clear from talking to them that what kept them motivated was the quality of experience they felt when they were involved with the activity.
32 Thoughts From a 32-Year-Old – Ryan Holiday – Medium
The world breaks all of us, Hemingway said, and those who won’t break, it kills. Be willing to give up. To fail. To admit you blew it. To try it a different way in the future. That’s the only way to survive…and to get better.
Distrust That Particular Flavor - William Gibson
As a science-fiction writer, I’m sometimes asked whether or not I think the Net is a good thing. That’s like being asked if being human is a good thing. As for being a human being a good thing or not, I can’t say—this has been referred to as the Postmodern Condition.
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big - Scott Adams
Another benefit of having a big, world-changing project is that you almost always end up learning something valuable in the process of failing. And fail you will, most of the time, so long as you are dreaming big. But remember, goals are for losers anyway. It’s smarter to see your big-idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills. From that viewpoint, if you have a big, interesting project in the works, you’re a winner every time you wake up.
A Joseph Campbell Companion - Joseph Campbell
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. If we fix on the old, we get stuck. When we hang onto any form, we are in danger of putrefaction. Hell is life drying up. The Hoarder, the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed. If we are hanging onto the form now, we’re not going to have the form next. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Destruction before creation.
👍👍👍👍
Hoping everyone finds some new portals.
Thanks for reading.
Any thoughts or comments, please reach out.
Namaste,
Christian
