Episode 27 of John Vervaeke’s, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis presents an intriguing definition of intelligence, and in particular how does one succeed or fail at finding solutions to generalized problems (“I’m thirsty, how do I get water?” “How do I win this chess game?” “What’s 4 times 8?”)
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
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How does an individual’s experience with movement and community influence their personal growth and perspective on life?
Moving to a different country and starting over is a challenge that Renae Dambly embraced. She shares how parkour and movement fit into her life, and how she takes care of herself, especially after moving to Germany. Renae unpacks her perception of herself vs other’s viewpoints, and publicly representing parkour. She discusses climbing, injury, competition, painting, and hitting the ‘plateau.’
As an athlete trying to make a positive impression on the public, I’m not going to stop training, but I’m also not going to train in a disrespectful manner. I want to make the best choice to, I think, have parkour viewed in a more positive light. So I will keep training, but I will show respect.
~ Renae Dambly (17:46)
Renae Dambly is an athlete and coach, recently moved to Germany from Colorado. She has a diverse movement background, including track, rugby, and rock climbing in addition to parkour. Renae is pursuing a career in fitness alongside her professional parkour career.
The conversation explores how movement influences personal identity and self-discovery. The participant shares their deep connection with movement, viewing it as a guide and a means of navigating life’s challenges. Experiences of balancing education and movement, adapting to new cultures, and maintaining self-care practices provide a rich context. The discussion includes insights into how movement impacts self-perception and how public perception adds complexity to training and expression.
Key topics include competition’s role as a social connector rather than a competitive tool and the importance of respect and adaptability in representing movement practices. The conversation also touches on creativity, with watercolor painting and art as outlets of self-expression, and the nuanced exploration of personal and societal dynamics in movement and community participation.
(more…)Cognitive load matters. Mullainathan and Shafir believe that scarcity imposes a similar mental tax, impairing our ability to perform well, and exercise self-control.
~ Shane Parrish from, Scarcity
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Short of food: starving. Short of water: dehydration. Short of money: in debt. Short of time: over-committed. Short of attention: distracted, mindless. But also, short of outlets for creativity? Short of satisfaction? Short of peace? Short of meaning?
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This, in one sentence, is the difference between the laborer-for-hire and the entrepreneur. This is the Professional Mindset.
~ Steven Pressfield from, Writing Wednesdays: Tk Ths Job n Shove It
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Pressfield’s example—I’m always assuming you’ve clicked-thru and read—is oversimple: the factory worker. But that laborer-for-hire mindset is real. The shift required is real, and really difficult. Hard like: This is the air I’ve always breathed. …and I want to be a fish, so I need to grow gills, get in the water and learn how to swim in water without seeing the water—in the same way I used to be oblivious to the air. That is to say: Impossible.
Morning friends! How’s the air?!
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It’s easier for Artist Today to post to Medium than it is to build her own site so Artist Tomorrow has a place to live when yet another publishing platform dies or becomes watered down by crap. It takes hard work and conviction to build your own thing — and it takes relationships, which are greater investments than ad dollars.
~ Steven Pressfield from, What It Takes: Common Sense
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I’m nobody. Nobody’s asking me why I’m not posting on Medium. Although, come to think of it, people do ask me why I don’t post on LinkedIn, and some people ask why I left Facebook… Anyway, you didn’t ask, but you’re still reading.
Truth be told, all the problems come from you, the aggregate readers (viewers, etc.) on the Internet. You have avoided doing the slightly-harder-than-droolingly-easy work of finding and following the things you care about. It’s easy to open an account on feedbin.com and to start following what you want to read. (And if something doesn’t play well with FeedBin, then it’s not actually on the open Internet and I encourage you to shun and shame it.) If you actively follow the things you care about, (using the Internet and software of course,) then you don’t need the middlemen; you don’t need the search engines and the social platforms.
Aside: Exactly ZERO percent of the stuff I share and talk about on this blog is discovered by search engines or social networks. (Just checked, and I have 485 things queued up as “that’s interesting, I should read it more carefully and look into it.” It was 486, until I created this post.) The kernels are found through my actively following many hundreds of different things. I receive exactly ZERO email newsletters [that’s a lie, I route a precious few into FeedBin :] Sure, I may go down search engine or social network rabbit holes learning more. But the things I care about I follow intentionally.
Once you start following things, you might even grow to love those things. One day you’ll realize that you even value those things so much that you voluntarily throw some money at them to support their work.
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Here’s my uneducated hypothesis: the childhood politics of trying can leave adults with the habit of sometimes engaging in tasks without a real intention to complete them.
~ David Cain from, Don’t Try, Intend
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My attention has been drawn to “intention.” I’ve now read and heard, from several sources I consider fonts of great information, that intention is the key to having your efforts yield what you actually want. I’ve started trying to figure out what actually is my intention in conversations, blog posts (meta!) emails, coaching, etc.. I’m definitely onboard the intention bandwagon.
There’s a fine hair to split—in my opinion—regarding what exactly does setting, (and then remembering and staying true to,) one’s intention accomplish? Let that sink in for a second. When we talk about intention, we’re talking about something I decide in my mind before I take action. What exactly is that historical decision supposed to do? I don’t think it creates motivation, nor does it sustain motivation I get from somewhere else.
I think it is simply a compass. Once I’m neck-deep in the swamp of doing the thing and the alligators are sliding from the banks into the glassy water… it gets hard to remember why I was draining the swamp. (Feel free to craft your own metaphor if you don’t like my alligator-laden negativi-tea.) A glance at my compass— A glance at my intention instantly reminds me: Alligators be damned, I was intending to … and by George I shall so endeavor!
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I’m not a full-on coffee snob; I’m more like a middling, level 14, coffee-snob-poser. I’ve had world-class pour-overs—beans weighed to the gram, water temperature to a specific degrees, controlled pour-over rate, beans roasted by the person brewing, one 8oz cup at a time—and I’ve made instant coffee from freeze-dried crystals… “Any port in a storm,” as they say. But most of my coffee is upper-middle: A local roaster’s beans, but ground incorrectly using a Krups bladed grinder, then electric-drip brewed, using filtered water. It’s fast, it’s reproducible, it’s a solid middle-ground “good.”
Recently I’ve been percolating coffee over a Whisper Lite gas camping stove. This is super fiddly. Set up the gas stove, connect gas canister, hand bur-grind beans, set up the percolator, (picture old-timey cowboys around a campfire,) set up the wind-screen around the stove, light stove with match, balance the percolator on the stove’s spindly, (but super-strong stainless steel,) legs, crank up the gas, (audible, I’m-not-kinding-around-over-here roar,) then about 5 minutes to boil the water, dial the gas down to a whisper, check the time and get a nice perc going—but not a rolling boil—then hover close-by for ten minutes… turn off gas, wrap stainless steel pot in a tea-towel cozy…
There are a million things in life that we do every day, quickly. Selecting one or three and intentionally doing them the less-convenient way is the absolute-best salve for the hustle-bustle busy and mental noise we create for ourselves.
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I was aching for what came next. I felt my whole life stretched out before me like an invisible buffet. I turned toward my future, mouth watering.
~ Amy Poehler from, Take Your Licks | The New Yorker
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Partly I simply wanted an excuse to quote some well-crafted prose.
But mostly I like the image she conveyed. The visceral potential of it all. The feeling that at any moment—but I’m not quite hurrying—I will intentionally turn a corner and I’ll be able to see down the next street. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this street of course.
But do you recall what it was like to long to look around that corner?
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The point is, you’re basically this walking, lumbering habit machine. And these habits — a.k.a. your identity — have been built up over the course of decades of living and breathing, laughing and loving, succeeding and failing, and through the years, they have built up a cruising speed of 40 knots or so in the freezing Atlantic. And if you want to change them — that is, change your identity, how you perceive yourself or how you adapt to the world — well you better slam that steering wheel to the side and be ready to hit a couple icebergs, because ships this big don’t turn so well.
~ Mark Manson from, Shut Up and Be Patient
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I’ve been saying, “big ship, little rudder,” for a long time about my own attempts to change course. I’m certain I’m right about myself, but it’s reassuring to hear other people say they see this about themselves too. Wether or not Manson is your cup ‘o tea, it’s nice to hear things that confirm your assessment. “That looks like a shark, right? That’s a shark; we should get out of the water, right?”
The reason—not “one of the reasons”, but the actual, single, I’m-not-kidding, this is really why, reason—I tell the truth is that it helps other people form a good model of their world. Sound bonkers? …try this:
You know what it looks like, and/or sounds like, when a car is approaching along a roadway. You have a model of your world that, I hope, predicts that being struck by said car would be Very Bad. So you instinctively adjust your actions—get out of the way that is—when you see or hear a car approaching. That’s you using a model of reality; in this case a really good model that almost always works. Your model isn’t perfect: The driver could swerve to avoid you, and end up hitting you. In which case your model of the world has failed; you should have stood stationary, in the street to avoid being hit.
Where did you get that model?
What if I had arranged it so that every car you encountered as a child was driven by a confidant of mine. I had them all swerve to avoid you, and I taught you that cars will avoid you. You’d have a very different model! …and you’d agree I had done some SERIOUS lying to you!
Does my definition of True make sense now? I’ll say something if it will help you build a better model of the world. One can try this test on everything; it always works perfectly to tell you what is morally correct [in the context of speaking]. Anyway, I digress.
So I’ve been saying to myself, “big ship, small rudder,” and here I have an external bit of evidence from Manson that my model is correct. *shrugs* Sorry, this is what happens when you peek into my head.
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I’ve written before about the sounds of summer thunderstorms. I’m completely trained to relax and drift away to these sounds.
It’s said there are three things you can stare at endlessly: running water, fire, and other people working. I believe the first two trigger something deep within our brains; I believe there’s something about the small, random movements of water and fire which hypnotize the predator part of our brains… something about those movements stimulates our visual cortex.
But sound! The auditory part of our brain is older still, and the sound of running water is—at least for me, how about you?—deeply alluring. I’ll sit under cover on my patio and freeze my ass off just to hear the rain falling and the sound of water in the gutters.
Anywho. What brings up this train of thought? …on a gloriously sunny and blue-skied day?
…”sounds of rain and thunder,” is a thing you can listen to on Pandora.
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