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Gradual Daily 67  📈

To: Gradually's OGs
February 9, 2021
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Impressing Yourself

[Image source: u/alfaguara27]
Cheers to the newly subscribed OGs🧃

External vs. internal motivation is something I’ve struggled and wrestled with for a while. I still do. I often ask myself whether I’m doing something to impress other people vs. am I doing something to impress myself. I love the framing the image above provides. If whatever you’re doing or choosing to do doesn’t impress your younger/older self, maybe rethink doing it. 

 

If you’re new here, welcome! Below you’ll find 3 pieces of valuable curated content that aim to make you wiser, wealthier, and healthier  — gradually (aka your daily dose of digital vitamins).

You can find all previous issues here, all previous curated content organized/archived here, and if you aren’t subscribed yet — you can do so here.

Wisdom
1mg • consume content below with care for full effect
[Image source: First Things]
Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual  by Paul J. Griffiths

Takeaways

I highly suggest consuming the full piece here (23 min. read time)

“What you want is time and space to think, the skills and knowledge to think well, and interlocutors to think with. If the university provides you with these, well and good; if it doesn’t, or doesn’t look as though it will, leave it alone.” — Paul J. Griffiths

Here’s what Griffiths argues for what aspiring intellectuals needs: 

Ambition: Each of these thinkers wants it all, intellectually speaking. In their respective spheres they intend to outthink, out-narrate, out-argue, and generally outdo their predecessors and contemporaries.

Obsessive energy/focus: These are all thinkers whose work extends over the course of their lives (some long, some short), and to whose lives, as far as we can tell, the intellectual work was central. They return to their themes, their questions, like dogs worrying over bones

Human world: we and our artifacts and habits and practices and possibilities, that interest them. They think about the nonhuman world, for the most part, only as it has connections with and effects upon us.

“Perhaps you’ll be a dilettante: You’ll love what you think about and you’ll think hard about it, but you’ll be easily bored and won’t think about anything for long…Clever people—quick studies—are often like this. They have properly intellectual gifts, but they lack the patience for attention’s long, slow gaze…” — Paul J. Griffiths

“Don’t follow your loves but, rather, what provokes thought in you. The two may be the same, but they certainly don’t have to be.” — Paul J. Griffiths

“Whatever it is you’re thinking about will demand of you that you think about it a lot and for a long time, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re distracted from moment to moment, or if you allow long gaps between one session of work and the next.” — Paul J. Griffiths

“Once you know what you want to think about, you need to learn whatever skills are necessary for good thinking about it, and whatever body of knowledge is requisite for such thinking.” — Paul J. Griffiths

“The most essential skill is surprisingly hard to come by. That skill is attention. Intellectuals always think about something, and that means they need to know how to attend to what they’re thinking about. Attention can be thought of as a long, slow, surprised gaze at whatever it is.” — Paul J. Griffiths

My two cents: I for one, do not consider myself an intellectual or an aspiring intellectual. Maybe, though? As discussed in the piece, Griffith talks about what a dilettante is and I think that’s what I am. I didn’t know what a dilettante was prior to reading this piece, but I guess it’s not a compliment: “a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.” It’s sad, but also true. I have a ton of interest in a bunch of things, but my depth of knowledge doesn’t go that deep. I aspire to go deeper as time goes on, though. 

 



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Wealth
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[Image source: Balaji S. Srinivasan]
Why India Should Buy Bitcoin  by Balaji S. Srinivasan

Takeaways

I highly suggest consuming the full piece here (20 min. read time)

“Bitcoin was invented in 2009 by a pseudonymous engineer named Satoshi Nakamoto. His creation solved an unsolved problem in computer science and created a trillion dollar industry.” — Balaji S. Srinivasan 

“In June 2010 the value of all cryptocurrency worldwide was $0. As of today, it’s $1.1 trillion. Bitcoin alone is worth more than $600 billion. That’s more valuable than any of the tech unicorns founded in the last decade, more valuable than Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, and Slack combined.” — Balaji S. Srinivasan 

The beauty of and what centralized organizations fear most is that, “Bitcoin and Ethereum are decentralized international cryptocurrencies that no single actor has control over.” — Balaji S. Srinivasan 

“Cryptocurrencies work across borders, at the speed of the internet, and are globally popular with tens of millions of users worldwide.” — Balaji S. Srinivasan 

“Excessive money printing can devalue a currency. And this is part of the reason why central banks around the world say they continue to hold gold: because it’s a hedge against inflation, highly liquid, a safe haven in a crisis, and internationally accepted.” — Balaji S. Srinivasan 

“Bitcoin is valuable for all the same reasons gold is valuable. It’s an internationally accepted store of value, it’s highly scarce, and it’s a so-called bearer instrument that can’t be seized with a keypress.” — Balaji S. Srinivasan

“As Marc Andreessen (creator of the graphical web browser) noted in 2014, the invention of the Bitcoin blockchain is comparable to the advent of the internet itself. Because if the internet was about sending information, blockchains are about transferring value. Specifically, until blockchains, we didn’t have a digitally native representation of scarcity.” — Balaji S. Srinivasan

My two cents: I thought this piece was timely with yesterday’s news of Tesla buying $1.5B worth of Bitcoin causing new all-time highs for the digital currency. Full disclosure, I own a little bit of Bitcoin and Ethereum, but if I had to explain the underlying tech behind it, I wouldn’t be able to. I merely own it to help diversify my portfolio and because I believe in the future of it. 

 



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Health
1mg • consume content below with care for full effect
[Image source: Kim Dong-kyu]
Andrew Sullivan’s Advice for Beating ‘Distraction Sickness’  by Andrew Sullivan

Takeaways

I highly suggest consuming the full piece here (32 min. read time)

“…this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.” — Andrew Sullivan

“Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality…I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time.” — Andrew Sullivan

“Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.” — Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan (the author of this valuable essay) decided to go to a meditation retreat center where he would not speak nor be connected for as long as he was there: “‘Remember,’ my friend Sam Harris, an atheist meditator, had told me before I left, ‘if you’re suffering, you’re thinking.’ The task was not to silence everything within my addled brain, but to introduce it to quiet, to perspective, to the fallow spaces I had once known where the mind and soul replenish.” — Andrew Sullivan

“Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety.” — Andrew Sullivan

“…there is the option of a spiritual reconciliation to this futility, an attempt to transcend the unending cycle of impermanent human achievement. There is a recognition that beyond mere doing, there is also being; that at the end of life, there is also the great silence of death with which we must eventually make our peace.” — Andrew Sullivan

My two cents: I can only imagine what it would be like to go without speaking or the internet for more than a week. It sounds quite terrifying, to be honest. Is the goal to have a breakdown? Because I think I certainly would! I’m curious if you’d ever do this? Maybe one day for me, but definitely under the supervision of people that know what they’re doing. Writing that sentence seems so crazy to think how connected we’ve become…

 



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