Weekly Drop(💧) #2

Hi friends, I hope that you had a great week.
Here is a round up of what I have been up to during the last week.

What is your black flash?

I love watching Japanese Anime. While others only see it as another type of cartoons, I think that they are more than that. They are good source of amazing stories, great display of animation technology and most of the times very educational.

While watching one of my favourite anime I learned about the idea of not wasting our resources and finding the practices that will help us use them more efficiently.

I wrote about it on Wednesday and you can read the full story here: https://dariomungoi.substack.com/p/what-is-your-black-flash

What I was reading: The evolution of everything

Like most of the people, I grew believing that everything happened for a reason. Something is only created because there is a creator.

This book is showed me how to look at everything with a different perspective. A bottom up perspective where things are seen as a result of evolution instead of a result of a directed effort by something/someone. The book has chapters describing the evolution of a different areas such as science, religion, education, technology and others.

Here are a few points from the book that I found interesting:

1. We are wired to believe in the top down approach of things.
   Humans want to find meaning and make sense of everything. So when there is not a clear explanation as to why things happen, we always resort to finding what the author calls a “Sky hook”.
   
   This sky hook is the reason we attribute the phenomenon we are talking or thinking about.
   
   This tendency is the base of a lot of religions and even the reason why some people change from one religion to another abruptly when they no longer can identify themselves with the original religion skyhook.
   
   Even the most feverous atheists have swerved in their beliefs at some and started believing that there is something out there that is the reason for everything.
   

2. Each technology is necessary for the next technology.
   
   Now that things move very fast, it is easy to believe on a master inventor and genius that came up with the latest technology. While these “geniuses” certainly feel good for all the accolades, unfortunately that is now how things really are.
   
   This medium(Substack) only exists because there were advancements in cloud computing, browsers and payment processing. On the other hand, this medium will be the proxy for the creation of the next technology. This could be a direct evolution or simply something else that will be built taking some of its aspects as inspiration.
   

3. Evolution is inevitable.
   Looking in hindsight it feels like as if a specific actor or moment was removed from the life equation, the thing that he/she is mostly known for would cease to exist. This is a big flaw of how history is taught to us because it focuses on a single actor.
   
   For example, the way history is told to us about the light bulb, it makes it sound as if without Thomas Edison, we would still be lighting our houses at night with oil lamps.
   
   Before Edison there were more than 20 other inventors who have worked on an earlier version of the light bulb. Some knew about each other and others were just doing their own things. Edison had a lot of money and power. He used this to secure some patents and start legal actions against some of these players. As you can guess by now, he won all these battles and history crowned him as our saviour.
   
   Regardless who we know as the winner today, If they were removed from the history books, the evolutionary process of that field would have made sure that thing happened if they were meant to be. Without Steve jobs we would not specifically have an iPhone but we would surely have smartphones with touch screens and very powerful cameras by now.

Interesting Sentence

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are. - Chinese Proverb

We spend most of our lives trying to fit it and do things because what other people will think. Read a certain types of books to be considered intellectual or wake up at 5AM because that is what successful people do. This and other things are not on itself bad but they can make us very miserable if we try to do them at all costs without considering what makes us feel good.

I used to think I should wake up at 5AM everyday. For a good year I did my best but no matter how I look at it, It did not feel natural. It always felt like I was not being true to myself. This feeling triggered my anxiety, made me sleep poorly and as a result made me depend a lot on coffee.

I realized that what I liked about waking up early is the fact of being able to get a lot of uninterrupted working hours. With some adjustments to my life and a firm decision I was able to create these pockets for deep work that worked well for me.

I though I had to wake up early but what I really needed is to be able to be intentional and find myself sometime to work uninterrupted.

What am I working on

Speaking of tension again. I’ve spent a lot of time trying and experiment with different productivity apps and tools. In the end I felt overwhelmed with so many choices and systems I was imposing myself. I decided to go back to the basics and started using a notebook to do everything.

Using a notebook made me think about what really mattered and forced me to simplify how I did things. Here it looks like:

I currently converting the notebook into an app that you can check out at https://intencional.app .

Treat of the week.

The first thing I do when I get my phone in the morning is to read The Hustle newsletter. As they say on their website I do this to get to know everything about “ business and tech in 5 minutes or less”.

This is not a sponsored message and I am just sharing here because I simply love the format and the content.

https://thehustle.co/

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If you found this interesting and worth sharing with a friend why no do it ?