Circle Three 81 / Nuvole Bianche
I rolled up my sleeves this week to help a management team. It made me recall this sentence:
“There are three kinds of places you can spend time: (1) those without a purpose; (2) those with an established, fixed purpose; (3) those that are discovering their purpose.”
Area 3 — the place of discovery — is exciting, new, and usually requires a certain orientation towards growth that isn’t easily found in a team. But there is a sort of magic that happens when a few people come to a place like Area 3 set on helping it find its purpose. Hope you feel some of that magic this week.
Enjoy C3,81, talk soon.
Contents:
brain bites: Psychology & Health
This Is How To Change Someone’s Mind
Eustress
Hell Yeah or No: what’s worth doing
brain bites: Business & Investing
Reinventing Operations in Asset Management
brain bites: Technology
The 5 Years That Changed Dating
Lyric: Nuvole Bianche by Ludovico Einaudi
brain bites: psychology & health
This Is How To Change Someone’s Mind. From Eric Barker, author of Barking Up the Wrong Tree. Of the six, the one that stood out was “The Unread Library Effect.” By rooting out the unknown unknowns, deep-seated beliefs can quickly break down.
“That means how we know what we know and why we believe what we believe are actually far more fragile than we think and instill far more doubt than debating the accuracy of the facts themselves.”
Eustress. The term eustress first crossed my path during Joe Holder’s fitness MasterClass. People are stressed every day, but at least for me differentiating between positive stress and negative stress — eustress and distress, respectively — offers a helpful reframe.
It makes me think back to ‘Choose Your Fires’, and how we choose our stresses to a certain extent, even when it doesn’t necessarily feel like a choice.
Hell Yeah or No: what’s worth doing. A collection of thoughts from Derek Sivers. A selection of my takeaways:
We are imperfect mirrors, so copy what you love. It will naturally include your quirks and personality. “Like a funhouse mirror that distorts what it reflects, your imitation will turn out much different from the original. Maybe even better.”
Even the toughest people have delicate motivation. “When you notice something is affecting your drive, find a way to adjust your environment, even if that’s a little inconvenient for others.”
Relax for the same result; everything can usually get done and nearly as well for what feels like half the effort. I’ve seen a study about the best sprinters running consistently at 80% rather than all-out. “Half my effort wasn’t effort at all, but just unnecessary stress that made me feel like I was doing my best.”
brain bites: business & investing
Reinventing Operations in Asset Management. From Accenture. The study is slightly dated, but the same problems persist: process improvements, radically-changing operations strategies to keep up with the times, and fighting to remain competitive. Now the report needs a section on digital asset management so we’d be up-to-date.
“As asset managers face up to today’s combination of sweeping economic shifts and rapid advances in technology, no firm is immune from the epic disruption that these forces create.”
brain bites: technology
The 5 Years That Changed Dating. I remember reading this from The Atlantic in 2019. It reappeared and — in a time when as a society we aren’t comfortable talking to strangers — remains just as relevant.
[With apps,] Friends, co-workers, classmates, and/or relatives don’t show up to flesh out the complete picture of who a person is until further on in the timeline of a relationship—it’s unlikely that someone would introduce a blind date to friends right away. In the “old model” of dating, by contrast, the circumstances under which two people met organically could provide at least some measure of common ground between them.
Lyric: Nuvole Bianche by Ludovico Einaudi
Likely on your “Piano Study Work Music to Zone Out To” playlist, Nuvole Bianche is a piano piece I’m attempting to learn as a creative outlet over the next month or so.
Nuvole Bianche translates to ‘white clouds,’ reminiscent of meditation and stillness.
“The idea of Nuvole Bianche is that you can watch the clouds go by, just thinking about whatever you want, and this music will be the perfect accompaniment.”
Here is Ludovico himself playing the piece in the Steve Jobs Theater in 2019.
Stay Curious,
Dan