Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Last weekend we had to make a very exciting last minute trip to Washington DC. The National Geographic documentary my wife scored won an Emmy Award so we celebrated with the film crew. Six years ago, she quit a marketing job at Google to pursue her dream of composing music for movies and TV. She didn’t have a single contact in the industry. Today she’s in the big league of award winning documentaries. I’m incredibly proud of her.
Until next week,
Florian
The Philosopher Child
We think of wisdom as something that grows with experience. But what if we were born wise and lost it along the way?
I remember the words my high school philosophy teacher once wrote on the blackboard:
“The only true skill you need as a philosopher is to cultivate a sense of wonder.”
It seemed easy at the time. And yet as we age, we become increasingly numb to the world around us. We go about our lives like a well coordinated colony of ants moved only by the magnetic force of our individual tasks.
Luckily, I hired a tiny new philosophy teacher. Yesterday, we walked around the block. He pointed out every truck that drove by, jumped in excitement at the sight of a Golden retriever and spotted a squirrel running up a tree.
My two-year-old has something I’m working hard to regain: a constant state of awe. There is no hierarchy in the world that surrounds him. The dirt is as noble as his wooden train track. Everything is subject to meticulous inquiry.
And so when he points at the mundane and asks “What's this?”, I try not to rush into an answer.
I pause.
And in that fraction of a second, I let the wonder win me over.
Weekly Wisdom
✔ Lists as a Lens: My former boss and now Head of Public Policy at Stripe writes one of the most intellectually delightful newsletters out there. This week, he draws our attention to the cultural and normative significance of lists, the importance of having a “not-to-do” list and how building a portfolio of lists can help teams perform better.
🏭 Productivity Fatigue: Cal Newport’s readers are fed up with productivity culture. He’s taking that opportunity dive into the historical roots of the concept. The emergence of the service economy in the 1960s coincided with a radical shift: the onus of improving productivity moved from the organization to the individual worker. Newport argues that the way forward is not to abandon productivity as a useful metric. Instead, we should go back to placing the responsibility on organizations.
Lateral Thought
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Pascal