You may need a Twitter Purge
Friends,
This is the 10th edition of the Practical Polymath. I’m so grateful to all of you for being part of this journey and honored that you continue to invite me in your inbox every Sunday.
This week, I’ve decided to try something a little different and co-wrote the post with fellow Write of Passage student Kyle Bowe.
This is the last week of Write of Passage. Hands down the best part of it were the exceptionally gifted people I got to have mind-bending conversations with.
In a time of extraordinary intellectual isolation, this new breed of cohort-based online learning experience is giving me immense hope that physical distance doesn’t need to be a barrier to the meeting of the minds. If you’re thinking about taking Write of Passage, feel free to ask me anything!
Until next week,
Florian
You may need a Twitter Purge
Think about the last time you opened Twitter. How did it feel?
Did you find yourself scrolling endlessly until you forgot why you got here?
Did you almost tweet but didn’t dare?
Did every flick of your thumb feel like chipping away a piece of your optimism?
Kyle and I have answered “yes” to these questions for way too long. And then we did something that radically changed our experience. We named it the Twitter Purge: cut 90% of your feed and rebuild it from scratch. Think KonMari Method applied to Twitter.
Here’s how to do it.
Step 1: Let go of the angry birds. They're easy to spot, their tweets sound snarky and cynical. Day after day, their beaks have been pecking away at your soul leaving you with little hope for the possibility of a better conversation. They're probably the reason you rarely tweet yourself.
Now onto the parrots. You know, the ones that never stop talking because there's always something new happening in the world and they want to be the first to break it to you. Lose them too and enjoy the ensuing sense of quiet.
Don’t worry if you’re only left with a few feathered friends, these are the ones you care about. Now that you’ve let go of all that loud shrieking, you can focus on the birds that will truly spark joy.
Step 2: Find your flock. Flying alone can be daunting but you don’t have to. Fortunately there are plenty of species out there that make for great flight companions. Follow those whose chirp invites you to sing along instead of making you recoil in your nest. Those who generate conversation instead of broadcasting slogans. Those who share the nuances of their journeys, the good and the bad, so you don’t have to lose as many feathers as they did.
They are a very approachable breed. So watch out for an appetizing seed of conversation and join the choir. You’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll get chirped back at.
Our flock inspires us to come out and play. Find yours and gone will be the fear of smashing your ego down on the rock hard soil of public judgement. It doesn’t have to be many at first, two or three and you’ll be flying in good company.
Step 3: Spread your wings and tweet away. What will you sing first?
Weekly Wisdom
Read this piece about what’s quickly becoming one of my favorite topics: how we systematically over-anchor in numbers to understand the messiness of the world. Test scores to evaluate student performance and GDP to measure a country’s well being are two examples where we end up measuring what we can count instead of what we really care about.
Watch this 2 minute introduction to René Girard’s theory of Mimetic Desire. I’ve only recently learned about it but this explanation of human behavior is blowing my mind.
Meet angel investor and storyteller Sari Azout. In this piece she predicts the emergence of an economy of knowledge organization. Because of the current architecture of the internet, we consume information chronologically, not contextually. She asks a really powerful question: what would it look like to make information consumption contextual so that it serves our goals?
Lateral Thought
“When cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas.”
Caitlin Moran