A Few Good (Lateral) Thoughts #14
Quick little thoughts at the end of the week
Welcome to the Friday edition! If you’re active in the stock market, you need a hug (I know I do). If you’re not, I hope your week has been fantastic and if you ask why the rest of us need a hug, I will hunt you down.
We’re slowly coming to a breaking point - we’re running out of interesting lateral thinking exercises, so starting now, I’ll be either making some myself or I’ll be borrowing lessons from various other stuff I’m reading or have read.
This one is one my dad’s favorite stories to tell and it has a great twist.
A young Zen pupil falls in love with a girl. Torn between his Zen teachings and his one true love, he goes to his master and asks:
“Master, I’m in love with a woman. I know that if I choose to be with her, I have to renounce studying with you, but I’m afraid I’ll regret it. What do I do, how do I choose?”
What advice would you give the young pupil?
An answer, as usual, at the end.
Let’s dive into what caught my attention this week and I think you’ll all like:
A super interesting analysis on all things Web3 - now, before I get burned at the stake by the crypto inquisition, there are some exaggerated points in the video
There definitely are good sides to the whole Web3 story. The most important one being that it did create wealth people who weren’t part of the “old money” hierarchy.
The bad part is that it’s now mostly become such an overinflated hype machine that it’s virtually impossible to differentiate the pyramid schemes (call them rug pulls if that makes you feel more modern) from products with actual potential.
My take on this - take everything with a grain of salt. There’s still a lot of potential in the space and definitely plenty of business opportunities, but a good red flag is if the founders of whatever crypto/blockchain/NFT project praise their solution as the be all end all.
A healthy dose of skepticism from the people involved in the business is usually a good tell that they aren’t trying to sell a miracle cure.
People talk a lot about building confidence, yet forget that maintaining it is all about accepting your mistakes
You’ve probably heard about impostor syndrome. It’s unfortunately become the go-to explanation whenever someone is feeling inadequate or unsure of themselves.
A lot of the time, however, it’s simpler than that. You’re allowed to be unsure. Understanding that you’re not an all-knowing being is part of maintaining your confidence.
The most determined people I know are aware of the fact that they’re sometimes, maybe oftentimes, wrong. It’s part of their process. And most importantly, they forgive themselves for it.
The advent of self-proclaimed internet gurus has made us think that being at 100%, hell, even 110%, all of the time is the norm. It’s not. However, it’s convenient for them to claim that since whenever their advice doesn’t work, they can just blame it on you: “You’re not giving 110%”.
The people I love the most are people who doubt themselves. People who despite all that doubt decide to get up the next day and work towards building their version of the promised land, with all the milk and honey they can imagine.
(Potential) answer/interpretation:
The Zen Master replies: “No matter what you choose, you’ll regret it.”
Now, there’s a lot to unpack there and you can of course take that statement a lot of different ways. But to stay true to our lateral thinking topic, this is my take on it:
We’re taught to avoid regret. There’s even a huge meme culture around avoiding regret (YOLO, ape in, degens etc.).
I’ll argue that as long as you don’t let regret lead your life, it can be extremely useful. Regret, in reality, is unavoidable, so the more you pretend it doesn’t exist, the more it’ll hit you when it eventually catches up to you.
Instead, happily accept that it’s ok to have regrets. Don’t ponder on them too long, but focus instead on what’s in front of you.
If you missed out, here’s the previous post:
Yuuuumm, this soothed my soul <3