5 Things prompts/ideas to ponder
August
Hi friends! Sorry for the silence and delay, been going through some things recently. I’ll try to catch up and maintain the publishing pace! Thank you so much for your patience with me!
Here are your 5 ideas to ponder/journaling prompts
From How to Overcome Your Fear of the Unknown, think about where you could reduce uncertainty in your life and list out the type of risks you tolerate better (I suggest rating out of 5): financial, intellectual, social, emotional, physical, and so on. (Types of personal risks)
‘The important lesson is that knowing which risks you tolerate well can help you see where to push more boldly into the frontier, while knowing which you don’t will help you prepare so that you can approach them with more confidence.’ (HBR)
Enlighten Me, Please! by one of my friends and favourite writers on Medium, Yean Foong:
Sometimes, our minds can’t accept differences. Different preferences create two distinct worlds, and a different ideology could sound threatening.
What makes our eyes see so vast while our minds think so narrowly? While the former is the product of evolutions that unfolded over thousands of years, what should we blame for the latter?
Do you have any old interests you’ve been neglecting or wanting to do for a while? Consider picking them back up or replacing them entirely. Time to schedule some of these into your calendar!
List down past interests, and ponder what about the experience that interested you, and why you stopped when you did (when you lost interest/your reward).
Rewards for you may look like: learning something new, the satisfaction of going from ignorance to competence, building expertise, a sense of community and belonging, and discovering how things run behind the scenes.
(Source: Refuse to Choose by Barbara Cher, Chapter 2)
This activity would help you understand yourself better, and why you love doing the things you do, going beyond particular activities.
For example, one of my past interests was badminton and embroidery (I still consider picking them up to get better at them), but stopped when I knew how to do it reasonably well. I lost interest in past the discovery stage and learning the skills. I got what I came for: the basics know-how, and I know the methods of learning (like how the different stitches work so I know how to learn them) if I were to wish to complete a project on my own. I find that to be true to different extents of competency across other hobbies and activities.
I recently watched an interview of professional musicians, some of which are very accomplished professors teaching at some of their great institutions. The video is in Mandarin since the Youtuber is Taiwanese and since there are no English subtitles in the video, I will try my best to translate the main idea said by one of the interviewees that I found profound and wish to cover here.
One of the professors said what I thought was a pretty cool analogy when asked if he would advise students who are very passionate about music but aren’t exactly great at it to not pursue music professionally. He said no since there will be a place for these students in society as well.
He talked about society being a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid, by mass, sits the people like music lovers. At the top of the pyramid is where the elites belong. In this pyramid, there are many different levels in between, and they all require very different people of different levels to fill up these positions in society which are all very important. This would result in every musician finding different paths, and without having to sit at the very top where they become the best to find work out there.
And I find this analogy pretty cool, and I think it applies not just to music, but to most other fields that I can think of as well.