Question on sitting with the darkness:

How will this struggle fuel my inevitable growth?

There is a beautiful passage from Rumi that I love:

I said: what about my eyes?
He said: Keep them on the road.
I said: What about my passion?
He said:Keep it burning.
I said: What about my heart?
He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?
I said: Pain and sorrow.
He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

That last line just hits different:

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

In Ancient Indian traditions, there is a belief in a concept called the Wheel of Time (or "kalachakra"). The idea is that time goes through a natural three-part cycle:

1. Creation
2. Destruction
3. Rebirth

Every period of creation is followed by a period of destruction. Every period of destruction is followed by a rebirth and period of creation.

This has always resonated with me. I believe our lives follow a similar natural cycle from creation (growth) to destruction (struggle) to rebirth (new beginnings).

The true wisdom is found in outlasting the darkness of the periods of destruction—knowing that the darkness is a necessary precursor to your rebirth.

As Rumi wrote, the wound (darkness) is the place where the Light (rebirth) enters you.

Lesson: View each period of pain, sorrow, and struggle as a natural precursor to your inevitable growth. Have faith. Sit with it. Allow that light to enter and grow within you before it shines for everyone to see.

Quote I'm hanging on my wall:

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Paradox of Risk: The greatest risk comes from taking no risk at all.

Don't follow their path. Create yours.

(Share this on X/Twitter!)

Framework for managing hard problems:

Monkeys & Pedestals

The Monkeys & Pedestals mental model is a problem-solving approach developed by Google's internal moonshot innovation unit, X (not to be confused with the new Twitter).

I first came across it through the amazing Annie Duke (author of Thinking in Bets and several other best-selling books).

X is focused on solving large, world-scale problems through transformative innovation. The idea of Monkeys and Pedestals is foundational to their approach.

Let's say your end goal is to have a monkey juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal.

That problem has two parts, one hard and one easy:

1. Hard: Training a monkey to juggle flaming torches.
2. Easy: Building a pedestal.

The core insight is that there's no point building the pedestal if you aren't going to be able to train the monkey to juggle flaming torches.

You should focus on the hardest part of the problem first, because it is the bottleneck to being able to solve the entire problem.

If you start with the easy part (building the pedestal), and it turns out the hard part (training the monkey) was impossible, your team will have wasted a lot of time, energy, and money that could have been deployed into something else.

When facing a large project, we can all adopt a similar approach:

• Deconstruct the project into its component parts.
• Determine the hardest parts upon which completion of the project are reliant.
• Assess the feasibility of solving those parts.
• Proceed (or stop) accordingly.

If you learn to follow this generalized approach, you'll waste less time on projects that are destined to fail and focus on those that have a higher chance of success.

Heart-wrenching post on love and loss:

This was a beautiful (and heart-wrenching) read. I can't possibly add, so I'll quote from it:

"The only thing that matters AT ALL is the quality of the relationships with the people we love. Focus on that...Loving that deeply is a practice. It’s like anything, sometimes it’s easy, and sometimes it’s so very hard. But it’s always worthwhile."

A great annual post of tiny learnings:

​52 Things I Learned in 2023​

An annual post of random, fun learnings that I always enjoy.

A few favorites from this year's list:

• Only 28 books sold more than 500,000 copies in the US in 2022. Eight of them were by romance novelist Colleen Hoover.
• When Italy banned Chat-GPT, productivity of coders in the country fell by 50% before recovering.
• 40% of people shown a photoshopped image of themselves riding in a viking ship as a child claimed to remember the (fictional) incident. This replicates a similar experiment from 2002 involving a fictional balloon ride.

Worth your time.