Gratitude

“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

Symbolikon

I’ve recently watched Graham Hancock’s banned TED talk “The War on Consciousness”. Graham, during an interview on London Real, later said the only reason why it got banned was because his views “challenged a dogma of a particular faction of science”. The faction he is referring to is the faction that holds a materialist-reductionist worldview. Since I always thought TED stood for openly sharing a vast array of worldviews, so that one can approach a topic from different angles, I find it weird that TED banned his talk.

I went on exploring Graham’s website and watched a featured interview with John Anthony West, about “The Mysterious Origins of Civilization”. If you are curious about human history, I highly recommend it. You will notice that John is, well, a true character. Through Graham’s news section I stumbled upon a Fast Company article about a new project around ancient symbols. During the last three years an Italian designer named Michela Graziani has been doing research about the meaning of ancient symbols and is currently running a Kickstarter campaign for a digital library of symbols, hooray!

As some of you already know one of my current projects, VAU, is inspired by universal symbols that extend through diverse aspects of life, from nature to geometry to spirituality to art. I’ve already backed the project and I hope you will, too.

Fomo vs. learning

Fomo, the Fear of missing out, is real, so is the desire to learn. Sometimes I overwhelm myself with the vast amount of things I keep adding to my lists: YouTube to watch video list, Goodreads to read book list, Podcast to listen episode list, Website to read page list, conference/trade shows/events to participate in list, boardgames to play list….

There are moments in which I recognise a sense of anxiety around the fact that I won’t make it through all of these, at least not in this life. Then there are moments in which I realise this is just a story I tell myself. There is no real need to get through all of these items. I can rejoice in the fact that there are so many opportunities for learning, for being playful and simply use them as the tools they are.

Thank you for reading. I wish you a playful week.

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Create. Your. Own. Universe.

Dance with fear

I am alumni of The Marketing Seminar, in short TMS, by Akimbo Workshops which is a brand created by Seth Godin. Akimbo Workshops includes a series of online learning programmes such as e.g. the altMBA and TMS. Recently I joined their online platform Forward Link where the Akimbo team and their audience meet to learn and connect. On a weekly basis Seth posts prompts around different topics provided via short videos. One of these was titled “Dance with fear”. I posted the following to share an exercise I sometimes do when I realise I am in fear. 

“Since TMS4 ended I am part of a Mastermind group. It is a lot of fun and offers immense learning. There are five of us who have a weekly Zoom call. Before each call each of us does an exercise from the TMS cycle, sometimes we do a hotseat. Last week we talked about Tribes. Somewhen during this week’s call the topic fear came up. I shared what works for me when I become aware of my own fear, when I am able to observe it and don’t immediately rush to fight or flight mode.

It is a little visualisation exercise that goes like this: I picture myself in my deathbed, many years from now and ask myself the following question: The thing that right now I am fearful of, assuming the worst case scenario unfolded (of course we all know it rarely does), would I give this thing any thought, is it important enough that I would reflect upon it while lying in my deathbed, taking my last few breaths? In this “mindgame“ it is astounding how few fears actually make the journey to join me in my deathbed. A lot of times this exercise ends with me having a good laugh, about the drama story I gave birth to. In such moments I remind myself that I do not need to be a victim of my own fear, I can live with the fear and do it anyway. When I do this exercise it feels liberating, as if I managed to lift a weight from my shoulders.  

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Here are three books that came to my mind while I listened to Seth’s prompt video:
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers
The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski (this one made my all-time favourite list)
Dear Human: Master Your Emotions by Mark Youngblood  
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Do you have any exercise that works for you regarding fear? Let me know by reaching out via the Contact page.

Create. Your. Own. Universe.

A fun fact

“It’s one kind of information. And it has its own limitations. I think there are other kinds of information that are valid. For example, the information that comes from your own experience. And I like to point out to people that in all languages derived from Latin, unfortunately not English, the word for experience and the word for experiment are the same. In Spanish, experimentar means both to experience and to experiment. So your own experience is a form of experimentation that produces useful information. You have to check it against other kinds of information. With double-blind studies, this is held out as the gold standard. And many people think this is the only kind of information we should pay attention to. But here’s an interesting thing. You can try this yourself. And it’s an assignment that I give to medical students and doctors.” Dr. Andrew Weil

Discovered via a Tim Ferriss podcast episode with Dr. Andrew Weil. Here you can find the full transcript of the episode.