Be part of a good community
Last modified on April 04, 2022
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Maintain continuity in life
We need some ways of maintaining continuity in our life, keeping re-upping on the same, powerful threads. Life shouldn’t dissolve into a sea of fragmented, 30-second Youtube clips…rather, we should keep coming back to the same threads, seeing how they evolve over time.
To be transformed by a book, readers must do more than absorb information: they must bathe in the book’s ideas, relate those ideas to experiences in their lives over weeks and months, try on the book’s mental models like a new hat.
I feel like…it takes time to integrate insights. To stitch them into our webs of meaning.
This can mean:
- Doing intellectual work on a more daily basis, rather than in sporadic bursts, in order to be more immersed in that headspace. I feel like the people who are the best at what they do are absolutely immersed in the headspace – they’re the kind of people whose minds wander to think about those problems while they’re in the shower.
- Actively memorizing things through spaced repetition .
- Establishing a daily meditation practice, where you learn new insights over time.
- “Slow-reading” a book, allowing its insights to unfurl over the backdrop of your life in motion. (Alternatively, re-reading a book at different points in your life.)
I think another crucial source of continuity in life is being part of a good community. Essentially, I’d want to find community/communities that take “that one engrossing conversation that kept you up till 3am,” and serialize it. Be living and breahting in an ideaspace that is enriching.