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I was doing some more reflecting on what this newsletter is truly about and why people would want to read it, and in the spirit of “building with the garage door open,” my current answer is that this is a small corner of the Internet where I’m experimenting with creating a space to intentionally reflect on how humans can become more intentional, creative, and effective, minus fear-based incentives.

The best way to help the world (and yourself) is to be grounded, intentional and doing what only you can do.

The alchemy of journaling: channeling chaos into clarity

In a world drowning in data and starved for wisdom, taking time to jot down your thoughts is not just helpful, it's a necessity.

A core value of this newsletter is the belief that only consuming things (whether it’s information, food, data, etc.) is super harmful to your intelligence, happiness, and psyche overall.

As humans, we have to create at least as much as we consume. Creating something - an experience, a journal entry, an opinion, an outcome - is where we process what we learned at a deeper level and make it our own.

I was recently writing an article about how to have a durable understanding of how the world works and make better decisions through the skill of knowledge integration, and inevitably wrote a little section about journaling.

Everyone agrees we should all be journaling more, but not all journaling is the same. You can have a really valuable journaling session or you can just have a meh session where you don’t walk away with much.

In the article, I told a story about how I happened to listen to a podcast between Seth Godin and Tim Ferriss and the questions they ask themselves to refocus on the things that are most important to them. I paused the podcast and tried to answer those questions for myself.

The result was one of the best journaling sessions I’ve ever had. I walked away feeling like I had approached the same problems I’d been dealing with for months with a new perspective.

That experience was a good reminder of the power of a well structured question, and made me wonder what else my digital mentors would recommend as journaling prompts.

So as any good AI-fearing millenial would do, I asked ChatGPT4 for some starting points and the answers were pretty dang good.

Given that ChatGPT generated over 40 different questions, I’m going to sprinkle them in the next few newsletters so as not to overwhelm. The questions are so good that I also want to give them the proper space to be heard and not get lost in the mix.

#1 and #7 are top of mind for me rn.

P.S. I’ve verified the quality of these questions (I’ve heard each of these thought leaders ask these questions out loud via podcast) and I’m amazed at how easy ChatGPT made it for me to retrieve these questions.

Tweet of the week

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Until next time ✌️