LSC #25: The wisdom of the inner crowd 🔮🔮
Hi there! Welcome to a new #LSC benchmark: the 25th edition, yay!
As a quick heads up, in case you just landed here or have been forwarded this newsletter, expect to find some content on productivity, personal growth, health hacks, and interesting content, always with a down-to-earth approach. Nice, right?
So, let's get into it!
Today’s summary:
🙏 Asking gives you humility
📅 The life calendar, or how to humanize our time
👣 WeWard - Get rewarded for walking
🔮 The wisdom of the inner crowd
🙏 Asking gives you humility
There is something incredibly powerful in asking. Whenever you face a new situation or a scenario you're not entirely sure how to tackle, asking people with more experience or a different perspective can be extremely helpful.
Asking cultivates humility and teaches us to listen
This is a skill that is, unfortunately, becoming quite rare these days. Listening, actually, can be categorized into three different levels:
Internal Listening (focused on self): At this level, your focus is primarily on yourself. You may only be half-listening, as your mind is busy with how what's being said relates to you or what you plan to say next.
Focused Listening (focused on other): Here, you're fully engaged with the other person. You're absorbing their words, emotions, and point of view as if you're stepping into their shoes for a moment.
Global Listening (focused on context, and what isn’t being said): Here, you're not just listening to what's being said, but also to what's not being said. It's like sensing the vibe of a room or picking up on subtle signals that aren't spoken aloud.
We are constantly bombarded with messages and communications coming from different places, which can significantly impact our ability to listen effectively. Also, we tend to listen with the filter of our experience, positioning ourselves as the center of our mental conversations (If I were in this position, I would do this).
This is why asking is so powerful! It humbles us, shifting the focus from us to our interlocutor, giving them the main stage, and allowing us to wait for some insights on whatever topic we’re asking about.
In a way, admitting that we don't have all the answers and seeking advice from someone whose opinion we value is a gift we give both to ourselves (I am not perfect) and to our interlocutor (I need you).
📅 The life calendar, or how to humanize our time
And since we've started with humility, there's a topic I've been wanting to discuss for a while but didn't quite know how to bring up.
Do you ever think about time? I mean, your time. The older I get, the more I find myself thinking about what's left. I know, there’s still (hopefully) a long road ahead. But nothing is eternal and just as we arrived, there will come a time when we won’t be here anymore.
Having this awareness doesn't necessarily affect me one way or another, but it gives me perspective. If anything, it pushes me to appreciate the highs or put the lows into context.
There is this fantastic read from Tim Urban where he presents his Life Calendar. If you’re not familiar, it's essentially a grid where each square represents a week, with each row representing one year and a total of 90 rows, meaning 90 years in total. Each week, you mark off a square, giving you perspective on how many weeks you have left.
I know, the concept may seem a bit dark, but it's rooted in the Memento Mori concept, which, aside from being a fantastic phrase for a tattoo, is something I reflect on every now and then to help me put things into perspective.
If you’re a new parent, it might be fun to create a Life Calendar for your child so they can look at it back later and see what happened in the first few years of their life. It's a nice way to document memories and milestones, giving them an actual tangible piece of their history.
I don't have a printed calendar at home (and I don't expect you to either), but humanizing death and making it part of our daily lives is both humbling and liberating.
After all, we all will be gone at some point, right? So let’s make it count!
Every day is a bonus. Now go treat it as such.
👣 WeWard - Get rewarded for walking
Speaking about bonuses… this week's product recommendation is an app that rewards you for walking. Cool, isn’t it?
The primary goal of any product, whether digital or physical, is to either cover a user's need or provide them with a benefit, right?
So that’s what WeWard does. It converts your steps into coins, allowing you to exchange these coins for cash, gifts, or charity donations.
Moreover, you can integrate it with other digital platforms and get rewarded for your purchases, adding more Wards (that’s what they call their coins) to your account.
Of course, don’t expect to get rich overnight, but if you can get something from your physical activity, it sounds like a win-win to me, right?
(Plus, you can collect cute cards during your walks—cards that are totally useless but so nice to have).
Anyway, the point is: walk more, it’s an incredibly powerful medicine. And getting rewarded for it? Well, that's just the cherry on top, isn't it?
🔮 The wisdom of crowds
Something interesting I learned this week is the theory of the Wisdom of Crowds. What it comes to say is that if you gather a bunch of different people and ask them to guess or solve something, their average answer is often pretty close to the right one, even if some individual guesses might be way off.
For instance, if you ask a group of people about the weight of an elephant (African elephants up to 6,300 kg, Asian elephants up to 4,500 kg), the average response will be closer to the actual weight of the elephant than the estimates of most individual crowd members.
I didn’t fact-check the theory myself, but hey, we can give it a shot: Reply to this email with your guess on the average weight of a blue whale. Let’s see what happens!
📊 Data Dive
And to close this, as always, a little look at the LSC performance:
268 Subscribers → Last week we were 260
0 Unsubscribed → Yay, clean week!
61% Open rate → In the healthy 60-70% range
Also, I'd love your help spreading the word about this newsletter to those who haven't discovered it yet. Here are some ways you can help:
Forward this e-mail to a few friends
Share the link on your LinkedIn profile
Post a story about it on Instagram
Tweet about it or share it on your Slack (or Microsoft Teams if that’s the tool you’re using, sorry about that)
Simply tell your friends or coworkers about it
As a farewell gift, and since we've touched on the Memento Mori concept in the newsletter, I wanted to share this scene from Fight Club where Tyler Durden drags a cashier behind the convenience store where he works and puts a gun to his head. The whole speech and the underlying concept of this scene are pure gold.
And it's Brad Pitt in one of his best roles, and there's never a wrong time to enjoy Brad Pitt, right?
And now, for good, this is it for today. How did you like the content? Is there something you’re missing or would like me to talk about? Rate this edition and use the form below if you want to suggest some topics. Happy to hear from you!
Until next week, stay safe and healthy! 🚀🚀