On the Path | Issue 15 | May, 2022
On the Path | Issue 15 | May, 2022
Musings, ideas, explorations, and finds for the curious, adventurous, and modern-day action-takers of the world.
I've been super active (as usual), looking at life through a lens that is uniquely mine, connecting some dots here and there, and keeping myself exploring, growing, learning, and loving. I'm still on a consistently deep dive in the areas of spirituality and consciousness. I'm fascinated by the amount that's out there that I didn't know I didn't know. The more I know, the more I realize I don't know... and the more vast the pool of the I don't know that I don't know seems to get... now how in the hell is THAT possible ◡̈ ? But YES! And THANK GOODNESS... there's never an end to the exploring!
Below are some of the things I've been exploring, experimenting with, and learning...
Love and blessings,
Andy
P.S. If you, or anyone you know is looking to up their game in life... or, is struggling, hurting, or could just use someone to talk to, I am just an email away. While we may not necessarily end up working together, sometimes it's just one conversation that can make all the difference.
My Second Brain
I've always wanted the notes I take (meetings, conversations, books, videos, lists, locations, travel, reminders, etc) to be something incredibly useful. Something that I go to day in and day out to give me quick access to all the information that is not living in my head. This is something people online call your "second brain". The beginning of the trip down this particular path involved me realizing that my system is NOT that! ◡̈ It's more like a graveyard (except for a very few of them like favorite quotes, recipes, and shows/movies to watch).
I've tried a bunch of things to try to accomplish this - from the freedom and creativity of Bullet Journaling to the app that seems to do MORE THAN EVERYTHING related to notetaking (and then some), Evernote.
Some of the others I've used - Microsoft One Note, Notion, and the one I've used most consistently recently - Apple Notes.
A few weeks back I heard some whisperings about something called "backlinking". It allows you to connect the dots in your notetaking so that your notes become more usable and connected instead of being this dead end of accumulated information (like mine have often become). If you do it correctly, backlinking connects things together so that your notes start to mimic your brain - and when you think of one thing, other things related to it also come up in your searching.
I decided to take a deeper dive through articles on Medium and videos on Youtube (too many to list here - google it, and you'll see what I mean), and I came up with three apps to try out that make backlinking an integrated part of their ecosystem - Obsidian, Craft, and the one that I've settled on (for now), Roam Research.
I'll warn you... learning how to start working with backlinks instead of folders and tags takes a bit of getting used to. It's VERY different from anything I've done before, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. And I DEFINITELY see it's value.
I haven't moved my existing notes over to Roam Research yet... but every new note I'm creating is in there. And I'm starting to see how connecting the dots this way will be really useful in the future.
If you decide to start down this path, or already have, please email me... I'd love to hear about how it's going for you!
Quotes I'm pondering
“The closer you come to knowing that you alone create the world of your experience, the more vital it becomes for you to discover just who is doing the creating.”
~ Eric Micha’el Leventahl
“Some people are so poor, all they have is money.”
~ Bob Marley
A Documentary Especially for Book Lovers (Plus a Good Story)
I was in NYC a few weeks back for one of four 2-day "sharpen your sword" professional coaching events I'm taking part in this year. On Thursday afternoon I got an email from friend Teddy, somewhat out of the blue. He emailed to check in, but also to let me know that the documentary made about his brother and his bookstore would be premiering in Santa Monica (at the Laemmlie) in a couple of weeks.
He also said that he would be in NYC the next day (Friday) for the actual premiere, at this great little theater in Greenwich Village called The Film Forum.
Holy smokes! Both of us in NYC at the same time? A 'random' email? An unscheduled Friday evening upon which I had nothing planned? Coincidence? I think not!
So I said, "Teddy, I'm IN NYC right now. Got an extra ticket?"
And so there I was... feeling very much like a local, getting to attend the global premiere of "Hello, Bookstore" with the star's brother and the rest of his family.
The movie... it's a wonderful little documentary, with a Covid feel-good component, about a little bookstore in Western Massachusetts called... wait for it... "The Bookstore", and its owner, Matt Tannenbaum.
What I loved about it... rarely in life do you find someone who demonstrates through the work that they do the "BEINGNESS" of love, kindness, and service. Matt Tannenbaum is ALL of these, and more (sometimes at the expense of his own livelihood) through his love of books, and love for people. He is truly aligned... and it shows. His customers, many of whom are residents of Lennox, have grown to know, love, and respect him over the 40+ years he's owned and operated his little establishment on Main St. He loves them, and in turn, they love him right back. The film really captures it all in a slow, simple, expose about one year in the life - a year that happened to include the beginning of the Covid Pandemic.
See it when you can - you'll be better off for it as it will remind you of the possibility and capacity of any of us to conduct our lives around goodness, whole-heartedness, love, service, and authenticity.
PS - After the movie, I decided to walk back uptown on 7th Ave, stopping at whatever pizza place I came to (I was STARVING). At my first stop, I ate one of the worst pieces of pizza... ever. But the second? I happened to stumble upon a little NYC pizza joint called "Bleeker St. Pizza" and had three of the best pieces of NY-style pizza I've had in my life... EVER!!
Making Your Book Highlights Count
Are you anything like me... with good intentions of revisiting your book notes, and highlights, but never getting back around to it?
I've read hundreds of books over the last couple of decades. For any non-fiction I'm diving in to, I'm ALWAYS highlighting when reading on my Kindle, or underlining when reading book book. As you might imagine, I have a LOT of highlights that I've accumulated over the years.
Though I stopped letting the graveyard of my accumulated notes and highlights bother me years ago, a little voice inside has always said, "Ugh... what a waste!"
That's why it was love at first use when I discovered the app called Readwise. Once I connected it to my Kindle account, it took all of my highlights, organized them, and began sending them back out to me in random order as daily emails.
I was not impressed at first - as the LAST thing I wanted was more junk email.
But wait a minute... this WASN'T junk!! These emails contained passages from books that I LOVED over the years... these were the BEST PARTS of these books - highlights that I said were important and that I wanted to revisit!!
I loved these emails... and wanted to add more highlights to the daily email!
Since it allows you to customize pretty much everything about that email it sends, you can fine-tune the process any way you want.
As a result, these emails have started to be com
Another bonus... it allows you to add highlights from physical books. You take a picture of the page with the highlight, select the text you want, and then the app automatically converts those specific sentences to text and stores it for you.
Check it out... there is a free trial, but it's not free (I think the $4.49 monthly price tag is totally worth it). However, if you use THIS LINK or the one above, you'll get a FREE month added to your membership once you sign up.
What's Real? What's Not?
I love optical illusions... why? Because they're cool. But the other, more important reason for me... they remind me that what we experience in life through any of our five senses is not, in fact, objective reality.
There is really no such thing as objective reality... because everything any of us sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches, or thinks is dictated by built-in limitations in our brains, and is also affected greatly by our life experiences and how we think.
I'm not going to go on about that now, as it's the topic of volumes and volumes of books, research, and debate. But I thought I'd include an optical illusion here for you that I thought was pretty cool.
Can you count the black dots? How many do you come up with?
