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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 176 (Feb 25, 2024) — Ego Trip Trap, Ready to See, Circle of Competence, & More
Sloww Sunday shares my latest and greatest creations and curations to 10,000+ students of life. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to other lifelong learners.
📚 Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
What is in your “circle of competence”?
In last week’s newsletter, we covered Leo Tolstoy’s circle of reading. This week, let’s pair it with Charlie Munger’s circle of competence:
- “You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence … Rise quite high in life by slowly developing a circle of competence—which results partly from what they were born with and partly from what they slowly develop through work … In effect, you’ve got to know what you know and what you don’t know. What could possibly be more useful in life than that?” — Charlie Munger (Poor Charlie’s Almanack)
- “When ego and not competence drives what we undertake, we have blind spots. If you know what you understand, you know where you have an edge over others. When you are honest about where your knowledge is lacking you know where you are vulnerable and where you can improve. Understanding your circle of competence improves decision-making and outcomes … No one can have a circle of competence that encompasses everything. There is only so much you can know with great depth of understanding. This is why being able to identify your circle, and knowing how to move around outside of it, is so important.” — Shane Parrish (The Great Mental Models Vol 1: General Thinking Concepts)
- “The inside of the circle covers areas where you have knowledge or experience—where you are competent—and in those areas, you can think effectively. In areas outside the circle, you cannot. The most dangerous zone is just outside your circle of competence, where you might think you are competent but you really are not.” — Gabriel Weinberg & Lauren McCann (Super Thinking)
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Do you really know what’s possible with money?
I recommend that everybody read Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker (Book Summary). Premium members also have access to my ERE synthesis which includes content from the ERE book, ERE blog/wiki/forum, interviews, and podcasts: 🔒How to Build a Lifestyle Design Strategy & System (+ Visuals).
I read the ERE book exactly 3 years ago, and I still think about it all the time. It’s one of only a few books I plan on rereading because it challenges everything you think you know about money and lifestyle design. All aspects of the “extreme” approach may not work for everyone, but it at least opens minds to what is possible. And, Jacob’s practical philosophy speaks for itself: his total annual expenses have only been around $7k/year for decades now ($14k combined expenses including his wife), he was financially independent at age 30 while never making more than $41k/year, and as far as I can tell he has under $1M in net worth yet has 150+ years of his living expenses covered!
“On the whole, I have fully internalized the ERE philosophy … I think this way naturally and automatically. I walk the talk. I don’t think of my choices as a sacrifice … Spending money mainly serves to resolve friction from inefficient lifestyle design. And for us, there’s just not a whole lot of friction left anymore except real-estate, taxes, and insurance premiums (which account for nearly 60% of our budget). We consider spending money a failure to solve our problems by smarter means.” — Jacob Lund Fisker
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
You can only see what you are ready to see…
This is a curated collection of my favorite quotes that illustrate you can only see / realize / understand what you are ready to see / realize / understand (pair with: 🔒What is the Subject-Object Relationship?):
- “You can glean what you can glean when you are ready to glean what you are ready to glean.” — Guy Ritchie
- “The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.” — E.M. Forster
- “The landscape and the conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he’s ready for is the one that he gets.” — Joseph Campbell
- “When conditions come together for something to arise, it will arise.” — Sharon Salzberg
- “You’ve now heard it, and now God could use that down the road possibly if it’s going to be of any use to you or prove insightful in any way.” — Bernadette Roberts
- “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.” — Eckhart Tolle
- “No matter what your level of experience, you can trust that you’ll take what most serves your awakening awareness.” — Tara Brach
- “You do what you do because that’s what the harmony of the universe requires … Everybody has as much guidance as they need. It’s all happening perfectly. That’s what’s so mind blowing. The thing is just unfolding for each person so perfectly … What seem like critical moments in a life, when you look back later, you see that there was a lot of preparation in your being for that.” — Ram Dass
- “The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. How much are you ready to take?” — Anthony de Mello
- “When you’re ready to wake up, you’re going to wake up. And if you’re not ready, you’re going to stay pretending that you’re just ‘poor little me.'” — Alan Watts
- “When the question, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ appears in all urgency, when one is ready to give all to this question, then one is a disciple, a disciple of truth, of life.” — Jean Klein
- “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready, the teacher will disappear.” — Unknown
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
The Ultimate Ego Trip Trap
Always remember this (pair with: The other side of Ego that Spiritual Narcissism, Virtue Signalling & Moral Grandstanding have in Common):
- “You may rid yourself of all worldly addictions and aversions, (and) the most deadly pretension may raise its head. You may begin to believe you are a spiritually superior person.” — Gerald Heard
- “Before, you had a worldly ego and now you’ve got a spiritual ego, but you’ve got an ego all the same, a refined one and one more difficult to cope with. When you renounce something, you’re tied to it.” — Anthony de Mello
- “I’ll do every single thing that a spiritual person would do, and then I’m spiritual. No, you’re not. It’s nothing. It’s the biggest trap that could possibly exist … Do not try to put nice white lights around your garbage and sit there and say, ‘I’m pure’. That is spiritual ego.” — Michael Singer
- “The more one strives for greater insight and seeks detachment from ego, the more attached one is to whatever one is seeking … Ego tries to usurp even the loftiest spiritual notions to feel good about itself. Trungpa Rinpoche famously diagnosed this tendency as spiritual materialism.” — Susanne Cook-Greuter
- “The fundamental conflict in the spiritual quest is that ego desires spiritual enlightenment, but ego can never achieve spiritual enlightenment. Self cannot achieve no-self … The end of the one marks the beginning of the other. No one can have their cake and eat it too, despite what so many egotists and profiteers would have us believe … Spiritual enlightenment gets redefined as something attainable by ego, and now the equation works to everyone’s satisfaction. Ego gets to continue the noble quest and a thriving spiritual industry continues to thrive. Of course, no one gets the grail, but if you understand the fundamental conflict, you’ll see that no one really wanted it anyway. The quest for the grail is about the quest, not the grail.” — Jed McKenna
- “Unconscious people – and many remain unconscious, trapped in their egos throughout their lives – will quickly tell you who they are: their name, their occupation, their personal history, the shape or state of their body, and whatever else they identify with. Others may appear to be more evolved because they think of themselves as an immortal soul or living spirit. But do they really know themselves, or have they just added some spiritual sounding concepts to the content of their mind? Knowing yourself goes far deeper than the adoption of a set of ideas or beliefs. Spiritual ideas and beliefs may at best be helpful pointers, but in themselves they rarely have the power to dislodge the more firmly established core concepts of who you think you are, which are part of the conditioning of the human mind. Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.” — Eckhart Tolle
- “Many of the greatest minds in history have gotten caught in this trap of wanting to be God and at the same time to retain their separate identity. They are caught because they still have energy attached to the desire for ego power. And to be God is obviously the ultimate power trip … The psychosis business is an interesting business if you go through the doorway too fast and you’re not ready for it. You’re bound hand and foot and thrown into outer darkness. You may land anywhere, and lots of people end up in mental hospitals. The reason they do is: they went through the door with their ego on and: ‘Wow! I’ve been invited to the wedding feast. I mean dig me! Sam Jones! Sam Jones in Heaven! Sam Jones standing on the right side of the Lord. There’s the Lord, and there’s Gabriel, and there’s Sam Jones.’ They don’t understand that you gotta die to be born. That only when you have been born again do you enter the kingdom of heaven. So, they’ve gone in on the first round, and what happens is they go on a huge ego trip. It’s called: The Messianic Complex. It’s called: Paranoia. Delusions of grandeur.” — Ram Dass
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Ram Dass on the Perfection of What is
Ram Dass, bestselling author of Be Here Now (Book Summary), has too many great quotes to list them all here so this is just a sampling. Premium members also have access to Ram Dass’ tips on 🔒How to Practice Witnessing (+ Infographic).
- “When I talk about perfection, I’m saying open to just what is … The way of things is just the way it’s supposed to be.”
- “Watch how creative the mind is in keeping you being somebody doing something … The statement in the Dao ‘one does nothing, and nothing is left undone’ means you’re getting very tired being somebody doing something, and there’s a whole other way of being in which you are the thing itself and whatever happens happens.”
- “Your understanding of what the universe is all about changes as you proceed further along the path towards enlightenment. As your vantage point or perspective changes, you begin to understand more and more of ‘how it is.’ With this greater understanding comes greater compassion . . . an acceptance of ‘how it is’ . . . an ability to see the divine plan in everything . . . even in your failings and the failings of others.”
- “The simple rule of the game, repeated in the most profound mystical texts, reminds us that it is not my but THY will, O Lord . . . not my trip but THY Trip … The more clearly you hear, the more your actions will be in harmony with the Way . . . with His Will. Then you will truly understand: Not my but Thy will, O Lord.”
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
“I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody—including me, has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.” — Ken Wilber
Pair with:
- “If you could see the world the way I see it, you’d understand why I behave the way I do.” — Axiom of Clinical Psychology
- “We can see other people’s behaviour, but not their experience.” — R. D. Laing
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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