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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 181 (Mar 31, 2024) — No More Podcasts, Mind Over Body, Truth Above All, & 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
Hot Take #1: If you care about learning, stop listening to podcasts!
This doesn’t apply to those who listen to podcasts for entertainment or even edutainment. If those are your intentions, by all means, keep listening to podcasts for fun. However, if your main goal is learning and you need/want to cut something out of your info diet, cut out all podcasts. My experience over the years is that podcasts have the lowest learning return per minute spent. If you need something to listen to in the car or while exercising, listen to audiobooks.
Here’s an example: Let’s say an author recently published a book and is going on a podcast appearance tour/circuit. The average book can be read in 3-5 hours. Podcasts can be 1-5+ hours. And, I’ve never once heard an author deliver their key points in the spoken word (podcasts) more succinctly than in the written word (books). If you want to get a video/audio introduction to someone from a podcast, I think that’s great (which is why I do podcast appearances)—but only spend 1-30 minutes with a podcast by utilizing the timestamps to click around to the segments that are most interesting to you. It’s almost never worth it to listen to a multi-hour podcast from start to finish.
My experience: I synthesize from all types/sources of content (books, papers, videos, podcasts, social, etc). My own lived experience is that I’ve had far more spontaneous/serendipitous insights, epiphanies, aha moments from reading than from listening to anything. And, on the flip side, I’ve regretted spending time listening to stuff far more often than reading anything. Also, I’ve found it a very rare occurrence where someone on a podcast is talking about something they haven’t already thought about and, in most cases, written somewhere before.
All in all: There are always learning trade-offs at play. Are you actively and consciously thinking about how you are spending your precious time and energy to learn? If you care most about learning, focus on the written word because it almost always has a higher learning return per minute spent than the spoken word which is often too messy and fluffy.
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Hot Take #2: Body health is no guarantee of mind health!
Conventional wisdom says you can do either of these and it will take care of the other:
1. You can take care of your body, and it will take care of your mind, or
2. You can take care of your mind, and it will take care of your body.
Hot take: This is often not the case! I agree with #2, but not #1. It seems like there are tons of body healthy people (physical focus on diet, fitness, etc) who are not mind healthy (psychologically mature, developed, etc)—but I don’t often see someone mind healthy who isn’t also generally body healthy. In other words, being body healthy is no guarantee of being mind healthy, but being mind healthy often has a natural byproduct of being body healthy.
Take me as an example: I was in great shape when I had my existential crisis (and I had been in great shape essentially my entire life to that point—organized sports, competitive swimming, scholarship to run cross country and track in college, triathlons, etc). Being body healthy did not lead to mind healthy (in the sense of being psychologically developed). Now, a decade later, I’m far more mind healthy (psychologically mature/developed), but I’m not even close to being in great shape (yet I still generally take care of my body, eat right, quit drinking, maintain healthy weight, etc).
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
Enneagram Stages of the Work
Last week’s newsletter covered my possible Enneagram types. This week I revisited the infographic below, and it occurred to me that it’s way deeper than I first realized. This is the final page of the book The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Riso & Hudson (Book Summary).
Keywords: Aware, observing, awakening, seeking, seeing, experiencing, remembering, transforming.
In a nutshell: We are not our personalities. We will what God wills. It’s all God.
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Mind & More with Dorothy Hunt
Master the mind (and move beyond mind) with this new page of Dorothy Hunt quotes:
- “We’re all addicted to thinking on one level … The mind takes the idea of presence to think it’s something it’s supposed to do.” — Dorothy Hunt
- “The mind can be threatened and the body can feel its response, but there is this dimension of ourself that is not threatened by anything … What’s actually here now is a great antidote to the mind just spinning.” — Dorothy Hunt
- “No concept is truth. No belief is truth. No thought is truth. The truth can’t be thought.” — Dorothy Hunt
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Truth Above All
Don’t be surprised if your passion/interest in truth eventually eclipses your passion/interest in everything else:
- “At some point the interest in the nature of ‘I’ eclipses all other interests. It is like falling in love with truth or reality.” — Rupert Spira
- “(As a child) No. 1 be a pilot, and No. 2 find God. As I grew up, being a pilot became No. 2 and find God became No. 1, until only No. 1 remained.” — Swami Sarvapriyananda
- “I was an architect. But, all my life since youth, my passion has not been architecture at all. I earned my living at it, but my passion is to find out who I really, really, really am. The issue of my identity has been what makes me tick all along.” — Douglas Harding
Wise Walk Update: We are 3 months (13 weeks) into Wise Walk! Every day for 30 minutes, we walk while listening to a spiritual teacher (a different teacher every week). I’ve absolutely loved it and have already discovered some new favorite teachers. You can still join Wise Walk for the next 39 weeks of the year (and get access to all the highlights from the first 13 weeks): Join Wise Walk
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
“You are the one which is free of happiness and sadness. You are the one which is the witness of happiness and sadness—witness of their arrival, witness of their stay, witness of their departure.” — Swami Sarvapriyananda
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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