Hi, I’m George. You’re here because you bumped into me on Twitter or we know each other IRL. I started writing this newsletter as a meditation on a quote from David Brooks’ book, The Social Animal.
The truth is, starting even before we are born, we inherit a great river of knowledge, a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days or hours ago, we call education and advice.
The quote is so rich and touches on nearly every aspect of living, I’m trying to make sense of it by writing What is the Information? my weekly newsletter where I try and share information from what I’m reading, thinking or writing about. Thanks for reading and leave a comment, if you’d like. I would love to chat with you about what you read here.
What mental baggage do we choose to hold on to?
More from Luke Burgis’s book called Wanting. I’m following up on exercise I mentioned in WITI No. 54 - still working through this but I did have a chance to reflect on what I believed to be some accomplishments that define me...
Learning Japanese and traveling there after graduating from university. In high school, I talked about studying abroad but never had the guts to follow through. I don’t think I had the resources to be able to do something like that from the high school I attended. Or maybe I just didn’t want it enough. That study abroad experience has forever colored my life. I’m a big believer that young people should travel abroad, especially Americans, to be exposed to different ways of life beyond what they perceive the world to be. Living in urban Japan exposed me to a first-world alternative perspective.
Changing careers after studying engineering for 6 years. I cringe when I think back to my early adulthood. I had such a fixed mindset. It was helpful to accomplish a goal like getting credentialing with an engineering diploma but I couldn’t figure out the next step. I discovered my love of reading and sharing complex information in a simple way and it led to different career.
Coaching my children on how to avoid the mistakes I made and building on the lessons I’ve learned. This is an ongoing project with an overflowing source of accomplishment and potential dread. No parent wants to see their child fail but mistakes are inevitable and often the best teachers. As long as mistakes are reversible, there’s not too much harm in it.
This brings me to this meme:
Cringe memories vs. Good memories.
This is something that I have to keep working on myself and not get too frustrated with my children when they fall into this trap. I try to remind my children that perhaps they are making a memory more prominent than it needs to be and thinking that the prominence implies importance. What they forget, and so do I, is that they are the ones who originally attached the original significance to it. That significance can be diminished too. A bad memory doesn’t have to define you.
Word of the week: recalcitrant (you should worry if you find your child described this way) I especially love the synonym: contumacious
Find of the week
Animal crossing IRL
Bambi & a bobcat
Osaka, Japan. I found myself bowing in apology to my Japanese host mom for walking me home from the train station after a exchange student dinner where too much sake was served. I cringe thinking about it 24 years later. (Definitely etched in stone.) What cringe memory would you share? Comment above.
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That’s all for this week,
Mata ne!
-George
I think for you, you need to start working toward going back to Japan. How amazing would that be as a trip for you and your boy? I know my boy would be super jealous. It’s at the top of his bucket list.