#68 How Curious! 2022's The Best of The Best

A round-up of the very best from 'How Curious' in 2022

Jan 03, 2023

Happy New Year, and welcome to the very best of ‘How Curious!’ from 2022.✌️

The ‘Best of the Best’ edition is always the most fun to create. It reflects on all my favourite discoveries shared in the last 12 months. If you were to read just one ‘How Curious!’ email, this is it.🏆

‘How Curious!’ started as a New Years’ resolution in 2018. Many resolutions fail fast, so it’s particularly pleasing to see this one going strong after five years.

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PS - After 5 years with Revue, I’ve changed the newsletter provider to Substack, as Elon Musk is shutting it down. You may notice a slightly different design, and ‘How Curious!’ is sent from howcurious@substack.com. But you can expect the same free content each month.

📸 2022 In Photos - A nice balance of coastal living and European city exploration

💡Quotes

More than your salary. More than the size of your house. More than the prestige of your job. Control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy. - Morgan Housel
Everything we say at funerals should be said at birthdays instead. We leave so much love unspoken. - Neil Strauss.
You’re going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work. - Naval Ravikant

📚Books

🪴How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

2022 was the year I finally sorted out my diet. I’d give this book 40% of the credit1.

I expected tips to reduce the odds of developing common fatal diseases. It turned out to be all about a plant-based diet! The book suggests that most premature deaths can be prevented with simple changes in what you eat and how you live.

I’ve been a vegetarian since reading this book last January.

Our diet is the number-one cause of premature death and the number-one cause of disability.
For most of the leading causes of death, the science shows that our genes often account for only 10–20 percent of risk at most.
Glancing at my plate, I can imagine one quarter of it filled with grains, one quarter with legumes, and half a plate filled with vegetables, along with maybe a side salad and fruit for dessert.

🧠How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

Super impactful book. It’s short but packs a punch, I highlighted 66 passages in the 112 pages!

I’ve applied the learnings on strategy, listening, focus, and empathy to my daily life.

Asking oneself to imagine what our lives might be like, without direct tools for a fix at hand, might feel immature and naive. Yet it is by formulating visions of the future that we more clearly identify what it is we might be missing, and thus set the wheels of change in motion.
The good listener takes it for granted that they will encounter vagueness in the conversation of others. But they don’t condemn, rush or get impatient, because they see vagueness as a universal and significant trouble of the mind that it is the task of a true friend to help with.
The challenge isn’t to avoid envy but to bring it more clearly into focus in order to guide our own next steps.

🎓The Little Book of Talent

I love trying new sports and learning new skills. In 2022 this included distance running, surfing, and surf-skateboarding.

This book contains 52 actionable tips to improve any skill. My favourites include:

#21 Think in Images - Whenever possible, create a vivid image for each chunk you want to learn. The images don’t have to be elaborate, just easy to see and feel.
#22 Pay attention immediately after you make a mistake - People who pay deeper attention to an error learn significantly more than those who ignore it.
#31 To Learn a new move exaggerate it - Going too far helps us understand where the boundaries are. To learn a new move, exaggerate it. If the move calls for you to lift your knees, lift them to the ceiling.

➕Bonus: The Culture Map: Decoding How People Think, Lead, and Get Things Done Across Cultures

🎙️Podcasts

🗺️#241 – Money, Happiness, and Productivity as a Solo Founder with Pieter Levels (Part 1 of 2)

Pieter Levels is a prominent figure in the digital nomad and ‘build in public’ world. He has a unique and appealing approach to creating solo businesses and runs several successful sites for remote workers, including Nomadlist, RemoteOk & Rebase.

As one of the inspirations for kick-starting my digital nomad life, many of his business-related philosophies resonate with me.

😁#139 Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness

Can you accurately identify what aspects of life make you happy? Would you even know if you found true happiness?

Leading psychology professor and happiness expert Laurie Santos dives deep into all the factors contributing to our happiness, why we spend so much energy pursuing it, some evidence-based methods to boost our happiness, and much more.

Santos is a Professor of Psychology and the Head of Silliman College at Yale University. Since 2018 she’s been teaching Psychology, and the Good Life, one of the most popular courses at Yale, which attracted approximately a quarter of the school’s undergraduates at one point.

✈️Call of Duty: Free | 99% Invisible, EP.477

On the west coast of Ireland lies a small town called Shannon. But Shannon is not a quaint fishing village or farming community. Its industry is its airport. It looks like a cosmopolitan international airport, but it has a unique claim to fame: the world’s first airport duty-free store.

Today, the store has what you would expect – designer perfumes, jewellery and various fine foods, with many local (in this case Irish) products in particular. But like the area around the airport, the shop started small, with a local boy from the area who would go on to change the world of tax-free commerce in and beyond Shannon. The idea also kick-started economic free zones worldwide.

🏆Best of the Web

📱App: Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts | Snipd

The default podcast player on your phone sucks. I’ve tried many, and my favourite is Snipd. It’s awesome and is available on iOS & Android.

My favourite features include:

Save podcast highlights in one tap. Saving by tapping my AirPods feels magical.
Browse episodes via AI-generated chapters and transcriptions.
Export saved highlights to one of my all-time favourite apps: Readwise.

🎒Backpack: Rolltop - GOT BAG

I’ve travelled for years with a generic corporate laptop backpack and knew I needed a more practical upgrade. The abundance of options made it challenging to decide, so I outsourced the decision. This bag is awesome:

Roll-top, so it can expand as needed.
I bring it on planes for free as my “small personal bag”.
Includes a removable laptop case.
Waterproof, and made from ocean plastic.

Several friends have now bought this bag, and they all love it. If you’ve ever considered getting a decent backpack, make your life easy, save yourself the research hassle and just buy this one. All credit goes to Marleen for the original recommendation!

📝Blog: 100 Tips for a Better Life - LessWrong

I love life-tip lists and read many last year. In this article I highlighted 16 tips, my favourites include:

4. “Where is the good knife?” If you’re looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out.
31. The best advice is personal and comes from somebody who knows you well. Take broad-spectrum advice like this as needed, but the best way to get help is to ask honest friends who love you.
95. Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment.

⚒️Show Your Work! My Two From 2022

Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you. - Austin Kleon

I’m continuously looking for outlets to create more and share what I enjoy with others. In 2022 I created two things I’m proud of.

One has broad appeal, whilst the other is super niche.

💫 32 Life-Enhancing Learnings

Any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from other people’s experiences. Here’s your chance to learn from mine!

I wrote this post to reflect on the learnings that have improved my life. Some of them may also be relevant to you. I hope you enjoy them and that at least one resonates! People seem to particularly like:

13) What are you optimising for? Always know your priority. Prioritise and act accordingly. I revert to this question for all important decisions.
22) Daily top three. Ask your partner or people close to you for their top three highlights of the day. It’s a wonderful way to catch up and see what resonates most with them.
32) Increase your luck surface area. Increase the odds of luck crossing your path by interacting with more people in more diverse situations. Sharing your work and interests online is a good start. Catching a fish is much easier if you cast a wide net.

🚨Niche interest alert🚨

🗞️LegalTechTrends: All your Legal Tech news in one place.

I enjoy building side projects to keep my product skills fresh and stay on top of new tech. LegalTechTrends is one such project. It aggregates and categorises all legal tech news and podcasts across the web so that I can efficiently stay up to date.

If you’re not in legal tech it’s boring, but if you are, it’s incredibly useful!