Uncover your guiding principles

This new tool by the Clearer Thinking team helped me discover and build a list of my own guiding principles. Your principles are what guides you when making decisions and if you know what they are, you can have less anxiety surrounding decisions and make them faster. Here are a few questions and principles that influence my decisions:

• Choose life-expanding choices over comfort.
• Ask yourself how this serves your growth.
• Can I accept the consequences of this choice? If I can, that is true freedom.
• What would my fully-actualized self do?
• When in doubt, opt for the natural path over the forced path.

— CD

Peculiar, charming film

Here is an uplifting, charming film that should not work, but does. It is a live-action film with a talking sea shell as the hero. Marcel-the-shell overcomes disabilities (he is just a sea shell!) to reunite his lost family. It’s adorable, strange, inventive, weird, and heartwarming. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On began real life as a YouTube short that went viral, and was turned into a feature film with expert stop-motion effects. It’s so odd, but joyful, you won’t forget it. Available for rental ($6) on all the commercial video streams. — KK

Best coffee creamer

I usually like my espresso black, but lately I’ve been adding Peak evaporated full cream milk. Unlike most canned evaporated milk, which has added sugar and thickeners, Peak contains nothing but milk, minus a lot of the water. It tastes delicious, more so than half and half, and a little amount is all I need to lighten my coffee.  — MF

Personal annual report

Rather than making new year’s resolutions, I answered these seven pairs of questions, structured as a “Personal Annual Report” in this downloadable PDF created by Shane Parrish at Farnam Street. For instance, “What can I do this year that will leave me in a better position for next year?” The quick exercise is worth doing once a year.  — KK

Museum of Failure

The Museum of Failure is a collection of failed products and services from all over the world. It’s kind of weird, kind of sad, kind of funny. You can check out the collection here. — CD

Top year-end lists

Here are a few of my favorite end-of-year lists, with two samples from each:

100 Tips for a Better Life

• “Keep your identity small. ‘I’m not the kind of person who does things like that’ is not an explanation, it’s a trap. It prevents nerds from working out and men from dancing.“
• “Cultivate compassion for those less intelligent than you. Many people, through no fault of their own, can’t handle forms, scammers, or complex situations. Be kind to them because the world is not.”

40 Ways to Let Go and Feel Less Pain

• “Channel your discontent into an immediate positive action—make some calls about new job opportunities, or walk to the community center to volunteer.”
• “Remind yourself these are your only three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it. These acts create happiness; holding onto bitterness never does.”

52 things I learned in 2022

• 37 per cent of the world’s population, 2.9 billion people, have never used the Internet. [International Telecommunication Union]
• A deep learning model trained on 85,000 eyes can tell male from female eyeballs with 87% accuracy but no one knows why. [Edward Korot & co]

— MF

01/15/23