My 12 Top Insights In 2020
Some highlights of this year's note-taking habit.
Hey friends,
2020 has come to an end.
Since 2016 I’ve been keeping and obsessively updating an Evernote file named Meditations on Life.
It’s a simple unstructured list with 2,000+ bullet points. Each representing and idea I have heard, read or simply thought about and that seemed noteworthy.
Throughout 2020 I have added a couple hundred more bullet points. Not all of them are share worthy — but some stand out as core ideas, perspectives and insights that have influenced me in some shape or form.
So without further ado, here are twelve of my top notes of 2020. I hope some of these will provide food for thought for you, too.
ONE - 1
Bad people can have good ideas. Good people can have bad ideas.
Although it's very human to dismiss that which comes from those we don't like, it limits our potential for learning. The truth is that every single person has a billion thoughts, ideas and beliefs, all of which lie on a spectrum between good and bad, helpful and useless, constructive and destructive.
Carving out what's meaningful and ignoring what isn't — regardless of who says it — is a superpower.
TWO - 2
It's nobody's fault that life has problems.
Life isn't supposed to be smooth and without challenges. An intrinsic feature of life as a process is that things can move into very different ways. It's a simple law of probability that things will turn out not the way we would like them to from time to time.
Instead of seeking fault in others for that, focusing our energy on playing the cards we are handed in the best way possible is the only way to make progress.
THREE - 3
Achieving goals without fulfillment equals failure.
Goals are intrinsically worthless.
They are a means to an end. If the end isn't meaningful, the means themselves aren't either.
Goals ought to serve us, not the other way round.
FOUR - 4
We all tacitly assume that we will live forever.
There will come a day when we know that our life is past us; and when we wish, we would have spent our time differently — paid more attention to what matters and less to what doesn't.
It's when we acknowledge and internalize the finiteness of our lives that we begin to truly cherish what happens within it.
Why not do it already now?
FIVE - 5
Today's beliefs shape tomorrow's reality.
The imaginary limits I impose on what I dare to think possible become the actual limits of what I will be able to create.
What we see around us today restricts what we believe can be created — we attach our imagination too much to existing forms instead of future functions.
SIX - 6
We can solve long-term problems with short-term habits.
Small actions, over time, add up to big changes. Daily routines started now can solve problems that are far out in the future.
Likewise, grandiose achievements don't result from single spectacular efforts, but from many small and ordinary tasks.
SEVEN - 7
The universe doesn’t owe us anything.
The universe does not respond to need, it responds to seed. (Jim Rohn)
Instead of asking what the world has to offer us, we should ask what do we have to offer to the world?
EIGHT - 8
The Good Life is designed, not discovered.
The natural tendency of all structures is to become less orderly over time. (Entropy)
To create, maintain or increase order requires energy as there are usually infinitely more variants of disorder than of order. This makes is ridiculously unlikely that a puzzle thrown out of a box just falls into place.
The same applies to our lives where most of what's meaningful to us relies on order to some degree. If we don't design intentionally, we will discover chaos.
NINE - 9
In a world where we pay with our attention, paying attention to what we pay attention to pays off.
Attention is the cash value of time.
The time we spend with anything becomes meaningful only insofar as we pay attention to it. The world increasingly competes for our attention on a daily basis.
The more of it we give away freely for petty things, the less of it we have to enjoy what’s truly enjoyable.
TEN - 10
Good can seem bad when in contrast to excellent.
Perceived achievement is relative.
While we can hardly stop comparing ourselves to others, we can work on not taking it so seriously anymore.
As long as we measure ourselves to illusionary perfect versions of reality, we won’t recognize good enough as good enough.
ELEVEN - 11
Abundance is often harder to handle than scarcity.
In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. Today, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don’t know what to pay attention to, and often spend their time focusing on and debating side issues. (Homo Deus)
In a world where we are being flooded with information, separating the signal from the noise becomes an essential skill for making good decisions.
TWELVE - 12
We do not live in reality but with concepts of reality.
Our concepts consist of ideas about the utility of things, beauty, as well as right and wrong and they are nested within and fed by the social system we live in. They are a result of individual experience and collective and cultural indoctrination.
Our perceptions are the result of cultural learning processes that turn (raw) sensations into concepts (that make it easier to navigate the world).
Reality as it truly is will always be cloaked in our subjective mental representations.
That’s it.
If you liked this, you might enjoy my lists from 2017, 2018 and 2019 as well.
Happy 2021 ✨
Phil
P.S.: I have just launched a podcast. It’s an experiment. Check it out below 👇🏼