Brain Food: On keeping your options open, leverage, and courage

FS | BRAIN FOOD

Sunday Brain Food: a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights for life and business.

FS

Before we reinvent the wheel, it's worth looking back to leverage what we've already figured out.

— Lessons From Shakespeare

Explore Your Curiosity

★ "Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is a quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'"

— Mary Anne Radmacher on courage in 1985

★ "[W]e never want our roadmap to be just the list of things that people have asked for. That's where the longer-term thinking comes in. You have to balance the short-term, reactive stuff with the long-term."

— Building Products

Timeless Insight

"I've come to believe that this is the defining characteristic of my generation: keeping our options open. The Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has a great phrase for what I'm talking about: liquid modernity. We never want to commit to any one identity or place or community ... so we remain like liquid, in a state that can adapt to fit any future shape. And it's not just us—the world around us remains like liquid, too. We can't rely on any job or role, idea or cause, group or institution to stick around in the same form for long—and they can't rely on us to do so, either. That's liquid modernity: It's Infinite Browsing Mode, but for everything in our lives."

— Pete Davis in Dedicated

Tiny Thought

In life, you don't need to know the answers to all the questions. But don't try to lie that you do.

Anyone worth partnering with can spot an amateur liar.

Professional liars have a tell. They always need to find a new person to fool because the people they've duped in the past don't want to work with them again. This is why a professional liar almost never succeeds on a large scale.

If you don't know, just say you don't know and you'll figure it out. Don't fake it till you make it. Work until you get it.

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Stay safe,
Shane

P.S. The attention to detail is remarkable.

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