#11 - The Sistine Chapel Inside Us All 🔭
What we can learn from discovering 12,000 year old rock paintings
Hi! 👋🏽
Happy Wednesday, Long Way Home🏡 crew. Down to some quick housekeeping.
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On this week's LWH🏡
🗞— The Sistine Chapel Inside Us All by Vandan Jhaveri
🎙— Seth Godin on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters (check out my summary thread)
📃— Human Nature and the Regularness of Life by Rob Henderson
📃— The Elephants by Nick Crocker
📚— Originals by Adam Grant
The Sistine Chapel Inside Us All
This past week, archaeologists revealed that they have discovered mysterious wall paintings on an eight-mile stretch of cliff faces in Serranía de la Lindosa, Colombia. The ancient masterpiece is at least 12,000 years old and qualifies as being one of the world's largest collections of prehistoric wall paintings.
Luckily, the facades are incredibly well-preserved. The rock paintings depict long-extinct animals, giving researchers a sense of the ancient civilization. The paintings are so detailed that scientists are able to recognize distinct species of horses, turtles, lizards, birds, and fish embedded into the rock face.
For me, the most astounding aspect of this discovery is the fact that this is a "discovery" at all. That despite all our advanced technology and research expeditions, we are still uncovering new wonders of the ancient world. It baffles me that there are still mountains which we haven't scaled, rivers across which we haven't sailed, and jungles through which we haven't ventured. Our technology is still no match for the enormity of our world.
Readers of this newsletter will likely spend the majority of their lives in major cities. Urban areas account for merely 3% of the earth's surface area. We will spend almost our entire lives in our own little pocket of this 3%. The discovery of these rock paintings happened in a tiny corner tucked away somewhere in the other 97%. It's dizzying to imagine the sheer vastness of our world, and how many corners we will never turn, doors through which we will never walk, and sidewalks down which we will never meander. It's humbling to think about how much we will never see, no matter how hard we try.
Our knowledge of many things follow this 97/3 template (a more extreme Pareto (80/20) Principle). Below are three key examples.
First, our cities. Our daily or weekly commutes and errands lead us to only 3% of our cities. We're intimately familiar with so little of the places we call home. We know our favourite restaurants, our gyms, our friends' houses. Beyond this, we're clueless. Our neighbours' mental maps of the very same city can, and does, look drastically different than ours. It might as well be a different city altogether.
Next, our friends. Our daily conversations and small talk lead us to only 3% of our friends and colleagues. We know which hobbies and memories we share, retellings of which stories we find entertaining, and what about them we want to learn from. Beyond this, we're clueless. We don't venture down unexplored topics or experiences despite oceans of untapped potential to bring the relationship closer if we so chose. In other words, we know which version of our friends we enjoy best and prefer that they stick to the script.
Last, us. Our daily and weekly tasks and musings lead us to access the same parts of our brain over and over again, deepening the synaptic ruts between our neurons. As relationships between brain cells strengthen, it takes less and less for them to be activated, increasing the likelihood of having similar thoughts in the future. Year after year, we think about similar things at work, study similar things at school, and worry about similar things during all the times in between.
Our identity is formed from a handful of descriptors that we carry with us into every problem and into every conversation. We know the few things we're trying to improve and the very small number of faults that we have reluctantly accepted and have no intention of changing.
We have a short highlight reel in our heads of our greatest accomplishments and a small shoebox in a dingy corner of our minds with all our worst pains. All of this together amounts to maybe 50 or 60 separate things. A dismally small number. Beyond this, again, we're clueless.
What if we only routinely accessed 3% of ourselves? What if our self-concepts also lived at the tiny above-water peak of our expansive, largely hidden potential? It is incredibly unlikely that by the time we are 20, 30, even 40, we have discovered all the things that we are naturally good at. Most of us haven't gone on enough literal and figurative adventures to have had enough opportunity to experiment and discover hidden parts of ourselves.
Simply put, we all have our own undiscovered masterpieces inside us, waiting to be found by a risk-taking adventurer. Just like the researchers who discovered the recent rock painting in Colombia, it may be wise to become researchers of ourselves on a mission to find the Sistine Chapel inside us all. Somewhere in that 97%, chances are that we will stumble onto something that will completely transform how we view ourselves and how we interact with the rest of the world.
And we should find it.
Searching,
Vandan🏡
@vandan_jhaveri
🎙 The Practice
In typical Debbie Millman fashion, the interview has thoughtful questions, prompting Seth Godin to talk about some of his core philosophies related to creating consistently and detaching yourself from the outcome to focus on the process. I thought it was such a great interview that I decided to do a thread of my key take aways. Check it out below! 👇🏽
📃 Objects in This Mirror Are More Boring Than They Appear
Rob Henderson explores that cinematic nature of autobiographical accounts. We talk about the most exciting parts of our day, week, or year, and leave the monotony in the past. This skews our perception of others' lives. In reality, peoples' days are much more boring and mundane than we realize, and that can feel empowering. Read here.
📃 A Real Support System
Nick Crocker details a simple yet powerful system he has with a group of three (now two) other men in which they transparently discuss goal-setting and progress towards their goals. It reminded me of the Personal Board of Directors but with a little more structure that I know many people (including myself) would appreciate. Read about it here.
📚 If You Do Creative Work, Hedge Your Bets
So far in Adam Grant's Originals, I found that original thinkers are counterintuitive in a lot of ways. I'll definitely be doing a summary thread once I finish but a key takeaway so far was that creative originals actively seek stability and predictability in all areas of their life other than the one in which they are taking creative risks.
This gives them the emotional (and often financial) position to weather the burden of risky decision-making and face the fear of doing something new. We may commonly believe that daring creatives lack stability in many aspects of their life, but really they become masters at mitigating risk so that they're in a position to take big risks when and where it matters most. Learn more here.
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