How I Socially Get Out of My Own Head
What I'm Up To (Ramping Up), What I Reflected On (Scenius), and What's Occupying My Mind (Caliban's War, an Expanse Novel) - all part of Allen's Friday Flights
HELLO to the Friday Flights
These are a flight of personal updates from me and it’ll be centered around what I’m up to, what I reflected on, and what book (or even thing) occupies my mind. Makes sense why I’d have a different selection of topics since I often choose samplers and flights when I go out to eat and drink.
Ciao!
Allen
Past Friday Flights
Inside:
What I’m up to
What I reflected on
What thing occupies my mind
What I’m Up To
TL;DR: I’m ramping up.
The Things:
WriteWeb3 - I’m part of a small band of writers looking to up the ante in Web3 content.
$3k in online Ecommerce sales milestone, woot woot.
I bought the PS5 and played Stray, a third person cat adventure game. It’s lovely.
I’m basically a Notion Consultant at this point with the amount of times I talk about it, and help implement it. (Note: I should look at this more)
I got Vampire Survivors to play on my Steamdeck. It is now my 2022 most addicting yet challenging game.
I was included in Top 333 Blockchain Leaders to Follow on LinkedIn.
After seeing what GoCharlie.Ai can do with Brennan Woodruff, Co-Founder, there will be a moment where one of my pieces are written by an AI, and you won’t even know. It’ll even have an accent.
Zayd Syed Ali, a founder I know, launched FISH, an app that helps Gen-Z get early-stage investor deals. Interested? Check out this post.
I know a lot of people hiring across all kinds of roles. Check out my job board newsletter to see whats up, and what you can be referred into.
If you want career or industry SMR insights on short-form brand content strategy, I know a swell guy. Javier Rivilla.
What I Reflected On
TL;DR: To get out of your own head, you need to go join someone else’s in theirs.
How I Socially Get Out of My Own Head
One of the joys I get from as long as a career break as I have experienced is all this time I get to spend in my own head. So much so, that if left long enough alone in my head, I would have done nothing.
Inspired by my thoughts around Finding Your Curiosity Through Others, here are 2 healthy socially active things I do and engage with to get out of my own head, and they all involve getting in someone else’s.
Find an Intellectual Sparring Partner
Find Your Scenius
Important note- you can do this with your significant other / spouse, but similar to the concept of getting professional therapy, you need to develop a diversified network beyond your SO when it comes to talking about, and advancing, ideas.
Find an Intellectual Sparring Partner
Every Tuesday, I have a standing 30 minute call to talk with a friend who happens to be my business partner in trying audaciously new things at a very micro level. He is the same person who I started an online ecommerce store with, 99% to learn what the world is all about. In many ways, I found curiosity for independent solopreneuring things through him.
We walk about different product ideas. Different household problems. Absurdly elongated processes. We shit on existing processes. We express gratitude in the time we get to think and do that.
It is a recurring activity, flexible to our days so long as we connect once a week. A fun conversation we had was how do you make people compete on their water usage, or at the very least, know if they are in the “good, great, or best” range for their drought prone region. Same concept as how Nest tells me my energy usage and gives me a leaf.
I also engage folks via text, and it can take the form of “sharing an article” to “can you explain this for me wtf is it”
Who do you like talking ideas and bouncing them around with?
Find Your Scenius
I have many villages, and I often bounce around between them and add to them when I have energy. Sometimes I leave them. Life happens. But what’s important is to find a scenius that helps prop your craft forward.
What’s a scenius?
A scenius is a counter-idea to the Great Man Theory, which is the notion that great leaders are born, not made. It’s hard to see what goes in behind the scenes, because no one ever writes about that, but as it turns out all great men and women have a scene of genius collaborators that they are surrounded by, and cultivate more attraction for.
Some examples
A great example is to look at the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group that both J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings) and C.S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia) were apart of two decades. This group encourage each other, and often add passages on top of each others work, to collective advance a craft. In almost every where, the WriteWeb3 collective I’m in is that.
Psychology as we know today is derived from the Viennese founding members of the Wednesday Psychological Society, more commonly known as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The people in this group intensely debated and even caused rifts with each other, but here’s what they made:
Alfred Adler: Individual Psychology
Carl Jung: Analytical Psychology
Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis
Do you know any other associations or groups where people come together to contribute and advance a mission or cause?
Closing
Essentially this entire tidbit hinges on the phrase: To get out of your own head, you need to go join someone else’s in theirs.
What’s beautiful about talking to someone else is that you will put forth an idea, and they will in turn contribute a thought that you couldn’t imagine, and that will spark your flywheel forward.
Do you have any socially active ways you get out of your own head? Would love to hear your doings, even if they are temporary things you do.
What thing occupies my mind
TL;DR: The book series I come back to when I haven’t read in a bit, because its fun, engaging, and well written.
I’m reading Caliban’s War, which is book 2 in a 9-book Expanse series by James S. A. Corey, of which there is an incredibly adapted TV Show called The Expanse on Amazon Prime.
It is by far one of my best science fiction books, now dethroning the Dune Series for me. It’s a series where the chapter titles only denotes which character the story is being told from, and there is no third-person omnipotent exposition, only the thoughts of each character in their situation.
It’s also a book that not only passes, but sets a bar, on the Bechdel test. One of my favorite character is Chrisjen Avasarala, who is depicted often wearing different kinds of sari in the book, and on screen, is an incredible character, with Chief Engineer Naomi Nagata and Sgt Gunnery Bobbie Draper consistently depicted as main characters. If you watch the TV Series, there is an extra character called Drummer, whom is a force in her own right.
Here are 3 quotes from Chrisjen Avasarala alone.
On the Escalation of War between Mars, the Belt, and United Earth
“They’re all fucking men,” she said. “Excuse me?” Soren said.
“The generals. They’re all fucking men.”
“I thought Souther was the only—”
“I don’t mean that they all fuck men. I mean they’re all men, the fuckers. How long has it been since a woman was in charge of the armed forces? Not since I came here. So instead, we wind up with another example of what happens to policy when there’s too much testosterone in the room.”
On Optics
“Reputation never has very much to do with reality. I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people. And some of the best men I know, you'd walk out of the room if you heard their names. No one on the screen is who they are when you breathe their air.”
Next Move
“What are you going to do?” “The same thing as always. Try to keep civilization from blowing up while the children are in it.”
How to experience it
Whenever the relationship with reading and hearing audiobooks gets strained, I am reminded of what terrific storytelling and narration can be like through the Audiobook. It’s easy to pick up and drop, and pick back up. While the Expanse is 9 books, it is best to consider it in this over arching structure:
Duology (books 1 & 2)
Duology (books 3 & 4)
Duology (Books 5 & 6)
Trilogy (Books 7, 8, and 9)
Side note, book 1 is not as a good as book 2.
Where to get it (Affiliate links to me <3):
Book 1: The Leviathan Wakes
Book 2: Caliban’s War (what I’m reading now):
Web3 Inklings?!