#108 The Unexpected Complement

ByLukas
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Unique value often lies in seemingly strange combinations.

The beekeeping lawyer.

The pro soccer player with an astrophysics degree.

The theologist waking up early every morning to go surfing.

The public servant spending their evenings performing at the local stand-up comedy bar.

The motorcycle repair shop owner writing philosophy books.

The chess champion with a Brazilian Ju-Jitsu black belt.

Societal pressure and expectations make such combinations unlikely. Out of the ordinary. Maybe even undesirable: an obstacle to conformity.

And if it’s undesirable, it becomes rare.

And here’s the twist: what’s rare usually becomes valuable.

Because there’s nothing incompatible about these combinations – in fact, the skills you practice may well complement each other in unique and valuable ways.

What could be an unexpected complement for your life?

Something you’re secretly interested in, but – according to society – doesn’t fit who you are (or who you’re supposed to be)?

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    And even when you’re ready to go faster, it’s still fine to go slow and steady.

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    Always moving.

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    When you go slow and steady.

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    #49 Moderate to get more

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    A neurotransmitter that once helped us evolve and motivated us to go out and explore the world now has us glued to screens and plates filled with sugary food.

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    Not just to read a useful article, but click more headlines.

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    #180 Progressive Insight

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    Performance gap: the frustrating gap between how you know something should be done in an ideal world and how you currently do it. 

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    Sometimes, progressive insight shows that your initial intellectual understanding completely missed the mark.

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    #8 Musenküsse

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    klimt-the-kiss-musenkuss
    Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907-1908).

    der Musenkuss (German) The kiss of the Muse

    Creativity becomes much easier if you see it as a game of finding new ways of describing what has always been there.

    Observing, rather than inventing.

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    #45 The tragedy of the spoken word

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    Language helps us describe the world we perceive. Yet in doing so, it closes our eyes, our ears, our touch, and our heart to the parts of the world we don’t have words for.

    Every language is a lens on a felt reality within and around us – both clarifying and categorizing the world, and limiting it by the words it has available.

    Learning more languages gives you new lenses – and a richer sense of reality.

    But just like the structure of our ears limit the sounds we can hear, and the structure of our eyes limit colors we can see, the structure of any language somehow limits our felt experience of the world.

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    How do we re-learn to listen to the voices of the wordless world speaking to our animal self… the voices that once upon a time, before verbal language emerged, were all we had?

    there’s an eternal song
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    with all its might language wants us to abide
    but the wordless world it tries to hide
    will forever be inside

    Lukas Van Vyve

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