Hi there!

Experimenting with something new. Over the past few months, I’ve been slowly at work designing yina’s Ecosystem (might share this in a later post) as a way to explore how to stay organized with the knowledge and content I find, as well as my tasks and life management.

It seems I’ve gotten to a good place with personal knowledge management. My Library in Notion has started to help me resurface helpful articles I’ve found. And so much so, I feel confident I can start sharing them out to others so voila — a little experiment with a weekly newsletter sharing my curated highlights from the week.

The way I see it, this serves a win-win purpose: it helps me review items in my library and recall what I learned from them, and share it where you can hopefully learn something as well!

I imagine the format, frequency and style of this will likely shift over time as I figure out what works so bear with me — but that’s the beauty of it, right? Experimenting until something clicks.

And so, let’s get started with this week’s Weekly Roundup!

3 Gems from the Week

3 various pieces of content that resonated with me this week

1. The science-backed ‘Future Self’ strategy can pave the way to greater success (Article)

Understand the psychology of our future selves: how we identify with our future selves is a driver of our current personality and behaviors.

Thinking about how I can benefit future Yina has shaped a lot of my behaviors and decisions that might be geared towards a more short term reward.

Often times, the things that can benefit our future selves are usually things that don’t help our present self. For example, Future Yina will benefit if Present Yina put the chips back in the pantry, but Present Yina loses out on any sort of reward.

But in the end, I’m still getting a reward, aren’t I? It’s just been kicked down the road. By thinking that it’s my future self that will reap the reward, I find it more bearable for my present self to lose out on something in the short term.

When you see your future self as a different person, with different perspectives and preferences, then you can make present decisions based on what your future self would want.

These decisions may go counter to what you actually would prefer in a given moment. For example, your current self may want to eat a bag of doughnuts, but if you consider what your future self would prefer, you may come up with a different decision.

2. Transformation Glow Up: A Progress Report (IG Post)

Have you ever tried something new and consistently felt like you’ll never master it? Well, if you ever need a motivational boost, watch this transformational video of Lauren Flymen’s journey from jump rope beginner to pro.

Back story: Lauren started playing around with jump roping at the start of the pandemic. And as her skill and curiosity in the sport increased, it’s led to becoming her full time role, and best part — mastery of the skill.

This was a wonderful reminder that oftentimes, we don’t realize we are making progress until we look back at how far we’ve come since we started out. I’ll be loing back at this whenever I need motivation / hope that mastery in whatever I’m attempting at the moment is possible. But only through consistent practice and hard work.

Best part of this video: the fence behind her also has a glow up as well!

3. How I Tricked My Brain To Like Doing Hard Things (Video)

I’m continually on a quest to learn how to make doing hard things easier. We all have so many goals, desires, projects we want to finish. And the challenging part is — it’s obvious these are things that would be good for us down the future — but why is it so hard for us to actually do them?

This video walks us through these two questions to help us with the Quadrant II (not urgent but important) tasks and avoiding procrastination:

1. Why are some people more motivated to tackle difficult things?
2. And is there a way to make doing difficult things, easy?

The answer to these two questions: dopamine.

The dopamine detox starves you of all the pleasure you usually get, and in turn, it makes those less satisfying activities more desirable.

To put it simply: dopamine detox works because you become so bored, that boring stuff becomes more fun.

He simplifies the neuroscience down to this key point: a lot of businesses chase revenues through the dopamine effect. Very smart people have designed highly stimulating and easily engaging products all around us (social media, gaming, junk food, etc) that release high amounts of dopamine.

The best way to solve this: a scheduled dopamine detox where you purposely avoid these high dopamine activities to reset dopamine levels. AKA learn to sit with boredom to improve your motivation to do the hard things.

TL;DR:

• Make time to be intentionally be bored. When you’re bored, you’re more likely to do the things you’ve been procrastinating on in order pass the time.
• Treat high dopamine activities as a reward — something as a treat after you’ve done steady deep focus work that might not feel as rewarding in the short term.

Hope you find these fruitful! Enjoy!