🪄Learn to direct your mind's relentless processing power to focus on what truly matters

Welcome to S3T, the essential newsletter, podcast, and learning platform for change leaders. Every week we review the top developments and insights you need to stay ahead of the curve, build your ethics & leadership skills, and drive intentional beneficial innovation.

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In this edition of S3T:

• 🧠 Harness the Power of Your Mind: Discover how to direct your mind's relentless processing power to focus on what truly matters.
• 💡 Transform Stress into Solutions: Learn techniques to direct your thoughts away from worries and towards high-value ideas and solutions.
• 🔍 Intentional Thinking Steps: Follow actionable steps to cultivate a habit of mindful mental processing, enhancing productivity and well-being.
• 📊 Maximize Mental Efficiency: Implement strategies to make the most of your mental energy and avoid unproductive thought patterns.
• 🚀 Elevate Your Change Leadership: Equip yourself with tools to thrive in stressful situations and lead effectively amidst challenges.
• 📉 Economic Outlook: Understand the current economic uncertainty and how it impacts consumer spending and political dynamics.
• 🤖 AI Disruption: Explore how GenAI could shift $9T worth of retail and why some experts view certain AI companies as the "Titanic."
• 💰 Crypto in Politics: Learn about the integration of crypto into the GOP platform and its implications for financial innovation.
• 🌿 Career in Nature & AI: Check out the exciting opportunity to join iNaturalist as Head of Engineering and contribute to biodiversity and conservation.

As change leaders we often operate in stressful situations and zones of conflict - where there may be resistance to change, fear of unknowns or other challenges. I've seen this take a toll on change leaders including myself.

As I've lived and learned, there is one lesson, that has been of the most helpful lessons that has made a positive difference for me, my resilience and my ability to focus. It's this one simple point: your mind is a relentless processor, and that you need to decide what you allow it to process.

Your mind is a powerful processor. What do you want it to be processing?

Worries. Fears. What if scenarios. Ideas. Solutions. Next steps. Our minds are maybe a bit like hound dogs that pick up a scent and automatically start following a trail regardless of where it goes. Your mind is constantly hunting for solutions and safety. Our minds quickly get immersed in topics and start impacting us - often before we are aware of what is happening. Let's look at some examples.

Finding solutions:

• How to solve an important problem and do something next level OR
• How to solve a problem that's not worth solving, or that doesn't even exist.

Figure out why:

• Why someone said what they said. Why _____ always happens to you OR
• Why a chemical compound or other substance causes a specific result; Why one phenomenon coincides with or follows another, and what that might mean for (an important opportunity to solve an important problem).

Your mind can also process reasons:

• Reasons to do something OR
• Reasons not to do something. Reasons to procrastinate.

Point: Our minds aren't very discerning about what they pick up and start chewing on. Whether its high value solutioning that will help millions, or low value rumination and grudge dwelling, your mind is capable of getting fixated on any one of these, and burning up huge amounts of time on them. In other words, our minds are prone to treat high value or low value topics with equal time-consuming attention, as if they were of equal importance.

Unless, you learn how to intervene.

Some of the things your mind could focus on lead to great experiences, learning, and achievements that will feel nothing short of exhilarating. Others are sheer wastes of time and mental energy, roads to nowhere that will only make you sad.

So how do you learn how intervene? Is it possible to direct our minds to focus on certain things, while letting other things drop?

How to build a habit of intentional processing

These simple steps will help you build a powerful habit of harnessing and directing your thinking capabilities, and reducing mental overload.

Step 1: Start noticing what your mind is processing. Develop a habit of just noticing...this can be as simple as saying or thinking to yourself a simple statement like "Wow I'm really focused on the meeting we had earlier today. It was kind of bumpy." Acknowledging your feelings and being aware of what you're doing - and feeling - is a really helpful step.

Step 2: Pause trains of thought and decide whether they're worth thinking about right now. Make it a point to decide: What should I be processing right now. One way to get a head start on this at the beginning your day: take some time as soon as you wake up and decide: What do I want to be processing today?

Step 3: Give yourself time to be an intentional thinker. Carve out blocks of time where you can process with intention. When you have blocks of time for specific topics this helps you be intentional. When certain worries or work situations come into your mind, you can say to yourself, "Ok but I'm not processing that now. Right now I'm focused on (whatever you actually intend to focus on)." AND these blocks of time don't have to just be empty timeslots where you sit staring into space - not that there's anything wrong with that :) ...but it could be meeting with a person who is your trusted sounding board and just talking through something together. That's a perfectly valid way of intentional processing. Another - one of my favorite - is drawing or diagramming out a view of a complex situation or issue. That exercise of putting it out into visual form is a very helpful way of processing.

Step 4: Make notes that help you retain important details you can refer to when it's time to process something. Part of what consumes some of our mental energy is the fear that we will forget something important, or that we won't remember certain key details, or somehow won't be prepared. Writing things down in a space that you always revisit (like a journal or note taking app that you use consistently) can really help. Tip: Pick one place and write things there. Resist the temptation to write things in multiple places...you'll burn extra energy trying to find things. Once something is written down in a safe space that you know you can refer to later can free up your mind to focus on that you need to process right now.

One quick note: There is a more serious version of unintentional mental processing that sometimes is labeled as "rumination" or connected to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. If you feel like this might describe your situation, talk to your doctor to see how you can best support your health and wellness.

Summing up what you've just learned

In conclusion, our minds have a tendency to fixate on both high-value and low-value topics with equal intensity, often wasting time and mental energy. To avoid this, it is crucial to learn how to intervene and direct our focus intentionally. By following these steps—starting to notice what your mind is processing, pausing to evaluate the worth of your thoughts, dedicating time for intentional thinking, and making notes to capture important details—you can cultivate a habit of purposeful mental processing. This will not only enhance your productivity and well-being but also prevent you from getting stuck in unproductive mental loops. If you struggle with serious rumination or OCD, it is important to seek professional help.

Midyear: uncertain economic outlook

In its midyear outlook, BlackRock outlines 5 potential economic scenarios, 2 of which involve "hard landings" ..only 1 is outright positive.

Consumer spending is losing momentum notes Goldman Sachs.

Customers fed up with inflation are directing their outrage at Big Retail as the large companies flirt with ideas like dynamic demand-based pricing (similar to Uber's "surge" pricing). Republicans are making the most of the economic uncertainty.

Conservatives are moving to enclaves in what some worry is "a great sort." This is being painted as a cultural phenomenon but may also be a continuation of a longer term cost of living based "sort" that has been happening with both sides of the political spectrum for a few years now. See "Wage Inflation: Geographic Moves.." in the Feb 27 2022 edition of S3T.

As noted in S3T previously, the Fed's ineffective war on inflation did not address the root cause of corporate pricing power and regulated monopolies. (See S3T May 17 2024)Together these factors have been driving a form of perennial inflation that predated the pandemic, and as headlines are starting to report, won't be impacted materially by interest rates.

AI Prospects - eCommerce disruptor or Titanic?

ARK Invest thinks GenAI agents will disintermediate search engines and shift $9T worth of retail from the web to OS or Device based apps. See Hackernoon's explainer with helpful diagrams.

OpenAI thinks its at level 2 in a 5 level climb toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). One of its prominent employees just quit, saying he fears the company is "the Titanic of AI".

Crypto gets hardwired into the Republican party platform

Crypto is now written into the 2024 GOP party platform, as progressives urge the Democratic Party to do the same.

One might ask - with crypto prices on a downward slide recently - whether Crypto is a timely political topic. I think it’s important to step back and look at the longer trend in the drivers for financial innovation.

• Historically, money and stores of value were issued and controlled by centralized governments.
• Crypto, and Bitcoin specifically, broke this pattern and represents the first time in history (first we know of...feel free to raise examples if you know them) where a form of money has emerged without the sponsorship of a government, with the built in ability to combat the achilles heel of Government issued money.
• Government issued money (fiat money) has always tended toward devaluation and inflation.
• Between World War II and 9/11 the US enjoyed a very unique financial position in the world, which gave it flexibility for delaying and concealing currency devaluation and inflation in ways that most nations in most eras can't.

Reasonable question: how long this is gonna last?

People look at this in 1 of 2 ways:

• The end US financial hegemony would be welcome and long overdue
• The US financial hegemony has been largely beneficial and needs to be extended

But either way, you don’t look at the current financial system and think to yourself, "This is the future."

Either way you end up rooting for financial innovation - specifically the kinds of new financial building blocks that have been coming out of the crypto space, the inevitable merger of networks, cryptography and money.

This kind of financial innovation has been an intuition of many for decades now. I remember being in conversations with VCs back in the mid-90s about the feasibility of digital money based on unique network addressing schemes. What we are witnessing today is the result of a long arc of a fairly obvious evolution, as people scattered across different fields intuitively converge on similar ideas about the future of finance.

This why its been so painful for some of us to watch in recent years as an influential block of the Democratic Party miss clue after clue, consistently taking an anti-innovation stance against crypto, and taking it so far as to hand the GOP what could be a decisive advantage in the upcoming election.

Career Opportunity in Nature and AI

iNaturalist is hiring a Head of Engineering. Go here to learn more and apply.

iNaturalist is the leading biodiversity platform crowdsourcing one of the world's largest biodiversity databases, . With 4 million monthly active users and 400 thousand monthly active contributors, each month iNaturalist generates over 6 million observations of over 100 thousand distinct species. The iNaturalist database is the backbone of conservation science, supports a global network of stewards, and motivates a movement of nature advocates. Launched in 2008 and operating as a nonprofit committed to open data, iNaturalist is at the forefront of combining crowdsourcing and AI models to further our mission. 

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Opinions expressed are those of the individuals and do not reflect the official positions of companies or organizations those individuals may be affiliated with. Not financial, investment or legal advice. Authors or guests may hold assets discussed.