In The Know #64: Journaling, Leadership & The Value of Suffering
Hi friends,
Quick one this week. There is a very impactful and approachable journaling protocol I got a lot out of and would recommend to everyone, as well as an interview with investor Bill Ackman, and an excellent thread on the qualities of great leaders. Hope you enjoy, and wishing you a beautiful weekend surrounded by family and friends.
Jamie
✍️ Highly impactful and approachable journaling practice — A Science-Supporting Journaling Protocol to Improve Mental & Physical Health, via Huberman Lab Podcast
When I saw this episode in my podcast feed a few months ago, I was intrigued. I know journaling can help process your emotions, but the description made it sound a little too fantastic, so I wanted to learn more. The format is actually quite simple and approachable for anyone to do — conduct 4 journaling sessions of 15-30min at regular intervals within the period of 1 month (e.g. 4 days in a row or once a week for 4 weeks in a row). The hard part is that you must write about a traumatic event in your life — ideally, the most traumatic. Write about what happened, how it made you feel, and how that event may be impacting you today, and keep your pen moving for the full duration of the journaling session, letting whatever comes up out onto the page. The reason it is apparently so impactful is that writing about a traumatic event stimulates your neuroplasticity and helps reframe and create new meaning around it. As each session progressed, I noticed that my negative feelings towards the event dissipated, and by the end I had actually gained a lot of insight and reframed how it fits into my life and who I am today. Although subtle, the shift has been profound, and the negative memories have lost a lot of their power. Given it’s such a simple protocol and everyone has trauma in their lives that has not been fully processed, I’d really recommend giving it a try. After all, it’s only an investment of 1-2 hours of your time over the course of a month. Check out the full podcast to learn more about the science behind it, and how it also improves your immune function, helps heal some chronic conditions, improves sleep, and a bunch of other mental and physical benefits that have been replicated across multiple studies. It’s really quite amazing.
🎧 Great podcast with a modern icon of investing — Lex Fridman Podcast feat. Bill Ackman
Bill Ackman is someone I’ve followed and looked up to throughout my career. For those not familiar, he’s a hedge fund manager who has been involved in several large public deals as an activist investor throughout his career, and has more recently been a prominent voice that pushed for leadership change at Harvard in light of their reaction to the events of October 7, 2023. Personally I found the story about how he almost lost everything in the mid 2010s to be the most impactful — no matter how successful someone may appear on the outside, you really never know what’s going on behind the scenes. Hearing how he bounced back from it was inspiring, especially his focus on just making a little progress each day, and how when he now looks back on that time it’s just a little blip in the overall arc of his life.
🫡 Excellent thread on the qualities of great leaders, by Matt Gray
This is a Twitter thread (I still can’t bring myself to say X) on some of the qualities of great leaders. Definitely worth a browse, and most of the points have short video clips discussing or exemplifying each quality for more context.
❝ Quote of the week — “Suffering is a moment of clarity, when you can no longer deny the truth of a situation and are forced into uncomfortable change. I’m lucky that I didn’t get everything I wanted in my life, or I’d be happy with my first good job, my college sweetheart, my college town. Being poor when young led to making money when old. Losing faith in my bosses and elders made me independent and an adult. Almost getting into the wrong marriage helped me recognize and enter the right one. Falling sick made me focus on my health. It goes on and on. Inside suffering is the seed of change.” ~Naval Ravikant
I wish everyone would journal!!
Awesome quote!!!