Mindful Mondays #12: Serendipity Edition
My 2022 annual review, maximizing serendipity, and the most important skill set for mental health and personal effectiveness.
Good morning and welcome to another edition of Mindful Mondays. It’s another rare rainy day here in San Diego, and I’m enjoying having a cup of tea and listening to the rain fall while I write today’s newsletter.
I hope your week is off to an equally peaceful start.
Chris’s Writing
2022 has been a very full year for me: full of new creative projects, relationships, challenges, and opportunities. It’s also been an exciting year, as I’ve made new friends, learned new things, and stepped out of the comfort zone of my past into the wild unknown of my future.
I’ve written quite a bit now about Past Year Reviews as a practice. Here, for those of you who want a deeper glimpse into what I’ve been up to for the past year, is a write-up of my own PYR for 2022. Read more on Medium.
(Note: although I’m enrolled in Medium’s Partner Program now, the links to my own articles in Mindful Mondays are “friend links,” meaning you’ll always be able to read them for free even without a paid Medium membership.)
Articles of Interest
Therapist completes a ‘year in review’ for the past 5 years. Here are his biggest lessons: Okay, I’m sharing this mainly because it makes me laugh. My work on Past Year Reviews was featured this week in this article from Upworthy. It’s really weird to read about myself in the third person. Bonus: if you keep scrolling past this article, the next one is about one of my favorite actors, Michelle Yeoh. I guess I’ve truly made it in life! 😂
The Most Important Skill Set in Mental Health: This weekend, I wrote a Twitter thread about the single most important skill set for both emotional wellbeing and effectiveness in life: psychological flexibility. Here’s a much better explanation of the same topic, from Steven C. Hayes, a professor at University of Nevada and co-founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
How to Maximize Serendipity: In light of the whole Tim Ferriss Effect thing, I’ve had a few conversations with friends this week about the role of serendipity in life and how to maximize it. My thinking on this has been inspired by David Perell, the founder of Write of Passage, the course that led me to start this newsletter. This article is David’s take on serendipity.
Podcast of the Week
Dr. Sam Harris: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness and Expand Your Mind: In this absolute monster of a 4 hour, 22 minute interview on the Huberman Lab podcast, neuroscientist Sam Harris talks about meditation, free will (or lack thereof), and a number of other fascinating topics. But the most important takeaway, in my opinion, is that the true purpose of meditation isn’t just to improve the contents of your consciousness—it’s to recognize that you are the consciousness in which everything you experience is arising.
Quote of the Week
“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
That’s all for this week. As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mindful Mondays. What was your favorite thing I shared this week? How can I make this newsletter more helpful to you? Reply to this email, comment on Substack, or hit me up on Twitter to let me know.
Thanks,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
PS: If you want to experience first hand how improving your psychological flexibility can help you achieve your goals, I still have a couple of spots open in my coaching practice. Just hit reply to this email to let me know you’re interested.
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I really resonate with David Perell’s idea of publishing online as a “serendipity vehicle”. I find it to be the hardest thing to explain to people who haven’t started yet. I feel like your annual review is such a great example of this. Doing something you love, sharing it publicly and seeing how it inspires people while also bringing unexpected opportunities your way.
Sam Harris's book Waking Up is so good. I was introduced to him by Tim Ferriss (who woulda guessed?).