profile

Hi! I'm Mike Slavin.

🌀🐇 #21: personality quiz, trippy visuals, wisdom in your browser

Published about 3 years ago • 3 min read

⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

Can't miss gems of the weird and wonderful

4️⃣The Four Tendencies: A personality quiz exploring how you deal with expectations. Which one are you?

📈Visualize Value: A free chrome extension that blasts you with a bit of wisdom every time you open a new tab. Get it here.

🌳Sounds Of The Forest: A sound map plotting the tones and textures of woodlands from around the world. Listen here.

👁 Trippy Visuals: A 27-minute audiovisual journey featuring psychedelic imagery. See it here.

🪐Size of Space: An interactive webpage that compares the size of celestial objects showing you just how massive our universe is. Explore it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This is the longest exposure photograph ever taken. Regina Valkenborgh placed a beer can pinhole camera on a telescope at the University of Hertfordshire’s Bayfordbury Observatory. There it was forgotten until it was discovered over 8 years later. The photograph features 2,953 arced trails of the sun.

🧠 ️Unclog Your Mind

We live in a fast-paced world with endless information firehoses drowning our attention. It's easy to fall behind on our mile-long todo lists while trying to juggle all of the things we care about.

It can feel like our mind gets clogged with everything we have to keep track of. This can feel incredibly draining and overwhelming.

But there is a simple practice you can do to pull the weeds from your mind and clean up your cognitive plumbing.

Some call it a brain dump. Others will equate it to "clearing the mental desk." It's simple and this version only takes 20 minutes.

We often have unnecessary mental chatter because our brain is trying to make sure we remember important things.

So we're going to take what is inside our mind and put it outside on paper. Of course, you could just type it but there is something visceral about putting a pen to a page that I feel adds to the potency of the exercise.

Here it is:

Step 1: Set a timer for 5 minutes and write down everything you have to do.

Step 2: Reset the timer and write down everything you're worried about.

Step 3: Reset the timer and write down everything you're excited about.

Step 4: Reset the timer and write down everything you're grateful for.

After you've done this, the cognitive chaos should settle down while also having an uptick in appreciation and enthusiasm for the things to come.

Give it try and see if it helps you unclog your mind.

🙏 The Family of Things

Enjoy these words of wisdom from Mary Oliver:

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

🤓 Learn This Words

Heimweh: a german word that means "a longing for home."

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article

How to Overcome Perfectionism: Life Lessons from Kubrick to Picasso

"We all know the feeling…

We start a diet and we stick to it PERFECTLY.

Then suddenly temptation gets the better of us…

…we eat ONE bad thing and BOOM.

We binge like there’s no tomorrow, feel guilty, then binge some more.

This is All Or Nothing Thinkinga classic symptom of perfectionism.

But perfectionism doesn’t just affect our diets, it affects our confidence, our relationships, our work, our lives…

…And it needs to be stamped out.

Why Learning From Failure Is ESSENTIAL

In How To Overcome Procrastination And Turn Pro, I briefly explained that we often know what we should do in order to succeed, but find the idea of following our own advice too frightening to act upon.

If we fail under someone else’s council, then surely it is not our competence that is questionable, but the council we have received.

We seek out external resources (like this article) to lift some of the burden of responsibility from ourselves and provide a way of rationalizing any potential failure.

The fear of creating art, and the fear of following our own advice, I believe, are symptoms of our proclivity to take failure personally.

We live in a society where everyone is basically given the same opportunities to succeed, and so our eventual position in life, including the successes and failures along the way, are thought of as deserved."

[Keep Reading]

🎬 Endnote and Invitation

Here's a quick invitation for you:

We'll soon be closing the doors to a new experience for people ready to express their unique gifts in the world. It's a tight-knight group who want to finally launch their creative project, switch career paths, monetize their passion, or earn an impactful income. Very few spaces remain. If you're interested in being considered, reply "tell me more" and I'll send you more details.

We hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell us what you think.

Share this with a friend and brighten up their day. Simply click forward and send it their way. We'll love you for it too. :)

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin & The HighExistence Team

P.S. Did a friend forward you this email? Read previous issues and sign-up to receive future issues here: https://highexistence.com/rabbithole

Hi! I'm Mike Slavin.

I write Down The Rabbit Hole. This newsletter is your weekly window into wonder.

Read more from Hi! I'm Mike Slavin.

⚡️ Enlightening Bolts ⌛️ Zen and Now: A 1969 short film narrated by Alan Watts that discusses the Zen philosophy of living for the present, developing sensory awareness, and appreciating the beauty of nature. Watch it here. 🏦 How to Pay Off Your Emotional Debt: A toolkit for navigating stressful experiences and cultivating emotional mastery. Read it here. 🚧 Life's Infinite Paths: Uncertainty, maximizing, and the paradox of trying to live the best possible life. Read it here. 🎇 Image of The...

7 months ago • 3 min read

⚡️ Enlightening Bolts 🔎 Reality has a surprising amount of detail: Reality contains many small but critical elements that are initially invisible; to make progress on difficult problems and avoid stagnant thinking, you must continually seek out and perceive aspects you have not noticed before. Read it here. 🎙This Past Weekend: Comedian Theo Von and podcaster Duncan Trussell covered topics ranging from aliens to addiction recovery in a thoughtful discussion about finding inner peace. They...

7 months ago • 7 min read

⚡️ Enlightening Bolts ✍🏼 Devote Yourself to the Cause of Your Life: What if your daily grind is destroying your soul? This writer shares his journey from meaningless corporate work to finding purpose as a writer, and challenges you to re-examine how you spend your time. Read it here. 🧠 Change Your Brain w/ Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman: This mind-expanding conversation provides powerful tools anyone can use to transform their mindset and take charge of their mental fitness. Watch it...

8 months ago • 5 min read
Share this post