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Happy Thursday folks!

Here is my favorite passage of the week, two quotes and book of the week with two important lessons to ponder on:

Professional Fitness Instructor and Author Steve Kamb on nonjudgemental curiosity:

The book of the week is Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough by Michael Easter.

This book reveals the biological and evolutionary foundations behind our brain’s fixations so that we can recognize the trap and embark on journey of living more satisfying, healthier and meaningful on the long run for the years to come.

Are we hardwired to crave more? From food and stuff to information and influence, why can’t we ever get enough? The problem is our scarcity mindset, and new technology and institutions from dating and entertainment apps to our food and economic systems are exploiting our scarcity brain.

If you loved The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, you would absolutely love this book as well.

Here are two important lessons from the book:

The behavior we do in rapid succession, from gambling to overeating to overbuying to mindless scrolling to binge-watching to binge drinking and so much more are powered by a “scarcity loop.”

This loop is the ultimate trigger of the scarcity mindset, and it has three parts:

All animals, including humans, want a reward infinitely more if we aren't sure we'll get it. If it's received unpredictably. Unpredictability makes us obsessive and far more likely to quickly repeat the behavior.

Here's how it breaks down if we take slot machines as an example:

Opportunity: The chance to win big money by simply pressing a button.

Unpredictable Rewards: We never know if the next spin will pay off with a jackpot or nothing at all. This uncertainty mimics the survival-driven thrill keeping us hooked as we chase the possibility of a win.

Quick Repeatability: We can spin again instantly with no delay between attempts. This fast pace locks us into a cycle, making us hard to walk away, as each spin fuels the hope of hitting it big.

There’s a difference between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge is possessing facts. Understanding is different.

When we understand something, we not only possess a lot of independent facts, but we see how those facts connect, we possess some internal model or account of it which we can use to make predictions, conduct further investigations, and categorize new phenomena. Understanding is most likely to land when we work a bit harder to get our knowledge straight from the source. This requires more effort and deeper exploration. A willingness to go there, pick up the phone, or at least read a primary source, like a study. But it leads to deeper, more accurate understanding.

Research suggests that if we want to better remember information, search for it more labor intensively, like finding the right book, then finding the right section in the book, can be advantageous. Just as slow food has advantage over fast food, slow information is often better than fast information.

The Nvidia Way by Tae Kim. A deeply reported business history of the chip-designer Nvidia from its founding in 1993 to its recent emergence as one of the most valuable corporations in the world, explaining how the company’s culture, overseen by cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang, has powered its incredible success.

Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again by Austin Kleon. This book is about rediscovering the joy of creating with kid-inspired insights, and ultimately, to feel the unbridled joy of creating in your own unique way.