Ola! Welcome to this week's digest. This is a very special 'I'm pretty scared to pilot a new idea' edition - more on that below in my blatant self-promotion. This week's topics include coaching, creative ways to give to charity, Buddhism, intentionality, free speech, and learning from a chess prodigy. Enjoy!

• MY COACHING PILOT
• CHARLES MOORE'S TWO CENTS FOR CHARITY
• BOOK - Why Buddhism is True (My full Kindle notes)
• BLOG POST - Raptitude: You Never Have Time, Only Intentions
• ARTICLE - Wired: It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech
• PODCAST - Tim Ferriss Show #148: Josh Waitzkin, The Prodigy Returns

• Who you are: Type A overachiever (duh) who is excited to invest in your personal life as diligently as you do in your professional life.
• Example use cases: Making a major decision (career, spouse). Creating a new healthy habit. Struggling with work or a new business idea.
• What I do: (1) Help you figure out what you want. (2) Help you design processes and systems to get what you want. (3) Test and push your boundaries.
• What I don't do: (1) Do the work for you. (2) Allow you to lie to yourself with bullshit excuses. (3) Let you give up or be too hard on yourself.
• The pilot: Two months of weekly, half hour coaching sessions (four hours of coaching total). Remote via video or phone.
• My ask of you: Tell other people about the great work we do together!
• Apply for one of the two spots here (it's a rigorous, five question application - three of the five questions are your first name, last name, and e-mail address ;D)
• More information is available on my website

• The Dalai Lama has said, “Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.”
• What’s fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings is the general dynamic of being powerfully drawn to sensory pleasure that winds up being fleeting at best. One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more.
• Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.
• “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”
• To live mindfully is to pay attention to, to be “mindful of” what’s happening in the here and now and to experience it in a clear, direct way, unclouded by various mental obfuscations.
• ...let’s face it: though anxiety is sometimes productive in this sense, people do a lot of worrying that serves no good purpose.
• What you’re generally not doing when your mind is wandering is directly experiencing the present moment.
• People are often aware of these forms of self-delusion—at least, they’re aware of them in other people.
• ...just follow these four easy steps: (1) sit down on a cushion; (2) try to focus on your breath; (3) (this step is the easiest) fail to focus on your breath for very long; (4) notice what kinds of thoughts are making you fail.
• We build stories on stories on stories, and the problem with the stories begins at their foundation. Mindfulness meditation is, among other things, a tool for examining our stories carefully, from the ground up, so that we can, if we choose, separate truth from fabrication.
• “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
• ...you can now subject your feelings to a kind of reasoned analysis that will let you judiciously decide which ones are good guiding lights... And all of this means informing your responses to the world with the clearest possible view of the world. 

• The longer I live, the more I’m convinced that our suffering comes from insisting on more control over our experience than is actually available to us.
• You may have noticed almost nobody has enough time. Somehow, even after decades of life experience, we cannot seem to corral all of our responsibilities within the amount of time we have. It should be simple math, but it never works out.
• When intentions are your focus, time returns to its true status as an unpredictable condition—a weather system, rather than a stockpileable commodity. This allows you to make the best possible use of it without stressing over the quantity or quality available on a given day.
• If you intend to do it, it gets done if it can be done. And what else matters really? 

• In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech.
• Here's how this golden age of speech actually works: In the 21st century, the capacity to spread ideas and reach an audience is no longer limited by access to expensive, centralized broadcasting infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.
• The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.
• Fostering a healthy, rational, and informed debate in a mass society requires mechanisms that elevate opposing viewpoints, preferably their best versions.
• By this point, we’ve already seen enough to recognize that the core business model underlying the Big Tech platforms—harvesting attention with a massive surveillance infrastructure to allow for targeted, mostly automated advertising at very large scale—is far too compatible with authoritarianism, propaganda, misinformation, and polarization.

• Cultivating a way of life which is fundamentally proactive... It's most foundational to develop a mindfulness practice, to cultivate the ability to sense the most subtle ripples of human experience.
• Really high level thinkers have integrated cognitive biases into their intuitive process... We aren't going to intuit the cognitive bias, we are going to intuit the feeling that corresponds with the cognitive bias being present... We're going to cultivate the ability to have presence.
• ..For them (investors) to be successful, they have to operate from the inside out. They have to bring out the essence of who they are as a performer... But if they are constantly feeling pressured by what others expect from them, what others want from them, how they'll be perceived... The problem is that the others usually aren't world class... And so you have the man in the arena who is compromised by a sense of self-consciousness of how the critics will perceive him.
• We want to build a proactive way of life that's fundamentally moved from the inside out, versus a reactive way of life... where we are constantly oppressed by a sense of how we are being perceived, social pressures.
• The ones who put themselves on the line as a way of life just learn much faster than the ones who are protecting their egos... There's that constant search for exposure.
• Most people think they can wait around for the big moments to turn it on, but if you don't cultivate turning it on as a way of life in the little moments, and there are hundreds of times more little moments than big, then there is no chance in the big moments... We do not raise to the level of our hopes, we fall to the level of our training.
• I have built a life around having empty space for the development of my ideas, for the creative process, and for the cultivation of a physiological state which is receptive enough to tune in very very deeply to the people I work with.
• Forcing yourself to end of each day think about what the most important question is in what you're working on... Most people don't surface enough to reflect on what's the most potent direction to go.
• We're living in a world of so much noise, and so much distraction, and of the space being constantly filled. It's rather remarkable what can happen if we cultivate a mindfulness, a stillness of the waters, as a way of life. There's so much beauty that can come from silence. We can learn so much by feeling the ripples of our internal experience.