⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🏛 The Ultimate Stoic Daily Routine: Learn how to structure your day to maximize your Stoic practice and develop more courage, wisdom, and compassion.  Read it here.

👾 Gamify List: Discover the best gamification apps to motivate yourself to achieve your goals.  See it here.

🤔 What's Our Problem: A Self-Help Book for Societies by Tim Urban.  Learn more here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Photo of the Jashak Salt Dome in the Zagros Mountains in southwestern Iran. I've been writing this newsletter for well over 2 years and I'm still blown away by the pockets of the earth I find that look otherworldly. This planet is astounding!

️‍💯 The Path of Personal Greatness

From The Mind of Eric Brown, HighExistence Steward:

Tap into your dream for a moment. Your deep desires, hopes, and ambitions.

How would your life transform if you took a bold step towards your dream – every day, for 100 days?

The real question is: how could your life not transform? Too often we’re knocked off course after minor setbacks, and too quickly we drop a new habit after a few attempts. Greatness waits for us on the other side of showing up.

Whether personal, professional, creative, emotional, or relational, the outcome will be dramatic. A complete 50,000-word book draft. A growing portfolio of creative work. A deeply ingrained personal practice. Mastery of a new skill. 100 relationships deepened with direct calls. 100 attempts at doing something that scares you. 100 bold steps towards personal greatness.

This personal ritual is a core part of the  Hero100 . A simple, effective, direct path of personal evolution.

The rest of the experience, from 1:1 accountability, live community support, and additional 5 disciplines provide the scaffolding, the safety, the support, and the vital life force for taking massive action on your personal ritual.

Mastery and growth aren’t always shiny. It’s moving through the grit, the doubt, the mistakes, the muck, and the bruises. It’s getting back up. Practicing, one more time. Doing the thing.

I know you’re ready for this. I know we can do it. And we’re doing it together. On April 1st, we embark on the  Hero100 adventure . Let’s go get it.

🍄 The Untold Mushroom Story

I've been fascinated by our culture's relationship to mushrooms for over a decade. This was sparked by my indignant notion that psilocybin had a therapeutic role to play in society and it was ridiculously classified as a schedule 1 drug.

When Denver was in the midst of their landmark campaign to become the first city in the United States to decriminalize psilocybin (which succeeded), I naturally wanted to cover that  story. 

That's when I met the team behind it. This included the director of outreach, Del Jolly.

After the campaign's success, he went on to start Unlimited Sciences, a non-profit that now is the world's largest prospective observational research registry on how people use psilocybin in the real world.

This is the popular story around mushrooms that gets a lot of airtime.

What's the lesser-known story? It's the one of functional mushrooms. I believe these non-psychedelic compounds have a role to play in the optimal functioning of the body. Here's why I've come to think that:

Del sent me a stack of potent  mushroom tinctures  that I've been taking daily. I'm not a religious biohacker but I've taken my fair share of supplements to improve my everyday performance and I've been blown away by how these functional mushrooms make me feel.

Here's how I use them:

Cordyceps: I use this to get an energy boost to keep me sharp during the day, especially during that mid-afternoon slump. Picks me right up.

Reishi: I take this to wind down after a busy day. I've heard it described as a "hug for your central nervous system." Feels that way too.

Lion's Mane: I use this at night before bed. Helps me get deeper sleep plus extremely vivid dreams (which is a perk for me as I'm a big fan of lucid dreaming).

Psilocybin gets a lot of airtime (rightfully so) but these completely legal non-psychedelic mushrooms can have a tremendous impact on us as well. I suspect they will become increasingly popular as people start to use them and feel the effects themselves.

🍄 Promise Yourself

Enjoy these quick quotes from Terry Pratchett:

"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it."

"Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom?"

"The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues."

🤓 Learn This Word

Flâner: to purposely wander, to decide to explore with no final destination.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

 21 Rules for Life from a Legendary Master Samurai 

“I choose to live by choice, not by chance.” — Miyamoto Musashi

In the life of a samurai swordsman, every day could be your last.

You face death constantly. Over and over and over again.

The slightest error, the smallest lapse in judgement results in lost limbs and lost lives.

It is the Way of the Warrior.

There is no one who embodied and mastered this Way as well as Miyamoto Musashi. Musashi was a legendary swordsman, philosopher, military strategist, and ronin (wandering samurai). He was one of the few individuals to ever receive the designation of Kensei, the ‘sword saint of Japan.‘

He is famously known for his publication of the Go Rin No Sho — ‘The Book of the Five Rings’ — a guide on how to train and fight in sword combat and military strategy.

He espouses the virtues of relentless practice, merciless pragmatism, and a fiercely ascetic relationship with the external world.

For Musashi, mastery of the world was mastery of the Self.

 [Continue Reading] 

🎬 Endnote

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With Wonder,

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