Moving From Struggle To Consistency
Why is consistency with things we actually want to pursue such a struggle for so many of us? It’s the overwhelming bars we set for ourselves. This issue is about (perceived) trust, filter bubbles, and OnlyFans users.
In the past week I’ve been restructuring Sunday Sparks to use screen space more efficiently, to make it more concise, and, most importantly, to achieve a higher level of consistency. My writing is going to be more direct and unedited, and thus certainly come at a higher level of spelling and grammar mistakes—but it will also feel more like it comes from the heart, a space of unconditional affection. And this is what Sunday Sparks was always supposed to be: free expression of thought given from a full cup and that I truly enjoy instead of slowly drifting into a position of burden and coercion.
Our sparks will continue to fly just as my writings on more elaborate thought through analyses; the latter you will from now on find under the New Content section of this newsletter. These changes will also allow me to communicate new topics and content in a much more personal and prominent way.
We all more or less know that one of the easily attainable master keys to success in whatever aspect of life is consistency. Yes, a well structured full body workout plan would be a nice thing to have but if we’re not actually doing it, it’s a waste of time. Just five push ups, pull ups and squats every day for a year will bear much better results than trying to push through a 1h workout you manage to motivate yourself to inconsistently, sometimes twice per week, sometimes twice per month.
So what’s the key? The key is the honest and truthful recognition of one’s own capacity for a certain activity that has not manifested as a habitual practice yet. I actually elaborated on this topic in a previous newsletter episode:
Ferdinand Kutschker
Getting those total 15 repetitions in three exercises done should cost most people no more than five to ten minutes. And if you notice that this exceeds your capacity, no problem, just don’t make the mistake we all are always prone to do: stopping the activity altogether. Just lower the bar.
And that’s exactly what I’m going to do with my writing. I’m lowering the bar. Usually, such bars only exist in our own minds anyways. Bars we set for ourselves, things we have come to believe we must deliver to be valued and appreciated, which then in turn create expectations within us that what we’re doing should be appreciated by others. In most cases, these are illusions. It’s nothing but levels we set to determine our self worth.
So whatever it is you’re currently struggling with in your life, lower your bars. And then tell the people who you think might be affected by these changes. You’ll be surprised to realize that most people have never and will never realize the pressure you put yourself under. In most cases it’s not what others do to us or expect from us that we suffer from, but what we do to and expect from ourselves.
Push for more, pursue your goals relentlessly. But the moment you notice that you’re going beyond your abilities and operating on a level you can’t maintain—the moment you start suffering—, step down. Only if we do things that don’t exceed our individual capacity for performance we can stay with them and expand on them in a state of unconditional affection and cultivate love towards what we do.
Lower your bars, and I promise you consistency will follow.
Have a phenomenal week!
⏤Ferdinand
✨ Sparks
🧬 Science & Research‌‌: PwC’s 2023 Trust Survey
Trust is one of the most important social assets. It requires a long time and positive track record to generate but at times only one significant mistake to destroy. This yearly survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s Big Four accounting firms, depicts nicely the discrepancy between perceived and actual trust.
While there’s general agreement that trust is important, there’s far less agreement on how much companies are trusted. Among respondents, 84% of business executives think that customers highly trust the company, yet only 27% of customers say the same. Employees show a less dramatic trust gap: 79% of business executives say their employees trust the company, but only 65% of employees agree. In both cases, this gap in perceived trust remained just as large as our June 2022 survey — 57 percentage points for customers and 14 points for employees.
PricewaterhouseCoopers
🤓 Encyclopedia: Filter bubble
The filter bubble is one of the most important concepts to be aware of in the modern digitally connected world we live in. It describes a state of mental or intellectual isolation that results from the consumption of personalized media.
Selective search mechanisms on online platforms filter and tailor the type of content, social interaction, or communication individuals engage with and condition their minds and intellects to specific niche perceptions of the world by creating echo chambers for the mind due to not being exposed to disagreeing viewpoints. Selectively curated search results are typically based on personal information about the user, such as their connection to other users, location, past click-behavior, and search history.
This phenomenon exceeds the mere stream of content provided by digital online platforms. Two people using the same search term receive different search results that match their preferences. The objective is obvious: to serve the consumer what they prefer to hear, read and believe in order to increase engagement and retention in order to ultimately drive revenue.
This can happen not just through digital algorithms of online companies but also through personal choice. If you choose to only talk to people and only consume information—offline or online—that propose a specific perception of the world, you equally create a cultural or idiological bubble.
The difference with modern technology is that your individual choice becomes much harder because the filter criteria are managed for you and most of the time remain obscured.
Filter bubbles are dangerous because they lead to extreme and stubborn, unchangeable viewpoints and limit the ability to accept other viewpoints, resulting in social fragmentation and a limitation in effective public discourse.
To get deeper into the subject, check out the book The Filter Bubble, in which Eli Pariser coined the term.
🧬 Science: Sexual Attitudes and Characteristics of OnlyFans Users
Although one might think that the main target group for a platform like OnlyFans, a medium infamous for its primarily pornographic and semi- or quasi-pornographic content, is lonely, single men, this survey paints a different picture.
This U.S. survey was conducted with 335 men and 383 women, ages 18 to 71, with a mean age of 29.46.
[…] the typical OnlyFans user could be described as male (63.1%), white (68.9%), married (89.5%), and either heterosexual (59%) or bisexual/pansexual (37.8%).
Our findings also revealed that OnlyFans users and nonusers endorsed similar sexual attitudes related to permissiveness, communion, instrumentality, and birth control across sex.
Stacey Diane Arañez Litam
💡 This Week’s Wisdom
It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no re-form or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
From 1984 by GEORGE ORWELL.
Captured and resurfaced using the phenomenal Kindle reader.
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