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Daily, snackable writings to spur changes in thinking.
Building a blueprint for a better brain by tinkering with the code.
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THE CLEAVER
August 10th, 2018
The WELL OILED ZOOM is the ability to zoom in and out on subjects. It’s akin to seeing the forest and then taking a look at a single leaf or vice versa. It’s an incredibly important skill to have because otherwise it can be like walking around looking at the world through a TUBE. Just try to imagine driving a car looking through a pair of binoculars.
Sometimes, however, things can get to the point where our ZOOM is effectively stuck, and life is constantly focused on one thing. Those who experience depression or anxiety might feel as though their zoom is stuck in this way in the sense that repetitive and negative thoughts are often a hallmark of these experiences.
If such a sort of condition were literalized as a tube someone felt forced to perpetually view the world through, how eager would a person crave a way to chop down that TUBE, to get that zoom working again and see the world in a different, larger, more generous way?
One important avenue is is to use THE ONLY TOOL, which is a method of designing a series of questions that create better questions. Asking the right question can be like taking a CLEAVER to the tube stuck to our own narrowly focused view.
THE ONLY TOOL is merely the act of finding a better question.
Perhaps we feel as though we have asked all the questions we can, but this is a hall mark of a ZOOM that is stuck.
The key to building a CLEAVER is remembering that there is always a better question we can ask. A better question we can ask of ourselves. A better question we can ask about our situation. A better question we can ask about the questions we’ve thought of so far. A question that can sharpen a question, and in so doing cut through whatever fog keeps us from seeing a more generous, wondrous life that we can explore creatively and curiously.
This episode references Episode 54: The Well-Oiled Zoom, Episode 30: The Only Tool, and Episode 113: The Tube. If you’d like to fully understand those references, please check out those episodes next.
