Ness Labs: What are your Default Definitions? 🔐

Edition #185 – April 6th, 2023

Default Definitions

Since we are born, a set of defaults influences our goals, our relationships, our tastes. From fashion to friendship, many of the choices we make in life are imperceptibly constrained by default definitions.

For example, the default definition of education is formal schooling. The default definition of love is monogamy. The default definition of success is wealth and power. The default definition of aging is decline.

Those default definitions are the invisible puppeteers quietly manipulating our actions and directing our lives. Fortunately, even though those are the most commonly accepted definitions, we don’t have to stick to them.

In this edition, I want to share a simple exercise you can do today to question the default definitions in your life. As you'll see, sometimes those default definitions are completely fine! But, often, we realize that there may other doors we've never considered opening before.

The idea of this exercise is not to turn your life upside down. Rather, it is to live more mindfully, in accordance with your authentic ambitions. Whatever the answers you find, I hope you find it helpful.

Enjoy your weekly dose of mindful productivity!
Anne-Laure.

🧠 Brain Food

From default definitions to deliberate questions (4 min)
Written by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Instead of simply accepting the defaults that govern our lives, we can ask ourselves what we truly want and what we truly believe. We can do this by turning our default definitions into deliberate questions. To do this exercise, you just need to grab a piece of paper or open your note-taking app, and go through three simple steps.

Functional fixedness: when we stick to what we know (6 min)
Written by Dr Hannah Rose
Surely, a knife is made for cutting things. And you can only use a cotton swab to clean your ears — right? Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias which makes us automatically narrow down the function of each tool. Although functional fixedness offers great mental shortcuts, it can present barriers to working to your full creative potential.

Transform your writing with the founder of Chibi AI (18 min)
Interview with Chad Thiele
Chibi AI, an AI writing tool that seamlessly weaves in prompts and automatically analyzes your text to offer suggestions for improvement, so you can focus on crafting great content. In this interview, we talked about the role of AI as a creative copilot, how prompts can help elevate content, using AI to overcome writer’s block, the future of AI writing assistance, and much more.

🤝 Brain Trust

Nette is launching an initiative for "modern bookworms" in the community. Come discuss what this special book club will look like with her today. You can also join a co-working session later today at 4pm UTC. With Pomodoro timers, short breaks, and a review discussion at the end, it's the perfect way to make progress on your work.