Happy Sunday! There's so much I want to put into these but I'm trying to get keep them in the short to average length range. Good thing I can send stuff that didn't make it into today, next week. Just a reminder, if you find something interesting and you want to share it with me, don't hesitate to do that.

Alrighty, on to the Stir!

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The World of Privilege

Privilege exists and what are we going to do about it? By now, we've all heard of "White Privilege" but there's lots of other types of "privilege". One in particular that I've always brought up and felt like trumped everything else - Beauty. You never hear the social justice warriors talking about that one. I hadn't read any studies looking at the topic of beauty privilege but I came across this article that pulled together several studies.

The benefits of being attractive are exorbitant. Beauty might be the single greatest physical advantage you can have in life. And yet compared to other other privileges that may arise from race, gender, or sexuality, we don’t talk much about it.

Attractive people are more likely to be seen as competent and be hired for a job. They are perceived as smarter and having more social grace. They are perceived to have better personality qualities like trustworthiness. They are perceived as kinder. They are more persuasive. They are more likely to benefit from acts of kindness from a stranger. They have greater self esteem.

In a meta analysis of the role of attractiveness in criminal sentencing, it was found that unattractive people received 120–305 percent longer sentences than attractive people. Yes, in criminal sentencing, looks were over 10x more important than race.

This is just a brutal fact of life and something that we all know deep down to be true. Not sure how you can change something so hardwired into human nature. Lots of stuff I totally disagree with in this article but fun to read something about the privilege of beauty.

The World of Alcohol

Here's an interesting article about how we use alcohol to check the trustworthiness of others. We all know this how this works. When you're tipsy or drunk, it's harder to be fake and pretend. Your inhibitions have been lowered and you don't have the normal brain power to keep your mask up. So it starts to fall down and reveal your true colors.

These techniques take advantage of the fact that deception is fundamentally a cold-cognition act and relies on cognitive control centers. This means that if we can impair the cognitive control abilities of people we're trying to judge, we’ll do a better job of sussing them out: they will be less able to confuse our cheater-detection systems.

One of the primary effects of alcohol and other intoxicants is to "downregulate," or temporarily paralyze, areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with cognitive control.

Next time you're unsure about a new friend and if you can trust them or not, have some drinks with them and see what comes up.

The World of Amazing Humans

Autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire took a 20-minute helicopter ride over New York City. What did he do next? He drew an 18ft picture of New York from memory!

The World of Tweets

@fortelabs If you spent the next year just putting into practice the knowledge you already have, and not learning anything new, your life would be totally transformed.

Thoughts: Just starting, acting on something and sticking to it consistently yields greater returns than learning new things every day but never doing.

@julian The best editor for your writing is you in one month. Let enough time pass that you forget what you wrote.

Thoughts: I think is 100% accurate. Reading what you wrote a month later when you're detached, will definitely give you a fresh outlook.

@julian Success isn't an end state. Success is having the freedom to focus on the grind you actually enjoy. Most people should spend way less energy trying to get rich and way more energy building a tight-knit friend group that will be with them until old age.

The World of Proverbs

If you chase two rabbits, you will catch neither. Japanese Proverb

Thoughts: You can’t pursue two things at once. Pick one - aim then shoot.

End Note

If you've enjoyed the Sunday Stir, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up. I hope you're enjoyed this episode..

Live free,

Brennen