The Motivating Power of Curiosity
A 7x world champion endurance athlete, 2023 best albums, and creative AI prompts
From December five years ago - on a sunny cliffs outside San Diego
Hello there,
We have reached the time in the year when all the best-of lists proliferate across the internet, and it shouldn’t be surprising, but I’ve heard of absolutely none of these Best Albums of 2023.
One nice thing from Spotify is that your Year-End Summary leaves out all the kids’ songs. Squeezed in next to Noah Kahan and Yussef Dayes probably should be a few songs like “Icky Sticky Bubble Gum” (an instant classic by title alone) - but I enjoy pretending I have adult music taste.
Luckily we’ve got two weeks left in the year, so we can all still explore new music, like Laufey or Meshell Ndegeocello. I’m also working on my list of favorite books from the year - stay tuned!
The Remarkable Journey of Rebecca Rusch
The professional endurance athlete and seven-time World Champion has a surprising story. More recently, Rebecca Rusch’s film about biking the Ho Chi Minh trail through Vietnam won an Emmy in 2017 (which I haven’t watched yet because… well, I can find time for podcasts, but not for 90 min films).
As a kid, she grew up in Chicago, running cross country and studying business in college. After college Rebecca found herself working at a sports nutrition company. On a whim, she decided to check out the climbing wall in her building, partly because the guy working there looked cute. She got hooked on rock climbing, moving into her car, and traveling West for better crags.
Rebecca's wanderings led her to Costa Mesa, California, where she worked at an outdoor gear store and taught climbing at Joshua Tree. She climbed outside whenever possible, between her work commitments, which included founder and part owner of a chain of climbing gyms.
One day a group of adventure racers walked into the gym asking for a lesson on rappelling. They were decked out in tights and tank tops, which looked strange among climbers in jeans and flannels, but Rebecca took interest.
She started adventure racing at age 30, when many people seemed locked in on their lifestyle and jumped into a new sport and started winning races.
For the next eight years, Rebecca's life was a whirlwind of travel, races, and living out of her car. She won races across the globe and landed sponsorships and TV coverage until the funding dried up.
Quitting adventure racing left a big hole in her life so when some friends invited Rebecca to a mountain bike race in Moab, she said yes. With so little experience in technical biking, she ran the tricky sections of the trail, carrying her bike, but still managed to post an impressive time.
Diving into mountain biking, Rebecca went on to win nearly all the races she entered, excelling at endurance, like the brutal Leadville races. She even earned a spot in the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 2019. Shifting sports in her late thirties and still setting records is a true testament to her determination and adaptability.
In a podcast interview, Rebecca shared some wisdom that resonates with me. She talked about confidence, not as something you're born with, but something you find along the way. Her advice? Get out there. Walk, run, just move. You'll learn about what your body can do. “And that's pretty awesome!”
Here’s a line from best-selling non-fiction author Steven Kotler:
When you've found the spots where curiosities overlap, play in those intersections for a bit. Devote twenty minutes a day to diving into those intersections. Just get in there and feed your curiosity for a bit.
What most impresses me is her ability to keep shifting her identity and excelling at new activities. Sometimes you get dealt a crappy hand, and you figure out a better path to navigate it.
After retiring from mountain bike races, Rebecca Rusch took on an entirely new challenge. At age fifty she completed the Alaska Iditarod bike race, traveling 350 miles self-supported across the snow and subzero temperatures, taking the first place podium for females.
We aren’t all superheroes, but I like the encouragement to keep picking up new things as life progresses.
Worthy & Remarkable
A nifty looking holographic from Looking Glass Go (based in Brooklyn NY) raises $592k for something out of the future
I love that the TempoFlow rolling ball clock exists and people are supporting the creator even though it seems like an annoying thing to have in your house
Beautiful footage and a glimpse into a little French mountain town to get you excited about skiing this winter from Blake Marshall
Ronnie Romance film that captures how freeing biking can be so that you tap into that 5-year old’s enthusiasm
One Thing from Me
Before AI takes over the world (joking, ahem, kind of), there’s a chance to make fun stuff with it! I have been working on a “trained” chatbot (more to come) and I’ve been listening to a bunch of podcasts on the topic.
They say it takes hearing something eight times for it to sink in… Perhaps you’ve already heard encouragement to use ChatGPT even more times than that, but I still encourage you to go play with AI tools!
I offer you three amusing and off-the-beaten-path things to try:
Help me write a summary of my creative projects from the last five years by asking a series of questions one at a time, and compiling the answers into a short essay
Write a three part sequel to the wizard of Oz but based in Portland Oregon and for each section generate an image of the characters in some iconic part of Portland
Create a whimsical 10-question adventure game that teaches {topic of choice}, with each mini-story and lesson followed by a question, allowing me to answer and receive feedback before proceeding to the next section.
And you can get free access today if you just go to Bing and use their “chat” tool, which generates responses from OpenAI’s GPT 4.
This model according to writer and Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, “just feels smarter, you are more likely to get the weird illusion of sentience from it than any other model.”
You can get a true sense of the future of AI with this model. Ethan says that once you put in around ten hours of using AI people tend to “get it.”
That’s only ten days at one hour a day! Or one month at 20 minutes a day (although I found it more valuable to block larger chunks of time).
Wintry Cheers and Solstice Sentiments,
Jono
PS - I’m hoping to find some holiday shopping deals like this