Hello, Adversity Weekly Roundup #21 - June 24, 2023

Unlocking your hidden genius, prediction machines, taking better breaks, and...*checks notes*...a love story.

Photo credit: Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the 21st edition of the Hello, Adversity Weekly Roundup. I hope you had a great week.

I am currently writing this newsletter from overcast Philadephia, where I have a work event this evening. Although the weather hasn’t been great, my hotel room has a spectacular view of the Delaware River. I haven’t done a lot of traveling these last few years, so it’s nice to have a change of scenery, even if it means enduring what might be a cracked rib. (Ouch!) I’ll tell you more about the trip next week.

Without further ado, here are this week’s links:

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1. Hidden Genius, by Polina Pompliano

My friend Polina Pompliano, author of the always-fascinating Substack The Profile, published her first book on Tuesday, titled Hidden Genius.

Over the last few years, Pompliano has read thousands of profiles of interesting people, from entertainers to innovators to politicians. Every Sunday, she shares a roundup of the most captivating feature pieces she came across that week. On Wednesdays, she sends out a deep-dive “dossier” on a specific person, drawing on articles and interviews throughout the subject’s career to distill the most crucial takeaways about their creative process, philosophy, and influences. (My favorite is her deep-dive on Keanu Reeves from 2021.)

Hidden Genius is the culmination of years of reading and research. The book explores the different ways the world’s most successful and innovative people have tackled complex problems, taken career risks, overcame adversity, and ultimately, unlocked their potential. Pompliano shows how we can learn from these examples to expand our mental toolkit and achieve our own greatness.

I am still in the process of reading it. The only reason I haven’t finished it yet is because I have been traveling this week and get car sick when I try to read. But it’s just as good as I expected it to be! My Kindle edition is already filled with dozens of highlighted passages.

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2. I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.

I subscribe to Sue Deagle’s The Luminist newsletter and always find interesting takeaways in her posts that I can apply to my life. Deagle writes eloquently about picking up the pieces after a life-changing trauma, whether it’s the loss of a loved one, an illness, or another setback. (Sue lost her husband Mike in 2016.)

In her latest post, Deagle reviewed the book The Expectation Effect, by David Robson, connecting the book’s takeaways to her own life experience. The premise of The Expectation Effect is that our mind tends to go haywire in anticipating future events due to a combination of factors. The “prediction machine” inside our head takes limited, subjective data and projects out into the future, leading us to believe that what we think is going to happen is destined to occur.

This is especially the case with negative events. Because we envision it, we think it’s inevitable, no matter how catastrophic or unrealistic the scenario.

One remedy to combat this aggravating tendency is to update our expectations of the future. For example, if we always expect the worst-case scenario, we can change our mental scripting by exposing ourselves to this potentially unpleasant future by confronting our fears head-on.

In Deagle’s case, after experiencing the devastation of losing her husband, she couldn’t envision an optimistic, hopeful future. After reading about different people who encountered similar grief and who were able to eventually move forward, she was able to see that a positive future was still possible. This “exposure therapy” approach helped her prediction machine recalibrate:

Over and over I read the words of people who had suffered unimaginable loss… and then had put Humpty Dumpty back together again in the form of new lives and new loves. 

Turns out loss isn’t the end. Sometimes it's even the beginning. But often it's just the middle of a life shaped by many things.

I had never heard of Robson’s book but look forward to reading it. I struggle with worry and always believe the worst possible outcomes are destined to happen. My “prediction machine” is out of whack.

It reminds me of the famous Mark Twain quote:

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.

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Photo by Radek Grzybowski on Unsplash

3. How to Take Better Breaks at Work, According to Research

I am a horrendous break-taker; it has been a flaw of mine for many years. I get in the zone and I try and power through, or I think that by taking a break, I will lose all momentum. This article in the Harvard Business Review was written for break-deprived souls like me.

The article starts by looking at the perils of ignoring break time. It may not seem like a big deal, but the problem has real consequences:

But the cost of being always-on (and doing it well!) is high. More than half of employees (59%) report feeling burnout according to a recent survey from Aflac. Engagement has taken the opposite turn and is declining among the U.S. workers. Alarmingly, both high burnout and low engagement rates are associated with hindered performance.

Working longer does not equate to working better. In fact, breaks can actually boost our productivity:

Pausing work throughout the day can improve well-being and also help with getting more work done. Counter to the popular narrative of working long work hours, our research suggests that taking breaks within work hours not only does not detract from performance, but can help boost it.

Some breaks are better than others. The authors give advice on maximizing our downtime, offering best practices on break duration, location, and activity. Going outside and being active is a great way to unwind. Checking social media is not.

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4. They fell in love backpacking through Europe then they lost each other. Here’s how they’ve ended up married for 24 years

Once you see life through the lens of adversity, it is hard not to see it in everything you read.

In 1998, two Americans, Tom Latkovic and Kim Morgan, while backpacking separately through Europe, met in a chance encounter in a hostel elevator in Munich, Germany. The rest, as they say, is history.

Well, until they lost each other:

Tom Latkovic woke up in disbelief. He’d found the woman of his dreams and somehow, less than 12 hours later, lost her – maybe forever.

Somehow, against all odds, after a romantic evening spent getting to know one another and falling in love, they accidentally separated. They never managed to exchange phone numbers. They didn’t even know each other’s last name.

The next morning, Tom and Kim each had a choice to make: try and find each other, or chalk the night up to a chance encounter and go their separate ways for good.

For Tom the choice was easy. He was going to find Kim:

Meeting Kim in the first place had felt like fate. But Tom decided he wasn’t going to rely on fate to strike twice.

“I’m more of a ‘providence favors the prepared’ kind of guy,” he tells CNN Travel today.

Kim felt the same way about Tom. Both decided to head to the Marienplatz, a busy central plaza in the city, on the off chance the other might have wandered there. Against all odds, they found each other!

(This time, they exchanged contact information.)

Twenty-five years later, Tom and Kim are happily married with three kids.

By this point, you are probably wondering: what does this have to do with adversity?

Fair question. The short answer is that it ties in perfectly with my newsletter last week. Both Tom and Kim realized that if they didn’t make an attempt to find each other—even though they had other countries to visit—they would regret the decision for the rest of their lives. They had to at least try. Fate was at stake.

Their 100-year-old selves would be pleased with their decision.

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If you have a story you’d like me to include in a future newsletter, please email me at HelloAdversity@substack.com or leave a comment below.

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