Tie Your Camel

Hey friends,

Here’s a fun story I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s narrated by the 9th-century Islamic scholar Tirmidhi. It goes along these lines:

One day, the Prophet Muhammad noticed a Bedouin leaving his camel unattended without tying it. He asked the Bedouin “Why don’t you tie your camel?” The Bedouin answered “I place my trust in God”. The Prophet said “Trust in God, but tie your camel”.

This is great stuff. Trust in God, but tie your camel.

This ties in (lol) with the Stoic concept of The Trichotomy of Control that I wrote about a year ago in this newsletter. There are things within our control, there are things partially in our control, and there are things outside our control. We’d all live happier lives if we focused our attention only on the stuff we could control, and let the rest go.

Tie Your Camel reminds us to put the effort into helping ourselves (within our control), but beyond that, from being free of expectations about the outcome (outside our control).

Have a great week!

Ali

This week on Not Overthinking

Not Overthinking is the weekly podcast hosted by me and my brother. If you enjoy these emails, you’ll hopefully like that too. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castro (my favourite podcast app) or any other podcast app – just search for ‘Not Overthinking’.

Intentional Socialising | Not Overthinking

In this episode we talk about how we socialise — the different types of social events we take part in, and how we take part in them. We talk about how we, for the most part, leave our social life down to chance, and we try and find ways to be more intentional about how we socialise.

My Favourite Things this week

1 – Article – This is a very funny and astute observation about the state of the dating marketplace (at least in the West). It’s written by a hedge fund guy and is sort-of written like an academic paper, definitely worth reading if you’re into this stuff.

On a related note, my brother and I are on a crusade to make all our single friends sign up to dating apps. Far too many of them are putting all their faith in God, but are leaving their proverbial camel untied in this context.

2 – Podcast – I learned a lot from this episode of Bulletproof Radio called Why You Desperately Need Carbs. Worth listening to if you (like me) have the internal bias that ‘carbs are bad’.

3 – Audiobook – I’ve now started listening to book 3 of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan on Audible. The end of book 2 and the start of book 3 were so good that I’ve been prioritising listening to these audiobooks over podcasts, and so my podcast queue has hit the triple digits. Might have to do a purge soon 🙂

Kindle Highlight of the Week

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and it looks like work.”

A quote (allegedly) from Thomas Edison, recounted in the book YouTube Secrets by Sean Cannell and Benji Travis. Resurfaced with Readwise.

This week’s video