Worthwhile Links: Witnessing Friendship + Equal-Odds Creativity + Potent Probiotic

Worth Reading

David Whyte reflects on the true nature of friendship:

[T]he ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

Barbara Sarnecka explains Dean Simonton's equal odds rule for creativity:

The take-home message from this research seems to be that if you want to produce great scientific work, you should just focus on producing as much work as possible.... Just write every day and keep submitting stuff. Some of it will be brilliant; most will be average; some will be embarrassingly bad. . . It doesn't matter. Just keep writing.

Harold Lee offers a contrarian perspective on buying experiences, not things [via]:

In truth, there is no real boundary between things and experiences.  There are experience-like things; like a basement carpentry workshop or a fine collection of loose-leaf tea.  And there are thing-like experiences, like an Instagrammable vacation that collects a bunch of likes but soon fades from memory.

Worth Hearing

I will never tire of hearing artists talk about their creative struggles. That's why I so enjoyed this Song Exploder episode on "Goodbye," which I knew as the theme from the extremely excellent show "Dark." I prefer the shorter Netflix mix which distills some of the song's emotional resonance. But the story of the song itself is inspiring. Make artistic friends!

Worth Trying

The science of gut health is still in its bleed-it-with-leeches stage, but it does seem that diversity of strains matters. I noticed a significant improvement to gut health after trying this 40-strain probiotic. It's expensive but it's the broadest-spectrum pill I could find that's also easily available. If you try it, let me know your results in the comments.