Most decisions aren’t made on a spreadsheet, where you just add up the numbers and a rational answer pops out. There’s a human element that’s hard to quantify, hard to explain, and can seem detached from the original goal, yet carries the most influence.
-Morgan Housel, from this post with some interesting examples
You’re more likely to unlock a big leap in performance by trying differently than by trying harder. You might be able to work 10% harder, but a different approach might work 10x better. Remain focused on the core problem, but explore a new line of attack. Persistence is not just about effort, but also strategy. Don’t merely try harder, try differently.
Success in education seems to mean only that a child leaves the classroom with more information in his or her head than when he or she walked in. That crude way of thinking about what teachers do is exemplified in the (comprehensively misleading) documentary Waiting for "Superman," where learning is visualized as a teacher simply opening the brains of students and pouring knowledge in. This is a ridiculous way to portray the work of schooling, even setting aside the fact that sharing knowledge is in fact a very small part of teaching. (Facts can be Googled; it's learning processes, skills, that make education valuable.) No one who has ever taught would agree that teaching children is a straightforward affair, or that all children are equally easy to teach.
-Fredrik deBoer, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
Orwell and Churchill recognized that the key question of their century ultimately was not who controlled the means of production, as Marx thought, or how the human psyche functioned, as Freud taught, but rather how to preserve the liberty of the individual during an age when the state was becoming powerfully intrusive into private life.
-Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom
History is not always a very good guide to the way people felt about things when they happened. Nothing today would seem more expressive of health and well-being than such great Impressionist paintings as Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere or Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party or Monet's Terrace of Sainte-Adresse. Simply to look at these paintings makes one think of how agreeable life must have been at that time. But, in fact, when they were first exhibited, most people regarded them as immoral daubs—flashy, inept and practically incomprehensible—while those most qualified to judge regarded them, at best, as a repudiation of everything that mattered. To academicians art was a matter of trade secrets, and nature was manipulated according to fixed laws. The Impressionists, on the contrary , staked everything on the actual and previously unrecorded look of things. As the name suggests, they saw the world in terms of instantaneous impressions that were to be set down as truthfully as possible.
-John Russell, Time-Life Library, The World of Matisse 1869-1954
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| Édouard Manet oil on canvas 1882 Un bar aux Folies Bergère |
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| Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oil on Canvas 1881 Le Déjeuner des canotiers |
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| Claude Monet Oil on Canvas 1867 Terrasse à Sainte-Adresse |
But even Maury thought that the purpose of learning a bit of history, literature, and geography was essentially social, in that a smattering of such knowledge would enable "a Virginia gentleman" to converse with confidence and thus same him from the embarrassment of making "a ridiculous & awkward Figure in Life."
Indeed, judging by Jefferson's literary commonplace book, into which he copied passages from authors who had caught his attention, Maury immersed the young man in the classics. There are few better ways to study a literary passage than to write it out in one's own hand, feeling each word and following the flow of thought. Not surprisingly for an intelligent fourteen-year-old who had just lost his father, Jefferson was especially inclined toward commentaries on mortality. He began by copying several passages from Cicero's Tusculum Disputations about the inevitability of death. Jefferson liked Cicero's essays, considering him "the first master" of style, but in notable contrast to the taste of the time, held the Roman's speeches in low esteem. The best models of oratory, he wrote, were "Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, & most assuredly not in Cicero."
-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
-Thomas Jefferson, in correspondence with John Adams
But these boys were also volunteers. They wanted to become soldiers, and this was the only process being offered to move them around and get them deployed and shooting. So they drilled and continued to drill until they began to feel the power of the whole, which was the entire point.
It was also a big problem. Most of these boys had arrived in what we would call good shape: lean and physically fit from lives on farms or strenuous work elsewhere, used to walking and being outdoors. But they were weak in ways they never suspected and living together—sleeping in twelve-man Sibley tents and eating in mass messes—almost immediately reveal their lack of immunity to measles, mumps, and tonsillitis, childhood diseases that soldier from cities would have already experienced.
These put them down in huge numbers, half or more during their first months of service. So many were sick that Sergeant Spotts of the Eighty-seventh Indiana was shocked to see "only 400 guns (out of 1,000) stacked at night. Though most recovered, many were weakened for the arrival of real killers, smallpox, and the streptococcus erysipelas. Before long. boys were helping to bury their friends and neighbors, casualties of an enemy they couldn't see and hadn't signed up to fight.
-Robert L. O'Connell, Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman
Debt used to be frowned upon. Now it’s a way of life.
-Ben Carlson, from this post on why he isn't worried about $1 Trillion (in total, not his personally) in credit card debt
Given that pain and suffering are literally and permanently unavoidable in human life, teaching others to be resilient rather than teaching them to be victims is an act of mercy, and cultivating resilience in yourself is an act of essential personal growth and adult development.
-Freddie deBoer, from this substack post
..............................with Louis Brandeis:
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
At the foundation of our civil liberty lies the principle which denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.
Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.
.......................eventually someone will win it. In the meantime, I get at least $4 worth of enjoyable daydreams. As investments go, that is better than some. Back story here:
What would you do if you won the Mega Millions? It’s now up to a record $1.55 billion! We would start a not-for-profit to educate people not to play the lottery. Why? Your odds of winning are 1 in 302.6 million…you are 70 times more likely to die in a shark attack than win this lottery.
But it’s even worse than that because only 50% of the proceeds of ticket sales go into the prize pool. Half of your “investment” is gone the second you buy a ticket. The other half is gone when they do the drawing, unless lightning strikes, which is unfair to lightning because you are more likely to get hit by real lightning. In other words, it’s a total waste of money.
But people still play, and dream. We think about this because government sponsors this crazy lottery at the same time it shirks its own fiduciary responsibilities.
....................to gothic rock, but if I had to I'd probably start here. If broadening your musical horizons is important to you, check in with The Hammock Papers and Cultural Offering on a regular basis.
......................................light bulbs:
The transition to more sustainable products should feel like an upgrade for consumers, not a sacrifice.
...................................change and risk:
Increasing health and falling fertility has been making our world older, and I think this is a big reason for the many ways it has been decaying and declining. Old secure folks are less willing to allow risky innovations or changes. They care more about keeping what they have than about maybe getting much more. Problem is, without sufficient change even what we used to have will slowly fade away.
.............................I've suggested to our kids not to count on it:
Social Security is the largest source of retirement income for a large number of retirees in this country. The program provides at least 50% of income for 40% of beneficiaries. One out of every 7 people who receive Social Security rely on it to provide at least 90% of their income.
-as culled from here
That’s a fundamental choice in our work. To close doors on our way to an answer, or to open them on the way to things we never expected.
-Seth Godin, from here
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