The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight. But it’s easy to view the process that led to successful outcomes as something to emulate, and the process that led to failures as something to avoid.
-Morgan Housel, from here
Putting a state-of-the-art digital video camera with a zoom lens in the hands of a fifty-year-old man on Christmas morning is like giving a sixteen-year-old the keys to your Porsche. It just shouldn't be done. There I am, yelling a litany of parental cliches like "Look here, Cameron," "Puddy, what did you get?" "Savannah, what time did you get home last night?" We all turn into overbearing, obtrusive directors with some half-baked notion that one day we will assemble all of the footage into a meaningful chronological account of our time on Earth. I don't know about you, but I can tell you that most of the videos in my family wind up in a shoe box somewhere and surface only when some kind of cleanup is initiated around the house. . . .
I know I've captured enough moments when I hear Savannah say through my headset, "Jesus, Christmas morning with Cecil B. DeBuffett. Dad, we're hungry. Please put the camera down and make us some pancakes."
-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty
This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness
comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
The dark thought, the shame, the malice
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
-Rumi
This country has felt more stunned and doomed than at any time since the assassinations of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, and while a sense of foreboding may be appropriate, the hate is not. At some point, the hate becomes an elective. I was becoming insane, letting politicians get me whipped up into visions of revenge, perp walks, and jail. But it didn't work as a drug, neither calming nor animating me. There is no beauty or safety in hatred. As a long-term strategy, based on craziness, it's doomed.
No one can take this hatred off me. I have to surrender it every time I become aware of it. This will not go well, I know. But I don't want my life's ending to be that I was toxic and self-righteous, and I don't know if my last day here will be next Thursday or in twenty years. Whenever that day comes, I want to be living, insofar as possible, in the Wendell Berry words "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts," . . .
-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
Hating the way I was feeling helped me give up Camel cigarettes thirty-two years ago, and then alcohol. It is good to surrender things that poison us and our world. Am I free of such toxicity now? Well, about forty percent, and that is a pretty good deal. I'll take it.
Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking. It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch, the opposite of sticking together and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky. The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump, and it changes our vision, as we scowl and paw the ground. So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the best we can. We square our shoulders and lift our gaze.
-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
- At times Marion must have seemed a martinet. But his rationale was simple: "Whenever any part of duty is neglected or done in a slovenly manner, though ever so minute, it tends to destroy disciple entirely."
-Marion preferred the loyalty of a few good men to the fickleness of many uncommitted ones.
-He possessed a strong mind, improved by its own reflections and observations, not by books or travel.
-As Lee would later write, "Marion and Lee were singularly tender of the lives of their soldiers; and preferred moderate success, with little loss, to the most brilliant enterprise, with the destruction of many of their troops."
-On March 21, while camped at Trapier's Plantation just outside Georgetown, Watson complained about Marion's style of warfare. "They will not sleep and fight like gentlemen," Watson told the plantation owner, "but like savages are eternally firing and whooping around us at night, and by day waylaying and popping at us from behind every tree." Had he heard this indictment, Marion might have taken it as a compliment.
*Assuming you like your wars fought by small numbers, with often conflicting loyalties, via hide-and-seek on horses, over a vast territory, punctuated by small skirmishes.
"He was never actually diagnosed as a kid," his mother says, "but he says he has Asperger's. and I'm sure he's right." The condition was exacerbated by his childhood trauma. Whenever he would later feel bullied or threatened, his close friend Antonio Garcias says, the PTSD from his childhood would hijack his limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotional responses.
As a result, he was bad a picking up social cues. "I took people literally when they said something." he says. "and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really mean." He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics, and coding.
Like all psychological traits, Musk's were complex and individualized. He could be very emotional, especially about his own children, and he felt acutely the anxiety that comes from being alone. But he didn't have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked. He was not hardwired to have empathy. Or, to put it in less technical terms, he could be an asshole.
-Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk
..............when you understand this sentiment:
I would like to see social pressure applied also in other areas: against marijuana use; against promiscuous use of four-letter words; in favor of forming relationships that result in grandchildren.
-Arnold Kling, from this substack
...........................at Sippican Cottage:
So, we were presented with a common design dilemma. A Victorian house is laid out differently than a more recent pile of sticks and bricks. The rooms are too big, or too small, or not where you expect them. Bathrooms are always in short supply, although a Victorian bathroom in good repair is a wonderful thing. They invented bathrooms, after all. They pretty much got it right on the first go-round. Everything was white, for cleanliness. Toilet, sink, tub, lots of white tile, with interesting patterns on the mosaic floors.
A Victorian house with two bathrooms was a rarity. For instance there used to be a pecking order of poshness for Boston Irish, which I am, sorta. They knew a thing or two about Victorian houses, and pecking orders. They had to mop the floors in them at first, and eventually they lived in them when the structures were run down enough to afford the rent. The bottom rung of the Boston Irish social climbing ladder was ignant bogtrotter. Then came shanty Irish. If you rose further in the world, you could become cut-glass Irish, also known as lace-curtain Irish. Middle class. The pinnacle, of course, was two-toilet Irish.
............................................looks like.
While Newton’s third law was developed with physics in mind, it applies equally well to biology. When pushed on, we push back. The harder we push others, the harder they push back. How well we align with this simple principle of mirrored reciprocation determines whether our outcomes are good or bad.
-Farnum Street, from this mighty fine edition of Brain Food
................................................language.
Makes you wonder, today as people endlessly “pursue perfect” — the perfect family vacation, the perfect athletic experience, the perfect house, the perfect life, are we missing the point? Instead of “searching for perfect”, should we instead be searching for unique experiences and embracing whatever this pursuit brings?
-Ted Lamade, from this guest post
Now, I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world; rights must be given to every citizen, or none at all to anyone. . . .
There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality that incites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 1, Chapter 3
If anyone gets intoxicated with his knowledge when he looks beneath him, let him turn his eyes upward toward past ages, and he will lower his horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample him underfoot.
-Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, Book 2, Essay 6
Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. As long as I hear truth, I am bathed by a beautiful element, and am not conscious of any limits to my nature.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay, Intellect
......................especially about the future:
A master-of-the-universe mentality is pervasive in finance because it’s a group of highly educated, competitive people. They see it as a sign of weakness if you admit you don’t know what’s going to happen next.
The problem is finance people (all people, really) are very good at telling you why something that just happened was obvious in hindsight. They are terrible at telling you what will happen in the future.
-Ben Carlson, from this post
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