A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
.....................................with Adam Grant:
Emotion regulation is not about controlling what you feel. It’s about choosing how you respond.
Wise people don’t suppress emotion—they find constructive ways to express it.
Intense feelings don’t always demand immediate reactions. They often benefit from deep reflection.
Readiness is not a feeling. It's a decision.
The voice in your head that says you're not ready is not protecting you. It's just stopping you from finding out what you're actually capable of.
-Mark Manson, from this edition
...............I had maybe four teachers on par with Rob Firchau - but they made all the difference,
Remember...............................
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| Normandy American Cemetery France |
"Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man".
Per Bylund agrees and suggests we pay attention to Goodhart's Law.
..................talks with Joe Rogan for three plus hours, mostly about AI. Extremely interesting.
X summary here; a few snippets:
6. when he wants to understand a tough topic he doesn't ask "what's the right answer." he asks the AI to steelman one side, then steelman the other. then he decides for himself. 7. for big questions he tells the AI to pretend to be a panel of experts. "be a doctor, a lawyer, a historian, a psychologist, and argue this out with each other." then he reads the debate they have. 8. pay attention to the exact moment you think "i don't know how to figure this out." most people just give up at that moment. that's the moment you should open the AI. 9. the only real skill left in using AI is knowing what to ask it. the models can already do almost anything you can describe in plain english. the bottleneck lives in your own head.
I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In other words, it forbids wholesome doubt.
-C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
-The Holy Bible, Romans 12:2, King James Version
....................................and restraint:
While there are many who compare Tim Cook to Steve Jobs and find him wanting on vision and flair, I am grateful, as an investor in Apple, for the restraint and discipline that he brought to the job. That gratitude will stay intact even if Apple's caution on AI turns out to be a mistake, since the restraint and rectitude that Cook brought to his job are management qualities that significantly undervalued. I don't teach from or write cases, but I would love to see more business school cases about CEOs like Cook who are not easily swayed by the temptation of more growth and ego-driven acquisitions. I loved the Steve Jobs movie, but I don't expect to see a Tim Cook movie anytime soon, and while that is understandable, it also explains why we will continue to have too many CEOs at companies viewing themselves as saviors, gambling shareholder money on turnarounds and rescues, when the better pathway would be acceptance and shrinkage. I believe that investors lose more money from companies trying to do too much rather than from them doing too little, and from overreaching than from underachieving.
-Aswarth Damodaran, from this essay
“Respect is earned, not given” implies a cold kind of cruelty. If everyone around us must work to “earn” our respect, this implies that our default assumption is that others do not deserve respect. It does not seem proper or fitting to approach everyone we meet with such an assumption of unworthiness and then expect them to pass an unknown test in order to be deemed worthy of respect. It seems uncharitable in the extreme to approach every new person with a “prove me wrong” attitude.
Let us build memories in our children,
lest they drag out joyless lives,
lest they allow treasures to be lost because
they have not been given the keys.
We live, not by things, but by the meanings
of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords
from generation to generation.
Ray Visotski takes us for a walk down his musical memory lane. He must be a youngster: no Motown, no Beach Boys, no girl groups, no British Invasion tunes. Those were the days my friend.
Go back in time. Examine the babe when still in its mother's arms. See the external world reflected for the first time in the still-dark mirror of his intelligence. Contemplate the first models to make an impression on him. Listen to the words that first awaken his dormant powers of thought. Take note, finally, of the first battles he is obliged to fight. Only then will you understand where the prejudices, habits, and passions that will dominate his life come from. In a manner of speaking, the whole man already lies swaddled in his cradle.
Alexis de Tocqueville made these observations in Democracy in America to explain his rationale for studying America's "point of departure." Of course, the beginning is also where the biographer must start. For the young Tocqueville, that external world was dominated by figures from the highest miliary and administrative nobility of the Ancien Regime, survivors of the Revolutionary Terror, loyal to the exiled Bourbons, and dead set against the liberal views Tocqueville himself would eventually embrace. Presaging this divergence, Tocqueville displayed considerable independence of mind at an early age, and he repeatedly flouted expectations. At the same time, he developed the habit of casting doubt on much of what he did and saw.
-Oliver Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville
. . . I’m about to run into trouble, because I don’t have everything I need (the right arguments, good enough material, whatever) for the bit that’s coming next. This bothers me less than it used to, though, because again and again, the missing insight, anecdote, or angle arrives just in time. I’ll open a book at random, or hear something on a podcast, or a friend will make a comment, or I’ll notice something on a walk, and it’ll be exactly what I need for everything to fall into place. It never seems to arrive until the moment it’s required, though, so that’s more way it’s being constantly hammered home to me that trusting yourself/reality/the process is the whole game here.
-Oliver Burkeman, from this edition
Music has the ability to calm our brains, our hearts, our nerves. We tend to like music that reminds us of something we've heard before, but not too much. We like music that strikes the sweet spot between novelty and familiarity, simplicity and complexity, and between predictability and surprise. The job of the composer, and of the musicians who interpret the composition, is to hit these in just the right balance. The trick of it is that the sweet spot is not the same for all of us, and often not even the same from day-to-day. Loving music requires that we be receptive to it, that we make the mental space and time to allow ourselves to give into it, to be won over by it. If our defenses are up—as they can be in clinical, therapeutic environments—it may simply not work. Or it can catch us by surprise, evoking some of the deepest memories and deepest feelings of our lives, and in the progress, help us through almost anything.
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
Joe Nichols.............................The Impossible
Unsinkable ships - sink
Unbreakable walls - break
Sometimes the things you think will never happen
Happen just like that
Unbendable steel - bends
If the fury of the wind is unstoppable
I've learned to never underestimate
The impossible
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art. The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible.
-Albert Camus, from this 1957 lecture
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