In praise of Tim Cook......................

 

....................................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

Thinking about respect................

 

“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.

-as lifted from here

The World according to........................

 

........................................memes:

better memories...................

 

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.

-as culled from here

Age differences................

 

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.

Opening paragraphs..................

 

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

On trusting the process..............

 

 . . . 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

Gotta love........................

 

.........................................The Bee:

Music- is there anything it can't do...?

 

     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

the impossible..........................

 

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

Almost seventy years ago.................

 

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

circumstances...........

 

     We are buffeted by circumstances so long as we believe ourselves to be creatures of outside conditions; but when we realize that we are a creative power and that we may command the hidden soil and seeds of our being out of which circumstances arise, then we become the rightful masters of ourselves.

     That circumstances grow out of thought, each of us, who has for any length of time practiced self-control and self-purification, knows—for we will have notices the alteration in our circumstances has been in exact ratio with our altered mental condition.  So true is this that when we earnestly apply ourselves to remedy the defects in our character and make swift and marked progress, we pass rapidly through a succession of vicissitudes.

     The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors, that which it loves, and also that which it fears; it reaches the height of its cherished aspirations; it falls to the level of its basest desires—and circumstances are the means by which the soul receives its own.

-James Allen, As A Man Thinketh

let it go.........

 

Don't be afraid of verbal abuse or criticism.

     Only the morally weak feel compelled to defend or explain themselves to others.  Let the quality of your deeds speak on your behalf.  We can't control the impressions others form about us, and the effort to do so only debases our character.

     So, if anyone should tell you that a particular person has spoken critically of you, don't bother with excuses or defenses.  Just smile and reply, "I guess that person doesn't know about all my other faults.  Otherwise he wouldn't have mentioned only these."

-Attributed to Epictetus, from A Manual for Living

principles...................

 

     In sum, principles are the collective wisdom of our species.  They tell us what is valuable.  They warn us what is not.  Principles of law safeguard society and protect our rights.  Health principles guide us on nutrition, exercise, and the prevention of disease.  Scientific principles further technology and explain the natural world.  Spiritual principles guide our lives. Or should.

     There will always be arguments about doctrine, of course.  But there is little disagreement on core principles: honesty, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, perseverance, justice, humility, charity, and gratitude.

     These principles aren't binding.  They're liberating.  They imbue life with meaning.  And, make no mistake, human beings are meaning-seeking creatures.  Without a reason to live, people easily fall into depression or despair.  In some sense, we are all spiritual seekers.

-Alexander Green, beyond Wealth: The road map to a rich life

The ongoingness of creation....

 

When you are creating something, you will usually find that once things appear 90 percent done, you are actually about halfway there. But you have to create the first 90 percent in order to see the half that needs to be revised.

-James Clear, from this edition

opinions and purposes.........

 

Here in Kerry I live among mountains, some of them almost touchably near, all of them breaking and raising my horizon, higher than the highest-flying ravens by day, high as high-hunting Orion at night.  And these mountains, all of them, have old names, the Paps, Coghane, Brennaun Mor, Stoompa, the Blind Horse's Glen with its three lakes and its almost perpendicular back wall, Mangerton Mountain, Torc Mountain and, not entirely eclipsing the Reeks, a cluster of Bens called Toomies.  Northwards, the world stretches away across the hilly, rolling lands of north Kerry and west Limerick.

     To live in a place so heartbreakingly beautiful can be a difficult blessing.  Sooner or later as I'd sit here writing in the morning I would lift my head and look out and, as arrestingly as a heart attack or a stroke, what I'd see would invalidate me in my opinions and purposes.

     Here, in such a world on such a day, opinions and purposes are a Fall or at least they are the agents and symptoms of our exile from what we paradisiacally are at the core of our being.

     There at the core of our being we are as pure as a drop of water on a lotus leaf.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

a dispensable piece..............

 

     Two things are unassailably and irreconcilably true on such a day: perceived with clear eyes, with eyes naked of preconception, reality as a whole is immaculate, is perfect, is pure, that even though three stone-fenced fields away a fox is plundering a wren's nest and is ravenously killing and devouring the still bald chicks, they themselves, every time their mother returns with her mouth full of death, seeming to be little more than luridly shrieking voracities for insects and grubs.

     To survive at all on such a day I'd have to forgo being a self: where normally I would say "I see," now in self-abeyance I would say "seeing is".

     On such a day it is good to know and still better it is to act on the knowledge that the subjective-objective divide is a dispensable piece of mental machinery, the mechanism of our alienation, turning us into spectators.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

Ludwig van....................

 

      Talking with a nice lady on the phone.  She has a case of the midwinter spiritual rot.  And a terminal cold she's had since September 1.

     "Well," rasps she, "you don't ever get depressed, do you?"

     "Listen," says I, "I get lows it takes extension ladders to get out of."

     "So what do you do?" asks she.  "I mean, what DO YOU DO?"

     Nobody ever pinned me down quite like that before.  They usually ask wat I think they should do.

     My solace is not religion or yoga or rum or even deep sleep.  It's Beethoven.  As in Ludwig van.  He's my ace in the hole.  I put his Ninth Symphony on the stereo, pull the earphones down tight, and lie down on the floor.  The music comes on like the first day of creation.

     And I think about old Mr. B.  He knew a whole lot about depression and unhappiness.  He moved around from place to place trying to find the right place.   His was a lousy love life, and he quarreled with his friends all the time.  A rotten nephew worried him deeply—a nephew he really loved.  Mr. B. wanted to be a virtuoso pianist.  He wanted to sing well, too.  But when he was still quite young, he began losing his hearing.  Which is usually bad news for pianists and singers.  By 1818, when he was forty-eight, he was stone-cold deaf.  Which makes it all the more amazing that he finished his Ninth Symphony five years later.  He never really heard it!  He just thought it!

-Robert Fulghum,  All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten

--------------------------------

It may be as impossible to understand the human person by exploring the evolution of the human animal as it is to discover the significance of a Beethoven symphony be tracing the process of its creation.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

--------------------------------

London Symphony Orchestra.....Beethoven's 9th

embraced.................

 

The spark of inspiration about how to live a full life depends on the fact that it doesn't go on forever, so we must make the most of it.  And the mystery of faith is that divinity cannot be proven or disproven—as though it were a complicated problem—but must be embraced as a complex, mysterious proposition about the human condition, a supernatural love that transcends earthly evidence, the digital preservation of the soul, or even the ability to explain.

-Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life

On goals..........................

 

     There are two sources of goals: goals created out of inspiration and goals created out of desperation.

     When goals are created out of desperation, we feel an immense sense of scarcity and urgency.  They feel heavy, like a burden, and we may feel daunted by the colossal task we've just committed ourselves to.  Impostor syndrome and self-doubt begin to manifest, and we feel like we're always short on time.  We go about our lives frantically, desperately searching for ways to accomplish our goals faster, always looking externally to fill the void we feel internally.

     Worst of all, if we achieve the goal, soon after, all those feelings of lack begin to resurface again. . . .

     When we create goals out of inspiration, it's an entirely different story.  In this state, we are creating because we feel deeply moved, inspired, and expansive.  Our goals feel like a calling rather than an obligation.  We feel like a powerful force of life is coming from within us, wanting to be expressed through us and into the physical world.  This is why painters paint, dancers dance, writers write, and singers sing, even if they never get paid or make a living from it.  We feel pulled instead of forced to create something.  We gravitate towards it.  We feel compelled to do it.  When we feel like this, we create from a place of abundance instead of lack.

-Joseph Nguyen, Don't Believe Everything You Think

Don Surber..................

 

................lays out the impact of wealth, both its creation and its spending, on the U. S. of A.

the divide..........................

 

Two children are looking at screens.

One has an infinite iPad: videos, feeds, colors, and recommendations carefully designed to ask nothing of her other than her attention. The other has an AI tutor: patient, demanding, adaptive, and often hard work. It asks her what she thinks and why one answer is better than another.

It’s the same rectangle and the same general class of technology, but it is doing opposite things to the child. That is the divide I care about: how AI deployed two ways can form two different people.

-Brendan McCord, as quoted here

Ah, experience.................

 

Like all of life’s rich emotional experiences, the full flavor of losing important money cannot be conveyed by literature. You cannot convey to an inexperienced girl what it is truly like to be a wife and mother. There are certain things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin by words or pictures. Nor can any description that I might offer here even approximate what it feels like to lose a real chunk of money.

-Fred Schwed, Jr., Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: Or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street

So many books........................

 

.............................................so little time.

Yes...................

 

History teaches you to avoid overconfidence.

-Ben Carlson

Wallking around.............

 

Luck flows through people and travels by conversation. The people you talk to determine the opportunities you find.

Keep talking to the same people, keep finding the same opportunities. Start talking to new people, start finding new opportunities.

If you want different luck, start walking into different rooms.

-James Clear, from here

Resilience....................

 

This is what it means to be resilient: to mourn a thousand endings and celebrate a thousand beginnings, to be as strong as steel and as soft as warm butter, to practice both resilience and acceptance, to cradle both life and death in our arms.

-Ethan Tapper, as culled from here

Constraints......................

 

. . . So the most common reply I got was: “What’s the best way to get started?”

My knee-jerk reaction was to say, “Do whatever you want.”

Dumb. I forgot that “Do whatever you want” is the most paralyzing sentence in the English language, surpassed only by “We need to talk” and “The doctor will call you with the results.”

-Eric Barker, from this episode

raising the ceiling.......................

 

Self-care creates impact.

Your body and mind are the most valuable tools you have to produce anything. Neglecting them puts a ceiling on everything else.

-Shane Parrish, from this edition

true companionship..............

 

But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God.

-Thomas Merton

Beach reading.....................

 

Michael Wade's eclectic, but watery, list is here.  Barnes & Noble will be hearing from me shortly.

an old favorite....................

 

    more memeish fun here

    for those who can't get enough memes, more here

a worthy goal....................

 

     "When I am reading a book, whether wise of silly," Swift once wrote, "it seemeth to me to be alive and talking to me."  The books he owned that have survived show that he constantly talked back, filling the margins with comments and objections, as he did when he referred to King William's morals.  Describing this period ten years later, he said of himself, "The author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head.  By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could."  That was his lifelong goal: to be faithful to firm principles, but only after thinking them through.

-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

the complex interplay.................

 

The brain is the most complex biological assembly we know of.  Its 80 billion neurons—nerve cells—communicate with each other to make trillions of connections, more that the number of particles in the known universe.  These connections give rise to the sum of our experiences:  all of our thoughts, desires, and beliefs; our emotions, changing moods, memory, even our heart rate and the contents of our dreams.  How does this funny-looking, folded-in-on-itself, three-pound tangle of wires and blood vessels do all this, as well as orchestrate the complex interplay between emotion, memory, sound and healing that comes from music?  And how does it allow us to remember music that we like, make playlists, and party likes it 1999?

-Daniel J. Levitin,  I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

two ways....................

 

This I believed: there are two ways we could have gone, the way of the Titan, Prometheus, or the way of the dolphin.  In the Promethean way we shape nature to suit us, in the way of the dolphin we let nature shape us to suit it.  Everywhere there is evidence that we have chosen wrongly.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

Meanwhile, in Great Britain in 1781.....

     Reckoned by talent alone, Burke should have had a Cabinet position himself.  Yet he lost out.  He was a commoner, indeed and Irish novus homo, at a time when Cabinets were small and almost invariably drawn from the peerage; and there may have been some taint from the well-known financial speculations of Will Burke and Richard Burke.  But there wer perhaps two other important reasons in the background.  Burke's relationship with Rockingham had faded somewhat, and the long years of often futile opposition had taken a toll on his public character.  He was not merely passionate and outspoken but becoming tougher, somewhat embittered, and prone to rant.  Over time he would acquire the nickname of 'the Dinner Bell', able to clear the Commons benches when he rose to speak.  Colleagues who had admired him increasingly saw him as a bore . . . uncollegial . . . unsteady . . . too independent-minded . . . not someone to have round the Cabinet table.  It cannot have helped either side that he was so often right.

-Jesse Norman,  Edmund Burke: The First Conservative

sow seeds......................

 

In cultivating loving-kindness, we train first to be honest, loving, and compassionate toward ourselves.  Rather than nurturing self-denigration, we begin to cultivate a clear-seeing kindness.  Sometimes we feel good and strong.  Sometimes we feel inadequate and weak.  But our loving-kindness is unconditional.  No matter how we feel, we can aspire to be happy.  We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well-being, gradually becoming more aware of what causes happiness as well as what causes distress.  Without loving-kindness for ourselves it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others.

 -Pema Chödrön

In the background....................

 

The Marshall Tucker Band....Where We All Belong

a long-term holding.............

     Our problem is that we're ticker watchers of our own lives.  Happiness (however we individually define it) is not best measured by looking at the ticker, zooming in and magnifying moment-by-moment or day-by-day movements.  We would be better off thinking about our happiness as a long-term stock holding.  We would do well to view our happiness through a wide-angle lens, striving for a long, sustained upward trend in our happiness stock, so it resembles the first Berkshire Hathaway chart.

-Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets:  Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

a coven of initiates..............

 

I have attended too many seminars in some great universities which degenerated into a closed language game played by a coven of initiates who prized obscure self-referential congratulations over hones engagement with reality.

-Michael Ignatieff

Choices................

 

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

-Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers

Inclinations...................

 

     We are inclined to see history through the lives of great men.  That inclination blinds us to the real complexity of politics, business and finance.  So we find intentionality and design where there is only chance and improvisation; directness where there is obliquity.

-John Kay, Obliquity:  Why our goals are best achieved indirectly

Choosing...................

 

    At the same time, we must take care to protect the sovereign domain of our personal tastes and proclivities as well as our sense of wonder.  Choosing the right music for pleasure or for healing is never going to be one-size-fits-all affair.  Even setting aside therapeutic uses, our tastes change over the course of a life or even a day.  If I've just heard my favorite song six times in a row, I may not want to hear it again.  The right music is whatever music is right for us at any given time and place.

-Daniel J. Levitin,  I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine