America may have a sick political system and an economy that does not work well for many, but it is distinctly different, and in many ways better than its prime competitors. Our legacy, and our future, lies in large part in preserving that system without falling into the trap of centralized autocracy.
-Joel Kotkin, from this edition
Because the hard part of writing—the part where you wrestle with what you actually believe—that’s still 100% human.
And if you try to cheat that, you might still publish something…
But it won’t be yours.
-Mark Manson, as cut-and-pasted from here
It’s a George Gershwin, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Estevan Ochoa, Saul Bellow, Elon Musk, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, Ulysses S. Grant, Cochise, Ted Williams, Dorothy Parker, Rod Serling, Jimmy Stewart, Carl Sandburg, and Wyatt Earp sort of place . . .
-Michael Wade, from here
Your first attempt might not be very good, but nobody's early work is good. There will always be a gap between where you are and where you want to be. And the bridge between that gap is courage. The courage to look foolish in the beginning. The courage to show up again when your early work is criticized. The courage to look yourself in the mirror and say, "I realize I'm not good enough yet, but the only way to get better is to keep working on it."
-James Clear, from this episode
You've been so focused on the loss of external things that you failed to account for the ongoing loss of internal things. And unlike money or jobs, time and integrity don't regenerate once spent. Every day you live disingenuously is a day of your life burnt. How many more are you willing to torch? . . .
In health terms, chronic stress is deadly when it wrecks your immune system, heart, and brain. So, keeping the peace externally might be killing you slowly, whereas a short burst of conflict, followed by a freer life, could literally improve your health. Your contract could be cutting years off your life by keeping you under constant stress. Loss aversion made you avoid short-term pain as the cost of long-term well-being. A bad trade.
-Stan Taylor, The Black Book of Power
Leadership isn't a burden—it is an opportunity and obligation. It affords us power and influence and, as much as is possible, control. It gives us what we all want most—freedom. We gain freedom to make decisions, and to determine in every way possible the outcomes of our lives. Leadership prevents us from being victims. It's how we mitigate the risks caused by external forces and pressures. It's how we avoid lying face down in the dirt waiting to die. It's how we win.
On that day in Iraq, I was lucky. But relying on luck or hoping circumstances will change on their own is not a good business plan, not a solid approach to leading a team. And it's definitely not a good way to build a marriage or raise a family. Your luck will run out at some point, and you will end up a victim to your situation. The check engine light in your car won't go off on its own—you have to do something to fix it. The same is true everywhere. You need a strategy, some plan of action, when the external threats arise. You need to be leading through each aspect of life,
So, lead in every situation, under every circumstance, no matter how mild or severe or routine a problem appears. Don't wait, don't sit back, don't assume you have no course of action and become a victim of the world around you. Lead.
-Dave Berke, The Need to Lead: A TOPGUN Instructor's Lessons on How Leadership Solves Every Challenge
Debates over wealth differentials and inequality are important for every society as we seek to reduce poverty and guarantee opportunity for all citizens. Yet capitalism is much like what Winston Churchill said of democracy: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Capitalism does produce wealth inequalities but has also proven to be the most successful system at wealth creation and opportunity in history. The focus should not be on wealth concentration alone but economic and social barriers to wealth creation.
-Jonathan Turley, Rage and The Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution
How Tocqueville settled on this plan is unclear, but there was a widespread sense in Restoration intellectual circles that the Old World could learn from the grand American "experiment" of democratic governance. George Washington was revered in France as a virtuous general who lived humbly, fought only when necessary, and relinquished his power at the end of his term—a kind of anti-Napoleon. Nobody drew the contrast better than Chateaubriand in his Voyage en Amerique, published in 1827 and widely excerpted in the French press. "Washington and Buonaparte both emerged from the republic's bosom; both were the children of freedom," Chateaubriand remarked but added, "Washington remained loyal to freedom, but Buonaparte betrayed it.
-Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville
She stepped outside, wondering whether a life could really be judged from just a few minutes after midnight on a Tuesday. Or maybe that was all you needed.
-Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life, should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make. Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with AIs, since AIs run on the predictable. . . .
The more you-ish you become, the less competition you have, because you are occupying your own niche. Less competition means you don’t have to be in a race; you can relax and focus on your strengths. You have the space to become even more you, and even less likely.
-Kevin Kelly, from this substack
It’s easy to make any case, no matter how absurd, by misrepresenting reality and hoping that your audience won’t notice – that is, by resorting to unfair intellectual practices. It’s a bit more difficult, yet vastly more productive – and honorable – to actually consult and report the data even when they fail to tell the tale that you wish to be told.
-Donald J. Boudreaux, from this post
The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamily self-aware, the submicroscopic moments...
-Don DeLillo, from here
If you have any doubt, default to writing. It scales better, respects people’s time, and produces better thinking. Writing forces you to define the problem and to admit whether calling the meeting was simply delaying the decision.
-Nicholas Bate, from here
Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning — the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind.
This is why beauty, even today, especially today, cannot serve any party; it cannot serve, in the long or short run, anything but men's suffering or their liberty. The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains free-lance. The lesson he then finds in beauty, if he draws it fairly, is a lesson not of selfishness but rather of hard brotherhood. Looked upon thus, beauty has never enslaved anyone. And for thousands of years, every day, at every seond, it has instead assuaged the servitude of millions of men and, occasionally, liberated some of them once and for all.
-Albert Camus, from his 1957 lecture "Create Dangerously"
"Are you happy here?"
I looked out of the window and took a breath. I couldn't lie to him.
"I'm happy here, but I also want to grow more. I want more things for myself. I am trying to sort it all out.
Then we were silent.
A few days later, he asked me to meet him at the office on the following Saturday morning. As soon as I walked in the door and saw his face, I knew what was coming.
"This is going to be the best thing that ever happened to you," he began. He fired me, then said, "It's time for you to fly."
After six years at the 55 Restaurant Group, I walked out of that office for the last time.
-Cameron Mitchell, Yes Is the Answer. What Is the Question?: How Faith in People and a Culture of Hospitality Built a Modern American Restaurant Company
.................celebrates the World Cup by offering 48 songs, one from each of the countries playing in the on-going tournament.
Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.
Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege
And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
-Seamus Heaney, "Oysters"
Youth walked before me and I followed him until we came to a distant field. There he stopped, and gazed at the clouds that drifted over the horizon like a flock of white lambs. Then he looked at the trees whose naked branches pointed toward the sky as if praying to Heaven for the return of their foliage.
And I said, "Where are we now, Youth?
And he replied, "We are in the field of Bewilderment. Take heed."
And I said, "Let us go back at once, for this desolate place affrights me, and the sight of the clouds and the naked trees saddens me."
And he replied, "Be patient. Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge."
-Kahlil Gibran, The Voice of The Master
Although we cannot dictate all the circumstances around us, there is no excuse for being unprepared or irresponsible. All too often we disregard our ability to influence the outcome because we see a situation as beyond our control. We casually dismiss our responsibility with the refrain, "It is what it is."
We need to lead. Even when circumstances feel completely beyond our control, we must still act. Only then will we be positioned to exert our influence, which will drive us closer to determining the outcome. By leading, we can overcome the feeling of victimization and, instead, understand the range of options within our power.
By taking control of our preparation, reaction, and response to problems, we become leaders. When we reframe our mindset and see situations through the lens of leadership, we understand that things don't have to remain as they are.
-Dave Berke, The Need to Lead: A TOPGUN Instructor's Lessons on How Leadership Solves Every Challenge
The truth is that memory and forgetting are forever entwined. . . .
Neurobiologists learn a great deal about memory by studying forgetting. To forget something means we had to have known it at some point, and that's different than never having known it in the first place. And even when we think we know something, memory is fallible in two different ways. First, we can lose things in our memory banks, sometimes temporarily, sometimes for a lifetime. Second, when we do locate and retrieve a memory, it can be fantastically distorted without our realizing it.
The truth is we have false memories every day, lots of them. We just don't know it because we're not often challenged.
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
Throughout, however, Burke demonstrates his ability to combine specific details with Olympian generalization. Thus a discussion of imports from Jamica and the malign effects of the Stamp Act yields the timeless Burkean insight that 'politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.'
-Jesse Norman, Edmund Burke: The First Conservative
An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it. The writers of today know this. If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked. If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence.
-Albert Camus, from his 1957 lecture at the University of Uppsala
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.
-George Bernard Shaw, from here
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