Work...........................

 

Ah, history.....................................

      There is so much we don't know. And not just about the future, but the past.

      History knows three things: 1) what's been photographed, 2) what someone wrote down or recorded, and 3) the words spoked by people whom historians and journalists wanted to interview and who agreed to be interviewed.

     What percentage of everything important that's ever happened falls into one of those three categories?  No one knows.  But it's tiny.  And all three suffer from misinterpretation, incompleteness, embellishment, lying, and selective memory.

-Morgan Housel, as cut-and-pasted from here

Every single one.........................

 

      via and via

Checking in with.....................................

 ............................Shane Parrish:

The formula for failure is a few small errors consistently repeated.

When you don't communicate what's most important, people are left guessing about what matters.

The future is not like the weather.  It doesn't just happen to us.  We shape our future with the choices we make in the present, just as our present situation was shaped by choices we made in the past.

Admitting you're wrong isn't a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength.

The biggest mistake people make isn't their initial mistake.  It's the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it.  The first mistake is expensive; the second one costs a fortune.

The most critical step in any decision-making process is to get the problem right.

The way you define a problem changes what you see.

Shifting your frame of reference is a powerful safeguard against blind spots.

Show me your role models and I'll show you your future.

Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people.

You don't tap into peoples' resourcefulness, intelligence, and skills by command-and-control.

except when it isn't..............

 The complacent investor view that geopolitics should be ignored might be true, except for the times when it isn’t. We suspect we are in one of those times. If we are right, current extreme levels of geopolitical tension will lead to lower stock prices over a timeframe that lasts more than a couple of hours.

-David Einhorn, from here

One way..........................

 ......................................to get new ideas.

This is why............................

 ......................one always checks in with Sippican Cottage.

And with God as my witness, I have played a polka version of Sweet Child of Mine. I’m not proud of that, exactly, but I’m not ashamed of it, either. Why be normal?

As we say around the neighborhood, normalcy is merely the psychosis of the majority.

inexplicable....................

 I will not attempt to sound the depths of psychoanalysis to explain human behavior, which is inexplicable as life itself.  More than sex or infantile aberrations, I believe that most of our ideational compulsions stem from atavistic causes—however, I did not have to read books to know that the theme of life is conflict and pain.  Instinctively, all my clowning was based on this.  My means of contriving comedy plot was simple.  It was the process of getting people in and out of trouble.

-Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography

This might explain my remarkably good health....

 

the great debates...................

 In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public. When we look at the past great debates on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we should have liked the excitement of such argument. The old problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization.

-Richard Feynman

the close at hand..................

 It means that a good person tries to look at everyone with a patient and discerning regard, tries to resist self-centeredness and overcome prejudice, in order to see another person more deeply and with greater discernment.  The good person tries to cast a selfless attention and to see what the other person sees.  This kind of attention leads to the greatness of small acts: welcoming a newcomer to your workplace, detecting anxiety in somebody's voice and asking what's wrong, knowing how to host a part so that everyone feels included.  Most of the time, morality is about the skill of being considerate of others in the complex situations of life.  It's about being a genius at the close at hand.

-David Brooks, How To Know a Person:  The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Some quotes...................

 Risk is what's left over after you think you've thought of everything.
-Carl Richards

The idea that what you don't see might refute everything you believe just doesn't occur to us.

-Daniel Kahneman

Invest in preparedness, not in prediction,

-Nassim Taleb

- All quotes used by Morgan Housel in his new book

predictions...........................

 Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible.  But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliation, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I'd take.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

advantage........................

All the time and energy you spend fixing your unforced errors comes at the expense of moving toward the outcomes you want.  There is a huge advantage in having more of your energy instead go toward achieving your goals instead of fixing your problems.

-Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results 

Suspecting that..................

. . . an accurate and comprehensive list of what we really do not know would dwarf an accurate and comprehensive list of what we truly know.   For instance:

    via

As purposes go.....................

  And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.

-Kurt Vonnegut via Kurt Harden

Speaking of..........................

 ......................................purposes.

I was a history major.............

..........who only took two econ courses, so maybe I'm wrong, but sooner or later, this is going to hurt:

. . . the US is currently running the most reckless budget in the history of the country.  Never before has the deficit soared so quickly to such a high level when the US is still at peace and not in recession. 

-as culled from Brian Wesbury's most recent post

Oh, right....................

 Best practices aren't always the best.  By definition, they're average.

-Shane Parrish

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

David Sanborn.........................................Pearls

 

Couldn't agree more.......................

 

     thanks Kurt

muddy..........................

 Every current event—big or small—has parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, siblings, and cousins.  Ignoring the family tree can muddy your understanding of events, giving a false impression of why things happened, how long they might last, and under what circumstances they might occur again.  Viewing events in isolation, without an appreciation of their long roots, helps explain everything from why forecasting is hard to why politics is nasty.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

quite unlike himself.................

 One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way – said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

-Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

fun............................

 He had these enthusiasms for his projects and his future—his present.  It was not as if you had to deny yourself in the present for the future.  The focus was on how interesting things are today, how much fun to see them built.  It was so much fun being in the moment.  That's what he always communicated.

-Janet Lowe, Damn Right! Behind the Scenes With Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger

a yeoman aristocracy....................

 The best sort of democratic education is neither snobbish nor egalitarian.  Rather, it accords a place of honor in our common life to whatever is best.  At this weird moment of growing passivity and dependence, let us publicly recognize a yeoman aristocracy: those who gain real knowledge of real things, the sort we all depend on every day.

-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work