Here is the thing. Adaptability
is the number one key to success. Not intelligence. Not work ethic. I used to
think it was work ethic, but it is not. The ability to do different
things will determine whether you succeed or fail.
Saturday, November 1, 2025
Adaptability..................
On busyness..................
You’re busy. You’re active. And in a culture that celebrates busyness as success, it‘s easy to convince yourself that you’re making progress.
But busy doesn’t mean effective. Motion isn’t momentum. A rocking horse moves all day, but never goes anywhere.
Scarecrows...................
Scarecrow, murmur, tell the tale,
Of winds that howl and rains that wail.
Point the way, through dusk and dawn,
A silent guide till night is gone.
No voice to cry, no tears to weep,
Yet dreams he holds in straw-filled sleep
Of fields alive, of skies that hum,
Of harvests reaped when Autumn's come.
Since ancient times his spirit flies,
Carried forth in brooding skies.
Scarecrow stands, both proud and meek,
Telling tales the winds bespeak
Be careful what you wish for..................
Just saying but most AI’s represent a big improvement over the “brain trust” running many corporations.
Uh-oh................
Cultures are built around claims and beliefs about the otherworld: about God or gods, about correct worship, about the nature of reality, about goodness and truth and the meaning of virtue. These are also, inevitably, claims about what it means to be human. Knock out the spiritual core of any culture, and however hard people fight, its fate is sealed.
-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine
disorientation...................
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
-Jonathan Haidt, as cut-and-pasted from this essay
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Be careful what you wish for...............
Societies are much more fragile than the elite seems to think. One of the things our Founders and the people who built our country understood was that building and maintaining a free society was hard and took real maintenance. Our current elite has inherited a society that was built over generations and is squandering the inheritance at an alarming rate, assuming that it exists as a permanent structure, and not a carefully balanced practical project.
-David Strom, from here
shocking......................
The claim that Wall Street
is gambling-adjacent is something I used to associate with cranky old people.
Now I am old and cranky.
-Arnold Kling, from this episode
Sunday, October 26, 2025
your personal balance sheet..........
The most valuable financial asset is not needing to impress anyone.
Not needing to impress other people, especially strangers, is an asset on your personal balance sheet that can be more valuable than anything else.
When you don't feel the need to impress other people, your desires fall. When your desires fall, your satisfaction with what you already have grows. It is really that simple.
One definition of success............
I resolved a long time ago to not be one of those entrepreneurs on their 7th startup and their 7th wife. In fact, the think I am most proud of in my life is not the companies I started, it's the fact that I was able to start them while staying married to the same woman; having my kids grow up knowing me and (best I can tell) liking me, and being able to spend time pursuing the other passions in my life.
Teddy.............................
The worst lesson that can be taught a man is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings.
On opportunities...........
Everyone searches for opportunities while running from problems,
missing that they're the same thing.
Problems aren't obstacles to opportunity, they ARE the
opportunity.
The problem with enlarging the ego..............
Robespierre regarded any disagreement as the latest betrayal, any deviation as questionably motivated. It was once said that he was a lover of mankind who could not enter into sympathy with the minds of his own neighbors or colleagues. . . .
It could be said that the best a man can do is enlarge his ego to the betterment of his kin, of his kind, and his nation, and so find satisfaction in their widening beneficence. This, after all, is what Robespierre thought he was doing, or at least hoped he was doing, on a grandiose scale. But in the end, as happens so often to those who claim to know the truth, or believe themselves to be the messenger of God, the politics of the revolution clouded his wisdom, and the Terror darkened his judgement.
-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800
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