On being you-ish.............

 

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

And comparison is a great source................

 

......................................of unhappiness.

Compete externally and you compare.
Compete internally and you improve.

-James Clear, from here

Let the games begin.................

 

..............................Will be very surprised if there aren't a few first round blow outs.

interesting theory....................

 

"the decline of the heavy manufacturing industry in the American “Rust Belt” is often thought to have begun in the late 1970s, when the United States suffered a significant recession. But theory suggests, and data support, that the Rust Belt’s decline started in the 1950s when the region’s dominant industries faced virtually no product or labor competition and therefore had little incentive to innovate or become more productive."

The rust-belt’s problems were caused not by its industries' and workers' confrontation with economic competition but, instead, from their insulation from competition— . . .

-Don Boudreaux, from this post

single-player game..............

 

Socially, we're told, "Go work out. Go look good."  That's a multi-player competitive game. . . . We're told, "Go make money.  Go buy a big house."  Again, external multi-player competitive game.  Training yourself to be happy is completely internal.  There is no external progress, no external validation.  You're competing against yourself—it is a single-player game.

Eric Jorgenson, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Good questions................

 

But now the machine has begun to encroach on domains of our intellectual lives that many had thought were essentially immune from competition with computing intelligence.

     The potential threat to our entire sense of self as a species cannot be overstated.  What does it mean for humanity when AI becomes capable of writing a novel that becomes a bestseller, moving millions? Or makes us laugh out loud?  Or paints a portrait the endures for decades?  Or directs and produces a film that captures the hearts of festival critics?  Is the beauty or truth expressed in such works any less powerful or authentic merely because they sprang from the mind of a machine?

-Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West

Darwinian........................

 

     The rebirth of America's chip industry after Japan's DRAM onslaught was only possible thanks to Andy Grove's paranoia, Jerry Sanders's bare-knuckle brawling, and Jack Simplot's cowboy competitiveness.  Silicon Valley's testosterone and stock option-fueled competition often felt less like the sterile economies described in textbooks and more like a Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest.  Many firms died, fortunes were lost, and tens of thousands of employees were laid off.  The companies like Intel and Micron that survived did so less thanks to their engineering skills—though these were important—than their ability to capitalize on technical aptitude to make money in a hypercompetitive, unforgiving industry.

-Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

ruthless..........................

 

-from this Gaping Void post

Good guys/Bad guys.........................

 ......Maybe two competing truths can be true at once. 

expanded horizons.......................

      I started out wanting to be a Serious Southern Writer.  My mother had made me a reader and stressed the legacy of my family's Mississippi roots.  William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor were household names—Mississippians who had made people take notice. . . .

Well, I knew I wasn't one of those people.  I was too warped by the court-jester-like behavior that's essential to being a good stage performer.  I knew that whatever I wrote, it would have a heavy layer of humor.  By the time I expanded my horizons from three verses and a couple of choruses to short stories, and then prose, my sense of humor naturally came along for the ride.

     Besides, I don't have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers.  Anyway, writing is not a competition to me.  Writing is fun, and I am simply a storyteller.  I also really enjoy the self-discipline writing requires.

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Competition..................

 

via

Competition................

       One area where all American steelmakers could maintain absolute, almost religious agreement was on the topic of British steel.  British steelmakers were more efficient, and as a result, their rails were cheaper even than Carnegie's.  As with the iron industry before, the Americans' collective strategy was equally simple: tariffs.  Congress complied.  The tariff on a ton of imported British steel started at $28 per ton.  Given that Carnegie's first-ever order was fulfilled at $68 per ton, the British would have had to sell steel at $40 per ton, with overseas shipping included, to pay the tariff and match the price in the market.  In an era without a personal income tax or corporate income taxes, the federal government relied on duties and tariff generated income for a significant portion of its revenue . . .

      Even Carnegie, with all his competitive, Darwinian pride, granted that tariff protection "has played a great part in the development of manufacturing in the United States." . . . But laissez-faire capitalism it was not.  The invisible hand of Adam Smith's free market was accompanied by the guiding hand of government policy.

-Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

No idea about his prospects..........

..................but I'll root for this attitude:

 “I took the mindset that it was time for us to stop asking for a seat at the table. And we were going to build our own table,” Smith says.

Escape...........................

 Another tweet I had that is worth weaving in, but didn't do into the "How to Get Rich" tweetstorm, was very simple: "Escape competition through authenticity."  Basically, when you're competing with people, it's because you're copying them.  It's because you are trying to do the same thing.  But every human being is different.  Don't copy.

-The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Still one of the all-time great movies...

In that way, Meatballs is exactly like life, or at least life at a summer camp. There is no script. There is no structured three-act story with a perfect ending. It’s a hot mess of half-remembered snippets, tales that are likely exaggerated, and a whole lot of stupid antics in-between that go nowhere.

       

via

The beauty of studying history..........

...................comes from realizing the world has always and forever been a glorious mess.   

      The French expansion into the Ohio country put their plans in jeopardy.  Not only did the French reject the right of the British crown to grant lands in Ohio to the Ohio Company or anyone else, but a French presence in Ohio would render the region insecure for Anglo-American settlers.  The French themselves would be hostile; more threateningly they would turn the Indians of the region hostile.  The various tribes there understood the competition between the two European empires, and they played one against the other, to their own benefit.  Part of the benefit consisted of trade goods that made the lives of Indians easier—firearms, steel knives and the like; another part entailed military support in the rivalries of the tribes against one another.  The sum of the interplay of empires and tribes was a welter of intrigues and conflicts on the frontier: British against French, British against France's Indian allies, Britain's Indian allies against the French and the French Indians, Indians against Indians.  There was even competition between Virginians and residents of other British colonies, notably Pennsylvania and New York, who had their own claims to the Ohio country.

-H. W. Brands, Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution

On investing competition..........................

       Frankly, there's no substitute for limited competition.  You can be a genius, but if there's a lot of competition, it won't matter.  I've spent my career trying to avoid its destructive consequences.  Competition skews people's assessment; as buyer get competitive, the demand for assets inflates prices, often beyond reason.*

-Sam Zell, Am I Being Too Subtle:  Straight Talk From A Business Rebel

*Also known as "the winner's curse"

On trade..........................

The philosopher and lover of man have much harm to say of trade; but the historian will see that trade was the principle of Liberty; that trade planted America and destroyed Feudalism;  that it makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish slavery.  We complain of its oppression of the poor, and of its building up a new aristocracy on the ruins of the aristocracy it destroyed.  But the aristocracy of trade has no permanence, is not entailed, was the result of toil and talent, the result of merit of some kind, and is continually falling, like the waves of the sea, before new claims of the sort.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his 1844 lecture, The Young American

"The biggest moment of anyone's life"...

more than you ever wanted to know about Rock Paper Scissors may be found here

Ah, humanity.......................

..................................................Nothing wrong with The World today that more things like this couldn't fix:



thanks