Checking up on Patrick O'Brian..............

 

In Desolation Island (1978), the fifth novel in the series, Maturin invokes the costs of a life “spent in dissimulation”—regretting how “the long-lived lie soak[s] into the liar’s deepest fibre.”

-Tim Lake, from his essay, Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else

It's no secret............................

 

Let me tell you the secret to investing.  

     There is no secret.

Sorry to break it to you, but there is no Holy Grail that guarantees overnight riches in the markets.  There's no confidential stock-picking scheme that will give you all of the upside with none of the downside. . . .

It has to be this way because risk and reward are attached at the hip.  If you want to earn a return on your capital, you must accept risk in some form.  One of the few iron laws of investing is there is no free lunch.

Ben Carlson, from his introduction to Risk & Reward

tough job.................

 

One secret to being a successful prognosticator? Never mention a number and a date in the same sentence.

-Spencer Jakab

Remembering................................

 

...............................the not-so-secret secrets.

The secret sauce..............

 

When people start, they want to know the secret sauce.

     After Katie Ledecky won four gold medals at the Rio Summer Olympics, that's what she was asked.

    And she said, "The secret is there is no secret."

    Work hard.

    Take care of your body - nutrition, sleep, training, recovery, and so forth.

    Pay attention to the details - the little things that will add up to make a big difference.

    Show up every day - whether it's a Sunday game day, a Wednesday practice day, or a Tuesday in the off season.    

    Fall in love with what you do.  The simplicity of it.  The beauty of it. The day-to-dayness of it.

    You do all of this, and on a long enough timeline, you'll get where you want to be,

-Paul Rabil,  The Way of the Champion: Pain, Persistence and the Path Forward

at times.......................

 Secrets are at times a necessary tool for peace.

-Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

thanks David

secrets........................

 

via

simple..................

       But allow me to let you in on a secret:  Life is negotiation.

      The majority of the interactions we have at work and at home are negotiations that boil down to the expression of a simple, animalistic urge:  I want.

-Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

A dirty little secret......................................

     "I try to learn from the past without being inspired by it.  My big question is always, 'What did they try, and why did it work?'  When I hear stories of success and failure, I look for the little things that made a big difference.  What conventional wisdom was shunned? . . . I avoid using a past success as a proxy for the future.  After all, the dirty little secret is that every success was almost a failure.  Timing and uncontrollable circumstances play more of a role than any of us care to admit.

-Scott Belsky, as culled from here

Unfortunately, it requires being kind yourself...

 

                 via

No matter how holy the motives..............

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

-Robert A. Heinlein

The secret.........................

"The secret . . . is in the awareness that when we seek to give instead of to get, all of our own needs are automatically fulfilled."

-David R. Hawkins,  Letting Go:  The Pathway Of Surrender

Secret...................................

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

-attributed to Albert Einstein

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

Once upon a time, nearly two and a half centuries ago, there was a secret network that tried to change the world.  Founded in Germany just two months before thirteen of Britain's American colonies declared their independence, the organization came to be known as the Illuminatenorden - the Order of the Illuminati.  Its goals were lofty.  Indeed, its founder had originally called it the Bund der Perfektibilisten (the League of the Perfectibles).  As one member of the Order recalled its founder saying, it was intended to be:

      an association that, through the most subtle and secure
      methods, will have as its goal the victory of virtue and
      wisdom over stupidity and malice; an association that will
      make the most important discoveries in all fields of science
      that will teach its members to become both noble and great,
      that will assure them of the certain prize of their own
      complete perfection in this world, that will protect them 
      from persecution, the fates and oppression, and that will
      bind the hands of despotism in all its forms.

The Order's ultimate objective was to 'enlighten the understanding by the sun of reason, which will dispel the clouds of superstition and of prejudice'.  'My goal is to give reason the upper hand,' declared the Order's founder.  Its methods were, in one respect, educational.  'The sole intention of the league', according to its General Statues (1781), was 'education, not by declamatory means, but by favouring and rewarding virtue'.  Yet the Illuminati were to operate as a strictly secret fraternity.  Members adopted codenames, often of ancient Greek or Roman provenance;  the founder himself was 'Brother Spartacus'.  There were to be three ranks or grades of membership - Novice, Minerval and Illuminated Minerval - but the lower ranks were to be given only the vaguest insights into the Order's goals and methods.  Elaborate initiation rites were devised - among them an oath of secrecy, violation of which would be punished with the most gruesome death.  Each isolated cell of initiates reported to a superior, whose real identity they did not know.
     At first, the Illuminati were tiny in number.  There were only a handful of founding members, most of them students.  Two years after its creation, the Order's total membership was just twenty-five.  As late as December 1779, it was still only sixty.  Within just a few years, however, membership had surged to more than 1,300.

-Niall Ferguson,  The Square and the Tower:  Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook

On secrecy...................................

“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.” 

-Robert Oppenheimer

Fictive kinship...................

     One of the main reasons humans have been so successful, as Israeli researcher Yuval Noah Harari points out, is due to what is called "fictive kinship."  Most species hang out only with family.  Everybody else is a potential enemy.  Good ol' Homo sapiens have been so successful because we've extended the definition of family by using mutually agreed upon stories.  Families are not merely blood relatives.  We're in many families:  We're Americans.  We're IBM employees.  We're on the same softball team.  Most simply, we're friends.  Friends are just the family we choose.  This allows us to collaborate on a scale that's impossible for other animals.  This is the secret to our success as a species.  It's also the secret to your success as an individual:  friendship.

-Eric Barker,  Barking Up The Wrong Tree:  The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

This wee corner of the blogosphere is filled with "fictive kinship."  It is why I'm still here.

It probably isn't really a secret, but...............

The secret to living well................

You have to fill in...................

.............................................................your own answer.

On drops and buckets......................

"Portion control via vessel size is a secret to success and happiness."

-Seth Godin, as excerpted from here