A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
sense.......................
The trouble with fiction . . . is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
unintended.........................
Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.
Monday, May 27, 2024
Wisdom........................
Life is unexpected and often unfair in many ways.
You can do all the right things and plan for a host of eventualities but sometimes it doesn’t matter. Life can get in the way regardless of your plans.
So you do the best you can. You save. You give yourself a margin of safety. You enjoy yourself today while planning for tomorrow.
Then you roll with the punches depending on what life throws your way.
-Ben Carlson, from here
Highly recommended..................
You can make someone's day better and your own day better with the same act of kindness and generosity. And you don't need to be rich or flush with cash to do it.
Being curious and being a good listener are a big part of how to effectively utilize your relationships . . . it's only when you learn to soak up what those people tell you—not just let it go in one ear, out the other—that you truly begin to make yourself useful to others and become a resource yourself.
Curiosity. Hunger for information. Being open-minded. Putting your knowledge to good use. This, it turns out, is a formula for anyone to create real, meaningful change . . .
None of us has ever done anything on our own when you really think about it. We have always had help or guidance. Others have paved or pointed the way for us . . .
. . . it's important for you to recognize that you have a responsibility to give back. To help others. To send the ladder back down and lift the next group up. To pay it forward. To be useful.
Sunday, May 26, 2024
"busy".........................
Let me put it another way: busyness is bullshit. We're all "busy." We all have things to do every day. Obligations and responsibilities. We all have to eat, sleep, pay the bills. What does that have to do with putting in the work to reach your vision? If it matters to you, make the time.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life
no growth hack............
If there is one unavoidable truth in this world, it's that there is no substitute for putting in the work. There is no shortcut or growth hack or magic pill that can get you around the hard work of doing your job well, of winning something you care about, or of making your dreams come true.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life
its normal crop........................
Nobody is surprised when a fig tree brings forth figs. Similarly, we ought to be ashamed of our surprise when the world produces its normal crop of happenings. A physician or a shipmaster would blush to be surprised if a patient proves feverish, or a wind contrary.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8:15
unlocking......................
Watching someone with a crazy goal give it everything they've got and then succeed is so powerful. It's like magic, because it unlocks potential we didn't even know we had. It shows us what is possible if we put our mind to something and then back that up with effort.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life
unhappy is he..................
No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.
naysayers.........................
When it comes to you and your dreams, the naysayers have no idea what they are talking about. And if they haven't done the things you are trying to do, the question you need to ask yourself is: Why should I ever listen to them?
The answer is, you shouldn't. You should ignore them. Or better yet, hear what they have to say and then use it as motivation. . . .
You have a choice with the naysayers you face on the road to achieving your goals. You can ignore them or you can use them, you just can't ever believe them.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life
Saturday, May 25, 2024
Joy..................
Joy for the human beings lies in proper human work. And proper human work consists in: acts of kindness to other human beings, distain for the stirrings of the senses, identifying trustworthy impressions, and contemplating the natural order and all that happens in keeping with it.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Recommended.......................
. . . relieve yourself of the need to forge a masterpiece. Progress is what matters. Not perfection.
. . . the focus required to get better is simply not compatible with busyness.
"A little quality work every day will produce more and more satisfying results than frantic work piled up on top of frantic work."
Obsession, she pointed out, can be paralyzing. Quality matters, but if it becomes everything, you may never finish.
Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality.
without effort.................
To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.
-attributed to Bertrand Russell
Friday, May 24, 2024
tipping point.....................
In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back and forth email threads need to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. . . . As your workload increases, however, the overhead tax you're paying will eventually pass a tipping point, beyond which logistical efforts will devour so much of your schedule that you cannot complete old tasks fast enough to keep up with the new.
-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
transform.....................
. . . we shouldn't underestimate the ability of our surroundings to transform our cognitive reality.
-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity
wildly.............................
. . . humans are wildly optimistic when we estimate how much time is needed to complete cognitive efforts.
-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity
unceasing intensity.................
Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable. . . . A more natural, slower, and varied pace to work is the foundation of true productivity in the long term.
-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity
breathing room and respect.......
Slow productivity emphatically rejects the performative rewards of unwavering urgency. There will always be more work to do. You should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it.
-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity; The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
administrative kudzu................
We've established that overload is not fundamental to knowledge work. It's instead largely a side effect of the crude ways in which we self-manage our work volume. We further established that toiling at maximum capacity greatly reduces the rate at which we accomplish useful things, as it chokes our schedule in administrative kudzu and splinters our attention into fragments too small to support original thinking.
-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
Sunday, May 19, 2024
no nirvana-like un-change...................
How do we know that change is accelerating? There is, after all, no absolute way to measure change. In the awesome complexity of the universe, even within any given society, a virtually infinite number of steams of change occur simultaneously. All "things"—from the tiniest virus to the greatest galaxy—are, in reality, not things at all, but processes. There is no static point, no nirvana-like un-change, against which to measure change.
-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock
pointing......................
Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
chiefly..............................
To be rich you don't need to make more money; you chiefly need to better manage the money already flowing through your hands.
Saturday, May 18, 2024
dizzying.............................
Yet culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with the much more serious malady, future shock. Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.
-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)
dress accordingly...............
When you open paint, even a tiny bit, it will always find its way to your clothes no matter how careful you are. Dress accordingly.
a focus.......................
. . . a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.
-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
stoked.............................
. . . curiosity is a strange drive. Unlike hunger or thirst, curiosity is stoked, not sated, when we learn more.
-Scott H. Young, Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery
Friday, May 17, 2024
Eric Baker...................
...............offers four paths to peak happiness:
But in a field of study like psychology where things are often blurry, it seems fair to say there is one necessary condition for extreme happiness…
Connecting with people you love.
Being a pessimist........................
.................goes against my nature, but if there is a World War III it is likely there will be no stock market left to invest in.
facing it.............................
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.
In the background.......................
life management..............
. . . I experimented with a new time management strategy. Every Monday, my assistant would reset the passwords on all my social media accounts, which logged me out on each device. All week I worked without distraction. On Friday, she would send me the new passwords. I had the entire weekend to enjoy what social media had to offer until Monday morning when she would do it again.
-James Clear, Atomic Habits
humanness.......................
Compassion for others and for their humanness transforms life and all relationships.
-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender
Thursday, May 16, 2024
on looking at paintings...........
If people would just look at the paintings, I don't think they would have any trouble enjoying them. It's like looking at a bed of flowers, you don't tear your hair out over what it means.
the rules............................
I'm not saying if you just visualize what you want, then it will come true. Hell no. You have to plan and work and learn and fail and then learn and work and fail some more. That's just life. Those are the rules.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Live
normies vs. elites...................
The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children—boring
stuff. That’s what normal means.
The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie. For them there is no good and evil, no right and wrong—only oppressors and oppressed. Every transaction demands their intervention to protect designated oppressed groups. “Social justice” translates neatly into “elite control.”
-Martin Gurri, from here
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
The language will never fail you.........
. . . but I’m convinced that one of the reasons why I read so many books, and poetry is because I want to dial in the gods of language – yes, they do exist – and not fall into a state of ennui, despair or torpor in trying to find a way to make sense of this anthropocentric world.
-Julian Summerhayes, from here
The value of..........................
....................................smarts, discipline, and compounding interest (since 1965):
Berkshire’s total returns work out to a cumulative gain of more than 4,000,000%. The S&P 500 returned more than 31,000% in the same span
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
As Commencement Addresses go..................
..................this is a pretty good one:
Whenever I speak with my students—I teach at the University of Virginia—they seem deeply pessimistic about the state of the world. We all know the reasons. Climate change is going to kill us all; late-stage capitalism is running amok; inequality is at an all-time high; racism and bigotry are rampant; gender-nonconforming and queer people are under unprecedented attack; economic anxiety has never been worse; AI is coming for our jobs; and on and on and on.
I
then pose a simple thought experiment to them: If you were given a time machine
that could take you back to any period in the last 12,000 years—since the dawn
of civilization—when would you rather live?
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
Ah, culture........................
And all the time—such is the tragicomedy of our situation—we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity.' In a ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
-C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)
Opening paragraphs.................
In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically sound people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizen of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon.
-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)
Ed. note: first read this book about fifty years ago. Young Brandon handed me a new copy of it today, thinking I might find value in it. Early returns say he was correct.
Saturday, May 11, 2024
Life is full of tradeoffs:..............
.............if we want more "big data" and artificial intelligence then we might have less green energy.
Data centers consume massive amounts of electricity. They are sprouting up all over Central Ohio. If the push for all electric vehicles doesn't fade, there is little chance the electric grid will be able to keep up. Sooner or later, we need to reconsider building new nuclear power plants.
If you believe the system....................
...............has your best interest at heart, you might consider reading this post from our friend at Sippican Cottage.
Evolution.............................
..............................can be messy and painful:
The world rewards those who can best adapt to change. Legacy companies struggle to adapt because their businesses are organized to dominate a market that no longer exists. The game has changed, but media is far from dead.
Less would be good.......................
What the nation will most need from the presidency in 2025 is less of it. But both the incumbent and his predecessor intend to intensify the anti-constitutional executive aggrandizement that has become a bipartisan tradition.
It preceded Donald Trump, whose presidential lawlessness was, like him, haphazard and opportunistic. Joe Biden’s presidency-without-limits has been ideological and perversely principled. Progressives, such as he has become late in life, are impatient with institutional impediments (Congress and courts) to progress, meaning their policy preferences achieved by unfettered presidential actions.
-George Will, as clipped from here
Friday, May 10, 2024
dogmatically.....................
History and the study of cultures do not teach or prove that values or cultures are relative. All to the contrary, that is a philosophical premise that we now bring to our study of them. This premise is unproven and dogmatically asserted for what are largely political reasons.
-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
full...............................
Although the world is very full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.
-attributed to Helen Keller
your thing..........................
Making art is not selfish; it's for the rest of us. If you don't do your thing, you are cheating us.
chosen consciously...............?
. . . the essential point of freedom is whether we have chosen consciously to fulfill a certain want, or whether we are just being blindly run by unconscious programs and belief systems.
-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender
Limits....................
You won't see most of this planet.
Under each rock.
Beneath the water.
Secrets of air and soil
Can you feel the joy behind this limitation?
That there is always a new thing to discover,
a new way to grow,
is one of the sweetest parts of living,
and it's free and inexhaustible.
-Jarod K. Anderson, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest
impact........................
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.
-James Clear, Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results
one day at a time................
Only you can create the life you want for yourself—no one is going to do it for you. If you don't know what that life looks like yet, for whatever reason, that's fine. We're here now. The choices you make from here on out are what matters. . . . Focus on making improvements and banking achievements one day at a time.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life
Thursday, May 9, 2024
Opening paragraphs........................
What made Melvin, the youngest of the Kaminsky kids, so darn funny? Later people said—he himself said—it was Brooklyn, the Depression, being Jewish and growing up in the shadow of Hitler. But there was also something about birth order and the family genes that contributed to "the strange amalgam, the marvelous pastiche that is me."
-Patrick McGilligan, Funny Man: Mel Brooks
Checking in............................
.........................................Mel Brooks:
Comedy is a very powerful component of life. It has the most to say about the human condition because if you laugh you can get by. You can struggle when things are bad if you have a sense of humor. Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye. It’s a defense against unhappiness and depression.
Failure is vital. It is an incredibly important quotient in the equation of a career. After you wipe away your tears, it’s not a bad experience and under the right circumstances it will make you better, both as a person and as an artist. I think it’s important to fail, especially between the ages of twenty and thirty. Success is like sugar. It’s too good. It’s too sweet. It’s too wonderful and it burns up very quickly. Failure is like corned beef hash. It takes a while to eat. It takes a while to digest. But it stays with you.
Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you've got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy, colorful and lively.
As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.
I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.
Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We're unrehearsed.
Saturday, May 4, 2024
decipher......................
We always have a choice. What we don't always have, unless we create it, is something to measure our choices against.
That is what a clear vision gives you: a way to decipher whether a decision is good or bad for you, based on whether it gets you closer or further away from where you want your life to go.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life
Although, more sleep would be pretty good.......
No, we don’t need more sleep. It’s our souls that are tired, not our bodies. We need nature. We need magic. We need adventure. We need freedom. We need truth. We need stillness. We don’t need more sleep, we need to wake up and live.
You gotta love..............................
.......................................Martin Gurri:
This being an age of social justice, I want to recognize the achievements of today’s most ruthlessly marginalized and stereotyped ethnicity: the Anglo-Saxons.
Wait, what.......................?
It’s the unbidden realization that you are deeply into the second half of your life . . .
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Dots...........................
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
-Steve Jobs, as quoted here
This should make some interesting reading...
King-Slutzky, whose thesis is on “theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens” and the “fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760–1860,” and whose fantasies are indeed limitless, goes on . . .
On volatility, debt, and endurance..................
I think this is the most practical way to think about debt: As debt increases, you narrow the range of outcomes you can endure in life.
Sunday, April 28, 2024
leakage.................
The leakage of prestige from politicized universities is overdue and wholesome. Those schools that once were preeminent and now are punchlines might soon have a bruising rendezvous with real politics, which, unlike the sandbox radicalism of campus playgrounds, can be serious.
-George Will, as excerpted here
The really good news........................
What’s the average college GPA of an American millionaire? 2.9 out of 4.0.
The truth is, becoming wealthy isn’t about having a brain the size of a planet. It’s about doing the boring, sensible things, consistently, over time.
-Eric Barker, from here
Ed. Note: Just coincidentally, I graduated with a 2.9.
An equation............................
Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence. This is the equation.
-attributed to Averroes
On not being mercurial....................
Investing is hard, but it doesn’t need to be as hard as people make it. As John Rahm and Scottie Scheffler illustrate, success can come in very different forms, so long as you consistently adhere to your process.
Risk-seeking and risk-mitigating can both be successful strategies, so long as you are disciplined enough to stick to them.
-Ted Lamade, as excerpted from here
As well as how weird the present is.............
Read a lot of history so you can understand how weird the past was; that way you will be comfortable with how weird the future will be.
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