After David McCullough passed away, his daughter published a collection of his various speeches and writings into a book called [*History Matters*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/history-matters-david-mccullough/080b74a6afda5a44). The picture on the cover is one of the most inspiring photographs of someone at work. 

![](https://res.cloudinary.com/dde1q4ekv/image/upload/v1786726798/david-mccullough-facebook-photo-e1660042267818_lstius.webp)

Because McCullough is my favorite author, I enjoyed this book thoroughly. Here are some notes and highlights.

On happiness and learning:

> And how he loved that task. “We speak a language that isn’t ours,” McCullough notes in these pages. “It’s been handed down to us with a tradition of expression and power that is well worth a lifetime of study, and particularly for those for whom writing is a way of life. I love what I do. I love every day of it. Happiness—true happiness—is not to be found in vacations or the like. It’s to be found in the love of learning and doing what you really want to get up and get to each day.”

A good Churchill line:

> Churchill in his great speech in the darkest hours of the Second World War, when he crossed the Atlantic, reminded us, “We haven’t journeyed this far because we are made of sugar candy.”

From Thomas Jefferson:

> Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free,” Jefferson said, “expects what never was and never will be.

I resonate with this expression. Asking what happened—or how things happened—is a great way to go about life if you want to grow your knowledge and experience constant wonder.

> I am not an engineer. I am not even a historian. I am an English major. But I am drawn to the past because I care to know what happened.

A man can dream:

> Lucky finds and collections of great libraries and archival collections have happened for me again and again.

Some good advice:

> Be generous. Give of yourselves. Count kindness as all-important in life. Take interest in those around you. Try to keep in mind that everyone you encounter along the way, no matter their background or station in life, knows something you don’t. Get in the habit of asking people about themselves, their lives, their interests, and listen to them. It’s amazing what you can learn by listening.

This following few quotes are from [McCullough's interview with *The Paris Review*](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/894/the-art-of-biography-no-2-david-mccullough).

> **Interviewer:** Would you tell us about the motto tacked over your desk?
> 
> **McCullough:** It says, “Look at your fish.” It’s the test that Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard naturalist, gave every new student. He would take an odorous old fish out of a jar, set it in a tin pan in front of the student and say, “Look at your fish.” Then Agassiz would leave. When he came back, he would ask the student what he’d seen. “Not very much,” they would most often say, and Agassiz would say it again: “Look at your fish.” This could go on for days. The student would be encouraged to draw the fish but could use no tools for the examination, just hands and eyes. Samuel Scudder, who later became a famous entomologist and expert on grasshoppers, left us the best account of the “ordeal with the fish.” After several days, he still could not see whatever it was Agassiz wanted him to see. But, he said, “I see how little I saw before.” Then Scudder had a brainstorm, and he announced it to Agassiz the next morning: “Paired organs, the same on both sides.” “Of course! Of course!” Agassiz said, very pleased. So Scudder naturally asked what he should do next, and Agassiz said, “Look at your fish.”
> 
> I love that story and have used it often when teaching classes on writing, because seeing is so important in this work. **Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.** Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’ great admonition to all writers, “Make me see.”

(Emphasis added.) And later he says something similar about the process of writing his books in general:

> The chances of finding a new piece are fairly remote—though I’ve never written a book where I didn’t find something new—but it’s more likely you see something that’s been around a long time that others haven’t seen. Sometimes it derives from your own nature, your own interests. More often, it’s just that nobody bothered to look closely enough.

On McCullough's strategy for writing, specifically about a young Theodore Roosevelt in [*Mornings on Horseback*](https://www.dltn.io/posts/mornings-on-horseback-by-david-mccullough):

> There’s another scene in Mornings on Horseback that I felt was crucial to understanding Roosevelt’s character, which might not be considered important by conventional standards. The family was taking a trip up the Nile, and young Theodore, who was an amateur taxidermist, shot and stuffed a number of birds. So I went out and found out how taxidermy is done. It takes patience and dexterity, and it’s smelly and grubby—a kind of work that would be very difficult for a child. And if you do it on a boat with your whole family present, you upstage them all. **There’s a paragraph or two in the book about the process of stuffing a bird, because I thought that would show a lot about the boy. I didn’t want to say, “He was a bright boy who did things other boys couldn’t.” I wanted the reader to know it.**

(Emphasis added.) Another time McCullough did this was in *Truman.* Harry Truman wanted badly to fight in World War One, but he had horrible eyesight. He knew that he wouldn't be chosen if he showed up to the initial exams with his glasses. So, he memorized the lines in the eye chart, and was able to read off the letters when they were called. That's grit. That's motivation. That's letting nothing stop you. But rather than saying "Truman had grit," telling the story of how Truman bypassed the eye test reveals that grit in a much more dramatic way.

Advice on what to write a book about:

> Thornton Wilder was a fellow at my college at Yale. Here was a world-celebrated writer for us to talk to, to have lunch with—imagine!—and he was easy to talk to, delightful. Later, while working in New York, I read the interview with him in The Paris Review. I can’t tell you what a difference it made for me. When asked why he wrote books and plays, he said, “I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book which I would enjoy reading or to see a new play that would engross me.” If it didn’t exist, he wrote it so he could read it or see.

How to write consistently:

> One evening, in New York, at a gathering of writers and historians interested in the West, my boss, Alvin Josephy, pointed to a white-haired man across the room. He said, “That’s Harry Drago. Harry Sinclair Drago. He’s written over a hundred books.” I waited for my chance and walked over. “Mr. Drago,” I said, “Alvin Josephy says that you’ve written over a hundred books.” “Yes,” he said, “that’s right.” “How do you do that?” I asked. And he said, “Four pages a day.” “Every day?” “Every day.” It was the best advice an aspiring writer could be given.

And on a similar note:

> Sometimes I think I’m not a writer, I’m a rewriter. When a page isn’t working, I crumple it into a ball and throw it in the wastebasket. Always have. Our son Geoffrey when he was a little boy would come out where I work and look in my wastebasket to see how many “wrong pages” I had written that day. If the basket was full, it had been a good day. I’d worked things through.

McCullough uses a unique aspect of narrative storytelling in his biographies. The pattern is common now, but it wasn't when McCullough began writing. But this was always his intention, inspired mostly by Sir Walter Lord's excellent narrative of the sinking of the *Titanic* in *A Night to Remember*:

> I never had any intention of writing except in the narrative form. I believe in the strong narrative. In E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, he talks about the difference between a sequence of events and a story. He says, If I tell you that the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I tell you that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that's a story—you *feel* that.

As a typewriter enthusiast, I can't help but relish this passage:

> I write on an old Royal typewriter, a beauty! I bought it secondhand in 1965, before I started The Johnstown Flood, and I’ve written all my books on it. It was made about 1941, and it works perfectly. I have it cleaned and oiled about once every book, and the roller has to be replaced now and then. Otherwise it’s the same machine. Imagine—it’s more than fifty years old, and it still does just what it was built to do! There’s not a thing wrong with it.
> 
> I love putting paper in. I love the way the keys come up and actually print the letters. I love it when I swing that carriage and the bell rings like an old trolley car. I love the feeling of making something with my hands. People say, “But with a computer you could go so much faster.” But I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower. I don’t think all that fast. They say, “But you could change things so readily.” I can change things very readily as it is. I take a pen and draw a circle around what I want to move up or down or wherever, and then I retype it. Then they say, “But you wouldn’t have to retype it.” But when I’m retyping I’m also rewriting. And I’m listening, hearing what I’ve written. Writing should be done for the ear. Rosalee reads aloud wonderfully, and it’s a tremendous help to me to hear her speak what I’ve written. Or sometimes I read it to her. It’s so important. You hear things that are wrong, that call for editing.

Listen to your editors—especially when they are your spouse.

> Yes, I make a little mark, or she does. Once when she [Rosalee McCullough] was reading one of the last chapters of Mornings on Horseback, she stopped and said, “There’s something wrong with that sentence.” I said, “Read it again.” She read it again, “There’s something wrong there.” I said, “Give it to me, you’re not reading it right,” and I read it out loud and said, “See?” Well, a year or so later, when the book was published, Gore Vidal reviewed it in The New York Review of Books. It was a favorable review, and I was very pleased, except that, out of the whole book, he singled out one sentence as an example that my writing wasn’t always the best. And it was that sentence! The only one he quoted!

I think I'll use this line when someone asks what my favorite book is—the one I'm reading now, of course.

> I’m often asked which is my favorite book, and it’s always the same: the one I’m working on. And I feel that now. I really look forward to going out there tomorrow morning and working on chapter three. The time will fly.

There is not a correlation between the time spent studying during the day and the amount of knowledge that is increased:

> “Strain your brain more than your eye,” Eakins would tell his own students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he had established the most rigorous curriculum of any art school in the nation. “A few hours’ intelligent study is better than a whole day of thoughtless plodding.”

On the most important characteristic in a President:

> *Character Above All* is the title of this book, and character counts in the presidency more than any other single quality. It is more important than how much the president knows of foreign policy or economics, or even about politics. When the chips are down—and the chips are nearly always down in the presidency—how do you decide? Which way do you go? What kind of courage is called upon? Talking of his hero Andrew Jackson, Truman once said, it takes one kind of courage to face a duelist, but it’s nothing like the courage it takes to tell a friend no.

I liked this line on courage: "Courage is having done it before."

This importance of history is not just for Presidents—it's for everyone. While knowing how *the world* came to be is important, if you are an American and want to responsibly exercise your civic duty, you must—absolutely must—know (or be actively pursuing knowledge about) what has been tried, what has worked, and what has not. You have to know why elections were lost or won, or the pivotal issues that were at the top of mind for Americans in different decades. I believe that without some overall understanding of those things, it is very hard to know how to vote or live.

> TRUMAN’S PROFOUND SENSE OF history was an important part of his makeup. He believed every president should know American history at the least, and world history, ideally. A president with a sense of history is less prone to hubris. He knows he is but one link in a long chain going all the way back to the first president and that presumably will extend far into the future. He knows he has only a limited time in office and that history will be the final judge of his performance. What he does must stand the test of time. If he is blasted by the press, if his polls are plummeting as Truman’s did during the Korean War, these are not the first concerns. What matters—or ought to matter—is what’s best for the country and the world in the long run.

John Adams shared a similar sentiment:

> Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people who have the right to that knowledge and the desire to know. But besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge—I mean of the character and conduct of their rulers.

One of the underlying themes in *Truman* is President Truman's humility.

> In the course of more than one hundred interviews for my biography of Truman, I found no one who had worked with him, no one who was on the White House staff, or the White House domestic staff, or his Secret Service detail, who did not like him. He knew everybody by name on the White House staff and in the mansion itself. He knew all the Secret Service people by name. He knew all about their families—and this wasn’t just a politician’s trick. If he could have picked his own father, one former Secret Service man told me, it would have been Truman.

And principles:

> When friends and advisers warned [Truman] that he was certain to lose the election in 1948 if he persisted with his civil rights program, he said if he lost for that, it would be for a good cause. Principle mattered more than his own political hide. His courage was the courage of his convictions.

A paraphrase of a quote from a biographer about Dr. Ezra Stiles: "He kept sacred his omnivorous curiosity. He was always more interested in what he did not know than in what he did."

A book at the foot of the bed for Christmas—what a wonderful gift.

> Christmas and books have been tied up together in my mind for so long I’m not altogether sure whether it’s because of my feelings for Christmas that I love books, or if it’s the other way around. In any event, as my family knows, books are what I give at Christmas, and books are what I hope to be receiving come the magic morning; and as all in my family—children, grandchildren—also know, this goes back to a Christmas tradition started by my mother and father in the home where I grew up in Pittsburgh.
> 
> Every Christmas Eve, we McCullough children—four boys—went to bed knowing what to expect the next morning. Well before our father had put on his ancient, faded Indian blanket bathrobe to lead the march downstairs to who knew what Christmas bounty in the living room, even at the very moment of opening our eyes, we would each find a first present at the foot of our bed.
> 
> It was always beautifully wrapped, with ribbon and bow, and it was always a book. And thus did the biggest day of the year begin at 549 Glen Arden Drive. 
> 
> Now, with this glorious moment went an implicit understanding that once having opened our books, we four, each on his own, would spend time enjoying it to himself—quietly, that is—and thereby grant mother and father more sleep. And in time to come, having become a parent, I would see in this, as in other things, the wisdom of my mother and father. So my five children, too, were to awaken Christmas mornings to find books at the foot of their beds, and my wife and I, too, having been up most of the night wrapping presents, struggling to assemble this or that impossible-to-assemble game or toy, would enjoy a blessed extra half hour or so of morning sleep.

> Churchill once wrote that the most industrious, useful people of society may be divided into two categories—those who work with great intensity at their job and for pleasure, for relief, turn to golf or travel or vacation. And then there are those for whom their work and their real joy in life are one and the same—who are thus on vacation every day. And they are the luckiest of all.


History Matters by David McCullough

Richard Goodwin worked in John F. Kennedy's White House, served as Lyndon Johnson's chief speechwriter, and was Bobby Kennedy's campaign advisor. He even stood by Bobby's side in California on that fateful June day. Goodwin was also President of the _Harvard Law Review_, where he graduated first in his class, and served as a law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter. Perhaps no one has a better resume.

Except for maybe his wife.

Doris Kearns Goodwin served as a White House fellow to Lyndon Johnson and helped the former president with his memoir. She's also written multiple _New York Times_ bestselling books, including _Team of Rivals_, _The Bully Pulpit_, _No Ordinary Time_, _Leadership in Turbulent Times_, and more. She is a brilliant writer and "America's historian-in-chief."

![](https://res.cloudinary.com/dde1q4ekv/image/upload/v1784690295/images_1_nve7ml.jpg)

But [*An Unfinished Love Story*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/an-unfinished-love-story-a-personal-history-of-the-1960s-doris-kearns-goodwin/d353cb8cf412d38f) is one of Mrs. Goodwin's most personal. Before her husband passed, they were determined to work their way through the more than three-hundred boxes of letters, diaries, memos, reports, and other documents that Mr. Goodwin saved from his career. These were memos written directly to the men he served when he served them, sitting undisturbed in bankers' boxes for more than fifty years. After he died, Mrs. Goodwin decided to finish the project—and this book was the result. It is part biography of Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin (with revealing behind-the-scenes accounts of JFK, LBJ, and RFK) and part history of the 1960s.

Mr. Goodwin wanted to start the project because, a few days after he turned eighty, he said, "I'm an old guy after all. If I have any wisdom to dispense, I'd better start dispensing." Mrs. Goodwin describes the endeavor as "their last great adventure."

Doris Kearns Goodwin recounted that her love of libraries began when she was in middle school and would walk there to get books for her mom who had rheumatic fever. "Through books she could travel to places she could never go. And what a joy it was for me to turn left into the adult room instead of right into the children's room."

I loved this passage, because, same: "During any free time he was able to muster, Dick retreated to the base library where he found his own serviceable nook to smoke a cigar, relax, read, and study. He devoured one book after another, covering a broad range of subjects: poetry, history, science, cybernetics, fiction, drama, mathematics, philosophy, psychology. It was a habit that would mark every day of our lives together, for whenever and wherever Dick settled, he would soon enough be nestled in piles of books, magazines, newspapers, and catalogues." A note from a journal follows: "I also have begun one of those projects which one only dares attempt in the army. And that is reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall. I have read 50 pages and have only about 2500 to go. But then I have at least 17 more months to do it."

It's fun to read the letters Mr. Goodwin wrote during law school. "This election opens all doors to me," he wrote of becoming President of the Harvard Law Review. "Next year, I can work for any law firm in the country . . or I can clerk for a Justice of the Supreme Court . . . And so my problem, which would not seem burdensome to some but is to me, is to make the right choice." (Yes, how burdensome that must have been.) And while he summered at Covington and Burling, "in which Dean Acheson is a senior partner," he never intended to be a "company man." "What I didn't want had become clearer to me than what I did want," he said.

In November of 1957, he wrote in a letter: "The elfin good fortune which seems to dog the path of my own career continues. I have been selected as a law clerk to Justice Frankfurter. There is no doubt that Frankfurter has the finest mind on the bench. He is also a warm man of wide culture and interests. He is known for taking a strong personal interest in his clerks and always discusses his opinions and ideas with them." And when Mr. Goodwin told the Justice that he was ready to start right after graduation, he was met with Justice Frankfurter's oft-cited line about the need to relax: "Young man, there's something I want you to remember for the rest of your career, the laws of physiology are inexorable."

Mr. Goodwin also recounted other advice from Justice Frankfurter. "Our job is to enforce the law, including the Constitution. We have nothing to do with your abstract notions of justice or liberty. Only with what the law provides. Trample the law for your own ends, Dick, and the time will come when you'll be trampled under someone else's ends." [(See also Saint Thomas More's speech in _A Man for All Seasons._)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk):

> **William Roper:** "So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!"
> 
> **Sir Thomas More:** "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
> 
> **William Roper:** "Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
> 
> **Sir Thomas More:** "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

Clerking for Justice Frankfurter—at that time of the Supreme Court's history—must have been something special. Mrs. Goodwin writes: "Dick was spellbound by anecdotes about the great men the Justice had known: Franklin Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis. He freely discussed a wide range of subjects, from the latest news stories to the comparative merits of two English chancellors in the eighteenth century, to the personalities of his fellow Justices. Chief Justice Earl Warren, despite his beaming smile and warm handshake, struck Frankfurter as cold and distant; Justice John Marshall Harlan, one of the best men on the bench in his view, he saw as a majestic figure of sound and independent views; Justice Hugo Black, he considered the formidable intellectual leader of the liberal wing."

Mr. Goodwin was eventually recruited by Theodore Sorensen as a speech writer for John F. Kennedy. Sorensen's initial call to Mr. Goodwin came with strict instructions on how to craft a Kennedy speech: "It was to be made of three 'interchangeable parts' that could be snapped together as needed, like some version of Legos: first a tribute to the grandeur of the Democratic party; second, a brief exploration of the 'soup du jour'—foreign policy, arms control, health care—and third, an invocation of American greatness and our responsibility to make a great country even greater."

![](https://res.cloudinary.com/dde1q4ekv/image/upload/v1784685246/xl_545247433de1-richardgoodwin_feature_kuu4al.jpg)

It's interesting that Mr. Goodwin spent so much time with John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Goodwin with Lyndon Johnson, because the two gentlemen could not have been more different. (As explored so brilliantly by Robert Caro in _The Passage of Power_. When will number five come?) But something I admire about Lyndon Johnson is that he had "an uncanny ability to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse." Mrs. Goodwin explains that "as party whip, minority leader, and majority leader, he had taken positions with small bases of power and vastly magnified and multiplied their functions." That reminded me of the quote from the Greek general Epaminondas who reworked the city's sewers: it's not the office that makes the man but the man that makes the office. I wrote that line again later in the book when Mrs. Goodwin asked why Mr. Goodwin wanted to move from the Peace Corps to the Arts Council, and he replied, "A job is what you can make of it." Mrs. Goodwin writes: "Long ago I had heard nearly identical words when Lyndon Johnson described how he could take a strategically placed small job—like messenger to a college president or secretary to a Congressman—and build them into something exponentially greater." Plus, Mr. Goodwin wanted to be back in the White House. It's not about what you do, it's about who you work for.

Kennedy, of course, had wit. After he saw something on a speech that he didn't like, he asked Sorensen and Mr. Goodwin, "Who the hell wrote that?" "I didn't," Sorensen replied. Because Mr. Goodwin "never had less desire to take credit for something he had written than at that moment," he stayed quiet. "Well, then," Kennedy said, "I guess no one wrote it."

After the first Kennedy-Nixon debate wherein Kennedy's suave oozed through the tubes, Kennedy and the gang relaxed aboard their private plane; Kennedy enjoying tomato soup and a beer. "To Dick, it all seemed too muted. Unable to retain his enthusiasm, he exclaimed, 'We've got it won now! Not just the debate but the election!' Kennedy smiled, finished his beer, and said, 'Next week, Cold War and foreign policy. Better get some sleep and get ready.' Dick told me he learned something important that night. Kennedy was a veteran sailor, a professional. Regardless of circumstances, he kept steady and stable, on an even keel." There is a good lesson there: do the work, and then move along. Kennedy emphasized the same lesson later, when, before he won the election, someone asked if he was serious about the Peace Corps. "Until Tuesday [Election Day], we'll worry about this nation, after Tuesday, the world." Later, Mrs. Goodwin writes: "One of the most beguiling aspects of Kennedy's temperament, Dick told me, was his refusal to be swept away by accolades when things went well, and his ability to maintain his balance and wit when things fell apart."

When Mrs. Goodwin complained that neither candidate had a reflective moment on television during the debates, Mr. Goodwin explained that that was the whole point. "A TV debate is not exactly a format for levity, complexity, or reflection. Time is short, stakes are enormous. A single, serious mistake could prove fatal to months of campaigning. Style, of necessity, towers over substance." Your message must match the medium.

Jackie Kennedy sent Richard Goodwin a file with "JFK, Inauguration, 1961" written on it. Inside were tickets to the inauguration and scraps of speeches. Jackie Kennedy's note said "For Dick Goodwin who was there—as he was always—for all the things that mattered most to President Kennedy and me." It contained a draft of a speech that Kennedy gave in Alaska at the start of the campaign that would eventually become the famous "ask not" line. The first use of a similar phrase Kennedy made at the nominating convention where he said "It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them." Then, at the speech in Alaska, the line was: "This is the call of the New Frontier. It is not what I promise I will do; it is what I ask you to join in me doing."

Mr. Goodwin was upset after he was transferred to the State Department. "It hurt," he told his wife. "And of course," he continued, "there would no longer be the informal contact with the president, the sort of chance meetings that had led to conversations and assignments. Missing was the tonic of proximity to power." I wrote next to this in the book: "Lord Halifax to America" (referencing Winston Churchill's banishment of Lord Halifax across the pond so he would stop pestering him).

![](https://res.cloudinary.com/dde1q4ekv/image/upload/v1784685254/180521-goodwin-lbj-al-1058_xeo5cz.webp)

The passing of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was a watershed moment in American history. Kennedy dreamed it up, but Johnson executed on it. Likely, JFK would not have been able to break the filibuster because that was only something a true master of the Senate could do—and LBJ was such a master. But the Bill wouldn't have been what LBJ dreamed up.

LBJ on Congress:

> There is but one way for a President to deal with the Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it's really going to work, the relationship between the President and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous. He's got to know them even better than they know themselves. And then, on the basis of this knowledge, he's got to build a system that stretches from the cradle to the grave, from the moment a bill is introduced to the moment it is officially enrolled as law of the land.
> 
> A measure must be sent to the Hill at exactly the right moment, and that moment depends on three things: first, on momentum; second, on the availability of sponsors in the right place at the right time; and third, on the opportunities for neutralizing the opposition. Timing is essential.

Mrs. Goodwin on her husband's speech writing talents:

> He knew the cadences of [LBJ's] speech. The speechwriter's job, Dick explained, was to clarify, heighten, and polish the speaker's convictions in the speaker's own language and natural rhythms. If the words did not sound authentic to the speaker, the emotional current of the speech would not hit home.
> 
> I knew that Dick often searched for an arresting short sentence to begin every speech or article he wrote.

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all voyage of their life is bound in the shallows and in miseries."

A poem from Aeschylus: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom, through the awful grace of God."

Towards the end of their project, Mr. Goodwin's cancer became more and more aggressive. He couldn't smoke, drink, or enjoy his good food—but he could still read. But eventually that became too hard for him:

> As Dick increasingly found it difficult to read, he would hand me a book or article and ask me to read it aloud to him . . . We had lived surrounded by books all our married lives. They were our element. We had written them, read for pleasure, amassed mini-libraries for particular projects, collected them, organized them into ever-shifting categories, and in the end, dwelled inside what we joyfully called our house of books.
> 
> One afternoon, Dick asked me to slowly recite one of his favorite poems, Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality." When I had nearly finished, he was breathing very deeply, and I thought for certain he had fallen asleep. I went on reading until the end. When I finished, he turned towards me, and from memory repeated:
> 
> *Though nothing can bring back the hour
> Of splendor in the grass, or glory in the flower
> We will grieve not, rather find
> Strength in what remains behind*

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

I picked up this book after overhearing [Ryan Holiday mention it to Morgan Housel during their bookshop tour](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHayBwf8cJY). I finished my first semester of law school on Thursday, and woke up Friday morning waiting to read a "fun" book. So, naturally, I picked one about Richard Feynman.

This one didn't disappoint, but it was different. The [description](https://www.amazon.com/Feynmans-Rainbow-Search-Beauty-Physics/dp/0307946495) explains:

> Though [sic] a series of fascinating exchanges, Mlodinow and Feynman delve into the nature of science, creativity, love mathematics, happiness, God, art, pleasures and ambition, producing a moving portrait of a friendship and an affecting account of Feynman’s final creative years.

I was expecting a book with stories and conversations like [Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman](https://www.dltn.io/posts/surely-youre-joking-mr-feynman), but from the perspective of a third person. Instead, it was a few of those conversations, but interspersed between explanations of quantum chromodynamics, the author's exploration of his imposter syndrome, his weed-smoking roommate, and Murray Gell-Mann.

Anyway, it was a fun read and there were a few good anecdotes. The "theme" of the book is, essentially, "follow your passion." The author, Mlodinow, first arrives at Cal Tech confused and lost. He believes he doesn't belong among the faculty, and has no idea what to pursue next. Amidst that struggle, he finds Feynman in around the campus doing and saying the things that Feynman did and said. Through their conversations, it seems like Feynman opened Mlodinow's eyes up and mad him see that, yes, he loves physics and math, but maybe that doesn't mean a career in academia. As the frustration builds, Mlodinow decided to start writing a screen play. An old professor ridicules him for this, but Feynman encourages it. He sees writing, especially fiction, as an exercise of the most important human trait: imagination. Mlodinow decides to pursue it, and the book ends explaining that Mlodinow wrote episodes for Stark Trek.

Here are my highlights and notes:

When they first met, Mlodinow expressed his concerns about whether or not he was where he should be. He recounts:

> He was speaking to the point that had bothered me most—did I have that something special that it takes to be a scientist? Feynman said: Don’t think it is so different, being a scientist. The average person is not so far away from a scientist. He may be far away from an artist or poet or something, but I doubt that too. I think in the normal common sense of everyday life that there is a lot of the kind of thinking that scientists do. Everyone puts together in ordinary life certain things to come to conclusions about the ordinary world. They make things that weren’t there, such as drawings, such as writing, such as scientific theories. Is there something common in the process? I don’t see such a big difference between that and the scientist’s work.

---

On the difference between worrying and thinking:

> Scientists do think in a constructive way. You ask a scientist some question and it worries him. He doesn’t worry in the sense that a normal person sometimes worries, like “I wonder if this sick person is going to get better.” That’s not thinking, that is just worrying. The scientist tries to build something up. Not just to worry about something, but to think something out.

---

Great scientists don't "do" anything special; they just do a lot more of something than normal people do: imagine.

> Really all we do is a hell of a lot more of one particular kind of thing that is normal and ordinary! People do have imagination, they just don’t work on it as long. Creativity is done by everybody, it’s just that scientists do more of it. What isn’t ordinary is to do it so intensively that all this experience is piled up for all these years on the same limited subject. A scientist’s work is normal activities of humans carried out to a fault, in a very exaggerated form. Ordinary people don’t do it as often, or, as I do, think about the same problem every day. Only idiots like me do that! Or Darwin, or somebody who worries about the same question. “Where do the animals come from?” Or, “What is the relation of species?” A scientist works on it, and thinks about it for years! What I do, is something that common people often do, but so much more that it looks crazy! But it’s trying to find the potentiality as a human being.

In other words, the "greats" just do the ordinary, more.

> For example, neither you nor I have muscles that stand way out on our arms like these fabulous guys. For us that would be impossible. Well they work and they work and they work on it. In that case, it might be a fault. How big can you make those muscles? How can you make the chest look great? They try to find out how far you can go. And therefore, they do something with an intensity that is out of the ordinary. It doesn’t mean that we never lift weights. All they do is lift weights more. But, like us, they’re trying to find the greatest potentiality of human beings’ activity in a certain direction. The scientist as a brain jock? Did I believe him? Is creative genius a form of synaptic sweat?

---

When you're solving a hard problem, you have to believe that you have something that other people don't. Some gift, some perspective, etc.

> The next psychological aspect is, I have to think that I have some kind of inside track on this problem. That is, I have some sort of talent that the other guys aren’t using, or some way of looking, and they are being foolish not to notice this wonderful way to look at it. I have to think I have a little bit better chance than the other guys, for some reason. I know in my heart that it is likely that the reason is false, and likely the particular attitude I’m taking with it was thought of by others. I don’t care; I fool myself into thinking I have an extra chance. That I have something to contribute. Otherwise I may as well wait for him to do it, whoever it is.

And:

> “I’m not telling him not to work on something new,” Feynman said. Then he looked at me and said, “I’m just saying, whatever you choose to work on, be your own worst critic. And then don’t do it for the wrong reasons. Don’t do it unless you really believe. Because if it doesn’t work out, you could end up wasting a lot of time.”

And what other people think is irrelevant. Sometimes.

> “Let me ask you something,” I finally said. “Do you think it would be wise to work on a theory that almost everyone else thinks is nonsense?” “Only under one condition,” he said. “And what is that?” “That you don’t think it is nonsense.” “I’m not sure I know enough to tell.” He chuckled. “Maybe if you knew enough to tell, you wouldn’t work on it, either.” “You mean maybe I’m too dumb to know better.” “Not necessarily. Maybe you just don’t know enough, or haven’t known it long enough, to be spoiled by what you know. Too much education can cause trouble.”

---

Some good quotes from Mlodinow on imagination and preparation:

> For instance, Tschaikovsky wrote, “The germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soil is ready . . .” And Mary Shelley: “Invention does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” And Stephen Spender: “There is nothing we imagine which we do not already know. And our ability to imagine is our ability to remember what we have already once experienced and to apply it to some different situation.”


---

Feynman loved nature, but unlike some, he was okay with there not being a unified "theory of everything." Feynman's view, which I like, was essentially *who the hell are we to tell nature how it should behave.*

>“I don’t want anything. Nature has nothing to do with what I want! How do you know there’s one unified theory? Maybe there’s four theories! Maybe there’s a theory for each force! I don’t know. I don’t tell nature what to do. Nature tells me. This whole discussion is pointless! It’s getting on my nerves! I told you—I don’t want to talk about string theory!”

---

I liked this passage:

> Back then, I did not know the answer. Today, as the father of two young children, I recognize the attraction. Even after the ups and downs of the fifty or so years of adulthood, even in the process of dying, Feynman was still a child. Fresh, gleeful, playful, mischievous, curious . . . IN-ter-ES-ted. Add a few hairs, subtract a few wrinkles, give him his health, and you’d have the same Feynman who yelled fake curses in made-up Italian to scold offending drivers in Brooklyn fifty years earlier. Hanging around a grown kid like Feynman made you question things. Like all the things we do in life because we have to do them—or at least we think we do. Sitting through boring meetings with colleagues or customers or clients when we’d rather be outside staring at a rainbow, or managing our careers along some path for which we have no passion merely because it is supposed to be the road to success. Like my young boys today, Feynman was startlingly honest with people, including himself, and you couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do, at least not without grumbling. In contrast, there I was, still free to choose my own path, and I was compromising almost before I began. What, for me, was worth doing? What would give meaning to my life? Was it string theory? Lattice theory? Or was it simply “fitting in” at a place like Caltech?

---

On Feynman's motivation for being a scientist:

> I can say I am a scientist. I find excitement in discovery. The excitement is not in the fact that you’ve created something, but that you’ve found something beautiful that’s always been there. So scientific stuff affects every part of my life. And affects my attitudes toward many things. I can’t say which is the cart and which is the horse. Because I’m an integrated person and I can’t tell you whether for instance my skepticism is the reason I’m interested in science or my science is the reason I’m skeptical. Those things are impossible. But I want to know what is true. That is why I look into things. To see and to find out what is going on.

---

Most of the time, you want to think rationally; some of the times, you don't.

> I’ll tell you a story. When I was thirteen I met a girl, Arlene. Arlene was my first girlfriend. We went together for many years, at first not so seriously, then more seriously. We fell in love. When I was nineteen we got engaged, and when I was twenty-six we got married. I loved her very deeply. We grew up together. I changed her by imparting to her my point of view, my rationality. She changed me. She helped me a lot. She taught me that one has to be irrational sometimes. That doesn’t mean stupid, it just means that there are occasions, situations, you should think about, and others you shouldn’t.

---

Something I've thought about while learning about programming and the law:

> For him [Feynman] satisfaction in discovery was there even if what you discover was already known by others. It was there even if all you are doing is re-deriving someone else’s result your own way. And it was there even if your creativity is in playing with your child. It was self-satisfaction. Feynman’s focus was internal, and his internal focus gave him freedom.

There may be a few people in this generation who discover something truly "new." Most of us, though, will not have that luck. But, we can discover things that are "new" to us. I think that's why I like learning and reading so much. When I learn something I didn't know before, I'm not merely cramming my head full of names, dates, and facts; I'm *discovering* part of our history and part of the world that I didn't know existed.

This was the cool thing about coding. Every engineer working at any tech company in the world knows how functions work. But when *I* first discovered how functions work for myself, I was mesmerized. I felt like I unlocked a whole new world.

Learning = discovering for yourself something somebody else already knows.

---

Throughout the entire book, Mlodinow is chasing Feynman's approval. (And for good reason. We probably all would have if we were in his shoes.) But then, at the end of the book, he realizes the lesson that Feynman had been trying to teach him the whole time: it's not what Feynman thinks, it's what Mlodinow thinks.

> And whether I continued to write as a hobby, or ever supported myself with it, I hoped that maybe someday I’d write something that Feynman would admire. And then I thought, no, even better, I hope that someday I will write something that I will admire.

---

A lesson from Feynman's life, and something good to aim for.

> For Richard Feynman always knew how to get the most out of what the world had to offer, and how to get the most out of the talent with which God—or mere genetics—had blessed him. That’s all we can hope for in life, and in the years since he’s passed on, I’ve found it to be a valuable lesson.


Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow

The title of this book is gaudy. I admit that. But it caught my attention when I wasn't trying to read a book like this, so maybe gaudy titles work.

The book and its contents, however, are not gaudy. Barnum gives quite a few "lessons" about how to be successful in life and business. Reading them, it seemed like an original version of [Kevin Kelly's advice](https://kk.org/thetechnium/68-bits-of-unsolicited-advice/).

Here are my highlights and notes.

### Introduction

How to get rich: spend less than you earn.

> Mr. Micawber, one of those happy creations of the genial Dickens, puts the case in a strong light when he says that to have annual income of twenty pounds per annum, and spend twenty pounds and sixpence, is to be the most miserable of men; whereas, to have an income of only twenty pounds, and spend but nineteen pounds and sixpence is to be the happiest of mortals.

> True economy consists in always making the income exceed the outgo.

---

It's important to save money, but don't do it at the expense of losing knowledge:

> A few years ago, before kerosene oil was discovered or thought of, one might stop overnight at almost any farmer’s house in the agricultural districts and get a very good supper, but after supper he might attempt to read in the sitting-room, and would find it impossible with the inefficient light of one candle. The hostess, seeing his dilemma, would say: “It is rather difficult to read here evenings; the proverb says, ‘you must have a ship at sea in order to be able to burn two candles at once;’ we never have an extra candle except on extra occasions.” These extra occasions occur, perhaps, twice a year. In this way the good woman saves five, six, or ten dollars in that time: but the information which might be derived from having the extra light would, of course, far outweigh a ton of candles.

---

Classic advice on how to change your ways:

> Here is a recipe which I recommend: I have found it to work an excellent cure for extravagance, and especially for mistaken economy: When you find that you have no surplus at the end of the year, and yet have a good income, I advise you to take a few sheets of paper and form them into a book and mark down every item of expenditure. Post it every day or week in two columns, one headed “necessaries” or even “comforts,” and the other headed “luxuries,” and you will find that the latter column will be double, treble, and frequently ten times greater than the former. The real comforts of life cost but a small portion of what most of us can earn.

---

Keep a clear mind:

> These remarks apply with tenfold force to the use of intoxicating drinks. To make money, requires a clear brain. A man has got to see that two and two make four; he must lay all his plans with reflection and forethought, and closely examine all the details and the ins and outs of business. As no man can succeed in business unless he has a brain to enable him to lay his plans, and reason to guide him in their execution, so, no matter how bountifully a man may be blessed with intelligence, if the brain is muddled, and his judgment warped by intoxicating drinks, it is impossible for him to carry on business successfully.

---

### Don't mistake your vocation

If you pick the wrong job, you'll never win.

> If a man was to take such a boy as I was, and attempt to make a watchmaker of him, the boy might, after an apprenticeship of five or seven years, be able to take apart and put together a watch; but all through life he would be working up hill and seizing every excuse for leaving his work and idling away his time. Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation. Yet we see many who have mistaken their calling, from the blacksmith up (or down) to the clergyman.

---
### Avoid debt

> Money is in some respects like fire; it is a very excellent servant but a terrible master. When you have it mastering you; when interest is constantly piling up against you, it will keep you down in the worst kind of slavery. But let money work for you, and you have the most devoted servant in the world.

---

### Whatever you do, do it with all your might

> Work at it, if necessary, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well *now*.

>  Many a man acquires a fortune by doing his business thoroughly, while his neighbor remains poor for life, because he only half does it.

> Fortune always favors the brave, and never helps a man who does not help himself. It won’t do to spend your time like Mr. Micawber, in waiting for something to “turn up.” To such men one of two things usually “turns up:” the poorhouse or the jail; for idleness breeds bad habits, and clothes a man in rags.

---

### Depend on Your Own Personal Exertions

> He will be like the Yankee tin-peddler, who, having been cheated as to quality in the purchase of his merchandise, said: “All right, there’s a little information to be gained every day; I will never be cheated in that way again.” Thus a man buys his experience, and it is the best kind if not purchased at too dear a rate.

> The possession of a perfect knowledge of your business is an absolute necessity in order to insure success.

> “Like causes produce like effects.” If a man adopts the proper methods to be successful, “luck” will not prevent him. If he does not succeed, there are reasons for it, although, perhaps, he may not be able to see them.

---

### Use the Best Tools

>  An important element in an employee is the brain. You can see bills up, “Hands Wanted,” but “hands” are not worth a great deal without “heads.”

---

### Don't Get Above Your Business

> The great ambition should be to *excel* all others engaged in the same occupation.
> The college-student who was about graduating, said to an old lawyer:
> “I have not yet decided which profession I will follow. Is your profession full?”
> “The basement is much crowded, but there is plenty of room *upstairs*,” was the witty and truthful reply.
> No profession, trade, or calling, is overcrowded in the upper story. Wherever you find the most honest and intelligent merchant or banker, or the best lawyer, the best doctor, the best clergyman, the best shoemaker, carpenter, or anything else, that man is most sought for, and has always enough to do.

---

### Learn Something Useful

> Every man should make his son or daughter learn some useful trade or profession, so that in these days of changing fortunes of being rich today and poor tomorrow they may have something tangible to fall back upon. This provision might save many persons from misery, who by some unexpected turn of fortune have lost all their means.

(I like this argument for when people say AI will take their job. Just...learn something else?)

---

### Do Not Scatter Your Powers

> Engage in one kind of business only, and stick to it faithfully until you succeed, or until your experience shows that you should abandon it. A constant hammering on one nail will generally drive it home at last, so that it can be clinched. When a man’s undivided attention is centered on one object, his mind will constantly be suggesting improvements of value, which would escape him if his brain was occupied by a dozen different subjects at once. Many a fortune has slipped through a man’s fingers because he was engaged in too many occupations at a time. There is good sense in the old caution against having too many irons in the fire at once.

---

### Be Systematic

> Men should be systematic in their business. A person who does business by rule, having a time and place for everything, doing his work promptly, will accomplish twice as much and with half the trouble of him who does it carelessly and slipshod.

---

### Beware of "Outside Operations"

> however successful a man may be in his own business, if he turns from that and engages ill a business which he don’t understand, he is like Samson when shorn of his locks﻿—his strength has departed, and he becomes like other men.

> If a man has plenty of money, he ought to invest something in everything that appears to promise success, and that will probably benefit mankind; but let the sums thus invested be moderate in amount, and never let a man foolishly jeopardize a fortune that he has earned in a legitimate way, by investing it in things in which he has had no experience.

---

### Advertise Your Business

>  A French writer says that “The reader of a newspaper does not see the first mention of an ordinary advertisement; the second insertion he sees, but does not read; the third insertion he reads; the fourth insertion, he looks at the price; the fifth insertion, he speaks of it to his wife; the sixth insertion, he is ready to purchase, and the seventh insertion, he purchases.” Your object in advertising is to make the public understand what you have got to sell, and if you have not the pluck to keep advertising, until you have imparted that information, all the money you have spent is lost.

---

### Be Polite and Kind to Your Customers

> The truth is, the more kind and liberal a man is, the more generous will be the patronage bestowed upon him.

---

### Don't Blab

> Some men have a foolish habit of telling their business secrets. If they make money they like to tell their neighbors how it was done. Nothing is gained by this, and ofttimes much is lost. Say nothing about your profits, your hopes, your expectations, your intentions. And this should apply to letters as well as to conversation. Goethe makes Mephistophiles say: “Never write a letter nor destroy one.” Business men must write letters, but they should be careful what they put in them. If you are losing money, be specially cautious and not tell of it, or you will lose your reputation.

---

### Preserve Your Integrity

> It is more precious than diamonds or rubies.

> To all men and women, therefore, do I conscientiously say, make money honestly, and not otherwise 

The Art of Money Getting by P.T. Barnum

Book Notes on 'Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman'

"Remember what I say: if you would cling to earthly pleasures--these are the things which murder souls," JC Ryle wrote. "There is no surer way to get a seared conscience and a hard heart towards the things of God, than to give way to the desires of the flesh and mind. It seems like nothing at first, but it tells in the long run."

Born in England in 1816, educated at both Eton and Oxford University, Ryle was an Anglican Bishop and pastor. He wrote [*Thoughts for Young Men*](https://www.preachtheword.com/bookstore/thoughts.pdf) because he noticed, as he writes in the introduction, that among the churches biggest "troublemakers" were the young men and that without strict discipleship, they would go the way of the world. So, he penned a short five chapter pamphlet that outlined the reasons for exhorting young men, the dangers young men face, general advice to young men, special rules for young men, and finally a conclusion.

The entire pamphlet is worth reading, but the fourth chapter, Special Rules for Young Men, is filled with practical advice for young men living their lives as Jesus followers. I particularly like the emphasis he puts on attending church every Sunday.

> I would not want to leave any false impression on your minds. Do not go away and say I told you that going to church made up the whole of Christianity. I will tell you no such thing. [Something a disproportionate amount of church-goers think is the case.] I have no wish to see you grow up formalists and Pharisees. If you think the mere carrying of your body to a certain building, at certain times, on a certain day in the week, will make you a Christian, and prepare you to meet God, I tell you flatly you are miserably deceived...[T]he practices of Christianity are not to be despised because they are not saviors. Gold is not food, you cannot eat it, but you would not say it is useless, and throw it away. Your soul's eternal wellbeing most certainly does not depend on the practices of Christianity, but it is certain that without them, as a general rule, your soul will not do well.

Here are some other brilliant things he wrote.

---

> Go and take your fill of earthly pleasures if you will--you will never find your heart satisfied with them. There will always be a voice within, crying, like the leech in Proverbs 30:15, "Give! Give!" There is an empty place there, which nothing but God can fill. You will find, as Solomon did by experience, that earthly pleasures are but a meaningless show--promising contentment but bringing a dissatisfaction of spirit--gold plated caskets, exquisite to look at on the outside, but full of ashes and corruption within. Be wise in your youth. Write the word "poison" on all earthly pleasures. The most lawful of them must be used in moderation. All of them are soul- destroying if you give them your heart. **Pleasure, must first have the guarantee that it is not sinful--then it is to be enjoyed in moderation.**

I've never thought about "pleasures" in the sense of *are they sinful or not?* But this is clearly a must-do for Ryle. And if it's not, then it is to always be enjoyed in moderation, never excess.

---

Beware of reaching for and attempting to attain success in the world:

> Young men, God does not show favoritism or respects the honors bestowed by men. He rewards no man's heritage, or wealth, or rank, or position. He does not see with man's eyes. The poorest saint that ever died in a ghetto is nobler in His sight than the richest sinner that ever died in a palace. God does not look at riches, titles, education, beauty, or anything of the kind. There is only one thing that God does look at, and that is the immortal soul. He measures all men by one standard, one measure, one test, one criterion, and that is the state of their souls.

---

All moral failures, great sins, and life destroying circumstances come little by little. We often wonder, "How could that person be so stupid! They just decided to wake up one day and ruin their marriage and family?" But they didn't wake up one day and decide to ruin their marriage and family. They woke up one day a year ago and looked at something they shouldn't have. And then six months ago they talked to a co-worker in an inappropriate manner, which led to inappropriate feelings. Moral failures seem to be easy to avoid because they are so big, but they're not big. They happen little by little.

> You can be sure that no wicked man ever meant to be so wicked at his first beginnings. But he began with allowing himself some little sins, and that led on to something greater, and that in time produced something greater still, and thus he became the miserable being that he now is. When Hazael heard from Elisha of the horrible acts that he would one day do, he said with astonishment, "How could your servant, a mere dog, accomplish such a feat?" (2 Kings 8:13). But he allowed sin to take root in his heart, and in the end he did them all.

> Young men, resist sin in its beginnings. They may look small and insignificant, but mind what I say, resist them, make no compromise, let no sin lodge quietly and undisturbed in your heart. There is nothing finer than the point of a needle, but when it has made a hole, it draws all the thread after it. Remember the Apostle's words, "A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough" (1 Corinthians 5:6).

Small sins lead to big sins:

> Many a young man could tell you with sorrow and shame, that he traces the ruin of all his worldly prospects to the point I speak of--to giving way to sin in its beginnings. He began habits of deception and dishonesty in little things, and they grew on him. Step by step, he has gone on from bad to worse, till he has done things that at one time he would have thought impossible till at last he has lost his standing, lost his character, lost his peace, and almost lost his soul. He allowed a gap in the wall of his conscience, because it seemed a little one, and once allowed, that gap grew larger every day, till in time the whole wall seemed to come down.

> Remember this especially in matters of truth and honesty. Be careful in even the least syllable spoken. "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much" (Luke 16:10). Whatever the world may like to think, there are no little sins. All great buildings are made up of little parts--the first stone is as important as any other. All habits are formed by a succession of little acts, and the first little act is of mighty consequence. The axe in the fable only begged the trees to let him have one little piece of wood to make a handle, and he would never trouble them any more. He got it, and then he soon cut them all down. The devil only wants to get the wedge of a little allowed sin into your heart, and you will soon be all his own. It is a wise saying, "There is nothing small between us and God, for God is an infinite God."

> First it startles him, then it becomes pleasing, then easy, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then a way of life! Then the man feels no guilt, then obstinate, then resolves never to repent, and then he is damned.

Then how do we avoid those outcomes?

> Young men, if you don't want to come to this, remember the rule I give you this day-- resolve at once to break off every known sin...Resolve, by God's help, to shun everything which may prove an occasion of sin.

It can be easy to focus on dealing with or attempting to irradiate the "big" sins in your life. But often, the small lies, the little deceptions, and the moments of pride, anger, and envy lead to the "big" sins. So, Ryle encourages to "break off every known sin." And not only that, but to "shun everything which may prove an occasion of sin." Don't open the websites that lead to temptation. Don't go to the bars or late night dinner with coworkers. Don't go near alcohol or restaurants if those settings "may prove an occasion of sin."

He continues:

> It is an excellent saying, "He that would be safe from the acts of evil, must widely avoid the occasions." There is an old fable, that the butterfly once asked the owl how she should deal with the fire, which had singed her wings; and the owl counseled her, in reply, not to even look at its smoke. **It is not enough that we determine not to commit sin, we must carefully keep at a distance from all approaches to it.** By this test we ought to examine the ways we spend our time--the books that we read, the friends that we visit, the part of society which we interact with. We must not be content with saying, "There is nothing wrong here;" we must go further, and say, "Is there anything here which may cause me to sin?"

"**It is not enough that we determine not to commit sin, we must carefully keep at a distance from all approaches to it.**"

And also, guard our thoughts, for "imagination" is the hot bed of sin.

> Young men, "Flee from sexual immorality" (1 Corinthians 6:18) if you love life. "Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God's wrath comes on those who are disobedient" (Ephesians 5:6). Flee from the opportunity of it--from the company of those who might draw you into it--from the places where you might be tempted to do it. Read what our Lord says about it in Matthew 5:28, "I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Be like the holy servant Job: "I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl" (Job 31:1). Flee from talking about it. It is one of the things that ought not even be hinted about in conversation. You cannot even touch black grease without getting your hands dirty. Flee from the thoughts of it; resist them, destroy them, pray against them--make any sacrifice rather than give way to them. Imagination is the hotbed where this sin is too often hatched. **Guard your thoughts, and there will be little fear about your actions.**

---

We often think religious persecution isn't really something to worry about in 21st Century America. And in the traditional sense, it's not. You needn't not worry for your life if you want to preach the gospel. But a form of religious persecution shows itself still in other ways. People don't quite understand why you don't go for drinks with the team every Friday night, or why you spend so much time volunteering at church, or why you give so much money away. These confusing actions can create conflict in others. Often, people will think you assume you're better than them and start to resent you. Or, they'll push you. "C'mon, going to the club isn't that bad. We're just gonna watch!" "The movie isn't *that* inappropriate."

This is Ryle's response:

> Young men, endeavor, as much as you can, to keep clear of everything which may prove injurious to your soul. People may say you are too conscientious, too particular, and ask where is the great harm of such and such things? But don't listen to them. It is dangerous to play tricks with sharp tools: it is far more dangerous to take liberties with your immortal soul. He that would be safe must not come near the brink of danger. **He must look on his heart as a barrel of gunpowder, and be cautious not to handle one spark of temptation more than he can help.**

---

The sin of sloth can lead to temptation and sin evermore. When you're bored, you're mind is looking for excitement. When you're home alone and have nothing to do, that's when the enemy strikes the most fervently. So be on guard. Stay busy.

> This is one great reason why idleness is to be avoided. It is not that doing nothing is of itself so wicked; it is the opportunity it affords to evil and empty thoughts; it is the wide door it opens for Satan to throw in the seeds of bad things; it is this which is mainly to be feared. If David had not given opportunity to the devil, by walking on his house-top in Jerusalem with nothing to do, he probably never would have seen Bathsheba bathing, nor murdered her husband Uriah.

Idleness is the wide door in which Satan enters to "throw in the seeds of bad things."

---

Remember, God is everywhere. So, act in such a way that shows reverence to His presence:

> Live as in the sight of God. This is what Abraham did, he walked before Him. This is what Enoch did, he walked with Him. This is what heaven itself will be, the eternal presence of God. Do nothing that you would not like God to see. Say nothing, you would not like God to hear. Write nothing, you would not like God to read. Go no place where you would not like God to find you. Read no book of which you would not like God to say, "Show it to Me." Never spend your time in such a way that you would not like to have God say, "What are you doing?"

---

And go to church regularly. Be in community.

> I dwell on this point, because Satan will try hard to fill your minds with arguments against the practices of Christianity. He will draw your attention to the numbers of persons who use them and are no better for the using. "See there," he will whisper, "do you not observe that those who go to church are no better than those who stay away?" But do not let this move you. It is never fair to argue against a thing because it is improperly used. It does not follow that the practices of Christianity can do no good because many do them and get no good from them. Medicine is not to be despised because many take it and do not recover their health. No man would think of giving up eating, and drinking because others choose to eat and drink improperly, and so make themselves sick. **The value of the practices of Christianity, like other things, depends, in a great measure, on the manner and spirit in which we use them.**
> 
> Let me name another point which is closely connected with this subject. **Let nothing ever tempt you to become a Christian who does not make every effort to attend church on Sunday and make the day special to the Lord.** [This makes me wonder: how does one make Sunday special to the Lord in today's day and age?] Make up your mind to give all your Sundays to God. A spirit of disregard for this day is growing up among us with fearful rapidity, and not least among young men. Sunday vacations, Sunday visiting, Sunday excursions, to the exclusion of church attendance and honoring of the Lord, are becoming more common every year than they were, and are doing infinite harm to souls. 
> 
> Young men, be jealous on this point. Whether you live in the city or in the country, take up a decided line; resolve not to miss church on Sunday and the fellowship of God's people. Do not let the plausible argument of "needing to sleep-in to rest your body," do not let not the example of all those around you, do not let the invitation of companions pull you away from fellowship and worship; let none of these things move you to depart from this settled rule, that Sunday's are for God's honor and for fellowship with His people.
> 
> Young men, you may have friends who forget the honor of the Lord's day; but resolve, by God's help, that you will always remember to keep it special. Honor it by a regular attendance at some place where the gospel is preached. Settle down under a faithful ministry, and once settled, let your place in church never be empty. Believe me, you will find a special blessing following you: "If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight and the LORD'S holy day honorable, and if you honor it by not going your own way and not doing as you please or speaking idle words, then you will find your joy in the LORD, and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob" (Isaiah 58:13-14). **And one thing is very certain, your feelings about Sunday and the fellowship will always be a test and criterion of your fitness for heaven. Fellowship and worship are a foretaste and a fragment of heaven. The man who finds them a burden and not a privilege, may be sure that his heart stands in need of a mighty change.**

I've *never* thought about the comparison to Sunday's and Heaven.

---

And don't forget to pray

> Young men, believe me, if your soul is to be saved, you must pray. God has no speechless children. **If you are to resist the world, the flesh, and the devil, you must pray: it is in vain to look for strength in the hour of trial, if it has not been sought for.** You may be thrown in with those who never do it, you may have to sleep in the same room with someone who never asks anything of God, still, mark my words, you must pray.

Temptations to sin will always come, and it can be discouraging when you feel like God isn't showing up to help deliver you. But I'd ask, is that the only time you cry out to God? "It is in vain to look for strength in the hour of trial, if it has not been sought for."

Just as one goes to the gym to get stronger, or practices golf on the range to get better when they play, a Christian must pray, pray, and pray to continue growing in their relationship with the Lord.


Notes on Thoughts for Young Men by JC Ryle

Book Notes and Review of 'The Patriots by Winston Groom'

## Impressions

*Mornings on Horseback* is an engrossing narrative about Theodore Roosevelt Jr., his family, and his parents. It reveals a lot about why Roosevelt did what he did later in life, and how his family upbringing, childhood, and young adult adventures shaped his philosophy on life and work.

## Notes

Theodore Roosevelt was actually Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. The son, just so happened to make the name more famous than the father, which was not easy to do. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., was a wealthy businessman and philanthropist who loved to travel. His brother, Robert, told Theodore the purpose of travel

> is not to see scenery, you can see finer at home. It is not to see places where great people lived and died, that is a stupidity. But it is to see men. To enlarge your mind, which will never be enlarged by looking at a large hill, but by conversing with, and seeing the bent of the minds of other people.

Yet, he was a simple man. "Best were the pleasures of a morning walk or his books or a good cigar or what he called the quiet luxury of home life," McCullough writes. I can't help but agree.

A simple man who believed in hard work. "Man was never intended to become an oyster," he remarked. "He hated idleness," writes McCullough. "Every hour must be accounted for and one must also enjoy everything one did." Also: "I always believe in showing affection by doing what will please the one we love, not by talking."

---

**Lead, don't drive, younger folks into learning**

Dr. Hillborne West, an uncle from Philadelphia, would recite poems to Teddy and his siblings under trees. "The very fact that he was not achieving a thousand worthwhile things, as was my father, the very fact that he was not busied with the practical care and thought for us, as were my mother and aunt, brought about between us that delightful relationship when the older person leads rather than drives the younger into paths of literature and learning," wrote Connie, Teddy's sister.

---

**Why you should journal**

Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., upon leaving Washington, regretted not keeping a diary.

> All those whom I have seen in social intercourse day by day will be characters in history, and it would be pleasant hereafter [to read] my own impressions of them and recall their utterly different views upon the policy which should be pursued by the government.

---
Two observations McCullough makes about a young Theodore Roosevelt demonstrate his demeanor well. On a ship, Mittie, Theodore's mom, had to "keep a weathered eye on Teedie, who alone of her four children refused to have anything to do with the the other children on board." When the boat finally arrived in Liverpool, Mittie notes the madness in her diary. Everyone was running amok, except Theodore who, "sat off to himself in the salon, reading a book," McCullough writes.

Teedie's knack for learning was demonstrated by someone else once again later during the trip. Ellie, who was suffering a bad throat, "took offense when told to ease up and miss part of one day's touring. 'I want to learn about things, too, like Teedie,' he insisted."

Later, McCullough continues: "Still, there remains a theme, a mounting refrain really, of the pleasure and pride in being the first to see or do something, and eagerness to set himself apart from the others, to distinguish himself, to get out ahead of them; or simply to be alone, absorbed in private thoughts."

---

Foreshadowing the sorrow death would bring him later in his life, during this trip he was informed that his Uncle Weir Roosevelt died. He wrote in his diary, "It is the third relation that has died in my short life. What will come?"

---

As a boy, Teedie's father instilled a sense of action, hard work, and exercise into all of his kids, especially Theodore Jr. The family doctor wrote something that would become the family creed: "Organs are made for action, not existence; they are made to work, not to be; and when they work well they can be well."

"Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must *make* your own body," Theodore's dad admonished him. "It is a drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it."

"it was no good wishing to appear like the heroes he worshipped if he made no effort to *be* like them. Strength had to come first; one must be strong before everything else," McCullough writes.

---

"Asthma" in Greek means panting, something Theodore constantly struggled with as a kid. But these struggles made him stronger:

> Ailment other than asthma, any of the inevitable knocks and scrapes of childhood, or of later life, are often taken with notable stoicism. It is as if having experienced asthma, he finds other pains and discomforts mild by comparison.
> 
> He has learned at an early age what a precarious, unpredictable thing life is—and how very vulnerable *he* is. He must be prepared always for the worst.
> 
> But the chief lesson is that life is quite literally a battle. And the test is how he responds, in essence whether he sees himself as a helpless victim or decides to fight back, whether he becomes, as Teedie was to say of a particular variety of desert bird, "extremely tenacious of life."

[[Marcel Proust]] thought his asthma, like his homosexuality, was part of a price he had to pay for his creative gifts:

> We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy...Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly."

---

On his father's parenting style, Teedie once remarked that his father "used now and then to say that he hesitated whether to tell something favorable because he did not think a sugar diet was good for me."

I love that. [[Don't give people sugar diets.]]

---

Theodore Jr.'s father had the "power...of being focused." Louisa Schuyler said, "Without his power of concentration and great physical endurance such a life would have been impossible."

**If you want to do great things, you must cultivate the power of concentration.**

---

When Theodore Jr. went off in the train for Harvard, Theodore Sr. wrote, "As I saw the last of the train bearing you away...I realized what a luxury it was to have a boy in whom I could place perfect trust and confidence..."

I think that's a perfect goal as a parent to strive for in raising your kids: raise them so when they grow up, you have complete confidence and trust in who they are and what they'll do.

This feeling was reciprocated by the son. Theodore wrote his dad while he was in college: "I do not think there is a fellow in college who has a family that love him as much as you all do me, and I am *sure* that there is no one who has a father who is also his best and most intimate friend, as you are mine...I do not find it nearly so hard as I expected not to drink and smoke..."

After attending his father's funeral, he poured out his soul to his diary: He experienced "bitter agony when I kissed the dear, dead face and realized he would never again on this earth speak to me. He was the most wise and loving father that ever lived: I owe everything to him."

With his father now gone, nothing seemed to matter anymore. "Am working away pretty hard," he wrote in May; "but I do not care so much for my marks now; what I most valued them for was *his* pride in them."

---

On a gate to the entrance of Harvard Yard, William Roscoe Thayer had inscribed:

> Enter to grow in wisdom
> Depart better to serve thy country and they kind.

That's a good life motto.

---

After Harvard, Roosevelt attended Columbia Law School:

> "The law work is very interesting," he said in his diary; and again, "I like the law school work very much." Some afternoons, when not at the Astor Library, he read law in the offices of Uncle Robert...

---

Roosevelt wrote a book, *Naval War of 1812*, and his work habits are revealing about who he was and how he approached his calling:

> To write his *Naval War of 1812,* Theodore forced himself to master every nuance and technical term of seamanship—Theodore, who never particularly cared for sailing, who disliked long sea voyages. Theodore had plowed through everything in print on his subject, tracked down original documents to amass volumes of statistics on fighting ships, armaments, crews.

Sometimes, though, he felt as if he had taken on more than he could handle. He wrote, "I have plenty of information now, but I can't get it into words; I am afraid it is too big a task for me."

(I'm glad other people feel this. If I were to ever write a history book, I think this would be my problem. I'm amazed at authors like David McCullough or Ron Chernow who can not only do the research, but then shape that research into something that's very fun to read and actually coherent.)

---

When Roosevelt was in the State Legislature, he shared a house. His roommate would "always know when it was Theodore returning from a weekend, because Theodore would swing the front door open and be halfway up the stairs before the door swung shut with a bang."

This is telling: it reveals the energy and drive with which Theodore went about his day and conducted his business.

---

On the day that both his mother and wife died, February 14, 1884, Theodore wrote a big "X" on that day in his diary. Beneath it he wrote, "The light has gone out of my life."

---

**What someone does *for* you, they'll eventually do *to* you:**

> Once, seeing one of his ablest cowboys about to put the Maltese brand on an unbranded stray found on Gregor Lang's range, Theodore dismissed him on the spot. The cowboy could not understand. "A man who will steal *for* me will steal *from* me," Theodore said. "You're fired."

---

During his time in the West, Theodore Roosevelt came to embrace not only the lifestyle but the virtues of a "cowboy." He wrote in *Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail*:

> "Meanness, cowardice, and dishonestly are not tolerated," he observed. "There is a high regard for truthfulness and keeping one's word, intense contempt for any kind of hypocrisy, and a hearty dislike for a man who shirks his work." It was, of course, exactly the code he had been raised on. (Recalling his father years later, he would use very nearly the same words: "He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.") The cowboy was bold, cared about his work; he was self-reliant and self-confident. Perhaps most important of all, the cowboy seemed to know how to deal with death, death in a dozen different forms being an everyday part of his life.

(That is probably one of my favorite passages I've ever read.)

---

I like wrote McCullough wrote of Theodore in the Afterword:

> A book was about the only thing that could make him sit still and his love of books lasted as long as he lived. He read everything and anything, sometimes two books in an evening, and his favorites—theIrish sagas, Bunyan, Scott, Cooper, the letter of Abraham Lincoln, *Huckleberry Finn*—he read many times over.

---

## Books mentioned
- *The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt* by William H. Harbaugh
- *The Pilgrams Progress*
- *My Brother Theodore Roosevelt*

Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. believed in hard work and knowledge. He remarked, “most things in this world, half their terrors vanish when you walk up and tackle them.” The anxious thoughts about what “might” happen were often worse than the actual situation. Once “you lay hold of the lion’s skin it comes off and the same old donkey is underneath.”

As he edged toward turning ninety, he wrote:

> My old formula is that a man should be an enthusiast in the front of his head and a sceptic in the back. Do his damndest without believing that the cosmos would collapse if he failed. One should have the same courage for failure that many have for death.

When Chief Justice Melville Fuller delayed in getting the cases assigned to Holmes over to him, Holmes wrote him a note:

> Will you let me know as soon as convenient the cases you assign to me. I worry until I know. Nil actum reputans dum quid superesset agendum.

The Latin was a quote from Lucanus’s poem about Caesar: “He believed nothing done, so long as anything remained undone.”

Holmes had an unbelievable work ethic. In total, he wrote 873 opinions, a Supreme Court record. “He brought that same zest for duty to everything,” Budiansky wrote. “In 1865, at age twenty-one, he began keeping a list of every book he read, noting them down in tiny handwriting in a small leather…book, known to his secretaries as the ‘Black Book.’ By the time of his death the list exceeded four thousand, which worked out to more than a book a week for seventy years. The range was extraordinary: law, philosophy, sociology, literature, religion, history, economics, murder mysteries, poetry, science.”

---

In his opinions, Holmes rarely used legal jargon. The quality of his prose demonstrated clear thinking. Learned Hand praised in Holmes’s opinions his “deadly eye” for “question-begging words” that disguised shallow thinking. “To Holmes, the act of writing was above all the act of thinking. Finding the right words was not rhetorical ornamentation: it was the very essence of his work of thinking though complex legal jargon.”

Note: What people mean by writing is thinking. It forces you to come up with words that describe what’s in your head. The mismatch between the words you use and the thoughts in your head is the actual process of your thinking being refined. You’re being forced to put a thought which contains many words and many meanings into a few words that each just have one meaning. That is thinking.

---

Boston in the 1800s was a town full of pompous, educated men and women seeking to make their mark on the world through their words and books. Pretty much everyone was Unitarian. “Unitarianisms’s fundamental tenet was that God had given man a rational nature and a moral conscience, and expected him to use them. Salvation was no longer to be found in outward conformity to rigid doctrine or unquestioning obedience to an unknowable God, but lay rather within each man’s own conscience.”

This philosophy “now channeled into a faith that made self-improvement, the cultivation of virtue, and social conscience the ultimate expression of God’s will.”

Edward Everett Hale put it best: “There was the real impression that the kingdom of heaven was to be brought in…if we only knew enough”

This was the culture Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was born into, and came to love.

---

From a young age, Holmes showed an act for words and conversing. His report card at age six said, “Talk’s too much.” His brother Edward explained, “Wendell ends every sentence with a ‘but’ so as to hold the floor till he can think of something else to say.”

---

Holmes understood the importance of focus. He wrote in a letter about his father:

> If he [his father] had the patience to concentrate all his energy on a single subject, which perhaps is saying if he had been a different man, he would have been less popular, but he might have produced a great work. I often am struck by his insight in things that he lightly touched. But, as I said, **it is the last five percent that makes the difference between the great and the clever**.

---

As a boy, Holmes had a “futile shrinking from new things” that kept him from learning to ride or drive a horse or ice skate. But this was not a “physical timidity; it was rather that he already had a sense of what it took to truly master a subject, and an inkling of the dissatisfactions of half-knowledge.”

---

Holmes did not value academics. In 1913, he warned Felix Frankfurter that academic life is…

> a withdrawl from the fight in order to utter smart things that cost you nothing except thinking them from a cloister…Business in the world is unhappy, often seems mean, and always challenges your power to idealize the brute fact but it hardens the fibre and I think is likely to make more of a man of one who turns it to success

---

For Holmes, the war taught him “early on to face with courage and calmness the inevitable hardships of life.” In 1917, he told Harold Laski “I am converting misfortune into a source of satisfaction.” The author explains, “His limitless capacity for work was undoubtedly an emotional escape but it was also a need that he shared with many who had been through the intense experiences of war: civilian life just did not seem that exciting by comparison.” “Repose,” Holmes wrote, “is not the destiny of man.” **“Life is a struggle,” the author observes, “and it is the struggle that gives it meaning. The only thing to do was to give one’s all, and leave the consequences to fate.”**

---

In a great quote about opportunity costs, Holmes said, “Remember, my friend, that every good costs something. Don’t forget that to have anything means to go without something else. Even to be a person, to be _this_ means to be _not that_.”

---

During his first year of law school, a professor said he “had never known of anyone in the law who studied anything like as hard as Wendell.” “From the start,” the author wrote, “he took heart in the belief that mastery of a subject, and thorough professional expertise, was the only way to accomplish anything significant in life. A year and a half after receiving his degree, and still thoroughly immersed in a now self-directed program of voluminous readings in the law, he wrote William James of his ‘ever increasing conviction that law as well as any other series of facts in this world may be approached in the interests of science and may be studied, yes, and practiced, with the preservation of one’s ideals. I should even say that they grew robust under the regimen.'”

Holmes’ father’s dilettantism worked out well for Holmes, because it showed him what _not_ to do. He wrote:

> Since I wrote in December I have worked at nothing but the law. Philosophy has hibernated in torpid slumber, and I have lain “slutishly soaking and gurgling in the devil’s pickle,” as Carlye says. It has been necessary,—if a man chooses a profession he cannot forever content himself in picking out the plums with fastidious dilettantism and give the rest of the loaf to the poor, but must easy his way manfully through crust and crumb—soft, unpleasant inner parts which, within one, swell, causing discomfort in the bowels.

---

Holmes became friends with both William and Henry James. William, while Holmes and he were close, was in a deep depression about the nature of the universe. In a world without a God, why did anything matter, James explained. Holmes, ever the realist, didn’t understand. He advised William (with words that a lot of us should take into account today re: politics and the “world” and everyone having an opinion on everything): “It seems to me that the only promising activity is to make _my_ universe coherent and livable, not to babble about _the_ universe.” This quote revealed Holmes’ philosophy about life: it doesn’t care about you, so get on with it and do your duty! (Or, rather, that’s my interpretation.)

---

One night after working late in the law library, Holmes and a younger lawyer, George Upham, walked home together. Recounting their conversation sixty years later, Upham said Holmes:

> told me he had a theory that anyone could accomplish anything he wished, if only he wished it hard enough, continuously, morning, noon, and night, and perhaps subconsciously while sleeping

A half century after that conversation, Holmes told John Wu that to achieve anything of importance “takes time, the capacity to want something fiercely and want it all the time, and sticking to the rugged course.”

Holmes followed his own advice.

While editing a new edition of Kent’s Commentaries, Holmes became utterly absorbed in the work. “I have as you know given up all my time to Kent’s Commentaries and during the past year especially have hardly touched any other business,” he wrote in July 1872.

He kept his manuscript in a green back, and he took it everywhere with him. After dining one night with Henry James’s mother, she wrote a letter to Henry:

> Wendell Holmes dined with us a few days ago. His whole life, soul and body, is utterly absorbed in his _last_ work upon his Kent. He carries about his manuscript in his green bag and never loses sight of it for a moment. He started to go to Will’s room to wash his hands, but came back for his bag, and when we went to dinner, Will said, “Don’t you want to take your bag with you?” He said, “Yes, I always do so at home.”

This “green bag” was so precious to him that, once a month, he conducted fire drills with the servants and staff of his house and ensured they knew their first mission if flames were to ensue: rescue the green bag.

Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes thought Holmes’ work on Kent is what allowed him to draft opinions faster than everyone else. The time Holmes spent in total immersion of the law “had given him an unusual and complete mastery of common law decisions and history. The effect of this in his habit as [a] judge was that, where others would be compelled to devote an enormous amount of time to the rediscovery of law, Holmes needed to make no re-examination—the law was at his fingertips.”

This is a great example of Dead Time and Alive Time.

The time in-between jobs he studied a ton, so that when he finally did get a court appointment, he was better prepared and smarter than everyone else. Such is how one should spend their days “waiting.” [[Notes/Active Patience|Active Patience]]

The author writes, “Success to Holmes above all meant accomplishing something original and of intellectual merit.” I relate to that strongly.

---

On the bench, Holmes had little patience for lawyers, remarking that they take 5 to ten minutes to say things that could easily be said in one. To pass the time, he wrote letters while lawyers were presenting their cases. This gave him the reputation of attentiveness, because, naturally, people thought he was taking notes on the case.

---

On writing, Holmes said, “One has to strike the jugular and let the rest go.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

Every good story-at-sea has at least two of three elements: a shipwreck, murder, or mutiny. While this tale definitely had the second, the third is questionable, and the first doesn’t appear at all.

Richard Snow does his best to recount the complicated and mysterious story aboard the _Somers,_ which is magnificent.

In 1848, the _Somers_, a US brig-of-war, set out from New York Harbor on a journey south with young naval officers. Its mission was to deliver papers, but its real mission was to teach its young crew what sea-faring life was like. (The Naval Academy at Annapolis was yet to exist, and, as a result of what happened on this ship, would be created.)

![](https://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2548-1-768x1024.jpg)

Phillip Spencer

Aboard the ship was Phillip Spencer, a “young punk” who just so happened to be the son of the Secretary of War for President John Tyler. Events ensued aboard the ship—a supposed mutiny led by Spencer—which caused Captain Alexander Mackenzie to hang Philip Spencer and two of his comrades.

The book’s first half explains the background of some of the crew and the events that lead to the eventual hanging. The second half covers the dramatic “inquiry” and court-martial into Captain Mackenzie’s behavior that sought to determine: 1. Was a mutiny _really_ going to happen? And 2. If so, was hanging the culprits necessary?

The drama rests in the fact that while Mackenzie claims a mutiny was coming, and Spencer admitted to talking about it, the actual likelihood of a mutiny happening was not great. So, the question was, did Mackenzie act too rashly? Some thought he did, others thought he acted valiantly. Maybe the fact that this was the only mutiny in US naval history gives us the answer.

At both the “inquiry”—a formal investigation simply to gather facts—and the subsequent court-martial, the captain’s behavior was deemed appropriate, and he faced no punishment. Philip Spencer’s father and the bride of another hanged were calling for Mackenzie’s prosecution for murder. They doubted a mutiny was really going to happen and thought Mackenzie’s punishment was overboard (no pun intended). Mackenzie’s log of whippings on board reveals he might be quick to punish. In total, he administered over 2,000 lashes to sailors who acted out of line, the youngest of which was a mere boy.

![](https://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2549-1-768x1024.jpg)

Captain Alexander Mackenzie

And that’s the story. Dramatic and entertaining? Yes.

My one critique (which, as a professional, I am not) about the book was that the author relied too heavily on direct quotes. In a story like this, having primary sources is important, but at times, the frequent direct quotes stopped the flow of the story.

For example:

> On March 28, “the court met this day in pursuance of adjournment…And the court being cleared, the court proceeded to consider the charges and specifications, and to make their finding thereon.”

Why not just write, “On March 28, the court met to consider the arguments and determine a verdict.” I understand the appeal of quoting the direct source, but the quote is just cumbersome.

I also didn’t like how he referenced two modern-day inventions as an

Still, like with any part of history, there is much to learn. Mainly, one is left asking why Mackenzie risked his career to hang the Secretary of War’s son on mere _talk_ of mutiny and a picture of a ship with a black flag. Such is the lesson to take away from this. It’s hard to undo hanging someone, yet it seemed as if Captain Mackenzie was set on this method of discipline from the very beginning. Why?

It’s theorized in the book’s epilogue that his decision was intentional. In a time of peace, it would be hard for a ship captain to become famous, as many of his peers did in the Battle of 1812.

So, was the decision to hang the son of such a prominent figure Mckenzie’s way of being remembered? Perhaps. Here we are, two hundred years later, still talking about him.

Sailing the Graveyard Sea by Richard Snow

## Impressions

I was let down by this book, but only by a little.

I started reading it on July 4, thinking I would learn the history of the Declaration of Independence and the early days of America. Aside from a brief mention of the paper signed by Mr. John Hancock, it wasn't what I was expecting at all.

Instead of a grand narrative of the political battlefields of 1776, it's a grand narrative of the actual battlefields of 1776, mainly, the first year Washington's rebel army faced off against the lobster backs.

The mistake was mine and mine alone. I should have read the description more, and not just the title. Once I understood the premise of the book, I was delighted to learn about the Revolutionary War.

People parade George Washington around as one of the best generals ever, but the first half of this book tells a very different picture. Was he a great general? Yes. But he was also indecisive and let his emotions get the best of him; he was constantly on the retreat from the British, and was always fighting Congress for more money and men, since he could really perform only as good as the soldiers he had.

Still, it was a miracle the American Revolution was a success, and without George Washington, who knows what would have happened?

From the last chapter:

> Especially for those men who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning—how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities of strengths of individual character had made the difference—the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.

---
## Notes

**There’s great reward in being able to see things as they are, and not be fooled by optimism**

David McCullough on what made George Washington a great commander during the early days of the Continental Army:

"In truth, the situation was worse than they realized, and no one perceived this as clearly as Washington. Seeing things as they were, and not as he wished them to be, was one of his salient strengths."

Later, McCullough writes:

“Seeing things as they were, not as he wished they were, was known to be one of Washington’s salient strengths…”

Once, during the Siege of Boston, Washington replied to a message from someone complaining about the situation, saying, "...we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish."

---

**In a position of power, respect is more valuable than likability or friendship**

Washington was “amiable” and “modest” during his time as commander, but he intentionally set himself above others. He advised his officers, “Be easy…but not too familiar, lest you subject yourself to a want of that respect, which is necessary to support a proper command.”

He wanted his soldiers to respect him more than like him; he was to be seen as their commanding officer, not a friend.

---

**Plan for the circumstances**

In the heat of battle in New York, Washington’s presence was requested in Philadelphia to consult with Congress. Meanwhile, arrangements were made “for fast horses to be held at ready intervals along the road, so that if necessary he could get back to New York with ‘utmost expedition.’”

---

**Appeal to the benefits (or fears) of winning (or losing) when trying to spurn action in someone**

Washington: “The hour is fast approaching, on which the honor and success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding country depend. Remember officers and soldiers that you are free men, fighting for the blessings of liberty—that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do no acquit yourselves like men.”

---

Sir George Otto Trevelyan wrote about the American Revolution: "It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world."

---

Abigail Adams: "Affliction is a good man's shining time."

---

David McCullough:

> He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgement. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.

---

## Books mentioned

- *Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company in Conversation*
- *The Journal of Major George Washington*
- *The Crisis*, Thomas Paine

1776

If, like me, you've long wondered how Germany—after the Treaty of Versailles—was able to amass a big enough army and enough weapons to invade Poland and France, and wage war on Britain, just a few short years later, this is how: 1. They ignored the treaty and 2. Hitler played Neville Chamberlain like a violin.

*The Gathering Storm* is Winston Churchill's account of those events, and these are my notes.

Churchill's rise to fame in pre-World War Two British government largely stems on the fact that, for years, he raised warnings about Germany's build up of arms and soldiers, France's diminishing arms and soldiers, and was trying to raise alarm bells. No one listened, until, of course, they had no choice but to.

This first volume covers from the end of World War One, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and what it was *supposed* to mean, Germany's eventual invasion of Poland, and Churchill's ascension to Prime Minister.

It is a very, very fun book to read. I'm quite looking forward to studying the next five volumes.
## Notes

**If you want to lead, you need the best information**

Churchill maintained relationships with people deep within the French and German governments. This "enabled me to form and maintain opinions which did not depend on what was published in the newspapers..."

---

In 1932, Churchill almost met Hitler in person. The meeting was cancelled after Churchill asked one of Hitler's confidants why he hated Jews. "How can any man help how he is born?" Writing about the cancellation, Churchill says, "Thus Hitler lost his only chance of meeting me."

Thought that was a cheeky way to write that.

---

**Disasters come fast. Though everything might look okay, decades can happen in minutes. Always be preparing; always be on the lookout.**

Churchill: "Wars come very suddenly"

---

Churchill had great faith in human's ability to do the impossible when circumstances demanded at. When the question was raised how Britain would defend against bombers, Churchill wrote:

> My experience is that in these matters, when the need is fully explained by military and political authorities, science is always able to provide something. We were told that it was impossible to grapple with submarines, but methods were found... Many things were adopted in the war which we were told were technically impossible, but **patience, perseverance, and, above all, the spur of necessity under war conditions, made men's brains act with greater vigour, and science responded to the demands...**

---

**Success isn't always about having the nicest equipment or fanciest tools, but rather using what you *do* have better than anyone else.**

Writing about the British radar system, Churchill admits the Germans "developed a technically efficient radar system which was in some respects ahead of our own." But also explains that the Germans were surprised by "the extent to which we had turned our discoveries into practical effect... **it was our operational efficiency rather than novelty of equipment that was the British achievement**."

---

**You never know when something seemingly bad will end up working out for your good.**

Churchill:

> How little can we foresee the consequences either of wise or unwise action, of virtue or of malice! Without this measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed... This was not the first time—or indeed the last—that I have received a blessing in what was at the time a very effective disguise.

That reflection came after Churchill's realization that not being formally connected to Chamberlain's administration was actually a good thing. When things needed to change, Parliament needed someone unattached and completely new to the government. Churchill was able to be this person.

At first, he was upset at not being picked to serve with Chamberlain, but then, as his reflection shows, it was a "blessing in...a very effective disguise."

---

**If you fight when you don't have to, you won't have to fight when you're forced to**

From the beginning, Churchill was an advocate of war. Not because he was a bloodthirsty scoundrel, but because he saw what was happening in Germany and how eerily similar it was to the first war. Churchill wanted to do whatever it took to prevent another full-fledged war.

Churchill reflects on the failure of the British government to act earlier:

> Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.

That description fits lots of things in life.

If you wait to prioritize your marriage until it's on the brink of failure, it will be a much harder battle to fight than if you would've prioritized date nights and intentionally loved your spouse from the outset.

If you wait to get your finances in order until you're on the brink of bankruptcy, it will be a much more difficult challenge than if you started budgeting when you first began working.

If you wait to start working out and eating right until you have your first heart attack, getting healthy will be much more difficult than if you started doing it thirty years ago.

---

> Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.

Translation: No one is made great sitting on the sidelines, coasting along, making easy decisions. Great men and women are formed through difficult circumstances.

---

Churchill on Vyacheslav Molotov:

> I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.

The Gathering Storm


### Impressions

I'm struck by the depth of research and prose with which it is written, and it doesn't even cover the presidential years! I'm anxiously waiting for volume two. Some things I learned:

• Jack was incredibly wealthy, yet he never used his name to gain prestige for himself; his father often did on his behalf. The son usually accepted these favors.

• He had a harrowing experience in the war. At first, he was excited to fight. But after a week-long stretch on an island, after his PT boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer, he had enough.

• His back pain and other ailments were his biggest problems. He had a priest read him his last rites on two separate occasions because of how close he was to dying.

• He had a unique education in foreign affairs, which is what he focused on in Congress and the Senate. His dad was the Ambassador to Great Britain at the start of WW2 and spent time in Europe and Germany just before the War broke out.

• He was quite the player. He used his charm to gain votes from women when he was young and could flash his smile but never gave up his womanizing ways even after being married.

• He lost his older brother and younger sister while they were not very old, both, in fact, in different plane accidents. Of the 9 kids his parents had, only 5 would live until old age. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated five years after his older brother.

### Notes

From an early age, Jack demonstrated his individuality. “There was always the sense that Jack stood somewhat apart from his large and close-knit family–he was of the unit but also outside of it. He was the family reader, the daydreamer, the introspective son, the one who relished words and their meaning, who liked poetry. Alone among the older kids, he had a romantic imagination, a feel of the things of the spirit, for the intangibles in human affairs. (It’s what drew him to Churchill, a man whose appeal Joe Senior could never grasp.)”

---

Young Jack had a serious rivalry with his older brother, Joe Jr; much to Joe Sr.’s delight. “Remember that Jack is practicing at the piano each day an hour and studying from one-half to three-quarters of an hour on his books so that he is really spending more time than you are,” he wrote Joe Jr. in July 1926. Aiding Jack’s superior intellectual prowess were his frequent illnesses and maladies. He used his time trapped in bed to read, learn, and study. “Words and their meaning interested Jack. He was the only one in the family, his sister Eunice said, who ‘looked things up,’ the one who ‘did the best on all intellectual things and sort of monopolized them.’”

---

”More than any of his siblings, he internalized his mother’s mantra that reading constituted “the most important instrument of knowledge. Biography, history, tales of adventure and chivalry–these were his genres, as he devoured Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott and read and reread Macaulay’s *Lays of Ancient Rome.* The cadences of historical prose appealed to him, and he had a first-rate memory of what he read, often able to recall scenes and quotations with astonishing accuracy, even decades later.

---

As Rose put it, Jack “thought his own thoughts, did things his own way, and somehow just didn’t fit any pattern. Now and then, fairly often in fact, that distressed me, since I thought I knew what was best. But at the same time that I was taken aback, I was enchanted and amused. He was a funny little boy, and he said things in such an original, vivid way.”

---

Rose, however, ensured her kids had proper grammar: “To my distress most of them seemed to be afflicted with deafness about the proper uses of ‘who’ and ‘whom,’ ‘I’ and ‘me,’ ‘shall and ‘will,’ ‘may’ and ‘can.’ They split infinitives with abandon, and put in commas or left them out as the spirit (an evil spirit) moved them, and they ended sentences with prepositions.”

---

Joe Sr. was mistakenly thought to only care about winning. He loathed seeing his boys fail at something, or so they thought. A friend, Paul Chase, who crewed for Jack as a replacement, caught a half hour lecture from “the old man on our return to shore. He said he watched the race and that he was disgusted with both of us. There was no sense, he claimed, in going to a race unless you did your damnedest to win…” The author makes a good distinction here though. “Chase’s anecdote hints at the possibility of a more benign assessment of Joe Kennedy’s relentlessness: that it was less about winning than about expending maximum effort in the attempt. **It doesn’t matter if you win or not, but you better be damn sure you at least try to win, else what’s the point of doing anything?**

---

The environment around the Kennedys was…intense. One weekend visitor wrote:

> Anticipate that each Kennedy will ask what you think of another Kennedy’s (a) dress, (b) hairdo, (c), backhand, (d) latest public achievement. Be sure to answer “terrific.” This should get you through diner. Now for the football field. It’s “touch,” but it’s murder. If you don’t want to play, don’t come. If you do come, play, or you’ll be fed in the kitchen and no one will speak to you. Don’t let the girls fool you. Even pregnant, they can make you look silly. Above all, don’t suggest any plays, even if you played quarterback at school. The Kennedys have the signal-calling department sewed-up, and all of them have A-pluses in leadership…Run madly on every play, and make a lot of noise. Don’t appear to be having too much fun, though. They’ll accuse you of not taking the game seriously enough.
>

---

A friend of Jack’s, Ralph “Rip” Horton noticed that, the author writes, “whenever a group of boys got together to listen to the popular radio quiz show *Information Please*, most of them could answer only a few questions, but Jack whizzed through more than half. ‘How do you know all this stuff?’ They’d ask. ‘I guess I read a lot,’ came Jack’s reply, neither boastful nor falsely modest.

‘Jack read a great deal but not to the point he was burdensome about it,’ Horton remembered. ‘I think he could read quite fast, and, yes, he read a great deal but not ostentatiously…He seemed to absorb what he read much better than the rest of us. He also, which I think is rather indicative of his future, always read *The New York Times.* He read that every single day from cover to cover, and I think that gave him a great insight into the political scene and international activities which he was so interested in.”

---

“History teacher Russell Ayers remarked in the fall of 1933 that Jack possessed ‘one of the few great minds’ he had in history class.”

---

After Jack’s visit to Europe, and seeing the Old-World up-close, a trait that had been visible from his childhood started to emerge more strongly. Notably, his ability to form independent judgements, often which contradicted those of his own father’s. “Most portentously, once sees in the young Kennedy that summer an emerging capacity an willingness to view world affairs in contextual, dispassionate terms–a contrast with his father, who tended always to view the outside world mostly in terms of what it meant for himself and his family.”

---

William Douglas-Home said of Jack: “He was age 21, very young, and very interested in everything. I mean, not only in politics, but the thing that struck you about him was that he was so vital about everything…He was interested, always interested. He would never have a deep political discussion without jokes at the same time. He had a very highly developed sense of humor. Joe was portably more serious than he was.”

---

Donald Thurber, a fellow student, remarked that Jack was willing to always challenge assumptions and to ask, “What makes you think so?” “You got the impression that here was a mind that was learning from other people, and that longed to learn from other people–he would regard them as sources of information and knowledge to fill out his own.”

---

In a great comparison between democracies and dictatorships, Jack noticed something. He, the author writes, “maintained that dictatorships by their nature have an easier time than democracies do in mobilizing resources–the latter, he argued, invariably must spend valuable time and energy attempting to reconcile competing priorities and competing interpretations of the national interest. Whereas citizens in totalitarian societies can be instructed on what to do, those in free societies must be won over, and that doesn’t always happen quickly.”

This gives a potential reason why it’s so hard to build things, or really do anything, quickly in America. It’s not about just finding the money and doing it. First, a majority must be convinced, and there are a lot of reasons why a majority spend time fighting things. What’s interesting is that the majority doesn’t have to be fighting for the *same* reason for something to not happen. One group can be arguing for the price tag, while another group is arguing the location of the project. Either of the groups by themselves aren’t a majority, but when combined, it becomes one. If this is the case (and I don’t know if it is), it would be smart to lobby the smaller of the two groups (less demands, in theory). If there are fewer people arguing about the price of a project than there are about the location, don’t spend resources trying to resolve the price *and* the location. Rather, try to figure out a way to decrease the cost or pay for it in creative ways (instead of through taxes.) In theory, if that group is appeased, there is no longer a majority fighting the project.

---

Jack’s Harvard mentor, Bruce Hopper, cautioned Jack with some helpful words of advice after his first book, *Why England Slept*, had massive literary success. Warning against selling out his name, Hopper wrote, “I know your mailbox must be full of laudatory reviews, letters of appreciation, and offers (maybe even from Hollywood!). Take them all in perspective, as reward for a job well done, and then try to forget them.”

---

Joe Kennedy helped JFK a lot in life. He helped get his book published, helped Jack get into the Navy, and then helped him become commander of a PT boat. A lot of people, perhaps rightly so, looked down upon Joe Kennedy’s “nepotism.” But to Lieutenant Commander John Harllee said: “There’s a lot of people in America who use political influence to keep *out* of combat, but Jack Kennedy used it to get *into* combat.” I thought that was a great point.

---

Jack’s PT boat incident made him a war hero, something Joe Jr., his now overshadowed brother and also servicemen, didn’t like. Joe, for the early part of their life, was the favorite child, but when Jack started to come into his own, that dynamic changed. It especially changed after the publication of Jack’s book, which essentially made him a famous young author. At home during a leave, the family was seated around the dinner table when Judge John J. Burns offered a toast “to Ambassador Joe Kennedy, father of our hero, our *own* hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.” “That was it,” the author writes. “No mention of the older son, who was seated right next to his father and who in a few days would be heading to England to go against the thrust of the ferocious Nazi war machine. As the judge sat down, Joe Junior lifted his glass and smiled stiffly. But another guest, Boston police commissioner Joe Timilty, said that that night he could hear Young Joe sobbing in the bed next to his and muttering, ‘By God, I’ll show them.’”

---

The author makes an interesting reference to Henri Bergson’s idea of “the illusion of retrospective determinism, or “the belief that whatever occurred in history was bound the occur.”

---

One of the most baller things to read about about America during the war is how insane our industrial factories just *freaking worked.* “At Ford’s bomber-producing Willow Run Plant…which featured assembly lines almost a mile long, workers by early 1944 were turning out 650 B-24 Liberators per month, or one every eighty minutes. Pilots and crews slept on cots at the plant, waiting to fly the bombers away as soon as they were built. On the West Coast, Henry Kaiser used mass-production techniques to cut construction time for Liberty ships–the huge 440-foot cargo vessels that transported the tanks, trucks, and guns overuse–from 355 days to 56 days. (In one publicity stunt, Kaiser’s Richmond shipyard, near San Francisco, constructed a Liberty ship in four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-six minutes.)…In the all-important year of 1943, the United States built three and a half times as many aircraft as Nazi Germany and well over five times as many as Japan.”

---

“Never be without a book in your hand.” – John F. Kennedy to his little brother, Teddy.

---

Distraught at Churchill’s ousting to the Socialist party near the end of the war, JFK made a few great observations. It showed his ability to think critically, and, even when he disagreed, assess the situation with poise. He wrote in his diary: “Socialism is inefficient. I will never believe differently. But you can feed people in a socialistic state, and that may be what will ensure its eventual success.” Lesson: People don’t care about their party, they just want their basic needs met. Beyond that, that’s when people start arguing. He also wrote: “It is important in assaying this election to decide how much of the victory was due to a “time for change” vote which would have voted against any government in power, whether Right of Left, and how much was due to real Socialist strength. My own opinion is that was about 40 per cent due to dissatisfaction with conditions over which the government had no great control but from which they must bear responsibility–20 per cent due to a belief in Socialism as the only solution to the multifarious problems England must face–and the remaining 40 per cent due to a class feeling–I.e., that it was time “the working man” had a chance.”

---

During his campaign for Congress, Jack and his aides came to an unorthodox realization: that regularly campaigning would not do the job. Their reasoning was simple: people who showed up to rallies were already committed to you. In order to win, you have to go *to* the people. So he would go door-to-door. He also learned a valuable public speaking skill: connect to your audience. During a talk to a group of Gold Star Mother’s (mothers who lost a son in the war), Kennedy said, “I think I know how all you mothers feel because my mother is a Gold Star Mother, too.” In that instant, an aide recalled, “the candidate established a kind of ‘magical link’ with everyone in the room, made himself real, showed that he understood their grief.”

---

In several speeches, Kennedy quoted a line from Rosseau: “As soon as man says of the affairs of state, ‘What does it matter to me?’ the state may be given up as lost.”

---

The attention to detail, even in the little things mattered. So too did having backup plans. Volunteers would get a list of names and numbers to call, with a document outlining Kennedy’s key stances on certain issues. If they got a question they couldn’t answer, someone from Kennedy’s inner circle would call back and answer it for them. On Election Day, those same people were called back, encouraged to vote, and asked if they needed a ride to the polls! At a rally with Jack, Boston mayor John B. Hynes was surprised to see two teleprompters set up for the speech. That is, until one broke down and the aides quickly and quietly switched to the other one. “Hynes understood he was in the presence of perfectionists,” the author writes. In another example, in a tea to kick off his campaign, he wanted to make sure the invitations were worded in such a way that they didn’t make anyone feel excluded. The crew settled on putting “Guests invited,” in the bottom right, “so it would have a sort of dual purpose,” Polly Fitzgerald later said, “in that a person who got it would feel that she was very lucky and it was personal, and yet people who didn’t get it would know that they could be invited.”

---

Kennedy was never a drinker. A running gag during the campaign was, after a long day, Kennedy would say, “Boy, do I need a drink,” and they would all go to a drugstore for a chocolate milkshake.

---

Jackie Bouvier loved his innate curiosity. “The luckiest thing I used to think about him was whatever you were interested in, Jack got interested in…When I was reading all this eighteenth century, he’d snatch a book from me and read and know all of Louis XV’s mistresses before I would,” she recalled. “People fascinated him,” the author writes, “and he had an appreciation for excellence in human endeavor–for virtuosity in performance, whatever the field–that Jackie admired and shared. At dinner parties, she said, Jack asked lots of questions, unlike other politicians present, who would generally talk only about themselves.” Jackie was witty too. “During the cacophonous family dinners, Jackie usually kept quiet. ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ Jack once asked her, and the room fell silent with anticipation. ‘If I told them to you, they wouldn’t be mine, would they, Jack?’”

---

To deepen his voice, Jack was instructed by a vocal coach to bark like a dog every morning. So he did.

---

After a ridiculous back surgery, Jack distracted himself, from his idleness and his pain, as he so often did when he was young. Although this time, instead of *reading* books, he wrote one. “This project saved his life,” Jackie said. “It helped him channel all his energies while distracting him from pain.” It would have been easy for JFK to lay low and piddle around. Perhaps even feel sorry for himself for the circumstances he was in, but that wouldn’t have done any good, and that’s not what leaders do. Leaders, hard workers, and ambitious people come to grips with reality, and seek to make the most of any situation. The increased downtime, and the fact that he was essentially bed-ridden, allowed him to research and write, so he did just that.

---

In a speech, JFK said: “‘Don’t teach my boy poetry,’ an English mother recently wrote the provost of Harrow. ‘Don’t teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament.’ Well, perhaps she was right–but if more politicians knew poetry and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live on the commencement day of 1956.”

---

In a contrasting statement to himself and Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy said: “The hell of it is, I love [the campaigning]. Not the fakery, but learning to talk to voters in their own language. Stevenson hates it. He’s dying to be President, but he hates campaigning. That’s the difference between us, and it’s important.

---

The book has an incredible ending. After Joe Kennedy’s admonition for a Catholic to become president, the author writes, “The son fell quiet, then looked up and smiled. ‘Well, Dad, I guess there’s only one question left. When do we start?’” And that’s the end of volume one. (I *can’t wait* for volume two, especially to read about the Bay of Pigs fiasco.)

## Books Mentioned

- *Dictatorship in the Modern World*
- *Sawdust Ceaser*
- *Germany Enters the Third Reich*
- *Mussolini’s Italy*
- *Communist Manifesto*
- *State and Revolution*
- *The Economic Basis of Politics*
- *A Treasury of the World’s Greatest Speeches*


JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century

From a young age, Spillane loved to read. “When I was a little kid,” he said, “we had moved into a school where there was a library that ran underneath the windows–and I remember the teacher saying, ‘Children, someday you’ll be able to read this book’ and she held up a copy of Moby-Dick. And I said to the teacher, ‘I like this book!’ She says to me, ‘You certainly didn’t read this book!’ And I said, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ She could never get over that!”

---

“There are only a certain number of basic plots,” Spillane said. “All stories are an elaboration on these plots and a good background in writing pulp fiction gives you the benefit of stockpiling these elaborations in your mind plus the ability to twist them into elaborations not yet used.” *You have to learn the rules and expectations, so you can break them.


---

Late in life, Spillane recalled his comic-book writing days fondly: “They were the happiest days of my life. I could walk anywhere and nobody knew who I was.” Fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

---

Sometimes, you just need a lucky break. After a friend took Spillane’s manuscript of I, The Jury to Jack McKenna of Duenewald Printing Corporation who worked with Fawcett Publications, in an intent for McKenna to pass it on to Roscoe Fawcett, McKenna couldn’t find the time to read the manuscript. His wife, however did. “You like detective stories,” McKenna told his wife. “Read this one.” The next morning, McKenna’s wife shook Jack awake. “Read it! This is different.” She read the entire thing the night before. McKenna would become Spillane’s agent.

---

Intentionally, Spillane never gave a description of his narrator, Mike Hammer. “If you describe a guy as being six-foot-two, stalwart, big-muscled and dark haired,” Spillane said in 1998, “how can a guy that’s short and fat think that he’s the hero in the story? He can’t do that. But if [Hammer’s] not described, that guy can be the hero in his own mind.”

---

Publisher Victor Weybright said, “[T]he literary world abounds in ruined careers in which a poor second book erases all the promise and luster of an initial success.” This came after Spillane showed his second manuscript, For Whom the Gods Would Destroy to the publishers. It wasn’t a bad book, they insisted, just wasn’t the right timing to publish it after how successful I, The Jury had been. So they didn’t reject it, else McKenna would have been able to sell it to someone else. Instead, they shelved it. McKenna’s lack-of-experience showed, because Spillane was given no compensation for this decision.

---

During a conversation between Mike Hammer and his creator, Hammer said to Spillane, “Writing’s a good racket, Mickey, all you need is an idea and a typewriter and you’re in business.”

---

Use what’s unique to you to create something unique to others. The author writes, “Spillane combined his eclectic reading (including pulp fiction) and life experiences (particularly wartime) with a direct knowledge of the elemental appeal of the comic book into a new style of fiction that excited and pleased a wide swath of the reading public.

---

“A perfect book is written with the climax on the last word of the last page,” Spillane said. “…If you took the last word away, you wouldn’t know what the book was about.” His editor, didn’t believe him, so Spillane bet him a thousand bucks that “if he submitted the new Hammer, Vengeance is Mine!, without the last word, the novel would make no sense. “I turned it in without the last word on the last page,” Spillane said grinning. “He said ‘What was the word, what was the word!’ I said, ‘Give me the thousand bucks.’ He gave me the thousand bucks–I gave him the word.” The last sentence of Vengeance is Mine!, of course, is “Juno was a man!”

---

The critics didn’t like Spillane’s use of sex and violence in his books, so he used their reviews for his gain. “I have gotten the worst reviews in the world,” he said. “So we made this big ad out of the bad reviews, quoting from them. Then underneath we’d have a line like, this book sold six million copies. The top of the ad said, Mickey Spillane says about his new book, ‘I hope this one gets lousy reviews.’”

---

Spillane quickly became one of America’s favorite writers. At a restaurant in Florida Keys where Hemingway’s picture hung up on the wall, Spillane stopped by and was asked for his photo to go up on the wall. On his next visit, Hemingway insisted, “Take him down or take me down.” And down Hemingway went. Later, after Hemingway bad mouthed a Spillane in Bluebook magazine, Spillane was asked what he thought of Hemingway and he responded, “Hemingway who?”

---

Victor Saville, a movie director, approached Spillane to make his books into movies. “I arranged a meeting with Spillane,” Saville said. “But not in an office, that was not the Spillane way. He insisted we meet under the clock at the Pennsylvania Railway Station.” A classic detective move, I guess? Their agreement was originally a 50/50 split of the profits, until Columbia Pictures offered Spillane $140,000 cash for four novels. Saville matched the offer, so Spillane went with Saville. Though Spillane chose the right partner, he passed on the better deal. “If Spillane had stuck to my original proposal,” Saville said, “he would have made half a million dollars as his share of the first two pictures.” Apparently, Spillane never really forgave Saville for that, even though it was kind of Spillane’s fault. Part of the deal allowed Saville to have first rights on any new Spillane novels as movies for five years. It didn’t seem like a lot, and to Spillane at the time it didn’t seem to matter, but it would cause a load of headaches in the future for Spillane. Two lessons: Know what you’re signing away and don’t sign away your future.

---

Jane Spillane, Mickey’s third wife, said in an interview:

> We would be asleep with nothing but silence in the middle of the night when I would be shaken out of nowhere from the rustling of Mickey getting out of bed, throwing on a lamp and grabbing a sticky note to write down ideas. No matter how many ideas occurred to him in the middle of the night, he would get up every time, turn on the lamp, and write them down on a sticky note. Then a book would result from his midnight musings.


Lesson: Books are made out of sticky notes ([Anne Lamott uses index cards](https://www.dltn.io/posts/book-notes-bird-by-bird-by-anne-lamott))

---

Mickey was always remodeling a house he and Jane lived in during his later years because “The guy who built it owned a lumber yard, but he didn’t own a level.” I thought that was a creative way to say it was crooked or it was a shoddy job. You could say something similar about someone who wants to write, but maybe uses basic words, “He liked to write, but it seemed like he didn’t own a dictionary,” or something like that.

---

In December of 1972, speaking to Esquire magazine about his clothes, Spillane had an important lesson on spending money: “I own two suits and a sports jacket. Clothes mean little to me.” But he owned “the best driving gear, the best flying gear in the world.” “Clothes,” he said, “were just something you wear in the city.” lesson: spend money on the things you care about.


Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction by Max Collins

## **Impressions**

<InlineImage src={https://res.cloudinary.com/dde1q4ekv/image/upload/v1690152207/9780306826139_oy2vdd.jpg} />

Whenever I watch a political thriller on Netflix I think, "No way, none of this stuff actually happens." *[Crooked](https://bookshop.org/p/books/crooked-the-roaring-20s-tale-of-a-corrupt-attorney-general-a-crusading-senator-and-the-birth-of-the-american-political-scan-nathan-masters/18618188?ean=9780306826139)* proved me wrong. This is a remarkable narrative non-fiction book about politics, Senate investigations, and bribery charges (I promise Nathan Masters makes all of that interesting) that goes all the way up to the top of the executive branch.

This book is about power, money, and the realization that any political office is just held by an ordinary person tempted by both of those things. It also sets the stage for one of the 20th Century's most notorious lawmen: J. Edgar Hoover and the birth of his shoe-shined black-suit slick-hair FBI. Reading this book helped shed some light on why Hoover was so ruthless in his documentation and the discipline special agents had to follow. Maybe he realized that without those things, a “secret police force” would do the deeds of the highest bidder.

## **Notes**

- I know a book will be good when it has a page titled “A Note to Readers” with this warning:

> This is a work of nonfiction, with no invented details or dialogue. Anything between quotation marks comes directly from historical sources, including FBI case files, Department of Justice records, newspaper reports, memoirs, archival collections, and the 3,338-page transcript of the Hearing Before the Select Committee on Investigation of the Attorney General.
>
- “When public officials were in the pocket of powerful interests, the odds would always be stacked against the little guy.”
- “Where else but a courtroom would a soot-stained miner and the mighty Anaconda Company be treated as equals?”
- The FBI first started as, essentially, a secret police force: the Bureau of Investigation. It was created in 1908 by executive action and was acting as the Justice Department’s in-house detective agency. It was not authorized by Congress.
- William Burns was the head of the Bureau Investigation and John Edgar Hoover was his young deputy.
- President Harding was a master at delivering “sonorous and empty remarks. It was his trademark. He even had a name for it–**bloviating**.”
- Calvin Coolidge was nicknamed “Silent Cal.” “Coolidge hated small talk and, although he tolerated social events, favored his own company to that of others. He slept nine hours every night, napped two hours in the afternoon, and in his waking hours went long stretches of time without opening his mouth, even during official functions.” He was “the sly and laconic Yankee rustic, who was cleverer than he appeared,” wrote one observer.
- Harry Daugherty hitched his train to President Harding throughout his whole career. This proved favorable when Harding was elected president, but disastrous after he died. Sure, he’d spent his life helping Harding navigate the ins and outs of political circumstances but, other than that, he hadn’t really **done** anything. After Harding died, his time as a free rider was coming to an end. That’s the danger of hitching your life and career to the success of someone else’s train.
- Just because someone votes to do something, or says they will do something, doesn’t mean they actually will. Robert M. La Follette understood this when, after presenting enough evidence to get a unanimous Senate vote to authorize an inquiry by the Committee on Public Land and Surveys, no one actually did anything. After seven months, the committee hadn’t even had their first meeting yet. The Senators vote was more for show. If something ever ***did*** turn up that was evidence of foul play, they wanted to be able to look back on the vote and say, “Look, we voted for that to pass,” but that doesn’t mean they were incentivized, or willing, to actually do any real work. (51)
- After Senator Burton Wheeler made his first address to the floor, though it was unprecedented he did so being a junior Senator, some people helped out. Sen. William Borah of Idaho said, “Wheeler, there’s a chance for you to make a reputation for yourself…If you’re honest, and you’ve got ordinary intelligence and you’re willing to work.” “How do you figure that,” Wheeler replied. “So damn few want to work.”The bar for doing something great in life isn’t as high as you think. With some hard work and honest intelligence, you can go quite far.
- Wheeler was willing to go outside of the Senate norms to do things no junior senator had done before (crossing party lines) and found out he could do things better that way. Maybe that’s the lesson with bureaucracies, sure there are rules and stupid regulations people have to follow, but if you’re willing to work outside of those norms, respectively of course, you might actually get stuff done.
- “Public trust ultimately came down to nothing more than the private integrity of individuals…A Justice Department true to its name hinged on the honesty of one man.”**No matter how powerful the position someone may have, it's held by a human being. One who is tempted by power, love, money, and success just as much as anyone else is.**
- The Bureau of Investigation was initially created to be just an in-house detective agency for the Justice Department, created under Roosevelt. But when America entered the First World War, the Bureau, at the orders of President Wilson, doubled its detective force and increased its budget to nearly $2 million. Its new job entailed protecting the nation against enemies – foreign and domestic. By 1920, it had 579 sworn field agents assigned to headquarters all across the nation. By that time, it was a full-fledged domestic intelligence agency, doing just about all they can to gain access to and information about anyone who had left-leaning political philosophies.
- **When you embark on a mission, be crystal clear about what your goal is**. For Burton Wheeler, he didn’t want to convict Daughtery in a Court of Law, that would entail a whole other host of problems and resources, he just wanted him out as Attorney General because he was abusing his post. So, all Wheeler had to do was dig up and present evidence in a way that the court of public opinion would resonate with, so they would put enough pressure on Coolidge to get rid of this bad man. Knowing that was the goal, it made it easy for Wheeler to sort through evidence and know what to present, and how, to tell the best story.In the epilogue, the author writes, “Wheeler’s particular genius–which seems almost counterintuitive today–was to seek justice instead in the court of public opinion. There, unbound by the rules of the criminal justice system, his freewheeling investigation forced Daugherty’s retirement from public life and consigned America’s most corrupt attorney general to the judgement of history. For all his successes, Burton Wheeler couldn’t guarantee another Harry Daugherty or William J. Burns would never undermine justice again. But he did show that it was a fight worth undertaking.
- Harry Daugherty had been able to get away so long with his swindling because he had Jess Smith do all of the dirty work. “In matters of official business, Harry Daugherty met with no one but Jess Smith, who then worked out the details with other parties. Two-way meetings were the rule. Three-person conferences were forbidden: too many witnesses.”
- After Coolidge replaced Daugherty as Attorney General, Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard Law professor, cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union, and former Justice Department lawyer, told Stone, “The key to [your] problem is, of course, men. **Everything is subordinate to personnel, for personnel determines the governing atmosphere and understanding from which all questions of administrative organization take shape.**”Stone appointed J. Edgar Hoover to the head of the Bureau of Investigation, and Hoover accepted on certain conditions: He said, that “The Bureau must be divorced from politics and not be a catch-all for political hacks. Appointments must be based on merit. Second, promotions will be made on proved ability and the Bureau will be responsible only to the Attorney General.”Stone: “I wouldn’t give it to you under any other conditions.”
- “Over these next few months, which would be so critical for the transforming the troubled agency into ‘the greatest detective force in the world,’ as [Hoover] described his goal to the press, the attorney general would personally supervise its major investigations, approve all hiring decisions, and, most importantly, steer the Bureau through a series of major policy changes.”**Doing something great requires actions that don’t scale.**


Crooked: The Roaring '20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, A Crusading Senator, And the Birth of the American Political Scandal

Anne Lamott’s father taught prisoners at San Quentin, and herself, how to write. “But he taught me too,” she writes. “Mostly be example…But while he helped the prisoners and me to discover that we had a lot of feelings and observations and memories and dreams and (God knows) opinions we wanted to share, we all ended up just the tiniest bit resentful when we found the one fly in the ointment: that at some point we had to actually sit down and write.”

And that’s the most important thing about writing. You can read all the books about the craft you wanted, write down all the notes and plots and storylines you want, but unless you sit down in a chair and write word after word after word, you won’t be successful.

---

Lamott’s dad: “This is the great tragedy of California, for a life orientated to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death–the greatest leisure of life.”

---

Lamott: “I read more than other kids; I luxuriated in books. Books were my refuge.

---

********************************************************************************Publication is not all that great. It will not solve all of your problems.********************************************************************************

“I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do–the actual act of writing–turns out to be the best part…The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”

> The problem that comes up over and over again is that these people want to be published. They ****kind**** of want to write, but they ******really****** want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.
>

> Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram–it’s the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar. What’s real is that if you do your scales every day, if you slowly try harder and harder pieces, if you listen to great musicians play music you’ll love, you’ll get better.
>

---

> ‘But how?’ my students ask. “How do you actually do it?”

You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You look at the cieling, and over at the clock, yawn and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind–a scene, a locale, a character, whatever–and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys.
>

---

“If I sit there long enough, something will happen.”

---

“’E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.”

---

When Lamott was a child, and her older, then then year old brother had a report on birs due the next day that he’d have three months to write, yet hasn’t started, was in tears at the kitchen table, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, “immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.” Then, her father sat down and with his arm around his young boy said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

She keeps telling this story because it gives others hope, and hope, she quotes Chesterton, “is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.”

---

Write shitty first drafts. “The only way I can get anything written is to write really, really shitty first drafts…Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts…A friend of mine says the first draft is the down draft–you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft–you fix it up.

---

“One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, ‘It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do–you can either type of kill yourself.’”

---

A great way to write: take short assignments and then produce really shitty first drafts of those assignments.

---

**********On characters:**********

- “As soon as you start protecting your characters from the ramifications of their less-than-lofty behavior, your story will start to feel flat and pointless, just like in real life.”
- “One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a new way that pages of description can’t. How would your main characters describe their current circumstances to a close friend, before and then after a few drinks?”
- Have a great narrator! That was Ethan Canin’s advice to Lamott. She explains, “If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn’t really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time…Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal.”

****************On plot:****************

- Plot grows out of character. Don’t force your characters into a plot. Let the plot develop based on what all of the different characters do.
- “For the climax, there must be a killing or a healing or a domination. It can be a real killing, a murder, or it can be a killing of the spirit, or of something terrible inside one’s soul, or it can be a killing of a deadness within, after which the person becomes alive again.”
- Alice Adams uses the ABCDE formula when writing short stories. Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending.
- If you’re stuck, write a plot treatment. After going through rounds and rounds of edits with her editor, Lamott still didn’t have a working book. So her editor said, “Listen. I want you to write that book you just described to me. You haven’t done it here. Go off somewhere and write me a treatment, a plot treatment. Tell me chapter by chapter what you just told me in the last half hour…”

************************On Dialogue:************************

- “You’re not reproducing actual speech–you’re translating the sound and rhythm of what a character says into words.”
- “If you’re a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days–listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you’ve taken in, all that you’ve overheard, and turn it into gold.
- You ********must******** be able to identify a character by what he or she says. Each one must sound different from the others. “And they should all not sound like you.”
- “Good dialogue gives us the sense that we are eavesdropping, that the author is not getting in the way. Thus good dialogue encompasses both what is said and what is not said.”
- “You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should *******confirm******* what you’ve observed in the world.”

---

As a writer, you don’t ever really know when you’re done with writing something. When you’ve toiled and edited and rewritten and agonized over it and when the person who reads your work says “Not bad” then it’s done. “Writing and editing is like putting an octopus to bed.” “If you know that there is simply no more steam in the pressure cooker and that it’s the very best you can do for now–well? I think this means that you are done.”

---

“Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on.”

---

“If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don’t ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately.”

“If your deepest beliefs drive your writing, they will not only keep your work from being contrived but will help you discover what drives your characters.”

“To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.”

“Tell the truth and write about freedom and fight for it, however you can, and you will be richly rewarded.”

---

“There’s an old Mel Brooks routine, on the flip side of the “2,000 year old man” where the psychiatrist tells his patient, “Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.” It means of course, that when you don’t know what to do, when you don’t know whether your character would do this or that, you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside.”

---

“My friend Terry says that when you need to make a decision, in your work or otherwise, and you don’t know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake…If you don’t know which way to go, keep it simple. Listen to your broccoli. Maybe it will know what to do. Then, if you’ve worked in good faith for a couple of hours but cannot hear it today, have some lunch.”

---

“A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.” – Henry James

---

“Hostile, aggressive students insist on asking what I **do** with all my index cards. And all I can say is that I have them, I took notes on them, and the act of having written something down gives me a fifty-fifty shot at having it filed away now in my memory.”

“When I get stuck or lost…I’ll look through my index cards. I try to see if there’s a short assignment on any of them that will get me writing again, give me a small sense of confidence, **help me put down one damn word after another**.”

---

Writing groups are good, but they require people to respond to their work as honestly as possible but without being “abusive or diminishing…You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.”

---

“When you don’t know what else to do, when you’re really stuck and filled with despair and self-loathing and boredom, but you can’t just leave your work alone for a while and wait, you might try telling part of your history–part of a character’s history–in the form of a letter. The letter’s informality just might free you form the tyranny of perfectionism.”

“Here’s the thing, though. I no longer think of it as block. I think that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door. The word *****block***** suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty.”

******Problems of output are problems of input.******

“The problem is acceptance, which is something we’re taught not to do. We’re taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, to alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given–that you are not in a productive creative period–you free yourself to being filling up again. I encourage my students at times like these to get one page of anything written…just for the hell of it, just because they have made a commitment to try to write three hundred words every day. Then, on bad days and weeks, let things go at that.”

---

When young writers emulate famous ones who came before, they’re getting that style on loan until they can develop and find the thing they’re really after: their own voice.

---

“You wouldn’t be a writer if reading hadn’t enriched your soul more than other pursuits.”

---

“I tell you, if what you have in mind is fame and fortune, publication is going to drive you crazy.”

But there is something good that comes from publication. “Publication is the acknowledgment from the community that you did you writing right. You acquire a rank that you never lose…But eventually you have to sit down like every other writer and face the blank page.”

---

“Sometime later you’ll find yourself at work on, maybe really into, another book, and once again you figure out that the real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.”

******************************************************************************You have to love the work. Focus on effort, not results.******************************************************************************

---

Coach to Cool Runnings team: “if you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”

If you’re not enough before the publication, the reward, or the recognition, you won’t be enough with it either.”

---

When Lamott went to see a pastor because she was “up and down, scattered, high, withdrawing, lost, and in the midst of it all trying to find some elusive sense of serenity,” he told her, “The world can’t give you that serenity. The world can’t give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts.”

“I hate that,” Lamott replied.

“I know,” he said. “But the good news is that by the same token, the world can’t take it away.”

---

“[My students] will not get big houses and stuff, though many of them want these things more than anything else. They don’t believe that if they got these things they’d probably end up even more mentally ill and full of stress and self-doubt than they already are…When I suggest, however, that devotion and commitment will be their own reward, that in dedication to their craft they will find solace and direction and wisdom and truth and pride, they at first look at me with great hostility. You might think that I had just offered them membership in my embroidery club. They are angry people. This is why they write.”

---

“Becoming a writer can also profoundly change your life as a reader. One reads with a deeper appreciation and concentration, knowing now how hard writing is, especially how hard it is to make it look effortless. You begin to read with a writer’s eyes. You focus in a new way. You study how someone portrays his or her version of things in a way that is new and bold and original. You notice how a writer paints in a mesmerizing character or era for you, without your having the sense of being given a whole lot of information, you may actually put the book down for a moment and savor it, just taste it.”

---

When you’ve finished a book, you’ve finished a book! It doesn’t matter how it sells or who reads it. You’ve gone and done it. Day after day you wrote and finished a book.

---

Writing is like “singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”


Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

************************The Accidental President************************ is a unique biography. A couple of chapters are dedicated to Truman’s upbringing and his “political education,” but as the subtitle suggests, the book focuses on the dramatic four months between April and August 1945. Those four months contained more world-changing events than most centuries: the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April and the atomic bombings off Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. In between those two events, Harry S. Truman became the most powerful man in the world. Though he dealt with wars on multiple fronts – the Pacific and the East, yes, but also at home with his wife who did not approve of his newfound presidential status – he also took control of a country where most of the population knew no other President than FDR, and, who all asked the same question when he took the oath: ****Who is Harry Truman?****

## Notes

On the morning of April 12, Truman dictated a letter to his sister-in-law, May Wallace about her dog. “I imagine Spot is getting fatter and fatter. I have gained nine pounds myself.” In another letter to James Pendergast, Truman dictated something about the War Production Board. But this letter would not be sent yet. Later that night he added, “Since this was dictated I’m Pres. of the U.S…Pray for me with all you have.”

---

During the war, the federal government employed 3.4 million civilians, “with enough committees and organizations to fill seventeen pages in fine print in the **************************Congressional Directory.”**************************

---

“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” – Harry Truman

---

The Veep’s job was “a graveyard of politicians.” “The Vice President has not much to do,” Truman said. When asked what he would do with this “spare time,” he answered: “Study history.”

---

During his eighty-two days as VP leading up to him becoming the president, Truman had visited FDR on official business just twice.

---

When Elenor Roosevelt told Truman about FDR’s death, Truman was astonished.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked her.

“Is there anything **we** can do for ***you***,” she replied. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

---

The night of FDR’s death, “Senators and statesmen sat with strong drinks distilling the world’s anxiety into the ink in their diaries,” Baime writes. I thought that was a beautiful piece of language.

---

Harry’s father raised he and his brother “to believe that honor is worth more than money. And that’s the reason we never got rich,” Harry said.

---

In the first grade, Harry got diphtheria. He couldn’t do anything but read, so that’s what he did. Here, Baime explains, “Harry had begun his political education without knowing it…In the stories of great men and women lay the answers to all the questions that were forming in the young boy’s mind, and as he learned, their triumphs and mistakes had shaped history’s path.”

**“In reading the lives of great men,” he wrote, “I found that the first victory they won was over themselves…Self-discipline with all of them came first.”**

In another entry he wrote:

> In other words, I began to see that the history of the world has moved in cycles and that very often we find ourselves in the midst of political circumstances which appear to be new but which might have existed in almost identical form at various times during the past six thousand years.
> 

The time spent on the farm in isolation helped him learn too. “I have memorized a whole book while plowing forty acres,” he wrote.

Later in the book, the author writes, “His lifetime’s reading had familiarized him with the triumphs and tragedies of innumerable worked leaders. Now he had become one of them.”

---

At thirty-three, Truman signed up for the draft. Though his eyesight was poor, he memorized the letters on the chart before he had to take his glasses off so he wouldn’t be deemed unfit for service.

Aboard the *****************George Washington*****************, Truman wrote, “There we were watching New York’s skyline diminish and wondering if we’d be heroes or corpses.

---

Tom Pendergast was the political kingpin of Kansas City. Here’s how he defined what his role, which I’ve found to be a pretty great description for all of politics:

> It’s a very simple thing when you come down to it. There’s people that need things, lots of ‘em, and I see to it that they get ‘em. I go to my office on South Main Street in Kansas City at seven o’clock in the morning and I stay there when I’m in town till about six o’clock at night and during that time I see maybe 200, maybe 300 people. One needs half a ton of coal. Another woman’s gotta get a job for her boy. I see to it that they got those things. That’s all there is to it.
> 

---

In politics, as much in life, things are rarely black and white, right or wrong. A lot of the time, you have to choose between lesser of two evils. This happened when Truman found out that one of the two judges working under him was collecting “kickback money in the road-building program. He was forced to look the other way in order to prevent more injurious crimes from occurring and to keep on the good side of Boss Pendergast, who had given him his career,” Baim explains.

---

When Truman became a Senator, he got a good piece of advice from J. Hamilton Lewis: “Don’t start out with an inferiority complex. For the first six months you’ll wonder how you got here, and after that, you’ll wonder how the rest of us got here.”

---

During his time in the Senate, Truman worked hard. “He routinely was up at five and arrived at his office at seven in the morning,” Baim writes. Edgar Faris, a secretary, recalled “That man was there earlier than everybody. I don’t care if he went to bed at 2 a.m., he was up at five and we was down at that office. That man really worked.”

---

At the Statler hotel, Truman outlined a philosophy and campaign that he and his staff would stick to until the end:

> • The Senator will not engage in personalities and asks his friends to do the same. Avoid mentioning the Senator’s opponents in any way.

• Avoid getting into controversial issues. Stick to Truman – his record as a judge, as a Senator, as a military man.

• While others discuss issues not involved in the primary, each worker will carefully avoid getting into those traps.

• The press is a function of our free institutions. If they are wrong in their attitude, try to make them see the true light, but under no circumstances attack them.

• Political parties are essential to our republic, our nation, and we must not attack them. What we’re doing is to show by our actions what we think our Party is destined to do: Provide basic laws for a more abundant life and the happiness and security of our people.
> 

Another one of Truman’s mottos was, “There is no substitute for a fact. When the facts are know, reasonable men do not disagree with respect to them.”

---

After FDR named Truman as his running mate, he and Bess smiled for the photographers, “the flash light newspaper picture boys,” is what Truman called them.

---

When Tom Pendergrast died, Truman attended his funeral, much to dismay of his political strategists. But they didn’t matter. Tom did a lot for Harry, and Harry knew that. Connely said, “I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to his funeral.” “That’s right,” Harry replied. That’s just the type of man he was. 

---

On the first day of Office, after addressing the staff, Admiral Leahy reminded behind to speak one on one with Truman. Leahy was the top military advisor to Roosevelt and had a special connection with the now late President. Leahy told Truman, “If I am to remain your Chief of Staff, it will be impossible for me to change. If I think you are in error I shall say so.”

”That,” Truman replied, “is exactly what I want you to do. I want you to tell me if you think I am making a mistake. Of course, I will make the decisions, and after a decision is made, I will expect you to be loyal.”

---

The candidness of Truman was refreshing to the press. “I don’t know if any of you fellows ever had a load of hay or a bull fall on you,” Truman told a group of reporters. “Last night the whole weight of the moon and stars fell on me…If newspapermen ever pray, pray for me.”

---

Truman’s new daily schedule was relentless. “Being President is like riding a tiger,” Truman wrote in one of his memoirs. “A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed.” Somewhere else he wrote, “It takes about 17 hours a day. And then you get as much sleep as you can, start over again and do it the next 17 hours as best you can. No man can do it as it should be done.”

The intense pace lead to extreme isolation. “It is the extraordinary isolation imposed upon the president by our system that makes the character and the opportunity of his office so extraordinary,” Woodrow Wilson once said.

During the summer, his wife and daughter went home to Independence and Truman stayed alone in the White House. He wrote Bess:

> I stay here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches, all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study.
> 

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote of him: “His family is gone, the house is bare and stiff and he’s the loneliest man I ever saw. He’s not accustomed to doing night work…and he doesn’t like it. He’s not at ease and no one else is. I am so sorry for him and he tries so hard.”

---

Truman was relentlessly efficient. Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew wrote, “When I saw him today, I had fourteen problems to take up with him and got through them in less than fifteen minutes with a clear directive on every one of them. You can imagine what a joy it is to deal with a man like that.”

At Postdam, he wanted the agenda for the next day’s discussions set before today’s were over. “I don’t want to just discuss,” he said. “I want to decide.”

---

Truman wasn’t the playboy Roosevelt and other men were. When at Potsdam, an army colonel whispered, “Listen, I know you’re alone over here [without your wife]…If you need anything, you know, I’ll be glad to arrange it for you.”

Truman was furious. “Hold it; don’t say anything more. I love my wife, and my wife is my sweetheart. I don’t want to do that kind of stuff…I don’t want you to ever say that again to me.”

The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

## Impressions

*******************American Prometheus******************* is a tale of a modern Galileo, “a scientist-hero martyred by the authorities in America’s anticommunist witch-hunt.” A sordid read full of science and sarcasm, dialogue and drama, love and war.

## Notes

“I was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy. My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.” – Oppie

---

While at a summer camp, Oppie made the mistake of telling his parents that the boys were teaching him “the facts of life.” This prompted a quick visit from his parents and soon, the counselor banned the telling of salacious stories. The boys knew Robert was responsible, so one night, “he was carried off to the camp icehouse, stripped and knocked about. As a final humiliation, the boys doused his buttocks and genitals with green paint. Robert was then left naked and locked inside the icehouse for the night.” Robert, amazingly, never said a word. He stuck it out the remaining weeks; “Robert suffered this gross degradation in stoic silence.” “I don’t know how Robert stuck out those remaining weeks,” a friend said. “Not many boys would have–or could have–but Robert did. It must have been hell for him.” The author writes, “Robert’s seemingly brittle and delicate shell actually disguised a stoic personality built of stubborn pride and determination, a characteristic that would reappear throughout his life.”

---

A teacher said Robert “received every new idea as perfectly beautiful.” I think that is a wonderful goal to aspire towards. This led him to be brilliant. When he was nine, the author writes, “he was once overheard telling an older girl cousin, ‘Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek.’”

---

Oppenheimer’s head tutor at Cambridge, Patrick Blackett, was a genius experimental physicist and Oppie sought his approval greatly, yet often failed to attain it. Blackett pushed Robert to do what he wasn’t good at: experiments. This irritated Oppenheimer. “Consumed by feelings of intense jealousy,” the author writes, Oppenheimer poisoned an apple on Blackett’s desk. Julius, Robert’s father, pleaded with the school not to press charges. Some months later, he would attack his friend. After the apple incident, Oppie went to see a psychiatrist, but that never ended well. Herbert Smith explained why, “The trouble is, you’ve got to have a psychiatrist who is abler than the person who is being analyzed. They don’t have anybody.”

---

Robert would declare, “The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.”

---

One day, when Oppenheimer sought to gift Paul Dirac some books, Dirac declined: “reading books interfered with thought.” Later, Dirac was perplexed by Oppenheimer’s intellectual range. “They tell me you write poetry as well as working at physics,” Dirac said to Oppie. “How can you do both? In physics, we try to tell people in such a way that they understand something that nobody knew before. In the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” “Flattered,” the author writes, “Robert just laughed. He knew that for Dirac life was physics was nothing else; by contrast, his own interests were extravagantly catholic.

---

During the Spring of 1926, Oppenheimer was in the midst of working on his first major paper in theoretical physics. It was a hard, new type of work. One day, he walked into Ernest Rutherford’s office and saw Niels Bohr sitting in a chair. Rutherford introduced the two. “How’s it going?” Bohr asked. “I’m in difficulties,” Robert replied starkly. “Are the difficulties mathematical of physical?” “I don’t know,” Oppie said. Bohr: “That’s bad.” Years later, Oppie reflected on Bohr’s profound question, “I thought it put a rather useful glare on the extent to which I became embroiled in formal questions without stepping back to see what they really had to do with the physics of the problem.”

**************Lesson:************** Know what problem you’re dealing with.

---

Oppenheimer was smart, and he knew it. During lectures from Max Born at Gottingen, he constantly interrupted with questions and corrections, chalk in hand. He’d declare, “This can be done much better in the following manner…” Naturally, other students complained, but Robert was oblivious to the politeness of Born’s nudges. One day, Maria Göppert, a future Nobelist, “presented Born with a petition written on thick parchment and signed by her and most of the other members of the seminar: Unless the “child prodigy” was reined in, his fellow students would boycott the class. Still unwilling to confront Oppenheimer, Born decided to leave the document on his desk in a place where Robert could not help but see it when he next came to discuss his thesis. ‘To make this more certain,’ Born later wrote, ‘I arranged to be called out of the room for a few minutes. This plot worked. When I returned I found him rather pale and not so voluble as usual.’ Thereafter the interruptions ceased altogether.

---

Robert was also wealthy, and spent money casually on food and clothes. Edward Condon, who just earned a PhD didn’t understand this. Robert didn’t understand Edward’s familial responsibilities. One day, Robert invited Edward and his wife out for a walk, but Emilie explained she had to stay with the baby. Robert replied, “All right, we’ll leave you to your peasant tasks.” After seeing Karl Compton’s two-year-old daughter pretending to read a small red book, which on the topic of birth control. Robert looked at the very pregnant Mrs. Compton and quipped, “A little late.”

---

Becoming a scientist, Oppenheimer said, “is like climbing a mountain in a tunnel: you wouldn’t know whether you were coming out above the valley or whether you were ever coming out at all.”

---

Robert spent a lot of young adulthood in Los Almos. “After a particularly grueling day on horseback, Robert wrote a friend wistfully, ‘My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.”

---

Oppie to Frank: “The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in a pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.”

---

“The work is fine, not in the fruits but the doing..” Oppenheimer wrote to his brother Frank in the autumn of 1932. “Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women,” he also wrote to Frank in 1929, “and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women, any ore than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one’s living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”

---

One night on a date in the San Fransisco Bay, Robert wrapped a blanket around his date and then said he was going for a walk. He came back shortly after and told said, “Melba, I think I’ll walk down to the house, why don’t you bring the car down?” But Melba had gone to sleep and didn’t hear him. Hours later, she woke up and waited for his return. Upon not coming, she flagged the police down. After searching the bushes for his body, Melba returned home with the police and they found a sleeping Oppie. Apoligizing, Oppie said he is awfully erratic and just “walked and walked–and I was home and went to bed.”

---

Since his emotional depression in 1926, Oppenheimer relied on discipline and work as his guiding principles. In the spring of 1932, those principles were elevated to a philosophy of life. He argued discipline “is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation…and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable.”

---

Oppenheimer didn’t intend to create the hub of theoretical physics at Berkley when he started teaching there, it just kind of happened. “I didn’t start to make a school.” Oppenheimer later said, “I didn’t start to look for students. I started really as a propagator of the theory which I loved. about which I continued to learn more, and which was not well understood but which was very rich.”

**********************Lesson: The odds of you building something great are slim, by definition, they have got to be even more so if you approach that which you do with the intention to “build something great.” But if you follow what you’re curious about, and what you know, you never know who you might bring along with you.**********************

---

One day, Joseph Weinberg met with Oppenheimer to discuss his course of study. After Oppie asked what he had done, not expecting an answer, Weinberg told him he had been working on a theoretical problem. “You have this written up of course,” Oppie asked. He didn’t, but said he would. Two days later, Oppie returned the paper, impressed, and had the student present the paper in place of a seminar. Afterwards, Oppie said what he had presented was “kid stuff” and that there was a “grown-up way to do this kind of problem.” Weinberg spent the next three months working on a complicated calculation, but to no avail. “Now you have learned a lesson,” Oppie said. “Sometimes the elaborate, the learned method, the grown-up method is not as good as the simple and childishly naive method.”

---

Leslie Groves, the Army man who ran point on the Manhattan project, had picked Oppie for the lead man, but he faced a good deal of opposition. When he proposed his name to the Military Policy Committee, he said, “I asked each member to give me the name of a man who would be a better choice. In a few weeks it became clear that we were not going to find a better man.”

**************Lesson:************** When facing opposition to an idea, ask for a better solution, if there isn’t one, you win!

---

When Oppie first met Richard Feynman, he knew he wanted him at Los Almos. But his wife, Arline, had tuberculosis and Feynman wouldn’t leave without her. One day in the winter of 1943, Feynman received a call from Oppenheimer. Oppie let Feynman know he had located a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque. Feynamn was touched, and persuaded to move.

---

“Knowledge is itself the basis of civilization., any widening of the borders of our knowledge imposes and increased responsibility on individuals and nations through the possibilities it gives for shaping the conditions of human life.”

– Niels Bohr

---

Many scientists didn’t agree with the use of an atomic bomb. One group in Chicago organized an informal committee to discuss the social and political implications of using one. In June 1945, several members presented a 12-page reported that outline that, “It may be very difficult to persuade the world that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a weapon as indiscriminate as the V2 rocket bomb and a million times more destructive, is to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement.” For peace as the result of destruction was no peace at all.

---

Einstein described Oppie as an “unusually capable man of many-sided education.”

---

One day when Peter, Robert’s son, Kitty, Robert’s wife, helped him build an electrical toy, “a square box filled with various lights, buzzers, fuses, and switches.” He called this toy his “gimmick.” Two years later, David Lilienthal was visiting the Oppenheimers. While there, Kitty was trying to fix the “gimmick.” After fiddling with it for over an hour but to no avail, she had to stop to cook dinner. Robert took Kitty’s spot and began working on the “gimmick.” As Robert sat on the floor, the author writes, “Peter ran to the kitchen and whispered loudly to Kitty, ‘Mama, is it all right to let Daddy work with the gimmick?’ Everyone laughed at the notion that the man who directed the construction of the ultimate “gimmick” might not be qualified to fiddle with his child’s electrical toy.

**************Lesson:************** Your kids are not impressed, nor care, what you do.

---

Frank Oppenheimer said, “The whole point of the Exploratorium is to make it possible for people to believe they can understand the world around them. I think a lot of people have given up trying to comprehend things, and when they give up with the physical world, they give up with the social and political world as well. If we give up trying to understand things, I think we’ll all be sunk.”


Notes: American Prometheus by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

No one influenced the ideas and philosophies of Orville and Wilbur more than their father, the Bishop Milton Wright. He said, “It is assumed that young folks know best, and old folks are fogies. It may be so, but old folks may be as right about new fangles as young folks are about fogy ways. ********************************************************************Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded. All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.”********************************************************************

---

A friend once told Orville that he and Wilbur would always stand as an example of how far Americans with no special advantages could advance in the world. Orville disagree: “But it isn’t true to say we had no special advantages…the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”

---

In 1889, Orville started his own print shop. He and Wilbur began publishing ******************The West Side News******************, “devoted to the goings-on and interests of their part of Dayton on the west side of the river.”

On March 1, a first edition of four pages appeared with a list of local advertisements. You could subscribe for 45 cents a year or two weeks for ten cents.

It strikes me that almost all intellectual figures in the past worked for a newspaper, or started on. Ben Franklin being another prime example. Thoreau and a band of brothers started ************The Atlantic************. It today’s day and age, people start newsletters. Then, they started newspapers.

Occasionally, they would reprint items from other publications. I liked this one a lot. It’s from *****************Architect and Building News***************** and titled “Encourage Your Boy”

> Do not wait for the boy to grow up before you begin to treat him as an equal. A proper amount of confidence, and words of encouragement and advice…give him to understand that you trust him in many ways, helps to make a man of him long before he is a man in either stature or years…

If a boy finds he can make a few articles with his hands, it tends to make him rely on himself. And the planning that is necessary for the execution of the work is a discipline and an education of great value to him.
>

---

Wilbur didn’t have an act for business right away. He preferred “intellectual pursuits” instead, writing to his father, “I do not think I am specifically fitted for success in any commercial pursuit even if I had proper personal and business influences to assist me. I might make a living, but I doubt whether I would ever do much more than this. Intellectual effort is a pleasure to me and I think I would [be] better fitted for reasonable success in some of the professions than in business.”

Yet he evidently spent quite some time thinking about business. He wrote to his brother Lorin:

> **In business it is the aggressive man, who continually has his eye on his own interest, who succeeds. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has.** No man has ever been successful in business who was not aggressive, self-assertive and even a little bit selfish perhaps…I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push. That is the very reason that none of us have been or will be more than ordinary businessmen. We have all done reasonably well, better in fact than the average man perhaps, but none of us has as yet made particular use of the talent in which he excels other men. That is why our success has been only moderate. We ought not to have been businessmen…

There is always a danger that a person of this disposition will, if left to depend upon himself, retire into the first corner he falls into a remain there all his life struggling for bare existence (unless some earthquake throws him out into a more favorable location), where if put on the right path with proper special equipment, he would advance far. **Many men are better fitted for improving chances offered them than in turning up chances themselves.**
>

---

During their third year in business as bicycle repair men, they started designing their own model of bike. It sold between $60 and $65; they called it the Van Cleve, in honor of their great-great-grandmother.

They had advertisements: “Van Cleves get there First.” I thought that was genius. They didn’t focus on the style or the new parts or any “features.” It was all about the benefits, “getting their first.”

---

Wilbur’s first first step to tackling the problem of flight was to deliberately study all that had been published, tried, and tested. On Tuesday, May 30, 1899, Wilbur sat down and wrote a letter addressed to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He writes, “I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language.”

---

*****Avion***** is a french word for aviation. It was named by a French electrical engineer, Clément Ader.

---

The problem with flight wasn’t getting in the air…it was staying there. At first, wind would help the brothers achieve this most. They had to find the windiest part of the country, so they asked. Wilbur wrote a letter to the United States Weather Bureau in Washington about prevailing winds around the country. In response, they sent extensive records of monthly wind velocities at more than a hundred Weather Bureau stations. This is where they first picked Kitty Hawk.

---

A poem under a chapter heading that I liked:

********************************************************************One ship drives east and another drives west
With the self-same winds that blow.
’Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.********************************************************************

– Ella Wheeler Wilxox, “Winds of Fate”

---

“The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.” – Wilbur, writing about his attitude towards testing flights at Kitty Hawk.

---

The stars were so bright at Kitty Hawk, “he could read his watch by them.” I ****love**** that metaphor.

---

The Wright Brothers didn’t make history without working hard. John T. Daniels, a Kitty Hawk residence who helped the brothers set up their operation there, said they were “two of the workingest boys” ever seen, “and when they worked, *they worked…*They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing.”

They also had undoubted courage. Said later in the ************Aeronautical Journal************, ************“Never in the history of the world had men studied the problem with such scientific skill nor with such undaunted courage.”

Daniels later said of the boys achievement:

> It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense; they put their whole heart and soul and their energy into an idea and they had the faith.
>

They also never fixated on their past success. After thier first flight with a motor, Charlie Taylor, the mechanic, said there were no “jig steps” over what had been achieved:

> Of course they were pleased with the flight. But their first word with me, as I remember, was about the motor being damaged when the wind picked up the machine and turned it topsy turvy…They wanted a new one built right away…They were always thinking of the next thing to do; they didn’t waste much time worrying about the past.
>

---

A visitor to the site at Kitty Hawk, Mr. Huffaker, was amazed by the brothers mechanical ability. Wilbur writes about him:

> He is astonished at our mechanical facility, and as he has attributed his own failures to the lack of this, he thinks the problem solved when these difficulties…are overcome, while we expect to find further difficulties of a theoretic nature which must be met by new mechanical designs.
>

This is a key lesson the Wright brothers understood: just because they figured ***one thing*** out, didn’t mean they had the ************entire thing************ figured out. They realized that a solution usually leads to another problem, one they didn’t know they would have – **************couldn’t know************** they would have.

---

The brothers “stood on the shoulders of many giants” - Lilienthal, Langley, and Chanute – but what they found out was that their data, the tables and charts their heroes had published before them were all wrong. They didn’t work in reality.

**************Lesson:************** Theory rarely matches reality.

---

Again, the hard part about flight wasn’t getting in the air, it was staying there. To do so, the “pilot” had to learn how to fly the wind, and this was very hard to do. In a wonderful presentation, Wilbur delivered a great example. Taking a sheet of paper and dropping it, he pointed out how it would not settle steadily, “but it insists on contravening every recognized rule of decorum, turning over and darting hither and thither in the most erratic manner, much after the style of an untrained horse.”

Wilbur said you could learn to ride this horse in one of two ways:

> One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on the fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders.
>

He followed up that if one were looking for safety, he would do well to sit on the fence. “But if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.”

---

The first critique of a new technology, almost always, is what useful thing will it do? This happened with hot air balloons and Ben Franklin when someone asked him what useful purpose the balloons will be for, to which he quipped “What use are babies for?”

Simon Newcomb, an astronomer, wrote in ****************McClure Magazine****************, “The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker, and will carry nothing heavier than an insect.”

---

Talk about an MVP…before they had a motor, the brothers spent three years learning how to just ride and glide on the wind. Once they could soar, float, dive, rise, circle, glide and land…then they tried to add a motor.

---

The thing that stands out the most to me about the Wright brothers is that they never let fame or success make them cocky or live for money. Samuel Langley was their “competitor” for a brief period of time. After his dismal failure, they never made critical or belittling comments about him. They expressed gratitude and respect. McCullough writes, “Just knowing that the head of the Smothsonian, the most prominent scientific institution in America, believed in the possibility of human flight was one of the influences that led them to proceed with their work…”

Wilbur also said about him:

> He possessed mental and moral qualities of the kind that influence history. When scientists in general considered it discreditable to work in the field of aeronautics he possessed both the discernment to discover possibilities there and the moral courage to subject himself to the ridicule of the public and the apologies of his friends. He deserves more credit for this than he has yet received.
>

---

The first time Orville flew with a motor he was asked afterwards if he was scared. “Scared?” He replied. “There wasn’t time.”

---

Samuel Langley, the brothers’ “competition” for a time, had a massive failure with his project. In all, it cost $70,000! For the brothers, their total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and travel from Dayton to Kitty Hawk, was a little less than $1,000, all payed for with profits from their bike shop.

---

Root would say of the brothers, he had been “astonished” by the extent of their library and to find in conversation that “they were thoroughly versed not only in regard to our present knowledge, but everything that had been done in the past.”

---

****************************************“The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.” – The Wright Brothers****************************************

---

While trying to negotiate the sale of their flyer, naturally, tensions were high, but Wilbur never rattled. McCullough writes, “He could be firm without being dictorial, disagree without causing offense.”

---

After the big successful flight at Le Mans, Léon Delagrange wrote of Wilbur:

> Wilbur Wright is the best example of strength of character that I have ever seen. In spite of the sarcastic remarks and the mockery, in spite of the traps set up from everywhere all these years, he has not faltered. He is sure of himself, of his genius, and he kept his secret. He had the desire to participate today to prove to the world he had not lied.
>

Another spectator said of Wilbur, “He went his way always in his own way, never showing off, never ever playing to the crowd. The impatience of a hundred thousand persons would not accelerate the rhythm of his stride.

---

With the increased attention came increased pressure to fly. People would come from all over to see the spectacle, but there was always a risk that conditions for flight weren’t favorable. Wilbur, in all his quiet confidence, never let that pressure get to him. Once, on the very first flight when the motor turned on, Wilbur didn’t like what he heard. He asked an associate if there was a last minute change to the motor. There was. Wilbur got out of the seat and walked over to the motor to ensure there was nothing out of sorts.

When Orville began test flights with the motor in the US while Wilbur is in Paris, he wrote him a letter

> Don’t go out even for all the officers of the government unless you would go equally if they were absent. Do not let yourself be forced into doing anything before you are ready…Do not let people talk to you all day and night. It will wear you out, before you are ready for any real business. Courtesy has limits. If necessary, appoint some hour in the daytime and refuse absolutely to receive visitors at any other time. Do not receive anyone after 8 o’clock at night.
>

Later, after they had much success and were back in Fort Meyer for trials, they experienced a 16mph gale, too strong to fly. With the pressure of thousands watching, they wheeled the plane back to the shed. A senator was overheard saying, “I’m damned if I don’t admire their independence. We don’t mean anything to them, and there are a whole lot of reasons why we shouldn’t.”

Lesson: Don’t let any one pressure you into doing something you’re not ready for.

---

Amazingly, in the nine years they were flying, they only had one major crash. It was Orville. His guest on the plane, died that day. Wilbur knew it too. He wrote his father it was, “the only time anything has broken on nay of our machines while in flight, in nine years experience.” His was the first death in the history of powered flight. Orville was much too lucky. But the crash did nothing to their reputation. “If Mr. Wright should never again enter an aeroplane,” Squier said, “his work last week at Fort Meyer will have secured him a lasting place in history as the man who showed the world that mechanical flight was an assured success.”

Wilbur blamed himself for the accident. He wrote a letter to Katherine:

> I do not mean that Orville was incompetent to do the work itself, but I realized that he would be surrounded by thousands of people who with the most friendly intentions in the world would consume his time, exhaust his strength, and keep him from having proper rest…If I had been there I could have held off the visitors while he worked or let him hold off while I worked…People think I am foolish because I do not like the men to do the least important work on the machine. They say I crawl under the machine when the men could do the thing well enough. I do it partly because it gives me opportunity to see if anything in the neighborhood is out of order.
>

Wilbur worked so much on the plane, the guys in Paris called him “The Oilcan.”

---

At a banquet for The Aéro-Club de France, Wilbur Wright and his machine were honored. His speech that night sums up his attitude and reflects his humility in all he had done:

> In the enthusiasm being shown around me, I see not merely an outburst intended to glorify a person, but a tribute to an idea that has always impassioned mankind.
>

Northcliffe would say about the Wrights, that he did not think the excitement over them and the intense interest produced by their extraordinary feats had any effect on them whatsoever.

---

In a mark of brilliance, the king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, witnessed the flights, but he wanted another demonstration. “I have seen what you [Wilbur] can do. I want to see what one of your pilots can do.”

---

The time in Europe had amounted to $200,000 in contracts for the family. Nice, but doesn’t seem huge honestly. Later, they signed a contract with the War Department for $30,000.

---

When the family returned to Dayton, they had a huge celebration put on in their honor. The night before, the Dayton Daily News ran an editorial

> There was beginning a great deal of talk about man’s no longer having the opportunities he once had of achieving greatness. Too many people were beginning to believe that all of the world’s problems had been solved…Money was beginning to tell in the affairs of men, and some were wondering whether a poor boy might work for himself a place in commerce or industry or science.

This celebrations throws all such idle talk to the winds. It crowns a new the efforts of mankind. It crushes for another hundred years the suspicion that all of the secrets of nature have been solved or that the avenues of hope have been closed to those who wold win new worlds.

It points out to the ambitious young man that he labors not in vain; that genius knows no class, no condition…

The modesty of the Wright brothers is a source of good deal of comment…But above all there is a sermon in their life of endeavor which cannot be preached too often.
>

---

“A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool.” – Wilbur Wright


The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

*You can read more structured notes [on this book here](https://thewanderingreader.substack.com/p/he-wasnt-like-other-scientists). It was originally posted on my newsletter.*

Like any great genius in Feynman’s day, he got his start fixing and playing with science through radios. He’d take them apart and put them back together again, only making them better than they were before. Through this, he got job fixing broken radios. In one instance, he made quite an impression on someone.

The radio in question was made a funny noise when it first turned on but stopped after awhile and was fine. Not an ideal situation, but hey at least the radio still worked. When Feynman got the scene to assess the damage, he heard the sound and the following silence, “How can that happen?” he thinks to himself.

He starts walking back and forth, thinking. “One way it can happen is that the tubes are ready to go, and there’s nothing feeding in, or there’s some back circuit feeding in, or something wrong in the beginning part…” Evidently this took quite some time because the guy says to him, “What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but you’re only walking back and forth!”

“I’m thinking!” Feynman snaps back. He then thought to take the tubes out and reverse the order completely, thinking maybe they’d heat up better if they were reversed. This fixed the problem. The guy giving him trouble at first reversed his stance, getting Feynman more jobs and telling everyone, “He fixes radios by ***********thinking!”*********** “The whole idea of thinking to fix a radio–” Feynman writes, “a little buy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it–he never that was possible.”

---

While working at a hotel his aunt owned, Feynman did a lot of odd jobs. One of those jobs was cutting vegetables in the kitchen, and specifically string beans, into one-inch pieces. It was a convoluted and inefficient process he had to follow, so he changed it up.

“I sat down at a wooden table outside the kitchen, put a bowl in my lap, and stuck a very sharp knife into the table at a forty-five degree angle away from me. Then I put a pile of string beans on each side, and I’d pick out a bean, one in each hand, and bring it towards me with enough speed that it would slice, and the pieces would slide into the bowl that was in my lap.”

This was much more efficient and got the attention of his boss who asked him what he was doing. While answering, Feynman missed a string bean and put his finger through the knife. Instead of having a bunch of beans cut, now he couldn’t use any of them because they were soiled with blood. That was the end of cutting experiments.

---

Sometimes, truth works. For whatever reason, Feynman decided to take the door off of his fraternity house in the middle of the night as a prank. In the morning, everyone asked who took the door. Going around one by one, they would ask each member if they took the door. Being serious, Feynman admitted to taking it: “Yeah, *I* took the door.” But his mates thought he was joking. “Cut it out Feynman; this is **********serious!”**********

---

When you have a different box of tools than everyone else, you can do things they can’t. Feynman learned, though *****************Advanced Calculus*****************, how to solve integrals in a way that wasn’t commonly taught at MIT or Princeton. Therefore, he was able to solve problems guys who went to those schools couldn’t. “If it was contour integration, they would have found it; if it was simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everyone else’s, and they tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.”

If you’ve learned any skill untraditionally, you may feel like you don’t know ************everything************ people who attended university for that skill do, but you might learn other things. Just because your box of tools may differ, doesn’t mean they’re worse. Never be afraid to tackle a problem in an unconventional way. The worst that could happen is you get the same result everyone else before you had: not right.

---

While working at Los Almos, every now and then a lieutenant from the Army would come down and check on their work. Feynman’s boss told him that since he was a civillian section, the lieutenant ranked higher than any of them. “Don’t tell the lieutenant anything,” his boss ordered. “Once he begins to think he knows what we’re doing, he’ll be giving us all kinds of orders and screwing everything up.”

Knowledge is power. Be careful who you share information with. If someone isn’t telling you something, it may be because you’re the lieutenant.

---

Hans Bethe is one of the most remarkable physicists to ever live. Feynman crossed paths with him multiple times at Los Alamos and made quite an impression. During the early stages of the project, Bethe needed someone to bounce his ideas off of. Feynman became that guy because he said it like it truly was, not afraid of his stature. “You see, when I hear about physics, I just think about physics, and I don’t know who I’m talking to, so I say dopey things like, ‘no no you’re wrong,’ or ‘you’re crazy.’ But it turns out that’s exactly what he [Bethe] needed. I got a notch up on account of that, and I ended up as a group leader under Bethe with four guys under me.”

Bethe remembering this interaction, told Neils Bohr, an even more remarkable scientist than Bethe, that Feynman was the guy to talk to when they had a crazy idea. “Next time when we want to discuss ideas, we’re not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes yes, Dr. Bohr. Get that guy [Feynman] and we’ll talk to him first.”

“I was always dumb in that way,” Feynman writes. “I never knew who I was talking to. I was always worried about the physics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition.”

---

Feynman famously bashed the mission statement of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). Though it was home to the likes of John von Neumann, Albert Einstein, and Robert Oppenheimer, its principles, according to Feynman, were misguided.

IAS was started as a research institution. It promised to provide a salary and a place to work for the most brilliant minds in science and math without the hinderance of teaching courses, as was the custom with most universities. Feynman hated this.

> I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, ‘At least I’m living; at least I’m *****doing***** something; I’m making ****some**** contribution.
>

> When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specifically selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get an idea for awhile: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting ideas. I believe in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depressions worms inside of you, and you begin to *****worry***** about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens when there’s not enough ****real**** activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
>

> In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the ******longer****** periods of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “Well, at least I’m teaching my class.”
>

> If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are ****easy**** to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you ***do*** think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
>

> The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they ******remind****** me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind *******yourself******* of these things.
>

---

When you can, it’s important to follow your curiosity and wonder. It may just win you a Nobel Prize. At least, it did for Feynman. Here’s the story.

Within a week of starting as a professor at Cornell, Feynman saw some guy throw a plate with a medallion of Cornell in the center of it. While it was spinning around in the air, Feynman noticed the medallion was spinning around faster than the rest of the plate. “I had nothing to do, so I started figuring out the motion of the rotating plate,” he writes. “I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate–two to one. It come out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, ‘Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?’” Eventually, he worked at the motion for those particles and how the acceleration makes it two to one.

“There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from the piddling around with the wobbling plate.”

---

One of Feynman’s many life lessons can be learned from the stories about him in a bar or a nightclub. Here is an interesting one.

While Feynman was out one night, he asked “The Master” for advice on picking up girls. The Master taught Feynman it wasn’t as hard as he was making it to be. He said you simply buy them a drink and then ask them to sleep with you.

After a few failed attempts, it worked! Feynman was surprised, but this wouldn’t become a regular habit of his.

Still, there is a unique insight he makes: “No matter how effective the lesson was, I never used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.”

---

One day in Brazil, around 3:30 in the afternoon, Feynman was walking along the sidewalk across the beach and past a bar. “I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: ‘That’s ****just**** what i want; that’ll fit just right. I’d just love to have a drink right now!’ I started to walk into the bar, and suddenly thought to myself, ‘Wait a minute! It’s the middle of the afternoon. There’s nobody here. There’s no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you ****have**** to have a drink?–and I got scared. I never drank again, since then.”

He explains that he has such a fun time ********thinking******** that he didn’t want anything to “destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.” This is also the reason he was reluctant to try LSD at a later point in life.

Don’t let anything master you. Be your own master.

---

Don’t make decisions when you’re sad, tired, angry, or lonely.

Feynman once met a girl, Mary Lou, at Cornell. He liked her a lot, but they fought constantly. Eventually they split up. But after another year of dating without any progress, he became lonely.

While in Brazil, he wrote a letter to her and proposed. “Somebody who’s wise could have told me that was dangerous,” he writes. “When you’re away and you’ve got nothing but paper, and you’re feeling lonely, you remember all the good things and you can’t remember the reasons you had the arguments.”

The arguments started again right away and the marriage lasted just two years.

---

Feynman tells this story about a Greek scholar who loved the Greek language, but in his country, no one studied Greek. But he goes to another country and finds everyone studying Greek. So he goes up to a student who is getting his degree in Greek and goes, “What were Socrates’s ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?” Sadly, the student can’t answer. So he asks the student, “What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” At this, he tells you everything, word for word that Socrates said, in Greek. But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

Feynman explains, “What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning how to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then the sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually ****mean**** something. To the student, they are all artificial sounds.”

To Feynman, knowledge meant something ****real****. It wasn’t just words and sounds, but it describes how nature works and what happens in the world. It’s important, always, to make sure you’re actually ********learning******** and not just **********memorizing**********


Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

The Splendid and the Vile

Working by Robert Caro

## Impressions

When one opens ************The Crack-Up************, they open a portal to a strange new world: the jazz and liquor-filled 1920s. Through a collection of miscellaneous pieces penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald and letters from literary greats such as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Elliot, and Thomas Wolfe, the life behind the words of ****************The Great Gatsby**************** are illuminated. Since a lot of the works are personal reflections, I found myself lost here and there, not understanding the references of the times. Though confusing, I enjoyed that. It makes the words seem timeless.

## Notes

### The best people aren’t interested in politics because it doesn’t pay much

“In the theatrical world extravagant productions were carried out by a few second-rate stars, and so on up the scale into politics, where it was difficult to interest good men in positions of the highest importance and responsibility, importance and responsibility far exceeding that of business executives but which paid only five or six thousand a year.”

### First-rate intelligence

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

## On early success

“But one was now a professional–and the new world couldn’t possibly be presented without bumping the old out of the way. One gradually developed a protective hardness against both praise and blame. Too often people liked your things for the wrong reasons or people liked them whose dislike would be a compliment. No decent career was ever founded on a public and one learned to go ahead without precedents and without fear…The dream had been early realized and the realization carried with it a certain bonus and a certain burden. Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to willpower–at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. **The man who arrives young believes that he exercise his will because his star is shining. The man who only asserts himself at thirty has a balanced idea of what will power and fate have each contributed, the one who gets there at forty is liable to put the emphasis on will alone.** This comes out when the storms strike your craft. **The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter.**”

### Egyptian Proverb

“The worst things:

To be in bed and sleep not,

To want for one who comes not.

To try to please and please not.”

### Some things overheard

“I’m giving a dinner tonight, some very fine and cultivated people. I want you to come. I sent a note to your cabin.” For God’s sake, Lew groaned, “I don’t want to meet any people. I know some people.”

---

“We can’t just let our worlds crash around us like dropped trays.”

---

“I like writers. If you speak to a writer, you often get an answer.”

---

“Learn young about hard work and good manners–and you’ll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.”

---

“You look to me like a very ordinary three-piece suit.”

### Epigrams, wise-cracks, and jokes

Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy

---

Optimism is the content of small men in high places

---

You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.

---

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition to it.

---

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

---

Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from us.”

Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.”


The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald

## Impressions

An enthralling tale of “murder and mayhem” at the Chicago World’s Fair. There are two storylines Larson traces in this book: that of the construction of the Chicago World Fair and that of a murderous villain who got away with killing multiple people in the heart of Chicago.

## Notes

The motivation behind the Chicago World’s Fair was one of pride. After France’s wonderful demonstration at the prior fair, and the unveiling of the Eiffel tower, America felt humiliated. 

---

John Root, one of the architects of the fair, was a modern-day polymath. “His conversational powers were extraordinary,” a friend said. No doubt caused by his incessant reading of art, philosophy, science, and just about everything else. “There seemed to be no subject which he had not investigated and in which he was not profoundly learned.”

---

### You will always be compared to what came before

A man of fame, speaking to the *******Tribune******* about what Chicago had to live up to said, “The most marvelous exhibit of modern times or ancient times has now just closed successfully at Paris. Whatever you do is to be compared with that. If you equal it you have made a success. If you surpass it you have made a triumph. If you fall below it you will be held responsible by the whole American people for having assumed what you are not equal to.”

If you’re trying to copy something that came before, your only options are to go above and beyond or to make something completely different and new that the two things become incomparable.

### Trying to ‘out Eiffel the Eiffel’ will not lead to a great product

Burnham, the fair’s chief architects, promised the Chicago fair would surpass that of Paris on every level, every level that is, “except one,” Larson writes. At 1,000 feet, the Eiffel tower was the tallest structure in the world. A phrase became popular: Chicago had to “out Eiffel the Eiffel.”

To try and do so, though, they opened up an opportunity to submit plans for something grand. Inventors and engineers from all over sent in designs. One proposal, sent in by someone with the initials R.T.E had the brilliant idea to attach a car to a two-thousand foot long piece of the “best rubber.” The car would be filled with people and pushed off a platform up in the air, It would descend into a free-fall and snap back with the rubber until it came to a complete stop. Larson writes that, “the engineer urged that as a precaution the ground ‘be covered with eight feet of feather bedding.’”

### There’s a balance between “safe enough” and “too safe”

Working at such a fast pace, Burnham was scrutinized that he was forcing the workers to work too fast, causing unsafe buildings. One criticism was that the buildings weren’t strong enough to withstand the wind. But one engineer thought the buildings were perfectly fine. After admitting to failing to calculate increased wind loads, the chief engineer of the project, Abraham Gottlieb resigned because Burnham wanted to make the buildings “too strong.” Burnham wanted to look at the last ten years of wind and calculate how strong the buildings should be. Gottlieb disagreed and thought they were fine as is. “This may be going to the extremes,” said Burnham, “but to me it seems wise and prudent, in view of the great interests involved.” In 1891, Burnham reported that the criticism now was that the structures were too strong!

### When creating a scene, every detail matters

Olmstead, the chief landscape architect of the fair, declared to not have steam boats on the fair’s waterways. “Put in the waters unbecoming boats and the effect would be utterly disgusting, destroying the value of what would otherwise be the most valuable original feature of this Exposition.”

Olmstead, though he had a natural concern, could become too fixated on an idea. The aesthetics were important, but would it really be all that bad to have steam boats? Especially if they shuttled passengers to and fro cheaply and quickly? Probably not. 

### Walt Disney’s dad worked at the fair

Larson writes that the ranks of employees included, “a carpenter and furniture-maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell many stories about the construction of this magical real beside the lake. His son Walt would take note.”

I thought that was a neat paragraph.

### Simple and done well is better than extravagant and rushed

A problem for the fair’s landscape was the rain and wind. Rain would come, creating mud, and all the beautiful plants and displays would be washed away or crowded out. But Olmstead had a plan. He wrote his “boots on the ground guy”: “Do not lay out to do anything in the way of decorative planting that you shall not be quite certain that you will have ample time and means to perfect of its kind. There can be little fault found with simple, neat turf. Do not be afraid of undecorated, smooth surfaces.”

Larson continued, “it was far better, Olmstead lectured, to underdecorate than to overdecorate.” Olmstead explained, “Let us be though over-much plain and simple, even bare, rather than gaudy, flashy, cheap, and meretricious. Let us manifest the taste of gentleman.”

### Plan for the unplanned worst-case scenarios

Since the fair was to be a warm-weather affair, no one thought about designing the roofs to withhold the weight of the tons of snow that falls on Chicago every year. This became a problem when, during the winter before the fair opened with many buildings already built, hundreds of tons of snow laid upon the roofs of the buildings. Eventually, the roof of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts building, bearing the weight of all that snow, collapsed to the floor below.

### A lot of still-in-business brands debuted at the fair

“A box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s”; Juicy Fruit; Cracker Jack; and Pabst Blue Ribbon won the exposition’s top beer award–it’s brewer calling it Pabst Blue Ribbon.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

## Impressions

In *****************************[Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts](https://a.co/d/e5BJxTb)*****************************, Ryan Holiday creates a playbook for writers, creators, and artists to make exceptional work and get noticed. And yes, those are two ********sep********a********rate******** skills.

Creating great work is hard and takes time, but so is getting that work in front of other people. But, don’t think just because you’ve captured attention means your work will sell ([look at this example](https://www.insider.com/instagrammer-arii-2-million-followers-cannot-sell-36-t-shirts-2019-5) of someone who had 2 million followers and couldn’t sell more than 50 items).

Creating work that lasts and marketing that work is two sides of the same coin. To create a true ****************perennial seller****************, both skills are needed. You’ll learn the perfect formula for doing so in this book.

## Notes

### You can’t want to make something timeless, and then focus on metrics that aren’t

Holiday writes, “People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds.” Writers and business leaders ******want****** to create something that lasts a long time, but then agonize over social media followers and blog views–things that are pointless. People say they want to create timeless work, but then spend energy trying to figure out how to make their post go viral instead of how to make sure it lasts for 15 years. There’s a fundamental flaw there in the logic. “If you focus on near-term growth above everything else,” investor Peter Thiel writes, “you miss the most important question you should be asking: Will this business still be around a decade from now?”

### Perennial, defined

A perennial seller is something that, over time, has continued success and finds an audience that loves the product, whatever it is. Perennial’s aren’t defined by their initial success, because the initial success is irrelevant if it’s going to last for 20 years.

### The true act of creation is to make things that last

“The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” – Cyril Connolly

### If you want great marketing, start with a great product

No one who spends 1/4 of the time making and 4/5 of the time marketing will be a perennial seller. ******Making****** something worth buying, writing something worth reading is the first (and fundamental step) to creating timeless work. “The better your product is, the better your marketing will be. The worse it is, the more time you will have to spend marketing and the less effective every minute of that marketing will be.” Phil Libin, the co-founder of Evernote says, “People [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product.” You start by *******wanting******* to make the best product.

### Ideas are worthless

********Everyone******** has ideas. Ideas for “the next big thing,” ideas for a book, ideas for how they want to turn their life around. But ideas are worthless. They mean nothing to the world. “The difference between a great work and an ****idea**** for a great work is all the sweat, time, effort, and agony that go into engaging that idea and turning it into something real. “Lots of people,” Austin Kleon says, “want to be the noun without doing the verb.”

### Work on things that last (and don’t hurry)

As famous astronaut Jeff Bezos put it, “Focus on things that don’t change.” You can’t expect something to last if it’s built on top of, explains, or piggybacks off something that ********doesn’t******** last or is constantly changing.

The beautiful thing about writing and creating timeless stuff is that you don’t have to hurry. You’re not trend-chasing. If the thing is *****truly***** timeless, whether it comes out next month or in two years shouldn’t matter; it should be equally relevant. So take your time and make it great. “It’s better to play the longer game,” Holiday writes. “Leave behind the hype and ephemeral infatuations for the time capsule and the one-hit wonders.” 

### Great work is created little by little

“You don’t have to be a genius to make genius–you just have to have small moments of brilliance and edit out the boring stuff.”

### Inspiration is a function of doing the work

“Getting into action generates inspiration. Don’t cop out waiting for inspiration to get you back into action. It won’t!” – Robert Evans | Planning a project is important, but don’t get so bogged down in the details you forget to do the work. Plus, no matter how *******perfect******* the plan is, it’s just an idea if you don’t actually do the work on it. And remember what we said earlier about ideas?

### You have to know who your project is for (and who it’s not for)

Charlie Rose asked the creator of ********Hamilton********, Lin-Manuel Miranda, what set him apart from other kids he went to school with. Miranda replied, “Cause I picked a lane and I started running ahead of everyone else…” If you don’t know who you’re making something for, how do you know you’ve successfully created something? If you can’t identify who will buy your thing, why do you expect ******anyone****** to buy your thing?

### Project brief: One sentence, one paragraph, one page

For every new project or creative endeavor write out exactly what your project is supposed to be, who it’s supposed to help, and what it’s supposed to do in one sentence, one paragraph, and one page. What are the things that matter and what are the things that don’t?

This is a _________ that does _______. This helps people __________.

************What is it?************ Is it a modern piece of experimental art? Is it a low-budget YouTube video with friends? What genre is it in? Brain Koppelman, screenwriter and creator of ********Billions********, told Seth Godin, “Everything that has a clear path to commercial success is in a genre.”

Jon Favreau, when dreaming up ********Iron Man********, said in an interview once that his vision depended entirely in Robert Downey Jr. being Iron Man. Everything else–actors, set, story–revolved around him.

You must do this because, a Holiday writes, “An unaimed arrow rarely hits a target.”

Holiday’s “book about Stoic philosophy,” became, for an elevator pitch, “a book that uses the ancient formula of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to teach people how to not only overcome obstacles but **********************thrive because of them**********************.”

### Packaging matters

“A great package on a great product is what creates an explosive reaction,” Holiday writes. ******************Catcher in the Rye****************** sold well when it was first published, but sold over 1.25 million copies in the early pulp paperback edition. The cover was provocative and the blurb sucked you in: “This unusual book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart–but you will never forget it!”

### You must stay focused (distraction is tempting)

“Nothing has sunk more creators and caused more unhappiness than this,” Holiday writes, “our inherently human tendency to pursue a strategy aimed at accomplishing one goal while simultaneously expecting to achieve other goals entirely unrelated.” If you want to create a new way of doing a non-profit, you can’t also expect to chase a big payday (and succeed). Seneca writes one must have, “confidence in yourself and the belief that you are on the right path, and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost, though some are wandering not far from the true path.” If you want to create a piece of timeless art, you can’t compare yourself to the people who are trying to get a billboard ranking next week or who are playing a different game altogether. A decade from now, you’re going to wish you stuck it out and kept pursuing the hard thing. 

### Anything that gets or keeps customers is marketing

Anything you do that creates new customers or keeps old ones is marketing: giving away a free chapter in a book, showing up to a local event and sponsoring it, signing books at a local book store, signing people’s emails up by hand.

### Piracy is better than obscurity

Don’t be fooled into thinking your content or thing is so special that it can’t be given away for free. Tim O’Reilly said it best when he said, “The problem for most artists isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.” Holiday continues, “we spend a lot of time insisting that nobody steal our work or get it for free…but we forget that being ******unknown****** is a far worse fate for an artist than being underpaid.” Cory Doctrow, a blogger and science-fiction author gripes on the same point: “Although it’s hard to turn fame into money in the arts, it’s impossible to turn obscurity into money in the arts.” This is especially true if you have another, high price paid offer like consulting or a course. If just one session of consultation or a speaking gig gets booked from free content, it’s worth it.

### “Trade up the chain”

It’s tempting to want to start out on the biggest media outlet you can get, but it’s often smart to start small. Most outlets pick up stories from smaller ones. “By starting with a small podcast where I could tell the story on my own terms,” Holiday explains, “led to a pickup on a small site that covers a niche, and then sharing and spreading that piece out so it was seen by the right people, I was able to ultimately go from a tiny show to one of the biggest and most influential outlets in the world.”

### When in doubt, “newsjack”

The idea of “newsjacking” was popularized by David Meerman Scott and he defines it as “the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.” When everyone is talking about X, position yourself and your product to also talk about X.

Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday

## Impressions

***********************How to Live on 24 Hours a Day*********************** is the most timeless, practical guide to time management. It gives both philosophical ideas and practical steps to help you take control of the hours you typically waste to do something that betters yourself with them.

This book, written in 1908, is the complete opposite of anything close to “self-help” books published today. You won’t read anything in here about cold showers, waking up at 4:30am, or going for a 5 mile run every morning.

The advice is simple. The words are witty and refreshing. I highly recommend.

## Notes

- The first step in arranging one’s life that they may live fully and comfortably within one’s daily budget of twenty-four hours is the calm realization of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices, and the endless effort which it demands. I cannot too strongly insist on this.
- How to begin: ********************just begin********************. If someone trying to get into a cold both were to ask you, “Sir, how do I start to get in?” You would reply, “Well just get in!”
- You say your day is already full to overflowing. How? You actually spend in earning your livelihood–how much? Seven hours, on the average? An in actual sleep, seven? I will add two hours, and be generous. And I will defy you to account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight hours.
- The person who works 10 to 6 everyday, and who doesn’t have a real passion for their job, make the first mistake by assuming 10 to 6 is “their day” and that the ten hours prior and the six hours following are nothing but a prologue. This attitude kills any interest with doing something with those 16 hours. Even if said person does not intentionally waste them, the point is he does not *****count***** them; he regards them simply as margin.
    - Doing this is a grave mistake because it makes the centrality of one’s day just something “to get through” or “have done with.” “If a man makes two-thirds of his day subservient to one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how can he hope to live fully and completely? He cannot.”
    - What this person must do, then, is arrange a day within a day. This second day starts at 6pm and ends at 10am. It is a day of sixteen hours. And during this 16 hours, he has nothing to do but cultivate his body and his soul and his fellow men.
    - **“What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change–not rest, except in sleep.”**
- Don’t dedicate the extreme hours of solitude to reading tiny thoughts and other things that are meant to be read with speed. Reading newspaper on the train is wasting a good 30 minutes of quiet time.
- “Can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy–the thought of that something gives a glow and a more intense vitality to the whole day?”
- One might say they are exhausted from their day’s work because they give so much effort and can’t commit to the evening hours of study. To that, Bennett says great! This book, this advice is not for those who are already living a good life–whom work hard at their jobs because they’re good at them and love them. It’s for the worker who shuffles through the day rising in the morning and just waiting until he can go to sleep again. There are probably some things the hard worker who loves their job can take from the book, like the morning and evening practices of focus and reflection, but they are already not wasting 8 hours/day, so Bennett says let them carry on as they are.

## Practical advice

- Face the facts and tell yourself at 6 that you are not tired–because you’re not. And don’t let dinner interrupt the middle of the evening.
- Work 7 days a week, at first. It is he who has only worked tirelessly for a time who truly appreciates a full day of rest. Especially if you’re young in age. Use that energy. But in the average case, only do 6. And if you so choose to do 7, look at it as an extra source of time, so that anytime you wish you can go back to six without feeling like you’re giving something up.
- So far, we have half an hour in the mornings six days a week and an hour and a half three days a week. With that seven and a half hours put to good use, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish. “My contention is that the full use of those seven-and-a-half hours will quicken the whole life of the week, add zest to it, and increase the interest which you feel in event the most banal occupations.”
- During the evenings, give yourself more than an hour and a half to do that which takes an hour and a half. Remember human nature. Remember accidents. Remember distraction.
- From the moment you leave your home to the moment you arrive at work is reserved for strengthening the mind. What you ought to do, then, is to concentrate your mind on something–it can be anything, but Bennett suggests maybe a paragraph from Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus–and when your brain gets off topic, use brute force to think about it again. Doing this trains your mind everyday for long bouts of focus on something.
- Then, reflect. Reflect on your principles, your happiness, and your life. Man know thyself. If you are searching for happiness and you haven’t found it, and yet still don’t reflect, on the “deliberate consideration of your reason, principles, and conduct, you admit also that while striving for a certain thing you are regularly leaving undone the one act which is necessary to the attainment of that thing.”
    - Do so on your journey home. This is a good time to transition from the day to the evening hours and your tired spirit will be in a good position to do so.
- At night, you can study music, art, literature,
- If you choose to study literature at night, here are some tips:
    - Define the direction and scope of your efforts. Choose a limited time period, or a limited subject, or a single author. Define yourself as a specialist for there is much pleasure in being one.
    - Think, as well as read. Devote 45 minutes of reflection for each 90 minute period of reading. Doing so will slow your progress on the book. That’s okay. Don’t worry about that.

## Warnings

- If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a time-table with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once. If you are no prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin.
- Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own. “Self respect is at the root of all purposefulness, and a failure in an enterprise deliberately planned deals a desperate wound at one’s self-respect. Hence I iterate and I reiterate: Start quickly, unostentatiously.”
    - “When you have consciously given seven hours and a half a week to the cultivation of your vitality for three months–then you may begin to sing louder and tell yourself what wondrous things you are capable of doing.”
- “If you imagine that you will be able to devote seven hours and a half a week to serious, continuous effort, and still live your old life, you are mistaken. I repeat that some sacrifice, and an immense deal of volition, will be necessary.”
- Don’t be a prig.
    - “A prig is a pert fellow who gives himself airs of superior wisdom. He’s a pompous fool who…has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humor.”
- Following the program is important, but it’s not a religion. You’re the master. Maintain flexibility. But you also have to take it seriously enough for it to work and not just be a cruel joke or something you hope to do. There is a right amount of rigidness and flexibility one must achieve.
- Don’t rush. One may take the dog out at 8 and be thinking the whole time that he has to start reading at 9 and therefore never enjoy the moment of the walk.
- In choosing the occupations of the evening hours, commit to that which you have a supreme interest and let nothing else influence or dictate that which you choose to study. Being a walking encyclopedia of philosophy is all well and good, but not so if you have a disdain for philosophy and would rather study the stars.
- Finally, but most importantly, don’t fail. The only way you can fail is by taking on too much. Get your ego under control and commit that which you can reasonably do and no more. If you take on too much, you have a greater chance of failing and if you fail, you’ll quit and never try again.

## Quotes

- Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in persuading you to admit to yourself that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life; and that the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling that you are every day leaving undone something which you would like to do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have “more time.”
- “I do not suggest that you should employ three hours every night of your life in using up your mental energy. But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind.”
- “The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.”
- “Happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.”
- “When one has thoroughly got imbued into one’s head the leading truth that nothing happens without a cuase, one grows not only large-minded, but large-hearted.”
    - “One loses, in the study of cause and effect, that absurd air which  so many people have of being always shocked and pained by the curiousness of life.”
    - **************************************Nothing is humdrum.************************************** There is a cause and effect to everything.
    - **********************He’s saying here, essentially, that if you don’t like literature or art, then study why things are the way that they are–the cause and effect relationship between stuff in the world**********************.
- “The whole field of daily habit and scene is waiting to satisfy that curiosity which means life, and the satisfaction of which means an understanding heart.”
- “The best novels involve the least strain.”
- “The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.”


How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett

## Impressions

I discovered this book at a used bookstore. There’s something magical about walking into a time capsule that is a used bookstore with a specific type of book on your mind, and walking out with one that satisfies.

Dillard’s sporadic reflections on the life of a creative were refreshing. I enjoy reading fiction authors write about writing because of the life they bring to the page. They craft a story about a non-fiction subject and I aspire to do that. There’s no better way to practice than to read someone who does so, for as Dillard writes in this book, “A writer is careful what he reads, because what he reads, he writes.”

## Notes

**We love that which we pursue.**

Every year a young photographer gives his photos to an older photographer. The older photographer separates the images into two piles: good and bad.

Every year, the same image gets put in the “bad” pile, yet the young photographer keeps bringing it to the old photographer.

”You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?”

The young photographer responds: “Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.”

---

When you are stuck someplace when writing a book, when you have worked and worked and worked and it just won’t go anywhere, either the narrative has messed up somewhere, or you are approaching a fatal mistake. What you had planned will not do. “If you pursue the present course, the book will explode or collapse…”

---

“Your freedom is a by-product of your days’ triviality.”

Your routine allows for flexibility. Discipline creates freedom.

---

Thomas Mann wrote a page a day for 365 days. That is a good-sized book once a year. “My guess is that full-time writers average a book every five years: seventy-three useable pages a day….On plenty of days, the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of days he concludes he must throw them away.”

---

“There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.”

---

“A pile of decent work behind him, no matter how small, fuels the writer’s hope.”

---

********************************Write, then edit********************************

”The reason not to perfect a work as it progresses is that, concomitantly, original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds their sheen. Only when a paragraph’s role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work’s ends.”

---

“I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.”

---

“You read in the space of a coffin and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.”

---

**********************************************************How you spend your day is how you spend your life**********************************************************

”How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim…A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order–willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur’s life a good one, or Thomas Mann’s?”

---

********************************Physical energy leads to mental energy********************************

”When my creative energy flowed most freely, my muscular activity was always greatest.” – Emerson (I think)

---

Jack London, before he undertook to write, got a list of books and the syllabi from the University of California. He spent a year reading the textbooks on philosophy and literature. He also maintained that every writer needed a technique, experience, and a philosophical position.

---

****************************************************Aim for the chopping block****************************************************

When you split wood, if you aim to hit the wood you’re trying to split, you won’t be very successful. Instead, you should aim for the chopping block and cut through the wood; past it.

This, too, is how you should write. “The page, the page, that eternal blankness,” Dillard writes. “The page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write. There is another way of saying this. Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing.”

---

“Many writers do little else but sit in a small room recalling the real world.”

---

A writer must prepare themselves, every morning, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary day.

---

********************************Don’t skip days********************************

”If you skip a visit or two, the work in progress will turn on you. A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barley domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, “Simba!”

---

“Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain.”

---

“The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.” – Anne Truitt

Thoreau said something similar: “Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life…Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.”

---

“The writer is careful what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.”

---

A well-known writer got asked by a college student, “Do you think I could be a writer?”

”Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know…do you like sentences?”

If the student liked sentences, then of course he could be! A well-known painter said something similar when asked how he got to be a painter. “I like the smell of paint,” he said.

---

****************************Ignore the hat, keep doing the work. Note: Similar to success paradox from Greg McKeown****************************

Great writers “worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world flapped at them some sort of hat, which, if they were still living, they ignored as well as they could, to keep at their task.”

---

“Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: can it be done? and, can I do it?”

---

**********************************************************If you have something good, write it then. Don’t wait.**********************************************************

”Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now.”

---

“Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw, and do not waste time.” - This was a note found in Michelangelo’s studio after he died. Antonio was his apprentice.

---


The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

## Impressions

Almost every writer or creative person I listen to swears by this book. I had high expectations. Those were met (and exceeded).

Throughout, Pressfield identifies this “thing” that he calls Resistance. Resistance is a force that keeps you from achieving the things you were born to do. Fear is Resistance. Criticism is Resistance. Jealousy is Resistance. Rationalization is Resistance. Resistance is tough, but it’s also a sign that you’re supposed to be doing that thing. The greater something is to your calling or the more that you feel like you should do something, the more Resistance you’ll feel while doing so.

The only antidote to Resistance is to show up every day and do the work. When you focus on the daily process and not the outcomes or the accolades, you give Resistance less power.

Ryan Holiday has [said he reads this book before starting a new creative project](https://www.instagram.com/p/ClEPlD6OWLk/). I plan to adopt that habit.

## My Notes

- Writing isn’t hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. Making videos isn’t hard. What’s hard is sitting down to film videos. Editing videos isn’t hard. What’s hard is sitting down to edit videos.
- We get jealous of others’ success because their success means they’ve overcome resistance but for some reason, we can’t. “What do they know that we don’t,” we think to ourselves? It also makes us face our own reality. It shows that whatever excuses we’ve been telling ourselves for why we can’t get something done is utterly wrong, because someone else did it.
- Trouble, frustration, complaining, and ill-fortune are all things that keep the working artist from doing their work. Great artists distance themselves from trouble and ensure any distractions they ****can**** control are kept to a minimum.
- Having a condition–being sick, being a victim, etc.–rationalizes the significance to one’s own existence. People that go from condition to condition becomes their work of art, one that is ****much**** easier than the work of art they ******should *****create.** They use the condition as an excuse to keep themselves from their art.
- Unalleviated Resistance turns to unhappiness, boredom, restless, unsatisfied, and so on. This forces us to turn to vices to alleviate the unhappiness. We turn away from art to drugs or substances or distractions to keep entertained. If this is how you feel, you may not have a chronic condition of anything, but instead are chronically avoiding something you should be.
- People are only as free as the extent of their own self mastery. Those who do not govern themselves will find something to govern them: drugs, relationships, vices, etc.
- Amateurs focus on the outcome. Professionals focus on the work. The professional knows that success, like happiness, is a by-product of doing the work. The professional focuses on the work and allows the rewards to come or not to come.
- **********************************************Principle of Priority:********************************************** (a) you must know the difference between what’s important and what’s urgent (b) you must do what’s important first.
- ****************************Professionals:****************************
    - Show up every day
    - Show up no matter what
    - Stay on the job all day
    - Committed over the long haul
    - The stakes for us are high and real
    - We accept renumeration for our labor
    - Do not over-identify with their jobs. ***********Pros recognize that they are not their job descriptions. Ams do. “Resistance knows that the amateur compose will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and over*********** ***********terrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him.***********
    - Master the technique of their job
    - Have a sense of humor about their jobs. ***********************Pros take it seriously, but not too seriously***********************.
    - Are patient. The amateur thinks they can get their big goal done in 2 weeks. The professional knows it takes years of daily effort to produce consistently, quality work.
    - Seek order. ******************They eliminate chaos from their enviornment so they can banish chaos from their mind.******************
    - Accepts no excuses. *********A pro knows that if he caves in today, he’ll be twice as likely to cave in tomorrow. If you so much as say hello to Resistance, you’re finished.*********
    - Are prepared. ***Not for victory, but for the process. Professionals handle their details. The plans. The small things. They work all of them out.***
    - Dedicates himself to mastering the technique. **************************They do so not because technique is a substitute for inspiration, but rather they want to be prepared with the full arsenal of skills when inspiration finally comes. By toiling by the front door of technique, the professional lets genius enter slyly from the back.**************************
    - Don’t let the actions of others define who they are or what they do. *************The critic won’t be there tomorrow. But you know what will be? The blank page…staring you back in the face.*************
    - Know their limits. *************************************************************************************************************Pros can only be a pro at one thing. So they bring in other pros to help them (lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc.)*************************************************************************************************************
    - Reinvents themselves. *******Pros don’t limit what they can create in the future to that which they’ve created in the past. They recognize that with changing technology and ideas, so must their creations. Amateurs think they’re too good to change.*******
- You will fail. You will be criticized. But that’s the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Pressfield had a horrible review written about his first screenplay in *******Variety*******. But someone snapped him out of his misery. “You’re where you want to be right! Writing full-time?”
- ********************************************************************************************************************Resistance will stop you from achieving greatness. The antidote, the only lasting antidote, is professionalism. Professionals follow the rules, qualities, and characteristics of the previous.********************************************************************************************************************
- “The goal of life isn’t to discover who you ought to be, but to become who you already are.” – me
- The Artist is entitled to their labor, not the fruits of their labor.

## On Resistance

- Any act that rejects short term gratification for long term exceptionality will elicit resistance. Resistance stops you from doing that which you are called to do. And it will do anything to stop you from doing so.
- Resistance is always lying and always full of shit. If you listen to its demanding voice, you deserve ***********everything*********** that you get.
- The more important something is to our calling, the more Resistance we will face while doing it. Resistance attacks our love and our calling. If you are experiencing Resistance in one area, it’s a sure sign that you should be doing and accomplishing that thing. **The thing that you keep trying to do and just can’t, is probably the thing you should be doing.**
- Resistance is omni-directional and only opposes that which desires a higher order. You’ll never feel resistance quitting your hard corporate job to work the drive thru at in n out. You will feel it trying to quit your 9-5 to go work as a missionary in the Congo.
- Resistance is greatest when the finish line is in sight. It’s like the story from *****Odysseus,***** when they were close to the island at first, the crew opened the bag of wind.
- Fear is Resistance. If you’re afraid of something, it’s a sign to do that thing. Resistance is also proportional to Love. If you love something deeply, their will be more Resistance facing you there.
- Healing is Resistance. Telling yourself you can’t create because you’re working on “who you are” or you’re dealing with trauma is a form of Resistance. The part we create from and the part of us that needs healing are not the same. Where we create from is so deep and so within us, that nothing our parents did or our spouse said can touch it
- The outcomes don’t beat Resistance. Sitting down to do the work beats it.
- Support is Resistance. What better way to avoid doing the work than going to a workshop or networking event? “The more energy we spend stoking up on support from colleagues and loved ones, the weaker we become and the less capable of handling our business.”
- Rationalization is Resistance–and it’s oftentimes true! We probably should be helping our pregnant wife, or spending more time with family, or this might be a particularly busy season…but “that all means diddly.” There will ******always****** be enough rationalizations to keep you from work: Resistance.
- Resistance loves pride. Resistance says, ‘Show me someone who is too good to take Job X or Assignment Y and I’ll show you a guy I can crack like a walnut.”

## Quotes

- How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumors and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers, gossip, and compulsive cell-phone use, simply because we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to?
- The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.
- There was never a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our own destiny.
- The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.
- The professional tackles the project that will make him stretch. He takes on the assignment that will bear him into uncharted waters, compel him to explore the unconscious parts of himself.
- It’s one thing to study war and another to live the warrior’s life – Telamon of Arcadia, mercenary of the fifth century B.C.
- “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” – Somerset Maugham. This echoes another deeper truth: that by performing the mundane act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his. He knew if he built it, she would come.
- The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.
- You don’t hear the amateur bitching, “This fucking trilogy is killing me!” Instead, he doesn’t write his trilogy at all.
- The critic hates the most that which he would have done himself if he had the guts.
- The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.
- The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred.
- “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.”


The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

## Impressions

Though this book wasn’t the detailed account of the technical innovations required to get to space as I was hoping, I enjoyed it. I feel inspired reading about a time in America where a president had the ability to bring the nation together under one goal, even if some thought that goal was insane.

*****************American Moonshot***************** gives a unique peak behind the Cold War political curtain. I never realized how much of the space race was influenced ********because******** of the Cold War. Some reviewers, [including me](https://www.dltn.io/posts/book-review-american-Moonshot), have questioned whether Kennedy would have had such an audacious goal if there was no Soviet Union to race against. We’ll never know.

## Notes

- Robert Goddard was the first real rocketeer in America. His experiments began in the 1920s but didn’t gain much publicity. This was in part because he promised a moonshot and couldn’t quite deliver on that yet. After struggling to get someone to finance his research, Charles Lindbergh stepped up and convinced David Guggenheim to give him $100,000 over a four-year period. Ecstatic, Goddard moved to New Mexico. In one experiment, his rocket reached 9,000 feet in just 22 seconds.
- JFK’s father was a diplomat of sorts in Britain during Roosevelt’s presidency, appointed by POTUS himself. Though he struggled to bite his tongue and keep his strong opinions to a minimum. Eventually, FDR fired him.
- Upon Germany’s collapse and a couple failed evacuation attempts, Von Braun decided it was best to surrender to the US Army. One member of his team said:
    
    > We despise the French. We are mortally afraid of the Soviets; we do not believe the British can afford us; so that leaves the Americans.
    > 
- After his initial surrender, and with a map of where to go, American troops seized 14 tons of blueprints and designs from different Nazi facilities. They’d also have enough parts to make one hundred V-2s. And they had the guy who knew how to do just that. This did not make Stalin happy. He’s quoted saying, “This is absolutely intolerable. We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde, but the Americans get the rocket engineers? What could be more revolting and more inexcusable?
- Was operation overcast the same as operation paperclip?
    - Yes it was. It was changed due to a security breach. The name was chosen by officers who would fasten paperclips to the folders of Nazi rocket experts they chose to hire.
- JIOA whitewashed von Braun and his teams of their Nazi history, sealed their files, and gave them full security clearance to begin work in America.
- According to the US Government’s own estimate, America had been at least eight years behind German rocket capability. With the new addition of von Braun and crew, that gapped vanished overnight.
- Jack Kennedy was a private man who preferred to keep to himself or spend time with friends. Pandering to voters wasn’t really his cup of tea. “With smiling ease, he could be full of good conversation while never completely connecting with anyone or revealing a thing.”
- After FDRs death (and his thirteen-year long presidency), the Democratic party had a hard time redefining itself without its leader…and Truman was not the person to fit that bill. The Republican Party grabbed the upper hand and took a very anti-Soviet, anti-communism position that became the defining attitude of the times.
- Stalin, in 1943, was **********The Times********** “Man of the Year”..lol what
- With the Red Scare in full effect in America, people became paranoid. “The murkiness of the line between reason and hysteria and the whisking away of serious deliberation bothered many New Deal Democrats. But any liberal candidates who attempted to have a nuanced discussion were attacked as being soft on communism.
- In 1946, the Army Signal Corps bounced radio waves off the moon and received them back on earth for the first time. This proved that radio waves would work in space and could be adapted to control manned and unmanned spacecraft.
- JFK was *****such***** a young senator
- RAND was developed by many people, including General H.H. “Hap” Arnold. His idea was that academia, industry, and the military had common goals and would benefit from cooperation during the transition from war to peace.
- Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in October 14, 1947. He launched out of the bomb bay of a Boeing Superfortress B-29. Why couldn’t he have just gel nods like normal?
- What exactly was the Berlin Air Lift?
- What was Atomic Energy Act of 1946?
    - “The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) determined how the United States would control and manage the nuclear technology it had jointly developed with its World War II allies, the United Kingdom and Canada. Most significantly, the Act ruled that nuclear weapon development and nuclear power management would be under civilian, rather than military control, and established the United States Atomic Energy Commission for this purpose.”
- Due to the Americans strength in the air during the Korean war, Truman did not think it was necessary to spend money developing ICBMs at a level comparable to the Soviets. For comparison, in Truman’s last year, he spent $3 million on ballistic missile development. Eisenhower took that number to $161 million when he became president.
- Von Braun was a genius advertiser. He understood that in a democracy, where tax-payers were footing the bill of space exploration, he had to appeal to their patriotic pride. He juxtaposed spending on space exploration as a way to beat the Soviet’s and made sure that everyone knew that whoever was in space first…would eventually make the rules. “Advertising is everything in America,” he would tell a friend.
- For some reason, I can’t totally figure out why, Eisenhower was avoiding space, satellites, and rockets. He spent money on them, sure, but he didn’t want to actually launch anything. Was he afraid of failing?Am I missing something? Probably. That is until London B. Johnson gave a riveting speech to the people after *******Sputnik******* was launched. His speech is recognized by most as the tipping point in the Cold War to create a unified space program. p.134

- Von Braun became a hero in Cold War America due to his beliefs that they could beat the Soviet’s in most space exploration’s. He said he got 10 letters a day from people asking how to be a rocketeer. One lady, he said, wrote that God doesn’t want man to leave earth and that she’ll bet him $10 they never make it. **He wrote back saying, “as far as I know, the Bible said nothing about space flight, but it was clearly against gambling.”**
- 2 months after Sputnik, the Navy launched one of their Vanguard rockets with a test satellite. It rose 4 feet in the air and then exploded. There was no live coverage, but the event was called “Kaputnik” or “Stayputnik.” I thought that was funny lol.
- At the time, a Washington journalist, Drew Pearson, accused Kennedy of not actually writing Profiles in Courage and instead said the credit belongs to his speechwriter. Why did he say that? Is there any merit to it?
- After the Navy’s failed launch, von Braun, working with the Army, got word to build a modified Redstone rocket in 90 days. If he did it, he could launch. 90 days later, **********Explorer 1**********, the first US satellite to circle earth, was in orbit and carried by von Braun’s rocket. Feb. 1.
- Joe Walker, one of the astronauts picked as a contender to the be the first in space, was a test pilot. Though Chuck Yeager received world fame by breaking the sound barrier in 1947 in the X-15, Walker eventually flew higher and faster then Yeager. On his first flight, being surprised by the sheer force of the rockets, he yelled, “Oh my God!” into the radio. “Yes? You called?” The flight controller responded back comically.
- Watch *********************Shooting for the Moon*********************.
- JFK had an uncanny ability to master and brand words that defined his mission. He used “missile gap” to explain the vast difference between the Soviet Union’s missile tech and that of the United States. During his presidential bid, he used the term ************New Frontier************ to captivate the minds of Americans to think about what was next.
    - ************New Frontier************ would be a cool newsletter name
- JFK’s “missile gap” propaganda was a Cold War myth. The Soviet’s were a lot less armed than was thought of at the time. The problem was, no body knew that except high level officials in the CIA. Since this “gap” was one of Kennedy’s main talking points during his presidential campaigning, the CIA director, Allen Dulles, decided to let him and Nixon, his opponent, in on the secret: the Soviet’s are ***not*** stockpiling ICBMs. Kennedy didn’t change his strategy and kept alluding to the gap. Nixon knew he could destroy this play, because it was a strong one, but only by giving up their source and information, which he obviously couldn’t do. “I could expose that phony in minutes by displaying our high-altitude photographs and explaining the quality of information we are getting,” Nixon declared. “I can’t do that without destroying our source, and Kennedy, that bastard, knows I can’t.
- Explaining Tomorrow with the Space Agency - read this.

- A common anecdote JFK told on the campaign trail about Benjamin Franklin watching the first gas-filled balloons rising up in Paris. A skeptic asked Franklin what possible use the balloon was to mankind. Franklin answered, “What good is a baby?”

- “Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries? – Amelia Earhart
- Yuri Gagarian’s flight was soon followed by the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. These events acted as a one-two punch to knock Kennedy down.
- “Instead of cowboy hats and six shooters, the unshrinkable New Frontier heroes wore silvery fabric and rubbery space suits along with round helmets with wide visors.”
- One Mercury astronaut, Deke Slayton, commented that Kennedy’s “before the decade is out” goal was brilliant. “What Kennedy did was pick a goal people could relate to,” he said. “It has to be something under ten years; if you give people a thirty-year goal, they won’t waste time thinking about it, it’s too far away.”
- I like how Harvard professor Richard Neustadt defined presidential greatness, saying that it was the “power to persuade.” I think that’s just what makes a great leader. Can you get the people around you bought into your vision? I think that’s why D is having trouble with their ideas… too in the weeds. They need to be inspired.
- But not everyone agreed with JFK’s moon mission. Robert Boyd, a British physicist said, “This may in fact be the best political thing they can do in the circumstances in which they find themselves. But just taking humanity as a whole and the question of what we would do if we were all sane men, I think we wouldn’t be spending money sending man into space…Personally I am rather sorry that, frequently, science is dragged in as the justification for what I really regard as political exercise.”
- Dr. Hans Thirring said he didn’t think it would be possible for another 30 or 40 years!
- Another critique, that had merit, was what could be accomplished if the $20 billion being allocated for the moon landing would do if spent on a more humanitarian cause like curing cancer or building a high speed rail from coast to coast.
- How and why was Rice University tuition free? And why did they start charging tuition?
- Houston winning the bid for the new Manned Spacecraft Center was a lifeline to Houston; and all embraced it. I didn’t put this together, but the Astros and the Rockets are named after the space buzz of the 1960s.
- Gemini, the astronaut training program designed for two-man space flights, was named after the constellation that included twin stars Castor and Pollux, a sign of the zodiac controlled by Mercury.
- On Jan. 20, 1962, after a few scrapped launched for John Glenn, he was summoned to the White House. Im his words, Kennedy and he chatted “like one guy to another.” Kennedy wanted to be sure Glenn felt personally that everything had been done to keep him safe and make sure everything goes to plan. Glenn said when they first started the program, Space Task Group chief Robert Gilruth told each astronaut that they had complete veto power and if at “any time we, as experienced test pilots, saw something going on that we didn’t like or there was an area that we thought needed more testing or anything that we weren’t satisfied with, to let him know…the President thought that was an excellent way to conduct such a project.”
    - Interesting…I get the sentiment because they were test pilots, but where does the **********trust the expert********** motto come in here? Maybe there isn’t one because they are talking about a literal life or death scenario and not the copy on a website..lol.
- ************Friendship 7************, Glenn’s capsule, contained more than 7 miles of wiring and ten thousand components! It was built by McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, which eventually became Boeing.
- Minutes before Glenn blasted off, he told his wife, “Remember don’t be scared. I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum.”
- On reentry, Glenn’s capsule lost part of its heat shield. He was rescued sweating, dehydrated, and 5-pounds lighter than when he entered it.
- After the flight, Glenn and JFK became quite the friends. Aboard Air Force One, Jackie Kennedy brought her daughter, Caroline, to meet Glenn. After being introduced, five-year old Caroline looked confused. As tears started to swell up in her eyes, she asked, “But where’s the monkey?” Referring to Enos.
- I wonder, then, can ***law*** in general not exist without any means to enforce it? Could the Tragedy of the Commons be used as a description here? If there are many people in one area and someone doesn’t follow the rules but doesn’t get punished for it, is that why the Tragedy of the Commons happens?
- Gordon Cooper, the last and longest of the Mercury mission astronauts had a short circuit on reentry and had to do it manually. He splashed down ********Faith 7******** just 4.5 miles from the recovery ship. Unbelievable.

American Moonshot by Douglas Brinkley

## Impressions

Captivating, heart-breaking, and awe-inspiring are just a few of the many adjectives I could use to describe this book. The author, Margot Lee Shetterly, did a great job weaving together the lives of “the black women mathematicians who helped win the space race” to show their grit and cant-stop-me attitude mixed with the terrible injustices they had to face.

One thing I realized was that African American’s fought for “freedom” in both world wars but they weren’t offered that same freedom back home. America and the allies painted themselves as a land that loves all and recognized the injustices the Jews were facing in Germany. Yet at the same time, African Americans were still fighting for fundamental freedoms and rights back home. I had never seen that juxtaposition before.

A similar situation happened during the space race. The USSR ensured anyone who so desired could be trained as an engineer. They had waves of people learning the most advanced math, science, and physics. Meanwhile, In America, African Americans were struggling to get a decent grade school education. In 1959 in Prince Edward County, rather than integrate, segregationists defunded the entire county school system. The schools in that district remained closed for five years. “Virginia,” Shetterly writes, “a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth.”

When the space race took off, Civil Rights activists thought we didn’t have any business reaching out beyond the stars if we couldn’t figure out how to live together beneath them. I see their point.

Lucky for us, Dorthy Vaughn, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson looked these difficulties in the face and persevered. Their work helped John Glenn orbit earth and Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

## Notes

- Charles Hamilton Houston, one of the NAACP’s top lawyers, reflected on his time in the war in 1942 to the *****************Pittsburgh Courier***************** after he was on a train on the way home and a white man refused to sit by him and a friend. He said, “I felt damned glad I had no lost my life fighting for my country.”
- In 1959, President Eisenhower set the plan for constructing a secret bunker deep under the Greenbrier Hotel
- ‘This is not science fiction’ wrote President Eisenhower in a fifteen-page document called ****************************[Introduction to Outer Space](https://lunar.colorado.edu/jaburns/publicfiles/IntroOuterSpace.pdf).*
- School board’s in white-only districts paid special “school fees” to black families to keep their children in black districts. Virginia colleges did something similar to black graduating students, paying them a “scholarship” to attend college out-of-state.

> But simple luck is the random birthright of the hapless. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitably, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize the opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance.
>

**********Star Trek********** wasn’t a show that just made nerds cool. It helped usher in a new era of tolerance in America. Showcasing the different races (and genders) of the universe inspired those who were usually dealt the short end of the stick.

Lieutenant Uhura, a black women and proud citizen of the United States of Africa was fourth in command aboard the spaceship **********Enterprise**********. The actor, Nichelle Nichols, tendered her resignation with the show’s creator, Gene Rodden, after the first season. Devastated, Rodden asked her to take the weekend to think it over.

That weekend just so happened to host an NAACP civil rights fundraiser and a coordinator for the event told Nichols that “one of her biggest fans” wanted to meet her. That fan was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Margot Lee Shetterly, writing in **************Hidden Figures**************, said that Nichols appreciated Dr. King’s effusive praise of the show, but let him know she had decided to leave. Before she even finished, according to Shetterly, King replied:

> ”You can’t leave the show…We are there because you are there.” Black people have been imagined in the future, he continued, emphasizing to the actress how important and ground-breaking a fact that was. Furthermore, he told her, he had studied the Starfleet’s command structure and believed that it mirrored that of the US Air Force, making Uhura–a black woman!–fourth in command of the ship.

**”This is not a black role, this is not a female role,” he said to her. “This is a unique role that brings life to what we are marching for: equality.”**
>

**On Monday morning, Nichols marched into Rodden’s office and asked to tear up the resignation letter.**


Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly


- Ernest's grandmother told him that the only regrets she had in life were the things that she hadn't done.
- If you make something easy and fun, you're more likely to do it. Ernest, early on in his writing career, wrote short humorous stories for the school newspaper.
- Jazz, at the time of Ernest's upbringing was shifting to mean the music it refers to now, from a word that originally meant sexual intercourse.
- Ernest's first real writing job was at the *Kansas City Star*. There, he would start to adopt the infamous style he would use throughout his life, thanks to a document The Star provided all of their new writers. Ernest later said the document was, "the best rules I've ever learned for the business of writing. I've never forgotten them." This guide contained rules like "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." It also had rules for describing news events. One such rule was to never write anyone was "seriously injured" because all injuries were serious. It also said to avoid adjectives. Words like "gorgeous," "grand," or "marvelous" were not to be used. Ernest said, "[No writer] can fail to write well if he abides by [those rules]."
- Ernest knew it wasn't important enough just to write, but that the writer had to "push the envelope, engage in nothing less than literary revolution, or, in the famous words of Ezra Pound, 'make it new.'"
- Hadley, Ernest's first wife, used a cool analogy when answering whether or not being engaged was the greatest time in her life. She said it wasn't–and that the best things are yet to come. But she compared it to "the difference between studying the sun thru astronomical methods & simply and joyously living in a country saturated by light."
- Ernest would "try to write one true sentence, he vowed in the early days of Paris. He would avoid adjectives. He would work on the iceberg principle, meaning that if the writer knew much more than what actually made its way into the story, or the part of the iceberg that is below the water, and wrote in the right fashion, what was unseen would inform the story, the part that was above water, without the writer voicing it. Writing was a craft, and it had rules, which, if they had to be reduced to a single concept, dictated that the writer be genuine."
- I didn't know this, but early in his career, Ernest would have to battle a stereotype that male writers weren't serious, or that writing, even as a career, was a very feminine practice.
- **In response to his mother's comments about the content of his writings, Ernest replied, "I know what I'm doing and it doesn't make any difference either way what anybody says about it. Naturally, it is nice to have people like it. But it is inside yourself that you have to judge...You have to be your own worst critic."**
- "Ultimately, I suppose, one must judge the degree of one's love for a person by the hush and the emptiness that descends on the day–after the departure." - This was a quote from Gerald Murphy. He and his wife had become good friends with the Fitzgeralds and wrote that in a letter after their leaving.
 - Don't use "something or other" or "etc." in your writing. If you don't want to tell, why bother using three words to say that? #writing-advice
 - "Something permanent being ended for something passing", was a phrase Hadley used to describe Ernest and Pauline, his second wife's love before they had split. I think it's a cool phrase to use.


Ernest Hemingway by Mary V. Dearborn

## Impressions
*Killers of the Flower Moon* opened my narrow mind to a new (for me) genre of writing: narrative non-fiction.

It tells the true story of the Osage murders and gives a unique insight into the early days of the FBI and, more importantly for me, J. Edgar Hoover's philosophy of running the Bureau. I finished it in two days becuase of how gripping the writing is. This story needs to be told more. On that note, I was excited to see a movie, directed by [Martin Scorsese](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000217/) is coming out in 2023.

Since this was a narrative, I didn't highlight much. I did, however, learn interesting facts about the early days of private detectives and forensic science.

## Notes
- The term "to detect" is derived from the Latin verb "to unroof." According to legend, the devil allowed his henchmen to peer into houses by removing their roofs, so at one point, detectives were known as "the devil's disciples." In 1850, Allan Pinkerton founded the first American provat detective agency and the company's logo was a large, Masonic-like eye, which is what sparked the moniker "private eye."
- Alphonse Bertillion, in 1879, created the first rigorous scientific method for catching repeat criminals. The process, known as Bertillionage, takes notes of body measurments, tattoos, scars, and other distinguishing features to easily identify and capture repeat criminals. Bertillion also created the mugshot.
- Shakespeare:
	- *Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy: Hide it in smiles and affability.*
- Hoover, as commonly known, ran the FBI with an iron fist. After firing agents who were drinking on the job, he told White, "I believe that when a man becomes a part of the forces of this Bureau he must so conduct himself as to remove the slightest possibility of causing criticism or attack upon the Bureau."

> History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.


Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

## Impressions
Few books touch your soul the way *Letters To a Young Poet* does. The language is enchanting. The problems are wide-ranging and applicable to most people. The main creative outlet addressed in the book is poetry, but the advice applies to anything someone with a creative bone in their body touches with pride and says: *I made that.*

It's a book for the soul, not the mind. Don't expect to to learn tips for managing your creative workload or a process for creating great work. Rather, expect to look at your heart, more than once, and ask it: *Why do you want me to create, little heart?*

## Quotes

- Nothing is less relevant to a work of art than the judgement of other people.

- You ask if your poems are good. You ask me. You've asked others before me. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you worry when journals reject them. Now, since you've invited me to advise you, I will ask you to give all that up. You are looking outward, and now you must avoid that at all costs. No one can advise and help you. No one. There is only one thing to do. Go into yourself. Ask yourself why you pursue this thing you call writing. Look and see if its roots draw from the deepest place in your heart. Ask yourself if you would die if you were forbidden to write. Above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, *Must I do this?* Delve within for the deepest answer. And if you respond to this question with a strong and simple yes, then build your life according to its necessity.

- Therefore, protect yourself from stale motifs and turn to your *own* life. Portray your sorrows and daydreams, your passing thoughts and beliefs stirred by a glimpse of beauty.

- *On how hard it is to give advice to other people:*

	For any one person to advise or help another, so much must come together; a whole constellation of factors must be in play for that to succeed even once.

- Time eludes measurement. What is a year? And ten years is nothing. To be an artist means not to count or reckon but to ripen like the tree that does not force its sap and, trustingly, stands through the storms of spring without fear that summer will not come. It will come. But it comes only to the patient ones, who stand there with eternity stretching around them, quiet, vast, and free of worryt.

- This is one of the toughest tests for creative artists: to remain ever unaware of their best qualities in order not to rob them of authenticity.

- I feel that no person has an answer for the questions and feelings arising from deep within you. For when adressing the most delicate and nearly unsayable, words fail even the best.

- I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language.

- In a single creative thought dwell a thousand forgotten nights of love, which infuse it with immensity.

- It is good that you will soon be entering a profession that will ensure your independence and self-sufficiency in every regard. Be patiently watchful lest your inner life be diminished by the requirements of this profession. I consider that to be difficult in the extreme, given the weight of convention and one's own grasp of the duties involved. **But your solitude amid unfamiliar circumstances will be haven and home for you, going forth, you will find your way.**

- Going within and meeting no one else for hours–that is what one must learn to attain...And if one day one grasps that their busyness is pathetic, their occupations frozen and disconnected from life, why then not continue to see like a child, see it as strange, see it out of depth of one's own world, the vastness of one's own solitude, which is, in itself, work and status and vocation?

- It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it.

- To love is not about merging. It is a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another. It is a great, immodest call that singles out a person and summons them beyond all boundaries.

- I belive that almost all our sorrows are moments of tension that we fear might cripple us because we are no longer in touch with our banished feelings.


Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

## Impressions
I could not have been happier with the few hours I spent reading this book. How da Vinci's life ebbs and flows through his curiosity is a whirlwind of unbelievable stories. This book encouraged me to do two things:

1.) **Write more on physical paper.** Isaacson explained how much easier it was to piece parts of da Vinci's life together because most of his journals were still around, unlike most of Steve Job's writing.

2.) **Continue to be unashamedly curious.** Da Vinci wrote down things like "describe the tongue of a woodpecker" in his notebook multiple times. Some of the research was for a painting, but most of it was to soothe his insatiable curiosity. I aim to do the same.

## Takeaways
-  da Vinci's goal in life, through his practice of art and study of science, was no less than to know "everything there was to know about the world."
- Kenneth Clark called da Vinci "the most relentlessly curious man in history."
- He didn't have any traditional education and learning with art, science, or math. Some people would use this as a crutch against him, saying he didn't really know what he was talking about. But he famously whipped back saying what he does doesn't require words, it requires experience. So, Leonardo became a disciple of experience early on. As he got more curious, he learned to use others books and advice better to blend with his experience for the ultimate learning machine. He wrote in a notebook, "He who has access to the fountain does not go to the water jar." Isaacson went on to write, "This makes him different from the archetypal Renaissance Man, who embraced the rebirth of wisdom that came from rediscovered works of classical antiquity." Eventually, though, he realized that **knowledge is a mix between acquired wisdom and life experience.**
- The leading thinkers of Florence "embraced a Renaissance humanity that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge."
- Leonardo's only formal education was through an abacus school, where he learned useful math skills for commerce. One skill that was emphasized mainly was how to draw analogies between cases. "Analogies and spotting patterns became for him a rudimentary method of theorizing."
- As a left-hander, da Vinci wrote from right to left on a page and each letter was facing backwards. Often, they had to be read with a mirror. (p. 32)
- One defining method of his works in art is the realistic appearance of light and shadows. He observed greatly how things *should* look in real life and then figured out a way to make that happen on a canvas. But, he never let the realities limit his imagination of what was able to be accomplished in a painting. Reality informed his paintings, but it *never* constrained them.
- A sometimes surprising fact of the life of Leonardo is that he started many, many more works than he actually finished. He was a great artist, but a horrible business man. A hypothesis as to why this is was that his ideas were so close to reality, they could never be pulled off to the degree of perfection Leonardo expected of himself. So he got as far as he could on some paintings and then just stopped. Another reason this happened was because what could be excited Leonardo much more than what was. He got so excited about an idea when he thought of it that he abandoned everything else he was working on. This cycle just continued. 'He was a genius undisciplined by diligence.' He was afraid to call a painting completed, for he knew he would learn something new eventually that would make the piece better.
- da Vinci was not motivated at all by wealth or luxury. In one of his notebooks he wrote, "men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind."
- da Vinci's *Virtuvian Man* was birthed from a treatise written by Virtruvius, a Roman military officer and engineer from the first century B.C. What his work did for Leonardo was that it gave a concrete example of the Renaissance humanism: "the relationship between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the earth" p.149
- da Vinci, unlike Einstein, struggled with theory, thought experiments, and abstract concepts. He preferred to look at the effects of something and deduce the cause instead of knowing the case and thinking about what effects it may have.
- da Vinci started to work on many problems that he could, and we haven't still, solved. But he showed there is at least a value to trying because even if we may never know how to solve them, it's important to understand why we wouldn't.
	- Lots of examples in page 199 of da Vinci creating something years before it became mainstream. And another on p.272
- Mastery requires focusing intently on the little details.
- Contrary to popular belief, Leonardo was not an individual artist working like a mad genius in his workshop. Instead, he would devise a painting and his assistants worked on it with him to make multiple copies. Sometimes they were duplicates. Other times, though, they were identical in message but differed in form.
- Leonardo thought through sketching. It's a process called "componimento inculto" - an uncultivated composition that helps work out ideas through an intuitive process.
- "America" is named so after Amerigo Vespucci, cousin of Agostino Vespucci, who landed in Brazil with Columbus during his third voyage and correctly surmised they had graced a new continent. #idea
- Leonardo magically transformed "complexity into elegance" through his anatomical drawings. Similarly, great writers are able to magically transform complex subjects, ideas, and philosophies into a beautiful elegance.

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## Quotes
- His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive.
- Yes, he was a genius: wildly imaginative, passionately curious, and creative across multiple disciplines. His genius was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation.
- Leonardo: curious, passionate, and always filled with wonder.
- I [Isaacson] did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.
- Like so many writers and artists, da Vinci grew up feeling a part of the world but also detached.
- Florence's festive culture was spiced by the ability to inspire those with creative minds to combine ideas from disparate disciplines.
- There was harmony in proportions, and math was nature's brushstroke.
- "Movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body."
- "Pleasure and pain are represented as twins, because there is never one without the other." - Leonardo
- Leonardo's *Vitruvian Man* embodies a moment when art and science combined to allow mortal minds to probe timeless questions about who we are and how we fit into the grand order of the universe.
- Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously.
- da Vinci's "uncanny abilities to engage in a dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understanding."
- "His curiosity, like that of Einstein, often was about phenomena that most people over the age of ten no longer puzzle about."
- "If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory."
- "As with his study of the flight of birds, Leonardo went from seeking knowledge that could be of practical use and began seeking knowledge for its own sake, out of pure curiosity and joy."
- "Leonardo wove an argument that was integral to understanding his genius: that true creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy."
- "Men of loft genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form." - da Vinci
- "We should put aside our romantic image of the artist alone in his studio creating works of genius. Instead, Leonardo's studio was like a shop in which he devised a painting and his assistants worked with him to make multiple copies."
- On being so obsessed with something else: "In truth, his mathematical experiments have absorbed his thoughts so entirely that he cannot bear the sight of a paintbrush."
- "Sometimes fantasies are paths to realities."
- "Although at times he was irresolute and willing to abandon tasks, his powerful curiosity tended to overcome any hesitations when it came to exploring nature's wonders."
- Leonardo: "Though human ingenuity make make various inventions it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous."
- "Leonardo wanted to accumulate knowledge for his own sake and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history." Perhaps that is what made his knowledge and curiosity so "out-of-this-world-like"
- "There is something nice about leaving a little to our imagination. As he knew, the outlines of reality are inherently blurry, leaving a hint of uncertainty that we should embrace. The best way to approach his life is the way he approached the world: filled with a sense of curiosity and an appreciation for its infinite wonders."

## Stories
- An example of his relentless perfectionism can be seen be examining *St. Jerome in the Wilderness.* This painting was done in two phases: the first being in 1480 when he started and the second being in 1510. Under infared analysis of the painting, there were dual neck muscles and other parts added in 1510 that were not part of the original drawing. The muscles and parts added seem to align with the anatomical discoveries da Vinci was making through his autopsys.
- When da Vinci wanted to paint something, he would think about what type of social setting and emotion the piece would represent. When he determined the answer, he would go to places that held that type of emotion and observed people's faces, manners, and dresses, and gestures. Then, "he noted it in a little book which he was always carrying in his belt."
- One notebook page from about 1490 was deemed Leonardo's "theme sheet." It had various drawings, doodles, and sketches of many of the different interests that da Vinci thought of or wanted to think of. (p. 109)
- da Vinci predicted the scientific method, writing, "Before you make a general rule of this case, test it two or three times and observe whether the tests produce the same effects."
- p.438 - Great story about being open minded and willing to change his mind. He thought that springs of the earth, just like blood in the body, is somehow pumped from lower areas to higher. How else could water get up into mountain springs? He was convinced of that explanation, but eventually abandoned it. He realized the water there is from evaporation getting soaked into clouds and then raining.
- Many of Leonardo's paintings were lost or never finished, so there is a lot of mystery and allure around them. For one painting in particular, *Saint Anne* there were three or versions that were circulated. As historians tried to understand which came first to help paint a timeline of his life, they assumed Leonardo began one version of *Saint Anne* in 1501, then changed his mind and drew it a different way. He then changed his mind again to paint something that closely resembled the original sketch from 1501. This was the consensus until, in 2005, a note by Agostino Vespucci was found in a book by Cicero that he was reading. The passage in the book said something along the lines of a painter perfect the head and bust of Venus. Vespucci's comment in the margin was "So Leonardo da Vinci does in all his paintings, such as the head of Lisa del Giocondo, and Anne Mother of the Virgin." From this, we are able to assume he had begun working on the *Mona Lisa* and the final painting of *Saint Anne* in 1503.
- Michaelangelo and Leonardo were rivals. However, people commissioned Leonardo for one style of work and Michaelangelo for another. This is why its important to create things in a style that suits you and not follow the crowd. Eventually, someone will see the need for your style.


Leonardo da Vinci

## Impressions
I bought this book five years ago because it was old and looked cool. That's essentially my filter when buying books in an antique store. I read a few essays from it at the time because I was in a big transcendentalist stage, but never revisisted after that.

Earlier this month, I saw it on my shelf and in a moment of boredom, decided to see who wrote it–David Starr Jordan. Huzzah! *The founding president of Stanford University*?! I was hooked. And enjoyed it. It turned out to be a beautiful illustration of what college is meant to be. It's a collection of his speeches and in it, he shares his vision for what higher education should mean, the relationship between the State and the school, and much more.

The following are direct quotes from the book. Italiziczed words are personal commentary unless otherwise stated.

## Notes

- So, if you learn to use it rightly, this the college can do for you: It will bring you in contact with the great minds of the past, the long roll of those who, through the ages, have bone a mission to young men and young women, from Plato to Emerson, from Homer to Euripides to Schiller and Browning. Your thought will be limited not by the narrow gossip of to-day, but the great men of all ages and all climes will become your brothers. You will learn to feel what the Greek called the “consolations of philosophy.” To turn from the petty troubles of the day to the thoughts of the masters, is to go from the noise of the street through the door of a catherdral. If you learn to unlock these portals, no power on earth can take from you the key. The whole of your life must be spent in your own company, and only the educated man is good company for himself. The uneducated man looks out on life through the narrow windows, and thinks the world is small.
- The world's work, the world's experience does not begin with us. We must know what has been done before. We must know the paths our predecessors have trodden, if we would tread them further. We must stand upon their shoulders–dwarfs upon the shoulders of giants–if we would look farther into the future than they. Science, philosophy, statesmenship, caanot for a moment let go of the past.
- The young man who is aiming at nothing and cares not to rise, is already dead.
- If you say to yourself, "I will be a naturalist, a traveler, an historian, a statesman, a scholar"; if you never unsay it; if you bend all your powers in that direction, and take advantage of all those aids that help toward your ends, and reject all that do not, you will some time reach your goal. *The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is going.* (Author's emphasis)
- A college cannot take the place of a parent. To claim that it does so, is a mere pretense. It can cure the boy of petty vices and childish trickery only by making him a man, by giving him higher ideals, more serious views of life.
- It is the noblest mission of all higher education, I believe, to fill the mind of the youth with these enthusiasms, with noble ideas of manhood, of work, of life. It should teach him to feel that life is indeed worth living; and no one who leads a worthy life has ever for a moment doubted this. It should help him to shape his own ambitions as to how a life my be made worthy. It should help him to believe that love, and friendship, and faith, and devotion are things that really exisit, and are embodied in men and women. He should lern to know these men and women, whether of the present or the past, and his life will become insensibly fashioned after theirs. He should form plans of his own work for society, for science, for art, for religion. His life may fall far short of what he would make it; but a high ideal must preced any worthy achievement.
- *Jordan believed the country wasn't supporting higher education properly. He thought the funds were going to plant more schools, instead of watering the ones that already exisisted. Naturally, this created a place where there weren't any great schools, just a lot of ok ones.*

  "The funds available [for higher education] have been used for planting, rather than watering–to found a multitude of weak schools, rather than to make a few schools strong."
- The best political economy, Emerson tells us, is the care and culture of men.
- The essence of manhood lies in the growth of the power of choice. In the varied relations of life the power to choose means the duty of choosing right. To choose the right, one must have the wit to know it and the will to demand it. In the long run, in small things as in large, wrong choice leads to death. It is not " punished by death," for nature knows nothing of rewards and punishments. Death is simply its inevitable result. No republic can live--no man can live in a republic in which wrong is the repeated choice either of the people or of the state.
- A Japanese writer, Uchimura, says this of education in old Japan: "We were not taught in classes then. The grouping of soul-bearing human beings into classes, as sheep upon Australian farms, was not known in our old schools. Our teachers believed, I think instinctively, that man (persona)is unclassifiable; that he must be dealt with personally -i.e. face to face, and soul to soul. So they schooled us one by one -each according to his idiosyn-crasies, physical, mental, and spiritual. They knew each one of us by his name. And as asses were never harnessed with horses, there was but little danger of the latter being beaten down into stupidity, or the former driven into valedictorians' graves. In this respect, therefore, our old-time teachers in Japan agreed with Socrates and Plato in their theory of education. So naturally the relation between teachers and students was the closest one possible. We never called our teachers by that unapproachable name, Professor. We called them Sensei, men born before, so named because of their prior birth, not only in respect of the time of their appearance in this world, which was not always the case, but also of their coming to the understanding of the truth.

  It was this, our idea of relationship between teacher and student, which made some of us to comprehend at once the intimate relation between the Master and the disciples which we found in the Christian Bible. When we found written therein that the disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord; or that the good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep, and other similar sayings, we took them almost instinctively as things known to us long before."

  Thus it was in old Japan. Thus should it be in new America.

  In such manner do the oldest ideas forever renew their youth, when these ideas are based not on tradition or convention, but in the nature of man.
- The best spent money of the present is that whichis used dfor the future.
- In other words, the people will always have as agood a government as their intelligence and patriotism deserve, and no better. In the long rungovernemtncan be made better only by the improvement of the public opinion on which it rests.
- It is not your duty to join yourself to organizations which can take away any part of your freedom. It is not your duty to vote the ticket of my party, nor of your party, nor that of any one of the time-honored political organizations into which men naturally fall. For you and I know that the questions which divide the great parties of a free country are not, as a rule, questions of morals or good citizenship. The sheep are never all on one side, nor the goats on the other. Party divisions are based, for the most part, on hereditary tenden-cies, on present expediencies, and hopes of temporary gain, and too often on the distribution of power and plunder, of power to plunder.

  When your party is led by bad men, or when its course is headed in the wrong direction, your State expects you as educated men to know it.
- That you stand aloof from the majority is no proof that you are right and they are wrong.
- The good citizen is a citizen of the world; itself, as citizenshipimproves, becoming one vast community, the greatest of all republics.
- The story of the decline and growth of empires is the stry of the growth of man.
- The degree of tolerance which is shown by any people toward those whose opinions differ from their own s one of the best tests of civiliization.
- The growth of tolerance is one of the most important phases in the hsitory of modern civilization. The right of freedom of the mind, the right of private interpretation, is a birthright of humanity. As the scholar has taken a noble part in the struggle which has won for us this freedom, so should he guard it in the future as one of his highest possessions. It is each man's right to hew his own pathway toward the truth. If there be in this country a town, North, South, East, West, on the banks of the Yazoo, or the Hudson, or the Sacramento, where an honest man cannot speak his honest mind without risk of violence or of social ostracism, in that town our freedom is but slavery still, and our civilization but a barbarism thinly disguised.
- The value of life is measured by its aim rather than by its achievement. Loftiness of aim is essential to loftiness of spirit. Nothing that is really high can be reached in a short time nor by any easy route. Most men, as men go, aim at low things, and they reach the objects of their ambitions. They have only to move in straight lines to an end clearly visible. Not so with you. You are bound on a quest beyond the limit of your vision. There are mountains to climb, rivers to ford, deserts to cross on your search for the Holy Grail. The end is never in sight.
-  What you have done thus far is little in itself.

	  You have reached but the threshold of learning. Your education is barely begun, and there is no one but you who can finish it. Your thoughts are but as the thoughts of children, your writings but trash from the world's waste-paper basket. Nothing that you know, or think, or do but has been better known or thought or done by others.

	  The work of your lives is barely begun. You must continue to grow as you are now growing before you can serve the world in any important way. But the promise of the future is with you.

	  You have the power and will of growth. The sunshine and rain of the next century will fall upon you. You will be stimulated by its breezes, you will be inspired by its spirit. It is not an easy thing to grow. Decay and decline is easier than growth-so the trees will tell you. Growth is slow, and hard, and wearisome. The lobster suffers the pangs of death every time he outgrows and sheds his shell; but each succeeding coat of armor is thicker, and stronger, and more roomy. So with you. You will find it easier not to develop. It will be pleasanter to adjust yourself to old circumstances and to let the moss grow on your back. The struggle for existence is hard; the struggle for improvement is harder; and some there are among you who sooner or later will cease struggling. Such will be the cases of arrested development-those who promised much and did little, those whose education did not bring effectiveness. Be never satisfied with what you have accomplished, the deeds you can do, the thoughts you can think. Such satisfaction is the sting of old age, the feeling that the best is behind us, and that the noble quest is over forever.
- To be known as an apostle or as the devotee of some special idea, often prevents a man from learning or from growing.
- Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.
- Sin is a man's failure to realize his highest possibilites.


The Care and Culture of Men by David Starr Jordan


- 252 million years ago, the Permian period of the world ended with a massive mass extinction underneath Siberia. It wiped out 90% of the living things in the world and lasted for a few million years.
- Body fossils, the most popular type, are when parts of the actual animal or plant become fossilized. Trace fossils are when a footprint, bite mark, or something of the like become fossilized. These are valuable because they show how the animal interacted with the environment around them.
- Dinosaurs lived through three periods of geological history: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, which are together known as the Mesozoic Era.
- The earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago. Around 1.8 billion years ago is when we start getting our first complex organisms. They finally started to emerge onto land about 390 million years ago.
- One of the first species to evolve after the end-Permian extinction were the archosaurs. From them, two lineages branch off:
	- First, pseudosuchians, later gave rise to crocodiles
	- Second, the avemetatarsalia developed into pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and the birds we now see today. This group is called the bird-line archosaurs.
- True dinosaurs first entered the picture around 240 and 230 million years ago. The hesitation in accuracy is because its difficult to radiometric date
- The dinosaurs grew up on a one-continent, one-ocean world. Pangea and Panthalassa.
- The high carbon dioxide in the Late Triassic period started a chain reaction: huge fluctuations in temperature, wildfires and humid spells. This made it very difficult for plants to establish themselves in an ever-changing world. Consequently, plant-eating dinosaurs had a difficult time establishing themselves as well, even 20 million years after they first arrived on the scene.
- Convergence - When different types of animals end up resembling each other because of similarities in lifestyle and environment.
- Morphological disparity - A type of comparison done to analyze diversity based on features of anatomy. A bird is more diverse than a jellyfish because birds have a much more complicated system than jellyfish, who are basically just sacks of goo, do. This technique is so effective because so many functions of biology, diet, behavior, growth, and metabolism, are all governed by anatomy.
- Some 30 million years after dinosaurs first came about, they still hadn't had world domination like we think of it. They were being outmanned and outgunned by their crocodile-like adversaries, pseudosuchians.
- At the very end of the Triassic, some 201 million years ago, Pangea, after 40 million years of slow tugging and drifts, finally cracked. This caused magma and lava from underneath the earth's surface to erupt in a massive volcano, the end-Triassic eruptions. In the end, some three million square miles of central Pangea were drowned in lava.
- The end-Triassic eruptions were the best thing that could have happened for dinosaurs. Afterwards, they became more diverse and more adaptive and bigger - outnumbering now the previous crocodile-like pseudosuchians. (Not sure why though, - yet at least.)
- Most 3D models of dinosaurs today are created using photogrammetry. They're able to take pictures of fossils, import them into a computer program and let it build out a skeletal model. From there, you can add organs, muscles, and skin and create a life-like dinosaur, complete with the ability to make it move. Pretty crazy.
- The key to brontosaurs massive size:
	- 1.) Their neck - it allowed them to reach high above the trees, higher than any other plant eating dino. It also allowed them to camp in one spot and gobble up plants from all around, expanding very little energy while doing so.
	- 2. The rate at which they grew was very fast
	- 3. Their lungs were different from all other lungs and it was much more efficient.
		- [Unidirectional lung](http://www.fernbank.edu/birding/respiration.htm#:~:text=Unidirectional%20flow%20means%20that%20air,and%20out%20of%20the%20lungs.)
	- 4. Their bones were hollow, filled with air sacs much like honeycombs and not solid bone.
- [Niche partitioning](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/niche-partitioning#:~:text=The%20term%20niche%20partitioning%20refers,Advances%20in%20Ecological%20Research%2C%202016) - When coexisting species avoid competing with each other be behaving or feeding in slightly different ways.
- Tyrannosaurs are actually a group of dinosaurs that are all similar to the T. Rex and are who the T. Rex evolved from. They started to take shape around the middle Jurassic, when sauropods and other dinosaurs were making their big debut. The first ones were very small.
- *Kileskus* was the first tyrannosaur we know of. It was around more than 100 million years before T. Rex.
- T. Rex finally rose to the top of the food chain at the dawn of the Campanian subinterval of the latest Cretaceous period. We're not sure why. There is a theory that volcanic ash and poisonous gas spewed up and made the planet toxic for a while, killing off a bunch of species (that's fact) but we don't know if that helped the T. Rex takeover or it's just a mere coincidence.
- T. Rex lived about 69 to 66 million years ago and thrived in Western North America - which was covered in forest-y coastal plains.
-  Encephalization quotient - A measure of the relative size of the brain compared to the size of the body. Bigger animals will have bigger brains because their bodies are naturally bigger, but that doesn't mean they are smarter.
- Rex had large olfactory bulbs - the lobes at the front of the brain that control the smell. This led to their very keen sense of smell.
- Birds are dinosaurs - just like theropods and sauropods, birds are just another one of the many branches from the dinosaur family tree.
- Natural selection works by favoring certain heritable traits that aid in surviving longer. If a group of offspring all have slightly different colors and one is darker and that helps them camouflage better, and the trait is inheritable, they will pass that on.
	- If a population is somehow divided enough and each subset goes its own way, evolving its own features until the two groups are so different that they can no longer mate with one another, then they have developed into a new species.
- It's no doubt birds evolved from theropods. But they didn't evolve wings to fly at first. Most likely, they evolved to show off and get mates, like the tails of peacocks. Since bigger wings were more impressive, wings kept getting bigger and bigger relative to the size of the body. Eventually, the wings got big enough to support the bird's body in the air.
- The food they ate and their size had a lot to do with why dinos died and why some mammals and reptiles went on to live after the Cambrian explosion.
- The asteroid/comet hit right on the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula.


The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs by Steven Brusatte

Sitting around a campfire listening to stories passed on from generations brings with it a feeling of wonder and joy for the adventures told from long ago.

Each one of these stories is special on its own and they could never be told in a *bad* way.

But you reach another level of captivation when someone who is a great storyteller holds the talking stick and their vocal cords rumble.

Each word lingers in your mind as you anticipate the next set of syllables, waiting to laugh, to cry, and to love. It's a whole new experience.

This is how I felt reading [*What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OA6KIS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Richard Feynman. I have a deep admiration for Feynman's beliefs on life, knowledge, and science, but that admiration went deeper still as I followed the stories of his life told by the man himself.

Feynman, You Sexist Pig!
------------------------

Shortly after giving lectures at CalTech, Feynman was accused of being anti-women because of two stories he told to illustrate different points in his *Feynman Lectures on Physics*. In response to the letter he received, Feynman wrote, "Don't bug me man!" and sent it off.

About a year later, he was in San Francisco receiving an award he was given from writing those books, but not all was well. A group of protesters were in front of the lecture hall giving out flyers with black, large letters titled, "FEYNMAN SEXIST PIG!"

As he started his talk, he addressed the protestor's:

> I'm sorry that my short answer to your letter brought you here unnecessarily. There are more serious places to direct one's attention towards improving the status of women in physics than these relatively trivial mistakes--if that's what you want to call them--in a textbook. But perhaps, after all, it's good that you came. For women do indeed suffer from prejudice and discrimination in physics, and your presence here today serves to remind us of these difficulties and the need to remedy them.
>
> Even though the American Association Physics Teachers has given me an award for teaching, I must confess I don't know how to teach. Therefore, I have nothing to say about teaching. Instead, I would like to talk about something that will be especially interesting to the women in the audience: I would like to talk about the structure of the proton.

Handled with grace and care.

Infinite numbers
----------------

Richard Feynman was an "uncle" to several of his physicist's kids. One such nephew was Henry Bethe, son of Hans Bethe who was a 1967 Nobel Prize winner. After the passing of Feynman, Henry sent a letter to Feynman's wife retelling a magnificent story that illustrates Feynman's playful attitude and ability to simplify the complex. Henry recalls:

Dick [Feynman] turned to me and said, "Did you know that there are twice as many numbers as numbers?"

"No there are not!" Henry quipped back.

But Feynman wouldn't give up, insisting that Henry name a number.

> "One million" A big number to start.
>
> "Two million."
>
> "Twenty-seven."
>
> "Fifty-four."
>
> I named about ten more numbers and each time Dick names the number twice as big. Light dawned.
>
> "I see; so there are three times as many numbers as numbers"
>
> "Prove it," said Uncle Dick. He named a number. I named one three times as big. He tried another. I did it again. Again. He named a number too complicated for me to multiply in my head. "Three times that," I said.
>
>


What Do You Care What Other People Think? By Richard Feynman

## Impressions

*Discipline is Destiny* brilliantly illustrates a depressingly "bro-culture" idea: discipline. This characterization stems from the hustle culture accounts on Instagram or finance bros on Twitter explaining their 4 AM morning routines, cold showers, and 35-minute meditation sessions. This overexposure to a powerful concept has therefore watered down a powerful idea, the idea that *you, and only you, control your life.* This book brings the idea back into reality.

Through 54 short chapters, Ryan Holiday gives rules, ideas, and principles to live a disciplined life. By studying some of the most disciplined people who have breathed life on this Earth, the reader can't help but think, *What if I start to be more disciplined today, right now?* *What if I actually did "attack the dawn?''* *How different would my career be if I really did do the hard things first?* *What if I just showed up every day for the next 5 years? 10 years?* *What would my life look like if I got rid of that thing that controls me?* *What happens if I actually use discipline to shape my destiny?*

## Takeaways

**Treat the body rigorously** - Lou Gehrig was no "good-time Charlie." He wasn't a drinker and didn't chase thrills or girls. "The obligation of a champion," Holiday writes, "is to act like a champion...while working as hard as somebody with something to prove." It wasn't about his "image" or wanting to be "above reproach." Gehrig knew his body was a machine, and it was how he made his money. He wasn't going to abuse it, and neither should we.

Someone would write about him that he didn't drink, "not because of any prissy notions of righteousness that it was evil or wrong to take a drink but because he had a driving, non-stop ambition to become a great and successful ball player. Anything that interfered with that ambition was poison to him." Muhammad Ali would say later, "When a man can control his life, his physical needs, his lower self, he elevates himself"

Musonius Rufus, speaking on a similar note, writes, "Obviously the philosopher's mind should be well prepared for physical activity, because often the virtues make use of this as a necessary instrument for the affairs of life. We use the training common to both when we discipline ourselves to cold, heat, thirst, hunger, meager rations, hard beds, avoidance of the pleasures and patience under suffering. For by these things...the body is strengthened and becomes capable of enduring hardships, study and ready for any task."

You train your body and mind in moments that you can control, so you can control your body and mind in moments that you don't.

**Work before the light and do the hard thing first** - Toni Morrison, speaking on the virtues of waking up early to work, said, "Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It's not being *in* the light, it's being there *before it arrives*. "

Half of this battle is going to bed early and making sure you get enough sleep. Holiday writes, "The best way to master the morning is to have mastered it the night before."

"Just as days are made of mornings," he also wrote, "lives are made of days. To procrastinate at any time, day or night, young or old, to *push it until later,* is a loser's game."

**Be your own master** - One day in 1949, Richard Feynman felt an increased urge to reach for the flask. It was a craving for a drop of alcohol, separate from the reward of celebrating the results of hard work. Right then and there, he gave up drinking. Because as Holiday writes, "Nothing, he felt, should have that kind of power over him."

A core idea of self-discipline is to be extremely wary of anything that has mastery of you. These can be vices like caffeine, alcohol, or drugs. But they can also be virtues like success, working out, and so on. The desire isn't the issue. *It's the need.*

**Work clean, think clean** - Robert Moses liked to work on a large table because it made him more effective and encouraged a better workflow. He believed in processing, or what David Allen's GTD method called an "inbox." When something came in, you dealt with it. And since a table has no drawers, his biographer Robert Caro would write in *The Power Broker*, "there was no place to hide papers; there was no escape from a nagging problem or a difficult-to-answer letter except to get rid of it in one way or another." Holiday says, "The space where great work is done is holy. We must respect it." As Gustave Flaubert says, "Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work."

**Just show up. Once you do, enjoy the work** - Thomas Edison said, "The genius hung around his laboratory day and night. If anything happens, he's there to catch it; if he wasn't, it might happen just the same, only it would never be his." Showing up when it's easy...is easy. But doing it when it's hard is when it really counts. Showing up when you're tired. Doing the work on the project for the 5th year in a row when it feels like you'll never get it done. Those are the days when greatness is born.

John Steinbeck called these "dawdly days." Holiday explains, "Those days when everything seems out of whack, when you're just not feeling it, when the distractions won't stop." Showing up on those days "is the first step to greatness."

And once you show up...get to work."I come from a part of the world where people did work rather than just talk about it," Joyce Carol Oates said. "And so if you feel that you just can't write, or you're too tired, or this, or that, and the other, just stop thinking about it and go to work."

Encouraging his readers just to show up and work regardless of the arbitrary outcomes, Holiday would write, "Decide what you want to be, and then do that work." If you love the work, you don't care what the outcomes are, the prizes you get, or the money you make. You do it because it's what you love to do.

**Sweat the small stuff** - No big project has succeeded by ignoring the small stuff. "It is the loose ends," Zelda Fitzgerald said, "with which men hang themselves." There's an old saying about a horse, *for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.* For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. And then, because of the shoe, the horse was lost. Because of the horse, the rider was lost and because of the rider, the message, and because of the message, the battle, and because of the battle, the kingdom...

**Don't overdo it** - Discipline isn't only resisting the temptation to give up; it's also resisting the temptation to go too far. Working out too much, getting injured, and not working out at all usually take someone to the same place. John Steinbeck referred to those who fell prey to their desires to accomplish a lot and called this the "indiscipline of overwork."

**Keep the main thing the main thing** - "Anyone who has not groomed his life in general towards some definite end cannot possibly arrange his individual actions properly." -- Michel de Montaigne.

Holiday writes, "If you don't know where you're sailing, the Stoics said, no wind is favorable." He continued, "the secret to success in almost all fields is large, uninterrupted blocks of focused time." To do this, we can borrow a line from E.B. White, who replied after being asked to be a part of some commission, "I must decline for secret reasons."

It sounds simple, but doing it isn't easy. To keep the main thing the main thing requires you not to be a slave to your ego. After you become successful, they want you to appear on every podcast, go to every conference to "network," and be a part of communities, so people know who you are. Your ambition and ego will want you to continue walking down the path of success and fame, but that ambition isn't helpful if it's not taking you anywhere. You must learn to tame ambition and to keep the main thing the main thing.

But that's not enough.

Once you've cleared your plate of only the most essential, you must **focus relentlessly** on that task. Holiday shares an interesting story about Beethoven after a friend asked if he was even listening. "I was just occupied with such a lovely, deep thought," Beethoven replied, "I couldn't bear to be disturbed." Holiday puts it bluntly: "The muses never bless the unfocused."

**Perfectionism is a vice** - "I want it to be perfect," says someone who keeps saying they're writing a book, or a blog post, or making anything at all. "It doesn't matter the cause," Holiday writes, "whether it was from procrastination or perfectionism, the result is the same. You didn't do it."

Don't sacrifice completion for perfectionism. A bad book written is more successful than one in your head.

**Get better every day** - If you're not getting better, you're getting worse. There's a word for this in Japanese, *kaizen*. It means continual improvement. Holiday asks, "How much progress could you make if you made just a little each day over the course of an entire life?"

**Expect much from yourself, little from others** - You have to be disciplined. You don't have to force discipline on others. Those people are just annoying, and no one likes them. Don't judge other people for drinking if you don't. Don't make someone feel bad for not running, reading, waking up early, etc.

But that's not an excuse to be soft on yourself. Their life is not in your control, so don't act like it is. Hold yourself to high standards. Cato the Elder said, "I am prepared to forgive everybody's mistakes except my own." Ben Franklin said something similar when he said, "Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices." Holiday writes, "Be a strong, inspiring example and let that be enough." He also shares a story from one of Lincoln's secretaries who would marvel at the way he "never asked perfection of anyone, he did not even insist, for others, upon the high standards he set for himself."

On a similar note, Seneca writes, "Happy is the man who can make others better, not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts." So though you shouldn't hold people to your high standards, you should inspire them to be better just by *being you.* Not giving some fake speech or showing off your accomplishments, but by your character, your attitude, and your approach to life. Holiday writes, "The fire within us can burn bright enough to warm others. The light within us can illuminate the path for others."

**Bring distinction.** - Epaminondas, a general in Greece, was appointed to an insulting office in Thebes--taking care of the city's sewers. Instead of being upset, he did the job with diligence. Holiday shares that Epaminondas declared "that it is not the office that brings distinction to the man, it is the man who brings distinction to the office."

## Notes
- We have two choices: to master ourselves or be mastered by something else.
- We each have a higher and lower self that are constantly battling with each other. The lower self wants to do what's easy. The higher self wants to do what is right. The ancients called this inner battle *akrasia*.
- I'm disciplined, or try to be disciplined, because I'm afraid of who I'd be if I wasn't.
- Lou Gerhig wore his fame lightly, but took the obligations of it seriously.
- You say you love what you do. Where's your proof? What kind of streak do you have to show for it?
	- This is a great question to encourage keeping a reading/writing/working out/golfing log.
- "The one thing all fools have in common, is that they're always getting *ready* to live."
- Anger isn't bad. It's okay to be angry. You just can't *do anything* out of that anger.
- *Mos maiorum* - the unspoken yet also very much spoken way of life of your grandparents.
- July and August are named after Julius and Augustus Cesear.
- Be a hero to the valet.
- Destiny isn't going to be easy. But if it was, would it still be worth anything?

## Quotes
- "We must keep ourselves in check or risk ruin."
- More than talent, life is about temperament. And temperament.
- Although they come from very different places, the desire to skip a workout and the impulse to work out too much end up in the same place.
- No one who is a slave to their urges or to sloth, no one without strength or a good schedule, can greate a good life.
- The queen, you can be sure, always knows more than she says.
- Greatness is not just what one does, but also what one refuses to do. It's how one bears the constraints of their world or their profession, it's what we're able to do within limitations–creatively, consciously, calmly.
- "Remember to conduct yourself in life as if at a banquet. As something being passed around comes to you, reach out your hand and take a moderate helping. Does it pass you by? Don't stop it. It hasn't yet come? Don't burn in desire for it, but wait until it arrives in front og you. Act this way with children, a spouse, toward position, with wealth–one day it will make you worthy of a banquet with the gods."
- Someone else's lack of self-control is not a justification for abandoning your own.
- If you have money, spend it...the problem is when people spend money they don't have, to get things they don't need, at a price nowhere near worth the cost.
- And is "f-you money" really such an admirable goal anyway? To have so much money you don't have to care about anything or anyone? That's not vritue, it's childishness.
- "The modern stoic knows the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it exactly at the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble." Ryan writes, "The person who wakes up whenever, wakes up and does whatever, orders their day however? This is a person who will never have enough time, who will always be behind."
- "The nearer a man is to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength." – Marcus Aurelius
- "It doesn't matter what you bear. It matters how you bear it." – Seneca
- "If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter." (This is something you shouldn’t do, and it illustrates the idea of sunk costs.)


Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday

## Impressions
I had been eyeing this for about a month before I bought it because reading a 400+ page book about the history of the library seemed like a big undertaking. Much to my surprise, it was a fun read and flowed nicely. I expected it to be much more pedantic than it was.

I do wish the contents were organized in a more structured timeline. I don't get why authors who write biographies or histories on something specific try and be creative with the structure by organizing the book by topic, like this one was, or in reverse-chronological order like *[Edison](https://www.amazon.com/Edison-Edmund-Morris/dp/081299311X)* was. This book wasn't completely random and followed a rough outline, but did not advance year to year.

## Actionable Takeaways
1. A good description of a library could be: *making the genius of man public property.*
2. A good way to tell what's important to someone, or a group of people, is to look at where the store things in their home. If they have a special room for something, it's a good indication that whatever is in there means a lot. We can use this strategy to infer books and the process of writing was very important to monastic monks, because they had a dedicated room for this endeavor: the scriptorium.
3. The earlier Stages of libraries had chains connected to books to prevent thieves from stealing anything. Once universities started displaying their books on shelves, the got rid of the chains to make it easier for people to study, but this also meant they lost more books. By 1338, over 300 of the mere 2,000 books in the possession of the College of the Sorbonne had already disappeared.
4. Before the invention of the printing press, books were used as a display of wealth. But once they became cheaper to buy, this practice became less so. It's a good illustration of scarcity creating an appearance of wealth and also how, even hundreds of years ago, people still wanted to "show off."
5. Like with any technological advancement, the incumbents thought printed books were not as equal in value to books written by hand. Those critics were often those who were in the business of writing books by hand or who had an uptight taste. The everyday person didn't care whether it was written by hand or printed, they just wanted the value that could be found inside. This is a great illustration about how people don't care what technology is used to build something–they just want that thing.
6. Throughout history, libraries were always a big target during any war. People could steal books to sell them, sure. But what was of more value was changing the city's ideology, for what people read, they became. So if you want to influence a group of people, they realized one of the best places to do that was the library. So they got rid of any books that talked about "the old way" and replaced them with books that matched that attackers philosophy. We see this play out from the early 1000s even up to WW2.

## Notes
- [Pliny the Elder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Elder), when talking about [Asinius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Asinius_Pollio), the friend of Julius Cesear who would bring Ceser's plan for a library in Rome to fruition, said Asinius was "the first to make the genius of man public property." I quite like that description for a library.
- "A monk who works is troubled by only one devil, while a monk who is idle is troubled by many." This is similar to Newton's quote about resisting temptation by keeping busy with intellectual practices in *[The Clockwork Universe](https://www.daltonmabery.com/book-notes/the-clockwork-universe)*.
- After the fall of the Roman Empire disrupted the papyrus supply throughout the Mediterranean, parchment became the standard replacement. It was more expensive, but lasted longer and could be written on on both sides.
- The importance of books in the monastic life could be symbolized through the existence of the scriptorium or writing room. For no one ever dedicated a room to something that wasn't important.
- Around the twelfth century, monasteries lost their monopoly on book collections and creations and universities took the reins.
- The word *studio* is derived from the Latin *studium*, which describes a monk's cell.
- Eventually, in the rooms of those colleges, books began to be put on display for anyone to use, rather than locked away in chests like they were in monasteries. This was a positive, for it made knowledge-sharing much easier and people could reference books in a much faster way. This also meant it was easier to lose books. By 1338, over 300 of the mere 2,000 books in the possession of the College of the Sorbonne had already disappeared.
- After the invention of the printing press, owning and collecting books no longer became a status symbol because it was much cheaper to get a book. Before, when things were produced by hand, they were much more expensive and it was a fun thing to "flex" on. That was no longer the case after the invention of the printing press.
	- "Ownership of a library no longer marked a man out as a member of the European social and political elite."
	- Paris became the center of printing in Northern Europe; in the south, it was Venice.
- Though some tried to make an argument that printed books weren't as "worthy" of books that were written by hand, owners didn't seem to mind: "Those buyers who bought a book for its text do not seem to have minded whether it came from a press or a pen."
- Whether the press had any role on the value of books is up for debate, but it certainly had an impact on the creation of libraries. Before the press, wealthy people wanted to make libraries to show off their wealth, but they were open for other people to use. But since the press made it much easier for anyone to get a book, the ruling class, the only people building libraries at the time, weren't as inclined to donate their generous books and money.
- Fernando Colon was one of the first people to recognize building a library for what it is today: a place for all books on all subjects for all people in all languages. This was not the common attitude for most collector's of the day.
- We lost a lot of potential collections and libraries once the owner passed on. Though they had a plan and intention to pass it on to an heir, it was a common thread throughout history that the heir didn't want to bare the responsibility. It was much easier to just get a little pay day from the collections.
- The Reformation had a quite a lasting impact on libraries and it was the beginning of a common pattern that is still happening today. After the Protestant's rose up, a lot of the Catholic works were no longer accurate (which at that point, was a lot of Europe's book stock), so they got rid of the Catholic works in libraries and started to replace them with Protestant works. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 acknowledged King Henry as head of the Church of England. This granted him the power to dissolve monasteries and with it, a lot of their books. Later in 1550, another Act was passed that made owning of the former monastic books illegal, which only sped up the rate of destruction that was currently taking place. But it wasn't just Catholic works that were lost, because when you're in a frenzy of book burning, it's quite difficult to tell the difference between "secular manuscripts of historical importance and works of catholic theology."
- When Queen Mary took over, the reformed books act were reversed and everyone started stacking shelves with catholic works again. This wasn't as vicious of a process as before, but it did have an effect on Oxford and other colleges, for they were where those of the future were being taught. This was again reversed under Queen Elizabeth, which added space for more protestant works again. But to this day, "No Oxford colleges own any Protestant books acquired before the reign of Elizabeth." It makes sense though, for "Why would colleges spend money on books when the books might be confiscated or burned after the next reversal of royal policy?"
	- This pattern of one ideology ruling, burning the others books or trying to censor them, and someone else coming into power would be a running thread through history.
- Between 1550 and 1750, normal tradesmen such as doctors, lawyers, and merchants starting collecting more books. Essentially, they picked up where the monks left off.
- By the middle of the 17th century, the Dutch Republic had become the center of the international book market. Book auctions had been around since the 15th Century, but the Dutch Republic were the first to separate books out from the rest of the estate. They also provided a printed catalogue people could look through ahead of time and come ready to bid. This had an interesting second order effect. Because books were now making much more money posthumously than before, people were much more encouraged to invest in books throughout their life, because they knew it could be used as a sort of an investment for their family when they passed.
- Thomas Bodley restored the Oxford library to what it is today completely on his own dime. He may have been the first to incorporate, strictly, the "silence rule" in libraries. By 1711, this rule had been adopted more widely; where the user in Amsterdam was greeted with this severe warning:
	- "You learned sir, who enter among books, don't slam the door with your tumultuous hand...here it's the dead who speak to them who work." (147)
- Libraries were a popular target to destroy during wars because what people read, they become. So if you wanted to change the culture, starting at the libraries was a good thing to do.
- The success of early public libraries depended on the degree of access and excitement of the leaders to treat it as a genuine public good, not just an off-shoot of their personal collection. **When someone cares about something, they make it last.**
- Starting around 1720, older books became much more valued. Hitherto, a book was valued solely on the contents of it, not when it was published, by whom it was written, or how it was published. This started to change around 1720, as people started to value older manuscripts and earlier printed books as much more valuable as later ones.
- The Library Company of Philadelphia was the world's first subscription library. We can thank Benjamin Franklin for this beautiful addition to the library economy. It still flourishes to this day.
- Fiction became it's own industry around the 19th Century, even though it carried with it a sense of disrespectfulness and "childish" attitude.
- Carnegie, with his generous donation of libraries in the Americas and Europe, truly inaugurated the golden age of the public library.
- WW1 and WW2 destroyed many of Europe's great libraries and books.

## Quotes
- As with so many of the libraries we will meet in this book, neglect was a much more potent enemy than war or malice.
- Libraries were a private encyclopedia of the world's wisdom and follies.

<Subscribe />


The Library: A Fragile History

## Takeaways
-   Writing is the art of using the English language in a way that will achieve the most strength and least clutter.
-   Must constantly ask yourself, 'What am I trying to say?' and say that.
-   School has taught us to use fancy words, jargon, and long transition phrases. Basically anything you learned in school about how to write, do the opposite. People want to know what you're saying in the least amount of words possible.
-   Get rid of every word that doesn't need to be there.
-   **Clutter is the language people speak when they're too scared to say what they mean.**
-   Never use, "I think," "I want to note," "I believe," etc. We know you think it, you're writing it.
-   When you're re-reading your rough draft, try bracketing the words that aren't doing anything. If the sentence still makes sense, ditch those words in the final draft.
-   Style can't be taught or learned, but don't force yourself to sound fancy.
-   Writing is all about sounding personal, but if you want to stay out of the first person, use "I" in the rough draft and replace them in the final draft.
-   There is no audience, you're writing for yourself.
-   If you find something amusing, add it. If you want to go on a tangent, do it. Again, writing is all about sounding personal. Someone has probably written something the way you have, but not with your style, examples, or tangents.
-   Cliche phrases, metaphors, etc., **are to never be used. It's lazy writing.**
-   Use _Websters Dictionary, Second College Edition,_ _Websters Dictionary of Synonyms,_ and _Rogets Thesaurus_ to make sure the word you chose actually means what you said it does. You can save a lot of space simply by using the right word.
-   Use new words if they fill a good need and help you express something you otherwise couldn't. If they don't, never use them again.
-   Separate usage from jargon.
-   Before WWII, people wanted novels and stories. But after Pearl Harbor, people just wanted to know what the hell was going on. They wanted facts, quotes, numbers, etc.
-   Before you start writing, be sure to choose which tone you want to use.
-   Ask yourself:
    -   How will I address the reader?
    -   What tense will I use?
    -   What style do I want to write in?
-   Every piece of non-fiction should leave the reader with one, just one, provocative thought he didn't have before he read the piece.
-   Try to give an extra twist to the last sentence in each paragraph. For example:

    > *I've often wondered what goes into a hot dog. Now I wish I didn't.

    My trouble began when the Department of Agriculture published...– In other words, can a chickenfurter find happiness in the land of the frank?*

-   Always collect more material than you think you will use and don't lead the reader get away. Make sure each sentence begs the reader to read the next.
-   If you've explained the facts and made the point you want to make, just stop.
-   Pick something crazy or a quote that's funny to surprise the readers with as the last sentence to your piece.
-   If a place comes to you easy, don't use it. It's most likely a cliche.
-   Eliminate every fact that is a known attribute. You don't need to use a simile to explain how hot and dry Death Valley was, people know that.
-   Distill the important information from the immaterial.

**Verbs**
-   Use short words. Of the 701 words in Lincoln's inaugural address, 505 are one syllable.

**Adverbs**
-   Most adverbs are unnecessary.
-   Don't write, "The radio blared loudly." Blared means it was loud.

**Adjectives**
-   Most are also unnecessary. "Brown dirt." Duh, dirt is brown.

**Qualifiers**
-   Don't use "sort of," "kind of," "a little," etc.
-   Tell the reader as early as you can that you're switching gears.
-   Use "but," "yet," "nevertheless," at the beginning of the sentence to replace what the reader was about to do.
-   Despite what you were taught in school, **you can start a sentence with "but."**
-   Newspaper paragraphs shouldn't have more than 2-3 sentences.
-   **The quickest fix to any sentence is to get rid of it.**

### Science and Technical Writing
-   If you're struggling trying to come up with simple writing, write about how something works. This is great practice for ordering your thoughts sequentially.
-   Imagine technical writing to be like an upside-down pyramid. Start with the first fact the reader must know to understand something and follow that pattern.

### Business and Professional Writing
-   Say what you want to say. Don't murk it up with big words trying to sound "professional."
-   The way to warm up almost any institution is to locate the missing "I" in the memos, reports, documents, writings, and so on.

## Quotes
- "The man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is a fool."
- "Ultimately, the product that any writer has to sell is not his subject, but himself."
- "The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components."
- "A clear sentence is no accident."
- "Writing improves with the direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out that shouldn't be there" (I recognize the irony of this.)
- "Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide its mistakes."
- "Leaders who bob and weave [with their words], don't inspire confidence."
- "Surprise is one of the most refreshing commodities in writing."
- "Beauty as we understand it, and as we admire it in nature, is never arbitrary."
- "A simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; A muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too dumb or too lazy to organize his thoughts."


On Writing Well by William Zinsser

## Impressions

*[Leadership](https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Six-Studies-World-Strategy/dp/0593489446/ref=asc_df_0593489446/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=532660552781&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15035015911338731310&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9032520&hvtargid=pla-1411574914459&psc=1)* by Henry Kissinger profiled six leaders who led during a dramatic half-century. The leaders in this book influenced the world that followed the two colossal world wars that engulfed Europe and its allies. Their duties included reorganizing collapsing governments, cities, and countries; humbly accepting defeat and enduring global embarrassment; attempting to create global peace; and much more. These leaders struggled to create long term policies when everything that came before was focused on the immediate.

Kissinger's own experience with each of the leaders made this book all the more interesting. There was plenty of research and due diligence from Kissinger that profiled each subject well, but each chapter ended with Kissinger's reflections and lessons from the personal relationships he maintained with each statesmen. I didn't know that when I started reading it and it was a welcomed surprise. For some reason, these interactions made each subject more personal and real, not just someone whose name is in the history books a few times.

## Practical lessons

- **If you want to have respect in the world, live by principle and not by slogans, pressure, or persuasion**. In a discussion on the qualities of strong leadership, Konrad Adenauer cautioned Kissinger to 'never confuse energy with strength.'

- **Be cautious of whom you show incompetence to, or why you say something can't be done.** "Young man," Eisenhower said to Kissinger, "Never tell anyone that you are unable to carry out a task entrusted to you."

- The First World War eroded trust in the political elite, after Europe's leaders failed to navigate the oncoming disasters.

- **Keep reading and learning widely.** Each of the leaders profiled in this book "were taught a wide range of subjects, including especially the humanities, as if in preparation for the challenges of leadership, for which a sense of history and the ability to deal with tragedy are indispensable. Above all, they received an education which would help them to understand the world, the psychology of others and themselves."

- **Attain 'deep literacy'.** Defined by Adam Garfinkle as '[engaging with] an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning.' "Ubiquitous and penetrating, yet invisible," Kissinger writes, "deep literacy was the 'background radiation' of the period in which the six leaders profiled in this book come of age." He wrote also, "Intense reading can help leaders cultivate the mental distance from external stimuli and personalities that sustains a sense of proportion. When combined with reflection and the training of memory, it also provides a storehouse of detailed and granular knowledge from which leaders can reason analogically...Books record the deeds of leaders who once dared greatly, as well as those who dared too much, as a warning."

- **Discipline (self-mastery) and the ability to take the long view are two essential attributes of great leaders.** This is helpful to know for myself, but also be wary of the opposite in leaders I'm following. If a leader is constantly falling prey to their desires, not doing what they said they would, or constantly looking for short-term wins, Dalton beware.

- **Be direct. Don't be afraid to tell hard truths.** 'Who do you think lost the war?' Adenauer famously said to his fellow members of parliament after they were complaining about the rule and reign of the Allied powers in postwar Germany.

- **Be in tune with reality, but have a guiding vision** Kissinger writes, "Mediocre leaders are unable to distinguish between the significant from the ordinary; they tend to be overwhelmed by the inexorable aspect of history." They are able to identify the essential elements of their state and determine which are necessary, which must be improved, and which must be forgotten.

- **Be bold.** When faced with important decisions, especially with unfavorable conditions, each leader did what had to be done. Thatcher, under doubt from experts and facing an economic crisis, sent a Royal Navy Task Force to recover the Falkland Islands from Argentina. De Gaulle's attitude with France was to act like it was much bigger, more unified, and much more confident than it actually was.

- **Continue with the practice of solitude** Sadat, in prison, initiated his reflective habits. Adenauer followed suit in a monastery as he was in exile. Thatcher made some of the most important decisions while she was reviewing her papers, early in the morning.

- **Paradoxically, they embraced divisiveness. Some divisiveness is okay.** Each leader, rightly so, wanted their people to follow on the path that they lead. Naturally, not everyone would follow. But that's okay. They weren't looking for consensus. Naturally, tension was to follow. When de Gaulle appeared in Paris to meet with members of the French defense establishment, a soldier told Kissinger, "whenever he appears, he divides the country." Kissinger writes, "A leader does not undertake fundamental economic reforms as Thatcher did, or seek peace with historic adversaries as Sadat, or build a successful mutliethnic society from the ground up as Lee, without offending entrenched interests and alienating important constituencies." He continues, "Both during their years in government and afterwards, not everyone admired these six leaders or subscribed to their policies. In each case, they faced resistance–often carried out for honorable motives and sometimes by distinguished opposing figures. Such is the price of making history."

- **Be virtuous** James Q. Wilson defines virtue as, "habits of moderate action; more specifically, acting with due restraint on one's impulses, due regard for the rights of others, and reasonable concern for distant consequences." #quote  Kissinger writes, "Good character does not assure worldly success or triumph, but it does provide firm grounding in victory and consolation in failure."

## Notes

- Any and all systems are in transit between and must balance the effects of a past that forms its memory and a vision of the future that inspires its evolution.

- The vital attributes of leadership are courage and character: courage to make decisions among a set of complex and difficult options and character to continue on that course where the benefits and dangers are not fully realized yet.

- Leaders operate in scarcity, for every situation has certain limitations placed upon it. They operate in time, for each era will have different values and habits that form the eventual outcome. They also operate in competition, with their allies and those they are up against. They also have to make judgements based on intuitions and hypotheses that cannot be proven at the time of a decision.

- Different times call for a different style of leadership, these can be classified as a statesman and a prophet. The statesman understands that one of their tasks is to preserve their society by changing their circumstances rather than be overwhelmed by them. They also must balance an exciting vision with a tough of wariness. Statesmen are suspicious of those who personalize policy, because throughout history, many rules and reigns rooted in personality have come down. The second type of leader, the visionary prophet seeks to erase the past. They are suspicious of anything that's gradual because they seek to upheave the past.

- Konrad Adenauer's strategy to rebuild Germany as an equal with the rest of the powers was composed of four elements: accepting the consequences of defeat; regaining the confidence of the victors; building a democratic society; and creating a European federation that would transcend the historic divisions of Europe.

- His embracing of the humility of the Allies to "babysit" Germany was his plan to turn submission of the rules into a virtue, and he realized that a temporary inequality of conditions was a necessary precursor to equality of status.

- He said, "We cannot and must not assume that with the others there has occurred suddenly a complete change in mood toward Germany, but instead trust can only be recovered slowly, bit by bit."

- To whom can I confide/the secrets of my soul and the cares of my life?

 - De Gaulle's authority rested in his innate sense of personal confidence and an unshakeable faith in France and its history.

  - De Gaulle proclaimed something to be so, and so it was so. He persuaded his people through the creation of a political reality by a sheer force of will.

  - "One must become a man of character. The best way to succeed in action is to know how to dominate oneself perpetually."

- Three principles from Nixon's time in office would benefit the US:

	- The centrality of national interest

	- The maintenance of a global equilibrium

	- The creation of sustained and intense discussions among major countries to construct a framework of legitimacy within which the balance of power can be defined and observed.

- Sadat's tendency toward solitude endowed him with insight and independent thought but also marked him as a loner. Though he had been in the highest echelons of Egyptian power, no one really trusted him when he took over from Nasser because he never stepped into the limelight.

- In 1973, twice Sadat faked-out the Israeli army, causing them to mobilize at great expense. On the third time, Sadat actually struck, this time facing no Israeli reinforcements because, says Israel's then-defense minister that Sadat, "made me do it twice, at a cost of ten million dollars each time. So, when it was the third time around I thought he wasn't serious. But he tricked me!"

## Quotes

- Leadership is needed to help people reach from where they are to where they have never been and, sometimes, can scarcely imagine going.

- Leaders think and act at the intersection of two axes: the first, between the past and the future; the second, between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead.

- Ordinary leaders seek to manage the immediate; great ones attempt to raise their society to their visions.

- "...what seems inevitable becomes so by human agency."

- Great leadership is more than an evocation of transitory exultation; it requires the capacity to inspire and to sustain vision over time.

- Something is amiss when the relationship between the leadership class and much of the public is defined by mutual hostility and suspicion.

- "Intense reading can help leaders cultivate the mental distance from external stimuli and personalities that sustains a sense of proportion. When combined with reflection and the training of memory, it also provides a storehouse of detailed and granular knowledge from which leaders can reason analogically. More profoundly, books offer a reality that is reasonable, sequential and orderly–a reality that can be mastered, or at least managed, by reflection and planning. And, perhaps, most importantly for leadership, reading creates a 'skein of intergenerational conversation', encouraging learning with a sense of perspective. Finally, reading is a source of inspiration. **Books record the deeds of leaders who once dared greatly, as well as those who dared too much, as a warning.**"

- "For information to be transmitted into something approaching wisdom, it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience."

- "Great leadership results from the collision of the intangible and the malleable, from that which is given and that which is exerted. Scope remains for individual effort–to deepen historical understanding, hone strategy and improve character. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote long ago, 'We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.' It is the role of leaders to help guide that choice and inspire their people in its execution."

## Random Tidbits

- "Study history. Study history," Churchill said, "In history lie all the secrets of statecraft." when asked about how one might prepare for the challenges of leadership in may 1953.

- In prison, Anwar Sadat had undergone a profound transformation. Instead of whittling time away in solitary confinement, he developed what he called 'inner strength.' This was his 'capacity...for change.' He said, "My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place had taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress. "


Leadership by Henry Kissinger

*[The Man From the Future](https://www.amazon.com/Man-Future-Visionary-Life-Neumann-ebook/dp/B098TYZN67?crid=3FM501TO8DIZ6&keywords=The%20Man%20From%20The%20Future&qid=1657608834&sprefix=the%20man%20from%20the%20future,aps,140&sr=8-1&linkCode=sl1&tag=slatestarcode-20&linkId=90b726e6acb3d8ccb1fe7b31e3d3ab21&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl)* explores the life of a time-traveler. Someone who theorized, pondered, and invented tools that would create the lives of some and destroy the lives of many. [Game theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory), quantum mechanics, [The Manhattan Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project), computers, and the [RAND Corporation](https://www.rand.org/) are just some of the many disciplines which von Neumann dabbled. This book explores those wide-reaching fields and the many lives they impacted.

After reading, I want to understand two fields better: game theory and the birth of the computer. I want to understand how to use game theory to demolish friends at Risk and I'd like a complete understanding of how the [ENIAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC) created the [EDVAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDVAC) and how that lead to the modern computer. To that, I shall continue my exploration of the shelves of libraries that holds the wisdom of the world–all for my taking.

## Takeaways/Learnings
- The brilliant Hungarian scientists, who were abundant in the physics and math world of the 20th Century, called themselves The Martians because of their strange accents and exceptional intellects–they must have been born on another planet.
	- It makes me wonder though, *why were there so many brilliant minds from Hungary in the 20th Century and specifically, how were they all working together*?
	- Von Neumann would attribute his generation's success to cultural factors that produced "a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction."

- Orthogonal polynomials are sets of independent mathematical functions that can be added together to make any other.

- Von Neumann was 17 when he shipped his first publication. It investigated the zeroes of Chebyshev polynomials. This is the first time Von Neumann's voice appears and it wouldn't change much. Freeman Dyson notes, "Johnny's unique gift as a mathematician was to transform problems in all areas of mathematics into problems of logic."

- Schrödinger came up with his famous thought experiment because he was trying to illustrate the ridiculousness that was von Neumann's claim of turning everyday objects into those of quantum mechanics.

> "Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my three-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us." – Edward Teller

- When von Neumann was offered a lectureship at Princeton, his arrival was delayed because he had to "fix a family matter." That family matter would be getting married.

- Fabian Waldinger, an economist, analysed the impact of the war on German research. He found that "university science departments that were bombed during the war recovered by the 1960s, but those that had lost their staff remained sub-par well into the 1980s."

- Von Neumann had an act for driving fast. So much so, in fact, that he would buy a new car every year because he had totaled the previous one. He drove a Cadillac because, he would say, "no one would sell me a tank."

- Feynman hated the idea of the Institute for Advanced Study. The idea of the institute was to allow professors to think deeply about hard problems, without the burden of teaching and getting paid handsomely to do so. Feynman thought the whole idea was a shame, saying: "these poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all day by themselves, ok? They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas...Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"

- Von Neumann was an exceptional thinker, but that cost him. His daughter, Marina, said, "Although he genuinely adored my mother, my father's first love in life was thinking, a pursuit that occupied most of his waking hours, and, like many geniuses, he tended to be oblivious to the emotional needs of those around him." His wife, Klari, notes other peculiarities. "A drawer could not be opened unless it was pushed in and out seven times, the same with a light switch, which also had to be flipped seven times because you could let it stay."

- The design for Von Neumann's EDVAC had five distinct parts. The first three were a central arithmetic unit for performing mathematical operations; a central control unit to ensure that instructions were executed in the proper order; and a memory to store the code and numbers. The final components were the input and output units.

- Gleb Watahin once commented to Von Neumann that he was done thinking about mathematics and on to just thinking about bombs. "That is quite wrong, I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers."

- In 1947, Jean Batrik, one of the ENIAC's original operators, was hired to program the EDVAC–"the first time anyone had been employed solely for that task. The job of the computer programmer was born."

	- Von Neumann's wife, Klari, wrote complex Monte Carlo simulation to run on the EDVAC. It was the first truly useful modern program ever to have been executed.

- The birth of the field of Game Theory into the world spung from Von Neumann's urge to find neat mathematical solutions to complicated real-world problems.

> "The task of the perfect strategist is to gain the upper hand with as little effort as possible." – Emmanual Lasker

- Von Neumann boiled games down to a series of events. Some events depended entirely on chance, which he called 'draws'; and other which depend on the "free decision" of the players, which he called 'steps.' Each player's goal in a zero-sum game, is to minimize the amount they can lose while minimizing the amount they can win. This became known as Von Neumann's 'minimax' theory.

> "Any event may be regarded as a game of strategy if one looks at the effect it has on participants" - von Neumann.

- Chess, tic-tac-toe, and other similar games von Neumann calls games of "perfect information" because all the moves are available to every player. Every game of perfect information must end in a win or a draw and there is always only one optimal move for each player at a time.

> "The point of bluffing is not so much that you might win with a bad hand, as that you want to encourage the opposition to bet with middle-range hands when you have a good hand." – Kenneth Binmore

- When formulating a strategy, one always has to account for actions of a completely rational enemy.

- For a machine to copy itself, von Neumann argues three things are required. 1) The machine must have a set of instructions that describe how to build another like it. 2) It must have a construction unit to build new automaton by executing the instructions. 3) Finally, it needs a way to copy the instructions and insert them into the new machine.

- Floccinaucinihilipilification - The habit of regarding something as worthless.

- The first conference dedicated to artificial life was at Los Alamos in September, 1987.

- John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky originally coined the term "artificial intelligence" and founded one of the first labs to study it at MIT in the 1950s.

- Terrified of his own death, von Neumann saw the catholic priest while he was in the hospital. Marina, von Neumann's daughter, said he was thinking of Pascal's wager and had always believed that in the face "of even a small possibility of suffering eternal damnation the only logical course is to be a believer before the end." According to her, von Neumann once told her, "Catholicism was a very rough religion to love in but it was the only one to die in."

- In a page of her unfinished memoirs, von Neumann's longtime wife, Klári writes: "I would like to tell about the man, the strange contradictory and controversial person; childish and good-humored, sophisticated and savage, brilliantly clever yet with a very limited, almost primitive lack of ability to handle his emotions–an enigma of nature that will have to remain unresolved."


The Man From The Future

*You can purchase [the book here](https://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Action-Vannevar-Bush/dp/1953953204).*

I've been wondering lately how the process of scientific research has developed over the years and this book helped shed some light on a potential answer. As I understand, it was Bush who helped create the current funding structure between the government and universities, as he thought it was of great importance for the military to work with the best civillian researchers, all of whom held positions at a university.

[Vannevar Bush](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush) was an engineer, inventor, and administrator who headed the [U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Scientific_Research_and_Development) (OSRD) during WWII. Bush reported directly to President Roosevelt. Essentially all of the R&D of military equipment and operations were conducted through this department. This book is a culmination of those experiences distilled down to the lessons Bush learned about dealing with "tyros", going toe to toe with Churchill, his philosophy on organizational structure, what's wrong with the patent system, how engines work, an ode to teachers and colleges, and much more.

The foreword to this book, written by Ben Reinhardt, puts it well by saying:

> So dive in. Have fun with it. Be curious. Skip around. Go deep. **I went into this book with little more than a name and came out with the closest thing to a mentor someone you've never met can be.**

I echo that statement.

## Practical Takeaways
- Change depends on two things: someone to work in a new way and an effective organization to bring those changes around. One is not more important than the other.

- A leader's job is coordination. It requires a trust in the people doing the actual work (Bush did not appreciate how Churchill handled many scientific matters during the war), and it requires a clear line of communication with someone 100% responsible and able to make a drastic decision if that need be. Bush recounts times where there was confusion as to who could actually make a decision about going forward and this lead to more confusion and frustration.

- This country pays greater attention to those who yell and complain about how something works today, or how it once worked, and seems to ignore those who are quietly working away towards a solution–especially those trying to work towards a solution within the confines of the current "screwed up" system.

- The success of our democratic government is dependent on at least two things: 1) We must learn and impress upon ourselves the difference between the freedom to do what we please and the infringement upon the right's of others to do the same. 2) The nature and stability of the democratic system itself. Namely, the success and cooperation between the three branches of the government, and, whether when its forces get out of play, it has within itself the ability to restore itself to equilibrium.

- A key trait of great leaders and workers is not just that they can get the job done when everything is going well, but that they know what to do and how to do it when everything goes wrong.

- There are two primary ways to lose a battle (with all other things being equal): The first is by having confused lines of communication. The second is to have someone in charge with poor judgement.

- A program, product, or initiative is guaranteed to fail if the CEO, leader, or president does not actively seek to make it work. If they don't care about it or are indifferent to it, it will not succeed. It may be average, but it won't ever achieve greatness.

- The more complex something becomes, the more likely it is that just one thing can break or go wrong and cause throw the whole system into shambles. This is true of engineering and of relations and organizations.

- In any large organization, there has to be a system for tracking and maintaining innovations that arise outside a specific field that would be useful for it. If not, they will get tossed aside and thrown in the "not useful" pile when in reality it was very useful, just for a different department.

- In meetings where strategy is being discussed, there should be someone present who is a master of technical advancements that are just being put into use or will be put into use sometime in the near future.

- Any group working in isolation will not sufficiently make adequate technological advancements.

- In an industry that is standardized, where basically all companies are making profits, small changes can be introduced but nothing major will happen. There is no sense in disrupting something that seems to be working out okay, especially if the future is unknown.

- An invention by itself is usually useless. It must be paired with promotion, financing, development, engineering, and marketing if the inventor wants to actually make some money and go somewhere with it.

- There are two main ways to go about inventing something. One is to identify something the public needs and hurry to make something that fits that need. The other is to develop new knowledge in areas where there may be useful results and see where it leads.

- When giving a speech, or really any conversation for that matter, don't start talking unless you know the exact sentence you're going to say at the end. Also, look at someone in the back row. If they become restless, put more volume into your voice. If they are still restless, stop talking.

- When someone gets to the age where they start observing, understanding, and questioning how things in the world are done, they separate into three groups: The first is those who meekly conform to how things have always been and follow suit. The second, a smaller minority, attack the system and get really rebellious. A smaller third group, who is usually overlooked, propose to do something about what they don't like and propose to accomplish this by working within the system itself–repairing from the inside out.

- Great teachers can teach you a lot about pride, humility, accomplishment, and a great many other virtues without ever saying a specific word about any of those topics.

- For anyone working in a professional setting, understanding human relations and having sound social skills are just as important, if not more, than being a master of the actual facts of the field in which they operate.

## Notes
- Anybody who is serious about creating enduring change realizes that it's critical to understand the origins of the institutions that shape our world.

- This book, provides a perspective "on the modern innovation environment as an evolved system with simple origins."

- Ben Reinhardt in the foreword: "I went into this book with little more than a name and came out with the closest thing to a mentor someone you've never met can be."

- The development of the atomic bomb fell into two phases, as I imagine most big technical breakthroughs follow. The first was the actual underlying physics behind it. The second was how to actually use those physics for something beneficial. I think this pattern is common: first comes the idea/discovery/breakthrough and then comes the "Okay, so what can we actually do with it." That is all fine and well, but we must be careful not to ask the second question too soon, for if no use is discovered, the breakthrough might be tossed to the waste bin. We must be able to recognize the value of the idea and not just the use case for the idea.

- The tyro, as new recruits were called by the Romans, have contempt for channels of authority and ducks around them. They just butt into all sorts of levels and clash into the train of gears. A common type of tyro is the chap who assumes and flaunts his boss's authority, either without the boss's knowledge or simply because the boss does not realize the havoc being caused.

## Quotes
*The following are direct quotes from Bush's words in the book.*

- Youth has always been in rebellion and should be if society is not to become static.

- The study of history can aid in avoiding mistakes, provided it is recent history and accurate, that is, before it has degenerated into a myth.

- The essence of civilization is the transmission of the findings of each generation to the next.

- "Much of this book will be devoted to how we can keep our business rolling in the right direction."

- Apparently in this strange country, we just continue practices that injure our neighbors until enough people get mad and make us quit.

- For, after all, there is happiness in the world, in this cruel and confused world, if we but seek it, and welcome it when it appears.
- Little things become submerged when great things are dominant.

- There should never be, throughout an organization, any doubt as to where authority for making decisions resides, or any doubt that they will be promptly made.

- When he knows stumbling blocks may get in the way of a joint effort in which he is engaged, a man who is light on his feet tries to anticipate them, to figure out where they may arise and why, and how best to evade them...Planning strategies means taking into account the personal quirks of some individual who almost always is the source of the blockade, and devising ways to annul his blockade by disarming him, by avoiding him by and end run, or, if necessary and possible, by knocking him on the head–figuratively of course.

- As we subdivide fields of learning and render all of them more precise and more intricate, no man can be a master of all, but a man who sets his mind to it can become a valuable amateur in fields outside his mastership.

- A man of intelligence can become well acquainted with a subject in surprisingly short time if he puts his mind to it. This is not to master it, but to arrive at a point where he speaks the language and can judge whether a proposal before him has been thought through and is sound. If a man is a good judge of men, he can go far on that skill alone.

- A lot of invention appears merely because of curiosity and with little thought at the time of possible utility.
- I think any man who has a bit of ingenuity in his soul gets quite a lot of fun out of following around with things that do not amount to anything, for the reason that when he does so, he has no pressures.

- It would be well if people, youth in particular, recognized the debt society owes to the quiet workers whom we never hear of, especially those who are led on by their curiosity and their desire to explore, with very little thought about acclaim or fortune.

- The inventor who works alone, who is isolated from the current trend of thought, and who hence does not grasp where the real opportunities lie, seldom makes a worthwhile invention.

- The reward of a great teacher lies in the success in later life of his students.

- Teachers are a vital ingredient in the long and delicate process by which the young mind attains the ability to make informed wise choices between alternatives at any level of simplicity or sophistication. The teacher's task... is to guide the student mind in its search for knowledge–the gathering of information, the understanding of its implications and applications, the consequent growth of knowledge, and, it is to be hoped, the ultimate growth of wisdom.

- One learns about teaching by observing teachers, by being taught, by teaching, and by thinking about it. Above all, it depends upon the realization that teaching is an art, as elusive as the art of painting or sculpture, that it is an individual art, developed by each man for himself, that it must be genuine and not forced, and that its mastery can bring joy and satisfaction.

- He taught me pride of scholarly accomplishment. And he never said a word to me on that subject.

- If a college or university is permeated with a spirit of success, so will its students be, and one who expects success is well on the way to attaining it.

- For every professional man...an understanding of human relations, the acquisition of a sound and effective grasp and practice in regard to them, is fully as important as excellence in the knowledge of facts and principles applicable to the area in which he operates.

- The basic function of education is to ensure that the experience of one generation may be passed on to the next. It is the ability to make this transfer that distinguishes man from beast.

- As an actual fact, much of the failure of management is due to a mistreatment of simple elementary principles rather than to any lack of handling of complex affairs.

- Alongside the course of mathematics of electric circuits, we need a course in the history of ideas. And we need that balance whenever older minds seek to help younger minds on the way of life.

## Random Tidbits
- What work needs to be done to remove the constraints preventing today's impossibles from becoming tomorrow's amazing?

## Books/sources recommended
- Preparing Tomorrow's Business Leaders, Drucker
- Bush's Meet the Press interview in 1959
- Bush's article on the memex


Pieces of the Action


- Before the universe began, there was nothing. There was no space outside the singularity, the really small dot of matter composed of material that was about to bang, and there was no time. So there was no "where" and there was no "before".
- The first remittance of the Big Bang was discovered, unknowingly, in 1965 by two scientists. At the time, they didn't know what they were hearing, but it was in fact light that had travelled across the universe and stretched so much it was now microwaves.
- Inflation Theory - Proposed by Alan Guth, this theory says moments after the Bang, the universe inflated from something you can hold in your hand to something that was the size of Earth today. This explains the ripples and eddies in our world.
- Most star systems are double-starred, which makes our single starred system (the sun) a slight oddity.
- If a supernova were to form within 10 light years of the earth, we'd be goners. But we don't have to worry about that happening. For a true supernova to form from a collapsed star, the star has to be ten to twenty times the size of the sun to begin with and the closest thing we have to that is 50 light years away, called Betelgeuse.
- Isaac Newton was wild. Very neurotic and kinda crazy, but he was brilliant. His masterwork, *Principia*, described the mathematical principles of natural philosophy and at the heart of it was his three laws of nature. This made Newton instantly famous. He was the first person to really create a universal law of sorts, that being gravity.
- By the late 18th Century, scientists knew the shape, size, and weight of the earth thanks to some precise measurements by a variety of scientists using a variety of techniques. They did not know, however, how old the earth was.
- How fast galaxies are moving away from us is called their recessional velocity.
- The word molecule comes from the Latin word for "little mass." Atoms make up everything, but most scientists talk about atoms in terms of molecules instead of atoms themselves. Molecules are two or more atoms working together in a stable way. If you have two Hydrogen atoms and then through on an Oxygen atom, you get a water molecule.
- Ernst Mach was the name behind the speed of sound - Mach 1.
- Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - An electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves. The uncertainty around the theory is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant but we cannot know both.
- Two forces keep atoms together - strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force. The strong force binds atoms together and allows the protons to stay in the nucleus. It's strong, but doesn't have a wide range of effect. This is why elements with big, crowded nuclei are so unstable. The force can't hold on to the protons in the nucleus, so some escape and then you get a new element.
- Hadrons, a collective term to describe protons, neutrons, and other particles governed by strong nuclear force are made up of quarks - rhymes with larks. Richard Feynman wanted to call these partons, but was overruled. Quarks are sub-divided into sub categories - up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom-which are refered to as their "flavors." These are even further divided into red, green, and blue.
- A Mars sized object slammed into Earth to create the Moon out of debris. This was very good for us, since the moon helps earth so much. But if it happened in 1986 or last Wednesday, we wouldn't be so pleased about it.
- The elements of chemistry are very strange... Oxygen and hydrogen are two of the most combustible elements in the world, but put them together and they make water. A similar thing happens with Sodium and Chlorine. Chlorine is a harsh chemical useful for cleaning and sodium is explosive. Smash them together and you get sodium chloride, or what most people call salt.
- When elements don't occur naturally on Earth, they become extremely toxic to us. Plutonium is a good example.
- Temperature is really just a measure of the activity of molecules.
- Storm clouds can contain enough energy for four days of power for the US. These clouds can contain updrafts and downdrafts and are often side by side, which is why pilots don't like to fly through them. The lighter particles tend to become positively charged, the heavier particles become negatively charged and stay at the base of the cloud. The negative particles want to race towards the positively charged earth - creating lightning.
- Overcast clouds are formed when moisture-bearing updrafts lack the oomph to break through a level of more stable air above, and instead spread out, like smoke hitting a ceiling.
- Darwin originally proposed that all organisms competed for resources, and the ones that had some innate advantage would prosper. That advantage would be passed on to the offspring. This is how species evolved. He first explained this is "Descent with modification."

## Quotes
- [One cannot] predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely.
- Every living thing is an elaboration on a single original plan. As humans, we are mere increments–each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications, and providential tinkerings stretching back 3.8billion years.
- "Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in often astonishingly large numbers.
- "It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously."
- "We really are at the beginning of it all [life.] The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks."

## Stories/Studies
- One of the most unlucky scientists, Guillaume Le Gentil (p. 54)
- Mary Anning found a strange 17 foot long sea monster fossil which is now known as ichtyosaurus embedded in the English Channel. For the next 35 years, she collected and sold fossils to tourists. It's long been held that she coined the original tongue twister, "She sells sea shells by the sea shore."
- Sometime in the 1950s, during the mass production phase of lead, a lot of studies were conducted to see the effects of lead. The problem was that most studies were funded by lead producers. In one such case, a doctor who had no training in chemical pathology conducted a study where they gave lead samples to volunteers in increasing doses. After, they tested their urine and feces for lead samples. But what the doctor didn't know was that lead isn't produced as a waste product. Rather it gets absorbed by the blood and bones - which is why it was so dangerous. It makes me think, shouldn't the fact that there was no lead being produced in waste send of a warning light?

# Questions
- If the earth formed from the Big Bang, where did the oceans come from - and how were the oceans already so deep compared to land?Was it just one big grand canyon like thing before someone turned the hose on and filled it with water?
	- “We have identified a vast reservoir of Earth-like water in the outer reaches of the solar system,” said Darek Lis, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the study. “Water was crucial for the development of life as we know it. We not only want to understand how Earth’s water was delivered, but also if this process could work in other planetary systems.”
	- https://www.nasa.gov/feature/comet-provides-new-clues-to-origins-of-earth-s-oceans
- What was the Reign of Terror in Paris and why was Marie Antoniette beheaded?
- If the universe is expanding, where is it expanding to? Or expanding in?


A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

## Notes

During the 1650s and 60s, the universal view at the time was that the world had been falling apart since Adam and Eve were banished from Eden. Any time disaster struck, it was because God was angry at the Europeans. This is why floods and earthquakes are still called, "acts of God."

The custom of saying "Bless you" dates from 1660s England. When someone would sneeze, it was thought of as the first sign of the bubonic plague. Saying "bless you" was a gesture to hope you didn't suffer and die.

The Royal Society was one of the first groups to welcome experiments to test ideas. At the time, accepted wisdom and eye-witness testimony of the past was the most credible form of "evidence." Anyone going against the grain and trying to seek out something "new," was not doing what they should be doing.

The Royal Society also created the idea of expressed knowledge and to do experiments in public and to share what you discover with others. Until then, discoveries and intricacies of fields were kept secret for only those who were "worthy". One might tell someone about their discovery or find, but the details were written in code, only to be used if someone tried to argue them. The early group of the Royal Society would have understood Gore Vidal's remark, "it is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

The first time a major scientific discovery was announced in print via a periodical, was Newton's observation that white light actually contains all colors of the spectrum. He did so in a 1672 edition of *Philosophical Transactions*, the first ever scientific journal and that was started by the Royal Society.

"Planet" is Greek for *wanderer*.

Greek physics began by dividing its subject into two pieces:\
1.) One was the cosmos above, where motion represents the natural state of things and goes on forever.\
2.) The other was Earth, where *rest* is the natural state of things and motion must have an explanation.

After Galileo and Newton, science would "communicate in the language of mathematics, the measure of quantity," a language "in which no terms exist for good or bad, kind or cruel... or will and purpose and hope." The word *force* would cease meaning "personal power" and instead mean *mass X acceleration*.

Upon the invention of the telescope, Galileo made sure to point out the warfare uses first, even though he knew the true beauty would be in looking at the heavens with it. But this got the general public excited about what he saw and they understood it merely makes far away images look closer, and doesn't make a mirage of something. If he didn't do that, people may have excused his findings, blaming a technical error on the telescope.

**The Great Chain of Being** - a Seventeenth Century idea that all objects that had ever been created, from sand to angels, had a particular rank in a great chain that extended from the lowest to the low to the God's right hand. In this vein, there was a strange dichotomy between God being a mathematician and designing everything beautifully, and God allowing randomness to play (dichotomy because the physicists chose the former and biologists chose the later, but I'm not sure how they are mutually exclusive.)

Pythagoras discovered that there was a harmony in music if the instruments that were making the sound were similar in ratio. For example, if a blacksmith hit a piece of iron with a 12 pound hammer and the same piece of iron with a 6 pound hammer, the sound would be harmonious. But not if he hit the iron with a 9 pound hammer.

Was math invented or discovered? The Greeks came to say discovered, but it's an interesting thought.

-   On the one hand, geometry and algebra as concepts are clearly invented by humans. When have you ever gone for a walk and tripped over a 3?

-   On the other, what could be more obvious than that the truths of mathematics are facts about the world, whether or not humans catch on to them at all. If two dinosaurs were drinking water and two more came to join them, would that not meant there were four dinosaurs all together?

There are only five "Platonic Solids," three-dimensional objects where each face is symmetrical and all the faces are identical.

Though Kepler's incessant shape-rotating proved to be sort of useless, he did provide one correct answer in his *Mystery of the Universe.* Since he mapped each orbit of the planets getting bigger and bigger as you got further from the sun, that had to have meant it was moving slower. Therefore, whatever force *propelled* the planets around the sun must have grown weaker with distance. Before Kepler, the works of the sky had been descriptive and predictive, not explanation. No one before him had thought to ask *how the planets move about their courses*.

#### Kepler's Laws:

1.  The planets travel around the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one focus.

2.  The line from a planet to the sun is always equal in area in equal times. So the line from where a planet was one day 1 to the sun and where that planet was on day 10 to the sun can be connected and form a triangle. That area is always equal during an equal time period.

3.  His third law is confusing, but the speed of planets can be multiplied by the length of the year raised to the 3/4th power. *Note: I'm not sure I've been given a clear definition.*

Any object launched into the air--arrow, bullet, cannonball--travels in a curved path like a parabola. The moving object covers the same horizontal distance during each second of its flight.

Horizontal movement of a falling object and vertical movement of a falling object are always independent of one another. This means the horizontal speed of something doesn't impact the vertical speed and so on. So a bullet fired from a gun and a bullet dropped below the gun, let go at the same time, will hit the ground at exactly the same time. If you launch something like this from a high enough altitude, and by the time it falls 4 feet the earth would have dropped 4 feet due to its curvature. This would continue happening, the object falling and falling and the earth curving and curving. This is how a satellite works.

The Law of Pendulums--a pendulum takes the same time to swing through a small arc as through a large one.

In the mind of Aristotle, math and science were to be used to understand the physical, real world better. There was no point in talking about a sphere rolling forever or weights falling in a vacuum because it wouldn't affect the day to day life. In Galileo's view, this was backward. The way to better understand the world was to look beyond those day to day distractions and focus instead on the deeper truths that governed those things. Even though there may never be a vacuum in nature, understanding how things react in a vacuum helps to understand those day to day interactions. It's here that the concept of *abstraction* is so important, it was a means by seeing truth unadorned by sinful man.

Zeno, the famed Greek philosopher, had tripped up those who came after him with his strange fables. Often, they had to do with motion and time, usually infinity specifically. It was difficult to find an answer to those fables, though philosophers debated for ages. Eventually, the Greeks decided they'd stay away from motion and time all together. This could be a reason as to why they seemed so infant in motion and time theories.

-   Galileo was the first to come up with a sort of definition, being: If a small section of a larger set of numbers is the same size as the large set. But even he didn't go much further than this observation/insight.

-   Eventually, they were able to find a conclusion to Zeno's problem. If they added up 1 and then 1/2 and then 1/4 and then 1/8 and then 1/16 and so on, the number would hit it's limit at about 2 - it would never go higher than that. So they concluded it would take 2 seconds to get to the other side of the room. This also helped solve the "speed at X distance problem". Before, they would decrease to a smaller and smaller limit: "X speed between 12 and 12:30, between 12 and 12:15, and so on. They realized this too had a limit and that would be the approximated speed at X distance."

Calculus is the Latin word for *pebble.* A reference to the heaps of stones once used as a calculating aid in addition and multiplication.

God could have made humans as intelligent as dogs. The world may be a bit happier that way, because we wouldn't be able to understand and conceive of evil, cancer, sickness, or disaster--but this assumes God's intention was to create a happy, meaningless world. Surely that wasn't God's goal. So this begs the question, *what is God's goal?* Why would he give us the capability and capacity to understand the good and the bad things of this world, but be able to do only very little about them all. Essentially, we're living at the mercy of them. God had conceived every possible universe, and this was the best one, given the boundaries God put on himself (not the boundaries that were on God). If he designed us in a way that we only chose good and never evil, we may be great but we'd be completely autonomous beings.

v = 32t is the only equation we need to determine the speed of a falling object at any give time. Where v is velocity and t is time elapsed.

Acceleration is a measure of how fast velocity is changing. Velocity is a measure of how fast position is changing. And position (my words here) is a measure of how fast everything around an object is changing in relation to that object.

## Quotes

The group was one of curious men studying the heavens and scribbling in their notebook.

God was a mathematician, seventeenth-century scientists firmly believed. He had written His laws in a mathematical code. Their task was to find the key.

On Newton's lack of travel: "The man who explained the tides never saw the sea" p.48

"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in." -- Richard Feynman

Change came not from finding new answers to old questions but from abandoning the old questions, unanswered, in favor of new, more fruitful ones.

Aristotle had asked *why*. Galileo has asked *how*. Aristotle's *why* explained the world. Galileo's *how* described it.

What is a man in the midst of infinity? -- Pascal

Both telescope and microscope had opened up new worlds. The new vistas served to reinforce the belief that on every scale the universe was a flawless, harmonious, and unimaginably complex mechanism.

Only those who themselves have wandered lost, wrote Einstein, know the misery and joy of "the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding."

"The mission of science was to honor God and the best way to pay homage was to discover and proclaim the perfection of his plans."

The discovery of Pythagoras' Theorem was so amazing because:\
- One, Simply by thinking, without using any real tools, they had discovered one of nature's secrets, and eternal and never-before suspected truth about the structure of the world.\
- Second, they could prove it. Unlike other observations, this was definitely provable and not just true but *necessarily* true. "One of God's thoughts, finally grasped by man."

Abstraction is the pathway to truth.

"As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things" -- Newton

"A world with sin was better than a world without choice."

Giant wars are fought on narrow battlegrounds.

"For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb" -- Aldous Huxley


The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick

## Impressions
I didn't have many impressions before reading this book, other than being excited by the beautiful design and color theory. I also assumed it to be of some importance because Stripe Press was the publisher. I'm happy to say it did not disappoint.

I wrote about this in [my summary/review of this book](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/book-review-and-summary-revolt-of-the-public), but Gurri's writing helped me navigate the world as I see it today, which will be invaluable for navigating the world in the future. It combines geopolitics, social phenomena, and historical events into a cohesive narrative about the world. It also gave me language to talk about certain political situations.

## Key Learnings
Under conditions of scarcity, sources of information become authoritative. Increase the access to information and you decrease the authority of any one person on that topic.

There are two groups going head to head right now, The Public and The Authorities. **The Public**, from Walter Lippmann: "is not a fixed body of individuals. It is merely the persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only be supporting or opposing the actors." Guru agrees with this, but thinks the public today has become an actor: "It is composed of amateurs, and it had fractured into vital communities, each clustered around an affair of interest to the group." **Authority** pertains to the source. We believe something because of who said it. At an individual level, this standing is achieved by a professionalization. The person in authority is trained in a certain way and has access to hidden knowledge. But at an institutional level, there is lasting authority. This authority doesn't waiver with people. They have a certain connection to monopoly conditions on their field. These are government, corporations, research institutes, foundations, and so on.

Gurri's thesis is that a revolution in the nature and content of communication ended the top-down control elites exerted on the public during the industrial age. This is only true though, if we can show that information can actually influence the arrangement of power and create real-life effects and those effects have to be big enough to create a real crisis of authority.

We are, what Gurri calls, *homo informaticus* (HI), or information man. HI is literate and has access to newspapers, radio, movies, and TV. This is a new threat to the regime, because the public "with a longer reach may gain access to information that subverts its story of legitimacy." That story of legitimacy is currently the only thing holding the "public" to obeying/following the authorities power. The regime would try to control this new form of media, and can do so to a current extent, but the sheer volume of channels prohibits it from doing so completely. "As messages and images proliferate, it becomes progressively hard to determine exactly what their relationship is to the regime's justifying story."
This new channel of information broadens HI's field of vision to think about different worldviews. No longer is there one idea or opinion. "When judging his government, HI can then do so in light of alternative possibilities–different views of the same policy or event, different values invoked for an action or inaction, different performance by other governments, real or imagined." Since HI can't absorb *all* of the new information, he has to be selective. So he picks and chooses, as do other members of the public, who they listen to, what they watch, and inevitably, what they believe. Since all information has to either be mediated or recieved directly, the mass media mediators no longer can persuade the public to think one way about the regime.

The two groups came to a head in 2011, a period Gurri refers to as the "Phase Change." Most of the people, in each of the phase change events of 2011 were young, middle class, educated. "Sectarian ideals propelled them into politics." Neither, did any of the movements insist in a new way of governing, new policies or plans to move forward. They made no demands, but felt free to accuse.

Though the Occupy Wall Street movements didn't have large numbers compared to Tel Aviv or Egypt, it somehow tipped the scales for the public to distrust government institutions and with it, democracy. Their message was that the 1% tyrannized the other 99%, who was supposedly part of the march, but they didn't actually represent that 99%, only a small subset of people within that 99%. Somehow though, their message became interpreted as: "This is how the American public is feeling."

Thanks to the information sphere, the public sees their unmet expectations daily of the Center-based institutions. The public uses that information to attack the legitimacy of the institutions. Sometimes they're right in attacking the corruption, but other times they go to far. This all stems from the fact that the Center can't say "we don't know" and they're too busy making sure "bad science" from amateur's doesn't spread. This supposed confidence of certainty is received by the public as legit, until it isn't and they say something that isn't true or something happens that they said wasn't going to, because inevitably it will because they can't be certain of every little thing.

For a government to fail, two things must occur:

1. First some empirical event must occur that is perceived as a failure.
2. Second, The relationship between the government and the governed must somehow be ruptured. Trust must be broken for failure to have lasting consequences.

If the industrial age hierarchies of contemporary democracy are suffering a crisis of authority (they are), and if the public is on the move and expecting impossibilities (yes), then all things being equal, the system will continue to bleed away legitimacy–and there will be those who argue it should be put out of its misery. Gurri explains the road we're on leads to nihilism. The Nihilist heard George W. Bush say the war in Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction, but none were found there. He heard Obama say unemployment would be capped, only for millions to lose their job. But he doesn't see these as failures. He assumes the government are liars and cheaters. Without his digital devices, the nihilist would be nothing. Instead, he is overly informed about those few odd topics that obsess him, "and he produces a torrent of hard-core negations posted about about the world around him."

## Quotes
"When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over authoritative judgement."

"Even the simplest human events constitute complex systems ruled by nonlinearities. Within such systems, teasing out a single episode and proclaiming it the prime mover makes as much sense as picking a grain of sand and calling it 'the beach'."

"The anxiety to control information in those who already controlled the guns should alert us that political power may be less "hard""

"Propaganda was the totalitarian's admission that his power wasn't total."


Revolt of the Public


1. Nature and the world are not static. Therefore, anything or anyone that acts like it is static will eventually come to ruin. Instead, nature and the environment is dynamic. It begs for a constant tango between the inhabitants of the world as it mutates. Companies, ideas, and people that worked awhile ago aren't going to work today if they keep doing the same thing.
2. Anxiety and depression cannot be treated easily if the person has unpredictable daily routines. The system in the body that regulates those emotions and feelings are closely linked to the circadian rhythm. Ensuring you're sleep habits are regular can be a great place to start.
3. Life is a constant battle fighting to maintain order, but learning how to thrive in chaos.
4. consciousness can be defined as knowing exactly how and where we can be hurt and why.
5. One of the main differences between man and animal is man's knowledge of what's going on in the world. More specifically, man's desire and ability to cause trouble and pain and suffering for the sake of it.
6. Everyone has to experience a season of intense suffering, sadness, or loneliness so they know what they know where they don't want to go. This could give your life Meaning (note the capital M.) "I'm on this earth to help myself and anyone who wants to come with me to stay away from X, Y, and Z."
7. Don't be friends with someone whose friendship you wouldn't recommend to your son, daughter, sister, or mother.
8. Before you help someone, find out why that person is in trouble. It's likely they're in trouble partly because of their actions. Not to judge them, just to know how they ended up in the spot they are.
9. If you are succeeding at everything, it's most likely not because you're so freaking talented at so many different things. Rather, it probably means you're just not doing anything new, difficult, or challenging. Sure, you may be winning. But you're not growing. And what's the point of winning at something if it doesn't make you better? **Victory in the present shouldn't take precedence over trajectory across time.**
11. The fundamental moral goal of a parent or care taker over a child is to not shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience pain or failure, but how to make sure they learn something from their failure so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost.
12. There are two general principles of discipline. First, limit the rules. Too many rules makes kids go crazy. Second, use the least amount of force necessary. Don't go straight from 0-100 on the punishment scale. Work your way up and only get to the end if the child isn't cooperating on the previous levels. However, sometimes the highest form is necessary, like when a child is doing something that could quickly lead to something fatal. Then, it's necessary to get the kid to stop immediately, no questions asked.
13. A natural disaster is an act of God - you couldn't have predicted its arrival. But you can do what's necessary to prepare for one. You know, eventually, your car will stop working or need maintenance. It's inevitable. So you can either choose to ignore the warning lights, or maintain a schedule of maintenance and put money aside for the inevitable 4-figure repair cost.
14. Some of the worst people to be around are those who have decided to live life through a single axiom: "The right is bad." "Government is bad." They filter everything through this axiom and believe, truly believe, that everything that happens can be viewed through that. Too much money? The government isn't spending enough. Not enough money? The government is spending too much. Natural disaster? The government wasn't prepared enough (okay this one may be true.)
15. 2 types of people: "Did what I want to happen, happen? No. Therefore I did something wrong and I still have something to learn." "Did what I want to happen, happen? No. Therefore this thing is unfair. Someone else is to blame."
16. Stubborn refusal to change in the face of error is stupidity.
17. The purpose of memory is not to remember the past. It's to stop the same bad thing from happening over and over again. If something bad happens, and you know why, you can stop that bad thing from happening again.

## Quotes
- "It's not what we don't know what gets us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so." -
- "If mother nature wasn't so hell-bent on our destruction, it would be easier for us to exist in simple harmony with her dictates."
- "An idea is more credible when it emerges as a consequence of investigations in different realms." #note-taking #slipbox
- "When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you're so engrossed in what you're doing you don't notice–it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos."
- "You can't long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are still learning what you need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering." #mastery
- "It is far better to render beings in your care competent than to protect them."
- "If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in act two. Otherwise it has no business being there." #writing #details #quote
- "Those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it."
- "It's easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today's cheap pleasures."
- "Attend to the day but aim at the highest good."
- "If a society does not adequately reward productive, pro-social behavior, insists upon distributing resources in a markedly arbitrary and unfair manner, and allows for theft and exploitation, it will not remain conflict-free for long. If its hierarchies are based only on power, instead of the competence necessary to get important and difficult things done, it will be prone to collapse, as well."
- Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought, and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist.
- "A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie."
- If you don't believe in brick walls, you will still be hurt when you run headlong into one. Then you will curse reality itself for producing the wall.


12 Rules For Life

One Sentence Summary
--------------------

At all costs, you must be willing to innovate the way you do business and what your company delivers; "Innovate or Die" mentality.

Two Key Takeaways
-----------------

1.  When you innovate, everything has to change, not just the way you deliver a product
2.  Defining long-term priorities (3 or less), sticking to them, and repeating them often will be a sure sign of a successful and coherent organization.

Chapter 1: Starting at the Bottom
---------------------------------

-   "I didn't have a clear idea of what 'success' meant, no specific vision of being wealthy or powerful, but I was determined not to live a life of disappointment.
-   Having dedicated time to think every day is important. Creating space in each day to allow your thoughts to wander beyond your immediate job responsibilities. "I'm certain I'd be less productive and less creative in my work if I didn't also spend those first few hours away from email and text messages."
-   Learning to embrace new technologies, try every new gadget, and break every stale format is critical to a company today. One must have an "Innovate or Die" mentality.
-   "There's no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested."
-   There's a delicate balance between demanding that your people perform, and not instilling a fear of failure in them. That balance is critical to find.
-   "In your work, in your life, you'll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you honestly own up to your mistakes."
-   Be decent to people. Treat everyone with empathy and fairness.
-   "Excellence and fairness do not have to be mutually exclusive." You can be an excellent company, and care about the people you work with and serve.

Chapter 2: Betting on the Talent
--------------------------------

-   "True integrity - a sense of knowing who you are and being guided by your own clear sense of right and wrong - is a kind of secret weapon."
-   "One person's unwillingness to give a timely response can cause so much unnecessary strain and inefficiency."
-   The ability to look at things not as a catastrophe, but as a puzzle to be solved, will drastically shift the way your team approaches the problem.
-   "My instinct throughout my career has always been to say yes to every opportunity."

Chapter 3: Know What You Don't Do (And Trust in What You Do)
------------------------------------------------------------

-   "You can't pretend to be someone you're not or to know something you don't."
-   "Managing creative processes start with the understanding that it's not a science - everything is subjective; there is often no right or wrong."
-   "I'd much rather take big risks and sometimes fail than not take risks at all."
-   "If you want innovation - and you should, always - you need to give permission to fail."

Chapter 4: Enter Disney
-----------------------

-   Don't invest resources and time into your company that will give small returns. It's not worth taking up people's time with.
-   When two leaders have a dysfunction relationship, there's no way that the rest of the company beneath them can be functional.
-   "Managing your own time and respecting others' time is one of the most vital things to do as a manager."
-   When finding yourself in a hopeful situation that it'll work out without being able to explain *how* it'll work out, that's when you need ask clarifying questions.

1.  What's the problem I need to solve?
2.  Does this solution make sense?
3.  If I'm feeling some doubt, why?
4.  Am I doing this for sound reasons or am I motivated by something personal?

Chapter 5: Second In Line
-------------------------

-   Don't let ambition to get too far ahead of opportunity
-   Do the job you have well. Be patient. Look for opportunities to pitch in and expand and grow. Make yourself one of the people, through attitude and energy and focus, that your bosses feel they have to turn to when an opportunity arises.
-   "Good leadership isn't about being indispensable; it's about helping others be prepared to possibly step into your shoes - giving them access to your own decison making, identifying the skills they need to develop and helping them improve, and, sometimes being honest enough to tell them why they're not ready for the job.

Chapter 6: Good Things Can Happen
---------------------------------

-   Optimism in a leader, especially in challenging times, is vital
-   "it's about believing you and the people around you can steer toward the best outcome, and not communicating the feeling that all is lost if things don't break your way. The tone you set as a leader has an enormous effect on the people around you. No one wants to follow a pessimist.

Chapter 7: It's About the Future
--------------------------------

-   Determine Your Priorities. **You only get three**. "Priorities are the few things you're going to spend a lot time and capital on."
-   Communicate your priorities clearly and repeatedly. It's what separates great managers from the rest.
-   The way to get people to admire the company working for you, is to create products they're proud of.
-   Don't let negativity from people you barley know, affect the way you feel about yourself.
-   Don't let blows to the ego populate and stay long in your mind.

Chapter 8: The Power of Respect
-------------------------------

-   "Don't let your ego get in the way of making the best possible decision."
-   "If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real."
-   Be willing to disrupt your companies business model if it will have a positive affect in the long-term.
-   Give people authority. If you trust them to do a job, give them *total* control over that department, the job, and the decisions needed to be made in that field.

Chapter 9: Disney-Pixar And a New Path to the Future
----------------------------------------------------

-   Long-shots aren't usually as long as they seem.
-   Weigh all sides of a decision. Don't let the negatives drown out the positives. Just because they're more negatives, they may not be as dramatic as they few positives.
-   "Nothing is a sure thing, but you need to at the very least be willing to take big risks. You can't have big wins without them."

Chapter 10: Marvel and Massive Risks That Make Perfect Sense
------------------------------------------------------------

-   "Surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do."

Chapter 11: Star Wars
---------------------

-   "The worst thing you can do when entering a negotiation is to suggest or promise something because you know the other person wants to hear it, only to have to reverse course later."
-   Don't project anxiety onto your team. It's counterproductive.

Chapter 12: If You Don't Innovate, You Die
------------------------------------------

-   Short-term loses are guaranteed if you shift your business model. It won't look positive, but adjusting course to a long-term change is the best thing you can do for an organization.
-   "Being present for your people - and making sure they know that you're available to them - is so important for the morale and effectiveness of a company."
-   "When you innovate, everything needs to change, not just the way you make or deliver a product."

Chapter 13: No Price On Integrity
---------------------------------

-   "A companies integrity depends on the integrity of its people."

Chapter 14: Core Values
-----------------------

-   "Wherever you are along the path, you're the same person you've always been"


The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons From 15 Years as CEO of The Walt Disney Company

One Sentence Summary
--------------------

Tipping Points can be caused by the right people, with the right information, in the right context; all we have to do is find those variables.

Two Main Takeaways
------------------

1.  If content isn't sticking or getting through to an audience, don't change the content. Change the way the content is delivered.
2.  Having a clean work space, providing a loving home, being in a nice, clean neighborhood, and enjoying where we work - anything about our environment has a much more dramatic impact than what we think or what we say.

Chapter 1: The Three Rules of Epidemics
---------------------------------------

-   Epidemics are the function of people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating
-   The Tipping Point is the moment of Critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point
-   The Law of the Few -
-   One very influential persons hops on a trend, or gets a lot of people sick, starting the epidemic.
-   The Stickiness Factor -
-   There are specific ways of making information memorable. Simple changes can be made to the presentation and how information is structured that make a *huge* difference on the impact of the message
-   The Power of Context -
-   The context in which people incur a stimuli has a massive impact on how that person responds - not necessarily the stimuli itself.
-   *Humans are a lot more sensitive to the environment than we think.*

Chapter 2: The Law of the Few
-----------------------------

-   There are very few people who have enough influence and impact to tip an epidemic. But those who do, start waves in things they pursue.
-   The messenger matters. They're the ones who make something stick

Chapter 3: The Stickiness Factor
--------------------------------

-   Sesame Street started telling stories more and in the stories were lessons taught. They found the more they taught things in narrative form, the more kids remembered the lessons
-   The ideas in Sesame Street were not profound. Instead, the understood how they presented the messages and lessons was what meant a kid remembering the lesson or not. Changing the way information is presented can have a massive impact on how well things stick.
-   There are people out there who can start epidemics, you just have to find them - The Law of the Few. There is also certain ways to package information that makes it irresistible and will move people to action, you just have to find out what that is - The Stickiness Factor

The Power of Context (Part One)
-------------------------------

-   The Broken Window Theory - Criminologist James Q. Wilson and George Kelling; Argued that crime is the result of disorder. Therefore, if broken windows in homes go un repaired for certain lengths of time, people will assume there is no order and crime will be inevitable.
-   Following that rule, epidemics can be tipped by tinkering with the smallest form of environment or context
-   Fundamental Attribution Error - When interpreting other people's behavior, humans overestimate character traits, and underestimate the importance of the situation and context one is in.
-   *The best person in the world could steal money if in the right circumstance and context. On the opposite end, the worst person in the world could change depending on the situation and circumstance they're in.*
-   The immediate context of behavior is more important than the context of your thoughts

The Power of Context (Part Two)
-------------------------------

-   Small, close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic of a potential message or idea.


The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Summary
-------

This is an exceptional book on thinking outside the box, innovating when others think to go with the safe route, and the necessity to think from first principles. Plus, there are some interesting behind the scenes stories of successful and failed NASA missions.

Key Takeaways
-------------

To think like a rocket scientist is to look at the world through a different lens. **Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable.** They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable roadblocks. They're moved not by blind conviction but by self-doubt; **their goal is not short-term results but long-term breakthroughs**. They know that the rules aren't set in stone, the default can be altered, and a new path can be forged. ([Location 85](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=85))

Science, as Carl Sagan put it, is "a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."12 ([Location 111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=111))

Our yearning for certainty leads us to pursue seemingly safe solutions---by looking for our keys under street lamps. ([Location 355](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=355))

Only when we pay attention to the subtle clues---there's something off with the data, the explanation seems cursory or superficial, the observation doesn't quite fit the theory---can the old paradigm give way to the new. ([Location 612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=612))

"In order to stay calm in a high-stress, high-stakes situation, all you really need is knowledge.... Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on---to study it, dissect it, tease apart all its components and consequences---really works."67 ([Location 687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=687))

**Knowledge turns an uncertain situation into a high-stakes game of peekaboo**. Yes, spaceflight is no laughing matter---there are lives at stake---but astronauts contain uncertainty the same way that infants do: by figuring out who's going to appear on the other end when the hands open up. ([Location 704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=704))

Ask yourself, What's the worst-case scenario? And how likely is that scenario, given what I know? ([Location 716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=716))

After you determine what's truly worth being alarmed about, you can take measures to mitigate risks by calling two plays from the rocket-science playbook: redundancies and margins of safety. ([Location 725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=725))

Think about it: Where are the redundancies in your own life? Where's the emergency brake or the spare tire in your company? How will you deal with the loss of a valuable team member, a critical distributor, or an important client? What will you do if your household loses a source of income? **The system must be designed to continue operating even if a component fails.** ([Location 755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=755))

Process, by definition, is backward looking. **It was developed in response to yesterday's troubles.** If we treat it like a sacred pact---if we don't question it---process can impede forward movement. Over time, our organizational arteries get clogged with outdated procedures. ([Location 895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=895))

Process was developed in response to yesterday's problems. What worked in the past might not work in the future, so be wary of process. #TI

"To create the company of tomorrow, you must break down the bad habits, silos, and inhibitors that exist today." ([Location 1160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1160)) #quote

As Einstein said, everything should be made "as simple and as few as possible."36 This principle is known as [[Occam's razor]]. The name, I admit, is unfortunate. It sounds like a cheap late-night horror flick, but it's actually a mental model named after [[William of Ockham]], a fourteenth-century philosopher. The model is often stated as a rule: **The simplest solution to a problem is the correct one.** ([Location 1204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1204))

**A breakthrough begins with asking a good question, laboring over the answer intensely, and being stuck in idleness for days, weeks, and sometimes years.** Research shows that incubation periods---the time you spend feeling stuck---boosts the ability to solve problems. ([Location 1538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1538))

You must be patient enough to pursue the whisper and perceptive enough to receive it when it arrives. ([Location 1577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1577)) #quote

"To create," biologist [[François Jacob]] said, "is to recombine." ([Location 1605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1605))

Decades later, [[Steve Jobs]] echoed the same sentiment**: "Creativity is just connecting things.** When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.... [T]hey've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people."60 ([Location 1606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1606))

[[Combinatory play]] has also produced many breakthrough technologies. Larry Page and Sergey Brin adopted an idea from academia---the frequency of citations to an academic paper indicates its popularity---and applied it to the search engine to create Google. Steve Jobs famously borrowed from calligraphy to create multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts on the Macintosh. Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings was inspired by the subscription model used at his gym: "You could pay $30 or $40 a month and work out as little or as much as you wanted."71 ([Location 1644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1644))

"If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success," ([Location 1894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1894)) #quote

One way to shock your brain and generate wacky ideas is to ask, **What would a science-fiction solution look like?** ([Location 2029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=2029))

Breakthroughs, after all, are reasonable only in hindsight. "The day before a major breakthrough, it is just a crazy idea," says aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, who designed the first privately funded spacecraft to reach space. ([Location 2278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=2278))

Drury knows a secret missed by many business leaders: The low-hanging fruit has already been picked. **You can't beat a stronger competitor by copying them. But you can beat them by doing the opposite of what they're doing.** ([Location 2701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=2701))

To make sure you don't fall in love with a single hypothesis, generate several. When you've got multiple hypotheses, you reduce your attachment to any one of them and make it more difficult to quickly settle on one. With ([Location 2928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=2928))

When the world around you changes---when the tech bubble bursts or self-driving cars become the norm---**the ability to change with the world confers an extraordinary advantage**. "The successful executive is faster to recognize the bad decisions and adjust," explains Walt Bettinger, the CEO of Charles Schwab, "whereas failing executives often dig in and try to convince people that they were right." ([Location 3080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=3080))

"If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your gue**ss is, it doesn't make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is---if it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.**" ([Location 3210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=3210))

"You think that because you understand 'one' that you must therefore understand 'two' because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand 'and.'" ([Location 3277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=3277))

Boone's secret is the same as any self-respecting astronaut: test as you fly. **Train in the same environment you'll experience on race day**---while your competition trains from the comfort of a gym because it happens to be raining outside. ([Location 3422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=3422))

**There are two responses to negative feedback from a credible source: Deny it or accept it.** Every great scientist chooses the latter, and Squyres did the same. ([Location 3739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=3739))


Think Like a Rocket Scientist

Key Insights
------------

### Books allow you to enter an invisible world

"When you first open a book, you enter a liminal space. You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book, nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward). To some extent this polydimensionality describes the feeling of reading in general--one is in many places at once."

### Not all books can be read the same way

"If books were like roads, some would be made for driving quickly--details are scant, and what details are there appear drab--but the velocity and torque of the narrative is exhilarating. Some books, if seen as roads, would be made for walking--the trajectory of the road mattering far less that the vistas these roads might afford."

This description of books really hit home for me. I think it helps me solidify the fact that not every books can be read the same way, and that's okay! Some books need time to read and absorb the information. Others, you can zip right through without having to think twice about it.

### The Eye-Voice Span

The distance between where ones eyes are looking on a page and where , on the page, one's inner voice is reading.

### Reading is not a series of sequential "nows"

"Past, present, and future are interwoven in each conscious moment--and in the performative reading moment as well. Each fluid interval comprises an admixture of: the memory of things read (past), the experience of consciousness "now" (present), and the anticipation of things to be read (future).

This is evident in how we picture fictional characters. Some books open with the description of characters, like *Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood*. But most of the time, we learn a little about a character at a time and add that to a "picasso-esque" image in our minds of what we think the character looks like, updating it with each bit of information.

### All good books are mysteries

"At heart, all good books are mysteries. Authors withhold information. This information may be revealed over time. This is one reason we bother to turn a book's pages. A book my be a literal mystery, like *Murder on the Orient Express*, or a metaphysical mystery, like *Moby Dick*, or a mystery of purely architectonic kind--a chronoptic mystery, like *The Odyssey*.

### A description can be a rank or purpose (in a book and in life)

If you're reading a mystery novel and a character is introduced with a mustache, as a reader, you draw assumptions about that characters role in the book. Descriptions, therefore, can be a rank and a purpose.

"[Descriptions] tell the readers whether they are dealing with a pawn, a rook or a bishop."

This happens in life too. We draw assumptions about co-workers, strangers, and friends based on their appearance until we get to know them for who they actually are. People who are obsessed with playing "the game of life" will treat bishops and rooks much different than they do pawns, to their [the person who treats people differently based on their assumed "status"] detriment of course.

### A great author is able to 'bear witness' of reality well

"When we remark that a novel is 'finely observed,' we are praising the writer's ability to bear witness. This bearing witness is composed of two acts: the author's initial observation in the real world, and then the translation of that observation into prose. The more 'finely observed' the text, the better we readers recognize the thing or event in question."

### Readers perform their books

"We perform a book--we perform a reading of a book. We perform a book, and we attend the performance. As readers, we are both the conductor of the orchestra, as well as the audience."

### On Imagination

"Imagination is a turning-away from the mind-independent world. Imagination, you could say, is like an "inward eye."

### Words work like keys, unlocking something special in the reader

"Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words 'contain' meaning, but, more important, words potentiate (increase the power or likelihood of) meaning..."


What We See When We Read

Summary
-------

Winners never quit is an incorrect statement; they do quit, they just know what to quit and when.

### Two Key Takeaways

1.  When starting a new venture or skill, know when to quit. Have it outlined and don't quit unless you reach that threshold
2.  Sometimes quitting is the best way to reinvent yourself in an organization. Don't mistake being in a cul-de-sac for being in The Dip.

### Part 1: Being the Best in the World is Seriously Underrated

-   MYTH - Winners don't quit
-   TRUTH - Winners do quit. The just quit the right stuff at the right time.
-   *Michael Jordan quit baseball to focus on basketball in high school. Think he regrets doing that?*
-   The reason people end up being the best in the world is they were able to push through the mundane and the boring long enough to become the best.
-   Zipf's Law - The people who are #1 get much more results (money, followers, capital) then number two because the marketplace loves a winner
-   "Just about everything you learned in school is wrong, but the wrongest might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success
-   Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations. Reactive quitting and serial quitting just leaves your burnout, frustrated, and like you haven't accomplished anything

#### **Three Types of Curves:**

-   **Curve 1 - The Dip**
-   The low point after the initial excitement of learning a new skill or starting a new project. This could be the paperwork to get certified, the legal stuff to starting a business, etc.
-   Being able to stick through the dip longer, lean into the dip, and make something of it are the people who end up on top.
-   The Dip filters out all the people who weren't motivated. This is why people on the other side of the dip of highly compensated - scarcity. Scarcity creates value.
-   **Curve 2 - The Cul De Sac**
-   Going around and around in a dead end, hoping for a way out
-   Doing the hard things; dealing with the annoying customer for example, is the reason you're not replaceable. Be thankful for the dip.
-   "A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere but stay busy, or he can tap on one tree twenty-thousand times and get dinner" *You decide which woodpecker to be*
-   Simple Rule to Follow - If you can't make it through the dip, don't start.
-   **Curve 3 - The Cliff**

#### **Seven Reasons You Might Fail to Become the Best in The World**

1.  You would run out of time (and quit)
2.  You run out of money (and quit)
3.  You get scared (and quit)
4.  You're not serious about it (and quit)
5.  You lose interest or settle for being mediocre (and quit)
6.  You focus on the short term instead of the long term (and quit when the short term gets too hard)
7.  You pick the wrong thing at which to be the best in the world (because you don't have the talent and quit)

-   There are only two options: (1) Quit or (2) Be Exceptional. Average is for losers
-   The opposite of quitting isn't trying harder. The opposite of quitting is an invigorated new strategy designed to break the problem apart.

### Part 2: If You're Not Going to Get to #1, You Might as Well Quit Now

-   Failing and quitting are not one and the same. Failing happens when there are no other options to pursue your dream, or when you quit so often that you've used up all your time and resources.
-   Instead of, "Winners never quit" mantra, it should be, "Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can't deal with the stress of the moment."

#### **Three Questions to Ask Before Quitting**

1.  Am I panicking?
2.  Who am I trying to influence?
3.  What sort of measurable progress am I making?

-   The tactics you use in your organization are not the organization. The moment the way you do business is no longer part of winning The Dip - you *must* switch tactics.
-   Write down on a piece of paper when you're willing to quit
-   *If I lose $2,000* i*n one year of operations, I'm out.*
-   Don't enter a market that's too big for you to make a splash in. The pressure will be too high and your message will get lost. Pick a small market and grow from there.


The Dip by Seth Godin

Summary
-------

A short read, but interesting nonetheless. This book doesn't have a ton of practical insights, but gives some motivation to show what you're doing in public. An interesting argument and helpful for someone like me who is so young and feel like I haven't "accomplished" anything yet.

Key Insights
------------

Nothing is original.

The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something "original," nine out of ten times they just don't know the references or the original sources involved.

Collecting various good ideas from different forms of culture is an essential skill to writing and having influence.

Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.

Take on the identity of the 'someone' before you actually are the 'someone'

1\. Pretend to be something you're not until you are---fake it until you're successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them to; or 2. Pretend to be making something until you actually make something.

It's not just about taking their style. Understand how they are thinking, understand why they wrote one thing over another.

Wilson Mizner said if you copy from one author, it's plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it's research.

Don't just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.

If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff.

Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing.

So: Copy your heroes. Examine where you fall short. What's in there that makes you different? That's what you should amplify and transform into your own work.

If you have an idea for how something "should" be in life, make that thing. Don't sit around complaining or wishing something existed.

The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use---do the work you want to see done.

"Complain about the way other people make software by making software."

Being seen and being a creative is about sharing your work as you're going. Don't worry about being an 'overnight success' - enough people will see you when you're there. Start now and show your work.

You don't have to do it. Focus on the wildly important things.

In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what's really important to them.


Show Your Work by Austin Kleon

Summary
-------

This book is very helpful for anyone who wants to get into freelance or agency marketing. It gives some practical writing advice, but it's mainly tips and strategies on how to create good campaigns inside of an agency.

Outline
-------

### Chapter 2: Writing, Rewriting, and Re-Writing

The majority of our job is not coming up with great ideas. It's crafting the words and art around other people's ideas to make them great.

How to Write Headlines:

-   Sit in front of the page and write line after line after line in quick succession until your lines are loosely connected to where you started.
-   Once you get that perfect line, rewrite in 20 different ways. Flop the structure, start with the verb. Start with the noun.

Advertising has killed these words. Use them sparingly:

-   Perfect
-   Unique
-   Intersting
-   New
-   No Wonder
-   Special
-   Not to Mention
-   That's Why
-   First
-   Only
-   Exclusive
-   Special
-   No Matter

Before you put pen to paper, think about how you're going to say what you're going to say. British voiceover?

Don't EVER use these words in headlines:

-   Like
-   Stuff
-   Things

Never let people guess the next word you're going to use.

Create tension with headlines. Example:

-   Dull line: Take your work out of the office with a mobile broadband card.
-   Line with Tension: The office is no place to work.

#### How to Steal Headlines Like a Pro:

1\. Find a well-known saying and twist it.

-   "Start acting your *younger* age"
-   "Make your long story look short"

2\. Be bland, then play with it

-   This: Great signal in Kansas City.
-   Becomes this: KC's drenched in our sweet and tangy signal sauce

3\. Take the crappy line from a creative brief and make it not crappy

4\. Big small/High low

-   Finding a parallel you can make in the language between opposites
-   "Small Rates. Big Deal."
-   "Pay a little, get a lot."
-   "Giant horsepower. Tiny Price."

5\. Duck. Duck. Goose

-   Two quick thoughts followed by one longer thought
-   "It's this. It's that. It's going to change the way you do this forever"
-   "Word, word, word, twist."

### Chapter 3: More Words? You've got to be kidding. (Body copy and other longer form writing)

Don't make body copy an explanation for the headline. If that's the case, the headline isn't clear enough.

Think title & story. The title hints at what you're about to read, the story is what you read.

Write the body first, then think of the headline.

To properly write body copy for a product, the product must solve a problem or be a resolution to some situation. The first part of this process is defining that conflict.

Logic and order come more in the editing page. For now, just keep writing content.

One of the fastest ways to class up your language is to use VERB NOUN:

-   Hammer away.
-   Feather past
-   Anchor in.

Be specific.

If a story doesn't seem right, consider a convincing argument.

-   Logos - Does this make sense?
-   Pathos - Is there emotion? What is the reader feeling?
-   Ethos - Who are you and why should I care?

Rule #1 - Is this something you'd want to read? If not, I don't want to read it either.

### Chapter 4: TV or online video

The script will be a lot more attractive to a director if you let them put their own mark on it

Think through your choices very well

Trust your gut and other people's, but be wary of logical explanations for errors. No person will be there to explain to ever home viewer why it is the way it is.

### Chapter 5: Digital, social, and all of that

Put yourself in the role of the first time viewer. Does the single post make sense, even though they haven't seen the rest of the campaign?

When brainstorming, think of what you want people to take away from the campaign. List them out and start from there.

If your tone is funny, it has to be funny from the banner on Twitter to the About Us page on the website.

Some of the best digital experiences mimic the physical world or work on top it. Try to make digital less digital.

Read copy aloud. If a joke is supposed to be a punchline, have that line come up delayed.

If you're asking anyone to do something that's more difficult than lifting a feather, they won't do it.

As much as you can, don't make anyone click or tap through an ad. You lose people that way.

When optimizing for SEO, think like a person trying to find you. Not the words you think represent you or the brand.

### Chapter 6: Experimental Marketing

There's something unique about warped scale. A building is boring, but a shrunken building is cool. A thumbtack is lame, but a giant thumbtack is cool.

Make an exclusive guest list

Alcohol. 'Nough said.

You don't need to convince every on earth that the product is cool, just the people everyone on earth look up to.

### Chapter 7: Pitching new business

If any idea takes longer than 15 seconds to explain, kill it.

An easy way to create a manifesto is have an intriguing thought in the beginning, a line at the end that could be a tagline, and fill in the rest of it with language that flows from your insight to the line at the end.

A good test of your idea is to think if it would still be clever if you were presenting it in a noisy food court and you had to stop for a minute halfway through presenting it.

### Chapter 8: The delicate art of presenting

Solve your client's underlying problem, and there's no stopping what you're allowed to get away with. Sometimes, it's as simple as them not wanting to get yelled at by their boss. If that's the case, offer them extra help in impressing them with case studies, facts, data, etc.

Clients don't care about your awards or training. They want you to tell them an insight that they didn't know in a way that they can believe.

Let your client into the thinking. They often don't realize you spent 2 hour deciding which font to use.

If an idea is dead, move on. Don't let a client talk an idea to death over and over again. It wastes time. Take notes on what they don't like and move on.

Pick someone before the meeting to own the idea.  Everyone else shouldn't talk or explain it unless they are directly asked a question.

Don't use the world "cool" to present an idea. Use the word "smart".

### Chapter 9: Words of Advice

Making memorable work is not the agency's job. It's yours.

Don't wait for someone else to decide it's time for your career to start.

One assignment grows into the next, and into the next. Weasel in anyway you can.

### Chapter 10: Inspiration on being a creative

You're probably not the best. Put your ego aside and learn from other's.

Press is a better measure of success than awards.

### Chapter 11: How to deal and avoid politics

Let your clients kill your work and lean on your boss.

As a starting creative, your job is to prove your Creative Director right

Few will take risks, everyone will take credit.

No matter who says it, if it's a good idea, run with it.


Junior: Writing Your Way Ahead in Advertising

One Sentence Summary
--------------------

The Essentialist mindset is all about doing less, but better

Two Key Takeaways
-----------------

-   Focus on your objectives. There's no way to do everything you want to do well, but you can do 1-3 things *exceptionally* well
-   Saying no is apart of life. Have one decision that makes a thousand. When presented with an opportunity to do something or take on a new task, make sure you are 100% down. If you're even 90% down, it should be an automatic 'No'! (if you have the luxury to do that of course).

Chapter 1: The Essentialist
---------------------------

-   When you spend time focusing on too many objectives, you end up minoring in major activities, which makes work very frustrating
-   Instead of making a millimeter of progress in a million directions, you can begin to make major progress in the things that are truly vital
-   ***Less but better***
-   Essentialism is not about getting more things done, it's about getting the *right* things done; making the wisest investment of your time to feed the things with the most ROI
-   The way of the essentialist means to make decision based on design, not default. Being able to distinguish the vital few tasks from the trivial many, allow you to do the things you deliberately choose to do
-   "If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will"

Paradox of Success

-   Phase 1 - When you have such clarity on what to do, you do that thing really well
-   Phase 2 - Success leads to a reputation of the 'go-to person' in that field or area. This leads to an increase in options and opportunities.
-   Phase 3 - Increased opportunities, which is really just an increase in demand for your time,
-   Decision Fatigue - The more choices we have to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates.
-   The word 'Priority' came into the world in the 1400s. For 500 years, it remained singular until in the 1900s when people started talking about priorities - you can't have more than three important things you're focusing on
-   To help discern between what to do and what not do, ask yourself, "Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution toward my goal?"

Chapter 2: The Invincible Power of Choice
-----------------------------------------

-   Learned Helplessness plays out in two ways either: (1) Sometimes they check out and stop trying, or (2) They become hyperactive, they accept every opportunity presented and throw themselves at every assignment

Chapter 3: The Unimportance of Practically Everything
-----------------------------------------------------

-   *You must understand that certain types of effort yield higher rewards than others*
-   The Power Law Theory - certain efforts actually produce exponentially more results than others
-   An Essentialist discerns more so he can do less

Chapter 4: Trade-Off: Which Problem Do I Want?
----------------------------------------------

-   The worst thing an organization, or person, can do is ignore the reality of trade-offs. Every decision you make will be a trade-off to something else.
-   If you don't make the hard choice to decide your trade-offs, someone else is going to make it for you
-   Johnson & Johnsons mission statement says the customers are first, and the shareholders second. That is why when they had to recall Tylenol, even though they lost $100 million, they did it anyway. The customers safety was more important than a price point [[Story]] [[Infinite Game]]
-   Essentialists ask the tougher but more liberating question, "Which problem do I want?"
-   When faced with a decision where one option prioritizes family and another friends, health, or work, you need to be prepared to ask, "Which problem do you want?"

Chapter 5: ESCAPE - The Perks of Being Unavailable
--------------------------------------------------

-   To discern what is truly essential, we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep, and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make.
-   Newton, when asked how he discovered the law of universal gravitation, replied, "By thinking on it continually". What he thought on, he thought on continually or nearly exclusively

Chapter 6: LOOK - See What Really Matters
-----------------------------------------

-   In every set of facts, something essential is hidden
-   *The problem might not be the problem. You must have the ability to look at the high level picture of what's going on.*

Chapter 7: PLAY - Embrace the Wisdom of Your Inner Child
--------------------------------------------------------

-   Bob Fagan, a researcher who has spent 15 years studying the behavior of Grizzly Bears, discovered bears who played the most tended to survive the longest. In a world continuously presenting unique challenges and ambiguity, play prepares the bear for a changing planet
-   Play helps in reducing stress which is key to creativity because stress plays a big role of being an enemy of productivity and other exploratory parts of our brain
-   Stress increases the activity in the amygdala, while reducing the activity in the hippocampus, the thing that's responsible for cognitive function

Chapter 8: SLEEP - Protect the Asset
------------------------------------

-   Essentialists choose to do one fewer thing right now, in order to do more tomorrow
-   Read, "Sleep is the New Status Symbol for Successful Entrepreneurs"

Chapter 9: SELECT - The Power of Extreme Criteria
-------------------------------------------------

-   If the answer isn't a definite 'Yes' then it should be an automatic 'No'
-   Assigning numerical values to your decisions can help you make the right decision, instead of staying stuck in indecision.
-   Evaluate an option and think about the single most important criterion for that decision. Give that option a score between 0 to 100. If you rate it any lower than 90%, change the score to 0 and say no
-   Don't say yes to something just because it's an easy reward. Doing that runs the risk of having to say no to a more meaningful one down the road
-   Write down the opportunity. Next, write down a list of three 'minimum criteria' the options need to pass in order to be considered. Third, write down a list of 'extreme criteria' they would need to pass in order to be considered. If the opportunity doesn't pass both lists, it's a no

Chapter 10: CLARIFY - One Decision That Makes a Thousand
--------------------------------------------------------

-   If a team is disorganized and not having results, that's a clear warning sign for a lack of clarity. People are confused about what their roles are and experience stress, confusion, and frustration. When there is a high level of clarity, people thrive.
-   Done right, an essential intent is one decision that settles one thousand later decisions
-   Organizations who can answer, "If we could be truly excellent at only one thing, what would it be?" will thrive. If all of their employees can answer that question, the games over - they win

Chapter 11: DARE - The Power of a Graceful "No"
-----------------------------------------------

-   You can say no and regret it for a few minutes, or you can say yes and regret it for a few days, weeks, months, or even years

**HOW TO SAY NO GRACEFULLY**

1.  Separate the decision from the relationship
2.  You don't have to use the word, "No"
3.  Focus on the trade off
4.  Remind yourself that everyone is selling something
5.  Saying no often requires trading popularity for respect. Be okay with that.
6.  A clear "No", can sometimes be more graceful than a vague or noncommittal "Yes"

-   Essentialists accept they can't be popular with everyone all of the time

Chapter 12: UNCOMMIT - Win Big By Cutting Your Losses
-----------------------------------------------------

-   Don't continue investing time, money, or energy into something you know is losing proposition.
-   One helpful question to ask yourself is, "If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?"
-   Ask someone who is not emotionally involved in the situation and unaffected by the choice you make to give
-   Apologize. Be honest and tell the person that when you made the commitment, you thought there would be less responsibilities

Chapter 13: EDIT - The Invisible Art
------------------------------------

-   Latin root of the word decision - cis or cid - literally means, "to cut" or, "to kill"
-   When added on to an email thread, or when sitting in a meeting, wait to give your two cents. Observe what other people's ideas are and edit out what you think you *need* to say.

Chapter 14: LIMIT - The Freedom of Setting Boundaries
-----------------------------------------------------

-   When asked to do something, it can be intimidating to push back. However, what is worse than defending your priorities is what happens if you don't - the ability to choose what you're doing and eventually what is most essential in your own life
-   Don't solve everyone's problem for them. Forcing people to solve their own problems is equally beneficial for them as it is for you

Chapter 15: BUFFER - The Unfair Advantage
-----------------------------------------

-   Adding buffer into your schedule is an unfair advantage because no one does it
-   Work will expand the time allotted to it - Parkinson's Law - this can be a harmful thing, but also positive if scheduled properly
-   Planning Fallacy - Coined by Daniel Kahneman in 1979, refers to how people often times underestimate how long a task will take, even though they haven't done it before. They feel good because stuff if, 'planned', but not properly. This will just lead to a busy day where nothing gets done
-   *I'd rather do one thing incredibly well, then start 5 things and finish none of them in any given day*
-   Add a buffer into your schedule of 50%. If you think a task will take two hours, schedule three hours to accomplish it

Chapter 16: SUBTRACT - Bring Forth More by Removing Obstacles
-------------------------------------------------------------

-   Constraints (bottlenecks) hold the entire organization and company up. You can improve everything else, but if the bottleneck isn't improved, nothing will flow more efficiently.
-   Instead of focusing on the efforts and resources that need to be added, an Essentialist focuses on removing the constraints or obstacles that needed to be removed. First, y**ou must be able to determine what the clear, desired outcome is**. Until then, you don't know what's constraining you.
-   Ask yourself, "What are the obstacles standing between me and getting this done?" and "What is keeping me from completing this?" Make a list of those obstacles, and prioritize them based off the question, "what is the obstacle that, if removed, would make the majority of other obstacles disappear?"

Chapter 17: PROGRESS - The Power of Small Wins
----------------------------------------------

-   Don't go for the big, flashy wins. They don't matter. Instead, go for the small, everyday wins that have consistent results
-   Two primary internal motivators for people are achievement and recognition for achievement.

Chapter 18: FLOW - The Genius of Routine
----------------------------------------

-   "Routine in an intelligent man is a sign of ambition" - W.H. Auden
-   Routine is essential to being an essentialist. Without it, non-essentials distractions will always win
-   Every habit is made up of a cue, a routine, and a reward
-   Cue - A trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use
-   Routine - The behavior itself; can be physical, mental, or emotional
-   Reward - This helps your brain figuring out whether the habit is worth repeating or not

Chapter 19: FOCUS - What's Important Now?
-----------------------------------------

-   The only way to operate at your highest level of contribution, you must deliberately tune into what is important in the here and now
-   Don't get so caught up in past mistakes, or future opportunities that you can't focus and dominate the present
-   "Execution is easy if you work hard at it and hard if you work easy at it"
-   "In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present." - Lao Tzu

Chapter 20: BE - The Essentialist Life
--------------------------------------

-   Don't get caught up in the paradox of success.
-   Choose your priorities, do everything that accomplishes those and nothing that doesn't
-   Choose essential.


Essentialism by Greg Mckeowen

### The goal of science is to discover why the universe acts the way that it does.
• "There was a harmonious reality underlying the laws of the universe, and the goal of science was to discover it."

• What science teaches us, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein's life.

### Einstein's success was rooted in his ability to question the mundane things in life and not respect authority
• Einstein's success at life came from marveling at the mysteries that struck others as mundane, questioning conventional wisdom, and challenging authority.

• Throughout his life, Einstein never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell and underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote an old friend, "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."

• Einstein's scientific success had come in part from his rebelliousness. There was a link between his creativity and his willingness to defy authority. He had no sentimental attachment to the old order, thus was energized by upending it. His stubbornness had worked to his advantage.

• The explanation that Einstein himself most often gave for his mental Accomplishments was his curiosity. As he put it near the end of his life, "I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious."

• Curiosity, in Einstein's case, came not just from a desire to question the mysterious. More important, it came from a childlike sense of marvel that propelled him to question the familiar, those concepts that, as he once said, "the ordinary adult never bothers his head about."

### Einstein was a purely theoretical physicist. He never ran experiments himself.
• One of the interesting things about Einstein is that he never ran experiments. He was purely theoretical. In his papers, he would end them by explaining a few ways someone who wanted to test it, could, and if they did, they should get in touch with him.

• I love this because it shows that you don't have to solve a problem to be a critical thinker. Merely thinking about the problem is something that can go along way

### Einstein didn't let anything get in the way of his science
• Einstein was a true loner and didn't really want to let much get in the way of his scientific endeavors. He is quoted while trying to divorce Marić to marry Elsa saying, "For I shall never give up the state of living alone, which has manifested itself as an indescribable blessing."

### Einstein had a beef with quantum theory
• After his theories of relativity had made their way, he explored the world of quantum mechanics and basically spent the rest of life trying to create a unified field theory. His beef with quantum mechanics was that things seemed to appear to work chaotically at a subatomic level. There was no way to predict how particles are interacting with each other, outside of observing it. But once you observe it, that influences the particles and you're not seeing it for what it truly is.

• Einstein thought this preposterous. He couldn't come to believe that the good Lord would have created beautiful and subtle rules that have determined *most* of what happened in the universe, while leaving a few things completely to chance.

• This attitude was in direct contrast to his belief as a younger scientist. He thought there was nothing that could be known unless it was observed, which led him to relativity. But now he's saying that there must be rules that govern the universe, no matter one's ability to observe it. In a way, his dive into quantum mechanics was the start of him becoming the old order and a new wave of scientists saying, "We don't know that."

• Einstein, as he got older, couldn't help but believe that there was some higher spirit - an organizer or creator of all the rules in the universe. No way he thought all of this just happened. There's too much simplicity for things to just happen the way that they did.

• Einstein believed that all scientific theories, leaving aside their mathematical expressions, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description "that even a child could understand them."

• *Esse est percipi* - To be is to be perceived. From [George Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley#:~:text=Berkeley's%20immaterialism%20argues%20that%20%22esse,God's%20nothing%20can%20be%20real.)

### Einstein's belief in God changed, but never his attitude towards organized religion:
• "I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in a position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must've written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. They child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books and doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws."

• "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."

• "My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend about the knowable world. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."

• "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way, the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve." p.388

• *The main argument between science and religion, as Einstein states, is not whether or not there is a God. It's that scientist's job is to study the laws and rules of the universe and they can't comprehend that those would change based on the interaction of a diety. Divine will, or human free will, does not play a role in the cosmic causality* p.391

• Asked whether or not we have free will, he responed, "No. I am a determinist. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control...– We all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible plater."

• For some people, miracles are evidence that God exists. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the cosmos is comprehensible, that it follows laws, is worthy of awe.

### Schrodinger's Cat was an experiment to help Einstein prove the craziness of quantum theory

As some believed the observation of a particle would interrupt the particles state, so its nucleus was both alive and dead until it was observed. This made sence at a quantum level, but when abstracted to a more real life scenario, it seemed crazy. This is where the cat came into play. p.453

### Einstein worked until he couldn't work any longer
The last thing he wrote, before he went to sleep for the last time, was one more line of symbols and numbers that he hoped might get him, and the rest of us, just a little step closer to the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe.

### President Eisenhower on Eisntein:
<blockquote>
No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of the 20th century knowledge. Yet no other man was more modest in the posession of the power that is knowledge, more sure tha power without wisdom is deadly.
</blockquote>

### The NYT on Einstein after his death:

<blockquote>
Man stands on this diminutive earth, gazes at the myriad of stars and upon billowing ocean and tossing trees–and wonders. What does it all mean? How did come about? The most thoughtful wonderer who appeared among us in three centuries has passed on in the person of Albert Einstein.
</blockquote>

### Humility goes a long way
The world has had a lot of geniuses. What made Einstein special was that his mind and soul were tempered by his humility - the belief that no one had the right to impose ideas and beliefs on others.

### Just a beautiful quote
Isaacson on Einstein, "He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent, patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe."


Einstein: His Life and Universe

### Summary and Review
Phenomenal book. There are so many interesting lessons on creativity, innovation, and history that I've never read elsewhere. I will be coming back to this book constantly and excited to read more from Steven Johnson. There hasn't ever been a book I liked so much where I thought, "I wish I wrote this" other than this one. Really, really enjoyable.

### Why glass is transparent
> Most materials absorb the energy of light. On a subatomic level, electrons orbiting the atoms that made up the material effectively “swallow” the energy of the incoming photon of light, causing those electrons to gain energy. But electrons can gain or lose energy only in discrete steps, known as “quanta.” But the size of the steps varies from material to material. Silicon dioxide happens to have very large steps, which means that the energy from a single photon of light is not sufficient to bump up the electrons to the higher level of energy. Instead, the light passes through the material. (Most ultraviolet light, however, does have enough energy to be absorbed, which is why you can’t get a suntan through a glass window.) But light doesn’t simply pass through glass; it can also be bent and distorted or even broken up into its component wavelengths. Glass could be used to change the look of the world, by bending light in precise ways. This turned out to be even more revolutionary than simple transparency.

### What early glasses were called
> Those early spectacles were called *roidi da ogli*, meaning “disks for the eyes.” Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans—lentes in Latin—the disks themselves came to be called “lenses.”

### The Hummingbird effect of Gutenberg's printing press and glasses
Hummingbird Effect - When an innovation in one field exposes a flaw in some other technology. In the case of the printing press, that "technology" was our anatomy.

> But Gutenberg's great breakthrough had another, less celebrated effect: it made a massive number of people aware, for the first time, that they were farsighted. And that revelation created a surge in demand for spectacles.
>
> What followed was one of the most extraordinary cases of the hummingbird effect in modern history. Gutenberg made printed books relatively cheap and portable, which triggered a rise in literacy, which exposed a flaw in the visual acuity of a sizable part of the population, which then created a new market for the manufacture of spectacles. Within a hundred years of Gutenberg’s invention, thousands of spectacle makers around Europe were thriving, and glasses became the first piece of advanced technology—since the invention of clothing in Neolithic times—that ordinary people would regularly wear on their bodies.

### The creation of fiber optics
> Scientists at Bell Labs then took fibers of this super-clear glass and shot laser beams down the length of them, fluctuating optical signals that corresponded to the zeroes and ones of binary code. This hybrid of two seemingly unrelated inventions—the concentrated, orderly light of lasers, and the hyper-clear glass fibers—came to be known as fiber optics. Using fiber-optic cables was vastly more efficient than sending electrical signals over copper cables, particularly for long distances: light allows much more bandwidth and is far less susceptible to noise and interference than is electrical energy.

### On the benefit on transporting commodities
> The history of global trade had clearly demonstrated that vast fortunes could be made by transporting a commodity that was ubiquitous in one environment to a place where it was scarce. To the young Tudor, ice seemed to fit the equation perfectly: nearly worthless in Boston, ice would be priceless in Havana.

### "Multiple Invention"
> Those patents rippling across the planet are an example of one of the great curiosities in the history of innovation: what scholars now call “multiple invention.” Inventions and scientific discoveries tend to come in clusters, where a handful of geographically dispersed investigators stumble independently onto the very same discovery.

This happened with the light bulb, relativity, ice, flight, and so much more.

### Breakthrough innovations are a collection of ideas repackaged in new ways

 > To imagine a world of flash-frozen food, Birdseye needed to experience the challenges of feeding a family in an arctic climate surrounded by brutal cold; he needed to spend time with the Inuit fishermen; he needed to inspect the foul containers of cod-fishing trawlers in New York harbors; he needed the scientific knowledge of how to produce temperatures well below freezing; he needed the industrial knowledge of how to build a production line. Like every big idea, Birdseye’s breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration.

 > Fifty-eight years in the making, his [Galileo] slow hunch about the pendulum’s “magical property” had finally begun to take shape. The idea lay at the intersection point of multiple disciplines and interests: Galileo’s memory of the altar lamp, his studies of motion and the moons of Jupiter, the rise of a global shipping industry, and its new demand for clocks that would be accurate to the second. Physics, astronomy, maritime navigation, and the daydreams of a college student: all these different strains converged in Galileo’s mind.

### The invention of Sears, Roebuck catalog
> With watches spiking in popularity across the country, a Minnesota railroad agent named Richard Warren Sears stumbled across a box of unwanted watches from a local jeweler, and turned a tidy profit selling them to other station agents. Inspired by his success, he partnered with a Chicago businessman named Alvah Roebuck, and together they launched a mail-order publication showcasing a range of watch designs: the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Those fifteen pounds of mail-order catalogs currently weighing down your mailbox? They all started with the must-have gadget of the late nineteenth century: the consumer-grade pocket watch.

### Why timezones zig-zag
> Allen designed the map so that the divisions between time zones zigzagged slightly to correspond to the points where the major railroad lines connected, instead of having the divisions run straight down meridian lines.

### How satellites triangulate your position
> Those satellites are sending out the most elemental of signals, again and again, in perpetuity: the time is 11:48:25.084738 . . . the time is 11:48:25.084739. . . . When your phone tries to figure out its location, it pulls down at least three of these time stamps from satellites, each reporting a slightly different time thanks to the duration it takes the signal to travel from satellite to the GPS receiver in your hand. A satellite reporting a later time is closer than one reporting an earlier time. Since the satellites have perfectly predictable locations, the phone can calculate its exact position by triangulating among the three different time stamps.

> Like the naval navigators of the eighteenth century, GPS determines your location by comparing clocks. This is in fact one of the recurring stories of the history of the clock: each new advance in timekeeping enables a corresponding advance in our mastery of geography—from ships, to railroads, to air traffic, to GPS. It’s an idea that Einstein would have appreciated: measuring time turns out to be key to measuring space.

### How our idea of innovation affects our policies
> If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. But if we think that innovation comes out of collaborative networks, then we want to support different policies and organizational forms: less rigid patent laws, open standards, employee participation in stock plans, cross-disciplinary connections.

### Why it's important to learn about the past
> Learning from the patterns of innovation that shaped society in the past can only help us navigate the future more successfully, even if our explanations of that past are not falsifiable in quite the same way that a scientific theory is.

### The greatest innovator's were time travelers, making discoveries years before they were sometimes useful. This is how they did it:
> If there is a common thread to the time travelers, beyond the nonexplanation of genius, it is this: they worked at the margins of their official fields, or at the intersection point between very different disciplines.

> The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.

### Real innovation comes when you get lost in your craft
>But if you want to be like Ada, if you want to have an “intuitive perception of hidden things”—well, in that case, you need to get a little lost.

>But those disciplinary boundaries can also serve as blinders, keeping you from the bigger idea that becomes visible only when you cross those borders.


How We Got to Now

## Impressions

*I didn't really know what to think of this book before I started reading it. I really like Morgan Housel's blogs and so it was a no brainer whether or not to buy his book when it came out. I was pleasantly surprised with the actionable insights and takeaways for managing money. Though the focus is mainly on the psychology, as you could imagine, it does give some practical tips.*

*This book would pair well with [Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You To Be Rich.](https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/) Housel's book gives some psychological factors to think about and Sethi gives more practical advice on how to actually manage your money.*

## Actionable Takeaways
1. Just because you say you will do something when everything goes to hell doesn't mean you actually will. It's easy to *say* you'll buy when the market crashes and there is blood in the streets. But it's a totally different thing to actually do that when your portfolio is down 35% in one day.
2. Usually when people think about the market crashing 30%, they *only* think about the market crashing 30%. The problem with that is that when the market actually crashes 30%, it's because there is a massive deadly pandemic or a horrific terroist attack.
3. Managing money well is all about behavior.
4. Every decision someone makes, makes sense to them at the time. If you're baffled at how someone is behaving, try to think like they do. No one makes a decision thinking, "This makes no sense to me but I'm going to do it."
5. Good investing isn't getting crazy high, one-off returns. Instead, it's getting pretty average returns for an absolutely unbelievable amount of time.
6. Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.
7. Saving is as much psychological as it is tactical. Yes it requires you to physically put money away in an account somehow, but it also requires that you spend less. And you can't spend less if you're worried about what other people think of you.
8. Just because something hasn't happened before doesn't mean it can't happen. No one expected The Great Depression until it did. No one assumed WW2 would break out until it did. Don't use history, or the lackthereof as a predictor of future catastrophes. The future will most likely be much worse.
9. If you make too little money, you will never be able to retire. If you make too much money, you regret working so hard all of those years. The solution? Stay in the middle.
10. Not everyone is playing the same game. And one when group of people playing for a certain outcome get their moves and tactics from another group of people playing for a different outcome, the result is catastrophic.
11. Wealth is created by suppressing what you could buy today in order to have more stuff or more options in the future.
12. Use the money you earn to buy control over your time. Because the ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, is the biggest wealth benefit of all.

## Quotes
- "History never repeats itself. Man always does."
- "Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming."
- "Getting money is one thing. Keeping it is another."
- "“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important,” George Soros once said, “but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune."
- "But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate."
- "Every bit of savings is like taking a point in the future that would have been owned by someone else and giving it back to yourself."
- "The historical odds of making money in U.S. markets are 50/50 over one-day periods, 68% in one-year periods, 88% in 10-year periods, and (so far) 100% in 20-year periods. Anything that keeps you in the game has a quantifiable advantage."
- "A good rule of thumb for a lot of things in life is that everything that can break will eventually break
- "Bubbles do their damage when long-term investors playing one game start taking their cues from those short-term traders playing another."
- "Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant
- "Expecting things to be bad is the best way to be pleasantly surprised when they’re not."
- "Coming to terms with how much you don’t know means coming to terms with how much of what happens in the world is out of your control."
- "Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control of your time is such a powerful and universal drag on happiness. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance."
- "I can afford to not be the greatest investor in the world, but I can’t afford to be a bad one."

## Bonus (Stories, illustrations, & things that made me go wow.)
- A quote about another partner Warren Buffett did business with and how he wanted to get rich quick:
	 > Warren, Charlie, and Rick made investments together and interviewed business managers together. Then Rick kind of disappeared, at least relative to Buffett and Munger’s success. Investor Mohnish Pabrai once asked Buffett what happened to Rick. Mohnish recalled: [Warren said] “Charlie and I always knew that we would become incredibly wealthy. We were not in a hurry to get wealthy; we knew it would happen. Rick was just as smart as us, but he was in a hurry.” What happened was that in the 1973–1974 downturn, Rick was levered with margin loans. And the stock market went down almost 70% in those two years, so he got margin calls. He sold his Berkshire stock to Warren—Warren actually said “I bought Rick’s Berkshire stock”—at under $40 a piece. Rick was forced to sell because he was levered.
- > In Pharaonic Egypt … scribes tracked the high-water mark of the Nile and used it as an estimate for a future worst-case scenario. The same can be seen in the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which experienced a catastrophic failure in 2011 when a tsunami struck. It had been built to withstand the worst past historical earthquake, with the builders not imagining much worse—and not thinking that the worst past event had to be a surprise, as it had no precedent.


The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

Summary
-------

Being able to think and solve problems in a general sense allows for innovative breakthroughs and discoveries in a niche field.

My Top Two Takeaways
--------------------

1.  Before determining a solution to a problem, make sure to completely understand the type of problem it is. Not all problems are as they seem on the surface.
2.  Don't measure someones work-ethic or 'grit' based on an observation in a specific field. For example, the worst thing someone can do is base one's entrepreneurial spirit and drive on their homework scores. They're two completely different fields and one is not parallel to the other.

Chapter 4: Learning, Fast and Slow
----------------------------------

-   One of the best ways to produce real, long lasting learning is practicing retrieval.
-   The Generation Effect - Struggling to answer on your own, even a wrong on, enhance subsequent learning
-   Deliberate Difficulties - Making your study sessions or practice harder and harder in increments
-   Test taking cannot be an accurate measurement of long-term lasting learning. Real learning is hard to do quickly, like most schools expect during a week of new curriculum, but fleeting knowledge is easy.
-   Fleeting learning is based on before your eye progress - while deep learning is not. Deep learning cannot be measured in hours, more like days and weeks
-   Before determining the solution to the problem, you must figure out what problem you're solving. Not all problems are what they seem.
-   Far Transfer - When a knowledge structure is so flexible that it can be applied effectively even in new domains or extremely novel situations.

Chapter 5: Thinking Outside Experience
--------------------------------------

-   Analogical Thinking - The practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface.
-   Takes the new and makes it familiar, or takes the familiar and makes it new
-   "If you need a large force to accomplish some purpose, but are prevented from applying such a force directly, many smaller forces applied simultaneously from different directions may work just as well" Karl Duncker
-   Taking the Inside View - When you make judgements based narrowly on the details of a particular project that are right in front of us.
-   The most successful problem solvers are the ones who can identify the deep structure of the problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it.
-   Retrograde Motion - The movement of Mars when it reverses direction in the sky, does a little loop, and then continues on in the same direction.
-   Dunbar, a scientist, saw that the labs most likely to take unexpected findings into new knowledge for humanity made a lot of analogies, and made them from a variety of base domains.

Chapter 6: The Trouble With Too Much Grit
-----------------------------------------

-   Peregrinations - Travel or wander around from place to place
-   Match Quality - The term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are- their abilities and proclivities
-   Learning things is not as important about learning about oneself.
-   Every single person before taking on a new endeavor should identify terms under which they should quit.
-   *If I start this business, and I lose more than $2,000 in the first year*
-   The trouble with grit is that it isn't an accurate measure - grit is subjective to the person and what they love/what they're trying
-   Sunk Cost Theory - The more we have invested and even lost, the longer we will keep going and say, 'almost there' even though it's obviously failing. We don't want to lose the investment we gained by quitting.

Chapter 7: Flirting With Your Possible Selves
---------------------------------------------

-   Aviatrix - A female pilot
-   Leadership training is as simple as looking at any situation and asking, "what would teach me the most in this situation and how can I be of service?"
-   Be a Dark Horse in Life - Look at life and say, 'this is who I am. These are my motivations. I need to do this, that, and this to be there.'
-   All Dark Horses have short-term goals - don't think *too* far in the future
-   Our preferences for work and life are not going to stay the same as we age, because we don't stay the same. It's okay to move on. It's okay to switch careers - especially in today's day and age.
-   Instead of asking *if* someone is gritty, ask *when* are they gritty. This will reveal passions and motivational situations.
-   One way to make decisions is to not think too far in the future - look at all the possible options and choose the one that will give you the most options afterward
-   Ibarras Aphorism - I know who I am when I see what I do
-   Bad things could end up good, and good things could end up bad. You don't know what is until it's over. Don't react before the situation ends.
-   Want to find your talent? Try things.

Chapter 8: The Outsider Advantage
---------------------------------

-   Outside-In Thinking - Finding solutions in experiences far outside of focused training for the problem itself.
-   Viewing a problem in your industry, through the lens of all your experiences in that industry can sometimes lead to a brick wall. To come up with creative solutions to problems, frame the problem in a more general sense, not specific to the industry its happening in.
-   Einstellung Effect - A psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to use only familiar methods even if better ones are available
-   Clandestinely - Secretly; Kept a Secret

Chapter 9: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology
----------------------------------------------------

-   Lateral Thinking - A term coined in the 60s' for the reimagining of information in new contexts, including drawing parallels between to seemingly disconnected or unrelated ideas that can give them new uses
-   Functional Fixedness - A tendency people have to consider only familiar uses for objects
-   The more uncertainty there is to a problem, the more important having a analogical, lateral thinker on the team of problem solvers
-   Serial Innovators can be defined as people who are/have: a high tolerance for ambiguity; systems thinkers; repurposing what is already available; synthesizing ideas from many different sources.
-   When we expect a hyperspecialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area to magically be able to extend that knowledge to a new area, the results can be disastrous.
-   *A specialist in dog food advertising, can not be given the job to work as a fast-food advertiser.*

Chapter 10: Fooled By Expertise
-------------------------------

-   Hedgehogs - People who know one big thing
-   Foxes - People who know many little things
-   *Foxes see complexity in what others mistake as just simple cause and effect*
-   Most cause and effect relationships are not deterministic, they are probabilistic. There are variables, and things do not always repeat as precisely as they once did or have before. Foxes understand that they are always in a new learning environment and not everything is as it seems.

Chapter 11: Learning To Drop Your Familiar Tools
------------------------------------------------

-   Sometimes decisions can be made based off of the wrong data. Not all data is useful, and sometimes the data you have can be not enough. Before making a decision based on data, ask, 'Is this the data we need to make the decision we need to make.?'
-   When The Challenger exploded, there was a very simple warning that could have been analyzed, and fixed by the NASA scientist. Only problem was they were missing the data necessary to make the proper decision, but no one caught it.
-   Dropping the familiar tools you use to solve familiar problems is what you need to do when solving unfamiliar problems. Different problems require different tools.
-   Over Learned Behavior - Doing the same thing over and over again in response to the same challenges until the behavior has become so automatic that they no longer recognize it as a situation-specific tool. That answer now becomes the answer to *every* problem instead of just the situations in which its supposed to be used.
-   The most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial. They embraced ambiguity and clear cut systems.
-   There is a difference between the Chain of Command and the Chain of Communications
-   Most organizations make these one in the same - the CEO talks to the executives, who talk to the middle managers, who talk to the managers, who talk to their teams.
-   Successful and healthy organizations have an established Chain of Command, but not a chain of communication. The engineers can talk to the executives whenever something comes up, and no one bats and eye - that's actually encouraged.

Chapter 12: Deliberate Amateurs
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-   Take the skills you have in one domain, and apply them to a different problem in a different domain.
-   "A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs occur when you start down one road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun.'


Notes, quotes, and lessons from books