dltn.io feed

Chief Justice John Roberts at the Baker Institute

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:52:00 GMT

Chief Justice John Roberts joined Judge Rosenthal of the Southern District of Texas for a conversation at the Baker Institute. It was a fun watch.

What struck me the most about the conversation was how intellectually curious the Chief Justice is and how much he loves history. Though both of those things are not surprising, considering his job title and his undergraduate degree in History. But it seemed as if he came to life more when he was telling a historical anecdote than when he expounded on the role of the judiciary in America.

For example, he talked about how when he first went into one of the conference rooms at the Court, he did not recognize some of the former Chief Justices. He thought how embarrassing it would have been for him had a Senator asked him, "So, you're the 17th Chief Justice. Who are the others?" Only for him to respond with "I don't know." So, he spent the first summer after he was appointed reading and learning everything he could about the other Chief Justices.

Further evidence of his intellectual curiosity was that he also said the Chancellorship of the Smithsonian is the best part of being the Chief Justice. He then went onto explain where the finances for the Smithsonian originally came from, and contrasted Andrew Jackson's response to the offer with something along the lines of "We don't need British money" with John Quincy Adams' response with something like, "Well, hang on there, not so fast."

He recounted an anecdote from Chief Justice John Jay—the first Chief Justice—after Washington asked him for legal advice. Chief Justice Jay said that it was not his job to provide advice to a sitting President, for he was in a different branch of the government. While that is a commonplace notion today, it wasn't then.

The Chief Justice also recounted the story of when he was nominated to the D.C. Circuit in 1992, but the Senate never voted on his confirmation. He said it was sad, of course, but looking back he was glad it happened.

It was a disappointment. You look ahead and plan what your life will be like. I think it was a great honor. It was a great calling to be a federal judge. In retrospect, 100%, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. That is a young age to take on a life-tenure job. You give up a lot of opportunity for other experiences. I'm pretty sure if I had done that, I wouldn't have ended up where I am now. You do develop something of a track record and it is not always something that appeals to people. And I went on and was able to do private practice but also another government opportunity. It was a disappointment but turned out alright.

"It turned out alright" is a bit of an understatement, Mr. Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Regarding the Court's summer recess, he mentioned that it was important in order to maintain collegiality on the Court. It allows the Justices to decompress after a long ten-months filled with contentious issues and important decisions, and he said it allows them to remain friendly throughout the term.

Louis Brandeis said he could do the 12 months worth of work on the court in 10 months, but he couldn't do it in 12 months. And I think there was a lot of wisdom in that. And, you know, sometimes people get together in the summer, do this and that whatnot. I am, I think I got the group right, a four seasons fan. And my approach is, see you in September . . . . But so that helps sort of recharge the batteries.

My Reading Year, 2025

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:43:00 GMT

Like last year, 2025 was another light reading year for me. I echo the same thing I wrote last year: I read fewer "fun" books, but more words than ever before in 2025. However, my law books were still fun to read, especially my textbooks and supplemental materials for Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, and Statutes and Regulations.

I started the year finishing No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin. She is one of my favorite history authors because she has a unique ability to bring subjects of her works to life. I think this is because she spends time exploring the side characters in many of their lives—like Joe Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt’s good friend. When you understand not just the main subject, but the people that subject interacted with, the page comes to life.

Sadly, I didn’t pick up another fun book until my Spring semester ended. But the book I jumped to first was well worth the wait. In 2024, I read the first two books of Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. I wasn’t able to finish the rest of the series because school started, so I thought picking up where I left off after my first year was the best thing to do. Thus, I read the largest volume of the series, Master of the Senate and was enthralled. Lyndon Johnson figured out how the Senate works, and he figured out he could work the Senate. There are countless stories of Johnson’s logrolling and political maneuverers that helped me see the current Congress in a different light. The final couple hundred pages tells the most dramatic story of Johnson trying to balance the line between not upsetting the North over the South’s position on racial segregation while not upsetting the South’s support of him as a presidential candidate because of his stance on racial segregation. Caro does an incredible job of making you wonder: was Johnson a supporter of Civil Rights because he truly believed that was right, or because he wanted to become President? There are parts of his story that indicate both could be true, such as his time spent teaching and transforming a small school in Cotulla. It would not do the book justice to attempt to summarize everything here. If you read one book, one book at all, it should be Master of the Senate.

Then, I picked up the last volume in the series (so far, as Caro is working on the fifth and final volume) and loved the time Caro spent comparing Johnson and Kennedy. The two could not have been more different in their upbringing, their outlook on life, or their political strategies, which made it all the more interesting. I thought the book would end with Kennedy’s assassination, and the final volume would tell the story of his presidency. But Kennedy’s assassination came around the middle of the book and ended when Johnson started to run for President in order to be elected outright. The remainder of the book documents Johnson’s struggle with being one of the most powerful people in the country as the Senate Majority Leader and one of the least powerful people in the country as the vice president. Johnson mourned what he had; he attempted to maintain his hand in the Senate and the Democratic party, but to no avail.

One of my favorite ways to choose my next book is to chainsmoke, and since I loved The Passage of Power, and it quoted Death of a President by William Manchester so much, I read that next. I was excited to read more of Manchester after reading his incredible series on Winston Churchill in 2024.

I started school in August and swapped my fun books for textbooks. But that was fine by me, for I took two of my favorite classes of my entire law school career so far: Constitutional Law and Administrative Law.

While I don’t really prefer to read books on my Kindle, doing so seems to be the only way I can stay on top of my fun books throughout the semester because I can usually read before bed. Thus, I was able to work through Ruth Bader Ginsburg throughout the semester. She lived an extraordinary life and was interesting to read her personal thoughts on cases she worked on while with the ACLU like Reed and Fronterio, and then read those same cases in class.

Justice Anthony Kennedy taught at my law school before he was appointed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and he came to my law school for a lecture to promote his new book. Thus, I got a copy of that and read it. Something that happened during Ginsburg’s biography happened with reading Justice Kennedy’s—I read his reflections on Obergefell while reading and talking about it in class.

David McCullough—my favorite author—passed away a few years ago. However, this year, his daughter published a book that contained a selection of his speeches and various writings published in outlets. It was called History Matters, and if there is one thing I’ve learned in law school, especially with the current Supreme Court and its adoption of Originalism as a preferred constitutional theory of interpretation, it’s that history does matter. This was a fun little read.

McCullough, in various speeches and writings, made reference to Herman Wouk. It was clear that McCullough loved Wouk, and so I wanted to read him. McCullough said Wouk’s The Winds of War helped McCullough get through working a boring job one summer, and so I read that on Kindle, too. Reading some historical fiction was a good way to wind down at the end of the day. IN fact, when the semester ended and I had more free time, I picked up the hard copy of this book and tore through both volumes. It was incredible.

I also read another Supreme Court Justice’s memoir: Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Listening to the Law. If I had to pick between Justice Kennedy and Justice Barrett’s in terms of interesting tidbits regarding the Court, I would choose Justice Barrett’s. She included a lot of unique behind the scenes details from her time clerking for Justice Scalia and included many intellectual tidbits on originalism and even the major questions doctrine, something I am very interested in.

My first stop after taking my last final of the semester was Barnes and Noble, where I picked up The Pioneers by David McCullough. It was fantastic.

I then picked up James Madison by Richard Brookhiser, a biography of the book’s namesake. This is my first biography of James Madison but I was interested in learning more about him after taking Constitutional Law and his notes from the Constitutional Convention being cited so often my scholars and the Court. It’s very good, but short. It comes in at just around 250 pages, so it is certainly not as in-depth as Hamilton or John Adams is, but that is kind of nice. I saw it was highly recommended by The Best Presidential Bios website (one of my favorites) and I thought it would be a good primer. Ralph Kethcham’s biography of the fourth president seems to be the best, so perhaps I’ll tackle that one next.

Misconceptions About Gift-Giving

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 11:43:00 GMT

I stumbled upon this paper discussing a unique aspect of gift-giving. Mainly, it talks about how gifts that givers love to give are not always the gifts that recipients love to receive.

It's an interesting paper, because there definitely is something to being a good gift-giver. For example, every Christmas, my parents get my wife something that she really wanted, never would have bought for herself, that is almost always a complete surprise. One year, while my wife was going through some health struggles, my dad bought her a robot vacuum cleaner for Christmas. She told me later how perfect of a gift it was because she didn't know that she needed it until she had it.

Thus, I thought, and the typical advice seems to be, that a good gift giver is someone who gets the recipient something they want, that they don't need, that they likely wouldn't buy themselves at that time. But this paper explains that's not necessarily true.

It lists a lot of misconceptions people have about giving gifts.

For instance, the paper explains that while highly desirable gifts that are fun for the excitement or prestige upon opening them are fun for the giver, the recipients prefer something that will be more useful in the long-run.

There are a bunch of other examples, but I wanted to highlight one I've experienced multiple times.

There is a common idea that giving money or gift cards is not a "thoughtful" gift. For a giver, that may be the case. But often, recipients value those gifts more. It goes like this: Imagine you, the recipient, want a nice set of steak knives. These knives are expensive, and most people would probably balk at spending that much money on silverware. But, you love to barbecue. And there is nothing better, for you, than sitting down with a delicious ribeye and a nice steak knife.

Say a holiday is close—your birthday, Christmas, whatever—and you mention that you want this nice set of knives but can't quite afford it yet. Someone might hear that and think, "Ah! They want knives. I can get them some knives." But because they don't want to spend that much money on a gift—and rightly so—they get you different, less expensive, less quality knives. They are over the moon because they think they found a thoughtful gift. But you aren't too happy, because you didn't want those knives. You were more than happy to save money and buy the really nice knives eventually, and really would have appreciated maybe some money to build that pot of cash.

Do you see how cash—or a visa gift card—would actually be really thoughtful?

I think gift-giving is a unique skill, and something I'd like to be better at. The gist of the article is, essentially, when giving a gift, don't focus on how it makes you feel to give the gift, but imagine what the recipient will feel receiving the gift.

I think that's what people mean when they say they received a "thoughtful" gift. Sometimes, it's not about the actual item that was given, but the fact that the giver was able to discern that that specific item would make the recipient feel seen and loved. To do that, the focus has to be on what the recipient wants, and not what the giver wants to give.

Felix Frankfurter’s Letter of Advice to a Young Person Interested in Going into the Law

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I found this letter uploaded here, after it was referenced in a ceremony by Justice Stanley Mosk’s son, honoring the late Justice. I wrote about more quotes from that ceremony here.

My dear Paul:

No one can be a truly competent lawyer unless he is a cultivated man. If I were you, I would forget about any technical preparation for the law. The best way to prepare for the law is to be a well-read person.

Thus, alone can one acquire the capacity to use the English language on paper and in speech and with the habits of clear thinking that, only a truly liberal education can give. No less important for a lawyer is the cultivation of the imaginative faculties by reading poetry, seeing great paintings, in the original or in easily available reproductions, and listening to great music. Stock your mind with the deposit of much good reading, widen and deepen your feelings by experiencing vicariously as much as possible the wonderful mysteries of the universe, and forget about your future career. With good wishes,

Sincerely yours,

[Signed] Felix Frankfurter

M. Paul Claussen, Jr

Justice Stanley Mosk

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 17:56:00 GMT

I read a few opinions by Justice Mosk this week, which had made me curious to learn more about who he was, what he did, and how he lived.

I came across this wonderful recorded meeting of the Justices of the California Supreme Court to honor Justice Mosk after he passed away. His son, his wife, and various co-workers spoke about Mosk’s life, judicial philosophy, and who he was.

I was captivated by it all. Here are some highlights:

I loved this quote that Mosk’s son shared:

Felix Frankfurter once wrote to a young boy interested in the law that, “No one can be a truly competent lawyer unless he is a cultivated man.” He went on, “Stock your mind with the deposit of much good reading. Widen and deepen your feelings by experiencing vicariously as much as possible the wonderful mysteries of the universe. . . .” Stanley Mosk, throughout his life, did what Mr. Justice Frankfurter recommended.

If I can aspire to anything in my legal career, I hope I can stock my “mind with the deposit of much good reading” and “widen and deepen [my] feelings by experiencing vicariously as much as possible he wonderful mysteries of the universe.” Read Frankfurter’s full letter here.

And this classic from George Bernard Shaw:

As George Bernard Shaw wrote: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Mosk’s eminent, learned mind is evident from this anecdote:

We [Mosk, Bernie Witkin, and Joseph Cotchett] had met at about 11:30 and the three of us went to lunch. We always laughed because Bernie just used to tell jokes until you couldn’t stop him. We got on the subject of the United States Supreme Court in the 1930’s and the court-packing plan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and at this point Stanley Mosk took over and for the next hour recited every single opinion with full citation, almost every page, I’m sure, and the facts about the cases that reversed Roosevelt’s policies in the ‘30s. As he went on and on, I was just in awe. And the most important aspect of it was Bernie sat there without saying a word, which was truly remarkable for Bernie Witkin. Justice Mosk recited every piece of legislation and every case that dealt with it. When it was all over, Bernie Witkin looked over at him and said, “Stanley, do you know the Rule in Shelley’s Case?” I’m pleased to tell you, he said yes and recited it! Thank you very much.

And this, from Mosk’s research attorney, Dennis Peter Maio:

He gave as much attention to the small issues as to the great, for he believed and he acted on the belief that the law was a practical human creation, a mechanism that enabled all sorts of people with all sorts of values and goals to make communal life a going concern, a successful going concern. He was pragmatic, as others have said. But he was pragmatic out of principle. Many of Justice Mosk’s deeds and words at the court were similarly undramatic. To us on his staff, he was a quiet man, even though he had much to say. He was not at all self-important, even though he played a role that was prominent. He generally asked us for nothing, except whatever assistance we might be able to furnish, as in each case he attempted to get to the right result. Many a time, he got to a right result that was not to his liking — every time when it involved affirmance of a judgment of death, for, as all know, he was personally opposed to capital punishment. He would not change the result. Rather, he would pause, grimace, and say a word or two and then pass on to the next matter.

Once, years ago, in a case I still remember clearly, I recommended reversal of a judgment of death. He nonetheless rejected my recommendation, because the result, as I soon had to admit, was wrong. He knew what he liked and what he did not. But he believed that his job was to try to do what was right. I cannot say that he ever failed.

As I close, let me recall a particular memory of Justice Mosk, or rather a particular group of memories. Nine times in the course of the past decade, the moment for execution of a judgment of death would approach. Nine times, he would be found in his chambers, reviewing a last-minute habeas corpus petition if one had been filed, doing other work if one had not. Nine times, as the appointed hour drew near, he would assemble with other members of the court. Nine times, after what had to be done was done, he would leave and make his way home. Never did he say more than a few words. His face, however, always revealed a sad recognition that he would not see this ritual end in his lifetime. More important, his presence always demonstrated a full and open commitment to the law, not only when it guided him where he would go, but also, and perhaps especially, when it took him where he would not.

And, finally, his wife shares a uniquely personal portrait of the late Justice:

In the early morning I would often hear Stanley jogging or two-stepping to his own tune. When he saw me watching him exercise, he would call out: “Kiddo, I’m hungry!” I took this as a signal to prepare breakfast. He loved food–any kind of food–and was very tolerant of my limited cooking skills: Even when I burned his toast and eggs, he would exclaim, “Delicious! What a meal!”

Stanley was always careful about his appearance–not because of vanity, but because he respected his position in public life. When he was ready to go to work each day–always well groomed and wearing a nice suit–he would turn around for my inspection, and I would say: “Okay. Okay. Today you’re even more beautiful than I am.” Then his face would break into a radiant smile and he would leave the house with his usual parting remark: “Well, I’m off to make a living for us.”

What kept Justice Mosk going for 37 years? Simple. “He loved the law.”

What drove Stanley to do what he did so brilliantly, day after day, case after case, for 37 years? A short time before his passing, when we were in Los Angeles for a court session, he came home after a tiring day on the bench and mused how much he loved the law–but told me it would be the last session he would attend.

I’m excited to continue reading cases penned by Mosk, and proud to be living in a State that recognized Mosk’s genius, and put him where he needed to be.

Blog Questions Challenge

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 07:04:00 GMT

I saw Manu's post in my RSS feed this morning answering these questions and thought, why not?

1. Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I answered this question when I was featured on People and Blogs, and liked my response so much that I'll quote it here:

I love history and I noticed that most of the influential figures in history had some sort of publishing habit—Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill wrote biographies; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was a prolific essayist and writer before he became a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Other notable figures either wrote prolifically in journals and diaries or published in magazines. Creating a blog was my way of following in their footsteps.

2. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

My blog is hosted on Vercel and it's powered by NextJS. I wrote the code from scratch, which is what's keeping me here. There is something—maybe its ego—that loves the fact that I built my own little home on the internet that I fully control. I write my posts in markdown and push the changes to GitHub.

I chose this route because I wanted to learn teach myself how to code, and having a project to work on was the perfect way to do that.

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Honestly, no. I built a few sites on Squarespace and WebFlow, but I've never really "blogged" on another platform consistently. However, there was a period of time where I used WordPress as a headless CMS to power this blog. I liked using WordPress because of how easy it was to write new posts and add images to them. But there was always this nagging fear of losing all of my posts somehow.

That said, I really like Pika. I've debated switching there many times. I've read countless posts about how easy the platform is to use, and how it gives you just the right amount of customization. Really, the only thing keeping me from moving is that proud feeling I have that I blog on a site built from scratch. I have this imagination where I'll be talking to someone and they'll be impressed that I built my blog from scratch and hire me. I know in the development world, a self-made blog is table stakes, but that's not the case in the legal field.

However, I'm using Pika to share short quotes and ideas from books I'm reading. I post the full notes on this site, but sometimes it takes me a year to get around to typing up the entire book. So, I wanted a space where I can share quotes as I read them, and Pika is a good place to do that so far.

4. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that's part of your blog?

I currently use Obsidian, but I used iA Writer's free trial and loved the experience. The editing and grammar tools were awesome, and the interface is really nice. However, I just don't want to fork over $50 on a tool that's similar to Obsidian.

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?

Right after I learn something new or read a quote that I can't not share with others.

6. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Publish immediately. This is my personal blog, not the New York Times. I can always edit later!

7. What's your favorite post on your blog?

Don't Create a Horse Storm.

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Always! I actually like the current design a lot. It's simple and clean. I've debated using a serif typeface, and I have one I really like, but whenever I test it out in development, it gives too much of a serious vibe to the site.

As mentioned, I'm debating moving to Pika. The fact that I don't own the content, and the feeling that it's cool to have built my own blog, are the two things that are stopping me. Perhaps when I'm a busy lawyer (hopefully!), and realize I don't have time anymore to tinker with my blog, I'll make the switch.

My Reading Year, 2024

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 12:51:00 GMT

Read last year's here.

This was the lightest reading year I've had in awhile, if measured by books completed, thanks to law school. However, if measured by pages or words read, I probably read more than ever before.

Until August, my reading schedule was normal. But once school started, I was only able to finish two "fun" books throughout the entire semester. It's not that I didn't have the time to read fun books, but whenever I sat down to do so, there was a small voice inside my head that convinced me that my time was better spent reading books for school. I don't regret that, though. The rationale was that every hour spent studying should, hopefully, be worth it when the semester is over, and though reading fun books helps me learn, it's not as "productive" as being caught up on reading for school. Plus, spending a few hours reading for school helped me get ahead for the week, which allowed me to slow down and make sure I really understand the material, identify the areas I was confused, and come up with specific questions to ask my professors. I don't think I would have had that luxury if I wasn't so ahead.

All that to say, I didn't read as many books in the back half of the year. Still, here are the ones I did read.

I started the year continuing my Ron Chernow and early American history kick by finishing Grant and reading Alexander Hamilton. Being from Missouri, I feel a special connection to Grant. (Though I was surprised that he really didn't spend a lot of time in Missouri.) I also loved smoking cigars while making my way through the pages. I felt an even stronger connection to him then. And I don't know if I didn't pay attention in school well enough, or just forgot, but I don't remember learning anything about what Hamilton did during the early days of America. He was a political genius, even if he was slightly arrogant. I can't help but wonder what impact he would have had on America had he not died so young.

Sitting on a beach in Turks and Caicos, staring off into the vast expanse of the ocean, I was craving a shipwreck book. I started reading Robinson Crusoe, which was fun. Then I picked up Dead Wake by Erik Larson. I listened to the book in 2023, because Scott Brick narrated it and it was phenomenal, but I hadn't read it. It kept me locked in for my six hour flight home from Miami on that trip. It's a phenomenal book. Probably one of my top ten ever.

I then picked up Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough. I wasn't particularly interested in young Roosevelt, I just wanted to read another book by McCullough. However, it was such a fun read. I liked how McCullough embraced Roosevelt's early life, and didn't try to make it yet another Roosevelt biography. By doing so, he allowed the reader to really understand the Roosevelt family, and show how much of what Teddy did with his life was a result of his father, Theodore Sr. The first volume of Edmund Morris' Roosevelt series doesn't even come close to providing the detail and intricacies of the family and Roosevelt's childhood.

After a few biographies, I took a break to read a typical narrative non-fiction book. Ever since I discovered that genre in 2022, I've been obsessed with finding more books in that style. What I've realized, though, is that it's really hard to do that style of writing and make the book mean something. Not that every book needs to have a message, but there needs to be a reason for me to read the book. Maybe some people read for pure entertainment, but I don't. Sailing the Graveyard Sea was a book that was well written—and it was no doubt a unique, riveting story—but I didn't really see the point in reading it. When I finished it, I just kind of felt, like, "Okay..."

Last year for Christmas, I got Robert Caro's LBJ series. I read the first two volumes back-to-back around March and April. They're both amazing. The first volume is big, but the writing is so good and the story is so interesting that it doesn't feel like a slog to get through.

I picked up volume two of William Manchester's The Last Lion, his three-part biography of Winston Churchill, and loved it. Manchester was a beautiful writer. The opening of that book recounts how Churchill spent most of his days as Prime Minister, and I'm pretty sure it was the inspiration for the opening sequences of The Darkest Hour with Gary Oldman. (I started reading volume three, but Manchester died while he was writing that volume and the other author did not have the command of language that Manchester had. I felt it got lost in the details and spends too much time talking about the war movements in North Africa, for example, and not about Churchill.)

When I read Team of Rivals last year, I became enamored with Doris Kearns Goodwin's writing. I was thus excited to see her name on the shelf of a new, delightful book, An Unfinished Love Story. Goodwin's husband, Richard Goodwin, was a speechwriter who worked closely with JFK and LBJ. Throughout his career, he collected dozens of papers, memos, files, and notes into bankers boxes that filled their house. When he passed away, Doris set out on a mission to piece together the era of the sixties while recounting their love story. The finished product was this book: a compendium of stories between the two of them, JFK, LBJ, and other notable political figures of the era. I couldn't put the book down.

Another author I've fallen in love with over the years is Erik Larson. His attention to historical accuracy, as well as his ability to make any historical event read like a gripping novel is unmatched. I was excited to read his latest, A Demon of Unrest, a book about the shelling of Fort Sumter and the early days of the Civil War. I liked the book, but I didn't love it. Partly because I was expecting what Larson's Splendid and the Vile did for how I viewed Churchill to do the same with Lincoln, and that just didn't happen. Still, the story was good and I'll be anxiously waiting for Larson's next book.

Around the Fourth of July, I really wanted to read a short book that recapped much of the revolution and the early days of America. I set out to do this in 2023 with 1776 by David McCullough, but the book was not what I was expecting. The Patriots by Winston Groom scratched that itch. The book is essentially three mini-biographies of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. Instead of going from birth to death in each of them, Groom interweaves their stories together, which was creative and fun. It was just what I was looking to read at the time.

Probably the best book of the year was Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman by Merle Miller. Miller interviewed Truman on camera after his presidency—and a lot of Truman's friends, colleagues, and neighbors—for a documentary. But there was some shake-up at the network and the show never aired. Instead of letting all of those tapes go to waste, Miller compiled them into this oral biography. However, it's less a biography akin to McCullough's Truman and more of a series of vignettes from the most important episodes in Truman's life. Miller asks a question about an event, time, or person, and Truman chats about that. The book was filled with hilarious anecdotes and quotes from Truman. It also provided a unique look at Truman's philosophy on leadership and life, which I loved. Like Grant, I feel a very strong affections to Truman, because he was a boy from Missouri who didn't have a special childhood, failed a ton, and yet became the most powerful man in America, all while maintaining his humility. (The one episode in Truman's life I don't like is when he called Oppenheimer a crybaby for telling Truman that he thought he had blood on his hands. But, I see it from Truman's perspective as well—a lot of people think Oppenheimer was being too self-important.)

While I was doing some spiritual soul searching this year, I came across Thoughts for Young Men by J.C. Ryle. It's a convicting message, but one that needs to be preached from many pulpits and heard by many young Christian men.

My last big, traditional biography for the year was A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White. This was the first traditional Lincoln biography I decided to read, aside from And There Was Light by Jon Meacham, and it was a tough decision. There are more Lincoln biographies than there are Starbucks! I used one of my favorite sites to decide which one to pick up first: My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies. I read this book at the perfect time, because it gave a lot of attention and detail to Lincoln's legal career, which a lot of biographies skip over. I was most interested in learning about that, because I knew it would make me excited for law school, which was starting in a few weeks when I read this book. That's something that I love about pursuing a legal career: I get to follow in the footsteps of so many great thinkers and writers: Lincoln, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc.

It was about here, in August, when most of my fun reading came to a complete halt thanks to law school. However, I did manage to squeeze out a few more books over the semester.

A short and sweet one that caught me off guard was The Art of Money Getting by P.T. Barnum. It's a very short book filled with little ideas about wealth and life. The title is "clickbaity" today, but I imagine when it was published it took people by storm. It's less "hustle bro" culture and more thoughtful questions and paragraphs that cause you to reflect about what you want out of life, business, and work.

Before bed each night, I was able to knock off a few pages of the first volume of Edmund Morris' Theodore Roosevelt series on my Kindle. It's not the ideal way to read a biography, especially one as great as this one, but I made little time throughout the semester for fun reading, so I did what I could. I also prefer physical books, but it's easier to read on a Kindle while comfortable in bed and then go to sleep whenever my eyes start getting too heavy. I loved the first book, and am working my way through the second now.

The day after my last final, I started Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow, and finished it the next day. (I was excited to read a "fun" book.) It was a fun, philosophical read. I was expecting something slightly different, but what it turned out to be was great.

Since I'll spend most of 2025 and 2026 in school, I'm expecting my reading volume will be significantly less. However, hopefully over the summer I can squeeze out a biography or two, and do the same thing over winter break.

If you've read one of these books and want to chat about them, or want more book ideas to read, send me an email! I love chatting about books and history. maberydalton at gmail dot com.

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 13:09:00 GMT

I finished reading this book, and almost instantly started re-reading it and listening to the audiobook version of it. It's phenomenal, insightful, and engaging.

Here are my notes, quotes, and ideas:

I loved this quote from John F. Kennedy that preceded the Table of Contents, given during a dinner to honor Nobel laureates:

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

The prologue opens, "He awoke at first light." That's certainly something I hope can be written about me one day.

Also: "He loved his wife, his books, his farms, good wine, architecture, Homer, horseback riding, history, France, the Commonwealth of Virginia, spending money, and the very latest in ideas and insights."

And: "A philosopher and a scientist, a naturalist and a historian, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, always looking forward, consumed by the quest for knowledge. He adored detail, noting the temperature each day and carrying a tiny, ivory-leaved notebook in his pocket to track his daily expenditures."

The extent of Jefferson's knowledge can be understood through this anecdote:

A guest at a country inn was said to have once struck up a conversation...whom the stranger did not recognize. The two covered subject after subject, and the unremarkable traveler was "perfectly acquainted with each." Afterward, "filled with wonder," the guest asked the landlord who this extraordinary man was. When the topic was the law, the traveller said, "he thought he was a lawyer"; when it was medicine, he "felt sure he was a physician"; when it was theology, "he became convinced that he was a clergyman."

"Thomas Jefferson was the most successful political figure of the first half century of the American republic. For thirty-six of the forty years between 1800 and 1840, either Jefferson or a self-described adherent of his served as president of the United States."

I thought this was a unique definition of power:

In pursuit of his ends, Jefferson sought, acquired, and wielded power, which is the bending of the world to one's will, the remaking of reality in one's own image. Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators. They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma.

[...]

He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes. Broadly put, philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.

[...]

Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it. His bearing gave him unusual opportunities to make the thoughts in his head the work of his hands, transforming the world around him from what it was to what he thought it ought to be.

"It is a charming thing to be loved by everybody and the way to obtain it is, never to quarrel or be angry with anybody." – Jefferson #quotes

The author gives a good warning for reading history: "If we are to understand what he was like, and what life was like for him, then we must see the world as he saw it, not as how we know it turned out."

"It is the strong in body who are both the strong and free in mind." – Peter Jefferson, TJ's father. #quotes

"The most fortunate of us all in our journey through life frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us. To fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives."

I loved this definition of immaturity from Kant. I've never heard it put like this before:

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.

My personal summation of this quote: Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. #quotes #immaturity #maturity #mature #independence #responsibility

(I also notice how Kant wrote this in the style of a statute. He uses "self-imposed" and "immaturity" in the "rule" and then defines what both of those factors are, as if they are "sub-rules." Such is the style of writing—and reading and learning—I must attain if I am to excel in the practice of law.)

"For Jefferson laziness was a sin. 'Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth, as indolence,' he told one of his daughters. Time spent at study was never wasted. 'Knowledge,' Jefferson said, 'indeed is a desirable, a lovely possession.'"

Jefferson believed in rigorous exercised, despite the weather.

"Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise, and the weather should be little regarded," Jefferson once said. In fact, Jefferson believed the rainier and the colder the better. "A person not sick will not be injured by getting wet," he said. "It is but taking a cold bath, which never gives a cold to any one. Brute animals are the most healthy, and they are exposed to all weather, and of men, those are healthiest who are the most exposed."

Thomas Jefferson, the original David Goggins.

Jefferson believed in rigorous study, but also attaining a wide breadth of knowledge.

Aspiring attorneys, he said, should devote their mornings to the law, but variety was key. "Having ascribed proper hours to exercise, divide what remain (I mean of your vacant hours) into three portions. Give the principal to history, the other two, which should be shorter, to Philosophy and Poetry."

Noted.

While the roots of revolution were stirring in the colonies, and in Jefferson's heart and mind, he understood "Leadership" to be "knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world."

From the author:

Politicians often talk too much and listen too little, which can be self-defeating, for in many instances the surer route to winning a friend is not to convince them that you are right but that you care what they think. Everyone wants to believe that what they have to say is fascinating, illuminating, and possibly even epochal. The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: "one of the choice ones of the earth."

This is a good lesson for me as a start law school, and am potentially am put in positions to mediate conflicts in a few years.

"Harmony in the marriage state is the very first object to be aimed at." – Jefferson #quotes #marriageAdvice

He always wrote to his daughter:

Much better...if our companion views a thing in a light different from what we do, to leave him in quite possession of his view. What is the use of rectifying him if the thing be unimportant; and if important let it pass for the present, and wait a softer moment and more conciliatory occasion of revising the subject together.

Lesson: Choose your battles; if the battle is worth fighting, do it not in the heat of the moment for tempers are often flared.

In A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson laid stake to his identity of a revolutionary, clear thinker, and leader.

As 1774 drew to a close, Jefferson—at thirty-one years old, a husband, father, lawyer, planter, legislator, and thinker—had moved to a new, higher rank of political skill. The Summary View and his other pieces demonstrated a capacity to reflect and advance the sentiments of his public simultaneously, giving his audience both a vision of the future and a concrete sense that he knew how to bring the distant closer to hand, and dreams closer to reality.

"TJ's writings pushed him into a new echelon of political leadership. Such is the power of clear thinking, writing, and publishing your views," I wrote in the margin.

Jefferson's purpose in writing the Declaration of Independence was, "not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of...but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent state we were compelled to take."

Jefferson wasn't a failed governor of Virginia, but he definitely wasn't at his best. When the Redcoats invaded, he retreated, and the people didn't like this very much, and they let him know it.

Jefferson wasn't happy with the public critiques. He wrote: "If you meant to escape malice you should have confined yourself within the sleepy line of regular duty. When you transgressed this and enterprised deeds which will hand down your name with honor to future times, you made yourself a mark for malice and envy to shoot at. Of these things there is enough both in and out of office."

"Anguish is the price a public man paid for adulation," writes Meacham.

In response to Washington asking Jefferson to be the first Secretary of State, Jefferson once again battled with his desire to greatness and fear of ridicule. Meacham writes:

Jefferson was daunted, and said so, admitting that he feared the "critcisms and censures of a public just indeed in their intentions, but sometimes misinformed and misled, and always too respectable to be neglected."

He was trapped in a familiar paradox. Devoted to the stage and anxious for applause, Jefferson feared failure and disapproval.

When Jefferson was elected to Congress, he placed the care of his daughter in the hands of a Mrs. Hopkins, but distant father he was not. He expected Patsy to follow a strict regiment:

With respect to the distribution of your time, the following is what I should approve:

From 8 to 10 o'clock, practice music. From 10 to 1, dance one day and draw another. From 1 to 2, draw on the day you dance, and write a letter the next day. From 3 to 4, read French. From 4 to 5, exercise yourself in music. From 5 till bed-time, read English, write, etc.

I wonder what the difference between "practice music" and "exercise yourself in music" was?

He wrote something similar to his nephew Peter Carr:

You are now old enough to know how very important to your future life will be the manner in which you employ your present time.

There was little Jefferson valued in life more than independent thought. He wrote:

I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven with a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore I protest to you I am not of the party of federalists. But I am much farther from that of the Antifederalists.

Although Jefferson wanted things in the country to be a little different—and he let people know that's how he felt—he realized that nothing good could happen overnight. He wrote in a letter to Reverend Charles Clary in 1790:

[Y]ou are too well informed a politician, too good a judge of men, not to know that the ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, that we must be contended to serve what we can get from time to time, and eternally press forward for what is yet to get.

That's a good philosophy for life: Always strive, always be working toward getting better in your work, your life, your health, you education, etc., but don't expect anything to happen overnight. "Eternally press forward for what is yet to get."

While Hamilton was fighting for a national bank, Jefferson fought back. When Washington asked Jefferson's opinion on the constitutionality of the bank bill, he wrote:

To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.

Jefferson embodied a principal that many great leaders have: he was unrelenting on the end, but compromised on the means. "Like significant politicians before him, Jefferson was devoted to an overarching vision, but governed according to circumstance."

Jefferson had decorated the walls of his quarters with a collection of portraits that included Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton, all men of the Enlightenment. Hamilton asked Jefferson who they were. "I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them," Jefferson recalled.

One thing I learned reading history, is that the South wanted to secede long before 1860. It was a constant tension. Meacham writes, "He was thinking of the calamitous possibility of souther secession to protest Federalist dominance. 'I can scarcely contemplate a more incalculable evil than the breaking of the union into two or more parts,' Jefferson said, yet if Northern interests were to predominate, it would become impossible to say what might happen."

Jefferson made a prescient observation about the American public and the presidency when he said, "well I know that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it."

Brilliant.

There were rare moments in Jefferson's life when he recorded his philosophy on life, work, and politics. Often, they were in letters of advice to his children, like earlier when he wrote a detailed schedule for Patsy to follow. Others were in letters to his grandchildren, like in this letter to his grandson when he gave, what I think, is one of the most important and valuable lessons anyone can learn and follow in life.

He wrote, "A determination never to do what is wrong, prudence, and good humor, will go far towards securing to you the estimation of the world." Good humor "is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment's consideration; it is the giving a pleasing and flattering turn to our expressions which will conciliate others and make them pleased with us as well as themselves. How cheap a price for the good will of another!"

I could name about five people who always have "little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them" and deprive me of nothing, and I try to let them have their way, but I admit it is very hard.

He went on:

When this is in return for a rude thing said by another, it brings him to his senses, it mortifies and corrects him in the most salutary way, and places him at the feet of your good nature in the eyes of the company. But in strange prudential rules for our government in society, I must not omit the important one of never entering into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one or two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many, on their getting warm, becoming rude, and shooting on another. Conviction is the effect of our own dispassionate reasoning, either in solitude, or weighing within ourselves dispassionately what we hear from others standing uncommitted in argument with ourselves. It was one of the rules which above all others made Doctr. Franklin the most amiable men in society, "never to contradict anybody."

This is all brilliant advice. Everyone working with other people in any capacity should read this passage every single day.

Thomas Jefferson said a lot in his inaugural address, but one line stuck with me: "Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle."

I don't think a lot of people understand that. Just because someone disagrees about how something should be done, why something should be done, or when something should be done does not mean they are the enemy. People who want to see the same things in the world can disagree about all of the little steps and work required to get there.

Jefferson's presidential routine was gruesome; working for ten to thirteen hours a day at his writing table, doing paperwork and receiving callers from early morning until midday. "It was only at night—and it was the rare night—that he spent time on the 'mechanics, mathematics, philosophy, etc.' that he loved."

Regardless of the political environment and business, Jefferson found some time to continue the intellectual pursuits he so loved. For example, during the heat of the battle of the Louisiana Purchase, he closed a letter to Joseph Priestley with, "Have you seen the new work of Malthus on population? It is one of the ablest I have ever seen." Meacham writes, "How like Jefferson—amid the greatest of possible events affecting every aspect of American life and beyond, he was reading Malthus."

Benjamin Rush helped Jefferson form his views on church and state in 1800. "'I agree with you likewise in your wishes to keep religion and government independent of one another. Were it possible for St. Paul to rise from his grave at the present juncture, he would say to the clergy who are now so active in settling the political affairs of the world: "Cease from your political labors your kingdom is not of this world. Read my epistles. In no part of them will you perceive me aiming to depose a pagan emperor, or to place a Christian upon a throne. Christianity disdains to receive support from human governments."'"

Thomas Jefferson was the perfect person to execute the Louisiana Purchase. "The story of the Louisiana Purchase is one of strength, of Jefferson's adaptability and, most important, his determination to secure the territory from France, doubling the size of the country and transforming the United States into a continental power. A slower or less courageous politician might have bungled the acquisition; an overly idealistic one might have lost it by insisting on strict constitutional scruples. Jefferson, however, was neither slow nor weak nor overly idealistic."

The constitutional question was huge. There was a big debate around whether Jefferson had the power to do what he did with the Louisiana Purchase, or whether it should have been Congress' job. I think he did a good job of keeping it on the down low until the deal was essentially over, at which point, it was kind of too late for anyone to stop it or undo it.

Part of Jefferson's busy schedule including having dinner guests at the President's House. This wasn't a part of some desire to retreat from the realities of the world and have a drink and a meal, though; these dinners, like most things Jefferson did, had a reason. Meacham writes:

Jefferson believed, too, that sociability was essential to republicanism. Men who liked and respected and enjoyed one another were more likely to cultivate the virtuous habits that would enable the country's citizens to engage in "the pursuit of happiness." An affectionate man living in harmony with his neighbors was more likely to understand the mutual sacrifice of opinion of which Jefferson had spoken, and to make those sacrifices.

There was, of course, a more immediate point to frequent gatherings of lawmakers, diplomats, and cabinet officers at the president's table. It tends to be more difficult to oppose—or at least vilify—someone with whom you have broken bread.

During these meetings, Jefferson made sure to include everybody in the conversation. Rank and prestige were words that Jefferson didn't know existed. At one conversation, with someone who had lived in Europe for awhile, felt out of place. Noticing this, Jefferson praised him for the rice he sent from Algiers in front of the whole crowd. "With a stroke of grace," Meacham writes, "Jefferson had transformed an unnoticed guest into what Mrs. Smith called 'a person of importance,' and the president fulfilled the most fundamental duty of a host: he showed respect to those under his roof, making them feel comfortable and cared for."

Jefferson, though a lawyer, saw the law for what it is, a means to an end for preserving liberty and freedom. "A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means."

Jefferson realized he had enemies, but to him, enemies were simply a by-product of affecting change. "I suppose indeed that in public life a man whose political principals have any decided character, and who has energy enough to give them effect, must always expect to encounter political hostility from those of adverse principles."

My interpretation is that, if you don't have any enemies or people you're upsetting, you're not standing for anything.

When Jefferson left the presidency, no one would have blamed him for laying low and relaxing, except, perhaps, Jefferson himself. On a visit to Monticello in 1809, Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, "The sun never sees him in bed, and his mind designs more than the day can fulfill, even his long day." Yet the work, he loved; "There is a tranquility about him, which an inward peace could alone bestow."

After spending years immersed in politics, he was not interested in reading about it. "I feel a much greater interest in knowing what has passed two or three thousand years ago, than what is now passing," he wrote in 1819. "I read nothing, therefore, but of the heroes of Troy . . . of Pompey and Caesar, and of Augustus too." He loved, he said, the "ineffable luxury of being owner of my own time."

During the time at Monticello, Jefferson and Adams began conversing again through letters. They rekindled their friendship, repaired old wounds, and just, sort of, chatted. However, they steered clear of politics. "For with the commonplace topic of politics, we do not meddle. When there are so many others on which we agree why should we introduce the only one on which we differ?"

That's a great philosophy for life, friendship, and conversation.

Jefferson loved innovation. "The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention."

Jefferson loved education. "I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness."

He also wrote one of his famous letters filled with advice on living a virtuous life. "Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. [I think that's saying to not complain about things you can't control, or that happened to you.] So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss."

He also included "A DECALOGUE OF CANONS FOR OBSERVATION IN PRACTICAL LIFE."

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.

Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

Never spend money before you have it.

Never buy what you don not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.

Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.

We never repent of having eaten too little.

Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.

How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.

Take things always by their smooth handle.

When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.

Books mentioned

History of England by Paul de Rapin-Thoyras
"What is Enlightenment?" by Kant
Political Disquisitions by James Burgh

Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 10:40:00 GMT

I picked up this book after overhearing Ryan Holiday mention it to Morgan Housel during their bookshop tour. 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 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, 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.

Concurring opinions

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

When you're a huge nerd like me, you not only read court opinions for school, but you also get really excited to read those court opinions when it's written by a judge that you like to read. There are a few judges I love to read, even if I don't agree with everything they write. Judge Posner from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is one of those. The latest opinion we read from him opens with, "Richard Welge, forty-something but young in spirit, loves to sprinkle peanuts on his ice cream sundaes." And continues later:

Even so, the defendants point out, it is always possible that the jar was damaged while it was sitting unattended on the top of the refrigerator, in which event they are not responsible. Only if it had been securely under lock and key when not being used could the plaintiff and Karen Godfrey be certain that nothing happened to damage it after she brought it home. That is true--there are no metaphysical certainties--but it leads nowhere. Elves may have played ninepins with the jar of peanuts while Welge and Godfrey were sleeping; but elves could remove a jar of peanuts from a locked cupboard. The plaintiff in a products liability suit is not required to exclude every possibility, however fantastic or remote, that the defect which led to the accident was caused by someone other than one of the defendants.

I mean, come on. Inject this into my veins.

Another fascinating thing about reading opinions while studying how one area of law has developed is seeing how judge's concurring and dissenting opinions in one case end up being the rationale for the majority in a later case. Justice William Brennan of the Supreme Court was notorious for this in personal jurisdiction cases.

Here's a great example from my readings this week.

We're learning about strict products liability law, and the big crux of this area of tort law is that manufacturers and distributers don't have to be negligent (i.e. do anything "wrong" necessarily) for someone to recover against them. They are held strictly liable.

In 1944, strict products liability wasn't really a thing, but a justice on the California Supreme Court really wanted it to be a thing. In Escola v. Coco Cola Bottling Co., Justice Rodger Traynor wrote a concurring opinion advocating for strict products liability. He wrote:

In my opinion, it should now be recognized that a manufacturer incurs an absolute liability when an article that he has placed on the market, knowing that it is to be used without inspection, proves to have a defect that causes injury to human beings.

And here Justice Traynor is again in 1963, almost twenty years later, writing the same thing in the majority opinion in Greenman v. Yuba Power Products, Inc., thereby creating strict products liability for tort actions in California:

A manufacturer is strictly liable in tort when an article he places on the market, knowing that it is to be used without inspection for defects, proves to have a defect that causes injury to a human being.

And just like that, strict products liability is birthed into existence. I love finding stuff like this and connecting the dots.

The Art of Money Getting by P.T. Barnum

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 19:15:00 GMT

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.

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

A New Coat of Paint

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

If you read this blog on dltn.io, you might have noticed a new coat of paint recently. I didn’t do anything too drastic, but I love the new look. It’s simple, elegant, and timeless.

Here’s what’s new.

Design

I changed the background color from a blue-white to a pure white. There are still tones of blue, but not as much. The current color is #FAFAFA and the previous one was #FAFBFF.

The color of the links are now a deeper shade of blue. I like this look because it’s more typical of what the color of a link is “thought” to be.

Homepage layout

The biggest structural change was to my homepage. I removed the loop of tags because the list of tags and the list of posts brought my eye to too many different places at once. I liked that someone visiting the site for the first time instantly got an idea of what I wrote about, but it was just too much.

In its stead, I made this simple list of my favorite tags to write about, which just so happens to also be the tags that contain the majority of the posts. This gives me the benefit of having someone see what I write about when they first land on the page without being overwhelmed.

In a big change, I removed my subscribe callout. There are two reasons for this:

It wasn’t converting. I don’t know if my language wasn’t right or if people just don’t read stuff on the homepage, but I’d only get three or four signups per month.
I’m not sending my newsletter as frequently. When I first started blogging, everyone and their mother had a newsletter, but I could never quite find my rhythm with it. I’d rather just blog about what I want, when I want, and not worry about “bothering” people with my posts. I might add the signup form in the footer, or add a separate subscribe page eventually, but for now it’s gone. (You can still subscribe via RSS.)

I’ve been trying for months now to create a design I liked more than what I had before, but every time I came up with something new, I always just liked what I had before, better. I was always basing my re-designs on what I saw other people were doing on their sites, and I think I never allowed myself to just sit down and code to see what I came up with until I worked on this design.

One day, I sat down after a long day of school with nothing but time and the clear intention to just get something fresh and new pushed to main so I could get back to studying (because I have been slightly distracted by re-designing this lately). Since I was free of any time constraints, and wasn’t worried about staying up too late, I just got into the zone and made something. I think that speaks to trusting yourself when it comes to creative projects. Mood boards and inspiration are good, but don’t let those things replace your creative brain!

Why the “boring-ness?”

The reason I like the white background, black text, and blue links is because of my ideal career. I know I can do more “fun” things with my site, and it probably doesn’t really matter, but if a potential firm or client lands on my blog, I want to project an image of sturdiness and seriousness. Admittedly that sounds cheesy, but I believe it, and it’s what’s keeping me from having a dark blue background and light blue text. I love that look, but I just can’t pull it off right now.

That’s also why I’ve been debating using a serif typeface. Serifs are serious and educated and academic. I love all of those things, but when I read a short blog post on my phone in a typeface that looks like it belongs in a newspaper, something just feels “off.” I’ve yet to find a good looking but not too serious serif typeface. So, for the time being, I’ll continue using my trusty Inter.

New feature: Links!

Inspired by Jim Nielsen and Robb Knight, I’ve decided to build out a /links page. I’m not really using social media anymore, but I still have a desire to share what I read and learn with others. Sometimes I blog about things, but other times I just have a quick thought I want to share along with a great quote. That isn’t enough content for me to make a full blog post, but now I can make a new link post.

How it works

Technically: I have two folders in my repo: posts and links. When I want to post a new link, I make a new page in iA Writer and type the title of the article as an H1. Then I highlight the H1 and paste the link to the article. In the body I add quotes and thoughts. Finally, I name the file the current date and time: 2024-10-12T14:54. My backend strips the first H1 and saves it to a title property, the link gets stripped and saved to a link property and the file name minus the extension becomes the id. (This is all based on Jim’s process.)

On my /links page, I loop over every file in the links directory and pass the properties to a LinksDisplay component. I use psl to strip the domain name from the link variable, which is how it’s displayed on the page.

So, this file in iA writer...

...becomes this on my site...

Procedurally: I read every article on Readwise’s Reader app. (It’s great, check it out.) Highlights and notes I take from articles automatically get saved to Obsidian. When I have some time to sort through my notes, I open Obsidian and find any quotes that still resonate with me. When I find one, I follow the process above.

There is probably a way to automate this by pointing my /links directory to my Readwise folder, which actually could be a very fun, tough project to work on. But part of the learning process is re-examining what I saved and realizing much of it is not worth internalizing. Separating the wheat from the chaff is a slow but valuable process when it comes to retaining information.

As Jim points out, the benefit of having everything in one page is that, if you need to find a quote, you can simply do a CMND + F search of all your notes, which would be super valuable when you’re on the go.

New layout: Notes!

I’ve slightly altered my /notes page. Before, it was just a three-column grid of book covers. It worked; it was simple and clear. But I wanted to add more information about the books before someone clicked on one because some book covers are ambiguous.

I haven’t been posting new book notes as frequently as I would like to because writing new notes takes a lot of time, and my “fun” reading time has substantially diminished since starting law school. I think I need to limit myself to how long I spend on one book, and whatever I have written down when time runs out goes on the site. I have a backlog of about 40+ books to post, and that number is only increasing.

I think this is the most differentiated part of my site because most people who post notes just copy and paste their Kindle highlights from the book. That works, but it doesn’t give anyone reading the notes context for the information. I like trying to introduce each quote and provide actual lessons about history and people that I learn from the books. I don’t know if I’ll keep blogging for the rest of my life, but I’ll certainly continue reading books and sharing what I learn, so I really want to prioritize this part of my site.

(I say I don’t have time but really I haven’t made the time. I need to block off an hour or two every week to work on a book. At that rate, I could probably post a new book every three weeks or so.)

I also updated my about page.

My blog’s identity crisis

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Now that I have officially decided to keep my blog built with Next, I thought my blog tinkering time was over and I could just go back to sitting down and writing posts.

But then I realized I can still mess with the design...duh!

The blog has been pretty much this same design since its inception: white background, black text, using Inter. It’s clean, easy to read, and looks great on any device.

But it is a bit boring. I resonated with what The Jelly Teapot wrote about a site’s visual identity:

When I visit [certain] websites...I don’t need to read a single word, know the URL or the name of the site to know the one I am viewing. Same when I see the entries from Michael Tsai, Kev Quirk, or Quanta Magazine in my newsreader: they stand out in the feed and I know from which blog or website it’s from, as I recognise their icon.

I feel like my blog currently lacks this kind of visual identity. Its current icon — or rather its lack of an icon — feels a little like other feeds I am subscribed to, coming from Mastodon or Medium which all share the same favicon: generic, anonymous, and doesn’t stand out visually from the others.

Like I wrote in a previous post, There is no place like home: Why I love my blog, I know what makes my blog mine, what its identity is: bare-bones design, minimal style, tiny footprint, etc. But for the casual reader, for someone stumbling upon one of my posts, it can definitely feel a bit plain, boring, forgettable.

Might feels plain, boring, and forgettable. Like Magand’s though, that’s sort of the point? I like how easy everything is to read. But, still, I think I’m ready for something new.

I’ve tried using serif fonts in the past because since I write about history and books a lot, I wanted my site to feel more serious and studious. Crimson is an amazing typeface for that vibe. But the result was almost too serious and studios; when I read shorter posts from the archive, it just felt out of place.

Here are some renditions I’ve been working on.

Here’s a futuristic space vibe, inspired by Luke Harris’s site. I love the colors and the typeface, but my wife and I both agree that it doesn’t fit the overall content of my site very much. I do like it, a lot though.

And light mode

I think I’m going to remove the entire list of tags and posts from the /index because there are just too many things to click on. I’ll just build out a separate /tags page. So I think I’ll stick with this layout, I just don’t know which vibe to go with.

Here are some serif options.

And, of course I had to see what the genius-professor-too-busy-to-write-CSS was like. (I actually really love it.)

I also tried a pure black background with Verdana. My reasoning with trying Verdana was that it’s so classic and timeless that it looks studios and serious, but it’s not too serious to be out of place on a personal blog.

Still, every time I’ve tried a new color scheme or layout in the past, I always end up liking it less than what I currently have. I don’t know if that’s because what I have is familiar, or what I have actually just works really well. (Either way, thanks, Steph for the inspiration.)

For now the designs will sit in limbo in a GitHub branch, maybe never seeing the light of day.

Static blogs are like printers

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

From Jack Baty:

The problem I have with publishing a static site is that creating and editing content is too far removed from the actual rendered page.

I fly pretty fast and loose with my writing. I publish things I’m interested in and am eager to share. I’m impatient. If I had to write three drafts of every post before putting it out there I’d never publish anything. This is why I like using WordPress.

Using WordPress makes me feel like that boy at the Type-In. I feel like the words are going right onto the paper. Sure, the metaphor is a little thin, but the point is that when writing with WordPress (or any CMS, really), the distance between what I’m typing and what I’m publishing is very short. The only thing closer is editing HTML directly on a live page, but that’s something only crazy people do.

On the other hand, publishing a static site is like sending a document to a printer. I have to make sure everything is connected, that there’s paper in the machine, and then wait for the job to finish before seeing the output. If something needs editing, and something always needs editing, the whole process starts over.

So I struggle with choosing publishing tools. I much prefer the idea of statically rendered websites, but in practice I’d rather use WordPress.

I’ve been struggling with this back and forth for about two years and have never been able to put it so succinctly. (Thanks, Luke Harris!)

It’s my eternal struggle when it comes to blogging. Having markdown files safely stored on my machine, with all of the code and everything else that makes my site run seems, to me, to far outweigh any inconvenience from actually writing a new post. Plus, I’ve done some things to make just a tad bit easier.

But still, nothing is as nice as opening a browser window, typing some words in a big blank text area, and then hitting publish. Plus, the fact that WordPress lets you highlight text and then automatically link to other posts on your blog is an insanely nice feature that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

But WordPress and other site builders still limit what you can do. They either limit it expressly, by making certain areas of functionality closed off, or limit it implicitly by making it extremely difficult to do certain things.

With all of the WordPress drama going on lately, I’m happy to have my site not relying on their technology–or anyone else’s (except Vercel). But, I still resonate with Baty’s well-put observation.

To quote him, brb, gotta check the printer.

Your site should let you do what you want

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

For the last few months, I debated switching my site to a headless CMS using WordPress. I liked—nay, loved—how easy it was to open a browser window, type words, add images, and make a new post. It was much simpler than pushing to GitHub, dealing with front matter, and all those things.

As I was working on the api calls, I thought, “Why not just move my entire site to WordPress?” I reasoned that it would be nice to make pages with the same ease I made posts with, I could reasonably rely on WordPress being around for a bit, I was already hosting the site, and I found a theme that was minimal and elegant.

I thought about that idea for a weekend, but decided against it. Although the theme was really nice, and making new pages was easy, it proved so much harder than I wanted it to be to add anything that didn’t already exist. I don’t know the WordPress ecosystem like I do Next’s, but I just wanted to write some code that fetched my book notes and displayed the cover images. Admittedly, I never sat down with an intentional focus to work on that problem, but I just could not figure out how to do it in WordPress.

I also wanted to add a few simple sentences to my /index, and that proved more difficult than I thought it should be. I had the markup written correctly, and my CSS properly written with classes styled, but I couldn’t for the life of me get the styles to be applied. Also, the browser on my phone was still using the original theme more than four days after I changed the original CSS. It must have been some sort of caching problem, but I couldn’t figure it out.

But I shouldn’t have to figure it out. I kept thinking to myself, “You know, your current site already has all of these features.” There were a few times I got the functionality close to what I wanted, but I realized with a personal site, I don’t want it to be close, I want the site to look and feel exactly how I want it to look and feel.

This is a major benefit of having a site built from scratch that I didn’t recognize before. I was focused on “owning” my content and ensuring there were as little “middle men” between my content and my content existing online that I was blinded of the huge blessing that having a site do, be, look, and perform exactly how I want.

I liked how Mandy Brown put it in her post “Coming Home:”

[having a personal website] allowed me to cultivate the soil to suit my purposes—rather than having to adapt my garden to the soil I was given

When you have a personal site that you control, you can make it whatever you want it to be. If you want to build yourself a mini Twitter feed, build yourself a mini Twitter feed!

The only real limitation to this is your technical ability, but once you have a site live and working, ChatGPT can help you build just about anything. And when you run into errors or bugs, it’s an amazing troubleshooter.

Yeah, having a site built from scratch and writing posts in markdown files isn’t near as convenient as using something that builds the entire site for you, but I finally realized that tradeoff is worth it to me. I’ll take a bit more friction to write posts if it means that I have 100% control over everything about my site.

If you have a personal site, whatever tool, software, or system you use, it should allow you to do exactly what you want.

If that’s not worth it to you, and you want a site that hosts words, looks great, and lets you write, I recommend Pika.

Justice Holmes

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

One of the reasons I went to law school was because of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. It’s not like a had a conversation with him...obviously. He’s long dead. But his works, ideas, and life are not!

I read Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War Law and Ideas a while ago, and the passion and zest Holmes had for the law, logical thinking, and clear writing was inspirational to me. I was fascinated with his work, I thought maybe I could do what he did. (Be a lawyer, that is.)

I went into school liking the book so much that Holmes felt like my “mentor” or at least a big inspiration for why I was there, and that was special. I held him in high regard.

So I was ecstatic when we were assigned to read an excerpt in Torts from his book, The Common Law. I was even more excited when a case he wrote the opinion for was in our torts book. But...then I read the case, and we talked about it in class, and my professor kind of dissed on him. We talked about it afterwards in his office hours, and he said from the opinion, it was clear that Holmes had never driven a car—which he probably hadn’t—yet was creating a rule of law that required people who came to a railroad track crossing to get out of their car and look to make sure no train was coming before they crossed in their car. That’s...ridiculous.

After our conversation, I looked in the biography to see what the author said about that opinion, and I now agree. Here’s what the author wrote:

His zeal to write into the law his draconian views about risk led him to render one of his other most notoriously bad decisions on the Supreme Court...Holmes held that a railroad was not at fault in a fatal grade-crossing accident where the view of the tracks was obstructed to an approaching driver. Showing if nothing else that he had never learned to drive himself, Holmes ruled as a matter of law that it was a driver's duty to stop, get out of his car, and look down the tracks to see if a train was coming.

[...]

[Louis] Brandeis thought the Court had had no business taking on these cases in the first place and that Holmes had pressed his colleagues to do so mainly because he was "incorrigible when there is an opportunity of curbing the power and province of a jury."

[...]

While in so many areas of the law Holmes would prove decades ahead of his time, his Darwinian attitudes toward injury cases seemed at times almost a throwback to the nineteenth century—holding firm to a conception of tort law that was rapidly being swept aside by the very kind of nuanced balancing tests and apportionment of responsibility between the parties that he otherwise so zealously advanced.

I thought this was really interesting because it shows:

How not-closely I read biographies. I read parts closely but other parts not, but I don’t remember any mention of this case in the book. (But I did apparently think it was ridiculous when I read it because I wrote marginalia that said, “This is ridiculous lol”.) And;\
How not everyone we admire from history was “perfect.” I struggle with this. After I read a book about Truman or Lincoln or Adams or Jefferson, I’m enthralled with who they were (or, at least who the book portrayed them to be), that I usually remember all of the good quotes and cool things that they did and forget about the not-so-good things they did decisions they made. I don’t think there’s anything wrong about admiring people from history, but I’m reminded of being a bit more cautious in the people I choose to model my life and career after.

This post didn’t really have a point, but I was excited to see how my love of learning and history that I’ve poured myself into the last three years is finally converging into something useful, I guess? It’s fun to see the people and ideas and history I’ve learned about appear in contexts other than a book I’m reading on my back porch.

Markdown sans front matter

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

One of the reasons I’ve been tempted to switch—and in fact have switched a few times (and then back again)—to WordPress as a headless CMS was because of how dead simple and easy it was to write a new post.

I clicked the link in my bookmark, threw a title on the page, wrote, and published it. It was not a technical process, and that made it great. Also, adding images was so much easier in WordPress than uploading an image to Cloudinary and copying the link to embed it in a markdown file.

But I never quite felt good about using WordPress. Partly because I like the “cool factor” I feel from the fact that I built a blog from scratch and write in markdown files—like I’m some tech nerd or something. Part of it was the permanence thing; I want my blog to be around in fifty years, and I don’t know if WordPress will be! (Who knows if Vercel will be either, but switching a server provider seems easier than having to migrate decades of posts.)

What I didn’t like about writing in markdown files was having to either open a dev server to check new posts, or wait for my site to build to make sure I closed the front matter properly or something.

But then I saw Jim’s post which I stole the title of, “Markdown sans front matter.” He explained adding front matter in his posts was distracting and complicated the authoring experience. I agreed. So, I searched his code and looked at how he was interpreting the metadata of a post without front matter and thought what he did was brilliant.

I love his reasoning:

The perfectionist in me sees it as a “pure” markdown document. It's simple, I like it. Every time I start (or finish) a post, I don’t have to worry, “What metadata do I need to add again?”

He basically puts the date in the title of the file and the parses that out of the final /slug. The first H1 in the document becomes the title, and any # become tags.

With the help of ChatGPT (and some frustration and coffee), I was able to get something similar working. So now, I can write a post that looks like this, which is super easy.

Or for more complicated posts, or my book notes, like this.

Thanks, Jim!

Probably your fault

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Last year on the podcast, Jerry Colonna said something that deeply resonated with me: how are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?

You don’t want to be stressed? Why do you keep leaving important projects and tasks until the last minute?

You don’t want to be tired? Why do you keep starting Netflix shows at 10p.m.?

You don’t want to be so unhealthy? Why do you keep eating Taco Bell three times a week?

None of those questions have easy answers, but when you ask yourself that question and then evaluate every area of your life that you’re not happy with, I’m sureyou might find a few things that are creating—or helping to create—the conditions you say you’re not happy with.

I see this almost every day at school. I overhear people say how they’re so confused in Contracts or Civil Procedure, and then I see them online shopping during class or bragging (I guess?) about how they were too busy over the weekend to do the reading.

Like…you’re confused because you’re not paying attention and aren’t doing the reading. That is not a hard conclusion to draw; it’s a very simple cause and effect pattern. Those people are creating their confusion and then complaining about it! I simply don’t understand.

It’s like if you stabbed yourself in the hand everyday and then went around going, “Man my hand hurts really bad. This is super annoying because it’s making it harder to do other stuff in life.” Like, okay, stop stabbing your hand. Problem solved!

I’m not saying that just because you’re struggling or are unhappy in a certain area in your life that it’s 100% your fault, because that’s just simply not true. But, I bet there are a few things—a good amount of things maybe—that you do cause, or at least add to the causing, through your behavior somehow. I know I have those things for me.

Ask yourself: How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?

And then ask: What am I going to do about it?

Ambiguity is where the work is

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I just finished my second week of law school, and when people say it's a lot of reading...it's a lot of reading—even for someone who loves to read like me.

But I've been explaining to people that, so far, the material isn't hard, it's the volume. It doesn't take the same type of brain power that learning calculus does, but the amount of information you're expected to absorb (and retain) is a lot.

But that's not what this post is about.

I had very little formal training or experience in the law before going to law school. I had a laymen's understanding of the Constitution and knew that we live in a common law system, but I still expected most of the "rules" that govern society to be somewhat clear.

They're not.

For the ten days I've been in school, this was frustrating to me for nine of them. When we're given cases to read, I want to be able to finish the case and understand that rule completely. I felt like I could do that the first week, but then during the second week we read so many cases that essentially reversed the rules we read in the first week, or changed them so drastically, that those cases aren't as clear as I thought they were.

On the face of it, that isn't too difficult to understand. It's important to know how the law has changed over the years because it will change again. The difficult part is that the new cases don't "wipe away" the old ones every time. They're only applicable sometimes...and other times the original ones apply...and sometimes none of them apply! Can you see how this becomes difficult?

This was really starting to confuse me until one of my professors made an off-hand comment that is going to be my motto for the rest of my time in law school—and maybe even after I graduate.

A student was trying to get clarification for when we're supposed to use one standard over another, and my professor kind of took a deep breath and said something alone the lines of: You guys want me to give you a bright line answer. If I could give you a bright line answer, I'd be on the Supreme Court because I could say 'This is the law now, move on.' But practicing law is not like that. Ambiguity is where the work is. If there wasn't ambiguity, we wouldn't have jobs.

Ambiguity is where the work is.

I immediately wrote that phrase down in my notebook and have been thinking about it all week. Before, the ambiguity was frustrating; now, it's exciting. Yes! Ambiguity—that means I get to research this problem and think deeply about what I think should happen (or shouldn't happen), come up with an argument for why, and then argue that. Ambiguity is where the work (and the money) is. If the law was black and white, and anyone could easily figure out what to do, there would be no need for lawyers. And the little need there would be for them wouldn't create the range of "Ok" lawyers, "good" lawyers, and "great" lawyers that we have today. Ambiguity gives me the opportunity to become great.

This isn't just in the legal field, though. Many people now are some sort of "knowledge worker." They don't work with their hands, they make proposals and sit in meetings and create strategy decks and figure out how to run their department. All of those situations are full of ambiguity. If there was a playbook, they wouldn't need to pay you! They could pay some kid who knows how to flip burgers at McDonald's to "flip burgers"—follow the exact steps laid out for them by "best practices" or something—in their marketing department.

Embrace the ambiguity. That's where the work (and the money) is.

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

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 16:49:00 GMT

I have a strange affection for Harry Truman. Maybe it's because we were both born in Missouri—and both proud to be so—or maybe it's because David McCullough's biography of him is one of the first full-scale biographies I read of a President. Whatever it may be, I love him. He never let the office of the President of the United States—or the perks of the office—get to him or his head. And unlike so many others after they leave the White House, he moved back to where he was from: Independence, Missouri.

Merle Miller's oral biography is remarkable, there's really just no other way to put it. The content of the book was originally recorded on camera because Miller was working on a TV show about Truman and his presidency. Though for reasons explained in the book, the production company decided not to move forward with producing it. So, in the summer of Watergate, Miller decided to combine the tapes into this oral biography, and I'm glad he did.

Not very often, especially today, is someone able to experience such a raw and first-hand account of a President, their childhood and early career, their time in office, and what life was life was like when they walked out of the White House for the last time. Miller does an exceptional job of asking Truman about all of the controversial moments from his presidency like deciding to drop the bomb, escalate Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Though Truman's wit and wisdom shines through those moments, his personality and philosophy on life is revealed even more so through his off-hand comments about work ethic, leadership, and his favorite topic of all—integrity. Perhaps Miller understood this as well, for before the title page is this quote from Plutarch about Alexander the Great:

For, the noblest deeds do not always shew men's virtues and vices, but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport makes men's natural dispositions and manners appear more plain, than the famous battles won, wherein are slain ten thousand men, or the great armies, or cities worn by siege or assault.

Something that kept Truman grounded was that he, "never got to thinking that I was anything special. It's very easy to do that in Washington, and I've seen it happen to a lot of fellas. But I did my best not to let it happen to me. I tried never to forget who I was and where I'd come from and where I was going back to. And if you can do that, things usually work out alright in the end."

A saying Truman was found of: "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."

"Old Tom Jefferson wrote that, 'Whenever you do a thing, thought it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world watching you, and act accordingly.'" – Truman

"You'll never find me in anyway criticizin' or jumpin' on the people who are trying to help me. If a fella can't be patient and considerate of the people who are actually doin' the work for him, then he's not any good, and I don't like him."

"I always had my nose stuck in a book," he said, "a history book mostly."

"Some people think [the Stoics] are old-fashioned, but I don't. What [Marcus Aurelius] wrote in Meditations, he said that the four greatest virtues are moderation, wisdom, justice, and fortitude, and if a man is able to cultivate those, that's all he needs to live a happy and successful life. That's the way I look at it anyway." – Truman

Miller writes this in a footnote appended to that statement:

Mr. Truman's copy of Meditations, which he lent to me to take back to the hotel one night, was by the look of it one of the most read books in his library. He was a great underliner...I was interested to see that these passages in Meditations were underlined:

"If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it."

"First, do nothing thoughtlessly or without a purpose. Secondly, see that your acts are directed to a social end."

"Today I have got out of all trouble, or rather I have cast out all trouble, for it was not outside, but within, my opinions."

"It is not fitting that I should give myself pain, for I have never intentionally given pain even to another."

"Always be sure whose approbation it is you wish to secure, and what ruling principles they have. Then you will neither blame those who offend involuntarily, nor will you want their approbation, if you look to the sources of their opinions and appetites."

"When another blames or hates you, or when men say injurious things about you, approach their poor souls, penetrate within, and see what kind of men they are. You will discover that there is no reason to take trouble that these men have a good opinion of you. However, you must be well disposed toward them, for by nature they are your friends. And the gods, too, aid them in all ways, by dreams, by signs, toward the attainment of their aims."

In the margin of this particular paragraph Harry Truman had written, "True! True! True!"

Mr. Truman had an incredible memory, and a knack for memorizing that which was important to know:

In Cabell Phillips book The Truman Presidency, he says that in 1951, when Hillman was interviewing the President for the book Mr. President, Mr. Truman was talking about Alexander the Great, who had, he said, made the mistake of overextending himself.

Phillips writes:

"And then the people around him," he told Hillman, "made him think he was immortal, and he found that thirty-three quarts of wine was too much for any man, and it killed him at Babylon." Working over the proofs of his book later, Hillman paused to puzzle over the President's mention of the thirty-three quarts of wine. Obviously, he thought, it was some sort of allegory; he, him-self, had never heard of it, nor was he sure what it meant. He called the Library of Congress and asked their scholarly assistance in running the item down.

A few days later they called back to say, sorry, they could find no link, real or poetic, between Alexander and thirty-three quarts of wine. Hillman was convinced that the President had mixed either his metaphors or his kings and was about to challenge him on it when, a few days later, he received another call from the researcher at the Library. In the manner of librarians everywhere, this one had not given up the search after the first admission of failure. He had pursued his quarry behind the locked doors of the Rare Books Section, and into an obscure and long-out-of-print volume of the history of the ancient Greeks, and, by golly, the President was right after all!

"And you know what?" the researcher added. "That book has been checked out of the shelves only twice in the last twenty years, and the last time was for Senator Harry Truman in 1939."

"I wouldn't think much of a man that tried to deny the people and the town where he grew up. I've told you. You must always keep in mind who you are and where you come from. A man who can't do that at all times is in trouble where I'm concerned."

I liked this paragraph Truman read to Miller, from Browen's John Adams and the American Revolution:

On the Fourth of July, 1826, America celebrated its Jubilee—the Fiftieth Anniversary of Independence. John Adams, second President of the United States, died that day, aged ninety, while from Maine to Georgia, bells rang and cannon boomed. And on that same day, Thomas Jefferson died before sunset in Virginia.

"In their dying, in that swift, so aptly celebrated double departure, is something which shakes an American to the heart. it was not their great fame, their long lives or even the record of their work that made these two seem indestructible. It was their faith, their boundless, unquenchable hope in the future, their sure, immortal belief that mankind, if it so desired, could be free."

"Worrying never does you any good. So I've never worried about things much. The only thing that I ever do worry about is to be sure that where I'm responsible that the job is properly done. I've always tried my best and to some extent have succeeded in doing the job as well as it's been done before me."

"On the morning of his eightieth birthday he told reporters, 'Remember me as I was, not as I am.'"

When asked if Truman was ever bored as a kid, he said, "Oh, my, no. We didn't know the meaning of the word, and I'll tell you another thing. I can't remember being bored, not once in my whole life. How in the world can you be bored if you have things to think about, which I must say I always have."

Asked whether or not he thought that the times were better then, he said,"Oh, I don't know about that. Comparisons like that. They're so easy to make, but I'm not sure they're ever right."

He thought for a moment, and then he said, "The only thing I'm sure of: people weren't so nervous then. All these things people have now that are supposed to entertain them and all. They just seem to end up by making everybody nervous."

He said this in the 1960s. Imagine what he would say now. If he saw it then with just TVs and radios, it's undeniable that social media, streaming, and endless scrolling has had a large factor in the epidemic of anxiety and mental health issues.

Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State:

Mr. Truman read, I sometimes think, more than any of the rest of us. It was never necessary to digest anything for him, to simplify, to make it understandable to the...shall I say meanest intellect. Mr. Truman read the documents themselves, and he understood and acted on them. It was, I believe, the habit of reading and, moreover and possibly more important, of understanding that followed all through his life, from his boyhood on.

Don't just read; understand.

General Omar Bradley said that no matter what time of day it was, he saw President Truman pouring over papers in his office. "Now I know some people think that's going into too much detail. But from my own experience I found that even though I might be commanding a large unit, I had to know enough of the details to get a true picture of the big picture—the big problem. And I think that that was one of the attributes of President Truman. He always knew enough of the details to know what the big problem was."

You have to know enough of the details to get the big picture. It's been my experience that when leaders delegate the details to someone else, they lose sight of what's working and what's not. They know the map, not the territory. I think in an age of delegation and work-life balance, it's popular to espouse the values for CEOs and managers to stay high level, but I think that's a big mistake.

The people who are in the details often work with others in the wrong way, though. Instead of caring and making the product or team better, they lead from abuse and get branded a "micromanager." I think micromanaging is required to do great work—to a certain degree—but you don't have to be a jerk about it. I'm reminded of what Truman said earlier: "You'll never find me in anyway criticizin' or jumpin' on the people who are trying to help me. If a fella can't be patient and considerate of the people who are actually doin' the work for him, then he's not any good, and I don't like him."

"I've never regretted [the time I've spent reading] either," Truman said, "and I suppose considering the fact that I became President of the United States, it wasn't time wasted."

It's easy to think the time you spend reading, learning, or getting better might be time wasted, but I don't think that's ever true. You have no idea what your life will look like in five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years. And I can almost guarantee that no matter what you're doing, the time spend reading and learning will pay off at some point.

I love this part too:

Miller: I mentioned that someplace not long before, President Kennedy had made a speech in which he listed a whole series of books he had read recently. I said that to my knowledge, Mr. Truman had never done that.

Truman: Well, no. I never thought reading was something you went around bragging about. It was just something you did. And when I was a boy you kept quiet about it as you possibly could. Reading wasn't any too...wasn't the most popular thing to do around these parts.

At one point in time, Truman's grandfather owned much of what was to become Sacramento, but he sold it to pay off his debts. Miller asked about this.

Mr. President, if he hadn't sold that land, I guess you would have been born rich.

"I guess that's true, but people who spend too much time thinking about things like that are likely to wind up feeling sorry for themselves. So I haven't given it much thought...Anyway, if I'd been rich, I wouldn't have wound up President."

And given a choice...

"I didn't have a choice. What's your next question?"

A lesson in not falling prey to regrets and staying focused on what is, not what could've been.

Miller: I understand that you learned a good deal about politics from Plutarch's Lives and that your father read it aloud to you when you were a boy.

Truman: He did...I tell you. They just don't come any better than old Plutarch. He knew more about politics than all the other writers I've ever read put together.

When I was in politics, there would be times when I tried to figure somebody out, and I could always turn to Plutarch, and nine times out of ten I'd be able to find a parallel in there.

When asked if Truman would say his father was a success, Truman replied sharply: "He was the father of a President of the United States, and I should think that that is success enough for any man."

Talking about his days working at the bank, Truman said, "Another thing I didn't like [about working there] I didn't have any responsibility. I just added up figures all day, and it didn't seem to me there was much future in it..."

"[Farming and plowing land] gave me plenty of time to think. Farmers really all have time to think, and some of them do it, and those are the ones who have made it possible for us to have free government. That's what Jefferson was writing about. Farmers have more time to think than city people do."

Even though Truman had strict discipline as a child, he never went overboard on punishment even when he could have. I think that says a lot about his view on power. Some people do whatever they can to make sure people know that they are in charge and no one else. And for the most part, those are the people you want to keep power away from. You can see it in little moments; as soon as they get a lick of power or responsibility, they make sure everyone knows it. They speak up in meetings to give "direction," but really it's just so everyone knows they have "power."

Truman: Why put a man through the disgrace of a court-martial, something that will follow him the rest of his life, unless you absolutely have to? And ninety-nine times out of a hundred you don't.

You have to have faith in a man—that if he makes a mistake, and if you treat him like a man, you'll find that he won't repeat that mistake. That's been my experience in any case, and it was the same in the Army and in politics.

On the best definition for a leader, Truman said this:

I've always felt that the best definition of a leader, and it doesn't matter where it is, in the military or the White House. It doesn't matter. The best definition of a leader is a man who can make the people who served with or under him do what they don't want to do and like it.

You can take this reading too far, of course, to where it gets into manipulation, but that clearly isn't how Truman meant it. Rather, when a leader could inspire the people who worked with him or her to do what the leader thought was best, and not what any one faction of the group whom they were leading thought was best, that's a good definition of a leader.

A corollary to this is that if a group of people are under a leader and are disgruntled with their tasks, saying stuff like, "I don't know why we have to do this, but X is making us," then their leader is probably not very good.

During the days of being a haberdasher, Bluma Jacobson, Truman's business partner wife, explains that

There were slack days as well as good days, and if Harry wasn't around, you could always look up in the balcony, and Harry would be up there with a book, reading or studying. He studied law a good deal in those days. Just picking it up, not going to law school at that time. He later went to Kansas City and studied law, but at that time you would always find him reading a book.

Jacobson describes how Truman was practicing what Robert Greene calls "Alive Time." We all have slow seasons in our life where there isn't much to do. Maybe it's a few weeks where you're sick, or the weather is too brutal to be outside. During those times, what do you do? The 24 hours still pass. Do you binge reality TV shows, or do you try to learn a new skill, or become better in something you already know?

When Judge Albert A. Ridge was planning on going to law school, he talked to Truman about it. Ridge explains:

He encouraged me to go to night school and study law, but he said that just knowing the law wasn't enough. He said that was the trouble with far too many lawyers, that they knew the law but did not know much of anything else. He said...he encouraged me to also study about the nature of man and about the culture and heritage of Western civilization in general...

Harry Truman always said that...a man could do anything he set his mind to, and that encouraged me...He volunteered once to give me a list of about ten or so books that I ought to read...I can remember that it included Plutarch's Lives. And Caesar's Commentaries. And Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. He used to say, "Al, you'll find a good deal in there about how to make use of every minute of your day and a lot of horse sense about people."

This is my plan for August, and why I'm excited to start law school. I know every lawyer who passes the bar knows the law, but few will continue studying history, science, philosophy, and psychology as I (hopefully) will do. Ideally, I can have a broader understanding of the people and details pertaining to my case because I have different mental models to view the situation from.

Truman's haberdasher store failed, and although he could've declared bankruptcy—and indeed was counseled to do so—he refused. "It took him fifteen years to pay off his debts, but in 1934 he finally did it."

Abraham Lincoln did the same. While he could've left town in the middle of the night after his general store went up, he refused. He paid off all of the debt, and it was this incident that earned him the nickname "Honest Abe." I can't help but wonder if Truman was so inspired to stick it out based on Lincoln's example.

Truman hated complaining or talking about what "could've been." Regrets had no place in his mind.

You'll notice if you read your history, that the work of the world gets done by people who aren't bellyachers.

I had to look up what "bellyachers" meant because I'd never heard it before: "a person given to excessive complaints and crying and whining."

Bellyachers are the worst. I can't stand people who think the world is out to get them. I remember people in high school who said a certain teacher "gave" them a bad grade because the teacher didn't like them. Uhm..no, sorry. You gave yourself a bad grade by never doing the assignments.

Truman believed the presidency didn't bestow power on anyone, but rather allowed someone to be the instrument, or channel, of presidential power. Some people were more effective at the presidency than others because they wielded the power they were given better.

Truman, at one point during his either judgeship or as a Senator, denounced the KKK. Miller asked him if it wouldn't have been wiser to not go after them like that, because of the power they weilded. Truman's response:

It might have been, yes, but once a man starts thinking that way, about what it's wise to say and what isn't, he might just as well cash in his chips and curl up his toes and die.

I tried never to act that way, and for the most part I think you can say I succeeded. Sometimes I was advised to hold my fire on this and that because they said telling the truth would offend people. But whenever I took such advice I never thought much of myself.

If you keep your mouth shut about things you think are important, hell, I don't see how you can expect the democratic system to work at all.

Truman held a similar philosophy when it came to attending Tom Pendergast's funeral while he was the Vice President. After Pendergast's tax evasion conviction, and common knowledge that he didn't play fair in politics, and Truman was a product of his shenanigans, people told Truman to stay away from him, and definitely not to go to the funeral. Of course, Truman didn't listen. "What kind of man would it be...wouldn't go to a friend's funeral because he'd been criticized for it?"

That theme runs throughout this book—and Truman's life. He was always worried about doing what was right. Maybe it was his back-home, southern/mid-western education and value instillation, but he would never compromise his values to make a political party or section of a political party happy. Never, ever. How did he do it? Espousing the values is one thing. Actually making the decisions, and following through on the actions, is a completely other thing.

Truman had an amateur love for architecture. When he had the chance to build and remodel a courthouse in Kansas City and Independence, he left nothing to chance. He travelled all over the country looking at other courthouses to see what style he liked the most. In Shreveport, Louisiana, he found a courthouse that he liked, so he hired the same architect to build the courthouse in Kansas City. He noted that he travelled to Shreveport on his own dime.

There's a lesson there: if you want a job done a similar way, hire the person who did it!

During construction, Truman spent a considerable amount of time observing the workers. He explains, "That courthouse was costing the people of Jackson County a lot of money, and I didn't want anybody, the workers or the contractors or anybody, to lay down on the job. When you're spending the taxpayer's money, you've got to have a sense of responsibility."

This is perhaps the seeds of the Truman Committee—Truman's effort to ensure contractors were spending war money the right way—being planted.

He also spent a lot of time trying to find the right sculptor for the statue of Andrew Jackson that was to be placed in front of the courthouse. So, he hired Charles Keck, someone who made a statue of Stonewall Jackson that Truman thought was "the best equestrian statue in this country and maybe the world." He went to the Hermitage, Old Hickory's place in Nashville to see pictures of him on horses and measure his uniforms and gave the measurements to Keck so they would be "just right." Then he contacted the War Department to see what a general of Old Andy's stature would be wearing during that time.

Truman didn't have to do any of those things. But he did because:

I wanted that courthouse and that statue to be the best they could be...When I was a boy, that was the way everybody went about things. Or so it seems to me. Nowadays in politics and just about everywhere else all anybody seems to be interested in is...not how much he can do but how much he can get away with.

If you want it to be great, put in the effort to make it great. Ask not how much you can get away with, but how much you can do!

Truman loved Justice Louis Brandies and Oliver Wendell Holmes. (I love Holmes. I don't know enough about Brandies yet, other than what I learned in a Holmes biography.)

Every youngster as he grows up knows he was a darned sight smarter than his daddy was, and he has to get to be about forty before he finds out the old man was smart enough to raise him.

I'll tell you one thing for sure. The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.

During Truman's first term in Congress, he was on a committee to investigate railroads. To learn more about what he'd be investigating, he checked out fifty or so books from the Congressional Library to read up on the subject.

He explains:

I like to be thorough, to have a thorough knowledge of whatever I'm involved in...What surprised me about the Congressional Library was how few members of Congress ever seemed to use it; I used to go in there, and there sometimes wouldn't be anybody else there except a few young people and the librarians.

You can be ahead of 99% of people if you actually do the reading.

In a senate race against Lloyd Stark, Stark criticized Truman for receiving support from Tom Pendergast, a local political boss. At that time, Truman had a letter from Stark thanking Truman for introducing him to Pendergast so he too could get such support. When asked about why Truman didn't release that letter, he explained, "I didn't think it would be right to do a thing like that."

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. Winning isn't everything. It's important to keep your dignity.

I was always particular about where my money came from. Very few people are going to give you large sums of money if they don't expect to get something from it, and you've got to keep that in mind.

We've all suffered from sleepless nights—or weeks—when something important is on the horizon and is stressing us out. Maybe it's a big meeting with an important client, an interview for a job you desperately need, or maybe your boss just texted you before you got in bed, "Let's chat tomorrow." (We've all been there.)

Whatever it is, it's easy to let it eat us alive. But Harry Truman had a better way.

On April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt breathed his last in Warm Springs, Georgia. That night, at 7:09 P.M., Vice President Harry S Truman was sworn in as President of the United States.

"Did you sleep," Merle Miller asked in an interview with Truman years later about that day. "Of course," he said. And right away, too.

Truman continued:

I knew I had a big day coming up. I had to sleep.

[...]

If you've done the best you can—if you have done what you have to do—there is no use worrying about it because nothing can change it, and to be in a position of leadership...you have to give thought to what's going to happen the next day and you have to be fresh for...what you have to do the next day. What you're going to do is more important than what you have done.

Miller: If you've done the best you can.

Truman: That's right. That's the main thing. A man can't do anything more than that. You can't think about how it would be...if you had done another thing.

"If you've done the best you can, there's no use worrying about it..."

There are two takeaways from this:

If you've done the best you can, leave it at that and get some sleep.
If you're perpetually worried, maybe you know that you didn't do the best that you could've. Perhaps there's a small part of your "worry" saying, "I could've made that a little better, and I didn't." Or "I could've prepared more, but it's too late."

If that's the case, now you know for next time.

Harry Hopkins was a consummate ambassador for the United States and a close advisor for FDR. After FDR passed, and Hopkins got back from successfully talking to the Russians, Hopkins revealed a great aspect of Truman's personality. Upon his return, Truman thanked Hopkins for his service and left the room.

Harry Hopkins, as he went out, said to Steve Early, "You know, I've had something happen to me that never happened before in my life...Why, The President just said, 'Thank you' to me.

Miller: You mean in all those years he'd worked for Roosevelt he'd never been thanked for all he did?

Truman: Now I told you what he said. And that's all I told you.

That last comment reveals another aspect of Truman. He was hesitant to speak ill of anyone behind their back and weary of gossiping or making assumptions.

Alonzo Fields was a butler in the White House for twenty-one years. He wrote in his book that Truman was the only person who ever took the trouble to understand him as a person.

You can tell Truman did, too, because when Miller asked Truman about Fields, Truman responded: "He was a fine old fellow. He had wanted to be a singer, but it hadn't worked out..."

How many other presidents would even know Fields's name, let alone what he aspired to do in life, but failed? That only comes out through constant conversation and trust. That's no small-talk-in-the-hallway type of conversation. This shows Truman spent time with the White House staff. In fact, he knew Fields lived in Boston, and whenever Truman was there after he left office, they would hang out.

Perhaps something that helped Truman maintain his humility was that he had an exceptional ability to separate himself from the office.

You see the thing you have to remember. When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one-gun salutes, all those things, you have to remember isn't for you. It's for the Presidency, and you've got to keep yourself separate from that in your mind. If you can't keep the two separate, yourself and the Presidency, you're in all kinds of trouble.

During the 1948 campaign against Dewey, Democratic Senators told Truman that if he would just invite certain donors and big money guys on the Presidential Yacht, that the Democratic Committee would have no trouble raising money (they didn't have a lot of it at the time). But Truman refused. His reasoning:

Because it's the Presidential yacht. It belongs to the President.

Truman learned early in his Presidency, thanks to his extensive reading of the Gospels, that no two people saw the same thing the same way, and if their tales differ, it's not that they're lying, it's that they just saw it in a different way.

And that is one of the reasons that when I got into a position of power I always tried to keep in mind that just because I saw something in a certain way didn't mean that others didn't see it in a different manner. That's why I always hesitated to call a man a liar unless I had the absolute goods on him.

Reading history, Truman noticed this as well. He could read four or five books about the same topic or person and get four or five versions of the story. This is one the reasons it's important to read a variety of sources. You can't just read one biography and call it good, because each biographer focuses on, for them, what they're most interested in or the story they want to tell. It's important, before you read different history books though, to ensure you're actually reading different takes on someone's life. There are a lot of full scale biographies of Abraham Lincoln that are essentially the same book, while others differ in their focus. Some focus more on his childhood and early education and career as a lawyer. Others blow past his childhood and spend more time on his presidency. Some focus on his relationship with slavery; others focus on his cabinet. Still others focus on just his personal life revealed through his writings and scraps. Before you read a book, know what the focus of the book is.

Truman: I told him I knew all about experts. I said that an expert was a fella who was afraid to learn anything new because then he wouldn't be an expert anymore.

There's only one time in the book that Truman is noted to cry. A year after Israel became a state, the Chief Rabbi came to see the President and said, "God put you in your mother's womb so that you could be the instrument to bring about the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years."

"At that," Miller writes, "great tears started rolling down Harry Truman's cheeks."

During his presidency, Truman brought Herbert Hoover to visit him at the White House. He said to him, "Mr. President, there are a lot of hungry people in the world, and if there's anybody who knows about hungry people, it's you. Now there's plenty of food, but it's not going to the right places. Now I want you to—" and Truman explained how he wanted Hoover to do just what he did after the first World War.

Truman: Well I looked at him. He was sitting there, just as close to me as you are, and I saw that great big tears were running down his cheeks. I knew what was the matter with him. It was the first time in thirteen years [since Hoover left the Presidency in 1933] that anybody had paid attention to him.

I thought that was...touching. It reveals the human side of all of us, even those who once held the most powerful position in the world. At the end of the day, we want to be needed. We want to work hard and do important things. We want to make a difference. And it takes a leader, as Truman demonstrated here, what it means to find the right person for the job, what it would mean for that person to do the job well.

Dean Acheson: "I have never know a man who kept so clearly in mind what were first things. Mr. Truman was unable to make the simple complex in the way so many men in public life tend to do. For very understandable reasons, of course. If one makes something complex out of something simple, then one is able to delay making up one's mind. And that was something that never troubled Mr. Truman."

Lesson: When someone seems to be making something simple utterly complex, it's either 1) they don't really understand what they're thinking about or having to decide or, 2) they are delaying acting on the decision by telling themselves they are still "figuring it out." No. It's figured out just fine. You just have to have to guts to make the call now.

Truman didn't like how advertising men were getting more and more involved in political campaigns. Why?

I'm sure they're very good at what they're trained to do, but in politics what you're doing, and I've said this a few times before, what you're doing or ought to be doing is discussing ideas with people so they can decide which is better, yours or the other fellow's.

I loved this quote: "I didn't have time [for being bitter]. Being bitter...that's for people who aren't busy with other matters."

Abe Lincoln said something similar, about how people who are serious about being great and excellent don't have time to quarrel.

"If you can't win an election without attacking people who've helped you and who're friends of yours, it's not worth winning." – Truman

Dean Acheson: "I am something of a stoic both by nature and by inheritance. And I learned from the example of my father that the manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured."

When you're faced with a decision, and need to act quickly but are waiting on a superior's response, if you can, start the momentum. If you're waiting for them to approve a plan, do the plan. If they approve, the thing will already be in motion. If they don't, it should be easy to stop.

This was Dean Acheson's philosophy on the Korea decisions:

If the President approved this plan, they would have already started on it. If he disapproved it, they could stop it at once. But I thought that time was so pressing that we should not even delay while I spoke to the President.

Talking about firing General MacArthur, Truman said:

I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

He said later, about taking so long to fire him:

The only thing I learned from the whole MacArthur deal is that when you feel there's something you have to do and you know in your gut you have to do it, the sooner you get it over with, the better off everybody is.

The whole MacArthur situation reminds me of Lincoln's woes with his generals for the Army of the Potomac, especially McClellan and his overt disrespect for Lincoln and the office of the President.

In fact, in another chapter titled "On Generals in General" (such was the extent of Truman's views on generals that it deserved it's own chapter), Truman references McClellan and his political ambitions while "leading" the Army.

...they asked Lincoln if he was going to issue a reply to something or other McClellan said.

Lincoln said, "No," he wasn't. He said he wouldn't do that, but he said the whole thing reminded him of the fella whose horse started kicking around and got his foot stuck in the stirrup. The fella looked at the horse, and he said, "Look here, if you want to get on, I'll get off."

Truman liked Grant, though. As a General, not as president. Instead of relying on fancy strategies and techniques (that both sides of the war were relying on), Grant's strategy was simple, Truman explained:

He said what you have to do to fight a war, you have to find the enemy, and you have to hit him with everything you've got, and then you've got to keep right on going. And that's what he did. He never stopped to issue fancy statements about this and that. He just kept right on going.

That matches what Lincoln was trying to get his commanders to understand as well. They were obsessed with taking land and big cities. But Lincoln thought the cities didn't matter. What mattered was destroying the army. Find the Confederate Army and attack. And that's exactly what Grant did. And when Grant won, he kept on attacking. Other commanders, when they had a small glimmer or victory, stopped or even retreated. Not Grant.

Even after attending West Point, Grant said, Truman explains that, "what he'd learned there wasn't nearly as important as what he'd learned as a boy, which was that if you undertake a job, you have to finish it."

Truman hated Eisenhower's reliance on his staff to help him make decisions while in office. He explains, "When Castro decided to go in the other direction for support, Eisenhower was probably still waiting for a goddamn staff report on what to think."

"As you may have observed," Miller writes, "Mr. Truman was often a profane, a mildly profane man to me anyway, but 'staff report' were the two dirtiest words he uttered in all our talks together."

If you're in a position of power, you have to make the decisions.

Truman explained that we had the Civil War because we had five weak Presidents in a row.

What I do know is that when you have weak Presidents, you get weak results.

There's always a lot of talk about how we have to fear the man on horseback, have to be afraid of the...of a strong man, but so far, if I read my American history right, it isn't the strong men that have caused us most of the trouble, it's the ones who were weak. It's the ones who just sat on their asses and twiddled their thumbs when they were president.

If you have weak leaders, you get weak results.

Talking about those five weak leaders, Miller says that to him, it seemed like they were just being cautious. As long as they didn't rock the boat, the tension between free and slave states would disappear.

"That's right," Truman said. "And that's the one thing that won't ever happen, not in a million years. That's the meaning of government. If you're in it, you've got to govern. Otherwise, you're in the wrong business."

Truman liked Thomas Jefferson's idea that as a country, we'd be worse off without newspapers, no matter how much we dislike them.

In a letter in 1787, Jefferson wrote:

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a free government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

And in 1799 to Elbridge Gerry, presumably in response to the Alien and Sedition acts, he wrote:

I am for...freedom of the press and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force, and not by reason, the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agent.

Truman thought three things can ruin a man: power, money, and women. He explains:

If a man can accept a situation in a place of power with the thought that it's only temporary, he comes out all right. But when he thinks that he is the cause of the power, that can be his ruination.

And when a man has too much money too soon, that has the same effect on him. He just never gets to understanding that getting enough money to eat and getting a roof over his head is the thing that throughout history most people have spent their lives trying to do and haven't succeeded...If you've got too much money too soon, it ruins you by setting you too far apart from most of the human race.

And a man who is not loyal to his family..can be ruined if he has a complex in that direction.

The few times a Ms. Jane Wetherell had to deliver material to Mr. Truman in his hotel room while he was visiting New York to take part of the project, Truman let her into her sitting room but "then very deliberately left the door wide open for as long as she was there."

Billy Graham had a similar idea about perception; he wouldn't ride in elevators with women if it was just the two of them.

Lincoln, on his administration, said: "I desire to so conduct the affairs of this administration that if, at the end...I have lost every friend on earth, I shall have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me."

Dean Acheson: "I have almost invariably found that charm is used as a substitute for intelligence in persons of both sexes. Thus I have always been and will remain wary of it."

I love this whole two pages from Acheson:

"But to me his greatest quality as President, as a leader was his ability to decide. General Marshall, who also had that quality, has said that the ability to make a decision is a great gift, perhaps the greatest gift a man can have. And Mr. Truman had that gift in abundance. When I would come to him with a problem, the only question he ever asked was, 'How long have I got?' And he never asked later what would have happened if he had decided differently. I doubt that that ever concerned him. He was not a man who was tortured by second thoughts. Those were luxuries, like self-pity, in which a man in power could not indulge himself.

"I would say that Mr. Truman had an Aristotelian understanding of power. He had not only read the Greek and Roman philosophers, he understood them. And by understanding what men had done in the past he was able with a sometimes terrifying reality to anticipate what a man would do in the present. He had an almost unbelievable ability to judge character.

"And he was as near to being totally unselfish as any man I have ever known, with the possible exception of General Marshall.

"Mr. Truman was a good friend of Justice Brandeis, and when he was in the Senate, he used to go, almost every week, I believe, to the Justice's at-homes. On Monday evenings. It may have been Justice Brandeis who told him, as the Justice once told me, that: 'Some questions can be decided even if not answered. He meant by that that it isn't always necessary for all the facts on a given situation to be available. They almost never are, perhaps never are.

"And it isn't necessary that one side be wholly right and the other totally wrong, because that seldom happens either. "It is enough, the Justice used to say, that the scales of judgment be tipped in one direction, and, after a decision is made, he would say, 'One must go forward wholly committed.'

"I have been with Mr. Truman through a great many decisions, foreign policy decisions, decisions about war, peace, whether or not to go through with a difficult, unpopular operation, and never once have I seen him pause to consider whether or not he ought to do something because of its possible effect on his electoral future or the political future of his party.

"Now I can understand that many people would think this isn't a compliment, and it isn't really meant as a compliment. It is meant as an analysis of the man.

"I suppose that a President has to remain President in order to do great things, and therefore he ought to do sensible things to be re-elected. But I am also perfectly certain that if too many things get between the President's vision and the target he's shooting at, his vision is going to be deflected. Ambition is one of the great things that intervenes. Political considerations. Will this get me votes or will it lose me votes? That deflects the aim.

"Ego is a great deflector of aim. One of the major elements of Mr. Truman's greatness is that these matters did not get between his eye and the bull's-eye. He looked at what he was doing without the myopia of ambition or extraneous events or any of the other weak-Lesses of important people.

Something Truman believed in deeply was common courtesy, especially when he was the President.

Courtesy is the cheapest thing in the world, and it's a wonder to me that people aren't that way more of the time. When I was President myself, I never ran anybody out. If you're willing to work a little extra, you can see everybody it is necessary for you to see, and you can spend as much time with them as need be. There's always, almost always plenty of time. There are always twenty-four hours in a day if you make use of them. I think I mentioned that that's one of the lessons I learned from reading old Benjamin Franklins's Autobiography. He give you some very good hint on how to make the best use of your time.

Continuing on the theme of courtesy, he explains:

It's very, very easy to hurt people, and if you don't have to do it, you should do everything possible to avoid it.

Eric Sevareid quotes Truman as saying:

Mr. Truman went on to observe that a word, a harsh glance, a peremptory motion by a President of the United States, could so injure another man's pride that it would remain a scar on his emotional system all his life.

Then Sevareid recalled:

During the question period a boy got up and said, "Mr. President, what do you think of our local yokel?" He meant Pat Brown, then governor.

Mr. Truman told the boy that he should be ashamed of himself, that to speak of the governor of a state in such a disrespectful way, even if he disagreed with him, was a shameful thing. The boy, close to tears, sat down.

When the question period was over, Mr. Truman went to the boy and said that he hoped he would understand that what he had said had to do with the principle involved and that he meant nothing personal. The boy said that he did understand, and the two shook hands.

Afterward, Mr. Truman went to see the dean [of the college he was speaking at] to ask him to send reports from time to time on the boy's progress in school. The dean said he would and had.

Mr. Truman wrote the boy, and he Mr. Truman, a few times since the incident had taken place, and the boy was doing well.

Sevareid said of the incident, "The simple point here is that Mr. Truman had instantly realized how a public scolding by a former President could mark and mar the boy's inner life and his standing in the community."

In an article, Sevareid wrote:

A man's character is his fate, said the ancient Greeks. Chance, in good part, took Harry Truman to the presidency, but it was his character that kept him there and determined his historical fate. He is, without a doubt, destined to live in the books as one of the strongest and most decisive of the American Presidents.

I don't think knowing what's the right thing to do ever gives anybody too much trouble. It's doing the right thing that seems to give a lot of people trouble.

Books and other resources mentioned

John Adams and the American Revolution by Catherine Drinker Browen
Missouri's Struggle for Statehood
Bunker Bean
Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
My Twenty One Years in the White House by Alonzo Fields
Eisenhower Was My Boss
A Soldier's Story by General Bradley
Mr. Citizen
An Unknown Side of Truman, Eric Sevareid
The Truman Presidency, Cabell Phillips
Truman Speaks
Locksley Hall, Tennyson

Do The Hard Work That's Required

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

My biggest gripe with AI companies—and people who seem incapable of thinking about anything other than AI—is that they're all building and using products with the implied goal to replace the hard work that's required to do or make something great.

For example, there are a lot of PDF summarization tools being built. After you upload a PDF, these tools will summarize the contents of it and allow you to "chat" with the document. You can say things like, "What's the author's main point?"; "Where does the author talk about supply and demand?"; "Where does the judge define the issue in this opinion?"

Now, people who get paid to spend a lot of their time reading PDFs to glean unique insights don't have to spend a lot of their time reading PDFs. But if you're rewarded for gleaning unique insights from PDFs, why are you using a tool that attempts to glean unique insights for you?

I like how Readwise touched on this in a product update email about their AI feature, Ghostreader:

There might be some ways to complement the reading experience before or after with an AI chatbot, but as far as we're concerned, chatting while reading is a clash. To use a crude analogy, it's like having a conversation while watching a movie or sitting in a lecture. You'd be better off just paying attention in the moment and saving your conversation for after. What's with all these "chat with PDF" apps attracting millions of users then? As far as we can gather, none of our users regularly use these products. If there is a use case that retains, it's probably people using those apps as a substitute for reading rather than a reading companion. For example, a kid trying to quickly answer a homework question without reading the textbook or an office worker trying to avoid reading a boring 200-page research report. Those are valid use cases, but not what we're building software for. Ultimately, we want to maximize quality time spent reading long-form documents, not substitute for it.

Yes! That's why I love using Reader and supporting the Readwise team[1]. AI tools should maximize the time that's spent doing the hard work of creating something great. "Maximize the time" has two different definitions:

Actually maximize the time by using AI to accomplish insignificant tasks, thereby giving you more hours in the day to do the hard work that's required to make something great.
Metaphorically maximize the time by giving you different tools to spend every minute of a working block of time that you have productively.

AI tools should help you do the hard work that's required to make something great; AI tools should not replace the hard work that's required to make something great.

Jack Raines, author of the Young Money blog, recently wrote about this too. In a post, he shared a screenshot from a reader who suggested Jack create a GPT model that "writes in your distinctive style, tone, and format."

Jack didn't like the idea. He explains:

Anyway, while I appreciate messages from readers, this particular reader missed the point of writing.

The problem with taking an AI-first approach to tasks is that it robs you of everything that you would have gained by doing the work yourself.

[...]

I don’t write to simply generate a 1,200 word output. I consider writing to be an extension of my curiosity, and the writing process itself is what turns a rough idea into a finished product. I begin with a vague idea based on some observation of the world, and I put that on paper. As I’m writing that idea, two distant synapses in my brain connect, bridging seemingly-unrelated ideas. Maybe an anecdote from my time playing football relates to risk-taking in financial markets. Maybe a conversation I had at the bar the previous weekend sends me in a new direction entirely. As I continue down this path, the story evolves until it hardly resembles the original idea. Writing is a metamorphosis that turns vague abstractions into novel ideas, but you have to go through the writing process to connect the various points along the way.

As I get ready to start law school in the fall, I'm learning how to brief cases and make outlines. Since most law schools teach the same cases and structure their classes in similar ways, there are thousands of pre-made briefs and outlines you can buy online. Though those might be helpful to use as examples, we've been explicitly told not to use them and to always make our own. Why? Because the process of briefing cases and making outlines is how you learn to read and think like a lawyer. No one is grading you on how perfect your outline for Torts is; they're grading you on whether or not you can memorize and deeply understand the elements required for battery. To memorize and deeply understand the elements required for battery, you have to do the hard work that's required to brief cases and make outlines.

I could copy the cases I read into ChatGPT and ask it to make me a case brief for me. But if I want to get great grades (and one day be a great lawyer), I have to learn how to read dense, dry court opinions so I can to identify what's at issue, what the relevant facts are, and so on. The only way I can do that well is if I do the hard work that's required to brief a case.

Creating my case brief from scratch and then asking AI to help spot problems or over-looked concepts in my briefs is a great strategy to learn the material better. If I have questions about relevant law, I don't have to wait until the next day to ask the professor, I can ask AI to teach it to me. That's using AI to maximize the time spent doing the hard work. I'm still actively doing the work that's required to make something great, but I'm asking AI to help me make it even better.

When you use AI to replace the hard work that's required to make something great, you probably will never make something great.

All the benefits of writing blog posts about ideas you're struggling with, or reading abstract PDFs about complicated ideas you want to learn vanish when you outsource writing or reading to something that's not your actual brain.

If you want to make great things, or do great things, you have to do the hard work that's required—AI should only help you.

I think I'm in the minority of people who support Readwise's decision here, because Daniel Doyon, the author of that product update email, commented on the Tweet that sparked this blog post with, "thanks man! glad to hear that resonated with someone 😂"

Notes on Thoughts for Young Men by JC Ryle

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

"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 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.

How to learn like Sherlock Holmes

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The first few chapters of The Study in Scarlet, the first book in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, is when Dr. Watson and Mr. Holmes meet each other for the first time. Much of Holmes’ character and his philosophy on life and knowledge is revealed through these interactions.

When Watson finally discovered Holmes’ profession, he didn't know exactly what made Sherlock a better detective than anyone else.

Holmes’ answer:

I’m generally able, through my knowledge of the history of crime, to set [mysteries] straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of 1,000 at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the 1,001.

Sherlock also said: “I have a lot of special knowledge which I apply to the problem, and which facilitates matters wonderfully.”

But Sherlock didn’t just go around cramming his head full of facts; he only remembered what would be useful for his “application.” When Watson first learned this, he was astonished:

(Sherlock Holmes is written from the perspective of Watson.)

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

“To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

(Holmes’s “attic” quote is one of my favorites in any fiction book—nay, of any book.)

To help himself understand what Sherlock knows and doesn't know, Watson writes this telling assessment of the “limits” to Holmes’ knowledge:

SHERLOCK HOLMES—his limits.

Knowledge of Literature.—Nil.

Philosophy.—Nil.

Astronomy.—Nil.

Politics.—Feeble.

Botany.—Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.

Geology.—Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.

Chemistry.—Profound.

Anatomy.—Accurate, but unsystematic.

Sensational Literature.—Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.

Plays the violin well.

Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.

Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

Sherlock puts it another way:

It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated.

How to learn like Sherlock Holmes and become great in your field

Figure out what subjects matter to your life’s “application.”
Learn everything you can about those subjects. Learn also everything you can about the subjects once or twice removed from those subjects.
Learn the history of your field better than anyone else so you can determine patterns that no one else sees.

Bonus knowledge about Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

What’s fascinating is that Holmes was based on one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical professors:

In 1876, Doyle enrolled as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh, where he met the man who would change his life. On his first day in Dr. Joseph Bell’s class, Doyle watched the professor hold up a vial filled with amber liquid. This, gentlemen, contains a most potent drug,” Bell said. “It is extremely bitter to the taste. Now, I wish to see how many of you have developed the powers of observation that God granted you.” Opening the vial, Bell stirred the liquid with his finger. “As I don’t ask anything of my students which I wouldn’t do alone with myself, I will taste it before passing it around.” He licked his finger and grimaced at the seemingly unpleasant taste. Then he passed the vial around. Would Doyle meet the challenge? When it was his turn, he tasted the liquid. But neither Doyle nor his classmates proved to have what Bell was looking for. “Gentlemen,” the professor said, “I am deeply grieved to find that not one of you has developed his power of perception, the faculty of observation which I speak so much of, for if you had truly observed me, you would have seen that, while I placed my index finger in the awful brew, it was my middle finger—aye—which somehow found its way into my mouth.

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

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Impressions and Review

The Patriots by Winston Groom is part-biography and part-history. The biography part covers the lives of the three founding fathers who, beside Washington and maybe Franklin, created America: Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. "All three were driven by their own passions and particular genius, and when in the course of human events they saw a new fate opening for America they chanced their fortunes and futures on creating a more just and promising world," Groom writes.

The history part comes from Groom's very high level overview of the events and meetings that started the Revolution, ended the Revolution, and created The United States of America. None of the book seems to me "original" per se, but that doesn't matter because Groom does a wonderful job of taking what we know about the birth of our country and organizing it in a way that's simple to follow. This book probably won't be acclaimed in academic circles, but it's perfect for anyone wanting to better understand the events and people that made America.

Before my notes, I wanted to share this wonderful paragraph from the epilogue:

These men loved with an abiding perseverance the new country they had helped create, and each made deep personal sacrifices to ensure their dream of an ever free United States of America. Each also had strong ideas on how to government would function best, and feared that any other approach might lead to despotism and ruin. After all, the republican government that held together the barely united states was at that time an experiment no nation had tried before. And yet thanks to them these United States have held together for more than two centuries.

Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams made the country what it is today, and their dust still sparkles like stars in the minds of their fellow Americans.

Notes

Alexander Hamilton

"It would be a sin, in Reverend Knox's opinion, if this youth were to live a life of obscurity on a small Caribbean island."

"Hamilton had read John Locke, whose principle theory was that government was a contract between the leaders and the subjects—and that the contract could be canceled if it was abused."

Clearly, this was something Hamilton eventually believed as well.

You never know what you learn will one day come to help you immensely:

"With his joint fluency in English and French, both learned in his Caribbean boyhood, Hamilton quickly rose to be one of Washington's most respected aides, and at length he became his top aide bar none. It wasn't only his writing ability but his reasoning ability that allowed Hamilton to achieve what Washington described as 'thinking as one'."

The American victory at Saratoga wasn't only a moral booster for the Rebels, it also "convinced France that Americans could fight and win. The French Empire was now ready to ally with the Patriots in a war agains Britain, its own longtime enemy."

Philip Schuyler, Hamilton's Father-in-Law wrote him a letter after the wedding saying, "You cannot, my dear sir, be more happy at the connection you have made with my family than I am. Until a child has made a judicious choice, the heart of a parent is in continuous anxiety."

In 1781, despite the amicable and almost father-son sort of relationship Hamilton and Washington shared, there occurred a deep rupture.

"What had inspired this fury? Evidently, Hamilton had been smoldering for months, through all of Washington's refusals of his requests for a change of position. Somehow, Hamilton's frustration and pique had magnified Washington's faults in his mind until they had fashioned a twisted picture of the elder commander."

At the time, Hamilton was merely an aide-de-camp to Washington. But despite that prestigious position, Hamilton wanted a field command. No longer did he want to sit on the sidelines. His value to Washington, however, was too much to let him go. Washington rebuffed Hamilton's requests for a different position multiple times, until, one day Hamilton had enough, and resigned.

There are two lessons on this: 1) When you stifle ambitious employees, their frustration builds. I've seen this happen in real life multiple times, and I'm honestly not sure how to prevent it. Essentially, someone who is an excellent employee wants to do something different. But that person does their job so well, and is trusted, that leadership has a hard time moving that employee around, because they'll have to find someone new. Rarely does this work. What usually happens is the employee leaves the organization all together, or they become bitter and resentful in their current role.

The other lesson (2) is that when you feel angry about something, and refuse to confront or attempt to resolve that something, the anger builds and compounds. Eventually, whoever was involved in that situation turns into the worst person in the world, in your eyes, no matter if what they did isn't really all that bad.

"All through the long war, in between his military duties, Hamilton made a study of finance. In an attempt to understand the mutual relationship among money, governments, and the people of a country, he had read Adam Smith's increasingly popular book The Wealth of Nations, as well as many other, obscure works."

After the war, Hamilton practiced law. "The Hamilton family settled into a comfortable house on Wall Street not far from his legal offices, the courthouse, and city hall. Like Jefferson's, Hamilton's reading habits were insatiable. In the evenings he pored over the works of Sterne, Fielding, Swift, Walpole, Gibbons, Hobbes, Hume, and Voltaire."

Hamilton fought, not necessarily to appease the Tories, but to not be so harsh to them as others were after the war. He didn't think it was good for the country, or its finances, to hold the Tories in contempt. "The state legislature passed draconian laws denying them the vote and all manner of civil and property rights. Hamilton thought this was wrong and said so in long published essays under the name Phocion. This figure of classical myth had come to Athens from a foreign land and a questionable background but became a general who pleaded forgiveness of one's enemies when war ended."

I think that's admirable he did that, and smart he did used the pename that further illustrates his mentality. I want to get to a point in my knowledge of history to be able to use those names, or identify them when someone else uses them, or be able to use them in illustrations during work or something.

The Constitutional Convention was called to amend the Articles of Confederation. But most delegates knew that something bigger would be required to set the government up for success. "Right at the beginning, Virginia's delegation submitted an entirely new proposal: a document largely composed by delegate James Madison that became known as the Virginia Plan. It basically scrapped the Articles entirely and called for a national government that would be superior to state law and consist of coequal executive, legislative, and judicial branches."

The big question at the convention was how large and small states would get equal and fair representation.

Hamilton's Federalist Papers were the result of negative articles about the Constitution in newspapers. James Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay each wrote different numbers, all under the name Publius, the founder of the Roman republic.

As the nations's first treasury secretary, Hamilton's big job was to somehow deal with the debt colonies were settled with during the war. He came up with a plan that had three parts:

First, "the federal government was to assume the debt owed by the states and retire it by borrowing the money to do so from Europeans at lower rates. Revenue to repay the loans would be raised by tariffs on foreign goods."
Next, Hamilton wanted to found a national bank, modeled on the Bank of England
Finally, Hamilton wanted to enact legislation that would help the country's new struggling industries.

"When President Washington was looking for cabinet officers, he wanted 'splendid talents,' 'extensive knowledge', and above all, 'incorruptible integrity—All these he found in Hamilton."

John Adams

Since a young age, John Adams craved recognition and value. Not necessarily riches, but esteem as a gentleman. It's the reason he went into the law. He was also born in a unique time period where, "the notion of making a name for oneself had been quite elusive to anyone not born of the aristocracy prior to the eighteenth century...But the advent of newspapers and the pamphlet offered a platform to those who could express themselves well; characters such as celebrated British author Samuel Johnson and Benjamin Franklin proved that 'fame might be achieved by men born into a lesser social rank.'"

The first time the colonies really began to ponder the relationship between themselves and the mother country was after Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which required any legal document or paper to require paying a tax. "The Stamp Act was seen as a naked attempt to wring revenue from British subjects in America while their counterparts in England had no such obligations...Until the Stamp Act, Adams reasoned, America's relationship with the mother country had been free, open, and tolerant."

The backlash to the Stamp Act allowed Samuel Adams to find an audience for his contempt for Britain, and the creation of the rebel group, The Sons of Liberty.

The second abomination that the colonies faced from Parliament was the [[Townshend Duties]]. Named after Chancellor of the Exchequer (Britain's equivalent of the Treasury Secretary or Fed Chair), Charles Townshend, they taxed all tea, paints, glass, paper, and lead imported from Britain.

Although the Sons of Liberty—Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Benedict Arnold, John Hancock, and Patrick Henry ("give me liberty, or give me death)—disbanded after The Stamp Act, they once again regrouped to organize mass protests and rallies.

The protests caused Lord Hillsborough, the king's secretary for colonial American affairs, to try and isolate Boston from the rest of the colonies, for he felt that's where the heart of the insurrection was. In 1768, he sent a letter "threatening to dissolve the general assembly of any colony that demanded repeal of the king's taxes and duties. To back this up, four regiments of British redcoats were dispatched to garrison the city of Boston." Those actions only caused more protest and rallies.

The influx of soldiers into Boston also caused Parliament to pass the Quartering Act, which forced the people of Boston to shelter and feed the troops.

After the Boston Massacre trial, which John Adams defended the soldiers honorably, the redcoats were ferried to a nearby island and things settled down. But this didn't last long.

Britain decided to get rid of the tea rotting in London warehouses by selling it at half-price. Since the Townshend Duties, the colonies were boycotting tea, but there was no way they could resist half-priced tea, the British thought. To get their tax money, though, they would put a threepence-a-pound duty on it. When word of this spread around Boston and the ships with tea started to arrive, Samuel Adams called a meeting for December 16. The events of that night are familiar to everyone, and The Boston Tea Party commenced.

Despite Adams' love for law and order, he praised the Tea Party, saying, "This is the most Magnificent movement of all. There is a dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last effort of the Patriots that I admire...This Destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting that I cannot but Consider it as an Epocha in History."

Naturally, the British couldn't take this crap. So members of Parliament voted on four measures that came to be known as the Coercive Acts. To Americans, they would be known as the Intolerable Acts.

They stipulated that Boston Harbor would be blockaded by British warships to all commerce until the cost of the destroyed tea was repaid; that Boston's fishing fleet was banned from tapping into the bounteous Grand Banks fishing ground; that the Massachusetts government would be solely appointed by agents of the Crown, even down to juries (the colony's house of representatives was retained, but its functions were strictly limited); that mass meetings were forbidden; that any British officials, including soldiers, accused of capital offenses would be shipped to England for a fair trial, as would be an British subjects accused of being "disturbers of the King's peace"; that an additional five regiments of redcoats, commanded by the Massachusetts military governor...would be camped on Boston Common, as well as the soldiers that had been quartered in Castle William. Essentially, Bostonians were put under martial law and, with the closing of the port, exposed to starvation.

Other colonies, also outraged by these measures, lent a hand. They sent food and sugar, promising to send enough to "withstand a ten-year siege."

Samuel Adams read a motion he had prepared [in the house of representatives, which was banished to nearby Salem]: "That a General Congress of deputies meet at Philadelphia to consult together on the state of the colonies and to deliberate and determine upon wise and proper measures for the recovery of their just rights and liberties, civil and religious."

And this was how the First Continental Congress eventually met.

At that meeting, Congress voted to pass non-importation/exportation measures. These were essentially boycotts of all British imports and a refusal to export cotton and other crops to Britain. They also voted to encourage colonies to strengthen their various militias.

Between the First and Second Continental Congresses, battles at Lexington and Concord played out. There wasn't yet a full out war, but it was getting close. During the Second Continental Congress, there was debated between an all out break from Great Britain and independence, or a mere refusal of the Coercive acts, but with the goal to still stay with the Crown. The Olive Branch petition was created, which King George III promptly refused.

The question of an army was raised and Adams tossed Washington's name in the hat. With Adams's championing of the Virginia, Washington took the job, refusing pay, but asking for expenses to be reimbursed. On July 3, 1775, Washington left Philadelphia to commend the Patriot militia surrounding Boston.

After the ensuing battles, "Adams was so convinced that complete independence from Great Britain was going to be the end result of the present conflict that he wanted to advertise the fact with a 'declaration."

"A committee of five, led by John Adams, was selected to write the document. The other members were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston...Jefferson produced the document in seventeen days." On July 4th, 1776, Congress voted in favor of the Declaration. "Americans by their own proclamation, were officially free of British rule. John wrote to Abigail that the date would be commemorated "as the Day of Deliverance," and that it would be "solemnized in Pomp and Parade with...Bonfires and Illuminations from one end of the Continent to the other from this time forward forever more."

[A cool book like Erik Larson style would be to go back and forth between Parliament and the Colonies as they started to rebel. The scenes would be both sides of the Atlantic, and it would show really clearly how much it was a cycle.]

In late 1777, John Adams was appointed America's emissary to France.

"Learning the ropes" is a saying that refers to knowing how to operate a ship's rigging.

John Adams understood that, "Nothing of consequence in those times could be done without the direct approval of the king, as he was an absolute monarch. But all foreign diplomats to the court understood that it was essential to gain the ears of the king's advisers in order to sway his opinion."

As it is today. If you want to persuade someone with power to make a decision, talk to their aides and the people around them. Convince them why the leader ought to make the decision you're fighting for.

The [[Treaty of Paris]] was signed on September 3, 1783.

"The question of pay for the new government's officeholders had not been settled. Both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were against it on the theory that service to one's country ought to be voluntary and free. Adams opposed their position both on grounds that only the rich would then be able to hold office, which would lead to despotism, and also that he, personally, needed the money if he were to devote years of his life to being vice president."

"There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties...each in opposition to one another," Adams wrote. "This in my apprehension is the greatest political evil of our Constitution." Factions, he said, "could tie the hands and destroy the influence of every honest man." #quotes #politics

[[The Rights of Man]] by [[Thomas Paine]]

"Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots." #quotes #politics John Adams

While in the middle of his eight years as vice president, he complained to Abigail: "My country in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office" ever conceived by man, and that he "can do neither good nor evil."

Every time I read about [[The Alien and Sedition Acts]], I cannot believe it passed. It's absolutely insane, especially at such an early stage of the republic. I guess that's what happens when one party dominates the government. Adams didn't engineer the laws, but he did sign them into law. "Justified as a security measure, they allowed, among other things, the president to deport foreigners he found 'dangerous' although no precise definition of that term was specified."

On July 4, 1826, Jefferson and Adams both died. Jefferson, however, expired just before Adams. But Adams didn't know that. So, as he lay dying, he exclaimed, "Thomas Jefferson survives!"

Thomas Jefferson

I love how the opening chapter to Thomas Jefferson starts out: "Thomas Jefferson was a true Renaissance man. He was a student of philosophy and law, a scientist, inventor, architect, musician, and lover of fine things—a man of vision."

(I hope those words can be used to describe me one day, minus the "lover of fine things.")

Jefferson "gravitated to the cluster of ideas known as the Enlightenment. This great intellectual revolution had begun as a pattern of novel thoughts and notions dating to the previous century and to Sir Isaac Newton. The Enlightenment thinkers sought to throw off the superstitions, delusions, misconceptions, and blind faith to popes and kinds that had ruled Western thought since the Middle Ages and replace them with a world governed by science, logic, and humanity."

Thomas Jefferson's first adventure into the public realm of thoughts came with his A Sumary View of the Rights of British America. It stemmed from the committee of correspondence, an offshoot of the Virginia House of Burgesses to "communicate by letters and other means with its counterparts in the other colonies" while the Stamp Act, Townshend Duties, and Coercive Acts took place. Virginians, and other colonists, thought that if Britain could bully one colony, they could bully them all. John Adams called Jefferson's Summary "a very handsome public paper."

The colonists should remain loyal to the king, Jefferson asserted. But unlike the relationship between England and Scotland, Parliament had denied representatives from the American colonies to join them, while at the same time taxing, bullying, and subjugating them, most recently with the Intolerable Acts. "The true ground on which we declare these acts void," Jefferson wrote, "is that the British Parliament has no right to exercise its authority over us." But the heart of the paper was this gem: "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time, the hand of force may destroy [the colonies], but cannot disjoin them."

At a church in the Richmond country side, a convention of delegates from Virginia met in response to the Continental Congress appeal for each colony to raise troops. It was there [[Patrick Henry]] gave his famous speech, "give me liberty, or give me death." Jefferson said the speech was "sublime beyond imagination."

Jefferson had roughly three weeks to work on the Declaration of Independence. "He had taken rooms in a handsome building owned and constructed by a Philadelphia bricklayer. Across the hall from his bedroom was a small drawing room where he kept his writing desk, which he had designed himself. There, Jefferson set about composing the famous words. From his intensive study of Enlightenment thinking and his own legal and historical mind, he worked to create a statement of what liberty really meant."

That's a wonderful display of First Principles Thinking.

On September 6, 1782, Patty Jefferson, Thomas' wife, died. "Right before Patty died, she was said to have raised her hand and put it in Jefferson's, telling him that 'she could not die happy if she thought her three children would ever have a stepmother brought in over them.' While she was growing up, Patty had two stepmothers after her mother died, and apparently the experiences were not good. 'Mr. Jefferson promised her that he would never marry again. And he never did,' according to the account given by one of the slaves present."

Jefferson was inconsolable. He took to his room for three weeks and paced incessantly night and day between "violent bursts of grief." After that he spent long hours on horseback in the woods, alternately galloping for stretches then stopping to cry. His love, his best friend of a decade, was gone, and there was nothing to be done about it. #death

After the Constitutional Convention, Washington sent Jefferson a draft of the Constitution. "He found much to like but much to dislike. James Madison had suggested that some sort of Bill of Rights should be included, spelling out in particular what rights the Constitution guaranteed. Jefferson heartily agreed. He wanted a declaration guaranteeing freedom of religion and the press, trial by jury, habeas corpus, and protection against illegal search and seizure."

Later, Jefferson wrote, "What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that the people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms."

One evening, Jefferson and a swarm of guests over for dinner, including Alexander Hamilton. "Hamilton asked about a collection of portraits that hung on Jefferson's dining room walls, inquiring as to who the men portrayed were. Sir Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke, Jefferson said. 'I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced."

Jefferson on Washington: "He never acted until every circumstance under consideration was weighed. Hearing suggestions, he always did what was best."

In August 1796, Jefferson got a letter from Tennessee senator William Cocke, informing him that the people of that state wish Jefferson to be the next president. Jefferson, after considerable time, replied: "I have not the arrogance to refuse the honorable office you mention to me; but I can say with truth that I would rather be thought worthy of it than to be appointed to it. For well I know that no man will bring out of that office the reputation that carried him into it."

After Adams took the oath of office, George Washington whispered to him, "Ay, I am fairly out and you fairly in! see which one of us is happiest."

Buchanan said something similar to Lincoln when they transferred powers.

Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

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

Fix the fridge

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

A lot of "complicated" problems have simple solutions.

It doesn't seem like this is true because smart people don't want to admit that their problems have simple answers; they want to feel like they have difficult problems that need years of experience to solve.

Ravi Gupta, a partner at Sequoia, told this story in an interview on The Knowledge Project:

There’s this person who I worked with at Instacart….She was an ops leader in San Francisco, and the scenario she would give during an interview is, "You’re one of the managers in San Francisco, and one of the people at the Safeway in Potrero Hill calls you and says, 'The refrigerator where we store the groceries isn't working. What do we do?"

She said you get all these answers…. Sometimes people have backgrounds that are academic in nature. They'd say, “I’d call all the rest of the stores and I’d figure out if there’s a systematic problem with our fridges.” “I would analyze the data, I’d look at the sales that we’re going to lose in that store based on the fridge, and I would try to create a new algorithm that didn’t have people drop it off in the store,” and all these answers.

At first, this seems like a "complicated" problem. The fridge plays a vital role in Instacart's business at a store. If the fridge is broken, what do they do with all the orders? They could cancel them, but that would make a lot of customers angry. They could try and transfer the orders to a different store, but again, that would leave a lot of customers unhappy. Maybe you could run a promo for free delivery? But if you did that, you'd have to get engineers involved to make it all work in the app.

This is how easy it is to make it feel like you have a "complicated" problem.

The answer they were looking for in the interview was devastatingly simple:

Then the people she’d hire every time would be like, “I’d go to Potrero Hill and I’d fix the fridge. Or, I’d go and stop somewhere else and buy a new fridge and bring it there.” Every time. She’s like, “The answer is ‘Fix the fridge.’ Find a way to have us have a refrigerated thing as soon as possible so we can continue to run the business.”

Don't overcomplicate the problems in your life to make yourself aware of—or demonstrate to others—your brilliance.

If you have a problem, look for the simple solution first.

If the fridge is broken, fix the fridge.

Don't let it fade to black

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

On a podcast I was listening to, someone told the story about how he first met—and eventually started dating—his wife.

He said at first, they would go on long walks to get to know each other. Over time, though, their friendship seemed to diminish, and he thought any chance at a relationship was over.

But he told himself, “I’m not going to let this fade to black. I’m going to make her tell me whether it’s over or not.”

So, he told her how he was feeling, and she said she felt the same. They started dating and eventually got married.

He explained that he didn’t want it just to end. If he let that happen, he knew he’d always wonder, “What if…” Rather, “She would have to punch me in the face, so I knew it was over.”

Don’t let things fade to black.

If you’re confused about where a relationship is at, get clarity; don’t let it fade to black.

If you’re confused about your position in a company, get feedback. Figure out what you have to do to get to the next level; don’t let it fade to black.

If you’re at a crossroads with a book or exciting creative project, figure out what’s not working and move forward; don’t let it fade to black.

Rental car envy

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

You have a nice car at home that you love. Maybe it’s even paid off.

It has a few miles on it, but it still runs well. You’re happy.

But then you go on a trip and rent a brand-new car with 4,000 miles on it. The seats have heaters (and coolers). There are cameras everywhere for lane changes and parking. It’s so much smoother than your ride at home.

The trip ends.

You get back in your old beater and notice how stiff the steering wheel feels, how uncomfortable the seats are, and how annoying it is that you don’t have a touchscreen monitor.

What you were content with before now causes unhappiness because you realize just how much you’re “missing out” on.

Everything in life works this way.

You might love your job, but then see someone on social media doing something cooler (and making way more money). Now you’re unhappy.

You might love your partner but then hear stories of how great your friend’s partner is. “Why can’t my wife do that for me?” You start thinking to yourself. Now you’re unhappy.

I don’t know how to fix Rental Car Envy, but I know giving words to a feeling makes dealing with it in the future easier.

Explanation vs. excuses

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 13 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

An explanation helps all parties understand why something went wrong. By offering an explanation, you’re saying, “This thing happened because Y. It’s my fault Y happened. I’m not sure how I didn’t see that coming. In the future, I will do X and Z to make sure Y never happens.”

That is a great explanation and something everyone wants to hear after they catch a mistake you made. You’re accepting the responsibility for the mistake and explaining why it happened.

An excuse helps whoever made the mistake feel better about themselves. They blame Y, not their lack of foresight to predict Y and prevent it. When you offer an excuse, you say, “Y caused this thing to happen. I was working an A and B so I couldn’t also work on Y. Who was supposed to be working on Y?”

One accepts responsibility; the other shirks it.

When you make a mistake, don’t be afraid to explain what happened. People—especially bosses—like to know why things went wrong.

Just be careful not to offer an excuse.

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

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

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.”

Most things just need to be done

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I used to like the phrase, “How you do anything is how you do everything.”

Doing the little things right is important. But there’s not enough time in the world to do everything well. Some things just need to be done.

You don’t approach buying groceries the same way you approach creating and preparing for a big presentation at work. You shouldn’t approach those things the same way. No matter how “well” you get your groceries, at the end of the day, if the groceries are in your pantry, you did your job.

Paying bills is like this, too. Sure, there are ways to be efficient and strategic in paying your bills, but all that matters is if your bills got paid. How they got paid doesn’t matter.

I once read that a good measure of one’s maturity is how organized their sock drawer was. Because people don’t expect anyone to look at their sock drawer, having it organized shows they have integrity and care about doing the small things well. When I first learned that, I thought it was genius. But now I think it just means you spend too much time organizing your sock drawer.

Some things need to be done well, but a lot of things just need to be done. Don’t confuse the two.

Visible progress makes doing hard things easy

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Doing hard things for a long time isn't difficult because they're hard or because you have to do them for a long time.

It's difficult because the payoff between effort and reward can be years or decades. When it feels like the reward will never come, we get discouraged and quit.

If you got six-pack abs and looked like Terry Crews after just one workout, you'd go to the gym every day. It wouldn't matter how tired or busy you are; you'd get those bulging biceps because visible progress makes doing hard things easy. Conversely, if you gained twenty pounds after eating ice cream or drinking a few sodas, you'd never have ice cream or soda again.

But that's not how life works. One workout won't make you fit, but a hundred workouts in a row will. One bowl of ice cream won't make you obese, but a hundred bowls in a row will. But what if there were a way to make it seem like one workout made you fit or that just one bowl of ice cream made you gain weight?

There is.

Aside from sheer grit and discipline—which are required—making the long-term results visible in the short term can help you stick to the long, hard path.

If you're trying to stick to working out, don't rely on your physical appearance to keep you motivated because, often, your body is the last thing to change. Instead, buy a digital scale that measures body weight, muscle mass, and fat—and a notebook. Every morning, weigh yourself and write down your stats. Since these numbers change more frequently than your physical appearance, even if they're by small amounts, you'll be encouraged to keep those numbers trending in the right direction.

The same goes for dieting. If you're trying to lose weight and stick to a diet, buying a digital scale can help you track your body weight and fat more minutely. Maybe you don't see any changes after dieting for three weeks, but your body weight is down three pounds. That's a win!

Jerry Seinfeld famously created the "don't break the chain" method. He taught younger comedians that the key to writing great jokes is to write jokes every day. So, he said to buy a yearly wall calendar and every day that they wrote a joke, to draw a big X on it. Their only goal once they started was not to break the chain. This is the same idea. Their goal wasn't to draw Xs on their calendar; it was to be a better comedian, but that takes time. If, in three months, they didn't feel like they were funnier or had more jokes, they could look back at their calendar and see a record of all the jokes they wrote. The Xs made the invisible, visible, and visible progress makes doing hard things easier.

Doing the hard thing isn't hard; it's doing the hard thing for what feels like forever without seeing any results. The more things you can do to decrease the amount of time between "effort" and "reward" by making the invisible progress visible, the easier it will be to do hard things for a long time and increase your odds of success.

How I choose what to read: bullets vs. cannonballs

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Jim Collins writes about a bullet and cannonball analogy for business. Instead of going all-in on something that may or may not work, he advises shooting bullets—small bets at various things—until one hits the target. When it does, then you shoot a cannonball and go all in.

I like to read the same way.

There are a lot of books I want to read; currently, there are over $2,500 of books in my Amazon cart. With such a wide selection of options for my next read, I’m picky about what I start and finish. If I get bored with a book, I drop it. This works fine, but ideally, I get so good at “judging a book by its cover” that any book I decide to start is so good that I finish it. In this way, I hope to hone my judgment so that the number of books I quit each year will be fewer than the previous year. Not because I “experimented” less but because I did more research on the front end.

Reading with bullets and cannonballs makes this process easier. If I’m not sure I’ll enjoy a book, but the topic looks interesting, I’ll shoot bullets: I’ll read interviews with the author, a few sample chapters on Kindle, or book reviews. Sometimes, I’ll listen to an audiobook chapter. (Spotify having audiobooks makes this a lot easier now.) If either of my “bullets” hooks me, I know I’ll want to read the physical copy.

Sometimes, after shooting bullets, I feel like I got the gist of the book and don’t need to read the whole thing. This often happens with business books because it’s easy to summarize a business book in an hour-long podcast. When that happens, I write up some thoughts and move on to my next book. Other times, the author or topic is so interesting that I want to go deeper and get the nuance. When that’s the case, I shoot my cannonball and buy the book.

This happened this week. After listening to a podcast with Jared Cohen on Armchair Expert, I wanted to learn more about his book Life After Power. So I started listening to it on Spotify, and before the introduction was over, I knew I’d want to buy the physical copy.

The downside of all of this is that it takes time. If I had a money tree, I would just buy any book that looks interesting, but I don’t. Though books are cheap, the cost adds up over time, so I only try to buy a book I know I’ll enjoy and learn a lot from. This isn’t the only way to choose what to read, but it works well for me.

Sailing the Graveyard Sea by Richard Snow

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

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.)

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.

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.

Don't Create a Horse Storm

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Back when the quickest way to transport horses from one place to another was by boat, ship captains had to beware. Transporting inanimate objects was simple: you load the cargo on the ship, sail to your destination, and unload.

But it was a different story when cargo was alive, and horses were one of the most worrisome.

When a ship transported horses, they were stored in the bottom of a cargo hold, so the slightest wake from a passing ship or an unexpected wave could send the army of galloping creatures into a frenzy.

A wake from a passing boat could cause one of the ship’s sides to dip, startling the horses on that side. In response, they’d take a big step back, trying to balance themselves. This sudden movement startled the horses on the other side, causing them to take a step back for balance, which caused another sudden movement and startled the horses on the original side, who would then take a step back and…

This continuous back-and-forth was called a “horse storm,” and it would cause a ship to rock back and forth violently. Though it never managed to capsize a ship, it could damage a dock or a ship if a horse storm happened while the ship was docked.

Humans are the same way.

When something unexpected happens, our reactions can often make the situation worse. When the situation gets worse, we respond poorly again, making a not-so-bad situation into an absolutely terrible one.

Before you react to unexpected news, let the ship settle.

Don’t create a horse storm.

I first learned about a “horse storm” in Dead Wake.

1776

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

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

The Gathering Storm

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Success is found in the minutiae

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

“Your works?” Watson shouted.

“Oh, you didn’t know?” Sherlock cried, laughing. “Yes I have been guilty of several monographs. They are all upon technical subjects. Here, for example, is one ‘Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos.’ In it I enumerate a hundred and forty forms of cigar, cigarette, and pipe tobacco, with coloured plates illustrating the difference in the ash. It is a point which is continually turning up in criminal trials, and which is sometimes of supreme importance as a clue….”

“You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae.”

That exchange between the indelible, coked-out Sherlock Holmes and his Dr. Watson came in the first chapter of The Sign of Four.

Indeed, Holmes did have a genius for minutiae. In their first story together, A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock confirmed his murder suspect by matching the traces of tobacco found at the murder scene to the suspect’s preferred blend.

For Holmes, success was found in the minutiae.

The Super Bowl champions know this, too.

In 2022, the NFL changed the playoff overtime rules. Instead of the first team who scored a touchdown winning, like in the regular season, after the change, both teams got the chance to possess the ball.

The San Fransisco 49ers didn’t know the implications of this rule; the Kansas City Chiefs did.

Multiple San Francisco players said after the game that they were not aware that the overtime rules are different in the playoffs than they are in the regular season, and strategy discussions over how to handle the overtime period did not occur as a team. Defensive lineman Arik Armstead said he learned the details of the postseason rule when it was shown on the Allegiant Stadium jumbotron during a TV timeout after regulation. Fullback Kyle Juszczyk said he assumed the 49ers asked to receive when they won the toss because that’s what you do in the regular season, when a touchdown wins the game. “I guess that’s not the case. I don’t really know the strategy,” Juszczyk said.

Compare those statements to Kansas City’s strategy:

The Chiefs’ overtime plan worked out exactly how they had hoped—and it wasn’t by accident. Kansas City safety Justin Reid told The Ringer that the Chiefs had first discussed the new overtime rules as far back as training camp. Defensive lineman Chris Jones told me players were prepared for what to expect if the Super Bowl went to overtime.

“We talked through this for two weeks,” Jones said. “How we was going to give the ball to the opponent; if they scored, we was going for two at the end of the game. We rehearsed it.”

“…the Chiefs had first discussed the new overtime rules as far back as training camp. Defensive lineman Chris Jones told me players were prepared for what to expect if the Super Bowl went to overtime.”

There is probably nothing more boring to discuss at training camp than the post-season overtime rules. But for the Chiefs, that’s where success is.

In another video posted by @oeste on Twitter, you see Mahomes and Kelce running to the sideline saying, "They wanted it!" and "We wanted them to have the ball."

The camera then cuts to 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk saying, as casually as if he were ordering a latte, “Hey, even if we score a touchdown, they still get the ball.” At this point, he starts shaking his head and continues: “I didn’t know that.”

You can be very successful in your chosen career by becoming an expert in topics, ideas, or technologies that other people ignore and think aren’t important.

Success is found in the minutiae.

What are people ignoring around you?

Who you are is who you will be (but you can change)

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

One of the main ideas in Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer is that each of us – “religious” or not – is following something and allowing that thing to change us.

The book reiterates that the question isn’t, are you a disciple? But what are you a disciple of? Not do you have faith? but what do you have faith in?

Not are you being formed or changed? But who or what are you being formed into?

Comer gives a great example for that last idea:

Case in point: elderly people. Most people over the age of eighty are either the best or the worst people you know.

They are either the happiest, most joyful, loving, and sweet people ever who are just happy to be in the room. Or, they are the most spiteful, mean, pessimistic people in the world, he accurately explains. There’s a reason that’s true: “They’ve spent their entire lives becoming that person,” Comer writes. The mean old man at the end of the block wasn’t always the mean old man at the end of the block. He probably had an amazing family, a loving wife, and a job he loved. But then life did its thing; some awful things happened, leaving him bitter and angry. As the years and feelings compounded, he became who he is.

The sweet old couple next door wasn’t always the sweet old couple next door. They used to fight all of the time and were once on the verge of getting a divorce! But they sought counsel, worked through their problems, and learned to love each other. As the years, feelings, and lessons compounded, they became who they are. So, who are you becoming?

Are you becoming the mean old man who yells at kids, reports people to your neighborhood watch, and refuses to leave your house to spend time with family because you’d rather stay home and go to bed early? Or are you becoming the type of person curious about the younger generation and glad to see your growing brood multiply (along with your commitments)? Are you becoming the over-protective snowplow parent, ensuring your sweet little baby never faces a problem or obstacle alone? Or are you becoming the parent who loves your kid and understands heartbreak, frustration, and mistakes are the only ways they’ll learn how the real world works?

Who are you becoming?

You’re becoming somebody. Change is inevitable; it happens to everyone. But becoming the person you want to be is not. Becoming who you desire takes effort, hard work, and consistency.

Trace your current habits, attitudes, and actions over the next fifty years. Do you like who you see on the other side? Or is it time for some changes?

(I’m writing this for myself because, currently, I’m in the mean old man who likes to stay home and calls teenagers “hoodlums.”)

My Reading Year, 2023

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This was the first year I kept a detailed log of all the books I read. I don’t remember what compelled me to do this, but I’m glad I did. I’ll try to do something like this every year from now on!

History, biography, and creative non-fiction or narrative non-fiction were the most read categories by a landslide, and for a good reason, because they are the best genre of books ever.

Here is my Year in Reading for 2023. These books impacted me most as a person and taught me a lot about life and other people. (I stole this post format from Austin Kleon.)

Narrative Non-Fiction

The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson falls neatly into the category of narrative nonfiction and is a clear favorite of mine. Rarely does a book make me cry, but this book did just that. (I also cried after finishing Truman by David McCullough. Don’t you judge me.) Larson paints a uniquely personal portrait of Winston Churchill, his family, and his close advisors. Plus, it gave me a unique look at what it was like to live in London during the Battle of Britain. The Devil in the White City, also by Erik Larson, was an incredible narrative non-fiction book. It was just as engaging as Splendid but had fewer practical applications and lessons. The Wager by David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon) was also a fun read. It was about a shipwreck and mutiny in the 18th Century. Again, it is more of a fun story than practical lessons, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to read. His Majesty’s Airship by S.C. Gwynne also falls into that category.

Watergate by Garrett Graff is another informative narrative non-fiction book. Graff weaves together the different characters and motivations behind the Watergate scandal. One practical lesson: Watergate was not some grand conspiracy. “Labeling it a ‘criminal conspiracy’ implies a level of forethought, planning, and precise execution that isn’t actually evident at any stage of the debacle,” Graff writes. “Instead, the key players slipped, fumbled, and stumbled their way from the White House to prison, often without ever seeming to make a conscious decision to join the cover-up.” I suspect that’s how most moral failures occur. It’s a slippery slope, one tiny decision after another. It reminds me of Hemingway's answer about how someone goes bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

If you like riveting political tales, Crooked by Nathan Masters is also a great read. It documents the corruption of the Teapot Dome Scandal and the strange beginnings of the Department of Justice.

History and Biography

Each of the books above could be categorized as history and biography, but since I also read more “traditional” history and biography books, I separated them.

It’s impossible to say which biography was my favorite because many were so good. I read American Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s biography, to prepare for Christopher Nolan’s biopic, and the book was just as good as the movie. The prologue sucks you right into the conflict of Oppenheimer’s life, and the rest of the book follows suit. The writing is amazing, and you learn a lot about the early 20th-century world of physics. The fact that his life is one of the most tragic stories of any American helps.

Up there with Oppenheimer’s bio is JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century. This book chronicles the early years of JFK’s life and ends right before he begins his campaign for the presidency. (I’m anxiously waiting for volume two.) The third book in this three-way race that probably no one besides me cares about is Truman by David McCullough. As I mentioned before, I cried at the end of this book. I cried not because Truman was a revolutionary world leader but because McCullough did an amazing job bringing me into Truman’s life as if I was watching the entire thing myself. I felt like I knew the man – like I knew what made him tick – and naturally, I was upset at losing someone I knew. Plus, Truman and I are both from Missouri, which makes me proud.

I also read and loved Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas. Holmes’ philosophy on writing and thinking guides my writing and thinking. He believed it should be clear, focused, and free of legalese or jargon. He loved to read and learn, and that always inspires me. I understand this is a biography, but I thought the author spent too much time on Holmes’ war experience, though I don’t much like war stories. One fun anecdote from that period, though, is when Holmes yelled at Abraham Lincoln, “Get down, you damn fool!” when Abe paid a visit to Fort Stevens, and his top hat was sticking out over cover while trying to get a glance at the battle.

The Johnstown Flood and 1776 by David McCullough are both riveting histories. The former has a moral that is also illustrated in Watergate and Crooked: just because people are in power or have influence does not mean they are acting responsibly. If I had a chance to speak at a high school, that is one message I would try to get locked into people’s heads. 1776 fooled me a bit. I read it on the 4th of July, hoping it would provide some background on the Declaration of Independence and America’s freedom. It did little of that. Rather, it’s more of a mini-biography of George Washington, documenting some of the Revolutionary War's early battles, defeats, and victories. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough wasn’t as detailed as I thought it would be, probably because they were so secretive and liked to stay out of the limelight, but it was still incredible. The philosophy on learning, thinking, and doing the brothers inherited from their father is encouraging, and their story is a true American one. They were poor boys from Dayton, Ohio who worked hard, took risks, and completely changed the world.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power gave me what I was looking for with 1776, mainly how the politics of the age helped shape the birth of the nation. They were both exceptional.

G-Man, a biography about J. Edgar Hoover, was remarkable. Hoover’s tenure in the Bureau from 1924-1972 was ridiculously long. He survived many presidents (some he got along with, others less so), ideologues (communism, which he fought ‘till his dying day), and controversies.

And There Was Light and Team of Rivals are two books that helped me learn more about Abraham Lincoln, The Civil War, and the greater political questions that were being debated at that time. Team of Rivals is a multi-faceted biography covering Lincoln, Edward Bates, Henry Seward, Salmon P. Chase and other members of the Lincoln Cabinet. What’s noteworthy about his cabinet was most of the people he appointed to it were his competitors for the Republican primary campaign. They’d all lost to Lincoln, but were honored to serve him. And though each had a differing political philosophy, Lincoln trusted them deeply. He didn’t always do exactly what they wanted, but he at least gave their ideas the time of day and reasoned them carefully.

The Accidental President piggybacked off Truman and went deeper into the tumultuous four months from April to August of 1945 when Truman took over from FDR, the Potsdam Conference with Churchill and Stalin, and Truman’s controversial decision to drop the atom bombs.

I read James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson which was a unique book, and I understand why it’s stood the test of time.

I finally read The Gathering Storm, the first volume of Winston Churchill’s Memoirs of the Second World War, and it was amazing. I learned a lot about the period between the end of World War One and the beginning of World War Two. Mainly, what England and other European countries did wrong that allowed Germany to break the Treaty of Versailles and build up their army. Put simply: Neville Chamberlain was a horrendous judge of character. No matter how many times Hitler broke his word, Chamberlain gave him more and more, insisting that he would eventually stop. News flash: he didn’t stop.

Other Non-Fiction and Memoir

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard and Bird by Bird by Anne Lammot are helpful, spunky guides to writing, thinking, and life. Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work by Austin Kleon and Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday are three great books for creatives and artists.

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, a book written in 1908, is one of the most practical guides to productivity and time management I’ve ever read.

Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman is a fun read full of insightful stories from an intellectual hero of mine. Feynman never took himself too seriously and always questioned everything he learned. He wasn’t satisfied until he truly understood how something worked and believed others should have the same mindset. I agree. Working by Robert Caro gave a unique behind-the-scenes to a prolific historian and biographer who started a book about Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1970s and is still writing it. Caro provides background about his career and gives helpful tips, strategies, and frameworks for aspiring biographers. Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami does the same, but from a novelist’s perspective.

Fiction

This was the first year I ever got into some fiction, but even then, it was just a few books. Everyone was raving about Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, so I had to read that, and I’m glad I did. I read a few books by Cormac McCarthy after reading an interview he gave to an old magazine – Child of God and The Road – on the same weekend he ended up passing away. I found that very sad but also touching. Right before this great American novelist breathed his last, I was able to enjoy his works, just for a brief moment, while he was still on Earth. I find that sobering, for books connect us to other people in many ways. I read Slaughterhouse Five and The Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, liking the latter more. I also read Oliver Twist. So Long, See You Tomorrow was a sad book, but it kept me turning every page.

Reading plants seeds

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I started reading John Stuart Mill's Autobiography this week, and it's terrific. Mill had a unique childhood filled with self-education and, you guessed it–reading! He writes:

He [his father] not only drew my attention to the insight they afforded into Athenian institutions, and the principles of legislation and government which they often illustrated, but pointed out the skill and art of the orator—how everything important to his purpose was said at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his audience into the state most fitted to receive it; how he made steal into their minds, gradually and by insinuation, thoughts which, if expressed in a more direct manner, would have roused their opposition. Most of these reflections were beyond my capacity of full comprehension at the time; but they left seed behind, which germinated in due season (Emphasis mine).

That's a profound idea. Just because you read something beyond your "capacity of full comprehension" doesn't mean you aren't learning or getting something out of it. Seeds are being deposited, which, in due time, will sprout.

Those seeds won't germinate, though, if they aren't watered, rooted in good soil, and given the proper amount of sunlight. I may be over-extending the analogy here (I don't think I am), but without Mill's continued learning, the seeds he and his father planted at a young age would’ve never germinated. What he learned later in life allowed him to put greater context into what he read when he was younger. Without reading challenging works at a young age, his education may not have been as fruitful and advanced as it was when he was older. Without continuing to read challenging works when he got older, he may have never understood what he read when he was younger. It’s a feedback loop. As you read more, you begin to understand how little you know. As you continue to read more, those blindspots get back-filled, and knowledge begins to compound. You may be studying something for ten years, but nothing clicks until you finally read something that brings it all together in the eleventh. That’s the magic (and the difficulty) with compounding–all the big results are always at the end.

So, keep reading things above your “grade level.” It might not all make sense today, but it will if you keep reading and learning. When that happens, people will wonder how you got so smart. When they ask that, you know your compounding has started paying off. (But don’t let this fool you into thinking you’ve arrived. There’s still a lot you probably don’t know!)

JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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.”

Jack was…humorous in his letters relating the events that took place in his hospital rooms. From joking about a nurse who asked to give him a “workout,” to describing an incident when a “‘doctor came in just after I had woken up and was reclining with a semi [erection] on due to the cold weather. His plan was to stick his finger under my pickle and have me cough. His plan quickly change however when he drew back the covers and there was ‘JJ Maher’ quivering with life.’ (Jack had named his penis after his detested Choate housemaster.) The ‘very unsexy’ night nurse, meanwhile, ‘is continually trying to goose me so I always have to be on my guard.’”

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

An example of Chekhov's Gun

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

In The Firm, a 1993 legal thriller with Tom Cruise, there’s a great example of a storytelling technique called Chekhov’s Gun.

Named after Anton Chekhov, who advised in letters to young playwrights that“One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.” The term explains that every element in a story must be necessary, and if it’s not, it should be eliminated from the scene entirely.

Three times throughout the movie, while Tom Cruise’s character is making his way into his office, there is cotton truck blocking an alleyway. For some odd reason, you hear the voices of the security guard and the driver of the truck going at it louder than you hear other extras on the street. A reference is also made by the security guard that he’s tired of having this conversation with the driver every day, hinting to the viewer that the truck blocking the alley is a regular occurrence.

By the end of the movie, the cotton truck does not seem to have any importance. But true to the essence of Chekhov’s gun, it’s there for a reason.

When Tom Cruise eventually has to make a daring escape from the law firm’s building, he uses the cotton truck to catch his fall after jumping from a third-story window.

If that truck wasn’t ever there before in the movie, it would be an occurrence of deus ex machina, or what happens when a plot is resolved in a very unlikely way.

But knowing the cotton truck was there in both Acts 1 and 2 of the movie, the viewer doesn’t feel like they’re being cheated, and the question every viewer is asking – “Why is the cotton truck parked there every day and why do we hear them yell so much about it,” – is finally resolved.

TWR: Work, Position, Reading, Economists

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

~~You can't do the work for the reward~~: Martin Scorcese has won one Oscar in his entire career. It was for The Departed with Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson. (I watched it on the plane last night, and I recommend it.) You might think this would be discouraging for a director who constantly works with high-profile Hollywood stars, but it's not. "You can't make a movie for an award," Scorsese ~~said~~. "I always said this: just be quiet and make movies." You can't do the work for the reward; you have to love the work itself. The early mornings on set, the late nights in the editing room, and the endless takes to get the right scene are what making movies is all about, not getting an award. So it is with your work or creative endeavor. Writing this email every week isn't about the subscriber numbers going up; it's about sharing the countless fascinating things I read and learn. You can't do the work for the reward.

"~~Your position determines your future~~:" There are a lot of lessons I've learned from my boss, but this is probably one of the most important ones. People who constantly make good decisions aren't necessarily smarter than everyone. They're simply in a better position. This allows more opportunities for future success. When something goes wrong, as things inevitably do, they have more margin for recovery. Talking about relationships with your spouse, family, or friends, he ~~said~~, "If you imagine that there’s a patch of grass between you and them, is that grass dry or is it wet? Have I watered that for months, in which case the spark isn’t going to light it on fire, or is the smallest little spark going to start this forest fire? And the position that we bring into those arguments matters a lot in terms of the quality of the outcomes that we get."

~~In Defense of Voracious Reading:~~ There's an odd philosophy spreading throughout the intellectual underworld of "reading Twitter" that goes something like, "Don't read a lot of books. Just master the great books." In theory, I love that idea. There's a lot of published junk that should never be consumed. But as the author puts it: "But while I can conceive of someone filling up a 100+ book Goodreads goal with pure garbage and being the worse off for it, truthfully, I would prefer every over-indulgent reader of modern pulp to every non-reader and philistine in the world who denies the value of books generally..." I'll take a junk-food reader over someone who hasn't picked up a book in years any day.

~~Why Do Economists Get Paid More Than Sociologists?~~: There are a few fundamental forces that govern most of the world. Supply and demand is one of those forces. It controls the price of almost everything, sociology professors included. "You just don’t see that sort of direct application of sociology research in high-paying private-sector jobs. A lot of people with PhDs want to get a job doing research in their chosen field of study; it’s a lot easier to do real econ research in the private sector than real sociology research. All these outside options naturally make young econ PhD graduates more reluctant to take a job as a prof. Why get paid $113,000 or even $180,000 to go work as an assistant prof when you can go do real, substantive economics research at Amazon — and even see your theories immediately tested in the field! — while making $245,000?"

Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction by Max Collins

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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)

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.

Charles Dickens and Active Patience

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Active Patience Active Patience is the idea that while you're waiting, you should be preparing.

It's the reason I decided to go back to school. After my wife's lung transplant, I suddenly had a lot more time on my hands. Work was going well, and I loved what I did, but I want to be able to put myself in the best possible position in the future, for whatever opportunities might come my way.

Was I certain that going back to school would do that? Of course not, but it certainly wouldn't hurt!

Charles Dickens demonstrated this well, when at 22, he tried for the second time to get a job at the Morning Chronicle. He orchestrated a trifecta of people to contact the establishment on his behalf.

In Becoming Dickens, the author writes:

Although his uncle's first attempt, in 1833, to secure him a job on the Morning Chronicle had failed, in 1834, Dickens continued to press his case: in person, by writing to the long-serving editor John Black; through his father, who followed Dickens's approach by contacting the influential Whig parliamentary agent Joseph Parkes to promote his son's "competence in every respect for the duties he will be required to perform"; and via his old friend Thomas Beard, who had recently moved to the Chronicle from the Morning Herald. Eventually this triangulation of forces broke through, and in August 1834 the Chronicle appointed the twenty-two-year-old Dickens as full-time reporter at a basic salary of 5 guineas per week.

David McCullough on The Art of Writing, History, and Success

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

By far, David McCullough has had the strongest influence on my writing, reading, and life. His books are not just books; they are glimpses into a world long gone, glimpses that are near impossible to achieve anywhere else other than between the covers of his books. This makes sense when you look at his advice. Speaking about John Adams and writing his biography, he said, “You’ve got to marinate your head in their time and in their culture. You’ve got to become them in an effect.”

Therefore, I was thrilled to find a documentary on him, David McCullough: Painting with Words. Here are some notes.

On the standards he sets for his books, he said:

I’m starving to write a book that might qualify as literature. That’s the aspiration. I don’t want it just to be readable. I don’t want it just to be interesting. I want it to be something that moves the reader, that moves me.

On the one thing you should teach children, he said this:

The great thing about the arts is that you can only learn to do it by doing it. If a child gets that idea, early, that that’s how you learn things, by doing it, that may be the most important thing you can give them. You can’t learn to play the piano by reading a book about how to play the piano. You can’t learn to paint without painting. You have to do it. And in doing it, you suddenly begin to see, “By God I can do this!” And then after awhile “I can not only do this, I’m getting better.

If you were ever confused, McCullough is a writer, not an historian:

I don’t think of myself as an historian in the conventional understanding of the word. I’m a writer, who has chosen other days from our own - other times - as my field, that’s what I want to write about.

Echoing this later, he said, “I love to tell a story. And I particularly love to tell a true story.”

About the misconceptions people have about history, he said:

History is not about dates, and quotes, and obscure provisos; history is about life, about change, about consequences, about cause and effect, it’s about the mystery of human nature, the mystery of time. And it isn’t just about politics and the military and social issues - which is almost always the way it’s taught: it’s about music and poetry and drama and science and medicine and money and love.

In the last year of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited John Adams. Emerson afterward wrote down much of what they discussed. He reports that John Adams said “I would to God there be more ambition in the country…” Then he paused and added, “By that I mean ambition of the lottable kind: to excel.” “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” McCullough says while telling this story, “If we could reinstate through what we do as parents, grandparents, as teachers, as legislators, that old noble ambition to excel.”

On success and rewards, McCullough echoes something Robert Oppenheimer understood as well: that the work is the reward.

The fact that my books are still in print, I suppose I’m prouder of that than anything else. I’ve had a wonderful life, I’ve had a wonderful time, doing what I do. That’s the reward! The work is the reward, the kick of getting back to that typewriter and digging in for another project. That’s what I love. I won’t possibly live long enough to do all the books I want to writer. I have a list of possible books, I thing there’s 27 ideas on the list, so I guess I’ll just have to keep on working. Happily.

What Actually Happened in Oppenheimer

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

“Oppenheimer” was incredible. I’d watch it a hundred more times. The storytelling and cinema was top-notch of course, but that’s to be expected with a Nolan film.

Some Manhattan Project nerds will be disappointed that there wasn’t much emphasis on Los Alamos or the actual creation of the bomb, but this is no different than in American Prometheus, the fantastic book the movie is based on. The climax of the book is the security clearance trial, not the atom bomb. Though those criticisms are fair, because it would be great to have a good Manhattan Project movie, I more appreciated the historical accuracy and the lines of dialogue that were taken straight from the book.

Some examples (spoiler alert, obviously...but also we all know how it ends):

The apple

Yes, a young Robert did try to poison his professor, Patrick Blackett. No, the professor never did eat it, and the “poison” was most likely not actually cyanide, as that would have killed him. “More likely,” the author writes, “Robert had laced the apple with something that merely would have made Blackett sick; but this still a serious matter–and grounds for expulsion.” Thanks to Robert’s father’s persuasion of the school, Robert faced no consequences other than probation and having to see a psychiatrist. Niels Bohr almost eating the apple was a dramatization, but a good one nonetheless. That part of the scene didn’t actually happen.

Feynman’s bongos

The actor who played Richard Feynman had a scary resemblance to the man himself. Like, multiple times I thought, “That’s actually Feynman.”

Before the Trinity test, while an Army officer is passing around a piece of glass to act as sunglasses for the blast, Feynman declines. This happened in real life. He writes in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman:

They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses! Twenty miles away, you couldn’t see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can’t go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing.

After the Trinity test, while everyone is celebrating, you see Richard Feynman on top of his car playing the bongos. This happened as well.

After the thing went off, there was tremendous excitement at Los Alamos…I sat on the end of a jeep and beat drums and so on.

Damnit, I happen to love this country

Though these words weren’t actually spoken to Einstein, as happens in the movie, Oppie did say them. It was to George Kennan in the 1950s, as Kennan explains Oppenheimer’s funeral:

In the dark days of the early fifties, when troubles crowded in upon him from many sides and when he found himself harassed by his position at the center of controversy, I drew his attention to the fact that he would be welcomed in a hundred academic centers abroad and asked him whether he had not thought of taking residence outside this country. His answer, given to me with tears in his eyes: ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’

In a footnote to that quote, the author writes:

Kennan was deeply moved by Oppenheimer’s emphatic reaction. In 2003, Kennan’s hundredth-birthday party, he retold this story–and this time there were tears in his eyes.

Bohr’s ‘Prometheus’ Line

This didn’t actually happen, but I appreciated Nolan’s nod to the book title. The exact scene slips my mind, but I think it was Bohr (or maybe Teller), who warned Oppenheimer that has become the “American Prometheus.” That line wasn’t needed nor required by Nolan to write, but it was a clear nod to the book that inspired the film, and to nerds like me who loved the book, gave me chills.

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

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Impressions

Whenever I watch a political thriller on Netflix I think, "No way, none of this stuff actually happens." Crooked 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.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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.”

Break the Mold

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The only light in the motel room came in through the blinds from the street lights. This didn’t stop him from writing. Oh no. Because he’d been in a thousand rooms just like the one he was in now, he knew exactly what to do. He took out the high-wattage light bulb he always had and screwed it in. With a now-illuminated room, Cormac McCarthy began killing off his characters in the most brutal way imaginable.

And that’s how many of Cormac McCarthy’s early novels were written. In cheap, dark, Tennessee motel rooms. It doesn’t matter where you work, so as long as you work.

Sadly, McCormack died this week.

For a long time, McCormack and his novels about the cruelty of human nature were cult favorites. But with the publication of All the Pretty Horses, McCormack went mainstream – much to his disliking. Probably. His books are often described as macabre and surely would make you wince thrice. Put simply: they are not the types of books I’d listen to in the car with my wife.

Yet they stir something inside you. I don’t know exactly what it is but boy oh boy is it there. You’re half-scared / half-wondering who will die next and when and how. Everything within you is saying to put the book down. It’s time to go to bed. It’s time to work. Your family misses you. But you can’t.

William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Herman Melville – only some of the greatest writers to have ever lived – were McCormack’s inspirations and every one of his pages pays homage to them.

His books are different. There’s a lot of blood, yes, and “more corpses than commas,” but the most unique thing is the lack of punctuation. McCormack doesn’t use quotation marks to denote dialogue. You would think this would cause confusion, but it doesn’t. “There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks,” he said. “I mean if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”

Here’s an excerpt from one of his novels, Child of God:

Ballard came to the edge of the cutbank and looked up to where Kirby was sitting. He said: You got any whiskey?

Might have some.

Why don’t you let me have a jar.

Kirby stood up. Ballard said: I can pay ye next week on it. Kirby squatted back down again.

I can pay ye tomorrow, Ballard said.

Kirby turned his head to one side and gripped his nose between his thumb and forefinger and sneezed a gout of yellow snot into the grass and wiped his fingers on the knee of his jeans. He looked out over the fields. I cain’t do it, Lester, he said.

See. No quotation marks but you don’t get lost.

Writing dialogue is one of the first things they teach you in English class. You learn when to put the commas inside of the quotes, how to introduce a new character, and are told to make sure each character’s words have their own line.

McCormack broke all those rules and had massive success doing it. Why? Because the thing, the actual writing, story, and plot were terrific. McCormack mastered the fundamentals, so he could break every rule he wanted and people still read – and are still reading – his words.

I never once thought about how unimportant quotation marks are. I didn’t know you could write dialogue without them. How sad is that? Tradition was so engrained in my brain, I never thought to question those funny little lines before and after words from a character. Now I am.

How he wrote isn’t the only thing McCarthy chose to do differently. He didn’t go on book tours and rarely did interviews. He could talk until the cows came home about physics or the philosophy of mathematics but shied away from talking about his writing. What writer doesn’t want to talk about their work? Then again, what writer doesn’t use quotation marks?

I admire his knack for going against the grain, but his ex-wives who lived in poverty because of that habit didn’t. “We lived in total poverty," his second wife, Annie DeLisle said. On a dairy farm just outside of Knoxville, they’d take baths in the lake. Funny enough, that’s something a McCormack character would partake in. "Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week." That right there says all you need to know about Cormac McCarthy.

This great American novelist has passed, yes, but his words and habits and ideas will never die.

McCormack, both directly and indirectly, teaches one to question tradition and that there’s always room for something different, especially if it’s great.

Break the mold and break the mold and do it differently and break the mold.

If you’ve never read a McCarthy novel before, The Road is his most critically acclaimed. “No Country for Old Men” is a movie that McCarthy first wrote as a book with the same title. He published two new novels last year, The Passenger and Stella Maris, if you want to read something current. The New York Times wrote about his best books. Warning: his books are brutal. Some say the violence makes them hard to read, but that’s exactly why you should try.

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

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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.”

221b: Get Up and Write

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Get Up and Write

I started watching Foundation on Apple TV this week (I’m late, I know), and it was so good I had to learn more about Isaac Asimov, the original author of the Foundation series. In an interview in 1975, after being asked how it was humanely possible, he could write 4,000 words a day – turning out book after magazine article after book – he said, “What it amounts to [being able to write so much] is that I’m not happy except when I’m writing. It’s almost the only way I can think of to spend my time pleasantly, and so I’m naturally drawn to the typewriter at all times. The day is lost in which I don’t type.” By 1980, he had over 200 books to his name. His routine for that kind of output is simple; he explains, “I get up in the morning, sit down and write, and when I finish writing, go back to bed.” Consistency helped make him great, but time did as well. He started writing in 1939 and was still typing away over 40 years later. Getting up every morning to sit down and write doesn’t seem like a terribly hard thing to do, and it’s not, but doing it for 40 years is. But when someone commits, as did Asimov, greatness comes within reach.

Asimov wasn’t only a fan of writing, he loved to read as well. Read the congratulatory letter he wrote to the recipients of a new library here.

Write Stuff Down

Aboard the HMS Beagle in 1831, Charles Darwin started journaling. He’d never stop. He wrote, “Let the collector’s motto be ‘Trust nothing to memory,’ for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting.” If you rely on your memory to hold the ideas and information you learn, and it actually works, you aren’t reading or learning enough interesting things. Darwin began journaling because he had to. He wouldn’t remember the crazy-beautiful-incredible things he saw out in the wild without it. If you’ve ever had the desire to start journaling, and have failed, don’t try harder to force yourself to journal. Instead, focus on your inputs. Make it so you’re overwhelmed with interesting ideas that you have no choice but to journal.

Anything to Win

So far, two lines have stood out in dialogue from Foundation. The first is, “A rotten tree trunk looks strong until a storm breaks it in two.” Lesson: We’re all just one small thing from breaking down. Anyone can look strong on the outside, but you never know what’s going on within. It’s good to be kind. The second is, “You can’t play chess with someone who is willing to set the board on fire.” Lesson: You can’t play fairly with someone who will do anything to win. It’s impossible. No strategy, smarts, or negotiation tactics will help you beat them because they’ll go so far outside the bounds of what’s allowed to ensure victory. It’s best to stay away from these types of people.

Shake things up

If you’re stuck creatively, shake things up. When Joan Baez has writer’s block, she writes with her non-dominant hand. She says, “Somewhere in my teenage years, probably out of boredom, I taught myself how to write backward, starting with EINAOJ ZEAB, my new name…I still write backward as a form of therapy when I need to get to the root of a blockage or calm the buzzing heat of a panic attack. It's as though the appropriate wires cross my brain when I write backward, which allows information otherwise unavailable to surface.” Haruki Murakami did something similar when he was writing his first novel. Instead of using manuscript paper and writing in Japanese, which made him feel like he was writing literature, he used a typewriter and wrote in English. Writing in English, his brain avoided the "system overload" that accompanied writing in Japanese. If you’re stuck, do things differently. Write on a napkin instead of paper, use crayons instead of a pen, or go to a dog park instead of a coffee shop.

Old Story; New Ways

Erik Larson’s books are literary masterpieces. He combines thousands of journal entries and other primary sources from different historical events into page-turning narratives that make you feel as if you know every character. Plus, my favorite thing, you learn a lot about history. When he began the process of writing The Splendid and the Vile, a book that chronicles life in London during the German air raids of 1940 and follows Winston Churchill’s life closely, he was questioned on the necessity of yet another Churchill-esque biography. “There’s always a way to tell an old story in a new way,” he said. “It’s all in the telling.” I like that. It’s all in the telling

Telling old stories in new ways

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I spent the afternoon walking around the Hoover Institute at Stanford University today. My mission was to find and a piece of a lifeboat from the RMS Lusitania. While reading Dead Wake by Erik Larson, I learned it was there.

I was disappointed, though, because I had to come back with an appointment. Just to make sure I was in the right spot, I DMed Larson on Twitter. He confirmed that I was but yes, I did in fact need an appointment.

The first book of Larson’s I read was The Devil in the White City, an extravagant tale of murder, mystery, and mayhem at the Chicago World’s Fair. I followed that up with The Splendid and the Vile, which easily became one of the best books I’ve ever read. Next came Dead Wake.

Larson writes a particular style of books called narrative non-fiction. Everything in the book is true, but it reads like a novel. His books opened my eyes to a new style of reading and writing, and are the reason I want to write narrative non-fiction myself. In fact, I’m currently pursuing a Masters degree in English and Creative Writing with a non-fiction emphasis, much to the prompting of his books.

Larson believes there’s always a new way to tell an old story. At breakfast with the director of the International Churchill Society, Larson explains he was dubiously questioned about his motivations for adding yet another Churchill biography. “Well, look,” he said, “It’s all in the telling.

I wanted to write about how the Churchill family and their close advisers—who were like family—how they actually got through the Blitz, day to day, in that first year of his prime ministry, which happened to coincide with the first year of, and most important year of, the German air campaign. I wanted to know how these guys did it on a day-to-day basis, and their families—what they had for dinner and all that.

The narrative began to take shape when Larson received access to Churchill’s daughter’s diary. Mary, who was 17-years-old at the time, Larson explained, “[L]iked to have fun. You know, she liked to go to dances with the RAF guys; a couple of times she mentions snogging in the hay loft. That was exactly what I was trying to get at, was, how did people actually do it, how did they cope?”

That was one thing I was most delighted to read in The Splendid and the Vile. The diary entires addressed the same timeless ideas of love and hate, things we all still journal about today.

Mary, who in the midst of the Blitz was being courted by a young soldier, opened her heart to her journal. After meeting him, she wrote, “Now–Mary–take a hold on yourself–my little plum.”

After getting a letter from him asking her out to dinner, she simply wrote: “Oh heaven.”

The following Sunday, he called her. They spoke for twenty minutes. “He is v. charming I think & has a very beautiful voice,” she wrote. “Oh dear–have I fallen, or have I?”

Through his writing, Larson helps the reader realize how normal and simple people acted, even in the midst of utter chaos. “I think one thing that guides me is that I often look for things that tie us, in the present, to people in the past,” he said. “Things that make us realize that, you know, we aren’t so different now in how we feel about things, and what we do, and the things that move us. Anything that ties us to the past, I think, is a good thing.”

Isaac Asimov on writing and reading

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

After starting Foundation on Apple TV (I’m late, I know), I became interested in Isaac Asimov. I had a vague idea that he was an influential writer, but for what and why, I was ignorant.

Turns out, he’s fascinating.

When I want to learn about something or someone, like any great scholar, I use Wikipedia.

Here’s his analysis of the insanity that is being a full-time writer:

[T]he only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes.

In an interview in 1975, after being asked about the sheer absurdity of the fact that Asimov is afraid of airplanes even though he writes about going to the ends of the earth, he drops an incredible line:

I don't like to travel, it keeps me away from my typewriter.

Earlier in the same interview, he says:

What it amounts to [being able to write so much], is that I’m not happy except when I’m writing. It’s almost the only way I can think of to spend my time pleasantly, and so I’m naturally drawn to the typewriter at all times. The day is lost in which I don’t type.

His writing style is focused on simplicity, much to the dismay of science-fiction critics:

I have an informal style, which means I tend to use short words and simple sentence structure, to say nothing of occasional colloquialisms. This grates on people who like things that are poetic, weighty, complex, and, above all, obscure. On the other hand, the informal style pleases people who enjoy the sensation of reading an essay without being aware that they are reading and of feeling that ideas are flowing from the writer's brain into their own without mental friction.

Naturally, people wanted to know how one man was capable of writing over 200 books throughout his lifetime. In 1980, David Letterman asked, “What kind of schedule do you put in to write that many books?”

I get up in the morning, sit down and write, when I finish writing, go back to bed.

Asimov not only understood the power of writing; he preached on the benefits of reading too. On March 16, 1971, he sent this letter congratulating the recipients on a new library:

Shake things up

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I don't believe in writer's block in the traditional sense. If you can't write, you probably have nothing to say, so you should go find something to say.

But if you feel like you do have something to say and, for some reason, the words and the work aren't flowing, shake things up: do things differently than you normally do them.

If you normally write on a computer, try writing by hand or on a typewriter. If you usually write at home, go to a coffee shop or even a park.

If you use a pen, write with crayons. If you write on paper, write on a napkin or the back of an envelope.

Haruki Murakami, when he was stuck writing his first novel, started writing it in English on a typewriter instead of longhand in Japanese. Writing in English, his brain avoided the "system overload" that accompanied writing in Japanese.

It also led me to the realization that I could express my thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, as long as I combined them effectively and linked them together in a skillful manner. Ultimately, I learned that there was no need for a lot of difficult words – I didn't have to try to impress people with beautiful turns of phrases.

Joan Baez, when she feels stuck, writes backwards or with her non-dominant hand.

Somewhere in my teenage years, probably out of boredom, I taught myself how to write backwards, starting with EINAOJ ZEAB, my new name. I worked my way through the Greek alphabet: AHPLA ATEB, AMMAG, ATLED, and so on. I still write backwards as a form of therapy when I need to get to the root of a blockage or calm the buzzing heat of a panic attack. It's as though the appropriate wires cross my brain when I write backwards, which allows information otherwise unavailable to surface.

Later, I began drawing with my left hand instead of my right. Like writing backwards, using my non-dominant hand opened a different compartment in my brain. I discovered the results were less restrained and more fluid, and therefore more interesting to me.

If you're feeling stuck, shake things up. Do things differently. You may be surprised by what comes out on the other side.

221b: Poetry and Politics

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Poetry and Politics

In June 1956, Senator John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Harvard wherein he examined the newfound chasm between politicians and intellectuals. After discussing the various differences between the two vocations, he ended the speech, saying, "'Don't teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament,' an English mother recently wrote the Provost of Harrow." 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 this commencement day of 1956.

Mind as an Attic

You can impress people by knowing useless facts and memorizing dates and names of famous battles, but unless you plan to make a run on Jeopardy!, most of that information is useless. There is no point in bogging down your mind with facts you can look up with a quick Google search. Reading an article this week, I was reminded by this great Sherlock Holmes quote. In 1887, he said, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands.” The information you choose to put in your brain is much like commitments in life, with everything you add, something else has to go. Be cautious. Don’t pay attention to everything that shows you its checkout line.

You Win Every Battle You Don't Fight

Tom Hanks received an unsuspecting call from the FBI one day. On the other end, the feds were letting him know his name appeared on a list of potential targets to attack. After a Zoom call, there wasn’t much else to do, so Hanks went on with his life. Most people are surprised he didn't do anything else, but Hanks wasn't sure what else he could do. He explained his reasoning with a favorite wartime story from General MacArthur—how MacArthur, “aware of huge pockets of Japanese forces and arms on various Pacific islands, deliberately decided not to attack them.” Hanks says, “And so these Japanese soldiers essentially sat out the war doing nothing.” MacArthur just left them there. “And I thought, That’s friggin’ brilliant. You’re really smart in the battles you don’t fight.” You win every battle you don't fight. That’s why Haruki Murakami disdains literary prizes and doesn't join literary panels. He’s a writer, not a critic. “A writer’s greatest responsibility is to his readers,” he writes, “to keep providing them with the best work that he is capable of turning out…Developing the objectivity needed to approve of or reject others’ works in a responsible manner, however, sits entirely outside the boundaries of that battlefield.”

Time as a Judge

Time is the ultimate judge. With moviemaking, Tom Hanks explains, wherever the movie is at in twenty years is what counts, not what the critics say on opening day. “For me, it happened on a movie that I wrote and directed called "That Thing You Do!" he said. "I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it. When it came out, it was completely dismissed by the first wave of vox populi. It didn’t do great business. It hung around for a while, was viewed as being some sort of odd, kinda quasi-ripoff of nine other different movies and a nice little stroll down memory lane. Now the same exact publications that dismissed it in their initial review called it 'Tom Hanks’s cult classic, That Thing You Do!' So now it’s a cult classic. What was the difference between those two things? The answer is time." Time separates the wheat from the chaff, the good from the great. This is why I hesitate to read new books. Unless it’s by an author I love, I rarely read new books. Most of them won’t be around in five years. So why waste time on them now? Instead, I like to read old books and let time be my filter. If an old book is still in print, I know it’s going to be excellent.

A Perfect Day

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov describes his daily routine: "I awake around seven in winter... For a while, I lie in bed mentally revising and planning things. Around eight: shave, breakfast, enthroned meditation, and bath—in that order. Then I work till lunch in my study, taking time out for a short stroll with my wife along the lake... We lunch around one p.m., and I am back at my desk by half-past one and work steadily till half-past six. Then a stroll to a newsstand for the English papers, and dinner at seven. No work after dinner. And bed around nine. I read till half-past eleven..."

A daily routine is crucial because how we spend our days is how we live our lives. For what is life but a series of weeks, and what are weeks but a series of days? If you wish to live a good life, aim first to live a good day.

221b: Unlocking Success

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 26 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Knowledge

While Richard Feynman was working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, every now and then, a lieutenant from the Army would come down and check on his team’s work. Feynman’s boss told him that since he was a civilian 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.”

This story has two applications: 1) Be careful who you share information with. Once they know something, they can “help out.” 2) If someone isn’t telling you something, you may be the lieutenant.

Solution

Leslie Groves, the Army liaison who ran point on the Manhattan project, picked J. Robert Oppenheimer for the head scientist of the project, but he faced a good deal of opposition due to Oppie’s background with communist party members. When he proposed Oppenheimer’s 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.” Groves could have debated back and forth with the committee for weeks drumming up other suggestions, but he didn’t. “Okay,” he said, “If you don’t like my choice, give me another.” When they couldn’t, the decision became obvious and Groves got what he wanted. Sometimes problem-solving is as simple as seeking a better solution. If you don’t find one, go with what you have.

Kids

Peter Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer’s son, had an electrical toy, “a square box filled with various lights, buzzers, fuses, and switches.” He called this toy his “gimmick.” Two years after he got this toy, David Lilienthal, an attorney for the Atomic Energy Commission, was visiting the Oppenheimers. While there, Kitty, Oppenheimer’s wife, was trying to fix the “gimmick.” After fiddling with it for over an hour but to no avail, she stopped to cook dinner. Robert took Kitty’s spot and began working on the “gimmick.” As Robert sat on the floor, the author writes in American Prometheus, “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.” Despite being a brilliant scientist, Robert Oppenheimer is still seen as a father and, in his son’s eyes, may or may not possess the skills to fix his toy. Your kids, likely, aren’t impressed by your accomplishments or paychecks. At the end of the day, all they want to know is if you can fix their toy.

Trust

In the span of nearly a decade, Cillian Murphy has been in five of Christopher Nolan’s films. In each movie, he plays a supporting role of some sort, but the next one, he is the main character. Coming out in July, Murphy will play the lead role of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In an interview together, Nolan and Murphy talked about the benefits of “re-collaboration.” “I think the best thing that happens from re-collaboration is that you get this level of trust,” Murphy said. “I think that's allowed us to continue to make interesting work. To me, that's the most important thing. If you trust the director, you can really go out on a limb, and be vulnerable, and expose yourself emotionally.” Nolan agreed, saying, “Trust is creatively freeing, because you feel like you can try things, and there are no wrong answers, nobody's going to chastise you, or laugh at you. It's like, okay, let's just try a few different things, and then trust on the fundamental level of, okay, we're going to take you on a boat, and we're going to sit you on top of an overturned hull, and on a cue, you're going to jump off into the sea. [Laughs]” When you work with people you trust, you’re not afraid to fail because you have nothing to prove. You’re likely to take more risks, knowing that if it fails, that’s okay because these people know how good you are. Likewise, if they fail, they know how good you think they are, so they can try different things. It’s difficult to do something great with people you don’t trust.

Success

“All success is a lagging indicator,” Ryan Holiday writes. 99% of Warren Buffett’s net-worth was accumulated after his sixtieth birthday. The success he’s had is a lagging indicator of the discipline and consistency of being an investing-fiend while in his teens and twenties. The book that debuts on the bestseller list is a lagging indicator of the years of research, writing, and editing an author has dedicated. A good physique is a lagging indicator of the consistent days spent in the gym sustained over a long period of time. All success is a lagging indicator; if you’re not seeing success yet, keep going. You may have years to work until the payoff arrives.

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

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 21 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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.”

221b: Work, Places, Sentences, Problems, Timeless

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 19 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Enjoy the Doing

In the autumn of 1932, Robert Oppenheimer wrote in a letter to his brother Frank, "The work is fine, not the fruits but the doing..." That may seem like a throwaway sentence, but it's profound. Oppenheimer understood that the work is what mattered, not the results. Learning physics was the fun part, not the accolades or attention. When you base your attitude or willingness to work hard only on the hopes of great outcomes, you're setting yourself up for disaster. That's where unhappiness is born. Unhappiness is caused by placing your definition of success in outcomes you don’t control. Followers, fans, and revenue are all byproducts of doing the work. But when those things become what you seek, and you don’t get, happiness eludes you. If you don't enjoy the work, you'll be miserable. "When you move the outcome or the goal to something that is up to you, you'll always win," Ryan Holiday explains. He continued, "That's what wise people do. It's not that they're not ambitious, they are ambitious, but their ambition is things that are up to them."

It doesn't matter where

The writer's job is a bit romanticized in today's culture. Maybe you picture them in a forest overlooking a pond with an old cabin, a squeaky desk, and books strewn all around. Though that sounds like paradise to me, there's a danger in romanticizing the work. It can lead you to believe that you need the perfect "place" to start writing that book or working on that next project. That's just another way to avoid doing the work. Michael Lewis says, "I've written in awful enough situations that I know that the quality of the prose doesn't depend on the circumstance in which it is composed. I don't believe the muse visits you. I believe you visit the muse." When Haruki Murakami began writing his first novel, he couldn't get started. So he replaced his fountain pen and fancy manuscript paper with an old Olivetti typewriter because "as long as [the pen and paper] were in front of me, I felt like I was doing literature," he writes. The muse won't visit you anymore with the latest technology than it will with a napkin and a pen, just get started. It doesn't matter where. Neil Gaiman advises young writers that if they travel to get a book down, go to a boring city and an average hotel, "or else you might become a tourist and walk around... or you might luxuriate," he said. "You have to want to just get out and have nothing else to do so that you must sit down and write."

Sentences

Annie Dillard tells this great story in The Writing Life. A college student asked a published author if they think that the college student could become a full-time writer. "Well, I don't know," the author replies. "Do you like sentences?" If you want to be a writer, you have to like sentences. If you want to be a podcaster, you have to love hitting record. If you want to be an academic, you have to love the books and essays. If you want to be a teacher, you have to love students and learning and lesson plans. You have to love the smallest unit of your craft. Because that's the only thing you control. You don't control how many people buy your books or listen to your podcast episodes, so if you just do it for the results, you'll be miserable. You don't control the fruits, just the doing, so if the fruits aren't ripe yet, you have to still love the doing.

Problem

During the spring of 1926, Robert 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 or physical?" "I don't know," Oppenheimer said. Bohr: "That's bad." Years later, Oppenheimer 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." Don't spend time working on a math problem if the difficulties are physical. A problem well-defined is half-solved. Know what type of problem you're dealing with.

Timeless Focus

"People claim to want to do something that matters," Ryan Holiday writes, "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?"

221b: Reading, Nobody Cares, Wealth and Wisdom, AI and Writing, Van Cleaves

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 12 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Chase Your Reading

There are two main modes of reading, Robin Hanson writes , searching and chasing. With searching, you read widely to find something that interests you. Once you find that thing, you chase. While chasing, you're looking to solve a problem, figure something out, or trying to resolve an internal conflict within yourself. Though most people read in search mode, it's better to be chasing instead. "It helps to have in mind a question, puzzle, or problem," Hanson explains, "and then read in order to answer your question, explain your puzzle, or solve your problem." Samuel Johnson explains why this is important: "What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read." If you read without a gap in your knowledge or understanding, it becomes hard to actually learn what you read because that information doesn't have anywhere to anchor itself to. Read with intention.

Nobody Cares

When Bill Parcells began his career as the Head Coach for the New York Giants, he dealt with a wealth of injuries. Worried and anxious about how all of his players missing games might impact the team's performance, he talked to his mentor, the Raiders owner Al Davis, in hopes for some advice. "Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team," Davis replied. "You see," Ben Horowitz writes , "nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn't care, your investors don't care, your board doesn't care, your employees don't care, even your mama doesn't care. Nobody cares." When things go wrong over that which you (supposedly) had control, the reason they went wrong doesn't matter. No one cares. It happened, so what are you going to do to fix it? Your kids don't care why you missed their birthday or softball game, they just know you weren't there. Your spouse doesn't care that you were too busy with work to plan a special anniversary date night, they just know that they don't have special dinner plans next Tuesday. Horowitz continues, "It's best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do." Don't let the past occupy your head because nobody cares anyway. Focus on the future, on what you can control, and on how you might fix whatever went wrong.

Wealth and Wisdom

"A big problem with bubbles," Morgan Housel writes , "is the reflexive association between wealth and wisdom, so a bunch of crazy ideas are taken seriously because a temporarily rich person said it." Just because someone is rich doesn't mean they are wise. Just because someone is in a position of power doesn't mean they are wise. When Richard Nixon was the most powerful person in the world, he constantly made unwise decisions after unwise decisions. At the same time, his staff didn't think twice to question his decision-making process. They were certain that when the rubber met the road, Nixon would have everything under control -- the hush money payments, the illegal break-ins and wire tappings -- would all be washed away because a man in power didn't necessarily say to stop doing what they were doing.

AI

I'm not worried about AI taking my job, or my favorite author's job. Reading and writing aren't just about getting one word on the page after another. It's about getting a glimpse into the psyche of another human and learning their internal dialogue. For what is writing but someone's internal thoughts splattered on a page for all to read? I'm uninterested in the thoughts of a CPU, no matter how "sentient" said CPU claims to be. "Part of the experience of reading an author is getting a glimpse into a human mind," Richard Hanania writes , "a living, breathing person who perceives the world with all his quirks, prejudices, and foibles. You can interact with him on Twitter, try to get him mad, or wonder whether or not he's trolling or serious in any given circumstance. Even if an LLM could produce text in the style of a famous author and predict his views on every issue, I don't think the public intellectual has anything to worry about."

Van Cleaves

Before the Wright brothers were a global phenomenon for their lighter-than-air machines, they owned a bicycle repair shop. After three years simply repairing bikes, they designed their own. 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." That's genius marketing. It's a common phrase to throw around nowadays to focus on the "benefits, not the features" when advertising a product. Apple does this well. Their iPod wasn't the best MP3 player on the market with the latest technology. No no. The iPod let you put a thousand songs in your pocket. That's the benefit. People think this is a new idea, but the Wright brothers understood this over a hundred years ago. Their advertisements didn't focus on the parts used or the sleek design, it was all about the benefits: "getting their first." Because that's all anyone who rides a bike wants anyway. To go fast.

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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

How to Approach Life: From Leonardo da Vinci

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 05 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Being born out of wedlock in 1400s Italy didn't leave a lot of options for the son of a multi-generation notary. It was customary in that day for the sons of tradesmen to acquire the skills of the father, but Leonardo da Vinci didn't have that luxury since he was illegitimate. He also couldn’t enroll in proper schooling.

Though da Vinci lacked traditional education, he did attend an abacus school to learn useful skills in math and commerce. It was here that he learned the value of thinking about subjects through analogies and patterns, which became "for him a rudimentary method of theorizing."

It was after, where he got an apprenticeship in Verrocchio's workshop, that his true genius began to shine.

Here’s what I learned from reading *Leonardo da Vinci* by Walter Isaacson.

Leonardo da Vinci became an apprentice of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435 - 1488) at about 14 years old. The first painting da Vinci worked on with Verrocchio was The Baptism of Christ. It's believed he worked on the leftmost angel because of its soft facial features, which the other subjects in the painting are not graced with.

Being a disciple of experience, da Vinci noticed that when he looked at something in real life, it wasn't obvious where one object ended and another began, like it so often appeared in pictures. It's hard to describe what he saw, but he didn't think there should be a harsh boundary between different objects in paintings. This lead him to embrace a painting technique called sfumato. The word, derived from the Italian word for smoke, fumo, can be roughly translated to "soft, vague, or blurred." It makes the painting look airy and like every object blends into the next.

This was just one example of da Vinci's acute observational skills represented in his paintings. He wrote in a notebook:

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.

Isaacson writes:

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

Leonardo's artistic genius is undoubted, but his business suave could have been better. He seemed to do okay but was never truly rich because he couldn't finish most of the pieces he was commissioned to do. There's no real reason why this happened, but there are some hypotheses.

One hypothesis is that what could be excited Leonardo much more than what was. He got so excited about a new idea that he abandoned everything else he was working on to pursue it. This cycle never ended. Isaacson wrote, "he was a genius undisciplined by diligence."

Another example could be that da Vinci wasn't about "the grind." He preferred to work very little and follow his curiosity about the world instead. He wrote in a notebook:

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.

Another reason may have been because his idea of perfection was so close to reality that it can never be pulled off to the degree Leonardo expected of himself. So, he got as far as he could on some paintings and then just stopped. He was paralyzed by perfectionism. He didn't like to finish pieces because he would inevitably learn a new fact about how a body should be positioned that he could use to make the piece better down the line. To him, nothing was more beautiful than representing Nature like it ought to be represented; and nothing more disgraceful when Nature was represented incorrectly.

Though human ingenuity may 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 da Vinci

An example of this relentless perfectionism can be seen by examining St. Jerome in the Wilderness. This painting was done in two phases: the first being in 1480 when he started the painting and the second being in 1510. Under infrared analysis of the painting, you can see dual neck muscles and other parts added in 1510 that were not part of the original drawing. These additions seem to align with the anatomical discoveries da Vinci was making through his autopsies at the time. This implied he started the painting in 1480, but then changed it 30 years later to add small neck muscles that he didn't know existed before. His perfectionism was a virtue, but it was also his vice.

Da Vinci valued experience to a degree that lead him to dissect some 300+ bodies throughout his lifetime. He wasn’t a psychopath, though, he wanted to understand the layout of the human body and how muscles move different body parts.

Lesson: Be more curious

Da Vinci didn't intend for his life to come under a microscope 500 years later, yet, there is one thing we can learn when we do so: to observe and be curious about the little things in life more often.

Isaacson writes:

I 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.

He continued:

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.

If we look at Leonardo for a thesis on how to approach life, he might say to do so "with a sense of curiosity and an appreciation for its infinite wonders."

That, Mr. da Vinci, I will strive to do.

The Wright Brothers

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

One ship drives east and another drives westWith the self-same winds that blow.’Tis the set of the sailsAnd not the galesWhich tells us the way to go.

– Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Winds of Fate”

No one was less likely to change the world than two poor boys from Dayton, Ohio. But that’s what happened.

After spending two years in Europe for test flights, which were a resounding success, the Wright brothers returned home. Waiting for them in Dayton was a celebration to honor the hometown heroes. But for the quiet town, it wasn’t just about planes or money; it was about showing the world that anyone – no matter where they came from – could do something important.

The Dayton Daily News wrote:

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 celebration 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 would 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.

Here’s what I learned from reading The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.

1. Don’t be a burden

Orville and Wilbur’s work ethic, ideas, and philosophy on life were heavily influenced by their father, Bishop Milton Wright. He saw it as his duty to raise his kids with respect and love and always provide them with wisdom.

He once 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.”

2. Intellectual curiosity is important

A friend once told Orville that he and Wilbur would always stand as an example of how far Americans with no special advantages – old money, power, name, or influence – could advance in the world. Orville disagreed: “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.”

3. Consistency and longevity are the two keys to success

Wilbur, writing about his attitude towards test flights at Kitty Hawk:

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, again:

A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool.

4. It’s all about hard work

The Wright Brothers were smart, undoubtedly, but they also worked harder than anyone else. John T. Daniels, a Kitty Hawk resident who helped the brothers set up their operation, said they were “two of the workingest boys” he had ever seen, “and when they worked, *they worked…*They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing.”

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. The Brothers first build a glider, a plane that just rode the wind; once they got that design down, they added a motor. After their first flight with a motor, Charlie Taylor, the mechanic who built and maintained the motor, 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.

5. Don’t allow others to pressure your process

Once they figured out how to fly, people came from all over to see the spectacle, but there was always a risk that conditions for flying weren’t favorable. In all his quiet confidence, Wilbur never let the pressure of the crowd get to him. They wanted to see a show, but Wilbur never bet his hard work or pride on someone else’s desires. They’d have to come back tomorrow if he couldn't go up. Surprisingly, people understood this and happily obliged.

When Orville began test flights in the United States while Wilbur was in Paris, Wilbur warned Orville never to succumb to that pressure:

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.

Another time, with the pressure of thousands watching, the brothers had to cancel the flight because the winds were too strong. As 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.”

6. A solution usually leads to another problem

Wilbur and Orville Wright understood one thing that helped them succeed: when they solved one problem, another would almost certainly arise.

Edward Huffaker, a visitor at Kitty Hawk, never understood this. Wilbur wrote: "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."

Wilbur understood something many overlook: when you're doing innovative work, a solution usually leads to a different problem. If you assume the problem you're working on is the last one you'll ever encounter, it can ruin you when you find another.

Wilbur was practicing what Jim Collins calls the Stockdale Paradox: "the ability to combine the brutal facts of reality with the unwavering faith that you will prevail in the end." Brutal facts: flying is hard. There were going to be a lot of unforeseen problems that no one had encountered before. Unwavering faith: Wilbur knew, based on his past experiences, that he’d figure it out. If he kept working at it day by day with grit and confidence, he’d fly.

Bonus: Orville on bombers in WWII

Orville Wright lived surprisingly late, only passing away in 1948 due to a heart attack. As he realized the damage and destruction wrought by bombers in World War Two, he couldn’t help but feel some responsibility. Yet that feeling did not outweigh the importance of his and Wilbur’s achievements, and he knew that. He said:

We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong…No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is I regret all the terrible damage caused by the fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire into thousands of important uses.

Bonus: NASA pays respects on the moon

On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he paid homage to the Wright brothers. With him was a small swatch of fabric from the wing of their 1903 Flyer, the first plane that carried them a meaningful distance. Armstrong is also from Ohio.

9 Lessons on Curiosity and Adventure from Richard Feynman

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

20th-century scientists often embody a certain stereotype that befits their profession as stuffy and dry, only caring about smoking pipes and reading books. Richard P. Feynman – and his bongo-banging, night-club hanging, lock-picking self – fit none of them. If you liked to talk, you might enjoy riding shotgun with him behind the wheel. If you didn’t, you might ask to be let out at the next light.

Born just before the end of WWI, he attended MIT and Princeton, where he pulled his fair share of pranks. His “masterpiece” came one morning when he took a door off the hinges of a room and hid it because, well, why not? When those in his fraternity woke up, they noticed the missing door. “Feynman! Did you take the door?” Oh yeah! I took the door. But they didn’t believe him. His tone was too sarcastic. The mystery went on for a week until Feynman left a picture of where the door was on the table overnight, and they found it. Later, when he finally admitted to taking it, everyone accused him of being a liar, but he wasn’t! He said he took the door. It was everyone else’s fault for not believing him. Funny stuff.

During his time at Princeton, he started work on the Manhattan Project. In April 1943, he moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to continue work on the atom bomb. In 1946, he became a professor at Cornell. He lived and worked in Brazil and Japan a few times before settling at Cal Tech.

That paragraph does not do his life justice.

Here are (some of) the most insightful and fun stories from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

1. Spend more time thinking about the problem

Like any great genius in Feynman’s day, he first learned science by playing with radios. He’d take them apart and reassemble them, only better. Fixing radios became one of his first jobs. In one instance, he made quite an impression on someone.

The broken radio in question made a funny noise when it first turned on, but the noise stopped after a while, and then it would work fine. When Feynman got to the scene to assess the damage, he heard the problem and thought, “How can that happen?”

He starts walking back and forth, thinking to himself, “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…” This thinking went on for some time but was interrupted by shouts from the customer, “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 worked. The customer was amazed, telling everyone he knew, “He fixes radios by thinking!” Upon reflection, Feynman writes, “The whole idea of thinking to fix a radio – a little guy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it – he never that was possible.”

2. Use a different set of tools

When you have a different set of tools than everyone else, you can do things they can’t.

Feynman learned, through Advanced Calculus, how to solve integrals in a way not taught at MIT or Princeton. So, 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’re self-taught in a skill or profession, you may feel as if you don’t know everything people who have a degree do, but you might know 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 as everyone else.

3. Knowledge is power

While working at Los Almos on the Manhattan Project, every now and then, a lieutenant from the Army would come down and check on Feynman’s team’s work. Feynman’s boss told him that since he was a civilian 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.”

This story has two applications: 1) Be careful who you share information with. 2) If someone isn’t telling you something, you may be the lieutenant.

4. Say what you mean

Hans Bethe is one of the most remarkable physicists ever to live. Feynman met him multiple times at Los Alamos and made quite an impression. During the early stages of the project, Feynman became the guy Bethe brainstormed with because Feynman told him the truth; stature and importance be dammed.

“You see, when I hear about physics, I just think about physics, and I don’t know who I’m talking to,” Feynman explains, “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, another remarkable physicist, that Feynman was a good brainstorming partner. “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,” Bohr told Bethe.

“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.”

Don’t calculate someone’s status or hierarchy into the equation of what makes an idea good or bad. Say what you mean, no matter who it’s to.

5. Follow your curiosity

Within a week of starting at Cornell, Feynman saw some guy throw a plate in the air with a medallion of Cornell in the center of it. While it was spinning around, 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 comes 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.”

It’s important to follow your curiosity and wonder – “piddle.” It may just win you a Nobel Prize.

6. The world works differently than how you learned it worked growing up

About one in every five of Feynman’s stories takes place with him in a bar or a nightclub. What he ends up learning in those stories usually has nothing to do with either a bar or a nightclub, though. Here is an interesting one.

While Feynman was out one night, he asked “The Master” – some guy he deemed good at talking to women – for advice on picking up girls. The Master taught Feynman it wasn’t as complicated as Feynman was making it to be. He said you buy them a drink and then ask them to sleep with you. Though reluctant, he tried it out.

After some failed attempts, it worked! Feynman was surprised, but he didn’t try it again. “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.”

After my wife and I got married, she told me one day she was having “jumpy legs.” I hadn’t heard that term before. She explained to me that it’s the feeling of just wanting to move your legs around, what I just called restlessness. But here’s this phrase she’s had, for 23 years of her life, that she knew, that I had never heard before.

The real world works much differently than how you learned it does growing up.

7. Be your own master

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.

Be your own master. Don’t let anything have control over you.

8. 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 was as lonely as a horse in a cow pasture.

While staying 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 two years.

9. Seek understanding, not memorization

Sadly, the student couldn’t answer. So he asks the student, “What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” At this, he knows the answer. Word for word he explains what Socrates said, in Greek, in the Third Symposium. But what Socrates said in the Third Symposium was about 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; it described how nature works and what happens in the world. It’s important, always, to make sure you’re actually learning and not just memorizing.

6 Rules for Self-Mastery | 'Discipline is Destiny' by Ryan Holiday

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Discipline is a habit. But it’s also a choice and not an easy one. Discipline is ignoring what you desire in the moment for what you want in the future.

Some people think discipline is just for #hustlebros who want to wake up early and take cold showers, but it’s more than that.

Discipline is choosing to go back to your hotel room alone when the beautiful person at the bar has been giving you eyes all night after a fight with your spouse.

It’s choosing to let your money quietly compound in index funds while everyone else gets rich from pumping Game Stop. It’s the ability to show up every day for five years while you work on that degree without being “rewarded” for it.

Discipline is everywhere and applicable to everyone. Here are six rules I learned about self-mastery from Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday.

Most of the lessons are pulled from chapter titles, so thanks to Holiday for making that easy. I’m just highlighting the ones I thought were most important.

1. 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 you can control, so you can control your body and mind in moments you don't.

2. Don’t let anything have mastery over you

One day in 1949, Richard Feynman felt an increased 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 controls you. These can be vices like caffeine, alcohol, or drugs. But they can also be virtues like success or working out. The desire isn't the issue. It's the need.

3. Show up every day

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. 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."

4. 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...

For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.

5. 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.

6. Expect much from yourself, little from others

This is an important one.

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, or waking up early.

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: "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 her boss "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."

Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

You can read more structured notes on this book here. 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.”

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

7 Life Lessons from 'The Splendid and the Vile' by Erik Larson

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

As if it were a movie, The Splendid and the Vile captures the courage and hope of Winston Churchill – the newly minted Prime Minister – his family, close associates, and other Londoners during The Blitz, a nine-month rampage of German bombings on the capital of the United Kingdom during World War II.

I cried. I laughed. I learned.

I sat filled with sorrow about what it must have been like to live during those nine months when death rained from the skies above – every night – while the sun set on the once-quiet town as it tried to hide in a cloak of darkness.

Here’s what I learned about life and human nature.

1. Withholding bad news makes the bad news worse

When Winston Churchill heard of the bombing and subsequent sinking of the RMS Lancastria, where over 4,000 lives were lost, he barred the press from reporting on it. “The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least,” he said. The press was quiet for a while, but after 2,500 survivors arrived in Britain out of nowhere, people started asking questions. Eventually, The New York Times ran the story.

The Home Intelligence Agency, an organization responsible for monitoring British sentiment during the war, reported, “The withholding of the news of the Lancastria is the subject of much adverse criticism. The blatant censorship led the public to imagine what other bad news was being hidden from them.”

In times of war, morale is one of the most important things for survival. Churchill and the government worked hard to keep morale high, often increasing the tea limit to keep people happy. But more tea couldn’t make up for the government’s deceptiveness. In an effort to protect sentiment, the government only caused more damage by not reporting the bad news in a timely manner.

When you break something and wait to fix it, it usually makes it worse. When you do something wrong and don’t own the mistake immediately, it usually makes it worse. If you have bad news to report and don’t, it usually makes it worse.

When you try to hide something, it only makes people look harder for it. (See also: The Streisand Effect.)

2. Give people public attention for doing what you want more of

After the citizens of Jamaica, then a British colony, sent money to help build a bomber, Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Aircraft Production, ensured this act of unprompted kindness got widespread attention. Soon, more gifts arrived.

He realized this could generate cash but also boost the morale of the public and the workers building the planes. He sought more donations but never directly asked for them. Rather, Erik Larson writes, “he made a deliberate show of acknowledging those that arrived. When donations reached a certain level, the contributors could choose to name a specific fighter; a richer total allowed the donors to name a bomber.”

Eventually, the BBC gave recognition to the donors on its nightly broadcasts. In the beginning, Beaverbrook wrote a personal letter to each donor, but once this became impossible, he chose the gifts most worthy of attention based on sacrifice, not amount. Larson writes, “A child giving up a few pence was as likely to get a letter as was a rich industrialist.” By May 1941, the donations totaled ~ 13 million pounds ($832 million). Though that amount barely made a dent in the overall production of planes, that wasn’t the point. “To countless men and women,” Beaverbrook’s secretary David Farrer wrote, “he made easy the way to a more personal interest in the war and to an enthusiastic contribution to its waging.”

Instead of trying to get on the BBC every night and saying, “Donate! Donate! We need help!” He gave people public recognition for doing so already. The people that donated became quasi-celebrities, and everyone wanted to be a celebrity, so lots of people donated.

Praise people (in public) for doing what you want more of. If you want employees to come to the office (I hope you don’t), instead of emailing them every week telling them to come, offer perks, shoutouts, and recognition to those who already do. If you want your kid to behave differently, give their sibling public attention for behaving that way.

It's human nature to want attention.

3. A project with more than one owner will fail

Public shelters were home to many during the bombings but were a humane disaster. Liquids that shouldn’t be on the ground were because of the lack of “latrines.” Some latrines were right next to where people slept. Worst of all, there were no provisions for making tea!

Clementine, Churchill’s wife, told the Prime Minister these circumstances were unacceptable. She believed the problem was that too many agencies with overlapping authority were in charge of the shelters, resulting in nothing actually getting done. Quoting her, Larson writes, “‘The only way to get the matter straightened out is to have one authority for safety, health, and everything else’, she wrote to the Prime Minister (carefully calling him his title and not Winston). ‘Division of authority is what is preventing improvement.’”

A dog with two owners dies of starvation.

Division of authority is what is preventing improvement. – Clementine Churchill

4. What’s right for your people may not be the most efficient

One thing that had infuriated Londoners during the night raids wasn’t just the bombings; it was the fact that the Luftwaffe could come and go as they wished. The fact that the RAF was essentially blind at night was one reason the Luftwaffe flew with ease, but not the only one. Also helping their continual raids were the orders for anti-aircraft guns to conserve ammunition and only fire when planes could actually be seen in the sky, which was difficult to do at night. This upset many Londoners; they felt they were being walked all over.

“On Churchill’s orders,” Larson writes, “more guns were brought to the city, boosting the total to nearly two hundred, from ninety-two.” Churchill followed by giving the orders to fire at will, disregarding the previous understanding to conserve ammunition. Though Churchill knew anti-aircraft guns rarely did any damage to German bombers, “The impact on civic morale was striking and immediate,” Larson writes.

Yes, the constant shooting and bombing from the anti-aircraft guns made sleeping nearly impossible, but that didn’t matter. Private secretary John Martin wrote, “Tails are up and, after a fifth sleepless night, everyone looks quite different this morning–cheerful and confident. It was a curious bit of mass psychology–the relief of hitting back (emphasis mine).” The Home Intelligence reported the same, “The dominating topic of conversation today is the anti-aircraft barrage of last night. This greatly stimulated morale: in public shelters, people cheered and conversation shows that the noise brought a shock of positive pleasure.”

Did they waste a lot of ammunition? Positively so. Was it harder to sleep? Most definitely. But were the people happy? Yes. And that’s what mattered most.

A similar thing happened with COVID. Was quarantining, wearing masks, and shutting businesses down the safest thing to do? Yes, it probably was. But was it worth the anger, unhappiness, loneliness, isolation, social unrest, and other second-order effects it caused…?

5. Opinions are useless if you don’t have anything with which to back them up

“I shouldn’t think so, sir,” Colville replied.

“Is that just your opinion, because if so, it’s worth nothing,” Churchill roared back. “You have never seen an unexploded bomb go off. Go and ask for an official report.”

This, Larson writes, “reinforced for Colville the folly of offering opinions in Churchill’s presence, ‘if one has nothing with which to back them.’”

What’s that saying about people’s opinions?

Is that just your opinion, because if so, it’s worth nothing. – Winston Churchill

6. Your reputation takes a lifetime to build, but you can lose it in a second

Lord Beaverbrook resigned from his post as Air Minister three times by the start of 1941. Each time, he got a bit more serious, yet Churchill was able to persuade him to stay on; his patience, however, was waning.

Churchill wrote Beaverbrook after this third resignation attempt: “My Dear Max, I am very sorry to receive your letter. Your resignation would be quite unjustified and would be regarded as desertion. It would in one day destroy all the reputation that you have gained and turn the gratitude and goodwill of millions of people to anger. It is a step you would regret all your life.”

7. Be in a relationship with someone because you want to be

Clementine Churchill gave Mary, her daughter, sound advice for marriage: “Don’t marry someone because they want to marry you–but because you want to marry them.”

Read more notes on *The Splendid and The Vile* here.

5 lessons from 'Novelist as a Vocation' by Haruki Murakami

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Novelist as a Vocation gives a glimpse into the creative mind of novelist Haruki Murakami. It’s an anthology of essays – some new, some original – on what it means to be a novelist, why literary prizes are worthless, how Murakami writes, writing great dialogue, originality, and more.

1. A professional's true mark of greatness is consistency, not intensity

“It’s not that difficult to write a novel, maybe even two,” Murakami writes, “but it’s another thing altogether to keep producing, to live off one’s writing, to survive.” Elsewhere in the book, he writes, “It’s not difficult to write a single novel. Even a very good novel, depending on who you are. It isn’t easy to pull off, but it’s not impossible. What’s really hard is to keep on writing novels year after year. That’s not something anyone can do.”

It’s not about what you do, it’s about how long you’ve been doing it. Time is the greatest filter. In The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel explains this is why Warren Buffett is so famous. Has Buffett made the biggest returns ever? No, but he’s had “pretty good” returns for decades. In investing – as in writing, working, inventing, and life – time is the best judge.

The greatest way to win the game is to be in it the longest. Consistency over intensity.

2. When you’re stuck, change your process

When Murakami began writing his first novel, he had trouble getting the words to flow. Instead of just trying to work harder or, worse, quit, he changed how he approached it. He ditched his fountain pen and fancy manuscript paper. “As long as they were in front of me,” he writes, “what I was doing felt like literature.” Instead, he used an old Olivetti typewriter and began writing the opening of his novel in English instead of Japanese.

Though he didn’t have a Churchillian command of English, he had enough to make it work. “I could only write in short, simple sentences.” But instead of letting this hinder his performance, it helped. “However complex and numerous the thoughts running around in my head, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me,” he writes. “The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, and everything arranged to fit a container of limited size.” Though the prose wasn’t poetic, “a distinctive rhythm began to take shape.”

When he wrote in English, his brain avoided the “system overload” that happened while writing in Japanese. “It also led me to the realization that I could express my thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, as long as I combined them effectively and linked them together in a skillful manner. Ultimately, I learned that there was no need for a lot of difficult words–I didn’t have to try to impress people with beautiful turns of phrases.” (There’s a lesson there, too.)

After he wrote the introduction in English, he “transplanted” it to Japanese. What emerged was a unique style that became his. “Now I get it,” he writes. “This is how I should be doing it.”

If you’re stuck on a project, instead of trying to work harder and force something that isn’t working, see if you can change how you’re approaching the problem. Don’t force yourself to write in Japanese if it isn’t working.

3. No matter how good something is, it can be made better

Murakami used a word processor for the first time in his life when he wrote Dance, Dance, Dance. While moving from Rome to London, a chapter somehow went missing from his computer and he couldn’t find it anywhere. The chapter was beautiful, long, and unfortunately, wouldn’t turn up. After a few weeks, he resolved to rewrite the chapter from scratch, trying to remember how it went but feeling like he would never write it as well again.

Sometime later, after he was finished with the book, that missing chapter showed up again on his computer. He was flustered. Should he add the original chapter back in? After reading it, though, he was relieved to “see that in fact the rewrite was far superior. What this story shows is that, no matter what you have written, it can be made better.”

He writes later, “What’s crucial, in short, is the physical act of rewriting.** What carries more weight than anything else is the resolve to sit down at one’s desk to improve what one has written. Compared to that, the question of which direction to take in those improvements may be of secondary importance.”

When you rewrite something, you can feel the choppiness, the places where the words just don’t flow. That’s harder to do when you’re simply editing what’s already on the screen.

4. Find something to do when the muse isn’t musing

The best way to beat writer’s block is to do something similar to writing, but that doesn’t take the same creative effort. I do that by taking book notes. If I’m struggling to write something creative, I open a book and start taking notes. Murakami does something similar but translates books into Japanese.

I have been writing fiction for more than thirty-five years at the time of this book’s writing; yet I have never experienced what is commonly known as ‘writer’s block.’ Wanting to write but being unable is unknown to me. That may make it sound as if I am overflowing with talent, but the actual reason is much simpler: I never write unless I really want to, unless the desire to write is overwhelming. When I feel that desire, I sit down and set to work. When I don’t feel it, I usually turn to translating from English. Since translation is essentially a technical operation, I can pursue it on a daily basis, quite separate from my creative desire; yet at the same time, it is a good way to hone my writing skills.

Richard Feynman, the bongo-beating theoretical physicist, used teaching to help him come up with new ideas. This is one of the reasons he lamented the Institute for Advanced Study, a prestigious research institution that Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and John von Neumann called home. The Institute gave unlimited tenure to the brightest minds of the 20th century without the hindrance of teaching classes. They had complete freedom to do whatever they wanted – and this is exactly what Feynman hated. He writes:

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.

For Feynman, teaching gave him the ability to come up with creative ideas because he knew if he didn’t think of anything, he was still teaching. Murakami translated books.

What do you do when the creative juices aren’t flowing?

5. If someone gives you feedback, listen, but ignore their suggestions about how to fix it.

Murakami deals with feedback from early readers, usually his wife, in an interesting way: he rewrites every scene someone doesn’t like. In the end, even though he may not agree with their feedback, sometimes he writes the scene in an entirely new way, and it works much better than what he had before.

“It seems that when a reader has a problem,” he writes, “there is usually something that needs fixing, whether or not it corresponds to their suggestions.” This echoes advice given to founders: if a user has a problem, you should listen to them. But if they tell you how to fix it, ignore them.

Criticism doesn’t bother Murakami because he knows, in the end, he gave all he could. He didn’t try to write a bad story, try to cheat, or cut corners. If, for some reason, that wasn’t good enough, well…that’s alright with him. “I know at the physical level that I cut no corners in the writing; that I gave it all I had. I spent whatever time was needed to gestate the novel and let it settle, and further time tinkering to get it right.”

That’s lesson 5.5: if someone criticizes you or your work, and it hurts you, is it because you knew deep down that you could have made it better? Think about that.

If, like me, you read this book (or notes) and want to start writing novels, a word of caution: only start writing novels if you love writing novels…not because you love the idea of being a novelist. As Paul Graham puts it:

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.

That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Impressions

Novelist as a Vocation is an entertaining anthology of essays–some reprinted, some original–about writing and life. Though there are some practical tips for aspiring novelists like how to let the plot decide characters and the three requirements for creativity, I mostly enjoyed the behind-the-scenes look at how Murakami writes (and how he got started doing so). There is one chapter that takes you through, rewrite by rewrite, how Murakami drafts, edits, and eventually publishes a novel. That sort of insight is rare.

Notes

Murakami’s goal in writing this book was simple: “What I was after was to write, in the most concrete and practical way, about the path I’ve followed as a novelist, and the ideas and thoughts I’ve had in the process. That said, writing novels is nothing less than expressing yourself…”

“The only way I can think about things in any kind of order is by putting them in writing. Physically moving my hand as I write, rereading what I write, over and over, and closely reworking it–only then am I finally able to gather my thoughts and grasp them like other people do.”

This was just a beautiful piece of language Murakami used when talking about Underground: “I had stepped on the tails of the tigers who guard the sacred sanctuary of nonfiction, and they were angry.”

When talking about authors and other specialist’s attitudes towards newcomers, Murakami makes an interesting point: “The narrower and more specialized the field, I have found, the prouder the authorities tend to be and the stronger their antipathy to outsiders.”

On intensity vs. consistency he says, “It’s not that difficult to write a novel, maybe even two. But it’s another thing altogether to keep producing, to live off one’s writing, to survive.” He writes later, “It’s not difficult to write a single novel. Even a very good novel, depending on who you are. It isn’t easy to pull off, but it’s not impossible. What’s really hard is to keep on writing novels year after year. That’s not something anyone can do.”

It’s not impressive to just write a novel. I mean it is…but it isn’t at the same time. What’s impressive is writing a novel every year for thirty years. It’s not just about what you do, it’s about how long you’ve been doing it for. Morgan Housel explains in The Psychology of Money that this is why Warren Buffett is so famous. Other investors have made Buffett-sized returns, but none have been doing it for fifty years.

Writing is hard because you make a thousand tiny improvements that no one knows about. You don’t get a pat on the back for taking a complicated sentence and making it simple, because that’s your job. “Novelists sit cloistered in their rooms, intently fiddling with words, batting around one possibility after another,” Murakami writes. “They may scratch their heads an entire day to improve the quality of a single line by a tiny bit. No one applauds, or says ‘Well done’ or pats them on the back. Sitting there alone, they look over what they’ve accomplished and quietly nod to themselves. It may be later, when the novel comes out, not a single reader will notice the improvement they made that day. That is what novel writing is really all about. It is time-consuming and tedious work.”

If that doesn’t sound appealing, don’t become a writer. “We spend our day behind closed doors doing the intricate type of operations, day after day after day. The process is virtually endless. If you aren’t built for that sort of work and can’t shrug off all that it entails, there’s no way you’ll keep it up over the long haul.”

A novelist, and really all writers, need to keep moving; they need to keep doing something. Murakami says a writer understands “a leisurely life” to mean “the waning of one’s creativity.” “For novelists are like certain types of fish. If they don’t keep swimming forward, they die.”

I just liked this sentence: “’Learning about the world sounds rather presumptuous, but what I mean is that I grew up.” He writes later, “I imagine others have a lot more fun in their twenties, but I had neither the time nor the money to enjoy the ‘sweet days of youth.’ Still, I read whenever I had the chance. Life might have been hectic and things might have been rough, but the joy I took in books and music never wavered. That, at least, was something no one could take from me.”

Constraint leads to creativity. When Murakami began writing his first novel, he had trouble getting started. I imagine this is the case for most aspiring novelists. Instead of trying to work harder, he changed his tactic. First, he ditched his fountain pen and fancy manuscript paper. “As long as they were in front of me,” he says, “what I was doing felt like literature.” Instead, he used an old Olivetti typewriter and began writing the opening of his novel in English.

Though he didn’t have a Churchillian command of the English language, he had enough to work with. “I could only write in short, simple sentences,” he says. But instead of letting this hinder his performance, it actually helped it. “However complex and numerous the thoughts running around in my head, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, and everything arranged to fit a container of limited size.” Though the prose wasn’t poetic, “a distinctive rhythm began to take shape.”

Writing in English, his brain avoided the “system overload” that accompanied writing in Japanese. “It also led me to the realization that I could express my thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, as long as I combined them effectively and linked them together in a skillful manner. Ultimately, I learned that there was no need for a lot of difficult words–I didn’t have to try to impress people with beautiful turns of phrases.”

When he had the introduction written, he “transplanted” it to Japanese. What emerged was a unique style–unique to him–that became his and his alone. “Now I get it,” he writes. “This is how I should be doing it.”

Some criticized this simplicity, saying it removed the beauty from the Japanese language. Murakami didn’t think this was the case. “It is the right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language and expand the range of its effectiveness. Without that adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born.

He uses a great simile to describe what writing in Japanese felt like: “Writing in that style had been like exercising in clothes that didn’t fit.”

Another way Murakami illustrates the obstacle is the way is through the plot of his first novel. “When I began my first novel,” he writes, “I knew I had no choice but to write about having nothing to write about. That I would somehow have to turn having nothing to write about into a weapon if I was going to move forward as a novelist.”

He writes later, “In my opinion (and this is based on my experience), having nothing you feel compelled to write about may make it harder to get started, but once the engine kicks in and the vehicle starts rolling, the writing is actually easier. This is because the flip side of having nothing you must write is being able to freely write about anything.”

Murakami has a disdain for literary prizes. “The most important thing,” he says to interviewers who ask him about literary prizes, “is good readers. Nothing means as much as the people who dip into their pockets to buy my books–not prizes, or medals, or critical praise.” He writes later, “Readers have no ulterior motives when they shell out twenty or thirty dollars for one of my books…At the risk of stating the obvious, it is literary works that last, not literary prizes.” His reasoning is simple: “A literary prize can turn the spotlight on a particular work, but it can’t breathe life into it. It’s that simple.”

I feel the same way about online fame, fortune, and followers. It’s not hard to get their work into the spotlight or the algorithm, but does it have life? Can it move someone to action beyond clicking a button? Do tears and chills swell up in the reader, or do the thoughts dissipate into the great chasm of ones and zeroes?

He also doesn’t join literary panels. He sees no point in them. He’s a writer, not a critic. “A writer’s greatest responsibility is to his readers, to keep providing them with the best work that he is capable of turning out. I am an active writer…The task set before me is to survive, and to try and keep moving ahead. Developing the objectivity needed to approve of or reject others’ works in a responsible manner, however, sits entirely outside the boundaries of that battlefield.”

Lesson: Stay within the battlefield. Fight the battles you want to win.

He also doesn’t do public book signings for the same reason. “I’m a professional writer, what I can do best is write novels, and as much as I can I want to invest all my energy in that.”

The old establishment always rejects the new. Always. “People instinctively dislike those things they can’t understand, a pattern characteristic of members of the establishment who are buried up to their ears in the dominant forms of expression,” Murakami writes. “They tend to apprehend the newcomer with abhorrence and disgust, because, in a worst-case scenario, the very ground upon which they stand might fall away from under them.”

For something to be truly original, Murakami prescribes three basic requirements:

The artist should possess a clearly unique and individual style. That style should be immediately noticeable on first sight as well.
That style, though unique, should never stagnate. It should grow with time and build upon itself.
Over time, that style should become part of the audience; to become the basic standard of their evaluation. Other artists should see that style as a wellspring of inspiration from which they can draw.

Not all three requirements are necessary for an artist to be original, though. Usually, two are clear while the other is less so. That’s okay.

One defining characteristic of originality is time. “When an artist with a unique style grabs the eyes or ears of the public and then vanishes from sight or grows tiresome, it’s hard to call them ‘original.’” We must see an accumulated body of work before judging an artist’s originality.

“Suppose, for example, that Beethoven had composed only one symphony in his life–the Ninth. How then would we evaluate him as a composer? Could we deduce the Ninth’s intrinsic significance, or its degree of originality, in isolation? I think it would be very difficult. Looking at his symphonies alone, I think it is only because we are able to see the Ninth as a continuation from the First through the Eighth that we can fathom the Ninth’s greatness, and its overwhelming originality, in a three-dimensional and contextualized way.”

In the end, here are the words that Murakami explains as the best definition of originality: “Fresh, energetic, and unmistakably your own.”

Criticism is another sign that something might be original, though this is seldom definitive. “Better to evoke a strong response, even a negative one,” Murakami writes, “than to elicit nothing but humdrum comments and lukewarm praise.”

A key to battling writer’s block is to have something to do when the muse isn’t musing.

“I have been writing fiction for more than thirty-five years at the time of this book’s writing; yet I have never experienced what is commonly known as ‘writer’s block.’ Wanting to write but being unable is unknown to me. That may make it sound as if I am overflowing with talent, but the actual reason is much simpler: I never write unless I really want to, unless the desire to write is overwhelming. When I feel that desire, I sit down and set to work. When I don’t feel it, I usually turn to translating from English. Since translation is essentially a technical operation, I can pursue it on a daily basis, quite separate from my creative desire; yet at the same time, it is a good way to hone my writing skills.”

If you don’t know what to write about, the first thing you should do is read a lot of what you think you want to write. “I think the first task for the aspiring novelist is to read tons of novels. Sorry to start with such a commonplace observation, but no training is more crucial. To write a novel, you must understand at a physical level how one is put together. This point is as self-evident as the truism ‘You can’t make an omelette without scrambling a few eggs.’

Then, make a habit of looking at things and events in more detail.”

When you gather information, don’t be in a hurry to form an opinion or act on it. That leads to chaos and unnecessary drama and misunderstandings. “When less time is taken between gathering information and acting on it, so that everyone becomes a critic or a news commentator, then the world becomes an edgier, less reflective place. And probably much more dangerous, too. Opinion surveys allow you to check the box ‘Undecided.’ Well, I think there should be another box you can check: ‘Undecided at this present time.’”

Murakami explains that putting together a good novel is like the scene in E.T. when the alien builds a device to “phone home” out of a bunch of random junk in the garage. “The key component is not the quality of the materials–what’s needed is magic. If that magic is present, the most basic daily matters and the plainest language can be turned into a device of surprising sophistication.”

The key, then, is to always be collecting things in your garage. “Magic can’t work if your garage is empty,” Murakami writes. “You’ve got to stash away a lot of junk to use if and when E.T. comes calling!”

If you’re lamenting that you have nothing to write about, you’re giving up much too easily. “If you just shift your focus a little bit and slightly alter your way of thinking, you will discover a wealth of material lying about just waiting to be picked up and used. You only have to look (look at your fish). In the field of human endeavor, things that seem mundane at first glance can, if you persevere, give birth to and endless array of insights. All you need to do, as I said before, is retain your healthy writerly ambition.”

“Every era, every generation, experiences its own ‘reality.’ The novelist’s job of painstakingly collecting and stockpiling that material is as crucial as ever, and will remain so in the future. So if your aim is to write fiction, take a close look around you. The world may appear a mundane place, but in fact it is filled with a variety of enigmatic and mysterious ores. Novelists are people who happen to have the knack of discovering and refining that raw material. Even more wonderful: the process costs virtually nothing. If you are blessed with a pair of good eyes, you too can mine the ore you choose to your heart’s content.

Can you think of a more wonderful way to make a living?”

“When writing a novel, my rule is to produce roughly ten Japanese manuscript pages (the equivalent of sixteen hundred English words) every day…On days where I want to write more, I still stop after ten pages; when I don’t feel like writing I force myself to somehow fulfill my quota. Why do I do it this way? Because it is especially important to maintain a steady pace when tackling a big project. That can’t work if you write a lot one day and nothing the next. So I punch in, write my ten pages, and then punch out, as if I’m working on a time card.”

“No matter how long the novel is, or how complex its structure, I will have composed it without any fixed outline, not knowing how it will unfold or end, letting things take their course and improvising as I go alone.”

On the first write, Murakami just keeps writing until the end, not editing at all. Then he waits a little while. When he returns, he reads through it to make sure the plot makes sense and there are no inconsistencies. On the second rewrite, he looks at the smaller details. He changes dialogue, descriptions of characters, and so forth. Then, he takes another break. On the third rewrite he tweaks the novel slightly, “tightening a screw here, loosening a screw there, making sure that all is in place.”

After this, he sticks the manuscript in his desk drawer and takes a longer break. To two weeks or sometimes even a month. During this break, he either takes a trip or works on his translating. “The time spent working on a long novel is important, to be sure, but time spent doing nothing is no less so.” This reminds me of what Ray Bradbury says about being away from the typewriter. “The time we have alone–the time we have walking, the time we have riding a bicycle–is the most important time for a writer,” he says. “Escaping from the typewriter is part of the creative process. You have to give the subconscious time to think.”

The time away allows new details to jump out at Murakami that he hadn’t noticed before. “I can sense what has depth and what doesn’t. Just as the work settled, so too has my state of mind.”

Murakami deals with feedback from early readers, usually his wife, in an interesting way. Whether or not he agrees with their feedback is irrelevant because he rewrites every scene someone gave feedback on. In the end, even though he disagrees with their feedback, sometimes he takes the scene in an entirely different way.

“It seems that when a reader has a problem,” he writes, “there is usually something that needs fixing, whether or not it corresponds to their suggestions.” This echoes advice given to founders: if a user has a problem, you should listen to them. But if they tell you how to fix it, ignore them.

Criticism doesn’t bother Murakami because he knows, in the end, he gave all he could. He didn’t try to write a bad story, try to cheat or cut corners. He gave all he could and if for some reason that wasn’t good enough, well…that’s quite alright with him. “I know at the physical level that I cut no corners in the writing; that I gave it all I had. I spent whatever time was needed to gestate the novel and let it settle, and further time tinkering to get it right.”

Criticism hurts the most when you know you could’ve done better.

As a writer, you only do a disservice to your readers if you don’t take the time to make it great. Raymond Carver writing in The New York Times had a gripe with an author who said, “It would have been better if I’d taken the time.” Carver writes:

“I was dumbfounded when I heard a novelist friend say this. I still am, if I think about it, which I don’t. It’s none of my business. But if the writing can’t be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, it’s all we have, the only thing we can take into the grave. I wanted to say to my friend, for heaven’s sake go do something else. There have to be easier and maybe more honest ways to try and earn a living. Or else just do it to the best of your abilities, your talents, and then don’t justify or make excuses. Don’t complain, don’t explain.

There is always room for improvement and feedback. While writing Dance, Dance, Dance, Murakami used a word processor for the first time. While moving from Rome to London, a chapter somehow went missing and it could not be recovered. He was upset because it was a long chapter and he remembers writing it beautifully. After a few weeks, he resolved to just write it again, trying to remember how it went. Some time later, that missing chapter showed up again on his computer. He was flustered. Should he add the original chapter back in? After reading it though, he was relieved to “see that in face the rewrite was far superior. What this story shows is that, no matter what you have written, it can be made better.”

He writes later, “What’s crucial, in short, is the physical act of rewriting. What carries more weight than anything else is the resolve to sit down at one’s desk to improve what one has written. Compared to that, the question of which direction to take in those improvements may be of secondary importance.”

When you rewrite something, you can feel the choppiness, the places where the words just don’t flow. That sort of observation is harder to do when you’re just editing what you already wrote.

Murakami writes about a story from Raymond Carver. Carver wrote, about another writer, that “he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places.” Murakami acknowledges that there is a limit to editing. “If you tinker any more you will only damage what you have written. It’s a subtle point, easy to miss.”

The most important habit you must cultivate as a writer is to write. The second most important habit you must cultivate is exercise. “You have to become very physically fit,” Murakami writes. “You need to become robust and physically strong. And make your body your ally…The everyday combination of physical exercise and the intellectual process provides an ideal influence on the type of creative work the writer is engaged in…As I’ve followed this lifestyle, I get the feeling every day that my ability as a writer is gradually improving, and my creativity is becoming more secure and steady.”

“As long as you don’t mind putting in honest effort, the quality of the work you produce will also naturally be improved.”

This is a great explanation of why I love to read:

If you always see things from your own standpoint, the world shrinks. Your body gets stiff, your footwork grows heavy, and you can no longer move. But if you’re able to view where you’re standing from other perspectives–to put it another way, if you can entrust your existence to some other system–the world will grow more three-dimensional, more supple. And I believe that as long as we live in this world, that kind of agile stance is extremely important.

Murakami believes in the philosophy of getting 1% better each day:

In this way, every time I write a new novel I tell myself, “Okay, this time, here is what I’m going to try to accomplish,” one by one setting up concrete goals for myself–for the most part visible, technical types of goals. I enjoy writing like that. As I clear a new hurdle and accomplish something new or different, I get a real sense that I’ve grown, even if it’s a little, as a writer. It’s like climbing, step by step, up a ladder. The wonderful thing about being a novelist is that even in your fifties and sixties, that kind of growth and innovation is possible. There’s no age limit. The same wouldn’t hold true for an athlete.

Writing on characters, Murakami says novels must have characters that act, speak, and do unpredictable things. They have to still be real, but unpredictable. But that’s not all. The characters must also be able to advance the story. “Of course it’s the writer who creates the characters; but characters who are–in a real sense–alive will eventually break free of the writer’s control and begin to act independently. I’m not the only one who feels this–many fiction writers acknowledge it. In fact, unless that phenomenon occurs, writing the novel becomes a strained, painful, and trying process. When a novel is on the right track, characters take on a life of their own, the story moves forward by itself, and a very happy situation evolves whereby the novelist just ends up writing down what he sees happening in front of him. And in some cases the character takes the novelist by the hand and leads him or her to an unexpected destination.”

A writer must also let the plot decide the characters and not the other way around.

How to read more (if you have trouble reading)

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t think there are any secrets to reading more other than just sitting down to read.

Though that’s true, it’s not very actionable, and advice that isn’t actionable sucks.

So here are some things that have helped me read (and enjoy reading) a lot of books.

If you have plenty of time to read but can’t focus, the book you’re reading is probably bad

I’ve heard this from a lot of people: “I want to read more, but I just can’t focus.” If that’s you, know you’re not alone. While I can’t diagnose the issue for sure, something that might be causing the problem is that you just don’t like the book. Some books are boring, dry, and not very fun to read. If that’s the case, yeah, it’s going to be hard to focus.

If you’ve ever sat through a movie, you know it’s possible for you to sit down and do something for an uninterrupted amount of time as long as you’re interested. Therefore, you most likely don’t have a focus problem, you have a book selection problem.

Ditch the boring book and pick up a new one! And another new one…and another new one…and another new one…until you find one that makes 60 minutes feel like ten.

Quit more books

The biggest lie people believe about reading is that they can’t quit books. Hear it from me: you can! It’s perfectly okay to get a few chapters into a book and think, “Meh, this isn’t for me.” I do this all the time.

Life is too short to read boring books.

This is hard to do with books that signal status. It’s not hard to quit, but it’s hard to look at others and think, “Man they finished that book and liked it? I thought it was so boring! Maybe they’re smarter than me…” I know that’s hard to get over, but you have to try.

I tried reading The Power Broker because of how many people raved about it and I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t give it up completely, just put it back on the shelf for later. That’s hard to admit, but true. I probably quit around then books last year.

If you have plenty of focus but can’t find the time, you’re probably wasting it somewhere

Something something we all have the same 24 hours in a day something something.

While that saying has become abused by people who #hustle every day, it’s still true.

How many hours a week do you spend watching TV? How many hours do you lose scrolling social media? How many hours dissipate into the ether because you don’t know what to do next?

If you want to spend an hour a day reading, you most likely have to quit doing something else for an hour. That’s just the way life is. (Or you can wake up earlier/stay up later. That’s okay too.)

…but what if I’m not wasting time?

If you don’t feel like you’re wasting any time, good! What you need to do then is utilize the “spare change” more effectively.

Like finding nickels and dimes in your couch, you need to find 10 or 15 minutes throughout the day to make progress on your reading goal. Austin Kleon puts it well, “People often ask me, ‘How do you find the time for the work?’ And I answer, ‘I look for it.’ You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies.”

Some people who want to read for an hour a day think they need an uninterrupted hour. While I recommend that (so you can get lost in the book easier), it’s not necessary, especially at first.

Read for the extra 10 minutes before a meeting or for 15 minutes on your lunch break. A good rule to follow is anytime you don’t know what you should do next, read. You might only get through a couple of pages, but that’s how all books are read: page by page.

Read multiple books at the same time

Another good rule to follow is to always read three or four books at a time. This works because it makes reading for three hours in a row much more enjoyable. Instead of reading one book for three hours, you can read three books for an hour.

This also works because you’re never in the same “reading mood.” Sometimes you want something light and fun just to pass the time. Other times you want to read something long and important. Still others, you just want to read a good novel. So having a book to match each of these moods will help you read more.

If you’re only reading one book at a time and the reading mood you’re in doesn’t match the type of book you have, you won’t read at all.

Most people recommend reading a fiction book, a light non-fiction book, a heavy non-fiction book, and a biography or memoir all at the same time. I think that’s a good outline to follow until you realize what you truly love to read. I used to follow that, but now I just have a couple different biographies I’m reading at once, an instructional or how-to book, and a novel I read before bed or when I’m waiting in line somewhere. Currently I’m reading The Wright Brothers, Genius, In Search of J.D. Salinger, Bird by Bird, and The Catcher in the Rye.

Make it an experience

Finally, make reading an experience. Having a book you can’t wait to finish helps (see number one), but it’s not the only thing you can control. What type of music you listen to, where you sit in your house (or at a coffee shop), and what beverage you have to consume are all things that can encourage you to read more.

If you love to have a beer or glass of wine every night to unwind, make a rule for yourself that you can only do so while reading a book. That way you pair something you love (having a beer) with something you want-to-love (reading).

Sit down and read

While these tips have been helpful for me, remember, there is no secret to reading other than sitting down to read. You probably don’t need to watch a YouTube video teaching you how to read better (you can just start reading) or pay for an online course to learn how to read more (you can just start reading more).

Start with a physical magazine article (I like The Atlantic) or a poem if you have trouble committing to something as long as a book. There are also dozens of speeches and articles that contain unique insights and are less cumbersome to get through.

I hope these help. Happy reading.

PS If you’re looking for recommendations, I just finished Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami and loved it. (You can read my notes here.) Splendid and the Vile is good too. I have more recommendations here. You can visit my company’s site for more too.

221b: Irrationality, Mistakes, Ego, Third-Place, & Impressions

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Irrational

People don’t make irrational decisions on purpose. I learned this from The Psychology of Money. If someone is doing something, to that person, it makes perfect sense even though it looks idiotic to someone else.

Morgan Housel, the author, has a funny story that illustrates that same lesson. The story goes like this: Every day, a father would offer his son the choice between a nickel and a dime, and for whatever reason, his son always chose the nickel. His little brother thought this was crazy! “You do know a dime is worth twice as much as a nickel? You’re crazy for choosing the nickel!” his brother said. “Wrong,” the son replied, “because if I took the dime, dad would stop offering it!”

The game someone is playing isn’t always obvious.

Mistakes

Potty training a dog is tedious work. Often, it’s made more tedious because it’s hard to train a dog not to go to the bathroom inside unless they go to the bathroom inside. I was taught to stick the dog’s nose close to the accident, tell them, “No! Bad dog! Outside!” and then put them outside immediately. Eventually, they learned.

But the learning doesn’t come from getting put outside or even going to the bathroom in the house; it’s getting their nose stuck in it so they can associate that smell with being outside. We should do the same with our mistakes. In the words of Charlie Munger, “I know I’ll perform better if I rub my nose in my own mistakes.” If you make a mistake and move on without asking what went wrong, you’re cheating yourself of the opportunity to get better. Mistakes aren’t bad; repeated mistakes are.

Ego

Speaking to Stanford Business School, Marc Andreessen says he sees two common mistakes Venture Capitalists make: omission and commission. Mistakes of commission, he says, are when you invest everything you have in a company and lose it all. This is tough, but it’s easy to get over in time. Mistakes of omission are different. Not investing when you had the chance to will scar you for life. “Take the bet, lose 1X,” he says, “Don’t take the bet and possibly miss on 1,000X.”

Andreessen says people regularly make mistakes of omission because they don’t have an open mind. They form an idea, such as No one will want to sleep in a stranger’s home, and gather evidence that confirms that opinion. This is dangerous. Just because something didn’t work in the past doesn’t mean it won’t work in the future. “Just because MySpace didn’t reach Facebook levels of scale didn’t mean Facebook wouldn’t be able to. So you have to be ruthlessly open-minded and constantly willing to reexamine your assumptions...You have to take the ego out of ideas,” he says, “which is a very hard thing to do.”

Third-Place

I romanticize pubs, cafés, and coffee shops. The unplanned conversations, meet-ups, and run-ins are healthy. They provide a great break from the grind of daily life. Apparently, there’s an actual name for these types of places, The Third Place. An article in The Atlantic describes The Third Place as “a physical location other than work or home where there’s little to no financial barrier to entry and where conversation is the primary activity.” The author declares that Third Places are becoming less frequent because of our productivity-obsessed culture. Also, cities where most Third Place institutions are naturally built are expensive to live in, so people work long hours and have little time just to chill. “Urban-dwelling Americans, however, tend to place work at the center of life in part because cities are so expensive to live in. They might work 50-hour weeks to survive, leaving little to no time for leisure and community engagement,” she writes. “Unstructured quality time with friends is replaced with a scheduled series of continuous catch-ups. Subsequently, these overscheduled people lack meaningful ties with their neighbors, and so they patronize spaces to make those connections even less frequently.”

I like to learn the names of things because you can only talk about what you can describe, so knowing “places where people casually hang out” are more formally called Third Places is interesting.

Quote I’m thinking about

“If you try to make an impression, that’s the impression you’ll make.”

– Jason Zweig’s dad.

221b: Fish, Thinking, Knowledge, Waste, Genius

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Look at Your Fish

Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard naturalist, would place a smelly old fish in front of each one of his students and say, “Look at your fish,” then he’d leave. Upon returning, he would ask each student what they had seen. Naturally, there wasn’t much to say. So he’d leave and come back; he’d repeat this cycle for days. One student, unable to see what he thought he was supposed to see, eventually realized how little he had seen before. Finally, the following day, the student announced to Agassiz: Paired organs! The same on both sides! Agassiz was pleased.

David McCullough, the biographer, uses that story when teaching writing classes. “Seeing is so important…” he says. “Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than 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.” Quoting Dickens, he says, “Make me see.”

Good is a myth

The stories we tell ourselves create more drama in our lives than reality. We’ve all experienced the sunk stomach feeling–the text from a boss, “Do you have a second to chat?”; the ominous voicemail from someone you’ve been seeing, “Hey, something came up. I have to cancel…”–that turns our head into writing a screenplay. I resonated with this passage from a novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: “And yet, he knew himself and he knew he was the type of person that never called anyone, unless he was absolutely certain the advance would be welcomed. His brain was treacherously negative. He would invent that she had been cold toward him, that she hadn’t even had a class that day, that she had simply wanted to get away from Sam. His brain would insist that if she’d wanted to see him, she would have given him a way to contact her. “ But as Shakespeare wrote, “There is nothing good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Knowledge

Information creates clutter; wisdom creates clarity. Information creates confusion; wisdom creates insight. Though the two are often taken as one and the same, there is a difference. Knowing the order and terms of American presidents is information; wisdom is knowing how each President handled a failure in office and strategies they used to deal with conflict. “‘One needs to differentiate between information, knowledge and wisdom,” Henry Kissinger said. “In the internet era they tend to get mixed up. The more time one spends simply absorbing information, the less time one has to apply wisdom.”

Waste your time

Robert Caro didn’t intend to write about the many love affairs President Johnson had had in The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson. This was mainly because he didn’t think any of them really impacted his political career or influence, until he stumbled upon Alice Marsh. Caro writes, “Then, however, while turning pages in a folder whose label, ‘Public Activities–Biographic Information–Naval Career,’ hinted very strongly that turning pages in this folder would be a total waste of time, and whose contents seemed to consist largely of mimeographed copies of a press release about Johnson’s activities in the Pacific in 1942, there was, suddenly, and age-browned Western Union form: CHARLES BELIEVES YOU SHOULD FILE FOR SENATE, it said. POLLS SHOW YOU LEADING. NO ONE ELSE SHARES HIS OPINION ENTHUSIASTICALLY. IF POSSIBLE, TELEPHONE. LOVE, ALICE MARSH.” This character in Johnson’s life was peculiar and it opened up a lot of rabbit holes for Caro. He may have not stumbled upon it otherwise if he hadn’t wasted his time with a boring folder. Caro “looked at the fish” and saw what no one else could.

Genius

“A Genius! For thirty-seven years I’ve practiced fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!”

– Pablo de Sarasate

221b: Kubrick, Reputation, Star Trek, Time, & Observation

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Rules

Filmmaker extraordinaire Stanley Kubrick had 12 rules posted in every room in his house. They were simple yet effective. They were…

If you open it, close it!
If you turn it on, turn it off!
If you unlock it, lock it! If you break it, repair it!
If you can’t fix it, call someone who can!
If you borrow it, return it!
If you use it, take care of it!
If you make a mess, clean it up!
If you move it, put it back!
If it belongs to someone else, get permission to use it!
If you don’t know how to operate it, leave it alone!
If it doesn’t concern you, don’t mess with it!

Reputation

Lord Beaverbrook resigned his post as Air Minister for Britain three times by the start of 1941. Though he was a bit more serious about it each time, Churchill was able to persuade him to stay on; Churchill’s patience, however, was waning.

In response to his third resignation attempt, Churchill replied, “My Dear Max, I am very sorry to receive your letter. Your resignation would be quite unjustified and would be regarded as desertion. It would in one day destroy all the reputation that you have gained and turn the gratitude and goodwill of millions of people to anger. It is a step you would regret all your life.”

Reputation takes a lifetime to gain and a second to lose.

Star Trek

Lieutenant Uhura, a proud citizen of the United States of Africa, was fourth in command aboard the spaceship Enterprise in the show Star Trek. 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, King said, “You can’t leave the show…We are there because you are there.”

Shetterly continues:

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.

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

Dissatisfaction

In 1908, philosopher Arnold Bennet wrote one of the most practical guides on time management ever published. The ideas are simple, but Bennett’s setup on the importance of time management is crucial to understand. “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,” Bennett writes, “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.’”

Dissatisfaction is caused by many things in life: stress, busyness, work, and so much more. One pertinent cause is the feeling of regret that you lost your chance at what could’ve been. True, some things are probably said and done, but some aren’t. If you want to change your career, take some classes online. If you want to run a marathon, start training for it today. I’m sure you’re incredibly busy, but you can find 30 minutes here or there to start. It’s important to start now because you’ll never have “more time.”

A quote on my mind

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by chance ever observes."

– Sherlock Holmes

Annie Dillard’s Advice on Keeping a Daily Routine

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Whenever great artists talk about their craft, I pay attention. The meta-analyses on why they do what they do (and how) is refreshing because there is rarely a trick. There’s no praying to a special creative god to give them powers or spell they cast on their typewriter. It’s often that they just show up, work, leave, and repeat.

This is why it’s hard to learn about how great writers write, because even they don’t know. To them, they just write. Maybe they assume that it’s just what everyone does, so why bore people with the details?

Sometimes, though, we do get a peek behind the curtain. Such was the case in Annie Dillard’s short and sporadic reflections on writing in her book, “The Writing Life.”

Speaking on the importance of a daily routine, she writes:

”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.”

Having a good day is of the utmost importance because good days make a good life:

“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?”

Pair this with an analysis on the life of Albert Einstein.

The Splendid and the Vile

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Impressions

I can confidently say that The Splendid and the Vile is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Drawing on an abundance of diary entries from Churchill’s daughter, one of his private secretaries, and the ocean of information previously published, Erik Larson paints a unique portrait of Churchill and what life was like during the Blitz; the likes of which, no matter how hard I try, I can’t begin to fathom what was like. In this book, one sees the love and care Churchill had for the British people. (And his more light-hearted sides, like welcoming FDR into his room at the White House while in the nude, like it was a quite normal thing for one to do.)

Many tears were shed and shivers felt while reading about life in war-torn London.

Notes

“If I had to spend my whole life with a man, I’d choose Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr. Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.” – Nella Last, Mass Observationist

Churchill demanded his staff kept their memos to under one page and to ensure brevity. “it is slothful not to compress your thoughts,” he said.

Churchill made people feel “stronger, loftier, and, above all, more courageous,” Larson writes. John Martin, a private secretary for Churchill, said Churchill, “gave forth a confidence and invincible will that called out everything that was brave and strong.” Martin continued writing that Britons began to see themselves as “protagonists on a vaster scene as champions of a high and invincible cause, for which the stars in their courses were fighting.”

Inspector Thomas reported one evening that while he was dictating minutes to a secretary, a bat flew into the room after a window was cracked up. The secretary started going crazy, batting away at it and freaking out. “Surely you’re not afraid of a bat, are you?” Churchill asked. She was. “I’ll protect you,” he said. “Get to work.”

A country home, given to the government by Sir Arthur Lee in 1917, is where Churchill spent most of his weekends. However, Churchill often broke one of the rules which Lee dictated for his estate to be used, only for rest and renewal, no work. Lee writes, “Apart from these subtle influences, the better the health of our rulers, the more sanely will they rule and the inducement to spend two days a week in the high and pure air of the Chiltern hills and woods will, it is hoped, result in a real advantage to the nation as well as to its chosen leaders.

After hearing the news that the French were moving closer to capitulating, Churchill said to an aide, “Tell them…that if they let us have their fleet we shall never forget, but that if they surrender without consulting us we shall never forgive. We shall blacken their name for a thousand years!” A moment passed. Then he added, “Don’t, of course, do that just yet.”

After hearing about the bombing and sinking of the Lancastria, where over 4,000 lives were lost, Churchill barred the press from reporting it. “The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least,” he said. This didn’t go over well and the news couldn’t be hidden for long, especially since 2,500 survivors soon arrived in Britain. Eventually, The New York Times broke the story and the British public was quite upset. According to the Home Intelligence Agency, “The withholding of the news of the Lancastria is the subject of much adverse criticism. The blatant censorship led the public to imagine what other bad news was being hidden from them.

Germany’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, was a wizard. His crew did everything they could to disrupt morale in Britain. He wanted to set up Britain as the enemy, like they were the ones causing all the problems. He declared to his foreign-language transmitters that they “deliberately and systematically operate with slogans on the lines of ‘Nations of Europe: Britain is organizing your starvation!”

I thought this was an interesting reverse lesson on features vs. benefits. Instead of just saying, “Britain is causing the war,” they attacked where it hurt, where more people were experiencing it on a day-to-day basis: the food supply.

— — — — — — — — — — —

These secret transmitters were broadcasting from Germany with the illusion that they were English radio stations. Their goal was “to arouse alarm and fear among the British people.” To blend in, they’d start their broadcasts with unfavorable opinions about the Nazi party followed by grim reports of air death and injuries. The purpose of this was to instill fear in the British people so that when the German raids started on them, they’d already be in a mass panic.

Creating more drama, Goebbels instructed his transmitters to falsely report that the German army found hundreds of British uniforms left behind in Dunkirk and that the German army would wear the uniforms and parachute into Britain.

We all need someone to tell us when we’re wrong. For Churchill, his wife assumed that role.

“My Darling Winston,” she began a letter with, “I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.” She warned that though he was the most powerful man in the country, he must “combine urbanity, kindness, and if possible Olympic calm.” She continued, “I cannot bear that those who serve the Country and yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you…You won’t get the best results by irascibility and rudeness. They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality–(Rebellion in War time being out of the question!)” She ended, “Please forgive your loving devoted and watchful Clemmie.”

This was the second time she wrote this letter. The first being the previous week, but with a note of caution and error of self-discernment, decided to toss that one in the bin. After more reports came the following week, she knew the time had come.

Lord Beaverbrook, in an effort to increase aircraft output and in a striking example of the competence he had, devised a brilliant plan. After the citizens of Jamaica, then a British colony, sent money for contributing to the building of a bomber, Beaverbrook ensured this act of unprompted kindness got widespread attention. Soon, more gifts arrived. He realized this could be used to generate cash, yes, but also boost the morale of the public and of the employees building the planes. He leaned into the donations, but never directly asked for them. Rather, Larson writes, “he made a deliberate show of acknowledging those that arrived. When donations reached a certain level, the contributors could choose to name a specific fighter; a richer total allowed the donors to name a bomber.” Eventually, the BBC gave recognition to the donors on its nightly broadcasts. In the beginning, Beaverbrook wrote a personal letter to each donor, but once this became impossible, for the sheer number of letters he would have to write, he chose the gifts most worthy of attention, but not based on the total given, based on the sacrifice of each. Larson writes, “A child giving up a few pence was as likely to get a letter as was a rich industrialist.” By May 1941, the donations received totaled about 13 million pounds ($832 million). Though that amount barely made a dent in the overall production of the actual output of planes didn’t matter at all. “To countless men and women,” his secretary, David Farrer wrote, “he made easy the way to a more personal interest in the war and to an enthusiastic contribution to its waging.”

In a “minute” titled Brevity, Churchill set out rules for his staff to follow regarding written memos. He began: “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for essential points.”

What followed were four points for his staff to improve on with their reports:

First, reports should “set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.”
Any mention of complicated matters or statistical analysis should be included in an appendix.
The report should be able to be skimmed via only reading the headings, “which can be expanded orally if needed.”
Remove complicated prose, such as:
- “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…”
- “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect…”
He wrote, “Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is controversial.” He acknowledged that the change “may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of the officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.”

After the first attacks on Britain, the RAF seemed to have beaten the Luftwaffe at their own game. After hearing the news of success, Churchill said to his entourage in the car, “Don’t speak to me; I have never been so moved.” After a few moments of silence, he said, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” The line was an instant hit. Later, Churchill would use it in one of his most famous speeches.

You can’t believe everything.

In preparation for the British to start publicizing atrocious stories about how the German raids had killed old people and pregnant women, he told his crew to counter these with pictures of children killed in a May 10, 1940 air raid in Freiburg, Germany. What Goebbels failed to mention, though, was that this air raid that killed twenty children was actually a German attack carried out in error for thinking it was the French city of Dijon.

Churchill kept a commonplace book. He called it his “Keep Handy” file. “it is curious,” John Colville wrote, “to see how, as it were, he fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.” The realization came after Colville read a draft of one of Churchill’s upcoming speeches and realized he had heard bits and bobs of it before. Larson reports that, “Churchill tested ideas and phrases in the course of ordinary conversation.”

The Luftwaffe, catching on to the fact that when air raid sirens sounded in Britain, the airplane manufacturing factories stopped to take cover, routinely sent solo bombers of factories just to make them “cry wolf.”

A lesson in second-order thinking

“The wisdom of a 2-ounce tea ration is open to serious doubt,” Lindemann wrote to Churchill. “A large portion of the population consisting of the working class women who do all their own housework, and charwomen, rely exclusively on tea for a stimulant. It would be an understatement to call tea their principal luxury; it is their sole luxury.” His concern was for the second-order consequences of limiting one’s tea supply. “It is this class,” he warned, “which suffers most from the war. They meet the direct impact of high prices and scarcity. The blackout and, in certain cases, evacuation, impose further hardships. And they lack the compensation of new interests and adventures.” Tea was what kept morale high. If tea were to dwindle, well, so would morale. “If the whole of this class lost heart completely they might infect their menfolk and undermine morale, especially if intense bombardment added to their present troubles.”

Though this intercession had no overall effect on the tea ration, his thinking was clear and logical.

Olivia Cockett, for Mass-Observationist, defined well how the public was feeling about the looming danger of an imminent attack:

“I suppressed a horrid fantasy of fears on the lines of–sewer and water mains gone; gas gone; daren’t drink water (typhoid); then gas from cruising planes; and nowhere to go. Endless possibilities of horrors, difficult to dismiss during those listening hours in the night. My heart misses a beat whenever a car changes gear-up, or when someone runs, or walks very quickly, or suddenly stands still, or cocks their head on one side, or stares up at the sky, or says ‘Sshh!’ or whistles blow, or a door bags in the wind or a mosquito buzzes in the room. So taken all round my heart seems to miss more beats than it ticks!!”

Gauged by the Postal and Telegraph Censorship Department study of mail bound for America and Ireland, morale was highest in places that had been bombed the worst.

Alan Brooke, Commander in chief of Home Forces, noted in his diary how stressed he was, and the lack of solace he could seek in others made things worse. He wrote, “There was not a soul to whom one could disclose one’s inward anxieties without risking the calamitous effects of lack of confidence, demoralization, doubts, and all those insidious workings which undermine the power of resistance.” With everything that he had responsibility over, it all made “the prospect of the impending conflict a burden that was almost unbearable at times.”

This was just a beautiful piece of language used to describe the aftermath of dust in London after the first raid: “It was this dust that many Londoners remembered as being one of the most striking phenomena of this attack and of others that followed. As building erupted, thunderheads of pulverized brick, stone, plaster, and mortar billowed from eaves and attics, roofs and chimneys, hearths and furnaces–dust from the age of Cromwell, Dickens, and Victoria.

Len Jones, an eighteen-year-old, saw two heads sticking out from underneath some wreckage. “I recognized one head in particular; it was a Chinese man, Mr. Say, he had one eye closed, and then I began to realize that he was dead. When I saw the dead Chinese, I just convulsed and couldn’t get my breath. I was shaking completely. Then I thought well I must be dead, as they were, so I struck a match, and then tried to burn my finger, I kept doing this with a match to see if I was still alive. I could see, but I thought I cannot be alive, this is the end of the world.”

Visiting the East End after the attacks, people were dispirited, naturally, but happy to see Winston pay them a visit. Upon coming to a group of people, one woman shouted, “When are we going to bomb Berlin, Winnie?” “You leave that to me!” Churchill said with his fist shaking in the air. This caused the mood in the crowd to shift. A government employee, Samuel Battersby said, “Morale rose immediately. Everyone was satisfied and reassured. What could a Prime Minister at that time and in such desperate conditions say that was not pathetically inadequate–or even downright dangerous?” To him, Larson says, “it typified ‘the uniquely unpredictable magic that was Churchill’–his ability to transform ‘the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain stepping stone to ultimate victory.’” That is leadership.

One thing that had infuriated Londoners during these night raids wasn’t just the bombings, it was the fact that the Luftwaffe could come and go as they wished. The fact that the RAF was essentially blind at night was one reason the Luftwaffe flew with ease, but not the only one. Aiding their continual raids was the orders for anti-aircraft guns to conserve ammunition and only fire when aircraft were seen overhead, which was rare at night. This fact upset many Londoners.

“On Churchill’s orders,” Larson writes, “more guns were brought to the city, boosting the total to nearly two hundred, from ninety-two.” Also, Churchill gave the orders to fire at will, disregarding the previous fact to conserve ammunition, even though Churchill very well knew anti-aircraft guns rarely did any damage to German bombers. “The impact on civic morale was striking and immediate,” Laron reports.

Though the constant shooting and bombing kept everyone up, private secretary John Martin wrote that “Tails are up and, after a fifth sleepless night, everyone looks quite different this morning–cheerful and confident. It was a curious bit of mass psychology–the relief of hitting back.” The Home Intelligence reported the same, saying, “The dominating topic of conversation today is the anti-aircraft barrage of last night. This greatly stimulated morale: in public shelters, people cheered and conversation shows that the noise brought a shock of positive pleasure.”

***************************************************************************Lesson: What’s right for the people may not be what’s efficient or what looks best on paper. Yes, conserving ammo is important, but so is the overall morale. This was not something that seemed to be taken into effect during COVID, which I think resulted in a lot of upset people.

The public shelters were a terrible place to try and sleep, but not because of lack of care–well, kinda it was. But more so because the civil defense planners who made the shelters had not anticipated for air raids to happen at night. Before, bombers had to visually see the target, which was impossible at night. But with the advancements of radar, that fact was no longer true.

Churchill slept at 10 Downing Street. Much to the dismay of his wife, when the bombers came, Churchill climbed on the roof to watch.

During the raids, the simple things mattered. For a party for Mary Churchill, Winston’s daughter, Clementine, his wife, ordered a cake for her. “Mummie had ordered a lovely cake for me despite raids! How sweet she is!” Mary wrote in her diary.

Later that weekend, Mary reveled in the attention. She wrote: “How sweet everyone is in these terrible times to remember me being 18! I do appreciate it terribly.”

The sheer realization and “coming to terms with” attitude of the Londoners were surreal. Larson puts it well: “The raids generated a paradox: The odds that any one person would die on any one night were slim, but the odds that someone, somewhere in London would die were 100 percent. Safety was a product of luck alone. One young boy, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, a fireman or pilot or such, answered: ‘Alive.’”

The relentlessness caused people to feel strange ways. One diarist, after being missed by a bomb, wrote, “I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant. ‘I’ve been bombed!’, I kept saying to myself, over and over again–trying the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted. ‘I’ve been bombed!’…’I’ve been bombed–me!’ Never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.”

One raid on September 27 damaged the city’s zoo and let loose a zebra. Residents saw a black-and-white specter tearing through the streets!

A joke had begun making its way around the more cynical Berlin crowd: ‘An airplane carrying Hitler, Göring and Goebbels crashes. All three are killed. Who is saved?” Answer: the German people

Lesson: Opinions mean nothing

While working from his room at 10 Downing, Churchill learned that two bombs had fallen adjacent to the house but failed to detonate (that was a common occurrence). “Will they do us any damage when they explode?” He asked Colville. “I shouldn’t think so, sir,” Colville replied. “Is that just your opinion, because if so it’s worth nothing,” Churchill roared back. “You have never seen an unexploded bomb go off. Go and ask for an official report.”

This, Laron writes, “reinforced for Colville the folly of offering opinions in Churchill’s presence, ‘if one has nothing with which to back them.’”

During the presidential election, Roosevelt’s opponent set out to cast him as a warmonger. But instead of just saying something like, “FDR likes war,” he went with, “Our boys will be off to Europe in five months. Your boy will be off to Europe in five months.”

Though he lost, it’s a good lesson in focusing on the features vs. the benefits.

“When your boy is dying on some battlefield in Europe and he’s crying out ‘Mother! Mother!’–don’t blame Roosevelt because he sent your boy to war–blame YOURSELF, because YOU sent FDR back to the White House!”

Lesson: Saying don’t do something just encourages people to do something. Streisand Effect

Goebbels, the propaganda minister, bemoaned the fact that more German people were listening to the BBC. He ordered radio offenders to be sentenced and said, “every German must be clear in his mind that listening to these broadcasts represents an act of serious sabotage.”

These orders did the opposite. According to an RAF intelligence report summarized from captured German airmen, “in the long run worked in the opposite sense to that which was intended; it produced an irresistible urge to listen to them.”

Coventry, “best known for its medieval cathedral and for hosting, according to legend, the drafty eleventh-century ride of Lady Godiva (and as a by-product, gave rise to the term, “Peeping Tom,” after a man named Thomas was said to defy an edict ordering citizens not to peek at the passing countess.” From Wikipedia: The name "Peeping Tom" for a voyeur originates from later versions of this legend, in which a man named Thomas watched her ride and was struck blind or dead.

After a particularly brutal raid on Coventry, a quaint town, Churchill shed tears, “In these days, I often think of Our Lord.” That was all he could muster. “He sat down and looked at no one–” Larson writes, “the great orator made speechless by the weight of the day.” That’s a beautiful piece of language.

In the early days of the Blitz, America was hesitant to assist Britain. Churchill would write many letters seeking aid and reassurance, but there was a unique balance Churchill had to strike. Larson writes, “In writing the letter, Churchill once again had to find the right balance of confidence and need, as captured in the minutes of a meeting of his War Cabinet: ‘The Prime Minster said that if the picture was painted too darkly, elements in the United States would say that it was useless to help us, for such help would be wasted and thrown away. If too bright a picture was painted, then there might be a tendency to withhold assistance.’ The whole thing, Churchill grumbled, was a ‘bloody business.’”

Lesson: When asking for help, you can’t come off as too competent or not competent enough. There has to be a unique balance in life. When asking a mentor to take you under their wing, you must be proactive and do the work, but not too proactive for fear you may outshine them and they won’t want to aid in their own destruction. See: law 1 of power, don’t outshine the master.

Public shelters were a disaster. Liquid that shouldn’t be on the ground, was all over the place because there weren’t enough “latrines.” Some latrines were right next to other people’s beds! Most horribly, there were no provisions for making tea.

Clementine told Churchill she believed the problem was because too many agencies with overlapping authority were in charge of the shelters, resulting in nothing actually getting done. “The only way to get the matter straightened out is to have one authority for safety, health, and everything else, she wrote to the Prime Minister (carefully calling him his title and not Winston. “Division of authority is what is preventing improvement.”

Lord Beaverbrook resigned from his post as Air Minister (?) three times by the start of 1941. Each time, he got a bit more serious, yet each time, Winston was able to persuade him to stay on; Winston’s patience, however, was waning.

He wrote after this third resignation attempt: “My Dear Max, I am very sorry to receive your letter. Your resignation would be quite unjustified and would be regarded as desertion. It would in one day destroy all the reputation that you have gained and turn the gratitude and goodwill of millions of people to anger. It is a step you would regret all your life.”

Reputation takes a lifetime to gain and a second to lose.

During the war, the government invoked “double British summer time.” Though the clocks had not been turned back in the fall, they would still be sprung forward during the summer. This created two extra hours of daylight in the evening. These hours weren’t for more work to get done, though. Instead, it gave people more time to get home and settled before the blackouts began. Though helpful, it ensured the winter mornings would be quite long.

Churchill wooed FDR any chance he could get. When he sent to America a new ambassador, Churchill deliberately chose to send them on a new battleship, King George V. The reason was simple: Roosevelt loved ships and Churchill knew it. “No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt,” Churchill said. His choice of King George V. was to, “clothe the arrival of our new Ambassador, Lord Halifax, in the United States with every circumstance of importance.”

Eventually, anyone and everyone would have to deal with the realities of bombs being dropped in London…no matter who they were. Mary Churchill, Winston’s daughter, experienced this early in 1942. After the club she and her friends were planning to go to was bombed, and nearly everyone inside killed or severely injured, she seemed to finally face the realities. Until then, Larson notes, “the guns, the crews manning them, and the distant sounds and flashes had all seemed very remote, outside the bounds of daily life.” “Somehow,” Mary wrote in her diary, “these last did not seem real–of course it is only a terrible dream or figment of the imagination. But now–it is real–the Café de Paris hit–many fatal and serious casualties. They were dancing and laughing just like us. They are gone now in a moment from all we know to the vast, infinite unknown.”

I love reading the diary entries. One realizes the human heart, mind, and feelings hasn’t changed too much since then. Mary, after meeting a find navy man, wrote in her diary: “Now–Mary–take a hold on yourself–my little plum.” After getting a letter from him asking her out to dinner, she penned: “Oh heaven.” The following Sunday, he called her. They spoke for twenty minutes. “He is v. charming I think & has a very beautiful voice,” she wrote. “Oh dear–have I fallen, or have I?”

Churchill was a playerrrr. Larson explains, “Harriman noticed that as Churchill moved along the crowds, he used ‘his trick’ of making direct eye contact with individuals. At one point, believing Churchill to be out of earshot, Harriman told Pug Ismay, ‘The Prime Minister seems popular with the middle-aged women.’ Churchill heard the remark. He whirled to face Harriman. ‘What did you say? Not only with the middle-aged women; with the young ones too.’”

Clementine gave Mary sound advice for marriage: “Don’t marry someone because they want to marry you–but because you want to marry them.”

A leader can’t give anything–courage or hope or perseverance–but they can bring it out in people. Churchill knew this. Diana Cooper, the wife of information officer Duff Cooper, told Churchill that the best thing he had done was give people courage. Churchill disagreed. “I never gave them courage,” he said. “I was able to focus theirs.

Working by Robert Caro

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Impressions

Working is the book I was hoping it to be. Robert Caro has essentially spent his entire career immersed in the lives of two men–Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson–in an effort to explain the inner workings of political power. He wanted to know, in the case of Moses, how someone who was never an elected official seemed to have more influence than the governor. For LBJ, Caro was interested in how a poor boy from Texas walked into Washington as a junior politician and emerged later as an influential figure and Senate majority leader. Working is a culmination of the interviews, stories, and adventures Caro embarked on to understand and de-mystify political power. The book is full of tales about the wild things Caro had to do to better understand his subjects and the lives they lead, advice on writing, and how to properly research (hint: turn every page).

Notes

Slow down and don’t think with your fingers

Caro had to turn in a short story every two weeks and he always waited to do it until the last minute. Though he got a good grade, his professor wrote him, “You’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.” While writing for the daily paper, writing with his fingers was something Caro could get away with, but when he started his book, he could no longer do so. “That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper. And yet, even thus slowed down, I will, when writing, set myself the goal of a minimum of a thousand words a day, and, as the chart I keep on my closet door attests, most days I meet it.”

No one else will tell the story that you’ve been entrusted to tell

The generation that lived before electricity had a lot of interesting stories to tell. They would tell their daughters and they would tell their granddaughters, but sooner or later, they’d all be dead and there would be no one to tell what it was like to live before electricity. “So the story might easily have been lost,” Caro writes. “If in even a small measure I told it for them, these women of the American frontier, and in order to accomplish that, The Path to Power took a couple of years longer to write, well–so what?”

You’ve been entrusted to tell the story you want to tell. It’s your job and no one else’s. How will you steward that responsibility? With rushed research, shoddy sources, and average paragraphs? Or will you give the story the time, research, and attention it deserves? If the story you want to tell is truly important, it will be as relevant in three years as it is today. Take your time and write it well.

Why Robert Caro doesn’t talk about his books before they’re done

“I can’t discuss that book in any detail here–my writing seems never to come out well if I’ve talked about it beforehand. That was another thing I learned about myself as a reporter. My first job at Newsday was working nights; to get a story “up front” (in the first seven pages of the tabloid), you had to sell it first to the Night City Editor, and then you might also have to discuss it with the Night Editor. By the time I had done all that, I was so bored with the story that I no longer was interested in writing it.”

Figuring things out

The fundamental principle behind all of Caro’s words:

“I always liked finding out how things work and trying to explain them to people…I think figuring things out and trying to explain them was always a part of it.”

Turn every page

After being promoted to an investigative reporter, Caro told his boss, “but I don’t know anything about investigative reporting.” His boss looked at him and said, “Just remember, turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.”

This was a rule that Caro would follow religiously. In effect, it paid handsomely with stories, connections, and evidence that Caro, and only Caro, was able to make because he turned every page.

Why Caro picked his editor

After Caro found an agent for The Power Broker, the agent wanted to set him up with an editor. “You can stop worrying about money,” she said. “What you care about is writing. My job is to find you an editor you can work with for the rest of your life. I’m going to set up lunches for you and you can pick the one you want to work with.”

Caro writes, “Three [of the four] editors took me to the Four Seasons or some other fancy restaurant, and basically said they could make me a star. Bob Gottlieb at Knopf said, ‘Well, I don’t go out for lunch, but we can have a sandwich at my desk and talk about your book.’ So of course I picked him.”

Isolation is maddening

For the first five years of writing The Power Broker, Caro was pretty much on his own. “As a reporter,” he writes, “my days had been filled not only with bylines, a weekly paycheck and other trappings that made the journalistic world feel real, but also with interaction with my editors, with other reporters, with the subjects of my articles. When I had a problem connected with my work, there were many people with whom to discuss it…I don’t think that during the first five years I was working on The Power Broker I had any contact with a single other writer of serious books. There was no writer with whom I could discuss a writing problem.”

That feeling of isolation combined with the seeming eternity of time he had already spent working on the book left Caro doubtful about his future as a writer. But then things changed when he was admitted to the Frederick Lewis Allen Room at the New York Public Library. Surrounded by books and a new setting, Caro began to feel more at home. “But it was not books,” Caro says, “that were the most wonderful things I found in the Allen Room.” Instead, it was the company. After his first day was over, and once every one but him had left, he went around the room to see who else occupied the space: Nancy Milford, James Thomas Flexner, and more were now his companions. “The day I read the names of the writers to whose work space I had been admitted,” he writes, “was the day that I felt I might be a writer, after all.”

One day, when James Flexner asked Caro how long he had been working on The Power Broker, Flexner didn’t give the usual “Yeah that’s not going anywhere” look that people so often gave to Caro after he said, “Five years.” Instead, Flexner said, “Oh, that’s not so long. I’ve been working on my Washington for nine years.” After Joe Lash said Eleanor and Franklin took him seven years to write, Caro was once again relieved. “In a couple of sentences, these two men–idols of mine–had wiped away five years of doubt…Suddenly, just by being given a desk in the Allen Room, I had been made to feel a part of the community of writers.”

**********************************************************************************************Lesson: That’s the power of being with “your people.” Working from home is great, but it limits the interactions you have. No one can be there for you when you’re stuck, discouraged, and disheartened. It’s important to have a community.

I’m sure being around this group also gave Caro more motivation to write. By being surrounded by writers, he didn’t have much of a choice but to write. That’s another lesson. If you want to do something more, surround yourself with people who do that thing.**

Give people what they really want

One of the hardest parts about writing for Caro was getting stubborn people to talk to him, but he was very good at making them do so. One reason why was because he understood what they wanted and helped them get it. One example of this is clear with the story of George Brown.

Root & Brown, a firm that gave large amounts of money to Lyndon B. Johnson, was a source of mystery for Caro. He wanted to know why they gave such a large amount of money to LBJ during his time in the senate. Herman Brown had passed away, so George Brown was the only person to talk to. This was a problem because George didn’t want to talk, but he did want one thing: for the world to remember his brother, Herman Brown.

One day, while driving around Lyndon Johnson’s home town, Caro noticed a new building: the “Herman Brown Free Library.” “All at once, something occurred to me,” Caro writes. “George had loved and idolized his older brother, who had really been more like a father than a brother. Since Herman’s death, George had been building public monuments all over Texas, not only Herman Brown public libraries, but a Herman Brown Hall for Mathematical Sciences at Rice University.”

Once he realized this, he called an intermediary who helped him get in touch with George originally, asking to call just one more time. “Posh [the intermediary] said quite firmly that he wasn’t going to do that,” Caro writes. “I’m only asking you to call one more time, I said, and I want you to say just one sentence to him: tell him that no matter how many buildings he puts Herman Brown’s name on, in a few years no one is going to know who Herman Brown was if he’s not in the book…The next morning, very early, before I was awake, the phone rang, and it was Mr. Brown’s secretary asking what time would be convenient for me to meet with him.”

Lesson: By understanding the deeper psychological aspect of George Brown, and what he truly wanted for his brother, Caro was able to use that to help get them what they both want. This was straight out of the Robert Moses playbook if you ask me, but maybe with just a touch more class.

Sometimes, you have to recreate the scene

While writing about LBJ’s childhood, Caro gleaned some insight from his brother, Sam Houston. Though he was cooperative, Caro wanted more detail and more unfiltered thoughts. So, he persuaded the National Park Service to allow him and Houston to enter Johnson’s childhood home (it was now a museum) after hours. “I asked Sam Houston to sit in the same place he had sat in as a boy…I didn’t sit down at the table. I sat down instead behind Sam Houston, in a chair against the wall, and it was sitting there that I opened my notebook. I didn’t want anyone at that table who was not one of the Johnsons of Johnson City…’Now, Sam Houston,’ I said. ‘I’d like you to tell me again about those terrible arguments that your father and Lyndon used to have at dinnertime–just take me through them again, like you did before, only with more detail.”

Finding the facts takes time

“While I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts–through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing–can’t be rushed; it takes time.”

Go one level deeper

“Since the centerpiece of my third volume, a book about Lyndon Johnson as Senate Majority Leader, was going to be his monumental achievement in ramming through that body, in 1957, a bill to make it easier for black Americans to vote, the first civil rights bill to be passed in eighty-two years, I wanted to briefly show in the opening pages of the book–to make the reader understand and feel right at the beginning–how hard it had been for a black person to register to vote, let alone actually cast a ballot, in the South before 1957.”

Even though the book was about Johnson’s time as Senate Majority Leader, Caro spent a considerable amount of time digging up testimony and stories about the obstacles and struggles African-Americans faced while trying to vote. Instead of just writing a few paragraphs and saying, “It was really hard,” he used stories and evidence to show how hard it really was.

Waste your time

Caro didn’t intend to discuss the many love affairs Johnson had had. This was mainly because he didn’t think any of them really impacted his political career or influence, until he stumbled upon Alice Marsh. “Then, however, while turning pages in a folder whose label, ‘Public Activities–Biographic Information–Naval Career,’ hinted very strongly that turning pages in this folder would be a total waste of time, and whose contents seemed to consist largely of mimeographed copies of a press release about Johnson’s activities in the Pacific in 1942, there was, suddenly, and age-browned Western Union form: CHARLES BELIEVES YOU SHOULD FILE FOR SENATE, it said. POLLS SHOW YOU LEADING. NO ONE ELSE SHARES HIS OPINION ENTHUSIASTICALLY. IF POSSIBLE, TELEPHONE. LOVE, ALICE MARSH.”

This character in Johnson’s life was peculiar and it opened up a lot of rabbit holes for Caro. He may have not stumbled upon it otherwise if he hadn’t wasted his time with a boring folder.

Silence

“Interviews: silence is the weapon. Silence and people’s need to fill it–as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. Two of fiction’s greatest interviewers–George Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and John le Carré’s George Smiley–have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking, and let silence do its work.” Maigret, he says, cleans his pipe and Smiley cleans his eyeglasses with his shirt. “As for myself,” Caro writes, “I have less class. When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write “SU” (for SHUT UP!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of “SUs” there.

Nonfiction needs a sense of place

“By a ‘sense of place,’ I mean helping the reader to visualize the physical setting in which a book’s action is occurring: to see it clearly enough, in sufficient detail, so that he feels as if he himself were present while the action is occurring. The action thereby becomes more vivid, more real, to him, and the point the author is trying to make about the action, the significance he wants the reader to grasp, is therefore deepened as well. Because a biography should not just be a collection of facts. Its base, the base of all history, of course is the facts, it’s always the facts, and you have to do your best to get them, and get them right. But once you have gotten as many of them as possible, it’s also of real importance to enable the reader to see in his mind the places in which the book’s facts are located. If a reader can visualize them for himself, then he may be able to understand things without the writer having to explain them; seeing something for yourself always make you understand it better.”

“Since places evoke emotions in people, places inevitably evoked emotions in the biographer’s subject, his protagonist. Therefore, if a biographer describes accurately enough the setting in which an action took place, and if he has accurately enough presented the protagonist’s character, the reader will be helped to understand the emotions that the setting evoked in the protagonist, and will better understand the significance that the action held for him. If the place is important enough in the subject’s life–if he was raised in it, for example, or presided over it, or maneuvered within it–if the place played a significant role in shaping his feelings, drives and motivations, his self-confidence and his insecurities, then, by making the place real to the reader, the author will have deepened the subject, will have made the reader not just understand but emphasize with him, feel with him.”

Here is Caro putting that advice into action:

“When Rebekah walked out the front door of that little house, there was nothing–a roadrunner streaking behind some rocks with something long and wet dangling from his beak, perhaps, or a rabbit disappearing around a bush so fast that all she really saw was the flash of a white tail–but otherwise nothing. There was no movement except for the ripple of the leaves in the scattered trees, no sound except for the constant whisper of the wind…if Rebekah climbed, almost in desperation, the hill in back of the house, what she was from its crest was more hills, an endless vista of hills on which nothing moved, empty hills with, above them, empty sky; a hawk circling silently overhead was an event. But most of all, there was nothing human, no one to talk to.”

Go the extra mile

Rebekah, Johnson’s mother, was deeply unhappy due to her loneliness on the country ranch, and this unhappiness affected Johnson. “So what I decided to do to get a taste, a tiny taste but still a taste, of such loneliness, was to spend the whole day alone in the hills, spend the night there and wake up the next day and spend another with no one there but me.”

False optimism is dangerous

“Lyndon has seen firsthand, when his father failed, the cost of optimism, of wishful thinking. Of hearing what one wants to hear. Of failing to look squarely at the unpleasant facts. Because his father purchased the Johnson Ranch for a price higher than was justified by the hard financial facts, Lyndon Johnson had felt firsthand the consequences of romance and sentiment.”

Johnson’s father bought a big ranch in Texas that he would use to farm. The only problem was the land wasn’t good for soil, it was all rock. He was blinded by the expanse of the open country to see the brute facts: nothing would ever grow there. This mistake cost the family a lot of money, and for Johnson, he felt he had to work his entire childhood to fix his dads’s stupid mistake.

This danger to optimism made Johnson a master at vote-counting, and ensuring every Senator who would say they would vote one way actually did. Too many people, Caro explains, are blinded by how good their bill is and think more people will vote than actually will. Johnson didn’t have this problem.

After a staffer would report, “I think he’s going to vote this way.” Johnson would roar back, “What good is thinking to me? I need to know!”

See also: Churchill yelling at Colville about opinions in Splendid and the Vile

Some people thought this was just Johnson’s natural ability, but thanks to Caro’s trip to Texas, and a deep understanding of Johnson’s childhood and the things that shaped him as a man, he knew it was the result of having an overly-optimistic father. Johnson wouldn’t go on to continue that family trait.

Another example of Caro’s dedication

While Johnson was working as an assistant to a Senator, his co-worker would see him running past the Capitol building at 5:30 in the summer and 6:30 in the winters (since he got up with the sun). Caro was stuck trying to figure out why he had done this. He ended up walking the route from his apartment to his office every morning, trying to see if something caught his eye, but then he realized he never did it at the time Johnson would be, so he went earlier in the day. He noticed the sun’s rays striking the façade of the Capitol in full force–”it’s lit up like a movie set,” Caro writes.

But Caro had to find a way, he says, to not lecture the reader about this magnificent moment, he has to try and make them feel it, because his running was a symbol of what he had been working for his whole life–running away from the small apartment he lived in (and the small Hill Country of Texas) to the grand buildings full of power and influence in Washington. “Well, of course he was running–from the land of dog-run cabins to this. Everything he had ever wanted, everything he had ever hoped for, was there. And that gigantic stage lit up by the brilliant sun, that façade of the Capitol–that *******place-*******showed him that. Showed him that, and if I could write it right, would show the reader as well.

It’s okay to rewrite

“I rewrite a lot,” says Caro. “Sometimes I look at a page I typed but have reworked in pencil, and there’s hardly a word in type left on it. Or no words in type left at all–every one had been crossed out. And often there’s been so much writing and rewriting and erasing that the page has to be tossed out completely. At the end of the day there will be a great many crumpled–up sheets of paper in the wastepaper basket or on the floor around it.”

Rhythm matters

“I remember rewriting the introduction endless times,” Caro says in a Paris Review interview. “For instance, Moses built 627 miles of roads. I said, Come on, that’s just a bare statement of fact–how do you make people grasp the immensity of this? So…I tried listing all the expressways and all the parkways. I hoped that the weight of all the names would give Moses’ accomplishment more reality. But then I felt, That’s not good enough. Can you put the names into an order that has rhythm to it that will give them more force and power and, in that way, add to the understanding of the magnitude accomplished?

I thought I could have a rhythm that builds, and then change it abruptly in the last sentence. Rhythm matters. Mood matters. Sense of place matters. All these things we talk about with novels, yet I feel that for history and biography to accomplish what they should accomplish, they have to pay as much attention to these devices as novels do.

How Caro Outlines his books

“I can’t start writing a book until I’ve thought it though and can see it whole in my mind,” he said in a Paris Review Interview. So what he does is boil the book down to three paragraphs that are the summation of what he has in his mind. Then, he uses those paragraphs to outline the book. After that, he goes chapter by chapter, outlining each one. That is basically writing a short version of the chapter, without all of the supporting evidence. Then, he gets a notebook, one for each chapter, and fills it with all of his material–interviews, quotes, documents–and then he organizes that all together into a coherent narrative and begins writing.

Caro’s routine

Because Caro doesn’t have any real deadlines, he says it’s easy to fool himself into thinking he’s working and making progress on the book when he’s really not. “So what I do is–people laugh at me,” he says, “I put on a jacket and a tie to come to work, because when I was young everybody wore jackets and ties to work, and I want to remind myself that I’m going to a job. I have to produce…I try to do at least three pages a day. Some days you don’t but without some kind of quota, I think you’re fooling yourself.”

221b: Sandwich, Death, Fitzgerald, Sitzfleisch, Genius

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Sandwich

Robert Caro is a master biographer. After writing The Power Broker, he started a series to capture the life and power of Lyndon B. Johnson. Though he started shortly after Johnson’s death in 1973, Caro is currently writing his fifth (and final) volume of the series. He’s won numerous literary awards and is a master of his craft.

When looking for an editor for his first book, The Power Broker, his agent set him up with four different meetings. “Three of the editors took me to the Four Seasons or some other fancy restaurant, and basically said they could make me a star,” Caro writes. “Bob Gottlieb at Knopf said, ‘Well, I don’t go out for lunch, but we can have a sandwich at my desk and talk about your book.’” That made the choice easy for Caro, “So of course I picked him.”

I love the simplicity of that. It was a good choice, too, for Caro and Gottlieb are still working together. A documentary came out recently covering their relationship that looks fascinating, but I can’t find a way to watch it.

Death

The realization that death was around the corner for many Londoners during the Blitz is something I can’t wrap my head around, no matter how hard I try to imagine what life was like then. Erik Larson puts it well in The Splendid and the Vile: “The raids generated a paradox: The odds that any one person would die on any one night were slim, but the odds that someone, somewhere in London would die were 100 percent. Safety was a product of luck alone. One young boy, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, a fireman or pilot or such, answered: ‘Alive.’”

The fact that death could be seconds away caused many people to feel strange things. One diarist, after being missed by a bomb while in her home, wrote, “I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant. ‘I’ve been bombed!’, I kept saying to myself, over and over again–trying the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted. ‘I’ve been bombed!’…’I’ve been bombed–me!’ Never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.”

Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald kept a notebook of aphorisms, funny things he overheard in conversations, and other “wisecracks” in a journal. Parts of the journal were published in The Crack-Up and are delightful to read. Here are a few of the best ones:

“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.”
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.
Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from us.”

Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.”

You can read my notes on *The Crack-Up* here.

Sitzfleisch

I learned a new German word this week: sitzfleisch.

Literally, it means “sitting meat” or “sitting flesh,” but it describes "the ability to sit still for the long periods of time required to be truly productive."

It describes the patience and staying power one must have to do great work. It’s sort of a mash-up of endurance, perseverance, and focus. It’s not enough to just sit and work for long periods of time, can you sit and work for long periods of time on the stuff that truly matters? That’s sitzfleisch.

A quote on my mind

Coming back to Fitzgerald…

“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.”

Until next time.d s m

The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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

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.”

221b: Comparison, Simplicity, Details, Silence, Responsibility

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Comparison

Four years before the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the French unveiled the Eiffel Tower–a majestic display of creativity and ingenuity–at the Paris Exhibition.

America’s pride was hurt. Everyone in America thought they were the most creative and ingenious country. To be outshone by the French was an embarrassment. Chicago would help reignite its spirits.

But trying to “out Eiffel the Eiffel,” as the goal came be to known, would not be easy.

As Erik Larson writes , Chicago had to beat the extravagance of the tower or be humiliated, bringing disgrace and shame upon America.

An interview in the Chicago Tribune captures the consensus at the time:

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.

Lesson: If you try to imitate something that people have already experienced, you can’t just “build a taller tower.” Your product, offering, or service, has to be as new and unique as anything that came before, lest it be compared to just trying to build a taller tower in a race to “out Eiffel the Eiffel.”

Chicago’s big unveiling was the Ferris Wheel. It was something so different and new that it captured people’s imagination in a unique way. The Eiffel Tower, though it was still an amazing feat of architecture, didn’t spin 2,000 people around in a circle. Chicago had successfully out Eiffled the Eiffel.

Simplicity

Rain was a menace to the construction of the fair. It would wash away the wet paint on buildings and ornate plants that were already in the ground.

Frederick Olmstead, the chief architect of the fair, gave sound advice to his crew:

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 be can little fault found with simple, neat turf. Do not be afraid of undecorated, smooth surfaces.

Lesson: When a deadline is looming, do the best you can with the time you have, and don't overcommit. There's nothing wrong with simple.

A good plan done well is better than a great plan done poorly.

Details

Olmstead, the landscape architect, insisted on not having steamboats on the Chicago fair’s waterways, even though they would be more efficient.

He wrote:

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.

Lesson: Small details have a big impact. When they're done right, they create an extravagant scene. When ignored, they ruin it.

Silence

People are uncomfortable with silence. It's often why some people talk too much. They'd rather hear themselves blab than be forced to sit in the uncomfortable abyss of nothing. But silence is a crucial weapon, especially in an important meeting or interview.

Robert Carp, the legendary biographer who wrote The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson said silence is the most important thing when he interviews subjects. He writes , "Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people'e need to fill it–as long as that person isn't you, the interviewer...When I'm waiting for the person I'm interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write 'SU' (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were to ever look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of 'SUs' there."

A quote on my mind...

"Just because someone holds a position of responsibility doesn't mean they are acting responsibly."

– David McCullough

3 Lessons on Human Psychology and Project Management

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Here are three lessons I learned from reading The Devil in the White City, a book on the construction of the Chicago World’s Fair (juxtaposed with a suave, murderous criminal), on human psychology and project management.

1. You will always be compared to what came before

Four short years before the Chicago World’s Fair, the French had their turn. At the Paris exhibition of 1889, they unveiled the Eiffel Tower–a majestic display of creativity and ingenuity.

America’s pride was hurt. Everyone in America thought they were the most creative and ingenious country. To be outshone by the French was an embarrassment. Chicago would help reignite its spirits.

But trying to “out Eiffel the Eiffel,” as the goal came be to known, would not be easy.

Chicago had to either beat the extravagance of the tower or be humiliated, bringing disgrace and shame upon America.

An interview in the Chicago Tribune captures the consensus at the time:

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 help responsibly by the whole America people for having assumed what you are not equal to.

Lesson: If you try to imitate something that people have already experienced, you can’t just “build a taller tower.” Your product, your offering, your service, has to be as new and unique as anything that came before, lest it just be compared to just trying to build a taller tower in a race to “out Eiffel the Eiffel.”

2. Simple and done well is better than extravagant and rushed

Rain was a menace to the fair. It would wash away the wet paint on buildings and ornate plants of the landscape that were already in the ground.

Frederick Olmstead, the chief architect of the fair, gave sound advice to his crew:

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 be can little fault found with simple, neat turf. Do not be afraid of undecorated, smooth surfaces.

Lesson: When a deadline is looming, do the best you can with the time you have, and don't overcommit. There's nothing wrong with simple.

A good plan done well is better than a great plan done poorly.

3. When creating a scene or display, every detail matters

Olmstead, the landscape architect, insisted on not having steamboats on the fair’s waterways, even though they would be more efficient.

He wrote:

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.

Lesson: Small details have a big impact. When they're done right, they create an extravagant scene. When ignored, they ruin it.

Sometimes, you have to bite the bullet and spend more, or take the less efficient route, to create a great atmosphere or product.

Compliment this with my book notes from ***********Devil in the White City* or the founding President of Stanford’s thoughts on education, politics, and life.

221b: Da Vinci, Brevity, X-15, Ballomania, Thinking

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Da Vinci

If you want to be a “genius,” it starts with being more curious.

No life illustrates this more than Leonardo da Vinci’s. He never intended to be a famous painter. He simply followed his curiosity and drew things along the way. His adventures included: drawing detailed sketches of war machines; dissecting bodies to learn how muscles and veins work, and then drawing anatomical sketches of them; and cutting open skulls to see how they protected the brain.

His curiosity was enhanced by his desire to observe the mundane. “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects”, da Vinci wrote in a notebook, “begin with the details of them and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.”

But it wasn’t just big things that caught his attention. Walter Isaacson reports in ******************Leonardo da VInci,* that recovered in his notebooks are to-do lists filled with things like:

“Observe the goose’s foot: if it were always open or closed the creature would not be able to make any kind of movement.”
“Why is the fish in the water swifter than the bird in the air when it ought to be the contrary since the water is heavier and thicker than the air?”
“Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.”
“Inflate the lungs of a pig and see if they increase in length and width, or only width.”

So, was da Vinci a genius? Yes.

But that genius was rooted in two things:

Insatiable curiosity
Intense observation

Brevity

In 1940, Winston Churchill sent his staff a memo titled Brevity. In it, he shared four rules all further written correspondence must follow:

Set out the main points in short, crisp paragraphs.
If the report requires charts, stats, or some detailed analysis or explanation, put it in an appendix.
Sometimes, it's best to write only headings and expand orally if needed.
Don't use drawn-out phrases. Like: "It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations..." Or, ""Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect..." Churchill wrote, "Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word...Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational."

Churchill later told a private secretary, "It is slothful not to compress your thoughts."

'You Called?'

Joe Walker was the first person to fly NASA's X-15 rocket-powered aircraft. Experiencing the full thrust of the rockets on his first flight traveling 3,700 MPH, Douglas Brinkley writes in ******************American Moonshot,* he yelled, "Oh my God!" into the radio. This prompted the flight controller to respond, "Yes, you called?"

Ballomania

On November 21, 1783, with a paper and silk-covered hot-air balloon, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes set sail in the skies over Paris. They reached an altitude of 500 feet and traveled 5.5 miles before landing safely. This was the first time in history that humans kissed the sky.

Naturally, this event drew a crowd. But as always, some didn't understand what all the fuss was about. Someone complained to a stranger wondering what these balloons could possibly be used for. “What is the use of a new-born baby?” Benjamin Franklin quipped back to the stranger.

Though subtle, that eight-word reply gives us a unique insight into the worldview of Ben Franklin...and the value of curiosity. He knew the potential for innovation lies in the future, of what could be. He understood the fact that most "new" things seem useless.

The President of the Royal Society wrote to Franklin, with a somewhat snobbish attitude, trying to dissuade him from doing too much with the balloons. Sir Joseph Banks said:

"I see an inclination in the more respectable part of the Royal Society to guard against the Bloomania [until] some experiment likely to prove beneficial either to society or science is proposed."

To which Franklin responded:

"It does not seem to me a good reason to decline prosecuting a new experiment which apparently increases the power of man over matter until we can see to what use that power may be applied. When we have learned to manage it, we may hope some time or other to find uses for it, as men have done for magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement.”

Translation: That's dumb. First, let's see what's actually possible with the balloons, then we can try and find a potential use case.

At first, technical innovation never looks useful, but that doesn’t mean it never will be. Progress advances on a gradient...it's one useless thing after another until someone comes along and puts it all together.

Dismissing an idea before it's fully realized is a great way to never be a part of anything world-changing.

A quote on my mind...

"A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power."

– Bertrand Russel

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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.

221b: Curiosity and Edison

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Curiosity

In 1910, Thomas Edison created a controversial test as part of the application process to join his company. Though every applicant had passed college, Edmund Morris writes in Edison, only 4% passed the application “test.”

The questions were leaked to the press because of how ridiculous they were. In a column with the headline “Edison Questions Stir up a Storm” followed be a subhead saying “’Victims’ of Test Say Only a Walking Encyclopedia Could Answer Questionnaire,” some questions were listed:

What kind of wood is the heaviest? What kind of wood is the lightest?
What part of Germany do we get toys from?
Of what kind of wood are axe handles made?

Einstein threw shade at the test and is quoted saying he saw no reason to clutter his mind with facts one could read in an encyclopedia. Nikola Tesla, who isn’t the most unbiased source regarding all things Edison, said, “Edison attaches too great a value to mere memory.”

But as brilliant as both of those gentlemen were, they missed the point of the test. Edison explained it was a “rough test” to see who had the quality he loved most - curiosity. He wasn’t trying to measure “intelligence, logic or reasoning.” He wanted to hire those who had, “power of observation and interest in the life of the world.”

Flaw

20 years before the phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, an expert stenographer, patented a machine that recorded sound. After learning about how vibrations move through the ear in a textbook, he thought a machine might be able to do something similar.

caption for image

https://embed.filekitcdn.com/e/wKeU2qiPEN7uGTJ8Af3QNW/2wZzVKZdEX3ZeDP6G9QDqd/email

His machine captured sound waves through a funnel with a stylus on the end. The vibrations from the sound would move through the horn and the stylus would etch the corresponding waves onto the paper. He called it the phonautograph. But there was a problem.

There was no way to listen to the sound. As Steven Johnson writes in How We Got to Now since people could read the symbols of shorthand, Scott assumed they’d be able to do the same with the etchings on the scroll, or as they came to be called, phonautograms.

In the end, it was less of a flaw in the design and more of a flaw in the logic of how the devise would be used.

In 2008, the machine was discovered in a Paris patent office with a phonoautogram still etched in the scroll. Thanks to new technology, sound engineers were able to listen to the sound. It was a recording of someone singing “Au Clair de la Lune” from 1860. It’s the earliest known recording of a human voice.

It sounds cool , but eerie. Definitely not something you want to hear over the baby monitor in the middle of the night.

Money

People say money can’t buy happiness. I disagree. If you don’t have to worry about paying bills or picking up a check with friends for dinner, you’re going to be objectively more happy than if you had to worry about those things. Nonetheless, too much money can cause problems. Even though George Vanderbilt, grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, spent six years building a 135,000-square foot home, Morgan Housel writes that most of the land was eventually sold off to pay tax debts (after nearly ruining Vanderbilt financially). Housel continues quoting an 1875 op-ed that said, “socialites ‘devote themselves to pleasure regardless of expense.’ A Vanderbilt heir responded that actually they ‘devote themselves to expense regardless of pleasure.’”

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy in an organization is often the result of a solution to fix something that went awry at some point in time. Some examples:

An email went out with a typo in it four years ago, so now any outbound communication has to be read by four different editors.
A contractor got paid before they finished the work one time and were never heard from again. Now, any contractor needs to be vetted with multiple interviews and HR approvals before any contracts get signed or works get started.

Jason Fried, founder and CEO of 37Signals, has a term for this: “scarring on the first cut.” He explains , “Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again. They are collective punishment for the misdeeds of an individual. This is how bureaucracies are born. No one sets out to create a bureaucracy. They sneak up on companies slowly. They are created one policy — one scar — at a time.”

Don’t scar on the first cut.

A quote on my mind...

"Learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another's delusions."

– Will and Ariel Durant

Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Impressions

In Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts, Ryan Holiday creates a playbook for writers, creators, and artists to make exceptional work and get noticed. And yes, those are two separate 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 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.

221b: Edison, Einstein, Pursuit, Gödel, Rest

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Edison

143 years ago to the day, Thomas Edison patented his design for an incandescent lightbulb. The word incandescent just means something that lights up when it is heated. Most people assume Edison was the first person to ever invent an electric lightbulb. That is not true.

There are three variables at play in a lightbulb:

• Something that glows (a filament) when a current runs through it

• Something to stop the filament from burning out too quickly

• Something to supply power to create the reaction in the filament

Many inventors tried different combinations of each variable. In 1841, an English inventor tried using Carbon as the filament inside a vacuum, which is what Edison eventually settled on. However at the time, the vacuum wasn't strong enough and the carbon burned too quickly. In 1865, the mercury pump was invented, which finally allowed for a proper vacuum to form. Then, in 1880, Edison developed a Carbon filament bulb.

The creation of the lightbulb is attributed to Edison for other reasons than his showmanship, though. One of the biggest, was that he also discovered a way to spread electricity throughout a town, which was obviously needed to make an electric bulb work.

(There's a movie that dramatizes Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse's relationship and the invention of the bulb called The Current War.)

Wonder

The life and wisdom of Albert Einstein was the result of his innate curiosity. He had a willingness to ask questions about the strange mysteries in the world and see where finding answers lead him.

That curiosity was rooted in one thing: wonder.

This first time it happened, he was sick in bed as a kid when his father gave him a compass. He was fascinated with how the needle moved and was determined to understand how it worked. This was the spark–a simple act of wondering–that lead to a lifetime of revolutionary ideas. The New York Times, reporting on Einstein’s death, wrote the most beautiful words that describe his approach to life:

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 it come about? The most thoughtful wonderer who appeared among us in three centuries has passed on in the person of Albert Einstein.

“The most thoughtful wonderer...” I love that phrase.

Pursue

Annie Dillard tells this story in The Writing Life and it encapsulates so well human feelings towards what we create:

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. ”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 old photographer asks.

“Because I had to climb a mountain to get it,” the younger says.

We love what we pursue.

Loophole

Kurt Gödel, considered along with Aristotle to be one the most significant thinkers in the field of logic, often had trouble not wearing his "logician's hat." In one instance, Jim Holt writes in When Einstein walked with Gödel, while getting his U.S. Citizenship, Einstein had to calm Gödel down after he got agitated with the worker at the court house. The issue at hand was Gödel's insistence that the Constitution had a loophole in it that would allow a dictatorship to come into existence.

A Quote...

"We must be indulgent to the mind, and regularly grant it the leisure that serves as its food and strength."

– Seneca

Check all kinds of unusual things

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

After the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Richard Feynman got a call asking to be apart of a committee to investigate the accident. When he heard the job would be in Washington, Feynman had an immediate hesitancy to accept the role. His biggest question was, "How am I going to get out of this?"

Luckily, though, he didn't make that decision on his own. He called on numerous colleagues and mentors for advice, but the one that was most helpful came from his dear wife:

"Look” Feynman said, "Anybody could do it. They can get somebody else."

"No," said Gweneth. "If you don't do it, there will be twelve people, all in a group, going around from place to place together. But if you join the commission, there will be eleven people–all in a group, going around from place to place together–while the twelfth one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won't be anything, but if there is, you'll find it."

She said, "There isn't anyone else who can do that like you can."

“Being very immodest,” Feynamn said, “I believed her.”

A few funny things about time

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Time is funny.

We can wither away a day, a month, or even a year in the present, and it will never punish us.

But it doesn’t reward us either. We can’t get “more time” by being diligent with our allotted hours. I love how Arnold Bennett put it in How to Live on 24 Hours a Day:

Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you.

Another funny thing about time is that we can’t waste it in the future. With money, we punish our future selves with debt. With time, there is no such thing. Each day lies in wait, fresh and awaiting our plans for it, no matter what happened the day before. Whether the TV held our gaze all day or we solved world hunger, once the sun goes down, time forgives and forgets.

If you felt like yesterday was a waste, I have good news for you: today is a new day, and it couldn’t care less how you spent yesterday.

If you felt like yesterday was a success, I have good news for you as well: today is a new day, and it couldn’t care less how you spent yesterday. Time to do it over again.

When in doubt, remember what Michelangelo wrote to his apprentice:

Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.

The best thinkers are ‘wonderers’

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The life and wisdom of Albert Einstein was the result of his innate curiosity.

He had a willingness to ask questions about the strange mysteries in the world and see where finding answers lead him.

That curiosity was rooted in one thing: wonder.

The New York Times, reporting on Einstein’s death, wrote the most beautiful words that describe his approach to life:

“The most thoughtful wonderer...”

221b: Time, Moonshots, Artistry, 26.2 Miles, & Genius

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Time

In 1583, at the Duomo of Pisa, a teenager noticed something peculiar about the lamps swinging back and forth from the ceiling. No matter how big the arc was, the lamp seemed to take the same amount of time to go back and forth. As the arc got smaller, the swinging got slower, and vice versa. The student measured the swinging against his own pulse, to confirm his observation. “Most nineteen-year-olds figure out less scientific ways to be distracted while attending mass,” writes Steven Johnson in How We Got to Now. “But this college freshman happened to be Galileo Galilei.” At the time, an encounter with a regular beat was uncommon, so Galileo took note. What he realized was the time it takes a pendulum to go back and forth depends only on the length of the string. The size of the arc or the load on the end are irrelevant. Fifty-eight years later, after a life spent entrenched in the ideas of mathematics and physics, Galileo began drawing up plans for a pendulum clock. By the end of the century, you couldn’t go a few blocks without seeing the new timepiece.

Moonshots

John F. Kennedy’s speech in 1962 put a clock on everyone working to fulfill the space dream: “…in this decade.” Eight years, that's what they had. Deke Slayton, one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, said, “What Kennedy did with his goal was brilliant. It has to be something under 10 years; if you give people a 30-year goal, they won’t waste time thinking about it. It’s too far away.”

There’s a lesson there. You can’t set a goal to reach too soon, or else there's no hope of meeting it and you'll give up. You also can’t set a goal too far away, because it’s unrealistic to even think about. Who knows where you’ll be in 30 years? If you have unlimited time, it’s going to take unlimited time. A more realistic timeline, and something Austin Kleon encourages, is to focus on days. “Days have a rhythm,” he says. Hours, weeks, and months are all manmade, but days follow the rising and setting of the sun. If you focus on a good day’s work and show up, any moonshot is within reach.

Artistry

Doing a job is much easier if you have the right tools. You can build a house with a hammer, but it’s faster to use a nail gun. But becoming reliant on the tools you use is a recipe for disaster. What happens if the tool breaks, can you think outside the box and get the job done? Anyone can create something using the latest tech, but those who can create something great no matter what tools they have are the real geniuses. John Lennon said once, “I’m an artist man. Give me a tuba and I’ll get you something out of it.” I love that. “I’m an artist…”

26.2 Miles

During the 1908 London Olympics, Queen Alexandra made a request (as much as a queen can make a request I suppose) for a race to start on the lawn of the Windsor castle and end in front of the Royal box at the Olympic stadium. The distance between the two? 26.2 miles. That’s why a marathon has a seemingly arbitrary–well, actually it is arbitrary–distance of 26.2 miles. In 1921, the Olympic committee decided to make this distance a standard for future games. Prior to 1908, the distance was always around 25 miles for the marathon, in honor of Pheidippides, who in 490 B.C. died of exhaustion after running 25 miles to Athens announcing the victory over Persia after the Battle of Marathon.

A Quote I’m Thinking About…

“I’m no genius. I’m smart in spots and I stay around those spots.”

– Tom Watson, co-founder of IBM

A Practical Summary of How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

There’s no better manual on time management than Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on 24 Hours a Day (notes). It’s a masterpiece of philosophical advice and practical ideas for how to not fritter one’s day away.

Though the book is short, it’s sort of split into two sections. In the first half, Bennett writes about the preciousness of our time, how ridiculous it is that we often center our days around a job that we hate, and shows how to find 7 extra hours throughout the week.

The second half of the books shares different ways of using that newfound time.

Find time and be deliberate

The first step to live fully and comfortably within the allotted hours of one’s day is the realization that though it is possible, it is not easy. It requires an endless amount of effort and continuous sacrifice. Everything will be fighting against you, but you must not give in. Your happiness depends on it.

The importance of finding and using time deliberately is that we all have things we want to do (or to have gotten done) that we simply haven’t yet: going back to school, learning to write, studying history, improving our skills for a better job, and so on. “You are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life,” Bennett writes, “and 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.”

You will never ever have “more time.” As Bennett writes, “We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is.” Instead of trying to find “more time,” you need to make more time.

Here’s how to do that:

Don’t center your day around a job you hate

Bennett writes:

The person who works 10 to 6 every day, 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.

Instead of 10 to 6 being “the day,” think of 10-6 as being a day within a day. The first day starts at 10am and ends at 6pm. The second day starts at 6pm and ends at 10am.

For the sake of our humanity, let’s reserve 8 hours for nocturnal rest: 11pm to 7am. Now, what will you do during the new hours of that second day, from 6pm to 11pm and from 7am to 9am?

Be deliberate

Bennett finds 30 minutes in the morning for the subject of his text on the train. Since most people don’t ride trains to work anymore, we can find those minutes between 7am and 7:30am.

What are you supposed to do with these new minutes? Deliberately strengthen the mind.

From the moment you leave your house to the moment you arrive at work, practice concentrating on something. Whenever your mind wanders from on what it should be focused, drag it back with all your might. At first, you may be able to focus for just 30 seconds at a time. But as you practice, your ability to concentrate will get better.

You can focus on whatever you want: a quote from your favorite book, a song lyric, the beauty of painting, whatever. The what doesn’t matter so much as the act of doing it.

Bennett recommends focusing on a passage from Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus.

Whatever you do, do not use these perfectly good minutes of solitude to read “that which was meant to be read with rapidity.” Bennett here is referring to newspapers. I’m referring to Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Don’t waste 30 minutes when your mind is as fresh as it will ever be that day on ephemeral content.

Great. So far, we have found 2 and a half hours every week (30 mins a day X 5 days per week) that didn’t exist before and we’re now using it deliberately. Let’s now turn to our evenings.

Most people come home from work, sit on the couch for an hour, watch the news, and then start making dinner. After dinner, they either go back to tv or maybe (if we’re lucky) start reading a book.

Bennett advises that instead of having dinner interrupt the middle of your evening, to have it as soon as you get home.

He then advises reserving an hour and a half three days a week for the activities of bettering oneself. In doing so, you still have two weeknights and all of Saturday and Sunday to do whatever you want to do.

Now, what will you do with your 4 and a half evening hours each week?

Most people wrongly assume reading or studying literature is the only option. Nothing could be further from the truth.

You could study music, learn how to play an instrument, advance your knowledge in the field of mathematics, become an armchair physicist, write a book, become an expert on Renaissance paintings, learn how to paint, study for a certificate of some sort, learn how to program, commit to reading a large volume of text…shall I continue?

Everything is on the table with one requirement: You must be keenly interested in that thing. Don’t study philosophy because you like the idea of becoming a philosopher. Do it because you’re interested in philosophy and want to learn more about it.

If you do want to learn something academic but don’t want to go to an actual school, do what Jack London did. Before he started writing, he got a copy of the syllabi from the University of California and read all the books from English and Philosophy courses. You could do the same.

If you want to learn programming, you could take a self-paced bootcamp.

If you want to read, you could embark on a journey to cover famous volumes like The Story of Civilization or The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Some warnings

If you choose to embark on this journey, your life will change. It has to change. “If you imagine that you will be able to devote seven hours and a half a week to serious, continuous effort,” Bennett writes, “and still live your old life, you are mistaken. I repeat that some sacrifice, and an immense deal of volition, will be necessary.”
For your evening study, don’t let anything influence your decision about what to pursue other than your interests. Bennett writes:

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.
Don’t commit to too much in the beginning. People who embark on this journey fail in one of two ways:
- They either commit to too little (good), fail to have patience and become unsatisfied with their slow progress, decide to try to do more (bad), become overwhelmed, and quit.
- Or, they commit to too little (good), become unsatisfied with their lack of progress in a few months, and quit.
You must resist falling down either of these paths. Commit to little at first. Be patient and let the results compound. You may not make much progress in three months, but you will in six months, and by month seven, you won’t remember what it was like before you started doing this. You will try and you will fail, multiple times, but keep going. This isn’t a matter of better time management. This is a matter of self-discipline and motivation. “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,” Bennett says. “If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin.”
Maintain flexibility. Following the program is important, but it’s not a religion. You’re the master. Maintain flexibility. However, you have to take it seriously enough for it to work and not just be a cruel joke. There is a right amount of rigidity 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.
********************************Don’t be a prig. “********************************A prig is a pert fellow who gives himself airs of superior wisdom,” Bennett writes. “He’s a pompous fool who…has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humor.”

You will be tempted to look at those who live the way you used to with disgust. Don’t. Don’t be a prig. Their 24 hours have nothing to do with your 24 hours. This isn’t a way to save humanity, it’s a way to save yourself. As Ryan holiday says, “Be strict with yourself and tolerant with others.” It’s called ****self-****discipline for a reason.

Just Begin

You may be wondering, “Well okay this sounds all well and good, but how do I begin?” Just begin! Bennett says it’s like if someone were to ask you how to get into a cold bath. You would reply, “Well just get in!”

Good luck.

221b: Writing, Detectives, Libraries, Leadership, Reading

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Writing Advice from Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s first real writing job was as a reporter at the Kansas City Star. There, he adopted the simple style of prose with which he wrote throughout his life. That style, as Mary Dearborn explains in ** Ernest Hemingway: A Biography ( notes ), **was adopted from a writing handbook The Star issued 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." The 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]."

Devil's Disciples

The term "to detect" is derived from the Latin verb de-tegere which means "to unroof." In Victorian England, the birthplace of detectives, the public viewed detectives in the same light as journalists: crusaders for truth who uncovered all the dirty little secrets of the town. Since privacy at home was a cornerstone of the era, detectives had the unique job of “tearing off” the roof of a suspect’s home to analyze the life inside. This caused detectives to be known as "the devil's disciples" because, according to legend, the devil allowed his henchmen to peer into houses by removing their roofs as well.

Libraries

Pliny the Elder , when talking about Asinius , the friend of Julius Caesar who would bring Caesar's plan for a library in Rome to fruition, said Asinius was, "the first to make the genius of man public property." I love that description for a library. Compliment that with Van Gogh who said, “Bookstores remind me that there are still good things in the world.”

Leadership

Each leader profiled in *Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy* ( notes ) by Henry Kissinger faced opposition to their plan for the future of their country. But that's to be expected. They weren't looking for consensus, they were looking to lead, which usually brings tension. When Charles 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 [Margaret] Thatcher did, or seek peace with historic adversaries as [Anwar] Sadat, or build a successful multiethnic society from the ground up as Lee [Kuan Yew], 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."

A Quote on My Mind...

"The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book."

– George Steiner

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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.”

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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.

221b: Droste Effect, Rules, History, Work, Death

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Droste Effect

I'll ask you the same question Sally Draper asked on MadMen:

"When I think about forever, I get upset. Like the Land O' Lakes butter has the girl sitting holding a box and a picture of her on it holding a box, with a picture of her on it holding a box, with a picture of her on it holding a box. You ever notice that?"

https://embed.filekitcdn.com/e/wKeU2qiPEN7uGTJ8Af3QNW/bxRmVNpCepRVw6R2T4QCoE/email

Well, have you?

This is an example of the Droste Effect, known more formally as mise en abyme or "infinite regression." **It's the effect of an image appearing within itself.

This is often used in art and filmmaking to help express the idea of infinity.

Rules for a Deliberate 2023

There are many experts who write about their rules for success. I am neither. I'm just a 23-year-old kid trying to figure out life, but I suspect there are others who are trying to do the same.

With that, here are some ideas and rules I'm thinking about in 2023 to help me live deliberately:

More search, less feed – I learned this idea from Austin Kleon. Visit blogs I like directly. Subscribe to RSS feeds. Use Readwise Reader. Find and read content in other ways than what an algorithm forces down your throat.

Quit optimizing the system and just do the work – We're distracted by things that are new. It's human nature. The latest tools, the hottest new products, the coolest new productivity apps all make us believe that using them will unlock another gear in our ability to get stuff done. That's a lie. It won't. The only thing that gets work done is sitting down to do the work. So, work more, optimize less.

A full no is better than a half yes – Derek Sivers puts it more bluntly, saying, "Overwhelmed? If you feel anything less than 'hell yeah!' about something, say no." You'll earn more respect by saying no than by saying yes and not giving your all.

You can read six more rules here.

Why You Should Read History

Winston Churchill, when asked how to best prepare for leadership, said, "Study history. Study history. Study history."

Will Durant, the brilliant author and philosopher who wrote the 11-volume series, The Story of Civilization, describes the current culture of our consumption habits when he said, "Therefore I feel that we of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history. We know a thousand items about the day or yesterday, we learn the events and troubles and heartbreaks of a hundred peoples, the policies and pretensions of a dozen capitals, the victories and defeats of causes, armies, athletic teams."

Reading old things (or about old things) is one of the most important acts you can do. Reading about current events or the latest self-help books leads to ephemeral knowledge. It's not not worthwhile. “Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors," Einstein said, "looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else."

What's Really Difficult

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield makes an interesting point about getting work done. "Writing isn't hard," he says, "what's hard is sitting down to write (emphasis mine)."

Reading isn't a difficult task. What's difficult is sitting down in a chair with a book that you'll enjoy and that will prevent you from picking up your phone for 30 minutes. If you're struggling to read and want to read more, you don't need more tips on how to read. You need to sit down and read.

Is 2023 the year you want to write that book? Sit down and write 500 words every morning.

Will you start that business or side project this year? Sit down and work on it for 45 minutes every night.

You can read my notes on *The War of Art* here.

Something on my mind...

With each passing day you inch closer and closer to death.

It's up to you to decide if you're also moving closer and closer to that which makes you feel alive.

This is the first edition of the 221b Newsletter. If you enjoyed this post, please share it on social media. You can share this link: https://daltonmabery.ck.page/efe995a836

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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. 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.”

Reflections on Calculus

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Simple reflections

When you study Algebra, you study the rules of equations and polynomials. Algebra is used when there is some unknown variable or number in an equation.

Geometry deals with the study of shapes like triangles, squares, hexagons, and polygons.

Calculus, while using techniques taught in both algebra and geometry, focuses on the rates of change of functions and the area and slope of curves.

For example, say you have an equation that, when graphed, is a straight line y = 3x - 5.

Using the slope intercept formula taught in algebra tells you the slope of that function is 3.

So what do you do if you need to calculate the slope of a parabolic function, like y = x^2 + x - 3? This is where calculus comes in.

First, you take the derivative of the function. The derivative of y = x^2 + x - 3 is f’(x) = 2x + 1. Once you have the derivative function, you take the point you want to find the slope of and plug it in. If the point is (1, 3), you’d calculate f’(3) = 2(1) + 1 = 3 (This function is saying “when x is 3, what is y?. So at the point (1, 3), the slope of our function is 3.

Calculus also becomes useful when you want to find the area under a curve. A classic problem is where you have a plot of land that borders a river on one side, and a straight road on all the others. Since this isn’t a proper square, the formula for calculating the area of a square won’t work, but if you have the function of the curve of the river (which I know is unlikely to come on the deed of the property), you can calculate the area.

Another part of calculus deals with the instantaneous rate of change of an object. Let’s say you were going on a road trip and you were traveling at a constant speed of 60mph for the entire trip. If the trip took two hours, it’s easy to calculate that we went 120 miles.

But if your speed wasn’t constant and instead averaged at 60mph, which meant you were going 70mph at some points and 50 mph at others, you can use calculus to determine how fast you were going at any point in time on your trip. Pretty cool!

Reflections on how I learned it

I took Math 104 (Calculus 1) on Study.com as a prerequisite to a Computer Science program I’d like to attend. I was accepted, but just needed to get this course out of the way. It was…daunting…to say the least. I hadn’t taken a proper math class in about a year and the last one I took was more of a logic-math, not pure math.

Surprisingly, I really enjoyed it. I told myself all through high school that I was bad at math (Algebra was the only class I got a C in) and had always been more of a words guy. Turns out I was wrong. I simply didn’t have the desire to get good at math, nor have the resources available to help me when I was stuck. Though I had YouTube, I didn’t really know how to use YouTube for help at the time. The main limiting factor, though, was my desire: there wasn’t any. I had no need for algebra in my life and didn’t see how it would be useful for my career as a video editor/graphic designer. But now I have the desire.

As my curiosity has grown over the last few years, I’ve become more interested in science and especially physics. Most of physics is math. I also am pursuing a degree in Computer Science, which is a math heavy degree. Therefore, in an effort to understand armchair physics better and graduate with a degree in Computer Science, my desire to get good at math sprouted.

Study.com was helpful because after each video I had to take a 5 question quiz. If I got more than one answer wrong, I was forced to retake it in order to get actual credit for the course. This rapid learn-then-test-yourself environment prevents you from fooling yourself by saying you understand something when you really don’t.

The course had 124 quizzes, which I had to get an 80% or better on. When I finished the quizzes, I had to take a proctored exam. The exam was easier than I expected, thanks in no small part to the unlimited practice exams I could take. To study for the exam, I took a practice exam, saw what types of questions I didn’t understand well, study those, retake the exam, and repeat until I felt ready to take the final.

The downside of taking the exam on Study.com is that it takes two weeks to get your official results back because proctors watch the video back to ensure there were no shenanigans. It makes sense, but I feel like they could give you the official score and then come back if there are any problems. I also feel like you could easily train an AI model to exam the videos and flag any odd behavior for a human to double-check.

In conclusion

I’m excited I did it. I’m excited I learned. I’m excited for the rest of my learning journey. Thanks for following along.

American Moonshot by Douglas Brinkley

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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, 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.

Not Long Ago in a Galaxy Not Very Far

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

“If someone can just tell me how to catch up [to the Soviets in the space race],” John F. Kennedy thundered to a room full of space advisors. “Let’s find somebody–anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there, if he knows.”

The tense meeting came after the Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, became the first person in history to orbit Earth. This latest accolade for the Soviet Union was another blow to America’s trepidatious attitude towards the space program. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the worst thing to happen that week. Five days later, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion kicked off. Though Eisenhower planned it, he was no longer in office and the nation needed someone to blame. Kennedy became that someone.

For Kennedy, the answer for America’s next greatest feat had always been to go up. Space was the end all be all of the Cold War. Whoever could get the furthest in space, the quickest, Kennedy believed, would win the Cold War.

After Gagarin became the first man to orbit earth, Kennedy and his administration changed their approach to conquering the eternal sky. No longer could America entertain a tit-for-tat pattern with the Soviet Union. Instead, as Kennedy wrote to a Princeton student, America needed to Leapfrog the Soviet Union. And leapfrog they would.

Spaceflight in America was still young at the time. Before the Second World War broke out, Robert Goddard became the first real rocketeer in America. His experiments with liquid-fueled rockets proved they were the way forward. Unfortunately, Goddard was one of many who passed on before they could witness their innovations come true.

Goddard’s research, however, influenced a young engineer in Germany who used Goddard’s work as a foundation to build the V-2 rocket: the deadliest weapon used in WW2 against Britain. Unbeknownst to the engineer, Werner von Braun, his design for the V-2 would lay the groundwork for the eventual Saturn V, the rocket that landed two young astronauts on the moon in 1969.

Von Braun and a host of other brilliant German scientists and engineers were brought to America through Operation Paperclip, a covert plan to bring the most intelligent German minds to America at the end of WW2. The operation, originally called Operation Overcast, changed its monicker to Operation Paperclip after a security breach. The name was derived from the paperclips military officers would fasten to the folders of the Nazi experts they chose to hire.

Werner von Braun and John F. Kennedy became two backbone figures of the Space Race. Their journey, along with all the drama and political woes of the early 1960s is chronicled in American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and The Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley. In the words of a Kirkus review of the book:

[This book is a] look back at the days when American presidents and politicians believed in and promoted science—days when there was a world to win, along with the heavens.

The first part of the book is a mini-biography of John F. Kennedy. Brinkley writes about JFK’s childhood, his family life, and his time spent in the Navy. Kennedy’s character is slowly transformed from a party boy to a diplomatic statesman (though the parties never stopped). Paralleled with Kennedy’s life is a brief account of the history of rockets and Werner von Braun’s journey from Nazi engineer to the head of a rocket lab in Huntsville, Alabama.

Once Kennedy gets elected, Brinkley does a magnificent job pulling conversations, reports, scientific facts, and the general consensus at the time all together to paint a full picture of what was going on in America and around the world.

It’s unclear if Kennedy would have put such emphasis on a literal moonshot were it not for the times. Kennedy loved space, yes, and he was enamored with it. But asking for $40 billion from the American people wasn’t something that happened often. Would he have been as brave as to do so without the pressure of the Cold War? Brinkley doesn’t state the answer explicitly, but it can be implied. He cared less about space and more about winning the Cold War and proving to the world that America was the best. This doesn’t diminish his efforts one bit but casts them in an interesting light.

There was one conversation with James Webb, the NASA administrator, that gives a peak behind Kennedy’s motives. In September of 1963, Kennedy and Webb had a private conversation in the White House and you can hear the trepidation and regret in Kennedy’s voice about making “the moonshot” his grand plan.

Kennedy: “Do you think the lunar, the manned landing on the moon, is a good idea?”

Webb: “Yes, sir, I do.”

…

Kennedy: “If I get reelected, I’m not–we’re not– go[ing] to the moon in my–in our period are we?”

Webb: “No.”

Kennedy (Brinkley notes that his voice is slightly sulky): “We’re not going…yeah.”

…

Kennedy: “Why should one spend that kind of dough to put a man on the moon?”

Kennedy (Answering his own question): But it seems to me…we’ve got to wrap around in this country, a military use for what we’re doing and spending in space. If we don’t it does look like a stunt.”

Though some in America saw Kennedy’s ambitions for space as a waste of money and time, such as the former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who Brinkley wrote, “continued to snipe that ‘anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts,” the majority were inspired by the grand ambition, even though everyone knew money would be required in hefty amounts. A phrase repeated throughout the book is “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”

But aside from the Eisenhower administration's plans for incremental innovation and a small company named NASA that wasn’t quite sure who to listen to, Kennedy didn’t have much to go on when he took office. His presidency would be a continuous act of spinning plates between Kruschev and the Cold War, working with Lyndon B. Johnson to lobby congress for an ever-increasing pool of funds, and deciding just how ambitious America should be in trying to win the space race. The rewards were high, sure, but so were the risks, and no one let Kennedy forget that. Brinkley writes about the warning Eisenhower’s former science advisor spooked Kennedy with by saying “NASA wasn’t ready for manned space, and that if a Mercury astronaut were prematurely launched on a Redstone rocket, the attempted suborbital flight would be ‘the most expensive funeral man has ever had.’”

Thankfully, the warning didn’t deter Kennedy and the rest of America. JFK, his administration, NASA, James Webb, the Navy, and countless private companies worked together throughout a heyday of technical innovation, budgetary restrictions, and threats of war, to eventually put a man on the moon.

If you’re hoping to read a detailed account of the scientific and technical breakthroughs NASA achieved for the moonshot, this book is not the one. Though the beginning had interesting anecdotes about rockets, the majority of the book is about the political side of the space race and John F. Kennedy. Though interesting and I’m glad I read it, it lacks the technical bravado I was hoping for. That said, it’s a masterclass on power, influence, and Cold War politics.

getStaticPaths in NextJS Explained (Simply)

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

getStaticPaths always confused me. I never learned exactly ****what it did or how it works. I’d usually end up copying and pasting code from StackOverflow and pray for the best.

While migrating my headless CMS from Contentful to Notion, I ran into a problem though.

Most of the migration went smoothly…until I got to the code to make dynamic pages for the tags. I wanted to create a page, /tags/[tag].js , that would dynamically render a list of all the posts that contained the corresponding tag. The implantation is no different than doing any regular dynamic page in Next, but because it wasn’t for a blog post, I was lost. I almost gave up.

But just before I did, I had a realization: I didn’t really understand how the getStaticPaths function worked. I thought figuring that out might be a good place to start. So in an effort to engrain it into my mind and hopefully help another developer out, I wrote this post.

getStaticPaths, explained

Just how getStaticProps passes data to the page component, getStaticPaths needs information to actually build the pages. Whatever you end up returning in getStaticPaths is what will be pre-rendered by Next at build time.

Let’s look at a simple example.

export function getTags() {
    const tags =  ["programming", "reading-list", "books"]

    return tags.map((tag) => {
      return {
        params: {
          tag,
        },
      };
    });
  }

export const getStaticPaths = async () => {
    const paths = getTags();
    return {
      paths
    };
  };

Above is a code black that maps through my tags and then exports the getStaticPaths function. For simplicities sake, I’m not calling an API. Instead, I’m just passing programming, reading-list, and book to the variable tags.

Then, I’m mapping through the tags function and saying “For every item in the tags array, return an object, params, with the tag inside of it.

That’s the totality of what getTags is doing. It’s just getting a list of tags. Usually this will be a call to an API or a lib folder though.

I then call the getStaticProps function.

Inside that function, I say “Hey, paths, call getTags.” This will execute my getTags function. At this point, if I logged paths it would look like this:

params: {
	tag: 'programming'
}
params: {
	tag: 'reading-list'
}
params: {
	tag: 'book'
}

Then from getStaticPaths, I return the paths variable as an object. Next will then go and build a page for every value in params

And that’s how getStaticPaths works. Whatever is returned from getStaticPaths, Next will use to render as the slugs for dynamic pages.

Inside my page component, I can destructure tags and then use the value of the slug on the page like this:

const TagPage = ({ tag }) => {
	return (
		<h1>{tag}</h1>
		<p>All posts about {tag}.<p>
	)
}

How to time travel

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Before I begin, there is one thing you need to understand: every event has a time and a place. An event happening in Sacramento and New York at the same exact time is not the same event because they’re happening in different places. An event in Sacramento in June is not the same event as one that’s happening in Sacramento in August because they’re at different times. But, if an event happens at the same time and at the same place, then it’s the same event. Got it?

Some things you should know about Figure 1 below [1]:

In Figure 1, there's a rectangular box. At the bottom of the box is a light source.
On the other side of the box is a mirror reflecting that light source.
There are two events happening in the image. Event A is when the light leaves the light source. Event B is when the light returns to the light source after hitting the mirror.
The box is on a conveyor belt moving to the right at a constant speed.

As a punishment, you got put inside the box and are stuck in it. What you see is on the left side of the image. Since you're moving with the box, Events A and B occur at the same place: Point W.

We know the speed of light, c, travels at 186,000 miles per second and we also know that speed c is constant and cannot move any faster or slower (this is part of the general Principle of Relativity).

Inside the box, you measure the time between event A and event B as taking 0:00:01 seconds.

The right side of the image shows what I see as I look at the box from above the conveyor belt. I’m in charge of making sure you don’t jump out and escape your punishment.

Since the box is moving to the right of me, I observe events A and B occurring at different locations. Event A happens at point X and event B happens at point Y.

Since I see the light as now traveling in a diagonal and therefore having to go a further distance than it would if it were moving in a straight line, I can conclude it took longer for event B to occur after event A than it did for you. In this case, the time between event A and event B was measured at 0:00:01.07.

Therefore, you experienced time moving slower by .07 seconds than I did.

To clarify: these aren’t two different events. It’s the same event happening at the same time and the same place but viewed from two different reference frames. In the reference frame inside the box, events A and B happen in the same location. In a reference frame outside of the box, events A and B happen at different locations, namely X and Y.

So you, the person inside the box, are seeing the events occur at the same place and saying 0:00:01 seconds elapsed between the two.

I'm saying 0:00:01.07 seconds elapsed between the two.

This is time dilation.

The formal (yet simple) definition of time dilation is:

The time between two events is shortest when measured in a reference frame from where the two events occur at the same place.

For you, the person in the box that was moving on the conveyor belt relative to me, the light took 0:00:01 seconds to get from event A to event B. That's correct. That's how long it took.

But for me, the person that's not moving relative to the box, I saw the light take a longer path. Therefore, it had to take a longer amount of time than for you, which is why I measured 0:00:01.07 seconds between events A and B.

Therefore, we can conclude that time moved slower for you, and in this example, 0:00:00.07 seconds slower than time moved for me.

Note: The time allotted here is purely for example purposes and not real. I’m using the two times to demonstrate time dilation and not using the actual formula. Using the actual formula, an event that a stationary observer says took 0.1 seconds, an observer moving at 124,274.2 miles/second would see it take 0.1342385 seconds.

How to time travel

We can use time dilation to time travel.

To illustrate this, let’s look at two co-workers: Stella and Earl.

Stella wants to see what a star looks like in space, so she boards a spaceship and travels 186,000 miles per second and zooms off to a star in our galaxy, and comes back.

To Stella, the trip only takes a few days. But when she comes back, Earl is 20 years older!

Stella time-traveled 20 years into the future.

How did this happen? Time dilation.

Since the two events happened in the same place for Stella (event A is when she left Earth and event B is when she returned) and she was moving at near the speed of light, she experienced time moving more slowly than Earl did, which is why the trip took only a few days. For Earl, the trip took 20 years!

This thought experiment was demonstrated by a test conducted in the 70s with atomic clocks.

Named the Hafele–Keating experiment, after scientists Joseph C. Hafele and Richard E. Keating, researchers sent atomic clocks around the world aboard commercial airliners. When they returned, they compared their results to atomic clocks that stayed resting on the ground.

Here are the results:

As an example (it wasn’t really this dramatic), the clock on the ground elapsed 10 hours between takeoff and landing while the clock on the plane only elapsed 9 hours between the same takeoff and the same landing. In reality, the clocks gained about 0.15 microseconds compared to the stationary clock [2].

The clock would then be 1 hour "into the future."

This is how Stella did time traveled.

The clocks (and Stella) experienced a change in gravity as they got further from the center of Earth’s gravitational pull. As gravity decreases the further something gets in the atmosphere, the faster time will move.

Counter-acting that effect is special relativity’s time dilation caused by velocity, which is what we experienced with the boxes. The faster one’s relative velocity is compared to a stationary observer, the slower it will experience time in a reference frame from the observer.

Therefore, if you had a spaceship that could travel near the speed of light, you could time travel because you’d be moving so fast that time essentially comes to a halt [3]. Hopefully, you like what you discover, because you couldn’t ever come back.

Note: Time dilation effects aren’t noticeable unless you’re traveling at or near the speed of light. This is why it’s not something you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis and also why the effects were so minimal in the Hafele–Keating experiment.

Note 2: I am no physicist. I’m a curious person who reads books and tries to understand things and in the process, teach myself and try to teach others. I may have gotten some details wrong, but I tried to be certain of what I published. As I understand time dilation, and it’s a simple understanding I have, this is how it would work. If I’m wrong about something, please correct me and point me somewhere I can learn about my mistakes.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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.*
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.

David Starr Jordan on Life, Education, and Politics

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The best political economy is the care and culture of men. – Emerson

For all the controversy they stir up today, colleges used to be beneficial. Having a college degree meant something. It meant you not only had an education, but you had a moral foundation of right and wrong, ethics, theology, and philosophy. The humanities were as important as engineering. Subjects communicated with each other in a lattice of back and forth to give the mind the ability to see the big picture that life was painting -- as much as a human can see that, at least.

But somewhere along the way, something changed. College is no longer thought of as the place to understand the inner workings of the world or how we got to now. Some of the most astute judgments of college (and education in general) attack the curriculum for not teaching anything useful. But it wasn't meant to be this way.

Reflecting on the words of David Starr Jordan (January 19, 1851 -- September 19, 1931), the founding president of Stanford University, we find a beautiful illustration of what college is meant to be. In a publication of his speeches, Care and Culture of Men, Jordan shares his vision for what higher education should mean, the relationship between the State and the school, and much more.

Speaking on the benefits of having a college degree and the attributes that should come with it, Jordan has much to say:

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 borne 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 cathedral. 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.

When Jordan refers here to the educated and uneducated man, he literally is referring to someone with a college degree and someone without a college degree. Today, I view it as someone who has a thirst for knowledge and someone who doesn't. Whether that education comes from YouTube, a trade, or higher education doesn't matter. What matters is that someone has an open mind to learn the vast mysteries the world still holds dear to its heart.

There were two important things an education taught young men and women in Jordan's mind: morality and history. It taught one how to approach life, how to think of themselves, and how to attain greatness. But an education also taught the importance of learning from those who once lived:

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, can not for a moment let go of the past.

Morality, individuality, and striving for greatness, were popular themes throughout each of Jordan's speeches. Higher education was the path to learning about these things, but only to a certain degree. "A college cannot," Jordan says, "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."

What are those "more serious views of life"? Jordan explains:

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 exist, and are embodied in men and women. He should learn 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.

That last line echoed through most of Jordan's speeches. He took great care to encourage the younger generation to set their mind to something greater, and giving advice on how to achieve it, says to put their mind to something and let nothing get in the way:

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.

Whether someone actually achieved the goal of becoming a naturalist, a traveler, a historian, or a scholar didn't matter. Instead, Jordan made sure to emphasize that it's not the achievements of one's life that make it great, but the aim one takes that does so:

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.

I slightly disagree with that sentiment. Someone can have the aim to be the first person on Mars but do nothing to achieve it. So as long as their aim is high enough, they can sit on the couch all day playing video games. Clearly, this isn't what Jordan meant when he said, "The value of life is measured by its aim rather than by its achievement," but some may take it to mean that. He reiterates this idea in a different speech saying, "Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for."

Shifting to politics, Jordan believed the changes that were required in the future lay within the people to whom he was speaking:

In other words, the people will always have as good a government as their intelligence and patriotism deserve, and no better. In the long run, government can be made better only by the improvement of the public opinion on which it rests.

This point interests me greatly. Obviously, I wasn't alive during the 1900s, but it seems like the political actions were much loftier, grandiose, and impactful. Is that because the public of the 1900s *deserved *that type of government? That makes sense to me. If a culture is soft, the government is going to be soft, and vice versa.

One of the things I liked most about reading these speeches is that politics is addressed, but one party isn't favored over another. It was refreshing. In fact, he noticed that the arguments between parties were never about fundamental issues, so he needn't get involved at all.

He did, however, stress that it was the duty of the educated man to keep their respective political parties in check. Ensuring the main thing was kept the main thing was the educated person's responsibility. He often seemed worrisome about the blinders that people wear when they embrace a certain political party. "To be known as an apostle or as the devotee of some special idea", he says, "often prevents a man from learning or growing." This foreshadows something Einstein would say later in his life, which might be my favorite quote of his:

How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery.
-- Einstein

Instead, Jordan encouraged his audience to become citizens of the world. "The good citizen," Jordan says, "is a citizen of the world; itself, as citizenship improves, becoming one vast community, the greatest of all republics." He also made a stark warning to disregard your party if they start to run astray:

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.

Tolerance, for other people's ideas, worldviews, and opinions, Jordan believed, was one measure of a good civilization. "The degree of tolerance," he remarks, "which is shown by any people toward those whose opinions differ from their own is one of the best tests of civilization." Continuing, he adds how important it is that the degree of tolerance continues to grow:

The growth of tolerance is one of the most important phases in the history 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 sew 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.

May we be people who join an open mind, heart, and ears with a closed mouth as we continue to rise each day and set out on this mysterious journey called life. May we be people who keep studying the lives of those who once lived and let them teach us how to live today, forever.

Ernest Hemingway by Mary V. Dearborn

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Impressions

Though The Washington Post touted this book as "The most fully faceted portrait of Hemingway now available", I was unimpressed. The content of the book is detailed, but the writing was rigid. Facts about Ernest's life were written out in a matter-of-fact manner. The stories told, though few, lacked drama or failed to engage one’s imagination. Letters were mentioned and quoted, but you never saw them shown in full detail. I learned more about Hemingway's obsession with bullfighting than I did about his writing habits or philosophy, spare the mention of the Kansas City Star writing guide (mentioned below in the notes). I suppose that's what people want though. They want the man and life behind the writing, not the writing. I think it’s a well-written book, it just was not what I was expecting and hoping for.

It was also assumed you've read (and memorized) all of Hemingway's works. A plot in a story was mentioned and I'd have to Google what the book was about or how the character acted because it was never explained. A new person in Hemingway's life would be introduced and a passing reference would be made to how they would later become character X in one of his novels, but that was it. There was no further commentary about how, or why, or anything.

I’m always hesitant to say any work of art is “bad.” All I can think about is the time and energy the creator put into the piece, and then imagining them reading a review (like I really even matter as a reviewer) saying it’s bad. No work is ever really bad, sometimes it’s just not what we expect, or not something we like. And that’s okay. Because with the 7 billion people in the world, I’m sure lots would love this book. I’m just one of the few who didn’t.

However, I did learn interesting details about the Hemingway-Paris-writers era, which I've long been enchanted by. I closed the book with a fuller understanding of the man who called himself Ernest than I did when I opened it, which is what you hope for when you read a biography. A phrase that might sum up his life: don't meet your heroes, kid.

Notes

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.

On Ribbonfarm's Portal and Flags

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

People who spend their time debating others online are throwing their precious hours of human existence into a pit they'll never retrieve them from. It's the most useless act someone can partake in, even more so than playing video games or watching Rick and Morty.

No one is going to change their mind on abortion, gun-control, or any other hot button topic because of a response written by User07373 on FaceBook or Twitter. I'm sorry, but it's just not going to happen.

Sadly, the same thing can be said about real life interactions as well, though just not as strongly. If you have a 1% chance of winning someone over online from a debate, you might have a 7% chance of winning someone over in real-life. It's not much, but it's honest work I guess.

The reason it's so hard to win people over is because the issues are so complex and nothing is black and white. Another reason, though, is that most people approach complex debates in a horrible way. Ribbonfarm, a popular blog on the "constructions in magical thinking", writes this:

The point of complex debates is not to prove your side right and the other wrong. Smart people make this mistake most often, and end up losing before they ever get started. The point of complex debate is always seduction: winning-over rather than winning. You do this not through logic or even novel insight, but by demonstrating a more fertile way of thinking. One that promises to throw up an indefinitely extended stream of surprises within an ever-widening scope.

In other words, someone doesn't win a debate by having an absurd amount of evidence and reason, but rather painting a beautiful picture of a new way of thinking. Or as Ribbonfarm puts it, "turning it into a portal to a hidden universe of thought."

The opposite action to opening a portal is planting a flag, which most people do so on top of a pile of circumstantial evidence, weak reasoning, and ever-complicating opinions and facts.

So how does one start to paint this ever-beautiful picture? By letting go of winning:

All it takes is giving up the desire to “win” and the innate openness to experience that allows you to signal a readiness for adventure without even being conscious of it.

The scary thing with this approach is that it requires someone to give up power and control. That becomes the real thing you're "debating against."

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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 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.

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Leonardo da Vinci

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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.

Adventures of a Curious Richard Feynman

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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 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.

"So, is there a biggest number?" he asked.

"No." I replied. "Because for every number, there is one twice as big, one three times as big. There is even one a million times as big"

"Right, and that concept of increase without limit, of no biggest number, is called 'infinity'."

Running around

After the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Feynman got a call asking to be apart of a committee to investigate the accident. When he heard the job would be in Washington, Feynman had an immediate hesitancy to accept the role. His biggest question was–"how am I going to get out of this?"

Luckily, though, he didn't make that decision on his own. He called on numerous colleagues and mentors for advice, but the one that was most helpful came from his dear wife:

"Look I said." "Anybody could do it. They can get somebody else."

"No," said Gweneth. "If you don't do it, there will be twelve people, all in a group, going around from place to place together. But if you join the commission, there will be eleven people–all in a group, going around from place to place together–while the twelfth one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won't be anything, but if there is, you'll find it." She said, "There isn't anyone else who can do that like you can."

Being very immodest, I believed her.

The Care and Culture of Men by David Starr Jordan

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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.

2 Habits for a Better Intellectual Life

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

User TurnTrout posted their reflection on attaining a PhD in the LessWrong community recently. I've been debating going back to school for a Masters and PhD but can't determine the fundamental benefits other than a structured learning environment, peer group, and a bit of a social flex. I don't think those are the right reasons to go back to school, but maybe they are?

The post was brilliant and well-written. I implore you to read the whole thing. The most concrete advice was towards the end, where they outlined habits they had wished to practice more regularly. I thought the habits were practical even outside of academia and, if practiced more regularly by more people, would make for better conversations.

Distinguish between observation and inference

TurnTrout says:

When people speak to you, mark their arguments as observations or as inferences. Keep the types separate. I've gained so much from this simple practice.

I like the idea here, but I'd change "inference" to "opinion."

This echoes something I tweeted about last week about the importance of Twitter and other "thinking" out loud" tools being seen as a laboratory for testing conjectures and not a battleground for opinions. When an influential person tweets, inevitably they don't account for all of the nuance. It's impossible to do so with 280 characters. Also inevitably, everyone starts attacking the user for not mentioning their specific, niche life story that this tweet wouldn't apply to. It's annoying.

It would do well for people online to differentiate between an observation made about the world and an inference into how that world actually works.

This would be good for dinner conversations with family, especially those with opposing political views. I ask risky questions to people with protected opinions all the time because I want to understand what they think and how they see the world. I love running thought experiments. With the topic of abortion being front and center now, instead of arguing over whether the government should be involved or this view vs. that view, I'll pitch a thought experiment outlining a situation and then request we go through the experiment as if abortion were legal and if abortion weren't legal. What's the right thing to do? How would someone be feeling in that situation?

The benefit of this is that it allows you to run through some fringe scenario that would probably never happen. Since the problem is exaggerated, the solutions are exaggerated. Often, it illuminates one path as better than another because of how it plays out in the exaggerated situation.

To get to that point, though, one must be comfortable entertaining observations and questions. The group must understand that these scenarios aren't opinions, they're just questions to be explored. If we want to progress intellectually with hot-button issues, we must be able to set aside opinions and explore observations and questions. The first step to doing so is being able to differentiate the two in the first place.

Be concrete

TurnTrout says:

If a friend comes to me for advice and says "I'm terrible at dating, I just feel so shy!", I could say "You're really fun to be around, you're probably just in your head too much", and then they could say "Agh, maybe, but it's just so frustrating." Wouldn't that just be such a useful conversation for them? That'll definitely solve their awkwardness!

Alternatively, if I ask for an example, we can both analyze an event which actually happened. Perhaps they say, "I met a girl named Alice at the party, but I somehow ran out of things to say, and it got quiet, and we found excuses to part ways." Then I can help my friend introspect and figure out why they didn't have anything to say, which is in fact a question with a real answer.

Vague scenarios and questions help no one. I see/hear this a lot when someone is uncomfortable asking for advice on the specific scenario they're dealing with. So instead, they ask a vague question that doesn't make complete sense. This isn't helpful–for either the advice-giver or the advice-asker.

The more you can think through a scenario that actually happened, the better your thought processes and learning patterns will be from those situations.

Be concrete.

The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs by Steven Brusatte

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Impressions

I was inspired to buy this book after hearing the author's conversation on Armchair Expert. His enthusiasm for dinosaurs and the mysteries of earth 66 million years ago was contagious. I was hoping for a creatively written book about dinosaurs that helped me learn a lot about their origin. I wasn't disappointed with that notion in mind, but I also wasn't thrilled with the book. At the end, I still felt there was a lot of information missing about how dinosaurs were created, but perhaps that because no one actually knows. Either way, I think Brusatte is a good writer and is able to mix academic knowledge with engaging writing, but I was hoping for more academic knowledge and less engaging writing. That said, it was a fun book and I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to learn a bit about dinosaurs, their evolutionary processes, and what the hell happened to all those magnificent creatures.

Notes

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.
- 1. The rate at which they grew was very fast
- 1. Their lungs were different from all other lungs and it was much more efficient.
  - Unidirectional lung
- 1. Their bones were hollow, filled with air sacs much like honeycombs and not solid bone.
Niche partitioning - 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.

Why I Read

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The world changed in 1436.

Thanks to the brilliance of a German engineer, the long-held belief that knowledge was reserved for the upper echelon of society was shattered thanks to the printing press. Knowledge now belonged to the common man. Entertainment was available to the miner's wife, the corn farmer, and just about everyone else.

The world changed in the 1920s.

Combining magnets and wires in an unusual way, people discovered they could send voices and music across the plains. Radio shows became something people looked forward to. The sound of banjoes and twang reverberated through the South, saxophones, and trumpets in the North. The news was available almost instantaneously. Radio was born.

The world changed again in the 1950s.

Sound was now accompanied by moving pictures on a little box. The news was delivered even faster. People started to fall in love with actors.

Again the world changed during the 1990s with the adoption of the internet and yet again in the 2000s with social media.

It's changing still today with artificial intelligence and virtual reality. But with all these changes, did things actually get better? Did we become smarter? Are we able to solve problems more intelligently? Probably. But what have we lost in all of this?

Under the conditions of 24/7 news cycles, dopamine-inducing videos, and an infinite amount of information available at the end of your fingertips, reading a complex book and engaging with it intelligently is now an act of defiance. People are amazed when they hear that I buy two or three books per week but seem to think it's normal to binge entire seasons of Grey's Anatomy in a single day.

The technical revolution has inhibited us from maintaining deep literacy.

Deep literacy, as defined by Adam Garfinkle is '[engaging with] an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning.' Henry Kissinger, writing about the attributes of deep literacy in Leadership, puts it best when he writes:

To the politically concerned, deep literacy supplies the quality Max Weber called 'proportion,' or 'the ability to allow realities to impinge on you while maintaining an inner calm and composure. 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.

When you read about the tragedies experienced during the World Wars, your daily problems are put into perspective. Having a delay at the subway doesn't seem to be the end of the world when in the 1900s there were people your age being shipped off to sea to fight for freedom or starving and freezing in concentration camps. Taking a vaccine or having to take a sick day doesn't seem to be quite the inconvenience when you know hundreds of thousands of people--sometimes even whole towns--were killed off due to the epidemic of different cases of the flu.

When you read philosophy written in AD 150 that seems to resonate just as accurate now as it did then, you understand your problems aren't as unique as you might think. People have been struggling to get out of a warm bed for 2000 years (and probably even longer than that). Humans have always struggled with maintaining their composure under stress, regulating their emotions when they want to strike revenge, or dealing with heartbreak from jealousy or death. When you read, your eyes are opened to the truth that there really is nothing new under the sun.

Or at least, that's why I read.

I read because nowhere else can you learn the inner workings of the human psyche quite like reading a great novel. I read because nowhere else are the thoughts of the UK Prime Minister during World War 2 recalled than in his six-volume set of memoirs.

I read because it connects me with someone who once lived before teaching me how to live now.

Why do you read?

Kevin Kelly's 103 Bits of Advice, Expanded

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Kevin Kelly, who arguably has written one of the most influential essays regarding the internet and the creator economy, "1,000 True Fans", published "103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known" on his 70th birthday. In the simple article, he gives practical advice, philosophical quips, and everything in between. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it when it came out. So much so, I printed it out and annotated bits I loved and wanted to go deeper on.

To my luck, Freakonomics published an interview with him asking about that specific essay. Kelly was able to provide more context on his answers and share a few stories. The following comes from that interview.

One of the pieces of advice observe, very factually, that "ninety percent of everything, is crap." Kelly goes on to encourage the reader to, if they find something they don't like, just try finding the ten percent that is actually good. But how to find that ten percent was left as a mystery, until now. Stephen Dubner, the host of Freakonomics asked him for his advice on finding the "'non-crap' 10 percent":

I have to say, this one I’m talking to myself because I often get very impatient. So, the only bit of advice for me is to keep returning to it with as much grace and open-mindedness as possible because nine times out of ten you’re going to be very disappointed. So why are you going to go back the tenth time? Of course, life is limited. We can’t try all the stuff that we don’t like. But when I have a chance and it’s not too difficult, I’ll give things a second or third or fourth chance. And occasionally, I do change my mind and it’s like, “Wow, I’m glad that I pursued that because I didn’t see it in the beginning.”

Dubner cited research that showed when people approach the ages of 30 or 40, they typically are set in the ways of the food they eat and the things they do. Trying new things just isn't much of an idea as you get older. Fortunately, Kelly had some simple advice to staying more fluid as one ages:

Don’t sit in the same chair every night. I deliberately try not to do that at the table, to make sure I don’t get into these ruts. And I ask my kids to make me a playlist for birthday presents. Give me all the music you’re listening to as a way to hear new things and see if I can get into it. When you go out to eat, order your favorite thing, and then order something you’ve never ordered before. I think it has to be a very deliberate thing. It doesn’t really come easy.

Another bit of advice has to do with the appreciation of luck: "Ask anyone you admire, their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone." Kelly expanded on his reasoning for including this:

I have very little patience with particularly successful people who don’t acknowledge the luck. And if I have gained any knowledge or wisdom over time, it is my increasing realization and admittance that I am the product of luck. There is just no way around it. But having said that, I think you can still choose luck. I have to say this very carefully, in the sense that there are people who are luckier than others, and it’s not because of how they were born. I think there are probably different species of luck. The little bit I’ve read about luck is that people who have decided that they’re lucky are luckier. And so lucky people are expecting to be lucky, and that expectation is self-fulfilling. It’s kind of like that increasing returns — it’s because I have been lucky, I expect to be lucky, and therefore I am going to be luckier. In the same way, if you decide that you’re an unlucky person, you’re not going to be lucky. And that’s also been proven.

One of the more practical pieces of advice refers to why your parents probably walked so slowly through museums or monuments, when you just wanted to get to the ice cream: "Always read the plaque next to the monument." His answer to this one seemed personal. It was like he really cared about it because he had learned so much from reading plaques and wants others to experience that joy:

I was hiking in the Cotswolds just this week, and there was a plaque about a nuclear bunker that we’d walked past and had no idea what it was, or that it was even there. And then there was a plaque for a site that turned out to be a burial mound that they believe is older than the pyramids. There’s always a story about something. And it’s not evident or obvious, and it will always enrich your lives. And there’s a courtesy in the plaque saying, “Hey, I’m pretty interesting. You just spend one minute here, and I’ll tell you. I’ll let you in on the secret.” And then you do it and you say, “Thank you, plaque. That was amazing. I’m so glad you stood there all that time.”

Clearly, Kelly is a thoughtful guy and seems to spend more time than the rest thinking–about life, about living, and about everything in between. Actively thinking about the problems were facing–not panicking to solve them–will do us all well. This is what Kelly has to say about spending time in reflection and thinking:

I think you kind of almost veered onto Alfred Whitehead’s definition of civilization, which was that civilization advanced to the degree which we didn’t have to think about other things. So instead of having to think about where am I going to get enough food to eat, we could think about some other things because we have a system called civilization that provides all the food that we need and more. So I think what I would see over time is us switching where we spend time with our attention and our thinking, up the Maslow hierarchy, away from basic things about survival and shelter, maybe away from just generic things about having a job and being occupied to higher level things of self-realization in the larger sense of not just our own individual self-realization, but where we’re going as a society, as a collective species.

And we have collectively a very difficult assignment, which is, who do we want to be as humans? What do we want humans to be? And one of the reasons why I’m really keen on artificial intelligence is that we’re going to use A.I. to help us answer this question of what do we want humans to be. Because we’re going to be giving them lots of things that we thought we were about and realizing they can do that. And I think this larger identity problem of not just who am I as an individual, but who am I as a human, is where we’ll spend more time. And as we go on, I think this kind of identity crisis, not just on an individual level, but as a collective level, becomes more and more of the conversation.

His article that spawned this interview is a delight to read and I think more people should attempt to publish something similar. I have a doc called "My Life Thesis," where I record principles I want to live by. Most of them I hear from someone on a podcast or read about in a book, but some I've deduced myself–it's quite a lovely experience when this happens.

This type of essay is important because it's likely you have some bits of advice you live by, whether you do so consciously or not. Extracting the pure insight of those bits of advice into one or two sentences helps solidify the lesson and make it more tangible. You likely have much more insight in that little head of yours than you think you do. How much more interesting would the world be if we shared it all?

What Do You Care What Other People Think? By Richard Feynman

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Feynman, You 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

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.

Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.)

Make learning a reality

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The following passage comes from What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman. It's a collection of stories from his life and curious adventures.

We had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home. When I was a small boy he used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Britannica. We would be reading, say, about dinosaurs. It would be talking about the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and it would say something like, "This dinosaur is twenty-five feet high and its head is six feet across."

My father would stop reading and say, "Now, let's see what that meant. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be tall enough to put his head through our window up here" (We were on the second floor.) "But his head would be too wide to fit into the window." Everything he read to me he would translate as best he could into some reality.

I learned from my father to translate: everything I read to try and figure out what it really means, what it's really saying.

The most important step to learning is to understand what it truly means. Make learning a reality! If you're reading about the scientific revolution, make a timeline with all the dates of discoveries or lives of influential scientists to see which lives overlapped. You could even try mapping where each discovery took place. Any tangible action that makes learning abstract concepts into something tangible will bode better for your knowledge (and subsequently everyone else!)

The Library: A Fragile History

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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 was. This book wasn't completely random and followed a rough outline, but did not advance year to year.

Actionable Takeaways

A good description of a library could be: making the genius of man public property.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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, when talking about Asinius, 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.
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.

Book Review and Summary: Revolt of the Public

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Revolt of the Public helped clarify my thoughts, expand my worldview, and enlarge my vocabulary with certain societal phenomena. While reading, I could recognize patterns in our political system and acquire language to describe the actors playing in said patterns.

I learned how to understand the world as I see it today, which will be invaluable to navigating the world in the future. This book combines a multitude of factors including geopolitics, social media, protests, and more into a simple explanation of what has happened in the world and what might be around the corner. For context, it was originally written in 2014 with a revised chapter added in 2017. Let's begin.

Under the conditions of scarcity, sources of information become authoritative. In the 1960s, CBS and Walter Cronkite were a credible source of information about what was happening around the world, because they were one of the few sources of information. However, as soon as information became more abundant, the authority of any one source declined; information scarcity and authority are inversely correlated.

When information becomes as abundant as it has in the past, thanks to the adoption of the internet and subsequent social media services, two groups begin to clash: The Public and The Authority. Gurri focuses on the results of this clashing--and what that means for democracy--throughout the book. They are, you could say, the protagonist and antagonist of the past 20 years.

The Public, according to Gurri, are "amateurs, fractured into vital communities, each clustered around an affair of interest to the group." If you follow this logic, The Public, as Gurri defined it, cannot be equated with the people of a country. The Public is interested in a specific event or circumstance: climate change, abortion, police, and so on.

The Authority are the elites. Usually, they have some sort of "special expertise" or knowledge that make others believe what they say is credible. At an individual level, this standing is achieved by a professionalization. However, at an institutional level, their lasting authority doesn't waiver with people.

Though The Public has always been around, it's much more active and able to make a lasting change during this specific period of information overload, a period Gurri refers to as "The Fifth Wave." The invention of writing, the development of the alphabet, the printing press, and the rise of traditional media (local newspapers, three-channel broadcast television) were the previous four waves. The Fifth Wave has gotten rid of, or is in the process of getting rid of, the previous "I-talk-you-listen" pattern of traditional media--an environment where few people in authority have access to hidden knowledge and decide what and what not to feed to the public.

When the Fifth Wave emerged, players and pundits didn't think increasing access to information would make any important changes. No one thought the "soft" information of the online world--strangers interacting, incoherent ramblings, and so on--would initiate real change on "hard politics"--the actual policies enacted and how governments govern. The virtual world could not cross the chasm to reality. A group of online anarchists would never transpire to a real group of anarchists.

Before we go on, it's important to note, as Gurri does in the book, that the internet is not the sole driving force of the Fifth Wave. Rather, it's the entire information sphere: the internet, social media, TV, and anything else that increases the information available to the public and decreases the authority of top-down hierarchies from controlling what the public knows. "You can shut down the internet," Gurri explains, "as Egyptian authorities did when they faced their own uprising--but you can't shut down the information sphere."

II.

The "old world" is ruled by authority. These are top-down hierarchical organizations and they are represented by established institutions like Bank of America, National Broadcasting Corporation, and New York Times.

The "new world" is being debuted by the public. Instead of the top-down structure of the old, the new world's institutions, if you could even call them that, are networked. There isn't any hierarchy or established governing system.

Gurri also describes the dichotomy between The Public and The Authority in terms of being Centers and Borders. These were terms established by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky where they identified two archetypes that perform a dance with each other; when one side moves, the other follows.

The Center envisions the future to be a continuation of what has already been. It creates programs, people, and structures to maintain the stability of "what once was," and does everything it can to ensure it will still be.

The Border, on the other hand, is composed of networks that directly oppose the Center. They stand against it but, and here's the catch, they have no intention to govern or exercise new power. The Border will loudly oppose what the Center is doing, but refuses to provide an alternative. They'll gladly tell the Center how they're wrong, but won't make any proposals on how to make it right.

Naturally, the dance between the Center and the Borders has a pattern. Whenever the Center thought it had control of a domain or information, Borders swept in and took control. But since power isn't something that can easily be copied and shared, like a document on a computer, power has always favored a return to the Center. As Gurri eloquently declares, "Networks can overthrow, but can never govern."

So, what's going to happen? How does this dance get out of the stalemate?

Interestingly, these are the questions Gurri is hesitant to prophesy--he doesn't know better than anyone else--but he does attempt to reconcile the questions eventually. For now, he likens what is happening today to the religious wars of the 17th Century. Everyone was anxiously waiting for either the Protestants or the Catholics to win, and although at times each side held a more dominant position , they both ended up winning in their own way. Gurri predicts this will be the outcome between the hierarchies (the old world) and the networks (the new worlds).

Now that we fully understand The Authority, The Public, and their battle, let's establish Gurri's thesis. Gurri believes a revolution in the nature of content and communication ended the top-down control that the hierarchical institutions exerted on the public. However, this can only be true if soft information actually influences the arrangement of power and creates real-life effects in the world of hard politics.

III.

The abundance of information created a new species whom Gurri called homo informaticus, or, information man. But, before we can examine that new species, we first have to understand its opposite, whom Gurri called the "Unmediated Man (UM)."

The Unmediated Man lived and died within a political system governed by an authoritative regime. The problem this regime faced wasn't control of the people, but control of communication. If it wanted to impose its will on the Unmediated Man, it had to find a way to convey that will to him. For the regime to communicate its will upon the Unmediated Man, it needed to control the community, because that's where UM got its information from. Every person UM came in contact with believed the same thing about the regime: they were legit. In UM's world, the Public became whatever the government told it to be.

Now, let's introduce homo informaticus (HI) to the scene.

HI is literate and has access to newspapers, radio, movies, and TV. This is a new threat to the regime, because now the public may gain access to information that undermines the regime's legitimacy; and that reputation is currently the only thing keeping the public from obeying their authority. The regime can try to control this new form of media, and will succeed to a certain extent, but the sheer volume of channels prohibits it from doing so in totality.

The new channels of information broadens HI's field of vision to think about different worldviews. No longer is there one idea or opinion. "When judging its government," Gurri explains, "homo informaticus can do so in light of alternative possibilities--different views of the same policy or event, different values invoked for action or inaction, different performances by other governments, real or imagined."

But HI succumbs to the same challenge the regime faced: the unimaginable abundance of things to consume. Therefore, he picks and chooses, as other members of the public pick and choose who they listen to and what they watch. This inevitably leads to what they believe. "The consequences are predicted and irreversible," Gurri warns, "The regime accumulates pain points and botched responses to disaster. These problems can no longer be concealed or explained away. Instead, they are seized by the newly empowered public, and placed front--and--center in open discussions. In essence, government failure now sets the agenda."

The regime can no longer hide when they mess up or do something they're not supposed to, because the various channels of information spread news like wildfire. The public, now armed with newfound information that the regime messed up, decided to trust the regime less and less. As the public's trust with the regime deteriorates, so does the ability for the regime to govern. The public gathers to oppose the regime and voice their concern. Information absorbed by the public has now spurred change in the regime.

Those events are how homo informaticus, armed with new information, can sway political powers:

First, information conflicts with the government's prior story.
The greater the diffusion of information to the public, the more illegitimate a political status quo will appear.
Homo informaticus, network builder and wielder of the information sphere, poses an existential challenge to the legitimacy of the government.

With more information available to the public, failures, accidents, and contradictions from the government become much more widespread. No longer can they influence what the public thinks by controlling just three channels of news or a few newspapers. Anyone with a Twitter or Instagram account can post a video or image of something, immediately creating a swath of reactions from the public as they blatantly see the failure of their government. When this happens so many times, the public begins to realize how illegitimate the government actually is, encouraging them to rise up and take their own stand.

IV.

Gurri's thesis concerns the tectonic collision between a public that will not rule and institutions of authority that continue to be less able to do so. Through this stress, he fears democracy will be shred to pieces as an "immense psychological distance separates the two sides, even as they come together in conflict." What fills the gap between these? Distrust.

The elites and authority have never really trusted the public, and they still don't. So, what's changed? Two things.

First is the public's increased lack of trust for the authority it has relied on for so long. Now made aware of its ever present faults and failures, the public has come to the realization that, maybe the government isn't all knowing and good like they've thought it to be.

The second thing that has changed is the ever increasing power the public now has to actually do something about this growing mistrust; which is a direct effect of the arrival of the Fifth Wave.

All of this: Gurri's thesis, the clash between the authority and the public, the desire to overthrow but not rule, and more, all come to a head in 2011. Citing the Arab Spring revolutions, the Indignado protests, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party, Gurri goes in-depth into each event. He identifies the key players, explains what the problems were, lays out how increased information was one of the causes, and how each event influenced the others. Gurri's thesis is nearly a play-by-play of what happens in each of the "revolutions." Everything began to change in 2011.

As mentioned previously, it's important to note that the public as Gurri defines it and the people are not identical groups. Let's look at Occupy Wall Street for an example.

The protestors during the Occupy Wall Street movement were The Public--they believed that the top 1% tyrannized the other 99%. What's interesting though, is that the 99% wasn't actually the 99%. There wasn't 99% of the population of the United States in Manhattan, there was just a small subset of that 99%. Their message, however, became interpreted as "This is how the rest of America is feeling, you dirty sleaze bags.", which was clearly not the case. The Public was in attendance at the protests and The People were worried about their own financial troubles.

When Occupy Wall Street is examined further, Gurri notes that no one who attended those protests had any idea what to actually do next. You may think this is specific to Occupy Wall Street and that surely the other events of 2011 had a plan for the future, but that's not the case. "Revolution in 2011," Gurri exclaims, "means denunciation. Actual change was left for someone else."

So if Occupy Wall Street, the Tea party, or the other movements didn't have a plan for future change, what was the actual "phase change" part of 2011? According to Gurri, it sowed the seeds of distrust in the democratic process. It also showed that, in a matter of an instant, The Public can mobilize itself and command the attention of all political players. What the government realized after 2011 was that The Public was now someone that genuinely had to be taken into account. No longer could they control the narrative. No longer could they hide their faults and failures. The Public knew about everything, and they could be pretty annoying if they didn't get their answers.

Authority must be heeded by the public, and the best way to get The Public to do that is through persuasion, not bribery or force. Therefore, as The Public's distrust in authority grew, authorities' power decreased more and more. Gurri maintains that this gap had always been there, what changed was just the public's awareness of it. Gurri writes:

In the industrial age, the pratfalls of authority had been managed discreetly, camouflaged by the mystique of the expert at the top of his game. Today, failure happens out in the open, in public, where everyone can see.

The crisis of authority, Gurri demands, is rooted in the public's unmet expectations from those in authority. The Center tries to paint a grandiose picture of progress and achievement to the public, and the public bought this picture for awhile. But, as soon as those expectations go unmet, the public attacks. What's interesting is that those in authority have total control over the expectations the public assumes, because they're the ones casting the vision. If they want to bring down the expectations of the public, they need to reduce the "grandiose-ness" of their claims, lest they succumb to the inevitable failure.

Gurri contrasts John F. Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion with Obama's stimulus act and the rise of the Tea Party Caucus in 2010. Both initiatives from the president were failures: the Bay of Pigs did not go as Kennedy intended it to and Obama's stimulus act did not meaningfully affect the economy. But the reaction to each of these failures were opposites.

For a government to fail, Gurri explains two things must occur: First, some empirical event has to be perceived as a failure. Second, the relationship between the government and the governed must somehow be ruptured. Trust has to be broken in order for failure to have lasting consequences.

The Public, in Kennedy's day, saw him as a young president trying to achieve greatness. Sure he failed, but no one achieved anything great without trying. The Public perceived this as a loss/win. Things didn't go as planned, but the presidency learned something from it.

On the other hand, The Public rose up in radical revolt to the failure of Obama's stimulus plan. They had access to all the intricate details about the stimulus plan, but after nothing changed in the economy, they revolted.

You might be thinking, if The Public revolted, why didn't anything change? Remember, The Public seeks to overthrow, not to govern. In each of the examples cited in the book, The Public's revolts were composed of different groups of people with unclear ideals held together by the glue of what they hated, but lacked clarity on what they stood for. Therefore, creating any sort of plan for the future would be off the table.

What comes after this crisis of authority and failure of government is not good, and is exemplified through Obama's change of tone in office during his second term.

VI.

After the failure of the stimulus during Obama's first term, he took a different approach with America. Instead of being the problem solver, he became the negater. Rather than aligning himself with the governing bodies and the institutions of America, he aligned himself with The Public and their anger on any given issue. However, he failed to create a plan to actually do something about it. Gurri states, "For the president and his inner circle, the federal government existed an immense moral distance 'underneath' them, and was staffed by grubby bureaucrats who fully deserved the distrust of the public." It was the President and The Public against the government.

If we continue on this route, Gurri exclaims, we are headed towards one thing: increased nihilism and the desire to rid democracy. For how many failures in a system must we have before we realize the failure is the system? (Not my words, I'm voicing the nihilist public here).

Gurri explains the nihilist heard George W. Bush say the war in Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction, but none were found. They heard Obama say unemployment would be capped, only to watch millions lose their jobs. But after a while, the nihilist no longer sees these acts as failures, but starts accepting that the government and all authority are liars and cheats.

In some sense, the unmet expectations are the fault of the elites casting the vision and plan for the future. In another, The Public creates unmet expectations itself. After a century of continued progress and innovation, The Public wants more. When it doesn't get more, or get more quick enough, they make sure everyone knows how they feel.

VII

Reading Revolt of the Public in 2022 isn't too enlightening, because much of what Gurri predicted would happen, happened. As Scott Alexander dutifully notes:

Anyone who wrote it in 2000 would have been a prophet. Anyone who wrote it in 2020 would have been stating the obvious. Was writing it in 2014 a boring chronicle of clear truths, or an achievement for the ages?

I was just twelve during the phase change events of 2011, so I can't speak much to how America and the world has changed since then. I will, however, note that since the increase in cancellations of professors and celebrities who go against The Public's views and the "abolish the police" movements of 2020, it does seem that two things are still true.

First, The Public has yet to provide any alternative to things they wish to destroy.

Second, it does seem that more and more people have given up on "the system" and wish all of it would just disappear. I'm not convinced that's the answer. I think it's much more admirable to work on a solution than to just grumble about the faults of the current one. But working on a solution and working on the right solution are not the same thing. Question is: what's the right solution?

On Writing Well by William Zinsser

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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."

Leadership by Henry Kissinger

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Impressions

Leadership 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. "

The Man From The Future

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The Man From the Future 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, quantum mechanics, The Manhattan Project, computers, and the RAND Corporation 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 created the 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."

Dulcius Ex Asperis

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Some of the kindest people in the world often have no reason to be. They've faced horrible circumstances, tough situations, and unreal pain in their life that have reshaped their worldview and, very unexpectedly, made them kinder.

Like most virtues in life, there is a Latin phrase for this. Dulcius Ex Asperis, sweeter after difficulty.

In our case, people have become sweeter after difficulty. But that saying applies to much more than just people.

Victories won, projects completed, and relationships nurtured through difficulties are much sweeter than those that form without any obstacles. Other than the relationships, I'm not sure why this is. Relationships are sweeter after difficulty because the psychological effect of experiencing hardship with someone else brings two people together. But when a project is difficult and has a lot of obstacles, it too is much sweeter to complete and send off into the world compared to one that was more of a walk in the park. I wonder why that is.

It's important to have language for the experiences and emotions we feel because our world is only as big as the language we have to describe it. That's why it's important to learn, or at least be aware of, obscure Latin phrases and famous quotes that have been around for generations. They communicate something in a way no one has been able to communicate before, expanding our world one Latin phrase at a time.

Plan for Future Conduct

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

At 20 years old, Ben Franklin realized most of his life up to that point had just kinda happened to him.

So, he wrote a personal handbook that would guide his every action. This put him on a launch pad to being a great businessman, politician, and more.

This is what it said:

Be frugal

It is necessary for me to be extremely frugal for some time, till I have paid what I owe.

Always be truthful

To endeavor to speak truth in every instance; to give nobody expectations that are not likely to be answered, but aim at sincerity in every word and action — the most amiable excellence in a rational being.

Work hard and be patient

To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of growing suddenly rich; for industry and patience are the surest means of plenty.

Forgive quickly and don't hold grudges

I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth; but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged upon others, and upon proper occasions speak all the good I know of everybody.

Pieces of the Action

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

You can purchase the book here.

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 was an engineer, inventor, and administrator who headed the U.S. 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

What It Takes To Be a Great Teacher

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

There are few professions that impact future generations more than being a teacher. Not only do teachers teach students about history and science, but they teach students about the world. Through this teaching, students not only discover who they are, but who they want to become.

Days after Albert Camus became the second youngest person to win the Nobel Prize, Camus showed gratitude to whom it was due–his former teacher. Camus writes to Monsieur Germain:

Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened. I don’t make too much of this sort of honor. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.

With that generous heart guiding us, we shall appreciate all methods of teaching and learning.

But I'd be a fool to say all teachers are the same. Some care only about their students passing the tests. Some don't care at all one way or the other. Many are great experts in their fields, but don't have the unique ability to communicate that expertise to a mere novice.

So what is it that makes a great teacher? This is what Vannevar Bush explores in the penultimate chapter to his memoir Pieces of the Action (notes). Vannevar Bush was an engineer, inventor, and administrator who headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during WWII. Bush reported directly to President Roosevelt. His 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, and for the sake of this article, an ode to great teaching.

Bush begins by laying out the foundations for a great teacher:

We can discern a few conditions that any teacher worthy of the name must meet. Clearly, he must know the subject he is teaching. But this does not necessarily mean that he must be a master of all its higher complexities. In fact, he may be all the better a teacher if he does not know too much, especially when he is dealing with introductory courses. If he is far enough ahead of his students to treat the subject with assurance, to be unafraid of their questions, and to be able to explore with them, that is enough. But there is a corollary: he needs to stay that way. Subjects alter and advance. So he has to be a student himself, avid to learn, willing to struggle to keep well ahead.

But this attitude doesn't mean the teacher has to know every answer. In fact, Bush commends the teacher that explores questions with this students as they themselves are learning about it. Quoting Oppenheimer, he writes:

"To teach a mistake is unfortunate; to teach indifference is a crime." Teaching indifference occurs, of course, only if the teacher himself is indifferent, if he is not really and genuinely interested in the subject. It is all right to say "I don't know" to a student or to a class, provided it is said in an answer to a good questions and carries with it the connotation "But let's find out."...I think it creates a fine spirit among a class when the professor says, "Well, now, that's a good question, but I can't give you an offhand answer. Let's see what we can work out," and starts to examine the thing in detail right before the class. This attitude is, of course, at the heart of nearly all good teaching in graduate school.

This spirit of honesty and openness is important for a classroom, Bush notes, because:

Much of the way in which classes regard their teacher depends upon whether they think the man is honest or just a poser doing some kind of act.

These practical matters are quite important in determining a teacher's value, but they're not everything. Like any great art, there are practical skills that are required for a bare minimum job, but also required are less tangible skills. For those, Bush writes:

This is the spirit of success, and the ability, the deep, subtle ability, to transmit it, the mysterious characteristic which inspires emulation. And be it emphasized again, this by no means implies just material success, although that should be included too. My most inspiring teachers led me to seek understanding that was not worth a nickel in this world's goods. It is intangible–this spirit–somewhat an aura, which the ablest teachers bring with them to lecture hall or laboratory or classroom or conference, and to which in definable ways the student mind and spirit respond.

The task of teaching in colleges is not merely to provide students with the skills necessary for a professional career and to prepare them for the bases on which informal collaboration with their fellows is facilitated, but to go beyond these and provide the foundations for associative relationships that may become worthy, not merely trivial, and which confer genuine satisfaction upon those who participate.

The importance of being a great teacher are of utmost importance for not only the present generation, but for future ones as well. Influencing the future to come is the main driving force behind Bush's philosophy for great teaching. He writes:

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.

Bush concludes the chapter with a declaration for different types of courses, allowing students to combine key ideas in one field and relate them to key ideas in another:

Thus, we need a balance. Alongside the course in the mathematics of electric circuits, we need a course in the history of ideas. And we need that balance wherever older minds seek to help younger minds on the way of life.

His last words on the subject of teaching come as an encouragement for teachers to remember the duality between what they're teaching–the actual course content–and how to be someone in this strange world:

What is true in the college classroom is true in the kindergarten as well. Every teacher, no matter his subject, needs to remember that he is preparing most of his students for a life marked by a great duality, one part as a tiny element in a complex social structure, the other in informal relations with their fellows. As he remembers this, and puts it to work in all he does, as he leads his student to be useful, but also to find joy in life, he is a great teacher.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Impressions

I’ve been wanting to read this book for quite some time now. The title got me hooked because one of the main questions I seek to answer in life is, “How did we get here?” And “Where are we going?” This book did a pretty good job of shedding some light on that topic, but not as much as I’d hoped it would. It talked a lot about the people who made discoveries and the drama between them more so than it did about actual information about “nearly everything.” The stories about the people who made certain discoveries were important and interesting, just not what I was expecting. It was also about 100 pages too long. Nonetheless, I learned some interesting things.

Insights

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?

Book Review: da Vinci

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I chose to read a 500+ page biography on a strange renaissance artist because, much like Einstein, I was fascinated with how he approached the world through curiosity. I read Isaacson's biography of Einstein first, and he made comments about how da Vinci's life was filled with even more wonder and curiosity than Einstein's, and I wanted to know how, what that was like, and how I can do the same.

It turns out it's simple: Never complete what you say you're going to and spend years perfecting every intricate detail of your work. Easy, right?

Joke aside, da Vinci was infamous for not completing most of his commissions (more on that later) and was also known for spending hours perfecting the stroke of a tiny rock in the background that the normal layman would probably never see. But this isn't what made him so intelligent and wise in a broad array of fields. Oh no. That, he can thank his "relentless curiosity" for. His goal in life, above being an amazing painter, war machine architect, or city designer, was to know "everything there was to know about the world." Although he didn't quite get there, it wasn't for a lack of trying.

✓

How did da Vinci's life start?

Being born out of wedlock in 1400s Italy didn't leave a lot of options for the son of a multi-generation notary. It was custom in that day for the sons of tradesmen to acquire the skills of the father, but da Vinci didn't have that luxury since he was illegitimate. That fact also made it very difficult to engage in proper schooling, which da Vinci lacked. Most people would attempt to use this as a crutch against him later in life. But to him, it was a strength. What he did didn't require words but experience, which he learned early on how to become an apprentice of. Da Vinci, going against the typical image of the "Renaissance Man" that loved acquiring knowledge and wisdom from lost work, once wrote:

He who has access to the fountain does not go to the water jar.

As he matured though, it became clear that knowledge is neither all experience or past wisdom, but a combination of both.

Though da Vinci lacked education in the traditional sense, he did attend an abacus school to learn useful skills in math and commerce. It was here that he learned the value of thinking about subjects through analogies and patterns, which became "for him a rudimentary method of theorizing."

It was after, where he got an apprenticeship in Verrocchio's workshop, that his true genius began to shine.

On da Vinci's art

One critique I have with the book is that Isaacson doesn't go into much detail about how da Vinci got into the different paths of life. Nevertheless we know da Vinci became an apprentice of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435 - 1488) at about 14 years old, but it seems he was mostly a natural.

The first painting da Vinci worked on with Verrocchio was The Baptism of Christ. It's believed he worked on the leftmost angel because of its soft facial features, which the other subjects in the painting are not graced with.

Being a disciple of experience, da Vinci noticed when he looked at something in real life, it wasn't obvious where one object ended and another began, like it is so often painted in pictures. It's hard to describe what he saw, but he didn't think there should be a harsh boundary between different objects in paintings. This lead him to embrace a painting technique called sfumato. The word, derived from the Italian word for smoke, fumo, can be roughly translated to "soft, vague, or blurred." It makes the painting look very airy and kind of smashed together.

This was just one example of da Vinci's acute observational skills represented in his paintings. He wrote in a notebook:

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.

The genius of Da Vinci isn't realized in his incredible observational skills about how the world works though. Instead, it was realized in his ability to make those observations appear on a canvas. This was the true genius.

When he had an idea for a new painting, he would think about what type of social setting and emotion the piece should illustrate. When he got his answer, he would go to the places that held that type of emotion and observe how people behave, how their bodies are positioned, and what their faces look like. Then, "he noted it in a little book which he was always carrying on his belt." But da Vinci didn't just recreate that scene on a canvas. He used that as a starting point in reality and would add imagination and fantasy to make the painting truly come alive. Isaacson notes:

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

Leonardo's artistic genius is undoubted, but his business suave could have been a bit better. He seemed to get by okay, but was never truly rich because he couldn't finish most of the pieces he was commissioned to do. There's no real reason why this happened, but there are some hypothesis.

One hypothesis is that 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. Isaacson wrote, "he was a genius undisciplined by diligence."

Another example could be that da Vinci wasn't about "the grind." He preferred to work very little and follow his curiosity about the world instead. This was found in one of his notebooks:

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.

Another reason he may have not been able to finish paintings, was because 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. He didn't like to finish pieces because he would inevitably learn a new technique or fact about how a body should be positioned that he could use to make the piece better. To him, nothing was more beautiful than representing Nature like it ought to be represented:

Though human ingenuity may 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.

An example of this relentless perfectionism can be seen by examining St. Jerome in the Wilderness. This painting was done in two phases: the first being in 1480 when he started the painting and the second being in 1510. Under infrared analysis of the painting, one can see 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 autopsies (coming soon). This implied he started the painting in 1480, but then changed it 30 years later to add small neck muscles that he didn't know existed before. His perfectionism was a virtue, but it was also his vice.

So back to the autopsies. Da Vinci was so much a disciple of experience that he dissected some 300+ bodies throughout his lifetime. This wasn't some crazy fantasy for him though, he wanted to understand the layout of the human body so he knew which muscles moved which body parts. He also did a detailed analysis of the skull and brain.

He made very, very detailed drawings of his work and debated with himself about writing a treatise on the anatomy of the human body. He discovered things about how the body works centuries before someone would make the "real" discovery. But because Leonardo didn't have the organizational skills, drive, or desire to publish many of his writings or drawings, he didn't get credit for them until they were discovered.

Lesson: Be more curious

Da Vinci never intended to be a famous painter and artist, he simply went about his life as he thought he should and had some lucky breaks along the way. So even though he didn't intend for his life to come under a microscope 500 years later, there is one thing we can learn when we do so: to observe and be curious about the little things in life more often.

Isaacson writes:

I 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.

He continued:

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.

If we look at Leonardo for a thesis on how to approach life, he might say to do so "with a sense of curiosity and an appreciation for its infinite wonders."

That, Mr. da Vinci, I will strive to do.

The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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:

The planets travel around the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one focus.
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.
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

An attempt to understand the Kolmogorov Complexity of human values

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Let's pretend one day you find magic machine that could grant any lifestyle you asked it for. Professional golfer? Done. Star of Pulp Fiction? Say no more. Enlightened writer? Easy. Any lifestyle you wished to live could be yours upon demand.

But like with any magical box or genie, there's a catch: The only thing it gave you was exactly what you asked it for.

If you asked to be a star of Pulp Fiction, it could do that, but who knows what Pulp Fiction would become. It certainly wouldn't be the genre-breaking film it was. Perhaps it would be a book about orange juice, but hey, you'd be the star!

You could be a professional golfer, but it would be the year 1100 and golf would be nowhere near the sport it is today. It would take your prompt, but it would not give you the assumed preferences–the things you value and care about–unless you specifically asked for every single one.

Let's look at a more concrete example: that of a young couple wishing to get married, buy a house with a white picket fence, and have two kids with a dog. If this couple gave the machine with that criteria for a lifestyle, they would get their house with a white picket fence and two kids, but they might be the only people on their side of the Mississippi. Since they didn't specify they wanted a car–or any other technology for that matter–they wouldn't have it.

But for the purpose of this thought experiment, let's say before the young couple entered their lifestyle preferences into the machine, they had a teacher instruct them on the complications of it:

"Make sure to specify exactly the kind of lifestyle you want to live. If you want to live in Paris in the 1950s, make sure to specify you want to live in the 1950s Paris, just as it was in the real 1950s," says the teacher. "This machine will do exactly what you tell it to do with no assumed preferences or inherited human belief systems, so be specific and precise about the things you care about. Don't forget anything!"

Even on a good day, that couple isn't getting their lifestyle exactly as it is today. Maybe they have the technology that they have today, but since they didn't specify that they also wanted the ability to love, they now hate each other.

Complexity of value

The task of defining your every preference is difficult. If you didn't follow along with that thought experiment, just imagine all the different ideals and preferences you have about your current lifestyle. When I say preferences, I don't mean drinking lattes over americanos, though that is a valid preference. Instead, I mean how you define love, the legacy you wish to leave behind, and your definition of living a "good life." You could try listing things for hours and you're guaranteed to miss at least a couple of preferences.

This idea, the fact that our preferences and values cannot be explained with just a few sentences, is known as our Complexity of value. LessWrong, a popular blog geared towards improving decision-making and reasoning, explains that it's impossible for human values to be "summed up by a few simple rules, or compressed."

This is true because of the fragility of our human values. If we all woke up tomorrow and kindness didn't exist, the world would be wildly different. 99.999% of everything else in the world could be the exact same as it is today, but if we're missing kindness, or love, or humor, the world would cease to be the same. It might not be horrible, or evil, or bad, but it would most certainly be dull. Imagine a world without beauty. Everything, everywhere you look, was just one shade of black or gray. Not black and gray, but just different shades of either black or gray.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a computer scientist who wrote the post cited above explaining the fragility of our value puts it this way:

Consider the incredibly important human value of "boredom" - our desire not to do "the same thing" over and over and over again. You can imagine a mind that contained almost the whole specification of human value, almost all the morals and metamorals, but left out just this one thing -

and so it spent until the end of time, and until the farthest reaches of its light cone, replaying a single highly optimized experience, over and over and over again

Or imagine a mind that contained almost the whole specification of which sort of feelings humans most enjoy - but not the idea that those feelings had important external referents. So that the mind just went around feeling like it had made an important discovery, feeling it had found the perfect lover, feeling it had helped a friend, but not actually doing any of those things - having become its own experience machine. And if the mind pursued those feelings and their referents, it would be a good future and true; but because this one dimension of value was left out, the future became something dull. Boring and repetitive, because although this mind felt that it was encountering experiences of incredible novelty, this feeling was in no wise true.

Humans are complex. Our values might be even more so.

Kolmogorov Complexity

If we want to get technical, which I always do, you can say that human values have a high Kolmogorov complexity. The Kolmogorov Complexity of something refers to the size of the shortest possible description of that thing. If the Kolmogorov Complexity is high, like we know our human values are, it's difficult to describe that thing in any shorter way than actually just actually saying that thing. Since our values are very complicated, we are unable to create a rule, theory, or formula to feed to the magical machine and say "Give us this lifestyle with these parameters," because we have to then go and define every single one of those parameters. It reminds me of that classic illustration where someone is blindfolded and they have to relay instructions to someone else on how to make a peanut butter and jelly, but the person making the sandwich does exactly what the boss tells them to do. If they say, "Put the peanut butter on the bread," but fail to mention anything about opening the peanut butter jar or taking bread out from the bag, the sandwich-maker might just put the peanut butter jar on top of the bag of bread and call it good. In this case, the Kolmogorov Complexity of making a PB&J is high.

Inversely, if something is low in Kolmogorov Complexity, its description can be shorter without sacrificing any detail.

Let's pretend you and I went out for Chinese food after a long day at the office. I don't like fortune cookies, so I gave you mine and said you could pick the best one. Here they are:

dmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdm
83jsns02u84nlw9jsn48anw2kfmv8940

After reading both of them, I ask you what the first one said. You could say, "It says dm 32 times", which is only a 19 character response and is a simple description. Now I ask you what the second one said. The only real way to describe it is to say aloud the random string of characters exactly as they appear.

So naturally, the first set is less complex than the second set because the description of the first set is shorter (without sacrificing any detail) than the actual output. If for some reason I wanted to copy the fortunes, you could have said "Write dm 32 times." That's a very short input for the same output.

Conversely, what you might say for the second string, "Write 83jsns02u84nlw9jsn48anw2kfmv8940 ", is longer than the original output, so the Kolmogorov Complexity is high. It's interesting, though, that the complexity of any string cannot be much higher than the length of the string itself. Even with our high complexity string, the input is only 6 more characters long.

Why this matters

Calculating the Kolmogorov Complexity of a 32 character strings is not exciting, but when using Kolmogorov Complexity as a model as to how the world works, it gets fun. You start to understand the intricacies of everyday life and see how the world is actually really complicated, no matter what someone else says. It's hard to accurately represent something using just a map or description of that thing. As you start to realize that more and more, you become aware of all the possible, "Oh and this too"'s that are in the world.

Revolt of the Public

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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, 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:

First some empirical event must occur that is perceived as a failure.
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."

The Value of Science 67 Years Later

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

In 1955, Professor Richard Feynman gave one of the most famous talks on the importance of science. In his address, he listed three ways science is of important value and gave a strong encouragement (and a stark warning) to the future generations of scientists.

Science allows us to make things

The first way in which science is of value is familiar to everyone. It is that scientific knowledge enables us to do all kinds of things and to make all kinds of things.

Though most would argue science is mainly good, science in and of itself doesn't promote doing good or bad. It's left to the interpretation of mistake-prone humans to use science in any given way. Naturally, this opens up the door for bad things to be done. But if we want to continue improving, we must be okay with taking that risk.

In his lecture, Feynman tells a story of visiting a Buddhist temple and being told something he never forgot. The man in charge gifted them with a Buddhist proverb:

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.

Similarly, science can open the gate to heaven or the gate to hell. "So it is evident that," Feynman expresses, "in spite of the fact that science could produce enormous horror in the world, it is of value because it can produce something."

Science is an avenue for intellectual enjoyment

The second reason science is of value is the imagination it sparks in people from reading about it, writing about it, and working on it.

We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imaginings of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Have you ever considered the the bizarre curiosities in the world? If we put aside the "where did life come from?" question, there are still many things we don't know about the world. And the things we do now, we wonder how long they've been happening and what purpose they serve!

Perhaps this could be called the Paradox of Knowledge. As Feynman alludes to in his lecture, the more things we discover about the world, the more mysterious it seems. Knowledge about the world is like Hydra. For each piece we discover and cross off the list, two more pieces appear. But what's great about humanity, is that these mysteries never deter those with the lab coats. "With pleasure and confidence," Feynman exclaims, "we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries–certainly a grand adventure!"

One of the disappointing things about culture when it gets involved with science, is that it seems only interested in the use case for a remarkable idea and fails to appreciate the idea in and of itself. I see this happening today with the advancements in AI. When Dalle-2 was showcased on Twitter recently, the beautiful artwork that was produced based only on a small sentence description was amazing. But it didn't stop the pessimists from saying the all-too-common, "So what?"

Does it matter? Who knows what this could be used for, but let's enjoy the technical advancements right now and see what possibilities it opens up as other technology advances.

Science makes people comfortable with doubt and uncertainty

When a scientist doesn't know an answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt... in order to progress, we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt.

Science is a network of people who have ideas and theories. Most people are unsure about their ideas, some people are nearly sure, but none, as Feynman notes, are absolutely certain. This is possibly the greatest value of science–it encourages the idea of uncertainty. It ensures people know its okay to be confused and puzzled about something. In fact, not knowing the answer to something is a great place to be because it means you're on the edge of cutting off one head of the hydra only to discover two more.

Marc Andreessen shared a screenshot from an article recently explaining the rationale behind banning certain "misinformation" online. Though he didn't link the source, the screenshot is scary.

👨‍🍳💋 pic.twitter.com/n02xsC6ZQx
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) April 23, 2022

If we were to ban ideas that "contradict the scientific consensus" in 1543, (Well, they tried then) we'd still believe the Earth was at the center of the universe. If we did so in 1905, we might still believe the ether is real and would never have discovered the theories of General and Special Relativity.

Banning information that goes against the grain is the opposite of one of the most fundamental pillars of science: doubt. Interestingly, Feynman addresses this exact issue:

It is our responsibility to leave the men of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant; if we suppress all discussion, all criticism, saying, "This is it, boys, man is saved!" and thus doom man for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.

If we want to solve a problem that we have never before solved, we need to be open to solutions and ideas that we've yet to try. To do that, we must encourage doubt and uncertainty to run rampant in scientific fields, and in fact our own life as well, as we try to discover more mysteries of the universe.

Our responsibility as scientists

Feynman concludes his lecture with a heartfelt encouragement to scientists:

It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

It's our responsibility as people in 2022 to do the same.

Where the term 'zero-sum' comes from

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

In 1925, John von Neumann published one of the first papers introducing "game theory" into popular discourse. In it, he explained that most games are just a series of events. Some of those events depend entirely on chance–which von Neumann calls 'draws'– and others on the decision of a player–what von Neumann calls 'steps.'

Ultimately, he concluded a game, as The Man from the Future explains, "could be represented simply as the choice by each player of a single strategy (effectively an amalgam of all the strategies they play in the game), followed by a calculation of their respective payouts that accounts for everyone's choices (and which factors in their luck)."

But he couldn't get any further in his thinking with multi-player games, so he started thinking about games with two players whose payouts equal 0.

Since there are only two players, one has to win and the other has to lose. What one person wins is equal to what the other person loses. So if Player A wins $5, then Player B has to have lost $5 somehow. The two payouts, when added together equal 0 (5 + (-5) = 0). Therefore, these games were determined to be zero-sum: the sum equals zero.

Why this matters

The terms "zero-sum" and "positive-sum" are popular in the online world I hang out in. The benefits of the world and the creator economy being "positive-sum" or touted and the mindset that the world is "zero-sum" is negative. I always understood what they meant, but didn't know the background behind them. It turns out, John von Neumann helped birth these terms into the world through his earlier work on game theory.

The paper in which he lays out these terms is the one where he describes his 'minimax' strategy. In our example above, Player B wants to minimize the maximum amount of money they can lose and Player A wants to maximize the minimum amount they can win (called the 'maximin' strategy).

People who are described as having a "zero-sum mindset" are those that don't think there can be multiple winners. They'll do anything they can to climb the ladder or make the sale. They are also usually very jealous of other people's success because in their world, if someone else is winning, that means they're losing.

Though that's not how the world really works, so the world can be described as "positive-sum." There is enough winnings for everyone. Thankfully this is the case, because we're a few million years late to the party.

Sometimes your room for error, isn't enough

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

In Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, he writes about the idea of living with a margin of safety or room for error. It's a common idea, but an uncommon practice. In the book, Housel explains living with room for error means having more cash on hand than you think may be necessary to wither the unexpected storms that life brings.

The difficulty, though, is knowing how much room to give yourself. Living with too much room for error in the context of personal finances means you'd be losing out on some returns from stocks or other illiquid investments. Not enough room for error means you could be wiped out completely if something terrible happens. So living with room for error is a good thing, but knowing exactly how much room to live with is difficult.

Harland and Wolff, a shipbuilding company, had a practice for all of their vessel's maiden voyages. National Geographic explains, they sent men, called the Guarantee Group, aboard the ship who were experts in skills like "plumbing, electrical systems, carpentry, and machine fitting." Essentially, if anything went wrong, they were there to fix it. Harland and Wolff were living with room for error.

One of the most famous Harland and Wolff creations was the Titanic, so indeed, the Guarantee Group was aboard the vessel at the time of its sinking. Still, there was no stopping the ship's inevitable doom. Harland and Wolff's room for error wasn't quite enough.

So it goes with things in life.

How to Increase the Chances of Becoming a Genius

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Dwarkesh Patel wrote an essay exploring the mystery of the miracle year– "in which [scientists] make multiple, seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span of a single year or two" (source). Patel posits some potential explanations for the miracle year phenomenon including Selection Bias, right problem at the right time, and the amount of freedom the geniuses had at the time.

He concludes the piece saying:

I still don’t think I fully understand why these miracle years keep showing up in the lives of great scientists, except that it has something to do with them being young, concentrating intensely on the right problems, and remaining open to fresh perspectives.

The conclusion is a bit underwhelming, though it makes sense because these miracle years truly are a mystery and a lot of smart people have been thinking about them for a long time. But that conclusion can also be quite disappointing if you (1) aren't young and (2) don't feel like you're concentrating intensely on the right problems. Or if you're like me and don't even know what the right problems are.

So instead of focusing on the miracle year, I wanted to focus on the prior years and the second prior conclusion, how do you know what problems to focus intently on?

Finding the Right Problems

As Patel notes, Einstein's miracle year was in 1905. In the span of four short months, Einstein wrote four papers that answered a lot of seemingly unanswerable questions in physics. He lays out his plan in a letter to Conrad Habicht:

...I promise you four papers in return. The first deals with radiation and the energy properties of light and is very revolutionary, as you will see if you send me your work first. The second paper is a determination of the true size of atoms...The third proves that bodies on the order of magnitude 1/1000 mm, suspended in liquids, must already perform an observable random motion that is produced by thermal motion. Such movement of suspended bodies had actually been observed by physiologists who call it Brownian molecular motion. The fourth paper is only a rough draft at this point, and is an electrodynamics of moving bodies which employs a modification of the theory of space and time.[^1]

The first paper, eventually titled "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", described how "light comes not just in waves but tiny packets."[^1]

The choice to uncover the light quanta phenomenon wasn't random. It was a deliberate choice to pursue answers to, at the time, unanswerable questions. This is our first hint at what can lead up to the making of a miracle year.

One of the main questions in physics at the turn of the 20th Century had to do with what the world is made of and how it reacts to things. Is the universe made of particles? Or is it a continuous field like gravity and electromagnetic fields are?

Einstein, in his 1905 paper, took those questions, combined them with the fundamental work of Max Planck and Phillip Lenard that had recently surfaced and created his first revolutionary breakthrough: light quanta.

If you were to continue studying Einstein's miracle year, you would see that formula for creating breakthroughs throughout his life. Unanswerable questions + recent discoveries x time to think about the solutions = revolutionary breakthrough.

It was his deep knowledge of physics and the mysteries that had yet to be answered combined with his insatiable desire to know what was currently being worked on and ample time to think about the problem that were factors that lead to his miracle year. The explanations Patel gives in his essay for this could be seen as Right Problem Right Time. I'd argue that's the most beneficial factor (and hardest to create) that lead to Einstein's 1905 success.

Right Problem, Wrong Time

If you've studied the inventions of history or read How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson, you'd see over and over again the countless ideas and inventions that were created 10, 15, or 20 years too soon to really take off.

20 years before Edison created his phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented a machine that recorded sound. He was obsessed with shorthand writing and happened to study biology as a hobby. After he learned how ears capture vibrations in the air, he wondered if a machine could capture sound in the same way and record what it heard. His machine looked very much like Edison's original phonograph (picture below) but his device had one problem: it had no way of playing the recorded sound back. In his mind, this wasn't needed. Much like stenographers write in symbols interpreted by people, he assumed people would be able to interpret the etchings of his phonoautograph. Evidently that was not the case.

This is one example, of many more, of someone working on the right problem at the wrong time. If Einstein had been born 50 years earlier, he wouldn't have had Maxwell's equations to question nor would he have Planck's work to get him started on light quanta. But he wasn't, and to say, "Everything just has to work out in the right time" is another disappointing answer to the creation (or recreation) of more miracle years. And to that, we go back to Einstein.

On Curiosity

If the miracle year phenomenon can't be solved and is indeed just that, a phenomenon, we need to ask what we can do to increase the likelihood of that phenomenon taking place. As mentioned previously, Einstein's formula for groundbreaking insights is:

And that formula is rooted in one thing: curiosity.

Walter Isaacson writing in his biography Einstein: His Life and Universe says this about his sense of wonder and curiosity at life:

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 an 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 ability to question the mysterious evidence at play in the world, without a doubt, lead to his miracle year. But he didn't just wonder about the big, gaping holes in physics. He wondered about the mundane things as well. Isaacson writes later:

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.'

What this means for your miracle year

So if you're wondering how to increase the likelihood of your miracle year, I implore you to do three things.

Look at the unanswered questions in your field. Collect a list of all of the things that work "just because they do" and look at it constantly. Try, as hard as you can, to wonder about the answers and not get discouraged if you're not making progress. It took Einstein over 10 years to form his theory of special relativity since he first began thinking about it.

If you're in a field like software, what are the problems or bugs that are so difficult to fix, people have adapted to their annoyances?

Study history and learn how your field or passion got to where it is. Understand some of the earliest problems that were solved at some point. How did the solutions come about?
Continue reading the latest sources and studies that are being conducted in your field. It's important to know the breakthrough experiments as they're happening. If you're in software, stay up-to-date on the latest technologies and trends. Don't get too wrapped up in them that you are switching every few months, but have a general idea of the possibilities each new trend, study, or experiment brings.
Finally, embrace your curiosity. Continue reading wide and reading deep. Don't ever think "That's not applicable to what I'm doing." It is. It could be if you think big enough. When you combine ideas from separate fields, that's when innovation really happens.

Wonder about the little things. Be okay with not knowing the answer to a question, but don't settle for there not being an answer. Continue embracing life's curiosities and see where the path takes you. Don't be afraid to veer off the traditional path and make your own. In fact, this is probably the best thing you can do.

Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe

Building a Custom React Form Hook

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I'm taking an advanced React course and instead of powering through the tutorials to finish as fast as I can, I'm trying to slow down and make sure I understand each line of code. Naturally, I wanted to share for others to see and potentially benefit from.

The following lines of code come from a custom React hook to handle basic form submissions.

The Code

First, I created a function and initialized state for my form inputs. When the hook is called, I can pass default properties to it.

    import  {  useState  }  from  "react";

    export  default  function  useForm(initial  =  [])  {
	    // create a state object for our inputs
	    const  [inputs,  setInputs]  =  useState(initial);

I then created a function to handle the change of the form. It first destructures values from the event handler (using let because they will change). I then have some if statements checking to see if the input is a number or file because the behavior will change if either of those are true. Finally, I use the setInputs function to copy the current inputs and assign them to the value of the form. The spread operator copies the current inputs and overrides whatever is changed on the form. I wrote [name] because it allows the function to be dynamically used on a form that changes the price, the name, or something else.

   function  handleChange(e)  {
    let  {  value,  name,  type  }  =  e.target;

    if(type  ===  'number')  {
	value  =  parseInt(value);
   }
    if(type  ===  'file'){
	    value[0]  =  e.target.files;
    }

    setInputs({
	    // copy the exisisting state
	    ...inputs,
	    [name]:  e.target.value,
	 });
  }

Finally, I have some simple functions to reset the form to the initial properties (what was passed when the useForm function was called) and clear the form so it's empty.

The clearForm function is a bit confusing, but necessary. The Object.entries converts each of the inputs to arrays. Within each of those arrays are two other arrays, one for the property and one for the value. I then map over those arrays, destructure the key and value from them and assign new values of empty strings to them all. Finally, that's wrapped in an outer Object.entries function to convert those arrays back into an object. Next, I pass the blankSlate function to our setInputs state to clear the forms with the empty values passed during the mapping.

    function  resetForm()  {
    	setInputs(initial);
    }

    function  clearForm()  {
    	const  blankState  =  Object.fromEntries(
    	Object.entries(inputs).map(([key,  value])  =>  [key,  ''])
	  );
	  setInputs(blankState);
    }

In the end, I return each of the functions I want available when I use the hook.

    return  {
	    inputs,
	    handleChange,
	    resetForm,
	    clearForm,
    }

Season-Long Friendships

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Let me break a social norm: You don't have to be life-long friends with every person you become acquainted with. In fact, it's probably best you don't. Doing so could lead to 100 "friendships" with no depth. No one can carry the emotional burden of that many people on their shoulders.

Here's what usually happens:

Craig meets Darrel while they are both working as interns at a local accounting firm. They're young, fresh out of college, and in a similar life stage. Naturally, they bond over their shared experiences, eat few meals together, grab drinks, and maybe take a vacation or two with each other. Eventually, they become best friends.

After their two-year stint as interns, they're ready for something new. They want a job with more pay and more status. Nothing wrong with that, right?

So Craig gets a job on the East Coast and Darrel heads South. The goodbye is sad. They've shared laughs and memories together and now all that is coming to an end. They say they'll stay connected, and they probably do for a few months after the move but eventually, entropy sets in and their relationship dwindles. The final stage of this once strong relationship are casual swipe ups of 🔥 or 😂 on Instagram. Maybe the occasional, "I miss you."

This experience is all too common. But is that a bad thing? For some reason, society has deemed it to be.

The bitter best friend that got replaced at college or felt "forgotten" about is a popular storyline for Hollywood. And for some reason we have empathy for them. "How could they!" We think. "They shared so many memories together." But perhaps this is just the circle of life and we need to learn that. Not every person you're acquainted with at some point in life will become a life-long friend. Some will just be season-long friends. It doesn't diminish the memories, make them less of a person, or somehow mean the relationship was wrong. It was probably exactly what you needed at the time and now that you (and your season-long friend) are in a different place in life, it's time to part ways and head South, without the feeling of guilt or betrayal riding shotgun.

The Best Season-Long Friendship

If you've never seen Good Will Hunting, I implore you to drop everything right now and watch it. Good luck holding back the tears. But if you haven't that's okay.

A sub-plot in the movie is between two best friends, Will Hunting (Matt Damon) and Chuckie Sullivan (Ben Affleck). Will is a cocky genius who hasn't amounted to much in life other than getting in fights and hanging out with the boys. Chuckie is the average blue collar worker who works on his car on weekends and goes to the bar at night. Will and Chuckie have a routine. Chuckie picks up the boys in his car, drives to Will's house, and they go out on the town. This happens everyday. But the plot of the movie follows Will's nurturing of his genius and encouragement to make something out of his life, which is a speech Chuckie finally gives to Will after he's tired of seeing him throw his gifts down the drain:

(You can watch the video or read the script below)

Will: "What am I going to get out of here for? I'm gonna live here the rest of my life you know? Be neighbors. We'll have kids, take them to little league together up Folley Field."

Chuckie sighs and replies: "Look you're my best friend so don't take this the wrong way, but, in 20 years, if you're still living here, coming over to my house and watching the Patriots game and still working construction, I'll fuckin' kill ya. That's not a threat, that's a fact. I'll fuckin' kill ya."

Will, bewildered: "What are you talking about?"

Chuckie: "Look. You've got something none of us have–"

Will cuts him off: "Oh c'mon, why is it always this. I mean I fuckin' owe it to myself to do this or that. Wha- What if I don't want to."

Chuckie: "Nah, nah, nah, nah, fuck you. You don't owe it to yourself. You owe it to me. 'Cause tomorrow I'm gonna wake up and I'll be 50. And I'll still be doing this shit (construction). And that's alright. That's fine. But you're sittin' on a winning lottery ticket...

Every day I come by your house and I pick you up. And we go out and we have a few drinks and a few laughs and its great. You know what the best part of my day is? For about ten seconds from when I pull up to the curb to when I get to your door, 'cause I think maybe I'll get up there and I'll knock on the door and you won't be there. No goodbye. No see ya later. No nothing. You just left. I don't know much, but I know that."

The movie continues. Will has a breakthrough with his therapist, played by Robin Williams, and finally realizes what life is all about. He sets off to California to go see about a girl.

The camera cuts to Chuckie parking on the curb like he's done so many times before. He takes a quick jaunt up to Will's patio and knocks.

...

Nothing.

He looks through the dirty window inside and finds sheets folded neatly on the bed. His face turns from confusion to understanding. A slight grin begins to show on Chuckie's face followed by tears. He takes a 180 degree turn and slowly walks back to the infamous curb and shrugs to the boys in the car. Confused, he says "He's not there." But we all know what he's thinking.

"That son of a bitch left. No good bye. No see ya later. No nothing. He cashed in his winning lottery ticket."

Chuckie is the best kind of season-long friend. We learned from Will what matters most in life. We learned from Chuckie how to be a great friend and make those things matter.

There's nothing wrong with a season-long friendship. Sometimes, they have more impact on your life than anyone ever could.

This is the final scene, where Chuckie realizes Will left.

If, By Whiskey

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

As he was standing in the musty Mississippi courtroom, arguing for what he believed in, he got a brilliant idea. Instead of arguing for the benefits of alcohol while hoping (and maybe praying) no one on the defense brought up all of the negative effects of alcohol, he would address the effects directly. This took the defense's argument right from their hands, just like a little kid in a candy shop.

"Mr. Sweat", the judge begins, "Do you have anything to add?"

"I do your honor, and please, call me 'Soggy'." (His real name was Noah Sweat Jr., but he acquired the nickname for potentially obvious reasons.)

Our man continued,

My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey. All right, here is how I feel about whiskey:

If when you say whiskey you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman's step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.

The position depends on the audience

That dramatic introduction was my attempt at a narrative (How'd I do?) explaining the beginning of a rather fascinating fallacy known as "If by whiskey..."

Sweat, the character whom we observed in the musty Mississippi court room, was an American judge and state representative, famous for the former speech he gave in 1952 about whiskey. What made it so unique was that he wasn't arguing for one side or the other. Instead, he came down on both sides of the argument but took a different position depending on the audiences reaction.

Naturally, "If by whiskey..." arguments are used whenever the speakers position depends on the listener's opinion. It's a great way to take a position on something without really taking a position.

Another way to think about this is the Russel Conjugation.

Russel Conjugation

The Russel Conjugation, or sometimes called the Emotive Conjugation is when someone uses different words to describe something depending on the feelings they want to invoke in the listener.

This is something most people do without ever realizing they are doing it. This happens because all words convey two meanings. The first is the factual information the word conveys. We all know what a dog is because the word "dog" describes it. The second meaning words coney are their intended emotional response. "Dog" is a kind, loving animal. "Mutt" is a dumb, unwanted creature. "Sleeping around" vs. "Having lots of sex." "Getting drunk" vs. "Having a few too many."

By using a select choice of words instead of another, a speaker is able to create emotional responses to what they're saying. They can invoke love and sadness or fear and anger by describing the same situation based on factual meaning but that carries a different emotional load.

Reading advice from Tyler Cowen

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Tyler Cowen has easily risen to to the top of my "thinkers I like" list. There's probably no one else I know of today that I look at and think, "I want to be exactly like them when I grow up" other than Tyler Cowen. His curisoity and breadth of knowledge is amazing.

Part of that knowledge stems from reading. And reading a lot. Here's some advice:

People don’t read enough, and I think as a society we’re under-investing in reading. People feel compelled to finish books they’ve started – that’s just a tax on your reading. Why would you do that to yourself? Imagine a world where any restaurant you tried you had to keep on going there for days or weeks, you’d hardly ever go out to eat.
So I advocate reading books in cluster – the author can be the clustering factor, it can be the topic, it can be the historical period – but you really get into a person’s mind if you re-read everything they’ve done within the span of a few weeks or months, and then watch them on YouTube, and just try to think about and write out notes, “What am I going to ask them?” One of the very best ways to read is to have your own podcasy.
So the way you read well is just by reading a lot, and by reading a lot your whole life. And then when you go to read actual books you’re like “I know that, I know that, I know that,” and you keep on going, and you read much more quickly. And that’s really the way to read a lot. There are these compounding returns to being obsessed with reading, and starting young, and never stopping.

12 Rules For Life

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Impressions

I began reading this book when it came out and stopped about 3/4 of the way through. It just wasn't for me at the time. But it was a delightful read now. Peterson talks about some really interesting ideas in the book that it didn't think were applicable, but apparently they were. At times, the writing was a bit dense and too heady, but that's what you get from an intelligent college professor.

Actionable Takeaways

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.
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.
Life is a constant battle fighting to maintain order, but learning how to thrive in chaos.
consciousness can be defined as knowing exactly how and where we can be hurt and why.
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.
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."
Don't be friends with someone whose friendship you wouldn't recommend to your son, daughter, sister, or mother.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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."
Stubborn refusal to change in the face of error is stupidity.
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.

Questions

Are you so sure the person crying out to be saved has not decided a thousand times to accept his lot of pointless and worsening suffering, simply because it is easier than shouldering any true responsibility?
What have I done wrong and what can I do to make things at least a little bit more right?

Popular sayings

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I've always been curious where popular sayings come from. While they usually have an interesting origin story, most of them also have witty clap-backs.

Here are the second half of some popular sayings:

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Great minds think alike, though fools seldom differ.
For the love of money is the root of all evil.

(Most people say "Money is the root of all evil." Money isn't evil. The love of money is evil.)

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Jack of all trades, master of none but better than a master of one.
Birds of a feather flock together until the cat comes.
The early bird catches the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.

A lot of people hear these and wrongly assume these were the original and the second half got cut off sometime in the past. That's mostly wrong.

Instead, what probably happened was someone came up with a creative way to shut up the people who kept saying these quips to explain a point.

Naturally, they didn't catch on as well as the first half. But the idea that these are the "full" sayings is incorrect.

The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons From 15 Years as CEO of The Walt Disney Company

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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

When you innovate, everything has to change, not just the way you deliver a product
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.

What's the problem I need to solve?
Does this solution make sense?
If I'm feeling some doubt, why?
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 Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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

If content isn't sticking or getting through to an audience, don't change the content. Change the way the content is delivered.
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.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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)

Science, as Carl Sagan put it, is "a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."12 (Location 111)

Our yearning for certainty leads us to pursue seemingly safe solutions---by looking for our keys under street lamps. (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)

"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)

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)

Ask yourself, What's the worst-case scenario? And how likely is that scenario, given what I know? (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)

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)

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)

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) #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)

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)

You must be patient enough to pursue the whisper and perceptive enough to receive it when it arrives. (Location 1577) #quote

"To create," biologist [[François Jacob]] said, "is to recombine." (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)

[[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)

"If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success," (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

"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 guess 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)

"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)

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)

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)

What We See When We Read

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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..."

The Dip by Seth Godin

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Summary

Winners never quit is an incorrect statement; they do quit, they just know what to quit and when.

Two Key Takeaways

When starting a new venture or skill, know when to quit. Have it outlined and don't quit unless you reach that threshold
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

You would run out of time (and quit)
You run out of money (and quit)
You get scared (and quit)
You're not serious about it (and quit)
You lose interest or settle for being mediocre (and quit)
You focus on the short term instead of the long term (and quit when the short term gets too hard)
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

Am I panicking?
Who am I trying to influence?
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 in 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.

Show Your Work by Austin Kleon

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Junior: Writing Your Way Ahead in Advertising

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Essentialism by Greg Mckeowen

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 21 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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

Separate the decision from the relationship
You don't have to use the word, "No"
Focus on the trade off
Remind yourself that everyone is selling something
Saying no often requires trading popularity for respect. Be okay with that.
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, you 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.

Einstein: His Life and Universe

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 14 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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

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:

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.

The NYT on Einstein after his death:

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.

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."

How to Add Conditional Class Rendering in Next JS

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Conditional class rendering is pretty simple, but I've had to think through it a few times and always forget how to do it immediately. Hopefully this helps me and will help you too.

In this example, I'm trying to render different classes based on whether or not there is an image prop passed to my PageTitle component. I'm using this to display the title and description on my site, but on the home page I have a .gif that I don't want on any other pages. So on the home page, I'm passing an image prop and on the other pages I'm not. I have conditional rendering statement adding a div as a child to flexbox if there is an image prop.

The issue I was trying to solve was my mobile display of the PageTitle component. If there was an image, then the text covered 2/3 of the screen and the image was next to it. All good there. But if there wasn't an image, the text still covered 2/3 of the screen and created an awkward empty space. So on mobile, if there was no image prop, I wanted to take the flex property off the container but put it back for larger breakpoints because I didn't want to description text to span the entire page container. So here's what I did.

The Solution

First, create a variable with a ternary operator to check whatever you want to check. In this case, if image was true, I wanted to add flex class. If image was false, I wanted to add flex-none and sm:flex breakpoint. sm-flex says "On break points larger than small, do this." flex-none is the behavior of all other breakpoints. In this case, just the xs breakpoint.

const PageTitle = ({title, description, image}) => {

const condition = image ? 'flex' : 'flex-none sm:flex'

Next, I added that ternary operator as a string template literal to my classes on the container rendering the component:

const PageTitle = ({title, description, image}) => {

const condition = image ? 'flex' : 'flex-none sm:flex'

return (
	<div className={`flex-row items-center ${condition}`}>

So if image is true, the flex container will be added as a className and the component will flex naturally. If it's false, on breakpoints smaller than small, it will be a normal, full-length row.

Note: If you don't have any classes there in both instances, you can just add the variable to the className and don't have to do a string template literal.

How to Enable Word Wrap on Only MDX in VS Code

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I love editing in VS Code, but I couldn't get my MDX files to wrap on a specific column width without affecting all my other files. I want my MDX files to wrap because that's how I write blog posts, but I don't want any of my JS files to wrap because it makes it much harder to read. After doing some research, I was able to piece together a solution.

Paste this code in your settings.json file

    "[mdx]": {
        "editor.wordWrap": "wordWrapColumn",
        "editor.quickSuggestions": false,
        "editor.wordWrapColumn": 80,
    },

If you use markdown instead of MDX, change the [mdx] to [Markdown].

How to Redirect Users to a Different Page After a Set Interval with Next.js

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The following code example came after wanting to redirect my 404 page after someone landed on it. I've been using an astronaut for my branding and have been loving it. I found a picture of an alien beaming the astronaut into its spaceship, so wanted to 'beam' the user back home. The easy way out was to use a button and have them click it, but that didn't make sense to me. Since it's 'beaming', it should happen automatically. So I did the following:


import { useRouter } from 'next/router'

const Custom404 = () => {
    const router = useRouter()
    useEffect(() => {
        const timeout = setTimeout(() => {
            router.push('/')}, 2000);

The first line of code imports next/router from Next, don't miss that step. Then, I added a useEffect hook to set the timeout interval. I had to use that function inside the useEffect hook because it can only run client side. When I tried it without the hook, I kept getting an error because it was running on build. Silly me.

The argument in router.push is the page you want to redirect to, so change as needed. I'm redirecting home.

Solving the vague errors

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

When you write code, you have a local development environment you're able to work on. This gives you a real-time look at what your code does and how it functions. Once you get it working as you wish in development, then you push it to production, which allows others to visit a URL and actually view it.

The development environment is as close to the production environment as it can get, but there are still flaws. You can solve for a lot of the errors before you push it to production, but sometimes while you're trying to push it to production, you get errors. This is infuriating.

"It works perfectly in development, why isn't working in production?!"

The worst part of this experience is the error message the production logs give are usually vague and not very helpful. Most of the time it's something along the lines of, 'Hey this page had an error. May the odds be ever in your favor."

Life is the same way.

You can prepare for a situation as much as you want, but practicing and being in the situation in real-life will never be the same thing. There are too many outside variables in real life affecting your environment. Sometimes, you're forced to solve the vague errors on the spot.

15 Quotes from Albert Einstein That Reveals His Philosophy on Life

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Albert Einstein was a remarkable theoretical physicist. He made discoveries about the smallest things in the world to the largest things in the world and everything in between. Not everyone can say they've done that. But while most people were distracted by his insights in science, Einstein crafted a personal philosophy on the greater questions of life. He was engaged in political matters and used his influence to change the world. As one could imagine, he cared deeply for remaining curious about life and encouraging others to do the same. The following are direct quotes from Einstein on these matters of life. They give us an insight into the humanity of one of the world's greatest. I read these in Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson.

On Education

Near the end of his life, the New York State Education Department asked Einstein what they should teach in school. He replied,

In teaching history, there should be an extensive discussion of personalities who benefited mankind through independence of character and judgment.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

On Curiosity

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But, intuition is nothing but the outcomes of earlier intellectual experience.

Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.

All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.

Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality

Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.

On Individuality and Politics

It is important to foster individuality, for only the individual can produce the new ideas.

When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.

How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery.

On Personal Matters

To dwell on things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.

The monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

I've loved getting to study this man's life and write just about everything I could on the book. I wrote an essay examining his life and greater detail and wrote about how he came up with his ideas that changed the world (and explain how you can do the same). I also published my notes on the biography here.

2 Strategies To Help You Remember What You Read

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

For a few years now, I've been a voracious reader. I love understanding how we got to where we are today and how that might forecast where we're going in the future. I kept getting frustrated that I was reading things, but couldn't remember what I read nor make connections to historical events. It took a lot of hypothesizing, experimenting, and tweaking my system, but this is what I've found works best:

1. The Blank Sheet Method

Whenever you start a new book, podcast, article, etc., grab a blank piece of paper and write the title at the top. In one color, write down everything you know or you think you know about the topic before consuming the content. It's okay if that's nothing.

Then, write down anything you learn while consuming the content in a different color. Things that surprised you, things that made you go, "Huh, that's surprising."

When you're done, write a two-sentence summary of the content on the page and file it with the rest of your sheets. If you want, you can add tags to the top right and file it under a certain category.

2. Have a place to throw things and throw everything there.

For me, this is my Obsidian Daily Notes page. I have a 'Scratchpad' template that I write down any thought that I have, article I want to read, quote I heard, or task I want to get done. Then I add relevant tags to discover them later.

I also use Siri all the time when driving. If I'm listening to a podcast or audio book and they say something I want to come back to, I'll say, "Hey Siri, remind me about this idea at 23:45 in Indie Hackers Podcast." Things3, my task app, integrates with iPhone reminders and they show up in my inbox, so then I sort those out into each area.

If you want something easier, you can use the native reminders app as a widget on your phone to quickly add things. You can also email yourself links and ideas you see on your phone, want to revisit while at your desk. Mem, a note taking app, is integrated with Twilio and lets you text a number and those notes go to your Mem Inbox. It's a neat idea, but Mem is still in Beta and a bit buggy.

The key here is to create something with the least amount of friction as possible. For example in online marketing, the more times a user has to click to checkout or look at your product, the more customers you'll lose. Similarly, the more times you have to click to capture and idea, the more ideas you'll lose. This idea comes from _Atomic Habits_in that when you're trying to build a new habit, make it frictionless. If you're trying to break a bad habit, create as much friction as possible.

To Recap Those may or may not work for you. But whatever you choose, remember, it's going to take work! I make a lot of note taking videos on YouTube and a lot of people ask for a better system and honestly, their system is just fine. It just takes time to go through your notes each week and re-discover what you wrote. But that's how you get genuine insights. I've found most people want their tool to rediscover the insights and notes for them. While that's ideal (and some apps do a good job of this), the best ideas will come through doing the work of sorting through your notes and thinking critically about what you wrote.

Every Saturday morning, I go through my Obsidian and see what I wrote about. Making relevant tags that I see necessary, reviewing book notes, and so on.

Each note taking system has to...

Capture
Organize
Distill
Create

Figure out the best way to do these for you and you'll be set!

How Record Players Work: The Science Behind That Beautiful Sound, Simplified

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The eighth wonder of the world is sitting down in the evening with a cup of whiskey on the rocks with the strum and yodel of ol' Hank Williams crackling through the record player. It's the closest I could come to experiencing what it would be like listening to him on the radio.

If you don't like Hank or country music, imagine the serenading sounds of Sinatra, Beethoven, Anne-Margret, Ben E. King, or Franki Valli crackling through the speaker. No matter who you pick, it's going to be a delicious sound with just the right amount of noise, music, and feedback to transport you back to the mid-20th century.

After recently watching The Current War (featuring Dr. Strange and Spiderman before they were Dr. Strange and Spiderman), I did some light research on Edison and his phonograph and asked the question, "Cool, but how?" That led me down a rabbit hole of trying to understand how sound gets recorded on a vinyl disk and then how it can somehow play back at the exact right frequencies and pitch at a volume loud enough to be heard by our delicate little ears. The results of questioning, studying, and following that rabbit hole gave birth to this article. I'm happy I understand how it works and delighted to share my discovery. Let's begin.

In reality, a record player is pretty simple:

A record has grooves
A needle follows the grooves and makes a sound
That sound is amplified
Boom - you have a record player

But that wasn't good enough for me, which was unfortunate because that is what most of the articles said, in some form or another.

I still had many questions:

Where does a record player come from?
How does the sound get recorded into the record?
How does the needle actually make the sound?
How does the sound travel from the needle to the amplifier, which is seemingly hidden away?

Before I could begin to truly understand how a record player works, I first had to get down and dirty with the science of sound and, more specifically, what are sound waves and how do they work?

First, the science of sound

Sound is a wave that disrupts the air or other medium it's traveling across. When you talk, the particles in the medium vibrate back and forth and carry the sound wave. That wave rides the vibration of that medium into your ear and vibrates the ear drums which tell your brain, 'Hey! Something's going on over here, pay attention.'

Since the sound wave rides the medium, if there is no medium, there can be no sound. This is why there is no sound in space. There is virtually no air in space and, therefore, nothing to carry the sound that's made. So I guess that answers the question, if a tree falls in the middle of space and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Sound waves have three characteristics:

Wavelength
Frequency
Amplitude

If you have a high frequency sound vibrating the particles in the air, the particles move back and forth really, really fast. When you have a low frequency sound, the particles in the air vibrate much slower. The wavelength, frequency, and amplitude can be thought of as "data" which carries the information about what the noise sounds like. Your eardrums are able to read that "data" and tell you what something sounds like. So if someone starts talking in a higher pitched voice, the wavelength will get higher thus telling your ears, "This noise is a higher frequency."

To recap this section:

Sound is a wave that vibrates the particles in the medium it’s heard through.
The sound wave rides the medium into your ear, vibrating the eardrums.
The movement of the particles match the wavelength, frequency, and amplitude of the original vibration, which allows you to hear different things.

Now that we understand what sound is, we can dive into the history of record players and understand how a vinyl disc contains the lovely notes of Frank Sinatra and Anne Margaret.

The history of that lovely sound machine

Recording human sound was only possible after one understood what sound is and how we hear it, both of which we just learned. But in the 1850s, this information wasn't as available. But lucky for us, a printer named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville came across a biology book that piqued his interest in understanding how sound works. He saw from the textbook that sound traveled through the ear and vibrated the eardrum. Scott had also published a book on the history of shorthand writing, which at the time, was how voices were "recorded." But Scott would change that. Kinda.

As he combined his newfound interest in human anatomy and shorthand writing, he wondered whether or not a machine could write the sound waves instead of a person. Pretty neat idea if I do say so myself. So, in 1857, twenty years before Edison and his phonograph would come out, Scott was awarded a patent for a machine that recorded sound. He called this machine "the phonautograph."

But what Scott didn't add to his machine was a way to play that sound back. It seems obvious to us now, but Scott assumed that just as stenographers read symbols from shorthand writing, humans would be able to read the waves the machine recorded. Although that never happened, Scott took a giant leap forward in the history of recording sound and the central idea of his machine still lives on today in record players.

Record players are a close cousin to the gramophone, and the gramophone is a close cousin to the phonograph. Though the words are often used interchangeably, the devices are all slightly different. It's similar to the difference between a truck and a car. For the most part, they're the same, but the truck can do some things your average sedan can't.

A phonograph was a device used to record sounds and play the recorded sounds back. A horn was attached to a piece of rubber that allowed it to vibrate freely. On the other end of the horn was a needle that moved in tandem with the vibrations from the horn. Pressed against the needle was a piece of tinfoil wrapped around a metal cylinder. The metal cylinder was fixed to a hand crank which would rotate as the crank was manually turned.

When someone spoke into the horn, they produced sound waves in the air (remember how sound works?) These waves caused the horn to vibrate slightly. Those vibrations moved the needle in a corresponding fashion. As the hand crank turned, the tin-foil-wrapped cylinder rotated against the needle, allowing the needle's vibrations to etch a pattern into the tinfoil.

The hand crank is an important piece to this sound puzzle. If the crank wasn’t turned, the waves would be etched right on top of the previous wave. It’s like when you write something on paper, you need to move your hand. If you don’t, your letters will just be written over one another like the leaning tower of letters. Ha.

If you're a bit confused as to where the vibrations came from and how they correspond to the actual recording of the sound, don't worry because I was too. This is what held me up for a long time. But recall that all sound is, is vibrations. When you talk, you're vibrating the air in a certain pitch, tone, and frequency. When someone spoke into the horn, instead of those waves vibrating someone's ear canal, they vibrated the needle, matching the tone, pitch, and frequency that they were capturing.

Reminder: There was no electricity involved here. This was a purely analog piece of technology.

To play the sound back, the process is simply reversed. The needle turns the etched pattern back into vibrations, which run up the horn and plays back the sound. Pretty cool right?

Similar to the phonograph was the gramophone. The big difference between the two, though, is that the gramophone couldn't record sound. It only played recorded sound back. Thinking about it in terms of the phonograph, it was only the second half of the process. As you could imagine, a gramophone looked much closer to our modern day record players than the phonograph. A gramophone was a better listening device than the phonograph because it didn't have the added variable of the up-and-down movement while recording like the phonograph did, which often caused recording issues.

The "disks" first used in gramophones were metal or shellac, which are a different material than modern-day vinyl records. And this brings us to the difference between a gramophone and a record player. A record player is a more modern gramophone and plays vinyls while a gramophone plays metal or shellac records. Though I'm not a stickler for the exact definition of things like the "Don't you mean Frankenstein's monster" guy, I thought it would be helpful to break those down.

The most important thing to understand in this section is the phonograph and how it works because it answers some of the technical questions about how sound gets recorded onto a record and how modern day record players work.

Next, let's move on to understanding how a record gets the sound recorded on the vinyl for later playback.

How a vinyl record gets sound recorded on it

Similar to Edison's original phonograph, vinyl records get their sound etched in them by converting the electrical waveform of the music to an analog waveform that vibrates a needle. The electrical waveform carries data about the music, like its wavelengths, frequency, and velocity. Essentially, it's a digital vibration.

Regarding the actual process of recording the music, it's essentially a reverse record player. There is a master copy of the vinyl record on a turntable. That turntable has a needle which is connected to a machine. The machine contains the "digital vibration" of the music. The "digital vibration" of the music gets converted into an electrical current (more on how that works in the next section) and that current tells the needle how to vibrate, which etches the record with the grooves you're used to seeing on a vinyl record.

That record is usually stamped with an inverse record that gets an imprint of the master copy. They use that to stamp all the other records before they get shipped out for us to enjoy.

If you're confused here on how the science behind it works, just keep reading. I go into much more detail in the next section, but wanted to give you an idea of how sound gets on the record before we look at how sound gets out of the record.

How the sound from the record gets played back

Now that you understand how the sound gets recorded onto the record, we can reverse-engineer that process to understand how it's played back with just a few more variables.

Exactly like the phonograph described before, the stylus is inserted into the grooves of the record, which hold the vibrations of the recorded sound (we learned this in the last section). As the record spins, the stylus "reads" the information stored in the grooves and vibrates according to the recorded frequency, pitch, and tone. So far, this is no different from how the phonograph played the sound from the tinfoil. Instead of taking vibrations from the horn and playing those back, it's taking the vibrations from the recorded sound on the record player and playing that back.

What got complicated, for me at least, was understanding how those vibrations moved up the tone arm, turned into an electrical signal, raced through the amplifier, and came out of the speakers.

To understand how that all works, we have to introduce a bit of physics, specifically Faraday's Law of Induction.

Inside the body or hidden end of the tone arm, opposite the stylus, are two important components, without which we would not be able to amplify the sound. Those are a magnet and a coil. These two components create an electric current.

To understand how they create an electric current, we have to understand Faraday's Laws of Induction, which state that:

Whenever there is a change of force between a magnet and a coil, an electromotive force (emf) is created.
The strength of the emf is directly proportional to how the magnet moved in relation to the coil. The faster the magnet moved, the stronger the signal and vice versa.

Faraday's Laws explain how an electrical current can be created by something that isn't electric. Pretty handy for what we need right about now, huh? If you recall, we need some way to turn the mechanical energy from the vibrations (audio waveform) to an electrical energy that can be sent to the amplifier and out the speaker.

As mentioned previously, record players have a coil and a magnet on the tone arm, opposite of the stylus. When the stylus moves, it moves the attached magnet, which moves relative to the coils, creating an electrical current (Faraday's first law) identical to the audio waveform (Faraday's second law).

That electrical signal is sent to the amplifier, which increases the strength of the current. That current is then sent to the speakers, which vibrate in accordance with the electrical current. If you've ever seen speakers play really loud, bass-filled music, you can see how they bounce back and forth. This mimics the vibrations caused by someone talking and displaces the surrounding air. The sound waves created by the speakers ride the medium into your eardrums and cue the brain to start working. The speakers know how much to vibrate because they are getting the instructions from the original vibrations that were recorded into the record and that the stylus is now reading.

The stylus, tone-arm, magnet, and coils are all parts of what the science community calls a "transducer." A transducer is just a $3 dollar word for describing something that converts energy from one form to another. In our case, it's converting the mechanical energy of the vibrations into electrical energy.

Side Note

I have a record player and when researching for this article, I was listening to the record very closely and turning the volume up and down. I got to a point where it was so low that the amplifier wasn't on, so the speakers turned off, but the record player was still spinning. If I leaned in real close to the stylus, I could hear the raw vibrations caused by the stylus 'reading' the grooves of the record. I thought that was pretty fascinating! As I slowly turned the volume up, I could hear the speakers overtake the raw sound of the record and stylus doing their thing.

Putting it all together

Step 1: An artist records a track into a computer.

Step 2: That computer turns those "digital vibrations" into instructions. The instructions tell the needle how to vibrate. This is how a record gets sound recorded onto it.

Step 3: That record is placed on a record player. The needle from the record player vibrates exactly the same way the original digital file the artist recorded "vibrated.”

Step 4: Those vibrations (mechanical energy) are converted into an electrical current via the moving magnet and coil on the opposite end of the tone arm. This current matches the vibrations from the original file as well.

Step 5: That current is sent to the amplifier, which increases the amplitude of the electrical current and sends that amplified current as instructions to the speakers.

Step 6: The speakers displace the air in exactly the same way the artist originally displaced the air when they recorded the audio into the computer.

Step 7: Any species with ear drums enjoys that sweet sound.

If I'm not mistaken, that seems to answer all the previous questions about our record player and how everything works together. I'm truly amazed at this little device and had a joy understanding all the moving pieces, literally.

Examining the Life that Communicated With the Universe - Albert Einstein

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The more I read about the lives of those who have impacted our world today, the more obvious it is that one characteristic drives those people: Curiosity. Curiosity, in the form of questioning the mundane things. The things that most people simply assume work because "that's just what happens", is one of the defining attributes of the men and women who squeezed centuries of ideas and inventions into just one short life.

This fact became even more evident as my heart and mind were pulled in all directions reading Walter Isaacson's account of Albert Einstein in his biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe. Though this thick biography contained 500+ pages filled with letters, his family life, and his ground-breaking theories (which I plan to write about in the coming months), I most enjoyed the random yet intentional reflections on Einstein's life as a whole, both from Isaacson and included as direct quotes of the white-haired man himself. Beneath the thought experiments, complicated math equations, and political motivations, was a deep sense of curiosity to understand the rules that govern the universe and what that meant for us lowly beings whom inhabit one of the planets within it.

Though there is much to study regarding the scientific breakthroughs that Einstein contributed, this essay is devoted to appreciating his general curiosity of life, how he used that to create new theories, and the deep humility Einstein possessed regarding this knowledge. An essay at a later date will be dedicated to exploring his scientific breakthroughs and I've written previously about the habits that allowed Einstein to develop so many ideas over his lifetime.

Einstein's Curiosity

Isaacson explores the innate curiosity of Einstein throughout the book, though this paragraph is a good description of what he believed:

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 an 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, besides being a renowned scientist, was a philosopher of life, and that is seen most evidently in his "ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously." I have much appreciation for deep thinkers and even more so for those who don't care one bit about their opinion, they simply want to understand things better. The habit of coming up with two opposing theories and trying to work them out together was a routine pattern in Einstein's work.

Special Relativity

As he was thinking through his Special Theory of Relativity, there were two main postulates that seemed to contradict each other. They were The Principle of Relativity and what he deemed "The Light Postulate."

The principle of relativity stated that the fundamental laws of physics are the same for all observers. So if Person X is moving and Person Y is at rest, the laws of physics should be the exact same. There is no experiment that could determine who was "at rest" and who was moving.

The light postulate explained that the velocity of light was constant, independent of the movement from the emitting body. For example, if a train was moving at 60mph, light from the trains headlight would move at a constant that is the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. It would not be moving 60mph + 186,000 miles per second.

A Quick Note

Einstein didn't immediately assume light was independent of its source. He did have a postulate called 'the light emission theory' which treated light as if it was shot from its source like a gun. So a light on a train would shoot out at 186,000 miles per second plus the speed of the train. However, as he explored this idea further, it seemed to contradict Maxwell's equations. Eventually, he gave up on the light emission theory and assumed that light must travel at a constant speed, regardless of the motion of the emitting body.

But with these two postualtes right next to eachother, there was a glaring conflict. I'll illustrate that conflict with the following thought experiment:

Imagine someone standing on the side of a railroad track. We'll call them person A. Now imagine another person, but they are on a train moving East at 2,000 miles per second. We'll call them person B.

If a light beam is shot along the railroad track also moving East, it would zip by person A at 186,000 miles per second. All good here.

But person B, traveling away from the beam would see it zip past them at 184,000 miles per second. 186,000 (speed the beam is moving) - 2,000 (speed they are already moving in the same direction) = 184,000. The velocity of the light wave propagating comes out smaller for Person B, but that comes into conflict with the principle of relativity because the principle of relativity states that there is no way to determine who is "moving" and who is "at rest", but we just did. See the problem here? (This is similar to a thought experiment Einstein used.)

Person B's speed relative to the train would change depending on if they were racing towards the train or away from it, but their speed relative to the other train's headlight (which emitted the beam) wasn't changing. So the beam should zip by them with the exact same speed no matter which direction they're moving, but that's not what happened in our thought experiment. That was the conflict Einstein was trying to reconcile.

This made the two postulates, "seemingly incompatible," Einstein thought. The speed of light should be the same, no matter the motion of person B and it should be equal to what person A sees. This was defeating to Einstein.

He's quoted saying, "In view of this dilemma, there appears to be nothing else to do than to abandon the light postulate or the principle of relativity." But then he took a look at another variable: time.

And this is where his infamous theory comes together. By analyzing time, he determined that two events that appear to be simultaneous to one observer isn't simultaneous to another.

He now settled the conflict. But the only way to get there was to hold two seemingly opposing ideas in his head at once without having an identity crisis or nervous breakdown. This would be difficult to do today in a world where what you think is (wrongly) who you are.

Einstien wrestled with that conflict for a long time, but never gave up. Though things were seemingly incompatible, he worked two conflicting ideas out in his head at once to discover a ground breaking answer. And it all started with his innate curiosity.

In fact, what Einstein credited the most for his vast accomplishments was his curiosity, stating, "I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious." Isaacson went on to explain:

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.'

Questioning the familiar concepts that others deem too mundane to give brain space to allowed Einstein to explain the quantum realm and the universe–the smallest things in the world and the biggest things in the world–all in one lifetime.

Did Einstein believe in God?

This was a popular question to ask Einstein, and like any great scientist, he never gave a simple "yes" or "no" answer–despite many insisting on one.

To be clear, he was not an atheist. He writes:

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. The 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.

When asked whether he was a religious man, he would reply asking what they meant by religious:

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.

He goes on:

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.

When someone made a more direct comment about the war between science and religion, he was genuinely confused how there could even be such a thing:

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.

That's about as clear as an answer he gave for the existence of God. In short, he believes in a God or higher being that ruled the universe because there was too much simplicity in the laws that governed it to just happen. But, he did not believe in a personal God that could intervene on someone's behalf, as he made quite clear in this answer to whether or not he believes in free will:

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 player.

Most people beg God to show them a miracle to prove that He exists. But to Einstein, the absence of miracles is what truly reveals a divine presence. The fact that the universe is predictable, follows laws, and doesn't do whatever it wants (some people's definition of miracle), is worthy of awe in and of itself.

His wonder for the world and humility of knowledge made him personable

Einstein's knowledge about the world and his pure genius made him impactful, but that's not what made him memorable. His childlike wonder for the world caused a deep humility in him that gave him an attitude of "I do not matter in this world, I'm merely a man." And that's what made him memorable.

President Eisenhower himself remarked after his death:

No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of the 20th century knowledge. Yet no other man was more modest in the possession of the power that is knowledge, more sure than power without wisdom is deadly.

Power without wisdom is deadly.

Isaacson explains Einstein's humility in another way, stating:

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.

What fueled that deep humility was his passionate curiosity–the trait I admire most about him.

After his death, The New York Times wrote:

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 it come about? The most thoughtful wonderer who appeared among us in three centuries has passed on in the person of Albert Einstein.

The most thoughtful wonderer–an attribute I hope to leave behind when I pass on.

Isaacson ends the book with the most thoughtful passage. I get chills reading it each time and even writing it now:

He [Einstein] 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.

The above image was a picture of his desk, captured by photographer, Ralph Morris, a few days before he died. The messiness was a direct insight to how his brain worked. It has become an iconic image of the life of Einstein. In fact, he worked all the way up until his last breath. As he went to sleep for the last time, he scribbled one last math equation on a napkin before he took his final breath.

I wonder now, who is the Einstein living amongst us?

How the James Webb Space Telescope Will Look Back in Time

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

On Christmas Day of last year, one of the most pivotal moments for space exploration was launched: the James Webb Space Telescope.

Its mission is to orbit nearly 1 million miles away from Earth and literally look back in time (more on how that's possible in the next paragraph) to understand how our solar system has developed and whether or not there is life on other planets. I was a bit confused about the claims "look back in time" so did some research on how that's possible. Here's a brief illustration:

The Moon is about 239,000 miles away from Earth, which means it takes 1.3 seconds for the light to get from the moon to earth. Therefore, when you look at the moon, you're looking 1.3 seconds back in time (Yeah, you're a wizard Harry).

The distances between objects in space are so vast, that we measure them in terms of how many years it will take light to travel to get there. The nearest star is over four-light years away, so when you see that star, you're seeing it for what it was four years ago.

The Virgo Cluster of galaxies (galaxies at the center of the Virgo constellation) is about 60 million-light years away from the Milky Way. Therefore, the light we see from that galaxy is from around the end of the dinosaur age.

But that's not all. As the universe expands, light gets stretched into longer and longer wavelengths, beyond the point which we can see -- this is called infrared light. Hubble can see some infrared light, but The Webb observes infrared light exclusively. This allows Webb to see much older galaxies than Hubble, because their light has been stretched beyond that of Hubble's ability to see.

If Hubble showed us a galaxy at the toddler stage, Webb can show us it at a newborn stage, and that is how Hubble will "look back in time" to see how the universe and other galaxies have expanded.

So, Webb will show us planets like an actual movie, but billions of years ago? Well, not exactly.

The Spectra

Webb looks at planets through their spectra -- the wavelengths they emit, absorb, transmit, or reflect -- through a technique called Spectroscopy. Scientists use that method to determine what things are made of, how hot they are, how dense they are, and how fast they are moving in space.

Since different materials give off and interact with different colors of light in different ways depending on what the materials are made of, scientists can use what they know about other planets' spectra in our solar system to determine the composition of the planets Webb captures.

Webb will first observe the star exoplanets (a planet that orbits a star outside of our solar system) are orbiting and gather its spectra. Then, Webb will wait until the planet it wants to observe passes in front of the star it's orbiting and measure the spectra again. At this point, the exoplanet will then be backlit, like an eclipse on earth, so the planet will absorb some of the light emitted from the star, making its spectra differ from the spectra Webb originally captured.

Researchers will then compare the two data sets: the data originally collected about the star and the data collected while the planet blocked the star to see which type of light was absorbed by the planet and which wasn't. Finally, they will use the data from the two spectras and compare it with data about how certain molecules absorb light. When they put it all together, they are able to determine which molecules are present on the exoplanet.

For example, we know what Jupiter's Spectra looks like and we know what Jupiter is made out of. So we can use its spectra and compare it with spectra from the exoplanet and say, "Oh wow, this looks a lot like Jupiter's so there must be a lot of Hydrogen and Helium on that planet." (Just an example, not actual data)

And that is some of the basics of how this very big, very expensive, and very cool piece of technology will explore the most distant universes and look back in time. It can't be long until we understand just exactly how the universe came to be and answer that crucial question we've all been wondering: does the chicken or the egg come first?

How to Be Great? Be Okay With Being Bad

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I was leaving the golf course the other day after a terrible range session and I had a revelation about something I've been feeling for awhile: my desire to be good at a lot of things is keeping me from being great at one.

I fully recognize that sounds a bit arrogant, and it might be. But before you judge, let me explain.

I'm an Enneagram 5, also known as The Investigator. One of The Investigator's core fears is being incompetent at something. We will do anything to give off the impression that we have things under control. As you could imagine, this is a huge problem when it comes to trying new things. I want to be good at it, but it's hard for me to bear the fact that I'm awful for a time. So naturally, I don't like to try new things.

I'll use drawing as an example. I suck at drawing. My handwriting is bad, I can't draw, I can't paint, I can't do any of that stuff. But I also have no desire to be good at drawing. So the tension between "I suck" and "I want to be good" isn't there, because I don't want to be good.

However every once in awhile, I'll discover a topic or see something that peaks my curiosity just enough and is fun for me that I want to get good at it. Lately, that has been playing golf, writing, and developing. When I was in high school, it was video editing.

There's just one problem. There's no way I can be great at all of those things, and attempting to do so is keeping me being just "okay" at each of them.

The desire to be good at developing is stopping me from being an amazing video editor.
The desire to be good at golf is keeping me from being an amazing developer.
The desire to be good at writing is keeping me from being a great developer and a great video editor.

The reason is simple: I'm splitting my time between so many different things, it's impossible to cross the threshold of amazing at any one of them. Essentially, my energy is being dispersed in 10 directions and going one yard rather than being dispersed in one direction and going ten yards. It reminds me of this diagram from Essentialism by Greg McKeown:

I came to this reasoning after the bad driving range session because as I was leaving, a tour pro walked up to hit. It was cool to be practicing by that level of game, but as I left, I couldn't help but feel discouraged because I just had a bad practice session. As I was walking to my car, I was emotionally broken, on the verge of tears (that may sound dumb, but I'm being honest and vulnerable) about the fact that I'll never be that good.

That's when I had the revelation: "My desire to be good at a lot of things is keeping me from being great at one." If I had no desire to read, write, develop, or edit videos, I could work a great 9-5 and practice golf every morning and afternoon. But I can't. I want to read and write in the morning and practice developing and taking courses in the evening.

But as I came to discover, that might not be what's holding me back.

After I got home from the range and was struggling with those emotions, I did some research and re-read this great article from Steph Smith titled, "How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Consistently." I've read it before and knew I had to be reminded of some of the core ideas. And I absolutely did.

As you can gather from the title, Steph's main argument is that the key to being great is just being consistently good for a longer than normal amount of time. She encourages readers that every success story you read about or see wasn't formed overnight and more often than not, is the result of years and years of compounding from doing the next right thing.

The entire article is great, but what struck me the most this time was this quote from James Clear about falling in love with the boredom that comes from consistently doing the same thing:

"The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom."- Atomic Habits, James Clear

"Maybe," I thought, "It's not that I'm trying too many things. Maybe it's that I'm expecting world changing results after doing something for only a few months." I started taking development much more seriously around October of 2021 and started playing golf more seriously around September of 2021. When I first started playing, I never used my driver because I couldn't hit it. Fast forward to now, after a few lessons and a lot of practice sessions, I'm hitting it over 215 yards. It's not the most consistent, but I know that I know I can do it, which wasn't true just a few months ago.

As I mentioned at the start of this article, it pains me to admit that I'm not good at something I desire so strongly to be good at--like golf. But I know if I continue letting the embarrassment of going to the range and having a few miss hits in front of people run my life, I'll never have the opportunity to be great. I'll give up before I have the chance to even cross the threshold of "above average."

I can take that same analogy and use it for development. If I let the embarrassment of not being capable of something stop me from learning how to be capable, I'll never be capable. Instead of reflecting back in a few years thinking, "I remember when I didn't know what React was or how to use templating languages, but now I do." I'll look back and think, "It's been two years since I started to learn to code and I have no idea how to use React because I could never get over myself and be okay with the fact that I'm incapable."

So what's the lesson in all this?

I can't be great until I'm good. And I can't be good unless I allow myself to be bad and stick with it. I have to keep taking development courses everyday, even if I feel that other people are so far ahead of me. I have to keep showing up to the golf course and practicing, playing, and taking lessons. I have to be okay with the fact that I'll have some miss-hits, shanks, and embarrassing shots. But if I stick with both of them long enough and wait for the results to compound, I'll be a completely different golfer and developer in five years.

Patience -- forcing myself to be patient with results -- and consistency -- continuing doing what I said I'd do, no matter the results -- are the keys to being good. And until I figure out how to be good, being great isn't even on the table.

And maybe I am trying to do too much. Maybe it's going to take a lot longer to be a great writer, developer, golfer, or video editor if I continue trying to do all of those things. If I dropped one or two, I could advance quicker in the other two or three. But am I willing to make that tradeoff? I don't know yet. And I think that's okay. Until I can honestly say, "Okay, I'm happy with where I am from a golf standpoint, yes I still need to practice but not as intensely", or, until I come to a point where I feel like golf or writing or developing isn't for me, I'll keep practicing. But I can't give up after two months because "I'll never be good enough." That's immature and not realistic.

Make sure you're doing the right things

An essential caveat in Steph's article is to make sure you're not just being consistent, but that you're being consistent doing the right thing. She writes:

There is one thing to clarify: this habit of progression must come with the right inputs. Being consistent with something leading you in the wrong direction, will unsurprisingly lead you in the wrong direction.

If I went to the driving range everyday and hit my driver as hard as I could for a year, I probably wouldn't be any better of a golfer than I am today. Similarly, if I don't try and improve my writing by 1% in each article, never edit, and post the first draft of everything for a year, I most likely won't be a better writer by the end of it. I have to make sure I'm practicing in a way that's proper and will actually make me better, which is an idea for a whole other article.

How to Change the World With Your Ideas (Like Albert Einstein)

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The early life of Albert Einstein had its ups and downs.

He struggled in school as a kid, couldn't get anyone to take him seriously about some of his earlier ideas, and had trouble getting a professorship because of his monotone lecture style and seemingly lack of passion for physics.

But as we all know, it worked out alright for young Albert. However contrary to popular belief, his genius isn't the reason he became as successful as he was. He was smart, sure, but there are a lot of smart people in the world.

Einstein was such an impactful theorist because of his ability to continuously generate new ideas.

Paul Graham riffed on this in one of his recent essays titled, "Beyond Smart," and it just so happened that I was reading Einstein's biography by Walter Isaacson at the same time this essay came out, so the concept stuck immediately. I had a brief "light bulb moment" as I was reading Graham's words.

Graham's thesis is that being intelligent isn't special. Again, there are a lot of smart and intelligent people in every field of study. **What matters is one's ability to create or discover new ideas. **He writes:

"Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter. I would. The choice makes me uncomfortable, but when you see the two options laid out explicitly like that, it's obvious which is better."

--Paul Graham, "Beyond Smart"

There are multiple reasons why intelligence ends up being the thing that most people think is important. Although I have some interesting thoughts about that, I'm not going to get into that here. Not yet, at least.

Instead, I want to turn to the life of Einstein and reflect on what he did that made it possible for him to constantly generate new ideas.

How Einstein Generated New Ideas

1.) He wasn't afraid to go against long-held beliefs and prove them wrong.

At the start of this article, I mentioned Einstein had difficulty at school. Although the common story is painted as a motivational mirage like, "Einstein failed at school and he became successful and therefore you can achieve anything," Einstein was also just rebellious. He didn't like the strict, one-way road to learning something and thought it should be taught differently. (Imagine what he would say about today's education.)

Though that rebellious nature got him in trouble as a youngin', it proved to pay off later in life.

During the time of Einstein's rise, "the ether" as a force that carried electromagnetic waves was believed to exist. Though the ether was "invisible, weightless, undetectable chemically or physically, and literally permeating all matter and space," (source) many physicists believed it to be real because it was the only thing that made sense for light waves to travel on.

Einstein seriously doubted anything that couldn't be observed, a trait he picked up from reading David Hume and Ernst Mach, so naturally, he doubted the existence of the ether, though the idea had been around for a hundred years or so (In the context of light waves. It was used to describe gravity before Galileo's and Newton's discoveries, but a lot less people believed in it for that.)

Until then, people attributed the movement and behavior of light to this ether, which helped answer questions about how light travels. But since many experiments that were conducted to prove the ether existed failed, Einstein started from the premise that there is no ether.

This allowed him to start fresh and imagine what the true behavior of light would be without ether. After that, he was able to form his postulates for the speed of light which lead to his creation of the theory of relativity.

2.) He meditated on ideas for decades (and wasn't afraid to not know the answer to something)

Einstein was 16 when he started his journey down the road to the theory of relativity. It began with a thought experiment about what it would be like to ride at the speed of light next to a light beam, which produced a unique paradox:

"If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating. There seems to be no such thing, however, neither on the basis of experience nor according to Maxwell's equations (Maxwell's equations predicted there was a fixed speed of light, independent of the velocity of the observer.)

From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest. For how should the first observer know or be able to determine, that he is in a state of fast uniform motion? One sees in this paradox the germ of the special relativity theory is already contained."

Quite a paradox indeed, but he didn't let that stop him. He didn't give up after one year, five years, or even seven years. He decided to continue ruminating on this unique paradox, reading journals and talking to professors until he figured out his answer.

Though this shows his general tenacity for solving a problem, it also illustrates his comfortability with not knowing the answer to something.

Some people don't ponder big ideas for fear that it makes them look less intelligent than their peers, but in reality it's quite the contrary. Give me someone who is trying to understand the theory of relativity over those too scared to try any day. Intelligent people aren't afraid to not know the answer.

3.) He allowed conversation and life to intertwine with his study

By May 1905, Einstein had two postulates--two basic assumptions of general principal. The first was the principle of relativity, which stated that the fundamental laws of physics are the same for all observers: those "at rest" on earth and those moving in a train or on a plane.

His second postulate was that the velocity of light was the same, no matter the motion of its source. For example, if someone is on a moving train and shoots a laser in the direction the train is moving, it will reach a target in the same amount of time it takes for someone's laser standing on the tracks to reach that target. The laser's velocity on the train vt, would not equal the speed of the train s, plus the speed of light l. Both lasers would be traveling at the same velocity.

This was a puzzling dilemma to him because he couldn't wrap his head around the fact that an observer running towards the train, an observer running away from the train, and an observer at rest on the side of the tracks would all see the laser coming from the train at the same velocity.

After ten years of thought experiments, conversations, and papers, he was once again at a cross-roads, almost ready to give up. But then he went for a walk.

On a beautiful day in the city, Einstein visited a friend whom helped him get a job at the Swiss Patent Office. As they were chatting, Einstein brought up the dilemma he faced and said he was going to give it up.

But as they talked about the issue more, the dam finally broke and Einstein understood the key to the problem. The next time he saw his friend, "He skipped any greeting and immediately declared, 'Thank you. I've completely solved the problem.'"1 It had only been five weeks since they last spoke.

Often when I'm pondering ideas, I tend to become even more of a turtle than I already am. Thinking, writing, and ideating in my head and my room constantly until I can solve the problem or genuinely give up. What Einstein did, not just in the last few moments of his breakthrough theory but during the entire journey since he started at 16, was continue living life. He graduated college, he got married, he got a job, and he even had a baby!

He viewed life and conversation not as a distraction from his ideas, but something that made his ideas better, at least for the time.

Understand: An idea that has been around for a while is more likely to be true than a new idea (The Lindy Effect), but that doesn't mean all long held ideas are inherently true. Don't be afraid to go against the grain to previously held notions. But choose wisely. Don't go around trying to disprove factual information.

Sometimes, answers to problems don't reveal themselves right away. If you're struggling with a thought, idea, or experiment for a long time and have a passion for it, don't give up. Continue inching away at its resolution until the time comes.

Though it's important to be passionate about work and excited about the ideas and problems we think about, don't let those ideas overtake your entire existence. Keep close relationships, spend time doing what you love, and don't be afraid to converse with others about your problem-- they may end up helping you solve it.

Why Legacy Career Paths Can't Innovate

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

In 1718, a candlemaker set out to train his son in the business of wax-melting in hopes he would one day take over the family business. Being 12 at the time, the boy would have seven years to learn the ins and outs of candle making. "Perfect!" the dad thought.

However, his son had other plans. Rather than being a stingy old candle maker, the boy decided to work as an apprentice in his brothers print shop. Instead of a seven-year apprenticeship, it would be nine-years with much more laborious work, grueling hours, and fickle details. But the kid knew what he wanted.

And what he wanted wasn't to become the towns best printer, either.

Instead, Benjamin Franklin knew he wanted to be a writer and the print shop was the best place for him to learn how to do just that. Not only would he be surrounded by new books and popular newspapers from England, but he would have the chance to study those books and newspapers, to understand what made quality writing, quality.

He not only taught himself how to write, but how to run a print business as well. I believe that's what people in those days called, "Executing two dove with one pebble."

Value Learning Over Anything Else

Every time I hear this story of Ben Franklin, I'm inspired to continue my pursuit of knowledge no matter the bounds. You see, I'm quite a curious fellow and desire to have a deep understanding of many subjects: history, philosophy, theology, physics, and computer science. However, with that desire to learn comes challenges.

One of those challenges is deciding to live a life where learning is a priority and not* earning.*

Benjamin Franklin understood this concept well. He chose a longer, more brutal apprenticeship in the short-term, which allowed him the opportunity to become a famous writer and launched his career into politics.

What About The Money, Mate?

I first read about this concept in Mastery by Robert Greene and remember thinking it was cool and all, but was in a different place in my life. I was still in school, had just gotten out of an apprenticeship, and didn't really know what I wanted to do.

But I was reminded of this a few months back when Gary Ten posted this video on YouTube. Tan's thesis is:

Whatever job you're working right now, you either have to be earning or *learning. *If you're not doing either of those things, get out.

I think that's a great way to help someone on the verge of leaving their job, but I want to take it one step further. Instead of simply evaluating whether you're earning or learning, **do so on a weighted scale **with learning being weighted higher.

So if you're in a position to take a job where you'll make 10X what you currently do, but won't have much free time to learn and the job is pretty routine, you might want to take that. 10X is a lot of money.

But if you're in a position to make 2-3X what you currently do with less time to study and with a monotonous job, stick with the one where you can learn more. This could be the job that allows you to learn more while doing your actual work, or the job that frees up your time to study the things you'd like to study.

Ben Franklin chose the profession that directly advanced his career, but that's just one path. If he had taken the candle making job but still had time to study and be a great writer, that would've worked as well.

Why This Is Hard Today

As I was thinking about this concept, student debt became a core concept I know I had to address in this piece.

I think the value of money took over learning not because we're obsessed with earning, but because people don't have any other choice. They spend 4+ years in college earning a degree and come out with loans that need to be paid off immediately.

Naturally, people choose a high-paying job to help make that happen. But this can lead to fear of losing that high-paying job and therefore are less prone to take risks, try something new, and innovate in their career.

If people are afraid to take risks, they can't fail, and if they can't fail, it makes it difficult to learn. Therefore, creativity and innovation are at a lack in legacy career paths.

To increase innovation in different careers, failing needs to be an option without consequences. But that won't happen until the value of learning in early-stage careers is held in higher regard than earning.

Disclaimer: I'm not recommending people quit their job and go live in a cave and read Socrates the rest of their life. Rather, I'm proposing a simple framework to use if you're someone who wants to learn more about the world but haven't been able to figure out how.

How We Got to Now

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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.

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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. 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

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.
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.
Managing money well is all about behavior.
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."
Good investing isn't getting crazy high, one-off returns. Instead, it's getting pretty average returns for an absolutely unbelievable amount of time.
Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wealth is created by suppressing what you could buy today in order to have more stuff or more options in the future.
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.

Range by David Epstein

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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

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.
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

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.'

Book Summary - Think Again by Adam Grant

maberydalton@gmail.com | Dalton Mabery — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

When it comes to our ideas and mindsets, we're one of three personalities.

We're either a preacher, a prosecutor, or a politician.

Preacher mode comes out when our long-held, sacred beliefs are in jeopardy. We preach elegant messages and illustrations to protect and promote our precious ideas.

Prosecutor mode reveals itself when we see mishaps, flaws, or illogical thinking in someone else's argument. We do everything we can to prove them wrong and win our case.

Finally we all become "influential" politicians when we're trying to win over a crowd or an audience. We flash a smile, crack some jokes (or laugh at their corny jokes), all in hopes they will choose our idea to start thinking.

The Danger

But there's danger in each of these. As Adam Grant puts it in the book, "The risk is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we're right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we don't bother to rethink our own views."

Once we choose how to think of something, we often stick to that mindset no matter the evidence that presented to us.

So instead of being a stupid "P", Grant proposes we need to all be scientists. Don't worry, you don't have to quit your job and go buy a white lab coat, although you could. Instead, being a scientist means to search for truth, embrace evidence that seems to differ from your current position, and run experiments and tests to discover what the world holds beyond the views you've held for the past twenty years.

If you change your mind in preacher mode, it's a sure sign of weakness. But in scientist mode, it shows you have intellectual integrity.

But what if we're in scientist mode, have the data and research, but can't get other people to change their mind. Then what do we do?

Through an incredible story about how Steve Jobs was first resistant to creating the iPhone, Grant demonstrates there is power in arguing what will stay the same. Change is scary. People might think if things are going well in the moment, why change what we're doing now? But when you affirm what's going to stay the same through this change, they're more open to hearing and enacting your idea. They realize, "Oh, not that much is actually changing. A,B,C, and D are all staying the same, we're just changing E. Sure, let's try it."

Counterfactual Thinking

If reinforcing what will stay the same won't help, you could try leading them down a path to imagine a world in which their lives circumstances would have unfolded differently. This is what psychologists call "Counterfactual thinking."

It's easy to forget how influential things like where we were born, who raised us, or where we went to school can be on our thinking. If you can successfully get someone to understand how easy they might have held different initial opinions or stereotypes, they might be much more willing to change their view.

If you're in a heated debate, argument, or conflict at work (or elsewhere), it can helpful to ask, "What evidence would change you mind?" Because sometimes, that answer is nothing. And that's okay. I don't know about you, but I'd rather know that before I spend hours investing in trying to do so.

The Confident Impostor

I played baseball for 15 years as a child (My goal was to play in college, but I had other plans I guess.)

No matter where we played or who we played against, there was always the teammate or parent on the bleachers who thought they could do a better job of coaching the time than the actual coach. Sometimes they honestly might have been able to, there weren't many requirements for being a baseball coach in travel ball. But most of the time, they weren't.

That's what's called the armchair quarterback. The parent or fan who thinks they know how to do a better job than the actual coach. Armchair quarterbacks confidence exceeds competence.

On the other end of the spectrum is the imposter syndrome. This is a bit more common than the armchair quarterback but people who have imposter syndrome's competence exceeds their confidence. They are actually really good at what they do, but don't believe in themselves enough or don't want others to think they are good.

Obviously either end of that spectrum is negative. If your confidence exceeds your competence, you're just a jerk. But if you're competence exceeds your confidence, you won't get anything done and no one will trust you. So the ideal amount of confidence lies somewhere in the middle. Your competence and your confidence need to be in sync. You have to be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future, yet humble enough to question whether you have the right tools or you're the right person for the job.

It's when someone lacks skills in a certain area that they're afraid to ask for help or for someone else to do it. When someone tries and forces them to change their mind, they just double down. If that person is leading your team, you're headed straight for a nose dive that ends in a fiery crash.

Humility is a reflective lens: It helps us see weaknesses clearly. Confident humility is a corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those weaknesses.

You Are Not Your Ideas

When we think we know better than someone else, it's not just the armchair quarterback doing all that work by themselves. He's got a teammate and that teammate is the totalitarian ego.

The totalitarian ego is like a mini-dictator living inside your head, sitting right next to that pesky little armchair quarterback. Their job is to control the facts that flow into our heads, swatting down anything that disproves our hypothesis about a topic.

This happens in a two-step process:

First, the opinions that we hold are shielded in "filter bubbles." These filter bubbles get bigger and bigger with the more information that proves our opinion; and with the bubble grows the ego.

Once these opinions are reinforced by enough confirming data, they're sealed behind an impenetrable safe that forms an echo chamber of information only saying what we want it to say. Sound familiar?

There's only one cure to this totalitarian ego and it comes from Daniel Kahneman -- detachment.

As a psychologist, Kahneman doesn't go a day without thinking of a new, weakly held opinion. But also as a psychologist, his job is to look at the studies, interpret the data, and see if his hypothesis was right. And if it wasn't, change it. The only way he's able have so many fleeting ideas is that he refuses to let his beliefs become apart of his identity.

One practical way to go about this tomorrow is whenever you form a new idea, opinion, or hypothesis about how something works, ask yourself, "What would have to happen to prove this false?"