
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](https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/ravi-gupta/):

> 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.


Fix the fridge


I hear a lot of peers say how they want to get into something new.

"Oh I want to run a marathon, but I just don't know how to start training. I never really ran before."

"I'd love to learn French, but I don't have any experience with learning a new language."

"Going to medical school is a dream, but I just don't know how to study for it."

"I've been meaning to find a new job, but that job market is brutal."

Every time I hear something like that from someone, I want to calmly reply, "You can just...do things."

You can just...

- Go to medical school
- Learn a new language
- Move to a new city
- Find a new job
- Start training for a marathon
- Become a body builder
- Learn how to cook
- Go camping

There are often no prerequisites required for leaving something behind and starting new but two: courage to take the first step and faith that it might all just be okay.

You can just...


You can just

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.

Don't let it fade to black

Don’t learn how to do the thing from people who don’t do the thing.

Most financial “gurus” who tell you how to make money in the market only make money from shilling online courses and e-books. If they knew the secret to “quitting your job and retiring at 30,” why are they promoting their online course in every other Tweet?

A lot of real knowledge workers take their productivity cues from productivity “experts” who have no obligations other than tweaking their Notion templates and then wonder why they can’t maintain their “system” while working a full-time job and taking care of a family.

Instead of listening to your favorite YouTuber about how to be productive at your job, find the person who seems to get the most done and has influence within your organization. Ask them how they’re productive, and then do what they say.

Don’t take advice from non-practitioners.

If someone _used_ to do the thing, that’s okay. But beware: what got them “success” twenty years ago probably differs from what will bring you success now. When taking advice from elders, the principles are probably the same, but the tactics will change.

Don't take non-practitioner advice

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.

Rental car envy

“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](https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2024/2/12/24070402/san-francisco-49ers-receive-kick-overtime-decision-kyle-shanahan-super-bowl).

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](https://x.com/oeste/status/1758148881529909531?s=20), 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?


Success is found in the minutiae


From [here](https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1kg9L8tsQR/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link).

1. Your terrible job is the dream of the unemployed.
2. Your house is the dream of the homeless.
3. Your health is the dream of the ill.

"Don't let difficult times make you forget your blessings." Be thankful for what you have.

(A tad cheesy, but that doesn't make it any less true!)


Advice from Grandpa

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.”)


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


I’m two terms into a Masters in English and am wondering how I made such a bad decision.

There are a few things that are obvious: I was excited to start something new after a long few months of hardships and health scares, I liked the feeling that I was “working towards something bigger” aside from projects at work, and I idiotically believed the degree would help me edit books and have more credibility as a “writer.”

(That last point is a reasonable assumption, and to some part probably true; I may get a call back from certain organizations if I have a graduate degree in English than if I didn’t.)

But what I came to realize was that going back to school was easier than researching and writing a book, which is what I want to do. Writing a book is difficult; going back to school is less so. It’s still hard, sure, but for different reasons. If you’re trying to write a book, there is an infinite amount of uncertainty involved. You have to pick a topic, you have to organize an outline, research, write, and re-write, all without any (or very little) outside accountability.

When you go back to school, the uncertainty is near zero. Your program’s classes are pre-planned, all homework assignments have detailed prompts and grading rubrics that, if followed, will always guarantee a good grade. If you fail to do the assignments, you get punished, which creates an unmatched level of accountability and incentive to get the work done. This is why people who spend their 20s and 30s getting a PhD struggle in the real-world. The real-world sucks. It’s confusing and uncertain and there is almost never clear instructions. (Just think of tax season.)

My new heuristic, and what I’m telling anyone who asks, is **you should go back to school if it opens up opportunities for you to do things that would be *impossible* for you to do without the degree.** I put special emphasis on the word “impossible” there. I mean *truly impossible*. It has to be the case that you would not be able to do whatever it is you wanted to do no matter the amount of money or time you have without a degree or more schooling.

For example, my sister wanted to be a psychologist. She *hates* school, but it’s impossible to be a psychologist without a Masters degree, so she went back to school. That’s a *great* decision because it allows her to do something that was impossible for her to do before she got the degree.

In my circumstance, I can edit a book without having a masters degree. I can write a book without having a masters degree. I can get a book deal without having a masters degree. Would having a masters help in some of those situations? Absolutely. But doing any of that is not impossible without said degree.

A few other things come to mind: You can’t fly a plane without getting a pilots license and taking classes. So if you want to be a pilot, go back to school. The same can be said for becoming a doctor or a lawyer.

Sometimes, going back to school offers opportunities within your current role but higher up the totem pole. This is another reason to go back to school, *but only if you want to move up that totem pole*. My mother was a Spanish teacher for a lot of my childhood, but she wanted to become a principle. Becoming a principle is almost unheard of without some sort of higher education, so she got her masters.

By no means am I saying this is a simple process. It’s still a difficult decision. It might be even harder now because the question changes from *should I go back to school*? to *what do I want to do with my life, and will going back to school make it possible to do that thing*?


Should I go back to school?

“When I was a little kid,” Mickey Spillane 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!”

I love that story.

Here's how Mickey Spillane handled critics.

“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.’”

The meanest critics can be the best advertisers.

Read more [lessons from Mickey Spillane's life here](https://thewanderingreader.substack.com/p/8-ideas-on-writing-and-life-from), or read [my notes on one of his biographies here](https://www.dltn.io/posts/spillane-king-of-pulp-fiction).



How to handle critics

Last week, while waiting to make a U-turn across a busy street into Barnes and Noble, a car, poised for a right-hand turn, commenced its trajectory, coinciding with my own turn (even though I had the right-of-way).

I stopped, and let him continue. 'Twas a simple error, I deemed, since he was looking the other way to ensure no cars were coming.

But to my astonishment, he stopped, promptly rolled down his window, flipped me off, yelled some words I don’t think he would repeat in front of his mother, and then sped away.

I was amazed. For some reason, he felt the need to make his anger known to me, as if it was somehow going to change the circumstances.

This happened again last night. In a parking garage while I was talking with a friend, a motorcycle came down from the upper level, making its way to the exit. At the same time, a car was backing out, quite slowly.

The motorcycle saw the car backing out, deemed it would soon be in its own path, sped up to pass it, honked its horn, and then flipped off the car.

Again, an honest mistake. The car didn’t see the motorcycle, and I’m sure if they did, they wouldn’t have tried to hit them on purpose. Did the motorcycle think said driver was engaging in a malevolent act? I doubt it. Was just angry? Yes.

Reflecting on these tales, I think to myself, *Why do these people care so much?*

Then, I was reminded of the wisdom imparted by Seneca:

>  Now all the things which cause us to groan or recoil, are part of the tax of life – things, my dear Lucillius, which you should never hope and never seek to escape.

Reading thoughtless threads and being forced to watch mind-numbing videos on Twitter are part of the tax of seeking interesting ideas from strangers on the internet.

Cold DMs from people who want to “grow your newsletter revenue” are part of the tax of meeting interesting people in your inbox.

Dealing with close calls are part of the tax of driving.

But the best thing about all of these situations? You can just ignore them.

You don’t have to reply to anyone’s DM, or put them on blast by posting about it.

You don’t have to engage with anyone who has “Politics is my identity” or “The Democrats are evil” in their bio.

Upon the successful evasion of catastrophe, you may continue upon your merry drive.

Yes, there are taxes to be paid, but once paid, you can just ignore them.





You can just ignore things


The primary theme of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” is, you guessed it, self-reliance. The individual must disregard the institutions and opinions of others as they seek to find that which we all desire: truth.

I’m not a Transcendentalist scholar, so I don’t plan to analyze Emerson’s philosophy on religion and the self. Nor will I try to philosophize the effects of the ideas taken to the extreme like, what happens if we all say, “Screw everything; I’m the only one that matters.”

Rather, I want to explore the encouragements Emerson alludes to about true knowledge and doing the work.

Seeking knowledge, reading, and gaining wisdom are virtuous acts. In a world of ephemeral content and binge-watching TV, they are probably some of the most virtuous acts, but there *is* danger in seeking knowledge from other people, and *only* seeking knowledge from other people.
### The independence of solitude
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion,” Emerson writes. “It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” One interpretation of that passage is that the monk who escapes life and lives off the grid is no better than one caught up in the fleeting opinions of the world. Rather, the true test of originality and fortitude of the mind is he who can live in the midst of chaos of the world and still *think* as if they’re living in solitude.

But there’s another interpretation.

The “world’s opinions” could be that of *People* magazine, *The New York Times*, or your Facebook group with moms who think the neighborhood watch is the most evil entity in the world. But the “world’s opinions” Emerson references could also be the content you consume: the books you read, the podcasts you listen to, and the thinkers you follow on Twitter. If *their* thoughts are also *your* thoughts, you’re living in the midst of the world’s opinions. You’re no genius because you can find a niche article online and regurgitate the thoughts of the author as your own. *It is easy in the world to live after the opinions of the authors you consume*.

What “the great man” or women do is read the great articles and books, yet maintain their intellectual individuality. They read books, listen to podcasts, and watch lectures, but their beliefs, attitudes, and opinions are their own. They’re *self-reliant.* It is those people who are *in the midst of the crowd but keeping perfect sweetness of the independence of solitude.*

In the famous scene from *Good Will Hunting*, the Harvard student is living in the world of the world’s opinions. He sounds smart, but his words are from the mind of someone else, and Will calls him out on it.

>  **Clark:** I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities—especially in the southern colonies—could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capital–
>
>  **Will:** [interrupting] Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon, then you’re gonna be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
>
>  **Clark:** [taken aback] Well as a matter of fact I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of —
>
>  **Will:** "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from Vickers, Work in Essex County, Page 98, right? Yeah I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us—**you have any thoughts of—of your own on this matter? Or do—is that your thing, you come into a bar, you read some obscure passage and then you pretend, you pawn it off as your own**—your own idea just to impress some girls, embarrass my friend?

Don’t be Clark.

Allowing your own thoughts to form before letting those of somebody else’s liter your mind is crucial because often you’re smart enough to have the same thoughts someone writing for *The New York Times* has, yet you lack the time, discipline, or capability to 1) embrace them and 2) record them. When this becomes a pattern, you’re forced to interpret your thoughts in the words of someone else, and that is never a pleasant feeling.

Emerson knows this to be true, and he published this in the 1840s! He writes:

>  In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and **we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.**

Think, my darling, think! You know how to do it. It’s not hard, it just takes time. Often that time needs to be spent in actual solitude, which is the difficult part. Thinking is easy. Quieting the world around you enough to put yourself into a position to think is not, which is why original thought is rare.

Don’t allow another day to pass in which you’re forced to take with shame your own opinion from someone else.

### The allures of knowledge
Study and reading great works can enrich your life, but they’re also stops on the path paved to irrelevancy, for perpetual study without application is like a hamster on a wheel: forever work but you get nowhere.

“That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him,” Emerson writes. “ **Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare?** Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique…**Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.**”

*Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.*

That is the best sentence I’ve read all year.

I understand the irony there, because my favorite thing to do is read biographies. But Emerson isn’t bashing on the act of study itself; he’s exaggerating the uselessness that comes from *only* studying and never doing.

I could make an argument about PhD students who are in their mid-30s and have nothing to show for it other than academic papers about basket-weaving in the 1600s, but that seems harsh, so I shan’t.

Imagine instead a playwright. No no, rather someone who wishes to be a playwright in the future. They spend every waking hour reading Shakespeare, dissecting his diction and syntax and rhythm and rhyme and word formation process, but has never actually *written* a play. They go to the theatre every weekend and mingle with the actors, but have never tried being an actor themselves. Do you see Emerson’s point?

Imagine a developer, or rather someone who wants to be a developer. They read TLDR and listen to *Techmeme* on the way home. They check Hacker News and Indie Hackers every night to see what’s trending. They’ve taken courses in every programming language ever. Have they built anything that works? Probably not. Why? Because they’re *studying.*

Imagine someone who wants to write a novel. They do Julia Cameron’s morning pages every morning with their cup of coffee, and learn all about the shapes of stories from Kurt Vonnegut. They take creative writing classes at the local college and read breakdowns of the best movies to learn how to develop characters, but they’ve never written a book or even a short story.
### One must do
Study, without application, is useless. *Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.* One will never be a playwright through the study of playwriting. One will never be a developer through the study of programming languages. One will never be a writer through the study of creative writing. One must *do*.

Originality in thought is the highest honor an intellectual and thinking person can achieve. Yet those thoughts by themselves are useless, selfish even. Who cares if you’ve found the cure to cancer, if you sit around reading more books on how to solve cancer. The highest thoughts must be paired with the simplest actions to be of worthy cause.


One must do


There doesn’t have to be an end goal.

With work, with hobbies, with the things that you do, they don’t need to act as some means to an end. They can be an end themselves.

I love history. I love reading about history and I love writing about history. I sometimes fall into the trap of figuring out how I can use what I read and learn to accelerate my career. That seems like a noble thing to do, right?

The more I think about it, it’s like I’m searching for justification for my time spent reading. “Look,” I tell myself. “I’m spending a lot of time reading, but I’m sharing what I learn online, so it’s not a total waste of time.”

But even if I shared nothing online, it most definitely would not be a waste of time. I love to read, and that’s a fine way to spend my days.

This post was inspired [by a tweet from Obsidian CEO Stephan Ango](https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1694735091057279200?s=20), who, in response to someone asking what the end goal of Obsidian is, said, “there doesn't have to be an end goal. you can just make useful things for people who want to use them, and live a happy life.”

You can just read books and live a happy life.

You can just work a 9-5 and spend time with your family boating on the weekends and live a happy life.

You can just make some YouTube videos about things you want to share and live a happy life.

You can just post some interesting thoughts on Twitter and live a happy life.

You don’t have to have a content strategy. You don’t need to have a sales funnel or a five-year plan.

You can just do the things you love to do and live a happy life.



There doesn't have to be an end goal

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.


Charles Dickens and Active Patience

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is why my wife needed a lung transplant.

That answer is simple: she was dealt an unfair hand at this game called life.

The other thing you’ll probably want to know are the non-simple answers, the questions everyone thinks but are too polite to ask when they see a 25-year-old on oxygen: *was she sick? did she smoke? how long has she been on the list?*

Yes. Absolutely not. Two years.

My wife ~~has~~ had pulmonary fibrosis. A rare disease that, over time, scars the lungs. Scarring on any organ is bad, but especially the lungs. The scarring makes it hard to breathe and stops the lungs from doing their job (putting oxygen in the bloodstream and throwing out carbon dioxide).

But all that is over now because she had a lung transplant.

It’s crazy to look at her walking without oxygen. She’s been in a hospital bed for three weeks, but she already looks stronger than she was before. *Is this normal?* *How did we figure out how to do this?* *May God bless the donor’s family.*

I’m terrified. Transplants don’t last forever. Sure, there are stories of people who had a transplant 50 years ago and are climbing Mount Everest and running marathons, but those are outliers. I can’t expect that to happen to us. It’s like buying a lottery ticket and thinking *I’m going to win this because Cathleen in Indiana won a billion dollars last week.* Most lung transplants, we’ve been told, last about six years.

*Another clock on my wife’s life – and our relationship – great.*

I don’t want to think about that all the time, but it’s hard not to. I’ll be 29, and she 31 in six years – that’s not very old! You’re tempted to do everything you possibly can now, but the road to recovery is long and full of potholes and speed bumps. Weekly check-ins with Stanford, 13 different pills and potions to take twice a day, some to prevent infection, others to prevent rejection.

*Did we just trade one handicap for another?*

I don’t think so.

Actually, definitely not. Sure, there are a lot of medicines, but being able to walk around a shopping center on a Saturday morning (without oxygen), coffee in one hand and the leash to our dog in another: priceless.

People would ask us before, “Where do you want to go after transplant?” I’d always say London. I’ve never been. I thought the extravagant trip after transplant was what getting it was all about. *We’re off the leash! Let’s go see the world, take a cruise, visit the ocean, buy a house!*

All those things sound fun – and probably are – but that’s not what transplant is about. I mean, it’s okay to celebrate – we *should* celebrate – but my wife didn’t get new lungs so we can galavant around Europe. My wife got new lungs so she could *live.*

Like the lesson most Hallmark movies try to teach, life after transplant is about enjoying and experiencing the little things in life. It’s about being able to hold hands as we walk down the street without curious on-lookers wondering why a young woman is wearing oxygen. It’s about being able to spend the night at my parents’ house in the mountains since the thin air isn’t a problem anymore. It’s about the evenings spent chasing our dog in the field as the sun sinks behind the hills. It’s about being able to kiss my wife goodbye without tasting plastic from her nasal cannula. It’s about no longer having to worry if she should hang out with friends or rest because she won’t feel well if she pushes herself too hard. It’s about being able to see and enjoy family in other parts of the country.

It’s about the little moments. Those that would be forgettable if my wife hadn’t been dealt the unfair hand she had. But that’s the purpose of trials in life, to make the triumphs that much sweeter.

It’s about the moments in life when I look at my beautiful wife and think, I love you. I love this. It’s about being able to live out (and enjoy) every day for what it offers, not what it doesn’t. It’s about taking a deep breath in (literally) and thinking *this. is. living.*


Transplant

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](https://www.dltn.io/posts/albert-einstein).


Annie Dillard’s Advice on Keeping a Daily Routine

No one expected the economy to crash during the Great Depression...until it did.

No one expected (or maybe they did but didn’t prepare) for a disease to put the entire world at a halt...until it did.

Stuff like this happens because no one expects things to be worse than the last big disaster. For the next pandemic, people will take what they learned from COVID in hopes to prepare better. Maybe they’ll put a few extra months on their emergency fund or ensure they have enough protective equipment to cover for a lack of supply for a few months.

But what if the next pandemic is worse? What happens if it’s so dangerous to where people can’t go in to work at all, even essential workers? This may seem dramatic, but it’s only because it hasn’t happened yet.

Prior to 1930, creating a plan for what would happen if banks ran out of money seemed dramatic. “Their banks! They can’t run out of money,” people thought...until they did.

Preparing for the disasters you can’t see is an idea I learned from Morgan Housel. He [writes](https://collabfund.com/blog/risk-is-what-you-dont-see/), “Paying attention to known risks is smart. But we should acknowledge that what [we] can’t see, aren’t talking about, and aren’t prepared for will likely be more consequential than all the known risks combined.”

If you’re only as prepared for the next pandemic, economic crash, or job loss to be as worse than the last disaster, you’re going to be unprepared.

Be prepared for the disaster to be worse than before

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.”
>

Check all kinds of unusual things

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.
>

A few funny things about time

For the past four years, I’ve gotten up at 5:00 am on most work days. For the past week, my wake-up call has been closer to 4:00 am.

Am I crazy? Why do I do this?

No, I’m not crazy. The only reason I can do this consistently is because I go to bed at 9:00 pm every night. I’m not a night owl and I hate being out late.

I’m also not getting too many extra hours of productivity in during the day, so this isn’t hustle culture advice. Someone who wakes up at 8:00 am and works until midnight every night has the same amount of working hours that I do.

So…increased productivity isn’t the point.

**I do it because there’s no better way to conquer my inner demons than by waking up at an ungodly hour and saying, “I won today.”** I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s true.

I like how Jocko Willink famously put it: “Discipline equals freedom.”

When I wake up early, I have the freedom to choose what to work on, what to read, and who I want to become. I have the freedom to make myself 1% every day between the hours of 5:00 am and 7:00 am.

Starting my day off with a win makes the rest of the day suck less. No matter how tedious the project I’m working on is or how much Resistance is fighting me from writing or filming a video, nothing compares to how hard it is to get out of a warm bed (especially if your dog is cuddled up next to you). Doing so everyday gives me enough confidence to create, put myself out there, and say, “I can do this.”

Though productivity isn’t *the main* factor, it is **a** factor. Getting two solid hours of work in before 7:00 am makes me feel like I rule the world. It also shifts the spectrum of how bad a day can get towards the positive end. No matter what goes on in a day, if I get two hours of writing, reading, or video editing done in the morning, the worst my day is going to be is just okay.

I’ve found the hardest part about this is having enough patience to let the results of one morning compound into two and three and four and 365 mornings that all build off of each other.

If I’m working on a big project, I often won’t see “results” for a month or two. After a few weeks of chipping away at a big goal and not feeling any progress, it becomes much harder to convince myself to jump out of bed and get to work.

The trick to dealing with this is making sure there are enough small wins or “level ups” throughout the journey. Often this can be sharing what I’m doing on Twitter and sparking a conversation, or just reflecting back on where I was before I started to put some perspective on what I’ve accomplished.

On the ******really****** hard days, I remind myself of this Chinese proverb:

> No man who rises before dawn 365 days a year **fails to make his family rich.**
>

Rich financially, sure, but also rich mentally and physically. When I wake up early to read, write, and workout, I’m my best self. Being in that position allows me to be my best self for my family, friends, and everyone else.


Why I Wake Up at 5:00 am

The greatest things in life can also be the worst.

Sophocles said, "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse."

In *Essentialism*, author Greg McKeown talks about the "[success paradox](https://substack.com/redirect/695201e2-204b-4548-81dd-de476274fb80?r=3jw8b)" and it's a clear illustration of something great turning into a curse. Here's how he defines it:

> **Phase one.** We have clarity of purpose, enabling us to succeed in our endeavor. 
>
> **Phase two. **When we succeed, we gain a reputation as a go-to person, and we are presented with increased options and opportunities. 
>
> **Phase three. **When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts as we get spread thinner and thinner. 
>
> **Phase four. **We become distracted from what would otherwise be our highest level of contribution.

When an author writes a book that took three years in solitude to write and helps them break out into the world as a "Domain Expert on X," everyone will want to talk to them about X. Now they're getting invited to give TedTalks, appear on podcasts, and write columns for *The New York Times*. With each appearance, they become a bigger name and more people want to hear from them. Naturally, this leads to more invitations and the cycle continues.

Gone with the wind are the mornings of five-hour writing blocks and week long research retreats. They're famous now! They have obligations to their fans. They have to make money.

But giving TedTalks isn't what helped them achieve "success." It was being alone with their keyboard in the still small hours of the morning writing one word, and another one, and another one, and over again 60,000 times. But since they haven't been able to research or write at all since their book came out, they've got nothing else to go on. Maybe they've written a few blog posts here and there, but nothing close to the quality of their first book.

Now that they're pressed for time, they cut corners on their next book. They don't research as much, they don't think critically about the data and their implication, there's no clear organization structure--the second book is a joke.

That is the Paradox of Success.

Being well-researched and thinking critically about their first book lead them to write a smash-hit. But the success that followed prohibited them from working hard on their second one. They became distracted from what would "otherwise be [their] highest level of contribution."

It wasn't intentional. They weren't distracted by the limelight. They were just doing what they thought they had to do and said "yes" to everything.

Winston Churchill said, "You can never tell whether bad luck may not after all turn out to be good luck." I think *you can never tell whether good luck may not after all turn out to be bad luck*.

Beware of the curse.

Beware of the curse

## Impressions

*Discipline is Destiny* brilliantly illustrates a depressingly "bro-culture" idea: discipline. This characterization stems from the hustle culture accounts on Instagram or finance bros on Twitter explaining their 4 AM morning routines, cold showers, and 35-minute meditation sessions. This overexposure to a powerful concept has therefore watered down a powerful idea, the idea that *you, and only you, control your life.* This book brings the idea back into reality.

Through 54 short chapters, Ryan Holiday gives rules, ideas, and principles to live a disciplined life. By studying some of the most disciplined people who have breathed life on this Earth, the reader can't help but think, *What if I start to be more disciplined today, right now?* *What if I actually did "attack the dawn?''* *How different would my career be if I really did do the hard things first?* *What if I just showed up every day for the next 5 years? 10 years?* *What would my life look like if I got rid of that thing that controls me?* *What happens if I actually use discipline to shape my destiny?*

## Takeaways

**Treat the body rigorously** - Lou Gehrig was no "good-time Charlie." He wasn't a drinker and didn't chase thrills or girls. "The obligation of a champion," Holiday writes, "is to act like a champion...while working as hard as somebody with something to prove." It wasn't about his "image" or wanting to be "above reproach." Gehrig knew his body was a machine, and it was how he made his money. He wasn't going to abuse it, and neither should we.

Someone would write about him that he didn't drink, "not because of any prissy notions of righteousness that it was evil or wrong to take a drink but because he had a driving, non-stop ambition to become a great and successful ball player. Anything that interfered with that ambition was poison to him." Muhammad Ali would say later, "When a man can control his life, his physical needs, his lower self, he elevates himself"

Musonius Rufus, speaking on a similar note, writes, "Obviously the philosopher's mind should be well prepared for physical activity, because often the virtues make use of this as a necessary instrument for the affairs of life. We use the training common to both when we discipline ourselves to cold, heat, thirst, hunger, meager rations, hard beds, avoidance of the pleasures and patience under suffering. For by these things...the body is strengthened and becomes capable of enduring hardships, study and ready for any task."

You train your body and mind in moments that you can control, so you can control your body and mind in moments that you don't.

**Work before the light and do the hard thing first** - Toni Morrison, speaking on the virtues of waking up early to work, said, "Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It's not being *in* the light, it's being there *before it arrives*. "

Half of this battle is going to bed early and making sure you get enough sleep. Holiday writes, "The best way to master the morning is to have mastered it the night before."

"Just as days are made of mornings," he also wrote, "lives are made of days. To procrastinate at any time, day or night, young or old, to *push it until later,* is a loser's game."

**Be your own master** - One day in 1949, Richard Feynman felt an increased urge to reach for the flask. It was a craving for a drop of alcohol, separate from the reward of celebrating the results of hard work. Right then and there, he gave up drinking. Because as Holiday writes, "Nothing, he felt, should have that kind of power over him."

A core idea of self-discipline is to be extremely wary of anything that has mastery of you. These can be vices like caffeine, alcohol, or drugs. But they can also be virtues like success, working out, and so on. The desire isn't the issue. *It's the need.*

**Work clean, think clean** - Robert Moses liked to work on a large table because it made him more effective and encouraged a better workflow. He believed in processing, or what David Allen's GTD method called an "inbox." When something came in, you dealt with it. And since a table has no drawers, his biographer Robert Caro would write in *The Power Broker*, "there was no place to hide papers; there was no escape from a nagging problem or a difficult-to-answer letter except to get rid of it in one way or another." Holiday says, "The space where great work is done is holy. We must respect it." As Gustave Flaubert says, "Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work."

**Just show up. Once you do, enjoy the work** - Thomas Edison said, "The genius hung around his laboratory day and night. If anything happens, he's there to catch it; if he wasn't, it might happen just the same, only it would never be his." Showing up when it's easy...is easy. But doing it when it's hard is when it really counts. Showing up when you're tired. Doing the work on the project for the 5th year in a row when it feels like you'll never get it done. Those are the days when greatness is born.

John Steinbeck called these "dawdly days." Holiday explains, "Those days when everything seems out of whack, when you're just not feeling it, when the distractions won't stop." Showing up on those days "is the first step to greatness."

And once you show up...get to work."I come from a part of the world where people did work rather than just talk about it," Joyce Carol Oates said. "And so if you feel that you just can't write, or you're too tired, or this, or that, and the other, just stop thinking about it and go to work."

Encouraging his readers just to show up and work regardless of the arbitrary outcomes, Holiday would write, "Decide what you want to be, and then do that work." If you love the work, you don't care what the outcomes are, the prizes you get, or the money you make. You do it because it's what you love to do.

**Sweat the small stuff** - No big project has succeeded by ignoring the small stuff. "It is the loose ends," Zelda Fitzgerald said, "with which men hang themselves." There's an old saying about a horse, *for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.* For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. And then, because of the shoe, the horse was lost. Because of the horse, the rider was lost and because of the rider, the message, and because of the message, the battle, and because of the battle, the kingdom...

**Don't overdo it** - Discipline isn't only resisting the temptation to give up; it's also resisting the temptation to go too far. Working out too much, getting injured, and not working out at all usually take someone to the same place. John Steinbeck referred to those who fell prey to their desires to accomplish a lot and called this the "indiscipline of overwork."

**Keep the main thing the main thing** - "Anyone who has not groomed his life in general towards some definite end cannot possibly arrange his individual actions properly." -- Michel de Montaigne.

Holiday writes, "If you don't know where you're sailing, the Stoics said, no wind is favorable." He continued, "the secret to success in almost all fields is large, uninterrupted blocks of focused time." To do this, we can borrow a line from E.B. White, who replied after being asked to be a part of some commission, "I must decline for secret reasons."

It sounds simple, but doing it isn't easy. To keep the main thing the main thing requires you not to be a slave to your ego. After you become successful, they want you to appear on every podcast, go to every conference to "network," and be a part of communities, so people know who you are. Your ambition and ego will want you to continue walking down the path of success and fame, but that ambition isn't helpful if it's not taking you anywhere. You must learn to tame ambition and to keep the main thing the main thing.

But that's not enough.

Once you've cleared your plate of only the most essential, you must **focus relentlessly** on that task. Holiday shares an interesting story about Beethoven after a friend asked if he was even listening. "I was just occupied with such a lovely, deep thought," Beethoven replied, "I couldn't bear to be disturbed." Holiday puts it bluntly: "The muses never bless the unfocused."

**Perfectionism is a vice** - "I want it to be perfect," says someone who keeps saying they're writing a book, or a blog post, or making anything at all. "It doesn't matter the cause," Holiday writes, "whether it was from procrastination or perfectionism, the result is the same. You didn't do it."

Don't sacrifice completion for perfectionism. A bad book written is more successful than one in your head.

**Get better every day** - If you're not getting better, you're getting worse. There's a word for this in Japanese, *kaizen*. It means continual improvement. Holiday asks, "How much progress could you make if you made just a little each day over the course of an entire life?"

**Expect much from yourself, little from others** - You have to be disciplined. You don't have to force discipline on others. Those people are just annoying, and no one likes them. Don't judge other people for drinking if you don't. Don't make someone feel bad for not running, reading, waking up early, etc.

But that's not an excuse to be soft on yourself. Their life is not in your control, so don't act like it is. Hold yourself to high standards. Cato the Elder said, "I am prepared to forgive everybody's mistakes except my own." Ben Franklin said something similar when he said, "Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices." Holiday writes, "Be a strong, inspiring example and let that be enough." He also shares a story from one of Lincoln's secretaries who would marvel at the way he "never asked perfection of anyone, he did not even insist, for others, upon the high standards he set for himself."

On a similar note, Seneca writes, "Happy is the man who can make others better, not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts." So though you shouldn't hold people to your high standards, you should inspire them to be better just by *being you.* Not giving some fake speech or showing off your accomplishments, but by your character, your attitude, and your approach to life. Holiday writes, "The fire within us can burn bright enough to warm others. The light within us can illuminate the path for others."

**Bring distinction.** - Epaminondas, a general in Greece, was appointed to an insulting office in Thebes--taking care of the city's sewers. Instead of being upset, he did the job with diligence. Holiday shares that Epaminondas declared "that it is not the office that brings distinction to the man, it is the man who brings distinction to the office."

## Notes
- We have two choices: to master ourselves or be mastered by something else.
- We each have a higher and lower self that are constantly battling with each other. The lower self wants to do what's easy. The higher self wants to do what is right. The ancients called this inner battle *akrasia*.
- I'm disciplined, or try to be disciplined, because I'm afraid of who I'd be if I wasn't.
- Lou Gerhig wore his fame lightly, but took the obligations of it seriously.
- You say you love what you do. Where's your proof? What kind of streak do you have to show for it?
	- This is a great question to encourage keeping a reading/writing/working out/golfing log.
- "The one thing all fools have in common, is that they're always getting *ready* to live."
- Anger isn't bad. It's okay to be angry. You just can't *do anything* out of that anger.
- *Mos maiorum* - the unspoken yet also very much spoken way of life of your grandparents.
- July and August are named after Julius and Augustus Cesear.
- Be a hero to the valet.
- Destiny isn't going to be easy. But if it was, would it still be worth anything?

## Quotes
- "We must keep ourselves in check or risk ruin."
- More than talent, life is about temperament. And temperament.
- Although they come from very different places, the desire to skip a workout and the impulse to work out too much end up in the same place.
- No one who is a slave to their urges or to sloth, no one without strength or a good schedule, can greate a good life.
- The queen, you can be sure, always knows more than she says.
- Greatness is not just what one does, but also what one refuses to do. It's how one bears the constraints of their world or their profession, it's what we're able to do within limitations–creatively, consciously, calmly.
- "Remember to conduct yourself in life as if at a banquet. As something being passed around comes to you, reach out your hand and take a moderate helping. Does it pass you by? Don't stop it. It hasn't yet come? Don't burn in desire for it, but wait until it arrives in front og you. Act this way with children, a spouse, toward position, with wealth–one day it will make you worthy of a banquet with the gods."
- Someone else's lack of self-control is not a justification for abandoning your own.
- If you have money, spend it...the problem is when people spend money they don't have, to get things they don't need, at a price nowhere near worth the cost.
- And is "f-you money" really such an admirable goal anyway? To have so much money you don't have to care about anything or anyone? That's not vritue, it's childishness.
- "The modern stoic knows the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it exactly at the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble." Ryan writes, "The person who wakes up whenever, wakes up and does whatever, orders their day however? This is a person who will never have enough time, who will always be behind."
- "The nearer a man is to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength." – Marcus Aurelius
- "It doesn't matter what you bear. It matters how you bear it." – Seneca
- "If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter." (This is something you shouldn’t do, and it illustrates the idea of sunk costs.)


Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday

There's been two articles I've seen recently on the difference between people who ask for what they want (ask culture) vs. people who drop subtle hints at what they want (guess culture). I'm not afraid to admit I fall in the latter group. Does this mean some emotional aspect of my social life is immature or not developed enough?

Some say I'm "easy going" or very "go with the flow" and I'd agree with both of those statements. But it's not because I have a big soft spot in my heart and I want to be selfless. Rather, it comes from a deep sense of insecurity of not wanting to inconvenience other people. Most of my approach with groups of people, especially groups of people I don't know well, is to ensure other people aren't inconvenienced.

The reason I do that is simple: I know I can handle being inconvenienced. If I really want to go somewhere on a vacation and am unable to make it by the end, sure it's a bit sad, but life's still great. I just keep on keepin' on. Others are different. Some people really value seeing certain areas when they're in a new city and would be crushed to not see that thing. Sadness comes first followed me resentment at the people/reasons why they weren't able to see that thing. It's just much easier if I inconvenience myself because I know I can handle it. Is that egotistical? Maybe. A bit stupid? Probably? But does it make sense? In my head, yes.

Part of managing other people's inconvenience's has instilled in me a habit of practicing "guess culture." Guess/Ask Culture is an interesting social phenomenon originally reported on by *The Atlantic*, but [recently covered by *Maybe Baby* in an essay](https://haleynahman.substack.com/p/102-no-worries-if-not?s=r). A user named Andrea Donderi posted the following response to someone asking how to get out out of hosting someone at their house for a vacation:

![https bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com public images dc134bc8-3047-49db-ace8-fd9df306696d 1522x872](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/cZUhFNTPGlnfhPCO5Onp9/9a65a5216a4153c441e51fb28879826d/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_dc134bc8-3047-49db-ace8-fd9df306696d_.webp)

The ideas are really amazing and surprisingly not very well known. I will say here and now that I am an addicted guesser. I rarely, if ever, put a direct ask into words except to my wife or my best friends. If I get a burger from a restaurant that has mustard on it even though I specifically asked for no mustard, I will not say a thing. I will scrape the mustard off with a knife and enjoy it the best that I can. But if the waiter catches me scrapping off the mustard and asks, "Would you like us to remake it?" I will respond with something along the lines of "If you don't mind." Not a hard yes. Not a direct answer. But yet another "subtle hint" hoping they catch on. I know that I do this. I'm not ashamed, but also not saying it's the right thing to do.

Obviously that isn't a very deep example and having my meal made wrong is not the worst thing that could happen to me. But those actions play out in other scenarios. If I want a raise, I'm much more likely to bring up the cost of living with my boss, how everything is getting so expensive, or how long I've been at the company for–just hoping they take the bait.

**This is one of the least effective ways to communicate.** It's so hard to get anything done this way! Perhaps this has caused part of the decline in work happiness. It's not because the bosses are awful, but that employees are unable to communicate what they need to effectively get their job done. This leads to resentment, contempt, and eventually, quitting.

[*Bookbear Express* shared some helpful tips](https://ava.substack.com/p/be-an-asker) on how to leave guessing behind and become an asker:

> Here are my general rules for asking:
> 
> -   If it’s very easy for the other person to say no (zero cost to them) and you’ll probably never see them again, ask whatever you want (politely)
>     
> -   If it’s something like asking someone to hang out, I think it’s okay to ask two times if the person is unresponsive/gives a neutral response. After that, cut your losses.
>     
> -   If you really, _really_ want to press your case, I would say something like, “Letting you know that I really do want to meet up, and may follow up occasionally to see if you feel the same way. Is that okay?” Do not abuse this (for example, checking in once again after eight months is probably fine, and if they still seem uninterested just drop it).
>     
> -   Never get upset at someone for saying no. You don’t “deserve” an answer. The truth is, people who don’t know you don’t owe anything to you, and even people who know you really well are free to prioritize themselves (though you may want to rethink the relationship if they don’t seem to care about you, obviously).

On Being an Inconvenienced Guesser

I.
"Names don't constitute knowledge", the great professor and physicist Richard Feynman declared in an [interview in 1973](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI).

I know that A2 + B2  is equal to C2, that equation is called the Pythagorean Theorem, and it was named after Pythagorus. But I couldn't tell you why it works or how it works. I may be able to cobble together enough words to make a somewhat decent description, but I'll look like a fool trying to explain it to someone who has never heard of Geometry before. **I have the knowledge of it, not the understanding.**

That's not the only thing I'm lacking knowledge about. I've read 200+ books in the last few years and could probably summarize off the top of my head about 15 of them. The rest I may be able to recognize the title and paint a broad picture of the author's ideas, but that's about it. **I've read the books, but I don't understand the books.**

II.
This type of person, someone who has a lot of knowledge but no understanding, is what the blog [More to That]( https://moretothat.com/knowledge-is-not-understanding/) has penned as a "Dumb-Smart Person." A Dumb-Smart Person (DSP) is someone who has acquired loads of textbook knowledge, but doesn't know how to handle a situation that isn't pre-defined by something they've learned. They *know* the information, but don't *understand* it. What little information they do know, they're unable to adequately recognize when it's not in the context they've learned it in.

This is what I call context-dependent knowledge and it's a lot more common than you think.

Take for example Kyle here.

![Street Life - Standing](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/1rkFpWaMMGlLpo4LCcS997/e147a15845d8845f82f70cbd2a636583/Street_Life_-_Standing.png)

Kyle is a studious college senior who loves to read biographies of businesses and entrepreneurs. He's getting a degree in business, but it's not scratching the itch as much as he would like. He needs real examples, not case studies.

He had just finished reading Benjamin Franklin's biography and was struck by a well-known story about Ben Franklin asking a foe to borrow one of his books. The foe accepted and upon returning the book, the foe engaged in a friendly conversation with Benjamin. The foe was now a friend. Kyle thought this was incredible. Dealing with conflict has always been awkward, but this was a simple strategy that he could add to his toolkit to deploy when the time comes. Kyle noted the story in his "second brain" and moved on to the next read.

III.
Awhile later, he was put in a situation where the book tactic would be of great use. During one of his classes, students were assigned a group project. He happened to be paired with Lex, another brilliant but not-so-kind and arrogant student. Kyle knew this was his opportunity to apply the learning from Ben Franklin's life.

"Okay," Kyle thought, "If I ask him to borrow a book, he's going to have to lend it to me, right? Then I'll read it and when I give it back to him, I'll tell him my favorite points and ask what his were. Genius."

Operation Ben Franklin was a go.

"Hey Lex, I know you like reading Angela Duckworth's work. Could I borrow *Grit*? I've heard great things and would love to read it."

"You can just get it from the library..." Lex claps back.

"Oh, right. Sorry thanks." Kyle mumbles out, embarrassed. *Well that didn't work*, he thinks to himself. *What went wrong?*

What went wrong?! You used a strategy that worked in 1750 where books were scarce and hard to get. You didn't understand the deeper knowledge of that strategy. You were stuck in context-dependent learning and failed to apply the *knowledge* from that situation into a modern-day environment. You got cocky with your "second brain" only to realize you may not be as smart as you think.

Kyle is a dumb-smart person who fell prey to context-dependent knowledge–only being able to apply the learning of something if it's in the exact same context in which you've learned it.

This has happened to me countless times on my journey to learn programming. Watching a tutorial and following along step-by-step gives me some knowledge of how certain programming languages work, but if I don't understand *how* it works or *why* it works the way that it does, I won't know what methods to use in what situations when I'm trying to build things on my own out in the wild. I have to work really hard at applying methods and concepts outside of the specific use case the tutorial taught me. 

If I learn how to use the useEffect() hook from React one way, I'll fail to recognize how to use it when it's called for in a different context. Programming knowledge is *very* context-dependent. I've found that practicing on your own is the only way to overcome that obstacle and get out of tutorial hell.

IV.
We can picture a Dumb-Smart person's journey through knowledge and understanding as two mountains. The Mountain of Knowledge on one side and the The Peak of Understanding on the other.
![1-01](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/4gSCFCZFewIm6hqNh2Zlfy/27fb6f8cee3e52d746559072b0d91eb3/1-01.png)

Splitting the gap between the two is the Trough of Failures–an essential part of moving from The Mountain of Knowledge to the Peak of Understanding.
![2-01](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/2B5fH7Jbv8x3BaRZdR7S8V/9a10a385c753c290739e052d15c64702/2-01.png)
A dumb-smart person fails to recognize the gap between the two, assuming it's one big mountain that they've successfully conquered.

"Finally," they think. "I made it."

Man oh man do we have news for you.

V.

To get to the Peak of Understanding, one must do two things:

First, recognize there's a gap there at all. An arrogant, ego-filled academic will never reach the Peak of Knowledge if they think they are already there.

Second, they must trek through the Trough of Failures. They do this by taking their knowledge, applying it in certain situations, and seeing where it fits and where it doesn't. This is often accompanied by endless amounts of failures because that's how we learn.

With each application of knowledge, we get closer and closer to reaching the Peak of Understanding, until, finally, we've made it and can communicate the concept or idea in a simple way.

It sounds simple. And honestly it really is. The biggest obstacle I've seen (and faced myself) is having the desire to make the jump from one side to the other in the first place. Ever since we started learning in school, we were awarded with memorizing knowledge:

- What's the powerhouse of the cell?
- Who led the Revolutionary War?
- What year did Christopher Columbus set sail to the New World?

We were never taught, nor had the use case for, a deeper understanding of any concepts. As long as we could memorize some key vocabulary terms, things turned out quite alright.

And this doesn't change as life goes on. Signaling your knowledge is the second-most important thing to signal in human society, not too far behind wealth. If you can sprout off a few facts about World War 2 and entertain a dinner table with crazy Greek mythologies, people will assume you're intelligent (Unless you're annoying while doing that. And it's very easy to be annoying in that situation.

People who have knowledge may get remembered, but those who seek to understand will never truly die.

The Mountain of Knowledge (And Why Dumb Smart People Never Escape It)

Love is cruel mistress.

It’s a unique experience that opens up our hearts and minds to a place we didn’t know existed. A place far beyond our imagination, but somewhere we conjured up. A place filled with mountains of joy, streams of smiles, and fields of laughter depressingly contrasted by the valleys of sorrow and the rivers of pain.

Love may bring us to a high place we’ve never been before, but it also tears us down to a low we didn’t know existed. A place we know how bad it hurts, but a place we leave ourselves open to experiencing once more, for to forfeit the pain, we must also forfeit the joy.

It’s this experience of how good it would be combined with the fear and trouble of how bad it could be that leaves us open to not just love, but wonder and amazement about what this mathematically-beautiful world is and where it came from. Because it is only those who have wandered lost, in the words of Einstein, who know the mystery and joy of

> [T]he 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.

It is those whom this newsletter is for: the curious, adventure-seeking humans who refuse to be content with the disarray of information, facts, and figures that populate our everyday experience. It’s for those who have caught themselves more than once gazing at the sea of lights in our night sky wondering what’s out there? And for those who have been starstruck by the glorious sight of the face of the man on the moon piercing back into their eyes as they thank the gray hunk of what was once earth for keeping our little planet so safe to live our puny little lives on.

It’s for those wonderers. Those seekers. Those who are kept up at night thinking about the Atoms of the Universe.

My Manifesto

I have a love/hate relationship with new ideas.

In a spark of brilliance one day, I tweeted "Your inputs effect your outputs. Want better ideas? Consumer better things."

I was then reminded of an article Nat Eliason wrote called, "[How to Improve Idea Flow](https://www.nateliason.com/blog/improving-idea-flow)", where he talked about auditing your consumption channels.

If you look at my Instagram feed, Youtube homepage, the people I follow on Twitter, or the podcasts I listen to, they are all talking about the same thing. Most people I follow on Twitter are talking about building in public, note-taking, or startups. All the podcasts I listen to are about building businesses or interviews with the same 7 - 10 people on different podcasts, and the people I subscribe to on Youtube are all under the same filmmaking/technology niche.

No wonder I wasn't coming up with new ideas, I was in a vat of the same 10 - 15, getting thrown around with different words being used to describe them. **You can't come up with new ideas if you spend time thinking about the same ones.**

My hunch is most people struggle with this problem as well. People who are marketers follow the same 5-10 marketers and use their strategies, people who like to build e-commerce businesses follow the same few giants and try what they did. Science fiction geeks read the same books and watch the same tv shows over and over again - **everyone is stuck learning what they've already learned.**

So, what do we do? As Nat puts in his article, start auditing your inputs. Only follow one (maybe two) people in each niche you're interested in. Then, start stealing.

How to Steal New Ideas
----------------------

In *Steal Like an Artist*, Austin Kleon gives some actionable steps on how to and why you should steal ideas from different domains and repurpose them. Nothing is original.

### Collect Good Ideas, No Matter the Domain

When you rely on a narrow set of inputs to influence your ideas, you're wearing a mental straitjacket. Your cognitive range of motion is very limited. In the words of Charlie Munger, "All the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department."

People who are world class thinkers are silo-free thinkers, avoiding the habit of looking at life through one lens. This is why you need to develop liquid knowledge. Knowledge that easily flows from one topic to the next.

Another way to look at collecting ideas from different domains is through lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is a term that was coined in the 1960s and defined the reimagining of information in new contexts. By drawing together seemingly irrelevant concepts or domains, you can create new uses for old ideas.

My favorite example of this is when people read history books or biographies to learn how to lead. **Most problems in the world are new problems that can be solved with old solutions**, so reading history can be a great way to learn effective communication, or help you come up with a go-to-market strategy.

One thing I've started doing recently is listening to Dan Carlin's [Hardcore History Podcast](https://open.spotify.com/show/72qiPaoDRf8HkGKEChvG5q?si=oEjKy5xjRGGST1X4p7DfzQ). They are four hour long podcast episode that Carline unpacks famous historical events and applies his unconventional thinking to past circumstances.

A few other podcasts with varying themes are [Revisionist History](https://open.spotify.com/show/2LOJaYKijiwNefCvzczyib?si=GfoiHe-SRYa80jZTB6-2ng) with Malcom Gladwell or [Hidden Brain](https://open.spotify.com/show/20Gf4IAauFrfj7RBkjcWxh?si=Yy8w5ovaTqu64exeXsdGuQ) from NPR.

Creativity and innovation arise at the intersection of ideas. **Don't miss a great idea because you're on the wrong block**.

### Steal the Thinking, Not the Content

One of the best ways to recreate ideas and come up with "original" thoughts is to understand the thought process of someone you admire.

As I mentioned earlier, I admire Shane Parish and Anne-Laure. So, I might do some digging on how they are able to synthesize the information from sources to come up with new ideas. If I can get a grasp on *how* they think, not just what they think, I might be able to emulate my own idea around a certain topic. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further and you create your own ideas with stolen concepts.

James Clear does this quite often in his articles. In the footnotes section, he will add his sources, but sometimes will comment, "Hat tip to person x for inspiring this article", [he did it here](https://jamesclear.com/shoshin). I opened the article he mentioned to see how similar the two articles are and they sort of have the same title and basic information about Shoshin, but Clear has added relevant examples that his reader would like and stories that are personal to him. This is a great example of how to steal the thinking but not the content.

### Forget the Good Stuff, Add the Great Stuff

In this age of information overload and abundance, **no one wants a 5,000 word mediocre article.**

What someone does want is for you to drastically change their worldview in 500 words or less - that's true talent.

So when you get ready to write that article, film that video, or record that podcast, only add the great stuff. The stuff that you think no one's heard before. That story you thought was fascinating, or that one liner that rocked your world when you penned it.

Less, but better.

New Ideas Suck

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/19/albert-camus-letter-teacher/):

> 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](https://www.dltn.io/book-notes/pieces-of-action)). [Vannevar Bush](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush) was an engineer, inventor, and administrator who headed the [U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Scientific_Research_and_Development) (OSRD) during WWII. Bush reported directly to President Roosevelt. 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.

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What It Takes To Be a Great Teacher

My wife has pulmonary fibrosis, so we spend a lot of time in doctor's offices and hospitals. It's always a joy for me to observe and compare how one nurse handles certain situations than another. Personality shines through everything you do.

One thing that we've struggled with is the lack of documentation of how certain things work. Specifically, the notes left in the chart from each visit that other nurses and doctors consult at the following appointments.

We were in the hospital for a few days in a row one time and my wife was getting an antibiotic through an IV. One morning, she was getting the IV and it started to burn. So, the attending nurse turned the flow rate down a little bit. That seemed to solve the problem. Yet, that nurse didn't document in the chart this rate change.

Later that same night, when the nurses started the antibiotic once more, it started to burn again. We told them the nurse earlier in the day slowed the flow rate and that helped. But, lo and behold, they checked the chart and didn't see any documentation of the rate change. So, they had no idea what number to go down to or why that may have solved the problem. Instead, they stopped the flow of the antibiotic. This meant we had to wait for the head nurse to come in and guide us on the next steps.

I suspect this happens in every company and on every team. But it's a great illustration that explains the importance of documenting what you do.

Documenting what you do

I.
Obviously named after Galileo Galilei, Galilean relativity states that the laws of physics should be the same in all inertial reference frames. Inertial reference frames means any frame of reference that isn’t accelerating or decelerating. If either of those are the case, there is no experiment that can “prove” someone in one frame is really moving and someone else in another isn’t because the laws of physics are the same in both instances.

For example, someone in a plane 30,000 feet in the air could say the plane is stationary and the earth is moving away from it. Someone on the ground could say the plane is moving and the earth is stationary. With Galilean relativity in mind, they’re both right because they can’t perform an experiment that clearly determines one is moving and one isn’t.

It sounds obvious to us now, but to Galileo and his peers, it was revolutionary. Galileo thought about it like this:

“Shut yourself up with some friend in the main cabin below decks on some large ship,” Galileo wrote. If the ship was moving at a constant speed in one direction and you dropped a ball, it would drop to your feet in a perfectly straight line. But a fish outside of the boat, let’s say with x-ray vision (we’re thinking hypotheticals here folks), would see the ball move down and forward, even though you yourself didn’t see that change. If the ship didn’t have any portholes and you just woke up below decks and couldn’t remember how you got there, you would not be able to tell if you were on dry land “standing still”, or moving. That’s Galilean relativity and it helped explain why we can’t feel the motion of the earth.

But it also explains an existential crisis each of face at least once in our own lives, if not more.

II.

You see, in Galilean relativity the motion has to be constant because as soon as we felt the acceleration or deceleration, we’d know we’re the ones in motion.

This phenomenon helps explain why after being stuck somewhere for too long in life, we feel like we’re not moving forward. Whether you’re living in your hometown you swore to escape as soon as you could, or working the same job you are when you graduated college, or hanging out with the same group of friends you’ve had since middle school, a long period of constant motion makes us dull to the experiences of life’s motions. On the other hand, this is why starting a new job, getting into a new relationship, or moving somewhere new makes you feel alive. That acceleration reminds you that you are actually in motion–it’s just a bit slower at some points than at others.

This sounds a bit sad, but it’s actually quite encouraging. Galilean relativity helps explain why college feels like such a drag of doing the same thing for four years until that exciting day of graduation. You’re moving at a slow, constant speed freshmen - junior year which makes it difficult to notice how far you’ve come until you get to the destination. Then you get to senior year and it flies by because at least once a week you get a jolt of acceleration through job interviews, filling out graduation paperwork, and experiencing those bittersweet Friday nights. Somehow, it feels like you just moved into your dorm last month and four years just went by in an instant. Though that didn’t practically happen, it did in theory.

Everyday you woke up, went to class, went to work, studied, and went to sleep. That cycle moved you forward at a constant speed, making the same amount of progress each day, but you just never noticed. You were like the person beneath decks of a ship with no portholes. Friends and family members, on the other hand, were able to see your slow, steady progress the whole time. To them, college really did feel like four years.

Obviously since this is all a theory, I’m hesitant to provide any thing further than making an observation, but I will say if you’re struggling with the effects of Galilean relativity in your everyday life, try to force some functions of acceleration. This could be (again, just proposing how this might work) taking a vacation, trying something you’ve always wanted to try, learning a new hobby, or anything else that could remind yourself that you’re actually in motion, though it may be little, and slowly moving forward.

Question is: are you going where you want to end up, or have you just been hanging on to the tide?

Why you feel stuck in life

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](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/complexity-of-value), 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](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile). 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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"](https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/xr/in_praise_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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

An attempt to understand the Kolmogorov Complexity of human values

The coolest thing about the internet is the vast amounts of niche knowledge available in an instant.

Some knowledge can come from people's personal blogs who work a very unique job and also share that online. But the amount of people who have a unique job is quite small and the subset of people who write about what they do is even smaller still – so this type of blog is few and far between.

Another good way to find niche secrets online is to follow the footnotes. Traditional media companies sometimes write about what's going on in the world and will link to an original source. That original source likely contains much more fascinating insights than the piece that is synthesizing what they say. Try reading the original piece. This is also a good habit to get into because you learn how to shape ideas for yourself instead of relying on someone else to tell you what to think.

When you discover a niche secret, combine that with something you already know, remix a story from history, and you now have a new idea, complete with an illustration to use as an example that you discovered and synthesized all alone. How cool!

The value of niche secrets

Since October of last year, I've been diligently studying programming, I've done so on and off over the past few years, but took a very in-depth course in October that helped put me into gear. I've also met a few people who have been willing to extend a hand and help me get a footing in the field and for that, I'm ever thankful.

But as I approach learning for a year, I was wondering: **how do I know I'm getting better?** Luckily, I stumbled upon [this great essay from Julia Evans](https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/03/13/celebrate-tiny-learning-milestones/) about celebrating tiny learning milestones that answered this exact question. Evans writes:

> Hello! Today I want to talk about – how do you know you’re getting
> better at programming?
> 
> One obvious approach is:
> 
> 1.  make goals
> 2.  periodically check if you achieved those goals
> 3.  if you did, celebrate

She goes on to explain the cons of setting vague goals like "learn a new programming language" or "write enough code that's useful for someone." *Why do you want to write enough code that's useful for someone?* *What's the point of learning a new language? Does it do something you can't already do?* The fact that these questions aren't clear leaves room for vague interpretations, and with them, unmet goals.

## What to do instead
Instead of setting goals, Evans encourages celebrating **tiny milestones**. She explains the etymology of the word in that it's **stones** placed every **mile** along a path so that you know how far you've travelled.

Instead of something grandiose like "learn a new programming language", a tiny milestone might be using a new tool or fixing a new type of bug you've never seen before.

## Some of my developing milestones
Here are some examples of my tiny milestones from the last year.

 - Learned a few different [frameworks](https://nextjs.org/) and [libraries](https://reactjs.org/) to write JavaScript in
 - Learned how to read API docs and make API calls
 - Built a [simple YouTube clone](https://github.com/dmabery/yt-clone) that lets someone search for a term and gets back the related videos
 - Built a [small calculator](https://github.com/dmabery/cool-calculator) that helped me practice updating the screen on button clicks (something I've always wondered)
 - Learned the basics of [Tailwind](https://tailwindcss.com/)
 - Learned how to deploy a site on [Vercel](https://vercel.com/)
 - Learned how to read the vague errors Vercel gives and troubleshoot production errors that I didn't get in dev
 - Implemented prettier and ESLint on my codebases to learn how to write cleaner code
 - Understood the importance of git and how to use CLI tools for version control
 - This is a bigger milestone, but built [my blog](https://www.daltonmabery.com/) using Next and Tailwind.

When I look back at where I was a year ago, I'm so proud of how far I've come! I couldn't write JavaScript code from scratch without looking up every little thing online, I had no idea what React was or how it worked, and didn't really know what was so important about GitHub. Now, I know a lot of those things. How cool!

## Why I felt stuck
Getting into development can be very intimidating because of the abundance of information out there. There are so many programming languages you can start with and varying advice about where to start depending on what website you read. Most of the time once you get started, everything is so abstract that you're not really sure how it all comes together. Once I finally stuck to a course ([this one](https://www.udemy.com/course/the-web-developer-bootcamp/)) and got over the initial confusion by just telling myself "Keep going and it will all make sense" everything seemed to click!

Now that I know enough jargon to understand some of the abstract concepts, most of my tiny milestones happen by accident. For example, this weekend I was trying to write a function to check if something was true and if it was, return an object with certain key-value pairs and if it was false, return an object with different key-value pairs. Writing the function was easy enough, but then I was confused on how to actually access that object later when I needed the results of the function. I did some research and understood I had to call the function and then just chain the key of the property onto the function. Now I'll know how to do this in the future.

I may have learned something like that in a tutorial, but it didn't stick because I didn't have to really *learn* it.

On Celebrating Tiny Learning Milestones

Are kind acts done for selfish reasons still considered kind?

I'm not sure...but there's a reason I'm asking.

I have a rule that whenever someone asks to borrow one of my books, I just buy them their own copy. I do this because:

1.  I doubt I'll ever get them back. And also because there are personal marginalia in most of them that contain my deepest secrets and I don't want anyone reading those.

2.  But I also want the person to go on a journey with the book, much like I did. That's hard to do if you can't write in it, are on a time crunch to get through the book and give it back, or if you're constantly seeing passages marked up and thinking *I wonder why they liked this paragraph so much?*

Someone recently asked to borrow a copy of a book that has impacted greatly: *Einstein: His Life and Universe* by Walter Isaacson (and yes, I winced a little bit when the person asked to just bring my copy over the next time I see them lol).

Like I always do, I ordered their own copy and wrote a note in the cover. Here's what I said:

> Exploring Einstein's life and universe lead me to think about the world in a whole new way. Rather than seeing it as something fixed, I realized it was malleable, changing and full of endless curiosities--and not one of them too small to wonder about.
>
> Eisenhower said it best when he said there are few who contributed as much as Einstein did to the abundant growth in knowledge of the world in the 20th Century, yet not other who was more modest in the possession of power that is knowledge.
>
> I think that's why this booked touched me so much, for I finally understood the great benefit of knowledge for knowledge's sake; for scratching that itch that makes you think, "I wonder how that works."
>
> I hope your eyes are opened ever wider to the beauty of this world and the knowledge it contains, as mine were.
>
> With love, wonder, and curiosity,
> Dalton.

So, is this still considered a kind act, even though the motives are half selfish and half selfless?

P.S. *Einstein* really was amazing. If you're curious to find out more, you can [read my notes on it here](https://www.dltn.io/book-notes/einstein-his-life-and-universe).


What I do when someone asks to borrow a book

Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon are some of the fundamental elements for creating life. Without either of these, life will have a very hard time existing (if it can even get off the ground at all).

But there are other elements required to sustain life. Iron is needed to create hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that moves oxygen and carbon dioxide around in your body. Cobalt is one of the elements that B12 binds to in the body. Potassium and a small amount of sodium are used in controlling the nerves. Without them, it would be hard for your brain to send signals to your body and vice versa.

As you can see, the elements needed for creating life and the elements needed for sustaining life are not the same. So it is with most other ventures in the world.

The employees who took a company from 0-1 are not likely the same employees that are needed to take the company from 1-10.

The push you need to get a project started requires a lot of motivation and some excitement. But it requires careful planning and execution of that plan to finish the project. The one off motivation burts don't do well for achieving long term goals.

This is one of the many ways the real-world mimics the forces that control it. This is why it’s important to have a brief understanding of how things in the world work. It helps you identify patterns and rules you may otherwise miss.

You can't go there by doing that

In *[Psychology of Money](https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Money-Timeless-lessons-happiness-ebook/dp/B084HJSJJ2/ref=sr_1_1?gclid=CjwKCAjw9e6SBhB2EiwA5myr9jXY7bzuqPqcpT1ilW3gPPA_BWbFdOvNKch9NdwRFotGg7292dGeDhoCfAgQAvD_BwE&hvadid=241638696189&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9032520&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=12203680808315375271&hvtargid=kwd-816731825&hydadcr=21903_10171041&keywords=the+psychology+of+money&qid=1650221492&sr=8-1)* by [Morgan Housel](https://twitter.com/morganhousel), 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](https://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-Titanic-Editors/dp/1547854006)* 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.

Sometimes your room for error, isn't enough

Earlier this week, [Dwarkesh Patel wrote an essay exploring the mystery of the miracle year](https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/annus-mirabilis?s=r)– "in which [scientists] make multiple, seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span of a single year or two" ([source](https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/annus-mirabilis?s=r)). 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.](https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1515380200573390850?s=20&t=1HUm6zlftoazLiG2v7hdrQ)  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.

![formula for breakthroughs](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/6ct3tvtp6FIiqvvcfI9kQg/70a7635e930f5b36967230c203ce7b22/Untitled-2.png)

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.

![FMxLriXVUAIRx71](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/4v3u5Pt3FZIweSAebgJ5u7/79b42323b7c65984c21c34e184ce8e51/FMxLriXVUAIRx71.png)

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:

![formula for breakthroughs](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/6ct3tvtp6FIiqvvcfI9kQg/70a7635e930f5b36967230c203ce7b22/Untitled-2.png)
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.

1. 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? 

2. 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.
3. 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.

---

1. Isaacson, Walter. *Einstein: His Life and Universe*

How to Increase the Chances of Becoming a Genius

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:

<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xv7eeMikM_w?start=72" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

*(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.

<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/49TeSoo4Sx8" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>


Season-Long Friendships

## 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
1. Nature and the world are not static. Therefore, anything or anyone that acts like it is static will eventually come to ruin. Instead, nature and the environment is dynamic. It begs for a constant tango between the inhabitants of the world as it mutates. Companies, ideas, and people that worked awhile ago aren't going to work today if they keep doing the same thing.
2. Anxiety and depression cannot be treated easily if the person has unpredictable daily routines. The system in the body that regulates those emotions and feelings are closely linked to the circadian rhythm. Ensuring you're sleep habits are regular can be a great place to start.
3. Life is a constant battle fighting to maintain order, but learning how to thrive in chaos.
4. consciousness can be defined as knowing exactly how and where we can be hurt and why.
5. One of the main differences between man and animal is man's knowledge of what's going on in the world. More specifically, man's desire and ability to cause trouble and pain and suffering for the sake of it.
6. Everyone has to experience a season of intense suffering, sadness, or loneliness so they know what they know where they don't want to go. This could give your life Meaning (note the capital M.) "I'm on this earth to help myself and anyone who wants to come with me to stay away from X, Y, and Z."
7. Don't be friends with someone whose friendship you wouldn't recommend to your son, daughter, sister, or mother.
8. Before you help someone, find out why that person is in trouble. It's likely they're in trouble partly because of their actions. Not to judge them, just to know how they ended up in the spot they are.
9. If you are succeeding at everything, it's most likely not because you're so freaking talented at so many different things. Rather, it probably means you're just not doing anything new, difficult, or challenging. Sure, you may be winning. But you're not growing. And what's the point of winning at something if it doesn't make you better? **Victory in the present shouldn't take precedence over trajectory across time.**
11. The fundamental moral goal of a parent or care taker over a child is to not shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience pain or failure, but how to make sure they learn something from their failure so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost.
12. There are two general principles of discipline. First, limit the rules. Too many rules makes kids go crazy. Second, use the least amount of force necessary. Don't go straight from 0-100 on the punishment scale. Work your way up and only get to the end if the child isn't cooperating on the previous levels. However, sometimes the highest form is necessary, like when a child is doing something that could quickly lead to something fatal. Then, it's necessary to get the kid to stop immediately, no questions asked.
13. A natural disaster is an act of God - you couldn't have predicted its arrival. But you can do what's necessary to prepare for one. You know, eventually, your car will stop working or need maintenance. It's inevitable. So you can either choose to ignore the warning lights, or maintain a schedule of maintenance and put money aside for the inevitable 4-figure repair cost.
14. Some of the worst people to be around are those who have decided to live life through a single axiom: "The right is bad." "Government is bad." They filter everything through this axiom and believe, truly believe, that everything that happens can be viewed through that. Too much money? The government isn't spending enough. Not enough money? The government is spending too much. Natural disaster? The government wasn't prepared enough (okay this one may be true.)
15. 2 types of people: "Did what I want to happen, happen? No. Therefore I did something wrong and I still have something to learn." "Did what I want to happen, happen? No. Therefore this thing is unfair. Someone else is to blame."
16. Stubborn refusal to change in the face of error is stupidity.
17. The purpose of memory is not to remember the past. It's to stop the same bad thing from happening over and over again. If something bad happens, and you know why, you can stop that bad thing from happening again.

## Quotes
- "It's not what we don't know what gets us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so." -
- "If mother nature wasn't so hell-bent on our destruction, it would be easier for us to exist in simple harmony with her dictates."
- "An idea is more credible when it emerges as a consequence of investigations in different realms." #note-taking #slipbox
- "When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you're so engrossed in what you're doing you don't notice–it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos."
- "You can't long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are still learning what you need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering." #mastery
- "It is far better to render beings in your care competent than to protect them."
- "If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in act two. Otherwise it has no business being there." #writing #details #quote
- "Those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it."
- "It's easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today's cheap pleasures."
- "Attend to the day but aim at the highest good."
- "If a society does not adequately reward productive, pro-social behavior, insists upon distributing resources in a markedly arbitrary and unfair manner, and allows for theft and exploitation, it will not remain conflict-free for long. If its hierarchies are based only on power, instead of the competence necessary to get important and difficult things done, it will be prone to collapse, as well."
- Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought, and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist.
- "A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie."
- If you don't believe in brick walls, you will still be hurt when you run headlong into one. Then you will curse reality itself for producing the wall.

## 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?


12 Rules For Life

One Sentence Summary
--------------------

The Essentialist mindset is all about doing less, but better

Two Key Takeaways
-----------------

-   Focus on your objectives. There's no way to do everything you want to do well, but you can do 1-3 things *exceptionally* well
-   Saying no is apart of life. Have one decision that makes a thousand. When presented with an opportunity to do something or take on a new task, make sure you are 100% down. If you're even 90% down, it should be an automatic 'No'! (if you have the luxury to do that of course).

Chapter 1: The Essentialist
---------------------------

-   When you spend time focusing on too many objectives, you end up minoring in major activities, which makes work very frustrating
-   Instead of making a millimeter of progress in a million directions, you can begin to make major progress in the things that are truly vital
-   ***Less but better***
-   Essentialism is not about getting more things done, it's about getting the *right* things done; making the wisest investment of your time to feed the things with the most ROI
-   The way of the essentialist means to make decision based on design, not default. Being able to distinguish the vital few tasks from the trivial many, allow you to do the things you deliberately choose to do
-   "If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will"

Paradox of Success

-   Phase 1 - When you have such clarity on what to do, you do that thing really well
-   Phase 2 - Success leads to a reputation of the 'go-to person' in that field or area. This leads to an increase in options and opportunities.
-   Phase 3 - Increased opportunities, which is really just an increase in demand for your time,
-   Decision Fatigue - The more choices we have to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates.
-   The word 'Priority' came into the world in the 1400s. For 500 years, it remained singular until in the 1900s when people started talking about priorities - you can't have more than three important things you're focusing on
-   To help discern between what to do and what not do, ask yourself, "Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution toward my goal?"

Chapter 2: The Invincible Power of Choice
-----------------------------------------

-   Learned Helplessness plays out in two ways either: (1) Sometimes they check out and stop trying, or (2) They become hyperactive, they accept every opportunity presented and throw themselves at every assignment

Chapter 3: The Unimportance of Practically Everything
-----------------------------------------------------

-   *You must understand that certain types of effort yield higher rewards than others*
-   The Power Law Theory - certain efforts actually produce exponentially more results than others
-   An Essentialist discerns more so he can do less

Chapter 4: Trade-Off: Which Problem Do I Want?
----------------------------------------------

-   The worst thing an organization, or person, can do is ignore the reality of trade-offs. Every decision you make will be a trade-off to something else.
-   If you don't make the hard choice to decide your trade-offs, someone else is going to make it for you
-   Johnson & Johnsons mission statement says the customers are first, and the shareholders second. That is why when they had to recall Tylenol, even though they lost $100 million, they did it anyway. The customers safety was more important than a price point [[Story]] [[Infinite Game]]
-   Essentialists ask the tougher but more liberating question, "Which problem do I want?"
-   When faced with a decision where one option prioritizes family and another friends, health, or work, you need to be prepared to ask, "Which problem do you want?"

Chapter 5: ESCAPE - The Perks of Being Unavailable
--------------------------------------------------

-   To discern what is truly essential, we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep, and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make.
-   Newton, when asked how he discovered the law of universal gravitation, replied, "By thinking on it continually". What he thought on, he thought on continually or nearly exclusively

Chapter 6: LOOK - See What Really Matters
-----------------------------------------

-   In every set of facts, something essential is hidden
-   *The problem might not be the problem. You must have the ability to look at the high level picture of what's going on.*

Chapter 7: PLAY - Embrace the Wisdom of Your Inner Child
--------------------------------------------------------

-   Bob Fagan, a researcher who has spent 15 years studying the behavior of Grizzly Bears, discovered bears who played the most tended to survive the longest. In a world continuously presenting unique challenges and ambiguity, play prepares the bear for a changing planet
-   Play helps in reducing stress which is key to creativity because stress plays a big role of being an enemy of productivity and other exploratory parts of our brain
-   Stress increases the activity in the amygdala, while reducing the activity in the hippocampus, the thing that's responsible for cognitive function

Chapter 8: SLEEP - Protect the Asset
------------------------------------

-   Essentialists choose to do one fewer thing right now, in order to do more tomorrow
-   Read, "Sleep is the New Status Symbol for Successful Entrepreneurs"

Chapter 9: SELECT - The Power of Extreme Criteria
-------------------------------------------------

-   If the answer isn't a definite 'Yes' then it should be an automatic 'No'
-   Assigning numerical values to your decisions can help you make the right decision, instead of staying stuck in indecision.
-   Evaluate an option and think about the single most important criterion for that decision. Give that option a score between 0 to 100. If you rate it any lower than 90%, change the score to 0 and say no
-   Don't say yes to something just because it's an easy reward. Doing that runs the risk of having to say no to a more meaningful one down the road
-   Write down the opportunity. Next, write down a list of three 'minimum criteria' the options need to pass in order to be considered. Third, write down a list of 'extreme criteria' they would need to pass in order to be considered. If the opportunity doesn't pass both lists, it's a no

Chapter 10: CLARIFY - One Decision That Makes a Thousand
--------------------------------------------------------

-   If a team is disorganized and not having results, that's a clear warning sign for a lack of clarity. People are confused about what their roles are and experience stress, confusion, and frustration. When there is a high level of clarity, people thrive.
-   Done right, an essential intent is one decision that settles one thousand later decisions
-   Organizations who can answer, "If we could be truly excellent at only one thing, what would it be?" will thrive. If all of their employees can answer that question, the games over - they win

Chapter 11: DARE - The Power of a Graceful "No"
-----------------------------------------------

-   You can say no and regret it for a few minutes, or you can say yes and regret it for a few days, weeks, months, or even years

**HOW TO SAY NO GRACEFULLY**

1.  Separate the decision from the relationship
2.  You don't have to use the word, "No"
3.  Focus on the trade off
4.  Remind yourself that everyone is selling something
5.  Saying no often requires trading popularity for respect. Be okay with that.
6.  A clear "No", can sometimes be more graceful than a vague or noncommittal "Yes"

-   Essentialists accept they can't be popular with everyone all of the time

Chapter 12: UNCOMMIT - Win Big By Cutting Your Losses
-----------------------------------------------------

-   Don't continue investing time, money, or energy into something you know is losing proposition.
-   One helpful question to ask yourself is, "If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?"
-   Ask someone who is not emotionally involved in the situation and unaffected by the choice you make to give
-   Apologize. Be honest and tell the person that when you made the commitment, you thought there would be less responsibilities

Chapter 13: EDIT - The Invisible Art
------------------------------------

-   Latin root of the word decision - cis or cid - literally means, "to cut" or, "to kill"
-   When added on to an email thread, or when sitting in a meeting, wait to give your two cents. Observe what other people's ideas are and edit out what you think you *need* to say.

Chapter 14: LIMIT - The Freedom of Setting Boundaries
-----------------------------------------------------

-   When asked to do something, it can be intimidating to push back. However, what is worse than defending your priorities is what happens if you don't - the ability to choose what you're doing and eventually what is most essential in your own life
-   Don't solve everyone's problem for them. Forcing people to solve their own problems is equally beneficial for them as it is for you

Chapter 15: BUFFER - The Unfair Advantage
-----------------------------------------

-   Adding buffer into your schedule is an unfair advantage because no one does it
-   Work will expand the time allotted to it - Parkinson's Law - this can be a harmful thing, but also positive if scheduled properly
-   Planning Fallacy - Coined by Daniel Kahneman in 1979, refers to how people often times underestimate how long a task will take, even though they haven't done it before. They feel good because stuff if, 'planned', but not properly. This will just lead to a busy day where nothing gets done
-   *I'd rather do one thing incredibly well, then start 5 things and finish none of them in any given day*
-   Add a buffer into your schedule of 50%. If you think a task will take two hours, schedule three hours to accomplish it

Chapter 16: SUBTRACT - Bring Forth More by Removing Obstacles
-------------------------------------------------------------

-   Constraints (bottlenecks) hold the entire organization and company up. You can improve everything else, but if the bottleneck isn't improved, nothing will flow more efficiently.
-   Instead of focusing on the efforts and resources that need to be added, an Essentialist focuses on removing the constraints or obstacles that needed to be removed. First, y**ou must be able to determine what the clear, desired outcome is**. Until then, you don't know what's constraining you.
-   Ask yourself, "What are the obstacles standing between me and getting this done?" and "What is keeping me from completing this?" Make a list of those obstacles, and prioritize them based off the question, "what is the obstacle that, if removed, would make the majority of other obstacles disappear?"

Chapter 17: PROGRESS - The Power of Small Wins
----------------------------------------------

-   Don't go for the big, flashy wins. They don't matter. Instead, go for the small, everyday wins that have consistent results
-   Two primary internal motivators for people are achievement and recognition for achievement.

Chapter 18: FLOW - The Genius of Routine
----------------------------------------

-   "Routine in an intelligent man is a sign of ambition" - W.H. Auden
-   Routine is essential to being an essentialist. Without it, non-essentials distractions will always win
-   Every habit is made up of a cue, a routine, and a reward
-   Cue - A trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use
-   Routine - The behavior itself; can be physical, mental, or emotional
-   Reward - This helps your brain figuring out whether the habit is worth repeating or not

Chapter 19: FOCUS - What's Important Now?
-----------------------------------------

-   The only way to operate at your highest level of contribution, you must deliberately tune into what is important in the here and now
-   Don't get so caught up in past mistakes, or future opportunities that you can't focus and dominate the present
-   "Execution is easy if you work hard at it and hard if you work easy at it"
-   "In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present." - Lao Tzu

Chapter 20: BE - The Essentialist Life
--------------------------------------

-   Don't get caught up in the paradox of success.
-   Choose your priorities, do everything that accomplishes those and nothing that doesn't
-   Choose essential.


Essentialism by Greg Mckeowen

In 2015, *Wait But Why* author, Tim Urban, popularized the analogy of "The Chef and The Line Cook" in a 4-part blog series about Elon Musk. In the post, he described Elon as being a chef, someone who can take pieces of a puzzle apart and put them back together in a new, creative way.

Alternatively, he described line cook as being those who understand how to follow recipes. They know how to make a delicious steak with all the right ingredients, but if they're out of seasoning or something goes wrong, they can't salvage the dish. A chef, on the other hand, is able to make something just as scrumptious without the necessary components. In other words, *they understand each ingredient enough to know how it reacts with something else.*

[Urban put it](https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html) this way (emphasis mine):

> The chef reasons from first principles, and for the chef, the first principles are raw edible ingredients. Those are her puzzle pieces, her building blocks, and she works her way upwards from there, using her experience, her instincts, and her taste buds.\
>\
> The cook works off of some version of what's already out there---a recipe of some kind, a meal she tried and liked, a dish she watched someone else make.\
>\
> ...But what all of these **cooks have in common is their starting point is something that already exists**. Even the innovative cook is still making an iteration of a burger, a pizza, and a cake.\
>\
> At the very end of the spectrum, you have the chef. A chef might make good food or terrible food, but whatever she makes, it's **a result of her own reasoning process**, from the selection of raw ingredients at the bottom to the finished dish at the top.

For me, that analogy has been instrumental as a mental model to view certain professions and people in those professions. Being a cook is incredible, but I have mad respect for the "chef's" of their field. But today, I'd like to take that brilliant analogy one step further by examining some of the best golfers out there.

What I Learned Watching Golf
----------------------------

Golf has been a great fascination for me as of late. Not just playing golf, but watching it, studying the mechanics of a swing, understanding the history and the golfers who shaped what the game is today. Of course that would be impossible to do without looking at Tiger Woods.

The raw talent, enthusiasm, and grit are obviously some of the defining characteristics of Tiger, but what fascinates me the most with him, Phil Mickelson, Jordan Spieth, and other professional golfers is their ability to manipulate the golf ball in their favor.

Amateur golfers hit hooks (when the ball hooks at a sharp left) and slices (when the ball slices at a sharp right) all the time, but not on purpose. They do it because the club face is too open or closed at impact, their swing isn't shallow enough, or they are swinging from outside-in instead of inside-out.

Professional golfers are able to hit fades, draws, hooks, slices, and stingers on command. Sometimes they need to do this because of where the pin is placed on the green, but other times it's because their tee shot went 15-feet into the woods and they have to hit through trees. These shots are known as "Escape shots" and Phil Mickelson might be the most infamous at doing these. Just check out this video:

What him and Tiger understand are all of the tiny factors that play into how the golf ball will travel. **What amateurs do on accident, professionals can do on purpose.** They understand if the ball is further back in the stance it will fly lower, if the club face is open it will go much higher but not as far, and so on. **They understand the ingredients to create the "dish" they're looking for.**

But what they do even better than the fundamentals of the golf swing are the feel of the game of golf. The things we can't see with our eyes, they are consciously aware of. If you could copy the exact swing of Phil Mickelson, you *still* wouldn't be able to manipulate the ball like he does. He has one extra component of understanding how everything in the game of golf works together and is able to manipulate it.

This extra step, understanding not just the ingredients but the invisible force that affects those ingredients in any skill or field of talent is what the ancient Chinese call the Tao or Way. Robert Greene calls the Way *the dynamic *and explains it as "The living force that operates in anything we study or do."

If becoming a master is at 10,000 hours, understanding *the dynamic* comes at 20,000 hours.

But it's not that simple.

Playing golf for 20,000 hours will not make you as good as a professional golfer, just like going to the gym for 20,000 hours won't make you an athlete, or running track for 20,000 hours won't make you an Olympian.

To understand *the dynamic*, one must have an insane amount of practice time. But they also must *reflect* on every second of that practice time.

When Tiger Woods hits a shot into the trees, he knows *exactly* why it went into the trees. He knows this because he's studied his swing at practice, at the driving range, and on film to know what he does that makes the ball go left when he doesn't want it to. To understand *the dynamic*, each failure, victory, challenge, and setback must be viewed with a lens of reflection to answer the question, "How can this make me better?"

It sounds cliche, but it's true. Only by reflecting on your failure can you get any better and that much closer to becoming a master and understanding *the dynamic* in life, work, and relationships.

*Disclaimer: The Dynamic is not a new age, spiritual force that you can manipulate with crystals. It's simply an analogy to explain what happens when all the aspects of a certain field and profession are working together as one.*

Chef and The Line Cook: Going Deeper

> Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.\
>\
> -- John Keats

I. Senior year of high school was one of the most nerve-racking times for me. Not that I was worried about my academic success, which I'm glad I wasn't because no boss has ever asked what I got in English that year. But because what seemed like the rest of my life hung on one fateful decision: **what my plans were for after high school.**

The uncertainty most people face their senior year of high school as they consider which college to attend, where to live, or where to work is undeniable. And for some, it's almost overbearing. But as I've come to learn in the few short years since I've graduated, that uncertainty was only a glimpse of what will come the rest of life.

The ability to not just deal with but thrive with uncertainties is what the young poet John Keats calls *Negative Capability -- *one's ability to remain in uncertainties and mysteries. Cultivating Negative Capability for those tough life decisions is important, but Keats was alluding to a much more creative use of the term, saying that Negative Capability "went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously.[1](https://daltonsbookshelf.substack.com/p/negative-capability#footnote-1)"

II. Shakespeare's ability to put himself in the life and minds of each of his characters, even those that were evil, without judging them is what Keats so admired about his writings.

But Shakespeare wasn't the only creative who could do so. Mozart's ability to utilize different styles of music without forming opinions that some were better than others was how he practiced Negative Capability. Robert Greene points out in his book, *Mastery*, that Bach's music was very different from that of Mozart's. But instead of dismissing Bach's compositions as less than his own, he studied Bach's music and intertwined the two styles for a new, different style of music.

That's where the benefit of practicing Negative Capability pays off. If you're quick to dismiss an idea, philosophy, book, or person, you don't allow yourself to explore those mysteries waiting to be discovered. Greene explains in order to practice Negative Capability:

> "You must develop the habit of suspending the need to judge everything that crosses your path...You do anything to break up your normal train of thinking and your sense that you already know the truth."

Read books from authors you haven't heard of.\
Watch YouTube videos from channels to which you're not subscribed.\
Look at problems in fields unrelated to the one in which you work.

But most importantly, be okay with the mystery that comes with asking questions about why things are the way they are.

> "The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces."\
>\
> -- Robert Greene

III. With anything in life, there's a caveat to this. Although practicing Negative Capability is important, it becomes dangerous if you never get out of that mindset. Once you've evaluated all the options and considered all angles for how to solve a problem, make a decision and run with it. Sitting around and pondering ideas is an important practice, but if it's all you do you'll never create anything inspiring or original.

Doing that just reminds me of this scene from Good Will Hunting:

With that, I leave you to have an inspiring, thought-provoking, curiosity-filled Monday and hope that spirit continues throughout the week.

Being Okay With Negative Capability

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](https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-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:

![](/1_5BAfQfxsoiIjiSoNKz_9XQ.png)

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."](https://blog.stephsmith.io/how-to-be-great/) 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](https://amzn.to/31t6vQZ), 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 Be Great? Be Okay With Being Bad

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](http://paulgraham.com/smart.html)," 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](https://www.britannica.com/science/ether-theoretical-substance)) 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.

<Tex texContent={a^{2}=\int \binom{1}{5}} />

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](https://daltonsbookshelf.substack.com/p/what-made-einstein-special#footnote-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.

How to Change the World With Your Ideas (Like Albert Einstein)

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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLelgy5zRv4). 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.***