Category: Media

We construct when we increase the potential energy of the system…

Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it. … We construct when we increase the potential energy of the system in which we are interested, and we destroy when we diminish the potential energy. … Whatever may be thought of these definitions, we all know in practice whether an activity is to be regarded as constructive or destructive, except in a few cases where a man professes to be destroying with a view to rebuilding and are not sure whether he is sincere. – Bertrand Russell

…one of my favorite thinkers and creators (read, for example, Russell’s thoughts on persecution mania, on the career treadmill, on competition, and on envy.

Hat tip to BrainPickings.

Paul Saffo’s 6 rules to predict the future

Sometimes you read an article and wish you’d read it much earlier. Kinda like when I visited Japan in 2012 and regretted immediately that it took 28 years to visit.

This is one of those instances. Paul Saffo’s essay is a classic with great examples and insights. Read the original at Harvard Business Review. Below I rephrase his 6 rules to aid my own understanding (a practice that I find helpful).

Rule 1: Don’t predict AN outcome; predict a RANGE of likely outcomes

A good boundary is one made up of elements lying on the ragged edge of plausibility. They are outcomes that might conceivably happen but make one uncomfortable even to contemplate.

Rule 2: Visualize the S Curve – specifically, when you think growth will take off, and when it will slow or come to an end

Consider Columbus’s 1492 voyage. His discovery falls at the inflection point of Western exploration. Columbus was not the first fifteenth-century explorer to go to the New World—he was the first to make it back

Rule 3: Embrace the strange, the outliers. Very often that’s the future

The first Grand Challenge, which offered a $1 million prize, was held in March 2004. Most of the robots died in sight of the starting line, and only one robot got more than seven miles into the course. The Challenge’s ambitious goal looked as remote as the summit of Everest. But just 19 months later, at the second Grand Challenge, five robots completed the course.

Rule 4: Strong opinions, weakly held

In forecasting, as in navigation, lots of interlocking weak information is vastly more trustworthy than a point or two of strong information […] once researchers have gone through the long process of developing a beautiful hypothesis, they have a tendency to ignore any evidence that contradicts their conclusion.

Rule 5: Study the past…then go further

The recent past is rarely a reliable indicator of the future—if it were, one could successfully predict the next 12 months of the Dow or Nasdaq by laying a ruler along the past 12 months and extending the line forward. But the Dow doesn’t behave that way, and neither does any other trend. You must look for the turns, not the straightaways, and thus you must peer far enough into the past to identify patterns.

Rule 6: Forecasts are a tool to be used sparingly and strategically

But the Berlin Wall came crashing down in the fall of 1989, and with it crumbled the certainty of a forecast rooted in the assumption of a world dominated by two superpowers. A comfortably narrow cone dilated to 180 degrees, and at that moment the wise forecaster would have refrained from jumping to conclusions and instead would have quietly looked for indicators of what would emerge from the geopolitical rubble

If you like to think about and study the future, a quick plug for Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock [Amazon]. Published in 1970, its specific conclusions are dated but the questions that he asks and the methods that he uses are not.

Koo Doy (coup d’oeil)

Napoleon's koo doy (coup d'oeil)

Clausewitz: When all is said and done, it really is the commander’s coup d’oeil, his ability to see things simply, to identify the whole business of war completely with himself, that is the essence of good generalship. Only if the mind works in this comprehensive fashion can it achieve the freedom it needs to dominate events and not be dominated by them.

Koo doy: the ability to look and understand, to see the little pieces and the big picture, at the same time. A stroke of eye. The lightbulb moments.

For Clausewitz, koo doy is what sets apart the great generals, what makes Bonapartes so special and different from, for example, Percival or Grant.

Koo doy exists in every field. It is the summation of mastery, flow, and gestalt. Picasso had koo doy. So did Beethoven. So, surely, did Steinbeck when he said upon finishing East of Eden, “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years…I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”

Thanks Yinan for recommending Napoleon’s Glance which describes and applies this concept.

Your Personal Bible: making a handbook of your most treasured text

Since publishing the below post I’ve finished and shared mine publicly. You can read about and download the file here

Your Personal Bible

I’ve come to really value the process of reading the same content over and over and over, until I feel that I know it inside and out like a favorite song or an old sweatshirt. It’s a habit I’ve grown to enjoy and I think it has many uses. Today I want to take the concept a step further and share the idea of building your own Personal Bible.

The Judeo-Christian Bible, from my perspective, is a set of stories and lessons that have not only survived but thrived for millenia. It is both a historical document (who, what, when, where) and a doctrinal one (how you should live, and why). Believers read the Bible weekly if not daily, both silently and out loud, in private and within groups. For many centuries, the Bible was a growing, changing document to which its authors added and removed, edited and curated.

A few weeks ago I began to build my own such “bible”, by collecting my favorite texts from blog posts, books, poems, notes, and the like. (I mean no offense to Christians or anyone who may be put off by a perceived misuse of the word)

My goal for this Personal Bible is to have a handbook of the most inspiring, powerful, and interesting content I’ve experienced. Something I can read every day or as often as possible, a resource I can turn to when facing important decisions or tough emotional times. Together, they represent the ideas and beliefs and insights that I want to remember forever, concepts that I want to become a concrete part of my daily life.

Here are some examples of content that I’ve included in mine:

  • Richard Hamming: You and Your Research [link]
  • Paul Graham: How to do what you love [link]
  • David Brooks: The Heart Grows Smarter [link]
  • Paul Buchheit: Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. “Hacking” [link]
  • Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power [Kindle]
  • Steve Pavlina: Broadcast Your Desires [link]
  • 38 insights from Alain de Botton [link]
  • The Scott Adams happiness formula [link]
  • Jiro and Rene Redzepi have a cup of tea [link]
  • Derek Sivers: Hell Yeah or No [link]
  • Patrick McKenzie: Don’t End The Week With Nothing [link]
  • George Saunders advice to graduates [link]
  • Jure Robic and “That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger” [link]
  • The BVP Anti-Portfolio [link]

When I struggle to commit to a project or path, I read about Jure Robic and how he pushes his mind to near insanity. When I want to be more effective with my time and efforts, I read Richard Hamming’s advice on how to do great work. And so on.

(please note: for most of the above content, I do not include the full text in my bible, but rather my notes and select quotes and excerpts that I pull from the pieces)

And within this document I also include a few of my favorite poems, such as:

The Man Watching by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time, and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined to fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Alain de Botton said something like, we are already far better read than the great Greek philosophers of old, yet we are still think we’re not well-read enough. We hunger for the new. Instead, why not spend our limited time to really understand and know deep within our soul the great stuff we’ve already enjoyed?

“It’s the things you chain yourself to that set you free” – a collection of insights from David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks)

David Brooks is another of my favorite writers / thinkers. Like this post on Alain de Botton, here’s a collection of notes that I’ve taken from David Brooks’s writings and talks. There will be a part 2 at some point. There was too much for just one post.

“In the realm of emotion they have a web of unconditional love. In the realm of intellect, they have a set, permanent philosophy about how life is. In the realm of action, they have commitments to projects that can’t be completed in a lifetime. In the realm of morality, they have a certain consistency and rigor that’s almost perfect.” – David Brooks (from The Atlantic)

The Moral Bucket List [NYT]

  • “The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral”
  • “You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity.”
  • “But all the people I’ve ever deeply admired are profoundly honest about their own weaknesses. They have identified their core sin”
  • “But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?”
  • “The people on this road see the moments of suffering as pieces of a larger narrative. […] They see life as a moral drama and feel fulfilled only when they are enmeshed in a struggle on behalf of some ideal.”

The 4 Types of Commitments [YouTube]

  • failure advice sucks, don’t fail
  • happiness peaks in 20s, then declines until bottoming out at 47, then climbs again
  • “you need an agency moment, when you’re deciding your own criteria for judging success”
  • making commitments is key, there are 4 types:
    1. to spouse and family
    2. to career and vocation (“a vocation summons you”)
    3. to faith or philosophy
    4. to community and village
  • morality has an inverse logic: give to receive, failure leads to success, find yourself by losing yourself
  • society today values skills over character
  • “it’s the things you chain yourself to that set you free”

The Heart Grows Smarter [NYT]

  • “It was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.”
  • “In case after case, the magic formula is capacity for intimacy combined with persistence, discipline, order and dependability.”

The Service Patch [NYT]

  • “But I was struck by the unspoken assumptions. Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options.”
  • “Many people today find it easy to use the vocabulary of entrepreneurialism, whether they are in business or social entrepreneurs. This is a utilitarian vocabulary. How can I serve the greatest number? How can I most productively apply my talents to the problems of the world? It’s about resource allocation.”
  • “Around what ultimate purpose should your life revolve? Are you capable of heroic self-sacrifice or is life just a series of achievement hoops? These, too, are not analytic questions about what to do. They require literary distinctions and moral evaluations.”

The Thought Leader [NYT]

  • “The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited.”
  • “By his late 20s, he has taken a job he detests in a consulting firm, offering his colleagues strategy memos and sexual tension. By his early 30s, his soul has been so thoroughly crushed he’s incapable of thinking outside of consultantese. It’s not clear our Thought Leader started out believing he would write a book on the productivity gains made possible by improved electronic medical records, but having written such a book he can now travel from medical conference to medical conference making presentations and enjoying the rewards of being T.S.A. Pre.”
  • “The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity.”

The Haimish Line [NYT]

  • “We live in a highly individualistic culture. When we’re shopping for a vacation we’re primarily thinking about Where. The travel companies offer brochures showing private beaches and phenomenal sights. But when you come back from vacation, you primarily treasure the memories of Who — the people you met from faraway places, and the lives you came in contact with.”