Don’t be the best. Be the only.
Kevin Kelly
Kelly, Kevin. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 2023.
h/t – David Perell’s podcast below:
Category: technology
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What Carson did was to approach the study of how to create X by turning the question backward—that is, by studying how to create non-X. The great algebraist Jacobi had exactly the same approach as Carson and was known for his constant repetition of one phrase: “Invert, always invert.”83 It is in the nature of things, as Jacobi knew, that many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward.
– Charlie MungerIt’s not only Charlie’s bits of wisdom that leave you in awe, the number and variety of thinkers Charlie Munger references in each chapter is astonishing.
In this speech alone he draws on Samuel Johnson, Cicero, Johnny Carson, Moses, Benjamin Disraelias, Croesus, Issac Newton, Epictetus…
Stripe Press’s online version of Poor Charlie’s Almanack is what digital reading should be.
More to come.
https://www.stripe.press/poor-charlies-almanack/talk-one?progress=66.79%25
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A man with a large family . . . stands a broader mark for sorrow. But then, he stands a broader mark for pleasure too!
Benjamin Franklin, letter to Bishop Shipley, 1788A quote to remember as we approach Christmas.
Another for the children’s books are underrated files…
Fleming, Candace. Ben Franklin’s Almanac: Being a True Account of the Good Gentleman’s Life. United Kingdom, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2014. pp14
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Musk’s indisputable work ethic was forged in Canada?
Musk started doing some work on his cousin’s farm. He grew vegetables and shoveled out grain bins. Musk celebrated his eighteenth birthday there, sharing a cake with the family. Throughout the rest of the year, Musk hopped from city to city, working odd jobs. At one point, for example, he learned to cut logs with a chainsaw in Vancouver, British Columbia.
pp44Musk also took on hazardous jobs for better pay. Reminds me of Richard Linklater’s years on oil rigs off the Texas coast…
Musk found some of his jobs by going to the local employment offices where companies posted requests for work. He was told that the best-paying job–because of the hazards involved–was cleaning boilers at a lumber mill, so he decided to try that. “You have to put on this hazmat suit and then shimmy through this little tunnel that you can barely fit in,” Musk said. “Then you have a shovel and you take the sand and goop and other residue, which is still steaming hot, and you have to shovel it through the same hole you came through. There is no escape. Someone else on the other side has to shovel it into a wheelbarrow. If you stay in there for more than thirty minutes, you get too hot and die.” Thirty people started out at the beginning of the week to give the job a try. By the end of the week, it was just Musk and two other men doing the work.
pp44, 45This is not TIME Person of the Year Elon Musk, and yet somehow it still is.
Picture books are underrated, but I’m learning children’s books are underrated. This adapted version of Ashlee’s Vance Elon Musk biography has been inspiring so far.
Blazing through it.
Also see John Meacham’s adapted version of his Thomas Jefferson biography: Thomas Jefferson President and Philosopher
Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk and the Quest for a Fantastic Future Young Readers’ Edition. United States, HarperCollins, 2017.
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We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.
We believe in adventure. Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for community.
To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
We believe that we are, have been, and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology – both unnecessary and self-defeating. We are not victims, we are conquerors.
– Marc AndreessenImportant.
*post post thoughts:
When this post dropped it had the feel of a surprise album release. With all of the podcasts, reviews, criticisms, and raves. Will more online writing have this feel upon publication?
Anytime I see a title with “Manifesto” included it sparks intrigue. Where have all the manifestos gone? The internet seems like the ideal medium for them. Will this one inspire an uptick manifesto publishing?
More optimism is needed. You can argue the merits of Marc Anderson’s piece, but the world could use more optimistic writing that inspires action.
Andreessen, Marc. The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Marc Andreessen Substack. October 16, 2023.
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Beer incentivizes science.
From Will O’Brien’s piece in the Fitzwilliam
Taken over its entire history, Guinness may just be the most successful company Ireland has ever produced. In 1930, it was the seventh largest company in Britain or Ireland. It is one of our oldest companies of note. Considering that it predates the Bank of Ireland and the State itself, it could even be said that Guinness is the longest-running successful large institution in Ireland.
Will O’BrienThe Irish brewing company has relentlessly innovated on multiple fronts.
- Workplace benefits
- Annual leave
- Free meals (today would be a company cafeteria)
- Family trips
- Healthcare
- Pension
- Housing!
- The creation of a Guinness Research Laboratory
- The Easy pour system (1959) – Invented by mathematician Michael Ash. Allowed lesser skilled bartenders to serve a quality pour.
- Project ACORN (1969) – Advanced. Cans. of. Rich. Nectar. The first attempt to improve the can or bottle pour.
- “widget” – a gas filled, tennis table sized ball at the bottom of the can that releases a gas that creates bubbles. This greatly improved the taste of home-served pints.
- Branding – Guinness is good for you, Guinness is bad for you, The Guinness Book of Records, producing a Nigerian action film.
Guinness is proof that companies who endure, innovate across multiple areas of their business over an extended timeline. Innovation doesn’t pause.
A must read piece if you’re interested in history, economics, marketing, or beer.
- Workplace benefits
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Morale is real. Don’t dismiss it.
Brilliant weirdos Alexey Guzey and Brian Timar explain morale. Worth bookmarking this one for discouraging moments. It could help you figure out why your morale is low.
First, ponder this idea:
Morale is your motive force, and you live or die by its maintenance.
Brian Timar & Alexey GuzeyAlexey and Brian go on to share a list of 10 + things that increase and decrease morale.
ThreeFour morale boosters from their list that resonate:11. doing
35. making a decision
3. going outside
13. stopping a thief
Three morale sappers to be wary of:
4. being a coward
5. punting decisions
9. spending time on a task and not feeling closer to finishing it
Consider morale booster #11 – doing. Don’t only read these, go on and create your own list of morale increasers.
Some increasers (sunlight) are perennial, but many more will be personal. Same applies with morale sappers (sleepiness).
Read the piece in full here. Also, pair with Guzey’s post: Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now
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Gwern lays it out for you to play it out
Your only search guaranteed to fail is the one you never run
GwernUse Verbatim mode for literal matching.
Who knew? Gwern.
Explore the Internet’s attic. I didn’t even know the Internet Archive existed!
The Internet Archive (IA) deserves special mention as a target because it is the Internet’s attic, bursting at the seams with a remarkable assortment of scans & uploads from all sorts of sources—not just archiving web pages, but scanning university collections, accepting uploads from rogue archivists and hackers and obsessive fans and the aforementioned Indian/Chinese libraries with more laissez-faire approaches.5 This extends to its media collections as well—who would expect to find so many old science-fiction magazines (as well as many other magazines), a near-infinite number of Grateful Dead recordings, the original 114 episodes of Tom and Jerry, or thousands of arcade & console & PC & Flash games (all playable in-browser)? The Internet Archive is a veritable Internet in and of itself; the problem, of course, is finding anything…
So not infrequently, a book may be available, or a paper exists in the middle of a scan of an entire journal volume, but the IA will be ranked very low in search queries and the snippet will be misleading due to bad OCR. A good search strategy is to drop the quotes around titles or excerpts and focus down to
site:archive.organd check the first few hits by hand. (You can also try the relatively new “Internet Archive Scholar”, which appears to be more comprehensive than Google-site-search.)View your Evernote or OneNote stash like a personalized search engine. Excellent way to think about those tools.
Clippings: note-taking services like Evernote/Microsoft OneNote: regularly making and keeping excerpts creates a personalized search engine, in effect.
This can be vital for refinding old things you read where the search terms are hopelessly generic or you can’t remember an exact quote or reference; it is one thing to search a keyword like “autism” in a few score thousand clippings, and another thing to search that in the entire Internet! (One can also reorganize or edit the notes to add in the keywords one is thinking of, to help with refinding.) I make heavy use of Evernote clipping and it is key to refinding my references.
Snore. Snore. I know, everyone is tired of the AI conversation. But how do these search techniques change with Chat GPT 4 or tools like Perplexity?
Read all of Gwern’s Internet Search Tips here. Table of Contents included!
h/t Tyler Cowen?
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From his essay, How to Do Great Work.
The entire essay is noteworthy, but this small section of quotes made me look at questions in a new way.
#1 – Really good questions are partial discoveries:
One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition. People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question.
Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they’re used in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question is a partial discovery. How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By even asking such questions you were already in excitingly novel territory.
#2 – Revisit the questions from your youth.
Do you remember yours?
People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams alive, but it’s just as important to keep your youthful questions alive.
#3 – After answers, more questions.
This excerpt reminds me of the Haitian proverb, after the mountain, more mountains.
It’s a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones. Questions don’t just lead to answers, but also to more questions.
Graham, Paul. “How to Do Great Work.” Paul Graham, 2023. http://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html. Accessed 3 July 2023.
Floodlights and Goalposts 