People watching in Paris - Tara Isabella Burton
This article is so artfully written and it inspired me to write a version of my own on this subject. People watching is an activity which can be immensely fun and cathartic. Really well written!
5 lessons from history - Morgan Housel
Morgan Housel is a great writer and here he writes about lessons we can take from history. A lot of what we think we know seems obvious, but is incredibly hard to practice. And things seem easier to do from a distance, and especially when we are the ones dispensing advice. These lessons are a great way to remember that people behave in irrational ways, and things are often easier to explain in hindsight.
Communication is the job - Boz
Andrew Bosworth has been one of the earliest members of Facebook, and he shares the importance of communication and how to to do it well in this very well written blog post. Most of the problems that I have faced, in my fairly short career, have been communication related, manifesting in different ways. Solution: To communicate better.
The Great Books Program - Tommy Collison
Tommy Collison is the co-founder of Stripe, and a voracious reader. In this blog post he lists out a 4 year program to read 150 classics on the subjects of : Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Enlightenment and Modernity. Saving it here, so I can refer to it later.
- A really nice short story about a wager between a lawyer and a banker who debate what is better: A lifetime in prison or capital punishment?
The three-or-four-hours rule for getting creative work done - Oliver Burkemann
- “The real lesson – or one of them – is that it pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule not to "maximise your time" or "optimise your day", in some vague way, but specifically to ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus (ideally when your energy levels are highest). Stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer. And drop the perfectionistic notion that emails, meetings, digital distractions and other interruptions ought ideally to be whittled away to practically nothing. Just focus on protecting four hours – and don't worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos.”
Curiosity Depends on What You Already Know - Zach George
- “Scientists who study the mechanics of curiosity are finding that it is, at its core, a kind of probability algorithm—our brain’s continuous calculation of which path or action is likely to gain us the most knowledge in the least amount of time. Like the links on a Wikipedia page, curiosity builds upon itself, every question leading to the next. And as with a journey down the Wikipedia wormhole, where you start dictates where you might end up. That’s the funny thing about curiosity: It’s less about what you don’t know than about what you already do.”
Sometimes, paying attention means we see the world less clearly - Henry Taylor
- “The Tse illusion is just one example of how attention has the potential to mislead us about the world. There is excellent evidence that paying attention to a gap between two lines will make the gap look bigger. Paying attention to an object can make it appear more vivid than objects that we don’t pay attention to. Amazingly, attention also affects our perception of time. Paying attention to a particular event can make it seem to take longer than it really does. This last feature of attention might even be why people often report traffic collisions as happening ‘in slow motion’. If you’re involved in a crash, your attention will be grabbed suddenly and, as a result, you might experience it as taking longer than it actually does. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that, sometimes, attention can mislead us about the world. This is not to say that attention always distorts our knowledge of the world, but it does suggest that it might not be the unproblematic guide to knowledge that we originally thought. In order to unravel the complex link between attention and knowledge, we might need to change the way we think about both of these faculties.”
Why Your Inner Circle Should Stay Small, and How to Shrink It - Scott Gerber
- “Are you in control of the relationships in your life, or are you ceding that control to others? That standing lunch date, or the conference you’ve attended for years because your pal is involved — when is the last time those interactions either provided value or allowed you to give value? Do you come away energized or drained? If you are not deciding the rules of engagement and making deliberate choices about who you are spending time with, then you need to take back that control. Start by making a plan to lessen your time investment in people and activities that make unrewarding demands on you until you can fully withdraw from the person, commitment, or activity.”
The mirror: It’s about you, not them - Derek Sivers
- “I often tell people about a great book I think will help them, but sometimes they dismiss the book because they heard something they didn’t like about the author. What I think they’re really saying is, “Now that I’ve proven that the messenger is not perfect, I don’t have to listen to anything they say.”But the act of reading a book is really about you and what you get from it. All that matters is what you do with the ideas, no matter the source. Apply them to your own life in your own way. It was never about them. It’s about you.”
Commencement Address, American University in Beirut - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- “For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.”
6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person - Jason Pargin
- “Feel free to stop reading this if your career is going great, you're thrilled with your life, and you're happy with your relationships. Enjoy the rest of your day, friend, this article is not for you. You're doing a great job, we're all proud of you.”
Tails, you win - Morgan Housel
- “Long tails drive everything. They dominate business, investing, sports, politics, products, careers, everything. Rule of thumb: Anything that is huge, profitable, famous, or influential is the result of a tail event. Another rule of thumb: Most of our attention goes to things that are huge, profitable, famous, or influential. And when most of what you pay attention to is the result of a tail, you underestimate how rare and powerful they really are.”
A few thoughts on depression - Noah Smith
- Noah Smith is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and was a professor of finance at Stony Brook University. However this is his blog about suffering depression and his struggle with mental health. It is a lot of things, but I’ll leave you to draw your own insights.
Distribution vs Demand - Ben Thompson, Stratechery
- With the announcement of AT&T spinning off Warner Media to merge with Discovery, and MGM’s potential sale to Amazon, Ben Thompson explores the details of this industry and makes a key distinction between demand and distribution. It is a great, in-depth article on how things work, and what levers exist for these companies to use for growth.
Judge A Book Not By Its Gender - Lisa Whittington-Hill
- “The gender divide bias becomes even more problematic, and downright depressing, when you read the reviews and see how critics and the press receive female celebrity memoirs. Rather than celebrate women and their amazing stories, reviewers revert to stereotypes and tired clichés and, in the process, miss the actual story. Women can spend chapters talking about their accomplishments, their awards, and their accolades and reviewers will still only focus on the sex, the scandal, and the bombshell reveals that are expected from female-penned celebrity memoirs if they want to actually sell books. From memoir titles to book blurbs, when it comes to celebrity memoirs by women, sadly, we haven’t come a long way baby.”
Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome - Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey, HBR
- ““Imposter syndrome,” or doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud at work, is a diagnosis often given to women. But the fact that it’s considered a diagnosis at all is problematic. The concept, whose development in the ‘70s excluded the effects of systemic racism, classism, xenophobia, and other biases, took a fairly universal feeling of discomfort, second-guessing, and mild anxiety in the workplace and pathologized it, especially for women. The answer to overcoming imposter syndrome is not to fix individuals, but to create an environment that fosters a number of different leadership styles and where diversity of racial, ethnic, and gender identities is viewed as just as professional as the current model.”
Efficiency is the Enemy - Farnam Street Blog
- ““You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste. And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something.” Many organizations are obsessed with efficiency. They want to be sure every resource is utilized to its fullest capacity and everyone is sprinting around every minute of the day doing something. They hire expert consultants to sniff out the faintest whiff of waste. As individuals, many of us are also obsessed with the mirage of total efficiency. We schedule every minute of our day, pride ourselves on forgoing breaks, and berate ourselves for the slightest moment of distraction. We view sleep, sickness, and burnout as unwelcome weaknesses and idolize those who never seem to succumb to them. This view, however, fails to recognize that efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing.”
The Pandemic Shrank Our Social Circles. Let’s Keep It That Way. - Kate Murphy
- “The past year has forced a mass meditation on the nature and strength of our social ties. While our culture has encouraged us to accumulate friends, both on- and offline, like points, the pandemic has laid bare the distinction between quantity and quality of connections. There are those we’ve longed to see and those it’s been a relief not to see. The full reckoning will become apparent only when we can once again safely gather and invitations are — or are not — extended. Our social lives and social selves may never be the same.”
George Saunders’s Advice to Graduates - Joel Lovell
- "What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly. Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet. It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder”
68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice - Kevin Kelly
- Great short read. Love going back to this article.
- When faced with problems, humans are typically inclined to add features or effort in order to achieve the solution or reach a particular goal. It is easier to keep building on, and adding more elements. It is counterintuitive to actually subtract or remove elements from our current approach. However, subtraction can prove to be a great problem solving technique in our armory.
Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas - Jeanne Kadlec
- “Disney often codes their villains as queer: This is widely known and accepted. First noticed by scholars during the Disney Renaissance of the late ‘80s through the ‘90s, critical observations about characters like Scar (The Lion King) have since disseminated into pithy, viral tweets and TikToks. A quick Google search of “gay Disney villains” will turn up dozens of articles, all repeating the same litany of facts: That The Little Mermaid’s Ursula is based on the iconic drag queen Divine, that Hollywood often uses British accents and effeminate mannerisms in men like Robin Hood’s King John to signal moral decrepitude. But those are observations without analysis, which is to say: pointing out the obvious without asking why or how. The subtext of these clickbait articles and listicles is often: Disney codes villains as queer because Disney thinks being gay is bad. Which is one way to read it.”
Seeing In The Dark - Breai Mason-Campbell
- Drawing parallels with a Russian doll, that most things in life are layered, and only by going deeper, one can truly appreciate the complexity of a situation, Break talks about issues of race and un-peels various layers of experiences both personal and shared. It is a moving piece which talks about various things relating to accountability of white people for the systemic oppression, to grief that a person feels both in the immediate situation and in the aftermath and how once the situation changes it is not enough to continue what we used to do, as the context now differs. There is a lot to say about this piece, but I’ll leave it up to you to read it.
The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking - Peter Kaufman
- “Using a true multidisciplinary understanding of things, Peter identifies two often overlooked, parabolic “Big Ideas”: 1) Mirrored Reciprocation (go positive and go first) and 2) Compound Interest (being constant). A great “Life Hack” is to simply combine these two into one basic approach to living your life: “Go positive and go first, and be constant in doing it.”
- “The day I told her I was gay, the hugs changed. They became longer and tighter, like she was trying to hug the sin out of me. She told me it wasn't too late. I hadn't done anything with a man yet, and thank God I'd never even been kissed. All I had to do was to seek God and he would heal me. I knew she was wrong, knew I should get away from her, but if I returned to the dorms without seeing her, the fear would come back. I would barrel through the halls, head down, back hunched, and chest tight, hoping no one would notice me. So I stayed, and the fear was replaced with guilt. Guilt about the fact that I wouldn't change, wouldn't become "whole."”
The Case Against Shakespeare - Allan Stratton
- Anyone who has had some English education in school, would be familiar with Shakespeare. Perhaps not his works in entirety, but schools often have some pieces of his work. What this article argues, not that Shakespeare is not a great playwright, but exposing young children to plays written in an archaic language curbs the love of literature and reading that young people can develop at that age. People should be familiar with his works, no doubt, but often it appears as if he was the only guy writing stuff, or at least the only stuff which the curriculum thinks fit to be taught to children. You may or may not agree to his points, but the article is a great perspective and a nice read.
Why Bumblebees love cats and other beautiful relationships - Stefano Mancuso
- This lovely piece of writing is about bumblebees, cats, cactuses, the Aztecs, the British empire and its love of red color, sparrows (and more!) and what all they have in common. This excerpt from the book ‘Nation of Plants’ gives various anecdotal stories about where humans tried to meddle with the natural order of things, and resulting in far reaching consequences, mostly unimaginable. What we should always remember, that we are just one of the millions of species that inhabit the earth, and not the masters of the world that we often behave as.
Welcome to Holland - Emily Perl Kingsley
- She writes about raising a child with disability through a metaphor of travel. This essay, however, is applicable to general everyday life, and much more so in today’s life of hedonistic but superficial sharing and how we value things: through relativism and not absolutes. Every once in a while, it pays to stop looking around, and just look inwards.
It’s your friends who break your heart - Jenifer Senior
- “The older we get, the more we need our friends—and the harder it is to keep them.”