On Examined Life

Socrates was right about an unexamined life is not worth living.

Life often feels like a battlefield, filled with daily struggles and challenges. However, shifting your focus to what truly matters can bring clarity and purpose. Many life lessons may seem like clichés until they are personally experienced, but without a philosophical foundation, life can feel chaotic and directionless. Pursuing a life of quality and conviction is a worthwhile endeavor, and the key to achieving it lies in understanding your own belief system.

Stoicism, along with other philosophical frameworks, life experiences, and lessons learned from failures, serves as a powerful remedy for many of today’s modern problems. Below are my lessons—from personal experiences, great essays and great talks. These lessons are not rigid rules but rather guiding principles I use to hold myself accountable to a certain standard in life. They are presented in no particular order, but each holds a significance in my way to living a good and meaningful life.

Lessons from personal experiences

• Seek excellence. It fills your soul. Be a yardstick of quality where excellence is expected.

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. — Marcus Aurelius

• Don't set rules, set values. Rules set limits that teach us to adopt a fixed view of the world. Values encourage us to internalize principles for ourselves.
• Seek honesty in all matters. Without honesty none of the values below matter. It is easy to fool yourself subconsciously because your brain will allow you to play all sort of games and tricks. Once you give in to these tricks, breaking the honesty wall becomes a habit and lying becomes a norm. And yes, lying to yourself is not okay either! This is why honesty is the highest virtue you will carry. It takes years to build reputation and minutes to break trust. The byproduct of being honest is authenticity and originality because it leads you to a path that you want to take, not led by someone else. So always strive to seek for authenticity. If you are honest, you will own your individuality and the world will respect you for that. And if you ever screw up, actively seek out correction, accept ownership of your mistake and the world will forgive you. These are the traits of honest people.
• Be kind to yourself and everyone. Kindness has a longer shelf life and it cost nothing. Respect everything around you—yourself, people, work, time, money and relationships. Especially the “yourself” part. If you are kind to yourself (mind, body and soul), you can then learn to be kind to others and your environment around you. When you are kind to yourself the world fades out. Do not try to overburden yourself with acquaintances because it is very difficult to manage 100 long-term friendships versus 10 deeper ones. This is just one example of respecting relationships. You can respect others by giving them 3 things—being reliable, giving them 100% attention and making them feel good about themselves. You never know what others are going through. Be compassionate, respectful and never forget to smile.
• Dance with the universe. You are solely responsible for your own life. So design it however you want. You are writing a play as you are in it and acting it. You have this universe in front of you that you ignore it or dance with it. And if you learn to dance with the universe, you will build your own self-esteem and confidence.
• We all wake up with a fresh set of choices and how to respond to them.

Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. — Viktor E. Frankl

We all can be masters at our craft, but you have to make a choice. What I mean by that is, there are inherent sacrifices that come along with that. Family time, hanging out with friends, being a great friend, being a great son, nephew, whatever the case may be. — Kobe Bryant

I am a big believer in that we design our lives. We are writing a play as we are in it and acting it. You have this universe in front of you that you can ignore it or dance with it. — Tina Roth Eisenberg

Obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it. — Michael Jordan

• Abundance mindset is better than scarcity mindset. Being a life-long learner is not enough. You need to teach and share with others. Teaching requires a mindset of abundance. It requires you to be an anti-hater and anti-envious. There are two sets of people—people who contribute and people who don't. People with abundant mindset believe there is plenty in the world for everyone and are always happy to see others succeed. People with scarcity mindset tend to hoard because they are worried someone is going to get ahead. The zero-sum mindset is pure evil in my opinion. It leads to envy and unhappiness. Just look in a country like Haiti, and you'll find a family living on $2/day is happy to share their meal with you as if they have enough to share. I've experienced this myself when I was there. They should have a scarcity mindset because of lack of resources, but it is the opposite, they welcome you with open hearts and willing to share with you the little they have. People with scarcity mindset are always unhappy because there is never enough. The joy lies in sharing with others.
• Live deliberately every day. How many of us settle into habits and simply live the same year over and over again, waiting for some future event to occur before we start living? While you wait for that raise or career opportunity or ideal relationship, you tend to forget that life is happening now. Living deliberately is about awareness and purposeful action. If you take the necessary steps to craft each day deliberately, when the final day arrives, you'll be able to look back at a life brimming with joy, fulfillment and satisfaction. Today is all matters! Today, jettison the dead weight that’s holding you down.

Tomorrow isn't real. Life is just a bunch of todays. — Janis Joplin

• Practice equanimity by building pockets of stillness into your life. There is no such thing as being always happy. If you are sad, accept sadness. Accept every emotion to the fullest and ride them out with equanimous (calm and composed) mind. When the mind experiences something pleasant or unpleasant, it simply understands it as things are, then there is no suffering. Experience joy or sadness without giving into craving. Suffering comes from craving. You will maintain peace of mind with the attitude of accepting “as is” when you are dealing with emotions. Both peak and bottom shall pass by. This is one way to show gratitude.
• Positivity is a good behavior. Asking a question positively generates a better response. Example: “'Person: Can I smoke while I'm praying?' Priest: No. 'Person: Can I pray whilst I'm smoking?' Priest: Of course you can.” Positive thinking is an incredibly powerful tool. Proactive behavior spurs positivity and vice-versa. The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. Positive people don't just have a good day; they make it a good day. People who think positively usually see endless possibilities. Success doesn't create optimism, but optimism leads to progress. Avoid negative energy at all cost. But do not drop your skepticism. A skeptic is not a pessimist. A skeptic just knows how to avoid stupidity while being an optimist.

Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions. — Marcus Aurelius

The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury. — Marcus Aurelius

Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. — Epictetus

Any person capable of angering you becomes your master. — Seneca

If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. — Seneca

• Seek truth. Seek truth by always going to the source. Always ask why! Rationalize from the first-principles thinking. Ideas need to be mapped to objective reality to draw facts. The mindset of optimistic contrarian is when you think clearly from the ground up. Tactics provide the “what” and the “how.” But if you want results no matter how the landscape changes, you must also understand the “why.” By understanding the principles that shape your reality, your “why” will more accurately guide your thoughts and actions. Invert everything to refine your thinking. Instead of worrying about what it takes to be successful, ask yourself what will it take to be not successful. Be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy. Inversion allows you to remove blind-spots from your initial hypothesis. Believe in yourself but self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness. Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion. Learn to think well, and it'll pay huge reward!

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. — Robert Frost

The role of the artist is to be a mirror, to reflect back to our culture, to help us think critically and inspire action. — Hannah Chalew

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. — JFK

If something isn’t working, listen. Action without understanding is the beginning of destruction. — Victor Saad

• Live frugal, but not cheap. Learn to avoid lifestyle inflation and shifting up your goal post. Consume to meet the basic needs, waste nothing and be content with what you have. But don’t make mistake frugality with letting go of your youth and having fun. You don't have to cheap out on having fun. Both fun and frugality can co-exist. People who live far below their means enjoy freedom that people who are busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom. Frugality allows you to stay rich. Getting rich and staying rich are different things that require different skills. Spending money to show off is the fastest way to lose money. Debt will cripple you. Savings will give you wings to fly on. Freedom plus time are worth much more than nice cars and clothes.

Wealth consists not in having many possessions, but in having few wants. — Epictetus

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves too much, who is poor. — Seneca

• You can’t pursue anything if you’re pursuing everything. Focus is a force multiplier both in work and life. Without intense focus everything else fails. And focusing on too many things is a recipe for failure. Cultivate trust and attention. Protect your attention like you protect your friends, family, and money. Singular focus allows you to choose direction over speed. If you don't know the direction, it doesn't matter how fast you are traveling. Inversely, if you’re locked on to your desired destination, all progress is positive, no matter how slow you’re going. Of all emotions, desire must be controlled most, as it shapes what we pursue and defines our destiny. You’ll reach your destination eventually with intense focus and ruthlessly prioritizing.

To be everywhere is to be nowhere. ― Seneca

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable. — Seneca

If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one. — Russian Proverb

Time is not your adversary. You do not need more time: time needs more of you. — David Whyte

• Courage leads to action and learn from failure. Courage (risk-taking) is the highest virtue. Courage requires taking the first step. The journey of discovery is often tedious, filled with dead ends, and above all random, but persistence through randomness will always prevail. Grit comes from learning which allows you to get back up after you get knocked down. The issue with bravery is not many want to be pointed at for failure. But courage fundamentally requires accepting failure. You can learn more from your failure than success. Why? Because it is hard for most people to be humble. There are these defenses, overlooking their flaws and limitations. When it comes to human endeavor, success carries within itself with the seeds of failure and failure carries with the seeds of success. What do you learn from success? I can do it. I can do it again. It’s easy. I can do it in other fields. I can do it with more money. I can do it alone. It was me. It wasn’t a team. These are horrible lessons, success teaches terrible lessons because it plays our to your ego. You learn more from failures which allows you to learn humility. Enduring pain will help you take larger challenges and help you grow. Larger the ambition or creativity, larger the requirement of not asking for permission. No one will show up at your door and lift you up. You have to go out their and show the world what you are capable of. This requires courage!

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. — Anais Nin

Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active—of those who can correct their mistakes and put them right. — Ingvar Kamprad

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. — Theodore Roosevelt

Action produces information. — Brian Armstrong

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will. — Suzy Kassem

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. — Vincent Van Gogh

Never be anyone who tries to silence the art inside of you. — NA

Paint a lot, with a goal in mind. When you do a study, pick what you want to improve on. Value? Color? Rendering? Likeness? Every painting is a failure. Every painting session is a success. — NA

In the practice of meditating, the most important thing is the practice. It doesn't matter how you feel, it doesn't matter how much you succeed or fail—what matters is doing it. And I think that's also true of making films, or composing and playing music. We keep practicing our art forms so that we can keep coming closer and closer to what beckons us and energizes us, which we can't name—we can only go to it, and only our practice will get us there. — Martin Scorsese

• Be a lifelong student. To become a lifelong learner you have to prevent two biggest barriers—ego and blindspot. Be radically open-minded. Your need to be right and having strong opinions will prevent you from learning less and falling short of your potential. Everyone perceives reality differently which puts blindspot barriers. Using multidisciplinary approach and working with insightful and diverse people will narrow down your blindspots. Knowing too much is “the curse of knowledge” which is the inability to realize that other people with less experience than you have don’t see the world through the same lens you do. Hold thoughtful opinions loosely! Don't be married to an idea or be part of a cult. Update your knowledge as you progress in life. Always carry humility with you while being a life-long student.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. Language is a skin of the culture. Perspective comes from zooming out. Insight comes from zooming in. They’re both enhanced by zoning out for a while. — Anonymous

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them. — Baruch Spinoza

You wasted $150,000 on an education you could've got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library. — Good Will Hunting

The best never stop improving! Average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached, and great players want to be told the truth. — Michael Jordan

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. Language is a skin of the culture. Perspective comes from zooming out. Insight comes from zooming in. They’re both enhanced by zoning out for a while. — NA

To my mind there are no advantages and many disadvantages in lectures compared with reading. — Darwin

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them. — Baruch Spinoza

You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library. — Good Will Hunting

To get that kind of information, to me it’s like climbing Mount Everest and speaking to a Buddha at the top of the mountain. You want that information? You’ve got to climb that mountain yourself. — Kobe Bryant

Imitation precedes creation. — Stephen King

There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is Curiosity. There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is Vanity. There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love. — St. Bernard

• Take incremental steps to think long-term. Incremental steps are better than a giant leap. Compound interest is the most underrated law. Extreme patience with extreme focus with extreme decisiveness with a long-term view will do magic and wonders. It’s amazing how much of a competitive advantage can be found by simply having the disposition to wait longer than everyone else. Be the tortoise, not the hare! Take small steps in a sequence but with urgency. Smooth sailing is fast selling. Play long-term game with long-term people. Momentum in everyday life is highly underrated. It's all about effort.

The best kind of success is continuous, every day, not occasional. Learn, build, share, repeat — Patrick O'Shaughnessy

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. — Michael Porter

• Growth without goals is the ultimate goal. Expectations lead to disappointments. Don't expect. Trust the process. The means and the end are the same. When the process itself is the goal, magical things happen. Growth without goals is the ultimate goal. Have a life don’t have a career! Goals have an endpoint. System and process don’t. Growth or progress which is structured and habitual, but adaptable and not pre-determined through the setting of rigid long-term goals. Scores and achievements are traps! Let the process take care of itself.

The mindset isn’t about seeking a result—it’s more about the process of getting to that result. It’s about the journey and the approach. It’s a way of life. I do think that it’s important, in all endeavors, to have that mentality. — Kobe Bryant

Work of an artist is never completed only abandoned. — NA

• Repetition leads to excellence. Consistency is the playground for perfection. Be so good that they can't ignore you. Key to becoming so good is to do boring tasks over and over again until you perfect it. Doing new and cool things is desirable but doing repetitive task is not. It will take many tries till you perfect your art. Use space repetition technique and focused/diffused mode. Effort counts not passion; effort counts not talent. Deliberate practice is a key to repetition. Structured but flexible repetition is the best productivity tool. It doesn't matter what you are trying to become better at, if you only do the work when it’s convenient or exciting, then you’ll never be consistent enough to achieve remarkable results. The ability to show up every day, stick to the schedule, and do the work, especially when you don't feel like it, is so valuable that it is literally all you need to become better 99% of the time. The bravest people are usually the most consistent.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. — Aristotle

A genius is born in the midst of boring and repetitive tasks. — Anonymous

Discipline will sooner or later defeat intelligence. — Japanese Proverb

• Hard problems beget hard work. Skills will only take you far but work ethic will define your character. Work on hard problems. When you work on hard problems, you are alive and relieved after solving them. You can get to about 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both—you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and are willing to work a lot. You don't need to sacrifice life and hobbies while working hard. This is easy for people who see work playful. Momentum compounds, and hard work begets progress. Don't be afraid of it.

Hard work enables one to excel over those who coast through life. — John Boyd

A lot of people say they want to be great, but they’re not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness. They have other concerns, whether important or not, and they spread themselves out. That’s totally fine. After all, greatness is not for everybody. — Kobe Bryant

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present. — Marcus Aurelius

The public praises people for what they practice in private.

• Seek multidisciplinary approach over specialization. Complexity is the name of the game. We simplify because we are addicted to narratives, but the complexity goes on. This is why having a generalist mindset can be a huge advantage. Ideas in isolation doesn't have much value, but when you connect constellation of ideas, it takes a meaningful form. Knowing the key drivers and major ideas in variety of fields is a huge source of leverage. It is difficult to study broadly and deeply, but the two aren't mutually exclusive. You have to be radically open-minded. It is easy to pay homage to Charlie Munger’s latticework of mental models, but when you live it, you see why he is right.

I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person’s brain because it understands the most fundamental models–ones that will do most work per unit. — Charlie Munger

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful. — George Box

• Valuable feedback hurts a lot. Be careful in going in reactive or defensive mode.
• Luck increases with surface area. Be in the right places, have lots of conversations, put yourself out there, ask for what you want and be optimistic and positive.
• Seek uncorrelated inputs if you want to think originally and differently. Read wide and deep. Read older things over newer things. Form opinions and then find the strongest critique of those opinions. Repeat.
• As my wife says, now is the good old days. Nostalgia is now, don't waste it.
• Shortcuts will eventually bite you. Seek high integrity, even when it costs you.
• Know what makes you the worst version of yourself. Find your flaws so you can improve your current version.
• Know what makes you the best version of yoursef. Figure out what gives you enduring value. For me it is exercising and learning.
• Do things that uplifts you. It sounds simple but the imabalance life will put you over the edge. Wasting time is depressing. Spend time on your hobbies or explore alone or with your friends and family. It is the best way to lift your spirit.
• Time is undefeated. The only way to compete with time is to do things. The clock doesn't stop, but once you do something, clock cannot take it away. Take charge now.
• Guard your energy and time. In order to preserve the most of your time, you need to avoid distractions. The biggest class of distraction is the things you can’t control. By focusing on what you can’t control, you lose control. Blindspots abound. To find lasting peace in an unpredictable world, you have but one option — control over your character. The Stoics likened life to an archer — she controls her aim and shot but not the wind that may alter the arrow’s path. Thus, her focus should be on perfecting her aim, not the outcome.

Learning to live with less will create space in your life for the things that truly matter to you. — Seneca

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy. — Seneca

We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them. — Seneca

The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have. — Epictetus

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. — Epictetus

• Hard work and play are indistinguishable. You will see this in so called successful people. They are serious about the game they play. This is also true for children. They are pretty intense because they are serious when they play. This is where childlike wonder comes from.
• The challenge in life is figuring out both which game to play and how to play it best.
• The way to get things done is to be small and move fast. Moving fast forces you to strip things down to the bare bones. Impose urgency. Yes, no one is dying, but the missions drive humanity forward. Small is less complex. 2 is better than 4. 4 is better than 8. This is the nature of power laws.
• 20s are for explorations. 30s are for execution. Don't waste it.
• Find people who energize you and make you want to conquer the world. Go be friends with them. Long-term friends multiply life's true wealth.
• Proximity rules in relationships. Almost all relationships require proximity and intention to keep growing. True connection flourishes when we prioritize being present and intentional with one another. There are exceptions, but they are much rarer than you think.
• The energy you put out in the world, you get back.
• Beware of over-delegation and being too far from the details. I see too many people avoid real work. The work is in the details. The deeper you go, the better it gets.
• To enrich your professional life you have to be both strategic and detail-oriented. Ideas alone aren't enough and being in the trenches blocks you seeing the horizon. Execution only matters if the idea is worth something. Competitive edge lies when you can balance the two well.
• Doom scrolling and reading too much drowns out your inner voice. Lean more towards action.
• Days with 0 output are the killers and it matters when you know your primary focus but watch out for workaholic behavior.
• Imposter comes from over consuming. You need to balance your production and consumption balance.
• Learning happens when both context and time are right. Personal finance should be taught in high shcool is frequently discussed but if young adults don't have comprehension for the topic, what good will it do?
• Take the leap if you are thinking about it. Now is the time.
• Conduct annual reflection on everything that matters.
• Status seeking activities will eventually burn you out. Focus on substance and enduring value creation.
• Slowing down feels natural as you get older. Shift your priorities, lean into changes, be curious about new things, maintain child like wonder and move a lot. This should help prevent from slowing down.
• The willingness to problem-solve is underrated. Be the person who brings solutions and answers, not more questions. The employee who says “I researched this, here are three options, I recommend X because Y” becomes indispensable. Resourcefulness beats credentials every time because there is no playbook or no precedent. Go beyond the elite MBA credentials or novel frameworks. Agency will beat fancy credentials any day and the right people will notice you for your efforts.
• High agents don't ask for approvals and permissions. Figure out what you want to do, and plant the “this is happening” flag. People will come along for the ride.

I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. — Mandela

Life is a use it or lose it proposition. — Bill Gurley

• You will always be short of money but faith and obsession will drive you even further. Learn to work around constraints and use intangible resources that are availale to us.
• Don’t network, make friends. In all men’s lives one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local ring and the terror of being left outside. You can choose the friendship route or the transactional route to get in. One will standout longer than the other.
• Be honest in your endeavours of learning. Real learning is extremely hard and effortful. Anything that is too digestible is entertainment. We are bombarded with digestible things in the age of internet—podcasts, twitter, articles, etc.
• Reality is endlessly surprising. Technology tools were supposed to kill humanity. They haven't yet. Media is supposed to know the election outcome based on their polling. Everyone knows the stock market direction. No one knows. Be aware of Knightian uncertainty.
• The world is a museum of passion projects. This means there are infinite ways to live a beautiful life.

As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects. — John Collison

• How you react, give and love while suffering is just about the sum of who you are.

• Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. And then accordingly adjust your moral and reality compass which inevitably makes change a constant. Changing your mind is not a luxury to many but feel free to cultivate it.

• Don’t resist cynicism. Fight it actively.

• You are the custodian of your own integrity. People won't care about it until you breach their trust so hold it to its highest standard until it becomes a problem.

• Pick presence over productivity or quick hacks. Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

• Everything worthwhile takes a long-time. Don't give-up too easily.

• Choose to do things that magnify your spirit.

• Choose joy over fear. Choose joy over animosity. Most importantly, choose joy above everything else.

• Always check the y-axis. Don't generalize reality based on y-axis because scale can be compressed or expanded based on author's incentives or biases. Disproportionate scale creates unwanted fear portrayed by media. Always question the data before you buy into any narrative.

• Data can help you climb a mountain, it can’t tell you which mountain to climb. If you have customers complaining about something, but your metrics shows the other. That is where you need to rearrange your metrics with the right data. Metrics serve as proxies for their in-world representations, not as direct indicators of actual truth. When the data and the anecdotes disagree, go with anecdotes. They are usually right.

• You always have an option to have no opinion.

You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone. — Marcus Aurelius

• The cardinal sin is delaying the correction of mistakes and not acting to fix it no matter how big or uncomfortable that may be.

Sometimes I’ve made mistakes in assessing the future economics of a business I’ve purchased for Berkshire – each a case of capital allocation gone wrong. That happens with both judgments about marketable equities – we view these as partial ownership of businesses – and the 100% acquisitions of companies...The cardinal sin is delaying the correction of mistakes or what Charlie Munger called “thumb-sucking.” Problems, he would tell me, cannot be wished away. They require action, however uncomfortable that may be. — Warren Buffett 2024 Annual Letter

• Indecision will kill your dreams a lot faster than mistakes. Stay away from pessimistic. They have a problem for every solution. Their pessimistic outlook will bleed into your decision-making. One individual can ruin an entire action orientated group.
• Overanalyzing will cripple you. Don't let the pursuit of life's meaning paralyze you.

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account. – John W. Gardner

• Most meaningful things in life are rooted in paradox. They often require us to embrace opposing truths, ideas, or emotions simultaneously. Rather than choosing one side or rejecting the other, we are invited to hold both perspectives at once—to allow them to coexist within us. This can feel uncomfortable, even chaotic, but it is in this tension that growth and understanding emerge. Sit with the contradictions, lean into the complexity, and resist the urge to tidy it up. Life is not meant to be neat or perfectly resolved; it is a beautiful, messy tapestry of opposites interwoven together. Find joy in the messiness, for it is here that life reveals its richness and depth.

• To understand our human species you need to understand the comfort we find in storytelling. Stories scale but logic not so much.

• Reading is forced meditation. People who come off as genius do one thing consistently — they study deep and broad and read the manual.

• The universe doesn't reward those who play it perfectly safe. It rewards those who are willing to test gravity.

• Create an environment for people to talk and share. Sit back and listen. Just listen. You will learn a lot about people and problems when you ask them questions because people love to talk and share.**

• Lower the resistance to the things you want to do. Inertia is a powerful thing. Use it to your advantage. Want to exercise for 30 minutes? Tell yourself you'll do it for 10 minutes. Then, at the 10-minute mark, decide if you want to keep going. Chances are you will. This also works for the opposite. Trying to eliminate a habit? Make it harder. Put as many obstacles and distance as you can. It works wonders to eliminate habits.

• A disagreement does not mean a fight. Most disagreements stem from a lack of information. Learn conflict management as early as possible if you want people to be your greats allies in destroying the problems. In conflict management, never say “you”, but use “we” as often as you can to avoid finger pointing and blame game. Make “You vs Them” into “Us vs Them.”

• Don't forget to compliment people and say nice things to them. It doesn't matter whether it is a CEO or a janitor. We are all human beings, and we all want to live in a kinder environment. Offer a drink, snack or meal to contractors who come work at your house. Say hi to a janitor who cleans your desk. Be nice to your flight attendant. Treat the care takers of the world as best you can. Being good to strangers is the kindest thing you can do. This is how you build empathy for others.

• You'd be surprised what people will do for you if you just ask. As the saying goes, “you won't get what you don't ask for.” Knowing the right people and competency will help you get where you want to go. It is not one or the other. It's the combination of both. Who do you know? How do you demonstrate competence? Are you competent? Making friends along the way and show your work. Being visible is equally important as doing the work if you want to get somewhere.

• Not having kids puts life on an easy mode and a life without purpose. They are not replacement for friends or being your future care takers. Life becomes much more fruitful if you can have them. You get a sense of pride and purpose.

• In the late 1650s, the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer painted a picture called The Little Street, that continues to challenge our value system to this day. Living normal is more remarkable, rare and difficult than ambitions like ruling a nation.

• Be guided by beauty. You wouldn't sit in an unpleasant theater and watch your favorite movie. You'd rather pay a premium for a nice theater, so you can enjoy your favorite movie. This is why it is worth pursuing beauty. Beauty also matters beyond poetry and art. In fact, it matters in every aspect of life. An organization that is running extremely well and accomplishing its mission with excellence is beautiful in itself.

• Go all the way. Don't waste your time with half-baked. A clear “no” is one of the kindest things you can do for yourself or offer someone.

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start.” —Charles Bukowski

• You cannot be a perfect version at all times. You are going to trip and fall when you encounter unexplored territory. Get up, show up, and keep learning. And don't judge others when they are in similar situations.
• Joy is not a reward system. It is a practice. You can have fun at all times without feeling guilty. You don't need to choose joy for special occasions only. No one will complain about a joyful person.
• Take ownership of your time, or watch others claim it for their purposes. The difference between intentional living and lost years often comes down to this single choice. Be intentional about letting others hijack your schedule.
• Most mess stems from wanting pursuing excess beyond necessity. Having more or doing more is not going to solve your mess.
• The in-between is where the magic happens. Use breaks, long walk, and nature to find harmony and balance. This is where you will unleash your creativity.
• Clarity comes from space not from doing more. Being busy isn’t the same as being valuable. Learn the difference and take a step back when you feel overwhelmed.
• Don't believe everything your mind is chattering about.
• If you can't explain it simply, you do not understand.
• Leadership doesn't start with vision. It begins with listening.
• Some things are beautiful because they are small. Not everything needs to scale.
• Every moment begins with a story. What stories are shaping your choices right now? And who benefits from them? We live inside inherited narratives about growth, success, productivity, power—and often forget that these are not truths. They are agreements. Sometimes outdated ones. The good thing about stories is you can re-write them. Changemakers use stories to their own advantage.
• You need a clear sense of purpose to have a service orientation. Innovation for the sake of innovation isn't enough. Breaking things for the sake of breaking is not useful. Moving on quickly leaves the world disjointed. Understanding your place in the world is at the heart of moving the society forward. Understanding your foundational values is the fuel for conviction, vision and ideas.
• Those who spend time on meticulous tasks are not wasting their time. It is spiritual to them. This comes from a place of love and care.
• No one complains about joy unless you are a Grinch. Even the Grinch likes to smile big. A place where humor is not appreciated is a place without a soul.
• You cannot quantify design, creativity or delight. People generally agree 10 is a bigger number than 5. But when it comes to beauty, it is labeled as an opinion. There is no formula for beauty. You cannot measure beauty. But a theater that delights a user for 2 hours is lot more welcoming than a theater with sloppy chairs. It is worth trying to create joyful and delightful experiences even though you cannot measure it. If it is delightful, it will be used more which is a positive thing in a transactional environment such as business.
• We go through chapters or seasons and the painful part the conclusion of one and beginning of the next. This forces you to change your perspective and approach. One should accept the constant state of flux but not at the expense of compromising your foundational values.
• The evolution of an idea always start with a thought. These thoughts come from a quiet place. Therefore, you should seek more silence. Listen more. Talk less. You never know what you might come across or miss out on if you are constantly speaking.
• If you want to design a better world then step out of the conference room. There is far more to learn from getting out on the field and talking to people.
• Beauty cannot exist without utility. If something is not useful then it is ugly no matter how attractive the aesthetics are. This is what it means when people say a great design has both form and function.
• Always choose a path that is more humane when you are presented with choices.
• Poor consequences are a result of discussions happening far too late. If your intentions are blindsided with wrong incentives you are bound to have unexpected consequences which can be harmful to society.
• Pay a great deal of attention to the words you use because they affect the way we think. The words you choose to frame a problem has a lot more weight than you might think.
• Know your non-negotiables. Especially while you are parenting. The peak career years collide with your peak life years. Your kids are little, parents are aging, and your youth is slipping by. Your body and mental health is asking you to slow you down. Grind and sacrifice start to blur. You fight so hard to climb the ladder, and then realize the cost of staying there may be more than you are willing to pay. You have to decide what is worth it and what isn't. If you don't balance, if you are not asking the right questions, or if you are not setting the boundaries then one day you will end up with regrets. To minimize your regrets, know your trade-offs and set your non-negotiables, so you can truly live your life.
• Lack of father figure taught me to gift time, not things. Becoming a father taught me to never mess this up.
• Real growth doesn’t just happen in the doing, but in the quiet moments after, when the brain rewires itself through rest and reflection. Recent studies on neuroplasticity or brain plasticity is proving the importance of silence, meditation and inward journey practiced by thousands of years in the eastern part of the world. Information reinforcement happens when you are away from material. This type of deliberate learning allows the brain to rewire itself.
• Nostalgia allows you to reorient your perspective on time. It helps you feel like time is slowing down. The way to experience nostalgia are to do new things which allows you to welcome change, focus on small details because it forces you to be proactive about tiny things in life and embrace intensity because it will invoke strong emotions. All of these things will make you feel like time is stretching.

Lessons from great essays & talks

• A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard: If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all? My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the “boss” is away, as well as when he is home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets “laid off,” nor has to go on strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks will be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town, and village - in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such; he is needed, and needed badly—the man who can CARRY a message to GARCIA.
• You and Your Research — A talk by Richard W. Hamming: “You and Your Research” is one of Richard Hamming’s many lectures. In 1996, he published a write-up of his graduate course lectures in engineering at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in a book called The Art of Doing Science and Engineering; Learning to Learn. In Hamming’s words, “the course centers around how to look at and think about knowledge,” and is an extension of the wisdom of “You and Your Research.” The book was republished this year, with a foreword from Bret Victor, by Stripe Press. Why do I believe this talk is important? It is important because as far as I know each of you has but one life to lead, and it seems to me it is better to do significant things than to just get along through life to its end. Certainly near the end it is nice to look back at a life of accomplishments rather than a life where you have merely survived and amused yourself. Thus in a real sense I am preaching the messages that (1) it is worth trying to accomplish the goals you set yourself and (2) it is worth setting yourself high goals. Again, to be convincing to you I will talk mainly about my own experience, but there are equivalent stories I could use involving others. I want to get you to the state where you will say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do first-class work. If Hamming could, then why not me?” Our society frowns on those who say this too loudly, but I only ask you say it to yourself! What you consider first-class work is up to you; you must pick your goals, but make them high! I will start psychologically rather than logically. The major objection cited by people against striving to do great things is the belief that it is all a matter of luck. I have repeatedly cited Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” It both admits there is an element of luck and yet claims to a great extent it is up to you. You prepare yourself to succeed or not, as you choose, from moment to moment by the way you live your life....Newton observed that if others would think as hard as he did, then they would be able to do the same things. Edison said genius was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. It is hard work, applied for long years, which leads to the creative act, and it is rarely just handed to you without any serious effort on your part. Yes, sometimes it just happens, and then it is pure luck. It seems to me to be folly for you to depend solely on luck for the outcome of this one life you have to lead.
• How I became 'collapse aware': To be collapse aware is to live with the sense that something about the way we live is coming to an end. And then to ask the next obvious question head on: If the incrementalist approach of our existing political and economic structures is not up to the task of improving things — climate, society, inequality, injustice — what comes next? It’s frequently said that societal collapse is not a singular event, but a process. Collapse isn’t about any one system, country, or political leader — it’s about a shift in all our “normal modes” of living, being, and surviving. But I think you can argue that the American project is the fullest and most visible embodiment of the values that have driven us to this moment....That, more than anything else, feels energizing to me right now. As I’ve written before: Most of the things we need to do to heal the planet and our society are the same things that would heal ourselves. Figuring out how I’m going to live Here makes my life better right now, today. At the same time, it prepares me for a future that feels very uncertain and scary....Do you work so hard in your status-bestowing job that you don’t have any time or energy to offer anyone else in your life? Try to reallocate some of your energy away from how you earn your income. Are you so perpetually busy and overstimulated that the thought of sitting in silence with no entertainment or productive pursuit fills you with dread? Find practices to counter that — it’s a skill that’ll come in handy.
• How Language Shapes Thought by Lera Boroditsky at Long Now Foundation: A fascinating talk on language and how it shapes cognition. Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? For example, how do we think about time? The word “time” is the most frequent noun in the English language. Time is ubiquitous yet ephemeral. It forms the very fabric of our experience, and yet it is unperceivable: we cannot see, touch, or smell time. How do our minds create this fundamental aspect of experience? Do patterns in language and culture influence how we think about time? Do languages merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express? Can learning new ways to talk change how you think? Is there intrinsic value in human linguistic diversity?
• What is Amazon? by Zack Kanter: I am going to answer the question – what is Amazon? – but you can’t begin to understand Amazon without first understanding Walmart. Walmart revolutionized the retail game; Amazon “borrowed” Walmart’s playbook as a starting point, just as Walmart borrowed the playbook from the early discount retailers as a starting point before it. And so I’ll start by answering the question: what is Walmart?
• Agency by Prof G: America, and the Western alliance it leads, is dysfunctional. It’s also less dysfunctional than any other society. Why? America’s alchemy of individualism, rights, education, innovation, capital, diversity, entrepreneurship and generosity creates a substance found elsewhere but not at this potency. I spend a great deal of time digesting data and media. And there’s a fissure between them. The data reflects a cold but comforting truth: The hand you’ve been dealt is better than you’ve been told. There are paths to prosperity in our imperfect economy. There are paths to love and lasting relationships in our imperfect society. There are paths to fulfillment and meaning in our imperfect culture. The paths are there, and we collectively have an obligation to make the investments to ensure they stay broad and illuminated. However, you must walk them. Much of your future is outside of your control, but if you’re a graduate of an American university (the finest in the world), then more of it is in your control than nearly anybody else. What ultimately dictates your success relative to your environment is the choice you make to walk, and the resilience you find to keep moving. In a word, agency....Agency is the capacity to take the actions of your choosing, and through those actions shape your future and the world you live in. More than that, it is the recognition that you have the potency to make it happen. Agency is a fundamental aspect of human autonomy and identity. Individuals who perceive themselves as agents are more motivated, capable, and resilient. A society made up of immigrants has superior genes — they have DNA that naturally connects risks, and a propensity toward action, with better outcomes. I think, as a dad, one of my responsibilities is to help my sons connect actions, good and bad, with outcomes. To help them develop pattern recognition between action and reaction....You are not your cohort. You are not sentenced to be the average of your peers, the median of your race, or the mean of your gender. Agency begins with this insight. Within the mass of humans lumped together by statisticians, on several dimensions, you are an outlier. Your range of possible outcomes is invisible to the statistician’s eye. Statistics are observations, not conclusions....America offers unprecedented agency. That is why millions of people walk across continents to reach this place, and why we spend billions militarizing our southern border to keep the inflow manageable. Pro tip: America has not only benefited from immigration, but illegal immigration specifically, because the undocumented do dirty jobs at modest wages, pay taxes, and use fewer resources. Anyone who tells you immigrants are here for a handout is taking you for a fool. People don’t walk through jungles and traverse rivers for a welfare check. They come for the same reason my parents crossed the Atlantic in a steamship: to exercise their agency. Open borders are unacceptable, and a security threat, but we need to have a sober conversation re why we have turned a blind eye to illegal immigration for 40 years. Hint: money....Agency is not individuality. You exercise agency whenever you make a choice to shape your own life. Choosing marriage is exercising agency. Asking for more responsibility at work, or volunteering at a local institution, or putting $100 a month into an IRA — these are all choices to act and shape the world. Using social media to connect to people and share ideas can be an exercise of agency; scrolling TikTok all evening is not. The stoics taught us to focus on what is in our control. Agency is an embrace, and broadening, of what is in our control....Agency and democracy go hand in hand, and the first task of the authoritarian leader is to diminish agency. The likely misinformation lollapalooza surrounding this fall’s election won’t be advocating for a specific candidate or position, but flooding the zone with so much misinformation that people feel overwhelmed and decide just to stay home.
• If capitalism is a cancer, what are we?: Every multicellular organism exists because at some point, evolution favored cooperative cells over solitary ones. Cooperation evolved on this planet because it comes with great reward, complexity and resilience otherwise unavailable, but it has one essential cost: regulation. In order to glean the rewards of the whole, each part must forgo some individuality through self-regulation or regulation by it’s partners. That’s as true for the cells in a nematode or the ants in an ant colony as it is for the people and systems that make up an entire civilization. If regulation is abandoned, the complex system will eventually fall apart. Cancer forms when a cell loses its ability to be regulated. Where a cell once knew to limit itself, or where it was once limited by systems around it, it now divides and divides, draining resources at a rate the body eventually cannot sustain. In time, cancer undermines itself as it destroys the functions that, unbeknownst to it, sustain it. Cancer has no foresight. It doesn’t know it's rushing toward it’s own demise, it grows because it is brainless machinery. The parallels between cancer and today’s capitalism start to become clear. Capitalism is an economic system that resists regulation (neoliberalism’s rallying call is quite literally deregulation) and gamifies large groups of people towards ever-increasing growth as a means for return on capital. When it comes to unfettered growth on a finite planet, or in a finite body, something’s gotta give. If capitalism is a tumor, what does the inside of a tumor tell us about who we are as actors in this story? And what does this metaphor tell us about our pathways toward recovery?
• The Decline of Play and Independence : If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes. The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say. Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults.
• Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?: Let us imagine that a manager is walking down the hall and that he notices one of his subordinates, Jones, coming his way. When the two meet, Jones greets the manager with, “Good morning. By the way, we’ve got a problem. You see….” As Jones continues, the manager recognizes in this problem the two characteristics common to all the problems his subordinates gratuitously bring to his attention. Namely, the manager knows (a) enough to get involved, but (b) not enough to make the on-the-spot decision expected of him. Eventually, the manager says, “So glad you brought this up. I’m in a rush right now. Meanwhile, let me think about it, and I’ll let you know.” Then he and Jones part company. Let us analyze what just happened. Before the two of them met, on whose back was the “monkey”? The subordinate’s. After they parted, on whose back was it? The manager’s.
• David Goggins - How To Master Your Life on Modern Wisdom: This is the best interview. An exception human being. David Goggins is the best example of what happens when you start to listen to yourself! I am overwhelmed by his insights and his mindset. A spectacular conversation I'll keep coming back to. You got to go back to the beast and face demons. You're going to experience involuntary hardships in life, so might as well prepare by experiencing voluntary hardships. We are training kids and people to be soft, in a world that continuously gets harder. You're thinking about what you could've been. I am exactly what I should've been! You'll never meet a hater that's better than you. They are suffering because they are thinking where they could've been. I am exactly where I should've been. When you go to war with yourself, you find a lot of peace. Never be ashamed of anything you've done in your life. Face it, fix it, make it better. Your purpose is you. Don't let your dreams become your master. The growth is not in these massive corporate paychecks, but in these $14-$15/hour. What you resist, persists. What you fight, you get more of. What you embrace, dissolves. Mental toughness is a perishable skill.
• How To Do Great Work by Paul Graham: Paul Graham did it again! What a great essay on doing great work....The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going....- You need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions....I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've done great work seem to have done it....Work has a sort of activation energy, both per day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in the sense that it's higher than the energy required to keep going, it's ok to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to get over it....The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact it's a source of power too. To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?....Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness that's exactly what you need in doing great work. It's not learned; it's preserved from childhood. So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them. "It's easy to criticize" is true in the most literal sense, and the route to great work is never easy....Original ideas don't come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult....The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?
• Jony Ive Interview by Micknsey: Learning is really important. If you’re not curious, if being right is more important than learning, you’re going to have a very hard time building and maintaining any sort of momentum....One of the benefits of working closely with a large number of people who are curious is that you learn as a community. There’s this incredible power when you discover and learn together. At the end of a group project, I look at two things: I look at what we made, but far more important, I look at what we learned. If you’re not just going in and out, if you’ve really committed to a relationship, what we’ve learned is obviously far, far more important....To make that idea material and relevant, they need to work with a collection of people. But the nature of ideas and the creative process is so particular and unusual. It’s an activity that doesn’t naturally or easily sit within a large group of people. When you gather a large group of people, they generally want to be able to relate to one another and to be sociable. But any process that is unpredictable does not sit comfortably or naturally in a large group setting. So people come to value activities that are predictable....The difference between an idea and a product is that you’ve solved the problems. When someone says to me, “Well, you can’t do this for these reasons,” all it means is that there are problems to be solved. If they can be solved, the idea transitions into becoming a thing. If they can’t, it remains an idea....Sometimes the idea implicates or requires innovation that’s broader than the product, as in a system. But other times, it doesn’t. It’s very specific to the task. All I care about is trying to honor the species, trying to make things better. That’s what I care about. That’s something you cannot measure with a number, and you certainly can’t measure it with sales. It’s a really tough one to apply a metric to. But it’s very clear in my own head.
• Jim Carrey at MIU, Commencement Address at the 2014 Graduation: Life doesn’t happen to you. It happens for you. How do I know this? I don’t, but I’m making sound and that’s the important thing....Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world....There is a huge difference between a dog that is going to eat you in your mind and an actual dog that is going to eat you....That’s what I’m here to do. Reminding each other that we’re part of a larger self. I used to think Jim Carrey is all that I was. Just a flickering light, a dancing shadow. The great nothing masquerading as something you can name, seeking shelter in caves and foxholes dug out hastily. An archer searching for his target in the mirror, wounded only by my own arrows. Begging to be enslaved, leading for my chains. Blinded by longing and tripping over paradise. You didn’t think I could be serious, did you? I don’t think you understand who you’re dealing with. I have no limits. I cannot be contained because I’m the container. You can’t contain the container, man. You can’t contain the container. I used to believe that who I was ended at the edge of my skin, that I had been given this little vehicle called a body from which to experience creation. And though I couldn’t have asked for a sportier model, it was after all a loner and would have to be returned. Then I learned that everything outside the vehicle was part of me too, and now I drive a convertible. Top down, wind in my hair....No doubt some of you will turn out to be crooks, but white collar stuff. You know, Wall Street, that type of thing. Crimes committed by people with self-esteem. Stuff parents can still be proud of in a weird way....You are the vanguard of knowledge and consciousness, a new wave in a vast ocean of possibilities. On the other side of that door, there’s a world starving for new ideas, new leadership. I’ve been out there for 30 years. She’s a wild cat. She’ll rub up against your leg and purr until you pick her up and start petting her. And then out of nowhere, she’ll swat you in the face. It can be rough out there, but that’s okay because there’s soft serve ice cream with sprinkles. I guess that’s what I’m really trying to say here today. Sometimes it’s okay to eat your feelings. Now fear is going to be a player in your life, but you get to decide how much. You can spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about the pathway to the future, but all there will ever be is what’s happening here, and the decisions we make in this moment, which are based in either love or fear. So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect. So we never dare to ask the universe for it. I’m saying I’m the proof that you can ask the universe for it. Please. And if it doesn’t happen for you right away, it’s only because the universe is so busy fulfilling my order. Party size....You can fail at what you don't want. You might as well take a chance on doing what you love.
• What Is ChatGPT Doing ... And Why Does It Work? by Stephen Wolfram: The basic concept of ChatGPT is at some level rather simple. Start from a huge sample of human-created text from the web, books, etc. Then train a neural net to generate text that’s “like this”. And in particular, make it able to start from a “prompt” and then continue with text that’s “like what it’s been trained with”. As we’ve seen, the actual neural net in ChatGPT is made up of very simple elements—though billions of them. And the basic operation of the neural net is also very simple, consisting essentially of passing input derived from the text it’s generated so far “once through its elements” (without any loops, etc.) for every new word (or part of a word) that it generates. The specific engineering of ChatGPT has made it quite compelling. But ultimately (at least until it can use outside tools) ChatGPT is “merely” pulling out some “coherent thread of text” from the “statistics of conventional wisdom” that it’s accumulated. But it’s amazing how human-like the results are. And as I’ve discussed, this suggests something that’s at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of thinking behind it) are somehow simpler and more “law like” in their structure than we thought. ChatGPT has implicitly discovered it. But we can potentially explicitly expose it, with semantic grammar, computational language, etc.
• Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution by David Chapman: Before there is a subculture, there is a scene. A scene is a small group of creators who invent an exciting New Thing—a musical genre, a religious sect, a film animation technique, a political theory. Riffing off each other, they produce examples and variants, and share them for mutual enjoyment, generating positive energy. The new scene draws fanatics. Fanatics don’t create, but they contribute energy (time, money, adulation, organization, analysis) to support the creators. Creators and fanatics are both geeks. They totally love the New Thing, they’re fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs, and they spend all available time either doing it or talking about it. If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture. If the scene is unusually exciting, and the New Thing can be appreciated without having to get utterly geeky about details, it draws mops. Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time, and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.
• Childhoods Of Exceptional People by Henrik Karlsson: Let’s start with one of those insights that are as obvious as they are easy to forget: if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. If you want to learn writing, read great writers, etc. But this is not what parents usually do when they think about how to educate their kids. The default for a parent is rather to imitate their peers and outsource the big decisions to bureaucracies. But what would we learn if we studied the highest achievements? These naked apes, the humans, are intensely social animals. They obsessively internalize values, ideas, skills, and desires from the people who surround them. It is therefore not surprising that those who grow up to be exceptional tend to have spent their formative years surrounded by adults who were exceptional. Unstructured time to be bored, dedicated, intensive 1-1 tutoring, access to intellectual circles, the concept of a parent as mentor—these make up the childhoods of exceptional people, from Virgina Woolf to Alan Turing, Bertrand Russell to Marie Curie. For parents raising children today, here’s what you can do: learn to foster a “cognitive apprenticeship.” Give your children access to observe you and other people at work. Model patterns of reasoning by thinking out loud, coach, give feedback. Treat your children as capable of competence, as craving meaningful work. For the rest of us who are still raising ourselves (remember our inner child?), you can do it yourself, too: Read books, teach yourself, then reach out to exceptional people and convince them to bring you into their milieu. Books can, in other words, be a good stand-in for a social milieu, up to a point, but eventually, you need direct access to exceptional people. And having access to them from a young age greatly increases the likelihood that you will be shaped by them. A lot of care went into curating the environment around the children—fascinating guests were invited, libraries were built, machines were brought home and disassembled—but the children were left with a lot of time to freely explore the interests that arose within these milieus....Unlike children today, they had little access to entertainment, and so were often bored, unless they figured out a way to keep their minds occupied; the intellectual obsessions that grew into their life’s work often grew out of this boredom. At this point, they were not only learning, but also doing real intellectual work.
• The Idea Trap by Bryan Caplan (2004): Good ideas lead to good policy, good policy leads to good growth, and good growth reinforces good ideas. The bad news is that you can also get mired in the opposite outcome. A society can get stuck in an “idea trap,” where bad ideas lead to bad policy, bad policy leads to bad growth, and bad growth cements bad ideas. The connection between growth and ideas is not so much logical as psychological. It is not logical for people to embrace counter-productive ideas just because conditions are getting worse, but they seem to do it anyway. Perhaps the best explanation is that the public relies on a military metaphor: You should avoid aggressive government intervention in good times, but during a crisis, you need to teach your enemies a lesson, not waste time soul-searching about how you provoked them. During hyperinflations, for example, people are more likely to lash out at scapegoats—speculators and black marketeers—than to blame runaway monetary policy.
• John Mayer's Interview on Apple Music: This John Mayer interview is a huge gem on defining the craft and how social plays a role. “I was saying even Instagram is getting a little rough for me because it's the one thing I was saying social media has a problem with us like redundancy and we have a problem accounting for seeing one person's ambition but multiplied by a hundred every morning oh dude it is like the most beautiful and toxic experience to be drawn into other people's lives and yet constantly have it reflect on your own sense that achievement it is a very dangerous dance...The one thing that motivation, as I see it now is missing (on social media), the one strain. It's the only thing it's missing is the self reflection as to whether or not you're any good at the thing. Like I'm seeing a lot of motivation (on social media) about you following your passion, but I'm not seeing any critical thought to what that is or how to be better at that. So really, the product is passion. And that's strange to me. Because my product growing up was sitting in a room for six hours a day...But you can have it right now. So this is why it works for everybody; the person looking in on the Instagram can get something right now and the person sharing the motivation can get something right now.”
• Address At The Sorbonne In Paris, France: “Citizenship In A Republic” by Theodore Roosevelt: This speech is often referred to as “The Man in the Arena” speech given by Teddy Roosevelt in 1910. “A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority, but of weakness...It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat...In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that they ought to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and he also must have those qualities which direct the efficiency into channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient. There is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependent upon a sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is little place in active life for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from robust wickedness is likewise rendered immune from robuster virtues. The good citizen in a republic must first of all be able to hold his own. He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which will make him work hard and which at need will make him fight hard. The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient citizen. But if a man's efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that man's own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships those qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no difference whether such a man's force and ability betray themselves in a career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and far-seeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty...We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism...The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily in the line that separates class from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or whether he be poor, without regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in a republic. There have been many republics in the past, both in what we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to divide along the line that separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the rule of an oligarchy or the rule of a mob. In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position. In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.”
• Why the Past 10 Years Of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt: This is a great piece on what is happening in America. “We Americans are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth.” “We are cut off from one another and from the past. It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families. There is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales. We see this trend in biological evolution. We see it in cultural evolution too.”
• The Multidisciplinary Approach To Thinking by Peter Kaufman: Another great take on how to use multidisciplinary approach to make sense of the world. “So why is it important to be a multidisciplinary thinker? The answer comes from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, “To understand is to know what to do.” Could there be anything that sounds simpler than that? And yet it’s a genius line to understand is to know what to do.” How many mistakes do you make when you understand something? You don’t make any mistakes. Where do mistakes come from? They come from blind spots, a lack of understanding. Why do you need to be multidisciplinary in your thinking? Because as the Japanese proverb says, “The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.” You may know everything there is to know about your specialty, your silo, your “well,” but how are you going to make any good decisions in life—the complex systems of life, the dynamic system of life—if all you know is one well?”
• Finance As Culture by John Luttig: This is a beautiful write-up on how finance is influencing our society. “But financialization is no longer purely institutional; it has seeped into our culture. A combination of low interest rates, a historic tech bull run, and the resulting torrent of fomo has tethered us to our monitors to watch candlestick charts. The financialization of culture has manifested in two primary ways: lottery culture and equity culture.”
• How to Think for Yourself by Paul Graham: Paul Graham on how to think. “To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet.” “Because the components of independent-mindedness are so interchangeable, you can have them to varying degrees and still get the same result. So there is not just a single model of independent-mindedness.” “There are intellectual fashions in every field, but their influence varies.” “The conventional-minded are often fooled by the strength of their opinions into believing that they're independent-minded. But strong convictions are not a sign of independent-mindedness. Rather the opposite.”
• Beyond Smart by Paul Graham: Paul Graham argues there is more than just intelligence. “If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he was really smart. What was special about him was that he had important new ideas. Being very smart was a necessary precondition for having those ideas, but the two are not identical.” “Another quality you need in order to discover new ideas is independent-mindedness. I wouldn't want to claim that this is distinct from intelligence — I'd be reluctant to call someone smart who wasn't independent-minded — but though largely inborn, this quality seems to be something that can be cultivated to some extent.” “One of the most surprising ingredients in having new ideas is writing ability. There's a class of new ideas that are best discovered by writing essays and books. And that "by" is deliberate: you don't think of the ideas first, and then merely write them down. There is a kind of thinking that one does by writing, and if you're clumsy at writing, or don't enjoy doing it, that will get in your way if you try to do this kind of thinking.”
• Bill Gates' New Rules: An insightful take from Gates on the function of digital age and how business in the 21st century would operate. “To function in the digital age, we have developed a new digital infrastructure. It's like the human nervous system. Companies need to have that same kind of nervous system--the ability to run smoothly and efficiently, to respond quickly to emergencies and opportunities, to quickly get valuable information to the people in the company who need it, the ability to quickly make decisions and interact with customers.”
• The Arc of the Practical Creator by Lawrence Yeo: I love reading Lawrence Yeo's essays. They are heavy on wisdom and easy to cruise through. “A big part of the creative journey is understanding that there is no finish line. Even if you reach the heights of success, you know that there is still more room to grow. That’s because your potential is not actualized through people telling you that it is. It can only be actualized through an internal commitment to improvement, which is perpetual because we humans have the ability to recognize our inherent flaws. The key is to divorce the allure of external validation from the commitment to internal growth. That no amount of money or praise is a signal that you’ve reached the promised land. That so much of what makes the creative journey fulfilling is humility, and that embracing uncertainty is what allows you to forge onward. This leads to a final paradox that a successful Practical Creator must navigate. On one hand, you must continuously view your endeavor through the mind of a beginner. But on the other, you want to leverage the hard-earned wisdom you’ve picked up through years of experience. In this final stage of the arc, grow your curiosities, but preserve your attention.”
• The Mother of All Demos by Douglas Engelbart (1968): The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor. This whole video gives you goosebumps because how unimaginable it was in the moment but monumental for future generations. Incredibly revolutionary. Incredibly revolutionary in retrospect.
• 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known by Kevin Kelly: Kevin Kelly is still kicking it on the internet. He turned 70 and dropped several gems he has learned over his lifespan. He is such a genuine and fun creative soul.
• Why Life Can’t Be Simpler by Shane Parrish: Complexity is everywhere and if something is too simple then complexity is stored somewhere where no one can see. Hiding complexity does not make the system efficient. “If we accept that complexity is a constant, we need to always be mindful of who is bearing the burden of that complexity.”
• Make Good Art | Commencement Speech At The University Of The Arts 2012 by Neil Gaiman: What a great speech. It will lift your creative confidence and give you forward momentum. One of my top 10 commencement speeches. “The Moment you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your art and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that is the moment that you may be starting to get it right.”
• Milton Friedman Speaks: Money and Inflation: How can an economist be so cool? Milton Friedman is a brilliant economist who explains how inflation, taxes and policies work. A great lecture on understanding our current dynamics of our monetary and fiscal state. He explains inflation is the tax we pay for our unmet debts. He further explains it is a self-imposed disease. A must listen!
• Theo van Gogh letter to his brother: A fascinating masterpiece by Van Gogh. I loved this letter so much! It is fascinating preview of how Van Gogh thought about the world around him. The letter illustrates the mindset of Van Gogh. He leads with argumentative questions and work backwards to justify his chosen intellectual journey. He describes the importance of independent thinking, giving exploration a space and challenging status quo in a letter to his brother. A must read!
• David Foster Wallace On Consumerism (2003): Hearing this was profound. "We don't want things to be quite anymore." This left me speechless. "Reading requires sitting alone by yourself in a quiet room and I have friends, intelligent friends, who don't like to read, because they get—it's not just bored—there's an almost dread that comes up, I think, here about having to be alone and having to be quiet." David is brilliant in formulating his thoughts and observing the cracked surfaces in our contemporary culture. The battle of individual sport vs community sport will always remain alive because we are in constant pursuit of happiness which is a fallacy. David embraces humility in his talk and frankly nothing has changed in the last 20 years since his interview. Our desires and our actions are misaligned and the fork is getting wider with every generation.
• The Midlife Unraveling by Brené Brown: What a wonderful perspective on midlife crisis! Either we resist universal laws or face them. Our relationship with universe is critical in understanding who we are. Our entire mid life is lived based upon our upbringings but we forget to identify ourselves and and our needs. This was really an eye opening piece. Like she says, “Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling.”
• The Case For Optimism by Kevin Kelly: This was such a great piece on why optimism matters. In order to move civilization forward, civilization requires trust, trust requires optimism and civilization requires optimism. Our ancestors sacrificed so we could have a better future. This spirit of moving forward needs to be passed down to future generations. We should be optimistic not because our problems are smaller than we thought, but because our capacity to solve them is larger than we thought. Optimism yields happier and more resilient people. Bad things happen fast, while good things take longer. Being optimistic puts you in alignment with the long arc of history, and a part of something much bigger than yourself. The reasons for optimism are far greater than pessimism. Then we should remind ourselves that feeling optimistic is a moral obligation.
• The Age of the Essay by Paul Graham: PG points out that the most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Due to historical events, the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they taught you to in school.
• What You'll Wish You'd Known by Paul Graham: I wish I would've read this years ago. I love this essay a lot and I agree with what Paul Graham has to share in this article. Staying upwind, working on hard problems and going beyond school to discover fun topics has astronomical career benefits. Math or economics? Math will give you more options over economics. PG uses flying a glider downside vs upwind analogy because glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Math is upwind of economics. But how are you supposed to know that as a high school student? Look for smart people and hard problems; however stay away from fake problems and people. Smart people can pretend to be smart by publishing research papers which can be nonsense. Hard problems means worry. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. When an olympic athlete wins a gold medal, it leads to relief. It's not that bad after all. Diff bw high school students and adults might look like adults have to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
• Solitude And Leadership by William Deresiewicz: This essays pushes you to think for yourself. Leadership means thinking and leading others. If you are following the herd of opinions and thoughts, you are not leading, but led. Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. How can you know that unless you’ve taken counsel with yourself in solitude? I started by noting that solitude and leadership would seem to be contradictory things. But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.
• A Lesson On Elementary, Worldly Wisdom by Charlie Munger: Charlie Munger is one of the greatest thinkers of our time. There is so much to learn from him and this speech is one of the best on multi-disciplinary thinking. What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head. What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does. You become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great boob in medicine. And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.
• The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charlie Munger: The hallmark of an excellent professional is impeccable judgment, perhaps more so for managers. To make good judgments, one must be cognizant of human tendencies to err in a predictable and systematic way. Charlie Munger, Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathawa and a long-time partner of Warren Buffett, the world's second richest man after Bill Gates, arrived at 25 psychological tendencies of human misjudgment, which he has presented in lectures at Caltech and Harvard, and is published in a book entitled Poor Charlie's Almanack in a chapter called The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.

• The Tail End by Tim Urban: If you want to compress your timescale you should check this visually stimulating piece out by Tim Urban. In the end this article made me realize our concept of timing is off and is not what we think it is. It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end. Living in the same place as the people you love matters. Priorities matter. Quality time matters.
• Google Platforms Rant by Steve Yegge: An engineer's perspective on working at Google vs Amazon. A lot of insights to take away from this rant especially on security vs accessibility. Amazon is what it is today because it got its act together early on due to Bezo's mandate. Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds. But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network. The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate — ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can't cheat. You can't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.
• The Architecture of Tomorrow by Sotonye and Ben Horowitz: This was a great interview given by Ben Horowitz. But I was equally impressed by the questions asked by Sotonye. There were so many takeaways—bits vs atoms, regulations, innovation post-covid, etc. But I couldn't stop thinking about living-in-scarcity vs living-in-abundance. With scarcity mindset, people become haters, and they forget they have so much to contribute, but they forget they can. Martin Luther King Jr. was a contributor and had an abundance mindset. He contributed in big ways. Inspire of so much going against him. People with scarcity mindset are always unhappy. They have so much to share but they think they have very little. If you have to choose between the two, always pick the abundant mindset because that is a much better route.
• Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love by Bill Gurley: Bill Gurley had many great lessons to share with the world in his talk. He shares the stories of luminaries (Bobby Knight, Bob Dylan, Daniel Meyer, Katrina Lake and Sam Hinkie) and the patterns shared amongst them. These were the three stories I had read them all independently and I noticed that there was a similar strain that was running through each and every one of these stories and so now I've organized five profiles that I want to talk to you about. Life is a use it or lose it proposition.