The Investor's Manifesto – William J. Bernstein

The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between – William J. Bernstein
Date Read: 7/5/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

Champions an investment strategy focused on low-cost index funds that track the market, rather than attempting to guess on individual stocks. This is a must-read when it comes to investing. And it's not a massive encyclopedia. Bernstein offers a more rational approach to investing by detailing historic returns of various asset classes, the importance of diversification, and why you must play the long game if you have any hopes of coming out ahead. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

"In the past, stocks have had high returns because they have been really risky. But stocks are now so expensive that there are only two possibilities: either they are going to fall dramatically in price and then have higher returns after that (in which case investors are stupid for paying such high prices now), or there will be no big fall in price and little risk, but returns hereafter will be permanently low (in which case investors are smart). So which is it?

Diversification among different kinds of stock asset classes works well over the years and decades, but often quite poorly over weeks and months.

Investment wisdom, however, begins with the realization that long-term returns are the only ones that matter. Investors who can earn 8 percent annualized return will multiply their wealth tenfold over the course of 30 years.

Using historical returns to estimate future ones is an extremely dangerous exercise.

In the past, investors could expect only low returns when investing in safe assets; today this rule applies with a vengeance to Treasury bills, which currently have a near-zero yield.

Investors earn higher returns only by bearing risks–by seeking out risk premiums.

A house is most certainly not an investment, for one simple reason: You have to live somewhere, and you are either going to have to pay for it or rent it. Always remember, investment is the deferral of present consumption for future consumption, and if anything qualifies as present consumption, it is a residence. Further, if you pay for one in cash, then you are spending capital you could otherwise invest in something else.

How much does the price of a home rise over time? The best data on house prices suggest that, after taking inflation into account, the answer is slim to none.

Real house prices in the United States did not rise at all between 1890 and 1990.

If you own the house outright, you are tying up a large amount of capital you could profitably invest elsewhere, and the imputed rent, or use of the house, is your reward for doing so. On the other hand, if you have the ability to pay for a house outright but choose instead to rent, your unspent capital can earn a return in other assets, such as stocks and bonds.

The opposite reasoning applies if you cannot afford to purchase the house outright, but instead require a mortgage. By choosing to rent instead of own, you substitute rent payments for mortgage payments. True mortgage payments, at least early on, are largely deductible, but the advantage is more than offset by the catastrophic risk of default and repossession you take on with a mortgage.

Home ownership is not an investment; it is exactly the opposite, a consumption item. After taking into consideration maintenance costs and taxes, you are often better off renting.

A good rule of thumb is never, ever pay more than 15 years fair rental value for any residence. This computes out to a 6.7% (1/15th) gross rental dividend, or 3.7% after taxes, insurance, and maintenance.

Imputed rent does have one real advantage over the return from stocks and bonds, which is that it is tax-free.

The figure I keep in mind when house shopping is 150: the number of months in 12.5 years. After hearing a realtor's spiel, I will ask, "So, what would this house reasonably rent for?" If the number seems right, multiply it by 150; this will give you an excellent idea of the home's fair market value, above which you are better off renting.

On average the three small categories (growth, mid, value) had higher returns than the three large categories. This is not surprising; after all, small companies have more room to grow than large ones. Further, small stocks are certainly riskier than large ones, as well, since they have less diversified product lines and less access to capital and are more prone to failure.

How do value ("bad") companies tend to outperform growth ("good") companies in the stock exchange, when they manifestly do not in the consumer marketplace? Very simply, because they have to...In order to attract buyers for its far riskier stock, Ford must offer investors a higher expected return than Toyota.

"Efficient Market Hypothesis" (EMH), developed by Eugene Fama, which states, more or less, that all known information about a security has already been factored into its price.* This has two implications for investors: First, stock picking is futile, to say nothing of expensive, and second, stock prices move only in response to new information–that is, surprises. Since surprises are by definition unexpected, stocks, and the stock market overall, move in a purely random pattern.

*There are actually three forms of the EMH: the strong form, which posits that all information, public and private, has already been impounded into price; and the weak form, which posits only that past price action does not predict future price moves.

The implications of the EMH for the investor could not be clearer: Do not try to time the market, and do not try to pick stocks or fund managers.

In the long run, the advantages of the indexed and passive approaches over traditional active stock-picking are nearly insurmountable.

The investor cannot learn enough about the history of stock and bond returns. These are primarily useful as a measure of risk; they are far less reliable as a predictor of future returns.

Four essential preliminaries before making asset allocation decisions: Save as much as you can, make sure you have enough liquid taxable assets for emergencies, diversify widely, and do so with passive or index funds.

The consequences of oversaving pale next to those of undersaving.

Yes, picking a small number of stocks increases your chances of getting rich, but as we just learned, it also increases your chances of getting poor. By buying and holding the entire market through a passively managed or indexed mutual fund, you guarantee that you will own all of the winning companies and thus get all of the market return. True, you will own all of the losers as well, but that is not as important: the most that can vanish with any one stock is 100 percent of its purchase value, whereas the winners can easily make 1,000 percent, and exceptionally 10,00 percent, inside of a decade or two.

Asset allocation process, investor makes two important decisions:
1) The overall allocations to stocks and bonds.
2) The allocation among stock asset classes.

The rosiest scenario for the young investor is a long, brutal bear market. For the retiree, it most definitely is not.

The best time to buy stocks is often when the economic clouds are the blackest, and the worst times to buy are when the sky is the bluest.

The anticipation is better than the pleasure. Researchers have found that the nuclei accumbens respond much more to the prospect of reward than to the reward itself.

Caring, emotionally intelligent people often make the worst investors, as they become too overwhelmed by the feelings of others to think rationally about the investment process.

Advantages of mutual funds:
-Wide diversification
-Transparency of expenses
-Professional management (brokers = used car salesmen, fund managers = advanced degree)
-Protection (Investment Company Act of 1940)
-Ease of execution

The ownership structure of any financial services company ultimately determines just how well it serves its shareholders in the long run. Do not invest with any mutual fund family that is owned by a publicly traded parent company.

In the best of all possible worlds, the fund company has no publicly or privately owned shares and is instead held directly by the mutual fund shareholders. Only one fund company does this: the Vanguard Group.

Each dollar you do not save at 25 will mean two inflation adjusted dollars that you will need to save if you start at age 35, four if you begin at 45, and eight if you start at 55. In practice, if you lack substantial savings at 45, you are in serious trouble. Since a 25-year-old should be saving at least 10 percent of his or her salary, this means that a 45-year-old will need to save nearly half of his or her salary.

The possible adverse consequences of under-consuming in your youth or middle age pale in comparison to the risks of not saving enough for old age.

Retirement: My rule of thumb is that if you spend 2 percent of your nest egg per year, adjusted upward for the cost of living, you are as secure as possible at 3 percent, you are probably safe; at 4 percent, you are taking real risks.

For example, if, in addition to Social Security and pensions, you spend $50,000 per year in living expenses, that means you will need $2.5 million to be perfectly safe, and $1.67 million to be fairly secure.

The best annuity deal available: deferring Social Security until age 70. Waiting until 70 increases by almost one-third the monthly payment you would get starting at age 66...This calculates out to a guaranteed real return from waiting of 8 percent per year.

Dollar cost averaging (DCA): fixed dollar amount is periodically invested in stocks and bonds...Forces investors to invest equal amounts periodically. Lowers the average price paid for their purchases and increases overall returns.

Month 1: $100 purchase at $15/share = 6.67 shares bought.
Month 2: $100 purchase at $5/share = 20 shares bought.
Month 3: $100 purchase at $10/share = 10 shares bought.
*DCA = $8.18/share

Value averaging technique: based on targets.
Month 1: US Total Stock ($100), International ($100)
Month 2: US Total Stock ($200), International ($200)
Month 3: US Total Stock ($300), International ($300)
Month 4: US Total Stock ($400), International ($400)

If US Large Cap fund started Month 3 with $300 in assets, and then fell 10 percent in value over the next 30 days to $270, our saver would have to add $130, not $100, to top it off to $400 at the start of Month 4. Conversely, if international stocks rose by 10 percent to $330 in value, then only $70 must be added.

From time to time, the markets can go stark raving mad...Your primary defense against being swept up in the madness of such periods is a command of the history of the financial markets and the resulting ability to say, "I've been here before, and I know how the story ends."

Never forget that at the level of individual securities, the markets are brutally efficient. Whenever you buy or sell an individual stock or bond, you are likely trading with someone who is smarter and better informed than you are, and who is working harder at it.

The portfolio's the thing; do not pay too much attention to its best and worst performing asset classes.

Investors tend to be too susceptible to the emotional impact of the news and to the fear and greed of their neighbors. The better you can tune out this emotional noise, the wealthier you will be.

Human beings are pattern-seeking primates. Most of what goes on in the financial markets, by contrast, is random noise. Avoid imagining patterns; there usually are none.

Avoid fund companies that are owned by publicly traded parent firms.

You should live as modestly as you can and save as much as you can for as long as you can. Saving too much is not nearly as harmful as saving too little.

Consider tilting toward small and value stocks, since they will likely have higher expected returns than the overall market. Precisely how much you do so depends on the nature of your employment and your tolerance for temporarily underperforming the market for up to several years.

Growth Hacker Marketing – Ryan Holiday

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising – by Ryan Holiday
Date read: 7/2/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

Flips traditional marketing (and ad agencies) on its head in favor of the growth hacker mindset. Growth hacking still requires pulling customers in but it favors a more innovative, effective, and cheaper method of reaching the target audience. Holiday emphasizes the importance of Product Market Fit and building a product that generates explosive, contagious reactions from those who first see it. Great foundation to have in place before building any product, service or following. Digs into real examples of some of the most successful startups in Silicon Valley (Airbnb, Twitter, Dropbox, etc.) and how they were able to adapt, optimize, and make themselves indispensable in the process. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

"Marketing has always been about the same thing–who your customers are and where they are." -Noah Kagan

Growth hackers believe that products–even whole businesses and business models–can and should be changed until they are primed to generate explosive reactions from the first people who see them.

Airbnb went from a good but fairly impractical idea to an explosive and practical idea.
-Orginally founders put air mattresses on their floor and offered free homemade breakfast to guests.
-Repositioned as a networking alternative for conferences when hotels were booked up.
-Pivoted to the type of traveler who didn't want to crash on couches or in hostels but was looking to avoid hotels.

Instagram started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature). Core group of users flocked to one part of the app–photos and filters.

Some companies like Airbnb and Instagram spend a long time trying new iterations until they achieve what growth hackers call Product Market Fit (PMF); others find it right away. The end goal is the same, however, and it's to have the product and its customers in perfect sync with each other.

The books that tend to flop upon release are those where the author goes into a cave for a year to write it, then hands it off to the publisher for release.

On the other hand, I have clients who blog extensively before publishing. They develop their book ideas based on the themes that they naturally gravitate toward but that also get the greatest response from readers...They test the ideas they're writing about in the book on their blog.

The race has changed. The prize and spoils no longer go to the person who make it to market first. They go to the person who makes it to Product Market Fit first.

Use the Socratic method: We must simply and repeatedly question every assumption. Who is this product for? Why would they use it? Why do I use it?

"To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products." -Brian Halligan

Growth hacking still requires pulling your customers in. Except you seek to do it in a cheap, effective, and usually unique and new way.

Knowing the outlets where they [Dropbox] intended to post the video (Digg, Slashdot, and reddit), they filled it with all sorts of jokes, allusions, and references that those communities would eat up.

PR efforts are needed simply to reach out and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users.

If they are geeks, they are at TechCrunch or Hacker News or reddit or attending a handful of conferences every year. If they are fashionistas, they are regularly checking a handful of fashion blogs like Lookbook.nu or Hypebeast. If they are ____, like you and your founders are, they are reading and doing the same things you do every day.

The best way to get people to do this enormous favor for you? Make it seem like it isn't a favor. Make it the kind of thing that is worth spreading and, of course, conducive to spreading.

You can't just expect your users to become evangelists of your product–you've got to provide the incentives and the platform for them to do so.

Dedicated and happy users are marketing tools in and of themselves.

Retention:
-Twitter: Found that users who followed 5-10 accounts on first day, much more likely to stick around.
-Pinterest: Automatically follows a selection of high-quality Pinterest users so they don't have to hope users figure it out on their own.
-Dropbox: Dragging at least one file into your dropbox, not just creating the account.

When your product is actually relevant and designed for a specific audience, bloggers love to write about you.

Lesson: Cheaply test your concept, improve it based on feedback, then launch.

Lesson: Reduce barriers to entry; use targeted media and platforms to bring your first users on board.

Lesson: Build your email list!

Ask yourself: why would anyone sign up for a beta list for a new product or sign up the week it launches? The value proposition has to be overwhelming.

If your product does not do that–even on a small scale for a much smaller audience–you need to go back to the drawing board until it does.

As far as ad agencies go, I don't like their model. Why do you have to pay someone else to make/produce the content that you use to speak directly to your potential customers? It makes no sense to me.

The growth hacker mindset still applies no matter what kind of business you're in: make your service indispensable, find some loophole or underexploited niche, encourage word of mouth, and finally, ruthlessly optimize based on data and feedback.

How to Be a Stoic – Massimo Pigliucci

How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life – by Massimo Pigliucci
Date read: 6/24/17. Recommendation: 4/10.

New addition to my library of Stoic philosophy. I didn't feel like it brought enough original ideas to the table, based on the books already out there. It's essentially a walkthrough of Epictetus. If you're looking to get into Stoicism, check out A Guide to the Good Life, Ego Is the Enemy, or The Obstacle Is the Way. Or go straight to the source and read Seneca or Marcus Aurelius. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Stoicism is not about suppressing or hiding emotion–rather, it is about acknowledging our emotions, reflecting on what causes them, and redirecting them for our own good.

"Einstein's God": the simple, indubitable fact that Nature is understandable by reason....Identification of God with Nature.

Stoicism, like any life philosophy, may not appeal to or work for everyone. It is rather demanding, stipulating that moral character is the only truly worthy thing to cultivate; health, education, and even wealth are considered "preferred indifferents."

Such "externals" do not define who we are as individuals and have nothing to do with our personal worth, which depends on our character and our exercise of the virtues.

A decent human life is about the cultivation of one's character and concern for other people (and even for nature itself) and is best enjoyed by way of a proper–but not fanatical–detachment from mere worldly goods.

"We must make the best of those things that are in our power, and take the rest as nature gives it." -Epictetus

Past cannot be changed and you can only affect the here and now. This recognition takes courage–not the kind needed in battle, but the more subtle, and yet arguably more important, kind needed to live your life to your best.

One of the first lessons from Stoicism, then, is to focus our attention and efforts where we have the most power and then let the universe run as it will. This will save us both a lot of energy and a lot of worry.

Stoic ethics isn't just about what we do–our actions–but more broadly about how our character is equipped to navigate real life. We live in far too intricate social environments to be able to always do the right thing, or even to do the right thing often enough to know with sufficient confidence what the right thing is to begin with.

In other words, by all means go ahead and avoid pain and experience joy in your life–but not when doing so imperils your integrity. Better to endure pain in an honorable manner than to seek joy in a shameful one.

We must have wisdom–the ability to navigate well the diverse, complex, and often contradictory circumstances of our lives.

The Stoics adopted Socrates's classification of four aspects of virtue: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.

"As we pity the blind and the lame, so should we pity those who are blinded and lamed in their most sovereign faculties. The man who remembers this, I say, will be angry with no one, indignant with no one, revile none, blame none, hate none, offend none." -Epictetus

Medea lacks wisdom and is affected by amathia, the sort of dis-knowledge that brings ordinary people to make unreasonable judgements about certain situations that then lead them to what outsiders correctly perceive as horrible acts.

As he [Andrew Overby] explains: "Depressed people are rather self-aware; in fact, they are too self-aware, and too negatively so, often deriding themselves for small infractions of their own idealized standards, putting themselves down for not being perfect even in a world they recognize as being full of imperfections and human capital squandered. Part of depression is fixating on failures in the past, ruminating continually on past events or circumstances, and even drawing a kind of negative confidence from them. This type of thinking is antithetical to good outcomes at the present time, at least the vast majority of the time."

"Stand by a stone and slander it: what effect will you produce? If a man then listens like a stone, what advantage has the slanderer?...'I have done you an outrage.' May it turn out to your good." -Epictetus

All the major Stoic authors insist that it is crucial that we reflect on our condition and truly make an effort to see things in a different light, one that is both more rational and more compassionate.

Death itself is not under our control (it will happen one way or another), but how we think about death most definitely is under our control.

Epictetus is reminding us that if we are afraid of death, then it is out of ignorance: if we knew or truly understood more about the human condition–as a horse trainer knows and understands horses–then we wouldn't react the way we do to the prospect of our own death.

Singularity: the moment when computers will outsmart people and begin to drive technological progress independently–and perhaps even in spite–of humanity itself.

But our sage disagrees with the judgment of the thief, whose conclusion he finds highly questionable: he gained an iron lamp, but in the transaction he lost something much more precious–his integrity.

It is more helpful to think of people who do bad things as mistaken and therefore to be pitied and helped if possible, not condemned as evil.

"When I see a man in a state of anxiety, I say, 'What can this man want? If he did not want something which is not in his power, how could he still be anxious? It is for this reason that one who sings to the lyre is not anxious when he is performing by himself, but when he enters the theatre, even if he has a very good voice and pays well: for he not only wants to perform well, but also to win a great name, and that is beyond his own control." -Epictetus

Stoic principles:
- Virtue is the highest good, and everything else is indifferent.
- Follow nature...we should strive to apply reason to achieve a better society.
- Dichotomy of control. Some things are under our control, and others are not.

Stoic virtues:
- Wisdom: Navigating complex situations in the best available fashion.
- Courage: Doing the right thing, both physically and morally, under all circumstances.
- Justice: Treating every human being–regardless of his or her stature in life–with fairness and kindness.
- Temperance: Exercising moderation and self-control in all spheres of life.

Epictetus exhorts us to practice what is arguably the most fundamental of his doctrines: to constantly examine our "impressions"–that is, our initial reactions to events, people, and what we are being told–by stepping back to make room for rational deliberation, avoiding rash emotional reactions, and asking whether whatever is being thrown at us is under our control.

Reverse clause: Reminding us that we may set out with a particular goal in mind but that events may not go the way we wish. That being the case, our choices are to make ourselves miserable, thereby willfully worsening our situation, or to remember our overarching goal: to be a decent person who doesn't do anything that is unvirtuous or that may compromise our integrity (like behaving obnoxiously in reaction to another's obnoxious behavior).

^There is a nice analogy in Stoic lore meant to explain the point...dog leashed to the cart.

"For every challenge, remember the resources you have within you to cope with it...Faced with pain, you will discover the power of endurance. If you are insulted, you will discover patience. In time, you will grow to be confident that there is not a single impression that you will not have the moral means to tolerate." -Epictetus

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

"Let silence be your goal for the most part; say only what is necessary, and be brief about it." -Epictetus

"In your conversation, don't dwell at excessive length on your own deeds or adventures. Just because you enjoy recounting your exploits doesn't mean that others derive the same pleasure from hearing about them." -Epictetus

Live Your Truth – Kamal Ravikant

Live Your Truth – by Kamal Ravikant
Date read: 6/19/17. Recommendation: 6/10.

Not a book I would typically read, but there are a few hidden gems in its passages. If you're looking for inspiration, it's an easy read that you can get through in a day. Ravikant's handful of original, eye-opening insights make it worth it. Most of the book is focused on tapping into yourself and living an authentic life.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

What are the key components of one's life? Buckets, that if you fill daily, even if just a drop, move you forward and create progress.

Example of four buckets? Health, wealth, relationships, and self-expression

We don't stumble accidentally into an amazing life. It takes decision, a commitment to consistently work on ourselves.

Our ability to love and create – that alone makes this entire experiment worthwhile.

If there's a definition of freedom, I think it's this: living life on your terms.

The truth: I live my days as if I will live forever. Putting off so much, expecting there to be more time, another chance. If I accepted my mortality to my core, never knowing when the chain snaps, then how would I live? More on my terms. A free man. I'd write more, I'd love more, I'd laugh more.

Ask yourself: what is it, that if I believed it down to my core, would change everything?

Whatever you experience in your life, choose for it to make you grow in amazing and unbelievable ways.

Now I know what success is: living your truth, sharing it. Whether through a book, raising a child, building a company, creating art, or a conversation. Whatever human endeavor we choose, as long as we live our truth, it is a success.

Hemingway, whenever he was stuck in his writing, would tell himself to write one true thing. A true sentence. Then, he would write another. And another.

Peace is letting it be. Letting life flow, letting emotions flow through you. If you don't fight them, they pass through quickly and you feel better.

There is something magical about creating.

But that's the gift of any art. When we go all in, we find the answers. They're in us.

Suffering is when we resist the moment.

I once asked one of the best entrepreneurs in the Valley how he did it. He's created game-changing companies multiple times. He sort of laughed, then said, "if I only stuck with what I was qualified for, I'd be pushing a broom somewhere."

The best people, they're afraid, they question themselves. Many, if you corner them, will admit that they wonder if they're good enough. But what separates them from the rest is that they jump off the cliff anyway. Sprout wings on the way down.

It's the knowledge – or confidence or hope or sheer stupidity; the word doesn't matter – that they will figure it out. That's it. The only qualification you need to create anything.

I am not the outcome. I am never the result. I am only the effort.

One thing about discovering a truth: first you live it, and after you experience the transformative results, it is real for you unlike anything else. Then you almost become obsessive about sharing it.

Instead, I wrote the type of book that I would want to read. Importantly, a book I wish someone had given me when I was down.

Confidence comes from crossing thresholds.

You dive deeper, you strip away the cleverness and the words becomes more important than your ego and that's when you know it's real, when it's good.

The feeling of when you step away, finished, and you look at the page and you know you tapped into something bigger than yourself, that feeling is, dare I say, spiritual.

Homo Deus – Yuval Noah Harari

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow – by Yuval Noah Harari
Date read: 6/11/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

Follow-up to Harari's critically acclaimed Sapiens. Whereas Sapiens is focuses on humanity's history, Homo Deus examines on humanity's future. Compelling book in its own right and worth reading. Guaranteed to expand your perspective and worldview. He discusses how Homo sapiens came to dominate the world, imagine and assign meaning to life, and what our current trajectory looks like.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

The New Human Agenda
For thousand of years, human agenda centered around same three problems: famine, plague, and war.

For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.

There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines.

In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition. Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030. In 2010 famine and malnutrition killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.

Black Death began in the 1330s...between 75 million and 200 million people died – more than a quarter of the population in Eurasia.

Until the early twentieth century, about a third of children died before reaching adulthood. (now less than 5%)

In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence. In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.

Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way. Hence as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.

For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda....In essence, terrorism is a show...Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop.

Contrary to common notions, seventy-year olds weren't considered rare freaks of nature in previous centuries. Galileo Galilei died at seventy-seven, Isaac Newton at eighty-four, and Michelangelo lived to the ripe age of eighty-eight without help from antibiotics, vaccinations, or organ transplants.

In truth, so far modern medicine hasn't extended our natural life span by a single year. Its great achievement has been to save us from premature death, and allow us to enjoy the full measure of our years.

The war against death is still likely to be the flagship project of the coming century...Our ideological commitment to human life will never allow us simply to accept human death.

If you think that religious fanatics with burning eyes and flowing beards are ruthless, just wait and see what elderly retail moguls and ageing Hollywood starlets will do when they think the elixir of life is within reach.

People are made happy by one thing and one thing only – pleasant sensations in their bodies.

If science is right and our happiness is determined by our biochemical system, then the only way to ensure lasting contentment is by rigging this system. Forget economic growth, social reforms and political revolutions: in order to raise global happiness levels, we need to manipulate human biochemistry.

This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.

Part 1: Homo sapiens Conquers the World
In most Semitic languages, 'Eve' means 'snake' or even 'female snake'. The name of our ancestral biblical mother hides an archaic animist myth, according to which snakes are not our enemies but our ancestors.

The Bible, along with its belief in human distinctiveness, was one of the by-products of the Agricultural Revolution.

Whereas hunter-gatherers were seldom aware of the damage they inflicted on the ecosystem, farmers knew perfectly well what they were doing. They knew they were exploiting domesticated animals and subjugating them to human desires and whims. They justified their actions in the name of new theist religions, which mushroomed and spread in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution.

Biblical Judaism, for instance, catered to peasants and shepherds. Most of its commandments dealt with farming and village life, and its major holidays were harvest festivals.

Animist religions had previously depicted the universe as a grand Chinese opera with a limitless cast of colorful actors. Elephants and oak trees, crocodiles and rivers, mountains and frogs, ghosts and fairies, angels and demons – each had a role in the cosmic opera. Theist religions rewrote the script, turning the universe into a bleak Ibsen drama with just two main characters: man and God.

In the new theist drama Sapiens became the central hero around whom the entire universe evolved.

According to Christianity, God gave an eternal soul only to humans...Humans thus became the apex of creation, while all other organisms were pushed to the sidelines.

There is no doubt that Homo sapiens is the most powerful species in the world. Homo sapiens also likes to think that it enjoys a superior moral status, and that human life has much greater value than the lives of pigs, elephants or wolves. This is less obvious. Does might make right? Is human life more previous than porcine life simply because the human collective is more powerful than the pig collective? The United States is far more powerful than Afghanistan; does this imply that American lives have greater intrinsic value than Afghan lives?

We want to believe that human lives really are superior in some fundamental way. We Sapiens loves telling ourselves that we enjoy some magical quality that not only accounts for our immense power, but also gives moral justification for our privileged status.

According to a 2012 Gallup survey, only 15 percent of Americans think that Homo sapiens evolved through natural selection alone, free of all divine intervention...Spending three years in college has absolutely no impact on these views. The same survey found that among BA graduates...14 percent think that humans evolved without any divine supervision. Even among holders of MA and PhD degrees...only 29 percent credit natural selection alone with the creation of our species.

If you really understand the theory of evolution, you understand that there is no soul...the existence of souls cannot be squared with the theory of evolution. Evolution means change, and is incapable of producing everlasting entities.

However, there is a crucial difference between mind and soul...Whereas the existence of eternal souls is pure conjecture, the experience of pain is a direct and very tangible reality.

By humanizing animals we usually underestimate animal cognition and ignore the unique abilities of other creatures.

Humans nowadays completely dominate the planet not because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the individual chimp or wolf, but because Homo sapiens is the only species on earth capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers.

Sapiens don't behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions. These emotions, as we saw earlier, are in fact sophisticated algorithms that reflect the social mechanisms of ancient hunter-gatherer bands.

People constantly reinforce each other's beliefs in a self-perpetuating loop. Each round of mutual confirmation tightens the web of meaning further, until you have little choice but to believe what everyone else believes.

This is how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously.

Part 2: Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World
Humans think they make history, but history actually revolves around the web of stories. The basic abilities of individual humans have no changed much since the Stone Age. But the web of stories has grown...pushing history from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age.

For the Sumerians, Enki and Inanna (gods) were as real as Google and Microsoft are real for us.

Prior to the invention of writing, stories were confined by the limited capacity of human brains. You couldn't invent overly complex stories which people couldn't remember.

Writing has thus enabled humans to organize entire societies in an algorithmic fashion...In literate societies people are organized into networks, so that each person is only a small step in a huge algorithm, and it is the algorithm as a whole that make the important decisions. This is the essence of bureaucracy.

Such self-absorption characterizes all humans in childhood. Children of all religions and cultures think they are the center of this world and therefore who little genuine interest in the conditions and feelings of other people. That's why divorce is so traumatic for children. A five-year old cannot understand that something important is happening for reasons unrelated to him...He is convinced that everything happens because of him. Most people grow out of this infantile delusion. Monotheists hold on to it till the day they die.

No matter how mistaken the biblical world view was, it provided a better basis for large-scale human cooperation.

Human cooperative networks usually judge themselves by yardsticks of their own invention, and, not surprisingly, they often give themselves high marks.

Fiction isn't bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function...But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks.

Stories serve as the foundations and pillars of human societies. As history unfolded, stories about gods, nations and corporations grew so powerful that they began to dominate objective reality...Unfortunately, blind faith in these stories meant that human efforts frequently focused on increasing the glory of fictional entities such as gods and nations, instead of bettering the lives of real sentient beings.

It is often said that God helps those who help themselves. This is a roundabout way of saying that God doesn't exist, but if our belief in Him inspires us to do something ourselves–it helps.

Religion is any all-encompassing story that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms and values.

Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey.
-Religion gives a complete description of the world and offers us a well-defined contract with predetermined goals.
-Spiritual journeys are nothing like that. They usually take people in mysterious ways towards unknown destinations. The quest usually begins with some big question...Whereas most people just accept the ready-made answers provided by the power that be, spiritual seekers are not so easily satisfied. They are determined to follow the big question wherever it leads, and not just to places they know well or wish to visit.

Religion is interested above all in order. It aims to create and maintain the social structure. Science is interested above all in power. Through research, it aims to acquire the power to cure diseases, fight wards and product food. As individuals, scientists and priests may give immense importance to the truth; but as collective institutions, science and religion prefer order and power over truth.

Modernity is a deal...The entire contract can be summarized in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture.

The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realized how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, aim of existence is 'a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom.'

God is dead – it's just taking a while to get rid of the body. Radical Islam poses no serious threat to the liberal package, because for all their fervor the zealots don't really understand the world of the twenty-first century, and having nothing relevant to say about the novel dangers and opportunities that new technologies are generating all around us.

True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don't count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by backward-looking masses.

Ask yourself: what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of the twentieth century? That's a difficult question, because it is hard to choose from a long list of candidates...Now ask yourself: what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of traditional religions such as Islam and Christianity in the twentieth century? This too is a very difficult question, because there is so little to choose from.

Think, for example, about the acceptance of gay marriage or female clergy by the more progressive branches of Christianity. Where did this acceptance originate? Not from reading the Bible, St Augustine or Martin Luther. Rather, it came from reading texts like Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality or Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto.'

Yet Christian true-believers – however progressive – cannot admit to drawing their ethics from Foucault and Haraway. So they go back to the Bible, to St Augustine and to Martin Luther, and make a very thorough search. They read page after page and story after story with the utmost attention, until they finally discover what they need: some maxim, parable or ruling that, if interpreted creatively enough means God blesses gay marriages and women can be ordained to the priesthood. They then pretend the idea originated in the Bible, when in fact it originated with Foucault.

Part 3: Homo Sapiens Loses Control
Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented.

Every time the narrating self evaluates our experiences, it discounts their duration and adopts the 'peak-end-rule' – it remembers only the peak moment and the end moment, and assesses the whole experience according to their average. This has far-reaching impact on all our practical decisions.

Given the unbearable torments that many women undergo during childbirth, one might think that after going through it once no sane woman would ever agree to do so again. However, at the end of labor and in the following days the hormonal system secretes cortisol and beta-endorphins, which reduce the pain and create a feeling of relief and sometimes even elation. Moreover, the growing love towards the baby and the acclaim from friends, family members, religious dogmas and nationalist propaganda, conspire to transform childbirth from a trauma into a positive memory.

If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced they will be of the existence of the imaginary recipient.

Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe in one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament.

Organisms are algorithms. Every animal – including Homo sapiens – is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution.

Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Many if not most humans may be unable to do so.

Medicine is undergoing a tremendous conceptual revolution. Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.

Twentieth-century armies needed millions of healthy soldiers, and economies needed millions of healthy workers. Consequently states established public health services to ensure the health and vigor of everyone...In 1914 the Japanese elite had a vested interest in vaccinating the poor and building hospitals and sewage systems in the slums, because if they wanted Japan to be a strong nation with a powerful army and a robust economy, they needed many millions of healthy soldiers and workers.

In themselves human experiences are not superior at all to the experiences of wolves or elephants. One bit of data is as good as another. However, humans can write poems and blogs about their experiences and post them online, thereby enriching the global data-processing system....No wonder we are so busy converting our experiences into data. It isn't a question of trendiness. It is a question of survival. We must prove to ourselves and to the system that we still have value.

After Darwin, biologists began explaining that feelings are complex algorithms honed by evolution to help animals make correct decisions...For millions upon millions of years, feelings were the best algorithms in the world.

The Time Paradox – Philip Zimbardo

The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life – by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd
Date Read: 6/3/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

Fascinating look at how the way we regard time influences the course of our lives. Zimbardo and Boyd discuss six distinct time perspectives and illustrate how they are a reflection of our personal attitudes, beliefs and values. Great insight into the future-oriented world we live in and what that means for those who are more present-oriented. Also offers an interesting examination of various religions and their effect on individual time perspectives and behaviors.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Nothing that any of us does in this life will allow us to accrue a moment's more time, and nothing will allow us to regain time misspent...Our scarcest resource, time, is actually much more valuable than money.

Only during the last few thousand years have people gained the luxury of discretionary time, and only during the last few hundred years have substantial segments of us enjoyed it–or endured it.

Remember that people are more likely to regret actions not taken than actions taken, regardless of outcome.

Your body–even if it is in mint condition–is designed for success in the past. It is an antique biological machine that evolved in response to a world that no longer exists.

The transition from event time to clock time profoundly changed society, especially economic relations.

Your time perspective reflects attitudes, beliefs, and values related to time.
-Past-negative
-Past-positive
-Present-fatalistic
-Present-hedonistic
-Future
-Transcendental-future

I think that the events of childhood are overrated; in fact, I think past history in general is overrated. It has turned out to be difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality...There is no justification in these studies for blaming your adult depression, anxiety, bad marriage, drug use, sexual problems, unemployment, aggression against your children, alcoholism, or anger on what happened to you as a child.

Everyone is affected by the objective past but not completely determined by it. And it is not the events of the past that most strongly influence our lives. Your attitudes towards events in the past matter more than the events themselves.

You cannot change what happened in the past, but you can change your attitude toward what happened.

People who have positive attitudes about the past–whether or not these attitudes are based upon accurate memories–tend to be happier, healthier, and more successful than people who have negative attitudes toward the past.

If you are stuck in the past, you are less likely to take chances and risks, to make new friends, to try new foods, or to expose yourself to new music and art. You want the status quo and abhor change.

This is the paradox of time: Some present orientation is needed to enjoy life. Too much present orientation can rob life of happiness.

The development of a future orientation requires stability and consistency in the present, or people cannot make reasonable estimates of the future consequences of their actions.

All that is tangible and real in this world undeniably exists in the present.

Flow: a special state of mind in which there is total absorption for a period of time in a given activity. Main characteristics...
-Clear goals
-Concentrating and focusing
-Loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, merging of action and awareness
-Distorted sense of time
-Balance between ability level and challenge
-A sense of personal control over the situation or activity
-Intrinsically rewarding

What is wrong with all such programs (DARE) and their related advertising campaigns? They focus on aversive future consequences that work for future-oriented people but not for present-oriented–the target audience. They also focus on personal willpower, resolve, and character, which fails to recognize powerful situational and social forces in the present behavioral context that influence Hedonists.

Talent, intelligence, and ability are necessary for success, but they are not sufficient. Discipline, perseverance, and a sense of personal efficacy are also required.

Unlike their present-hedonistic peers who live in their bodies, the futures live in their minds, envisioning other selves, scenarios, rewards, and successes.

You become future-oriented by being born in the right place at the right time, where environmental conditions help transform little present-oriented babies into restrained, successful, future-oriented adults. These conditions include:
-Living in a temperate zone (requires planning/preparing for seasonal/weather change)
-Living in a stable family, society, nation
-Protestant or Jewish
-Educated
-Young/middle-aged
-Employed
-Tech-savvy
-Successful
-Future-oriented role models
-Recovering form childhood illness

Key predictors of children's financial success are their fathers' conscientiousness and their parents' future orientation.

We [authors] believe that the common good is not a moral matter but a time-perspective matter. Adopting a narrowly focused present orientation for immediate gain is not selfish; it is simply the way presents everywhere think.

There is not something unique about Muslim people that causes them to become suicide bombers. There is something about the situation in which some of them currently find themselves (of which beliefs about a heavenly future are a large part) that motivates them to become suicide bombers.

The Muslim profile is also extremely low on past-positive and present-hedonistic time perspectives. The Muslims in our sample tended not to bring positive elements from their past into the present, and they tend not to focus on pleasure. For Muslims, the focus is on the mundane and transcendental futures.

Seen from a transcendental-future perspective, a suicide bomber's act is not crazy, fanatical, hate-filled or hopeless, but an act committed by a religious person who may have had little hope for his future in this life but has abundant hope in the transcendental future.

Daylight savings time: car accidents increase by 10% the day after clocks are set forward in the spring, and decrease by a smaller amount the day after clocks are set back one hour in the fall.

The key to relieving depression lies not in untangling the Gordian knot of the past but in accepting and planning for the uncertain future.

In moderation, the present is a wonderful place to be, but in excess, it robs you of your ability to learn from the past and plan for the future.

Marshmallow test: Give single marshmallow to 4 year old, can eat now or wait a few minutes and get two. Children who were able to delay gratification (when later interviewed at 18) had developed a range of superior emotional and social competencies compared with the children who had eaten the treat immediately. They were better able to deal with adversity and stress, and they were more self-confident, diligent, and self-reliant. Intellectual ability markedly higher.

After adolescence, however, chronological age becomes a less reliable predictor of motivation, thought process, and emotional response.

Learning to control impulses and make better decisions is inextricably connected with being aware of one's internal states and with managing feelings rather than acting them out. Emotions rather than reason tend to drive the behavior of people who have poor impulse control.

Genetic happiness set point accounts for only about 50% of your overall happiness level. In addition, life circumstance–age, sex, ethnicity, nationality, marital status, physical health, income level–account for an additional 10% of your overall happiness. (leaves open possibility of increasing your level of happiness by 40%).

Our ability to reconstruct the past, to interpret the present, and to construct the future gives us the power to be happy. We must just take the time to use it.

As a society, we impose future-oriented punishments on present-oriented criminals...For presents, however, the threat of jail time is unlikely to matter. When a person does not have a concept of the future or believes there is no future for him, the future cannot be taken from him.

We live in a world created by futures for futures.

Sprint – Jake Knapp

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days – by Jake Knapp
Date read: 5/28/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

Targeted to those working in technology, but useful lessons that can be applied more broadly. The authors pioneered their own rapid sprint process at Google Ventures. The book documents, step-by-step, the best way to examine, prototype, and test new ideas with customers, in a single week. The faster you can test out a new idea out and gather real feedback, the better. Great framework for creative problem solving, no matter what project or initiative you're working on.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

my notes:

The sprint is Google Venture's unique five-day process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. It's a "greatest hits" of business strategy, innovation, behavioral science, design, and more–packaged into a step-by-step process that any team can use.

Monday: Make a map, choose a target. Tuesday: Sketch competing solutions. Wednesday: Decide on the best. Thursday: Build a realistic prototype. Friday: Test with target customers.

Solve the surface first:
The surface is important. It's where your product or service meets customers. Human beings are complex and fickle, so it's impossible to predict how they'll react to a brand-new solution. When our new ideas fail, it's usually because we were overconfident about how well customers would understand and how much they would care.

Get that surface right, and you can work backward to figure out the underlying systems or technology. Focusing on the surface allows you to move fast and answer big questions before you commit to execution, which is why any challenge, no matter how large, can benefit from a sprint.

Fragmentation hurts productivity.

Longer hours don't equal better results.

If you're looking at a screen (laptop, phone, etc.), you're not paying attention to what's going on in the room, so you won't be able to help the team. What's worse, you're unconsciously saying, "This work isn't interesting."

Imagine you've gone forward in time one year, and your project was a disaster. What caused it to fail? Lurking beneath every goal are dangerous assumptions.

*An important part of this is rephrasing assumptions and obstacles into questions.
Q: To reach new customers what has to be true? A: They have to trust our experience.
Q: How can we phrase that as a question? A: Will customers trust our experience?

Turning these potential problems into questions makes them easier to track–and easier to answer with sketches, prototypes, and tests. Also creates a subtle shift from uncertainty (which is uncomfortable) to curiosity (which is exciting)

Map the challenge:
Map should be simple, include only the major steps required for customers to move from beginning to completion.

Each map is customer-centric, with a list of key actors on the left. Each map is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Keep it between 5-15 steps.

How Might We's: take notes in the form of a question, beginning with the words "How might we...?" (How might we re-create the cafe experience? How might we ensure coffee arrives fresh? How might we structure key info for screening patients? How might we streamline discussion with outside doctors? How might we make reviewing electronic medical records faster?)

Lightning Demos:
Team takes turn giving three-minute tours of their favorite solutions from other products/different domains, etc.

Finding Customers (for prototype/interviews):
-Recruit customers through Craigslist (post a generic ad with a link to a screener survey)
-Recruit customers through your network

Storyboard:
Best opening scene for your prototype will boost the quality of your test (can help customers forget they're trying a prototype and react to your product in a natural way)

The trick is to take one or two steps upstream from the beginning of the actual solution you want to test...How do customers find out your company exists?

It's almost always a good idea to present your solution alongside the competition. As a matter of fact, you can ask customers to test out your competitors' products on Friday right alongside your own prototype.

When in doubt take risks, sprint is great for testing risky solutions that might have  a huge payoff.

"Prototype" mindset – it isn't a real product, it just needs to appear real.

Interview customers and learn by watching them react to your prototype.

After you've recruited and carefully selected participants for your test who match the profile of your target customer.
-Why five people? 85% of problems are observed after just five people.
-Testing with more people doesn't lead to many more insights - just a lot more work.
-The number of findings quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns.
-When 2-3 people out of 5 have the same strong reaction, positive or negative, you should pay attention.

One-on-one interviews are a remarkable shortcut. They allow you to test a facade of your product, long before you've build the real thing.

Offer important insight that's nearly impossible to get with large-scale quantitative data: why things work or don't work.

Remind the customer that you're testing the prototype, not her.
-"There are no right and wrong answers. Since I didn't design this, you won't hurt my feelings or flatter me. In fact, frank, candid feedback is the most helpful."

NOT: "Now that you've seen the site, would you be ready to sign up now, or do you need more information?"
YES: "Now that you've seen the site, what are you thinking?" (after answer, "why is that?)

DON'T ask multiple choice or yes/no questions (would you, do you, is it?)
DO ask "Five Ws and One H" questions

You can also learn a lot by just remaining quiet. Don't always feel compelled to fill the silence with conversation.

Being in a curiosity mindset means being fascinated by your customers and their reactions.
-Always ask "why?"

Once you've run your test an identified patterns, look back at your sprint questions. This will help you decide which patterns are most important, and also point you toward next steps.

Instead of jumping right into solutions, take your time to map out the problem and agree on the initial target. Start slow so you can go fast.

Instead of shouting out ideas, work independently to make detailed sketches of possible solutions.

Adopt the prototype mindset so you can learn quickly.

Test your prototype with target customers and get their honest reactions.

Walden – Henry David Thoreau

Walden – by Henry David Thoreau
Date read: 5/21/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

Another classic. Thoreau documents his two years of simple living in a cabin near Walden Pond outside Concord, Massachusetts. He discusses themes of minimalism and self-sufficiency. Along the way he emphasizes the value of reconnecting with the natural world, and hints at stoic themes with his disdain for modern luxuries and comforts. His motivation for the book? Ensuring he was not wasting his life on trivialities, and instead living in a more deliberate, meaningful fashion. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

 

My Notes:

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of...Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

But men labor under a mistake...By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves will break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessities of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them.

For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind.

As for clothing...perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinion of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out doors, even in wet and cold.

The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself.

A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.

I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable actions of men, date from such an hour.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked...we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad of instances and applications?

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence–that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit every where, which is still built on purely illusory foundations.

My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow, they have only one word..."

I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while other have not enough.

The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change.

The Art of Travel – Alain de Botton

The Art of Travel – by Alain de Botton
Date read: 5/15/17. Recommendation: 6/10.

Interesting book that feels like a series of essays. Dissects why we travel, the inspiration for doing so, and contemplates the experience of traveling abroad in a way that resonates with any seasoned traveler. In certain sections the language gets a bit too abstract and flowery for my taste. But if traveling is a large part of your identity, you'll appreciate de Botton's ideas.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest–in all its ardor and paradoxes–than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival.

Eudaimonia: Greek philosophy term for human flourishing.

It is easy for us to forget ourselves when we contemplate pictorial and verbal descriptions of places.

We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own either underwrite our joy or condemn us to misery.

Charles Baudelaire: "It always seems to me that I'll be well where I am not, and this question of moving is one that I'm forever entertaining with my soul."

The value we ascribe to the process of traveling, to wandering without reference to a destination, connects us to a broad shift in sensibilities dating back to some two hundred years ago, whereby the outsider came to be seen as morally superior to the insider.

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

Anything I learnt would have to be justified by private benefit rather than by the interest of others. My discoveries would have to enliven me; they would have in some way to prove 'life-enhancing.'

What would it mean to seek knowledge 'for life' in one's travels?

Nietzsche also proposes a second kind of tourism, whereby we may learn how our societies and identities have been formed by the past and so acquire a sense of continuity and belonging. The person practicing this kind of tourism 'looks beyond his own individual transitory existence and feels himself to be the spirit of his house, his race, his city'. He can gaze at old buildings and feel 'the happiness of knowing that he is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and that his existence is thus excused and indeed justified.'

A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as a necklace without beads without a connecting chain.

Even in the most fascinating cities, [many] have occasionally been visited by a strong wish to remain in bed and take the next flight home.

Our identities are to a greater or lesser extent malleable, changing according to whom–and sometimes what–we are with. The company of certain people may excited our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.

Natural scenes have the power to suggest certain values to us–oaks dignity, pines resolution, lakes calm–and therefore may, in unobtrusive ways, act as inspirations to virtue.

[William] Wordsworth urged us to travel through landscapes in order to feel emotions that may benefit our souls. I set out for the desert so as to be made to feel small.

There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist; we are forced instead to make awkward piles of words to convey what we feel as we watch the light fade on an early-autumn evening, or when we encounter a pool of perfectly still water in a clearing.

Sublime places embodied a defiance to man's will.

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.

What, then, is this traveling mind-set? Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic. Receptive, we approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting.

Home, by contrast, finds us more settled in our expectations.

A Guide to the Good Life – William B. Irvine

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy – by William B. Irvine
Date read: 5/8/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

There's no better modern introduction to Stoicism. Contrary to today's understanding of the term as a lack of outward emotion, it's a life philosophy which cultivates rationality, appreciation, and joy. Irvine discusses the practicality of Stoicism, how it applies to our every day lives, and the importance of adopting a coherent philosophy of life that suits us as individuals. He hits on key concepts in Stoic philosophy and wraps them in a modern, logical context. I originally read this book over a year ago, and almost every single word struck a chord with me. It was one of my first encounters with Stoicism and I was surprised to find it matched almost identically with my existing worldview, which I had pieced together over the years.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews. 

My Notes:

The Stoics feel somewhere between the Cyrenaics and the Cynics: They thought people should enjoy the good things life has to offer, including friendship and wealth, but only if they did not cling to these good things.

The sage is to Stoicism as Buddha is to Buddhism.

Greek Stoics: Primary ethical goal was the attainment of virtue.
Roman Stoics: Retained this goal, but we also find them repeatedly advancing a second goal, the attainment of tranquility.

Stoic tranquility: psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.

Roman Stoics argue tranquility and virtue are connected. Someone who is not tranquil, who is distracted by negative emotions such as anger or grief, might find it difficult to do what his reason tells him to do: His emotions will triumph over his intellect. This person might therefore become confused about what things are really good, consequently might fail to pursue them, and might, as a result, fail to attain virtue.

According to Epictetus, the primary concern of philosophy should be the art of living: Just as wood is the medium of the carpenter and bronze is the medium of the sculptor, your life is the medium on which you practice the art of living.

Negative visualization: spending time imagining that we have lost the things we value. The single most valuable technique in the Stoics' psychological tool kit.

As we go about our day, we should periodically pause to reflect on the fact that we will not live forever and therefore that this day could be our last. Such reflection, rather than converting us into hedonists, will make us appreciate how wonderful it is that we are alive and have the opportunity to fill this day with activity.

Hedonic adaptation has the power to extinguish our enjoyment of the world...Negative visualization is therefore a wonderful way to regain our appreciation of life and with it our capacity for joy.

One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted. To them, the world is is wonderfully new and surprising.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.

Our most important choice in life, according to Epictetus, is whether to concern ourselves with things external to us or things internal. Most people choose the former because they think harms and benefits come from outside themselves.

The trichotomy of control:
-Things over which we have complete control: goals we set for ourselves
-Things over which we have no control: whether the sun rises tomorrow
-Things over which we have some but not complete control: whether we win while playing tennis. Setting internal rather than external goals (playing to the best of your ability, not to always win).

It will clearly make sense for us to spend time and energy setting goals for ourselves and determining our values. Doing this will take relatively little time and energy. Furthermore, the reward for choosing our goals and values properly can. Indeed, Marcus thinks that the key to having a good life is to value things that are genuinely valuable and be indifferent to things that lack value.

Marcus thinks that by forming opinions properly – by assigning things their correct value – we can avoid much suffering, grief, and anxiety and can thereby achieve the tranquility the Stoics seek.

Musonius would point to three benefits to be derived from acts of voluntary discomfort:
1) Harden ourselves against misfortune that might befall us in the future.
2) Grow confident that we can withstand major discomforts so they aren't a present source of anxiety. Training to be courageous.
3) Help us appreciate what we already have.

Someone who tries to avoid all discomfort is less likely to be comfortable than someone who periodically embraces discomfort. The latter individual is likely to have a much wider "comfort zone"

The worse a man is, the less likely he is to accept constructive criticism.

There will be times when we must associate with annoying, misguided, or malicious people in order to work for common interests. We can, however, be selective about whom we befriend.

If we detect anger or hatred within us and wish to seek revenge, one of the best forms of revenge on another person is to refuse to be like him.

When you don't respect the source of an insult, you should feel relieved. If he disapproves of what you are doing, then what you are doing is doubtless the right thing to do.

The political correctness movement has some untoward side effects. One is that the process of protecting disadvantaged individuals from insults will tend to make them hypersensitive to insults...Epictetus would argue we shouldn't punish these individuals, but instead teach them techniques of insult self-defense.

"Unless reason puts an end to our tears, fortune will not do so." -Seneca

The advice that we respond to the grief of friends by grieving ourselves is as foolish as the advice that we help someone who has been poisoned by taking the poison ourselves or help someone who has the flu by intentionally catching it from him. Grief is a negative emotion and therefore one that we should, to the extent possible, avoid experiencing. If a friend is grieving, our goal should be to help her overcome her grief.

By allowing ourselves to get angry over little things, we take what might have been a barely noticeable disruption of our day and transform it into a tranquility-shattering state of agitation.

People are unhappy, the Stoics argue, in large part because they are confused about what is valuable. Because of their confusion, they spend their days pursuing things that, rather than making them happy, make them anxious and miserable.

Stoics value their freedom, and they are therefore reluctant to do anything that will give others power over them. But if we seek social status, we give other people power over us: We have to do things calculated to make them admire us, and we have to refrain from doing things that will trigger their disfavor.

It is foolish to worry about what other people think of us and particularly foolish for us to seek the approval of people whose values we reject. Our goal should therefore be to become indifferent to other people's opinions of us.

Most people use their wealth to finance a luxurious lifestyle, one that will win them the admiration of others.

Desire for luxuries is not a natural desires. Natural desires, such as a desire for water when we are thirsty, can be satisfied; unnatural desires cannot.

Those who crave luxury typically have to spend considerable time and energy to attain it; those who eschew luxury can devote this same time and energy to other, more worthwhile undertakings.

A Stoic who disparages wealth might become wealthier than those individuals whose principal goal is its acquisition (lost interest in luxurious living, overcome craving for consumer goods, more likely to retain a large portion of income).

What stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life.

If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim–if you refuse to let your inner self be conquered by your external circumstances–you are likely to have a good life.

The Stoics pointed to two principal sources of human unhappiness–our insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control.

There are people, I think, whose personality is uniquely well-suited to Stoicism. Even if no one formally introduces these individuals to Stoicism, they will figure it out on their own. These "congenital Stoics" are perpetually optimistic and they are appreciative of the world they find themselves in. If they were to pick up Seneca and start reading, they would instantly recognize him as a kindred spirit.

And why is self-discipline worth possessing? Because those who possess it have the ability to determine what they do with their life. Those who lack self-discipline will have the path they take through life determined by someone or something else, and as a result, there is a very real danger that they will mislive.

Most people go to the mall not because they have a specific need, but in hopes that doing so will trigger a desire for something that before going they didn't want. Why go out of their way to trigger a desire? Because if they trigger one, they can enjoy the rush that comes when they extinguish that desire by buying its object. It is a rush, of course, that has little to do with their long-term happiness.

The profound realization, thanks to the practice of Stoicism, that acquiring things that those in my social circle typically crave and work hard to afford will, in the long run, make zero difference in how happy I am and will in no way contribute to my having a good life.

On the Shortness of Life – Seneca

On the Shortness of Life – by Seneca
Date read: 5/4/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

If you're looking to dive deeper into the works of Seneca, this is a great follow up to Letters from a Stoic. I read the Penguin Great Ideas edition. It's a collection of three essays filled with plenty of brilliant insight that Seneca is so well known for. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Life is long if you know how to use it. But one man is gripped by insatiable greed, another by a laborious dedication to useless tasks. One man is soaked in wine, another sluggish with idleness...

You will find no one willing to share out his money; but to how many does each of us divide up his life! 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 which it is right to be stingy.

You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don't notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply...You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.

How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!

Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and a weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day. For what new pleasures can any hour now bring him? He hast tried everything, and enjoyed everything to repletion.

So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.

But nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it costs nothing.

The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.

Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs. All the years that have passed before them are added to their own.

We are excluded from no age, but we have access to them all; and if we are prepared in loftiness of mind to pass beyond the narrow confines of human weakness, there is a long period of time through which we can roam. We can argue with Socrates, express doubt with Carneades, cultivate retirement with Epicurus, overcome human nature with Stoics, and exceed its limits with the Cynics.

Honors, monuments, whatever the ambitious have ordered by decrees or raised in public buildings are soon destroyed: there is nothing that the passage of time does not demolish and remove.

But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.

It was nature's intention that there should be no need of great equipment for a good life: every individual can make himself happy. External goods are of trivial importance and without much influence in either direction: prosperity does not elevate the sage and adversity does not depress him.

Never have I trusted Fortune, even when she seemed to offer peace. All those blessing which she kindly bestowed on me – money, public office, influence – I relegated to a place whence she could claim them back without bothering me. I kept a wide gap between them and me, with the result that she has taken them away, not torn them away.

Let us pass on to the rich: how frequently they are just like the poor! When they travel abroad their luggage is restricted, and whenever they are forced to hasten their journey they dismiss their retinue of attendants.

No man is despised by another unless he is first despised by himself.

What you need is...confidence in yourself and the belief that you are on the right path, and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost, though some are wandering not far from the true path. But what you are longing for is great and supreme and nearly divine – not to be shaken. The Greeks call this stead firmness of mind 'euthymia', but I call it tranquility.

If you apply yourself to study you will avoid all boredom with life, you will not long for night because you are sick of daylight, you will be neither a burden to yourself nor useless to others, you will attract many to become your friends and the finest people will flock about you.

We must be especially careful in choosing people, and deciding whether they are worth devoting a part of our lives to them, whether the sacrifice of our time makes a difference to them.

Avoid those who are gloomy and always lamenting, and who grasp at every pretext for complaint...a companion who is agitated and groaning about everything is an enemy to peace of mind.

People are more cheerful whom Fortune has never favored than those whom she has deserted.

Let us aim to acquire our riches from ourselves rather than from Fortune.

In this race course of our lives, we must keep to the inner track. (minimalism)

So we should buy enough books for us, and none just for embellishment...Excess in any sphere is reprehensible.

Should Nature demand back what she previously entrusted to us we shall say to her too: "Take back my spirit in better shape than when you gave it."

For by foreseeing anything that can happen as though it will happen he will soften the onslaught of all of his troubles, which present no surprises to those who are ready and waiting for them, but fall heavily on those who are careless in the expectation.

It is too late for the mind to equip itself to endure dangers once they are already there.

Nothing happens to the wise man against his expectation.

So we should make light of all things and endure them with tolerance: it is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.

We must indulge the mind and from time to time allow it the leisure which is its food and strength. We must go for walks out of doors, so that the mind can be strengthened and invigorated by a clear sky and plenty of fresh air.

The 48 Laws of Power – Robert Greene

The 48 Laws of Power – by Robert Greene
Date read: 4/17/17. Recommendation: 10/10.

This took me months to read because there's so much to it. Perhaps the most detailed, convincing book I've ever read. Greene sets forth the individual laws of power and offers countless historical examples of each in practice. Not a book you're going to finish over the weekend, but a very important book and investment. Greene makes the argument that it's not a question of ethics, the game of power is inescapable, even in our daily lives. We might as well learn the game and master the laws of power so we're more aware, less distracted, and better able to negotiate situations in our favor. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

If the game of power is inescapable, better to be an artist than a denier or a bungler.

An emotional response to a situation is the single greatest barrier to power.

Emotions cloud reason, and if you cannot see the situation clearly, you cannot prepare for and respond to it with any degree of control.

Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power. Patience in all things is your crucial shield. Impatience is a principal impediment to power.

Law 3: Conceal your intentions
Hide your intentions not by closing up (with the risk of appearing secretive, and making people suspicious) but by talking endlessly about your desires and goals–just not your real ones. You will kill three birds with one stone: You appear friendly, open, and trusting; you conceal your intentions, and you send your rivals on time-consuming wild good chases.

Law 4: Always say less than necessary
The more you say, the more common you appear

Law 8: Make other people come to you - use bait if necessary
When you make the other person come to you, he wears himself out, wasting his energy on the trip...also create the illusion that he is controlling the situation.

Law 9: Win through your actions, never through argument
Words have that insidious ability to be interpreted according to the other person's mood and insecurities...Action and demonstration are much more powerful and meaningful.

Law 10: Infection: Avoid the unhappy and unlucky
You can die from someone else's misery - emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortunate on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.

The answer lies in judging people on the effects they have on the world and not on the reasons they give for their problems.

Law 13: When asking for help, appeal to people's self-interest, never to their mercy or gratitude
Self-interest is the lever that will move people. Once you make them see how you can in some way meet their needs or advance their cause, their resistance to your requests fro help will magically fall away. At each step on the way to acquiring power, you must train yourself to think your way inside the other person's mind, to see their needs and interests, to get rid of the screen of your own feelings that obscure the truth. Master this art and there will be limits to what you can accomplish.

Law 19: Know who you're dealing with–do not offend the wrong person
We forget a lot in our lives, but we rarely forget an insult...There is nothing to be gained by insulting a person unnecessarily. The satisfaction is meager compared to the danger than someday he or she will be in a position to hurt you.

Law 20: Do not commit to anyone
Slowness to pick up your weapons can be a weapon itself, especially if you let other people exhaust themselves fighting, then take advantage of their exhaustion.

That is what holding back from the fray allow you: time to position yourself to take advantage of the situation once one side starts to lose.

In the forest, one shrub latches on to another, entangling its neighbor with its thorns, the thicket slowly extending its impenetrable domain. Only what keeps its distance and stands apart can grow and rise above the thicket.

Law 25: Re-create yourself
Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity.

The world wants to assign you a role in life. And once you accept that role you are doomed. Your power is limited to the tiny amount allotted to the role you have selected or have been forced to assume. An actor, on the other hand, plays many roles...forge a new identity, one of your own making, one that has had no boundaries assigned to it by an envious and resentful world.

Law 28: Enter action with boldness
If boldness is not natural, neither is timidity. It is an acquired habit, picked up out of a desire to avoid conflict.

Law 34: Be royal in your own fashion: act like a king to be treated like one
David and Goliath Strategy: By choosing a great opponent, you create the appearance of greatness.

Law 38: Think as you like but behave like others
If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox ways, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them.

It is an old but powerful trick: You pretend to disagree with dangerous ideas, but in the course of your disagreement you give those ideas expression and exposure. You seem to conform to the prevailing orthodoxy, but those who know will understand the irony involved. You are protected.

Wise and clever people learn early on that they can display conventional behavior and mouth conventional ideas without having to believe in them.

Law 39: Stir up waters to catch fish
If a person explodes with anger at you, you must remind yourself that it is not exclusively directed at you–do not be so vain. The cause is much larger, goes way back in time, involves dozens of prior hurts...

Law 40: Despise the free lunch
The powerful learn early to protect their most valuable resources: independence and room to maneuver. By paying the full price, they keep themselves free of dangerous entanglements and worries.

Powerful people judge everything by what it costs, not just in money but in time, dignity, and peace of mind. And this is exactly what Bargain Demons cannot do. Wasting valuable time digging for bargains, they worry endlessly about what they could have gotten elsewhere for a little less.

Law 47: Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory learn when to stop
Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.

Law 48: Assume formlessness
The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order. Everything changes.

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius

Meditations – by Marcus Aurelius
Date read: 4/5/17. Recommendation: 10/10.

A cornerstone of Stoic philosophy, along with Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. It's critical which interpretation you read. I highly recommend the Modern Library version with an introduction by Gregory Hays. It's a short read with some of the most useful insights and aphorisms that money can buy. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

my notes:

Introduction by Gregory Hays
"States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers." -Plato

Ancient philosophy had a more practical dimension. It was not merely a subject to write or argue about, but one that was expected to provide a "design for living" - a set of rules to live one's life by.

One pattern of thought that is central to the philosophy of the Meditations (as well as to Epictetus)...the doctrine of the three "disciplines": the disciplines of perception, of action, and of the will. Together, the three disciplines constitute a comprehensive approach to life, and in various combinations and reformulations they underlie a large number of the entries in the Meditations.

Meditations 7.54:
Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option:
-to accept this event with humility (will)
-to treat this person as he should be treated (action)
-to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in (perception)

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. 2.1

Make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. 2.7

People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time - even when hard at work. 2.7

If it doesn't harm your character, how can it harm your life? 2.11

You cannot lose another life than the one you're living now, or live another one than the one you're losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone...For you can't lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don't have? 2.14

We should remember that even Nature's inadvertence has its own charm, its own attractiveness. The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why. 3.2

Don't waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people - unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You'll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they're saying, and what they're thinking, and what they're up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind. 3.4

If at some point in your life, you should come across anything better than justice, honestly, self-control, courage - than a mind satisfied that it has succeeded in enabling you to act rationally, and satisfied to accept what's beyond its control - if you find anything better than that, embrace it without reservations - it must be an extraordinary thing indeed - and enjoy it to the full. 3.6

Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. 3.10

Nowhere you can go is more peaceful - more free of interruptions - than your own soul. 4.3

Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you're alive and able - be good. 4.17

The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do. 4.18

People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn. Until their memory, passed from one to another like a candle flame, gutters and goes out. 4.19

Everything is transitory - the knower and the known. 4.35

It's unfortunate that this has happened. No it's fortunate that this has happened and I've remained unharmed by it - not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it. 4.49a

Does what's happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all the other qualities that allow a person's nature to fulfill itself? 4.49a

So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune. 4.49a

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: "I have to go to work - as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for - the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? -But it's nicer here... So you were born to feel "nice"? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? 5.1

Practice the virtues you can show: honesty, gravity, endurance, austerity, resignation, abstinence, patience, sincerity, moderation, seriousness, high-mindedness. Don't you see how much you have to offer - beyond excuses like "can't"? And yet you still settle for less. 5.5

In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us - like sun, wind, animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle of our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. 5.20

So other people hurt me? That's their problem. Their character and actions are not mine. 5.25

But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions. 5.37

Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. 6.2

The best revenge is not to be like that. 6.6

Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood...Perceptions like that - latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That's what we need to do all the time - all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust - to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them. 6.13

Not to assume it's impossible because you find it hard. But to recognize that if it's humanly possible, you can do it too. 6.19

If anyone can refute me - show me I'm making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective - I'll gladly change. It's the truth I'm after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance. 6.21

Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you. Our lives are short. The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts. 6.30

It's normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you're using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal - if he's living a normal human life. And if it's normal, how can it be bad? 6.33

The only thing that isn't worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don't. 6.47

When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one's energy, that one's modesty, another's generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us... 6.48

Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.
Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.
Sanity means tying it to your own actions. 6.51

You don't have to turn this into something. It doesn't have to upset you. Things can't shape our decisions by themselves. 6.52

Frightened of change? But what can exist without it? What's closer to nature's heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed? 7.18

Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you'd crave them if you didn't have them. But be careful. Don't feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them - that it would upset you to lose them. 7.27

To watch the courses of the stars as if you revolved with them. To keep constantly in mind how the elements alter into one another. Thoughts like this wash the mud of life below. 7.47

Look at the past - empire succeeding empire - and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events. 7.49

Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option:
-to accept this event with humility
-to treat this person as he should be treated
-to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in. 7.54

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly. 7.56

Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense. 7.69

It's silly to try to escape other people's faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own. 7.71

You've given aid and they've received it. And yet, like an idiot, you keep holding out for more: to be credited with a Good Deed, to be repaid in kind. Why? 7.73

When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic - what defines a human being - is to work with others. 8.12

Remember that to change your mind and to accept correction are free acts too. The action is yours, based on your own will, your own decision - and your own mind. 8.16

Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it - turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself - so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal. 8.35

You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves. 8.53

Fear of death is fear of what we may experience. Nothing at all, or something quite new. But if we experience nothing, we can experience nothing bad. And if our experience changes, then our existence will change with it - change, but not cease. 8.58

So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. 9.3

To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice - it degrades you. 9.4

And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing. 9.5

Leave other people's mistakes where they lie. 9.20

Everything that happens is either endurable or not.
If it's endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining.
If it's unendurable...then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well. 10.3

To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one. 10.16

To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before. And will happen again - the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging. Produce them in your mind, as you know them from experience or from history...All just the same. Only the people different. 10.27

The natural can never be inferior to the artificial; art imitates nature, not the reverse. In which case, that most highly developed and comprehensive nature - Nature itself - cannot fall short of artifice in its craftsmanship. 11.10

The soul as a sphere in equilibrium: Not grasping at things beyond it or retreating inward. Not fragmenting outward, not sinking back on itself, but ablaze with light and looking at the truth, without and within. 11.12

To live a good life:
We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference. This is how we learn: by looking at each thing, both the parts and the whole. Keeping in mind that none of them can dictate how we perceive it. They don't impose themselves on us. They hover before us, unmoving. It is we who generate the judgments - inscribing them on ourselves. 11.16

When you start to lose your temper, remember: There's nothing manly about rage. It's courtesy and kindness that define a human being - and a man. That's who possesses strength and nerves and guts, not the angry whiners. To react like that brings your closer to impassivity - and so to strength. Pain is the opposite of strength, and so is anger. 11.18

It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own. 12.4

When someone seems to have injured you:
But how can I be sure?
And in any case, keep in mind:
-that he's already been tried and convicted - by himself.
-that to expect a bad person not to harm others is like expecting fig trees not to secrete juice, babies not to cry, horses not to neigh - the inevitable not to happen. 12.16

At all times, look at the thing itself - the thing behind the appearance - and unpack it by analysis... 12.18

Constantly run down the list of those who felt intense anger at something: the most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever. And ask: Where is all that now? Smoke, dust, legend...or not even legend. 12.27

Antifragile – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder – by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Date read: 4/1/17. Recommendation: 10/10.

Taleb introduces his concept of antifragility, which explains that certain things (including us) benefit from a degree of randomness, chaos, and disorder. While comfort, convenience, and predictability, breed the opposite–fragility. He presents this as part of what he calls 'the central triad' which ranges from fragile to robust to antifragile. As he explains antifragility, he discusses the value systems that hold us prisoner, ancestral vs. modern life, and Seneca's version of Stoicism. It's a dense read, but worth it for a glimpse into the originality of Taleb's ideas.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

With randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

If about everything top-down fragilizes and blocks antifragility and growth, everything bottom-up thrives under the right amount of stress and disorder. The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education.

Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.

But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that "you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple."

The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to the gym for some exertion instead of resting. Also, it is a well known trick that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated - the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.

Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems. We human have two kidneys, extra spare parts, and extra capacity in many, many things (say, lungs, neural system, arterial apparatus). *debt is the opposite of redundancy

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.

Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book...Almost no scandal would hurt an artist or writer. *Jobs/professions fragile to reputational harm aren't worth having.

A midlevel bank employee with a mortgage would be fragile to the extreme. In fact he would be completely a prisoner of the value system that invites him to be corrupt to the core - because of his dependence on the annual vacation in Barbados.

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort - a disease of civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick. In a natural environment, people die without aging - or after a very short period of aging. For instance, some markers, such as blood pressure, that tend to worsen over time for moderns do not change over the life of hunter-gatherers until the very end.

Typically, the natural–the biological–is both antifragile and fragile, depending on the source (and the range) of variation. A human body can benefit from stressors (to get stronger), but only to a point.

"Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it." -Frano Barovic

Language acquisition: You pick up language best thanks to situational difficulty, from error to error, when you need to communicate under more or less straining circumstances...One learns new words, mostly by being forced to read the mind of the other person - suspending one's fear of making mistakes.

Touristification: systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make maters highly predictable in their smallest details. All that for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.

If you are alive - something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.

Also consider how easy it is to skip a meal when the randomness in the environment causes us to do so.

Ancestral life had no homework, no boss, no civil servants, no academic grades, no conversation with the dean, no consultant with an MBA, no table of procedure...all life was random stimuli and nothing, good or bad, ever felt like work. Dangerous, yes, but boring, never.

An environment with variability (hence randomness) does not expose us to chronic stress injury, unlike human-designed systems. If you walk on uneven, not man-made terrain, no two steps will ever be identical - compare that to the randomness-free gym machine offering the exact opposite: forcing you into endless repetitions of the very same movement.

Much of modern life is a preventable chronic stress injury.

So organisms need to die for nature to be antifragile - nature is opportunistic, ruthless, and selfish.

If nature ran the economy, it would not continuously bail out its living members to make them live forever.

Further; my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the "victims" of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors - though never the same error more than one - is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Buridan's Donkey Metaphor: A donkey equally famished and thirsty caught at an equal distance between food and water would unavoidably die of hunger and thirst. But he can be saved thanks to a random nudge one way or the other.

When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free. You can see here that absence of randomness equals guaranteed death.

Consider the life of the lion in the comfort and predictability of the Bronx Zoo (with Sunday afternoon visitors flocking to look at him in a combination of curiosity, awe, and pity) compared to that of his cousins in freedom. We, at some point, had free-range humans and free-range children before the advent of the golden period of the soccer mom.

If you want to accelerate someone's death, give him a personal doctor....access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow.

It is almost impossible for someone rational, with a clear, uninfected mind, someone who is not drowning in data, to mistake a vital signal, one that matters for his survival, for noise - unless he is overanxious, oversensitive, and neurotic, hence distracted and confused by other messages. Significant signals have a way to reach you.

Our track record in figuring out significant rare events in politics and economics is not close to zero; it is zero.

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it - books have a secret mission and ability to multiply as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.

A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion - in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to.

What we learn from reading Seneca directly, rather than through the commentators, is a different story. Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside.

Seneca fathomed that possessions make us worry about downside, thus acting as punishment as we depend on them.

Seneca's practical method to counter such fragility was to go through mental exercises to write off possessions, so when losses occurred he would not feel the sting - a way to wrest one's freedom from circumstances.

Seen this way, Stoicism is about the domestication, not necessarily the elimination, of emotions. It is not about turning humans into vegetables. My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

Seneca also provides us a catalogue of social deeds: invest in good actions. Things can be taken away from us - not good deeds and acts of virtue.

Seneca said that wealth is the slave of the wise man and the master of the fool. Thus he broke a bit with the purported Stoic habit: he kept the upside.

This kind of sum I've called in my vernacular "fuck you money"–a sum large enough to get most, if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects, such as having to attend a black-tie charity event and being forced to listen to a polite exposition of the details of a marble-rich house renovation. The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses tend to end up socializing with other people with big houses.

Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life on an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and alarm clock.

What we call diseases of civilization result from the attempt by humans to make life comfortable for ourselves against our own interest, since the comfortable is what fragilizes.

Another fooled-by-randomness-style mistake is to think that because life expectancy at birth used to be thirty until the last century, that people lived just thirty years. The distribution was massively skewed, with the bulk of deaths coming from birth and childhood mortality.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing. And when you take risks, insults by half-men (small men, those who don't risk anything) are similar to barks by non-human animals: you can't feel insulted by the bark of a dog.

Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one. And it is highly unethical to portray something in a more favorable light than it actually is.

If you ever have to choose between a mobster's promise and a civil servant's, go with the mobster. Any time. Institutions do not have a sense of honor, individuals do.

The Daily Stoic – Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living – by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
Date read: 3/29/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

If you're this far along in my reading list and you're on board with Stoicism, you'll enjoy this book. The greater your interest in Stoic philosophy, the more you're going to get out of the book. It's a tremendous resource. There's also a daily newsletter that offers brief overviews of many topics covered in the book. I don't normally recommend signing up for mailing lists, but this one is worth checking out. It's a great daily reminder and a solid introduction to Stoicism if you're looking for a place to start. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

my notes:

Stoicism was a school of philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BC. Its name is derived from the Greek stoa, meaning porch, because that's where Zeno first taught his students. Painted porch (Stoa Poikilê).

Stoicism assets that virtue (meaning, chiefly, the four cardinal virtues of self-control, courage, justice, and wisdom) is happiness, and it is our perceptions of things - rather than the things themselves - that cause most of our trouble.

Stoics framed their work around a series of exercises in three critical disciplines:
-The Discipline of Perception (how we see and perceive the world around us)
-The Discipline of Action (the decisions and actions we take - and to what end)
-The Discipline of Will (how we deal with the things we cannot change, attain clear and convincing judgment, and come to a true understanding of our place in the world)

"Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only they truly live. Not satisfied to merely keep good watch over their own days, they annex every age to their own. All the harvest of the past is added to their store. Only an ingrate would fail to see that these great architects of venerable thoughts were born for us and have designed a way of life for us." -Seneca

Control and Choice
"The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own..." -Epictetus

The single most important practice in Stoic philosophy is differentiating between what we can change and what we can't. What we have influence over and what we do not.

Perception, Action, Will
Control your perceptions. Direct your actions properly. Willingly accept what's outside your control.

If You Want To Be Unsteady
The image of the Zen philosopher is the monk up in the green, quiet hills, or in a beautiful temple on some rocky cliff. The Stoics are the antithesis of this idea. Instead, they are the man in the marketplace, the senator in the Forum, the brave wife waiting for her soldier to return from battle, the sculptor busy in her studio. Still, the Stoic is equally at peace.

Peace is Staying the Course
Seneca uses the greek word euthymia, which he defines as: "believing in yourself and trusting you are on the right path, and not being in doubt by following the myriad of footpaths of those wandering in every direction." It is this state of mind, he says, that produces tranquility.

Tranquility and peace are found in identifying our path and in sticking to it.

The Truth About Money
"Let's pass over to the really rich - how often the occasions they look just like the poor! When they travel abroad they must restrict their baggage, and when haste is necessary they dismiss their entourage. And those who are in the army, how few of their possessions they get to keep." -Seneca

Money only marginally changes life...external things can't fix internal issues.

Watching the Wise
"Take a good hard look at people's ruling principle, especially of the wise, what they run away from and what they seek out." -Marcus Aurelius

You Don't Have to Stay on Top of Everything
"If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters - don't wish to seem knowledgeable. And if some regard you as important, distrust yourself." -Epictetus

For the Hot-Headed Man
"A real man doesn't give way to anger and discontent, and such a person has strength, courage, and endurance - unlike the angry and complaining. The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength." -Marcus Aurelius

Anger is not impressive or tough - it's a mistake. It's weakness. Depending on what you're doing, it might even be a trap that someone laid for you.

Cultivating Indifference Where Others Grow Passion
Imagine the power you'd have in your life and relationships if all the things that trouble everyone else - how thin they are, how much money they have, how long they have left to live, how they will die - didn't matter so much. What if, where others were upset, envious excited, possessive, or greedy, you were objective, calm, and clearheaded? Can you envision that? Imagine what it would do for your relationships at work, or for your love life, or your friendships.

The Present is All We Possess
"Were you to live three thousand years, or even a countless multiple of that, keep in mind that no one ever loses a life other than the one they are living, and no one ever lives a life other than the one they are losing. The longest and shortest life, then, amount to the same, for the present moment lasts the same for all and is all anyone possesses. No one can lose either the past or the future, for how can someone be deprived of what's not theirs?" -Marcus Aurelius

The Best Retreat Is In Here, Not Out There
"People seek retreats for themselves in the country, by the sea, or in the mountains. You are very much in the habit of yearning for those same things. But this is entirely the trait of a base person, when you can, at any moment, find such a retreat in yourself." -Marcus Aurelius

Pay What Things Are Worth
Remember that next time you hear someone ramble on about how the market decides what things are worth. The market might be rational...but the people who comprise it are not.

Becoming An Expert in What Matters
At the end of your time on this planet, what expertise is going to be more valuable - your understanding of matters of living and dying, or your knowledge of the '87 Bears? Which will help your children more - your insight into happiness and meaning, or that you followed breaking political news every day for thirty years.

Pay Your Taxes
There are many forms of taxes in life. You can argue with them, you can go to great - but ultimately futile - lengths to evade them, or you can simply pay them and enjoy the fruits of what you get to keep.

Washing Away The Dust of Life
"Watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself running alongside them. Think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other, for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life." -Marcus Aurelius

Looking at the beautiful expanse of the sky is an antidote to the nagging pettiness of earthly concerns. And it is good and sobering to lose yourself in that as often as you can.

Character is a powerful defense in a world that would love to be able to seduce you, buy you, tempt you, and change you. If you know what you believe and why you believe it, you'll avoid poisonous relationships, toxic jobs, fair-weather friends, and any number of ills that afflict people who haven't thought through their deepest concerns. That's your education. That's why you do this work.

Be The Person You Want To Be
Spend some time–real, uninterrupted time–thinking about what's important to you, what your priorities are. Then, work toward that and forsake all the others. It's not enough to wish and hope. One must act–and act right.

Would I be better saying words or letting my actions and choices illustrate that knowledge for me?

Here is how to guarantee you have a good day: do good things. Any other source of joy is outside your control or is nonrenewable. But this one is all you, all the time, and unending. It is the ultimate form of self-reliance.

Always Have a Mental Reverse Clause
Just because you've begun down one path doesn't mean you're committed to it forever, especially if that path turns out to be flawed or impeded. At the same time, this is not an excuse to be flighty or incessantly noncommittal. It takes courage to decide to do things differently and to make a change, as well as a discipline and awareness to know that the notion of "Oh, but this looks even better" is a temptation that cannot be endlessly indulged either.

Take A Walk
"We should take wandering outdoor walks, so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing." -Seneca

The Obstacle is the Way
"While it's true that someone can impede our actions, they can't impede our intentions and our attitudes, which have the power of being conditional and adaptable. For the mind adapts and converts any obstacle to its action into a means of achieving it. That which is an impediment to action is turned to advance action. The obstacle on the path becomes the way." -Marcus Aurelius

You have the power to use the Stoic exercise of turning obstacles upside down, which takes one negative circumstance and uses it as an opportunity to practice an unintended virtue or form of excellence.

Receive Honors and Slights Exactly the Same Way
It can be so easy to get distracted by, even consumed by, horrible news from all over the world. The proper response of the Stoic to these events is not to not care, but mindless, meaningless sympathy does very little either (and comes at the cost of one's own serenity, in most cases).

Stoic Joy
Joy, to Seneca, is a deep state of being. It is what we feel inside it us and has little to do with smiles and laughing.

The Good Life Is Anywhere
We tell ourselves that we need the right setup before we finally buckle down and get serious. Or we tell ourselves that some vacation or time alone will be good for a relationship or an ailment. This is self-deceit at its finest.

Silence Is Strength
The inexperienced and fearful talk to reassure themselves. The ability to listen, to deliberately keep out of a conversation and subsist without its validity is rare. Silence is a way to build strength and self-sufficiency.

The Supreme Court of Your Mind
Think about someone you know who has character of granite. Why are they so dependable, trustworthy, excellent?Why do they have a sterling reputation? You might see a pattern: consistency. They are honest not only when it's convenient. They are not only there for you when it counts.

You become the sum of your actions, and as you do, what flows from that - your impulses - reflect the actions you've taken. Choose wisely.

Corralling The Unnecessary
The key to accomplishing that is to ruthlessly expunge the inessential from our lives. What vanity obligates us to do, what greed signs us up for, what ill discipline adds to our plate, what a lack of courage prevents us from saying no to. All of this we must cut, cut, cut.

Don't Be Miserable In Advance
"It's ruinous for the soul to be anxious about the future and miserable in advance of misery, engulfed by anxiety that the things it desires might remain its own until the very end. For such a soul will never be at rest - by longing for things to come it will lose the ability to enjoy present things." -Seneca

What Would Less Look Like?
One way to protect yourself from the swings of fate - and from the emotional vertigo that can result - is by living within your means now. So today, we can try to get used to having and surviving on less so that if we are ever forced to have less, it would not be so bad.

Overconfidence is a great weakness and a liability. But if you are already humble, no one will need to humble you - and the world is much less likely to have nasty surprises in store for you. If you stay down to earth, no one will need to bring you - oftentimes crushingly so - back down.

Anyone Can Get Lucky, Not Everyone Can Persevere
Anyone can get lucky. There's no skill in being oblivious, and no one would consider that greatness. On the other hand, the person who perseveres through difficulties, who keeps going when others quit, who makes it their destination through hard work and honesty? That's admirable, because their survival was the result of fortitude and resilience, not birthright or circumstance.

It Could Happen To You
"Being unexpected adds to the weight of a disaster, and being a surprise has never failed to increase a person's pain. For this reason, nothing should ever be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent out in advance to all things and we shouldn't just consider the normal course of things, but what could actually happen. For is there anything in life that Fortune won't knock off its high horse if it pleases her?" -Seneca

We must prepare in our minds for the possibility of extreme reversals of fate.

The Vulnerability of Dependance
"Anyone who truly wants to be free," Epictetus said, "won't desire something that is actually in someone else's control, unless they want to be a slave."

We could look at the upcoming day and despair at all the things we don't control: other people, our health, the temperature, the outcome of a project once it leaves our hands. Or we could look out at that very same day and rejoice at the one thing we do control: the ability to decide what any event means.

The Most Valuable Asset
"But the wise person can lose nothing. Such a person has everything stored up for themselves, leaving nothing to Fortune, their own goods are held firm, bound in virtue which requires nothing from chance, and therefore can't be either increased or diminished." -Seneca

A Mantra Of Mutual Interdependence
"Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe. For in a sense, all things are mutually woven together and therefore have an affinity for each other - for one thing follows after another according to their tension of movement, their sympathetic stirrings, and the unity of all substance." -Marcus Aurelius

Inherent to the Stoic concept of Sympatheia is the notion of an interconnected cosmos in which everything in the universe is part of a larger whole.

No amount of travel or reading or clever sages can tell you what you want to know. Instead, it is you who must find the answer in your actions, in living the good life - by embodying the self-evident principles of justice, self-control, courage, freedom, and abstaining from evil.

"Character is fate." -Hereclitus

Who Gets The Lion's Share?
"Aren't you ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnants of your life and to dedicate to wisdom only that time can't be directed to business?" -Seneca

The average person somehow manages to squeeze in twenty-eight hours of television per week - but ask them if they has time to study philosophy, and they will probably tell you they're too busy.

Accepting What Is
You don't have to believe that there is a god directing the universe, you just need to stop believing that you're the director. As soon as you can attune your spirit to that idea, the easier and happier your life will be, because you will have given up the most potent addiction of all: control.

All Is Fluid
"The universe is change. Life is opinion." -Marcus Aurelius

Our understanding of what something is is just a snapshot - an ephemeral opinion. The universe is in a constant state of change. Nothing is exempt from this fluidity, not even the things we hold most sacred.

Judge Not, Lest...
Leave other people to their faults. Nothing in Stoic philosophy empowers you to judge them - only to accept them. Especially when we have so many of our own.

The Glass Is Already Broken
Devastation is a factor of how unlikely we considered that event in the first place. No one is wrecked by the fact that it's snowing in the winter because we've accepted (and even anticipated) this turn of events.

Attachments Are The Enemy
Attachments to an image you have of a person, attachments to wealth and status, attachments to a certain place or time, attachments to a job or to a lifestyle. All of those things are dangerous for one reason: they are outside of our reasoned choice. How long we keep them is not in our control.

Pretend Today Is The End
"Philosophy does not claim to get a person external possession. To do so would be beyond its field. As wood is to the carpenter, bronze to the sculptor, so our own lives are the proper material in the art of living." -Epictetus

Spendthrifts of Time
"No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We're tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers." -Seneca

Meaningless...Like A Fine Wine
You don't get a prize at the end of your life for having consumed more, worked more, spent more, collected more, or learned more about the various vintages than everyone else. You are just a conduit, a vessel that temporarily held or interacted with these fancy items.

Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – by Yuval Noah Harari
Date read: 3/21/17. Recommendation: 10/10.

This takes the cake as my favorite nonfiction book...ever. It's one of the most important books you'll read and tackles some of the biggest questions we face. Harari tracks human evolution and the implications of the cognitive revolution through the agricultural, industrial, and scientific revolutions. There's a reason it's so popular and highly regarded. Just read it.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews. 

My notes:

Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.

It's a common fallacy to envision these (human) species as arranged in a straight line of descent...The truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same, to several human species...It's our current exclusivity, not that multi-species past, that is peculiar – and perhaps incriminating.

This is a key to understanding our history and psychology. Genus Homo's position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle...and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain.

That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances...

By 150,000 years ago, East Africa was populated by Sapiens that looked just like us.

Over the past 100,000 years, Homo Sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it's hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation...

Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all...This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum 'natural' size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals...Even today, a critical threshold in human organizations falls somewhere around this magic number. BUT larger numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

Any large-scale human cooperation is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imaginations (religious myths, national myths, legal myths).

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

For nearly the entire history of our species, Sapiens lives as foragers. The past 200 years, during which ever increasing numbers of Sapiens have obtained their daily bread as urban laborers and office workers, and the preceding 10,000 years, during which most Sapiens lived as farmers and herders, are the blink of an eye compared to the tens of thousands of years during which our ancestors hunted and gathered.

Before the Agricultural Revolution, the human population of the entire planet was smaller than that of today's Cairo.

Foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and objects, but also the internal world of their own bodies and senses...varied and constant use of their bodies made them fit as marathon runners.

The foragers' secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet.

Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution...Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygenic permanent settlements - ideal hotbeds for disease.

Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
For 2.5 million years humans fed themselves by gathering plants and hunting animals that lived and bred without their intervention. All this changed about 10,000 years ago, when Sapiens began to devote all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species.

No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.

There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease.

The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.

The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks (cultivating crops). It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carry water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price.

The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes...This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,00 BC. But nobody realized what was happening.

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad.

One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.

Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. 'Created equal' should therefore be translated into 'evolved differently'.

We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.

Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist.

Part Three - The Unification of Humankind
Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.

Money has an even darker side. For although money builds universal trust between strangers, this trust is invested not in humans, communities or sacred values, but in money itself and the impersonal systems that back it.

Empires were one of the main reasons for the drastic reduction in human diversity. The imperial steamroller gradually obliterated the unique characteristics of numerous peoples.

This does not mean, however, that empires leave nothing of value in their wake...Imperial elites used the profits of conquest to finances not only armies and forts but also philosophy, art, justice and charity.

Present-day Egyptians speak Arabic, think of themselves as Arabs, and identify wholeheartedly with the Arab Empire that conquered Egypt in the seventh century and crushed with an iron fist the repeated revolts that broke out against its rule.

Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, 'we' and 'they'.

In Chinese political thinking as well as Chinese historical memory, imperial periods were henceforth seen as golden ages of order and justice. In contradiction to the modern Western view that a just world is composed of separate nation states, in China periods of political fragmentation were seen as the dark ages of chaos and injustice.

As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all humankind is the legitimate source of political authority...The global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group.

Religion morphed from animism, to polytheism, to monotheism.

In these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.

Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists.

Regarding evil forces: How can a monotheist adhere to such a dualistic belief (which by the way is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament)? Logically it is impossible. Either you believe in a single omnipotent God or you believe in two opposing powers, neither of which is omnipotent. Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions.

Part Four - The Scientific Revolution
Modern science differs from all previous traditions of knowledge in three critical ways: The willingness to admit ignorance, the centrality of observation and mathematics, and the acquisition of new powers.

Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known.

What potential did Europe develop in the early modern period that enabled it to dominate the late modern world? Modern science and capitalism.

That's why capitalism is called 'capitalism'. Capitalism distinguishes 'capital' from mere 'wealth'. Capital consists of money, goods and resources that are invested in production. Wealth on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities.

When growth becomes a supreme good, unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily lead to catastrophe. Some religions, such as Christianity or Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.

Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity. Again, it is fueled by indifference. Most people who produce and consume eggs, milk and meat rarely stop to think about the fate of chickens, cows or pigs whose flesh and emissions they are eating.

Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured.

Obesity is a double victory of consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over.

As in previous eras, there is today a division of labour between the elite and the masses. In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny. Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care in managing their assets and investments, while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don't really need.

In 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich (for train timetable purposes). For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset cycles.

The Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Iraqi nations are the product of haphazard borders drawn in the sand by French and British diplomats who ignored local history, geography and economy.

Manchester United fans, vegetarians and environmentalists...defined above all by what they consume. It is the keystone of their identity.

Perhaps we are out of touch with our inner hunter-gatherer, but it's not all bad. For instance, over the last two centuries modern medicine has decreased child mortality from 33 percent to less than 5 percent. Can anyone doubt that this made a huge contribution to the happiness of not only those children who would otherwise have died, but also of their families and friends?

If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society – mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe's reservoirs of contentment.

Happiness and misery play a role in evolution only to the extent that they encourage or discourage survival and reproduction.

Happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather, happiness consists in seeing one's life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile...As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.

The Antidote – Oliver Burkeman

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking – by Oliver Burkeman
Date read: 3/11/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

Rejects the self-help industry and the "power" of positive thinking. One of my favorite books that I've read this year. Burkeman sees the obsession with positive thinking and attaining happiness as counterproductive, and the very thing that makes us unhappy. There are great chapters on Stoicism and negative visualization, meditation and non-attachment, resourcefulness and the myths of goal setting, as well as impermanence and the pitfalls of seeking safety above all else. Makes the case that living meaningfully starts with the negative path to happiness–one which embraces uncertainty, insecurity, and the realities of every day life–so you can better appreciate when things go right. Unrealistic positive expectations are not only ineffective, they're often counterproductive. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My notes:

Chapter 1 - On Trying Too Hard To Be Happy
The awkward truth seems to be that increased economic growth does not necessarily make for happier societies, just as increased personal income, above a certain basic level, doesn't make for happier people. Nor does better education, at least according to some studies. Nor does an increased choice of consumer products. Nor do bigger and fancier homes, which instead seem mainly to provide the privilege of more space in which to feel gloomy.

The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.

The alternative approach, a 'negative path' to happiness involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death.

The Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, who emphasized the benefits of always contemplating how badly things might go. It lies deep near the core of Buddhism, which counsels that true security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground. It underpins the medieval tradition of memento mori which celebrated the life-giving benefits of never forgetting about death.

In business, drop obsession with goal setting, embrace uncertainty instead.

Trying to make everything right is a big part of what's wrong. Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.

Crucial foundation to negative approach is that happiness involves paradoxes; that there is no way to tie up all the loose ends, however desperately we might want to.

Edgar Allan Poe - 'imp of the perverse': that nameless but distinct urge one sometimes experiences, when walking along a precipitous cliff edge, or climbing to the observation deck of a tall building, to throw oneself off - not from any suicidal motivation, but precisely because it would be so calamitous to do so.

People who seek out affirmations would be, by definition, those with low self-esteem.

Chapter 2 - What Would Seneca Do?
Stoics were among the first to suggest that the path to happiness might depend on negativity.

Stoicism, which was born in Greece and matured in Rome, should not be confused with 'stoicism' as the word is commonly used today - a weary, uncomplaining resignation that better describes the attitude of my fellow passengers on the Underground. Real Stoicism is far more tough-minded, and involves developing a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances.

Spending time and energy thinking about how well things could go, it has emerged, actually reduces most people's motivation to achieve them.

Stoicism came to dominate Western thinking about happiness for nearly five centuries.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." -Shakespeare, Hamlet

A more elegant, sustainable and calming way to deal with the possibility of things going wrong: rather than struggling to avoid all thought of these worst-case scenarios, they [Stoics] counsel actively dwelling on them, staring them in the face. Psychological tactic that is single most valuable technique in the Stoics' toolkit. They referred to it as 'the premeditation of evils,' also called 'negative visualization' (William Irvine).

Benefits of Negative Visualization:
1) One of greatest enemies of human happiness is 'hedonic adaptation' - any new source of pleasure is swiftly relegated to the backdrop of our lives, we become accustomed to it. Regularly reminding yourself you might lose any of the things you currently enjoy will reverse the adaptation effect. "Whenever you grow attached to something, do not act as thought it were one of those things that cannot be taken away..." -Epictetus
2) Antidote to anxiety. Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle; negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.

As Seneca frequently observes, we habitually act as if our control over the world were much greater than it really is. In better times it's easy to forget how little we control: we can usually manage to convince ourselves that we attained the promotion at work, or the new relationship, or the Nobel Prize, thanks solely to our own brilliance and effort.

For the Stoics, however, tranquility entails confronting the reality of your limited control. 'Never have I trusted Fortune,' writes Seneca, 'even when she seemed to be at peace. All her generous bounties - money, office, influence - I deposited where she could ask for them back without disturbing me.' Those things lie beyond the individual's control; if you invest your happiness in them, you're setting yourself up for a rude shock. The only things we can truly control, the Stoics argue, are our judgments - what we believe - about our circumstances.

Essential to grasp a distinction here between acceptance and resignation: using your powers of reason to stop being disturbed by a situation doesn't mean you shouldn't try to change it.

Tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones. And dwelling on the worst-case scenario, the 'premeditation of evils', is often the best way to achieve this - even to the point, Seneca suggests, of deliberately experiencing those 'evils,' so as to grasp that they might not be as bad as you'd irrationally feared.

No wonder we get so anxious: we've decided that if we failed to meet our goal it wouldn't merely be bad, but completely bad - absolutely terrible. But nothing could ever be absolutely terrible because it could always be conceivably worse.

"If you accept that the universe is uncontrollable, you're going to be a lot less anxious." -Albert Ellis

Negative visualization more effective strategy than reassurance for helping those who are anxious. Ask: so what if worst fears did come true?

Chapter 3 - The Storm Before the Calm
Meditation has little to do with achieving any specific desired state of mind. It's about non-attachment - approaching life without clinging or aversion.

Rather than merely enjoying pleasurable things during the moments in which they occur, and experiencing the unpleasantness of painful things, we develop the habits of clinging and aversion: we grasp at what we like, trying to hold on to it forever, and push away what we don't like, trying to avoid it at all costs.

Learn how to stop trying to fix things, to stop being so preoccupied with trying to control one's experience of the world, to give up trying to replace unpleasant thoughts and emotions with more pleasant ones, and to see that, through dropping the 'pursuit of happiness', a more profound peace might result.

Motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you can act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work.

It is illuminating to note, here, how the daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists - people who really do get a lot done - very rarely include techniques for 'getting motivated' or 'feeling inspired.' Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasize the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on accomplishing certain physical actions, regardless of mood.

"Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work." -Chuck Close

On meditation: my vantage point on my mental activity had altered subtly, as if I'd climbed two rungs up a stepladder in order to observe it from above. I was less enmeshed in it all.

Chapter 5 - Goal Crazy
"Future - That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured." -Ambrose Bierce

Chris Kayes on Everest Climbers (Into Thin Air Expedition) in 1996:
-The Everest climbers had been lured into destruction by their passion for goals. His hypothesis was that the more they fixated on the endpoint - a successful summiting of the mountain - the more than goal became not just an external target but a part of their own identities, of their senses of themselves as accomplished guides or high-achieving amateurs.

Typical Everest climber: someone who demonstrated considerable restlessness, dislike for routine, desire for autonomy, tendency to be dominant in personal relations, and a lack of interest in social interaction for its own sake. Their felt need for achievement and independence was very high. Climbers tend to be domineering loners with little regard for social convention.

Yale Study of Goals, 1953:
-Students graduating asked by researchers whether or not they had formulated specific, written-down goals for the rest of their lives. Only 3 percent of them said they had. Two decade later, the researchers tracked down the class of '53, to see how their lives had turned out. 3 percent with written goals had amassed greater financial wealth than the other 97 percent combined. The only problem is that it is indeed a legend: the Yale study of Goals never took place.

Many of us, and many of the organizations for which we work, would be better to spend less time on goal setting, and, more generally, to focus with less intensity on planning for how we would like the future to turn out.

This need not be taken as an argument for abandoning all future planning whatsoever, but it serves as a warning not to strive too ardently for any single vision of the future.

Steve Shapiro: Giving up goals and embracing uncertainty instead. Promised to help him achieve more, by permitting him to enjoy his work in the present. Goal-free living simply makes for happier humans.

The most valuable skill of a successful entrepreneur isn't vision or passion. It's the ability to adopt an unconventional approach to learning an improvisational flexibility not merely about which route to take towards some predetermined objective, but also a willingness to change the destination itself. This is a flexibility that might be squelched by a rigid focus on any one goal.

Chapter 5 - Who's There?
The ego, [Eckhart] Tolle likes to say, thrives on drama, because compulsive thinking can sink its teeth into drama. The ego also thrives on focusing on the future, since it's much easier to think compulsively about the future than about the present.

"When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought, but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in." -Eckhart Tolle

The thought then loses its power over you, and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. The is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.

"Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now." -Eckhart Tolle

Chapter 6 - The Safety Catch
"Security is a kind of death. I think." -Tennessee Williams

It turns out to be an awkward truth about psychology that people who find themselves in what the rest of us might consider conditions of extreme insecurity - such as severe poverty - discover insights into happiness from which the rest of us could stand to learn.

We fear situations in which we feel as though we have no control, such as flying as a passenger on an airplane, more than situations in which we feel as if we have control, such as when at the steering wheel of a car. Vastly more likely to be killed as the result of a car crash...

International surveys of happiness - including several reputable research projects such as the World Values Survey - have consistently found some of the world's poorest countries to be among the happiest. (Nigeria, where 92% of the populations lives on less than two dollars a day, has come in first place.)

The point is certainly not that it's better not to have money, say, than it is to have it. But it's surely undeniable that if you don't have it, it's much harder to overinvest emotionally in it. The same goes for prestigious jobs, material possessions, or impressive educational qualifications: when you have little chance of obtaining them, you won't be misled into thinking they bring more happiness than they do.

Living with fewer illusions means facing reality and insecurity head-on.

To seek security is to try to remove yourself from change, and thus from the thing that defines life. 'If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life,' Alan Watts writes, 'I am wanting to be separate from life.'

This, then, is the deep truth about insecurity: it is another word for life. That doesn't mean it's not wise to protect yourself, as far as you can, from certain specific dangers. But it does mean that feeling secure and really live life are, in some ultimate sense, opposites. And that you can no more succeed in achieving perfect security than a wave could succeed in leaving the ocean.

Chapter 7 - The Museum of Failure
Our resistance to thinking about failure is especially curious in light of the fact that failure is so ubiquitous.

Evolution itself is driven by failure; we think of it as a matter of survival and adaptation, but it makes equal sense of think of it as a matter of not surviving and not adapting.

Illusory superiority: mental glitch that explains why vast majority of people tell researchers that they consider themselves to be in the top 50% of safe drivers - even though they couldn't possibly all be.

Any advice about how to succeed, in life or work, is at constant risk of being undermined by survivor bias. We ignore or avoid failure so habitually that we rarely stop to consider all the people who may have followed any set of instructions for happiness or success - including those advanced in these pages - but then failed to achieve the result.

Neil Steinberg, journalist: "Musing over failure is not a particularly American activity. Sure it's big in Europe, where every nation, at one time or another, has had a lock on greatness, only to fritter it away smothering monster palaces in gold leaf and commissioning jeweled Fabergé eggs by the dozen. England had her empire; Spain her Armada; France, her Napoleon; Germany, it's unspeakable zenith. Even Belgium had a moment of glory..."

The vulnerability revealed by failure can nurture empathy and communality.

We too often make our goals into parts of our identities, so that failure becomes an attack on who we are.

Training to failure isn't an admission of defeat - it's a strategy.

JK Rowling: "Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me...I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized and I was still alive. [Failure] gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations...Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned."

Chapter 8 - Memento Mori
Epicurus made the point, what has become known as the 'argument of symmetry.' Why do you fear the eternal oblivion of death, he wonders, if you don't look back with horror at the eternal oblivion before you were born.

The more you remain aware of life's finitude, the more you will cherish it, and the less likely you will be to fritter it away.

Living more meaningfully will reduce your anxiety about the possibility of future regret at not having lived meaningfully - which will, in turn, keep sapping death of its power to induce anxiety.

Epilogue - Negativity Capability
Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.

For the Stoics, the realization that we can often choose not to be distressed by events, even if we can't choose events themselves, is the foundation of tranquility.

Talk Like TED – Carmine Gallo

Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds– by Carmine Gallo
Date read: 3/5/17. Recommendation: 7/10.

Gallo dissects the most popular TED talks and discusses the nine elements they all have in common. Great resource if you're hoping to improve your public speaking, presentation, or storytelling skills. The most engaging speakers elicit a set of common themes grouped as emotional, novel, or memorable. If nothing else, these lessons will help you become a better communicator.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews. 

My notes:

The most popular TED presentations share nine common elements.

The most engaging presentations are:
-Emotional: They touch my heart.
-Novel: They teach me something new.
-Memorable: They present content in ways I'll never forget.

"And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become." -Steve Jobs

Part 1 - Emotional
"They key part of the TED format is that we have humans connecting to humans in a direct and almost vulnerable way. You're on stage naked, so to speak. The talks that work best are the ones where people can really sense that humanity. The emotions, dreams, imagination." -Chris Anderson

Dig deep to identify your unique and meaningful connection to your presentation topic.

You cannot inspire others unless you are inspired yourself. You stand a much greater chance of persuading and inspiring your listeners if you express an enthusiastic, passionate, and meaningful connection to your topic.

"In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement. In many ways, however, it is an emotional quality that separates those who master a field from the many who simply work at a job....Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive." -Robert Greene

Compelling communicators, like those TED presenters who attract the most views online, are masters in a certain topic because of the inevitable amount of devotion, time, and effort invested in their pursuit, which is primarily fueled by fervent passion.

If you want to help someone, shut up and listen.

Tell stories to reach people's hearts and minds.

Bryan Stevenson, the speaker who earned the longest standing ovation in TED history, spent 65 percent of his presentation telling stories. Brain scans reveal that stories stimulate and engage the human brain, helping the speaker connect with the audience and making it much more likely that the audience will agree with the speaker's point of view.

Tell a story that makes it easy for the audience to connect with you on a personal and emotional level.

"You have to get folks to trust you. If you start with something too esoteric and disconnected from the lives of everyday people, it's harder for people to engage." -Bryan Stevenson

Ethos is credibility - we tend to agree with people whom we respect for their achievements, title, experience, etc. (10%)
Logos is the means of persuasion through logic, data, and statistics (25%)
Pathos is the act of appealing to emotions (65%)

"We all love stories. We're born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning." -Andrew Stanton

Best TED presenters stick to one of three types of stories:
1) Personal stories that relate directly to the theme of the conversation of presentation
2) Stories about other people who have learned a lesson and the audience can relate to
3) Stories involving the success or failure of products or brands

Business professionals rarely tell personal stories, which is one reason why they make such an impact when they do.

In a business presentation, telling stories is the virtual equivalent of taking people on a field trip, helping them to experience the content at a much more profound level.

Practice relentlessly and internalize your content so that you can deliver the presentation as comfortably as having a conversation with a close friend.

The verbal equivalent of a highlighter is to raise or lower the volume of your voice, change the speed at which you deliver the words, and/or use short pauses to punch key words.

Pay attention to how you speak in everyday conversation and how it changes during your presentation. Most people slow down their rate of speed when they give a speed or a presentation, making their verbal delivery sound unnatural. Don't deliver a presentation. Have a conversation instead.

Here's a simple trick: When you record your presentation, walk out of the frame once in a while. I tell clients if they don't leave the camera frame several times during a five-minute presentation, they're too rigid.

Don't put hands in pockets, makes you look bored, uncommitted, and sometimes nervous.

Part 2 - Novel
Reveal information that's completely new to your audience, packaged differently, or offers a fresh and novel way to solve an old problem.

Learning is addictive because it's joyful. It's also necessary for human evolution.

Bombard your brain with new experiences. Building novel concepts into your presentation does require some creativity and a new way of looking at the world.

Sample topics from the most-viewed presentations on TED.com. Notice how each promises to teach you something new:
-Schools Kill Creativity
-How Great Leaders Inspire Action
-Your Elusive, Creative Genius
-The Surprising Science of Happiness
-The Power of Introverts
-8 Secrets of Success
-How to Live Before You Die

The Twitter headline works for two reason: 1) it's a great discipline, forcing you to identify and clarify the one key message you want your audience to remember and 2) it makes it easier for your audience to process the content.

Nearly every TED presentation contains data, statistics, or numbers to reinforce the theme of the talk.

The key to being a great spokesperson is also to craft a succinct message that conveys your big idea.

Remember what worked. Think back to anecdotes, stories, observations, or insights that have made you and your colleagues smile in the past. If they worked there and are appropriate to your presentation, weave them into your narrative and practice telling it.

Part 3 - Memorable
"And being aware is just remembering that you saw everything you've seen for the first time once, too." -Neil Pasricha

On authenticity: "It's just about being you and being cool with that. And I think when you're authentic, you end up following your heart, and you put yourself in places and situations and in conversations that you love and that you enjoy. You meet people that you like talking to. You go places you've dreamt about. And you end up following your heart and feeling very fulfilled." -Neil Pasricha

Break your presentation into three parts, each lasting 6 minutes. It makes it easier for you to remember/deliver. Makes it easy for everyone else to follow.

A message map is the visual display of your idea on one page. (page 198)
-Step 1: Twitter-friendly headline
-Step 2: Support the headline with three key messages
-Step 3: Reinforce the three messages with stories, statistics, and examples

I can't tell you how many times I've met leaders who are passionate, humorous, enthusiastic, and inspiring, only to discover that the minute they get onstage they become soulless, stiff boring, and humorless.

You cannot move people if they don't think you're real.

Present content to a friend or spouse before you have to present it to the intended audience. More likely to let some of your "real" self come out when delivering the information to someone you have a relationship with.

Letters from a Stoic – Seneca

Letters from a Stoic – by Seneca
Date read: 2/13/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

Introduction to Penguin Classics edition. Perhaps the most highly regarded/referenced work of Stoic philosophy along with Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Go straight to the source. It's a classic and one of the most important works you'll read. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews. 

my notes:

Introduction in Penguin Classics:
Supreme ideal is usually summarized in ancient philosophy as a combination of four qualities: wisdom (or moral insight), courage, self-control and justice (or upright dealing). It enables a man to be 'self-sufficient', immune to suffering, superior to the wounds and upsets of life.

Letter II:
You do not tear from place to place and unsettle yourself with one move after another. Restlessness of that sort is symptomatic of a sick mind. Nothing, to my way of thinking, it better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.

To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships.

A multitude of books only gets in one's way. So if you are unable to read all the books in your possession, you have enough when you have all the books you are able to read.

You ask what is the proper limit to a person's wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough.

Leter III:
Think for a long time whether or not you should admit a given person to your friendship. But when you have decided to do so, welcome him heart and soul, and speak as unreservedly with him as you would with yourself.

For a delight in bustling about is not industry - it is only the restless energy of a haunted mind.

Letter V:
Let our aim be a way of life not diametrically opposed to, but better than that of the mob. Otherwise we shall repel and alienate the very people whose reform we desire; we shall make them, moreover, reluctant to imitate us in anything for fear they may have to imitate us in everything.

People should admire our way of life but they should at the same time find it understandable.

Letter IX:
What difference does it make, after all, what your position in life is if you dislike it yourself?

Letter XII:
The man who looks for the morrow without worrying over it knows a peaceful independence and a happiness beyond all others.

Letter XV:
Without wisdom the mind is sick, and the body itself, however physically powerful, can only have the kind of strength that is found in person in a demented or delirious state. So this is the sort of healthiness you must make your principal concern. You must attend to the other sort as well, but see that it takes second place.

So continually remind yourself, Lucilius, of the many things you have achieved. When you look at all the people out in front of you, think of all the ones behind you.

Letter XVI:
No one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom...

[Philosophy] moulds and builds the personality, orders one's life, regulates one's conduct, shows one what one should do and what one should leave undone, sits at the helm and keeps one on the correct course as one is tossed about in perilous seas. Without it no one can lead a life free of fear or worry.

Epicurus: 'If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people's opinions you will never be rich.' Nature's wants are small, while those of opinion are limitless.

Letter XVIII:
Set aside now and then a number of days during which you will be content with the plainest of food, and very little of it, and with rough, course clothing, and will ask yourself, 'Is this what one used to dread?' It is in times of security that the spirit should be preparing itself to deal with difficult times.

If you want a man to keep his head when the crisis comes you must give him some training before it comes.

Security from care is not dependent on fortune - for even when she is angry she will always let us have what is enough for our needs.

For no one is worthy of a god unless he has paid no heed to riches. I am not, mind you, against your possessing them, but I want to ensure that you possess them without tremors; and this you will only achieve in one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing.

Letter XXVII:
Of this one thing make sure against your dying day - that your faults die before you do.

Letter XXVIII:
Though you cross the boundless ocean, whatever your destination you will be followed by your failings.

Socrates: "How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away."

You have to lay aside the load on your spirit. Until you do that, nowhere will satisfy you.

As it is, instead of traveling you are rambling and drifting, exchanging one place for another when the thing you are looking for, the good life, is available everywhere.

I do not agree with those who recommend a stormy life and plunge straight into the breakers, waging a spirited struggle against worldly obstacles every day of their lives. The wise man will put up with these things, not go out of his way to meet them; he will prefer a state of peace to a state of war.

Letter XLI:
No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own.

Suppose he has a beautiful home and a handsome collection of servants, a lot of land under cultivation and a lot of money out at interest; not one of these things can be said to be in him - they are just things around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly man's.

Letter LV:
Soft living imposes on us the penalty of debility.

The place one's in, though, doesn't make any contribution to peace of mind: it's the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself. I've seen for myself people sunk in gloom in cheerful and delightful country houses, and people in completely secluded surroundings who looked as if they were run off their feet.

Letter LXIII:
When one has lost a friend one's eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation.

Would you like to know what lies behind extravagant weeping and wailing? In our tears we are trying to find means of proving that we feel the loss. We are not being governed by our grief but parading it.

Even a person who has not deliberately put an end to his grief finds an end to it in the passing of time. And merely growing weary of sorrowing is quite shameful as a means of cutting sorrow in the case of an enlightened man. I should prefer to see you abandoning grief that it abandoning you.

Letter XLV:
What is death? Either a transition or an end. I am not afraid of coming to an end, this being the same as never having begun, nor the transition for I shall never be in confinement quite so cramped anywhere else as I am here.

Letter LXXVII:
No one is so ignorant as not to know that some day he must die. Nevertheless when death draws near he turns, wailing and trembling, looking for a way out. Wouldn't you think a man a prize fool if he burst into tears because he didn't live a thousand years ago? A man is as much a fool for shedding years because he isn't going to be alive a thousand years from now. There's no difference between the one and the other - you didn't exist and you won't exist - you've no concern with either period.

As it is with a play, so it is with life - what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is.

Letter LXXVIII:
A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.

What's the good of dragging up sufferings which are over, of being unhappy now just because you were then?

In the meantime cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune's habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do. Whatever you have been expecting for some time comes as less of a shock.

Letter LXXXIII:
So-called pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments...

Letter XC:
We were born into a world in which things were ready to our hands; it is we who have made everything difficult to come by through our own disdain for what is easily come by. Shelter and apparel and the means of warming body and food, all the things which nowadays entail tremendous trouble, were there for the taking, free to all, obtainable at trifling effort. With everything the limit corresponded to the need. It is we, and no one else, who have made those same things costly, spectacular and obtainable only by means of a large number of full-scale techniques..

Letter XCI:
We should be anticipating not merely all that commonly happens but all that is conceivably capable of happening, if we do not want to be overwhelmed and struck numb by rare events as if they were unprecedented ones...

One thing I know; all the works of mortal man lie under sentence of morality; we live among things that are destined to perish.

A setback has often cleared the way for greater prosperity. Many things have fallen only to rise to more exalted heights.

In the ashes all men are leveled. We're born unequal, we die equal.

Letter CIV:
What good does it do you to go overseas, to move from city to city? If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.

But travel won't make a better or saner man of you. For this we must spend time in study and in the writings of wise men, to learn the truths that have emerged from their researches, an carry on the search ourselves for the answers that have not yet been discovered.

Letter CV:
Envy you'll escape if you haven't obtruded yourself on other people's notice, if you haven't flaunted your possessions, if you've learnt to keep your satisfaction to yourself.

Besides, to be feared is to fear: no one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind himself.

Never to wrong others takes one a long way towards peace of mind. People who know no self-restraint lead stormy and disordered lives, passing their time in a state of fear commensurate with the injuries they do to others, never able to relax.

Letter CVII:
Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even, being withstood if they have been trained for in advance. Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings. We must see to it that nothing takes us by surprise. And since it is invariably unfamiliarity that makes a thing more formidable than it really is, this habit of continual reflection will ensure that no form of adversity finds you a complete beginner.

Letter CVIII:
He needs but little who desires little. He has his wish, whose wish can be to have what is enough.

Letter CXXII:
No need to do as the crowd does: to follow the common, well-worn path in life is a sordid way to behave.

Letter CXXIII:
Nothing need arouse one's irritation so long as one doesn't make it bigger than it is by getting irritated.

Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We've been using them not because we needed them but because we had them. Look at the number of things we buy because others have bought them or because they're in most people's houses. One of the causes of the troubles that beset us is the way our lives are guided by the example of others; instead of being set to rights by reason we're seduced by convention.

The Obstacle Is the Way – Ryan Holiday

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph – by Ryan Holiday
Date read: 1/30/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

One of the most accessible modern introductions to Stoic philosophy. Holiday examines the inevitable obstacles we all face in life, how to better frame them as opportunities to practice virtue, and how to harness them to create momentum of our own. He structures the book around the three interconnected disciplines required to overcome any obstacle: perception, action, and will. There's an incredible amount of knowledge packed into these 200 pages. No matter what challenges you face or where you're trying to go, it's a great resource for fine tuning your attitude, strategy, and mental toughness. Inspired by Marcus Aurelius, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My notes:

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." -Marcus Aurelius

Obstacles as an opportunity to practice some virtue: patience, courage, humility, resourcefulness, reason, justice, and creativity.

As it turns out, this is the one thing all great men and women of history have in common. Like oxygen to a fire, obstacles became fuel for the blaze that was their ambition.

Not "be positive" but learn to be ceaselessly creative and opportunistic. Not: This is not so bad. But: I can make this good.

Sangfroid: unflappable coolness under pressure.

Most people can't access this part of themselves, they are slaves to impulses and instincts they have never questioned.

Talent is not the most sought-after characteristic. Grace and poise are, because these two attributes precede the opportunity to deploy any other skill.

"Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself." -Publius Syrus

When people panic, they make mistakes. They override systems. They disregard procedures, ignore rules. They deviate from the plan. They become unresponsive and stop thinking clearly. They just react - not to what they need to react to, but to the survival hormones that are coursing through their veins.

This is the skill that must be cultivated - freedom from disturbance and perturbation - so you can focus your energy exclusively on solving problems, rather than reacting to them.

"Don't let the force of an impression when it first hit you knock you off your feet; just say to it: Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test." -Epictetus

In the writings of the Stoics, we see an exercise that might well be described as Contemptuous Expressions. The Stoics use contempt as an agent to lay things bare and to "strip away the legend that encrusts them."
     -Strip things of their glamour, meat is a dead animal, wine is old grapes -- Marcus Aurelius
     -Allows us to see things as they really are.

Objectivity means removing "you" - the subjective part - from the equation. Just think, what happens when we give others advice? Their problems are crystal clear to us, the solutions obvious.

Perspective is everything...When you can break apart something, or look at it from some new angle, it loses its power over you.

"In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices." -Epictetus

Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power. But every ounce of energy directed at things we can't actually influence is wasted - self-indulgent and self-destructive.

Remember that this moment is not your life, it's just a moment in your life. Focus on what is in front of you, right now. Ignore what it "represents" or it "means" or "why it happened to you."

"Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There's no other definition of it." -F. Scott Fitzgerald

Psychologists call it adversarial growth or post-traumatic growth. "That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger" is not a cliche but fact. The struggle against an obstacle inevitably propels the fighter to a new level of functioning. The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth.

We forget: In life, it doesn't matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you've been given. And the only way you'll do something spectacular is by using it all to your advantage.

The thing standing in your way isn't going anywhere. You're not going to outthink it or outcreate it with some world-changing epiphany. You've got to look at it...

It's okay to be discouraged. It's not okay to quit. To know you want to quit but to plant your feet and keep inching forward – that's persistence.

Our capacity to try, try, try is inextricably linked with our ability and tolerance to fail, fail, fail.

The one way to guarantee we don't benefit from failure - to ensure it is a bad thing - is to not learn from it.

Everything we do matters...Everything is a chance to do and be your best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires.

Think progress, not perfection.

"The Great Captain will take even the most hazardous indirect approach - if necessary over mountains, deserts or swamps with only a fraction of the forces, even cutting himself loose from his communications. Facing, in fact, every unfavorable condition rather than accept the risk of stalemate invited by direct approach." -B.H. Liddell Hart

You don't convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held opinions. You find common ground and work from there. Or you look for leverage to make them listen.

Sometimes you overcome obstacles not by attacking them but by withdrawing and letting them attack you. You can use the actions of others against themselves instead of acting yourself.

It means that very few obstacles are ever too big for us...Remember, a castle can be an intimidating, impenetrable fortress, or it can be turned into a prison when surrounded.

Adversity can harden you. Or it can loosen you up and make you better - if you let it.

In many battles, as in life, the two opposing forces will often reach a point of mutual exhaustion. It's the one who rises the next morning after a long day of fighting and rallies, instead of retreating - the one who says, I intend to attack and whip them right here and now - who will carry victory home...intelligently.

"Nothing happens to the wise man against his expectations." -Seneca

When the cause of our problem lies outside of us, we are better for accepting it and moving on. For ceasing to kick and fight against it, and coming to terms with it. The Stoics have a beautiful name for this attitude. They call it the Art of Acquiescence.

The hubris at the core of this notion that we can change everything is somewhat new.

Amor fati: a love of fate
Not: I'm okay with this.
Not: I think I feel good about this.
But: I feel great about it. Because if it happened, then it was meant to happen, and I am glad that it did when it did. I am meant to make the best of it.

"A man's job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able - always remembering the results will be infinitesimal - and to attend to his own soul." -Leroy Percy

Stop putting that dangerous "I" in front of events. I did this. I was so smart. I had that. I deserve better than this. No wonder you take losses personally, no wonder you feel so alone. You've inflated your own role and importance.

Death doesn't make life pointless, but rather purposeful.

Embracing the precariousness of our own existence can be exhilarating and empowering.

The philosopher and writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined a Stoic as someone who "transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation and desire into undertaking."