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Your bowl of spaghetti
In Truth, Hector Macdonald writes, “A schoolteacher of mine once compared history to a bowl of spaghetti. There are many strands, all mixed up together, he said. Historians have to select a strand and pull it free from the rest to paint a coherent picture of the past. I still think it’s a great metaphor.…
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Charlie Munger, on low expectations
The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results good and bad as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism. Charlie Munger, via Morgan Housel
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Create momentum
50 Cent on his recent Final Lap Tour: I was gonna do four dates internationally, and Live Nation didn’t want to do the four days because they were like, “It’s gonna be COVID, you’re not going to get through the dates,” or whatever. I ended up financing the dates. I paid for the arenas, and…
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Paul Graham, on raising ambition
Economist and author Tyler Cowen recently spoke to Y Combinator founder Paul Graham. There’s a particular section of their conversation that caught my interest, which was about raising other people’s ambitions. Cowen had previously written a blog post on the topic, concluding, “This is in fact one of the most valuable things you can do…
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Hiring VIPs
Coinbase recently launched a new program to work together with people with extraordinary ability to effectively develop a role within the company. It’s nice to see a formal process for it, especially as there’s evidence that this has generally happened less formally. For example, when professional esports athlete KyeongHyun ‘SeleCT’ Ryoo was looking for an…
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Define yourself outside your life’s task
For the better part of a decade, I wanted to be a writer. It was what Robert Greene would have called my life’s task; any minute spent on anything else seemed to be a waste of my time. I made little bits of momentum, spurting and sputtering while exploring businesses that would help pay the…
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Same word, different meaning
A curious thing I learned today, via the marginalia (delightful, as always), in The Shared Language of Props: False cognates are words that look similar but have different meanings; heteronyms are words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently. Even expanding beyond the technical environment, I couldn’t agree more; words are incredibly contextual,…
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This was a really cool talk at Config
There are many others I mean to highlight; this is the one for today.
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Stick to the whim
In the early 2010s, after watching the film Pariah, fashion designer and lawyer Busayo Olupona felt an inner call to connect with actor Adepero Oduye and introduce her eponymous emerging fashion line, Busayo. Perhaps, Olupona thought, there might be an opportunity to style Oduye for a future work. The two of them connected on Facebook,…