Do you agree with the Black way of seeing the world? Oh . . . wait a minute. There is not one "Black" way of seeing the world and this is one of my biggest problems with modern social justice/CRT rhetoric. This video illustrates the how misguided it is to try to shove people into ideological or political silos based upon immutable physical characteristics.
Chapter 9: Learn How to Do Millions of Little Things
OK! I’m back with more advice for a newborn baby. This is my ninth lesson on how to thrive in the complex world. Baby, as you have probably figured out, I’m giving you the advice that I wish I had learned earlier and easier. I’m spoon-feeding you, but not with baby food. I'm feeding you with lessons I learned at the school of hard knocks.
What should you be doing when you are very young? You would think that I would tell you to work hard to do some really big and important things, but I’m going to suggest the opposite: You should get busy learning lots and lots of little things. These countless little things will enable you to accomplish big things decades later.
In the context of natural selection, Richard Dawkins once used the metaphor the problem of scaling the extremely high sheer cliff of Mount Improbable. Here’s how this metaphor came to be. People are amazed at the human eye (as they should be—-see Chapter 7) but they erroneously conclude “It’s impossible that such an amazing thing could evolve! It would be like a human being jumping thousands of feet into the air in order to get to the top of a sheer cliff.” Dawkins then lays out the clear evidence that many extremely simple eyes were actually probable in early life forms. He then describes the steps by which very simple eyes could be improved incrementally, in thousands of ways over millions of generations. There is no need to leap thousands of feet to get to the top of the sheer front cliff of Mount Improbable. That’s because you can drive around to the back side of Mount Improbable where you will find a long inclined hiking path you can use to walk slowly up the hundreds of switchbacks to get to the same high point of the mountain. Thus, there are two different methods to get to the top, one of them impossible (leaping) and the other achievable with determination and time (hiking a longer path of switchbacks).
I’m 65 years old now and I’ve done some a few things that have impressed some other people. Every one of those difficult things took a large number of mundane-seeming and achievable skills and years or decades of time. I learned countless numbers of smallish achievable things that added up over the decades. Things like learning how to read in the first grade, or learning to play a C chord on a guitar, or learning how to use a computer mouse, or learning how a camera aperture works. My “secret weapon” is that I’m a scrapper—I don’t give up. I grind away on something until I figure it out or until I’m exhausted. I’ve learned many things by sheer grit and experimentation. After decades of doing this, I have accumulated a large took kit of skills that can be used for achieving complex things like being a lawyer or composing music or raising children or publishing a book of my digital art. My “secret” is that I have exploited “compounding” to my advantage.
Shane Parrish of Farnham Street notes that “Compounding” is a concept commonly used in the realm of finance. It refers to making interest on your interest, a phenomenon familiar to anyone trying to retire. Parrish notes that compounding is also a useful concept when applied to things outside of finance. In “The Mundanity of Excellence,” Daniel F. Chambliss makes the case that numerous low-level skills can be leveraged into extraordinary achievements. In fact, he reminds us that great talent can happen only when we stand on the shoulders of numerous sub-talents. Excellence is the icing on the cake of mundacity:
Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence. When a swimmer learns a proper flip turn in the freestyle races, she will swim the race a bit faster; then a streamlined push off from the wall, with the arms squeezed together over the head, and a little faster; then how to place the hands in the water so no air is cupped in them; then how to lift them over the water; then how to lift weights to properly build strength, and how to eat the right foods, and to wear the best suits for racing, and on and on. Each of those tasks seems small in itself, but each allows the athlete to swim a bit faster. And having learned and consistently practiced all of them together, and many more besides, the swimmer may compete in the Olympic Games. The winning of a gold medal is nothing more than the synthesis of a countless number of such little things—even if some of them are done unwittingly or by others, and thus called “luck.”
I completely agree with Shane Parrish and Daniel Chambliss. Anything impressive that I’ve done is the result of 1,000 tiny things I’ve worked on much earlier in my life.That has included numerous little failures as well as work-arounds. I did these things because I have always been curious, energetic and relentless. Frankly, I have never done anything impressive that didn't take more than a decade of work that was then aggregated.
But here is a warning: Compounding can run in the opposite direction too. Enormous failures start with little missteps. Here’s one that is based on a real life story with which I’m familiar: “Hey, my wife had surgery and she has some leftover opioid painkiller. What the hell, I’ll try one and see how I feel.” Fast-forward five years and that person has a long history of sliding into many bad habits. He lost his focus and his will to achieve. He also lost his self-made business, destroyed his relationship with his kids. His only driving passion became his quest to find new ways of getting high.
I’ll end on a high note: One of the biggest ways compounding benefits you is the many small things you do to improve your reputation. As the saying goes, a good reputation is hard to earn and easy to lose. After you’ve spent your entire life trying to be trustworthy, truthful and kind, you’ll find that your reputation opens new doors for you, over and over. It’s easy to forget, though that this “superpower” of a good reputation was something you assembled over decades through truth-telling, hard work and kindness. Similarly, good health is usually the result of hundreds of mundane-seeming habits and routines.
Again, my advice to you is to aim low. Do lots and lots of little things. The world is your playroom. Practice many low-level skills and master them. Decades later you will be able to aggregate these into what other people think of as a super power, even though you know better.
Chapter 8: How and Why to Choose Friends.
Hello again, newborn baby! This is our 8th conversation. I am your self-appointed mentor, telling you things that you’ll need to know in order to make some sense of all the crazy things you are going to see on Planet Earth. Equally true, I’m telling you about the things that I wish I had learned when I was very young.
Today we’re going to talk about friends, which seems like a rather friendly topic if there ever is such a topic. But I’m going to shoot straight about friendships and this straight talk is probably going to make me seem mean-spirited.
First of all, what is a friendship? A friendship is a partnership, a two-way street where the two friends invest time in each other’s lives and keep each other in their realm of concern. There are many flavors of friendship and they are all good and well as long as the friends are happy with each other. When choosing friends, you’ll want to consider the purpose of spending time with each other. Some people merely want a card-playing partner (and not much more). Others want to hang around supporting each other as they both raise children. Others want art or craft friends. Others want friends with whom they can go to movies, shows and sports events and chit chat about those events. Others want honest, probing and thoughtful conversation about the meaning of life. Some of us actively seek out friends who will give us the unvarnished truth (as they see it), challenging us in direct but kind ways, serving as a sounding board so we don't fall off the rails regarding our world views.
Friends are extremely important to each others' happiness, making it critical that we show patience and kindness to our friends. That said, for self-preservation, there must be limits to your loyalty, as I will discuss below.
Second, how does one make friends? For most people it’s mostly a matter of luck. You bump into other people in school or work and one way or the other you end up doing things together, thus “cementing” the “friendship.” You’ll hear that you should be loyal to your friends. You should be the one willing to stick with them thick and thin and if your friendship is a good one, you’ll be even willing to help your friend bury the body, so to speak. Even though this method sometimes helps to find others to hang around with, it’s not an efficient method and it often comes at a great cost. I’m going to suggest a completely different approach for making friends.
What if someone you loved (e.g., your sister) asked you to find some good friends for her? Would you really follow such a haphazard approach, or would you do your best to use a Machiavellian approach, doing some serious work to identify people with excellent habits and character (much as you would if you were looking for a romantic partner). Further, if one of your sister’s friends took a bad serious turn--they became wealth obsessed or proudly addicted to chemicals that changed them for the worse--would you tell your sister to be “loyal” and stick with that deteriorating person through thick and thin because “once a friend, always a friend”? I sincerely hope not.
I would offer these two basic rules regarding relationships: A) Don’t expect a person to change and B) don’t expect a person to not change. My point here is a simple one: people can become more and less compatible with each other over time but, sometimes friends fall horribly out of sync and the relationship becomes painful. Similarly, someone you wrote off in high school as a knucklehead might have proceeded to get an “A” in the School of Life,” which you noticed, with some shock, when you had a chance meeting 20 years after high school--they dramatically changed for the better. So always keep your eyes open for the ebb and flow of a relationship and never rule out redemption. As you know, I often quote Nietzsche. In the following passage he discusses what he calls “star friendship.”
Star friendship. We were friends and have become estranged. But that was right, and we do not want to hide and obscure it from ourselves as if we had to be ashamed of it. We are two ships, each of which has its own goal and course; we may cross and have a feast together, as we did--and then the good ships lay so quietly in one harbor and in one sun that it may have seemed as if they had already completed their course and had the same goal. But then the almighty force of our projects drove us apart once again, in two different seas and sunny zones, and maybe we will never meet again--or maybe we will, but will not recognize each other: the different seas and suns have changed us! That we had to become estranged is the law above us; through it we should come to have more respect for each other--and the thought of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous invisible curve and stellar orbit in which our different ways and goals may be included as small stretches--let us rise to this thought!
I would advise the following: A) carefully pick who will be in your friendship circle, B) constantly evaluate each other for “fit” as the years go by and, C) without apology (but usually with sadness) distance yourself from friends that are no longer working out. Loyalty is not (always) a virtue. Don’t believe the people who say you must, for ever and ever spend your unreplenishable 1,000 months of life with people who are no longer a good fit. Most important of all, in order to have good friends, you need to be a good friend and this will require an investment of your time and energy into the partnership of friendship. You'll need to listen as much as you talk. You'll need to show through your actions that you care about the relationship.
[More . . . ]
I enjoy reading the writings of Freddie deBoer, who describes himself as a "Marxist of an old-school variety." Here is an excerpt from his most recent Substack post: Title is "I want a political movement that is . . .
We would be concerned first and foremost with reality, and we would therefore privilege “is” statements over “ought to be” statements. My ideal movement would recognize that the obsession with the symbolic has become a road to nowhere for the left-of-center. Our relentless habit will be to say, what does this do for actually-existing poor people? What does this do for actually-existing Black people? What does this do for actually-existing women or gay or trans people? What does this policy, argument, or claim do in fact, for real human beings, in material terms? Put another way, if we got our way, could we see the effects of that with our own two eyes? I can see hungry Black kids getting food. I can’t see white liberals “holding space” for Black people. We must return to the real. It’s past time . . .An effective left movement would identify building a mass movement by appealing to the unconvinced as its most central, most essential goal. All strategies and messaging would be bent towards the goal of rational appeal to potential supporters. We would identify obscurantism, factionalism, purity signaling, and other behaviors that limit the potential numbers of the movement as counterproductive. We would limit the use of specialized vocabulary and other forms of in-group signaling. We would constantly consider how our practices and discourses actually grow or fail to grow the ranks of the movement.
We would not abandon principle in the name of popularity, but we would insist that principles that inherently exclude large swaths of the human population cannot be the basis for a successful movement. We would seek to welcome, not alienate, those not already convinced. We would utilize traditional democratic principles such as voting and representation for decision-making. We would recognize that all “flat” movement structures, leaderlessness, and other anti-hierarchical systems of decision-making have repeatedly failed as means of governance in past left-wing movements. We would affirm and defend the rights of minority voices and dissent within the decision-making process. We would recognize the basic, beautiful radicalism of voting and democracy and defend them against the tyranny of structurelessness . . .
We would recognize that left movements have traditionally suffered terribly from assaults on individual rights, such as in anti-Communist purges, redbaiting, and anti-left eliminationism. We would acknowledge that the illiberalism and rights-trampling of several so-called Communist governments in the 20th century prompted an enormous backlash to left anti-capitalism. We would understand that a robust, functional left social movement would be strong enough to live alongside those who disagree with it, and would have no need of silencing them. We would move confidently in the knowledge that our core beliefs will eventually win because they are correct, and so feel no particular desire to silence those who dissent from those beliefs.
Chapter 3: The Most Important Fork in the Road: Approach versus Avoidance
Is the world something to be feared or something to be enjoyed? That is the most important decision you will need to make, day after day. Does the world seem like a scary haunted house or like a big playroom? The stance you take, avoidance versus approach, will have a profound effect, not only on what you accomplish, but on who you turn out to be.
I'll admit that Planet Earth is filled with many dangers, including spiders and snakes, but also automobiles and addictions to dangerous drugs. There are innumerable ways to ruin or lose a life and we are wired to see many of these dangers much more saliently than we see the safe and happy things. Daniel Kahneman teased out this deep instinct with his Prospect Theory. We see risks twice as big as we see benefits.
We have been wired to assume the worst. A snapped twig in the darkness of the forest might be a puppy, but the body’s operating assumption is to run because the joy of finding a puppy whereas the danger of a grizzly bear can kill you. We are wired to run at all of Life’s snapped twigs and metaphorical snapped twigs. Those twigs are everywhere, leading many people to curl up in a fetal position, afraid to leave their houses.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt characterizes this choice of Approach versus Avoidance as “the fundamental question of life.” This attitude affects almost everything we do, including how we approach education.
As soon as life began moving, as soon as you get little tails on bacteria, you have to have some mechanism for deciding this way or that? Approach or avoid? And all of the rest of the billion years of brain evolution is just commentary on that question.And so the human brain has these gigantic tracts of neurons on the front left cortex, specialized for approach. And then a frontal cortex specialized for avoid. And so all sorts of things go with this. So when we’re in explorer mode, some features of it are, we’re more, we’re curious. We take risks. You might feel like a kid in a candy shop with all these different things to explore. You think for yourself. And the model of a student in this mindset would be whoever grows the most by graduation, or whoever learns the most by graduation wins. If that’s your attitude, boy, are you going to profit from being in college for four years.
Conversely, if you spent most of your college years with your front, right cortex activated, because you’re told everyone’s against you, everyone hates you, you’ll never get ahead. It’s always been this way. Then it always will be this way. If that’s what you believe, you’re in defend mode, threat mode, and then you don’t trust people. Your goal is not to be curious. It’s to be safe. You’re afraid of things. And you think about books in terms of certain speakers in terms of danger versus safety. You see threats everywhere and you will cling to your team. And your motto is: If we defeat them, then we win. And that’s the incoherence that has been with us since 2015. We had an influx of students who were playing a very different game where everything was danger and conflict. And no, that’s not what a university [is]. You’ve misunderstood what we’re about and why you’re here. And so it’s been a tragic waste.
So what is your decision this moment and every other moment yet to come? Are you going to be an explorer, seeking out new worlds with uncertainty and risk? Or are you going to obsessively try to be “safe,” meaning that you will hide away and tremble as life passes you by?
Explorers often fail, they know it and they still explore. They know that failure usually doesn’t hurt you or kill you. They know that failure is a teaching tool and a way to build strong character. Long before Carol Dweck wrote about “growth mindsets,” the famous explorers felt it in their bones. They knew that human animals are antifragile, even though they didn’t know that word: they knew that they would thrive in the world because it is filled with stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. They understood Nietzsche’s point that “what doesn’t destroy you often makes you stronger.” They fe;t the wisdom of the Stoics in their bones: “The Obstacle is the way.” They would agree with Woody Allen’s observation that showing up is 80 percent of life.
There is one thing that does makes Explorers tremble: The thought that after they die, someone would carve this epitaph on their tombstone: “Here lies _____ ______ , who was afraid to leave the house.”
But what if you are afraid? What if you worry that you will get laughed at or humiliated, or criticized or called a name, much less that you might get hurt or even die? Heroes feel all of these things. There is nothing incompatible about being afraid and simultaneously being a hero. Heroes and explorers make themselves move forward even when they are scared. One of my favorite illustrations of this was noted by Nietzsche:
Sometimes during a battle he could not help trembling. Then he talked to his body as one talks to a servant. He said to it: “You tremble, carcass; but if you knew where I am taking you right now, you would tremble a lot more.”Nietzsche cited (in The Gay Science, Intro Book V) this quote as an illustration of his own conception of fearlessness (attributed to Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne (1611-75) a great French general).
So go hither and explore the world! Try new things. Plan to get knocked down, criticized and ridiculed. And then get up again and again. Channel Cool Hand Luke. Never ever give up.