Alexandersmap

    Category: Learning

    • Striving for Prévoyance

      “C’est une prévoyance très nécessaire de sentir qu’on ne peut tout prévoir.”
      (“It is a very necessary forethought to feel that you cannot foresee everything.”)
      – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

      Prévoyance. The word tantalizes me, capturing my imagination, tauntingly just out of reach. It’s a French word, essentially translating basically to “foreseeability”. Prévoyance is powerful when applied to the markets, or business, social trends or simply whether to bring an umbrella with you on your walk. It also helps greatly when managing our own lives. I heard a richer and more profound definition from David Hackett Fischer when describing this trait in Samuel Champlain. He defined prévoyance as “the power of a prepared mind to act upon chance events in a world of deep uncertainty.” My French hasn’t reached that level of nuance just yet (and never will without immersion), so I’m grateful when people point out the magic sprinkled in such words.

      The problem with learning is in learning what you don’t know, or levels that you haven’t yet reached in life. But within that inherent underlying frustration lies growth and progression towards a higher self. And that’s where I find myself: decades into life and scrambling over jumbled bits of acquired knowledge in a climb to wisdom and higher truth. The promised land that I’ll never quite reach, but a step closer than I was yesterday or the day before. Sisyphus has nothing on me.

      “It was better to be in the right place than to be smart and work hard. It was best to be cunning and focus on results rather than inputs. Acting on a few key insights produced the goods. Being intelligent and hard working did not.” – Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle

      In this life I find myself climbing a succession of mountains, looking around with a sigh, and descending back down to climb yet another (refer to yesterday’s post). Perhaps with a bit more prévoyance I might have climbed fewer mountains, and chosen the right one much earlier in life. But such is life: we don’t know what we don’t know until we gain experience or acquire and leverage knowledge from others who have had the experience.

      “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

      That distinction between greatness and meanness lies in which mountains we climb, and how soon we turn back down the path to ascend a different mountain than the one we’re climbing. And that leads back to foreseeability, to prévoyance, and acting upon chance events in a world of deep uncertainty. And so I stuff the brain with as many bits of knowledge from as many perspectives as I can consume, for knowledge, well-used, is the key to prévoyance. This blog, in many ways, is the public-facing library of that accumulated knowledge (such that it is), and the breadcrumbs on the path of where I’ve been recently. And in the 370,000 thousand published words, perhaps it telegraphs where I’m going too.

    • Choosing the Path

      “A lot of people don’t want to pick up the new skills that are necessary, or they don’t want to, for example, physically move, or they don’t want to disappoint the people in the relationships that they already have to make room for new relationships.

      So everybody wants to start where they are. Nobody wants to go back down the mountain to find the path going to the top. Everybody wants to stay on the path that they’re on, maybe make a few tweaks and get to the top. Or like Charlie Munger jokes; ‘You know people always ask me how do I get to be rich like you except quicker. I don’t want to be the old rich guy, I want to be the young rich guy.’

      So I think these are the hard parts. The hard parts aren’t the learning it’s the unlearning. The hard part isn’t the climbing up the mountain its the going back down to the bottom of the mountain and starting over. Its the beginner’s mind that every great artist or every great business person has, which is you have to be willing to start from scratch. You have to be willing to hit reset and go back to zero. Because you have to realize is that what you already know and what you are already doing is actually an impediment to your full potential. And most people just don’t want to acknowledge that.” – Naval Ravikant, on The Tim Ferriss Show Episode #473

      That’s a long quote, but I found it compelling enough to include it in its entirety. Naval has a way of waking you up to yourself. He’s a deep thinker who demands deep thinking from you as well. And he reminds you that you ought to demand it of yourself.

      Sometimes you climb to a certain rise in your career, your relationship or with some other pursuit you’re deeply invested in, you look around and realize that the path you’re on isn’t going to the top of the mountain you were meant to climb. That’s happened to me a few times in my life. It will surely again at some point in the future should I stick around long enough. The question is whether you make the decision to go back and start all over again. Can you teach an old dog a new trick?

      The obvious example of this is in my inner circle is the crew of Fayaway climbing off the mountain in their individual careers and going back to zero (income) with a three year sabbatical to see the world. And with the pandemic they’ve descended back down off of this mountain that they just started climbing and gone back to jobs to reset yet again. I admire their willingness to keep at it, and they challenge and inspire me to climb other mountains myself.

      So the question is, are you climbing, descending or stuck in place? What you’re already doing is an impediment to reaching your full potential. Staying put is the easy part. The hard part is turning back down the mountain and starting all over again. So where are you going anyway?

    • Reading is Autobiographical

      “The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well.”

      It happens this way, that I’ll pick up some random quote such as the one above, plucked from a James Clear newsletter, and immediately I feel compelled to hunt down the source. In this case Hugh Walpole’s Reading: An Essay. Short enough to devour in a few quick bites, I blew through his essay in no time at all. I suppose it was inevitable, I’ve heard about this short essay for years, but never got around to it… until I read the quote above.

      Written in 1929, the essay references “The War” frequently, and I shudder to know what he didn’t know about the world to come over the next 12 years. There would soon be another war. Walpole would pass away in 1941, well before the outcome was certain. A discretely gay man in a time when discretion was required, he never had children and turned his energy into a prolific writing career. Reading: An Essay is a love letter to his favorite pastime, and I found myself plucking quote-after-quote from it. I’m sure there are plenty I missed, and perhaps I’ll read it again sometime soon. But who wants to get everything out of an essay on the first go-around anyway? With reading, Walpole is a kindred spirit from a hundred years ago. He capitalizes “Reading” as if it were a person or a sacred subject, because of course it was to him. And in his reverence for the topic, the essay felt like a quiet conversation with a friend. So here are a few gems from this short essay:

      “I believe, with the pleasures of Reading it can be nothing if it is not autobiographical, for the only certain thing about Reading is that it is personal first, personal second, and personal all the time, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divina Comedia may be the twin dominating peaks of a glorious range, but they are nothing to you whatsoever if you happen to be looking the other way.” – Hugh Walpole, Reading: An Essay

      “For the rest of my days there should be always at my hand a land of escape and enchantment.”

      “Reading must be a personal adventure or the salt goes out of it.”

      “Libraries should be penetrated with the love of books, so that when you enter a room where the books are the air is warm with a kind of delicious humanity, and the books have been always so affectionately treated that, like the right kind of dog, they know no fear and yet have their fitting dignity.”

      “I believe that circumstances have altered very little, and that a novel to be absorbing has to have precisely the two ingredients that it had a hundred years ago, a narrative gift (and it doesn’t matter whether the narrative is about a tea party or a murder trial) and the creation of living characters.”

      “There is a kind of luxury in reading which is perhaps the best thing in the world; it is to be captured only, I think, through the old books, books that you know so well that they step out and meet you, take you by the arm and whisper in your ear: ‘Now lie back and talk to us, and then we will in turn tell you a thing or two. There’s no need to be clever this evening, we don’t want you to shine, we’ll have an hour or two together so pleasant that you’ll scarcely know we’re here.’”

      All of this talk of libraries and Reading makes me want to immerse myself in a good book. The house is still quiet, the sun hasn’t risen yet on this cold morning, and there’s time for another mug of coffee and a few chapters before the frenzied swirl of activity begins. If you’ll excuse me…

    • Vif d’Esprit et de Corps

      To be quick in mind and body – vif d’esprit et de corps – that is the goal. In this year of years I’ve seen many recede into dark places, or spritzed with wine or spirits or awash in binge-watching Netflix, or worst of all following the every move of the orange narcissist. Or maybe all of the above. I find myself sliding into these darker places, la détresse, when I’m too immersed in Twitter or Facebook. So I took a 30 day hiatus from Facebook beginning Sunday and just deleted Twitter for the next five days to force a reset of the brain. I’m doing the same five days off without alcohol, just to show it who’s boss.

      Where are you most alive? Doing what? To be quick-witted and vibrant requires work, but the work doesn’t have to be tedious or painful. It just requires consistency of effort. Who makes you feel most alive? Why aren’t you spending more time with them being so? What gets you invited to the dance? Raising your own game, of course. Becoming more. Doing more. Seeing more. Learning more. Not for water cooler talk (virtualized for the foreseeable future), but for a hand up on the climb. I view the next 20 years as the climb of my lifetime, and I’d better be mentally and physically fit enough to squeeze as much of the zest out of the experience as possible. And after the next 20? Well, I’ll worry about that when I get there, but it will have to start with a strong base.

      Ultimately, it becomes a matter of how do you live with yourself? What makes you interesting enough to hang around this being for any amount of time? What is the next act? Immersion in a French or Portuguese-speaking culture? Knocking off peaks and waterfalls and old castles? Chasing dark skies? Visiting every fascinating country on the list? Sailing across the pond? Building (or building on) lifetime friendships with choice adults, children, grandchildren (should they come) and dogs? Finally finishing those dusty classics taking up space on the bookshelf? There’s time for all of these things, and yet no time to lose. And no time to waste on the stuff of little consequence.

      To be quick in mind and body, vif d’esprit et de corps, begins with this next step. And the one after that. Let the adventure begin.

    • Choosing the Mindset

      “Your mindset is the filter through which you see the world. It determines how you spend your time, what decisions you make, and where you invest your resources.

      There’s an old saying in business that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

      If you want to be fit, hang out with friends who exercise.

      If you want to think big and aspire to change the world, hang out with people who have Moonshots and a massively transformative purpose (MTP)….

      As an entrepreneur, answering these questions is a critical part of your journey to be successful during this era of exponential change.

      The next step on that journey is choosing the mindset(s) that works best for you.”
      – Peter Diamandis       (from his Twitter thread)

      I found myself lost in PowerPoint for the last two days, creating a presentation well into the evening for a meeting on Monday afternoon. You might think being lost in PowerPoint is a bad thing, and we’ve all suffered through plenty of really bad PowerPoint presentations, compounded by webinars that eliminate the human-to-human interaction that makes them more engaging. But in this case, I was taking a large topic and boiling it down into concise slides. And the time flew by as I researched crime data and regulatory requirements and other such things that make a slide deck come alive. It occurred to me that I actually loved the creative aspect of creating slide decks. And then it occurred to me that it isn’t using the Microsoft product that I love, it’s finding creative ways to tell the story that I love.

      How to best leverage that creative energy remains (always) the question. And I think about Moonshots and massively transformative purpose in the way that Diamandis suggests, and find myself challenged to perform at a higher level still. Blogging every day seems to be a good direction, but I’m not seeing it as the community of writers I thought it would be. I suppose it was never going to be that. Blogging may not be a Nitya Puja, but it is a daily step on the journey that pushes aside the accumulated clutter of life for a time. Writing becomes a meditation of sorts, and brings you closer to the truth… so maybe, in a sense, it is a Nitya Puja after all.

      Jim Rohn said, and Diamandis references in the quote above, that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. In a pandemic that generally means being inside your bubble of family and a few close associates. Every other relationship and engagement with others seems to be remote: Zoom, Facebook, InstaGram, Twitter, TikTok and all the rest. Are those people raising your average or dragging you down? Increasingly it feels like the latter. Watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix and see how manipulative the world of social media is, and ask whether it should be a significant part of your life (Netflix has mastered manipulative distraction itself). And yet I pulled the Diamandis quote from Twitter, so there’s value in social media platforms. But little value in distraction.

      All that noise is clogging the mindset filter, and I find myself wanting to cut the cord once more. When you start checking how many likes your last post had or figuring out how many views you got on your last blog post it can drag you into the depths of distraction. How do you get anything meaningful done if you’re always distracted? And getting things done seems to be the real purpose. Not meaningless things, but the purposeful things that make you a better human. To contribute more. To be more. To reach your potential in this maze we call life. And it begins with your mindset.

    • A Moment With Harold Evans

      “I appreciate engineers, I wrote a book about their achievements, but I deprecate what they and other techies do to English words. Hey, these nouns and verbs aren’t bits of silicon you can dope with chemicals (boron, phosphorus, and arsenic), drop into a kiln at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and slice and dice. Words breathe. They need TLC—you know,”
      ― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

      When the world seems to be looking too far inward, when everyone around you seems to be spun up into things that shouldn’t matter, when the conversation turns towards the latest scandal in Hollywood or Washington or Buckingham Palace… seek other voices. Because the only way you’ll grow is to rise up towards it. The larger conversations in the world are happening without you until you join the adult table. When you get to the adult table, by all means be ready to join the conversation.

      Sir Harold Evans passed away last week at the age of 92. In a wild case of six degrees of separation I once had Thanksgiving dinner with Harold Evans and his wife Tina Brown, putting me literally at the adult table with two of the most influential and brilliant people in the publishing industry. I was a college student who happened to be in the right place at the right time – they lived next door to the place we were for the long weekend and we invited them over. Simple. The parents were up to the conversation at hand, I wasn’t quite up to the task – a college kid who still thought he knew everything and not bothering to do the work needed to get closer to there. Harold Evans asked me a question about which candidate in the Republican Primary I liked, and without any thought to the matter I blurted out “Bob Dole” without explanation. It seemed like a safe answer at the time. He looked at me patiently and diverted to other topics with someone else, ending our conversation instead of trying to draw any logic out of my answer. He and I both knew I’d punted. I always regretted not being better prepared for a conversation like that.

      “His parents had taught him to make the most of himself, so he had. Though he kept a certain working-class deference and friendliness, did not shout, was “Harry” to everyone and would quite kindly tell reporters their copy was hopeless, he had taken on almost every part of the establishment and made it quake.” – Harold Evans’ Obituary, The Economist

      Reading about Evans’ life, I was struck by how hard he had worked to raise himself up and to demand the best from himself and others. I remember he was a voracious reader, and would often devour several books on the drive from New York City out to Quogue, New York. As the editor of Random House he needed to read quickly because he had an endless stream of books coming at him. I would try speed-reading a few times over the years attempting to get as much from it as people like Evans did. But I’ve found that speed-reading doesn’t work for me. I like to linger on words and sentences a bit too much. If I were to have that one conversation with him again I might ask how he approached reading. I suspect he did it two ways, for work and for pleasure, and the speed varied based on which it was. It would have been a better conversation than the Republican Primary of 1987-1988.

      “Running a newspaper gave him “a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil”. – Harold Evans’ Obituary, The Economist

      Harold Evans was fired from The Times by Rupert Murdoch, setting up his move to New York and his rise to the top of the publishing industry. Had he not been fired I would never have met him. He used it as fuel to rise up even higher, and it was surely a gift not having to cater to the whims and biases of Murdoch. Attacking the devil was a purpose, and I wondered sometimes what he thought of the nastiness of present-day politics. But there it was, an interview from 2017 where he called Boris ‘buoyantly reckless’, Trump dangerous and May ‘terrifically smart’. I believe he was on point with all three. No surprise for a man who did the work necessary to find the truth of the matter with the most evasive of characters. Thinking back, I was no match for him at the time. But he helped inspire me to try harder, as I suspect he did with many others over the years. I wish I’d had another conversation with the man, I was more prepared for the next one.

    • Every Day A New Fancy

      “We are carried along by our thoughts, “now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm … every day a new fancy, and our humors shift with the shifts in the weather.” It is no wonder that the mind is like this, since even the apparently solid physical world exists in endless slow turmoil.“ – Sarah Bakewell, quoting Montaigne, who was quoting Heraclitus

      I’ve had the Montagnie’s Essays for some time now, but keep pushing it aside for other reading material. So when Bakewell’s book How To Live or A Life Of Montaigne was recommended by an author I follow closely I decided to dive in. While also reading the excellent Erik Larson book The Splendid And The Vile and Tristan Gooley’s How To Read Water and a business book recommended by the company President. So five books in various stages of completion, and a desire to complete them all. This happens now and then: every day a new fancy. I’m treating the business book like a homework assignment and read it for an hour then put it down for the day. But what of the others? You can’t read everything at once.

      The answer is you put aside the books that aren’t capturing your imagination at the moment. Get out and live, return and see where the mind settles. At the moment I’m settled on The Battle of Britain with Larson’s book. There’s only so much time for reading, just as there’s only so much time for anything else meaningful. We prioritize and complete what we can in this tumultuous world, and accept the day as it is when it ends.

      Being carried along by our thoughts is a very human condition. We all have the tendency to get distracted by the buzz around us, which has grown exponentially since Montaigne’s time. We do a disservice to ourselves having so much to consume, for we can’t possibly consume it all. Instead I’m trying to raise the bar. Consume, but make it nutrient-rich consumption. What are you getting out of this book? is as fair a question to ask as What are you getting following this person’s Twitter account? The price you pay to read it is time you’ll never get back and attention you could have spent on something else. So by all means make it worthwhile.

      In all the madness that is 2020 I forgot that this was a Leap Year. There are 366 days in 2020 – as if we needed another day added to this crazy year. Looking back on the last 250 days that have passed, I’ve managed to read 13 books so far, fewer than anticipated but overall a higher level of reading. I’m barely skating by on learning French and Portuguese, doing just enough to keep the streak alive. And of course I’ve recommitted to hiking and local travel. 2020 will go down as the most unusual year in my lifetime, but it won’t be a lost cause.

      “If you understand everything you consume, you’re probably going to be the same person 6 months from now.” – George Mack

      So there’s the challenge: stretch your limitations and grow. To turn Mack’s quote and look back six months ago when this pandemic really started locking things down, I can say I’ve accomplished a lot in spite of the pandemic (or because?). The time hasn’t been lost at all: filled with learning and family time and local travel I might have otherwise put aside in favor of the faraway. And so to turn that quote back around as a challenge to myself and look out six months from now, what will I have accomplished? When you ask this question of yourself and take it seriously it stills the tumult of the mind and lends focus to the march we’re on. Sure the stack of distractions remain, but the path becomes more defined. A tumultuous river and a still river both arrive at the same sea eventually. Which has the better journey?

    • The Light of Intellect

      “A man who lives an intellectual life is like a man who carries a lantern in front of him to light his way. Such a person will never come to a dark place, because the light of his intellect moves before him.“ – Leo Tolstoy

      I suppose I haven’t reached the intellectual level just yet, as I still stumble into dark places now and then. But on the whole the pursuit of an intellectual life, combined with a pursuit of the active outdoor life, and the family life have kept me above the darkest valleys I know some are struggling in. Feel overwhelmed at times? Tap into the Great Conversation and see what those who came before you thought and did with their own lives. We have it pretty good by comparison. But only if we fight for it.

      Leo Tolstoy was influenced by Henry David Thoreau (and each was an interesting character beyond his writing). He in turn strongly influenced the nonviolent direction that Mahatma Gandhi would take in his own life, and there was a handoff of sorts when the two corresponded for the last year of Tolstoy’s life when he offered insight and direction to Gandhi. Thoreau and Tolstoy and Gandhi in turn influenced Martin Luther King, Jr., who incorporated their wisdom into his own philosophy and referenced them often in his speeches. An intellectual life lights the way for more than just the original carrier of the lantern.

      A daily blog is the slow rising of the lantern. An attempt to light the way for yourself and perhaps for a few others now or someday. A way to balance the stream of consciousness and sound bite world we live in with deeper thought and contemplation. And a catalyst for probing deeper into the world – to travel more, to get outside more, to read more, to learn more, and to write better. The intellectual life is the life of pursuit. Its not a yawn-fest of casual reading in the study but a pursuit of understanding, both the self and the world. It’s a call to action. A call I’ve heard and pursue every day I wake up, which (thankfully) includes this one.

    • Discovering The Photographer’s Ephemeris

      Every now and then I discover something that makes my heart flutter a bit in excitement. There is a flutter happening now that goes beyond the first cup of coffee. For I’ve discovered an app called The Photographer’s Ephemeris. And I wonder where has my mind been all these years that I’d completely miss out on something so incredibly useful for those of us who chase the light.

      Followers of this blog know of my relationship with the early morning light – that magical time between nautical start and sunrise known as civil start. On the flip side of the day, this magical time is known as civil end (sounds a lot like 2020). For years I’ve known the wonder in this time, but I didn’t put a name on it. The combined more-than-a-passing recreational interests in astronomy and photography led me to learn more about the three phases of light in the dawn and at twilight. The Photographer’s Ephemeris handily charts out these phases on a timeline at the bottom of the app. But where it becomes really exciting is with the lines indicating where the sunrise will be and where it is now. It also offers a line showing where the moon will rise. And of course you get the same effect on the western side of the satellite image showing where the sunset will be, where it is now and where the moon will set.

      The word ephemeris is derived from ephemeral and the Greek ephēmero, or something that last for a short time. Each phase of the dawn or twilight is brief and fleeting, just as life itself is. An ephemeris is a method of tracking and predicting this ephemeral information that pivots above us. Making sense of the information falls on us. An ephemeris is usually associated with astrology and the position of the planets at the moment you were born. Or with astronomy and knowing the position of the stars now. Its handy information if you want to know where Mars and the moon are in relation to each other (dancing together last night), or if you believe in such things, why you don’t get along with your coworker.

      Ultimately, information offers a measure of predictability and understanding in our lives. I had a general understanding of where the sun might rise or set, and likewise a general idea of where the moon might be on a given night. But there’s something powerful about having the information readily available on a phone app. A thrill of expectation, but also a measure of control about where you might position yourself for that epic sunset or moonrise picture. It also saves me from looking out the window on those mornings by the bay when simply looking at the time of nautical start the night before would give me all the information I needed beforehand.

      I’m sure professional photographers have known about this app for years, but its new to me and perhaps to you too. I see The Photographer’s Ephemeris quickly rising to the top of my most-used apps. For it answers many of the celestial questions I geek out about in one handy place. And isn’t that the point of an app anyway?

    • Creating the Moon

      “The moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space. And remember that if the moon was formed in this fashion, the event may have had much to do with shaping the ocean basins and the continents as we know them.

      There were tides in the new earth, long before there was an ocean. In response to the pull of the sun the molten liquids of the earth’s whole surface rose in tides that rolled unhindered around the globe and only gradually slackened and diminished as the earthly shell cooled, congealed, and hardened. Those who believe that the moon is a child of Earth say that during an early stage of the earth’s development something happened that caused this rolling, viscid tide to gather speed and momentum and to rise to unimaginable heights.

      Physicists have calculated that, after 500 years of such monstrous, steadily increasing tides, those on the side toward the sun became too high for stability, and a great wave was torn away and hurled into space. But immediately, of course, the newly created satellite became subject to physical laws that sent it spinning in an orbit of its own about the earth. This is what we call the moon.

      There is to this day a great scar on the surface of the globe. This scar or depression holds the Pacific Ocean.” – Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

      Rachel Carson published The Sea Around Us 69 years ago, and it was a runaway best-seller at the time. I’ve known Carson as the author of Silent Spring, but was ignorant of this book that launched her into fame. As the name suggests, the book explores the sea and is filled with magically breathless wonder. The excerpt above filled me with awe and set the stage to position this book at the top of the stack. For who doesn’t look at the moon and wonder how it got there? And this theory of a massive wave of molten liquid rising up and ripping from the earth to form the moon, and the great scar of the Pacific basin makes as much sense to me as any other.

      Science is a funny thing. I ran away from science in school because the teachers were dispassionate bores. But when I read a passage that delivers a rightful sense of awe to the story, well, it becomes captivating. If the politicization of the pandemic and mask-wearing has demonstrated anything, its that the world needs more captivating story-tellers in science. Carson was a catalyst for a better understanding of our oceans and the environment with a page-turning writing style that betrayed her own wonder at the subject matter. Were her writing style technical and dry she never would have made the impact that she did, and the world may never have realized the threat of nuclear waste dumped into the ocean or of DDT on the food chain we are very much a part of. If she were alive today I expect she’d have a lot to say about plastic and climate change.

      Writing isn’t nearly as epic as creating a moon, but it can feel that way sometimes to the writer. I’m plugging away at the writing, both here and elsewhere, and feel that the words and characters are my own rolling, viscid tide moving unchecked through my mind. At some point maybe that momentum will spawn something awe-worthy. And that’s the challenge isn’t it? To produce something compelling and timeless. Watching the waxing crescent moon peaking through the forest last night as it dropped into the western sky was both an inspiration and a challenge to get it right. I imagine Rachel Carson looked up at the moon in a similar way, and she rose to that challenge. So why not us?