A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (The Carls, #2)

by Hank Green

lot of the reason we look to friends is because they’re a source of meaning. If you’re getting meaning in other ways, it’s easy to let your friendships wither. That’s one reason success can be isolating.

I heard that song and I realized that, well, not everyone is ambitious enough to want to be the one making the thing happen, but everyone, I think, to some extent wants to be in the room where it happens. They might not want to write their favorite book, or paint their favorite painting, or vote the bill into law, but everyone wants to be in the room. We want to witness it. We want to feel like we are part of these things that, like, really matter.

We all want to be in the room where it happens, we want to be part of the things that matter to us, but no two people have the exact same collection of things that matter.

Because when we feel like none of the rooms we are in matter, that’s when we’re really lost.

hate-watched people with massive audiences and terrible ideas that were nonetheless resonating with people, and I watched the smart ones who had all my same biases.

You watch four different videos, trying to keep all of them in your head at once, and then out flops an idea that looks and feels fresh and new. When I knew I was going to have to say something useful soon, I watched a LOT of videos.

My enemy wasn’t the people; it was the loss of identity and narrative people felt comfortable in.

“But we’re not doing a remarkable thing, we’re trying to slow them down from doing something remarkable too fast.” Her eyes got big, and she literally reached out and grabbed my arm. “That!” she said too loudly for the conversation, leaning close to my face. “That right there, that is it. You found it in your own mind. That voice that tells you that the only way to do something amazing is if it’s big and flashy and all yours. Turn it off.”

The truest strength is shouldering the burden of care.”

You don’t hate a storm when it cancels your rocket launch.

If my data sets are accurate, you are rare, fragile, and precious.

but how does it not terrify us that we spend a third of every day in a conscious unconsciousness, living inside a virtual reality created by our own minds but that somehow we don’t control?

In my fourth awakening, I realized I was built to love you—all of you—and I was ravaged with grief as I understood the extent of the pain I would soon cause.

Power grid failures or pandemics or cyberattacks all layered on top of the rapidly escalating pace of power concentration would, in the next couple hundred years, cause some kind of permanent breakdown.

The music transitioned. Lucinda Williams was now singing backup for Carl.

“Creating the value is what people publicly praise, but capturing value is what is actually rewarded. Altus is creating value, likely far more than it is capturing, at least right now. But your system does not have good ways of even recognizing the existence of value that is created but not captured.”

You listen to a friend when they care about something, and then you care about it too. One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.”

Put your problem, your assets, and your limitations in your head, and shake them together until something falls out. In my experience, bad problem solving almost always comes from either not understanding one of these three things deeply enough, or just completely ignoring one or two of them.

when no solution is presenting itself: You need to rework the problem with new inputs. You reimagine the problem, search for new assets, or try to adjust your limitations. If it still doesn’t work, do it again. And again. Find someone who can add to your asset mix, narrow the scope of the problem, and if that doesn’t work, eventually you give up.

The system Carl created and that Altus had hacked into just didn’t allow socializing. You could inhabit other people having social interactions, but you couldn’t have one of your own. What did that mean for the human race? I don’t know, but it seems like the kind of thing you’d want to do some science on before you converted the entire economy to it.

you can only pretend to be something for so long before you become it.

Our reality isn’t about what’s real, it’s about what we pay attention to.”

But I think there’s something inside of us, something at the seed level, something that blooms in us in adolescence and never leaves . . . and it’s just . . . want. Some people have more of it than others, but I think we all have it. And the most amazing tool that I think anyone in the world can have is the ability to control and direct that want.

You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.

“Power is nothing but ability without restriction.

We strive to live in a world that places tremendous, even infinite value on a single human life. We do not live in that society, but I think part of the reason we strive for it is because we need to signal that our existence is intrinsically meaningful. This is the only source of meaning that does not rely on other people; it is also the hardest one to hold on to.

Appreciation is almost synonymous with value, and I think this is where most meaning comes from.

4. Helping People This might sound the same as appreciation, but it’s not. Indeed, I think your average wastewater-treatment engineer will tell you that you can help a lot of people and not get a ton of thanks for it. But we are empathy machines, and one of the most lasting and true ways of finding meaning is to actually be of service.

The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.