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July 2 - September 3, 2018
Accept the rationality of time, never its fairness and morality.
In a crowd of a hundred, 50 percent of the wealth, 90 percent of the imagination, and 100 percent of the intellectual courage will reside in a single person—not necessarily the same one.
Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.
For soldiers, we use the term “mercenary,” but we absolve employees of responsibility with “everybody needs to make a living.”
To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.
You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the additional worse insult of having to become humble.*
When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
The problem with the idea of “learning from one’s mistakes” is that most of what people call mistakes aren’t mistakes.
Failure-resistant is achievable; failure-free is not.
Just as eating cow meat doesn’t turn you into a cow, studying philosophy doesn’t make you wiser.
Games were created to give nonheroes the illusion of winning. In real life, you don’t know who really won or lost (except too late), but you can tell who is heroic and who is not.
My best example of the domain dependence of our minds, from my recent visit to Paris: at lunch in a French restaurant, my friends ate the salmon and threw away the skin; at dinner, at a sushi bar, the very same friends ate the skin and threw away the salmon.
Change your anchor to what did not happen rather than what did happen.
Knowledge is subtractive, not additive—what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).*
They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
Happiness: we don’t know what it means, how to measure it, or how to reach it, but we know extremely well how to avoid unhappiness.
In the medical and social domains, treatment should never be equivalent to silencing symptoms.
For Seneca, the Stoic sage should withdraw from public efforts when unheeded and the state is corrupt beyond repair. It is wiser to wait for self-destruction.
To be a philosopher is to know through long walks, by reasoning, and reasoning only, a priori, what others can only potentially learn from their mistakes, crises, accidents, and bankruptcies—that is, a posteriori.
For many people, it takes a lot of preparation to learn to become ordinary.
It takes a lot of intellect and confidence to accept that what makes sense doesn’t really make sense.
Let us find what risks we can measure and these are the risks we should be taking.
In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates contrasts philosophy as the collaborative search for truth with the sophist’s use of rhetoric to gain the upper hand in argument for fame and money. Twenty-five centuries later, this is exactly the salaried researcher and the modern tenure-loving academic. Progress.
If you detect a repressed smile on the salesperson’s face, you paid too much for it.
If something (say, a stock price) looks slightly out of line, it is out of line. If it looks way out of line, you are wrong in your method of evaluation.
The worst damage has been caused by competent people trying to do good; the best improvements have been brought by incompetent ones not trying to do good.
Bring the good news in trickles, the bad news in lumps.
Never ask your client for advice.
Mediocre men tend to be outraged by small insults but passive, subdued, and silent in front of very large ones.*
To be a person of virtue you need to be boringly virtuous in every single small action.
If you are only bad-mouthed by people who prefer your company over those of many others, only critiqued by those who scrutinize your work, and only insulted by persons who open your email as soon as they see it, then you are doing the right thing.
The mediocre regret their words more than their silence; finer men regret their silence more than their words; the magnificent has nothing to regret.
Contra the prevailing belief, “success” isn’t being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.
The magnificent believes half of what he hears and twice what he says.
It is very easy to be stoic, in failure.
A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.
The first, and hardest, step to wisdom: avert the standard assumption that people know what they want.
Virtue is a sequence of small acts of omission. Honor and grandeur can be a single gutsy, momentous, and self-sacrificial act of commission.
By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!
In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the megalopsychos, which I translate as the magnificent, is the “great-souled” who thinks of himself as worthy of great things and, aware of his own position in life, abides by a certain system of ethics that excludes pettiness. This notion of great soul, though displaced by Christian ethics advocating humility, remains present in Levantine culture, with the literal Kabir al-nafs. Among other attributes, the magnificent walks slowly.
had to read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book IV ten times before realizing what he didn’t say explicitly (but knew): the magnificent (megalopsychos) is all about unconditionals.
Some reticent people use silence to conceal their intelligence; but most do so to hide the lack of it.
When someone says “I am not that stupid,” it often means that he is more stupid than he thinks.
If your beard is gray, produce heuristics but explain the “why.” If your beard is white, skip the why, just say what should be done.
A happier world is one in which everyone realizes that 1) it is not what you tell people, it is how you say it that makes them feel bad; 2) it is not what you do to them but how you make them look that gets them angry; 3) they should be the ones putting themselves in a specific category.
You can be certain that a person has the means but not the will to help you when he says “there is nothing else I can do.” And you can be certain that a person has neither means nor will to help you when he says “I am here to help.”
The general principle of antifragility: it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.
We expect places and products to be less attractive than in marketing brochures, but we never forgive humans for being worse than their first impressions.
If something looks irrational—and has been so for a long time—odds are you have a wrong definition of rationality.
Knowing stuff others don’t know is most effective when others don’t know you know stuff they don’t know.
