More Stuff #5
On thinking about thinking, emotional resilience, keeping things simple, the Midwit Meme, and more
Welcome to the latest edition of More Stuff links.
“You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.
It is good that the window should be transparent because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.” — C.S. Lewis
This is Water by David Foster Wallace. This timeless speech at Kenyon College talks about our instincts and how automated our thinking can be. Once aware, it helps to remember our awareness. A fish never thinks about the water it’s in because that’s all it’s been in, ever. It doesn’t question it. Because it doesn’t know a world outside water.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop.
The same goes for a lot of politicians, blue-collars, and investors. Most of them, including me, couldn’t get out of the water because that’s the unconscious and automated thinking we have evolved to.
Repair and Remain by Kurt Armstrong. A piece I keep coming back to most times. The emotional resilience that is required when in a family, marriage, or even a job, is what entices that emotional chord inside me. Staying the course is always hard but simple.
If you ignore the little things long enough, something as small as a nail clipper can make for two days of demolition and a trailer filled with an old sink, outdated vanity, faded linoleum, some lath and plaster, old plumbing, a thirsty old toilet, and so on.
Think of it like this, most things small can be fixed until it’s too big to be fixed. A rusted iron can never be de-rusted. It just can’t be without significant energy and money. No one is asking you to quit, just don’t be too casual for your own good.
The Meme Every Investor Needs to Grasp by Frederik Gieschen. The Midwit meme is one of the finest examples of our reliance on mental models and how inherently biased we can be.
If in a normal distribution, the tail end is the outsiders who gain the most. However, to keep gaining the most in the long run, one must go through the right of passage of the middle section. One has to overcomplicate everything to realize that it is stupid to do so. Even if for only once, it is necessary to be dumb to eventually become smart and just go with your instincts. Why?
Because during the overcomplicated phase, you forge your instincts by failing more often. By realizing what to avoid, you get what you want without stress and anxiety
See you next week!