Syntopica

image courtesy, Suzy Hazelwood Austin Kleon, quoting Octavia Butler on reading more than a book at a time. I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another. ...

The fastest way to raise your level of performance: Cut your number of commitments in half. — via James Clear’s latest 3–2–1 missive Jack Butcher puts it even more eloquently … Do! P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

My brain is too scattered, so here are a few scattered thoughts on writing and why I write. On the why? Writing, to me, is cathartic exercise. It acts like a pressure release valve. It makes me calmer. The very act of writing clarifies my thoughts, and helps sharpen my mind. It gives me distance from my thoughts, makes me more objective. It helps me learn better. As I was learning Maths last year, the teacher constantly reminded me that learning, true learing and understanding, comes from written practice. Knowledge, he’d say flows upwards, through the pen to your fingers, through your brain and into your mind. ...

I’ve, seen things, you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire, off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams, glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those, moments, will be lost, in time, like, tears, in rain. Time, to die. Blade Runner was the first movie I saw, that had a morally ambigous ‘hero’. And the villain is not bad? And he saves the hero? This was the first movie that made me look at the world in shades of grey, in shades of acceptance. ...

“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” — Charlie Munger That quote opens Shane’s post on the work required to hold an opinion, which remains one of the mental models I use most often. Which is why I had my ears and my mind open, when Shane began one of his latest posts with, “Trying to be perfect is a waste of time.” ...

Began reading The Warren Buffett Shareholder today. This is from the preface. Many contributors to this book remark upon Buffetts’s distinctive teaching style, which tends to instruct people how to think rather than what to think. And John Bogle has attended one Meeting, but attests that even one can change your world. A couple of pages later Our premise was that Berkshire’s intrinsic value owes a lot to the Meeting and the shareholder community. Buffett wrote in his 2014 letter … ...