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Oct 2
“Bad luck” is often caused by a lack of focus. When you have inertia directed away from yourself or out of the present moment, you miss things, lose balance, or misspeak.

Imagine your keys are loose in your pocket while you’re working out. You lay down to do glute bridges or an ab exercise, and your keys fall out. But you don’t notice because your headphones are in. That’s the last set of your workout, and you leave the gym without noticing your keys are missing.

The distraction didn’t cause a dire error. When you get to the car and notice your keys are missing, you go back into the gym to find them. Distraction isn’t ruinous, but it’s inconvenient and breeds anxiety.

If you read Genesis as if it were a story invented by humans, rather than an omniscient account of history, it comes off as a more cerebral/conceptual version of pagan stories.

Native Americans and the Aztecs saw rain or a harvest or a flood and created myths to explain Nature.

Christians examined human nature and created myths to explain it.

• We are creatures with morality, so God is the ultimate judge.
• Childbirth is painful for women, so we dream up a crime (original sin) that is worthy of such a consequence.
• Men are vengeful and violent, so we dream up the myth of Cain and Abel to describe brotherly conflict.

Oct 3
Only drafts can haunt you. Publish an idea to bury it. You can always resurrect it.

Don’t read into things. Read behind things.

Instead of dreaming up ideas and implications that don’t exist, take in the context of what someone is saying.

[[Conversation Culture]]

Oct 4
An aphorism is like a folded map you can put in your pocket.

Aphorisms are like acorns, if acorns could immediately unfold into great oaks. (An acorn in your hand, an oak in your head)

My little-league baseball coach repeated this maxim every practice and printed it on t-shirts:

Feedback is a gift.

It might be the greatest lesson I learned from playing sports. The more receptive you are to feedback, the more you’ll learn and the better you’ll perform.

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The greatest lesson I learned from sports was how to be coachable. The more receptive you are to feedback, the more you learn and the better you perform.

My Little League ball coach printed this maxim on a shirt and repeated it every practice:

Feedback is a gift.

On my Little League baseball team, we had three rules:

• Respect the game.
• No excuses.
• Feedback is a gift.

The third one really stuck with me. It taught me how to be coachable, which is one of the greatest lessons I learned from sports. The more coachable you are, the better you’ll perform.

Success comes from repeated failure, direction from many missteps, and great ideas from strings of duds. If you want fertile soil, mix in manure.

Oct 5
Fun reading is memorable writing.

Give unsolicited praise and criticism upon request.

Pass no judgement, give only feedback.

Level no judgement, give only feedback.

Change is the only certainty. To be certain of anything else is to be in denial of change.

Change is the only certainty. Being certain of anything else is merely a failure to accept change.

The only certainty in life is change. Certainty of anything else is merely a failure to accept change.

In logical writing, truth is explicit. In lyrical writing, truth is felt. Meta writing is about how to best communicate truth through language.

Oct 7
Subjects at Rest

Cultivate a practice of stillness, where you — the subject — sit on the banks and observe the endless Stream of Subjectivity: the happenings of your experience (thoughts, emotions, ideas).

The best thing you can do for the world is to become the best version of yourself.

Everything else follows from a concerted effort in that pursuit.

Oct 8
If you don’t resolve your insecurities, they will rule your life.

There are two ways people avoid insecurities:

• Guilt — internalized, fragile, non-confrontational
• Blame — aggressive, dismissive, disagreeable

The antidote to both guilt and blame is radical self-honesty, -responsibility, -reliance. Know yourself and your insecurities and work to correct them.

Can I remain detached from worldly outcomes while still achieving in the world?

Touch grass, kick ass (in that order).

Oct 9
Some of my favorite moments are when I’m misunderstood. They prove that I can’t be put in a box, that my essence exceeds definition.

Oct 10
A maxim is a heuristic for action, an aphorism a tool for thought.

Aphorisms help you discover what is true. Maxims help you decide what to do.

A maxim is a heuristic for action, an aphorism a vehicle for thought.

Oct 14
Local and Timeless Knowledge

You can think of knowledge along a 2-D matrix, with the axes being Time and Space. There is local or global knowledge, timely and timeless knowledge. Depending on what you care about, how you live, and what you do for work, only one of the four quadrants of knowledge will be most relevant to you.

I want to live in a way where I prioritize local and timeless knowledge, where that is the type of knowledge most relevant to my life. I don’t want to care about the world’s problems, only my problems and those of my friends, family, and commute — local knowledge. I don’t want tog follow stock-market news and watch sports, only universal accounts of history and timeless works of fiction and philosophy — timeless knowledge.

The problem: modern media trends toward timely, global knowledge.

Oct 17
Recalling a dream is like fishing into your subconscious. There’s no way to know what’s down there, but as you recall and your dream, you reveal an entire organism that was obscured by the depths.

The more you practice dream-recall, the longer your line gets, and the better your lure. You’ll catch bigger fish and see them in greater detail.

[[Dreams as an Aesthetic Experience]]

Oct 18
Give your vision integrity, give your word value by manifesting them in action.

How to handle desire: Avoid all distractions, but not all pleasures. Align your desires with your values.

Take pride in being illegible.

The faith required for morality: I am capable of discerning right from wrong, and I have a duty to uphold what I deem to be just.

Oct 19
Use a colon to attach one or more fragments. Use a semicolon to connect one or more sentences.

Every work of fiction is a fantasy. That’s why it’s worth reading.

Oct 20
Social media is a game show. Every user competes for attention and the fame and fortune that follows, strung out on an endless drip of likes, perpetually dissatisfied for their ever-increasing appetites.

Oct 22
Highly neurotic people operate as if the worst possible outcome is the most likely.

Oct 23
On Hannah Arendt’s active vs. contemplative life:

The contemplative and active phases of life feed each other, like inhaling and exhaling. Both are necessary, in a recurring sequence, and the alternative is pain.

Oct 25
It’s no secret that modern media incentivizes sensational clips and soundbites.

Oct 26
There’s nothing ugly about being human, so don’t hide what’s shared among us: sex, dreams, sex-dreams, etc.

A heterosexual man is so deluded that, based on the number of samples he gets from the good-looking dermatologist Dr. woman, he will convince himself thereafter in his memory that their conversation had a hint of sexual tension — rather than the reality that she had been friendly and attentive to him because he was her patient, not because of how he looked with his shirt off.

That good-looking woman cared for me, he thinks, forgetting/ignoring that the good-looking woman was a doctor.

She gave me a bag overflowing with samples of moisturizers, and it wasn’t because of the severity of my rash or her office’s abundance of lotions; it was because she was into me.

Oct 27
Great editorial feedback improves the writer’s craft, not just their draft.

Why do adults have to become parents before they give themselves permission to play at the playground?

Oct 28
The most impactful lesson that I’ve learned in life (and one of the easiest to forget): Success is a feeling.

We tend to measure success in life by the size of your house, the prestige of your job or university, the tics off your bucket list, or the number of plates you can bench. But when we measure success by material metrics, we always want more. There is no limit to how much money you could have, how much weight you could bench, or how big your house could be. When we measure success by material metrics, we forget that success is a feeling. More than any of those quantifiable things, success is measured by the calm of your mind in the morning, your sense of purpose at work, and how well you sleep at night.

The Origin of Idioms

Most idioms are just more memorable, rhythmic ways of saying common things.

Examples:

• “Fought tooth and nail” x “Bit and scratched”
• “Screamed at the top of his lungs” x “Screamed loudly”

Once the phrase becomes remembered, it takes on a figurative layer, beyond the literal meaning of the words in the phrase.

The best reason to play sports as a kid: You learn to be coachable, to invite and implement feedback.

Oct 30
There’s something about this longing for rest that we have in busy times, or after a work day. But with enough leisure time available, you long to do more than just relax. You long to learn and grow.

Just think of anyone in the pandemic who started off relieved for being granted a clean break from their busy lives, only to be sent into a spiral of boredom that they had to climb out of. Most people took to new hobbies and filled their time with learning and conversing and contributing to their communities.

The same happened to me in Iceland. When I first got there — more than anything — I was relieved to have no obligations. I took pleasure in exploring aimlessly, reading and writing and bathing in the city’s pools. When I left Reykjavik and started hiking, I would talk or sing to myself and even play with a fidget toy to pass the time. But after a certain amount of complete leisurely freedom, I started walking in silence and only uttering words to the strangers I met and the friends and family I called. I rarely watched any videos and never scrolled social media. My leisure time was spent journaling about my experiences or reading to learn new ideas and to study great writing.

When life is busy, I can play video games every day and justify it as relaxation. But if my calendar is empty, I can only play video games for so many days before I can no longer justify it, before I start using my free time to do things that are more meaningful to me.

Oct 31
The return key on a keyboard is a 1:1 map from the mechanics of a typewriter, but it doesn’t quite work for how we write today. Why do I have to hit “return” twice every time I start a new paragraph, just as I have to hit the lever twice on a mechanical typewriter? You only use line breaks for lists and poems; the rest of the time, you want a paragraph break, not a line break. So, why isn’t that the default function of the “return” key?

(There’s the exception of printed and indented prose. But that could just be a toggle setting in any word processor: Are you writing a novel or an email? For most people, paragraphs breaks will do.)

By the grace of some deity (or elf), that French family pulled up in their van in a storm only minutes after the Polish women had dropped me off in the cold, wet, foggy, rocky overpass. I was 15 miles from anywhere, or — as it turned out — a warm, 10-minute van ride that dropped me off an hour early for the last ferry of the day.

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

“The Bare Necessities” is not only an all-time pun but a rich philosophical discussion of what we can learn from how animals are in Nature. The bear lives like a bear — eats and sleeps and floats on the river according to the whims of his body and Nature. And every moment, he is only focused on the present, as all animals are. He has no anxieties about the past or future. The bear has all the carelessness of an animal yet the human faculty of gratitude, enough to marvel at the abundance of life and educate man on how to adopt his perspective.

I could be the John Muir of Iceland.

I hate the Screen-Time limits on iOS. They’re so performative; they’re barely hiding the fact they want you to stay on your phone, to keep scrolling. That’s not directly Apple’s incentive, but it’s how they appeal to developers. To appeal to customers, Apple acts like this is a lifestyle feature to help you manage your time. But with no more effort than it takes to dismiss a pop-up ad that interrupts your algorithm-fed, short-form video, you can extend your screen time for 15 minutes or ignore your self-imposed limits for the whole day with a single (color-incentivized!) click.