Miscellaneous Easter Sunday Wisdom
oz, 2022-04-17
philosophy
...or cleaning up my Dropbox. 😅
Be Water, My Friend - Bruce Lee
Start with focusing on a small market and dominate that market first. - Peter Thiel
Scratch Your Own Itch - Tim Ferriss
Only hire people who you would work for. - Mark Zuckerberg
Produce nice movies! - Sadhguru
Don't Save! Hedge! - Rich Dad
Take ownership and responsibility! - John "Jocko" Willink
Look yourself in the mirror right now and ask yourself "What do I want to do every day for the rest of my life?" Do that. Do it now. - (I lost the attribution here)
Sit comfortably, breathe (can close eyes), listen, try to identify 5 different sounds, then concentrate on your body, try to identify 5 feelings (pain, itches), try to listen again, 3 different sounds, then 3 feelings, then 1 sound, 1 feeling. At the end: breathe deeply multiple times, in-and-out.
Is also fun to do with a partner!
There is a Zulu phrase, "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu", which means "A person is a person through other persons." This is a richer and better account, I think, than "I think, therefore I am." - https://aeon.co/ideas/descartes-was-wrong-a-person-is-a-person-through-other-persons
"In the morning, – solitude; … that nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company." - Pythagoras
Over time, a whole body of literature emerged advocating that people should view themselves as a business – a bundle of skills, assets, qualities, experiences and relationships to be managed and continually enhanced.
Your job might be a space to learn skills that you can use in the future. Or, it might be a job with a company that has a good-enough reputation that other companies are keen to hire away its employees. On the other hand, it isn’t as good a job if everything you learn there is too specific to that company, if you aren’t learning easily transferrable skills. It isn’t a good job if it enmeshes you in local regulatory schemes and keeps you tied to a particular location. And it isn’t a good job if you have to work such long hours that you never have time to look for the next job. In short, a job becomes a good job if it will lead to another job, likely with another company or organisation. You start choosing a job for how good it will be for you to quit it.
In the quitting economy, you have to work for passion, and working for passion means focusing on the task, not the company.
Source: https://aeon.co/essays/how-work-changed-to-make-us-all-passionate-quitters
"We are all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is like anyone else [...] We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal but to us every human being is equally important." - Margaret Thatcher
I also recently started publishing my currently-still-WIP "Axioms", which will be my main philosophical writing outlet.
Every event, every example is singular. Forgetting details is a way of generalizing and applying past memories, past examples to current situations. Those abstractions are then used to explain the present, predict the future. Sometimes the abstractions are wrong because a relevant detail has been left out. Then we need a new abstraction, a new model.