Hey everyone! 2020 Continues to challenge the world, now with the US facing new turmoil. Stay safe and take care of yourselves. I have come across several profound quotes recently, so half of the content this month will be quotes. Take a few minutes to reflect on these and to find some stillness in the middle of the chaos.
Genius
• Article on what Paul Graham calls the bus ticket theory of genius. “When you look at the lives of people who’ve done great work, you see a consistent pattern. They often begin with a ‘bus ticket collector’s’ obsessive interest in something that would have seemed pointless to most of their contemporaries.”
• Much like Angela Duckworth who conducts groundbreaking research on Grit, Graham points out that highly successful people need passion andperseverance. Often that perseverance stems from an obsession. And often the creative person is more interested in that topic or idea than anyone else in the world, and the rest of the world might find it boring or at least unimportant.
“But there are some heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be one that matters. For example, it’s more promising if you’re creating something, rather than just consuming something someone else creates. It’s more promising if something you’re interested in is difficult, especially if it’s more difficult for other people than it is for you. And the obsessions of talented people are more likely to be promising. When talented people become interested in random things, they’re not truly random.”
Wisdom
• Excellent list that should be slowly digested. After 68 years of living, Kevin Kelly provides 68 pearls of wisdom. A few of my favorite ones:
• Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.
• Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?”, until there is no more.
• Optimize your generosity. No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving too much away.
• If you are looking for something in your house, and you finally find it, when you’re done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.
• Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.
• Hatred is a curse that does not affect the hated. It only poisons the hater. Release a grudge as if it was a poison.
• When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.
• You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.
Nutrition and COVID
• Short but densely packed article on overall metabolic health and risk of COVID and severe COVID disease. Topics covered: HDL in lung disease, the microbiome and viral resistance, Selenium, Vitamins D and K2.
• Take home point: “Eating whole unprocessed food, especially that low in sugar, refined and processed carbohydrates, is likely to have benefits for your immune system and viral resistance generally.”
• The more articles and nutrition I read, the more the truth seems to distill down to eliminating processed foods.
PPE
• For folks out there feeling strain from all the handwashing and mask wearing, check out this guide from a group of Dermatologists. A few pages on practices to limit skin issues from all of the PPE. Thanks everyone for your hard work in the hospital and offices.
Quotes
**My favorite quote this month:
We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
Louise Gluck, “Nostos”
“Humanity… is building its composite brain beneath our eyes…May it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its power of unification can never be achieved?”
– Mystical Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“As I’ve gotten older—I would say starting in my mid-to-late 20s—I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to people, if you just sit and listen, you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves. There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that they tell. Always on the receiving end of some injustice. There’s the person who’s always kind of the hero of every story they tell. There’s the smart person; they delivered the clever put down there. There are lots of versions of this, and you’ve got to be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are—in the way you craft your narrative—kind of crafting your character. And so I did at some point decide, “I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative, that I’m the happiest person anybody knows.” And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is.”
– The Tim Ferriss Show #427: Michael Lewis on the Crafts of Writing, Friendship, Coaching, Happiness, and More
“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings. We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.”
– Oliver Sacks
“You have comfort. You don’t have luxury. And don’t tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort.”
– Jean Cocteau, French poet, novelist, boxing manager, and filmmaker
