Grit: 

• In a group of students, athletes, children who all have talent, how can you predict who succeeds? McCarthy genius award winner Angela Duckworth argues that grit is the most important characteristic. Grit is a combination of passion and perseverance. As much as we all love “naturals,” most talented people who rise to the top (and change the world) put in a ton of work. They may not have immediate passion for their eventual sport, business, or instrument, but they have a persistent, purposeful drive to strive for expertise in an overarching goal.
• For this reason, extracurricular activities, when undertaken for multiple years with some advancement, predict college graduation rates better than most metrics. “Gritty” people also have higher life satisfaction.
• And you should be inspired: Grit is malleable and usually increases over one’s lifetime. 

More on Antilibrary:

• We learned about Umberto Eco’s antilibrary in a prior newsletter; one should be proud not of the number of read books in the library, but the number of unread books (from which you can learn). The Japanese word tsundokuis translated as a stack of books you have purchased but not yet read. 
• But this NYTimes piece is about a third category of books: the partially read books. Reference books, biographies, books of letters. You may dabble in these books over the years but never read cover to cover. I have a tough time at home deciding when to transition a partially read book from the unread to the read section. Need a third section. 

PHOCUS:

• Looking for a clean, caffeinated drink without the jitters? Check out PHOCUS. Based out of Louisville, PHOCUS offers a sparkling water with 75mg caffeine per serving. The unique attribute is the addition of 2 grams of L-theanine. Theanine is an amino acid with no apparent adverse effects that has been associated with calming effect in many study settings. If you can drink tea but get too hyper on coffee, theanine in tea (especially green tea) a likely explanation. PHOCUS also costs far less than most energy drinks. 

Vegetable Oil:

• If you’re up for a deep dive into lipid chemistry, check out this article on the oxidized linoleic acid hypothesis. The authors present evidence spanning decades, arguing that the [very easily] oxidized linoleic acid (from oils such as soybean, corn, sunflower, peanut, cottonseed) is responsible for the nasty effects of LDL and collection of plaque that clogs up our arteries. They present a 29 point chain of evidence making this argument.
• Scary stuff. Stay away from these human manufactured oils. For gosh sakes don’t cook with them. 

Wormholes:

• Intriguing piece by Ryan Holiday on human wormholes. A wormhole in physics is “a speculative structure linking separate points in spacetime,” and is based on supported mathematics by Einstein and others. Holiday identifies humans as wormholes and highlights the briefness of recent history. 6 handshakes could connect Barack Obama to George Washington. There are whales alive today older than the novel Moby Dick.
• He makes his way around to that “oceanic feeling,” that “every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” Great short piece to connect you to something larger than yourself. 

Quote:

“It’s unthinking ego that makes us assume that because the photos of the past were in black and white, that the past itself was too. Obviously it wasn’t — their sky was the same color as ours (in some places brighter than ours), they bled the same way we did, and their cheeks for flushed just like ours do.”
-Ryan Holiday