“One fairly minor quote [from the recent Ross Douthat interview of Peter Thiel] that’s worth thinking about: “I would define the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves.” This is actually a great working definition: a dividing line between middle and lower class is the assumption that the system basically functions well, and that if you work hard and follow the rules you’ll come out ahead. If you don’t believe that—for good reasons or bad ones—you’ll behave quite differently.”
Category: reading
Arnold Bennett’s Ten Step Plan for Learning to Appreciate Poetry
“I would advocate for more use of an anthology. And more memorisation. You may also find that, to begin with, you do not want take such a critical approach and would prefer to follow your nose rather than doing what Hazlitt tells you (although you should read Hazlitt at some point, he is among the greats). Still, I hope some of you find this of some use. It is taken from Literary Taste and How to Form It.”
–Arnold Bennett’s Ten Step Plan for Learning to Appreciate Poetry
Zuihitsu, 2025-04
Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.
- Information scarcity rewards knowledge acquisition. Information abundance requires pattern recognition.—Adam Grant
- Resilience does not prioritize efficiency.
- You cannot back into the future.
- Engage with things that someone put a lot of work into.
- The best countertrend setups don’t come from just buying dips. They come after failed breakdowns or clear bullish divergences. Without those signals, you’re simply buying weakness and hoping for a bounce.—Mike Shell
- It’s sort of inevitable if you stay alive and you keep working that you have to do something different.—Bill Murray
- Life is and should be hard, it should be challenging. It’s hard enough without getting miserable.
- Don’t we love life because we love seeing everybody else enjoying it too?—Brian Eno
- One cannot have all the lives one desires. A choice is always necessary.—Star Trek: Discovery, Season 4, Episode 1, Kobayashi Maru
- Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.—Ursula K. Le Guin in The Telling
- The 3x3x3 review: 3 things learned, 3 surprising things, and 3 remaining questions
- Became anything the way other men become monks: as a devotional practice, as an act of love, as a lifelong commitment to the search for grace and transcendence.—paraphrased Elizabeth Gilbert, on Jack Gilbert, in Big Magic
- Turn and face what wants to change you. —Elizabeth Lesser
- Freedom is the distance between hunter and prey.
- It’s good to be a beginner at something.
- Feedback is better than planning.
- Talking is the greatest intimacy of all.
- Books are spells that can transform you into a different person for the rest of your life.
- Discomfort signals adaptation.
- Imagination is intelligence having fun.
- Be sharply focused, not well rounded.—Derek Sivers
- You are the notebook.
- Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.—Voltaire
- You’ll achieve much more by being consistently reliable than by being occasionally extraordinary.
- Life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.—Molière
- Spending time alone is the beginning of thinking for yourself.
- If you avoid conflict to keep the peace, you start a war inside yourself.—Cheryl Richardson
- Survival requires living life on your own terms.
- Strife is life.
- If you get on the wrong train, get off at the nearest station. The longer it takes you to get off, the more expensive the return trip will be. —Japanese proverb
- The toes you step on today might be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow.—Brian Morton
- Rebellion is a response to an abuse of power.
- Collaborating is facilitated by brevity not info dumps.
- Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenge, wish for more wisdom.—Jim Rohn
- The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.—Schopenhauer
- The thought manifests as the word; the word manifests as the deed; the deed develops into habit; and habit hardens into character. So, watch the thought and its way with care.
- Everyone wants to talk about the light, but who speaks for the good dark?
- Only the paranoid survive.
- To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.—Theodore Roosevelt
- Money is heroin for boring people.
- You don’t have to have an opinion.—Megan Monahan, Don’t Hate, Meditate
- You can’t push a rope.
- Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.―Paul Bowles
- No one can ever heap enough insults upon me to suit my taste. I think we all really thrive on hostility, because it’s the most intense kind of massage the ego can undergo. Other people’s indifference is the only horror.—Paul Bowles
- Yet it is not just we who remember music. Music also remembers us. Music reflects the individuals and the societies that create it, capturing something essential about the era of its birth.—Jeremy Eichler
- If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.—Haruki Murakami
- Thoughts are fast. Feelings are slow.
- Partner with someone who can regulate their nervous system, has sexual discipline, and who tells the truth even when it doesn’t feel good to hear. You cannot build a life with someone who sabotages their own.—Nicole LePera
- Self-motivation, working well with others, addressing challenges, being personable are the secrets to living a satisfying life.—Teacher Tom
Zuihitsu, 2025-03
Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.
- Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake.
- Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.—Arthur Schopenhauer
- The three Ps–property, prices, and profits and loss. Property incentivizes us. Prices guide us. Profits lure us to new changes and losses discipline us.—Pete Boettke
- In marriage, everything is subject to peer review.
- Don’t talk, unless you can improve upon the silence.–Jorge Luis Borges
- Don’t piss in a ditch and call it an ocean of lemonade.
- All cruelty springs from weakness.—Seneca
- In matters of the heart, you only know what you want when you find it.
- Accept the loss, and move forward.
- Who do you serve?
- Face your fears or they will climb over your back.
- If you have no edge, correct position size is don’t buy. Position sizing is determined by downside. All great investing records employed leverage.
Tsampa
Tsampa is roasted pearl barley flour that is a staple food of Tibet.
Tools
- Large flat skillet
- Sieve
- Clean cloth
- Spatula
- Grinder
Ingredients
- 250g organic pearl barley
Recipe
- Take the barley, place in a bowl, cover well with cold water and soak for 12 – 24 hours.
- Drain the barley in a sieve and leave to drain well for 10 minutes.
- Transfer the soaked barley to a clean, dry cloth, roll up into a sausage, and refrigerate overnight.
- The following day, heat a skillet over medium heat.
- Take a generous couple of handfuls of the soaked barley, and put them into the heated skillet. Stir well.
- Keep stirring, to keep the grains from sticking together or to the pan. Gradually, as they cook, they will turn translucent, then to white again. Then, they go a nice nutty brown colour and will flow very loosely around the pan and have a sound like gravel.
- Pour the roasted barley grains into a large, clean glass bowl, and toss them a few times to cool them.
- Repeat, roasting all the barley.
- When cold, grind all the roasted barley into a flour.
- Transfer from glass bowl to a clean jar.
Zuihitsu, 2025-02
Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.
- Money loves speed. Poverty loves waiting.
- Resist the urge to maximize value.
- Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.—Rumi
- A man with a taste for blood, money or women is not to be trusted.
- Science is only path to the future.
- Everything changes. What is true today may not be true tomorrow. So, take no one’s word without reservation.
- Strength leads to responsibiliy not happiness.
- Facing facts is preferable to facing defeat.
- Imposing on another point of view is a kind of violence.
- The dice cannot read their own spots.
- First admit, then live with your difference. Embrace it, if you can.
- We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.—Marshall McLuhan
- Happiness is rarely a product of understanding.
- Disobedience isn’t a problem if obedience isn’t the goal.
- Prioritize time, friends, mind and body over money.
- There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.—Sun-Tzu
- …the truth is out there. But so are lies.—Dana Scully, The X-Files
- Don’t do other people’s thinking for them.
- Society has three elements: experts, elites, and masses. Experts have specialized knowledge. Elites lead. The masses are everyone else.
- There is a lot of alpha in dirty jobs.
- Always make your boss look good.
- Never power struggle, especially not if you don’t have power.
- What’s the most expensive thing you’ve broken?
- Price’s Law, the square root of the workforce does 50% of the work.
- Licensing protects people with licences, not the people using their services.
- You love what you give to—and in proportion as you give.
- Love is the death of duty.
- KTF, kill them first.
- Divide your activity into neck-down and neck-up.
- Outside of loving relationships, power is always supported by violence or the threat of violence.
- The defining feature of love is struggle.
- Rudeness is a sign of inner struggle.
- Quietly do the next and most necessary thing.
- Judgment in application is superior to following rules.
- Our awareness of life, of its great variety and beauty and possibility, emerges out of uncertainty.
- Being nice is not the same as being good.
- No feeling is final.
- Criticism is a whetstone of character.
- Possession or benefits require staying in the dream. Waking up to Truth requires forsaking everything you have or could have.
- Be brave enough to break your own heart.—Cheryl Strayed
- Respect your anger enough to shape and direct it.
- Art lives in constraints and dies from freedom.
- Competence is being good at earning. Character is being good for others when there is nothing to gain.
Tom Robbin on Dealing With Authority
Zuihitsu, 2025-01
Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.
- Heights are driven by process. Bottoms are driven by events.
- Above all, do not lie to yourself.
- At first, few see the opportunity. Eventually, everyone does. At the end, they imagine it will go on forever.
- Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
- It’s not what you buy, it’s what you pay that counts.
- Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It’s the courage to continue that counts.—Winston Churchill
- The true test of character isn’t crisis but power.
- The risk you didn’t see is the one most likely to get you.
- Sizing is more important than leverage.
- Movements must move.
- Focus on the long term and avoid the short term distractions.
- The most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.
- Mental clarity has far more to do with honesty than with intelligence.
- People without goals find meaning in drama.
- Art is not a message to be decoded. Viewers bring new meaning through interpretation.
- Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it. —Tom Robbins
- Politics are downstream from economies. Economies are downstream of markets. Recessions don’t cause market crashes. Market crashes cause recessions.
- What are you doing about what you are not worried about? The things you don’t worry about drive underperformance.
- Whatever you think should happen is not as important as what is happening.
- Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.—Rumi
- Vision without execution is a dream. Let the sleeper awaken!
- If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?—Rumi
- Gaps fill.
- Intensity beats extensity, every time.
- No tree grows to heaven.
- To the blind man, everything comes out of nowhere.
- Between the Idea and the Reality…. Falls the Shadow.” —T. S. Eliot
- Three ways to learn: reflection, imitation or experience – best to worst.
A reputation for integrity and fair dealing cannot be bought.
Zuihitsu, 2024-12
Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.
- Success contains the seeds of its own destruction. It breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
- Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.—Elie Wiesel
- People never die wishing they’d bought more stuff.
- Totalitarianism is using your agency to destroy your own agency.
- Convoluted language is a claim of authority.
- Liberal in principle, skeptical on specifics and conservative on boundaries.
- Don’t draw a black ball from the urn of invention.
- The most important factors for survival are resilience and flexibility.
- If it’s not growing, it’s dead.
- Give up all desire for control over oneself and others and freely submit.
- Do not let the world deafen you with its noise.
- Who are your mystics?
- What makes relationships complex is when one (or more) of the people are trying to control or change the others.
- Bravado is a form of insecurity.
Zuihitsu, 2024-11
Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.
- After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box.—Italian proverb
- Planning assumes order. Preparation assumes a range of possibilities.
- Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.—Robert Louis Stevenson
- The people that wound us are not interested in how the blood gets cleaned up.
- Hear what is not being said.
- Disagree, then commit.
- X should be X. If you want Y, use that instead.
- Either purpose or pleasure.
- A mistake made twice is a lesson not learnt.—Anonymous
- The three big decisions: what to do, where to live, and who to spend time with.
- Evaluating relations: 1) how much effort are we willing to make? 2) for how long?
- Two rules: 1) never give out all the information.
- We have poetry / so we do not die of history.—Meena Alexander
- If you wait by a river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.—Sun Tzu
- If your life is on the line, make sure you have more than a theory.
- Wait for the thing that will burn the unburnt side of your soul.
- Either learn to be satisfied with little or you’ll be satisfied with nothing.
- There is no love without commitment.
- The wolf doesn’t care about the sheep’s opinion, and the shepherd need not concern himself with the wolf’s.
- If there’s something you like, and you combine it with something else that you like, chances are that you’re going to like the result.—Claudia Fleming
- The most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security; it’s the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.—Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
- Sanity is a handicap and liability if you’re living in a mad world.—Anthony Burgess
- Craftsmanship is knowing how and art is knowing when to stop.
- What we don’t appreciate, we soon lose.
- When it is illegal, the cops come.
- One thing the middle class cannot afford is candor.—paraphrased James Baldwin
- When a clown moves into a palace he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.—Turkish proverb
- Love does not consider the consequences.
- If you lie about the facts, you’ll lie about everything.
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