Tag: life lessons

33 Ways To Improve Your Life, Japanese Style by Ashley  Ogawa Clarke

~ cafebedouin

This article is exactly what it says on the tin. Example:

Steel your sense of discipline

For Mr Kodo Nishimura, a Buddhist monk, LGBTQIA+ activist and the author of This Monk Wears Heels, the key thing that he learnt growing up in Japan was self-discipline. “Especially when I was in training to become a monk, we had to chant for hours and hours every day for three weeks,” he says. “One time, I started coughing non-stop and spat blood, another time, almost fell asleep standing up while chanting. What I learnt from these tough experiences is that, even if something looks impossible, it is possible. My ability is beyond my imagination.”

Zuihitsu, 2025-01

~ cafebedouin

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, 2024-02

~ cafebedouin

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.

  • The problem with throwing the tomato is it precludes using it for anything else.
  • When someone says something you don’t understand, ask them to specify or quantify.
  • Who’s down to clown?
  • Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.
  • Respect for the truth is the basis for all morality.
  • Relying on only one sense weakens the others.
  • Subtlety and self-control are power.
  • Train yourself to lean toward the positive under stress.
  • The difference between a people and a mob is some act as individuals.
  • When people question your motives for saying something, they’re implicitly conceding it’s true.—Paul Graham
  • Good pay today doesn’t guarantee good pay tomorrow.
  • We tithe just by living. We breathe the situation, eat the problems, and shit the solutions. That’s life.
  • Don’t prioritize a counterfactual over the actual.
  • A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.—Rabindranath Tagore
  • Naval’s Razors: 1) If you have two choices to make and it’s 50/50, take the path that’s more painful in the short term, 2) If a task is worth less than your ambitious hourly rate – outsource it, automate it, or delete it.
  • Save yourself, then help those you trust.
  • Don’t take pay in status.
  • Outcomes are easier to manage than behaviors.
  • Leadership is acknowledged by the led.
  • We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.—Seneca
  • Mind your own business.
  • Eliminate junk, whether food, thoughts, energy or people.
  • Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.—John Updike
  • Change happens when discipline, emotional maturity and taking responsibility for our lives intersect.
  • In a post-scarcity environment, taste is the only differentiator.
  • I don’t believe in words. In general, people lie, they don’t tell the truth. The truth lies in what’s hidden, in what’s not told. Reality lies in the unspoken part of our lives.—Nuri Bilge, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
  • Many things are beyond our control, but our work is our own and should be as good as we can make it.
  • Attend to difficult conversations first.
  • Table stakes and playing the game well are not the same.
  • We do not lack communication, on the contrary we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.—Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 108
  • Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.—Leo Tolstoy
  • Begin by being open, flexible and kind.
  • Live your life as an experiment.
  • It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.—Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
  • Don’t let life harden your heart.
  • How do you relate to discomfort?
  • Hatred never ceases by hatred but by love alone is it healed.
  • Every moment, a transition.
  • Two things define you: Your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.—Imam Ali
  • Testimony is evidence.
  • People by and large become what they think of themselves.—William James
  • Love is consideration, where decisions are made with the preferences of others in mind.
  • Speaking is limited in time and reach. Writing persists.
  • Ideas are dreams.
  • Place your fearful mind in the cradle of love.
  • Intelligence has little to do with happiness or good relationships with others.
  • In this life we cannot do great things, we can only do small things with great love.—Mother Theresa
  • Are you living with the spirit of forgiveness, centered in your heart or from the spirit of judgment?
  • All of us are merely passing through.
  • The silence of the unsaid is always working surreptitiously with another silence, which is that of the unsayable.—John Berger (from his preface to I Could Read the Sky by Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke)
  • To heal the body, we must study pain.
  • The imperfect has greater need of love.
  • People with opinions just go around bothering each other.
  • The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it.
  • A cup of understanding, a barrel of love and an ocean of patience.
  • Spiritual progress is turning one insult after another into fuel for development.
  • Life is just a succession of errors.
  • Success comes after failure.
  • More choice means more opportunity for error.
  • Repel the mediocre.
  • Words are where most change begins.—Brandon Sanderson
  • I don’t know. I’m the X, where X is someone of no consequence.
  • If you go, you have to stay gone.
  • Don’t slip on the banana peel of nihilism, even while listening to the roar of Nothingness. ―Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • A pickpocket only sees the saint’s pockets.
  • Peace comes not from fulfilling our wants but ending dissatisfaction.
  • Want what you have and don’t want what you don’t have.
  • Anger shows us the degree of our limits and attachments.
  • Learning requires giving up our stories.
  • Judgment is often prerecorded dramas we play to avoid the unexpected variations of this moment.
  • The judging mind can only be met with the forgiving heart.
  • Clarity without judgment; justice without hatred.
  • A cult is a religion with no political power. ―Tom Wolfe
  • Try your dumbest idea.
  • Correctness is determined by frame.
  • A corrupt process deserves to be hacked.
  • Many in this world recognise nothing as good unless it also brings some profit. They regard their friends much as they do their cattle, ranked according to who promises the largest gain. —Cicero, On Friendship, 79.
  • The bombs we plant in each other are ticking away.—Edward Yang
  • A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies.—Alfred Lord Tennyson
  • Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.—Samuel Johnson
  • Not all skills are trade skills.
  • Big people don’t deliver bad news.
  • Life is not lived in a glass case.
  • Enemies strengthen you. Allies weaken.
  • Every civilization is built on ponzi growth.

Zuihitsu, 2024-01

~ cafebedouin

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.

  • Ask a great question and the article will write itself.
  • To govern is to choose.—Nigel Lawson
  • Don’t waste precious time trying to prove someone else wrong.
  • What is the flavor of your life?
  • In a world powered by Artificial Intelligence, who makes the hard decisions?
  • Are you being kind or are you salving your guilt?
  • Dreams and romance grow in mystery and uncertainty.
  • Maintenance is one of the commandments of good engineering.
  • Don’t analyze, utilize.
  • People have three faces: one for strangers, one for friends, and one they never show anyone – the true self.
  • Fine-tuning or pruning?
  • Meritocracy: stack ranked according to my preferences.
  • Everyone is talking their own book.
  • Everything is a network.
  • You do not wake up one morning a bad person. It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders of self-respect to self-interest.—Robert Brault
  • Transform your tomb to chrysalis and emerge.
  • The goal of learning is not so much answers as better questions.
  • Many people are committed to the darkness even when exposed to the light.
  • There are no recipes for success; there is only trial and error.—Carlo Rovelli
  • The worst thing is not that people lied and no one noticed. It was that people knew it was a lie and it did not matter.
  • Morality comes after desire.
  • Picking losers is harder than picking winners.
  • The only lever to move the future is the present.
  • No marksman with crooked rifles.
  • Easier to laugh at a problem that isn’t your responsibility to solve.
  • If a training is obvious, you are not the target audience.
  • Investing is not about cash flow.
  • Avoid crazy at all costs.
  • Thank your enemies with guest-gifts of pain.
  • Where are the junctions where temporary reality mets the consensus reality.
  • All stories are one story, in the end.
  • Most work is a web rather than a straight line.
  • The horror of personal smallness is the realization that our life has no meaning in consensus reality.
  • What is being pushed to the margins?
  • Transformation, what has to be done to turn one thing into another?
  • No idea that proposes free money is ever a good idea.
  • There is a salvation to be found in the ruthless cutting out of bullshit.
  • Good rules make for good games. Bad rules lead to degeneracy.
  • Never believe you can solve the impossible equation, the getting of something for nothing.
  • Any relationship with a tyrant is in the master / slave mode.
  • Influence clusters.
  • In a mob, everyone gets a turn.
  • Write what is written within.
  • The variance is larger than the mean.
  • Narrative matters, and it is not always possible to control the narrative.
  • Truth transcends the visible.
  • If the why is important, many things become possible.
  • Where nothing makes sense, cast aside knowledge and only look to what is possible.
  • Conserve resources. Select where to apply effort, and don’t start something you are not prepared to see through to the end.
  • Revolutions of style are also revolutions of substance.
  • Locate meaning in the putatively superficial. Examine the values underpinning artifice.
  • Assassinations are like birthday presents. It’s the thought that counts.
  • Confidence comes from preparation.—Kobe Bryant
  • Narrative follows price.
  • Time makes more converts than reason.—Thomas Paine
  • The truth does not require  your participation to exist. Bullshit does.—Terence McKenna
  • Selection and time teaches what should be feared.
  • You are what you do. Not what you say or what you believe.
  • Don’t give unsolicited advice. Advice-giving inherently implies unequal status.
  • Three minutes? Ask a question.
  • Be strict with yourself and forgiving of others.
  • Exercise gratitude.
  • People are busy, distracted, and tired. Always follow up.
  • Don’t be the smartest person in the room.
  • Your choices shape your identity, not the other way around.
  • Character is more important than accomplishments.
  • Be kind, but be ready to walk.
  • Self-discipline is more important than motivation.
  • Conviction is necessary to turn the possible into actual.
  • Assume nothing is random, but also assume that any apparent connection needs to be substantiated.
  • Stasis is a poor form of longevity. Engagement, reinterpretation and evolution lead to long term relevance.
  • Meritocracy, an interesting idea no one wants implemented.
  • Romantics love the narrative.
  • The Others are the only ones that need to hide themselves, and everyone is an Other in some contexts.
  • Some garden. Others sit. A few transform the site into a dump.
  • The bliss of today leads to the pain of tomorrow, and vice versa.
  • Doing is learning.
  • Of Reality, we each experience only a single slice.
  • Paranoia sells.
  • If it is just words, let them howl.
  • Beginnings are easy. It’s knowing when to stop that is often hard.
  • Not every writer is Homer.
  • What choice do you make when the stakes are pain?
  • Questions that trouble the mind are the only questions worth considering.
  • The gym is a microcosm of life. Good training transfers.
  • If it is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.
  • For who can judge, or witness of those times, Where all alike are guilty of the crimes?—John Donne
  • Power and strength are not the same thing.—Plato
  • The prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers.—John Hart-Smith
  • Lying is impossible if everything is false.
  • Poetry is a shotgun aimed at our shared experience.
  • Too much detail when abstracted could mean anything.
  • Meaning is as fundamental to talk as matter.
  • Reality has been replaced with abstraction; the Real has become chosen belief.
  • The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence and obsolescence.—Art Linklater
  • Evolution requires variance. Optimization implies a static environment.
  • Because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured.—Andy Grove
  • Prediction and provocation are not the same thing.
  • Corruption is power that overflows its bounds.
  • Viewpoints outside one’s contextual frame are invaluable.
  • Van Riper Principle: give the job to your best then let them do it without looking over their shoulder.
  • Friends can be unfeeling and stupid and still be friends when it counts.
  • The advantage of being old is you have seen most of what happens before.
  • Without reaching a limit and failing, it is impossible to know the boundaries of the possible.
  • Humankind cannot bear very much reality.—T. S. Eliot
  • No meaning outside relationships.
  • Have you tried solving the problem?
  • Games with God have no score, only endings.
  • School the meat. Don’t let the meat school you.
  • Second trade first.
  • Are you security, public relations or some other thing?
  • Choice enables us to become more than what we are.
  • Electronic intercepts are great, but you don’t know if you’ve got two idiots on the phone.—Martin Peterson, former Executive Director of the CIA
  • You might not be interested in war, but sometimes, war is interested in you.
  • Let time toast it for you.
  • …the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself alone makes for good writing.—Faulkner
  • Don’t show me. Give me the recipe and I will show myself.
  • On a local level, (d)evolution is about fitness for survival of an animal, or indeed a species. But on a global level the point of evolution is that it is a parallel algorithm for exploring the many forms of fitness.
  • Beer on whiskey, mighty risky—Whiskey on beer, never fear.
  • Life wasn’t simpler when you were a kid. You were simpler when you were a kid.
  • Economic exclusion is central to social persecution.
  • Believe as little as possible without becoming a heretic, so that you can obey as little as possible without becoming a rebel.
  • Money is like heroin for boring people.
  • They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
  • Leadership means helping other people with their problems.
  • Discovery is about walking up to the edge of the familiar and stepping over.
  • After someone asking for some ridiculous thing from you: I see you mean business.
  • Put some paint where it ain’t.
  • Don’t borrow trouble.
  • Life is lived looking forwards and understood looking backwards.
  • The opposite of play isn’t work, it’s rote.—Edward Hollowell
  • Disney characters have a Hug Rule, where they wait for the child to release first. It doesn’t work if everyone does it.
  • Only Zeus has medicine for everything.—Stobaeus
  • It ain’t gonna smell better in a week.
  • We’re in crazyland now, the rules don’t apply.
  • Put yourself in situations where preparation does not ensure success.
  • Signal you are playing.
  • Conventional thinking tends to both sides, either / or thinking.
  • Crisis reveals character.
  • Hope clouds observation.
  • Value is established in the losing.
  • The primary motivator in a bureaucracy is fear.
  • The doors of hell are locked from the inside.—C. S. Lewis
  • That which submits rules.
  • A world is supported by four things: the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers if the righteous, and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.
  • Bad shepherds ruin their flocks.—Homer, Odyssey
  • Imagination is as effortless as perception.—Keith Johnstone
  • Is it a characteristic of a subgroup or of most people?
  • The Paradox of Opportunity: so long as we live, there will always be another opportunity. But, opportunities are finite. Good opportunities are both rare and can sometimes be manufactured, a gift of attitude, circumstance, or openness to what the moment offers.
  • The difference between being imaginative and its opposite often lies in whether we are being judged and whether we care about that judgment.
  • Contempt is the enemy of judgment.
  • A smile is not just in your mouth, it is also in your eyes, voice and body language.
  • Like a broken ceramic, trust can be repaired, but people will always look at the seam.
  • It could be worse. The dead could return and ask for their stuff back.
  • What use is money if it cannot buy what you need.

Zuihitsu, 2023-12

~ cafebedouin ~ 2 Comments

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.

  • Failure requires objectives.
  • Hedges are not for keeping people out, but directing them to the path.
  • Do not mistake games for wasting time.
  • A society is the commingling of dreams.
  • Our ideal ought to be, not union, but gravitational pull.
  • Proximity to power can ensure survival in tough times.
  • Carve out room for nonsense, for that which has no practical meaning.
  • Code-switching is a prerequisite for survival when living among different tribes.
  • Fabricated individual identities require external validation to transcend fantasy.
  • Liberalism is a cult of self-creation.
  • No salvation without Satan.
  • A morality without mercy or forgiveness in error isn’t a morality.
  • Wisdom accepts the world as it is and a role in that world. Folly is creating new worlds or living apart.
  • Only sick souls find Christianity appealing.
  • For a believer, chance is the work of Providence.
  • Rights are founded on state power. No state, no rights.
  • Modus vivendi over agreement. Promoting rights demands agreement.
  • It is enough to occasionally punch a hole in the big lie.
  • Materialism is the orientation of impotence.
  • Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis. English translation: Wherein you have no power, therein neither should you will.
  • No freedom without limits.
  • Science is the servant of madness.
  • One right way for everyone is just another tyranny.
  • Real fear or fear of a bruised ego?
  • Never get between a man and his meal.
  • Take your time. Go deeper. Be critical. After accepting something, reevaluate again.
  • The most serious problem is the one that cannot be discussed. Marc Andreessen
  • What other people think or say about me is none of my business.
  • Mind your own business.
  • Replacement is the most common variety of change.
  • Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
  • The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence.—Charles Bukowski
  • In your closet and your life, subtract whenever you add.
  • When the wrench is on the nut, tighten it.
  • Stop reaching for people who aren’t reaching back.
  • Give positivity an equal chance.
  • Compensation reflects the difficulty of training.
  • Behavior is communication.
  • An erection can not be argued with.
  • Talk a dream. A plan makes it possible. Put it on a calendar and review it weekly, and it becomes real.
  • Time, dry powder and patience.
  • If at first you don’t succeed, try giving up and going back to bed.
  • Do not be part of groups where speaking honestly is less important than some member’s comfort.
  • If you trade 50:50s, you’ll end up broke.
  • There are two types of investors: those that make money and those that don’t. You can learn from both.
  • The money is not in the cure. The money is in the comeback.
  • Be true to your truth.
  • It’s expensive to own nice things.
  • A fit body, a calm mind, and a house full of love are things that must be earned.
  • Start in the right place.
  • What type of person are you interacting with, e.g., trader, killer, influencer, maker, drone, or something else?
  • Life is loss. Learning to lose and to accept limits is key to longevity.
  • Success is being dumb enough to do it, and smart enough to know when to stop.
  • Pain stops when you learn its lesson.
  • It might not be your fault, but it is your problem.
  • Fundamentalists must fight pragmatists.
  • Rules are to induce conformity on a multiplicity.
  • People accustomed to winning feel every loss more keenly. Privilege implies vulnerability.
  • Should you do something because you want to or feel an obligation?
  • True love is selfless.
  • Conservative decision-making, risk mitigation, and a focus on costs over growth tends to longevity.
  • Reject unfounded blame and praise.
  • Imagination gives us access to strange new worlds.
  • When you leave, you find out who your friends are.
  • Know when something does not concern you, and you have no contribution to make.
  • Kindness begins with regard for those weaker than us.
  • What kind of artificial do you prefer?
  • Any question asked in bad faith can be rejected, out of hand.
  • No gift is free.
  • Laughter should travel with empathy as a companion.
  • Power shapes information to its convenience.
  • Sometimes Dionysius wins.
  • Education, in the modern context, is how to construct, evaluated and then reconstruct different worldviews and lens to use in problem-solving.
  • Whose stories are you telling, and what are their incentives?
  • You cannot forget what you don’t notice in the first place.
  • Be just, and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.
  • The easiest mark to fool is The Mark Inside.
  • Some ideas can only be thought outside the confines of law, tradition and other constraints.
  • A bull in the bedsheets. A bear in the spreadsheets.
  • Low cost, high price.
  • If it sucks, don’t give any fucks.
  • No man is a failure who has friends.
  • The smartest side to take in a bidding war is the losing side.—Warren Buffett
  • Inner speech is your flashlight in the dark room that is your mind.
  • A simple life is striped of unnecessary complication.
  • Enjoy what is easily available, preferring obtaining items for the least cost. Luxuries costs more than their price.
  • Persuasion is often an exercise in repetition.
  • Camp as Christmas. Hard as nails!
  • Every civilization must contend with an unconcious force which can block, betray, or countermand almost any concious intention of the collectivity.
  • Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?―Diogenes of Sinope
  • We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.—Charles Bukowski
  • Your scars can give someone else hope.
  • Learn enough history to: 1) bear reality patiently, and 2) respect the delusions of others.
  • Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves.—Chinua Achebe
  • You rent bonds. You own stocks.
  • No matter the color, the cat that catches mice is a good cat.
  • How alive are you willing to be?
  • Never give advice.
  • Mediocrity reigns.
  • Wisdom is discernment.
  • Reduce it to its essence.
  • Deal with people where the contract seems superfluous.
  • Learn from other people’s mistakes.
  • When something works well, keep doing it.
  • Being too busy is a sign you are not thinking enough.
  • Remember the essential.
  • Time and compounding can beat any problem.
  • Smart people often do dumb things.
  • One good test is worth a thousand expert opinions.—Wernher von Braun
  • Where there is no humor, there is no love.
  • Life is just one big carry trade.
  • The minute you understand the right thing to do, act.
  • Greed and fear are the engines of manipulation.
  • The moral high ground is great for sighting artillery.
  • Taking responsibility for your beliefs and judgments gives you the power to change them.
  • When growth is exponential, rate matters less than total time.
  • Time discovers truth.—Seneca
  • What’s the easiest thing you could do to make a little progress?
  • Creativity is a commitment to solving new problems.
  • Disagree, then commit to a course of action.
  • We can learn only when we acknowledge we don’t already know.
  • Being called weird is the highest praise.
  • Opinions are infinite. You cannot validate them all. Put all opinions in the not enough information pile. Then, try to select a small portfolio of opinions that help explain the world and can be reality tested.
  • Nothing prepares you for completing the last third. True of races, life and relationships.
  • It is okay to live a life others do not understand.
  • Damage is fast. Healing is slow.
  • Presentation may not be everything, but it’s important.
  • A college degree shows you can finish a long project.
  • There are two ways to live life: as the actor or the playwright.
  • Knowing something other people don’t leads to opportunity.
  • A society that values individual effort over community tends to deteriorate.
  • Respect the larger discussion and be flexible in your beliefs.
  • Arguments are often built with logic, but they are always sold with rhetoric.
  • Discovery always begins in idleness.
  • The master has failed more times than the beginner has tried.
  • Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity.
  • Instead of calling someone out, call them in: invite them to a conversation and actively listen.
  • Be a fountain, not a drain.
  • Walk at least a little way down into the Grand Canyon; don’t just stay up on the rim.
  • Anything with a mouth can bite.
  • Not my carnival, not my bearded lady.
  • In a world of toxic positivity, be authentic chaos.

Zuihitsu, 2023-11

~ cafebedouin

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.

  • Trading one asset class is blind trading.
  • An avalanche starts with a single snowflake, but which one?
  • Lawyers: When the law is not on your side, argue facts. If facts are not on your side, argue the law. If you have neither, pound the table and yell.
  • Either discipline or regret.
  • Ist der Holocaust ein Irrweg oder eine Spiegelung unseres selbst? Or, Is the Holocaust an aberration, or a reflection of ourselves?
  • Technical analysis is visual confirmation bias.
  • Sometimes the best move is to sit on the sidelines.
  • Consistently catch part of a move and scale your position.
  • The best way to raise the price of something is to say that you would never sell it.
  • Art is just money on walls.
  • Answer to no one. Retain complete control.
  • Biographies are blueprints.
  • Relationships run everything.
  • Find information asymmetries, and keep them to yourself.
  • The only exit strategy is death.
  • Be liquid and buy during recessions.
  • Don’t get distracted by meaningless tripe. Don’t fight for prizes not worth winning. Follow through, get it done, learn to pick locks and walk long distances. Be strong, be smart, bring your toothbrush, be kind, work hard, be beautiful.
  • As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy, and we’re gonna make mistakes.—Mel Brooks
  • When everyone is trying to give others a taste of their own medicine all the time, everything ends up tasting like shit.
  • Guessing at unpredictable outcomes develops brain power, if you check to see when you are right and guess why when you were wrong.
  • It isn’t bull or bear. There’s just one side. If you are a bull or a bear, you ain’t on it.
  • Seeing the moment coming is easy. It’s the waiting for it to come, acting, then waiting for the next moment to act, that is hard.
  • When times get hard, people sell what they must, not what they want to sell.
  • Most people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they’re 75.—Benjamin Franklin
  • Talented people are found, not hired as needed.
  • Taste is rare.
  • Befriend the best.
  • People want information, not direction.
  • Passion, purpose and discipline.
  • Eliminate low performers to establish standards.
  • Create an environment where excellence is expected.
  • People judge based on performance, so focus on outcomes.
  • Be the first to leave.
  • Quality over feelings.
  • Be of service, not self-absorbed. Money follows being of service.
  • Relationships last longer than money.
  • Do not attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence.
  • The revolution will never take place in a place where everyone knows each other.
  • The person kicking down a door doesn’t get to choose who walks through it.
  • Deviations from the mean don’t last and tend to balance.
  • Corrections are not steady state.
  • When everyone agrees something is going to happen, something else will.
  • To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.—Tacitus
  • Nothing changes sentiment like price.
  • Leave the severed head as a warning to the others.
  • A dealmaker primarily trades in reputation.
  • Be first, be smart or cheat. Being first is easiest.
  • The wider the smiles the bigger the lies.
  • There are a lot of dumb whores, but very few smart prudes.
  • You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.—Thurber
  • A life oriented toward leisure is, in the end, a life oriented to death, the ultimate leisure.
  • Make a commitment to finishing things.
  • No complexity without compensation.
  • Awareness is how we learn to keep ourselves company.—Geneen Roth
  • Discovery is fueled by messes.
  • We are each born with an acre of interior life to cultivate. What does yours look like?
  • Be likeable.
  • …you can safely assume you have created God in your own image, when it turns out that God hates all the same people as you do.—Tom, the priest, quoted in Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott
  • People know their pain but often do not know what will relieve it.
  • Life is a dream. Interesting lives are vivid and continuous.
  • ABDCE: action, background, development, climax and ending.
  • Strength can’t be faked. You can either lift it or you can’t.
  • If you have an idea or goal, aligned people who will help to achieve it, and some suitable catalyst, you might be able to effect change.
  • …a total unwillingness to cooperate is what’s necessary to be an artist – not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision.—Joni Mitchell
  • Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.—C.G. Jung
  • There’s no difference, really, between the popular madness in general and the kind that requires medical treatment except that the individual suffers from a disease and the masses are afflicted by false opinions.—Seneca
  • What you do in life simultaneously doesn’t matter and also is the only thing that matters.
  • Competing for status is radicalizing, particularly online.
  • Trading well means either: 1) cutting losers quickly and moving on to the next trade, or 2) finding hidden value and waiting for the market to recognize it.
  • Commit to finding the truth. But, you don’t need to commit to sharing it.
  • Comfort zones are dream killers.
  • To be engrossed by something outside of ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind.
  • Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.—Charlie Munger
  • The second mouse gets the cheese.
  • If something is broken and you can’t figure out why, try breaking it more.
  • High-grading does not imply homogeneity. Your opinion is simply not best-in-class.
  • A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.
  • Sense springs from nonsense.

Zuihitsu, 2023-10

~ cafebedouin

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.

  • It’s none of my business.
  • Fraud is the market of a bubble.
  • Each of us are a work made by our own hand.
  • Attempts may fail, but those never attempted fail with certainty.
  • The guilty man fears the law; the innocent man fears chance.—Publilius Syrus
  • Bees don’t waste their time explaining to flies that honey is better than shit.
  • Be around people focused on the future, not the past.
  • Untracked is unremembered.
  • Beginners ask what. Intermediates ask how. Experts ask who. Masters ask why.
  • Those that know their history are doomed to think it is repeating.
  • Manage risks, not returns.
  • Shadowbanning is technological gas lighting.
  • Beginner problems need more. Advanced problems need less.
  • if everything goes wrong, it’s the lawyer’s fault. If everything goes right, justice prevailed.
  • Learn. Do. Teach.
  • Don’t spend time. Invest it.
  • Spend time on what you excel at, enjoy and has the highest rate if return.
  • Perseverance without passion isn’t grit, it’s grind.
  • Call on God, but row away from the rocks.— Hunter S. Thompson
  • I spell my God with two o’s and devil with no d.—Cyrus Bartol
  • A lot of things are folklore.
  • Some people cannot take life easy.
  • Imagination is sufficient for some. Others must try to open the locked door.
  • In the dying organism, the healthy cell is still doomed.
  • The liar we listen to most is ourselves.
  • Paradise is for those that make it.
  • Live without disguise where they don’t advertise.
  • Can function arise from dysfunction?
  • Easy to change your mind. Hard to change your character.
  • Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.—Emerson
  • For people, perception trumps facts.
  • To make a thief, make an owner. To make a criminal, pass laws.
  • Distance and interval are sometimes necessary to see the beauty of a thing.
  • Useless work darkens the heart.
  • At some point, your group tendency or character will claim you.
  • Violence’s most devoted ally is the diverted eye.
  • Swearing is impossible where everything is permitted.
  • The satirist praises through rage.
  • Learn slowly, but learn.
  • No suffering, no joy.
  • There is no way to act rightly in our modern world.
  • Everything may have been tried, but I have not tried everything.
  • Sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.
  • Beware looking for goals. Look for a way of life.
  • Shade often gives better profiles.
  • Real leadership is recognized, not imposed.
  • Sign above the desk of Ursula Le Guin: 1) Is it true? 2) Is it necessary or at least useful? 3) Is it compassionate or at least unharmful?
  • Impatience is an argument with reality.
  • You tend to find what you look for. The difference between Mr. Rogers and a conspiracy theorist is one is looking for the helpers while the other is looking for someone to blame.
  • The best environments are characterized by intelligence, love and creative action.
  • The gossip everyone knows ain’t gossip.
  • The government is not particularly good at finding the winners of tomorrow, but the losers of yesterday are very good at finding the government.—Moritz Schularick
  • Growth mindsets are rare between the sheets.
  • Desire is fueled by beauty and art, and passion takes many forms, both good and bad.
  • People hate being sold to. Buy they love to buy. —Marty Neumeier
  • We live on the border between now and later.
  • Everything is compromised until proven otherwise.

Zuihitsu, 2023-09

~ cafebedouin
  • How is life? Harsh according to good standards, but well according to harsh ones.
  • Thank your enemies with guest-gifts of pain.
  • The angle of the dangle is proportional to the heat of the meat.
  • Two is one, and one is none.
  • Risk cannot be destroyed, only transformed.
  • No pain, no premium. Over the long term, risk leads to reward.
  • Diversification was three dimensional: what, how, and when.
  • It is the risk you are unaware of that most often gets you.
  • Every possible trade has a long and a short end.
  • The more diversified, the more difficult to time.
  • When unsure between two options, go 50/50.
  • Assume the market is right, and you are missing something.
  • Weizenbaum’s questions: Is it good? Do we need it?
  • Kindness down among the meek is harvested in crisis.
  • Elites are defined by those that cannot be criticized or held accountable? Who is that for you?
  • The enemies of learning are work and sleep.
  • Eliminate the unnecessary and focus on the substance.
  • If you are wearing it, you ate it.
  • Avoid people of base work and philosophical sentiment.
  • Dwell with a lame w2man, and you will learn how to limp.
  • The trees cannot be harmed if the Lorax is armed.
  • Pick a number or pick a time. You cannot do both.
  • It only takes a few exchanges to set the price.
  • Having eyes, but not seeing beauty; shaving ears, but not hearing music; having minds, but not perceiving truth…These are the things to fear.
  • Patience beats greed.
  • Three options: profit, slavery or do without.
  • Critique is for lovers. Hatred isn’t critique.
  • Climb, conserve, confess.
  • Innovation is easier with a relatively small team that has to make a decisive and clear concentrated bet and that doesn’t tolerate any mediocre performers. that’s it.”
  • If your intuition is good, follow it. If your intuition is bad, it doesn’t matter what you do.
  • There is a fine line between horror and hilarity.
  • The best games have no end game.
  • If you want to do X, just keep doing it. Most people stop.
  • Excess production breeds violence.
  • Barbell strategy. It’s at the extreme ends where it is easiest to learn.
  • Competence and power are often in conflict.
  • Capital preservation is key. You don’t have to make your fortune every session.
  • Conviction is either extremely difficult or free.
  • The dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.
  • Your opinion of the world is also a confession.
  • Wine from water is not so small, but the greatest miracle is that anything is here at all.
  • In any market, the first thing to understand is the pricing drivers. Always, without exception.
  • What needs to happen to achieve the result I want? Are the people say something, ask whether it is true.
  • The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem.
  • The circus tent fell and the clowns are loose tonight.
  • States fail when they cannot distinguish fools from serious men.
  • Do not defend someone you don’t know against evidence you haven’t seen.
  • Distributions trump averages.
  • Be definition, the unsustainable will fail.
  • Prophets denounce, circumscribe the limits and demarcate what is, or should be, impossible.
  • Are you an effective broker of trust?
  • Peace makes wealth. War simply moves the spoils from the weak to the strong.
  • Better to be blunt than misunderstood.
  • You are the tool, not the work.
  • Don’t borrow trouble before its time.
  • Forgiveness is better than regret.
  • A prayer answered is often a curse.
  • Conversations are the water in the river of community.
  • Learn how to be corrected without being offended. Humility is important for growth.—Feynman
  • In every situation, know your edge and your exits.
  • Pray for understanding in your darkness.
  • Loyalty must run both ways.
  • Innocence based on ignorance is unfit to protect itself.
  • The long game is less crowded.
  • Men exchange masks, but leave the heart open, exposed.
  • Children teach us true love.
  • Human beings are the only creatures on earth that claim a God and the only thing that behaves like it hasn’t got one.—Hunter S. Thompson

Zuihitsu, 2023-08

~ cafebedouin
  • If it’s an easy change, it’s superficial.
  • Slavery is not being able to speak your mind.—paraphrased Epictetus
  • You won’t get anything done by planning.—Karl Pilkington
  • We build on our experience, not our plans.
  • A culture of exposing weakness reduces critical failures.
  • Life and pain share kinship.
  • The gods do not give everything to people at the same time.—Homer
  • People know when something is wrong. They rarely know how to fix it.
  • No one wants to hear about how you would fix their problem.
  • When you are beat, admit defeat.
  • Practice is the teacher of all things.
  • Experimentation is non-stop, an unstable self requires constant exploration.
  • Everyone, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.—Robert Louis Stevenson
  • The world is large, and we can experience very little of it personally. To see what the world is like, we need to rely on other means: carefully collected global statistics.
  • Gifts debase people’s minds and actions.—Nostoi
  • The remedy for an offense is to forget it.
  • Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.
  • He who has struggled with continuous troubles gets hardened to injury and bends to no misfortune.—Seneca
  • Be small in small matters and big in large ones.
  • The price of vengeance: everything.
  • Contentment is for those that control their heart and stomach.
  • It is hard work having everyone as a friend; it is enough not to have enemies.—Seneca
  • If you say what you want, you may hear what you don’t.—Alcaeus
  • Words may not carry weapons, but they wound the heart.
  • The future can be found in our own mind.
  • Action produces information.
  • Crises expose realities and strip away obfuscation and misdirection.
  • Machine learning is money laundering for bias.—Maciej Cegłowski
  • Running from one problem often leads to a different one.
  • Virtue’s first rule is to avoid vice, and wisdom’s is to not be stupid.—Horace
  • What you focus on grows, what you think about expands, and what you dwell upon determines your destiny.—Robin Sharma
  • Wherever the storm drives me, I put ashore and look for shelter.—Horace
  • Facts are often time or context limited.
  • Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.—Howard Aiken
  • A truly free, unencumbered, competitive marketplace is the best assurance against tyranny.
  • There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.—George Santayana
  • Only ideology can keep a group together.
  • Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
  • Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.
  • Sometimes, it is best to throw everything out and start over.
  • There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.
  • Past experience provides a reality check. But, current reality doesn’t reflect the future.
  • You’re probably not smarter than the others.
  • Ninety percent of everything is crap. Finding the ten percent that is gold is the value of culture.
  • When in doubt, document.
  • Don’t do anything dumb.
  • Schedules only move in one direction.
  • You can’t get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.
  • Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.
  • You can’t make it better until you make it work.
  • First time, every time. Doing it again is your punishment for when you fail.
  • Understanding comes the third time.
  • Cutting losses quickly is the foremost rule of speculating.
  • Money isn’t made in the trading, but in the waiting.
  • We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails —Cora L. V. Hatch, 1859
  • Our minds remain open even after the drugs wear off.
  • You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.—Robin Williams
  • Do not search for reason where there is none.
  • Never decide when angry; never promise when happy.
  • You don’t own the world’s problems.
  • Systematize everything. Reproduction is key to improvement.
  • Life is a dream. We can dream a better dream. We can even wake up.
  • If there is no recourse there is no law.
  • Immortality transmutes the human person into a God or monster.
  • Life is a process of learning shit you never ever wanted to hear.—Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway
  • People with few choices must be patient and canny.
  • Control requires acknowledgment.
  • No liberty. No prosperity.
  • Emotional support can be as simple as spending time with someone and stating facts.
  • Comedy, and tragedy, is often finding the things you hate in what you love.
  • Risk constrains growth. No risk, no limits.
  • Different networks have different bottlenecks and points of failure.
  • Revel in all things glitch.
  • There is no cannot. Either try or ask for help.
  • Guilt is a luxury few can afford.
  • Be in the place you are in and don’t pretend.
  • Too many old things crowd out the new.
  • We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.—Winston Churchill