Zuihitsu, 2025-09

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 worst sin against stewardship is to waste your life.—R.C. Sproul
  • I believe in the brotherhood of all men, but I don’t believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn’t want to practice it with me. Brotherhood is a two way street.—Malcolm X
  • Deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance.—K. Anders Ericsson
  • To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.—George Santayana
  • No happy relationship is possible with someone who struggles with accountability. If they won’t accept ownership of their mistakes, take responsibility for their actions & make changes when they’re wrong, they have made your integrity the price of a relationship with them.
  • Being teachable solves many problems.
  • Because time will eventually take everything from you, the question of what to sacrifice is only the art of timing.
  • Beware of efficient markets, for price discovery may not be a nice discovery.
  • Entire beautiful lives can be had in the pockets of inefficiency!
  • Two waterfalls do not hear each other.
  • Objectifying people undermines relationships with them.
  • Empathetic understanding, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard.
  • You will not survive here. You are not a wolf. And this is the land of wolves now.—Sicario
  • Walk away from situations you don’t like.
  • A light heart makes for navigable waters.
  • The celebration of leisure is the preservation of man’s dignity.
  • What is truth to one may be disaster to another.
  • Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.
  • Don’t look for goals. Look for a way of life.
  • Eloquence is a byproduct of solitude.

Zuihitsu, 2025-10

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.

  • You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.—Warren Buffett
  • When the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.—Jeff Bezos
  • It’s not cynicism; it’s anthropology.
  • Context shapes competence.
  • Instability requires bilateral participation.
  • Every virtue has a shadow.
  • Sadness is nothing but worn out joy.
  • Honesty is a structural precondition for reality alignment.
  • The good person is the one who maintains enough integrity to keep showing up authentically.
  • Evolution is reenforcement learning for species.
  • There is a high cost to low discernment.

Zuihitsu, 2025-08

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.

  • No one wants to go to a party that seems to be winding down.
  • To listen requires a voice. For what needs to be know, requires to be asked.
  • It’s often hard to notice when a tool that’s helping you think has started thinking for you.
  • Critique without collapse.
  • Glacial change is still change.
  • Not the blaze, but the match.
  • Performance is not preparation.
  • Keep the questions alive.
  • To save yourself, you must change.
  • Creation by constraint (forge) vs. addition by inheritance (spiral)Observation alters the observed.

Zuihitsu, 2025-07

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.

  • Fruit reveals the root.
    You don’t need to be in the same category to have equal value.
  • If you cannot change it, it is not your problem.
  • Wages increase with complementation until full substitution.—Qwern
  • The bottom is never the bottom.
  • With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.—Von Neumann
  • Learn to accept rejection.
  • Good conversation is the shared construction of meaning, where what is said builds on what came before.
  • Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either.—Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild Built
  • Trying to even a loss often lends to more loss.
  • Claiming an attribute is favoring perception over being.
  • Finish your work and leave.
  • What would you do if you knew you would not fail?
  • You can choose to say yes, or no. Choosing yes leads to adventure. Choosing no is safe.
  • The mind that is occupied is missing the present.
  • Substitute attention for preparation.
  • The more space you have, the more you’ll fill it up.
  • Learn to do things alone.
  • Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it is going to be easy or free.
  • Art is the mother of religion.
  • Everything looks intentional when you’re an inexperienced imbecile.
  • Close enough is perfect.
  • Everything is high risk, if you’re a coward.
  • Have you considered just not doing it?
  • Don’t contradict, unless you want to fight.
  • Facts are about what is, truth is about feeling.
  • Puppets require strings.
  • Sometime you got to roll the hard six.
  • Safe challenge is oxymoronic.
  • At some point, you have to shut-up and do something.
  • A simulation of insight is not insight.
  • Solve only what earns solving.
  • Most people don’t respond to what you say, but how it makes them feel about themselves.
  • We don’t all attend the same bitch conference.
    To be creative you’ve got to be unsociable and tight-assed.—Bob Dylan
  • If it doesn’t work in the fire, it doesn’t work.—Daniel Ingram
  • Weirdness is a crucible.
  • Disruption clarifies, but it does not replace encounter.
  • Some arenas are for training, other are for competing.
  • Exercise, eat well, challenge your brain and spend time with people.
  • Walk faster, age slower.
    Sometimes, late in life,
  • God makes a minister out of a scoundrel, because it’s the only way to reach the other scoundrels.
  • Simple answers are a way for us to feel in control.

Zuihitsu, 2024-01

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.

  • 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, 2023-04

  • Data over narrative.
  • Authoritative without being authoritarian.
  • Don’t be a push-over.
  • Any fool can know. The point is to understand.—Albert Einstein
  • Look for the slope not the Y intercept.
  • Doing leads to becoming.
  • Panic and overreaction—the late response of fools.
  • We are what we do/make.
  • People with full lives tend not to pass judgment on the lives of others.
  • Choose your feelings as you would a weapon.
  • Constraints can be invisible.
  • A life deeply lived connects to truth beyond itself.

Zuihitsu, 2023-03

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.

  • The right way is the hard way.
  • Reimagine our world and create the conditions for human flourishing, which would necessarily involve self-determination, mutual aid and freedom from governments, markets, or ideologies dictating what an individual’s or group’s life can be.
  • More awareness, more choices.
  • Behavior is a combination of someone’s: past experiences, ability to self regulate, and their core beliefs.
  • You get what you tolerate.
  • The Gruen effect is when an intentionally confusing layout makes you forget the reason you came to a store to shop.
  • …sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts.—William S. Burroughs
  • Marginal improvement or create something new. These rarely overlap.
  • The world is full of people whose vision of the future is an idealized past.
  • If a lion could talk we would not understand him.—Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations
  • Connecting is better than protecting.
  • The first draft of history is emotional, inaccurate and conflicted.
  • No meaning without mythology.
  • A focus on accumulation destroys the social fabric.
  • People are a living composite of everyone they have ever loved.
  • Play is the soil from which healthy adults are grown and sustained.
  • Get in early and get out sooner.
  • Competition brings out the best in products, and the worst in people.
  • For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.—George Seaton
  • Wherever the wind blows, so too will my thoughts and feelings take me.
  • Speech is silver but silence is golden.
  • Use time as a filter.

Zuihitsu, 2022-10

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.

  1. When dealing with enemies, the goal must not be diagnosis, but defeat.
  2. All observation is drenched in theory.
  3. The problem with rowing your own boat is that you can’t see where you’re going.
  4. When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.—Isaac Asimov
  5. Some variance clarifies. Some disrupts.
  6. Modern finance’s innovations tend to make safe assets more risky.
  7. Survival in adverse environments is more important than maximum returns under favorable conditions.
  8. Even music can be a weapon when someone else controls it.
  9. Sind Kryptowährungen eine Verirrung oder ein Spiegelbild unserer selbst?
  10. Indecision often results from thinking we have more control than we do.
  11. Existence is a guerilla campaign.
  12. The problem with belief in universal truth or universal values is it also comes with the belief that they must be imposed on the rest of the globe, either through diplomacy, coercion, or violence.
  13. Stay in the game. Be patient. Avoid the big mistake. Do these things and you’ll be just fine.
  14. Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.—Mae West
  15. People that play it safe when young end up playing it safe their whole lives.
  16. If you cannot win the war you are fighting, fight another one.
  17. Journalism: history or conversation?
  18. …every instance of turf-protecting selfishness is evidence not of flawed human nature, but of a flawed society, one that values stuff or power or money or winning over relationships.
  19. The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilised forms.—Bruno Latour
  20. Two types of categorization: lumpers and splitters.
  21. An artist is not paid for labor but for vision.—James McNeill Whistler
  22. You can learn as much from things done badly as things done well.
  23. …if it’s provably secure, it’s probably not.—Lars Ramkilde Knudse
  24. Sometimes to find the light, we must first touch the darkness.
  25. Despise not the labor that humbles the heart.
  26. Controversy is artificial interestingness.
  27. What cannot be known hollows the mind. Fill it not with guesswork.
  28. It darkens the heart to call dark deeds good.
  29. Autocracy is brittle because it is blind.
  30. Death, taxes and people complaining. The sure things in life.
  31. Sometimes you change the subject, and sometimes the subject changes you.
  32. Without pain, without struggle, without anguish, discomfort and fear, transformation is impossible.
  33. When someone is crying, someone is learning.
  34. Are you weird enough?
  35. Learning is really just widening.
  36. Launch and iterate beats plan and pontificate.
  37. Les vacances, c’est la période qui permet aux employés de se souvenir que les affaires peuvent continuer sans eux.—E.J. Wilson
  38. If you need a sign, it’s bad design.
  39. Some people need a push, some need a shove. Some need the barrel of a .38 snub.
  40. Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.—Carl Sagan
  41. Don’t play the sap for some cause.
  42. Our main mission in life is to say to the other people: Do not be afraid.
  43. Learn the difference between constructive criticism and someone projecting their own insecurities.
  44. There is hope. Infinite hope. Just not for us.
  45. If your definition of a friend is someone who will die for you, then you don’t have any friends.
  46. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.
  47. Tomorrow may belong to your foes, but there is always the day after tomorrow.
  48. Being a nobody can be a great advantage because no one bothers to lie to you.
  49. Men will build empires for a wink and a meal.
  50. You can always tell a [type of person], but you can’t tell him much.
  51. History does not take lifelong holidays.
  52. You cannot make something good until you know who you are making it for.
  53. Knowledge all by itself, without deep wisdom, ends up becoming despair.—Ram Dass
  54. The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common – they don’t change their views to fit the facts. They change the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs changing.—The Doctor
  55. Cultivate and relearn the practice discernment.
  56. Write, think and create — a page a day.
  57. A bad metaphor is a curse.
  58. New environments have different norms and different cultures.
  59. People need a creative outlet, unstructured time and to know they are valued.
  60. When the judgment comes, the people in the middle will fall into hell first.
  61. Love is a choice and an action. Love is never merely a feeling.

Little Rules About Big Things

“People have vastly different desires, except for three things: Respect, feeling useful, and control over their time. Those are nearly universal.

…the past wasn’t as good as you remember, the present isn’t as bad as you think, and the future will be better than you anticipate.

A comforting delusion is thinking that other people’s bad circumstances couldn’t also happen to you.

Nothing too good or too bad stays that way forever, because great times plant the seeds of their own destruction through complacency and leverage, and bad times plant the seeds of their own turnaround through opportunity and panic-driven problem-solving.

Emotions can override any level of intelligence.

No one is thinking about you as much as you are.

There is an optimal amount of bullshit in life. Having no tolerance for hassle, nonsense and inefficiency is not an admirable trait; it’s denying reality. Once you accept a certain level of BS, you stop denying its existence and have a clearer view of how the world works.

You can’t believe in risk without also believing in luck because they are fundamentally the same thing—an acknowledgment that things outside of your control can have a bigger impact on outcomes than anything you do on your own.

A large group of people can become better informed over time. But they can’t, on average, become more patient, less greedy, or more level-headed during periods of upheaval. That will never change.

More people wake up every morning wanting to solve problems than wake up looking to cause harm. But people who cause harm get the most attention. So slow progress amid a drumbeat of bad news is the normal state of affairs.”

-Morgan Housal, “Little Rules About Big Things.” Collab Fund. October 11, 2022

This whole thing is quality.

Zuihitsu, 2022-09

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.

  1. Make a decision.
  2. The one true religion, survival.
  3. True creation requires sacrifice.
  4. Always be moving.
  5. The idea they one should do whatever it takes is irresponsible. Some things need razing.
  6. By their deeds you shall know them.
  7. There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.​—Louis L’Amour
  8. …the inevitable crisis takes longer to come than you can imagine, but when it does come it happens faster than you can imagine.—Dornbusch’s Law
  9. Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.—Salvador Dali
  10. Faith is 24 hours of doubt, and 1 minute of hope.
  11. The universe defines a work and war decides where it will end up.
  12. Revolutions are produced by improved conditions and rising expectations, not by mass immiseration.
  13. The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.—Adam Gopnick
  14. The narrating self doesn’t replace sense with story; it makes a story that makes its own sense.
  15. New styles involve breaking the algorithm, not following it.
  16. The middle way is not the way of melodrama.
  17. True revolution is a change of mindset.
  18. There’s head sense, and there’s heart sense.
  19. Even the hottest coals cool.
  20. Watches are the NFTs of meat space.
  21. Time proves which ideas are good enough to live on.
  22. Reacting to pain and pain avoidance usually result in bad decisions.
  23. If a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.—Jorge Luis Borges
  24. Utopia is impossible because problems are inevitable. Solving any problem leads to new problems. Dystopia is impossible because problems are solvable. Any solution not prohibited by laws of nature can be figured out. Progress means solving better and better problems forever. Life in inherently problematic, which makes it inherently interesting.
  25. Can you solve a small part of the problem?
  26. Figure out a way to make more mistakes.
  27. When Western people become wealthier, they buy more loneliness.
  28. True lack of understanding is learned.
  29. Landmine people, some people were put into the universe to rig it to explode, then walk away.
  30. Fighting with memes is fighting with weapons that will be coopted.
  31. Familiarity breeds comfort, not contempt.
  32. Least said, soonest mended.
  33. Love and freedom do not coexist.
  34. What we know is that we don’t know anything.
  35. People don’t care about research, principles or good governance. What they want is the magic bullet.
  36. Fear deafens the heart.
  37. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.—Richard Feynman