Generalizing the 5/10/15 Rule for U.S. Drug Development, Or The Cycle of the New

“U.S. drug development cycle, which he says “always follows the 5/10/15 rule. For the first 5 years, companies hype new drugs; next 5 years all hidden side effects are exposed, leading to black-box warnings and class action lawsuits; in [the] last 5 years, the companies start dissing their own old drug as the patent runs out to begin the hype cycle for their next new drug.” 

-Jane Metclafe, “2023 Predictions-The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.” neo.life. January 2023

This article on 2023 predictions is worth reading in full. However, I particularly found this piece interesting. Ultimately, this is about how incentives drive behavior. So, we might generalize this rule to something like: “Any novel thing goes through a period that focuses on benefits, another period on the risks, then finally becomes the status quo that will be replaced by some other, new thing.”

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.

Dru Riley’s 100 Rules

“3. “Not wanting something is as good as having it.” — If you don’t want something, you’re just as satisfied as someone who has it. Naval Ravikant says that “…desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

42. “It’s easier to resist in the beginning than the end.” — Mistakes become harder to correct the longer they linger. Sunk costs play tricks on us. Suck it up and rip the bandaid off now. Toxic relationships, bad hires and tough conversations. It’s immediate pain versus chronic pain…

82. “Play long-term games. Compound returns.” — Focus on the long-term. Most benefits come from later stages of compounding. Pick up habits that you can see yourself sticking with. Jeff Bezos says to focus on what doesn’t change

90. “Live below your means for freedom and options.” — Establish a margin of safety to take more risks. James Clear says that ‘Your success depends on the risks you take. Your survival depends on the risks you avoid.

Dru Riley, “100 Rules — Personal Philosophy.” druriley.com. Accessed August 20, 2022

I might tweak some of these, such as 82 should be infinite games and build on the ideas of James Carse in Finite and Infinite Games. But, this is a good list.

Zuihitsu, 2022-07

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.

  1. You do not need to be related to relate.
  2. Stop seeing life as a canvas to fill and see it as marble to shape.
  3. The market owes you nothing.
  4. Incorporate some calculated risks into your plan.
  5. You never know when you’re going to run out of steam.
  6. I don’t interest myself in the why. I think more often in terms of the when, sometimes where, and always how much.
  7. Don’t repeat yourself.
  8. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.—James Baldwin
  9. Markets of abundance are both bad for the median consumer, and good for intelligent ones.
  10. Cars destroy community.
  11. The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life.—Helen Keller
  12. Forgiveness and compassion are always linked.
  13. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.—Martin Luther King, Jr.
  14. Look for the 25 to 1 risk profile.
  15. You only find out who’s swimming naked when the tide goes out.—Warren Buffett
  16. Smart people hate small talk.
  17. Act like you like someone and you will.
  18. How do you spend most of your time?
  19. Perhaps the dead are the only reliable narrators because their stories are all they have left.
  20. It takes years, if ever, to understand the relative authenticities of our relationships.
  21. Stand in the presence of questions and do not look for answers.
  22. Play the man, not the puck.
  23. There’s imprisonment in trying to recreate the past.
  24. Love is the process of refining the truths we can tell each other.
  25. To know is to share a community of interpretation.
  26. In the game of privacy, the only way to win is not to login.
  27. Build infrastructure.
  28. Paths are made by walking.
  29. Tactics are exchanging one problem for an easier one.
  30. People have done this before, but not us.—Ada Limón
  31. And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.—John Steinbeck, East of Eden
  32. How long can the corpus outlast the corpse?
  33. If you aim at nothing, you hit nothing.
  34. I, and I alone, am responsible for everything I think and feel.
  35. The First Law of Online Writing: always make sure that anything you want to endure is hosted on a platform that you control.
  36. No. I’m fully committed right now.
  37. Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?
  38. The chances are minuscule. But minuscule is not zero.
  39. To be alive, he says, is to act in ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs.
  40. The past can’t hurt you anymore, not unless you let it.—Alan Moore in V for Vendetta
  41. Enduring relationships anchor our identity or our sense of self.
  42. Anything studied and discussed long enough on the internet tends to lead to disillusionment.
  43. People focus on the vices more than the virtues, and lose trust.
  44. Theories followed far enough permit us to transcend our worldview.
  45. Do nothing without gaiety.
  46. Withhold judgment. Distrust your own knowledge, and avoid ideology.
  47. You ultimately become whoever would have saved you that time no one did.
  48. Choose what is simple without hesitation; sooner or later, what is complicated will always lead to problems.–Bernard Moitessier
  49. Obsession with detail is a hallmark of the most successful maintainers.
  50. Simplicity is a form of beauty.–Bernard Moitessier
  51. Do not crystalize your thinking prematurely.
  52. Rapid growth is unbalanced growth. Eventually, growth will be redistributed to an equilibrium.
  53. Be genuine. Be interested. Give the conversation air.
  54. …what we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how.–Wordsworth
  55. People are different, with different strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to understand who you’re dealing with.
  56. One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.—Aldous Huxley
  57. Don’t overreact to recent bad news.

Zuihitsu, 2022-06

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. Cocaine is a drug for the lonely.
  2. Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.—Alan Watts
  3. There’s always space for new narratives. The more we share our individual stories, the more we open up space for our collective stories to shift and accommodate them.
  4. A good ending accounts for everything that came before.
  5. Meaning of life: eat and not be eaten.
  6. Scarcity makes people happy.
  7. Never end a command with a verb you do not want them to do.
  8. Your opinion is also a confession of character.
  9. Everybody complains of their memory, but nobody of their judgement”—La Rochefoucauld
  10. Find the room that aligns with your goals.
  11. The audience programs the media.
  12. Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.—W.B. Yeats
  13. Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.—George Bernard Shaw
  14. Death is essential. Predation is the transfer of life and that life is a gift.
  15. A little nonsense, now and then, is relished by the wisest men.—Willy Wonka
  16. Surprise is a warning that our understanding is inadequate.
  17. Be the unanswerable riddle.
  18. Are we living in a fairy tale?
  19. True distance is measured in time.
  20. Peace is postponing the conflict until the reason for the fighting no longer matters.
  21. The grass is always greener on the other side of extinction.
  22. Racing when its not a race gets you nowhere.
  23. Learn to question your assumptions of how other people feel.
  24. Patience is easier when there is no alternative.
  25. Differences in status and wealth drives violence.
  26. People are social, and our identity is built from what we see and hear of ourselves reflected in others.
  27. A culture that encourages the trashing of the nearest and easiest targets will always implode from infighting.—Noah Smith
  28. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought and ruthless pragmatism.
  29. The best managers are stellar individual contributors who don’t want to be managers, but they take the role on to maintain their quality standards.
  30. [You] don’t need a randomized controlled trial to know that a kick in the testicles is going to hurt.—Paul Chek
  31. Don’t tweet, just delete.
  32. The five most important skills are reading, writing, arithmetic, persuasion, and programming.
  33. It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.—A.N. Whitehead
  34. We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams.—Willy Wonka
  35. Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.—Maya Angelou
  36. People with patience are more difficult to manipulate.
  37. The way of the bully depends upon coercion and control.
  38. Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.—George Bernard Shaw
  39. When in a hole, stop digging.
  40. What if this situation is even worse than I thought?
  41. Evolution is a machine turning function into structure.
  42. Forgiveness is accepting the apology you will never receive.​—Shawne Duperon 
  43. The more ubiquitous it is, the more value in the original.
  44. Sell when they want your assets. Buy when they want your cash.
  45. He who brings trouble on his house will inherit the wind.—Proverbs 11:29
  46. Every plan shatters on contact with reality.
  47. Loneliness is both an inability to bond with others, but it is also when we become strangers to ourselves.
  48. Signs of old order collapse: nothing works.
  49. Human beings are an eye blink in the cosmic calendar.
  50. Don’t talk your way out of a compliment.
  51. The con does not work without the confidence.
  52. When you see a good move, look for a better one.—Emanuel Laskel
  53. Politics is for puppets.
  54. Never appeal to someone’s better nature. They may not have one.
  55. Don’t get caught in a distraction.

Zuihitsu: 2022-05

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. Architecture is what you do with the potential of life. —Sir Peter Cook
  2. Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery.—Buckminster Fuller
  3. Walk the line between chaos and the man.
  4. Want to be irascible? Better be entertaining.
  5. Learn to recognize when it is not your turn.
  6. Know your why.
  7. The price of a free press is torrents of bullshit.
  8. Nothing in life is sure.
  9. We all have chapters we would rather stay unpublished.
  10. Everybody goes down the aisle with half the story hidden.
  11. New market benefit most from contrarian viewpoints.
  12. Cui bono? Who benefits?
  13. The more you own it, the more you learn.
  14. You have to speculate to accumulate.
  15. Four quadrants: truths, probabilities, possibilities, and lies.
  16. Never make an enemy by accident.
  17. Never mistake a wish for a certainty.
  18. A group will reflect the larger culture in which it is part.
  19. Dreams are greater than facts.
  20. Investing: start early, live below your means, save regularly, diversify broadly, and stick to your investment plan.
  21. Take a chance and fail spectacularly. That’s how you learn to succeed.
  22. You must be your own master and call your own tune.
  23. The materials dictate what needs to be done.
  24. Principles are like prayers. Noble but awkward at a party.
  25. A mind can only solve problems of similar size.
  26. Develop a core strength of taste and select for beauty.
  27. Complain less.
  28. Contemplate what the world looks like long after you are gone.
  29. Everything worthwhile is done with other people.
  30. Time favors truth.
  31. A bet is a tax on bullshit.
  32. Avoid disputes. Disputes are a time sink and prevent you from getting real work done.
  33. Avoid becoming an administrator, a job that consists of dealing with money and disputes.
  34. What we need today more than anything else is to invest in beauty.—Vangelis
  35. Temporal bandwidth is the width of your present, your now. How far into the past (or the future) is now?
  36. Half-truths are lies. Every statement is a half-truth. All statements are lies. Q.E.D.
  37. The perfect is the enemy of the possible.
  38. Environment beats self-control every time.
  39. Beware bullish borrowers.
  40. Art is what you make for yourself or give to others. Sell it and art becomes a business.
  41. Earn, learn or relax.
  42. Life is a single player game.
  43. Omniscience has no need for memory.
  44. Be curious about change.
  45. Embrace anomalies and outliers.
  46. Hold exploratory views, but loosely.
  47. Use tools that make you think differently.
  48. Look for patterns rather than timescales.
  49. Each of us must lives with inescapable loneliness, and the temptation is to destroy ourselves to escape it. —paraphrase of Jim Harrison
  50. Shift imagination from the periphery to the foundation of all knowledge.
  51. The less you know, the harder it is to learn.
  52. There are more stupid people to factor in than you imagine.
  53. The tool or platform we are using can keep us stupid, even when we’re smart.
  54. Ignorance is insufficient data to solve a problem; stupidity is where no amount of data will solve it.
  55. Rules inflexibly applied lead to poor outcomes.
  56. It is not what you do not know but what you know that is not so that gets you into trouble.
  57. Avoiding open disagreement reduces the collective intelligence of any group.
  58. Craving the safety of clarity will make you stupid.
  59. Two points define a line. Three a playing field.
  60. No net is so fine or strong that nothing can get through.
  61. Endure the blow, accept the damage, and let someone else strike back.
  62. Death or hardship is not fearful, but our fear of them can destroy us.—paraphrase of Epictetus
  63. If you spend enough time in spaces that demand you be interesting, you eventually become boring.
  64. Once a strongman loses the ability to terrorize, a loss of respect is rarely far behind.
  65. Populism’s animating spirit is hatred of cultural elites. 
  66. If you do not need it and will not use it, do not buy it.
  67. Mistakes are inevitable, the cost of tuition.
  68. Choose one: creativity or productvity.
  69. Competition gets in the way of being oneself.
  70. No fool like an old fool.
  71. Marriage is a novel, not a short-story.
  72. Marriage is like going to church. You need to believe in it.

Zuihitsu: 2022-04

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.

1. I tell you: one must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.—Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
2. Build, test, and improve.
3. Apes vs. Gorillas, aka users vs. providers.
4. Find your own way of doing things, make your own rules.
5. If you’re thinking, but not writing, you only think that you are thinking.
6. Things are going to be alright, whatever happens.
7. r, the interest rate, is the rental rate for capital, and w is the rental rate (wage rate) for labor.
8. Parking lots are major revenue generators for airports. Storage is big business everywhere.
9. You can swim all day in the sea of knowledge and not get wet.–Norton Juster
10. Look at the world without euphemism.
11. Most arguments fail due to lack of imagination.
12. The Internet amplifies variance.
13. The puppet does not pull the strings of the puppet master.
14. You can print money but not oil to heat or wheat to eat.
15. All ESG roads eventually lead to international confrontation, nationalisation or protectionism.
16. You could not have wished to be born at a better time than this, when everything is lost.—Simone Weil
17. Don’t privilege privilege.
18. Love triangles are never equilateral.
19. It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.—Mark Twain
20. Many and small beats large and heavy.
21. Finding always beats flanking.
22. Swarming always beats surging.
23. I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.—Rabindranath Tagore
24. What makes you dance in the streets?
25. Some things are not meant to be.
26. You can’t unshit your pants.
27. Who brings more value, the producer or the reducer?
28. You can have all the ingredients and still not know the recipe.
29. Don’t be afraid of changing your mind.
30. Equality that penalizes productivity isn’t equality.
31. Don’t shitpost with your wallet.
32. Solve the mystery no one was wondering about.
33. You cannot get water from a book. But, a book might help you find it.
34. A boat should be in the water. But, the water shouldn’t be in the boat. Same with people and the world.
35. Time in a growth market > timing the market
36. Twitter is Uber for ideas.
37. If you are going to manage it, you first have to acknowledge it.
38. Progress, not perfection.
39. Doubt kills.
40. Change your world.
41. When you pray for rain, you have got to deal with the mud too.
42. Takes talent to make money, but brains to keep it.
43. Same mud, same blood.
44. Nothing is more expensive than free. Nothing harder than looking for the easy way.
45. Curating is an act of generosity—you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you.
46. Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.—Gustave Flaubert
47. Our past is never where we left it.
48. Nobody’s as deaf as those that don’t want to listen.
49. You cannot change where you come from, but you can change where you are going.
50. Imagination leads to emancipation.
51. Humans are more important than hardware.
52. Actions over credentials.
53. Every decline is surfable.
54. When nothing is happening, change what you are doing.
55. Vision, a positive attitude, and hard work can make a new reality.
56. Less furious, more curious.
57. Don’t be afraid to offend.
58. Social media are the fidget spinners of the soul.
59. Some tools can only be used to destroy.
60. Most of the disorder and dysfunction in the world is caused by lack of impulse control.—Dr. Andrew Huberman
61. Resistance or difficulty is necessary in order to understand the nature and depth of our own desires.
62. Few devices have done more to obscure the efforts of human labor than the smartphone.
63. Get it down there where the dogs can eat it.
64. Things that cannot go on forever, stop.

Zuihitsu: 2022-03

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.

1. Distrust turns quickly to dislike.
2. The difference between saying something to or about someone is the latter is always gossip.
3. Children don’t worry about the future.
4. Showmen need to know how the audience leans.
5. Strategies for dealing with pain: 1) sleep, 2) forgetting, 3) madness, and 4) death.
6. Wounds that can’t be healed must be forgotten.
7. Find water first. Everything else can wait.
8. May all your stories be glad ones, and your roads be smooth and short.
9. Bones mend. Regret is forever.
10. Entropy eases familiar ruts.
11. Every good story touches the truth.
12. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story true.
13. Small deeds for small men.
14. Just because something makes sense doesn’t mean it is true.
15. Fear tends to come from ignorance.
16. A man who travels with his wife can usually be trusted.
17. I’ll see you where the roads meet.
18. Stories give us a clarity and simplicity our lives lack.
19. To fear something, you have to dwell on it.
20. Stealth is a lie and a trap.
21. Borrow or lend, lose a friend.
22. Practice makes the master.
23.  Excellence is excellence’s only companion.
24. A laurel needs rain to grow.
25. A moment in the mind is worth nine in the fire.
26. Beer dulls a memory, brandy sets it burning, but wine is best for a sore heart’s yearning.
27. It’s easier to appear harmless.
28. Sweep up the glass of your broken plans and simply start again.
29. Learn to ignore what’s current.
30. Make something people want.
31. Wisdom precludes boldness.
32. You become what you pretend to be. You tell yourself a story, and you build your identity from it.
33. You don’t know the first note of the music that moves me.
34. Less trust, more rules.
35. Few are as gullible as the well-educated.
36. Never trust a weapon you haven’t personally test fired.
37. Roots are more vital than grafts.
38. The best time to think about it was decades ago, the second best time is now.
39. It’s rare, if not impossible, to produce clean answers to messy questions.
40. The consequence of secrecy in a community is lack of preparedness for facts on the ground.
41. Bad leadership cannot be overcome by spending.
42. De quoi s’agit-il?, or “What is it all about?”
43. Explicit knowledge is translated, and all translations are imperfect.
44. When you find good fortune, convert some to seed grain.
45. Know a lady by her manner and a man by his cloth.
46. Our experience shapes our senses. We see, hear and feel what we have before.
47. Everything has a price.
48. A secret is truth concealed.
49. Nothing is harder than convincing someone of an unfamiliar truth.
50. How badly are you willing to be burned to get it?
51. The unanswerable questions have the most to teach us.
52. Give a fact, the story ends. Give a question, the story begins.
53. Fools worry over what they can’t control.
54. Everyone eats a different part of the pig. Join them.
55. A story is like a nut. One fool will swallow it whole and choke. Another fool will throw it away thinking it has little value. But, the wise will find a way to crack the shell and eat the meat inside.
56. Strength creates enemies.
57. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass.
58. Leave mystery for poets, priests and fools.
59. True gifts are given without an expectation of getting something in return. Something given to bind another isn’t a gift.
60. If you need to run, run to where the hiding places are.
61. Among totalitarians, you either conform or have secrets.
62. Intelligence is everywhere, often unrecognized.
63. Freedom is deciding which chances you are willing to take.
64. Better than the person next to you or a better community?
65. Excellence is being open to people with different points of view.
66. Compassion without sentimentality.
67. The dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies of childhood become the self-evident norms of adulthood.
68. Replace the thing before it needs replacement.
69. If enough things get fucked up, you stop needing an origin story for them.
70. Humans are sex and murder machines.
71. It’s interesting, but it doesn’t get the tools stowed.
72. Life is risk.
73. Glossing over data and going straight to interpretation is hiding from whatever direction the data is pointing.
74. Anti-zuihitsu: “One person’s cliché is another person’s truth.”
75. Better to embrace that which cannot be avoided.
76. There’s often no right choice, just a plate of progressively off hors d’oeuvres.
77. The people talking don’t know, and the people that know are not talking.
78. Imagine you wake up one day and no one knows who you are.
79. One should not underestimate the probability of failure even when lots of money is spent.
80. When people don’t know anything, there’ll be a meeting to talk about it.
81. It takes an age to test if beauty will last.
82. Until death, all is life.
83. It’s a big toolbox, and everyone has to find their own way.
84. Nothing humans can touch goes unmodified.
85. Ribbing is fine when someone is happy, but comfort people when they are sad.
86. Beware money roach motels, where it is easy to get money in, hard to get it out.
87. It is so much simpler to bury Reality than it is to dispose of dreams.—Matrix: Resurrections
88. Science is a hard scramble out of ignorance.
89. Don’t huff your own farts.

Zuihitsu: 2022-02

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.

1. Learn to forgive quickly.
2. When can you walk on thin ice? Two weeks after you have seen the first ice fisherman out there.
3. The enemy is often closer than one thinks.
4. The people who have the least suffer the most.
5. What does this narrative do to my being?
6. The menu is not the meal.
7. How do you develop your ideas? That is, how do you decide which to pursue?
7. If losing me is the worst thing to happen, your life is still a good life.—Emily Kendal Frey
8. Novelty nourishes.
9. Much of life and productivity is about matching.
10. Leading is demanded by circumstance. Greatness is in answering the call.
11. Culture over rules.
12. If you want to win, find places where winning is easy. If you want to be the best, do the opposite and be prepared to lose.
13. Different situations call for different responses.
14. An overabundance of skepticism can lead you to disbelieve things that are true.
15. Act fast.
16. Simplicity rules.
17. Politics rules over everything.
18. Most people have trouble understanding anything outside their regular experience.
19. Reality reigns.
20. Americans are not dissuaded by death.
21. Figure out how to live with or even love a change you didn’t choose.
22. It’s not the action, it’s the reaction.
23. Cruises are the sampler of travel.
24. Utter cynicism is usually the safest bet.
25. Work is hardly ever checked.
26. Do you own it? Or do you make something happen?
27. Not everything is a lesson. Sometimes you just fail.
28. A constant alert turns quickly into non-alert status quo.
29. Seek simplicity and distrust it.
30. The fruit peel can be as important as the juice.
31. Our heels get higher the closer we inch to death.
32. Ledgers are currencies, platforms are countries.
33. Most skills are fungible, and differentiation is found in values, content and aesthetics.
34. Crypto is the monetary equivalent of the right to bear arms.
35. Only the dead have seen the end of war.
36. They say when something bad happens, you have three choices: let it define you, destroy you, or strengthen you.
37. Travel light.
38. The future cannot be fought. Time is on its side.
39. A thin line separates truth from a compelling lie.
40. The flip side of mutual interest is mutual pain.
41. No one has a monopoly on truth.
42. You can never learn all of anything.
43. Truths are seldom are straight-forward.
44. Names are important because they reveal a lot about a person.
45. Speak truth, but it never hurts to be polite.
46. Don’t do anything in private you don’t want discussed in public.
47. There’s nothing more classical than cannons.
48. Supply chains are payment chains in reverse.
49. Everything is not for everyone.
50. Understanding and accountability requires memory.
51. Blues without the music is catastrophe.
52. Be in America, but not of America.
53. Don’t leave power on the table.
54. When you view life as a gold rush, you end up worshiping the Golden Calf. A Golden Calf cannot love you back.
55. Create new arenas of struggle.
56. Hunchbacks get ridden.

Zuihitsu: 2022-01

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.

1. You need to play it poorly before you get anywhere good.
2. Higher variance in key.
3. Caring more is the first step to being better.
4. Literalist only after interpretation.
5. Self-interest defeats itself.
6. Adventure is just bad planning.—Roald Amundsen
7. In oral cultures, memory can mean remembering the time before you were born through story.
8. Literacy is in opposition to oral culture.
9. Be willing to be dazzled.
10. No progress without regress.
11. Framing sets the premises, which determines conclusions. Try multiple frames when the conclusion is important.
12. Just because the status quo is bad doesn’t mean your desired changes will be implemented.
13. Keep up the kindness with the people you are closest with.
14. Influence is an unruly weed. It grows and dies unpredictably.
15. Much of history is unwritten.
16. Leadership that lasts relies more than on strength or looks.
17. Follow your crazy.
18. With drawing, there’s only one rule: look.
19. The world is full of beauty. It’s up to us to capture and share it.
20. The unimagined is not missed.
21. Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.
22. Being nobody is more interesting than being somebody.
23. Don’t like your mind into noun or adjective prison.
24. Consistency compounds.
25. Necessity is the only law.
26. Survival requires change.
27. The broken will break again.
28. Relationships are the course sandpaper of being.
29. Forget that you’ve forgotten.
30. Switching one set of norms for another is merely reforming around the edges.
31. Strip away the illusion of reality and confront us with the reality of illusion.
32. Evoke the stream of warm impermanence, our grand plans are haunted by inevitable change and decay.
33. Rigged games aren’t worth playing.
34. Nothing is as simple as you want it to be.
35. Purposes can be perverted.
36. Being useful isn’t the same as being equal.
37. The prisoner who is his own guard can be set free, for the whole world is his prison.
38. Some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares.
39. Don’t live your life in a cocktail glass.
40. Ignoring politeness is a privilege of old age.
41. Farewells are easier when they are cruel.
42. We all pay a price for power.
43. Sharpen yourself.
44. Practice analytically, perform intuitively.
45. Less venting, more inventing.
46. Defamiliarize language and open portals to surprise.
47. You cannot kill a fox that swift.
48. Keep your commitments in line with your capabilities.
49. First seek to understand then to be understood.
50. An election is the defining and defending of tribes.
51. Act as if.
52. Love and hate aren’t mutually exclusive.
53. The dead desire nothing.
54. The intellect is a good servant, but the heart must be our master.
55. Names have power.
56. If you love, you don’t get to choose how it’s returned.
57. In the end, all real power is to be judged not on a global and absolute basis but on a local and relative one.
58. The journey to mastery is not made overnight.
59. People believe what they want to believe.
60. A society built on oppression must foster division.
61. Change implies both loss and gain.
62. Any lie or make-belief is more powerful & enduring when there’s an element of truth to it.
63. Stuck? Look for a decision, and make it.
64. Promises only bind those who listen to them.—Jacques Chirac