Notes

"The vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man."

This most fundamental problem of human life is so easy to overlook because our entire lives are made of the coping strategy. So much of what we seek is solely to flee the experience of being here. People buy things they don’t need, start fights with their partners, eat when they’re not hungry, and scroll miserable and inane content, just to escape the feeling of existence as it already is.

This is a crazy thing to notice after having been alive so many years — that your existence itself is so much to bear. There’s always something wrong, even when everything’s fine. It’s as if you can only bear the present moment when you’re trying change it into something else.

This is the strange condition of the human being. It’s allergic to its natural habitat, which is the present moment. In order to cope with this allergy, it perpetually seeks things: feelings and experiences that are not yet present. It wants to always be getting the hell out of here.

We simply need to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see. The key ingredient is to have the courage to face inconsistencies between what we see and deduce and the way things are done. This challenging of basic assumptions is essential to breakthroughs.

... People trying to understand what makes their world tick so that they can make it better. As they think logically and consistently about their problems they are able to determine cause and effect relationships between their actions and the results. In the process they deduce some basic principles which they use to save their plant and make it successful.

Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum set of assumptions that can explain, through a straightfor-ward logical derivation, the existence of many phenomena of nature.
The Law of Conservation of Energy of physics is not truth. It is just an assumption that is valid in explaining a tremendous amount of natural phenomena. Such an assumption can never be proven since even an infinite number of phenomena that can be explained by it does not prove its universal application. On the other hand, it can be disproved by just a single phenomenon that cannot be explained by the assumption. This disproving does not detract from the validity of the assumption. It just highlights the need or even the existence of another assumption that is more valid.

As Rilke says, there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away.

Objects have their shape and weight, their color, and beyond this a dimension for which there is no scale, their importance.

Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult. And besides, how is one to distinguish between conditions which are valuable, which despite their hatefulness give us strength or impel us to great things and others we would be far better free of? Which are precious and which are not? Why is it so hard to be happy alone? Why is it impossible? Why, whenever I am idle, sometimes even before, in the midst of doing something, do I slowly but inevitably become subject to the power of their acts.

I have not gone deep enough, that’s the thing. In solitude one must penetrate, one must endure. The icy beginning is where it is worst. One must pass all that. One must go forward all the way, through bitterness, through righteous feelings, advancing upon it like a holy city, sensing the true joy. I try to summon it to me, to make it appear. I am certain it is there, but it does not come easily. Of course not. One must waver. One must struggle. Beliefs are meant to cleave us to the bone.

Some thoughts a few chapters in:

• the prose is so lyrical. there is no connective tissue, it's all jump cuts. no establishing shots. Dreamlike, feverish (vivid, yet vague at the same time), pure sensation instead of information.
• why does this remind me of Pulp Fiction

Do you know the word otium in Latin, meaning, “doing nothing”? The Roman people were all laid back. In all the pictures, they were all laying around. They were doing nothing, just staring. In the winter on a Sunday afternoon, I can spend six hours in front of the fireplace, just looking at the flames and thinking. In the evening, I’m drunk with beautiful thoughts. My wife says to me, “What are you looking at?” I say, “The fire.” We have to take a step backward.

“a theory of good judgment”: self-critical thinkers are better at figuring out the contradictory dynamics of evolving situations, more circumspect about their forecasting prowess, more accurate in recalling mistakes, less prone to rationalize those mistakes, more likely to update their beliefs in a timely fashion, and—as a cumulative result of these advantages—better positioned to affix realistic probabilities in the next round of events

"Go work in an industry where the founders of that industry are still working"

"what do you do when you’ve captured your objective, only to find it abandoned and bad weather on the way"

Napoleon in Moscow, 1812: He got the thing he was marching toward: the enemy's capital, and it gave him nothing. The Russians had left, much of the city burned, and there was no one to sign the surrender he'd assumed the capture would produce. The objective turned out not to be connected to any outcome that mattered, and now winter was coming for an army that had staked everything on being done by then.

This reveals the difference between having an objective and having a strategy. An objective is a place on a map; a strategy is the alignment of what you want with what you can actually do, and crucially, a clear sense of what the objective is for.

Napoleon's aspirations were effectively unlimited while his means (men, supplies, time, weather) were stubbornly finite, and he had no mechanism for keeping the two in proportion. So he kept advancing on the logic that the next objective would be the decisive one, until he arrived at a prize that was hollow precisely because it had become detached from any purpose beyond itself.

So "what do you do" is partly a trick question. In the abandoned city with the storm rolling in, your options are already bad: Napoleon's retreat destroyed the Grande Armée regardless of how he managed it. The honest answer lives upstream: the discipline is to keep asking, before you commit, whether taking the objective actually delivers the thing you want, and to size your ambitions to your capabilities rather than assuming momentum will cover the gap.

“The test of a good theory lies in its ability to explain the past, for only if it does can we trust what it may tell us about the future.”

“But Xerxes failed to establish a proper relationship between his ends and his means. Because ends exist only in the imagination, they can be infinite: a throne on the moon, perhaps, with a great view. Means, though, are stubbornly finite: they’re boots on the ground, ships in the sea, and the bodies required to fill them. Ends and means have to connect if anything is to happen. They’re never, however, interchangeable.”

He could have warned Xerxes of the depleted rivers, hungry lions, sudden squalls, resentful locals, fierce fighters, cryptic oracles, avid rowers, and sinking nonswimmers awaiting him across the Hellespont: because their causes were knowable, their consequences were predictable. But only individually, for not even the canniest seer can specify cumulative effects.

Little things add up in unpredictably big ways—and yet, leaders can’t let uncertainties paralyze them. They must appear to know what they’re doing, even when they don't.

The tragedy of Xerxes and Artabanus is that each lacked the other’s proficiency. Xerxes was right. If you try to anticipate everything, you’ll risk not accomplishing anything. But so was Artabanus. If you fail to prepare for all that might happen, you’ll ensure that some of it will.

Scott Fitzgerald’s test for a first-rate intelligence: "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

One possible meaning for Fitzgerald’s opposites could be taking the best from contradictory approaches while rejecting the worst. How, though, might you do that? It’s easy to see how two minds can reach opposite conclusions, but can opposites coexist peacefully within one?

The best answer to this question comes from Isaiah Berlin. Ordinary experience, he pointed out, is filled with "ends equally ultimate, the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others." The choices facing us are less often between stark alternatives — good versus evil, for instance — than between good things we can’t have simultaneously.

"One can save one’s soul, or one can found or maintain or serve a great and glorious State," Berlin wrote, "but not always both at once." Or, to put it in terms any kid would understand: you can’t gobble all your treats on Halloween without throwing up.

We resolve these dilemmas by stretching them over time. We seek certain things now, put off others until later, and regard still others as unattainable. We select what fits where, and then decide which we can achieve when. The process can be difficult: Berlin emphasized the “necessity and agony of choice.” But if such choices were to disappear, he added, so too would “the freedom to choose,” and hence liberty itself.