Category Archives: Random

Your occasional digest of quick hits, cheap shots, and bon mots….

1. A good interview question: What was your most unpopular decision? When did you survey friends for advice and decide to act against it? What decision have you made that was most counter to conventional wisdom?

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2. Children’s artistic and imaginative impulses burst about. I distinctly remember a scene in the 1st grade when the teacher put on classical music and everyone spontaneously began to play conductor. We waved our hands as if mirroring the 1-2-3-4 beat. It felt so natural. In adulthood, we become so self-conscious that we suppress the basic impulse to gently tap our foot when a song we like comes on. As Picasso is supposed to have said, “All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.”

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3. Alan Webber, founding editor of Fast Company, says: “Keep two lists: What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you up at night?”

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4. Sometimes when I am riding in a car as a passenger I feel a bit chilly so I turn off the fan. In response, my friend who is driving will infer I am uncomfortable and take an action that he intends to help me. For example, if I turn off the fan and put on a sweatshirt he will assume I am chilly and, despite neither of us having talked about it, he will go turn on the heat. Yet when I turned off fan and put on sweatshirt I did so assuming all else would remain the same. I assumed static conditions. When the driver acted in response, it actually became too warm. In a system with multiple nodes anything you do will be interpreted and responded to by others. For every action there’s a reaction. That’s why it’s so important to communicate your thoughts and narrate your actions. Otherwise, you end up in a car that’s too hot.

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5. People underestimate the value of doing stuff in public. I have dozens of aborted blog posts. They are cases where in the process of writing something for public scrutiny I discovered that my thought wasn’t as coherent as first figured. It sounded good in my head but when I went to write it down it all felt apart. You enjoy this effect when writing in general, but it’s magnified when you publish in the public domain.

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6. I am intrigued when a good friend does not hit it off with a different good friend of mine. I try to figure out what I like about person three that my other good friend doesn’t; what side of me is brought out in person three. There is actually a decent amount of self-knowledge that emerges from such a thought exercise.

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7. The best case scenario for a status and fame-obsessed philanthropist is to give a big gift anonymously and then, due to a leak by someone at the foundation, be outed a few months later. Such leaks are less accidental than we think….

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8. A line from American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld (a woman), in the second to last paragraph of the book: “If the many novels I’ve read are an accurate indicator, I have to assume there are betrayals in most marriages. The goal, I suppose, is not to allow any that are larger than the strength of the partnership.”

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9. One sign of intelligence: Apply a general principle to your personal situation; Abstract the right general principle from your personal situation.

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10. When I arrive in Patagonia, or the coast of Uruguay, or a spectacular national park in America, I always have the immediate thought: “I want to move here and live here forever.” The tranquility and beauty is seductive. Yet, I know that after a couple weeks I’d get bored or lonely. There wouldn’t be enough smart people around to socialize with. Thanks to Skype and videochat and the web, though, I think I could last much longer living in a nature setting (with broadband internet) than in times past. Perhaps my ideal is 60% city life, 40% rural / nature.

It was no graveyard now, no warehouse, no, more like a chapel now, a modest decent place, but its walls were snug, its odor was green, there was a sweetness in the chapel.

That description of female genitals is evidence of Mailer's "hopped-up, quasi-religious view of sex," according to the interesting long-ish essay titled The Naked and the Conflicted. It compares how Roth, Updike, Mailer, etc. prolifically and wildly deployed sex in their novels compared to today's young talents like Wallace (RIP), Eggers, and Kunkel, who cast a more skeptical eye on sexual impulses.

Here's Mailer on lust:

Lust exhibits all the attributes of junk. It dominates the mind and other habits, it appropriates loyalties, generalizes character, leaches character out, rides on the fuel of almost any emotional gas — whether hatred, affection, curiosity, even the pressures of boredom — yet it is never definable because it can alter to love or be as suddenly sealed from love.

Recently I had the bad luck of flying through Philadelphia “We Lose Bags So You Don’t Have To” International Airport and as I waited in the gate area I witnessed an argument break out between a passenger and the gate agent. The passenger wanted to carry on his bag, the gate agent told him it was too big and he had to check it. The passenger resisted and started yelling at the gate agent, shouting, in essence, hell no you won’t check my bag! Everyone started watching. The passenger insisted his bag would fit in the overhead and the gate agent said, no, it’s too big. People stared and laughed and egged on the passenger. Neither party gave ground. Voices were raised. Screaming match ensued. Eventually security came and apprehended the guy for unruliness in the terminal. As the carry-on-bag-martyr was escorted out, I may have even heard him channel Newman from Seinfeld: “Tell the world my story.”

Bravery notwithstanding, the passenger made two obvious tactical mistakes.

First, by yelling he escalated the dispute to become a public spectacle. If people generally do not like admitting they are wrong or ceding ground in a negotiation, they hate making such an admission in a public or group setting.

Second, he did not make any concession that would allow the gate agent to claim victory and permit the bag as a carry-on. For example, he could have taken a kleenex out of the outer pocket and then said, “Ok, you’re right, so I’ve taken some stuff out so it will fit. OK?” No guarantees, but it increases his chances.

Remember, issues like this are rarely about the actual technical details as much as they are about power, status, and psychology.

Bottom Line: People hate admitting they are wrong or that they “lost.” So in stalemated negotiations give the other person an opportunity to be “right” by making a trivial concession that allows him to emotionally feel like the winner.

Der Spiegel did an interview with the #1 chess player in the world, Magnus Carlsen. He's 19 years-old. He comes off as incredibly normal. And very wise.

On the downsides of being too smart:

Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way.

On the advantages of being young and curious today — you have so much info available at a young age:

… my success mainly has to do with the fact that I had the opportunity to learn more, more quickly. It has become easier to get hold of information. The players from the Soviet Union used to be at a huge advantage; in Moscow they had access to vast archives, with countless games carefully recorded on index cards. Nowadays anyone can buy this data on DVD for 150 euros; one disk holds 4.5 million games. There are also more books than there used to be. And then of course I started working with a computer earlier than Vladimir Kramnik or Viswanathan Anand.

On his thinking style, which will resonate with anyone who doesn't like formal schooling:

I’m not a disciplined thinker. Organisation is not my thing; I am chaotic and tend to be lazy. My trainer recognised that and as a rule allowed me to practise whatever I felt like at the time….When I am feeling good, I train a lot. When I feel bad, I don’t bother. I don’t enjoy working to a timetable. Systematic learning would kill me.

And perhaps the perspective that shows he will remain king of the hill for awhile:

Chess should not become an obsession. Otherwise there’s a danger that you will slide off into a parallel world, that you lose your sense of reality, get lost in the infinite cosmos of the game. You become crazy. I make sure that I have enough time between tournaments to go home in order to do other things. I like hiking and skiing, and I play football in a club.

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George Friedman's clear overview of the U.S. geopolitical interests in Israel is an example of why I subscribe to his weekly newsletter.

Here's a good overview of the effectiveness of nutritional supplements. I take fish oil and a multi-vitamin.

Here's a "how to write" post, including: "Find the weak points in your argument and acknowledge them. Hell, celebrate them." 

In Chapter 1 of American Pastoral by Philip Roth, two gentlemen are having dinner, and one guy describes the other — who's stunningly handsome, athletic, successful — this way:

I was impressed, as the meal wore on, by how assured he seemed of everything commonplace he said, and how everything he said was suffused by his good nature. I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface. What he has instead of a being, I thought, is blandness — the guy's radiant with it. He has devised for himself an incognito, and the incognito has become him. Several times during the meal I didn't think I was going to make it, didn't think I'd get to dessert if he was going to keep praising his family and praising his family…until I began to wonder if it wasn't that he was incognito but that he was mad.

Something was on top of him that had called a halt to him. Something had turned him into a human platitude. Something had warned him: You must not run counter to anything.

A helluva piece of writing, and captures the emotion I have felt when listening to some over-assured guy talk over dinner about how much he loves his family. Rare outward facing comments are doused in political correctness. You want to reach across the table (even if it means knocking over a glass or two), grab his shoulders with each hand, and give him a good shake.

The description continues:

To respect everything one is supposed to respect; to protest nothing; never to be inconvenienced by self-distrust; never to be enmeshed in obsession, tortured by incapacity, poisoned by resentment, driven by anger…life just unraveling for the Swede like a fluffy ball of yarn.