To Be And To Last #29
A small favor before diving into today’s session: If you’ve been enjoying this weekly note, could you take a moment to reply to me with the book that’s most challenged your thinking?
I’m planning to spend more time reading in December, and I’m hoping to expand my recommendation inputs. - Nate
This week we explore patience, hard choices, and… European finance.
Is patience the preeminent virtue?
“Little by little, the bird builds its nest.” - Haitian proverb
(“Piti piti, zwazo fè nich.”)
As you may have noticed, I’ve been enjoying more podcasts this month. Listening to Edwidge Danticat on Tyler Cowen’s podcast, I appreciated the above Haitian proverb.
We live in a time where the majority of human focus is on the short-term. In business, quarterly earnings cycles encourage (or even mandate) short-term focus, and in our personal lives any number of internet apps encourage us to spend our time winning different flavors of “internet points”.
Scheduling focused time
This in turn brought to mind a quote shared in Tim Ferriss’ interview with Scott Kelly:
“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.” - Jerzy Gregorek
I sometimes wonder whether delayed gratification is harder today than it was 50 years ago. We certainly have more avenues for dopamine generation than our great-grandparents could have imagined possible.
One strategy I’ve been employing to great effect is focus hours: full 60 minute segments in which I dedicate my focus to one clearly defined activity (making strategy decisions, writing SQL code, whatever’s next on my list). If I stop for a quick email/Twitter break then I’ve broken my focus and the hour restarts.
For anyone who wants to try this, here’s a copy of the simple spreadsheet I use for tracking my focus hours (personally I aim for 3 per day, though that rarely happens).
Finance makes the world spin
It certainly makes my head spin sometimes.
As someone who’s curious about finance but who only roughly understands the role central banks play in economic growth and stability, I learned a bit from Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance. In short, Ahamed makes a convincing case that World War II can be attributed in large part to poor choices by politicians and financiers in the years following World War I.
Or in the words of one of the foremost bankers of the time:
“As I look back it now seems that … we achieved absolutely nothing … or indeed any effect at all except that we collected money from a lot of poor devils and gave it over to the four winds.”
- Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944
Whether in the natural world or even our own complex human systems (like finance), we still know remarkably little about how things really work.
We are only at the beginning of our collective human journey toward knowledge, with many exciting discoveries (and equally important “un-discoveries”) left to be uncovered. Which I suppose brings us back to anti-fragility from a couple weeks ago.
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