Monday Musings (10/8/18)
Look! Look! Look at your fish!
Look. Look. Look at your fish!
We live in a vortex of news and information.
Our information platforms are built around novelty. To use a fishing metaphor, we don’t catch, cook, and eat our fish. Instead, we “catch and release.” Information is presented to us in “streams,” and like a stream, the information flows quickly, and sometimes, violently.
I would love to experiment with a platform that resurfaces timeless wisdom. It would be biased toward the accumulated knowledge of the past, not the transient outrage of the present. It would resurface sections of our favorite podcasts and quotes from our favorite books and articles.
A couple weeks ago, on my birthday, a friend asked what I had learned in the previous year.
A surprising answer jumped to mind: I learned to see.
At a simple level, I enhanced my appreciation for aesthetics and beauty. I explored the shift from impressionism to cubism in the early 1900s and the history of Art Deco architecture in New York City.
At a deeper level, I’ve been learning to draw. Drawing is life as you perceive and interpret it. Illustrators hold a mirror to the world and filter it through their own, personal lens. In short, you don’t learn really how to draw — you learn how to see.
Like painters, great writers use words to illustrate the world. With the stroke of a pen, writers unlock the electricity of sight. From a blog post I published last week:
“If you let the reader see the place—if you do it well enough and have shown the character of your protagonist well enough, so that the reader can see the scene and be involved in the scene—then the reader can see things, sense things, understand things about your protagonist that the writer doesn’t have to tell him, that the reader can grasp for himself. When you’re in a place, it evokes emotions in you.”
Each moment has layers and layers of depth.
To illustrate the point, let’s play a quick, fun game: Lock your eyes on something. Then, identify something you’ve never noticed before. It could be the vibration of the music in your ears, the rattle of the subway you’re reading this on, or the temperature of the conversation in front of you.
Stop reading. Look up. Seriously… take your eyes off the page and look up. Observe. Deepen your perception.
Ok….. back to the fish.
David McCollough, one of the world’s best biographers, illustrated the inexhaustible potential of observation:
Remember, look at your fish.
Fresh Ideas
New Article: Swimming vs. Scuba Diving
In this post, I share my process for online learning. I talk about how to learn on the internet and compare the differences between different mediums, such as videos, podcasts, books, and articles.
“Most people usually focus on the content of information consumption, but forget about the context of how they consume it. They view information mediums as fungible. Unaware of the psychic and social effects of information technology, they’re like fish — unaware of the water they swim in.”
“Each medium has strengths and corresponding weaknesses. Different mediums emphasize different senses and stimulate certain ways of thinking and feeling. It’s like comparing swimming and scuba diving.”
You can read the full article here.
North Star Podcast: Arianna Simpson
Arianna Simpson is the Managing Director at a cryptocurrency hedge fund called Autonomous Partners.
She grew up in Italy and spent time in Zimbabwe, where she got a first-hand perspective on hyper-inflation and what it does to people. That’s where we began this conversation. Then, we moved on to learning.
Arianna is a voracious reader. At one point in her life, she was reading 300 — yep, 300 — books per year.
We talked about:
Burning Man
How to Find New Ideas
The Cultural Quirks of San Francisco
You can listen to the podcast here.
Naked Brands Interview Series: Jaspreet Singh
Jaspreet Singh is an entrepreneur and an investor.
His dream was to be an entrepreneur since he was a kid, but his parents forced him to pursue his education. He wasn’t going to let his dream die so he started multiple businesses while in college.
He even bought his first real estate investment property when he was just 19! He is now the host of the Minority Mindset YouTube Channel, one of the largest channels on entrepreneurship and financial literacy with over 15,800,000 views and 370,000 subscribers.
A big thanks to the Monday Musings reader who introduced me to Jaspreet.
You can read the interview here.
Coolest Things I Learned This Week
The Unintended Consequences of the Spreadsheet
“The most dangerous technology of recent years has spread without a voice raised against it. I am talking about the spreadsheet.
What the spreadsheet has done is to create in organizations and governments an over-reliance on numbers (by no means always meaningful or even accurate) with the result that often spurious numerical targets, metrics or values invariably override any conflicting human judgment.
This has given rise to what a colleague of mine, Anthony Tasgal, calls “The Arithmocracy”: a powerful left-brained administrative caste which attaches importance only to things which can be expressed in numerical terms or on a chart.”
Childhood vs. Adult Boredom
A Monday Musings subscriber sent this to me, and I absolutely love it.
Damn, That’s Some Great Design
Amazon’s navigation arrows have two tones — black and white.
This makes it easy to see the buttons everywhere, on dark and light backgrounds.
Work with the Door Open
This is from an excellent essay called You and Your Research:
"I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most.
But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder.
Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.”
Oh… and one more thing… This meme is a 10/10.
Photo of the Week
We snapped this shot a couple months ago in Bilbao, Spain. That’s me on the left, my sister in the middle, and our tour guide, Demitri on the right.
We hit it off with him. Originally from Arizona, Demitri spoke perfect English. He’s a total-hippie and has been living in Bilbao for five years.
And of course, one of Demitri's favorite places in Bilbao is the riverside, stained-glass decorated “Mercado de la Ribera” — the fish market.
Look at your fish,
David Perell