John P. Faris III

Things I'm Working On

Monthly Memo

Alive Time and Character

Alive Time

Last year I downloaded Ryan Holiday’s book Ego Is the Enemy. I recently picked it up with the intention of finishing it. The following passage struck me as most timely:

“According to Greene, there are two types of time in our lives: dead time, when people are passive and waiting, and alive time, when people are learning and acting and utilizing every second. Every moment of failure, every moment or situation that we did not deliberately choose or control, presents this choice: Alive time. Dead time. Which will it be?”…

“Think of what you have been putting off. Issues you declined to deal with. Systemic problems that felt too overwhelming to address. Dead time is revived when we use it as an opportunity to do what we’ve long needed to do. As they say, this moment is not your life. But it is a moment in your life. How will you use it?”…

“In life, we all get stuck with dead time. Its occurrence isn’t in our control. Its use, on the other hand, is.” —Ryan Holiday

Character

Inspiring words from Brooks:

“When most people think about the future, they dream up ways they might live happier lives. But notice this phenomenon. When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don’t usually talk about happiness. It is usually the ordeals that seem most significant. Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering.” — The Road to Character by David Brooks

Risk

German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer in his book Risk Savvy:

“People aren’t stupid. The problem is that our educational system has an amazing blind spot concerning risk literacy. We teach our children the mathematics of certainty—geometry and trigonometry—but not the mathematics of uncertainty, statistical thinking. And we teach our children biology but not the psychology that shapes their fears and desires. Even experts, shockingly, are not trained how to communicate risks to the public in an understandable way.”

Entertainment

Tim Ferris has an extremely successful podcast series. In one of his books he lists his top podcasts. First on the list is this one with Jamie Foxx. I can see why. (NOTE: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE)

If you’re looking for something a little more family friendly and you have a Disney+ account, check out the Forky Asks a Question series for a good laugh.

Amateur for Life

Ryan Krueger has become one of my favorite short form writers. I linked to one of his pieces in my first monthly memo. I still think his post is some of the best advice for parents. If you didn’t read it the first time around, I encourage you to check it out. In the absence of all the extracurricular activities that often defines our “normal” lives, you may find his words to be even more meaningful.

From another one of his posts comes this:

“I am embracing amateurism whenever I can, and intentionally seeking things I know I will not be very good at. The unusual dividend I have found accompanying this kind of experiment is a giant sigh of relief. Subtracting any worries, that can only be born from expectations, makes me feel like I am turning back the clock to how I felt as a kid”

That’s exactly the way I felt as I picked up a youth-sized guitar collecting dust in the corner of our house. No doubt my subconscious was at work when I found myself picking out the chords to a Pink Floyd song….

Wish You Were Here

I spent quite a bit of time going down the YouTube rabbit hole and checking out various versions of “Wish You Were Here”.  Here is a beautiful version by Reina del Cid.

I found this backstory to the original song.

By the way, wish you were here!

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Peer Presence and Snowflakes

Rocket Science

Apollo 11 was the spacecraft that carried 3 astronauts to the moon and back in 1969.

“Now in 2020 USB-C is here. Many USB chargers have a microcontroller with a CPU. Some are less capable than the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer. Some are more capable than the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer. Most of them with at least ~10x faster clock speed. USB-C Power Delivery solves problems and gives us new capabilities. But it is another step toward increasing complexity.”

forestheller.com

(H/T Ben Evans)

Peer Presence

We’ve all heard of Peer Pressure. Turns out Peer Presence is a thing too…

“Drivers did not make their decisions entirely alone. Sometimes the friends they had brought were in the room with them. Sometimes the friends were in the next room visible on a monitor but unable to communicate with the driver. The results were striking. With friends in the room watching, adolescents regularly took more chances. Adults did not. With friends out of the room but nearby, watching on a monitor but unable to communicate, adolescents still took more chances. In that situation, it wasn’t possible for the friends to exert verbal peer pressure, but it didn’t matter. “When teenagers knew their friends could see their performance, it increased the amount of risk taking they engaged in compared to when they were alone,” Steinberg told me.”

The Atlantic

Paper Towns

In the 1930s, Otto Linberg and Ernest Alpers worked as mapmakers.  They used an anagram of their initials (Agloe) to create a fictitious town at a dirt-road intersection in the Catskill Mountains of NY.  The town was designed as a “copyright trap”.

In the 1950s, a general store was built at the intersection on the map, and was given the name Agloe General Store because the name was on the Esso maps.[3] Later, Agloe appeared on a Rand McNally map after the mapmaker got the name of the “hamlet” from the Delaware County administration. When Esso threatened to sue Rand McNally for the assumed copyright infringement which the “trap” had revealed, the latter pointed out that the place had now become real and therefore no infringement could be established. 

Wikipedia

I learned about the town of Agloe while watching this talk by John Green.

Quality in Journalism

Its a new age for journalism.

“In contrast, experts spend years studying their craft before they ever write online. When the right story hits, they can share their experience with no constraints on the spread of their distribution. In the days after the second Boeing 737 Max crash, no-name pilots and independent writers with obscure blogs out-explained many of the world’s best newspapers. The variance in quality between journalists outside a field and experts within it is largest for technical or scientific fields.”

David Perell

Fusion Cuisine

Until I read this, I always assumed the tomato was from Italy.

“For most of the pasta sauces that we know today, the country had to await the tomato, which originated in Latin America and probably arrived in Europe only with the return of the Spanish conquistadors from Peru in the 16th century. Italians named it the “golden fruit or apple” – pomo d’oro (the modern version is pomodoro) – and for a while its main use was decorative. At the time, some Europeans thought that tomatoes were related to deadly nightshade, and were therefore poisonous. It was not until the late 17th or early 18th centuries that the tomato was slowly incorporated into Italian cuisine.”  

1843 Magazine

Snowflakes

A 52 year old Navy Seal attends Yale University and shares his thoughts on “snowflakes”:

“Think about that for a second. These students are first generation Americans. Their fathers immigrated to this country and started out by being taxi drivers. Now, their children are attending college at Yale University. I’m a patriotic man and those are the stories that help me understand how, in spite of the seemingly endless stream of negativity surrounding it, the American Dream is still alive and kicking. It makes my heart sing every time I see those kids.” 

James Hatch

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Depression, Progress and a Meaningful Life

Anxiety and Depression

How is a cow an anti-depressant? Watch this excellent TED talk by Johann Hari.  If you or anyone you know has trouble with anxiety or depression, watch this and share it.  Even if you don’t – watch this.  My favorite quote:
“We live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important in life.”

(H/T Collaborative Fund)

Signs of Progress

Signs of progress are all around us.  We tend to focus our attention on big changes that happen all at once, meanwhile we ignore some of the most notable ones that take place slowly over time.

“Heart-disease deaths have declined from over 400 per 100,000 Americans in 1981 to 168 per 100,000 by 2015. That decline means 754,000 fewer Americans die each year than would have had there been no improvement since 1981. That’s equal to the number of Americans killed in World War II, saved every seven months.”

Morgan Housel via Collaborative Fund

Morgan Housel’s article is filled with stats that will leave any reader hopeful about the future.

Buying time

“The biggest unlock in shareholder value in the last five years is Walmart’s click & collect and delivery. Walmart gave us four days a year back — grocery shopping takes an average of 69 min a week; you grocery shop 1.6 times per week, and the average commute for grocery shopping is 12.5 min each way. That makes the largest dollar-volume category (grocery, 750 billion) less time expensive. Since the introduction of click & collect and grocery delivery, Walmart has added over $100 billion in shareholder value.”

Scott Galloway

Meaningful

“IF YOU WATCHED a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo. But we spend years actually living those stories, and expect our lives to feel meaningful. The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.” 

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life by Donald Miller

(H/T to The Waiters Pad that lead me to this book)

Telling Stories

I was reading Miller’s book and came across an allusion to Tolstoy’s “green stick”. Unfamiliar with the reference I looked it up and found the following:

“When Leo’s brother Nikolai was 12, he told his family that he possessed a wonderful secret that could make all men happy, a secret which would mean that no one would ever die, that there would be no war or suffering. Nikolai added that he had written the secret on a little green stick and buried it at the edge of the ravine in Yasnaya Polyana. As a boy Tolstoy truly believed in the power of the green stick, and tried many times to find it. The allure of the little green stick and its ability to make all people everywhere happy stayed with Leo and in his old age he asked his family to bury his body without ceremony in a simple wooden coffin at the site of the little green stick.” 

Shakespeare.org

Apparently, storytelling runs in the family.

Forecasting

Indeed, robust academic research has shown that flipping a coin is a more accurate predictor of the future than the forecasts of leading economists. A CXO Advisory Group study collected 6,582 forecasts for the U.S. stock market from 68 market commentators and found similarly that a coin flip was more accurate than the forecasters. 

Bob Seawright

Predictions

Not to be deterred, I decided to do a little forecasting of my own.  Here are my 10 predictions for 2020…

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Habits and Learning

It’s a new year and a great time to start a new project.  If you are a reader of GSP Updates, you will remember that I used to include a section called “The Bigger Picture”.  This monthly email is a more extensive version of that section.  These are the best things I have read, watched or listened to recently; along with material I’ve written. 

Let’s get started…

The Top None Percent

An excerpt from the best blog post I read last year:

When I talk to my kids, they are never going to hear about anything being harder, just different. Rather than seeing good or bad, I want their lens to find problems to solve. There are not many one-dimensional puzzles anymore, and that’s GREAT! Trying harder and harder to jam one passion into place may be the wrong move. Experimenting on a few different dimensions might end up fitting together better than anybody else has imagined, because it may not even exist yet. Some combinations have never even been attempted, so they might lead smack dab to the middle of the top none percent.

Ryan Krueger

The full article by Ryan Krueger is a must read for every parent raising a child.

Learning

A new generation has grown up teaching themselves using YouTube.

I’m inspired by Jayson Tatum, the Boston Celtics star. He was 7 years old when YouTube was invented. Throughout his childhood, he watched Kobe Bryant videos on the internet. But he didn’t just watch the highlights. He studied Kobe’s footwork, the subtleties of his shot fakes, and the rhythm of his jab steps. Even though he’s now 21 years old, students of the game say he plays like somebody whose seen decades of basketball. That’s because he has.

David Perell via Monday Musings (10/7/19)

YouTube has even been credited with helping Olympic athletes.

Yego’s rise to fame is a bit more unconventional than the standard javelin medalist. In 2013, a year after qualifying for the 2012 London Olympics for the first time, Yego told CNN that he is self-taught and relied on YouTube videos to perfect his technique.

Business Insider

Small Changes in Habits

The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart. 

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Super Powers

Some blind people can understand speech that is almost three times faster than the fastest speech sighted people can understand. They can use speech synthesisers set at at 800 words per minute (conversational speech is 120–150 wpm). Research suggests that a section of the brain that normally responds to light is re-mapped in blind people to process sound.

[Austin Hicks & R Douglas Fields via 52 things I learned in 2019 by Tom Whitwell.

Eisenhower

Eisenhower was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1918, in advance of his coming deployment. He would not be promoted again for twenty years, until 1938. The army had a glut of officers who’d been elevated during the war, and there were not many openings for advancement in an army that by the 1920s was shrinking and assuming a marginal role in American life. His career stagnated, while the careers of his civilian brothers zoomed ahead. By the time he was in his forties, he was easily the least accomplished of the boys in the Eisenhower family. He was in middle age. He did not receive his first star until he was fifty-one. Nobody expected great things of him.

The Road to Character by David Brooks

Top Posts from 2019

These were the most popular posts from my website, based on page views.

The Work You Don’t See

But What If You Didn’t Pay Cash

How We Spend Our Lives

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