A Quick Announcement
Many of you are also subscribers to my email newsletter GSP Updates. You may have noticed you haven’t received an email since February 2020. I’ve put that project on hold and I’m devoting more attention to the Monthly Memo. In the meantime, I may try incorporating a bit of local content here.
__________
Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart, the first female pilot to fly trans-Atlantic, visited Spartanburg in 1931 and spoke at Converse College. While that’s notable, I found her mode of transportation even more interesting. She flew into the downtown airport in a helicopter-airplane hybrid called an autogiro. Here are some pictures of this unusual aircraft.
__________
Tail Events
“The world is driven by tail events. A minority of things drive the majority of outcomes. It’s one of the most important concepts in investing, where a few positions may account for most of your lifetime returns.
History is no different. World War II, World War I, and the Great Depression influenced nearly every important event of the 20th century. Industrialization and the Civil War did the same in the 19th.
Demographics, inequality, and information access will have a huge impact on the coming decades. How those Big Things end is a story yet to be told. But when it’s told we’ll have a better idea of where it began.” (Morgan Housel via Collaborative Fund)
It’s worth mentioning that this prescient piece was written by Housel in Oct 2019. I can’t help but wonder if we’re currently living a tail event.
__________
Doing the Hard Work
“…you can’t reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into. No one responds well to having their identity attacked. No argument made in bad faith—that the person on the other side is a moron or a dupe or a racist or a snowflake—is ever going to be received in good faith.
Reason is easy. Being clever is easy. Humiliating someone in the wrong is easy too. But putting yourself in their shoes, kindly nudging them to where they need to be, understanding that they have emotional and irrational beliefs just like you have emotional and irrational beliefs—that’s all much harder. So is not writing off other people. So is spending time working on the plank in your own eye than the splinter in theirs. We know we wouldn’t respond to someone talking to us that way, but we seem to think it’s okay to do it to other people.” – Ryan Holiday from his post It’s Not Enough to Be Right—You Also Have to Be Kind
__________
Detachment
Several months ago I started reading Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors. The book is an account of a season spent in one of the last fire lookout towers in the West. Here’s a passage from the beginning of the book…
“Not many people I know have to work this hard to get to work, yet I can honestly say I love the hike, every step of it. The pain is a toll I willingly pay on my way to the top, for here, amid these mountains, I restore myself and lose myself, knit together my ego and then surrender it, detach myself from the mass of humanity so I may learn to love them again, all while coexisting with creatures whose kind have lived here for millennia.”
The words “detach myself from the mass of humanity so I may learn to love them again” stuck with me.
__________
Forest Bathing
Many of us have spent more time outdoors this year. I learned a new term – “Forest Bathing”…
“In Japan, we practice something called forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku. Shinrin in Japanese means “forest,” and yoku means “bath.” So shinrin-yoku means bathing in the forest atmosphere, or taking in the forest through our senses…This is not exercise, or hiking, or jogging. It is simply being in nature, connecting with it through our senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Shinrin-yoku is like a bridge. By opening our senses, it bridges the gap between us and the natural world.” (Time Magazine)
__________
Peace
Summer is ending and I find myself thinking about Paul Graham’s post on having children. I especially like this passage:
“What I didn’t notice, because they tend to be much quieter, were all the great moments parents had with kids. People don’t talk about these much — the magic is hard to put into words, and all other parents know about them anyway — but one of the great things about having kids is that there are so many times when you feel there is nowhere else you’d rather be, and nothing else you’d rather be doing. You don’t have to be doing anything special. You could just be going somewhere together, or putting them to bed, or pushing them on the swings at the park. But you wouldn’t trade these moments for anything. One doesn’t tend to associate kids with peace, but that’s what you feel. You don’t need to look any further than where you are right now….Before I had kids, I had moments of this kind of peace, but they were rarer. With kids it can happen several times a day.”
Summer always presents a few more opportunities for these special moments. With all that is happening around us, I find these times even more meaningful.
Nevertheless, I always welcome the Fall and the cooler weather it brings.