Ponte du Hoc

On the morning of June 6, 1944 about 225 United States Army Rangers crossed the English Channel in British landing craft. Their destination was Ponte du Hoc, France – a cliff rising 100 feet above the sea, positioned between Omaha and Utah beach. Their mission was to climb the 10-story earth wall using ropes, ladders, and grapples while being fired upon by the enemy, and take control of the German position at the top. The purpose was to disable six large guns that would threaten the allied landings nearby. The mission was a success, but the story takes a few turns and has a surprise ending.

I discovered this fascinating bit of history through the 2019 documentary, “D-Day at Pointe-du-Hoc”.

Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder, who led the Rangers, later sent a condolence letter to the mother of Corporal Willis Caperton. Here are a few of his moving words:

“The Day of Invasion found these men ready, fully trained, fully equipped not only physically but mentally. On the day before they came to France, men of all Faiths had gathered with the Chaplain and dedicated the work at hand to God and their individual part in it as subject to HIs Holy Will.

The mission of the Rangers was successfully accomplished but as with all worthwhile things, the cost was great, so great indeed, that it cost the life you cherished and lost us a comrade and a friend. A Country must be great to call for the sacrifice of such men but America will always be great just because such men have fallen in order that the principles expressed in our Constitution might endure.”

Forgiveness

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

Problem Solving

“Hard science can permanently solve problems. In 1902 we couldn’t fly. Now we can because we found the solution, and that solution will be as valid 1,000 years from now as it is today.

Social problems – everything from relationships to the stock market – are different. Social solutions have shelf lives, limited applicability, and affect people differently.”

(Death, Taxes, and Three Other Inevitable Things by Morgan Housel)

Productivity

“Small increases in productivity have a huge long-term impact. From Nick Bostrom:

‘Imagine a tool was invented to help a researcher to improve by just 1%.

The gain would hardly be noticeable in a single individual. But if the 10 million scientists in the world all benefited from the tool, the inventor would increase the rate of scientific progress by roughly the same amount as adding 100,000 new scientists.

Each year the invention would amount to an indirect contribution equal to 100,000 times what the average scientist contributes.’ (David Perell)

Overconfidence

Jason Zweig is a financial writer for the WSJ. Last year Zwieg penned this entertaining autobiographical piece urging the reader (and himself) to avoid a recurring mistake of his past. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

“To say that these episodes cured me of overconfidence would be an absurd lie. More than four decades later, I still regularly commit the same blunder of presuming I know more than I do, more than the people around me, more than the people who came before me, more than the people who have spent decades studying a topic or working in a field. I underestimate the difficulty of problems and overestimate the ease of solutions. I assume reality is simpler than a lifetime of encountering complications should already have taught me it must be.”

And this from the same post…

“I love saying ‘I don’t know,’ but I don’t love it nearly as much as I should; just as water is the universal solvent, “I don’t know” should be our universal first response to nearly every hard question.” –  Jason Zweig (H/T Nick Maggiulli)

Kinship

Anthropologists have been arguing for decades about what exactly kinship is. Studying traditional societies, they have found wide varieties of created kinship among different cultures. For the Ilongot people of the Philippines, people who migrated somewhere together are kin. For the New Guineans of the Nebilyer Valley, kinship is created by sharing grease—the life force found in mother’s milk or sweet potatoes. The Chuukese people in Micronesia have a saying: “My sibling from the same canoe”; if two people survive a dangerous trial at sea, then they become kin…

In other words, for vast stretches of human history people lived in extended families consisting of not just people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with. (The Atlantic)