Recurring Ideas
Ideas I often find repeating to myself.
The point of wealth is to enable yourself to pursue things for their own sake, but ironically, most times the greatest wealth comes to people who pursue things for their own sake to begin with.
Struggle is entirely pointless, a distraction, a time sink, a thing that hinders a person to get to a place. No matter how proud you are of your version of the rags to riches, the ill person to healthy, the addict to sober, they are time sinks. Imagine, what more you could dream or achieve, if you didn’t have to struggle. Alternatively, struggle is the thing you rely on the most, to justify your time and effort going down the drain - because you couldn’t figure stuff out faster, or make better decisions earlier.
Intellectual work can be summed up in the following quote - “There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.” It’s exactly that - unlike physical work where things can be broken down, chopped up and pursued in a parallelized manner, most intellectual work is super linear, you could be stuck for 2 weeks looking at some problem, and then hit upon something that get’s you to solve it in 2 days. (literally happened to me on programming problem.) This has a profound impact on “productivity”, instead of systems and schedules and sprints to follow - you just aim to do the thing you want - all the way through, not artificially dividing it up - single shot pursuit. This is different from problem solving approach of breaking a complex problem up into pieces and solving it, piecemeal.
Almost all learning takes place within the context of a problem, a situation, and it is contrary to a syllabus, where you try to fill all the holes in one’s understanding at once. There is no greater motivator to learn something than an actual problem you’d like to tackle.
There is such a thing as talent, and not everyone is born equally with regards to this – but there is also such a thing as understanding - and everyone is equally capable of it! I may not be as gifted as the most gifted person - but I can understand the ideas and things that he/she can, and use it to solve my own problems.
Other persons ability to do well, to be productive, to be more knowledgeable , to create more wealth doesn’t take away my ability to do the same, but envying it, or worse preventing them from doing it, or spending time criticizing them, to stop feeling envious, does take it away.
People overestimate the impact of things like health, habits, sleep and nutrition have on their lives and underestimate the impact of living in conflict, boredom and drudgery (in whatever they are pursuing as a “priority”), fixing the former never fixes the latter, although that’s what most of the world has proclaimed. This is one of the most weirdest things I’ve come to admit to myself, because conflict is harder to come to face with than “bad” habits.