Learning Archives - Page 5 of 10

I Spent My 20s in College Libraries and Came Out With a Career

November 16, 2018February 28, 2024 Nik

I’d love to tell you that, to me, the library has always been a magical place – but it wasn’t.

Having grown up in a pile of books in a home where the walls were already lined with literature, library visits were rare and, often, disappointing. Our local, small-town book collection didn’t feel as refined as the one we had at home and due to funding issues, the place itself always seemed to teeter on the brink of foreclosure.

Today, you can get most books rather cheaply right from your couch, but there are still many reasons to go to the library beyond selection and price. Sadly, I never found those reasons when I was younger.

But when I started college, all of that changed. I’ve spent the majority of my 20s in campus libraries and, to this day, they’re the only kind of office I know. As it turns out, the library is more than a place of knowledge and wonder.

If you want to shape, even invent your own career, it’s a factory of dreams.

Don’t Imitate Successful People – Learn From Your Mistakes

November 14, 2018June 23, 2022 Nik

Do you feel let down by all the advice—books, articles, interviews, podcasts—from and about successful people? Of course you do. These people have an additional 10, 20, 30 years’ experience—even if you’re the same age. You can’t make up the difference by reading a few articles. You have to invest years of time and cultivate the right habits. But here’s the thing about habits: They are both causes and effects.

Take Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who is known to start his day at 3:45 a.m. Maybe he has always woken up at this hour, and eventually that habit played a role in his achieving his current position. Or perhaps it’s a habit after the fact; simply a coping mechanism to stay on top of his 800 emails per day. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Cook rose through the ranks and changed his alarm so he would rise earlier. Little by little, one day at a time. Sometimes it may have been a preemptive move and other times a more reactive one.

Our advice culture has imposed a singular, narrow view on a question that has as many answers as there are people on this planet: How should you live?

Life isn’t a straight line. Most relationships are bilateral. Two things that are connected tend to influence one another. It’s rarely as simple as X leads to Y. We see Banksy shredding their own painting and wish we had the courage to pull a creative stunt like that. But maybe bold Banksy is the result of hundreds of much smaller, less significant creative acts. Maybe Y led to X.

Our advice culture has imposed a singular, narrow view on a question that has as many answers as there are people on this planet: How should you live? This view is like looking at an iceberg through a telescope. You see only what’s on the surface, but it’s a focused picture, so you think you are seeing everything. The view confuses specificity for entirety. With habits, there is no entirety. You have to keep adapting, honing, changing.

There is no one uniform set of habits that leads to success. It has never existed and it never will. We can find many unique habit sets that correlate to success, but that doesn’t mean any one has a higher cause-to-effect ratio than another. Plus, whatever set you choose will continue to change and evolve. Instead of listening to the people who hand us a telescope, we must think independently. We must look at ourselves.

Striking Thoughts is a compendium of 825 aphorisms from Bruce Lee. It’s a collection because, unlike many sources of advice, Lee didn’t believe it was necessary to follow one correct set of ideas in order to live a good life:

Independent inquiry is needed in your search for truth, not dependence on anyone else’s view or a mere book.

This may sound daunting, as we tend to want simple solutions to difficult problems, but according to Bruce, neither actually exists. There are only questions and answers, both of which are hard-won products of thinking, and neither can provide universal solutions that last forever.

In science, all hypotheses must be falsifiable. If you can’t disprove a claim, you can’t test it. Even the best theories are just constructs made of hypotheses, waiting to be proven wrong, waiting for you to provide evidence that will make them collapse.

What’s unfortunate about mistakes is you have to make them.

In our lives, that evidence is mistakes. A mistake is valuable because it falsifies a prior assumption. Unlike a successfully cultivated behavior that may or may not lead you where you want to go, a mistake gives you a single raw point of actual data as to what not to do. Mistakes make you think.

What’s unfortunate about mistakes is that you have to make them. The only way to the data leads through failure. There is no way around this. We will all make many mistakes in our lifetimes. What differentiates us is whether we’re willing to learn from them. Are we willing to think? To sit with the mistake until we’ve extracted the data?

Lee describes the archetype of the person willing to think in “The Parable of the Butcher”:

There was a fine butcher who used the same knife year after year, yet it never lost its delicate, precise edge. After a lifetime of service, it was still as useful and effective as when it was new. When asked how he had preserved his knife’s fine edge, he said: “I follow the line of the hard bone. I do not attempt to cut it, nor to smash it, nor to contend with it in any way. That would only destroy my knife.” In daily living, one must follow the course of the barrier. To try to assail it will only destroy the instrument.

In other words, never learn the same lesson twice. You will only lose your edge.

The simplest way for a child to learn not to touch a hot stove is to touch a hot stove. The pain is powerful and immediate, and so is the lesson, but it also leads to a burned hand. If you hold your hand just above the stove, your hand might still hurt, but you’ll learn the lesson without burning it. This is following the course of the barrier.

To a certain extent, you can learn from other people’s mistakes. You can think about their burned hands and extract some data. But the further you move away from your own life, your own circle, the higher your hand lingers above the stove. At some point, you won’t feel any heat, so you can’t learn. While it’s better to study the failures of the people around you than the successes of distant or unknown people, nothing beats independent inquiry. Gather your own data. Falsify your hypotheses. Dare to make mistakes.

In his introduction to Lee’s book, John Little notes that we are encouraged—and often choose—to look outside ourselves, to anyone but ourselves, to find answers to our biggest questions. He points to one of Bruce’s aphorisms: “We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate.”

When it comes to the premier human inquiry, the issue of how we should live, imitation isn’t just a terrible answer. It’s a way to avoid asking the question. As long as we do that, it won’t matter when we get up. Even if it’s at 3:45 a.m.

The Day I Realized I Couldn’t Beat Time

October 3, 2018August 10, 2023 Nik

Today would’ve been my grandma’s 76th birthday. Sadly, she’s been dead for ten years. Cancer. Ugh. I hate the very word. And while no one should lose their grandma at 17, let alone a parent, people do every day. That’s life.

Luckily, I had a great time with my grandma while she was here. She taught me a lot. I guess all of the people closest to us can, if only we pay attention.

Grandma was born in East Germany even before East Germany became a thing and she embodied that mindset down to the clichés.

She was very frugal, downright cheap at times, but it kept the household and my grandpa’s architecture firm together. Except when it came to making gifts, where too much was never enough and she always gave freely.

First and foremost, however, my grandma was a comic. She was kinda clumsy, so she’d always get herself into some mess and then laugh at it from the bottom of her heart. One time she backed right into a stall at the farmer’s market, sending fruits and veggies all over the place. She’d often drop things and laugh at everything that happened whenever we played board games.

She dipped literally all foods into her coffee, from cake to cookies to ham sandwiches. Nothing was safe. She also had the sweatiest feet anyone’s ever seen and she laughed at that too. I can’t think of anyone who lived more by that famous quote:

“Life is too important to be taken seriously.” ― Oscar Wilde

Laughing at life is the thing my grandma taught me that’s most worth remembering. But there’s another big lesson I wouldn’t have wanted to miss:

None of us can beat time.

There Are Two Ways To Judge People — Both Are Useless

August 30, 2018September 28, 2022 Nik

We all do it. You do it. I do it. Your friends do it. We judge.

At the grocery store, we silently judge people waiting in line. We secretly rate our family members by how much they support us, our friends by how fast they call us back and our coworkers by how cocky they are. But we also make more subtle judgement calls. Ones we’re barely aware of making.

When we eat, our gut signals to us what’s safe to put in our mouths and what’s not. When we meet someone new, we can instantly tell if they’re attractive or not, without having knowingly sorted them into either category. When we’re in danger, we make split second decisions about where to jump, which corner to turn. Much of this is natural. It allows us to exist.

Judgement, both conscious and unconscious, is a fundamental part of the human experience. We all do it around the clock because it’s a necessary function of moving, acting, and living in a dynamic world. And while we can’t do much about the beliefs we form without actively contributing, we all have our own systems of how we evaluate others.

Sadly, most of those systems are fundamentally flawed.

Actions or Intentions, Which One Is It Going To Be?

How we judge others is mainly affected by how we’re raised. The two most commonly ‘taught’ approaches are based on how people interact with us: one on their actions, the other on their intentions. The goal of either is to make human behavior comparable.

When you grow up in a home where little emphasis is placed on outcomes, where you feel that your best is always good enough, chances are, you will hold others mostly to their intentions too. Your boyfriend got you a terrible gift? No problem, it’s the thought that counts.

If you’re raised under the motto of “actions speak louder than words,” however, it’s usually the result that matters. No second-place trophies. You either showed up to your friend’s birthday, or you didn’t. You score the client or you don’t.

Both systems have their advantages and drawbacks, so it’s hard to declare one superior to the other. Placing importance on intentions allows you to be patient and kind, while focusing on actions is a great motivator to try hard and hold both people and yourself accountable.

Problems occur, however, when we accidentally mix the two. There’s a saying that we tend to “judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions.” This gap, if present, creates a double standard. When you criticize a coworker for being late to a meeting, but let yourself off the hook for ‘really trying hard’ the next time you’re stuck in traffic, the outside world will label you a hypocrite, maybe rightfully so.

Regardless of which philosophy you grew up with, the message is, when choosing your own system as an adult, be consistent. Judge others the way you would judge yourself. It is here that the real predicament begins.

Both systems, even if practiced to a tee, put you under constant pressure to remain rigid in a world of permanent change. No matter which basis of judgements you choose, you’ll quickly run into instances where you’ll want to change that basis. If only just for a single occasion.

Maybe your girlfriend cheated on you, but you really want to forgive her. Or your son played an awful match of tennis, but man, he tried so hard you’d love to give him credit. Whenever we are uncomfortable because we don’t want to contradict ourselves, it’s usually a sign that the arrangement we made with ourselves was too inflexible to begin with.

Maybe we need a new way to make sense of people’s behavior altogether.

What We’re Really Looking For

If we want to develop a more accurate sense of judgement, one that leaves us feeling more comfortable in our own skin, we first have to look at why we feel we need an explanation of why people do what they do. I think it’s to help us streamline our interactions with others and improve our relationships.

Life’s events are hard enough to navigate as they are, so by detecting other people’s desires and reasoning, we reduce complexity. We want to find out who to engage with and who to avoid. In a business negotiation, clarifying the wants of all involved parties is the quickest way to close a deal. Knowing the one person in class who likes you the least makes it easier to find your clique.

The problem with comparison approaches, like actions or intentions, then, is that they neglect that much of who we are is contextual. Because so is what we want and why we want it. By pinning a small sample of observations on other people’s character, we render the contrast void before we even make it.

In science, this is called the fundamental attribution error. It’s our tendency to point to people’s identity when explaining why they do what they do. I guess this kind of flaw is to be expected from a brain that runs on lots of heuristics.

We judge as a shortcut to make sense of the world. We label the lady who cuts in line at the grocery store as egoistic and add a checkmark. Understood. But actually, we’ve understood nothing. We’ve merely skipped the effort of even trying when it’s precisely that effort that would give us what we want.

What if, instead of adding a period at the end of “she is disrespectful,” we added a question mark? What if we replaced instant judgement with instant curiosity? Wouldn’t that allow us to interact with others based on what’s going on, rather than who we think they are?

Because the only way we can really understand why people act the way they do is by assembling a picture of the context that they acted in. Was their choice one they made voluntarily? Or one they were forced to make? Or maybe one they felt they were forced to make, even if it wasn’t so?

Getting a grasp on the many factors that went into other people’s choices is a process of discovery. A process impossible to start from a conclusion, because then you’d only select the information that fits your preconceived idea.

Just like it’s impossible to be curious and judgmental at the same time.

The Yardstick That Never Fails

Making assumptions is part of life. In most cases, nature does a good enough job at getting us to make the right call. But when it comes to interacting with other humans, our basic wiring often fails us.

A yardstick is only as good as the number of things you can measure against it. That makes both actions and intentions poor yardsticks for judging others. When we use them, we’re too quick to jump to conclusions rather than the right questions, and we’ll always feel uneasy about our own, inner conflicts.

Curiosity, however, is universal. In refusing to judge people, we’re prompted to judge their circumstances. And since the circumstances of even the smallest decision are vast beyond what we could ever perceive, we’ll often find ourselves unable to make any judgement at all. What a wonderful way to live.

Replacing judgement with curiosity forces you to keep asking questions. It allows you to react to the same act by the same person in an entirely new way, if the situation demands it. And it’ll never squeeze you into the discomfort of contradiction, because contradiction is condoned, even necessary.

We can’t choose what belief systems we’re raised under, but we can update those systems once we discover them. If we’re curious enough to figure out what they are, we might actually change them — and us — for the better.

How To Use Idleness To Combat Setbacks

August 28, 2018October 1, 2022 Nik

Around 300 BC, a wealthy merchant set out on a voyage from his home in ancient Cyprus, Phoenicia, to Piraeus, a harbor town close to Athens.

Having almost made it to his destination, his ship crashed and went under, including the precious cargo. Luckily, he survived. Eventually, he reached Athens, and, once there, decided it’d be best to not do anything for a while.

Enjoying his newly found spare time, he spent most of it walking around the city, exploring. One day, he came across a book store, went inside, and picked up the first book that spoke to him. Its title was ‘Memorabilia.’ In the book, a man named Xenophon described episodes of his mentor’s life and how he tried to help others. That mentor was the famous philosopher Socrates.

The merchant was so inspired that he asked the owner of the store where he could find more men like Socrates. As fate would have it, another well-known philosopher happened to walk by, so the owner simply pointed at him. The merchant approached the philosopher and they started a conversation. After a while, he decided to stay and study under the philosopher’s tutelage.

He never left Athens again.

The Dangers of Importing Philosophy

Throughout history, many ideas from the ancient East have permeated into the newer, Western parts of the world. The most popular one, one that seems to be inseparably tied to our modern culture, may be the Japanese ideal behind the phrase “nana korobi ya oki.” It roughly translates to “fall down seven times, stand up eight” and is a reminder of the value of resilience.

This idea is deeply embedded in our Western concept of what makes a good life. It is the sole topic of thousands of podcasts, has given birth to countless books, and is the central theme of most conversations around, even our very definitions of success. And yet, in this historic game of telephone, it seems along the line half the message was lost. One aspect we completely neglect.

The Japanese have always been equally as slow as they have been perseverant.

That’s not a bad thing. To the contrary, it allows for deliberate action, refined decisions and the utmost respect of others in seeing them through. As Roman poet Ovid would put it: Dripping water holes the stone. And when you fail, the speed with which you bounce back has big implications.

What we tend to emphasize is how fast a person can stomach a setback, rather than how strong they return. Each defeat is supposed to be followed with an immediate, new attempt. On to the next one. Isn’t that how we say? But when you rush to recover from failure, springing from rock bottom like a jack-in-the-box, you’re likely to run into the same concrete wall, just faster. You’re not just too distracted to see what went wrong, you’re too busy to even look.

And, especially today, there’s a lot to be said for looking.

The Fortuitous Castaway

The name of the merchant was Zeno. Zeno of Citium. Once he dove into the ideas of philosophy, he found them to be so important that he saw no fate but one in which he spread and taught them for the remainder of his life.

To better understand the teachings of his master, he practiced discourse while pacing up and down a prominent, public square in Athens. As he became more articulate, people eventually gathered to hear him speak. When he parted ways with his teacher some 20 years later, his own pupils would come to be known as Zenonians.

Today, however, we call those people Stoics. Zeno is the founder of Stoic philosophy. 2,000 years later, it is one of the fundamental pillars of Western history. An entire branch of education is dedicated to studying, interpreting, and understanding its ideas. We teach Stoicism to children in schools and every month, over 300,000 adults turn to Google to learn more about it.

Ultimately, all of this goes back to one man’s decision to bounce back slowly. Instead of racing to recover his cargo, make the next trade, or return home with the next ship, he allowed the dust to settle. Once it did, he was able to see a new path and step on it with confidence.

I’m sure he would agree that sometimes, idleness can lead to amazing things.

A Chance For Quiet Observation

I’m not a boxer, so I can only imagine how much strategy follows being knocked down, but even if you know you can get up again, wouldn’t it be smart to stay down till the count’s at nine? They’re just seconds, but seconds of recovery nonetheless.

What’s more, they’re seconds of quiet observation. They give you a chance to catch up on your environment. Get a feel for what’s going on. Of course, life is not a boxing match. You can stay down for a while. Take some time to think. Even look at the stars. And, once you do come back, you’ll come out swinging.

But when we respond to setbacks with ever more aggressive attacks, we rob serendipity of the space it needs to unfold. It’s impossible to contextualize individual events when they’re inches from our face. We need time to process, to let our guts digest the experience. So that they may lead us in the right direction going forward.

Whether it’s the same direction we used to have or an entirely new one, we can’t know in advance. But I have a hunch that those, who take a deep breath and stay idle for some time, will often quote the words of Zeno looking back:

“I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered shipwreck.”

Will Smith: The Semantics of Success

August 24, 2018February 28, 2024 Nik

In the summer of 1985, the king of Philadelphia’s DJ scene threw down at a house party. That night, his hype man was missing. You know, the dude shouting around, getting folks excited, and prompting chants. Luckily, a local MC lived just down the street and offered to fill in.

The name of that MC was Will Smith. He and DJ Jazzy Jeff instantly hit it off. So much, in fact, that Jeff sent his former sidekick packing and the two joined forces. Less than a year later, they dropped their debut single “Girls Ain’t Nothing but Trouble” just in time to take the 1986 prom season by storm and allow Will to graduate high school as a rap star. Jeff recalls:

“Once Will and I made a record, we killed Philly’s hip-hop and ballroom scene. Nobody wanted two turntables. Now they wanted one turntable, a drum machine and some guy rapping. It wasn’t about Philly anymore. It was about conquering the world.”

And conquer the world they did.

The Strong-Link Theory: How to Build a Successful Career

August 3, 2018May 17, 2022 Nik

My favorite painting in Munich’s ‘New Pinacotheca’ is The Poor Poet by Carl Spitzweg. It shows a penniless artist in a crappy, run-down attic apartment.

The Poor Poet is one of Spitzweg’s earliest compositions after becoming a full-time painter in 1833. Today, it is his most famous work. Likely because in it, he managed to capture the ambiguity of his own life.

Spitzweg was born into a wealthy family and eventually launched his career off the comfort of a large inheritance. At the same time, his father forced him through a pharmacist education and he was entirely self-taught. All his career, he pursued humorous themes, contrary to the common-sense nature of art in his era, the Biedermeier period.

Like Spitzweg, The Poor Poet is a puzzling figure. He’s huddled up in blankets, covering a hole in the ceiling with an umbrella, burning his own writings to stay warm. But he doesn’t look flustered. Is he choosing his poverty-stricken existence? Does it inspire him? Did he end up there because society is misjudging his genius? Or was he just too much of a snob about his own art?

The answers to all these questions are left to the viewer’s imagination, which makes it a great painting. Another reason I like this picture, however, is that it’s a reminder that in today’s world, no artist must starve.

Life Is Full of Networks

Sometimes, the past deserves a second chance. That’s the tagline of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History. In one episode, he examines why philanthropy in education tends to center around the richest and most elite schools, as opposed to those that actually need it. To piece the answer together, he turns to a book about soccer.

Taking a page out of The Numbers Game, Gladwell frames education as a ‘weak-link problem.’ This means the overall outcome depends much more on giving access to those, who have none, than on providing high-class students with even better resources. The analogy in sports is that “a football team is only as strong as its weakest link.” Look at this year’s world cup results.

Ronaldo, Messi, Neymar, all world-class, yet none of their teams survived the quarter-finals. Because soccer is not about having one or two superstars, it’s usually the team with the fewest mistakes that wins. Plus, even the best striker can only score if the ball makes it to the front. Basketball is a counter-example. One Michael Jordan can do some serious damage. He might singlehandedly win a game, regardless of how the other players perform.

The beauty of this concept is that you can use it as an almost universal lens to work on your perspective. Life is full of networks and all networks have links.

Your body is a weak-link structure; one tiny, but critical part fails, and the whole system shuts down. Traffic is a weak-link phenomenon; a single bad driver can block an entire highway for hours. School is a strong-link game; you only need the exact right answers to pass any exam. And so on.

But there’s one area where applying this idea is especially interesting: work.

The Difference Between Your Career and Your Job

When companies vie for job applicants, they love to promise that “with us, you won’t just have a job, you’ll have a career!” What intrigued graduates take that to mean is that the prospects of working for said employer won’t be limited to the current gig. Promise me I can grow, and I’ll take you to the sunlight. That type of thing. The reality, however, is often different.

Your current job may be a weak-link game. In Germany, for example, waiters often split tips. Whatever the collected total, everyone gets the same share. In this scenario, positive outliers matter, but the average is held down by the lowest contributions. If you’re a strong link, you lose. Most jobs are like that. Rewards don’t hinge on singular results, but on the team’s output as a whole.

That’s because employment itself is also a weak-link problem. It’s better to make sure everyone has a job than giving particularly great ones to a select few. Missing opportunities at their firms are one reason that nowadays, people change jobs around every four years. Here’s another:

Your job may not be a strong-link game, but your career always is.

Career Engine Optimization

The internet has largely democratized the resources of building a business. Since fewer people can do more with less, the number of small firms has gone through the roof. New kinds of jobs pop up left and right, so people sample.

That’s smart. It’s the equivalent of creating more links. And since you only need one great career move to potentially land where you want to go, people maximize their chances. Think of Youtube discoveries like Justin Bieber or the first employees at Facebook. Those are extreme examples, but on a micro level, your and my career will play out just the same.

Another thing you could do is to get a strong-link job, where you can drastically increase your income, fame, and whatever else with a few good results. All artists have this. But there’s also commission-based work, like real estate and most sales, or equity compensation, from working at a startup or handling investment deals. Those are good bets too.

But the best thing you can do, by far, does not depend on job modalities at all.

The Human Lag in Reacting to Change

Back in Spitzweg’s days, The Poor Poet was the norm. His painting was as much a caricature as it was a critical comment on society at the time. It’s easy to imagine Spitzweg wouldn’t have chosen the artist’s path, had it not been for his family money. With few options, small personal networks, and the excessive importance of local reputation, playing it safe was the way to go.

In the past 200 years, however, the world has changed more drastically than ever before. Another thing the internet has democratized is the ability to create links from the comfort of your home. Not just actively, but letting them come to you. It is 30 years old, but this most people still don’t understand.

When Spitzweg first presented The Poor Poet to the critics at Munich’s art club in 1839, they weren’t impressed. It took until two years after his death for the painting to make it into a museum. Imagine he could have posted it on Instagram. Or blogged about the process. Someone might have reached out.

I’m surrounded by young, smart, tech-savvy graduates all day, but most of their link-building efforts seem limited to updating their LinkedIn when they complete another internship. I’m sure most of them will do just fine, but it’s a little as if they insist on being poor poets in a world that offers every opportunity for that to change.

How to Have a Successful Career: As You Shout Into the Woods…

I wholeheartedly believe the single most valuable thing you can do to get everything out of your career that you want is this:

Create.

It may be easy to say for a writer like me, but I mean it. And you don’t have to be creative. You can just document your day. You’re interesting. So is where you live. If you love accounting, by all means, keep us posted on the news from that world. Or maybe you don’t feel like tinkering in public. Good. Tinker in your garage and then showcase what you made online.

Whatever you do, don’t limit your participation in the biggest network in the history of the world to lurking behind a screen. The German version of “what goes around, comes around” is “as you shout into the woods, so it echoes back.” Only those who put effort in will receive something in return.

Most importantly, if you want to have a successful career, treat it like the strong-link game it actually is. Don’t fall for the victim narrative of gatekeepers preventing change. They’re still trying, but you can choose to ignore them. That’s a modern-day luxury The Poor Poet didn’t have.

There’s one more reason I like the painting so much: It is a wonderful reminder to work hard and stay humble. As long as we do that, we’ll always be our own strongest link. And there’s nothing ambiguous about that.

The Best Way to Improve Your Thinking

June 27, 2018May 17, 2022 Nik

Every day, up to a million people pass over the intersection outside Shibuya Station in Tokyo. With a capacity of 3,000 people in one exchange, it’s the biggest pedestrian crossing in the world.

Whenever the light turns green, a little race starts. Who gets across the quickest? Who takes the straightest line? Who’ll wiggle through without bumping into someone? It may not be as big in your town, but every day, that very same race happens billions of times at intersections around the globe.

I’m always fascinated by all the different players’ attitudes. Some just stare into space, others are completely absorbed by their phones. Some are lost in conversation or thought, while others can’t wait to continue their morning run.

But almost without fail, the person who makes it to the other side first is someone who paid attention. I try to be that person. I don’t always ‘win,’ but when I do, I’m halfway across by the time my fellow players look up.

There are lots of ways to improve your thinking. Train your memory, set goals, think positive, eat right, meditate, the list goes on. But they all pale in comparison to relentlessly using your best asset: your attention.

If you really want to do your brain a service, fully dedicate it to the task at hand.

Even if it’s just waiting for the traffic light to change.

A Letter to Rational People

May 22, 2018May 10, 2022 Nik

Hercule Poirot stands on the balcony, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Atop the clock tower in Jaffa, Israel, the greatest detective in the world stares into the distance. It is 1934.

Still baffled by how the Belgian gentleman with the big mustache solved the case of the missing relic, the captain of the police can’t help himself but stare.

“It’s just…how did you know it was him, sir? From just a tiny crack on the wall.”
“I have the advantage…I can only see the world as it should be. And when it is not, the imperfection stands out like the nose in the middle of a face. It…it makes most of life unbearable. But it is useful in the detection of crime.”

There are a lot of Hercule Poirots here on the web. Wonderful, rational people. It’s one of the reasons why I love this place. We may not all be detectives by profession, but we’re just as curious, just as righteous, just as skeptical of everything that, in a balanced world, shouldn’t be.

It’s why we read and write about justice, about equality, about fairness. About getting along, living better, and being kind. But sometimes we come up short.

This is a letter to everyone facing those times. A letter to rational people.

Nothing In-Between

The captain isn’t quite satisfied. Yes, Poirot can see the world plainly, but there is something more. Something beyond facts. “But it’s as though you see into their hearts and divine their true natures,” he says. To which Poirot replies:

“And whatever people say, there is right, there is wrong. There is nothing in-between.”

At first I was confused at Poirot’s statement. Doesn’t he know the truth is subjective? Isn’t that what makes him a great detective? Then I realized, it is knowing that this dichotomy exists despite the truth being subjective that does. We all have our own version of reality, but in each one, the distinction between right and wrong persists. Always. And, in a surprisingly large number of situations, a surprisingly large number of people agree.

As we become more rational, whether that’s through training, brute force, or education, the choice between wrong and right hovers more and more clearly over our head. And every day, we fight to do our best. But it’s hard. We don’t always choose what’s right, we’re only human after all. But the more we know what’s right, the more it weighs on us. That burden can be a lot to carry.

Breakpoint

The train pulls into the small town of Brod, Bosnia. Only days have passed, but they feel like years. The case he’s solved on board brought him to the edge of both his morals and abilities. Before he disembarks, Poirot writes a letter of his own. A letter to an old friend, that he only sends in his mind.

“My dear Colonel Armstrong,
finally I can answer your letter. At least with the thoughts in my head and the feeling in my heart that somewhere, you can hear me.
I have now discovered the truth of the case and it is profoundly disturbing. I have seen the fracture of the human soul. So many broken lives, so much pain and anger, giving way to the poison of deep grief, until one crime became many.”

When we grow past the mercy of our emotions, beyond holding ourselves accountable, we suddenly see the injustice all around us. Life’s not fair. Children die. Criminals succeed.

It’s not just depressing. It’s tempting. We’ve all made the wrong choice at the right time and gotten off easy. But there is a breakpoint to how much we can tolerate. It may not break you, but at least once in life, it is everyone’s turn.

I don’t know if it’s your turn yet, but I want you to know you’re not alone.

Even the greatest detective in the world has his struggles.

What Rationality Is Built Upon

As Poirot grapples with the abyss he’s staring into, he feels trapped in the middle. A prison halfway between wrong and right. This time, however, the key lies not within the depths of the human mind.

“I have always wanted to believe that man is rational and civilized. My very existence depends upon this hope, upon order and method and the little grey cells. But now, perhaps, I am asked to listen, instead, to my heart.”

What unites us in our fight for rationality is not our ability to see the world clearly. It is neither intelligence nor discipline; not even a shared lack of understanding for those, who act on impulse. We all set out on this journey together because we built our lives around this same, undying hope. That underneath it all, in spite of everything, man is still good. And sometimes, that hope must be enough.

If you’ve recently failed to do the right thing, whether you’ve known it before or found out after: rest easy. When others have failed to do right by you, rest easy. And give them space to rest easy too. Even the man who dedicated his whole life to finding the truth comes to see that sometimes, peace lies in that paralyzing fog between our choices. Or worse, on the wrong side. But from time to time, finding it may be more important than being right.

“I have understood in this case that the scales of justice cannot always be evenly weighed. And I must learn, for once, to live with the imbalance.”

You won’t always get what you deserve. You won’t always live a happy life. In fact, it will often be unbearable. But in spite of the imbalance, you will always find the strength to go on.

And to me, no matter where life sends us, going on is always the truth.

303 Life Lessons We All Learn But Keep Forgetting

April 8, 2018September 17, 2023 Nik

I used to think beyond 7th grade math is only useful for physicists and statisticians. After the rule of three, which allows you to calculate discounts on prices, diminishing returns start to kick in fast.

I’ve remedied that view a bit; geometry and calculus have led to some of histories strongest philosophical insights, but I still like to imagine a world in which our high school table of subjects includes:

Human behavior.
Relationships.
Communication.
Body language.
Personal finance.
Etiquette.
Career discovery.
Work habits.
Creativity.

Until that happens, however, I’m grateful for people like Alexander J.A Cortes, who compile the curriculum of such a school of life for us to learn it now, as adults. On February 25th, he shared a tweet storm previewing his next book titled Untaught Truths of Adulthood, which went viral.

As I read through his nearly 100-tweet-long outpour of life lessons, many examples from my own life popped up in my mind. It’s only natural, for all of us learn many of these things, but we never articulate them. I reached out to him and asked whether he’d be up for a collaboration: The result is his treasure trove in long-form, with my experiences as backup to his insights.

Category: Learning