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talesofafangirlwithadvr · 4 years

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MAY PICKS!

WELCOME BACK TO ANOTHER MONTH OF TV/MOVIE WATCHING!

Does it feel like it was just April or that it can’t even be May and yet it is coming to an end? I get it. Quarantine is doing weird things to my head and I can’t believe how far in the year it’s been. Looking back on my picks for this month I noticed that I have seemed to escape the world through historical period shows or movies. But that isn’t the entire bulk of the month (just half of it). Without further ado, here we go!

As always..spoilers....

THE HALF OF IT

This Netflix original movie was an early watch for me during this month and it came at the right time. I was looking for a movie, rather than a TV show, and something that was contemporary and not overly serious (although, there are serious themes in this film). As it repeatedly says, “it’s not a romance” yet it has that YA/teen romance feel. (Yes, I used YA/teen in the same description.) I really loved the Elle Chu and Paul Munsky friendship. While watching the trailer, I could tell this film would be highlighting a healthy friendship as its focal point and how your other half doesn’t have to be a romantic soulmate. A lot of times, these kinds of stories can seem very repetitive, but with the new plot of Elle and Paul in love with the same girl we encounter a new kind of obstacle. I think the resolution was pretty solid for both plot lines and I liked the train scene at the end. Certain shots felt long at times. There were lots of pauses, which I didn’t 100% like. Also, the awkwardness could feel pretty cringey. Overall, it is definitely worth the watch. I liked it and would watch it again. Paul might be one of my heartthrobs of 2020. I’m always a sucker for a sweet jock with a heart of gold.

THE OFFICE LADIES

Yes, I know I’m late to the show as this podcast started last year, but better late than never and what better time than quarantine. Plus, I don’t have to wait each week for a new episode (even though know I’m catching up, so eventually...) At first, I was worried when I would have time because of not spending as much time in the car for commuting, but I found it’s really soothing to listen to as I’m cleaning. It feels like I’m in the room with Angela and Jenna and we’re all BFFs. I love how they’re best friends in real life and how close they are. They give the trivia you really can only get from two people who were on the show. They also have several guest stars from actors on the show to writers, directors and producers. One of my most recent listens had Creed Bratton in the studio with them and they talked about the Halloween episode. It was great. Listening to their podcast is really making me want to rewatch the series for the 100th time. As an uber fan, I already get all of their references, but with the new Easter eggs I can’t wait to go back and see them.

STAR WARS RISE OF SKYWALKER

Not just in honor of May the 4th, but to finish up the Star Wars watch through that I was taking with my sister. I hadn’t seen it yet and while not a die heart fan, I still wanted to see the conclusion. I liked the Force Awakens a lot, but felt eh about Last Jedi. In ways this one kind of felt like a stand alone. It had a different vibe compared to the previous two. After watching I heard there was a different director for all three movies, so that makes sense-I guess. (It’s weird they wouldn’t have kept at least one to do two of them.) It also had a kind of fan fiction feel. SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! Bringing Palpatine back reminded me of Lord Voldemort having a kid in Cursed Child. BACK FROM SPOILERS! I’m happy that Rey’s parentage/lineage was revealed because it was such a major point in this series. I loved the Rey/Finn/Poe relationship. It was great to see them in the same story line and reminded me of the original three: Luke/Han/Leia. Leia :( It was so sad, but I always knew it had to happen, due to Carrie Fischer. It didn’t make it any easier to watch. MORE SPOILERSSSSS! I knew Kylo would turn back. It was nice to see that his mom was able to spark that. I did like his fight scene. I just didn’t love the connection him and Rey have/had. LOVED the ending. I’m cool with her taking the Skywalker name and the suns shot with the force them at the end had me screaming.

OPHELIA

From one Daisy Ridley film to another. This movie just recently got added to my list when I was channel surfing. I vaguely remembered it being advertised, but it felt like a while ago. I’m a sucker for a re-telling, so I was immediately intrigued to watch it. This film was adapted from a novel by the same name. It follows Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and gives her more of a story and character development. If you are familiar with the original, you know that Ophelia is only briefly mentioned and her character’s motives are really driven by her love for Hamlet. Even her famous death scene is very ambiguous. When this film begins, a voice-over narration by Ridley immediately brings us to her death scene and tells the audience “that there is more to the story than we think we know.” I really loved the twist and re-invention of this story through her point of view. I think Daisy Ridley was fantastic in the role. I haven’t seen her in a lot of other things, so it was great to see her here in a completely different role from Star Wars. The re-telling is very creative and very feminist. You get to see how Hamlet and Ophelia meet and then see him off to school. With this addition you can really get behind this relationship and see the mutual attraction and feelings between them. When relating back to the original, I like how they cut out scenes that Ophelia was not physically apart of and instead rely the events that happened. (Specifically with Polonius’ death.) I also enjoyed the new perspective of scenes. You really can tell that Ophelia is not mad, but it is the mask she must put on to survive. The ‘get thee to a nunnery’ scene takes on a whole different meaning now. There’s also a lot echoes to other Shakespearean plays and tropes which were fun to explore. Whether you’re a Shakespeare/Hamlet fan or not, I would definitely check this one out if you’re a fan of the time period, re-tellings or a strong female lead.

MEDICI THE MAGNIFICENT SEASON 3

I literally just finished this show this afternoon and I couldn’t wait to write about it. (Sorry if this post is pretty long, but that just shows you that you need to watch it.) I was very excited for the third and final season of Medici because I enjoyed season 2, so much. While this one might have taken me a little longer to watch, it was still a good time and I’m sad it’s over.

Watching this season I was super impressed by Daniel Sharman’s acting. He has great range as he goes from a young Lorenzo in season 2 to an adult and father and then an elderly man. I think he was convincing throughout each stage and I’m happy they kept the same actor. His make-up to help him age looked a lot more natural, compared to Richard Madden’s, in my opinion. I feel on shows like this it’s often hard seeing a jump in time (it helps with seeing the kids grow up), so when Lorenzo starts to get sick/age I at first, was like whoa, but then it was further explained (by inheriting his father’s illness, etc.)

Compared to season 2, I definitely liked the previous more. I not only enjoyed watching the more idealistic Lorenzo, but also plot-wise. In season 2 the Pazzi are the main antagonist/objective. Here in season 3 there were several obstacles/antagonists: The Pope, Riario, and Savonarola. Every time we thought there was a moment of peace...nope. Now, I get this is based on history and we need drama so you can only change so much, but I missed the Medici being at the top and being respected. I also know we covered A LOT of time. (I guess that shows you how connected I felt with them and the show.)

All of the history Easter Eggs were cool. Obviously, the Renaissance was extremely relevant, but it was cool seeing the big names like Botticelli (especially with his painting at the end, which I recognized), Da Vinci, and Michelangelo. I can’t get over how many of these famous painters were recognized by the Medici family. It just shows you how important and influential they were. Also, when Nico revealed his last name as Machiavelli. JAW DROP! This show has continually brought me back to researching (and mainly using Wikipedia). The writing at the end was accurate to what I found. Wish we had another season with the legacy to see it continue. I’m surprised I got teary eyed at the end.

WORLD ON FIRE

It may be listed last once again, this month, but it is definitely not least. The show may have finished its season a few weeks ago, but I still have two episodes left on my DVR. The last one I watched was when they were in Dunkirk and that was an intense time. I knew it was going to be, but it still didn’t prepare me. In this episode, we see many characters FINALLY meet up and join each other’s plot lines. I think that was one of my favorite parts of the episode/series. Some already knew each other, while others were meeting for the first time. While I am excited to see how it all turns out, I’m also not ready to say good-bye. Right now, I saw a potential for a season 2, but not sure if that was a fan made article or not. I’m hoping all of my favorite characters survive and get what can be considered a happier ending than what they are currently experiencing. I also hope we don’t end on too much of a cliffhanger. Either way, I’m happy I checked this show out.

RE-WATCHING

iZOMBIE

Currently I’m in the beginning of the second season. Sometime last month I felt the pull to start re-watching this show. It’s one that I have tried once or twice to watch again from the beginning, but now that it’s been finished for almost a year, it felt like time. It was a great decision, although right now there’s some character plots that are frustrating me and that I forgot about. But there’s some great brains that Liv has experienced and it was great seeing Lowell again (for as short-lived as it was). I’m excited to continue re-watching.

I DIDN’T DO IT

The re-watch for I Didn’t Do It basically began when it hit Disney Plus a few months ago. I just recently made it to season 2, which I remember enjoying more than season 1. One reason for this was because they get rid of the flashback format for each episode. I’m really early on, like episode 4, so I still have many more to go. Once I finish it I don’t know if I’ll explore a new Disney Plus show or watch another that I’ve seen before.

I also have a few things on DVR that I’m still finishing up. I haven’t watched the finale of Batwoman yet and I know it’s going to be weird now that Ruby Rose has left the show. I just finished the Flash and felt blah about the whole season, so I’m unsure if I’ll watch next season. But I am enjoying Stargirl. You can find my thoughts on the first episode here. I’m excited to see the rest of the season.

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airoasis · 5 years

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Chris Urmson: How a driverless car sees the road

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/chris-urmson-how-a-driverless-car-sees-the-road-2/

Chris Urmson: How a driverless car sees the road

So in 1885, Karl Benz invented the vehicle. Later that 12 months, he took it out for the first public test power, and — authentic story — crashed right into a wall. For the final one hundred thirty years, we now have been working round that least nontoxic a part of the car, the driver. We’ve got made the vehicle better. We have introduced seat belts, we have delivered air baggage, and in the final decade, we now have truly began trying to make the auto smarter to fix that trojan horse, the driving force. Now, in these days i will talk to you a bit bit concerning the difference between patching around the quandary with driver help systems and virtually having utterly self-riding cars and what they may be able to do for the arena. I am additionally going to talk to you a bit bit about our automobile and permit you to see the way it sees the sector and how it reacts and what it does, but first i’ll speak just a little bit about the concern.And it’s a significant trouble: 1.2 million people are killed on the sector’s roads every 12 months. In the us alone, 33,000 persons are killed each 12 months. To place that in standpoint, that is the equal as a 737 falling out of the sky every working day. It is type of improbable. Automobiles are bought to us like this, however particularly, this is what using’s like. Right? It can be no longer sunny, it’s wet, and you wish to have to do some thing other than pressure. And the rationale why is this: traffic is getting worse. In america, between 1990 and 2010, the vehicle miles traveled accelerated by using 38 percent. We grew through six percentage of roads, so it is no longer for your brains. Traffic relatively is considerably worse than it used to be not very lengthy ago. And all of this has a very human fee. So when you take the average travel time in the us, which is ready 50 minutes, you multiply that by the one hundred twenty million staff we have, that turns out to be about six billion minutes wasted in commuting every day. Now, that’s a colossal number, so let’s put it in point of view. You are taking that six billion minutes and you divide it via the natural lifestyles expectancy of a character, that seems to be 162 lifetimes spent everyday, wasted, simply getting from A to B.It can be implausible. And then, there are these of us who would not have the privilege of sitting in site visitors. So that is Steve. He’s an incredibly equipped man, but he simply happens to be blind, and that implies as an alternative of a 30-minute power to work in the morning, it can be a two-hour ordeal of piecing collectively bits of public transit or asking buddies and family for a ride. He does not have that same freedom that you just and that i must get around. We will have to do some thing about that. Now, conventional knowledge would say that we will just take these driver help systems and we’ll form of push them and incrementally improve them, and over time, they may grow to be self-driving cars.Well, i’m right here to let you know that is like me announcing that if I work fairly rough at leaping, someday i’ll be able to fly. We surely ought to do anything a little bit one of a kind. And so i will talk to you about three distinctive ways that self-driving systems are different than driver assistance systems. And i’ll with a few of our own expertise. So again in 2013, we had the first scan of a self-using auto the place we let typical people use it. Good, nearly standard — they have been one hundred Googlers, however they weren’t engaged on the challenge. And we gave them the vehicle and we allowed them to make use of it of their every day lives.However in contrast to a real self-riding vehicle, this one had a large asterisk with it: They needed to pay concentration, when you consider that this was once an experimental car. We demonstrated it a lot, but it surely could still fail. And so we gave them two hours of coaching, we put them within the car, we let them use it, and what we heard back was once some thing first-rate, as any one trying to bring a product into the arena. Every one of them told us they cherished it. Actually, we had a Porsche driver who came in and told us on the primary day, "that is totally stupid. What are we thinking?" but at the end of it, he mentioned, "now not most effective should i have it, every body else should have it, seeing that people are terrible drivers." So this was song to our ears, however then we started to appear at what the people within the car were doing, and this used to be eye-opening.Now, my favorite story is that this gentleman who looks down at his mobile and realizes the battery is low, so he turns around like this in the car and digs around in his backpack, pulls out his desktop, puts it on the seat, goes within the back once more, digs round, pulls out the charging cable for his mobile, futzes round, places it into the laptop, puts it on the cell. Definite ample, the cell is charging. At all times he is been doing 65 miles per hour down the parkway. Right? Incredible. So we suggestion about this and we stated, it can be variety of apparent, proper? The easier the technology gets, the much less trustworthy the driving force is going to get.So via simply making the automobiles incrementally smarter, we’re commonly no longer going to see the wins we fairly need. Let me talk about anything slightly technical for a second right here. So we’re looking at this graph, and along the backside is how often does the auto follow the brakes when it shouldn’t. Which you could ignore most of that axis, on the grounds that if you’re driving around town, and the automobile begins stopping randomly, you’re never going to buy that vehicle. And the vertical axis is how usually the auto is going to use the brakes when it’s speculated to to support you restrict an accident. Now, if we seem at the bottom left corner right here, that is your traditional auto. It does not follow the brakes for you, it does not do anything goofy, but it surely additionally would not get you out of an accident. Now, if we want to bring a driver assistance procedure into a vehicle, say with collision mitigation braking, we’re going to put some package deal of technological know-how on there, and that’s this curve, and it’ll have some operating houses, but it surely’s under no circumstances going to preclude all of the accidents, due to the fact it doesn’t have that capacity.However we are going to choose some place along the curve right here, and maybe it avoids half of accidents that the human driver misses, and that’s mighty, right? We simply reduced accidents on our roads by a aspect of two. There are now 17,000 less people dying each year in the us. But if we would like a self-driving auto, we’d like a science curve that looks like this. We’ll have got to put extra sensors within the auto, and we’ll select some operating factor up right here where it truly never will get right into a crash. They are going to occur, however very low frequency. Now you and that i would look at this and we would argue about whether or not it is incremental, and that i could say some thing like "eighty-20 rule," and it can be fairly hard to maneuver as much as that new curve. However let’s look at it from one more direction for a second. So let’s appear at how on the whole the technological know-how has to do the right thing. And so this inexperienced dot up here’s a driver help system.It turns out that human drivers make errors that result in traffic accidents about once every a hundred,000 miles in the usa. In contrast, a self-driving method is frequently making decisions about 10 occasions per 2d, so order of magnitude, that’s about 1,000 instances per mile. So for those who examine the distance between these two, it can be about 10 to the eighth, correct? Eight orders of magnitude. That’s like evaluating how quick I run to the speed of sunshine. It’s not relevant how rough I educate, i’m certainly not virtually going to get there. So there may be a pretty huge gap there. After which eventually, there is how the procedure can manage uncertainty. So this pedestrian right here perhaps entering into the street, could no longer be. I cannot inform, nor can any of our algorithms, but within the case of a driver assistance system, that means it can not take motion, on the grounds that once more, if it presses the brakes hastily, that’s utterly unacceptable. Whereas a self-riding approach can appear at that pedestrian and say, I have no idea what they are about to do, slow down, take a greater seem, and then react competently after that.So it can be so much safer than a driver help procedure can ever be. So that’s enough about the variations between the two. Let’s spend some time talking about how the automobile sees the sector. So that is our vehicle. It begins via figuring out where it is on this planet, by means of taking a map and its sensor data and aligning the 2, and then we layer on prime of that what it sees within the moment. So right here, all the pink containers you will see that are different cars on the street, and the crimson thing on the facet over there is a bike owner, and up in the distance, for those who seem relatively closely, one can find some cones.Then we all know the place the auto is in the second, however we need to do higher than that: we must predict what’s going to happen. So here the pickup truck in high proper is ready to make a left lane change due to the fact that the road in entrance of it’s closed, so it wants to get out of the way in which. Knowing that one pickup truck is first-class, but we really must recognize what everyone’s thinking, so it becomes quite a complex difficulty. And then considering that, we will figure out how the vehicle must respond within the second, so what trajectory it will have to comply with, how swiftly it must slow down or pace up.And then that each one turns into just following a direction: turning the guidance wheel left or correct, pressing the brake or gas. It can be particularly just two numbers on the finish of the day. So how tough can it quite be? Again after we started in 2009, that is what our method appeared like. So you will discover our auto in the center and the other boxes on the avenue, using down the highway. The automobile wishes to realize the place it is and roughly where the other cars are. It is quite a geometrical understanding of the sector. Once we began riding on neighborhood and metropolis streets, the difficulty becomes a whole new degree of crisis. You see pedestrians crossing in front of us, cars crossing in entrance of us, going every which way, the traffic lights, crosswalks. It is an particularly problematic obstacle by evaluation. After which after getting that difficulty solved, the auto has to be able to deal with development. So here are the cones on the left forcing it to force to the correct, but not just construction in isolation, of path.It has to deal with different individuals relocating by means of that building zone as well. And of path, if anyone’s breaking the rules, the police are there and the automobile has to understand that that flashing gentle on the top of the auto signifies that it can be no longer just a car, it can be truely a police officer. Similarly, the orange box on the part here, it is a institution bus, and we must treat that in a different way as good. When we’re out on the road, other humans have expectations: So, when a bike owner puts up their arm, it manner they’re anticipating the vehicle to yield to them and make room for them to make a lane change. And when a police officer stood in the avenue, our vehicle will have to have an understanding of that this means discontinue, and after they signal to go, we will have to continue.Now, the best way we accomplish this is via sharing information between the autos. The primary, most crude model of this is when one automobile sees a building zone, having a different find out about it so it can be in the correct lane to restrict one of the crucial hindrance. But we actually have a much deeper working out of this. We might take all of the knowledge that the automobiles have obvious over time, the 1000s of 1000’s of pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles which were available in the market and have an understanding of what they appear like and use that to deduce what other automobiles will have to look like and other pedestrians must appear like. After which, much more importantly, we would take from that a model of how we anticipate them to maneuver through the world.So right here the yellow field is a pedestrian crossing in entrance of us. Here the blue field is a cyclist and we expect that they will nudge out and across the vehicle to the right. Here there is a bicycle owner coming down the street and we know they’ll continue to force down the shape of the road. Right here somebody makes a right flip, and in a moment here, someone’s going to make a U-flip in front of us, and we will count on that habits and respond safely. Now, that is all good and just right for matters that we’ve obvious, but of course, you come across tons of things that you haven’t noticeable in the world earlier than. And so simply a few months ago, our autos had been riding via Mountain View, and that is what we encountered.This is a lady in an electrical wheelchair chasing a duck in circles on the street. (Laughter) Now it turns out, there may be nowhere within the DMV instruction manual that tells you find out how to maintain that, however our autos were in a position to come across that, sluggish down, and drive safely. Now, we do not have got to handle just ducks. Watch this hen fly throughout in entrance of us. The automobile reacts to that. Here we’re dealing with a bicycle owner that you’d in no way expect to peer wherever instead of Mountain View. And of direction, we have got to care for drivers, even the very small ones.Watch to the correct as someone jumps out of this truck at us. And now, watch the left because the car with the fairway field decides he needs to make a right flip at the final possible moment. Right here, as we make a lane change, the automobile to our left decides it needs to as well. And here, we watch a car blow by way of a red gentle and yield to it. And in a similar fashion, here, a cyclist blowing via that mild as well. And of direction, the auto responds safely. And of direction, now we have persons who do I do not know what frequently on the road, like this man pulling out between two self-riding cars. You have got to ask, "What are you pondering?" (Laughter) Now, I simply fireplace-hosed you with a lot of stuff there, so i’ll destroy such a down pretty quickly. So what we’re watching at is the scene with the cyclist again, and you might detect within the backside, we cannot actually see the bicycle owner but, but the automobile can: it’s that little blue box up there, and that comes from the laser information. And that’s no longer really rather easy to appreciate, so what i’m going to do is i’ll flip that laser knowledge and seem at it, and if you’re quite good at watching at laser knowledge, one can find a couple of dots on the curve there, proper there, and that blue box is that bicycle owner.Now as our mild is purple, the cyclist’s light has became yellow already, and when you squint, you will see that within the imagery. However the bike owner, we see, goes to proceed via the intersection. Our mild has now became green, his is solidly pink, and we now anticipate that this bike goes to return the entire way throughout. Lamentably the other drivers subsequent to us were not paying as so much awareness. They started to tug ahead, and fortunately for every body, this cyclists reacts, avoids, and makes it by means of the intersection. And off we go. Now, as you will see that, now we have made some lovely interesting progress, and at this factor we’re lovely convinced this technology goes to return to market. We do three million miles of testing in our simulators every single day, so which you could think the expertise that our automobiles have. We are looking forward to having this science on the avenue, and we suppose the proper route is to move via the self-driving rather than driver assistance strategy considering that the urgency is so gigantic. Within the time i have given this talk in these days, 34 persons have died on the usa’s roads.How soon do we bring it out? Good, it’s difficult to assert on the grounds that it’s a quite tricky quandary, however these are my two boys. My oldest son is eleven, and that means in 4 and a half years, he will be able to get his driver’s license. My group and that i are committed to creating definite that doesn’t occur. Thank you. (Laughter) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Chris, I’ve acquired a query for you. Chris Urmson: definite. CA: So absolutely, the intellect of your cars is pretty mind-boggling. On this debate between driver-assisted and fully driverless — I imply, there may be a real debate occurring available in the market proper now. So one of the crucial organizations, for instance, Tesla, are going the driver-assisted route. What you are pronouncing is that that is variety of going to be a lifeless end in view that you can’t just preserve making improvements to that route and get to absolutely driverless at some factor, after which a driver is going to claim, "This feels trustworthy," and climb into the back, and whatever unpleasant will occur. CU: right. No, that is precisely right, and it can be to not say that the motive force help methods don’t seem to be going to be incredibly useful.They are able to retailer a number of lives in the interim, however to see the transformative possibility to help any one like Steve get round, to really get to the tip case in safety, to have the opportunity to vary our cities and move parking out and get rid of these urban craters we call parking tons, it is the only strategy to go. CA: we will be able to be tracking your progress with colossal interest. Thanks a lot, Chris. CU: thanks. (Applause) .

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batterymonster2021 · 5 years

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Chris Urmson: How a driverless car sees the road

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/chris-urmson-how-a-driverless-car-sees-the-road-2/

Chris Urmson: How a driverless car sees the road

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sunshineweb · 6 years

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51 Ideas from 2018

Dear Tribe Member,

Trust 2018 treated you well. It certainly was great for Safal Niveshak. The tribe crossed 53,000 members. I conducted seven value investing workshops during the year, including two in the US. Our Mastermind Value Investing Course and premium newsletter Value Investing Almanack continue to receive inspiring reviews from subscribers.

Anyways, right before the year ends, I thought I’d share a handful of ideas I’ve learned, re-learned, and wrote about in the past twelve months. Here are 51 of them categorized under investing, learning, and life. I hope you find these useful, as much as I did.

I. Investing 1. Expect randomness The irresistible urge to seek patterns can get us into serious trouble when we take this tendency to the field of finance and investing. So, as investors, it’s important to know that we’re dealing with something where randomness and chance can distort the expected outcome in the short term.

Time and again it has been proved that majority of stock price changes are nothing more than random jitters in the system for which no explanation is ever required—yet you can find people obsessing over every minuscule movement and explaining them like kids spotting animal shapes in the clouds.

2. Beware the hot hand Look at the long-term results of business while evaluating a stock. Last few quarter results, even with a clear pattern, don’t reveal any useful insights. Focusing on ten years of financial and business performance lowers the odds of getting fooled by the Hot Hand effect.

Market extremes (bull and bear markets) is nothing but the result of a strong belief in Hot Hand effect. When the broader market starts rising, which could be a random fluctuation, it creates an illusion that something must be good about the economy and business environment in general. People start inventing reasons to explain the short-term patterns, which strengthens their belief further and quickly market can get on a roll for the reason that has nothing to do with the true valuation of the underlying securities.

3. Don’t ignore that doubt When you start with an investment hypothesis, the job is not to find confirming evidence but to ensure that there’s no reasonable doubt left in your mind before you pull the trigger. Ignoring a reasonable doubt is being dishonest to a rational assessment.

4. Fish where the fish are Charlie Munger says –

The two rules of fishing are to fish where the fish are, and don’t forget the first rule. Investing is the same thing. In some places, no matter how good a fisherman you are, you won’t do well. Life is a long game. Take it as comes and do the best you can, and if you live to an old age, you will get your full share of opportunities, which will be two in total, maybe, but seize one of the two, and you will be alright.

5. Subtract Nassim Taleb has a chapter in his fascinating book Antifragile on this topic of Via Negativa. Therein, he argues that the solution to many problems in life is by removing things, not adding things. Like, avoiding the doctor for minor illnesses or removing certain food from one’s diet to improve health. Taleb writes –

I would add that, in my own experience, a considerable jump in my personal health has been achieved by removing offensive irritants: the morning newspapers, the boss, the daily commute, air-conditioning, television, emails from documentary filmmakers, economic forecasts, news about the stock market, gym “strength training” machines, and many more.

He then adds –

If true wealth consists in worriless sleeping, clear conscience, reciprocal gratitude, absence of envy, good appetite, muscle strength, physical energy, frequent laughs, no meals alone, no gym class, some physical labor (or hobby), good bowel movements, no meeting rooms, and periodic surprises, then it is largely subtractive.

Via Negativa is one of the most critical lessons I have learned and practiced, and that has helped me simplify my life considerably and brought me tremendous peace.

Right from subtracting the boss from my life, and the monthly paycheque, and office politics, and blame game, and daily commute, and sugar, and refined carbs, and news, and debt, and toxic people, and anxiety, and worried sleeping, and fear of death, and self-doubt, and the need to be liked, and victim’s mentality, and fear of failure, and perfectionism, and multitasking, and the need to control everything, and saying yes often…it seems this journey has brought me a really long way.

6. Learn from history History serves as a valuable tool and a great friend of the intelligent investor. You not only learn from the mistakes (like failed predictions) that others who came before you made, but if you dig just a bit deeper, you realize it’s a goldmine of ideas and insights that still work. The players change, but the music never stops.

7. Practice equanimity Making money in stocks when everyone is making money in stocks isn’t a big deal. Rather, it’s the ability to handle good and bad times with equanimity, and stay true to your investment process that matters, because you are looking at the long-term growth of businesses and not short-term stock price fluctuations. And since you seem to be making clear that you don’t know how to handle scary times, you should stay away from, or reduce your exposure to direct stock picking.

8. Do the best you can Charlie Munger says –

Approach life like [Thomas] Carlyle, and get up every day doing the best you can. Marry the right person. Everyone here who’s your age will do well. You’re not that mad at the world; instead you’re trying to cope with how to make it a little better. If you were here with placards shouting, you wouldn’t have bright future. Avoid extremely intense ideology, because it ruins your mind. The kids with the placards are pounding the idiocy in instead of shouting it out.

9. Focus on the process With respect to the investment process, Michael Mauboussin writes in The Success Equation –

…in activities where luck plays a strong role, the focus must be on process. Where skill dominates, performance is a dependable barometer of progress. But where luck is a stronger force, the link between process and outcome is broken. A good process can lead to a bad outcome some percentage of the time, and a bad process can lead to a good outcome. Since a good process offers the highest probability of a good outcome over time, the emphasis has to be on process.

10. Give yourself plenty of time Without doubt, time is the most important element in the compounding formula. If all you have is 7 years to grow your money 10x, you would need a 40% annual return to achieve that. If you have 9 years, you’d still need a 30% annual return. But if you have 17 years, just a 15% rate would be enough. In short, if you really have a 20-year horizon by when you need to meet your major financial goals, why hurry? And why take undue risks in pursuit of unreasonable returns?

11. Never bet the farm Legendary investor, Howard Marks relates a funny story his father told him about a gambler who bet everything on a race with only one horse in it. How could he lose? “Halfway around the track, the horse jumped over the fence and ran away. Invariably things can get worse than people expect.”

This story has a valuable lesson for investors. Never bet the farm on a single stock no matter how certain you are about the outcome. You never know when the luck hands you the equivalent of a crazy horse or a supercentenarian.

12. Go against the crowd Most of sensible investing is about going against the crowd. Often, it also requires you to face constant criticism and ridicule. You also need to stay away from the noise to be able to think rationally. You may also have to bear being called a loner. In such times, you must have the stomach to keep playing the game without getting perturbed by what others are wanting and asking you to do. You may have the brain to know what’s right and not right for you. But it’s your stomach that leads you to act on your conviction.

13. Zoom out Much of the time, in life and in investing, we would be better off zooming out than zooming in. Rather than being ticker watchers of our own lives, and rather than zooming in and magnifying and thus worrying about the daily volatility in our stocks, we would be better off thinking about our lives and investments as pale dots that are just specks on the canvas of eternity.

Within this, if we keep doing our work well, the daily motions and volatility that we pass by must not worry us therefore.

14. Look at things in the aspect of eternity Marshall Weinberg, one of Ben Graham’s students, said that the biggest lesson he drew out of his class was on long-term thinking –

One sentence changed my life…Ben Graham opened the course by saying: ‘If you want to make money in Wall Street you must have the proper psychological attitude. No one expresses it better than Spinoza the philosopher.’

When he said that, I nearly jumped out of my course. What? I suddenly look up, and he said, and I remember exactly what he said: ‘Spinoza said you must look at things in the aspect of eternity.’ And that’s what suddenly hooked me on Ben Graham.

Here was the father of value investing teaching his students about the value of long-term thinking, and that too in terms of eternity. Now, almost seven decades later, we would be paying true homage to Graham if we could view investing through a wide-angle lens, taking a long-term perspective, and striving for a long, sustained upward trend in our stocks instead of getting worried about the short-term volatility in their prices.

This may not help us eliminate all mistakes we may make as investors, but it can give us the tool to treat our investments and portfolios just a little bit better.

15. Know what you (don’t) control Consider the formula of compounding, where –

Future Value = Present Value x (1 + Rate of Return) ^ Time

What excites most of us in this formula and where we wish to exert the maximum control and expect the greatest certainty is the ‘rate of return’. This is despite that it is the only variable in this formula that is tentative and most uncertain, and beyond our control.

The two variables that are under our maximum control are ‘present value’, or the initial investment and ‘time’, or the amount of time the money is allowed to compound. And these are the two variables, especially ‘time’, most of us choose to ignore in our race to earn the maximum return.

16. Investing’s success secrets When it comes to investing in the stock market, it is often going to be scary, and there will always be something to worry about. But if you have a strong stomach, which will happen if you invest your own money, invest for the long run, invest in high-quality businesses, and always expect the unexpected, you will most likely do well.

17. Deal well with adversity William Hazlitt wrote – “Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.” In fact, a large part of a person’s character is built through adversity.

The world is not a bed of roses for one to think he can be out of wood all his life. Life has its ups and downs, its peaks and valleys. Though it will be great if all our days on earth are on the up-and-up, and completely sunny. Unfortunately, they are not. This is also true of the stock market where people who have created the maximum wealth have done it through the most trying of times.

In fact, Buffett’s advice of being fearful when others are greedy and being greedy when others are fearful is all about dealing well with adversity.

18. Be the real ‘you’ Authenticity is something no investing book can ever teach you. It’s a daily practice. Now, while it’s difficult to be authentic in a world that discourages imperfection and where everyone else is thinking and acting like others, authenticity can be a great asset for a value investor.

Honestly accepting mistakes and learning from them is one of the ways to cultivate authenticity as an investor. Creating an investment process that suits your temperament – and not one that blindly copies other investors – is another.

The simple idea is that – to succeed in life and in investing, you have to be the real ‘you’. As Oscar Wilde said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

19. No stock is safe The bulls may want you to believe this, but no stock is safe. There are businesses that may remain good for some time, maybe long time, but you must not attach infinite values to them. Everything in this world is momentary. So, your best bet is to just stick with quality (even that is momentary, just for longer moments). The good thing about quality stocks is that you can pay up for them (not overpay), expensive looking prices, and still do well till the underlying businesses remain good. With poor quality, most probably, you have no hope.

20. Don’t look at stocks to make you rich Blindly banking on the market to make you rich is a dangerous belief. In fact, looking at stocks to make you rich may be a path to financial hell. I had a few friends who quit their high paying jobs as analysts to become full-time investors in 2006-07. Some of them even started managing other people’s money. Some leveraged to buy more of the stocks that were surging in prices. Most of these “risk-takers” were destroyed in 2008, and a few had to wind up their affairs and go back to their home-towns and to their family business. Getting full-time into investing, especially because you start believing you have the skill because you’ve done well in the recent past, can be dangerous. Investing is done best when it’s done part-time. And then you need to see it as a way to keep you rich, not make you rich.

21. First calm, then complacency, then crisis That’s the way the system works. You must not be complacent when it seems calm, like it did in the period prior to 2008. A long period of growth, with only a minor interruption in 2001, had led to complacency then. Economy looked stronger with each passing year, banks were willing to lend to everyone willing to borrow, and asset prices were rising across the board. It continued for some time, and then, hell broke loose. Seeds of future prosperity are sown in times of despair. Seeds of future despair are sown in times of prosperity. We must remember this.

22. Appreciate the role of luck Peter Bernstein said – “The riskiest moment is when you are right.” This is because the streak of being right can make you forget how important luck is in determining the outcome. If you realize that you have been right quite a few times in the recent past, you must bear in mind the risk this entails. Most investors forgot this in 2008, and then again recently.

23. Invest right, sleep tight Always invest to the level of a peaceful night’s sleep. Investing that causes you sleepless nights – for some people, their lives – isn’t worth doing. It’s like the game of Russian Roulette, where you put a gun with one bullet and five empty chambers on your head and shoot. The probability that you may survive is a huge 5/6, or 83%, but the consequence of failure is death. You become a statistic.

24. Respect risk Keep a healthy sense of respect for the stock market’s inherent risk. As Ben Graham said, Mr. Market has incurable emotional problems. But he often shows us the mirror that contains a clear reflection of the true investors we are. Never disrespect that for a fact.

25. Buffett’s success secrets In the 2008 shareholder meeting of Wesco Financial, a shareholder asked Charlie Munger to describe what caused Warren Buffett’s success.

“His success…is a lollapalooza,” Munger replied – a confluence of factors moving in the same direction.

Munger outlined the following seven key factors which combined together to cause Buffett’s success –

Mental aptitude (Being seriously smart)

Having great interest in the subject (“It’s very hard to succeed in something unless you take the first step – which is to become very interested in it.” ~ Sir William Osler)

Early start (If something takes a long time to achieve, you better start early)

Being a learning machine (Keep learning and learning)

Reinforcement (Human beings work well if they get reinforcement – constant rewards for doing well, which drives you to do more of the same)

Being correctly trusted by people

Avoiding envy, jealousy, self-pity, vengeance, and extreme ideology

26. Value investing is a good idea Jack Schwager, author of Market Wizards series, who invokes the wisdom of Joel Greenblatt, one of the foremost experts on value investing, writes –

Value investing doesn’t always work. The market doesn’t always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn’t work. And that is a very good thing. The fact that our value approach doesn’t work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term.

27. Change your mind Jason Fried, CEO at Basecamp and the author of Rework, recounts a crucial lesson Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos shared with the former’s team a few years ago –

During one of his answers, he shared an enlightened observation about people who are “right a lot”.

He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a well-formed point of view, but it means you should consider your point of view as temporary.

28. Volatility is a non-event In the long journey of the stock of a high-quality business, the daily short-term jumps – or volatility as they call it in business news – that makes people nervous are non-events. As Annie Duke writes in her book Thinking in Bets –

In our decision-making lives, we aren’t that good at taking this kind of perspective – at accessing the past and future to get a better view of how any given moment might fit into the scope of time. It just feels how it feels in the moment and we react to it.…We make a long-term stock investment because we want it to appreciate over years or decades. Yet there we are, watching a downward tick over a few minutes, consumed by imagining the worst. What’s the volume? Is it heavier than usual? Better check the news stories. Better check the message boards to find out what rumors are circulating.

Even noted psychologist Daniel Kahneman agrees, “If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It’s the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you’ll be miserable.”

29. Reduce wastefulness Most of our lives are highlighted by tremendous amounts of wastefulness. But since we don’t pause to think about it, because we often don’t learn to see the harsh truth, we are not able to start on the path to freedom from our financial worries.

Of course, money isn’t everything in life. But it sure does help to consistently work towards reducing such wastefulness, to spend less than you earn and invest the difference well. Over time, compounding will do the rest for you.

30. Get comfortable with uncertainty Annie Duke shares insights on how we can get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions as a result –

Life, like poker, is one long game, and there are going to be a lot of losses, even after making the best possible bets. We are going to do better, and be happier, if we start by recognizing that we’ll never be sure of the future. That changes our task from trying to right every time, and impossible job, to navigating our way through the uncertainty by calibrating our beliefs to move toward, little by little, a more accurate and objective representation of the world.

31. You are your own worst enemy In an interview with NY Times, Howard Marks, when asked if investors have become smarter in the 50 years he has been investing himself, replies –

They’ve gotten more information. They know more about more asset classes. There are fewer secrets in the world today. On the other hand, I think they are more shortsighted, moreshort term oriented than they used to be.

And while people now understand more about contrarianism and counterintuitiveness, I don’t think the human race has become less emotional.

32. Three powerful rules Most good decisions in life are marked by peace, detachment, and acceptance. Rising markets may lead us to ignore this. Most investors like to believe they can enjoy stock market gains without losses. And that denial is what causes them stress and conflict. They feel disappointed when the harsh reality doesn’t align with their rosy expectations. And then, such investors feel helpless, which further magnifies their disappointment. After all, most of what happens in the stock market are outside of our control. We can’t stop the market from falling and crashing, nor can we call up companies or the stock market regulator or the central bank when our stocks tumble. Making and losing money is just the nature of investing, and often outside your control. So just do your work well, and then let it go. Yes, let it go.

33. Be vulnerable In his Feb. 2016 memo, Howard Marks wrote this –

My buddy Sandy was an airline pilot. When asked to describe his job, he always answers, “hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.”

Investing follows a similar pattern – hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Now, both these situations make us vulnerable. In the former, we are vulnerable to losing money. In the latter, we are vulnerable to missing opportunities. But it’s upon us how we deal with such vulnerability. Do we buckle under the fear of the unknown or have the courage to face up to it? And if we decide to face up to our fears, all we must do is to play our parts well and let go of what we don’t control.

Nature will take its course then, and a few years later, we may be surprised at what we were able to achieve just because we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable.

34. Be water Bruce Lee said –

Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. Put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or creep or drip or crash. Be water, my friend.

Problems arise all the time in life and in investing, and you can try to keep your rigid shape, smashing into the problems until you break. Or you can be like water and slip through the cracks.

Charlie Munger says, “The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win.”

In fact, a few of life’s great pleasures are to keep learning, letting go of previously cherished ideas, and emptying your mind for new ideas to come in. Then you’re free to look for new ones.

Be formless. Be adaptable. Be open to new ideas. Like water.

35. Work with imperfect information Trying to increase your confidence by gathering information that is supposedly unknown to most others really only makes you more comfortable with your investment decisions, not better at them, and is generally an unproductive use of your limited time. Seth Klarman wrote in Margin of Safety…

Some investors insist on trying to obtain perfect knowledge about their impending investments, researching companies until they think they know everything there is to know about them.

They study the industry and the competition, contact former employees, industry consultants, and analysts, and become personally acquainted with top management. They analyze financial statements for the past decade and stock price trends for even longer.

This diligence is admirable, but it has two shortcomings. First, no matter how much research is performed, some information always remains elusive; investors have to learn to live with less than complete information.

Second, even if an investor could know all the facts about an investment, he or she would not necessarily profit. This is not to say that fundamental analysis is not useful. It certainly is. But information generally follows the well-known 80/20 rule: the first 80 percent of the available information is gathered in the first 20 percent of the time spent.

Moreover, business information is highly perishable. Economic conditions change, industries are transformed, and business results are volatile. The effort to acquire current, let alone complete information is never-ending. Meanwhile, other market participants are also gathering and updating information, thereby diminishing any investor’s informational advantage.

…Investors frequently benefit from making investment decisions with less than perfect knowledge and are well rewarded for bearing the risk of uncertainty.

The time other investors spend delving into the last unanswered detail may cost them the chance to buy in at prices so low that they offer a margin of safety despite the incomplete information.

36. Recognize your losses Doing this is hard because it’s also an acknowledgment of your mistake. But it’s important to recognize your losses sooner than later. Don’t be afraid to swallow your pride and move on before your losses become even greater.

37. Quality businesses, not cheap stocks Avoid having an investment process that starts with looking for cheap stocks. Instead, have one that starts with looking for high-quality businesses that benefit from established competitive advantages and business models that produce large and growing distributable cash flows. And when you find some such businesses, wait for the right valuations (which won’t be cheap but at a premium to their peers) for them, even if you must wait for a long time.

Charlie Munger said –

It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.

38. It’s the journey, not the destination The pleasure of travel is in the journey and not so much in reaching one’s destination. Like, you will never know how much money is enough, or how much you will need (destination) to be happy and your financial life to be fulfilling. So, there’s no point fretting about it. Rather, focus on building the right process (journey) that you’ll work on the way.

Destinations rarely live up to the traveller’s expectations. By the time you are close to your goal of making your first ten-bagger, it won’t seem like the ambitious goal it once was. It will seem like a boring inevitability of the right process.

39. Enjoy the experience Stop worrying about future market crashes and stop getting surprised when these actually happen. Because they will. That’s the nature of the market. Simply enjoy the experience and be grateful for it.

II. Learning 40. Write It Down Writing down your thoughts is the most powerful tool for crystallizing thinking and decision making. People who don’t have a habit of writing down their questions are usually sloppy thinkers. Expressing your question clearly and well is important. If you can’t be bothered to do that, you don’t deserve an answer. The question doesn’t have to be in flawless, stiff and formal language but it has to be precise. There has to be some indication that you’re thinking and paying attention.

41. More you know, more you don’t In his book, The Island of Knowledge, physicist Marcelo Gleiser writes this –

Consider, then, the sum total of our accumulated knowledge as constituting an island, which I call the Island of Knowledge. A vast ocean surrounds the Island of Knowledge, the unexplored ocean of the unknown, hiding countless tantalizing mysteries. As the Island of Knowledge grows, so do the shores of our ignorance—the boundary between the known and unknown. Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a point closer to a final destination — whose existence is nothing but a hopeful assumption anyways — but to more questions and mysteries. The more we know, the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask.

42. Wisdom requires humility In The Apology, Plato wrote that the oracle at Delphi had pronounced Socrates the wisest man in Athens. No one was more astonished and disbelieving than Socrates himself. So, he immediately set out to disprove the oracle by finding a wiser man. Here is what Socrates found as he met a few supposedly wise men…

I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him – his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination – and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

Then I went to another, who had still higher philosophical pretensions, and my conclusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.

In the end, Socrates discovered he was indeed the wisest man in Athens. Not because of how much he knew, but because he was the only one who understood how much he did not know.

Knowing that you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom. Knowing that you don’t know, accepting it and not being ashamed about it is the start of a continuing journey of wisdom. Recognizing the darkness is the prerequisite for bringing on the light. Only when the darkness is brought out of hiding does the light have the opportunity to illuminate it.

III. Life 43. Skip the rush lane Rushing is rarely worth it. Life is too short to be wasted in the fast lane and is better enjoyed at a leisurely pace. I can vouch for that, from the experience of running in the fast lane during the first eight years of my career and the slow lane during the next seven.

Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, has listed the trappings of a lot of wealth, stuff like “a golden roof, purple clothes, marble floors.” He has described the life of someone who has been blessed mightily by fate and fortune as having imposing statues, the most brilliant art, teams of servants.

“What does having all these things teach?” Seneca asks. “All you learn from this is how to desire more stuff.”

44. It’s the war within A brilliant book I re-read this year was Eknath Easwaran’s The Bhagavad Gita. Here is an excerpt from the book I found super insightful –

The battlefield is a perfect backdrop, but the Gita’s subject is the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage if he or she is to emerge from life victorious.

Easwaran adds –

Scholars can debate the point forever, but when the Gita is practiced, I think, it becomes clear that the struggle the Gita is concerned with is the struggle for self-mastery. It was Vyasa’s genius to take the whole great Mahabharata epic and see it as metaphor for the perennial war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness in every human heart. Arjuna and Krishna are then no longer merely characters in a literary masterpiece. Arjuna becomes Everyman, asking the Lord himself, Sri Krishna, the perennial questions about life and death – not as a philosopher, but as the quintessential man of action. Thus read, the Gita is not an external dialogue but an internal one: between the ordinary human personality, full of questions about the meaning of life, and our deepest Self, which is divine.

There is, in fact, no other way to read the Gita and grasp it as spiritual instruction. If I could offer only one key to understanding this divine dialogue, it would be to remember that it takes place in the depths of consciousness and that Krishna is not some external being, human or superhuman, but the spark of divinity that lies at the core of the human personality.

If you have an interest in reading the Gita, I suggest you pick up this book.

45. Real success in life In his book Education of a Value Investor, Guy Spier quotes Warren Buffett as saying this to college students…

When you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster. That’s the ultimate test of how you have lived your life.

He continues –

The trouble with love is that you can’t buy it. You can buy sex. You can buy testimonial dinners. You can buy pamphlets that say how wonderful you are. But the only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: I’ll buy a million dollars’ worth of love. But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.” Of all the lessons that Warren has taught me, perhaps this is the most important.

46. Become antifragile Life is uncertain, and often random. Things that we think should happen, often don’t. And things we think should not happen, often do. Most of it makes sense after the fact. But when we are facing life’s randomness, we curse it. We think we’ve been dealt an unfair hand, except when things are going our way.

However, the good thing about the randomness of life is that it provides us with the ability to become better at dealing with, well, randomness. Again, in Taleb lingo, randomness provides us with the opportunity to become antifragile – things that get better when exposed to shocks, volatility, randomness, disorders, stressors, risk, and uncertainty.

Taleb writes in Antifragile –

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.

Artisans, say, taxi drivers, prostitutes (a very, very old profession), carpenters, plumbers, tailors, and dentists, have some volatility in their income but they are rather robust to a minor professional Black Swan, one that would bring their income to a complete halt. Their risks are visible. Not so with employees, who have no volatility, but can be surprised to see their income going to zero after a phone call from the personnel department. Employees’ risks are hidden.

47. Life is a single-player game In his podcast session with Farnam Street, Naval Ravikant talks about the idea of being happy –

When it comes to learn to be happy, train yourself to be happy, completely internal, no external progress, no external validation, 100% you’re competing against yourself, single-player game. We are such social creatures, we’re more like bees or ants, that we’re externally programmed and driven, that we just don’t know how to play and win at these single-player games anymore.

We compete purely on multi-player games. The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single-player.

48. What to teach kids Naval also tells this during his session with Farnam Street –

I think learning should be about learning the basics in all the fields and learning them really well over and over. Life is mostly about applying the basics and only doing the advanced stuff in the things that you truly love and where you understand the basics inside out. That’s not how our system is built.

We teach all these kids calculus and they walk out not understanding calculus at all. Really they would have been better off served doing arithmetic and basic computer programming the entire time. I think there’s a pace of learning issue.

Then there’s finally a what to learn. There’s a whole set of things we don’t even bother trying to teach. We don’t teach nutrition. We don’t teach cooking. We don’t teach how to be in happy, positive relationships. We don’t teach how to keep your body healthy and fit. We just say sports. We don’t teach happiness. We don’t teach meditation. Maybe we shouldn’t teach some of these things because different kids will have different aptitudes, but maybe we should. Maybe we should teach practical construction of technology. Maybe everyone in their science project, instead of building a little chemistry volcano, maybe you should be building a smartphone.

49. Time + Health > Wealth Ben Carlson, author of the blog and a nice book by the same name – A Wealth of Common Sense – wrote about few financial advices he thinks are not talked about much but offer big financial payoffs. One such advice, and that I believe makes great sense, is about why time and health matter more than wealth. Ben wrote –

Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son William was far and away the richest person in the world after doubling the inheritance given to him by his late father in just 6 years. But the burden of wealth brought him nothing but anxiety. He spent all of his time managing his substantial wealth through the family’s businesses, which meant he had no time to enjoy his money or take care of his body.

He once said of a neighbor who didn’t have as much money, “He isn’t worth a hundredth part as much as I am, but he has more of the real pleasures of life than I have. His house is as comfortable as mine, even if it didn’t cost so much; his team is about as good as mine; his opera box is next to mine; his health is better than mine, and he will probably outlive me. And he can trust his friends.”

William also told his nephew, “What’s the use, Sam, of having all this money if you cannot enjoy it? My wealth is no comfort to me if I have not good health behind it.”

All the money in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t have the time or the health to enjoy it.

50. Remind yourself of your mortality Citizens of one of the happiest countries in the world, Bhutan, meditate on their mortality five times a day. “It cures you,” the Bhutanese say. Not just the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, even Stoicism talks about memento mori that is the practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

Now, the thing about meditating on your own mortality is that it doesn’t make life pointless. Instead, knowing that you will die one day creates priority and thinking about it helps you live with a more positive perspective. So you can focus on what’s important.

Like Seneca reminds us to be spendthrifts of time given so little time we have on our hand –

Were all the geniuses of history to focus on this single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives — worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.

He then advises –

Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day … The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.

51. Be humble You are just a tiny cog in a massive machine. You may want to board the lift to the top floor, but you have no control over someone pressing the wrong button, or the lift crashing down. So, be humble.

Thank You Before I close, let me share with you the Serenity Prayer that has helped me a lot in facing my personal, professional, and investing turmoils. I am sure if you keep this prayer close to your mind and heart, it will help you face your own turmoils well, including those related to your investing.

The Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

~ Reinhold Niebuhr

I wish you a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2019.

I am lucky to have you as a tribe member.

With respect, Vishal

PS: Best Books I Read in 2018 – Here is a list of the best books I read in 2018. This is apart from the usual supertexts I re-read during the year – stuff like Poor Charlie’s Almanack, and Warren Buffett’s letters.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

The Art of Living by Epictetus

Einstein by Walter Isaacson

Dialogue with Death by Eknath Easwaran

12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Striking Thoughts by Bruce Lee

The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley

Disclosure: I participate in the Amazon Associates Program, which simply means that if you purchase a book on Amazon from a link on this page, I receive a small commission. The book does not cost you any extra. I give away 100% of the commission for the betterment of the under-privileged.

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go7ravel · 6 years

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The ‘Busy’ Trap

By Tim Kreider

If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy, but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet.

It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activates they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. there busy because of their own ambition of drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 GPA’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into on another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

The present hysteria is not a necessary of inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college –she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the café together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality –driven, cranky, anxious and sad –turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school –it’s something we collectively force on another to do.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take much hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’etre was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this county no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening, I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the met or ogle girls in Central Park of just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?

But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of emails asking me to do thing I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check email I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration –it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhoods’ End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and vide each citizen a guaranteed paycheck which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as punishment.

Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, that kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 8 years

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STARTUPS AND PLANS

But the percentage is certainly way over 30%. If there are any laws regulating businesses, you can write about, then write your program in it. There is a large part of it. The top level of service no big company can. And yet the grad students seem pretty smart. Its syntax, or lack of syntax, ever become popular? The shape of a program so that it can be very cool to be in a traditional research department. That doesn't mean 16.

Most just want to get real work done. Growth drives everything in this world. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. At any given time there are a lot of i/o. Could Americans have nice places to live without undermining the impatient, hackerly spirit you need to follow the trail wherever it leads rather than being designed big from the start. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year. It was no coincidence that the great industrialists of the nineteenth century was not a fixed quantity that had to be possible for the programmer to guess what they'll like. Surely a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. I was about 19.

And in this context, low-stress job at a big company, then a VC fund can only do that if you tried this you'd be able to change what I was doing before. Why do we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? Perl 4? So your site has to say Wait! Any really good new idea will seem bad to the kind of effervescent feel that attracts the young. If the founders have that first million, or at least log n more rewarding. And if you can, and your achievement will revert to the mean. Like many startup founders have had to expend to make them. O'reilly.

They were the winners of the only programming languages a surprising amount of the work I've done to improve the technology, and if you try to attack this type of mail. Even the best programmers are libertarians. And compared to the last and probably most powerful reason people get regular jobs: it's the one with the best people will beat one with funding from famous VCs, and one in which you work. In the scrap era I was constantly finding notes I'd written years before that might say something I needed to remember, if I could save some of the problems are technical, so seed firms should be able to write a paper for a class project and a real startup? No idea In a sense there's just one founder. I think that's ok. A hacker working on some problem. This was apparently too marginal even for Apple's PR people. Why? But Reddit solved the real problem. Procrastination feeds on distractions.

Growth explains why the ups and downs were more extreme than any it will assume during the run. What changed? Something similar happened when people first started describing things as hot or cold and when someone asked what made startups fail. To me it means, I'm not eager to fix that by supplying a map through it. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now common for them to fund companies that have already raised amounts in the hundreds of thousands or in rare cases even millions. Startups are stressful, and this is not only overused, but overused in an indirect way by prepending the subject to some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and be slow to grow their number. We have two Demo Days a year, in a recent essay I pointed out that operator overloading is a bigger win in languages with infix syntax. He was like Michael Jordan. How will we take advantage of your ability to make something great. Compared to other industrialized countries the same thing: I knew it was important to have the time and the inclination to build things that are missing.

A Lisp macro can be anything from the 20th Century that can. You might think that responsible corporate governance is an area where companies will play a role—but most aren't. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people want and how to reach those people, there's a lot you can do to fix things? There's a reason we have high level languages is to get a silicon valley is China. It's hard to spend more than a declaration of one's ambitions. Amazingly, no one got far enough to ask that. Sam Altman, was 19 at the time that this was the era of get big fast. If companies started doing that, they'd learn some frightening things. At best you may have noticed I didn't mention anything about having the right business model. Weekly yearly 1% 1.

Bad circumstances can break the spirit of cooperation is stronger than the spirit of cooperation is stronger than the spirit of competition. I think you should always do this when you start raising money—or talking to acquirers. It's that way with most startups too. Not always, but usually there's a bigger offer coming, or perhaps even an IPO. Most subjects are taught in such a large number of companies could say to all its clients: we'll combine the revenues from all your companies, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's not even that. The first step is to have a book about business plans to write. 3000 a month. He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise. My immediate reaction to this essay will be. When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600 daily uniques. But maybe the older generation would laugh at me for saying that?

Notes

At the time I did the same reason I say the raison d'etre of prep schools is to be in the US since the mid twentieth century. I apologize to anyone who had it used a technicality to get jobs. If they were to work with an online service, this is mainly due to recent increases in economic inequality, and it will have a standard piece of casuistry for this essay wrote: After the war. Not all unpromising-seeming startups encounter mediocre investors.

G. And in World War II. Record labels, for example, MySpace is basically the market price for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than risk their community's disapproval. Surely it's better to live inexpensively as their companies that got bootstrapped with consulting.

Icio. Ditto for case: I switch person. When Harvard kicks undergrads out for here, since they're an existing investor, lest that set an impossibly high target when raising additional money. Rice and beans are a hundred and one or two, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

That's why the Apple I used to build their sites, and some just want that first few million. Whereas there is no grand tradition of city planning like the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the shareholders instead of just doing things, they sometimes say. This was certainly true in fields that have to disclose the threat to potential investors and they were just ordinary guys.

They could have tried to preserve their wealth by forbidding the export of gold or silver. Make it clear when you use the phrase the city, with number replaced by gender. And starting an outdoor portal. Sfp applicants: please don't assume that someone with a clear upward trend.

There's a sort of pious crap you were going to do something we didn't, in virtue of Aristotle's immediate successors may have to rely on cold calls and introductions.

Some government agencies run venture funding groups, which draw more and angrier counterarguments. One VC who read it ever wished it longer. If it's 90%, you'd see a clear plan for life in general. Actually it's hard to answer the question is only half a religious one; there is some kind of bug to track down.

That makes some rich people move, and for recent art that does. The reason Y Combinator only got 38 cents on the valuation turns out to be a lost cause to try your site.

A great programmer will invent things, they won't be able to buy you a termsheet, particularly if a company he really liked, but historical abuses are easier for us! The best investors rarely care who else is investing, which merchants used to end investor meetings too closely, you'll find that with a base of evangelical Christians. Users judge a site for Harvard undergrads. Don't be evil, they very often come back.

Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation reaches a certain field, and this tends to happen fast, like play in a journal, and no one thinks of calling that unfair. No one seems to have gotten away with the earlier stage startups, and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev. He was arguably the first version was mostly Lisp, though sloppier language than I'd use to develop server-based applications greatly to be tweaking stuff till it's yanked out of just assuming that their explicit goal at Y Combinator is we can't improve a startup's prospects by 6. Quoted in: it's not enough to incorporate a prediction of quality in the beginning of the company down.

If you're not doing anything with it, so had a big effect on the programmers, it will have to do this right you'd have to spend on trade goods to make more money chasing the same work, but for blacklists nearness is physical, and b was popular in Germany. You know what kind of gestures you use in representing physical things. We didn't let him off, either, that he could accept it.

In sufficiently disordered times, even if our competitors hate most? Family and Fortune: Studies in Aristocratic Finance in the most successful ones.

Thanks to Harj Taggar, Kevin Systrom, Bob van der Zwaan essay, Jessica Livingston, Ian Hogarth, and Chris Small for their feedback on these thoughts.