Emily

10 things I learned, found interesting, or used this month

Monthly Top 10 / /

1. If it doesn’t cause you physical pain to not have it, you don’t need it. The Epicureans rivaled the Stoics, though they had a lot in common. Both, for instance, believed virtuous living was the key to happiness. Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism, spoke at length about the virtue of moderation (one of the four core Stoic virtues). He said, “All desires that do not lead to physical pain if not satisfied are unnecessary.” Our nature requires little—it’s our imagination that requires a lot. For example, take eating. When we’re hungry, we feel pain. When we eat, the pain stops and our body is once again content. Now, take ice cream. When I’m craving ice cream, I’m not actually in pain. It may feel like I am, and may use that feeling to justify a Ben & Jerry’s run, but my body is just fine (better off, even) without it.

2. Pleasure occurs when we’re free of mental disturbances and anxieties. This is similar to the idea above. Epicurus said that the Epicurean “thinks it preferable to have bad luck rationally than good luck irrationally. In other words, in human action, it is better for a rational choice to be unsuccessful than for an irrational choice to succeed through the agency of chance.” The Stoic Epictetus said something similar: “Man, the rational animal, can put up with anything except what seems to him irrational; whatever is rational is tolerable.”

3. It’s very hard to fail completely. You know the Norman Vincent Peale quote, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”? It may sound corny, but it’s true. I like how Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, put it: “Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely. That’s the thing people don’t get.” Plus, landing among the stars almost always turns out better than the moon you imagined.

4. Take the shortest route—go inward. “Once it happened . . . Someone came looking for the Isha Yoga Center in southern India. They came to a nearby village and asked a local boy, ‘How far is the Isha Yoga Center?’ The boy scratched his head and said, ‘24,996 miles.’ The man was aghast. ‘What? That far?’ The boy said, ‘Yes, the way you’re going. But if you turn around, it’s just four miles.’

If you go outward, it is an endless journey. If you turn inward, it is just one moment. In that one moment, everything changes. In that one moment, you are not in pursuit of joy anymore. Instead, your life becomes an expression of your joyfulness.” -Sadhguru, Inner Engineering

5. Knowledge is the tool, not the goal. Progress is the goal. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is pointless. We study philosophy not to look smart or win arguments, but to be a better person and live a better life. When we make knowledge, not progress, the goal, Epictetus said, “it’s as if I were to say to an athlete, ‘Show me your shoulders,’ and he responded with, ‘Have a look at my weights.’ ‘Get out of here with you and your gigantic weights!’ I’d say, ‘What I want to see isn’t the weights but how you’ve profited from using them.'”

6. The cost of cutting corners: “If you think hiring a professional is expensive, try hiring an amateur.” -Red Adair

7. If someone tells you a book has changed their life, read it.

8. Overwork is the falsest of economies. This is a paraphrase from John Steinbeck that reminds me of our limits. We can’t do everything, we can’t get it all done. Accepting this makes life sweeter.

9. Reflective thoughts are truer than everyday thoughts. As we go about our day, thoughts sometimes pop into our head seemingly out of nowhere. These thoughts can be irrational or impulsive, which can lead to feelings that are irrational or impulsive, which can lead to actions that are irrational or impulsive. This is why awareness is so important. It’s why exercising our reasoning ability is so important. It’s why journaling or meditating is so important. When we do these things, we take our brain off autopilot. We become more intentional, less prone to acting contrary to our principles. As Epictetus put it, “Very little is needed for everything to be upset and ruined, only a slight lapse in reason.”

10. Notable books I read this month: How to be Content by Horace, How to Give by Seneca, Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright

Zero to one and the surprising advantage of generalized knowledge

Creativity / /

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel says he asks each potential employee this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

The question is deceptively simple. It’s quite hard to come up with a good answer.

‘Bad answers, he says, are common ones like these:

‘Our educational system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed.‘

‘‘America is exceptional.’

They’re bad because most people already agree with these.

A good response would look something like this: “Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.”

Peter says future progress will take either a horizontal or a vertical form. Horizontal progress involves copying what’s been done before (“going from 1 to n”). Vertical progress involves creating something new (“going from 0 to 1”). “If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.”

Here is his answer to his own interview question: “Most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.”

His explanation helped me to better understand his Zero to One theory:

“Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do—using only today’s tools—the result would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.”

This reminded me of another problem-solving technique I recently read about:

The Outside Advantage

In his wonderful book, Range: Why Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein illustrates the surprising advantage of generalized thinking. “Almost twenty years after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, thirty-two thousand gallons of oil remained stubbornly stuck along Alaska’s coast.” When oil mixes with water, it creates a sticky, peanut butter-like substance. Scott Pegau, research program manager at the Alaska-based Oil Spill Recovery Institute, turned to InnoCentive and offered $20,000 to the person with the best solution for removing this goo from the recovery barges.

Davis, a chemist, read about and pondered the oil spill cleanup challenge. His first thought was to use a chemistry-based solution to address the problem—but thought better of it, deciding it would be unwise to add more chemicals to a chemical problem.

He then thought of a distant analogy—drinking a slushy. You have to move the straw around to get the slushy out.

This reminded him of a construction job he once worked pouring concrete down a chute. The slow process allowed huge portions of the concrete to bake in the sun and harden before he could pour it. He recalled how his friend solved the problem by using a concrete vibrator to shake loose the concrete and keep it from sticking together. This was his eureka moment. He drew a diagram of a concrete vibrator attached to a barge and showed how it could easily unstick the oil, just like it had done with the concrete.

Davis presented this solution, and won the money. 

“Sometimes you just slap your head and go, ‘Well why didn’t I think of that?’” says Pegau afterward. “If it was easily solved by people within the industry, it would have been solved by people within the industry. I think it happens more often than we’d love to admit, because we tend to view things with all the information we’ve gathered in our industry, and sometimes that puts us down a path that goes into a wall. It’s hard to back up and find another path.”

Scientist Alph Bingham created Innocentive as a way for specialists to post industry-specific problems and offer rewards for solutions. The company soon discovered that the likelihood of a problem being solved increased in proportion to the diversity of the people trying to solve it. “The more likely a challenge was to appeal not just to scientists but also attorneys and dentists and mechanics, the more likely it was to be solved.”

Assemble your life action by action: the timeless approach to doing big things and keeping your sanity

Life / /

A few years ago I went back to school. Each semester, including summers, I would take a double course load. The goal was to earn my degree in two years. (At one point in 2018 I was taking eight classes simultaneously.) I also worked full-time. Stress was constant and it occasionally felt like panic. I remember thinking, at times, this is too much. I’m not going to be able to do all of this in two years. What if it’s all for nothing?

Around this time I read one of my favorite ideas from Marcus Aurelius: “You can assemble your life action by action, and no one can prevent that.” Even ants and spiders go about their day putting the world in order as best as they can, he chided himself. “And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?”

This floored me. Why was I working myself up by thinking about all the things I still had to do? Why was I exhausting myself with what-ifs?

“Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole,” Marcus Aurelius told himself. “Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, ‘Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?’ You’ll be embarrassed to answer.”

It was also around this time that I learned “the process” that seven-time national champion football coach, Nick Saban, teaches his players. He found that the average football play lasts about seven seconds. Don’t think about winning a national championship, he tells his players. Don’t think about winning the game. Don’t think about what the scoreboard says. Focus on your inner scoreboard. Focus on executing the current play to the best of your ability. As long as you focus on the inner scoreboard, the outer scoreboard will take care of itself.

In other words: I didn’t have to feel overwhelmed! I didn’t have to think about all the assignments and classes I’d yet to complete. I didn’t have to think about graduating. I didn’t have to think about careers. I didn’t have to work late into the evening! I only had to do two things each day: 1.) Focus solely on the work in front of me and 2.) Complete a few key tasks. That’s it. I could let time, over the long term, do the heavy lifting. I would provide consistent, small steps. Time would turn those small steps into larger accomplishments.

Below is a page from my 2019 planner. For each class, I’d write the assignments and their due dates. My only focus was on completing assignments and submitting them. This kept me focused and gave me the satisfaction of seeing visible progress.


You can do your work as nature requires, Marcus Aurelius said, by working…     

Without frenzy or laziness

Without delving into other’s affairs

Focused like a Roman on the task at hand

While always asking, is this essential?

Calmly, steadily, and with no loose ends.


This is a great example of slow productivity.

It’s also a great example of a classical adage I love: Festina lente…

Make Haste, Slowly

“By any reasonable standard, [John] McPhee is productive,” writes Cal Newport. “He’s published 29 books …. And yet, he rarely writes more than 500 words a day. When asked about this paradox, McPhee famously quipped: ‘People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re so prolific’…God, it doesn’t feel like it—nothing like it. But, you know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart.’”

Author Ryan Holiday is one of the most prolific writers of our generation. He’s written around a dozen books in 10 years (not to mention his countless other business and writing obligations). What’s most inspiring is that he still makes it home every day for dinner and evenings with his family. (After all, he reasons, how successful are you really if you can’t spend a lot of time with your family?)

How does he do it?

He explains that it’s a simple commitment to small, daily habits. “Two hours a day of writing may not seem like much,” he says, “but 2 hours a day for ten years adds up.” When he sits down to work on a book, his goal is not ‘finish the rough draft’, or ‘write until noon’—his goal is simply: ‘Write section 2 of chapter 3’. He doesn’t work on whims. There’s no time for toiling away in open-ended slogs. 

This idea is captured beautifully by Billy Oppenheimer, who recently wrote about Naval Ravikant’s approach: work like a lion. “The way people tend to work most effectively, especially in knowledge work,” says Naval, “is to sprint as hard as they can…and then rest.” Billy adds, “It’s like a lion hunting, [Naval] says: sit, wait for prey, sprint, eat, rest, repeat. The way to work most ineffectively is to work like a cow standing in the pasture all day, slowly grazing grass.”

Asked by his editor how he planned to write his epic novel East of Eden, John Steinbeck replied, “One foot in front of the other … Just get my two pages written every day. That’s the best and only thing I can do.” When his editor joked that he should increase his daily word rate, Steinbeck didn’t find it amusing. “I like to hold the word rate down because if I don’t, it will get hurried and I will get too tired one day and not work the next. The slow, controlled method is best.” He said he would not “permit himself the indiscipline of overwork. This is the falsest of economies.”

When the Duke of Milan questioned Leonardo da Vinci about his seeming procrastination in painting The Last Supper, Leonardo explained, “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” In Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg put it perfectly: “You can’t think all your best thoughts in advance.” Success happens when you keep showing up, keep applying pressure.

We don’t have to trade sanity for excellence. We can take it action by action. We can make haste, slowly.

A more accurate view of reality

Philosophy / /

In his fabulous book, How to Be Perfect, Michael Schur says moral philosophy can be summed up in these four questions:

What am I doing? 

Why am I doing it? 

Is there something I could do that’s better? 

Why is it better?

It’s important to note that these are questions, not statements. To live philosophically is to live reflectively. 

Maybe you think you don’t need to reflect. You’re a good person, you always try to do what’s right. Maybe you don’t even give much thought to doing what’s right—you just do it. It’s automatic.

It’s here where Aristotle, or Marcus Aurelius, or Emmanuel Kant might have reminded you that you’re not perfect. None of us are. We can always improve. And since we can always improve, we must always make an effort to improve. And we can’t make a genuine effort if we’re not mindful and aware of our everyday thoughts and actions.

I’ve found journaling to be the most useful way to reflect. I have a morning routine that I’ve used for years. It consists of a little reading and a lot of writing. (Trust me, it’s not nearly as daunting as it sounds.) I read a page from The Daily Stoic and A Calendar of Wisdom. I use a prompt from one of these books to write an intention for the day in a notebook. Then, in a separate notebook, I write my morning pages (you can read about my experience with them here). Coined by Julia Cameron, morning pages are 3 pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. The whole routine takes about 25 minutes, and it’s the most important part of my day.

The ancient Stoics knew the importance of journaling, of being reflective and mindful. Marcus Aurelius journaled in the morning to prepare himself for the day. Seneca journaled in the evening, appraising his actions, “concealing nothing” from himself. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” he said. Epictetus reminded his students to keep their philosophy lessons at hand day and night, write about them, and talk about them with others. The Stoics knew that philosophy involved daily mindfulness and work.

Perhaps they, like the Buddha and other philosophical and religious leaders, intuited what we now know to be scientifically true: left to their own devices, our minds pretty much run themselves. We have almost no control over the thoughts that pop into our conscious minds throughout the day. And this is why…

Reflective Thoughts are Truer Than Everyday Thoughts

Here’s a thought experiment, cited by Mark Manson in Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope, that nineteenth-century sociology founder, Emile Durkheim posed: What would life be like if there was no crime? If everyone was polite and respectful to others? If no one was violent or harmed anyone? What would happen? Would we all hold hands and sing songs?

According to Durkheim, no. The opposite would happen. We wouldn’t feel happier about not killing each other—we would just become equally upset over trivial things. As Mark summarizes, “Our minds simply amplify (or minimize) our problems to fit the degree of stress we expect to feel.”

I’m using this experiment to illustrate a common theme I’ve found: our brains have their own agendas. Evolutionary psychology confirms this. In Why Buddhism Is True (a remarkable book that shows how psychology intersects philosophy), Princeton University professor, Robert Wright, explains how our evolutionary wiring distorts our view of reality. Natural selection, he says, has one goal: to get genes into the next generation. That’s it. 

The problem with natural selection’s hardwiring is that it hasn’t caught up to the modern world. The sweet tooth that compelled hunter-gatherers to eat fruit (so they would survive and get their genes into the next generation) is the same sweet tooth we have today—only now we have processed sugar at our disposal. So, if this hardwiring produces thinking that’s not aligned with reality, if it creates feelings that are disproportionate to the situation, so be it. It has its own agenda.

The times during the day when we’re doing nothing in particular—not working, not watching a movie, not playing a sport—are when this agenda becomes most pronounced. Our brains enter into what scientists call the “default mode network.” In this mode, thoughts pop into our conscious minds seemingly out of nowhere. (And because thoughts cause feelings and feelings dictate behavior, it’s easy to see why an understanding of this is important.) Scientists can only speculate as to why, exactly, one thought and not another enters into our conscious mind. But one thing is clear: thoughts think themselves.

If you’re confused, we’re in the same boat. But the gist is this: we have a lot less agency over our thoughts and feelings than we typically think.

This is why, Robert argues, mindful meditation (or, in my experience, mindfulness and journaling) can be life-altering. Being mindful of our thoughts means being observant of them, instead of being controlled by them. When we observe anything—a plant, a table, a thought, a feeling—we create distance from it. This distance allows us to not become carried away by our initial impressions. It allows us to say to it what Epictetus advised: “Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent.”

By being reflective, we become better observers of our minds. We’re quicker to notice and discard untrue and harmful thoughts. We’re able to see—even if only slightly—a more accurate view of reality.

10 things I learned, found interesting, or used this month

Monthly Top 10 / /

1. We don’t want you to be authentic, we want you to be kind. I recently wrote about Seth Godin’s advice to professionals: we don’t want you to be authentic—we want you to be professional. This got me thinking about how we can apply this to our greatest duty as human beings: being kind to one another. Oftentimes people will excuse their intolerant behavior by saying they’re just being “authentic” and “real”. But we don’t want that. We don’t want you to be authentic—we want you to be kind.

2. Mindfulness, or there’s no point. A great experience “can still end up feeling fairly meaningless if you’re incapable of directing some of your attention as you’d like. After all, to have any meaningful experience, you must be able to focus on it, at least a bit. Otherwise, are you really having it at all? Can you have an experience you don’t experience? The finest meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant might as well be a plate of instant noodles if your mind is elsewhere; and a friendship to which you never actually give a moment’s thought is a friendship in name only.” -Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

3. From the fear of missing out, to the joy of missing out. “Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts most.” -Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

4. Don’t let anyone tell you reading isn’t work. We’re quick to accept a meeting invite when we’d probably be fine missing it, but how often do we schedule something that is always 100% worth our time? I’ve been scheduling a half hour each day for reading (instead of just reading when I have time) and trying not to miss it. And don’t let anyone tell you reading isn’t work. It is. It’s some of the most important work you can do.

5. There are fools and there are seekers of wisdom. Everyone else suffers. “An idiot is incapable of drawing conclusions. A [wise person] is unwilling to draw conclusions. The rest have glorified their conclusions as knowledge. The fool just enjoys whatever little he knows and [the wise person] enjoys it absolutely. The rest are the ones who constantly struggle and suffer.” -Sadhguru, Inner Engineering

6. You don’t become useful when you find your calling, you find your calling when you become useful. (Source: Kevin Kelly’s review of So Good They Can’t Ignore You)

7. Enjoy what you’ve worked for. I think of this quote whenever I feel discontentment start to creep in: “There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.” -Logan Pearsall Smith

8. I wrote a piece about how to handle insults. Here’s the shortened version: There’s really nothing to handle. What someone says about you doesn’t concern you—it concerns them.

9.  Roosevelt’s imperturbable cheerfulness. Theodore Roosevelt’s zest for life has been well documented. Stories abound of wilderness excursions that left him and his friends badly injured, exhausted, and starved. Through it all, according to fellow riders, Roosevelt always appeared to be having “the time of his life”. His cheerfulness persisted even when facing grave uncertainties. “What Roosevelt termed the “great day” of his life—the day that ended with the triumphant charges up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill—began with him exhibiting to the Rough Riders the most placid morning-time demeanor,” says Doris Kearns Goodwin in Leadership in Turbulent Times, “calmly shaving and knotting a blue polka-dot bandanna around his neck. Rough Rider Arthur Crosby found it heartening ‘to see our commanding officer on the dawn of a great battle performing an everyday function as though we were on an enjoyable camping trip.'” 

10. Notable books I read this month: Buddha by Karen Armstrong, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, The Art of Happiness by Epicurus, and The Girl Who Would Be Free by Ryan Holiday. Also, I made a list of the best books I’ve ever read.

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