
One of the reasons I went to law school was because of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. It’s not like a had a conversation with him...obviously. He’s long dead. But his works, ideas, and life are not!

I read [Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War Law and Ideas](https://www.dltn.io/posts/oliver-wendell-holmes-a-life-stephen-budiansky) a while ago, and the passion and zest Holmes had for the law, logical thinking, and clear writing was inspirational to me. I was fascinated with his work, I thought maybe I could *do* what he did. (Be a lawyer, that is.)

I went into school liking the book so much that Holmes felt like my “mentor” or at least a big inspiration for why I was there, and that was special. I held him in high regard.

So I was ecstatic when we were assigned to read an excerpt in Torts from his book, *The Common Law*. I was even more excited when a case he wrote the opinion for was in our torts book. But...then I read the case, and we talked about it in class, and my professor kind of dissed on him. We talked about it afterwards in his office hours, and he said from the opinion, it was clear that Holmes had *never* driven a car—which he probably hadn’t—yet was creating a rule of law that required people who came to a railroad track crossing to get out of their car and look to make sure no train was coming before they crossed in their car. That’s...ridiculous.

After our conversation, I looked in the biography to see what the author said about that opinion, and I now agree. Here’s what the author wrote:

> His zeal to write into the law his draconian views about risk led him to render one of his other most notoriously bad decisions on the Supreme Court...Holmes held that a railroad was not at fault in a fatal grade-crossing accident where the view of the tracks was obstructed to an approaching driver. Showing if nothing else that he had never learned to drive himself, Holmes ruled as a matter of law that it was a driver's duty to stop, get out of his car, and look down the tracks to see if a train was coming.
>
> [...] 
>
> [Louis] Brandeis thought the Court had had no business taking on these cases in the first place and that Holmes had pressed his colleagues to do so mainly because he was "incorrigible when there is an opportunity of curbing the power and province of a jury." 
> 
> [...] 
>  
> While in so many areas of the law Holmes would prove decades ahead of his time, his Darwinian attitudes toward injury cases seemed at times almost a throwback to the nineteenth century—holding firm to a conception of tort law that was rapidly being swept aside by the very kind of nuanced balancing tests and apportionment of responsibility between the parties that he otherwise so zealously advanced.

I thought this was really interesting because it shows:

1. How not-closely I read biographies. I read parts closely but other parts not, but I don’t remember any mention of this case in the book. (But I did apparently think it was ridiculous when I read it because I wrote marginalia that said, “This is ridiculous lol”.) And;\

2. How not everyone we admire from history was “perfect.” I struggle with this. After I read a book about Truman or Lincoln or Adams or Jefferson, I’m enthralled with who they were (or, at least who the book portrayed them to be), that I usually remember all of the good quotes and cool things that they did and forget about the not-so-good things they did decisions they made. I don’t think there’s anything wrong about admiring people from history, but I’m reminded of being a bit more cautious in the people I choose to model my life and career after.

This post didn’t really have a point, but I was excited to see how my love of learning and history that I’ve poured myself into the last three years is finally converging into something useful, I guess? It’s fun to see the people and ideas and history I’ve learned about appear in contexts other than a book I’m reading on my back porch.


Justice Holmes

Book Notes on 'Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman'

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. believed in hard work and knowledge. He remarked, “most things in this world, half their terrors vanish when you walk up and tackle them.” The anxious thoughts about what “might” happen were often worse than the actual situation. Once “you lay hold of the lion’s skin it comes off and the same old donkey is underneath.”

As he edged toward turning ninety, he wrote:

> My old formula is that a man should be an enthusiast in the front of his head and a sceptic in the back. Do his damndest without believing that the cosmos would collapse if he failed. One should have the same courage for failure that many have for death.

When Chief Justice Melville Fuller delayed in getting the cases assigned to Holmes over to him, Holmes wrote him a note:

> Will you let me know as soon as convenient the cases you assign to me. I worry until I know. Nil actum reputans dum quid superesset agendum.

The Latin was a quote from Lucanus’s poem about Caesar: “He believed nothing done, so long as anything remained undone.”

Holmes had an unbelievable work ethic. In total, he wrote 873 opinions, a Supreme Court record. “He brought that same zest for duty to everything,” Budiansky wrote. “In 1865, at age twenty-one, he began keeping a list of every book he read, noting them down in tiny handwriting in a small leather…book, known to his secretaries as the ‘Black Book.’ By the time of his death the list exceeded four thousand, which worked out to more than a book a week for seventy years. The range was extraordinary: law, philosophy, sociology, literature, religion, history, economics, murder mysteries, poetry, science.”

---

In his opinions, Holmes rarely used legal jargon. The quality of his prose demonstrated clear thinking. Learned Hand praised in Holmes’s opinions his “deadly eye” for “question-begging words” that disguised shallow thinking. “To Holmes, the act of writing was above all the act of thinking. Finding the right words was not rhetorical ornamentation: it was the very essence of his work of thinking though complex legal jargon.”

Note: What people mean by writing is thinking. It forces you to come up with words that describe what’s in your head. The mismatch between the words you use and the thoughts in your head is the actual process of your thinking being refined. You’re being forced to put a thought which contains many words and many meanings into a few words that each just have one meaning. That is thinking.

---

Boston in the 1800s was a town full of pompous, educated men and women seeking to make their mark on the world through their words and books. Pretty much everyone was Unitarian. “Unitarianisms’s fundamental tenet was that God had given man a rational nature and a moral conscience, and expected him to use them. Salvation was no longer to be found in outward conformity to rigid doctrine or unquestioning obedience to an unknowable God, but lay rather within each man’s own conscience.”

This philosophy “now channeled into a faith that made self-improvement, the cultivation of virtue, and social conscience the ultimate expression of God’s will.”

Edward Everett Hale put it best: “There was the real impression that the kingdom of heaven was to be brought in…if we only knew enough”

This was the culture Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was born into, and came to love.

---

From a young age, Holmes showed an act for words and conversing. His report card at age six said, “Talk’s too much.” His brother Edward explained, “Wendell ends every sentence with a ‘but’ so as to hold the floor till he can think of something else to say.”

---

Holmes understood the importance of focus. He wrote in a letter about his father:

> If he [his father] had the patience to concentrate all his energy on a single subject, which perhaps is saying if he had been a different man, he would have been less popular, but he might have produced a great work. I often am struck by his insight in things that he lightly touched. But, as I said, **it is the last five percent that makes the difference between the great and the clever**.

---

As a boy, Holmes had a “futile shrinking from new things” that kept him from learning to ride or drive a horse or ice skate. But this was not a “physical timidity; it was rather that he already had a sense of what it took to truly master a subject, and an inkling of the dissatisfactions of half-knowledge.”

---

Holmes did not value academics. In 1913, he warned Felix Frankfurter that academic life is…

> a withdrawl from the fight in order to utter smart things that cost you nothing except thinking them from a cloister…Business in the world is unhappy, often seems mean, and always challenges your power to idealize the brute fact but it hardens the fibre and I think is likely to make more of a man of one who turns it to success

---

For Holmes, the war taught him “early on to face with courage and calmness the inevitable hardships of life.” In 1917, he told Harold Laski “I am converting misfortune into a source of satisfaction.” The author explains, “His limitless capacity for work was undoubtedly an emotional escape but it was also a need that he shared with many who had been through the intense experiences of war: civilian life just did not seem that exciting by comparison.” “Repose,” Holmes wrote, “is not the destiny of man.” **“Life is a struggle,” the author observes, “and it is the struggle that gives it meaning. The only thing to do was to give one’s all, and leave the consequences to fate.”**

---

In a great quote about opportunity costs, Holmes said, “Remember, my friend, that every good costs something. Don’t forget that to have anything means to go without something else. Even to be a person, to be _this_ means to be _not that_.”

---

During his first year of law school, a professor said he “had never known of anyone in the law who studied anything like as hard as Wendell.” “From the start,” the author wrote, “he took heart in the belief that mastery of a subject, and thorough professional expertise, was the only way to accomplish anything significant in life. A year and a half after receiving his degree, and still thoroughly immersed in a now self-directed program of voluminous readings in the law, he wrote William James of his ‘ever increasing conviction that law as well as any other series of facts in this world may be approached in the interests of science and may be studied, yes, and practiced, with the preservation of one’s ideals. I should even say that they grew robust under the regimen.'”

Holmes’ father’s dilettantism worked out well for Holmes, because it showed him what _not_ to do. He wrote:

> Since I wrote in December I have worked at nothing but the law. Philosophy has hibernated in torpid slumber, and I have lain “slutishly soaking and gurgling in the devil’s pickle,” as Carlye says. It has been necessary,—if a man chooses a profession he cannot forever content himself in picking out the plums with fastidious dilettantism and give the rest of the loaf to the poor, but must easy his way manfully through crust and crumb—soft, unpleasant inner parts which, within one, swell, causing discomfort in the bowels.

---

Holmes became friends with both William and Henry James. William, while Holmes and he were close, was in a deep depression about the nature of the universe. In a world without a God, why did anything matter, James explained. Holmes, ever the realist, didn’t understand. He advised William (with words that a lot of us should take into account today re: politics and the “world” and everyone having an opinion on everything): “It seems to me that the only promising activity is to make _my_ universe coherent and livable, not to babble about _the_ universe.” This quote revealed Holmes’ philosophy about life: it doesn’t care about you, so get on with it and do your duty! (Or, rather, that’s my interpretation.)

---

One night after working late in the law library, Holmes and a younger lawyer, George Upham, walked home together. Recounting their conversation sixty years later, Upham said Holmes:

> told me he had a theory that anyone could accomplish anything he wished, if only he wished it hard enough, continuously, morning, noon, and night, and perhaps subconsciously while sleeping

A half century after that conversation, Holmes told John Wu that to achieve anything of importance “takes time, the capacity to want something fiercely and want it all the time, and sticking to the rugged course.”

Holmes followed his own advice.

While editing a new edition of Kent’s Commentaries, Holmes became utterly absorbed in the work. “I have as you know given up all my time to Kent’s Commentaries and during the past year especially have hardly touched any other business,” he wrote in July 1872.

He kept his manuscript in a green back, and he took it everywhere with him. After dining one night with Henry James’s mother, she wrote a letter to Henry:

> Wendell Holmes dined with us a few days ago. His whole life, soul and body, is utterly absorbed in his _last_ work upon his Kent. He carries about his manuscript in his green bag and never loses sight of it for a moment. He started to go to Will’s room to wash his hands, but came back for his bag, and when we went to dinner, Will said, “Don’t you want to take your bag with you?” He said, “Yes, I always do so at home.”

This “green bag” was so precious to him that, once a month, he conducted fire drills with the servants and staff of his house and ensured they knew their first mission if flames were to ensue: rescue the green bag.

Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes thought Holmes’ work on Kent is what allowed him to draft opinions faster than everyone else. The time Holmes spent in total immersion of the law “had given him an unusual and complete mastery of common law decisions and history. The effect of this in his habit as [a] judge was that, where others would be compelled to devote an enormous amount of time to the rediscovery of law, Holmes needed to make no re-examination—the law was at his fingertips.”

This is a great example of Dead Time and Alive Time.

The time in-between jobs he studied a ton, so that when he finally did get a court appointment, he was better prepared and smarter than everyone else. Such is how one should spend their days “waiting.” [[Notes/Active Patience|Active Patience]]

The author writes, “Success to Holmes above all meant accomplishing something original and of intellectual merit.” I relate to that strongly.

---

On the bench, Holmes had little patience for lawyers, remarking that they take 5 to ten minutes to say things that could easily be said in one. To pass the time, he wrote letters while lawyers were presenting their cases. This gave him the reputation of attentiveness, because, naturally, people thought he was taking notes on the case.

---

On writing, Holmes said, “One has to strike the jugular and let the rest go.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

From a young age, Spillane loved to read. “When I was a little kid,” he said, “we had moved into a school where there was a library that ran underneath the windows–and I remember the teacher saying, ‘Children, someday you’ll be able to read this book’ and she held up a copy of Moby-Dick. And I said to the teacher, ‘I like this book!’ She says to me, ‘You certainly didn’t read this book!’ And I said, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ She could never get over that!”

---

“There are only a certain number of basic plots,” Spillane said. “All stories are an elaboration on these plots and a good background in writing pulp fiction gives you the benefit of stockpiling these elaborations in your mind plus the ability to twist them into elaborations not yet used.” *You have to learn the rules and expectations, so you can break them.


---

Late in life, Spillane recalled his comic-book writing days fondly: “They were the happiest days of my life. I could walk anywhere and nobody knew who I was.” Fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

---

Sometimes, you just need a lucky break. After a friend took Spillane’s manuscript of I, The Jury to Jack McKenna of Duenewald Printing Corporation who worked with Fawcett Publications, in an intent for McKenna to pass it on to Roscoe Fawcett, McKenna couldn’t find the time to read the manuscript. His wife, however did. “You like detective stories,” McKenna told his wife. “Read this one.” The next morning, McKenna’s wife shook Jack awake. “Read it! This is different.” She read the entire thing the night before. McKenna would become Spillane’s agent.

---

Intentionally, Spillane never gave a description of his narrator, Mike Hammer. “If you describe a guy as being six-foot-two, stalwart, big-muscled and dark haired,” Spillane said in 1998, “how can a guy that’s short and fat think that he’s the hero in the story? He can’t do that. But if [Hammer’s] not described, that guy can be the hero in his own mind.”

---

Publisher Victor Weybright said, “[T]he literary world abounds in ruined careers in which a poor second book erases all the promise and luster of an initial success.” This came after Spillane showed his second manuscript, For Whom the Gods Would Destroy to the publishers. It wasn’t a bad book, they insisted, just wasn’t the right timing to publish it after how successful I, The Jury had been. So they didn’t reject it, else McKenna would have been able to sell it to someone else. Instead, they shelved it. McKenna’s lack-of-experience showed, because Spillane was given no compensation for this decision.

---

During a conversation between Mike Hammer and his creator, Hammer said to Spillane, “Writing’s a good racket, Mickey, all you need is an idea and a typewriter and you’re in business.”

---

Use what’s unique to you to create something unique to others. The author writes, “Spillane combined his eclectic reading (including pulp fiction) and life experiences (particularly wartime) with a direct knowledge of the elemental appeal of the comic book into a new style of fiction that excited and pleased a wide swath of the reading public.

---

“A perfect book is written with the climax on the last word of the last page,” Spillane said. “…If you took the last word away, you wouldn’t know what the book was about.” His editor, didn’t believe him, so Spillane bet him a thousand bucks that “if he submitted the new Hammer, Vengeance is Mine!, without the last word, the novel would make no sense. “I turned it in without the last word on the last page,” Spillane said grinning. “He said ‘What was the word, what was the word!’ I said, ‘Give me the thousand bucks.’ He gave me the thousand bucks–I gave him the word.” The last sentence of Vengeance is Mine!, of course, is “Juno was a man!”

---

The critics didn’t like Spillane’s use of sex and violence in his books, so he used their reviews for his gain. “I have gotten the worst reviews in the world,” he said. “So we made this big ad out of the bad reviews, quoting from them. Then underneath we’d have a line like, this book sold six million copies. The top of the ad said, Mickey Spillane says about his new book, ‘I hope this one gets lousy reviews.’”

---

Spillane quickly became one of America’s favorite writers. At a restaurant in Florida Keys where Hemingway’s picture hung up on the wall, Spillane stopped by and was asked for his photo to go up on the wall. On his next visit, Hemingway insisted, “Take him down or take me down.” And down Hemingway went. Later, after Hemingway bad mouthed a Spillane in Bluebook magazine, Spillane was asked what he thought of Hemingway and he responded, “Hemingway who?”

---

Victor Saville, a movie director, approached Spillane to make his books into movies. “I arranged a meeting with Spillane,” Saville said. “But not in an office, that was not the Spillane way. He insisted we meet under the clock at the Pennsylvania Railway Station.” A classic detective move, I guess? Their agreement was originally a 50/50 split of the profits, until Columbia Pictures offered Spillane $140,000 cash for four novels. Saville matched the offer, so Spillane went with Saville. Though Spillane chose the right partner, he passed on the better deal. “If Spillane had stuck to my original proposal,” Saville said, “he would have made half a million dollars as his share of the first two pictures.” Apparently, Spillane never really forgave Saville for that, even though it was kind of Spillane’s fault. Part of the deal allowed Saville to have first rights on any new Spillane novels as movies for five years. It didn’t seem like a lot, and to Spillane at the time it didn’t seem to matter, but it would cause a load of headaches in the future for Spillane. Two lessons: Know what you’re signing away and don’t sign away your future.

---

Jane Spillane, Mickey’s third wife, said in an interview:

> We would be asleep with nothing but silence in the middle of the night when I would be shaken out of nowhere from the rustling of Mickey getting out of bed, throwing on a lamp and grabbing a sticky note to write down ideas. No matter how many ideas occurred to him in the middle of the night, he would get up every time, turn on the lamp, and write them down on a sticky note. Then a book would result from his midnight musings.


Lesson: Books are made out of sticky notes ([Anne Lamott uses index cards](https://www.dltn.io/posts/book-notes-bird-by-bird-by-anne-lamott))

---

Mickey was always remodeling a house he and Jane lived in during his later years because “The guy who built it owned a lumber yard, but he didn’t own a level.” I thought that was a creative way to say it was crooked or it was a shoddy job. You could say something similar about someone who wants to write, but maybe uses basic words, “He liked to write, but it seemed like he didn’t own a dictionary,” or something like that.

---

In December of 1972, speaking to Esquire magazine about his clothes, Spillane had an important lesson on spending money: “I own two suits and a sports jacket. Clothes mean little to me.” But he owned “the best driving gear, the best flying gear in the world.” “Clothes,” he said, “were just something you wear in the city.” lesson: spend money on the things you care about.


Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction by Max Collins

<InlineImage src={https://res.cloudinary.com/dde1q4ekv/image/upload/v1690338124/mt_david_mccullough_inside_c4uapi.jpg} />

By far, David McCullough has had the strongest influence on my writing, reading, and life. His books are not just books; they are glimpses into a world long gone, glimpses that are near impossible to achieve anywhere else other than between the covers of his books. This makes sense when you look at his advice. Speaking about John Adams and writing his biography, he said, “You’ve got to marinate your head in their time and in their culture. You’ve got to become them in an effect.”

Therefore, I was thrilled to find a documentary on him, **********[David McCullough: Painting with Words](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210345/)**********. Here are some notes.

On the standards he sets for his books, he said:

> I’m starving to write a book that might qualify as literature. That’s the aspiration. I don’t want it just to be readable. I don’t want it just to be interesting. I want it to be something that moves the reader, that moves me.

On the ****one thing**** you should teach children, he said this:

> The great thing about the arts is that you can only learn to do it by doing it. If a child gets that idea, early, that that’s how you learn things, by doing it, that may be the most important thing you can give them. You can’t learn to play the piano by reading a book about how to play the piano. You can’t learn to paint without painting. You have to do it. And in doing it, you suddenly begin to see, “By God I can do this!” And then after awhile “I can not only do this, I’m getting better.
> 

If you were ever confused, McCullough is a ******writer******, not an historian:

> I don’t think of myself as an historian in the conventional understanding of the word. I’m a writer, who has chosen other days from our own - other times - as my field, that’s what I want to write about.
> 

Echoing this later, he said, “I love to tell a story. And I particularly love to tell a true story.”

About the misconceptions people have about history, he said:

> History is not about dates, and quotes, and obscure provisos; history is about life, about change, about consequences, about cause and effect, it’s about the mystery of human nature, the mystery of time. And it isn’t just about politics and the military and social issues - which is almost always the way it’s taught: it’s about music and poetry and drama and science and medicine and money and love.
> 

In the last year of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited John Adams. Emerson afterward wrote down much of what they discussed. He reports that John Adams said “I would to God there be more ambition in the country…” Then he paused and added, “By that I mean ambition of the lottable kind: to excel.” “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” McCullough says while telling this story, “If we could reinstate through what we do as parents, grandparents, as teachers, as legislators, that old noble ambition to excel.”

On success and rewards, McCullough echoes something Robert Oppenheimer understood as well: that the work is the reward.

> The fact that my books are still in print, I suppose I’m prouder of that than anything else. I’ve had a wonderful life, I’ve had a wonderful time, doing what I do. That’s the reward! The work is the reward, the kick of getting back to that typewriter and digging in for another project. That’s what I love. I won’t possibly live long enough to do all the books I want to writer. I have a list of possible books, I thing there’s 27 ideas on the list, so I guess I’ll just have to keep on working. Happily.
>

David McCullough on The Art of Writing, History, and Success

The only light in the motel room came in through the blinds from the street lights. This didn’t stop him from writing. Oh no. Because he’d been in a thousand rooms just like the one he was in now, he knew exactly what to do. He took out the high-wattage light bulb he always had and screwed it in. With a now-illuminated room, Cormac McCarthy began killing off his characters in the most brutal way imaginable.

And that’s how many of Cormac McCarthy’s early novels were written. In cheap, dark, Tennessee motel rooms. **It doesn’t matter where you work, so as long as you work.**

Sadly, McCormack [died this week](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html).

For a long time, McCormack and his novels about the cruelty of human nature were cult favorites. But with the publication of *All the Pretty Horses*, McCormack went mainstream – much to his disliking. Probably. His books are often described as macabre and surely would make you wince thrice. Put simply: they are not the types of books I’d listen to in the car with my wife.

Yet they stir something inside you. I don’t know exactly what it is but boy oh boy is it there. You’re half-scared / half-wondering who will die next and when and how. Everything within you is saying to put the book down. It’s time to go to bed. It’s time to work. Your family misses you. But you can’t.

William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Herman Melville – only some of the greatest writers to have ever lived – were McCormack’s inspirations and every one of his pages pays homage to them.

His books are different. There’s a lot of blood, yes, and “[more corpses than commas](https://web.archive.org/web/20200815201750/https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2005/08/cormac-mccarthy-interview),” but the most unique thing is the lack of punctuation. McCormack doesn’t use quotation marks to denote dialogue. You would think this would cause confusion, but it doesn’t. “There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks,” [he said](https://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/cormac-mccarthy-on-james-joyce-and-punctuation-video). “I mean if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”

Here’s an excerpt from one of his novels, *Child of God*:

> Ballard came to the edge of the cutbank and looked up to where Kirby was sitting. He said: You got any whiskey?
>

> Might have some.
>

> Why don’t you let me have a jar.
>

> Kirby stood up. Ballard said: I can pay ye next week on it. Kirby squatted back down again.
>

> I can pay ye tomorrow, Ballard said.
>

> Kirby turned his head to one side and gripped his nose between his thumb and forefinger and sneezed a gout of yellow snot into the grass and wiped his fingers on the knee of his jeans. He looked out over the fields. I cain’t do it, Lester, he said.
>

See. No quotation marks but you don’t get lost.

Writing dialogue is one of the first things they teach you in English class. You learn when to put the commas inside of the quotes, how to introduce a new character, and are told to make sure each character’s words have their own line.

McCormack broke all those rules and had massive success doing it. Why? Because the thing, the actual writing, story, and plot were terrific. McCormack mastered the fundamentals, so he could break every rule he wanted and people still read – and are still reading – his words.

I never once thought about how unimportant quotation marks are. I didn’t know you could write dialogue without them. How sad is that? Tradition was so engrained in my brain, I never thought to question those funny little lines before and after words from a character. Now I am.

How he wrote isn’t the only thing McCarthy chose to do differently. He didn’t go on book tours and rarely did interviews. He could talk until the cows came home about physics or the philosophy of mathematics but shied away from talking about his writing. What writer doesn’t want to talk about their work? Then again, what writer doesn’t use quotation marks?

I admire his knack for going against the grain, but his ex-wives who lived in poverty because of that habit didn’t. “We lived in total poverty," his second wife, Annie DeLisle [said](https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/19/magazine/cormac-mccarthy-s-venomous-fiction.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm). On a dairy farm just outside of Knoxville, they’d take baths in the lake. Funny enough, that’s something a McCormack character would partake in. "Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week." That right there says all you need to know about Cormac McCarthy.

This great American novelist has passed, yes, but his words and habits and ideas will never die.

McCormack, both directly and indirectly, **teaches one to question tradition** and that **there’s always room for something different,** especially if it’s great.

Break the mold and break the mold and do it differently and break the mold.

---

If you’ve never read a McCarthy novel before, *The Road* is his most critically acclaimed. “No Country for Old Men” is a movie that McCarthy first wrote as a book with the same title. He published two new novels last year, *The Passenger* and *Stella Maris*, if you want to read something current. The *New York Times* wrote about [his best books](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-best-books.html). Warning: his books are brutal. Some say the violence makes them hard to read, but that’s exactly why you should try.


Break the Mold

************************The Accidental President************************ is a unique biography. A couple of chapters are dedicated to Truman’s upbringing and his “political education,” but as the subtitle suggests, the book focuses on the dramatic four months between April and August 1945. Those four months contained more world-changing events than most centuries: the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April and the atomic bombings off Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. In between those two events, Harry S. Truman became the most powerful man in the world. Though he dealt with wars on multiple fronts – the Pacific and the East, yes, but also at home with his wife who did not approve of his newfound presidential status – he also took control of a country where most of the population knew no other President than FDR, and, who all asked the same question when he took the oath: ****Who is Harry Truman?****

## Notes

On the morning of April 12, Truman dictated a letter to his sister-in-law, May Wallace about her dog. “I imagine Spot is getting fatter and fatter. I have gained nine pounds myself.” In another letter to James Pendergast, Truman dictated something about the War Production Board. But this letter would not be sent yet. Later that night he added, “Since this was dictated I’m Pres. of the U.S…Pray for me with all you have.”

---

During the war, the federal government employed 3.4 million civilians, “with enough committees and organizations to fill seventeen pages in fine print in the **************************Congressional Directory.”**************************

---

“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” – Harry Truman

---

The Veep’s job was “a graveyard of politicians.” “The Vice President has not much to do,” Truman said. When asked what he would do with this “spare time,” he answered: “Study history.”

---

During his eighty-two days as VP leading up to him becoming the president, Truman had visited FDR on official business just twice.

---

When Elenor Roosevelt told Truman about FDR’s death, Truman was astonished.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked her.

“Is there anything **we** can do for ***you***,” she replied. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

---

The night of FDR’s death, “Senators and statesmen sat with strong drinks distilling the world’s anxiety into the ink in their diaries,” Baime writes. I thought that was a beautiful piece of language.

---

Harry’s father raised he and his brother “to believe that honor is worth more than money. And that’s the reason we never got rich,” Harry said.

---

In the first grade, Harry got diphtheria. He couldn’t do anything but read, so that’s what he did. Here, Baime explains, “Harry had begun his political education without knowing it…In the stories of great men and women lay the answers to all the questions that were forming in the young boy’s mind, and as he learned, their triumphs and mistakes had shaped history’s path.”

**“In reading the lives of great men,” he wrote, “I found that the first victory they won was over themselves…Self-discipline with all of them came first.”**

In another entry he wrote:

> In other words, I began to see that the history of the world has moved in cycles and that very often we find ourselves in the midst of political circumstances which appear to be new but which might have existed in almost identical form at various times during the past six thousand years.
> 

The time spent on the farm in isolation helped him learn too. “I have memorized a whole book while plowing forty acres,” he wrote.

Later in the book, the author writes, “His lifetime’s reading had familiarized him with the triumphs and tragedies of innumerable worked leaders. Now he had become one of them.”

---

At thirty-three, Truman signed up for the draft. Though his eyesight was poor, he memorized the letters on the chart before he had to take his glasses off so he wouldn’t be deemed unfit for service.

Aboard the *****************George Washington*****************, Truman wrote, “There we were watching New York’s skyline diminish and wondering if we’d be heroes or corpses.

---

Tom Pendergast was the political kingpin of Kansas City. Here’s how he defined what his role, which I’ve found to be a pretty great description for all of politics:

> It’s a very simple thing when you come down to it. There’s people that need things, lots of ‘em, and I see to it that they get ‘em. I go to my office on South Main Street in Kansas City at seven o’clock in the morning and I stay there when I’m in town till about six o’clock at night and during that time I see maybe 200, maybe 300 people. One needs half a ton of coal. Another woman’s gotta get a job for her boy. I see to it that they got those things. That’s all there is to it.
> 

---

In politics, as much in life, things are rarely black and white, right or wrong. A lot of the time, you have to choose between lesser of two evils. This happened when Truman found out that one of the two judges working under him was collecting “kickback money in the road-building program. He was forced to look the other way in order to prevent more injurious crimes from occurring and to keep on the good side of Boss Pendergast, who had given him his career,” Baim explains.

---

When Truman became a Senator, he got a good piece of advice from J. Hamilton Lewis: “Don’t start out with an inferiority complex. For the first six months you’ll wonder how you got here, and after that, you’ll wonder how the rest of us got here.”

---

During his time in the Senate, Truman worked hard. “He routinely was up at five and arrived at his office at seven in the morning,” Baim writes. Edgar Faris, a secretary, recalled “That man was there earlier than everybody. I don’t care if he went to bed at 2 a.m., he was up at five and we was down at that office. That man really worked.”

---

At the Statler hotel, Truman outlined a philosophy and campaign that he and his staff would stick to until the end:

> • The Senator will not engage in personalities and asks his friends to do the same. Avoid mentioning the Senator’s opponents in any way.

• Avoid getting into controversial issues. Stick to Truman – his record as a judge, as a Senator, as a military man.

• While others discuss issues not involved in the primary, each worker will carefully avoid getting into those traps.

• The press is a function of our free institutions. If they are wrong in their attitude, try to make them see the true light, but under no circumstances attack them.

• Political parties are essential to our republic, our nation, and we must not attack them. What we’re doing is to show by our actions what we think our Party is destined to do: Provide basic laws for a more abundant life and the happiness and security of our people.
> 

Another one of Truman’s mottos was, “There is no substitute for a fact. When the facts are know, reasonable men do not disagree with respect to them.”

---

After FDR named Truman as his running mate, he and Bess smiled for the photographers, “the flash light newspaper picture boys,” is what Truman called them.

---

When Tom Pendergrast died, Truman attended his funeral, much to dismay of his political strategists. But they didn’t matter. Tom did a lot for Harry, and Harry knew that. Connely said, “I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to his funeral.” “That’s right,” Harry replied. That’s just the type of man he was. 

---

On the first day of Office, after addressing the staff, Admiral Leahy reminded behind to speak one on one with Truman. Leahy was the top military advisor to Roosevelt and had a special connection with the now late President. Leahy told Truman, “If I am to remain your Chief of Staff, it will be impossible for me to change. If I think you are in error I shall say so.”

”That,” Truman replied, “is exactly what I want you to do. I want you to tell me if you think I am making a mistake. Of course, I will make the decisions, and after a decision is made, I will expect you to be loyal.”

---

The candidness of Truman was refreshing to the press. “I don’t know if any of you fellows ever had a load of hay or a bull fall on you,” Truman told a group of reporters. “Last night the whole weight of the moon and stars fell on me…If newspapermen ever pray, pray for me.”

---

Truman’s new daily schedule was relentless. “Being President is like riding a tiger,” Truman wrote in one of his memoirs. “A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed.” Somewhere else he wrote, “It takes about 17 hours a day. And then you get as much sleep as you can, start over again and do it the next 17 hours as best you can. No man can do it as it should be done.”

The intense pace lead to extreme isolation. “It is the extraordinary isolation imposed upon the president by our system that makes the character and the opportunity of his office so extraordinary,” Woodrow Wilson once said.

During the summer, his wife and daughter went home to Independence and Truman stayed alone in the White House. He wrote Bess:

> I stay here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches, all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study.
> 

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote of him: “His family is gone, the house is bare and stiff and he’s the loneliest man I ever saw. He’s not accustomed to doing night work…and he doesn’t like it. He’s not at ease and no one else is. I am so sorry for him and he tries so hard.”

---

Truman was relentlessly efficient. Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew wrote, “When I saw him today, I had fourteen problems to take up with him and got through them in less than fifteen minutes with a clear directive on every one of them. You can imagine what a joy it is to deal with a man like that.”

At Postdam, he wanted the agenda for the next day’s discussions set before today’s were over. “I don’t want to just discuss,” he said. “I want to decide.”

---

Truman wasn’t the playboy Roosevelt and other men were. When at Potsdam, an army colonel whispered, “Listen, I know you’re alone over here [without your wife]…If you need anything, you know, I’ll be glad to arrange it for you.”

Truman was furious. “Hold it; don’t say anything more. I love my wife, and my wife is my sweetheart. I don’t want to do that kind of stuff…I don’t want you to ever say that again to me.”

The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

After starting [Foundation](https://twitter.com/dltnio/status/1665743018257793024?s=20) on Apple TV (I’m late, I know), I became interested in Isaac Asimov. I had a vague idea that he was an influential writer, but for what and why, I was ignorant.

Turns out, he’s fascinating.

When I want to learn about something or someone, like any great scholar, I [use Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov).

Here’s his analysis of the insanity that is being a full-time writer:

> [T]he only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes.
> 

In [an interview in 1975](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUz_KkibYAs), after being asked about the sheer absurdity of the fact that Asimov is afraid of airplanes even though he writes about going to the ends of the earth, he drops an incredible line:

> I don't like to travel, it keeps me away from my typewriter.
> 

Earlier in the same interview, he says:

> What it amounts to [being able to write so much], is that I’m not happy except when I’m writing. It’s almost the only way I can think of to spend my time pleasantly, and so I’m naturally drawn to the typewriter at all times. The day is lost in which I don’t type.
> 

His writing style is focused on simplicity, much to the dismay of science-fiction critics:

> I have an informal style, which means I tend to use short words and simple sentence structure, to say nothing of occasional colloquialisms. This grates on people who like things that are poetic, weighty, complex, and, above all, obscure. On the other hand, the informal style pleases people who enjoy the sensation of reading an essay without being aware that they are reading and of feeling that ideas are flowing from the writer's brain into their own without mental friction.
> 

Naturally, people wanted to know how one man was capable of writing over 200 books throughout his lifetime. In 1980, [David Letterman asked](https://youtu.be/365kJOsFd3w), “What kind of schedule do you put in to write that many books?”

> I get up in the morning, sit down and write, when I finish writing, go back to bed.
> 

Asimov not only understood the power of writing; he preached on the benefits of reading too. On March 16, 1971, he sent this letter congratulating the recipients on a new library:

![5692290321_36e10b9b35_o.webp](Isaac%20Asimov%20on%20writing%20and%20reading%20ba64171fc84d4195b08122826b364155/5692290321_36e10b9b35_o.webp)

Isaac Asimov on writing and reading

> The best political economy is the care and culture of men. – Emerson

For all the controversy they stir up today, colleges *used* to be beneficial. Having a college degree meant something. It meant you not only had an education, but you had a moral foundation of right and wrong, ethics, theology, and philosophy. The humanities were as important as engineering. Subjects communicated with each other in a lattice of back and forth to give the mind the ability to see the big picture that life was painting -- as much as a human can see that, at least.

But somewhere along the way, something changed. College is no longer thought of as the place to understand the inner workings of the world or how we got to now. Some of the most astute judgments of college (and education in general) attack the curriculum for *not* teaching anything useful. But it wasn't meant to be this way.

Reflecting on the words of David Starr Jordan (January 19, 1851 -- September 19, 1931), the founding president of Stanford University, we find a beautiful illustration of what college is meant to be. In a publication of his speeches, *Care and Culture of Men*, Jordan shares his vision for what higher education should mean, the relationship between the State and the school, and much more.

Speaking on the benefits of having a college degree and the attributes that should come with it, Jordan has much to say:

> So, if you learn to use it rightly, this the college can do for you: It will bring you in contact with the great minds of the past, the long roll of those who, through the ages, have borne a mission to young men and young women, from Plato to Emerson, from Homer to Euripides to Schiller and Browning. Your thought will be limited not by the narrow gossip of to-day, but the great men of all ages and all climes will become your brothers. You will learn to feel what the Greek called the "consolations of philosophy." To turn from the petty troubles of the day to the thoughts of the masters, is to go from the noise of the street through the door of a cathedral. If you learn to unlock these portals, no power on earth can take from you the key. The whole of your life must be spent in your own company, and only the educated man is good company for himself. The uneducated man looks out on life through the narrow windows, and thinks the world is small.

When Jordan refers here to the educated and uneducated man, he literally is referring to someone with a college degree and someone without a college degree. Today, I view it as someone who has a thirst for knowledge and someone who doesn't. Whether that education comes from YouTube, a trade, or higher education doesn't matter. What matters is that someone has an open mind to learn the vast mysteries the world still holds dear to its heart.

There were two important things an education taught young men and women in Jordan's mind: morality and history. It taught one how to approach life, how to think of themselves, and how to attain greatness. But an education also taught the importance of learning from those who once lived:

> The world's work, the world's experience does not begin with us. We must know what has been done before. We must know the paths our predecessors have trodden, if we would tread them further. We must stand upon their shoulders--dwarfs upon the shoulders of giants--if we would look farther into the future than they. Science, philosophy, statesmenship, can not for a moment let go of the past.

Morality, individuality, and striving for greatness, were popular themes throughout each of Jordan's speeches. Higher education was the path to learning about these things, but only to a certain degree. "A college cannot," Jordan says, "take the place of a parent. To claim that it does so, is a mere pretense. It can cure the boy of petty vices and childish trickery only by making him a man, by giving him higher ideals, more serious views of life."

What are those "more serious views of life"? Jordan explains:

> It is the noblest mission of all higher education, I believe, to fill the mind of the youth with these enthusiasms, with noble ideas of manhood, of work, of life. It should teach him to feel that life is indeed worth living; and no one who leads a worthy life has ever for a moment doubted this. It should help him to shape his own ambitions as to how a life my be made worthy. It should help him to believe that love, and friendship, and faith, and devotion are things that really exist, and are embodied in men and women. He should learn to know these men and women, whether of the present or the past, and his life will become insensibly fashioned after theirs. He should form plans of his own work for society, for science, for art, for religion. His life may fall far short of what he would make it; but a high ideal must preced any worthy achievement.

That last line echoed through most of Jordan's speeches. He took great care to encourage the younger generation to set their mind to something greater, and giving advice on how to achieve it, says to put their mind to something and let nothing get in the way:

> If you say to yourself, "I will be a naturalist, a traveler, an historian, a statesman, a scholar"; if you never unsay it; if you bend all your powers in that direction, and take advantage of all those aids that help toward your ends, and reject all that do not, you will some time reach your goal. *The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is going.*

Whether someone actually achieved the goal of becoming a naturalist, a traveler, a historian, or a scholar didn't matter. Instead, Jordan made sure to emphasize that it's not the achievements of one's life that make it great, but the aim one takes that does so:

> The value of life is measured by its aim rather than by its achievement. Loftiness of aim is essential to loftiness of spirit. Nothing that is really high can be reached in a short time nor by any easy route. Most men, as men go, aim at low things, and they reach the objects of their ambitions. They have only to move in straight lines to an end clearly visible. Not so with you. You are bound on a quest beyond the limit of your vision. There are mountains to climb, rivers to ford, deserts to cross on your search for the Holy Grail. The end is never in sight.

I slightly disagree with that sentiment. Someone can have the aim to be the first person on Mars but do nothing to achieve it. So as long as their aim is high enough, they can sit on the couch all day playing video games. Clearly, this isn't what Jordan meant when he said, "The value of life is measured by its aim rather than by its achievement," but some may take it to mean that. He reiterates this idea in a different speech saying, "Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for."

Shifting to politics, Jordan believed the changes that were required in the future lay within the people to whom he was speaking:

> In other words, the people will always have as good a government as their intelligence and patriotism deserve, and no better. In the long run, government can be made better only by the improvement of the public opinion on which it rests.

This point interests me greatly. Obviously, I wasn't alive during the 1900s, but it seems like the political actions were much loftier, grandiose, and impactful. Is that because the public of the 1900s *deserved *that type of government? That makes sense to me. If a culture is soft, the government is going to be soft, and vice versa.

One of the things I liked most about reading these speeches is that politics is addressed, but one party isn't favored over another. It was refreshing. In fact, he noticed that the arguments between parties were never about fundamental issues, so he needn't get involved at all.

He did, however, stress that it was the duty of the educated man to keep their respective political parties in check. Ensuring the main thing was kept the main thing was the educated person's responsibility. He often seemed worrisome about the blinders that people wear when they embrace a certain political party. "To be known as an apostle or as the devotee of some special idea", he says, "often prevents a man from learning or growing." This foreshadows something Einstein would say later in his life, which might be my favorite quote of his:

> How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery.\
> -- Einstein

Instead, Jordan encouraged his audience to become citizens of the world. "The good citizen," Jordan says, "is a citizen of the world; itself, as citizenship improves, becoming one vast community, the greatest of all republics." He also made a stark warning to disregard your party if they start to run astray:

> It is not your duty to join yourself to organizations which can take away any part of your freedom. It is not your duty to vote the ticket of my party, nor of your party, nor that of any one of the time-honored political organizations into which men naturally fall. For you and I know that the questions which divide the great parties of a free country are not, as a rule, questions of morals or good citizenship. The sheep are never all on one side, nor the goats on the other. Party divisions are based, for the most part, on hereditary tenden-cies, on present expediencies, and hopes of temporary gain, and too often on the distribution of power and plunder, of power to plunder.
>
> When your party is led by bad men, or when its course is headed in the wrong direction, your State expects you as educated men to know it.

Tolerance, for other people's ideas, worldviews, and opinions, Jordan believed, was one measure of a good civilization. "The degree of tolerance," he remarks, "which is shown by any people toward those whose opinions differ from their own is one of the best tests of civilization." Continuing, he adds how important it is that the degree of tolerance continues to grow:

> The growth of tolerance is one of the most important phases in the history of modern civilization. The right of freedom of the mind, the right of private interpretation, is a birthright of humanity. As the scholar has taken a noble part in the struggle which has won for us this freedom, so should he guard it in the future as one of his highest possessions. It is each man's right to sew his own pathway toward the truth. If there be in this country a town, North, South, East, West, on the banks of the Yazoo, or the Hudson, or the Sacramento, where an honest man cannot speak his honest mind without risk of violence or of social ostracism, in that town our freedom is but slavery still, and our civilization but a barbarism thinly disguised.

May we be people who join an open mind, heart, and ears with a closed mouth as we continue to rise each day and set out on this mysterious journey called life. May we be people who keep studying the lives of those who once lived and let them teach us how to live today, forever.

David Starr Jordan on Life, Education, and Politics

## Impressions
Though *The Washington Post* touted this book as "The most fully faceted portrait of Hemingway now available", I was unimpressed. The content of the book is detailed, but the writing was rigid. Facts about Ernest's life were written out in a matter-of-fact manner. The stories told, though few, lacked drama or failed to engage one’s imagination. Letters were mentioned and quoted, but you never saw them shown in full detail. I learned more about Hemingway's obsession with bullfighting than I did about his writing habits or philosophy, spare the mention of the *Kansas City Star* writing guide (mentioned below in the notes). I suppose that's what people want though. They want *the man and life behind* the writing, not the writing. I think it’s a well-written book, it just was not what I was expecting and hoping for.

It was also assumed you've read (and memorized) all of Hemingway's works. A plot in a story was mentioned and I'd have to Google what the book was about or how the character acted because it was never explained. A new person in Hemingway's life would be introduced and a passing reference would be made to how they would later become *character X* in one of his novels, but that was it. There was no further commentary about how, or why, or anything.

I’m always hesitant to say any work of art is “bad.” All I can think about is the time and energy the creator put into the piece, and then imagining them reading a review (like I really even matter as a reviewer) saying it’s bad. No work is ever really bad, sometimes it’s just not what we expect, or not something we like. And that’s okay. Because with the 7 billion people in the world, I’m sure lots would love this book. I’m just one of the few who didn’t.

However, I did learn interesting details about the Hemingway-Paris-writers era, which I've long been enchanted by. I closed the book with a fuller understanding of the man who called himself Ernest than I did when I opened it, which is what you hope for when you read a biography. A phrase that might sum up his life: *don't meet your heroes, kid.*

## Notes
- Ernest's grandmother told him that the only regrets she had in life were the things that she hadn't done.
- If you make something easy and fun, you're more likely to do it. Ernest, early on in his writing career, wrote short humorous stories for the school newspaper.
- Jazz, at the time of Ernest's upbringing was shifting to mean the music it refers to now, from a word that originally meant sexual intercourse.
- Ernest's first real writing job was at the *Kansas City Star*. There, he would start to adopt the infamous style he would use throughout his life, thanks to a document The Star provided all of their new writers. Ernest later said the document was, "the best rules I've ever learned for the business of writing. I've never forgotten them." This guide contained rules like "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." It also had rules for describing news events. One such rule was to never write anyone was "seriously injured" because all injuries were serious. It also said to avoid adjectives. Words like "gorgeous," "grand," or "marvelous" were not to be used. Ernest said, "[No writer] can fail to write well if he abides by [those rules]."
- Ernest knew it wasn't important enough just to write, but that the writer had to "push the envelope, engage in nothing less than literary revolution, or, in the famous words of Ezra Pound, 'make it new.'"
- Hadley, Ernest's first wife, used a cool analogy when answering whether or not being engaged was the greatest time in her life. She said it wasn't–and that the best things are yet to come. But she compared it to "the difference between studying the sun thru astronomical methods & simply and joyously living in a country saturated by light."
- Ernest would "try to write one true sentence, he vowed in the early days of Paris. He would avoid adjectives. He would work on the iceberg principle, meaning that if the writer knew much more than what actually made its way into the story, or the part of the iceberg that is below the water, and wrote in the right fashion, what was unseen would inform the story, the part that was above water, without the writer voicing it. Writing was a craft, and it had rules, which, if they had to be reduced to a single concept, dictated that the writer be genuine."
- I didn't know this, but early in his career, Ernest would have to battle a stereotype that male writers weren't serious, or that writing, even as a career, was a very feminine practice.
- **In response to his mother's comments about the content of his writings, Ernest replied, "I know what I'm doing and it doesn't make any difference either way what anybody says about it. Naturally, it is nice to have people like it. But it is inside yourself that you have to judge...You have to be your own worst critic."**
- "Ultimately, I suppose, one must judge the degree of one's love for a person by the hush and the emptiness that descends on the day–after the departure." - This was a quote from Gerald Murphy. He and his wife had become good friends with the Fitzgeralds and wrote that in a letter after their leaving.
 - Don't use "something or other" or "etc." in your writing. If you don't want to tell, why bother using three words to say that? #writing-advice
 - "Something permanent being ended for something passing", was a phrase Hadley used to describe Ernest and Pauline, his second wife's love before they had split. I think it's a cool phrase to use.


Ernest Hemingway by Mary V. Dearborn

From a 1955 article written by von Neumann titled, "[Can We Survive Technology?](http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf)"

> What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day --- or perhaps year-to-year --- opportunistic measures, along sequence of small, correct decisions. And this is not surprising. After all, the crisis is due to the rapidity of progress, to the probable further acceleration thereof, and to the reaching of certain critical relationships. Specifically, the effects that we are now beginning to produce are of the same order of magnitude as that of "the great globe itself." Indeed, they affect the earth as an entity. Hence further acceleration can no longer be absorbed as in the past by an extension of the area of operations. Under present conditions it is unreasonable to expect a novel cure-all. For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment [...]
>
> The one solid fact is that the difficulties are due to an evolution that, while useful and constructive, is also dangerous. Can we produce the required adjustments with the necessary speed? The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been subjected to similar tests before and seems to have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble. To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable. We can specify only the human qualities required:\
> patience, flexibility, intelligence.

This sounds an awful lot like what AI Alignment has been trying to do. Granted, as [Scott Alexander notes in a book review](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future?utm_medium=email) of von Neumann's biography:

> This sounds suspiciously like the smartest man in the world admitting he's not sure what to do.


John von Neumann on how to safely progress with technology

## Impressions
I could not have been happier with the few hours I spent reading this book. How da Vinci's life ebbs and flows through his curiosity is a whirlwind of unbelievable stories. This book encouraged me to do two things:

1.) **Write more on physical paper.** Isaacson explained how much easier it was to piece parts of da Vinci's life together because most of his journals were still around, unlike most of Steve Job's writing.

2.) **Continue to be unashamedly curious.** Da Vinci wrote down things like "describe the tongue of a woodpecker" in his notebook multiple times. Some of the research was for a painting, but most of it was to soothe his insatiable curiosity. I aim to do the same.

## Takeaways
-  da Vinci's goal in life, through his practice of art and study of science, was no less than to know "everything there was to know about the world."
- Kenneth Clark called da Vinci "the most relentlessly curious man in history."
- He didn't have any traditional education and learning with art, science, or math. Some people would use this as a crutch against him, saying he didn't really know what he was talking about. But he famously whipped back saying what he does doesn't require words, it requires experience. So, Leonardo became a disciple of experience early on. As he got more curious, he learned to use others books and advice better to blend with his experience for the ultimate learning machine. He wrote in a notebook, "He who has access to the fountain does not go to the water jar." Isaacson went on to write, "This makes him different from the archetypal Renaissance Man, who embraced the rebirth of wisdom that came from rediscovered works of classical antiquity." Eventually, though, he realized that **knowledge is a mix between acquired wisdom and life experience.**
- The leading thinkers of Florence "embraced a Renaissance humanity that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge."
- Leonardo's only formal education was through an abacus school, where he learned useful math skills for commerce. One skill that was emphasized mainly was how to draw analogies between cases. "Analogies and spotting patterns became for him a rudimentary method of theorizing."
- As a left-hander, da Vinci wrote from right to left on a page and each letter was facing backwards. Often, they had to be read with a mirror. (p. 32)
- One defining method of his works in art is the realistic appearance of light and shadows. He observed greatly how things *should* look in real life and then figured out a way to make that happen on a canvas. But, he never let the realities limit his imagination of what was able to be accomplished in a painting. Reality informed his paintings, but it *never* constrained them.
- A sometimes surprising fact of the life of Leonardo is that he started many, many more works than he actually finished. He was a great artist, but a horrible business man. A hypothesis as to why this is was that his ideas were so close to reality, they could never be pulled off to the degree of perfection Leonardo expected of himself. So he got as far as he could on some paintings and then just stopped. Another reason this happened was because what could be excited Leonardo much more than what was. He got so excited about an idea when he thought of it that he abandoned everything else he was working on. This cycle just continued. 'He was a genius undisciplined by diligence.' He was afraid to call a painting completed, for he knew he would learn something new eventually that would make the piece better.
- da Vinci was not motivated at all by wealth or luxury. In one of his notebooks he wrote, "men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind."
- da Vinci's *Virtuvian Man* was birthed from a treatise written by Virtruvius, a Roman military officer and engineer from the first century B.C. What his work did for Leonardo was that it gave a concrete example of the Renaissance humanism: "the relationship between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the earth" p.149
- da Vinci, unlike Einstein, struggled with theory, thought experiments, and abstract concepts. He preferred to look at the effects of something and deduce the cause instead of knowing the case and thinking about what effects it may have.
- da Vinci started to work on many problems that he could, and we haven't still, solved. But he showed there is at least a value to trying because even if we may never know how to solve them, it's important to understand why we wouldn't.
	- Lots of examples in page 199 of da Vinci creating something years before it became mainstream. And another on p.272
- Mastery requires focusing intently on the little details.
- Contrary to popular belief, Leonardo was not an individual artist working like a mad genius in his workshop. Instead, he would devise a painting and his assistants worked on it with him to make multiple copies. Sometimes they were duplicates. Other times, though, they were identical in message but differed in form.
- Leonardo thought through sketching. It's a process called "componimento inculto" - an uncultivated composition that helps work out ideas through an intuitive process.
- "America" is named so after Amerigo Vespucci, cousin of Agostino Vespucci, who landed in Brazil with Columbus during his third voyage and correctly surmised they had graced a new continent. #idea
- Leonardo magically transformed "complexity into elegance" through his anatomical drawings. Similarly, great writers are able to magically transform complex subjects, ideas, and philosophies into a beautiful elegance.

<Subscribe />

## Quotes
- His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive.
- Yes, he was a genius: wildly imaginative, passionately curious, and creative across multiple disciplines. His genius was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation.
- Leonardo: curious, passionate, and always filled with wonder.
- I [Isaacson] did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.
- Like so many writers and artists, da Vinci grew up feeling a part of the world but also detached.
- Florence's festive culture was spiced by the ability to inspire those with creative minds to combine ideas from disparate disciplines.
- There was harmony in proportions, and math was nature's brushstroke.
- "Movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body."
- "Pleasure and pain are represented as twins, because there is never one without the other." - Leonardo
- Leonardo's *Vitruvian Man* embodies a moment when art and science combined to allow mortal minds to probe timeless questions about who we are and how we fit into the grand order of the universe.
- Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously.
- da Vinci's "uncanny abilities to engage in a dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understanding."
- "His curiosity, like that of Einstein, often was about phenomena that most people over the age of ten no longer puzzle about."
- "If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory."
- "As with his study of the flight of birds, Leonardo went from seeking knowledge that could be of practical use and began seeking knowledge for its own sake, out of pure curiosity and joy."
- "Leonardo wove an argument that was integral to understanding his genius: that true creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy."
- "Men of loft 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." - da Vinci
- "We should put aside our romantic image of the artist alone in his studio creating works of genius. Instead, Leonardo's studio was like a shop in which he devised a painting and his assistants worked with him to make multiple copies."
- On being so obsessed with something else: "In truth, his mathematical experiments have absorbed his thoughts so entirely that he cannot bear the sight of a paintbrush."
- "Sometimes fantasies are paths to realities."
- "Although at times he was irresolute and willing to abandon tasks, his powerful curiosity tended to overcome any hesitations when it came to exploring nature's wonders."
- Leonardo: "Though human ingenuity make make various inventions it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous."
- "Leonardo wanted to accumulate knowledge for his own sake and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history." Perhaps that is what made his knowledge and curiosity so "out-of-this-world-like"
- "There is something nice about leaving a little to our imagination. As he knew, the outlines of reality are inherently blurry, leaving a hint of uncertainty that we should embrace. The best way to approach his life is the way he approached the world: filled with a sense of curiosity and an appreciation for its infinite wonders."

## Stories
- An example of his relentless perfectionism can be seen be examining *St. Jerome in the Wilderness.* This painting was done in two phases: the first being in 1480 when he started and the second being in 1510. Under infared analysis of the painting, there were dual neck muscles and other parts added in 1510 that were not part of the original drawing. The muscles and parts added seem to align with the anatomical discoveries da Vinci was making through his autopsys.
- When da Vinci wanted to paint something, he would think about what type of social setting and emotion the piece would represent. When he determined the answer, he would go to places that held that type of emotion and observed people's faces, manners, and dresses, and gestures. Then, "he noted it in a little book which he was always carrying in his belt."
- One notebook page from about 1490 was deemed Leonardo's "theme sheet." It had various drawings, doodles, and sketches of many of the different interests that da Vinci thought of or wanted to think of. (p. 109)
- da Vinci predicted the scientific method, writing, "Before you make a general rule of this case, test it two or three times and observe whether the tests produce the same effects."
- p.438 - Great story about being open minded and willing to change his mind. He thought that springs of the earth, just like blood in the body, is somehow pumped from lower areas to higher. How else could water get up into mountain springs? He was convinced of that explanation, but eventually abandoned it. He realized the water there is from evaporation getting soaked into clouds and then raining.
- Many of Leonardo's paintings were lost or never finished, so there is a lot of mystery and allure around them. For one painting in particular, *Saint Anne* there were three or versions that were circulated. As historians tried to understand which came first to help paint a timeline of his life, they assumed Leonardo began one version of *Saint Anne* in 1501, then changed his mind and drew it a different way. He then changed his mind again to paint something that closely resembled the original sketch from 1501. This was the consensus until, in 2005, a note by Agostino Vespucci was found in a book by Cicero that he was reading. The passage in the book said something along the lines of a painter perfect the head and bust of Venus. Vespucci's comment in the margin was "So Leonardo da Vinci does in all his paintings, such as the head of Lisa del Giocondo, and Anne Mother of the Virgin." From this, we are able to assume he had begun working on the *Mona Lisa* and the final painting of *Saint Anne* in 1503.
- Michaelangelo and Leonardo were rivals. However, people commissioned Leonardo for one style of work and Michaelangelo for another. This is why its important to create things in a style that suits you and not follow the crowd. Eventually, someone will see the need for your style.


Leonardo da Vinci

Sitting around a campfire listening to stories passed on from generations brings with it a feeling of wonder and joy for the adventures told from long ago.

Each one of these stories is special on its own and they could never be told in a *bad* way.

But you reach another level of captivation when someone who is a great storyteller holds the talking stick and their vocal cords rumble.

Each word lingers in your mind as you anticipate the next set of syllables, waiting to laugh, to cry, and to love. It's a whole new experience.

This is how I felt reading [*What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OA6KIS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Richard Feynman. I have a deep admiration for Feynman's beliefs on life, knowledge, and science, but that admiration went deeper still as I followed the stories of his life told by the man himself.

## Feynman, You Sexist Pig!

Shortly after giving lectures at CalTech, Feynman was accused of being anti-women because of two stories he told to illustrate different points in his *Feynman Lectures on Physics*. In response to the letter he received, Feynman wrote, "Don't bug me man!" and sent it off.

About a year later, he was in San Francisco receiving an award he was given from writing those books, but not all was well. A group of protesters were in front of the lecture hall giving out flyers with black, large letters titled, "FEYNMAN SEXIST PIG!"

As he started his talk, he addressed the protestor's:

> I'm sorry that my short answer to your letter brought you here unnecessarily. There are more serious places to direct one's attention towards improving the status of women in physics than these relatively trivial mistakes–if that's what you want to call them–in a textbook. But perhaps, after all, it's good that you came. For women do indeed suffer from prejudice and discrimination in physics, and your presence here today serves to remind us of these difficulties and the need to remedy them.

> Even though the American Association Physics Teachers has given me an award for teaching, I must confess I don't know how to teach. Therefore, I have nothing to say about teaching. Instead, I would like to talk about something that will be especially interesting to the women in the audience: I would like to talk about the structure of the proton. 

Handled with grace and care.

## Infinite numbers

Richard Feynman was an "uncle" to several of his physicist's kids. One such nephew was Henry Bethe, son of Hans Bethe who was a 1967 Nobel Prize winner. After the passing of Feynman, Henry sent a letter to Feynman's wife retelling a magnificent story that illustrates Feynman's playful attitude and ability to simplify the complex. Henry recalls:

Dick [Feynman] turned to me and said, "Did you know that there are twice as many numbers as numbers?"

"No there are not!" Henry quipped back.

But Feynman wouldn't give up, insisting that Henry name a number.

> "One million" A big number to start.
> 
> "Two million."
>
>
>"Twenty-seven."
>
>"Fifty-four."
>
>I named about ten more numbers and each time Dick names the number twice as big. Light dawned.
>
> "I see; so there are three times as many numbers as numbers"
>
"Prove it," said Uncle Dick. He named a number. I named one three times as big. He tried another. I did it again. Again.
He named a number too complicated for me to multiply in my head. "Three times that," I said.
>
> "So, is there a biggest number?" he asked.
>
> "No." I replied. "Because for every number, there is one twice as big, one three times as big. There is even one a million times as big"
>
> "Right, and that concept of increase without limit, of no biggest number, is called 'infinity'."

## Running around

After the space shuttle *Challenger* exploded, Feynman got a call asking to be apart of a committee to investigate the accident. When he heard the job would be in Washington, Feynman had an immediate hesitancy to accept the role. His biggest question was–"*how am I going to get out of this?*"

Luckily, though, he didn't make that decision on his own. He called on numerous colleagues and mentors for advice, but the one that was most helpful came from his dear wife:

> "Look I said." "Anybody could do it. They can get somebody else."

> "No," said Gweneth. "If you don't do it, there will be twelve people, all in a group, going around from place to place together. But if you join the commission, there will be eleven people–all in a group, going around from place to place together–while the twelfth one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won't be anything, but if there is, you'll find it." She said, "There isn't anyone else who can do that like you can."
>
> Being very immodest, I believed her.

Adventures of a Curious Richard Feynman

Kevin Kelly, who arguably has written one of the most influential essays regarding the internet and the creator economy, "[1,000 True Fans](https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/)", published "103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known" on his 70th birthday. In the simple article, he gives practical advice, philosophical quips, and everything in between. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it when it came out. So much so, I printed it out and annotated bits I loved and wanted to go deeper on.

To my luck, *Freakonomics* published an interview with him asking about that specific essay. Kelly was able to provide more context on his answers and share a few stories. The following comes from that interview.

---

One of the pieces of advice observe, very factually, that "ninety percent of everything, is crap." Kelly goes on to encourage the reader to, if they find something they don't like, just try finding the ten percent that is actually good. But how to find that ten percent was left as a mystery, until now. Stephen Dubner, the host of *Freakonomics* asked him for his advice on finding the "'non-crap' 10 percent":

> I have to say, this one I’m talking to myself because I often get very impatient. So, the only bit of advice for me is to keep returning to it with as much grace and open-mindedness as possible because nine times out of ten you’re going to be very disappointed. So why are you going to go back the tenth time? Of course, life is limited. We can’t try all the stuff that we don’t like. But when I have a chance and it’s not too difficult, I’ll give things a second or third or fourth chance. And occasionally, I do change my mind and it’s like, “Wow, I’m glad that I pursued that because I didn’t see it in the beginning.”

![KK 2](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/6Dlvh9t1OYyyGdcu3zj99p/c7bc5ef7918a136aa7515df610ebefd9/KK_2.png)

Dubner [cited research](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/03/30/open-season-2) that showed when people approach the ages of 30 or 40, they typically are set in the ways of the food they eat and the things they do. Trying new things just isn't much of an idea as you get older. Fortunately, Kelly had some simple advice to staying more fluid as one ages:

> Don’t sit in the same chair every night. I deliberately try not to do that at the table, to make sure I don’t get into these ruts. And I ask my kids to make me a playlist for birthday presents. Give me all the music you’re listening to as a way to hear new things and see if I can get into it. When you go out to eat, order your favorite thing, and then order something you’ve never ordered before. I think it has to be a very deliberate thing. It doesn’t really come easy.

Another bit of advice has to do with the appreciation of luck: "Ask anyone you admire, their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone." Kelly expanded on his reasoning for including this:

> I have very little patience with particularly successful people who don’t acknowledge the luck. And if I have gained any knowledge or wisdom over time, it is my increasing realization and admittance that I am the product of luck. There is just no way around it. But having said that, I think you can still choose luck. I have to say this very carefully, in the sense that there are people who are luckier than others, and it’s not because of how they were born. I think there are probably different species of luck. The little bit I’ve read about luck is that people who have decided that they’re lucky are luckier. And so lucky people are expecting to be lucky, and that expectation is self-fulfilling. It’s kind of like that increasing returns — it’s because I have been lucky, I expect to be lucky, and therefore I am going to be luckier. In the same way, if you decide that you’re an unlucky person, you’re not going to be lucky. And that’s also been proven.

![KK3 -01](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/3qE9UddGwZIb4lmfGcov35/0ecae2091ef8adb9a52593890a1db2db/KK3_-01.png)

One of the more practical pieces of advice refers to why your parents probably walked so slowly through museums or monuments, when you just wanted to get to the ice cream: "Always read the plaque next to the monument." His answer to this one seemed personal. It was like he really cared about it because he had learned so much from reading plaques and wants others to experience that joy:

> I was hiking in the Cotswolds just this week, and there was a plaque about a nuclear bunker that we’d walked past and had no idea what it was, or that it was even there. And then there was a plaque for a site that turned out to be a burial mound that they believe is older than the pyramids. There’s always a story about something. And it’s not evident or obvious, and it will always enrich your lives. And there’s a courtesy in the plaque saying, “Hey, I’m pretty interesting. You just spend one minute here, and I’ll tell you. I’ll let you in on the secret.” And then you do it and you say, “Thank you, plaque. That was amazing. I’m so glad you stood there all that time.”

Clearly, Kelly is a thoughtful guy and seems to spend more time than the rest thinking–about life, about living, and about everything in between. Actively *thinking* about the problems were facing–not panicking to solve them–will do us all well. This is what Kelly has to say about spending time in reflection and thinking:

> I think you kind of almost veered onto Alfred Whitehead’s [definition](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41568/41568-pdf.pdf) of civilization, which was that civilization advanced to the degree which we didn’t have to think about other things. So instead of having to think about where am I going to get enough food to eat, we could think about some other things because we have a system called civilization that provides all the food that we need and more. So I think what I would see over time is us switching where we spend time with our attention and our thinking, up the Maslow hierarchy, away from basic things about survival and shelter, maybe away from just generic things about having a job and being occupied to higher level things of self-realization in the larger sense of not just our own individual self-realization, but where we’re going as a society, as a collective species.
>
> And we have collectively a very difficult assignment, which is, who do we want to be as humans? What do we want humans to be? And one of the reasons why I’m really keen on artificial intelligence is that we’re going to use A.I. to help us answer this question of what do we want humans to be. Because we’re going to be giving them lots of things that we thought we were about and realizing they can do that. And I think this larger identity problem of not just who am I as an individual, but who am I as a human, is where we’ll spend more time. And as we go on, I think this kind of identity crisis, not just on an individual level, but as a collective level, becomes more and more of the conversation.

His article that spawned this interview is a delight to read and I think more people should attempt to publish something similar. I have a doc called "My Life Thesis," where I record principles I want to live by. Most of them I hear from someone on a podcast or read about in a book, but some I've deduced myself–it's quite a lovely experience when this happens.

This type of essay is important because it's likely you have some bits of advice you live by, whether you do so consciously or not. Extracting the pure insight of those bits of advice into one or two sentences helps solidify the lesson and make it more tangible. You likely have much more insight in that little head of yours than you think you do. How much more interesting would the world be if we shared it all?


Kevin Kelly's 103 Bits of Advice, Expanded

Sitting around a campfire listening to stories passed on from generations brings with it a feeling of wonder and joy for the adventures told from long ago.

Each one of these stories is special on its own and they could never be told in a *bad* way.

But you reach another level of captivation when someone who is a great storyteller holds the talking stick and their vocal cords rumble.

Each word lingers in your mind as you anticipate the next set of syllables, waiting to laugh, to cry, and to love. It's a whole new experience.

This is how I felt reading [*What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OA6KIS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Richard Feynman. I have a deep admiration for Feynman's beliefs on life, knowledge, and science, but that admiration went deeper still as I followed the stories of his life told by the man himself.

Feynman, You Sexist Pig!
------------------------

Shortly after giving lectures at CalTech, Feynman was accused of being anti-women because of two stories he told to illustrate different points in his *Feynman Lectures on Physics*. In response to the letter he received, Feynman wrote, "Don't bug me man!" and sent it off.

About a year later, he was in San Francisco receiving an award he was given from writing those books, but not all was well. A group of protesters were in front of the lecture hall giving out flyers with black, large letters titled, "FEYNMAN SEXIST PIG!"

As he started his talk, he addressed the protestor's:

> I'm sorry that my short answer to your letter brought you here unnecessarily. There are more serious places to direct one's attention towards improving the status of women in physics than these relatively trivial mistakes--if that's what you want to call them--in a textbook. But perhaps, after all, it's good that you came. For women do indeed suffer from prejudice and discrimination in physics, and your presence here today serves to remind us of these difficulties and the need to remedy them.
>
> Even though the American Association Physics Teachers has given me an award for teaching, I must confess I don't know how to teach. Therefore, I have nothing to say about teaching. Instead, I would like to talk about something that will be especially interesting to the women in the audience: I would like to talk about the structure of the proton.

Handled with grace and care.

Infinite numbers
----------------

Richard Feynman was an "uncle" to several of his physicist's kids. One such nephew was Henry Bethe, son of Hans Bethe who was a 1967 Nobel Prize winner. After the passing of Feynman, Henry sent a letter to Feynman's wife retelling a magnificent story that illustrates Feynman's playful attitude and ability to simplify the complex. Henry recalls:

Dick [Feynman] turned to me and said, "Did you know that there are twice as many numbers as numbers?"

"No there are not!" Henry quipped back.

But Feynman wouldn't give up, insisting that Henry name a number.

> "One million" A big number to start.
>
> "Two million."
>
> "Twenty-seven."
>
> "Fifty-four."
>
> I named about ten more numbers and each time Dick names the number twice as big. Light dawned.
>
> "I see; so there are three times as many numbers as numbers"
>
> "Prove it," said Uncle Dick. He named a number. I named one three times as big. He tried another. I did it again. Again. He named a number too complicated for me to multiply in my head. "Three times that," I said.
>
>


What Do You Care What Other People Think? By Richard Feynman

## Impressions

*[Leadership](https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Six-Studies-World-Strategy/dp/0593489446/ref=asc_df_0593489446/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=532660552781&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15035015911338731310&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9032520&hvtargid=pla-1411574914459&psc=1)* by Henry Kissinger profiled six leaders who led during a dramatic half-century. The leaders in this book influenced the world that followed the two colossal world wars that engulfed Europe and its allies. Their duties included reorganizing collapsing governments, cities, and countries; humbly accepting defeat and enduring global embarrassment; attempting to create global peace; and much more. These leaders struggled to create long term policies when everything that came before was focused on the immediate.

Kissinger's own experience with each of the leaders made this book all the more interesting. There was plenty of research and due diligence from Kissinger that profiled each subject well, but each chapter ended with Kissinger's reflections and lessons from the personal relationships he maintained with each statesmen. I didn't know that when I started reading it and it was a welcomed surprise. For some reason, these interactions made each subject more personal and real, not just someone whose name is in the history books a few times.

## Practical lessons

- **If you want to have respect in the world, live by principle and not by slogans, pressure, or persuasion**. In a discussion on the qualities of strong leadership, Konrad Adenauer cautioned Kissinger to 'never confuse energy with strength.'

- **Be cautious of whom you show incompetence to, or why you say something can't be done.** "Young man," Eisenhower said to Kissinger, "Never tell anyone that you are unable to carry out a task entrusted to you."

- The First World War eroded trust in the political elite, after Europe's leaders failed to navigate the oncoming disasters.

- **Keep reading and learning widely.** Each of the leaders profiled in this book "were taught a wide range of subjects, including especially the humanities, as if in preparation for the challenges of leadership, for which a sense of history and the ability to deal with tragedy are indispensable. Above all, they received an education which would help them to understand the world, the psychology of others and themselves."

- **Attain 'deep literacy'.** Defined by Adam Garfinkle as '[engaging with] an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning.' "Ubiquitous and penetrating, yet invisible," Kissinger writes, "deep literacy was the 'background radiation' of the period in which the six leaders profiled in this book come of age." He wrote also, "Intense reading can help leaders cultivate the mental distance from external stimuli and personalities that sustains a sense of proportion. When combined with reflection and the training of memory, it also provides a storehouse of detailed and granular knowledge from which leaders can reason analogically...Books record the deeds of leaders who once dared greatly, as well as those who dared too much, as a warning."

- **Discipline (self-mastery) and the ability to take the long view are two essential attributes of great leaders.** This is helpful to know for myself, but also be wary of the opposite in leaders I'm following. If a leader is constantly falling prey to their desires, not doing what they said they would, or constantly looking for short-term wins, Dalton beware.

- **Be direct. Don't be afraid to tell hard truths.** 'Who do you think lost the war?' Adenauer famously said to his fellow members of parliament after they were complaining about the rule and reign of the Allied powers in postwar Germany.

- **Be in tune with reality, but have a guiding vision** Kissinger writes, "Mediocre leaders are unable to distinguish between the significant from the ordinary; they tend to be overwhelmed by the inexorable aspect of history." They are able to identify the essential elements of their state and determine which are necessary, which must be improved, and which must be forgotten.

- **Be bold.** When faced with important decisions, especially with unfavorable conditions, each leader did what had to be done. Thatcher, under doubt from experts and facing an economic crisis, sent a Royal Navy Task Force to recover the Falkland Islands from Argentina. De Gaulle's attitude with France was to act like it was much bigger, more unified, and much more confident than it actually was.

- **Continue with the practice of solitude** Sadat, in prison, initiated his reflective habits. Adenauer followed suit in a monastery as he was in exile. Thatcher made some of the most important decisions while she was reviewing her papers, early in the morning.

- **Paradoxically, they embraced divisiveness. Some divisiveness is okay.** Each leader, rightly so, wanted their people to follow on the path that they lead. Naturally, not everyone would follow. But that's okay. They weren't looking for consensus. Naturally, tension was to follow. When de Gaulle appeared in Paris to meet with members of the French defense establishment, a soldier told Kissinger, "whenever he appears, he divides the country." Kissinger writes, "A leader does not undertake fundamental economic reforms as Thatcher did, or seek peace with historic adversaries as Sadat, or build a successful mutliethnic society from the ground up as Lee, without offending entrenched interests and alienating important constituencies." He continues, "Both during their years in government and afterwards, not everyone admired these six leaders or subscribed to their policies. In each case, they faced resistance–often carried out for honorable motives and sometimes by distinguished opposing figures. Such is the price of making history."

- **Be virtuous** James Q. Wilson defines virtue as, "habits of moderate action; more specifically, acting with due restraint on one's impulses, due regard for the rights of others, and reasonable concern for distant consequences." #quote  Kissinger writes, "Good character does not assure worldly success or triumph, but it does provide firm grounding in victory and consolation in failure."

## Notes

- Any and all systems are in transit between and must balance the effects of a past that forms its memory and a vision of the future that inspires its evolution.

- The vital attributes of leadership are courage and character: courage to make decisions among a set of complex and difficult options and character to continue on that course where the benefits and dangers are not fully realized yet.

- Leaders operate in scarcity, for every situation has certain limitations placed upon it. They operate in time, for each era will have different values and habits that form the eventual outcome. They also operate in competition, with their allies and those they are up against. They also have to make judgements based on intuitions and hypotheses that cannot be proven at the time of a decision.

- Different times call for a different style of leadership, these can be classified as a statesman and a prophet. The statesman understands that one of their tasks is to preserve their society by changing their circumstances rather than be overwhelmed by them. They also must balance an exciting vision with a tough of wariness. Statesmen are suspicious of those who personalize policy, because throughout history, many rules and reigns rooted in personality have come down. The second type of leader, the visionary prophet seeks to erase the past. They are suspicious of anything that's gradual because they seek to upheave the past.

- Konrad Adenauer's strategy to rebuild Germany as an equal with the rest of the powers was composed of four elements: accepting the consequences of defeat; regaining the confidence of the victors; building a democratic society; and creating a European federation that would transcend the historic divisions of Europe.

- His embracing of the humility of the Allies to "babysit" Germany was his plan to turn submission of the rules into a virtue, and he realized that a temporary inequality of conditions was a necessary precursor to equality of status.

- He said, "We cannot and must not assume that with the others there has occurred suddenly a complete change in mood toward Germany, but instead trust can only be recovered slowly, bit by bit."

- To whom can I confide/the secrets of my soul and the cares of my life?

 - De Gaulle's authority rested in his innate sense of personal confidence and an unshakeable faith in France and its history.

  - De Gaulle proclaimed something to be so, and so it was so. He persuaded his people through the creation of a political reality by a sheer force of will.

  - "One must become a man of character. The best way to succeed in action is to know how to dominate oneself perpetually."

- Three principles from Nixon's time in office would benefit the US:

	- The centrality of national interest

	- The maintenance of a global equilibrium

	- The creation of sustained and intense discussions among major countries to construct a framework of legitimacy within which the balance of power can be defined and observed.

- Sadat's tendency toward solitude endowed him with insight and independent thought but also marked him as a loner. Though he had been in the highest echelons of Egyptian power, no one really trusted him when he took over from Nasser because he never stepped into the limelight.

- In 1973, twice Sadat faked-out the Israeli army, causing them to mobilize at great expense. On the third time, Sadat actually struck, this time facing no Israeli reinforcements because, says Israel's then-defense minister that Sadat, "made me do it twice, at a cost of ten million dollars each time. So, when it was the third time around I thought he wasn't serious. But he tricked me!"

## Quotes

- Leadership is needed to help people reach from where they are to where they have never been and, sometimes, can scarcely imagine going.

- Leaders think and act at the intersection of two axes: the first, between the past and the future; the second, between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead.

- Ordinary leaders seek to manage the immediate; great ones attempt to raise their society to their visions.

- "...what seems inevitable becomes so by human agency."

- Great leadership is more than an evocation of transitory exultation; it requires the capacity to inspire and to sustain vision over time.

- Something is amiss when the relationship between the leadership class and much of the public is defined by mutual hostility and suspicion.

- "Intense reading can help leaders cultivate the mental distance from external stimuli and personalities that sustains a sense of proportion. When combined with reflection and the training of memory, it also provides a storehouse of detailed and granular knowledge from which leaders can reason analogically. More profoundly, books offer a reality that is reasonable, sequential and orderly–a reality that can be mastered, or at least managed, by reflection and planning. And, perhaps, most importantly for leadership, reading creates a 'skein of intergenerational conversation', encouraging learning with a sense of perspective. Finally, reading is a source of inspiration. **Books record the deeds of leaders who once dared greatly, as well as those who dared too much, as a warning.**"

- "For information to be transmitted into something approaching wisdom, it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience."

- "Great leadership results from the collision of the intangible and the malleable, from that which is given and that which is exerted. Scope remains for individual effort–to deepen historical understanding, hone strategy and improve character. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote long ago, 'We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.' It is the role of leaders to help guide that choice and inspire their people in its execution."

## Random Tidbits

- "Study history. Study history," Churchill said, "In history lie all the secrets of statecraft." when asked about how one might prepare for the challenges of leadership in may 1953.

- In prison, Anwar Sadat had undergone a profound transformation. Instead of whittling time away in solitary confinement, he developed what he called 'inner strength.' This was his 'capacity...for change.' He said, "My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place had taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress. "


Leadership by Henry Kissinger

*[The Man From the Future](https://www.amazon.com/Man-Future-Visionary-Life-Neumann-ebook/dp/B098TYZN67?crid=3FM501TO8DIZ6&keywords=The%20Man%20From%20The%20Future&qid=1657608834&sprefix=the%20man%20from%20the%20future,aps,140&sr=8-1&linkCode=sl1&tag=slatestarcode-20&linkId=90b726e6acb3d8ccb1fe7b31e3d3ab21&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl)* explores the life of a time-traveler. Someone who theorized, pondered, and invented tools that would create the lives of some and destroy the lives of many. [Game theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory), quantum mechanics, [The Manhattan Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project), computers, and the [RAND Corporation](https://www.rand.org/) are just some of the many disciplines which von Neumann dabbled. This book explores those wide-reaching fields and the many lives they impacted.

After reading, I want to understand two fields better: game theory and the birth of the computer. I want to understand how to use game theory to demolish friends at Risk and I'd like a complete understanding of how the [ENIAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC) created the [EDVAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDVAC) and how that lead to the modern computer. To that, I shall continue my exploration of the shelves of libraries that holds the wisdom of the world–all for my taking.

## Takeaways/Learnings
- The brilliant Hungarian scientists, who were abundant in the physics and math world of the 20th Century, called themselves The Martians because of their strange accents and exceptional intellects–they must have been born on another planet.
	- It makes me wonder though, *why were there so many brilliant minds from Hungary in the 20th Century and specifically, how were they all working together*?
	- Von Neumann would attribute his generation's success to cultural factors that produced "a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction."

- Orthogonal polynomials are sets of independent mathematical functions that can be added together to make any other.

- Von Neumann was 17 when he shipped his first publication. It investigated the zeroes of Chebyshev polynomials. This is the first time Von Neumann's voice appears and it wouldn't change much. Freeman Dyson notes, "Johnny's unique gift as a mathematician was to transform problems in all areas of mathematics into problems of logic."

- Schrödinger came up with his famous thought experiment because he was trying to illustrate the ridiculousness that was von Neumann's claim of turning everyday objects into those of quantum mechanics.

> "Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my three-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us." – Edward Teller

- When von Neumann was offered a lectureship at Princeton, his arrival was delayed because he had to "fix a family matter." That family matter would be getting married.

- Fabian Waldinger, an economist, analysed the impact of the war on German research. He found that "university science departments that were bombed during the war recovered by the 1960s, but those that had lost their staff remained sub-par well into the 1980s."

- Von Neumann had an act for driving fast. So much so, in fact, that he would buy a new car every year because he had totaled the previous one. He drove a Cadillac because, he would say, "no one would sell me a tank."

- Feynman hated the idea of the Institute for Advanced Study. The idea of the institute was to allow professors to think deeply about hard problems, without the burden of teaching and getting paid handsomely to do so. Feynman thought the whole idea was a shame, saying: "these poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all day by themselves, ok? They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas...Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"

- Von Neumann was an exceptional thinker, but that cost him. His daughter, Marina, said, "Although he genuinely adored my mother, my father's first love in life was thinking, a pursuit that occupied most of his waking hours, and, like many geniuses, he tended to be oblivious to the emotional needs of those around him." His wife, Klari, notes other peculiarities. "A drawer could not be opened unless it was pushed in and out seven times, the same with a light switch, which also had to be flipped seven times because you could let it stay."

- The design for Von Neumann's EDVAC had five distinct parts. The first three were a central arithmetic unit for performing mathematical operations; a central control unit to ensure that instructions were executed in the proper order; and a memory to store the code and numbers. The final components were the input and output units.

- Gleb Watahin once commented to Von Neumann that he was done thinking about mathematics and on to just thinking about bombs. "That is quite wrong, I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers."

- In 1947, Jean Batrik, one of the ENIAC's original operators, was hired to program the EDVAC–"the first time anyone had been employed solely for that task. The job of the computer programmer was born."

	- Von Neumann's wife, Klari, wrote complex Monte Carlo simulation to run on the EDVAC. It was the first truly useful modern program ever to have been executed.

- The birth of the field of Game Theory into the world spung from Von Neumann's urge to find neat mathematical solutions to complicated real-world problems.

> "The task of the perfect strategist is to gain the upper hand with as little effort as possible." – Emmanual Lasker

- Von Neumann boiled games down to a series of events. Some events depended entirely on chance, which he called 'draws'; and other which depend on the "free decision" of the players, which he called 'steps.' Each player's goal in a zero-sum game, is to minimize the amount they can lose while minimizing the amount they can win. This became known as Von Neumann's 'minimax' theory.

> "Any event may be regarded as a game of strategy if one looks at the effect it has on participants" - von Neumann.

- Chess, tic-tac-toe, and other similar games von Neumann calls games of "perfect information" because all the moves are available to every player. Every game of perfect information must end in a win or a draw and there is always only one optimal move for each player at a time.

> "The point of bluffing is not so much that you might win with a bad hand, as that you want to encourage the opposition to bet with middle-range hands when you have a good hand." – Kenneth Binmore

- When formulating a strategy, one always has to account for actions of a completely rational enemy.

- For a machine to copy itself, von Neumann argues three things are required. 1) The machine must have a set of instructions that describe how to build another like it. 2) It must have a construction unit to build new automaton by executing the instructions. 3) Finally, it needs a way to copy the instructions and insert them into the new machine.

- Floccinaucinihilipilification - The habit of regarding something as worthless.

- The first conference dedicated to artificial life was at Los Alamos in September, 1987.

- John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky originally coined the term "artificial intelligence" and founded one of the first labs to study it at MIT in the 1950s.

- Terrified of his own death, von Neumann saw the catholic priest while he was in the hospital. Marina, von Neumann's daughter, said he was thinking of Pascal's wager and had always believed that in the face "of even a small possibility of suffering eternal damnation the only logical course is to be a believer before the end." According to her, von Neumann once told her, "Catholicism was a very rough religion to love in but it was the only one to die in."

- In a page of her unfinished memoirs, von Neumann's longtime wife, Klári writes: "I would like to tell about the man, the strange contradictory and controversial person; childish and good-humored, sophisticated and savage, brilliantly clever yet with a very limited, almost primitive lack of ability to handle his emotions–an enigma of nature that will have to remain unresolved."


The Man From The Future

At 20 years old, Ben Franklin realized most of his life up to that point had just kinda happened to him.

So, he wrote a personal handbook that would guide his every action. This put him on a launch pad to being a great businessman, politician, and more.

This is what it said:

1. Be frugal

> It is necessary for me to be extremely frugal for some time, till I have paid what I owe.

2. Always be truthful

> To endeavor to speak truth in every instance; to give nobody expectations that are not likely to be answered, but aim at sincerity in every word and action — the most amiable excellence in a rational being.

3. Work hard and be patient

> To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of growing suddenly rich; for industry and patience are the surest means of plenty.

4. Forgive quickly and don't hold grudges

> I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth; but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged upon others, and upon proper occasions speak all the good I know of everybody.

Plan for Future Conduct

In 1955, Professor Richard Feynman gave [one of the most famous talks on the importance of science](https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1575/1/Science.pdf). In his address, he listed three ways science is of important value and gave a strong encouragement (and a stark warning) to the future generations of scientists.

![Richard Feynman](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/5alWsn7w7eZkXSoQKFlnQO/db79387ebaf7e17255a304e82c450e1b/1_h0m81hmIfZzPLFTG1pPAeg.jpeg)

## Science allows us to make things

> The first way in which science is of value is familiar to everyone. It is that scientific knowledge enables us to do all kinds of things and to make all kinds of things.

Though most would argue science is mainly good, science in and of itself doesn't promote doing good or bad. It's left to the interpretation of mistake-prone humans to use science in any given way. Naturally, this opens up the door for bad things to be done. But if we want to continue improving, we must be okay with taking that risk.

In his lecture, Feynman tells a story of visiting a Buddhist temple and being told something he never forgot. The man in charge gifted them with a Buddhist proverb:

> To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.

Similarly, science can open the gate to heaven or the gate to hell. "So it is evident that," Feynman expresses, "in spite of the fact that science could produce enormous horror in the world, it is of value because it *can* produce *something*."

## Science is an avenue for intellectual enjoyment
The second reason science is of value is the imagination it sparks in people from reading about it, writing about it, and working on it.

> We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imaginings of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Have you ever considered the the bizarre curiosities in the world? If we put aside  the "where did life come from?" question, there are still many things we don't know about the world. And the things we do now, we wonder how long they've been happening and what purpose they serve!

Perhaps this could be called the *Paradox of Knowledge*. As Feynman alludes to in his lecture, the more things we discover about the world, the more mysterious it seems. Knowledge about the world is like Hydra. For each piece we discover and cross off the list, two more pieces appear. But what's great about humanity, is that these mysteries never deter those with the lab coats. "With pleasure and confidence," Feynman exclaims, "we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries–certainly a grand adventure!"

One of the disappointing things about culture when it gets involved with science,  is that it seems only interested in the use case for a remarkable idea and fails to appreciate the idea in and of itself. I see this happening today with the advancements in AI. [When Dalle-2 was showcased on Twitter recently](https://twitter.com/sama/status/1511724264629678084), the beautiful artwork that was produced based only on a small sentence description was amazing. But it didn't stop the pessimists from saying the all-too-common, "So what?"

Does it matter? Who knows what this could be used for, but let's enjoy the technical advancements right now and see what possibilities it opens up as other technology advances.

## Science makes people comfortable with doubt and uncertainty

> When a scientist doesn't know an answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt... in order to progress, we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt.

Science is a network of people who have ideas and theories. Most people are unsure about their ideas, some people are nearly sure, but none, as Feynman notes, are *absolutely* certain. This is possibly the greatest value of science–it encourages the idea of uncertainty. It ensures people know its okay to be confused and puzzled about something. In fact, not knowing the answer to something is a great place to be because it means you're on the edge of cutting off one head of the hydra only to discover two more.

Marc Andreessen shared a screenshot from an article recently explaining the rationale behind banning certain "misinformation" online. Though he didn't link the source, the screenshot is scary.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="und" dir="ltr">👨‍🍳💋 <a href="https://t.co/n02xsC6ZQx">pic.twitter.com/n02xsC6ZQx</a></p>&mdash; Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) <a href="https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1517687662282387456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 23, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

If we were to ban ideas that "contradict the scientific consensus" in 1543, (Well, [they tried then](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Controversy)) we'd still believe the Earth was at the center of the universe. If we did so in 1905, we might still believe [the ether](https://www.britannica.com/science/ether-theoretical-substance) is real and would never have discovered the theories of General and Special Relativity.

Banning information that goes against the grain is the opposite of one of the most fundamental pillars of science: doubt. Interestingly, Feynman addresses this exact issue:

> It is our responsibility to leave the men of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant; if we suppress all discussion, all criticism, saying, "This is it, boys, man is saved!" and thus doom man for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.

If we want to solve a problem that we have never before solved, we need to be open to solutions and ideas that we've yet to try. To do that, we must encourage doubt and uncertainty to run rampant in scientific fields, and in fact our own life as well, as we try to discover more mysteries of the universe.

## Our responsibility as scientists
Feynman concludes his lecture with a heartfelt encouragement to scientists:

> It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

It's our responsibility as people in 2022 to do the same.

The Value of Science 67 Years Later

In 1925, John von Neumann published one of the first papers introducing "game theory" into popular discourse. In it, he explained that most games are just a series of events. Some of those events depend entirely on chance–which von Neumann calls 'draws'– and others on the decision of a player–what von Neumann calls 'steps.'

Ultimately, he concluded a game, as *[The Man from the Future](https://www.amazon.com/Man-Future-Visionary-Life-Neumann/dp/1324003995)* explains, "could be represented simply as the choice by each player of a single strategy (effectively an amalgam of all the strategies they play in the game), followed by a calculation of their respective payouts that accounts for everyone's choices (and which factors in their luck)." 

But he couldn't get any further in his thinking with multi-player games, so he started thinking about games with two players whose payouts equal 0.

Since there are only two players, one *has* to win and the other *has* to lose. What one person wins is equal to what the other person loses. So if Player A wins $5, then Player B has to have lost $5 somehow. The two payouts, when added together equal 0 (5 + (-5) = 0). Therefore, these games were determined to be *zero-sum*: the sum equals zero.

## Why this matters
The terms "zero-sum" and "positive-sum" are popular in the online world I hang out in. The benefits of the world and the creator economy being "positive-sum" or touted and the mindset that the world is "zero-sum" is negative. I always understood what they meant, but didn't know the background behind them. It turns out, John von Neumann helped birth these terms into the world through his earlier work on game theory.

The paper in which he lays out these terms is the one where he describes his 'minimax' strategy. In our example above, Player B wants to minimize the maximum amount of money they can lose and Player A wants to maximize the minimum amount they can win (called the 'maximin' strategy).

People who are described as having a "zero-sum mindset" are those that don't think there can be multiple winners. They'll do anything they can to climb the ladder or make the sale. They are also usually very jealous of other people's success because in their world, if someone else is winning, that means they're losing.

Though that's not how the world really works, so the world can be described as "positive-sum." There is enough winnings for everyone. Thankfully this is the case, because we're a few million years late to the party.


Where the term 'zero-sum' comes from

One Sentence Summary
--------------------

At all costs, you must be willing to innovate the way you do business and what your company delivers; "Innovate or Die" mentality.

Two Key Takeaways
-----------------

1.  When you innovate, everything has to change, not just the way you deliver a product
2.  Defining long-term priorities (3 or less), sticking to them, and repeating them often will be a sure sign of a successful and coherent organization.

Chapter 1: Starting at the Bottom
---------------------------------

-   "I didn't have a clear idea of what 'success' meant, no specific vision of being wealthy or powerful, but I was determined not to live a life of disappointment.
-   Having dedicated time to think every day is important. Creating space in each day to allow your thoughts to wander beyond your immediate job responsibilities. "I'm certain I'd be less productive and less creative in my work if I didn't also spend those first few hours away from email and text messages."
-   Learning to embrace new technologies, try every new gadget, and break every stale format is critical to a company today. One must have an "Innovate or Die" mentality.
-   "There's no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested."
-   There's a delicate balance between demanding that your people perform, and not instilling a fear of failure in them. That balance is critical to find.
-   "In your work, in your life, you'll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you honestly own up to your mistakes."
-   Be decent to people. Treat everyone with empathy and fairness.
-   "Excellence and fairness do not have to be mutually exclusive." You can be an excellent company, and care about the people you work with and serve.

Chapter 2: Betting on the Talent
--------------------------------

-   "True integrity - a sense of knowing who you are and being guided by your own clear sense of right and wrong - is a kind of secret weapon."
-   "One person's unwillingness to give a timely response can cause so much unnecessary strain and inefficiency."
-   The ability to look at things not as a catastrophe, but as a puzzle to be solved, will drastically shift the way your team approaches the problem.
-   "My instinct throughout my career has always been to say yes to every opportunity."

Chapter 3: Know What You Don't Do (And Trust in What You Do)
------------------------------------------------------------

-   "You can't pretend to be someone you're not or to know something you don't."
-   "Managing creative processes start with the understanding that it's not a science - everything is subjective; there is often no right or wrong."
-   "I'd much rather take big risks and sometimes fail than not take risks at all."
-   "If you want innovation - and you should, always - you need to give permission to fail."

Chapter 4: Enter Disney
-----------------------

-   Don't invest resources and time into your company that will give small returns. It's not worth taking up people's time with.
-   When two leaders have a dysfunction relationship, there's no way that the rest of the company beneath them can be functional.
-   "Managing your own time and respecting others' time is one of the most vital things to do as a manager."
-   When finding yourself in a hopeful situation that it'll work out without being able to explain *how* it'll work out, that's when you need ask clarifying questions.

1.  What's the problem I need to solve?
2.  Does this solution make sense?
3.  If I'm feeling some doubt, why?
4.  Am I doing this for sound reasons or am I motivated by something personal?

Chapter 5: Second In Line
-------------------------

-   Don't let ambition to get too far ahead of opportunity
-   Do the job you have well. Be patient. Look for opportunities to pitch in and expand and grow. Make yourself one of the people, through attitude and energy and focus, that your bosses feel they have to turn to when an opportunity arises.
-   "Good leadership isn't about being indispensable; it's about helping others be prepared to possibly step into your shoes - giving them access to your own decison making, identifying the skills they need to develop and helping them improve, and, sometimes being honest enough to tell them why they're not ready for the job.

Chapter 6: Good Things Can Happen
---------------------------------

-   Optimism in a leader, especially in challenging times, is vital
-   "it's about believing you and the people around you can steer toward the best outcome, and not communicating the feeling that all is lost if things don't break your way. The tone you set as a leader has an enormous effect on the people around you. No one wants to follow a pessimist.

Chapter 7: It's About the Future
--------------------------------

-   Determine Your Priorities. **You only get three**. "Priorities are the few things you're going to spend a lot time and capital on."
-   Communicate your priorities clearly and repeatedly. It's what separates great managers from the rest.
-   The way to get people to admire the company working for you, is to create products they're proud of.
-   Don't let negativity from people you barley know, affect the way you feel about yourself.
-   Don't let blows to the ego populate and stay long in your mind.

Chapter 8: The Power of Respect
-------------------------------

-   "Don't let your ego get in the way of making the best possible decision."
-   "If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real."
-   Be willing to disrupt your companies business model if it will have a positive affect in the long-term.
-   Give people authority. If you trust them to do a job, give them *total* control over that department, the job, and the decisions needed to be made in that field.

Chapter 9: Disney-Pixar And a New Path to the Future
----------------------------------------------------

-   Long-shots aren't usually as long as they seem.
-   Weigh all sides of a decision. Don't let the negatives drown out the positives. Just because they're more negatives, they may not be as dramatic as they few positives.
-   "Nothing is a sure thing, but you need to at the very least be willing to take big risks. You can't have big wins without them."

Chapter 10: Marvel and Massive Risks That Make Perfect Sense
------------------------------------------------------------

-   "Surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do."

Chapter 11: Star Wars
---------------------

-   "The worst thing you can do when entering a negotiation is to suggest or promise something because you know the other person wants to hear it, only to have to reverse course later."
-   Don't project anxiety onto your team. It's counterproductive.

Chapter 12: If You Don't Innovate, You Die
------------------------------------------

-   Short-term loses are guaranteed if you shift your business model. It won't look positive, but adjusting course to a long-term change is the best thing you can do for an organization.
-   "Being present for your people - and making sure they know that you're available to them - is so important for the morale and effectiveness of a company."
-   "When you innovate, everything needs to change, not just the way you make or deliver a product."

Chapter 13: No Price On Integrity
---------------------------------

-   "A companies integrity depends on the integrity of its people."

Chapter 14: Core Values
-----------------------

-   "Wherever you are along the path, you're the same person you've always been"


The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons From 15 Years as CEO of The Walt Disney Company

### The goal of science is to discover why the universe acts the way that it does.
• "There was a harmonious reality underlying the laws of the universe, and the goal of science was to discover it."

• What science teaches us, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein's life.

### Einstein's success was rooted in his ability to question the mundane things in life and not respect authority
• Einstein's success at life came from marveling at the mysteries that struck others as mundane, questioning conventional wisdom, and challenging authority.

• Throughout his life, Einstein never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell and underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote an old friend, "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."

• Einstein's scientific success had come in part from his rebelliousness. There was a link between his creativity and his willingness to defy authority. He had no sentimental attachment to the old order, thus was energized by upending it. His stubbornness had worked to his advantage.

• The explanation that Einstein himself most often gave for his mental Accomplishments was his curiosity. As he put it near the end of his life, "I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious."

• Curiosity, in Einstein's case, came not just from a desire to question the mysterious. More important, it came from a childlike sense of marvel that propelled him to question the familiar, those concepts that, as he once said, "the ordinary adult never bothers his head about."

### Einstein was a purely theoretical physicist. He never ran experiments himself.
• One of the interesting things about Einstein is that he never ran experiments. He was purely theoretical. In his papers, he would end them by explaining a few ways someone who wanted to test it, could, and if they did, they should get in touch with him.

• I love this because it shows that you don't have to solve a problem to be a critical thinker. Merely thinking about the problem is something that can go along way

### Einstein didn't let anything get in the way of his science
• Einstein was a true loner and didn't really want to let much get in the way of his scientific endeavors. He is quoted while trying to divorce Marić to marry Elsa saying, "For I shall never give up the state of living alone, which has manifested itself as an indescribable blessing."

### Einstein had a beef with quantum theory
• After his theories of relativity had made their way, he explored the world of quantum mechanics and basically spent the rest of life trying to create a unified field theory. His beef with quantum mechanics was that things seemed to appear to work chaotically at a subatomic level. There was no way to predict how particles are interacting with each other, outside of observing it. But once you observe it, that influences the particles and you're not seeing it for what it truly is.

• Einstein thought this preposterous. He couldn't come to believe that the good Lord would have created beautiful and subtle rules that have determined *most* of what happened in the universe, while leaving a few things completely to chance.

• This attitude was in direct contrast to his belief as a younger scientist. He thought there was nothing that could be known unless it was observed, which led him to relativity. But now he's saying that there must be rules that govern the universe, no matter one's ability to observe it. In a way, his dive into quantum mechanics was the start of him becoming the old order and a new wave of scientists saying, "We don't know that."

• Einstein, as he got older, couldn't help but believe that there was some higher spirit - an organizer or creator of all the rules in the universe. No way he thought all of this just happened. There's too much simplicity for things to just happen the way that they did.

• Einstein believed that all scientific theories, leaving aside their mathematical expressions, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description "that even a child could understand them."

• *Esse est percipi* - To be is to be perceived. From [George Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley#:~:text=Berkeley's%20immaterialism%20argues%20that%20%22esse,God's%20nothing%20can%20be%20real.)

### Einstein's belief in God changed, but never his attitude towards organized religion:
• "I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in a position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must've written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. They child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books and doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws."

• "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."

• "My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend about the knowable world. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."

• "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way, the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve." p.388

• *The main argument between science and religion, as Einstein states, is not whether or not there is a God. It's that scientist's job is to study the laws and rules of the universe and they can't comprehend that those would change based on the interaction of a diety. Divine will, or human free will, does not play a role in the cosmic causality* p.391

• Asked whether or not we have free will, he responed, "No. I am a determinist. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control...– We all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible plater."

• For some people, miracles are evidence that God exists. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the cosmos is comprehensible, that it follows laws, is worthy of awe.

### Schrodinger's Cat was an experiment to help Einstein prove the craziness of quantum theory

As some believed the observation of a particle would interrupt the particles state, so its nucleus was both alive and dead until it was observed. This made sence at a quantum level, but when abstracted to a more real life scenario, it seemed crazy. This is where the cat came into play. p.453

### Einstein worked until he couldn't work any longer
The last thing he wrote, before he went to sleep for the last time, was one more line of symbols and numbers that he hoped might get him, and the rest of us, just a little step closer to the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe.

### President Eisenhower on Eisntein:
<blockquote>
No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of the 20th century knowledge. Yet no other man was more modest in the posession of the power that is knowledge, more sure tha power without wisdom is deadly.
</blockquote>

### The NYT on Einstein after his death:

<blockquote>
Man stands on this diminutive earth, gazes at the myriad of stars and upon billowing ocean and tossing trees–and wonders. What does it all mean? How did come about? The most thoughtful wonderer who appeared among us in three centuries has passed on in the person of Albert Einstein.
</blockquote>

### Humility goes a long way
The world has had a lot of geniuses. What made Einstein special was that his mind and soul were tempered by his humility - the belief that no one had the right to impose ideas and beliefs on others.

### Just a beautiful quote
Isaacson on Einstein, "He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent, patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe."


Einstein: His Life and Universe

Albert Einstein was a remarkable theoretical physicist. He made discoveries about the smallest things in the world to the largest things in the world and everything in between. Not everyone can say they've done that. But while most people were distracted by his insights in science, Einstein crafted a personal philosophy on the greater questions of life. He was engaged in political matters and used his influence to change the world. As one could imagine, he cared deeply for remaining curious about life and encouraging others to do the same. The following are direct quotes from Einstein on these matters of life. They give us an insight into the humanity of one of the world's greatest. I read these in [*Einstein: His Life and Universe*](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/einstein-his-life-and-universe) by Walter Isaacson.

## On Education
Near the end of his life, the New York State Education Department asked Einstein what they should teach in school. He replied,
> In teaching history, there should be an extensive discussion of personalities who benefited mankind through independence of character and judgment.

> The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

## On Curiosity
> Imagination is more important than knowledge.

> A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But, intuition is nothing but the outcomes of earlier intellectual experience.

> Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.

> All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

> I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.

> Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality

> Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.

## On Individuality and Politics
> It is important to foster individuality, for only the individual can produce the new ideas.

> When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.

> A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.

> How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery.

## On Personal Matters
> To dwell on things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.

> The monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

***

I've loved getting to study this man's life and write just about everything I could on the book. I [wrote an essay examining his life and greater detail](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/albert-einstein) and wrote about [how he came up with his ideas that changed the world (and explain how you can do the same).](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/what-made-einstein-special) I also published my [notes on the biography here.](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/einstein-his-life-and-universe)

15 Quotes from Albert Einstein That Reveals His Philosophy on Life

The more I read about the lives of those who have impacted our world today, the more obvious it is that one characteristic drives those people: Curiosity. Curiosity, in the form of questioning the mundane things. The things that most people simply assume work because "that's just what happens", is one of the defining attributes of the men and women who squeezed centuries of ideas and inventions into just one short life.

This fact became even more evident as my heart and mind were pulled in all directions reading Walter Isaacson's account of Albert Einstein in his biography, *Einstein: His Life and Universe.* Though this thick biography contained 500+ pages filled with letters, his family life, and his ground-breaking theories (which I plan to write about in the coming months), I most enjoyed the random yet intentional reflections on Einstein's life as a whole, both from Isaacson and included as direct quotes of the white-haired man himself. Beneath the thought experiments, complicated math equations, and political motivations, was a deep sense of curiosity to understand the rules that govern the universe and what that meant for us lowly beings whom inhabit one of the planets within it.

Though there is much to study regarding the scientific breakthroughs that Einstein contributed, this essay is devoted to appreciating his general curiosity of life, how he used that to create new theories, and the deep humility Einstein possessed regarding this knowledge. An essay at a later date will be dedicated to exploring his scientific breakthroughs and [I've written previously about the habits that allowed Einstein to develop so many ideas over his lifetime](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/what-made-einstein-special).

## Einstein's Curiosity
Isaacson explores the innate curiosity of Einstein throughout the book, though this paragraph is a good description of what he believed:

> Throughout his life, Einstein never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. 'People like you and me never grow old,' he wrote an old friend, 'We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.'

Einstein, besides being a renowned scientist, was a philosopher of life, and that is seen most evidently in his "ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously." I have much appreciation for deep thinkers and even more so for those who don't care one bit about their opinion, they simply want to understand things better. The habit of coming up with two opposing theories and trying to work them out together was a routine pattern in Einstein's work.

### Special Relativity
As he was thinking through his Special Theory of Relativity, there were two main postulates that seemed to contradict each other. They were The Principle of Relativity and what he deemed "The Light Postulate."

The principle of relativity stated that the fundamental laws of physics are the same for all observers. So if Person X is moving and Person Y is at rest, the laws of physics should be the exact same. There is no experiment that could determine who was "at rest" and who was moving.

The light postulate explained that the velocity of light was constant, independent of the movement from the emitting body. For example, if a train was moving at 60mph, light from the trains headlight would move at a constant that is the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. It would not be moving 60mph + 186,000 miles per second.

#### *A Quick Note*

*Einstein didn't immediately assume light was independent of its source. He did have a postulate called 'the light emission theory' which treated light as if it was shot from its source like a gun. So a light on a train would shoot out at 186,000 miles per second plus the speed of the train. However, as he explored this idea further, it seemed to contradict Maxwell's equations. Eventually, he gave up on the light emission theory and assumed that light must travel at a constant speed, regardless of the motion of the emitting body.*

But with these two postualtes right next to eachother, there was a glaring conflict. I'll illustrate that conflict with the following thought experiment:

Imagine someone standing on the side of a railroad track. We'll call them person A. Now imagine another person, but they are on a train moving East at 2,000 miles per second. We'll call them person B.

If a light beam is shot along the railroad track also moving East, it would zip by person A at 186,000 miles per second. All good here.

But person B, traveling away from the beam would see it zip past them at 184,000 miles per second. 186,000 (speed the beam is moving) - 2,000 (speed they are already moving in the same direction) = 184,000. The velocity of the light wave propagating comes out smaller for Person B, but that comes into conflict with the principle of relativity because the principle of relativity states that there is no way to determine who is "moving" and who is "at rest", but we just did. See the problem here? (This is similar to a thought experiment Einstein used.)

Person B's speed relative to the train would change depending on if they were racing towards the train or away from it, but their speed relative to the other train's headlight (which emitted the beam) wasn't changing. So the beam *should* zip by them with the exact same speed no matter which direction they're moving, but that's not what happened in our thought experiment. That was the conflict Einstein was trying to reconcile.

This made the two postulates, "seemingly incompatible," Einstein thought. The speed of light should be the same, no matter the motion of person B and it should be equal to what person A sees. This was defeating to Einstein.

He's quoted saying, "In view of this dilemma, there appears to be nothing else to do than to abandon the light postulate or the principle of relativity." But then he took a look at another variable: **time**.

And this is where his infamous theory comes together. By analyzing time, he determined that two events that appear to be simultaneous to one observer isn't simultaneous to another.

He now settled the conflict. But the only way to get there was to hold two seemingly opposing ideas in his head at once without having an identity crisis or nervous breakdown. This would be difficult to do today in a world where what you think is (wrongly) who you are.

Einstien wrestled with that conflict for a long time, but never gave up. Though things were seemingly incompatible, he worked two conflicting ideas out in his head at once to discover a ground breaking answer. And it all started with his innate curiosity.

In fact, what Einstein credited the most for his vast accomplishments was his curiosity, stating, "I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious." Isaacson went on to explain:

> Curiosity, in Einstein's case, came not just from a desire to question the mysterious. More important, it came from a childlike sense of marvel that propelled him to question the familiar, those concepts that, as he once said, 'the ordinary adult never bothers his head about.'

Questioning the familiar concepts that others deem too mundane to give brain space to allowed Einstein to explain the quantum realm and the universe–the smallest things in the world and the biggest things in the world–all in one lifetime.

![](/5eea91594dca6834276c1f24.jpeg)
## Did Einstein believe in God?
This was a popular question to ask Einstein, and like any great scientist, he never gave a simple "yes" or "no" answer–despite many insisting on one.

To be clear, he was not an atheist. He writes:

> I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in a position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must've written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books and doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.

When asked whether he was a religious man, he would reply asking what they meant by religious:

> The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

He goes on:

> My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend about the knowable world. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

When someone made a more direct comment about the war between science and religion, he was genuinely confused how there could even be such a thing:

> Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way, the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve.

That's about as clear as an answer he gave for the existence of God. In short, he believes in a God or higher being that ruled the universe because there was too much simplicity in the laws that governed it to just *happen*. But, **he did not believe in a personal God that could intervene on someone's behalf**, as he made quite clear in this answer to whether or not he believes in free will:

> No. I am a determinist. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control...– We all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.

Most people beg God to show them a miracle to prove that He exists. But to Einstein, the absence of miracles is what truly reveals a divine presence. The fact that the universe is predictable, follows laws, and doesn't do whatever it wants (some people's definition of miracle), is worthy of awe in and of itself.

## His wonder for the world and humility of knowledge made him personable

Einstein's knowledge about the world and his pure genius made him impactful, but that's not what made him memorable. His childlike wonder for the world caused a deep humility in him that gave him an attitude of "I do not matter in this world, I'm merely a man." And that's what made him memorable.

President Eisenhower himself remarked after his death:

> No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of the 20th century knowledge. Yet no other man was more modest in the possession of the power that is knowledge, more sure than power without wisdom is deadly.

**Power without wisdom is deadly.**

Isaacson explains Einstein's humility in another way, stating:

> The world has had a lot of geniuses. What made Einstein special was that his mind and soul were tempered by his humility - the belief that no one had the right to impose ideas and beliefs on others.

What fueled that deep humility was his passionate curiosity–the trait I admire most about him.

After his death, *The New York Times* wrote:

> Man stands on this diminutive earth, gazes at the myriad of stars and upon billowing ocean and tossing trees–and wonders. What does it all mean? How did it come about? The most thoughtful wonderer who appeared among us in three centuries has passed on in the person of Albert Einstein.

**The most thoughtful wonderer**–an attribute I hope to leave behind when I pass on.

Isaacson ends the book with the most thoughtful passage. I get chills reading it each time and even writing it now:

> He [Einstein] was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent, patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.

![](/0011511101.jpeg)

The above image was a picture of his desk, captured by photographer, Ralph Morris, a few days before he died. The messiness was a direct insight to how his brain worked. It has become an iconic image of the life of Einstein. In fact, he worked all the way up until his last breath. As he went to sleep for the last time, he scribbled one last math equation on a napkin before he took his final breath.

I wonder now, who is the Einstein living amongst us?


Examining the Life that Communicated With the Universe - Albert Einstein

The early life of Albert Einstein had its ups and downs.

He struggled in school as a kid, couldn't get anyone to take him seriously about some of his earlier ideas, and had trouble getting a professorship because of his monotone lecture style and seemingly lack of passion for physics.

But as we all know, it worked out alright for young Albert. However contrary to popular belief, his genius isn't the reason he became as successful as he was. He was smart, sure, but there are a lot of smart people in the world.

Einstein was such an impactful theorist because of **his ability to continuously generate new ideas.**

Paul Graham riffed on this in one of his recent essays titled, "[Beyond Smart](http://paulgraham.com/smart.html)," and it just so happened that I was reading Einstein's biography by Walter Isaacson at the same time this essay came out, so the concept stuck immediately. I had a brief "light bulb moment" as I was reading Graham's words.

Graham's thesis is that being intelligent isn't special. Again, there are a lot of smart and intelligent people in every field of study. **What matters is one's ability to create or discover new ideas. **He writes:

> "Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter. I would. The choice makes me uncomfortable, but when you see the two options laid out explicitly like that, it's obvious which is better."\
>\
> --Paul Graham, "Beyond Smart"

There are multiple reasons why intelligence ends up being the thing that most people think is important. Although I have some interesting thoughts about that, I'm not going to get into that here. Not yet, at least.

Instead, I want to turn to the life of Einstein and reflect on what he did that made it possible for him to constantly generate new ideas.

How Einstein Generated New Ideas
--------------------------------

#### 1.) He wasn't afraid to go against long-held beliefs and prove them wrong.

At the start of this article, I mentioned Einstein had difficulty at school. Although the common story is painted as a motivational mirage like, "Einstein failed at school and he became successful and therefore you can achieve anything," Einstein was also just rebellious. He didn't like the strict, one-way road to learning something and thought it should be taught differently. (Imagine what he would say about today's education.)

Though that rebellious nature got him in trouble as a youngin', it proved to pay off later in life.

During the time of Einstein's rise, "the ether" as a force that carried electromagnetic waves was believed to exist. Though the ether was "invisible, weightless, undetectable chemically or physically, and literally permeating all matter and space," ([source](https://www.britannica.com/science/ether-theoretical-substance)) many physicists believed it to be real because it was the only thing that made sense for light waves to travel on.

Einstein seriously doubted anything that couldn't be observed, a trait he picked up from reading David Hume and Ernst Mach, so naturally, he doubted the existence of the ether, though the idea had been around for a hundred years or so (In the context of light waves. It was used to describe gravity before Galileo's and Newton's discoveries, but a lot less people believed in it for that.)

Until then, people attributed the movement and behavior of light to this ether, which helped answer questions about how light travels. But since many experiments that were conducted to prove the ether existed failed, Einstein started from the premise that there is no ether.

This allowed him to start fresh and imagine what the *true* behavior of light would be without ether. After that, he was able to form his postulates for the speed of light which lead to his *creation* of the theory of relativity.

#### 2.) He meditated on ideas for decades (and wasn't afraid to not know the answer to something)

Einstein was 16 when he started his journey down the road to the theory of relativity. It began with a thought experiment about what it would be like to ride at the speed of light next to a light beam, which produced a unique paradox:

> "If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating. There seems to be no such thing, however, neither on the basis of experience nor according to Maxwell's equations *(Maxwell's equations predicted there was a fixed speed of light, independent of the velocity of the observer.)*\
>\
> From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest. For how should the first observer know or be able to determine, that he is in a state of fast uniform motion? One sees in this paradox the germ of the special relativity theory is already contained."

Quite a paradox indeed, but he didn't let that stop him. He didn't give up after one year, five years, or even seven years. He decided to continue ruminating on this unique paradox, reading journals and talking to professors until he figured out his answer.

Though this shows his general tenacity for solving a problem, it also illustrates his comfortability with not knowing the answer to something.

Some people don't ponder big ideas for fear that it makes them look less intelligent than their peers, but in reality it's quite the contrary. Give me someone who is trying to understand the theory of relativity over those too scared to try any day. **Intelligent people aren't afraid to not know the answer.**

#### 3.) He allowed conversation and life to intertwine with his study

By May 1905, Einstein had two postulates--two basic assumptions of general principal. The first was the principle of relativity, which stated that the fundamental laws of physics are the same for all observers: those "at rest" on earth and those moving in a train or on a plane.

His second postulate was that the velocity of light was the same, no matter the motion of its source. For example, if someone is on a moving train and shoots a laser in the direction the train is moving, it will reach a target in the same amount of time it takes for someone's laser standing on the tracks to reach that target. The laser's velocity on the train *vt*, would not equal the speed of the train *s*, plus the speed of light *l*. Both lasers would be traveling at the same velocity.

<Tex texContent={a^{2}=\int \binom{1}{5}} />

This was a puzzling dilemma to him because he couldn't wrap his head around the fact that an observer running towards the train, an observer running away from the train, and an observer at rest on the side of the tracks would all see the laser coming from the train at the same velocity.

After ten years of thought experiments, conversations, and papers, he was once again at a cross-roads, almost ready to give up. But then he went for a walk.

On a beautiful day in the city, Einstein visited a friend whom helped him get a job at the Swiss Patent Office. As they were chatting, Einstein brought up the dilemma he faced and said he was going to give it up.

But as they talked about the issue more, the dam finally broke and Einstein understood the key to the problem. The next time he saw his friend, "He skipped any greeting and immediately declared, 'Thank you. I've completely solved the problem.'"[1](https://daltonsbookshelf.substack.com/p/what-made-einstein-special#footnote-1) It had only been five weeks since they last spoke.

Often when I'm pondering ideas, I tend to become even more of a turtle than I already am. Thinking, writing, and ideating in my head and my room constantly until I can solve the problem or genuinely give up. What Einstein did, not just in the last few moments of his breakthrough theory but during the entire journey since he started at 16, was continue living life. He graduated college, he got married, he got a job, and he even had a baby!

He viewed life and conversation not as a distraction from his ideas, but something that made his ideas better, at least for the time.

**Understand:** An idea that has been around for a while is more likely to be true than a new idea (The Lindy Effect), but that doesn't mean all long held ideas are inherently true. Don't be afraid to go against the grain to previously held notions. But choose wisely. Don't go around trying to disprove factual information.

Sometimes, answers to problems don't reveal themselves right away. If you're struggling with a thought, idea, or experiment for a long time and have a passion for it, don't give up. Continue inching away at its resolution until the time comes.

Though it's important to be passionate about work and excited about the ideas and problems we think about, don't let those ideas overtake your entire existence. Keep close relationships, spend time doing what you love, and don't be afraid to converse with others about your problem-- they may end up helping you solve it.