Timeless Ideas | August 29, 2021

Here’s your weekly dose of timeless ideas to sharpen your mind, make smarter decisions, and live better.

Quotes

I.

The rich invest in time; the poor invest in money.

— Warren Buffett

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II.

Your work is too important to be left to how you feel today.

― Seth Godin

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III.

The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.

― Ling Ma

Ideas

I.

So the final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart.

John M. Barry in The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

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II.

When you skip a meal, telling your rumbling stomach that food is coming later in the day, and therefore it has no reason to fear starvation, doesn’t alleviate the powerful sensation of hunger. Similarly, explaining to your brain that the neglected interactions in your overfilled inbox have little to do with your survival doesn’t seem to prevent a corresponding sense of background anxiety. To your entrenched social circuitry, evolved over millennia of food shortages mitigated through strategic alliances, these unanswered messages become the psychological equivalent of ignoring a tribe member who might later prove key to surviving the next drought. From this perspective, the crowded email inbox is not just frustrating—it’s a matter of life or death.

Cal Newport in A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

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III.

The cosmic humor is that if you desire to move mountains and you continue to purify yourself, ultimately you will arrive at the place where you are able to move mountains. But in order to arrive at this position of power you will have had to give up being he-who-wanted-to-move-mountains so that you can be he-who-put-the-mountain-there-in-the-first-place. The humor is that finally when you have the power to move the mountain, you are the person who placed it there--so there the mountain stays.

Ram Dass in Be Here Now

Articles Worth Reading

I.

The death of the job

Anna North | Vox

Some say the idea that we actually earn our income has already been exposed as a fraud — just look at the fact that the average CEO made almost 300 times the median worker salary last year, a gap that’s only growing. If we can detach income from work — and that’s what’s happened in the labor market — why not just do that? For now, it seems like a fairy tale — the idea that Americans could choose to work or not work based on their desire, rather than the threat of starvation. But maybe, in some ways, the pandemic has brought that fairy tale a little closer to reality.

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II.

Parents Are Not Okay

Dan Sinker | The Atlantic

Parents aren’t even at a breaking point anymore. We’re broken. And yet we’ll go on because that’s what we do: We sweep up all our pieces and put them back together as best we can. We carry on chipped and leaking and broken because we have no other choice. And we pray that if we can just keep going, our kids will survive too.

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III.

Why You Need to Protect Your Sense of Wonder — Especially Now

David P. Fessell and Karen Reivich | Harvard Business Review

We spend much of our time at work trying to stake our claim and make our voices heard. It can feel counterintuitive to engage in something that might stimulate feelings of “smallness.” But doing so through a positive experience of awe can, in the end, bring us that sense of grounding we’re searching for, along with a multitude of benefits — such as energy, inspiration, and resilience — for ourselves and for our teams.

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