Timeless Ideas | September 19, 2021

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

Quotes

I.

Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.

― Ed Catmull

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II.

Failing is scary. Wasting your life is dangerous.

― Guy Raz

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III.

The magic of the creative process is that there is no magic. Start where you are. Don't stop.

― Seth Godin

Ideas

I.

There is nothing like losing all you have in the world for teaching you what not to do. And when you know what not to do in order not to lose money, you begin to learn what to do in order to win. Did you get that? You begin to learn!

Edwin Lefèvre in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

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II.

Values are closely associated with with the concept of self - a reflexive concept if ever there was one. What we think has a much greater bearing on what we are than on the world around us. What we are cannot possibly correspond to what we think we are, but there is a two-way interplay between the two concepts. As we make our way in the world our sense of self evolves. The relationship between what we think we are and what we are in reality is the key to happiness - in other words, it provides the subjective meaning of life.

George Soros in The Alchemy of Finance

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III.

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

Stephen King in Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

Articles Worth Reading

I.

The ‘melancholic joy’ of living in our brutal, beautiful world

Brian Treanor | Psyche

When we open our eyes to the fullness of reality, what we find is a chiaroscuro canvas of both darkness and light. Seeing the evil in the world helps us to live well while we can, because death is coming for us all, and entropy is gnawing at the fringes of our existence. And seeing the goodness helps us to live gratefully, softening the sting of reality.

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II.

The Problem with Depression Doping

Lisa Miller | Nautilus

The perilous state of our collective mental health is not, I would argue, something we should look to resolve through private visits to the therapist’s office alone. It should be less of a tête-à-tête and more of an open house, in which we are being called to rethink and reimagine our way of living as a society. We would not only be taking advantage of developmental depression, but also the dramatic shifts and realizations the pandemic is putting us through.

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III.

The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck

Maria Popova | Brain Pickings

In recent times, the touching human longing for sympathy, that impulse to have our suffering recognized and validated, has grown distorted by a troubling compulsion for broadcast-suffering and comparative validity. Personhoods are staked on the cards dealt and not the hands played, as if we evolved the opposable thumbs of our agency for nothing. In memoirs and reality shows, across infinite Alexandrian scrolls of social media feeds, the unlucky events of life have become the currency of attention and identification.

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