What I'm Reading...

Stand Up Straight

Circumstances change, so can you. Positive feedback loops, adding effect to effect, can spiral counterproductively in a negative direction, but can also work to get you ahead. That’s the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price’s law and the Pareto distribution: those who start will probably get more. (…) Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified (or dampened) by that expression. (…) To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).

-- Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life, p.26-27

Risk

The casino operator said: “What I love is the risk. Some nights we make money, and other nights we make more money1.”


  1. Peter Bevelin, Seeking Wisdom. From Darwin to Munger, p. 152 
bets risk

Be consistently not stupid

It’s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying: ‘It’s the strong swimmers who drown.’

-- Charles Munger, quoted by Peter Bevelin in Seeking Wisdom. From Darwin to Munger, p. 58

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