No. 616 – February 16, 2025
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Tiny Thoughts
Once something is obvious and working, people tend to underestimate it.
Most people quit before they reach their best work.
Excellence lives in doing a bit more than others.
The meaning you give work determines its difficulty.
A coder working on a passion project works 12 hours straight and calls it energizing. That same programmer, doing maintenance on legacy code they consider meaningless, feels exhausted after 2 hours.
Your relationship with the work shapes its weight more than the work itself.
Insights
Sigmund Freud on love:
“We are never so vulnerable as when we love.”
Napoleon on speaking up:
“Ten people who yell make more noise than ten thousand who keep silent.”
Nassim Taleb on the bravery required to remain skeptical:
“It takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one’s limitations—scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.”
The Repository
Observation isn’t just about looking—it’s about disappearing. Joan Didion grasped this better than anyone.
“Didion had a way of penetrating beneath the surface of events to a deeper, and often unstable, core. She did this not by asking lots of questions, but by standing back and observing. “She listened!” the photographer Julian Wasser, whose images of Joan adorn many a writer’s dorm room and have provided his own professional mother lode, told me in 2022, a few months before his death. “She didn’t talk; she observed.” This ability to fade into the wallpaper and take in the scene was one of the keys to Didion’s success. As she wrote in the intro to the first collection of her writing, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” The introvert’s revenge.”
Source: The World According to Joan Didion
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The Knowledge Project: Outliers
In 1883, Timothy Eaton mortgaged everything he owned to buy an entire city block. He then announced that he would tear down the city’s best retail stores to build something new.
When a teary-eyed local reverend toured the massive, empty building that replaced those stores, he lamented, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Eaton, you’re ruined. What will you do with this great barn of a place?”
Eaton replied, “Fill it with goods and sell them.”
That so-called “barn” eventually became the foundation of a retail empire, commanding 60% of Canadian department store sales.
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Mental Model of the Week
V1 | General Thinking Tools | Occam’s Razor
Occam’s razor is the intellectual equivalent of “keep it simple.”
When faced with competing explanations or solutions, Occam’s razor suggests that the correct explanation is most likely the simplest one, making the fewest assumptions.
This doesn’t mean the simplest theory is always true, only that it should be preferred until proven otherwise. Sometimes, the truth is complex, and the simplest explanation doesn’t account for all the facts.
The key to Occam’s Razor is understanding when it works for you and against you. A theory that is too simple will fail to capture reality, and one that is too complex will collapse under its own weight.
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