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Basically, this is an “I, Pencil” point. Leonard Read, writing from the perspective of the pencil, noted that these writing devices are wondrously simple, portable, reliable and inexpensive, “Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”
Pencil manufacturers know how to complete only the last steps of a process that begins in distant forests, mines, and factories. There are lots of lessons from Read’s essay: **The market is a wondrous invention that allows people of different faiths, nationalities, ideologies, etc., to work peacefully and cooperatively with each other, literally all around the globe. **Another is that some knowledge is cumulative. Every generation, human nature might start back at zero, but technical knowledge advances, because it is transmitted through physical things and through institutions. If, every generation, we had to relearn from scratch how to make a pencil, never mind a microchip, we’d never invent either. One additional lesson is that the division of labor is the great engine of productivity. Other people made all these points before Read, but if I wanted to introduce high school kids to the glories of the market, I wouldn’t have them read about pin factories in The Wealth of Nations—I’d have them read about the humble pencil.
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LIKE MANY ASPECTS of her personality, she traces that undertow of vulnerability to not having known her father, a subject she returns to several times in our conversations this fall. His absence haunts her still. Last May, Streisand, like the rest of the world, watched George Floyd being killed by the Minneapolis police. She was struck by the horror of Floyd’s death, but she was struck as well by his 6-year-old daughter, Gianna, now left fatherless. To lose a father — “I know how that feels,” Streisand says. So, in June, Streisand sent Gianna some shares of Disney stock, along with a letter, written from the perspective of a young girl whose father has died.
“I think our dads watch over us forever,” Streisand wrote. “When you get older and have a decision to make … just close your eyes and ask him for help. And if you listen very carefully, he will lead you to the right choice. I promise!
Love,
Barbra.”
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Create space for serendipity.
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“But that misses the point. What the flacks are doing is cleverly substituting quality evidence with quantity evidence. Just keep bringing up examples that conform to your narrative and people will think they confirm your narrative.”
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Rule #1: Management is not leadership. Rule #2: Don’t try to create robots. Focus on managing the what, not the how. Rule #3: Never create a second patient. Rule #4: Spend more time than you think you need to with your high performers. Rule #5: Set expectations, but know that you’re not always the one who needs to bring the clarity. Rule #6: Remember direct is kind, and have the hard conversations.
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Workers 25 to 34, on average, leave a job after 2.8 years… The problem is our educational institutions, governmental support systems and corporate structures have not caught up to this reality. They continue to build and operate an antiquated infrastructure designed for a stable, linear, 1950s American workforce. This disconnect is keeping millions of Americans from building fulfilling and economically viable careers. It is time to reengineer some of our most deeply held professional pathways.”
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This is crazy and sad to me. Just 51% of Facebook employees believe Facebook has a positive impact on the world. That’s down 23 percentage points from May. … And yet these people stay there. To advance something they don’t think is positive. The compromises we make for money, status, security… It feels relevant to this election season, understanding the compromises made about Trump because of economic gain.
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THE CURE OF TROY by Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer. They torture one another. They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured.
History says, Don’t hope On the side of the grave,’ But then, once in a lifetime The longed for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea- change On the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracles. And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing, The utter self revealing Double-take of feeling. If there’s fire on the mountain And lightening and storm And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing The outcry and the birth-cry Of new life at its term. It means once in a lifetime That justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.
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“The key fact is that Donald J Trump has been decisively defeated. He will be a one-term president. This was by no means inevitable. But in a massive turnout, where both sides mobilized unprecedented hordes of voters, and when the GOP actually made gains in the House, and did much better than expected, Trump lost. A critical mass of swing voters and moderate Republicans picked Biden over him. **Our nightmare of four years — an unstable, malignant, delusional maniac at the center of our national life — is over. ** Take a moment to feel that relief. Breathe. Rejoice. He’s done.
He will not concede. He cannot concede — because he would suffer a psychic break if he did. And what we witnessed Thursday night, in his drained yet still despicable rant, was a picture of a sad, lost, delusional person, a man utterly unfit to hold the office he holds, lying and lying and lying, spinning paranoid conspiracy theories…”
-Andrew Sullivan, November 6, 2020 (before the election officially “called” on November 7)
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Donald Knuth, a renowned mathematician and recipient of the Turing Award (considered the Nobel Prize of computer science), retired from using email in 1990.
He issued a public statement on his Stanford faculty page, which I saved to Evernote 1–2 years ago. I think of it often, and my favorite portion is below:
“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”
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“The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, self-sufficient. It knows how to survive in hard places. But it is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently by the base of the tree, and fade into our surroundings, the wild animal we seek might put in an appearance.” – Parker Palmer
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Thread believes – and urges others to believe – that empathetic and enduring relationships are our society’s most essential form of wealth. www.thread.org/who-we-ar…
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Are we making progress? Not so much, Douthat answers. Baby boomers will wince at his title, since “decadence” sounds to them like the complaint of an old curmudgeon. They cannot stand to think of themselves as old, nor can they bear to think of the society they dominate as dysfunctional. But this is a young man’s book. Douthat can see our sclerotic institutions clearly because his vision is not distorted by out-of-date memories from a more functional era.
Douthat outlines four aspects of decadence: stagnation (technological and economic mediocrity), sterility (declining birth rates), sclerosis (institutional failure), and repetition (cultural exhaustion).
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To be motivational, a goal must be both ambitious AND achievable. (not unreachable pipe-dreaming)
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“The…independent-minded…have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it’s not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can’t do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so.
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“One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism.”
The thinking and arguments in Paul Graham’s July newsletter are great. www.paulgraham.com/conformis…
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“Eppur Si Muove”
“Eppur Si Muove” (And yet it moves) -Gaileo-Galilei
Approaching 500 years ago, the Italian polymath Galileo had the audacity to posit that the Earth moves around the Sun, not the other way around, as conventional “wisdom” at the time had it. The apocryphal story goes that he was forced, on pain of death, to recant his heretical proclamation. After he did so, however, he then muttered “Eppur si muove”, or “and yet it moves”. Broadly, what I take from this as a meaning is that no matter what people may say, the truth is always the truth. For leaders, sometimes Galileo’s phrase may be highly valuable in the face of an alternate view held by many as to the right path ahead. Such key moments may come when a leader has to stay with the truth, their truth, no matter what they are told by others, by the echo chamber, by the groupthink, that “this is not the way we do things here”, or “we’ve always done it this way”, or “We can’t do that because {x}”.
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“…the roots of critical theory are fundamentally atheist, are very much concerned with this world alone, and have no place for mercy or redemption or the individual soul.”
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“Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.”- Miroslav Volf
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0JZlqkAanhA&feature=emb_title
This video made me weep this morning. I purposely didn’t watch it when it came out a few weeks ago. But this morning, on a Sunday overlooking the lake, I watched it with arms raised to heaven, thanking God for who he is and praying blessing over my beautiful, precious New York City. The home of my heart is NYC. Lord bless it, protect it, rise in it. I miss it. I can’t wait to return to it. I canceled three plane tickets for trips originally scheduled during this pandemic. I’ll return anytime.
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“We do what we measure. The list puts your more considered self in charge when your rampaging, daily-appetite-driven self has its white knuckles on the wheel.”
I love this article by John Dickerson. I read it several times myself and then used it for a portion of a staff development day. Everyone read it and reflected on it and developed their own list of questions. What did we want to bring to our lives and our work? We said we wanted to commit to asking ourselves these questions for the next 30 days.
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“Years ago, when I was a student at the Joffrey Ballet School, I was dealing with a slew of injuries that sidelined me for the majority of my training year. The expectation was that I was still to come to school every day to help teach other dancers my roles and observe rehearsals from a metal folding chair. I longed to be up dancing, and was now left to simply sit and watch, day after day. Suddenly I couldn’t do the thing that I loved and had been working so hard for. Over a cup of coffee in the West Village I shared my struggles with my friend, Michael Keller. His response has stayed with me since. “Well, it’s time to find out who you are in a folding chair.”
For everyone in the world, this pandemic is truly a watershed moment–or in my case, a folding chair moment. This global crisis is forcing us to see what we have left to hold onto. We see what has meaning in our lives as careers are put on pause, social circles are disbanded, and usual conveniences are literally and figuratively out of stock. The space that has been cleared now gives us the clarity to see what is left when everything around us is canceled, postponed, delayed or simply gone. God is showing us the things we falsely relied upon for so long. We cannot continue to do as we have done before. When we are met with the fragility of earthly things of which we once were so sure of, we feel our vulnerability and can see how easily distracted we have become from things of eternal value.
-Molly Yeo in Life in the Gospel quarterly.gospelinlife.com/no-longer…
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‘He always had to fight the residual sadness of the driven man, the unspoken melancholy of the prodigy,” Chernow observes. While others resented him with a furious passion or gaped at him with amazement – Talleyrand considered him one of the three greatest men of the epoch – Hamilton himself was lacerated with a feeling of “personal inadequacy that the world seldom saw.’‘
David Brooks’ NYT review of Chernow’s biography of HAMILTON. Long before the musical…
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