Shower Thoughts I Stand By 🛀💭
Some ideas don’t need 500 words. A few that have stuck with me.
We Emerge from the Summer Breeze 🌳🍼👶
I was thinking about the famous Richard Feynman video where he explains that trees come mostly from the air, not the ground…
This time, I thought a few steps further in a way that I hadn’t before: if carbon-based life-forms are either plants that grow from the air, or animals that either eat those plants or eat the animals that eat those plants, and we humans are one of these animals…
It means that most of the carbon in our bodies comes from the air!
If you trace it all the way back, we emerge from the summer breeze.
Poetic, ain’t it?
Originally appeared in Edition 310 of Liberty’s Highlights.
Books as Telepathy and Time Travel 🧙♂️🪄📚
Great books combine telepathy and time travel, dreaming and awakening.
They compress decades of life experience, thinking, and research into something that fits in your hands and can be downloaded into your brain in a few hours.
Photons bouncing off the pages conjure images and words on the inner screen of your consciousness.
Sometimes they alter your mood for a moment, sometimes they change your life forever.
This is still one of humanity’s coolest technologies, even after all this time.
Originally appeared in Edition 548 of Liberty’s Highlights.
Writing Is Like Walking Around With a Camera 📸
Every chance I get, I encourage people to start writing.
It makes you look at life differently.
It’s a bit like walking around with a camera. You look at the world more actively because you have purpose — could this be a good shot? How would the composition look if I walked over there? Maybe if I got close to the ground?
Knowing that you might write about something will transform passive situations into active ones, and even when you aren’t working on a specific idea, you’re still always looking, so your senses are sharper, like a hunter walking through a quiet forest. 🌳🌳🌳🌳🦌🌳🌳🌳
Originally appeared in Edition 422 of Liberty’s Highlights.
Paper Walls 💪
If you think you’re fragile, you are.
That belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thinking you’re fragile makes you fragile.
I’m not saying you’re invincible, but you’re probably stronger and more resilient than you think — especially if you’ve been taught that you’re fragile!
To find our limits, we must go near the edge, do difficult things, and fail a bunch of times. If you never fail, you’re not doing enough hard things.
You might believe your redline is at 37, when it actually lies at 77 (made up units to illustrate my point).
There could be incredible achievements waiting for you in the 50-60 range, but if you’ve convinced yourself that 37 is your ceiling, you’ll never explore that territory.
Challenge your assumptions about your own strength. Don’t let untested assumptions about your capabilities hold you back.
The walls you’ve built might be made of paper 📑
Originally appeared in Edition 548 of Liberty’s Highlights.
The Simpsons Is Older Than Amazon 📺🌱📈
Compound growth is incredible.
To illustrate: When I was in primary school, Amazon was shipping a handful of books from a couple of packing tables. Now, they generate more than $700 billion in revenues per year and own the data-centers and servers that run a large fraction of the internet as well as one of the biggest TV streamers, film studios, more logistics than Fedex, planes, boats, satellites, etc.
And it hasn’t been that long. The TV show The Simpsons has only been around 5 years longer than Amazon…
Originally appeared in Edition 432 of Liberty’s Highlights.
A Less Cheery One About Nuclear Bombs 💣☢️
We’re pretty lucky that enriching uranium to bomb-grade or making plutonium, and getting everything else right to get a nuclear explosion, is as hard and costly as it is.
Imagine if all that stuff was much easier than it turned out to be?
What are some other technologies that we’re going to master in the future that could be similarly destructive, but they’re not nearly as hard and expensive to execute (or won’t stay hard and expensive long, because they’re largely digital)? There’s a reason many very smart people are worried about engineered bioweapons and AI.
Originally appeared in Edition 328 of Liberty’s Highlights.
Achievement as Sand 🛣️🏆⏳
As cliché as it sounds, it really is the journey, not the destination.
Destinations are points in time, they don’t last. You can’t live there.
Even the feeling of achievement will slip through your fingers like sand — you can’t hold on to it for long. You have to dig the work itself (there’s a great video about this from standup comic Hasan Minhaj).
Originally appeared in Edition 390 of Liberty’s Highlights.
The world is a museum of passion projects 🧠 🌏
John Collison (co-founder of Stripe) has a good tweet:
As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen.
But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity *everything* requires. That hotel, that park, that railway.
The world is a museum of passion projects.Children of the Mind: How hard it is to bring things into the world…
Friend-of-the-show and supporter (💚 🥃) Jim O’Shaughnessy also puts it very well:
Anything we don't find in nature came directly out of the minds of men and women.
One of the reasons I am a pragmatic optimist is because of the endless human ingenuity that created almost everything we use on a daily basis.
Have you ever just looked at a smartphone and and marveled at the ingenuity and collective human intelligence that created it? We humans are an adaptable lot, but occasionally look and wonder how you could ever explain a smartphone to someone from 1900. Yes, there are problems and always will be--but given how far we have come so relatively quickly, I believe that the directional arrow of human progress points upward.
Here's a quote from Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that nicely makes a similar point:
"Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all out of someone’s mind. That’s important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone’s mind. There’s no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There’s nothing else there. But what’s “potential”? That’s also in someone’s mind!"This is a pretty good encapsulation of one of the big themes that runs through this newsletter:
STOP AND LOOK! THINK ABOUT THINGS! WHO MADE IT, HOW, WHY? WHAT NEW THINGS CAN WE MAKE TO SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS? IF NOT US, WHO?
Sorry, got carried away for a moment there… 🫢
Originally appeared in Edition 322 of Liberty’s Highlights.
🧭 These pieces first appeared across Liberty’s Highlights. New here? I made a page for that: Start Here.