On Lessons from History, Asking for your Time & Scarcity
Hey friends, happy Sunday!
No articles this week, I spent the week working on my personal site, taking courses on design + development and client work.
One more week of building and then I hope to get into the flow of releasing articles + videos weekly [I have a few pieces I'm working on] but there's a lot of work to be done prior [getting the personal site finished, building out the MakerFlow site etc] and I want to do this right.
Anyway let's get onto the filter.
On The Big Lessons from History
This is an incredible article: "The Big Lessons from History". I'd recommend this to anyone looking to learn the lessons from history that apply to our day to day lives.
"History is full of specific lessons that aren’t relevant to most people, and not fully applicable to future events because things rarely repeat exactly as they did in the past. An imperfect rule of thumb is that the more granular the lesson, the less useful it is to the future."
As Morgan explains in the article we can't learn much from the individual lessons of history because they are too granular. Instead we need to focus on the lessons that show up again and again throughout history.
"The irony of good times is that they breed complacency and skepticism of warnings.
Nothing too good or too bad stays that way forever, because great times plant the seeds of their own destruction through complacency and leverage, and bad times plant the seeds of their own turnaround through opportunity and panic-driven problem-solving."
Throughout the piece he lays out compelling cases for the lessons we need to learn from the big events in history that shape our trajectory [covid-19, 9/11, WWII etc].
"An important lesson from history is that the long run is usually pretty good and the short run is usually pretty bad. It takes effort to reconcile those two, and learn how to manage them with what seem like conflicting skills. Those who can’t usually end up either bitter pessimists or bankrupt optimists"
Perhaps the most interesting part is how we all want simple answers to outlier events of history. We have a need to find a hero and a villain in every story. When in reality almost all events are caused by multiple factors not just one - take the current pandemic for example:
"Covid-19 is similar. A virus transferred from animal to humans (has happened forever) and those humans socialized with other people (of course). It was a mystery for a while (small sample size) and then bad news was then likely suppressed (hoping it would soon end). Other countries thought it would be contained (standard denial) and didn’t act fast enough (bureaucracy, lack of leadership). We weren’t prepared (over-optimism) and could only respond with blunt-force lockdowns (do what you gotta do) and panic (calm plants the seeds of crazy)."
Definitely check out the full article when you get chance, there are some great stories in here.
On Asking for your Time
Ryan Holiday wrote this article: "To Everyone Who Asks for "Just a Little" of your Time"
"I want as absolutely little in my calendar as possible. I’m meticulous about it. Whatever the least amount possible I can have in my calendar without killing my career—that’s what I want"
To be clear, this isn’t some nonsense about not putting things in the calendar, like someone who says they’re on a diet but eats a lot. This is about committing to and scheduling next to nothing on a daily and weekly basis."
He uses a metaphor throughout about "Calendar anorexia" - linking it to the idea that to get the important creative work done you need to say no to a lot and keep your calendar free.
"When people ask how I manage to get so much writing done, my anorexia is the answer. Same goes for how I’ve managed to keep a healthy relationship and how I manage to exercise and read. I keep a maker’s schedule because I believe that anything else is anathema to deep work or creativity."
He rightly points out our weird relationship with time compared to things like money. We hand out our time easily even though it's a finite resource yet are stingy with money something we can always get more of.
"Seneca writes that if all the geniuses in history were to get together, none would be able explain our baffling relationship with time. He says,
No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives—worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passers-by, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers."
If you constantly feel like you don't have enough time I'd recommend checking out this post and start questioning how you manage your time.
"But even anorexia fails as a metaphor. Because food, once consumed, can be burned off. Even Seneca’s property metaphor fails too. Property can be regained, money can be re-earned.
Time? Time is our most irreplaceable asset—we cannot buy more of it. We cannot get a second of it back. We can only hope to waste as little as possible. Yet somehow we treat it as most renewable of all resources."
On The Myth of Exclusion and Scarcity
Seth Godin provides some delightful short reads and this one is no different "Undoing the toxic myth of exclusion and scarcity"
He points out this strange belief that excluding a group increases the benefit to those that are doing the excluding. Whilst this might be true in a world where there are scarce resources the scarcity mindset actually has a negative impact because we live in abundance.
"More programmers, more healthy parents, more scientists, more leaders, more passionate artists, more breakthrough designers, more caring health care providers–it doesn’t crowd out anything. It creates more opportunity for everyone.
This is one reason that the faux scarcity of famous colleges is so toxic. Because we don’t have to exclude and sort to help people move forward, yet we do."
The biggest reminder from this short post is that we're all playing infinite games, other people doing well is a net positive for the world. We live in an abundant world not one of scarcity.
Best Tweet of the Week
Favourite Quote of the Week
"Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion.
People who labor all their lives but, have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time even when hard at work." - Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
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Have a great Sunday,
- Stephen