Add it to things worth avoiding.
Subtract it from things worth doing.
I’ve been granted the God-like power to issue commandments. And similar to normal deities, these commandments are nothing more than strong suggestions carrying a special weight of importance. If my commandment is too obvious — Thou shall not kill — I’ve squandered an incredible opportunity. Even if I declare something less obvious — Thou shall sleep eight hours per night — I’m not helping much since lack of information isn’t the reason you’re sleep deprived. So it is, really, with most matters: the challenge comes not in the form of missing information, but rather the difficulty of actually following through on what you already know you should do. Plus, I’m God-like (at least in this respect), so I ought to find something peculiarly wise.
THOU SHALL NOT DEMEAN THYSELF
FOR HAVING ATTENDED xxxxxxxxx
People who claim, “I don’t care what others think” are either liars or psychopaths. For better or worse, status matters. People who claim, “I know exactly what I want for me” are either liars or live in an isolated cave. For all non-cave dwellers, the unending influence of people, adverts, media, art, etc. means it’s quite impossible to totally disentangle your unadulterated desires from socially-conditioned desires.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t partially disentangle the two. And even partial understanding meaningfully enhances self-awareness. Consider possessing zero self-awareness. Instead of having some idea about what you really want, you are solely guided by what society says you should want. All the times when your mysterious true desires fail to overlap with socially-conditioned ones, you may well “achieve” … and still be empty. Because if you attain things the deep-down-unique-you didn’t truly covet, there’s a profound disconnect which shows remarkable concentricity with emptiness.
So we might as well try to get that partial understanding, right? Right. But how? Well, if you grew up in that cave, you would only have unadulterated desires. Of course this wasn’t your upbringing (thankfully), but we can extract a framework from the hypothetical: imagine what you would do if you couldn’t tell anyone what you did? It works both in your imagination and in practice. Like, go to a concert by yourself, snap zero pictures, and tell nobody you attended. Little dips into this practice can yield rapid insights. Oh shit, I don’t really like this band. Rather, I like being able to tell people I saw a band that’s considered “cool” which, by association, enhances my “coolness.” And, again, this may not be a bad thing! Status confers many benefits! But status doesn’t mean happiness, and so upgraded enlightenment can help better prioritize actions going forward. You may still rank, say, female attractiveness just as highly, but you’ll be doing so from a position of greater self-awareness where you can more confidently declare that I want this for me.
is an inheritance.
Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children. A gambler’s actual wealth varies wildly.
The code that Morse devised for his telegraph was relatively good because the most common letter, E, is represented with the shortest code, a single dot. Uncommon letters, like Z, have longer codes with multiple dots and dashes. This makes most messages more concise than they were in some of the early telegraphic codes. This principle, and many more subtle ones, figures in today’s codes for compressing digital pictures, audio, and video.
Assuming you wanted your spouse to bring home Shamu, you wouldn’t just say, “Pick up Shamu!” You would need a good explanation. The more improbable the message, the less “compressible” it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon’s point: the essence of a message is its improbability.
Collectively, the world’s investors own 100% of all the world’s stock. That means that the average return of all the world’s investors has to be identical to the average return of the stock market as a whole. It can’t be otherwise.
Even more clearly, the average return of passive investors is equal to the average stock market return.
Subtract the return of passive investors from the whole. This leaves the return of the active investors … Collectively, active investors must do no better or worse than the passive investors.
Active investing is therefore a zero-sum game. The only way for one active investor to do better than average is for another active investor to do worse than average. You can’t squirm out of this conclusion by imagining that the active investors’ profits come at the expense of those wimpy passive investors who settle for the average return. The average return of the passive investors is exactly the same as that of the active investors, for the reason just outlined.
Take Shannon’s pipe dream of turning a dollar into $2,048. You buy a stock for $1. It doubles every year for eleven years (100 percent annual return!) and then you sell it for $2,048. That triggers capital gains tax on the $2,047 profit. At a 20 percent tax rate, you’d owe the government $409. This leaves you $1,639. That is the same as getting a 96 percent return, tax-free, for eleven years. The tax knocks only 4 percentage points off the pretax compound return rate.
Suppose instead that you run the same dollar into $2,048 through a lot of trading. You realize profit each year, so you have to pay capital taxes each year. The first year, you go from $1 to $2 and owe tax on the $1 profit. For simplicity, pretend that the short-term tax rate is also 20 percent (it’s generally higher). Then you pay the government 20 cents and end the first year with $1.80 rather than $2.00.
This means that you are not doubling your money but increasing it by a factor of 1.8 – after taxes. At the end of eleven years you will have not 2^11 but 1.8^11. That comes to about $683. That’s less than half what the buy-and-hold investor is left with after taxes.
The marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the even recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.
They seek a source of gold that is cheaper than mining ore from the ground. Alchemy does describe a means to make gold, but the procedure is so arduous that, by comparison, digging beneath a mountain is as easy as plucking peaches from a tree.
In pursuing the boy, with no hint of whether he’d succeed or fail, he had felt his blood surge in a way it had not for many weeks. And seeing the boy’s tears had reminded him of the Prophet’s teachings on the value of mercy, and Hassan had felt virtuous in choosing to let the boy go.
Rather, using the Gate is like taking a secret passageway in a palace, one that lets you enter a room more quickly than by walking down the hallway. The room remains the same, no matter which door you use to enter.
It is said that repentance and atonement erase the past.
It is also possible that a man who would make use of such a guarantee would not find his older self alive when he first used the Gate.
Driven by the curiosity that impels men to look at the heads of the executed,
It’s not auto parts that need to be fulfilled. It’s fucking art. Treat it as such. Give it a little reverence. Music used to be the thing. That is what I was doing. If I had time, I was listening to music. I wasn’t doing it in the background while I was doing five other things. And I wasn’t treating it as a disposable commodity. I don’t go into the cinema and do my taxes while the movie is playing. I’m there to watch a movie. I kinda miss the attention music got.
I’m guessing you’ve been quite courageous. But before I get into guessing, let me start with what I 100% know. I know that I’ve always enjoyed being around you and your brightness, thoughtfulness, and ease. As xxxxxxxxx became unreachable years ago, it was not just the loss of his company, but also of yours. I will always and forever cherish great times I had with you.
Now back to courage. Too often, discussions about courage revolve around the dramatic: running into burning buildings, pushing of children out of traffic. These acts are to be celebrated, for sure, but they are unthinking momentary impulses that come from who knows where. Furthermore, the opportunity to exhibit courage in this manner may never arrive. So I like emphasizing a second, more ordinary form: doing hard things for oneself that conflict with the interests of people one cares about and may well conflict with some of one’s interests and values as well.