I fell off my bicycle right between a bus and a rickshaw, just as traffic started to move.
I only got a few scrapes, but it was scary. And I rode on. And again the next day.
Sometimes, moving forward is safer than staying still–and the only way to get where you want to go.
I had about a mile from my house to the office, along an artery road in a city of 20 million. Sometimes, the commute took 10 minutes by bicycle. Sometimes, it was 45 minutes. I was an aggressive minnow among the buses, cars, rickshaws, and motorbikes.
I hadn’t always been a cyclist. At first, I’d negotiated a rickshaw fare each morning. Starting the day with a stressful negotiation, and taking a long ride to the office on side roads, wasn’t sustainable. I needed a bike to cut through traffic.
My first day on a bike in Dhaka, I realized I needed to be more aggressive. For safety. People expected me to move into tiny gaps in traffic, but I was hesitating, and blocking the dance. That was a good way to get hit by someone, or cause an accident for someone else.
I needed to shorten my commute. Bicycling increased my risk, but to shorten my commute it was a risk I had to take–so I did. And I quickly learned how to reduce the risks. I learned to:
Look at the flow of traffic ahead
Claim my place in the flow
Recover quickly
Buy some cycling gloves
In life or in business, risk is sometimes unavoidable. Unless you give up and go home. But it helps to know where you’re trying to go.
Through Common Thriving, I help small-business owners see clearly:
where they are
where they want to be
what they need to do next.
And how to deal with the details, risks, and rewards of doing what’s next. Sign up for the Light Stretches newsletter for an idea and an action step to grow a bit each Friday.
Bill Gates’s seat was 50 feet in front of mine. My seat, of course, wasn’t in the section roped off for board members; I was there as a lowly B-share holder. I’d even had to find a different hotel the night before after they canceled my reservation.
I was a nontraditional college student, and I was going to be rich. And I was going to learn from the best how to get there. In my teens, I’d learned the magic of compounding returns. I moved on to Peter Lynch’s “Beat The Street”. And I found the Super-Investors of Graham And Doddsville, and I was hooked. I read Ben Graham. I printed out 10-K SEC filings and pored over them, calculating free-cash-flow ratios. And I bought a couple of “baby” shares in Graham’s most famous disciple’s company, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. (Turns out, financially, I should have stopped right there…but anyway.) I wasn’t sure whether I’d manage a fund or private wealth, but I was going to hone my skills, and use them to make other people rich, and become independently wealthy myself.
The Berkshire shareholder meeting has been called “The Capitalist Woodstock”, and one B-share would get you in to hear the Oracle’s wisdom live. And so, I made the pilgrimage to Omaha. Like a huge fair, you could load up on products from Berkshire companies. Mrs. See’s. Justin Boots. A custom Berkshire Monopoly game. Swarovski crystal from Borsheim’s. And books, my favorite. Recommendations from the masters themselves, Buffett and Charlie Munger. And a lovely coffee-table book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, written by a fan of Munger to capture his “worldly wisdom”. That was a dangerous book.
Munger really was a wise person, with deep insights. His approach to mental models changed my intellectual life. (For a worthy current promoter of these ideas, see Shane Parrish at Farnam Street.) And the practical wisdom captured in his speeches and aphorisms is worth reading and re-reading.
But one little nugget in the Almanack stuck in my mind. It wasn’t lengthy and apparently isn’t famous, because I’m having difficulty finding it either in the physical pages or online right now; citation, hopefully, to be added. But it was a seed that began to grow.
Munger was a billionaire. But he lamented how much we reward intelligence in finance, and how much society loses when brilliant minds devote themselves to “shuffling little pieces of paper” (I wish I had the exact quote for you, but for now you’ll have to rely on recollections from a couple of decades ago) instead of working on the real problems confronting us.
It gave me a bit of pause, but I read on. Later, I finished a couple of business degrees and a postgraduate finance designation. But Munger’s lesson kept on simmering. It combined with other destabilizers over time…but those factors, and the ways they’ve combined, are other stories. Stories along the path to becoming a lot less focused on maximizing my net worth, but even more interested in understanding what kinds of “wealth” we hold, build, and destroy in our collective interactions.
I’ve come to a complicated relationship with capital and with business. Misuse of money can be a social cancer, and the structures of modern capitalism celebrate such misuses. But I still believe good people can build good businesses that build up their communities, even amidst a broken system–and I’ve spent several decades acquiring the tools to help them do so.
If you’re a business owner fighting to build something meaningful and profitable, I’d like to get to know you and cheer you on as an ally in the struggle. Or if you want to work with me, I’m glad to do that too.
Through Common Thriving, I help business owners move from chaos and uncertainty in their businesses to clarity and confidence about specific steps toward a future they really want. I also offer implementation help, so that paralysis and confusion can change to forward momentum and understanding, and to thriving individuals, companies, and communities. If these are challenges you’d like to progress on, book a time on my calendar to explore what might be possible–I’ll enjoy talking with you!
…further reflections on book summaries, Socrates, knowledge, and wisdom
It strikes me that words are the footprints of thought. Words aren’t thoughts themselves; words aren’t the things themselves; words aren’t knowledge or wisdom. Words are dead. But if the footprints follow a helpful path, and you follow the path, you may walk the path into wisdom or knowledge as well.
Socrates wasn’t a fan of writing, for much the same reasons I’m somewhat skeptical of book summaries. Indeed, I’d planned, but forgot, to mention his dislike of books in my prior post. Later, when I searched online, I found this excellent article (you should read it; it’s short), with a quote of Socrates from Plato’s The Phaedrus:
[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
The map is not the territory; the words in a book are not the author’s thoughts. If well-chosen, the words may be helpful guides along a path of thoughts similar to that which the author followed, but knowledge and wisdom are attributes of people, not of words.
In travel, guidebooks and tour guides can be helpful orientations to places, can even in themselves be enjoyable and educational experiences. And yet, a “guided tour” of a place is an entirely different experience than to inhabit that place. Perhaps it’s so with books and authors. The mere act of writing and reading (or speaking and listening) mediates the flow of wisdom and knowledge between two people, perhaps constricting it, certainly re-shaping it.
I’ve visited Darjeeling. It’s a lovely place, with mountain air, wonderful food, old hotels. I could recommend several restaurants, a lovely little hotel, and several experiences to you. Perhaps you could say I know a bit about Darjeeling.
But several years ago, tourism to Darjeeling stopped for a time. A community center was burned; there were burning tires in the streets. I could give you only a laughably sparse sketch of the reasons for this. I don’t know, in any meaningful way, the experience of those who live there, of the tensions within the community in Darjeeling and beyond.
I know a bit about Darjeeling. I’ve been there. But really, I don’t know Darjeeling. Those who live there know the place more than I–but even they know portions of it, from limited perspectives.
If you want to know Darjeeling, go there. Enjoy the experiences. Then seek out the people who live there, across the various ethnicities. Listen deeply to them; learn the joys and frustrations. Live there yourself. And then, you’ll actually know a portion of Darjeeling.
We read books seeking wisdom and knowledge. They’re often amazingly effective as guides of thought, for being only blots of ink on a sheet of plant fiber–but they are guides only, flawed mediators of thought, valuable only insofar as they lead us to “re-think”, or to think anew, things that are valuable.
Seek to think, to learn wisdom for yourself, to discover for yourself–and you’ll find the words on the page to be powerful allies. Seek a shallow knowledge, and you’ll receive it, a gilding for the lead of your being. Your guides will lead you to what you seek.
(Oh, curse self-awareness. The above felt really meaningful while I was writing it, but it faded to glurge. I’m publishing anyway. The core idea is at the start: words are “footprints”, they won’t do the work for you, and if you expect them to do so, you’ll end up with nothing worthwhile. Friends who write: constructive criticism welcome (here or via e-mail). I don’t mind rambling a bit, but how does one ramble well? Perhaps the biggest problem is that I started pontificating somewhere along the way.Generally a bad idea, probably especially when one’s tired.)
Are book-summary services valuable innovation, or valueless semblance of knowledge?
I don’t know the answer. I do, though, have several thoughts.
Against: they’re abominations!
My instinct: they’re extreme abridgements, and can’t help but do violence to an author’s message. Shane Parrish, a gent I highly respect, describes book summaries as being put together by 22-year-olds who don’t have your life experience, insight, or context–and as really not useful.
They build an appetite for “snacking” rather than for thoughtful engagement. Even if they accurately represent the content, the work of reading is part of actual absorbing what you read in a meaningful way.
They kill the aesthetic in favor of the utilitarian.
They make you, and others, think you know more than you actually know, offering a shallow appearance of knowledge or wisdom rather than the real thing.
More than that, they let others seem more knowledgeable and wiser than they are! Grr!
For: they’re really useful!
All reading is skimming. I think that’s actually another insight I gained from Parrish. You’ll never read all the books out there. You might not even finish most books you start. Is it better to not encounter an idea at all, or to encounter it in possibly-distorted, possibly-oversimplified form?
Books are often way too wordy. Carol Dweck’s Mindset has a powerful idea, but struck me as stuffed full of fluff. Some other books bearing brilliant ideas have nonetheless been tortuous reads. Summaries get to the point!
A summary can be useful as a “preview” of a book, as a roadmap of the author’s ideas and the book’s structure.
A summary can be useful for a book you know you’ll never read.
And…
My gut reaction to summary services is abhorrence. And I just now downloaded a number of summaries, and also recently subscribed to a “summary-ish” service. I have getAbstract access through my membership in a professional association, and think I will find value in the summaries. I think there is value in them, in “tasting” books and ideas. But the idea of them is deeply prosaic, deeply “grey”, deeply…well, the medicine one must swallow, not the delightful confection one dreams of. And it’s really sad to have knowledge or insight as “medicine”, not the stuff of delight but the stuff of necessity.
I’m not going to gush over summary services, but I think they have a place, a useful role. And they feel like a desecration of the art of writing. Bah, humbug, and all that.
It strikes me that to “know” something without a rich set of context is, at best, a weak and impoverished knowledge. It’s not a binary thing; all of us are imperfect “knowers”. But the more we rely on what we “know that we know” to order the world, the higher the barriers we erect to our own learning, and the further behind our potential we will fall. Books that come to mind:
The Great Divorce, by C. S. Lewis, a speculation on life and afterlife as fulfillment of one’s desires. Offers a rich analogy with the “mundane” domain of knowledge.
Questions Are the Answer, by Hal Gregersen, a book I highly recommend that argues for the importance of seeking out “unknown unknowns” and that offers some tools to do so.
One pattern of learning is to delve deep into a subject, going far beneath the surface to find the treasures that no one else sees. These mines hold treasures, and they’re unassailable–but it’s easy to block the entrance to the “surface” world.
Another pattern is that of the Mongol hordes. Their pattern was to move fast, spend a bit of time securing the territory, and then sweep onward, taking with them a harvest of intellectuals and craftsmen from the conquered cities. They were formidable…and as they went, their culture changed to something new.
The Mandelbrot set, a fractal, is infinite in detail, yet it fits in a constrained space. Yeast also grows in fractal fashion, yet in expansionary mode.
The empire of the mind needs to produce its own treasure. The empire needs intellectual raiders.
A great roadmap I stumbled across for generating and exploring ideas for action, and actually moving to implementation (rather than just having a cloud of circulating ideas):
Generate 100 ideas.
Choose the top ten and dig deeper into them.
Drive one of the ten to full implementation.
More info via Charles Chu and Nick Bentley, though I encountered the idea somewhere else (but can’t remember where).
I’m a wannabe intellectual. I always have been. I love the life of the mind, admire those who’ve done the work and come up with original insights–but I haven’t put in the hard work, and have no Revelation From The Deep Well of Reality to share.
But it occurs to me: maybe all intellectuals are wannabes. Not one knows everything there is to know, even in his particular field. And despite the occasional originality, most intellectual advancement comes from remixing the thoughts of others. Remixes happen under the influence of a particular person’s experience and cultural context; even if they aren’t “original”, they may bring new insight. And ideas don’t flow instantaneously and freely throughout humanity. So, if the group of which I’m a part would otherwise never encounter the ideas of a “great intellectual”, to translate and bridge her ideas into my context is not arrogance, is not redundant effort, but is service to those around me and to the world.
All true intellectuals “wanna be” better, and want the world to be better, and invest mental and (probably?) communicative energy in that. “Better” is a moving target, individually and corporately, and we won’t ever declare complete success–but perhaps even one who isn’t a “real”, qualified, worthy intellectual of the highest caliber can add value in this effort.
I am anything but an accomplished intellectual. But maybe it’s OK to be a wannabe.
Related:
“The Loving Intellect”, a worth-reading article (focused on a “Christian intellectual”) in First Things, a publication I often regard with some skepticism. I found to be helpful the idea of deconstruction as a tool for use in a larger effort.
A few of the many sources I love for “remixing”:
Farnam Street: impressively wide and deep consideration of how to live, learn, and think well; introductions to many other thinkers.
Brain Pickings: wide-ranging reflection; introductions to many others.
I’ve been looking for the solid truths of the world, things I can know without a doubt. And yet, I’ve discovered that–though I don’t doubt the existence of the truly real–to say that the real exists is a very different thing than to say I understand the real.
You may have seen the movie version of a command center: panels of screens, some with scrolling data, others with plots of missile trajectories or disease outbreaks, and yet others awaiting instructions (authenticated by iris scan or voice-print, of course) from the Very Important People. They know what they need to know. They have eyes in the sky, NSA taps into Internet chokepoints, radar, real-time data feeds. They know how to respond, and they do so decisively. It’s a very satisfying story.
The command center of my psyche is a bit different. Behind a sliding bookcase, at the end of a tunnel that glows with candlelight and smells of incense, is a windowless room. It’s anything but gloomy, with warm wood walls and abundant cushions for reclining. There’s a desk and a comfortable chair…and on every wall, a chaos of sticky notes.
“I should eat more protein; p=0.6.”. “Cycling even in horrible air is still a net positive for health; p=.55”. “John is generally trustworthy; p=.95”. “Killing a person without provocation is morally wrong; p=.999”. “I should not give to beggars by default; p=.5”.
You might know the story of Erwin Schrödinger’s hypothesized cat, who lived (or died) in a box with a flask of poison and a switch to open the flask (or not) based on the randomness of radioactive decay. Until the box is opened, says Schrödinger’s interpretation of quantum theory, the cat is both dead and alive. Aside from the flask-of-poison thing, the cat has a wonderful life. It will not, it cannot, commit to so simple a thing as being either alive or dead!
Unlike the cat, I’m often forced to decide. I’m often forced to act. And those decisions are never perfect ones, based on a perfectly clear view of reality. I’m forced to make a provisional decision, a guess, and then move forward from it. But the guess might be wrong!
Some guesses “feel” more confidently right than others. I really don’t think I’ll conclude anytime soon that, well, execution by flaying is after all an appropriate action in some cases; my opinion on the subject is really rather firm. But my sense that “it will probably take about an hour to go across town” has much less confidence attached–neither half an hour nor an hour and a half would be completely shocking. Both of these have subjective probabilities of being right; the “no gruesome killings rule” with near certainty, the travel-time expectation with about 50% confidence. And yet, I sometimes have to act on an assumption that’s as likely to be wrong as right–or even, sometimes, on a “best out there, but probably wrong” one.
The problem is, the inability to see perfectly inheres in being human. In other words, flawed perception and flawed reasoning is guaranteed. (If you haven’t had your fill of umlauts, go check out Kurt Gödel for one lens on this.) In such a situation, the question is not whether you’re wrong, it’s a question of how wrong you are. And then, to act in the way that seems least wrong, with no guarantees that it is indeed the least-wrong way. And so, my sticky-noted beliefs have probabilities attached. They might be wrong. Even the probabilities might be wrong. But life often demands answers, and the sticky notes provide them–acknowledging that they’re imperfect, that I’m imperfect, and that I can truly, indubitably, know almost nothing at all. To claim otherwise is to assert my perfection, which I’m far from ready to do.
“Sticky notes” aren’t just for insignificant issues. Often, the “wishy-washiness” of a sticky-note isn’t because its subject doesn’t matter; it’s because it does, and the issues are far too important and too complex to risk “locking into” a wrong position. And yet, since many situations demand “answers”, the sticky notes are there: acknowledgments that my understanding is certainly incorrect and incomplete to some degree, and that each of my “answers” is provisional, and subject to change if I find a better one.
Among the sticky notes, there is one small cluster of metal etchings. That’s a cluster of things I simply choose, completely indefensibly, to hold as true. (I don’t pretend to have moved beyond the smallest foothills of understanding it, but Michael Polanyi’s work on “personal knowledge”, as filtered through the first part of Lesslie Newbigin’s Proper Confidence, was nevertheless a game-changer for me on this, an argument that a set of some such indefensible commitments is essential to communicating about any kind of knowledge.)
Each of my sticky notes helps me engage the world without collapsing into indecision. Each one reflects the reality of my cognition: three pounds of soft tissue trying to grasp something far vaster than itself, with the guarantee that its perceptions will be incomplete and incorrect, and that their processing will be influenced greatly by the “noise” within and without.
Sometimes, in the windowless comfort of the Chamber, there’s an inexplicable whisper of wind. The notes on the wall rustle; occasionally, one falls to the floor and I can’t quite figure out where to reattach it. And I rest, and I read, and I sort, and I update my scribbled portals to the world.
Deep Knowledge is a four-part series in progress, in which I ramble concerning the nature of knowledge, our capacity to handle it, and our orientation to it. Parts include:
This post follows “A Place to Stand“, in which I described my search for deep knowledge that could let me understand and control my world.
Reality exists. Descartes demonstrated at least that, as he realized that a non-existent entity is unlikely to be considering the question of its existence. And even a simulated consciousness points to the “reality” of the simulator. I think it’s fair to assume that a reality of some sort exists, and (as long as I ignore the faint meowing of Mr. Schrodinger’s cat) that it exists largely indifferent to my understanding, or even awareness, of it.
Reality exists. I understand reality to exist in a certain way. I experience gravity pulling me down as I write. But is that attraction the mass of my body being pulled toward the larger mass of Earth? Is it simply a manifestation of the way my body and the planet mutually warp space-time? Or are the things I think of as “I”, the planet, the universe, and the relations among them just ways of interpreting the vibrations of 26-dimensional strings? (By the way, to anyone reading this who actually knows what they’re talking about in physics, my apologies.) Reality exists. That doesn’t meant that I understand reality.
I know that, at one point, the Americas contained societies very different from those of Europe. I know that Europeans came to the Americas and became the dominant culture in what is now the USA, that fighting broke out, and ended with England ceasing to govern “the American colonies” and a new, federal government being formed. Although I think these are fairly universally accepted facts, a Native American, an “American Patriot” of that era, a Loyalist American of that era, or a Briton would all have different understandings of what “really” happened–even, I suspect, if miraculously given all the necessary ability and time to observe every event and every person’s thoughts at the time.
My perspective is finite, is biased by my history and environment, and is therefore incomplete and inaccurate. So is that of every other human who has ever lived. It isn’t that we have not yet learned the correct perspective; it is that there is no possibility, given three pounds (or three megatons) of brain matter, of ever achieving a perspective that is complete and fully accurate.
The thing is, I know there’s a reality that’s worth digging for. Or, at least, I’m acting in faith that that’s so. But my confidence that I, or anyone else, is able to clearly perceive it has been on a steady downward trend for most of my adult life. The Apostle Paul, a couple of millennia ago, spoke of the situation (as translated to the English of the 1600s) as “seeing through a glass darkly”–gaining hints of reality, through distorted filters. In a strange paradox, the more you learn about your own filter, the more you can correct for it–but the more you learn about the distortions of the filter you know about, the more likely it seems that there are other filters to which you’re still oblivious.
The anthropologist Paul Hiebert proposes “triangulation” as a helpful tool for reducing distortions in our perception, using diverse viewpoints to help correct each other to estimate what’s behind the veil. I think he’s right–but it’s an issue of reduction rather than elimination, and a process subject to its own biases, and a collaboration among finite beings. It’s worthwhile–but, two thousand years after the apostle wrote, we still find ourselves gazing at reality through clouded panes of glass, and unable to completely pierce the clouds.
When reality matters, and when one can’t clearly see it, what is one to do?
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
-Stephen Crane
Deep Knowledge is a four-part series in progress, in which I ramble concerning the nature of knowledge, our capacity to handle it, and our orientation to it. Parts include:
Known Unknowns 