ButWhatFor? Four for Friday | No. 041

Resources, Bad Habits, Foster Homes, and Britain did a Genocide

Sep 23

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One Quote: Greater than our Resources
One Long: Bad Habits
One Short: I Grew Up in Foster Homes
One Extra: That Time Britain Did A Genocide

One Quote

We will benefit from that helpful precept of Democritus, showing us that tranquility lies in not undertaking tasks, either in public or private, that are either numerous or greater than our resources.
— Seneca

A trap I often fall into is trying to do too much. I think many others have the same problem. It seems to be a mental disease of some sort for the anxious or motivated.

It is easy to look at 24 hours in a day, say that is nowhere near enough time to do everything you want to do but you are going to try anyway, stuff your time full of idealistically optimized tasks, fail miserably at roughly all of them, and then feel bad about it when you are trying to sleep that night.

The ancient Stoics had the same problem — so Seneca had to remind them that life is about prioritization. It's hard because most of the time the person telling us to do that incremental thing is the person staring at us out of the mirror.

That person tends to be a terrible taskmaster if you aren't careful.

To quote Ryan Holiday of the Daily Stoic:

Each of us needs to take the time to set our priorities straight and to understand our limits... The key isn’t to always do more, more, more, but sometimes to do less so that we can do more of what we care most about.

One Long

Bad Habits

Picasso was walking through the market one day when a woman approached him.

She pulled out a piece of paper and said, “Mr. Picasso, I am a fan of your work. Please, could you do a little drawing for me?”

Picasso smiled and quickly drew a small, but beautiful piece of art on the paper. He handed it back to her.

“That will be one million dollars.”

“But Mr. Picasso,” the woman protested, “It only took you thirty seconds to draw this little masterpiece.”

Picasso smiled, “On the contrary, it took me thirty years to draw that masterpiece in thirty seconds.”
— Sahil Bloom

A while back, Sahil Bloom shared an email in the spirit of thinking backwards / thinking through inversion — but more specifically about how habits can tear apart your future more easily than you can build it.

Some of the "bad habits" that caught my eye:

Saying yes to everything (see Quote above)
Obsessively optimizing your time
Multitasking is simply fake productivity
Comparison traps
- “Comparison is the thief of joy” — Theodore Roosevelt
A persistent desire to be right
- “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool” — George Orwell
Waiting for the perfect moment
- “Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes” — Robert Watson-Watt

One Short

I Grew Up in Foster Homes

Rob Henderson @robkhenderson

I grew up in foster homes, fled as soon as I could by enlisting in the military at age 17, and studied psychology at Yale and Cambridge with the GI Bill + scholarships. Here are 31 things I learned from growing up in dysfunction and deprivation and climbing out of it Thread

Rob Henderson writes about a variety of topics all tied into human nature on Substack. He also has quite the Twitter following and a while back posted about things he learned growing up and dealing with a less-than-stable childhood.

Some things that stood out to me — and apparently I have a thing for bulleted lists this week — though the entire thread is a quick, interesting read, but:

You are what you do. Not what you say or what you believe.
- “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool!” — Richard Feynman
Have friends outside of your profession.
- This is something that I have shared with friends and colleagues over time as well; I work in banking / investing, and you can get stuck in a fake, little, unhappy finance world with all its associated myopia if you aren’t careful
Getting punched in the face once permanently reduces your fear of it happening again. It’s not fun. But it’s not as bad as you think.
Read at least ten pages of a book every morning. It doesn’t have to be the same book. Just start by building the habit.
- This is good for any habit: “Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action” — James Clear
Envy knows many disguises.
- “Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at” — Charlie Munger
Don’t be the smartest person in the room.
If you have a good idea or an interesting thought, always write it down
At funerals, people don’t talk about the accomplishments of the deceased. They talk about their character.
- “The most suitable defenses of old age are the principles and practice of the virtues” — Cicero

One Extra

That Time Britain Did A Genocide

I think most people know of the Irish Potato Famine — the mid-1800s period of mass starvation and disease that lead to over a million deaths and two million people leaving Ireland.

What I think a lot of people don't know — I was completely unaware, at least — is that but for the British's colonization efforts and the related taxes on the Irish, the famine’s deadly impact could have been mostly avoided. There was enough food in Ireland outside of potatoes, but the British land owners and the government continued to forcibly take it from the Irish through taxes and threats of homelessness.

Thus, in effect, the cold approach the British government and landowners took towards the plight of the starving Irish was a genocide. They viewed the Irish of lesser value than their "true" citizens in the UK, blamed these made-up deficiencies for the increasing death toll, leveraged recently popularized and conveniently responsibility-reducing Malthusian ideas about population collapses being inevitable for the unsophisticated, and went on their own merry way.

Robert Evans does a great job with the topic here:‎

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Have a great weekend,

— EJ

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