A Learning a Day

After watching the movie “The Boys in the Boat”, I checked out the book’s Goodreads page. I immediately found two quotes that resonated (and shared them here) and bookmarked the page for future reading. I finally got back to this and I thought I’d share a few more that resonated.

“It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can’t waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead.”

“The wood…taught us about survival, about overcoming difficulty, about prevailing over adversity, but it also taught us something about the underlying reason for surviving in the first place. Something about infinite beauty, about undying grace, about things larger and greater than ourselves. About the reasons we were all here.”

“What mattered more than how hard a man rowed was how well everything he did in the boat harmonized with what the other fellows were doing. And a man couldn’t harmonize with his crewmates unless he opened his heart to them. He had to care about his crew.”

“Perhaps the seeds of redemption lay not just in perseverance, hard work, and rugged individualism. Perhaps they lay in something more fundamental—the simple notion of everyone pitching in and pulling together.”

Beautifully written. These were a few among many that resonated.

Weike Wang shared a beautiful essay on friendship in The New Yorker magazine. It takes about 10 minutes to read – it is worth reading in full.

I found myself smiling and nodding as I read it. She starts by sharing her experience as a teacher talking to her students about their friends. Kids, especially in their pre-teens and teens, are all about friends and friendship. They can’t imagine a world otherwise.

She, on the other hand, has only been experiencing attrition. As she’s grown up, she shares how marriage, kids, and work reduce the number of friends – true friends – she really has.

She then goes on to reflect about the gift and curse of friendship – choice.

“The wonder, and the curse, of friendship is choice. You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends. For me, common qualities and habits help. Female. About my age. Sense of humor. I would not choose a friend who went out dancing all night on Ecstasy. No offense to dancing or Ecstasy, but in comparison with those things I would be a total bore. I would not choose a friend who had a second home somewhere like the Hamptons or Lake Como or Austria. Of course, it is superficially nice to be invited to garden parties or SoHo lofts, but I don’t want to be the lone Asian woman in that garden wearing a cotton dress and sensible shoes, my only topics of conversation being work, the grind, and not that new art gallery down the street. In other words, the supposed freedom of friend selection goes only so far, and, given how deeply my choices are informed by my background, family, and upbringing, I wonder if they are choices at all.“

It is beautifully expressed – especially “I wonder if they are choices at all.”

She then goes on to describe the truth behind friendships – friends grow apart… and growing together is not the norm.

“All this to say that friends grow apart. Commonalities change. Common habits diverge. Qualities that you didn’t much like in a friend amplify, and your own traits, priorities, shift. A friendship is not stagnant, and growing together is usually not the norm. It’s nice to have writer friends, but then all you talk about is writing and how insane you have to be to do it. Nice to have friends with other jobs, but then all you hear about is their work, which you might not understand or care about. Work colleagues can never be true friends, and neither can one’s students. A fake friend is easy to spot, and even easier is the friend or acquaintance who, after a long period of no contact, emerges from literally nowhere with the message Hey! Just saw you published a book! Here’s a picture of that book in a bookstore. Let’s grab coffee and catch up.”

And she ends her essay by making peace with that beautifully temporary nature of friendship.

“From the lobby, I entered the elevator with my dog. A pair of summer students came in, too, with their suitcases and totes, and my dog and I were pushed into a corner. I was annoyed that summer students were already moving in, less than two weeks after the regular ones had left. I imagined more weed, more parties, full washers and dryers, rank trash drips in the hallways for workers to clean up. Then the two students started talking about their afternoon plans. Today, they were going to go to Central Park, sit on a blanket, make friendship bracelets, and braid each other’s hair. They were earnest. I heard no sarcasm. An interloper to this casual, wholesome moment, I was reminded that, though most friendships are temporary, they are very beautiful in bloom. The friends left the elevator laughing, tote bag to tote bag. All my annoyance went away.“

As I started writing this blog in my teens, I’ve thought about friendship a lot over the years and written about it plenty over the years. I’ve experienced the phase where friends are everything and then also experienced the attrition she talks about.

The one idea that has stayed with me over the years (decades?) is that friendships last for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. As they’re a two way street – even with your best intentions, you can’t make a seasonal friendship last a lifetime.

It is a painful lesson to learn. But it doesn’t change how true it is.

But, to Weike’s point, though most friendships are temporary, they are very beautiful in bloom.

Enjoy that, we must.

Mark Manson’s “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” was one of the more practical and useful happiness/life advice books I’ve read in a while. A few reflections:

(1) Mark’s liberal use of profanity to make his point made me chuckle at various points. It is thus fitting that the biggest lesson I took away from the book was a point he made early on in the book (paraphrased) – We all walk around giving too many f*cks. We let far too many things bother us – none of this is going to matter when we look back years from now. Leading a good life is about learning to give a f*ck about the few things that matter.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the past weeks since reading the book. Even today, I faced an incident that I might have reacted to. But “don’t give too many f*cks about random things” came right to mind. I smiled and moved on.

(2) “Often, the only difference between a problem being perceived as painful or powerful is whether we feel we chose it. With great responsibility comes great power.”

With great responsibility comes great power is a wonderful flip of the famous Spiderman quote “with great power comes great responsibility.”

(3) “Wanting positive experience is a negative experience. Accepting negative experience is a positive experience.”

As I reflected on a sub-par first half of this year during my mid-year break, I realized that I’d let far too many things get to me. I’d lost perspective and equanimity over an uncharacteristically long stretch. So, Mark’s wisdom came at a time when I was just working out how to take action on that realization.

It is short and impactful – a book I’ll be recommending.

I went to our neighborhood “Sports Basement” the other day with our bikes. I wanted to check if they needed a tune up.

These tune ups can be expensive services in most bike shops and it had been a while since our last one. So I wasn’t sure what to expect.

The guy at the bike section checked all four and said they’re all in good shape. No tune up necessary.

He could just as easily have done something on the margin and charged us. I would have been none the wiser.

But, by deferring that bit of business in the short term, he immediately won my trust. I won’t be going anywhere but sports basement for any future tune ups.

Many stores write up values and mission statements. I’m sure Sports Basement has something about customer service or trust. Like every other competitor.

But values are only values when they cost you money. They only make it down from the wall to the office floor when we’re willing to trade-off short-term gain.

“The main theme of human history is that we become steadily more specialized in what we produce, and steadily more diversified in what we consume: we move away from precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence.” | Matt Ridley in How Innovation Works

I’ve often pondered about the gradual increase in the amount of specialization in our society. I think of it every time I marvel at a complex gadget or some amazing piece of infrastructure.

I thought this note on specialization and the move from “precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence” was well put.

It resonated.

A good personal finance hygiene habit is to do a recurring check on all recurring payments/subscriptions.

Thanks to the recurring nature of these payments, there are often optimization opportunities that add up to significant savings over the long run.

And, every once a while, these checks help us evaluate if we’re still getting the value we signed up for. No point optimizing something that shouldn’t be part of the mix in the first place.

A biker recently vandalized my left rearview mirror recently and sped away. I’d initially thought it was a case of hit and run. But, no, the video showed him drive close and punch the mirror before he sped away.

The video also confirmed he’d turned his plates around so he couldn’t be identified. He knew what he was doing.

This brings some unnecessary hassle with it. The covering and a few of the wires are gone and will need to be fixed.

But I came away feeling lucky. The mirror didn’t break – so I’m still able to drive the car while I schedule a fix.

It could have been worse.

This is also when my very useful bigger accident superstition kicks in to reframe this random incident as a gift that prevented something worse from happening.

A good reminder that we don’t usually control what happens to us… but we can control how we respond. And, sometimes, a bit of reframing goes a long way to ensure we’re responding from wholeness vs. our wounds.

As we march toward a world where energy is both abundant and sustainable, we’re still in the early days of identifying win-win methods of deployment. One such method is “Agri-PV.” Here’s the problem statement – land is typically used exclusively for crops or for solar panels.

However, it is possible to merge the two with solar panel shaded agriculture. It can provide temperature regulation and optimize water usage while providing electricity for the farmer.

This, of course, works differently based on the type of crop. So, the type of Agri-PV system depends on how much shade/sunlight the crop needs.

As you can see from this study in Central Europe, it works better for berries and fruits (which yield more with more shade) while also providing the additional benefits of solar power.

I think of these kinds of systems every time I drive past the California central valley. When I look at the uncovered canals bathed in sunlight, I think of the amount of water that is lost in the system to evaporation. Covering these canals with solar PVs (a.k.a. “Project Nexus“) would reduce the water loss for farmers while providing electricity for the same communities at scale.

Agri-PV and Project Nexus are great examples of the experimentation needed as we make this energy transition. I’m excited for all that lies ahead.

“Wanting positive experience is a negative experience. Accepting negative experience is a positive experience.”

I thought this was well put.

H/T: Mark Manson

“The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I’m not sure it’ll ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe, everything except itself.” – from the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956 film

This made me chuckle. It is why self-awareness is hard.