Hey friend,
Our app is still going through the App Store review process, so we jumped on a train to Edinburgh and spent a few days there.
I loved it. Old, colossal buildings; the largest park I’ve ever seen, and monumental castle on a hill. We were lucky enough to have some sunny weather, which is not always the case in Scotland, so we had a good time walking around and enjoying the city. Some pics below.
I also read a short book that changed my mind on how to think (grateful to Dmitry Kurilo for sharing).
Here’s what’s up this week.
Writing
Disconnect
New essay is out! I found spending time offline extremely beneficial to my thinking and mental health in general, so I wrote an extensive guide on why you might want to try it as well, and how to actually do that.
If you only have 5 mins and prefer video to read, watch this.
Books
Thinking as a Science, by Henry Hazlitt
One of the best reads this year, along with the Incerto series by Taleb. As you might have guessed already, the book is about thinking.
The author got me from the first paragraph:
Confess it, have you not often been in a waiting room or a Pullman, noticed people all about you reading, and finding yourself without any reading matter, have you not wished that you had some?—something to “occupy your mind”? And did it ever occur to you that you had within you the power to occupy your mind, and do it more profitably than all those assiduous readers? Briefly, did it ever occur to you to think?
Note that the book is 103 years old. That’s actually a proper criterion for choosing reading matter: the older the book, the more likely it’s good because people would not print and distribute bad stuff for hundreds of years. Whereas what all the new hot bestsellers are doing is taking original works by great thinkers and making them “popular” for non-voracious readers. Ugh.
What stuck out:
“The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder, is but a pair of spectacles behind which there is no eye.” — CARLYLE.
If a man were to know everything he could not think. Nothing would ever puzzle him, his purposes would never be thwarted, he would never experience perplexity or doubt, he would have no problems. If we are to conceive of God as an All-Knower, we cannot conceive of Him as a Thinking Being. Thinking is reserved for beings of finite intelligence.
A problem properly stated is a problem partly solved.
What men do not know about they take for granted.
But if you immediately abandoned every problem you started to think of, whenever you came across one which you imagined was just as important, you would probably never really solve any big question.
Here’s another reason why concentration is necessary. Suppose a man started to put up a barbed wire fence, got as far as driving in all the posts, then lost interest in the fences and decided to grow potatoes in his field, plowed up the ground, lost interest in the field and neglected to plant the seeds; decided to paint his house, got the porch done, lost interest… That man might work as hard as any other man, but he would never get anything done.
Thinking done in the evening seldom approaches in efficacy the thinking done in the first hours of the morning.
It has been frequently said that many of the world’s greatest inventions were due to accident. In a sense this is true. But the accident was prepared for by previous hard thinking.
Learning to think by reading is like learning to draw by tracing.
“The safest way to have no thoughts of one’s own is to take up a book every moment one has nothing else to do.” — Schopenhauer
“A man should read only when his thoughts stagnate at their source, which will happen often enough even with the best of minds. On the other hand, to take up a book for the purpose of scaring away one’s own original thoughts is a sin against the Holy Spirit. It is like running away from Nature to look at a museum of dried plants, or gaze at a landscape in copperplate.”
We do not like to devote a lot of time to one book, but would rather run through several books in the same time, believing that we thereby gain more ideas. We are just as mistaken as a beginner in swimming who would attempt to learn several strokes before having mastered one well enough to keep afloat.
The best practice for boxing is boxing. The best practice for solving important questions is solving important questions.
Think for yourself, my friend.
See you next Sunday,
Vasili