SD#74: Carbonara, failure and social status
October 29, 2023
Welcome to the 74 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here.
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Hi friends,
Is it just me or is there more and more information available at our fingertips but fewer ideas on what to do with it? Wasn’t it easier 20 years ago when you didn’t know how to make a carbonara and your only options were to buy a book, pay someone to teach you or try and improvise? Now there are 50 different recipes on how to cook it on YouTube, Google, ChatGPT. If you Google it once, you’ll be followed by ads serving you Italian cooking lessons for the next month. How do you choose the right recipe? Is there one? How many videos do you need to watch to decide that you know enough? We’re all trying to find the best one and if we do, what happens with the next 49 recipes that have been passed on through generations? The treadmill for a fully optimised life seems to have no end.
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. How to drop out This piece is a bit further from what I subscribe to usually, but I still value exposing myself to different ideas and different this was. Getting free of the system is more complex than we’ve been led to believe. Here as in so many places, our thinking has been warped by all-or-nothingism, by the Hollywood myth of the sudden overwhelming victory: quit your corporate job this minute, sell all your possessions, and hop a freight train to a straw bale house in the mountains where you’ll grow all your food and run with the wolves! In reality, between the extremes, there’s a whole dropout universe, and no need to hurry. The path is different for everyone. Maybe you’re already intuitive and decisive and know how to have fun, but you don’t know how to manage money or stay grounded. Maybe you’re using wealth or position or charm to keep from having to relate to people as equals, or you’re keeping constantly busy to avoid facing something lurking in the stillness. Whatever weaknesses keep you dependent on the system, you have to take care of them before you break away from the system, just as you have to learn to swim before you escape a ship. How? By going out and back, a little farther each time, with persistence and patience, until you reach the skill and distance that feels right. To drop out is to become who you are. Do not feel guilty about using strengths and advantages that others do not have. That guilt is a holdover from the world of selfish competition, where your “success” means the failure or deprivation of someone else. In the dropout universe, your freedom feeds the freedom of others — it’s as if we’ve all been tied up, and the most agile and loosely tied people get out first and then help the rest. 👉 Ran Prieur |
2. If you see life as a giant experiment where your goal is to explore as much as you can to obtain answers to your questions, failure becomes an investment to get closer to these answers In the words of Seth Godin: “The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.” Scientists often repeat experiments thousands of times to get a conclusive answer. And more often than not, the answer they get is that their initial hypothesis was wrong. Not performing the experiment would have allowed them to stay in a cosy limbo of being not wrong, but then we wouldn’t have any science. This is why approaching failure like a scientist is so powerful. By making decisions that will let you learn something new, you are guaranteed to be successful — where success is learning, evolving, and growing as a human being. Failing becomes a way to cultivate aliveness. 👉 Ness Labs |
3. It always takes longer than you think it will There is this law called Hofstadter’s Law which says it always takes longer than you think it’s going to take. Even when you think it’s going to take a long time. Even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account. Waiting is not the hardest part. It’s the not knowing when the waiting is going to end. But that’s life. That’s how success works. It takes longer than you want. It takes longer than you expect. It takes longer than you’re willing to wait. In any case, it takes however long it takes. Talk to parents who had trouble conceiving. Talk to people waiting for their immigration papers to come through. Talk to scientists taking a drug through clinical trials and regulatory approvals. This isn’t to say there isn’t good news along the way, that there aren’t trending signs and little hits that keep you going. There will be. But it’s going to take a while to get what you want. 👉 Ryan Holiday |
4. Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t? Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anaesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century. The first public demonstration of anaesthesia was in 1846. In those days, even a minor tooth extraction was excruciating. Without effective pain control, surgeons learned to work with slashing speed. Attendants pinned patients down as they screamed and thrashed until they fainted from the agony. Nothing ever tried had made much difference. Nonetheless, a surgeon agreed to let a local dentist demonstrate his claim that he found a gas that could render patients insensible to the pain of surgery. The idea spread like a contagion, travelling through letters, meetings, and periodicals. Sepsis — infection — was the other great scourge of surgery. It was the single biggest killer of surgical patients, claiming as many as half of those who underwent major operations, such as a repair of an open fracture or the amputation of a limb. Infection was so prevalent that suppuration — the discharge of pus from a surgical wound — was thought to be a necessary part of healing. Yet, it struggled to catch attention for years and even decades despite clear benefits. So what were the key differences? First, one combatted a visible and immediate problem (pain); the other combatted an invisible problem (germs) whose effects wouldn’t be manifest until well after the operation. Second, although both made life better for patients, only one made life better for doctors. Anesthesia changed surgery from a brutal, time-pressured assault on a shrieking patient to a quiet, considered procedure. Listerism, by contrast, required the operator to work in a shower of carbolic acid. Even low dilutions burned the surgeons’ hands. 👉 New Yorker |
5. People are bad at predicting how they’ll act in the future The empathy gap describes the tendency to underestimate the role our current emotions play in decision-making. It’s related to the projection bias, which refers to our tendency to overestimate how much our future self will share the same tastes and preferences as our current self. Sometimes referred to as the “hot-cold” empathy gap, when people are in a ‘cold’ state — not feeling any negative emotions — they assume they’ll make rational decisions in the future. Yet, when in a ‘hot’ state — such as being hungry, tired, afraid, sad, jealous, etc. — those negative emotions can drive them to make poor decisions. If you’ve ever committed to eating healthier and then gone grocery shopping hungry, you’ve likely experienced the empathy gap. 👉 Customer Camp |
6. Apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behaviour Nobel Laureate economist, John Harsanyi, said that “apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behaviour.” The more noticeable status disparities are, the more concerned with status people become. Of course, status differences are not simply relevant to economic standing, but they appear to be on our minds at all times. As renowned neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga has noted, “when you get up in the morning, you do not think about triangles and squares and these similes that psychologists have been using for the past 100 years. You think about status. You think about where you are in relation to your peers.” Between CEO and employee, quarterback and wide receiver, husband and wife, status looms large. Ongoing efforts to maintain a positive view of oneself despite economic and social hardships can engage psychological defence mechanisms that are ultimately self-defeating. Instead of ingratiating themselves to those around them – this is the successful strategy for status attainment – low-status individuals may be more prone to bullying and hostile behaviour, especially when provoked. Research identifying factors that lead to successful status-seeking provides some optimism, though. Individuals capable of signalling their worth to others rather than being preoccupied with signalling their worth to themselves may be able to break the self-defeating cycle of low-status behaviour. 👉 Scientific American |
7. Connection between laziness and productivity Writer Hanif Abdurraqib on The Stephen Satterfield Show: “I constantly sit on a lot of ideas. So what that means for me is that I have to be disciplined and kind of thoughtful. I’m very lazy! I think there are multiple kinds of people in the world: There are people who are hard-working and disciplined. There are people who are hard-working but pretty un-disciplined — so there’s a scattershot way their work appears in the world. And me, I’m pretty lazy, but I’m very disciplined. Perhaps more disciplined, I would guarantee, than anyone you know. They act in opposition to each other, right? So the laziness is kind of inherent. Which means that I know that left to my own devices, I would do nothing. I was an athlete. I played basketball, I played soccer in college. So I had to learn a type of discipline, because my love for what I was doing propelled me towards that discipline. Suzan-Lori Parks, a playwright who I adore, says this thing about how discipline is simply a love for your big self. And that’s kind of the path that I follow, because I’m driven to get the things I’m excited about out of my head. Because I don’t know how good they do me — just me in the world — if they’re only in my head. And that isn’t saying that everyone needs to see them, it just means that there has to be some kind of extraction process that fuels and excites me. Writing does that. Writing about music, specifically, does that. I can be in opposition to my inherent laziness, and build a discipline around, not even the work of writing, but the work of joyful extraction. And to present it like that, and to put it like that, offers me a better runway to it. And I cannot stay in bed, because I would much rather be in pursuit of some revelation that might arrive to me in the process of doing this work. So that’s how I act in opposition to my own laziness.” 👉 Austin Kleon |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”
Albert Camus
🎁 Fun things to click on:
GigaBrain scans billions of discussions on reddit and other online communities to find the most useful posts and comments for you. How to be happier: eleven of the most popular approaches. Stable Doodle converts simple doodles into detailed art using generative AI.
Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.
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Speak soon,
Tom