Random Surprise - Chapter 10 of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

I opened Meditations book randomly and got this surprise.

This has been one of very painful and liberating lessons of life for me. 

Kabir said : Sab paise ke bhai.
Nanak said : Eh jag meet na dekhyo koi

And thats truth. 

You just get people in your lives. 

The  thing I can-not comment on is 'children'. How they affect us. The emotional connect etc.

I also remember a monk that I met at Huda Metro Station, with whom I had a brief discussion. I forgot what I asked him, but the only thing I still remember is he said, "only soul is changeless, everything else is impermanent". 

Another monk I remember, who just said, "its true, you just have faith in any God (Ram or anyone else) and spend life, get married."

Also, as @fateh pointed out "people like you because how you make them feel."
Not the truth, not if you are a saint. 
No. 
"How you make them feel".
What can you do for them.

Will not touch upon dynamics of strangers, friends, relatives or family members.
**
18-07-2020 : Reading again today - "Nature bound you to them". 

Nuance


  • Specifics gives clarity. Generic talks can only give shape to vision. Always go to specifics after discussion of the general. Details. 
  • People who make suggestions or ask you about your own growth are your well wishers. 
  • Google, Youtube in particular looks like is giving preference to individual creators. (12-07-2020)
  • There are people who will not change their belief even if you provide a contrary evidence. They will keep adding observations confirming their long held beliefs. Unable to let go their time investment, ego investment etc to waste. 
  • Intellectual honesty makes one easy to work with.
  • Everybody wants to feel important.
  • Awareness of impact of presence/absence of father is a blessing. Some people just have no idea that this is something they are missing or have missed.
  • Negatives in life can be avoided ( by avoiding / observing experiences of others or by learning from others), however anything positive, one needs to experience oneself. There is no other way. Self-experience is the only way. 
  • Understand 'headache'. (This is not about head).
  • Just found out that the fewer words by @fateh have been condensed. It is good to have explanation or reasoning behind that one sentence. Example "reading widely builds discernment". We should know how, reasoning behind it, a little explanation. (Although, it looks self explanatory.)
  • Inwardly calm, out worldly taking actions. Take a few moments to separate yourself from everything external.
  • V. good interview. I'm learning to take things that concern me. I have no understanding of interest rates, options, stock market etc so will ignore. I would like to understand basic 'accounting' (not finance, you see. accounting). So, I take following things from his interview: 
    • Squeezes are followed by a glut. Things, aka events now happen at faster pace due to internet.
    • That all that I can recall.
  • You see, Taleb liked someone comment that 'people hustling on twitter all day might be better if they get a job somewhere'. He's right. He's right for his estimation of a caliber. What about people like me who would love to have a a side hustle paying in $ while I spend in INR? The minimum $ wage is better if I spend in India. 
  • Not that he does not talk about this. He does as in his books and somewhere in printed articles. I remember he mentioned somewhere a CEO who informed his mom about a shoe store that he opened. His mom's dream was to own a shoe store. Right there, his mom slammed him saying, it's not the same thing. 

Self-awareness in Women

After reading this thread by Illimitable Man, I understand that how 'self awareness' in women is quality that I have taken for granted in these times. Self-awareness is a good trait, if one has.
He spits gold on Twitter. Here is a thread on 'self-delusion' in women. The significance of this thread is not only in understanding women, also in human psyche. Being realistic requires effort and may bring one face to face some bitter truths. 

Here you go : 

Also, we take the normal for-granted. Only deviation from the normal towards worse is noticed. Note here that maintaining something normal requires consistent effort.

 I will give you a very simple example, clean floor. 
It's normal, we expect floor to be clean, forget appreciation, won't even notice how clean the floor is. But, it takes a daily effort to keep it clean, sweeping + mopping.

 In this age, same applies to human mind too. Forget about appreciation, we won't even notice a clean mind. For us, it should be default. However; its not. It takes consistent effort to develop oneself. So, we should be grateful for what we call normal.

 Let's be grateful for what we have. Appreciate it and see what you can add to improve it.

 Oh, don't forget to go through that thread, it will clear out alot how to identify self-delusional women or people. 

Why most dislike difficult questions?

Most people respond badly to difficult questions. You ask them a hard question and simplistic minds either discard the question or make an ad-hominem argument.

One reason is that its extremely hard for us humans to understand something that we have not personally experienced. (Maybe impossible in many-many cases).

Simple answer is, because it forces one to think. And its hard to think. We want everything easy. Counter-intuitive things requires more mental work.

It is escapism.

However, keep avoiding hard questions and you will waste alot of time. The real-life challenges require one to ask hard questions from oneself. If you are one who avoids asking them, then you need someone else to ask them from you.

You need questions
- To assess reality
- To have honest assessment
- To avoid difficulties down the road
- To stay on right track

Don't avoid them. Ask hard questions. Write'em.




Consistency

2020.
Six months have passed. I've not started anything new. Although a project is ongoing however, only time will show results.
Its the lack of consistency, lack of motivation.
Or maybe Analysis Paralysis.
There's always something the pops up. And the attention is diverted.
No-doubt it is equally important too.

 However, I do feel that there is lack of motivation. There's no goal. There is only a mini-goal which needs to be kept in the focus, needs to be reminded about. Ideally, it should not be the case. That should be first thing in my mind. There has to be momentum.

 This thing might be because, there is nothing going on. Only once when you do things, there will be momentum. So, this might be the cause. Surely, Chinese Virus has a major role to play in this. Things stagnated due to this virus. Not to mention competition from very own supplier.

 Anyways, I went back to a Quote from Taleb, on trial. He says,
"Trial and Error Means Trying Alot". 

Can You Calculate Risk?

Thought of the day:

My friend said, "but when the time comes, can it be calculated"?
That 'it' that we were talking about was Risk.

Don't we go all-in?
or maybe when the times pushes us to the wall.
What Daniel has been talking about in the tweet above, Taleb has termed as 'Convexity'.
Here is the point number two in his essay Understanding Is a Poor Substitute for Convexity (Antifragility)

"2) A "1/N" strategy is almost always best with convex strategies (the dispersion property):
following point (1) and reducing the costs per attempt, compensate by multiplying the number of trials and allocating 1/N of the potential investment across N investments, and make N as large as possible. This allows us to minimize the probability of missing rather than maximize profits should one have a win, as the latter teleological strategy lowers the probability of a win. A large exposure to a single trial has lower expected return than a portfolio of small trials."

"take many small safe-to-fail bets".
In order words, avoid 'ruin'.
However, as pointed out by my friend, do we really have a choice to calculate when the testing times come?

My opinion is, difficult times do test us and when we take action; we gain with resilience.
Ruin or not, we always have a choice.

Even when the ships are burned, we have a choice. Die fighting or conquer.




Man inspiring other men, giving nuisanced pointers : Fateh Singh

I've been following @fatehshernu on twitter. This man has provided solutions. Solutions to many question that had been not answered so far. Now making it easier to break this recursive loop. I wish I had got him earlier.

Here is one of the snippets :