1. It was indicated to the President by his chief adviser that it should be attempted to formulate a decision to act at the earliest opportunity, in the best interests of circumventing what might otherwise result in the country flowering into embarking on a prolonged, extended and exorbitant military conflagration.
2. The chief adviser urged the President to act quickly to avoid war.
The first is messy, excessive and requires multiple readings to understand. The second is clear and straight to the point.
In many domains, it’s tempting to complicate things. We think what we currently have isn’t enough and look for external improvements. Here are some traps I’ve fallen into:
To be productive, I need shiny apps.
To run, I need expensive running shoes, a flipbelt and a Garmin watch.
To make a sentence better, I need to make it long and use lots of adjectives.
But often, you have what you need to start. All you need to be productive is yourself. All you need to start running are your legs. The most elegant sentences are the simple and clear ones.
Add-ons can certainly help. But they also run the risk of overcomplicating something until either they’re too much of an investment for you to start or are unreadable.
We all have the same 24 hours in a day. One second is 1000 milliseconds whether we like it or not. You can’t slow or speed up time.
But everyone has moments when time goes really fast. Maybe you were absorbed in a book or a puzzle. Maybe you were drunk or lost in social media. Or what about those times when you had a great conversation with a kindred soul and time just disappeared? In times like these, hours can feel like minutes.
And we also know moments when time feels really slow. Maybe you were stuck in an elevator or waiting in line. Maybe you were reading a difficult article or doing a tough workout. And how about those moments when you’re in an environment you detest and are trying to find a way out? In times like these, seconds can feel like an eternity.
We all have the same amount of time. But the way we perceive it is totally different.
Ever since I got over my phone addiction, I’ve noticed how long some days feel. It’s not that I’ve been given two more hours in a day: I still have the 86,400 seconds as everyone else. But it certainly feels like I have more time. And if that’s the case, what’s the difference?
When we comment on how the years seem to fly past, perhaps we should check ourselves. Because a baby has the same amount of time as me and you, and yet they seem content with the time they have.
Maybe it’s not the world that’s getting faster, but just us losing ourselves in it.
Makes sense: We need a Universal system of time for scheduling things like meetings and when planes need to depart. Not really: Nothing really changed between 11:59pm – 12:00am. A new day starts when we wake up.
2. Joining a running festival
Makes sense: An organised sports event that you’ve paid for gives you greater motivation to train. You also receive a medal to flex on your non-runner friends. Not really: You can literally run the course for free any other day.
3. Swimming
Makes sense: Earth has so much water. Why not move around in it? Not really: Why are we trying to be fish?
4. Wearing pants
Makes sense: It protects us from harsh environmental stimuli and serves as a fashion statement. Not really: Pants give us atrocious tan lines and no other animal wears them.
5. Personality tests
Makes sense: People have personalities. Let’s test them and see where they match compared to others. Not really: Can you seriously group 7.9 billion people into 16 (MBTI) or 9 (Enneagram) categories?
6. Formal education
Makes sense: You learn to socialise with people at a similar stage in life and make friends. Also, it’s important to be educated so you can enter the professional workforce and earn lots of money. Not really: You can socialise with similar people through other group activities such as sports, volunteering or music. Furthermore, any school class can only reach a particular level of ability: if you are above the standard, you are held back; if you are below the standard, you are left behind. The abundance of high-quality online courses these days makes self-directed learning much more accessible. Books can teach you more about the world than your lived experience ever could. Lastly, employers don’t care about your degrees and are more interested in what skills you have, particularly soft skills; things schools don’t teach nearly as much as they should.
Makes sense: Under experimental observation, quantum entities may be described as either a wave or a particle. Not really: ???
The point of all this is that the world is filled with ideas we take for granted but don’t really make sense under closer scrutiny (at least to me). I wonder what other dubious narratives are out there.
Here’s the analysis of a game of chess I played the other day:
Me (white) vs. a Serbian (black)
With computers surpassing humans in chess, engines are able to analyse a chess game to see how accurate the moves played were.
The better the moves are according to the engine, the more likely you will get a good, excellent or best move by the engine’s standards. On the other hand, moves that the engine deems questionable are labelled inaccuracies, mistakes or blunders, in order of how bad the move was. Blunders are basically the engine’s way of saying what on Earth are you doing?
The accumulation of these moves result in an overall accuracy number, out of 100.
In this game, I played a game with 19.3 accuracy. Which is literally a fail according to the chess engine.
But it’s okay, because only one statistic matters.
I didn’t blunder.
It doesn’t matter that the whole game had eight inaccuracies and nine mistakes. Although many moves played were pretty bad, they were good enough to prevent an immediate win for the other player.
Only one move decided the game: a single blunder on move 22 from my opponent. They resigned the move after.
After a fairly balanced midgame, White now has mate in 4
In many domains, part of the formula of success is knowing which mistakes are fatal and which ones aren’t. Consider these findings:
The highest performing athletes are the ones who avoid injury;
The most successful investors are the ones who could lose all their stocks and still survive;
The person that wins a game of chess is the one who makes the least worst mistakes.
This isn’t to say success means making no mistakes. Athletes make bad plays all the time. All investors choose a wrong stock at some stage. No human chess game is ever played perfectly.
The key is making the least worst mistakes. If you know which decisions are fatal, you will eventually prevail over those who don’t.
Yet, how do we know when a mistake will end us? We can’t know what is fatal unless we experience it ourselves, right? Here are two suggestions:
1. Learn from others
Chances are, you’re not the first person to start a task. People have tried what you’re trying and have made the mistakes for you.
Learn from them.
2. Remember that it is not the end
Let’s say you do make a fatal mistake. You get injured. You lose all your money on stocks. You lose a close game of chess.
Is your life over?
No! Mistakes are a natural part of life. You will grow and learn from this mistake and do better in the next battle. None of us are beyond encounters with total stupidity.
Indeed, if we never made some huge blunders from time to time, life would be pretty boring.
Birds sitting on a tree aren’t worried about a branch breaking.
If it breaks, they just fly away.
Their trust is not on the branch, but in their own wings.
In anything with inherent risk – investing, starting a company or asking someone out – paralysis analysis can run rampant. It can be easy to envision possible doom-and-gloom scenarios which halt one from starting at all.
But on closer inspection, the root problem isn’t that the risk is dangerous, but more that we don’t trust ourselves to survive if all hell breaks loose.
We have all overcome hardships. You being alive today and understanding this sentence is a biological miracle. Your lived experience has made you into an intelligent, adaptable force. Your sufferings have strengthened you in unimaginable ways.
Why not trust the wings that have sprouted from them, as birds trust in theirs?
Sometimes, they’re too hard. Yet, leave them out for a little too long and suddenly, they’re rotten.
But every once in a while, you’ll cut into an avocado and it’ll be perfect.
When you encounter the perfect avocado, you certainly aren’t going to waste it. You’ll turn it into the most delightful avo-toast sandwich, eat it straight out with a spoon or do whatever you enjoy the most.
Recently, I’ve been musing about timing. As a baby, reading the Vampire Academy series would have been beyond me. The task would be premature; too hard. But if now I were to go back and read it, I’d probably cringe after every chapter. The task would be overdue; too rotten.
The perfect time to read Vampire Academy was in my teens. And when I did, it was great.
What opportunities are ripe for picking right now? Things that seemed far-fetched a few years ago, and might seem childish in a few years: where are they?
Because we only really have the present moment. If we continue doing what we’ve always done in the past, we might find a rotten avocado. Yet, if we look too far forward, we might begin an endeavour we’re not ready for. The perfect adventure for us exists right now but is on an expiry date.
Are we not ever-changing, both gradually and per situation?
It took me three weeks to write my first ever article.
Along the way, I gave up multiple times. The reasons to stop were deafening. It’s not worth your time. People will judge your work. You have nothing to share.
The loudest one was: You can’t write.
I had never taken a writing class and had no writing style to draw upon. Ideas in my head constantly failed to materialise into words. Imagine trying to tell a story but having no voice. Utterly paralysing.
One day, I decided to try something new. I pretended that I knew how to write and invented a story for myself that I was a writer; that people were interested in what I had to say and would enjoy my prose. All completely unproven and probably not true.
But it worked. My first article was posted exactly two years ago: 02 March, 2019. It was a terrible piece of writing and is one of my least read posts, but it got this train started. And now, after 130 posts, I finally feel like I’m finding my voice.
You might feel like you’re not capable enough. Quite frankly, you might not be. But if you tell yourself a good enough story, you just might rise to the occasion. And if you do it long enough, the fiction might just become a reality.
In his commencement speech at the University of the Arts, Neil Gaiman gently urged: So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.
One of my most surreal memories came from the age of 15. It was a cold and quiet Friday night. The street lights were off and the neighbourhood was painted pitch black. I was chatting on the driveway with a few friends and a mentor of ours – six in total. Suddenly, our mentor told us to stop.
Look up, he said.
We didn’t hear him at first. A few of us were laughing at how we couldn’t see each other. A little boy was complaining at how he was cold. Yet, our mentor insisted.
Look up.
When we craned our necks to look upward, all six voices fell silent. The sky was breathtaking. It was one of the most spectacular starry nights I had ever seen. Millions and millions of stars lit up the dark canvas like candles in the dark. The night, which seemed so dark and mysterious, was graced with pockets of light from thousands of light years away. We stood there enchanted for a good 10 seconds or so.
What my mentor said next I’ll never forget.
The world can be incredibly dark. This darkness can be scary; at times it might even be suffocating. It might threaten to engulf you whole.
But look at the stars. Just one star produces enough light to vanquish all the darkness. And if you have many stars, suddenly the world looks dazzling. But it all starts with that one star.
We are all stars.Whenever the darkness feels like too much, remember that you can do something about it. If you see no light in your world, be the light yourself. Shine.
Yet, it’s not so easy to shine. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. Us being small does not serve the world. There is nothing impressive in shrinking into insignificance.
To shine is a challenge to be different. To be a light in times where darkness prevails. And who knows? Perhaps liberating our own fear gives permission for others to do the same.
“For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.” – – Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb
Yes and no are often thought of as being two sides of the same coin.
But in reality, the difference between these two is enormous. Let me explain.
Yes is saying no to everythingelse; whereas no is saying yes to anything else.
If you say yes to a 15-minute call at 2:00pm, you devote that 15 minutes to that call and nothing else. You’re not eating, brushing your teeth, or moving your attention. Nothing else goes into that scheduled time. When you say yes, you say no to everything else.
More still, this 15-minute block affects more than the scheduled time. You know what it feels like: one appointment causes the day to shift and swing towards this event’s centre of gravity. 12:00 isn’t 12:00, but 2-hours-until-that-appointment o’clock. The day which was once free for anything, now rotates around this 15-minute call.
On the other hand, no is one of the most liberating things out there. When you say no to an offer, you free up that time to do anything you want. You could read a book, take a nap, call a loved one or watch a movie. The possibilities for that 15 minute block are endless. When you say no, you say yes to anything else.
This isn’t to start a war against scheduling time and saying yes. Having a weekly timetable and embracing new challenges are two practices that I firmly stand by.
But for the ones who value freedom and autonomy, the reminder here is to be careful of what we say yes to. Often, the hidden dangers of a “yes” far outweigh the FOMO of saying “no”.
Here are five ideas that I’m currently warming to, plus five rebuttals from a disgusted, younger me.
1. You don’t need to be the top of your class. Just being average is fine, so long as you know the fundamentals. Only this person has enough time to pursue other skills and hobbies.
Previous me: Excelling academically is one of the highest priorities one can hold, for this will unlock opportunities later on to enjoy life (related: The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman).
2. There is nothing but the present moment. This moment in time and space is perfectly unique and impossible to grasp.
Previous me: Having a vision to work towards is one of the greatest ideals one can have.
3. Nothing has intrinsic meaning. Everything – place, person, or song – is a blank canvas; you can project whatever meaning you want onto it.
Previous me: The most meaningful thing one can do is figure out why they were placed on this world and to live it.
4. If someone ignores my invitation or message, following up with them is a sign of respect – they may have just been busy or forgot to reply.
Previous me: If someone ignores my invitation or message, I should just let them be. They clearly don’t want to deal with me.
5. People are really interesting. The threads that intermix and weave together to form a person are enchantingly beautiful. Yet, cultivating lasting friendships can be difficult.
Previous me: People are all the same. Making friends is easy: just don’t judge others.
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