Welcome to the Reading List, a Saturday roundup of readings and links about personal growth, business, entrepreneurship, good work, and the human condition.
This edition features: what it means to try, 18 life-learnings from Maria Popova, data as added sense, and facing our mediocrity.
“One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to.
Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn’t know what to do so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. And then he asks the impossible question, “What would the average random code do?” He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good, and that therefore there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts?
That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.”
“Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness — that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another.”
“One of the biggest misconceptions about data is that it somehow stands in opposition to ‘gut’, or ‘intuition’.
One way this gets reinforced is that you will meet individuals who are slavishly beholden to the ‘data’ — they will make arguments and demand hard numbers to back a position, even when the numbers are difficult (or impossible) to get. Another variant of this is that these same folk will follow — blindly — wherever the data leads them — even when it goes against common sense.”
“Motivation and discipline are buzzwords in a culture captured by a profusion of sensual pleasures and distractions. Our attention is driven left and right like Newton's Cradle while we remain fixed in the same position. However for those untethered to paralyzing comforts and diversions, the greatest challenge lies not with inaction, but unrealized potential.”
