2024-12-31 08:00:00

It’s time to wrap up and celebrate 2024, an eventful year that fueled my yearning for internal growth and curiosity, with challenges and lessons I am grateful for.

I’ve recently built a set of Grafana dashboards to track my personal goals, which I’ve been finding incredibly interesting to explore and visualise (something that might be interesting to share in a later post).

Final Tally

There are other metrics I track, but specifically to 2024 content creation, these are the final statistics¹:

• 17 posts on this blog, 16 of them being notes (not counting this one), and one of them being a full blog article sharing how to build a personal local (Llama3 8B) LLM, extended with WhatsApp and Obsidian data
• 10 YouTube videos on my main channel. 8 of them being long form, the other 2 being shorts.
• 5 YouTube videos on Out and About, a recently created channel where I share random experiences on activities such as walking / hiking around or driving.

Notice that the tracked metrics are on the volume of content produced, not their number of views, subscribers, likes. Although keeping track of topline metrics makes sense for a full fledged business, I chose instead to track what I can control, which is my output. At the end of the day, this is a hobby, a labor of love.

If I can influence someone’s life for the better, that will already fill my heart to the brim. This, added to how important posting these contents has become to consolidate and structure my thoughts, and serendipitous opportunities they randomly opened, make this an incredibly satisfying endeavor.

I’ve experienced time and time again that consistency eventually bears wonderful fruits. Who knows which doors might open one day later? I don’t, but I’m curious to find out.

2025, one day away

With 2024 wrapped up, let’s welcome 2025. I’ve pinned down next year’s goals and will be looking forward to sharing what I learn along the way. Happy new year, and see you on the other side! 🫡

2024-12-30 08:00:00

Over the past 4 years, I’ve written about 1820 pages on the 13 A5 notebooks shown in the picture above. This tool has become essential for my job, and in this article I’ll describe the simple process behind it, which I’ve found to deliver consistent results, reliably.

Write, Consolidate, Repeat

The process I’ve been using for several years is based on Option 3. of Solving Task Switching Through Documentation, and is broken down in three steps:

1. Write

• Material: A5 spiral notebook (it makes it easier to be written anywhere, because the pages can always be flipped around in a way that only the writing page is facing up, and the rest of the pages serving as a solid writing surface; plus the notebook’s rings are great for carrying your pen or pencil reliably), with clear pages (this allows for diagrams, phrases, texts, tidbits, collaborations to happen without any formal restriction). Have another backup notebook within reach, to replace the main one when it runs out.
• When: Make sure to always have your notebook and pen / pencil at your desk, meetings, conferences, 1:1s, and any environment where a collaboration is made, within reason.
• What: Write down your thoughts, key points that coworkers communicate, ideas, anything else you find relevant. These are your notes, so allow yourself to expand and experiment.

2. Consolidate

With several notes written, their consolidation can happen in three different time spans:

• Immediately:
  • The mere act of writing often helps the thought process, since it forces ethereal concepts to be materialized into paper. Expect that a good portion of the written notes to not be read ever again.
• Shortly after they are written:
  • Keeping track of conversations: has it ever happened to you that suddenly you completely lost track of the discussion, especially a complex / ambiguous one? Refer back to the jotted down key points to quickly recall and connect points. Soon after you will be back on track, and maybe with new insights.
  • Summarization of conversation segments, usually at the end of a meeting: leverage the written notes to summarize key takeaways and action points. There is nothing worse than spending 30 minutes in a discussion without material end results or follow ups.
• Some time after notes are written: I avoid this period to be longer than one day.
  • Transcribe key points into a structured medium, such as a document, article, or personal log (I use a simple text file where I log important events during the day; this text file has been consistently updated for 4 years, and is a personal historical treasure trove spanning several thousands of lines).

3. Repeat

Just like other processes, their value only becomes apparent after they have been used several times. Build a habit. It will then become immediately apparent whenever a notebook is not at hand, or when structured notes are not written down.

2024-12-28 08:00:00

I’ve recently finished reading Diary of a CEO: 33 Laws of Business and Life, which draws from both Steven Bartlett’s entrepreneurial journey and interviews from the homonymous podcast. These are are my main takeaways:

Building high performance groups

Incentives and culture

• If you want to predict what a group of people will do over the long term, you need to look at their incentives, not their instructions.
• Companies don’t have one company culture: every manager in an organization creates a subculture underneath them.
• In a small group / startup, when the culture is strong, new joiners become like the culture. When the culture is weak, the culture becomes like the new joiners.
• In a small group / startup (and likely this can be applied to teams), create a cult-like dynamic upon its inception, but then transition it to a more sustainable structure. Key elements of a cult:
  • Provides meaning, purpose and belonging. Asserts superiority of the group.
  • Clear shared identity and commitment to ideology.
  • Leaders present themselves as infallible, confident and grandiose.
  • “Us vs Them” mentality: there is a clear adversary.

Traits of a good leader

• The factor that kills meaning the fastest is a leadership team that dismisses employee’s work or ideas, removes their sense of ownership and autonomy, and asks them to spend time on work that is cancelled, changed or disregarded before it’s been completed.
• Allow people the space to fail and succeed. The main job of a leader is to be a supportive enabler, not a critical micromanager.
• Leaders should proactively remove any obstacles, bureaucracy and sign-off processes that prevent the team to achieve daily progress, this includes identifying and providing the required resources for them to do their job. To discover these gaps, ask the teams informally or formally about these problems (via retros for example).
• Leaders need to point out, publicize and praise progress as loud, far and wide as they possibly can. Recognition reinforces behaviour, but it also acts as evidence to adjacent teams that progress is possible for them too.
• Alex Ferguson, the widely successful manager from Manchester United, didn’t care about tactics, strategies and formations. He cared about getting the best out of each individual, the team’s culture and attitude. He didn’t want them to be become complacent:
  • He had different ways of dealing with different players. He knew how to get the best out of everyone. He knew his players well, and what made them tick, like Gary Neville’s important connection with his grandparents.
  • Some players strived under Ferguson’s “hairdryer” treatment, others under a more compassionate approach, and others by being more hands off. There was not a size fits all approach. The main objective was always to have the team and club at a higher ground.
  • It is impossible to seamlessly blend into a team as a jigsaw piece, unless you comprehend the unique shape of each of your team members.

Ask who, not how

• Every CEO and founder will be judged on their ability to hire the best, and bind them into a culture that gets the best out of them. An environment where they become more than the sum of the parts.
• Your ego will insist that you do. Your potential will insist that you delegate.

Excise bad apples, promote bar raisers

• “The cost of one bad apple can be the loss of many good ones” - CEO of General Electric
  • Study found that employees were 37% more likely to commit misconduct at work when they encountered a new co-worker who had a history of misconduct themselves. Toxic employees really are contagious.
  • When a bad apple isn’t fired, it can lead to employee disengagement, other employees copying the behaviour, social withdrawal, anxiety and fear. Culminating in the deterioration of trust in the team and further disengagement from its team members.
• 3 bars framework
  • Ask yourself, or managers: “if everyone in the organization had the same cultural values, attitude, and level of talent as this employee, would the average bar be lowered, maintained, or raised?
  • Fire the ones that lower the bar, promote the bar raisers.
• “(…) not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players”. “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do” - Steve Jobs

Dealing with discomfort

• “Hard” is the price we pay today for an “easy” tomorrow.
• When you refuse to accept an uncomfortable truth, you’re choosing to accept an uncomfortable future.
• When something is unresolved because we’ve chosen to bury our heads in the sand, it doesn’t sit dormant, waiting to be addressed; it becomes toxic, contagious and poisonous to those around us, inflicting more collateral damage with every day that it remains unaddressed.
• When seeking the truth that is causing the discomfort, listen to understand, not to look for a victory, but rather in the perspective of a partner that wants to overcome that difficulty.
• In a relationship, if you’re having the same conversation over and over again, you are having the wrong conversations. You’re avoiding the uncomfortable conversation you should be having.
• It is in talking about our disconnections that people create more connectedness with one another.
• You can predict someone’s success in any area of their life by observing how willing and capable they are at dealing with uncomfortable conversations. Your personal progression is trapped behind an uncomfortable conversation.
• As mentioned by George Vaillant, denial can be healthy, enabling individuals to cope with rather than become immobilized by anxiety, or it can be unhelpful, creating a self deception that alters reality in ways that can be dangerous.
• “People think they’re motivated by seeking pleasure; they’re wrong, they’re motivated by avoiding discomfort” - Nir Eyal

Pressure only comes to those who earn it

• “Pressure is a privilege, and champions adjust” - Billy Jean King (BJK)
• Pressure is external, stress is internal.
• How you handle pressure and its resulting stress is essential, and makes a difference between positive and negative outcomes.
• Great pressure moments often precede great privileges.
• Life without pressure is a life without purpose.
• Pressure is neither good nor bad. It’s what we do with it that matters.
• Kelly McGonigal looked at a study made for 30k American adults, and noticed that people who experienced a lot of stress during their lives had 43% increased risk of dying, but this was only true for the ones who perceived stress as harmful. The ones that did not perceive it as harmful had the lowest risk of dying, even when compared to the ones who experienced relatively little stress.
• Objective is not to get rid of pressure, it’s to change your relationship with it altogether.
• “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat” - Theodore Roosevelt

Building good habits

• Instead of fighting against a bad habit, acknowledge the cue, routine, reward habit loop. When removing any of these elements, its void will need to be replaced. Replace rather than delete.
• Cues are powerful, since they are the starting points to routines. As such, be mindful of how you set up your environment. For example, Steven Bartlett placed his DJ set in the kitchen table, in plain sight, and made sure to take only one click to start practicing, in order to reduce perceived cost of practicing it. I’ve personally done the same thing with my camera setup to shoot YouTube videos, by using a simple and predictable set up for video and microphone, which I have with highly visible in my living room, incentivizing me to do more videos.

Persistence

• “We don’t have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.” - Warren Buffett
• Katherine Milkman shared research that having a plan B, in any ambition, has a net negative on our chances of succeeding with a plan A.
  • The more you perceive negative emotions in the event of failure, the more driven you will be to succeed-
  • But don’t be reckless. Take risks that don’t put you in irreversible and dangerous circumstances.
• “If there be no alternative but death, the soldiers exert themselves to the utmost.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Incremental wins, keeping momentum

• How much you are achieving is pretty much irrelevant to your motivation: but if you feel like you are getting somewhere, you’ll be driven to keep going.
  • When problems seem insurmountable or too hard or unknown, that’s when procrastination creeps in.
  • The key here is to break down the problem into smaller, more manageable ones. The small resulting improvements and the sense of momentum will keep you going, and these will eventually compound.

Applying time and energy effectively

• The exact same skill applied in a different industry or context can have a widely different value, as seen by a Washington Post experiment where one of the world’s greatest violinists Joshua Bell, who was able to professionaly command $1,000 a minute, barely got any attention or spare change from playing in the subway.
• Position yourself correctly, and get the skills that your industry finds to be rare and valuable, and that your competitors don’t have.

Time

• Time betting exercise
  • Imagine you, and everyone is sitting around the game of life. Each player is assigned a number of chips, each representing an hour. They don’t know how many they have. Maybe it’s one, maybe it’s 500k. You can try to predict, but you don’t really know.
  • The rule is that every hour you need to put one chip on the table, or it will just be placed automatically. You can place it on Netflix, learning a new skill, sleeping, etc. Certain actions that increase your health will increase your stock of chips.
  • Your fitness will block you from betting on certain positions. For example, if you have a serious locomotion injury, you cannot choose to run.
  • The game ends when all chips are gone. You don’t get to keep anything you earned during the game.
• Being selective about how you spend your time, and who you spend your time with, is the greatest sign of self respect.

Failure as an advantage

• Ask the questions: Why will this fail? Why is this a bad idea?
• Apply the pre-mortem process to visualize and attempt to preempt failures in your plan. This will mitigate risk and likely increase your prediction accuracy.
  • A 1989 study found that prospective hindsight—imagining that an event has already occurred—increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%.
  • Steven Bartlett’s pre-mortem method:
    • Set the stage: the objective of the exercises. It is to uncover risks, not to look for escape goats.
    • Fast forward to failure. Ask team to visualize failure as clearly as possible.
    • Brainstorm reasons for failure.
    • Ideate independently, and then share and discuss.
    • Develop contingency plans.
• Share experiment failures, so that their knowledge can be leveraged when building new experiments.
• “I have not failed, I have just found 10k ways that won’t work” - Thomas Edison

2024-12-21 08:00:00

This ad struck me as the culmination of a long-standing trend. I struggled to articulate it at the time, but I’ll attempt to do just that in this article.

Let’s start by the ad itself. It carries implicit symbols and memes, whose interpretations will vary wildly from person to person, but in general I believe it attempts to convey these subtle messages:

1. In order to be seen and acknowledged as an individual, one must spark admiration and rise above the crowd with a stylish look, makeup and fashionable garments. Appearance is the solution.
2. Feeling seen is about exterior validation (which requires the advertised beauty products), rather than real understanding and connection with another being.
3. You need to command the attention of acquaintances and strangers, their judgement is important for your self worth.¹

Relying only on external validation, specially from foreign entities, as a means to sustain one’s self-esteem is a time honored strategy to produce nefarious results. Yet, it’s celebrated by certain influencers, mainstream media, TV shows, ads and movies that attempt to distort a small sample into a normality.

Demanding Standards

When external validation is postulated as a basic human need, and one’s default natural, vanilla body is not sufficient to garner the validation one needs (as the above ad suggests), it soon follows that external interventions are required to achieve it.

I was fortunate enough to grow in an environment where artificial external displays of vanity were seen as a quirk, and sometimes even frowned upon (depending on the situation), thus not a requirement for a happy and fulfilled life. But once one is born or dislodged into the eye of a hurricane, it is hard to see the surrounding damage, especially when peers abide by those standards, generating an underlying group integration peer pressure.

Hazardous trends

Several off-the-shelf beauty products are known for their toxicity, contributing to increased prevalence of cancer and infertility, yet they stand as one of the cornerstones of modern standards of beauty.

How we show up is important, and is a meaningful way of self expression, but when the baseline for allowing one’s self expression requires one to consume / apply several products (sometimes on the go), or even subject to invasive body modifications, then I would argue that something is wrong in the underlying societal system.

Mind the ouch

One such body modification, turned mainstream, is the injection of botox.

Botulism is an often-fatal nervous system disease, first recorded in Europe in 1793, claiming the death of over half of those patients who had become ill through eating uncooked blood sausages. botulus being the Latin word for sausage. One one-millionth of a gram this neurotoxic protein can kill a man, and one pint would be enough to kill everyone on earth.

In 1989, purified botulinum toxin was approved as a drug under the brand name Oculinum, and later renamed to Botox. In small doses, the same nerve damage that causes fatal paralysis in poisoning cases, helps to remove forehead creases and crow’s feet, with the only side effects being an inability to express emotion using your face, and an occasional case of drooping eyelids.

Today, injecting the deadliest substance on earth into one’s face is normalized, as seen in this TV commercial (where its mid-commercial disclaimers makes one question if it’s a real ad, or a parody²), or as seen in this suggestive London tube ad:

Look Within

I hold nothing against those who choose to subscribe to a certain mode of expression or style. I too, have my own. I do welcome you to introspect why you chose it. If your sincere why comes from a deep rooted desire to feel accepted and valued by others (good to receive these in healthy dosages, but dangerous when overbearing), then it might be something to look out for.

Relying solely on external validation likely results in feelings of emptiness and insatisfaction. I’ve been there several times, and its not pleasant. Instead, attempt to obtain self validation by looking in, rather than out. Some simple, yet powerful strategies:

1. Consider your ancestors, a stable past. For example, what would your ancestors eat, do, that worked out for their health? Our bodies have adapted throughout milenia to certain patterns, and if we are on their descendancy line, surely they did something right. Time is the great filter of nonsense and fallacies.
2. Recognize the cycle: ask yourself why you are seeking external validation, and understand the patterns and needs that lead to it.
3. Practice self-appreciation: build your self-acceptance structure, practice gratefulness and appreciation for what you are and did (a journal might help).
4. Rejection therapy: put yourself in situations you seek rejection. Start small, such as asking for a discount or applying for a job you think you are not qualified for. It helps you realise that rejection is not as bad as it appears, which decreases the need for other’s validations.
5. Set personal goals: instead of relying on others to measure against, take control, and set goals that serve your needs and desires. Keep yourself accountable to hit them.
6. Listen to your intuition: you know yourself best, so why rely on others for answers? Reach within and take distraction free time to listen to yourself.
7. Self care to self validate: do activities that make you feel good, use self affirming thoughts, take care of yourself.

2024-12-08 08:00:00

I’ve recently finished Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, a controversial, yet useful book. The information it shares makes one better prepared to navigate our complex and perilous world of influences, power and subtle manipulations.

I found it to be an eye-opener on some fronts, but mostly as providing different perspectives on things that on the surface, appear obvious.

I can recommend this book to just about anyone. Its information, just like a knife, can be used for useful, enriching and productive endeavours (like cutting vegetables for a family dinner), or for nefarious activities (such as inflicting harm upon others). It’s ones responsibility to use it correctly and morally.

Below are my key takeways, segmented by Behaviour, Resources, Relationships, Strategies and How you Show Up.

Behaviour

Attitude and Behaviour

• Be royal in your demeanor. How you present and carry yourself tells the people how they should treat you. As seen in Columbus, son of a cheese maker, who behaved like royalty, as someone who deserved to be treated well. He amazed the Portuguese king, and eventually got the Spanish royalty to get him what he wanted: a fully paid expedition, except for a lifetime 10% profit shares for him and his descendants. They felt like he was one of them. Even though he knew less about navigation than any of his sailors and was a bad leader, he still got what he wanted, because of how he carried himself.
• Beware of venerating a new seductive culture that is not your original one. Don’t despise and look down upon the culture that raised you and provided you gifts, for it will grow resentment of the ones that follow it.
• Boldness over timidity. Both are acquired behaviours. Timidity gives others time to think and plan. Makes even the tamest prone to attack when they sense blood in the water.
• Only the weak rest on their laurels and dote on past triumphs.

In victory, don’t go past your mark

• Success is intoxicating and dangerous. The moment of victory is the moment of greatest peril. Do not allow success to come to your head. Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.
  • Know when to stop and consolidate wins, instead of persisting in pushing forward.
  • When success is attained, step back, and reflect upon the conditions that led to it. Don’t simply repeat the same actions again and again.
  • History is littered with corpses and fallen empires who did not know when to stop.
  • There is a Japanese saying that Furuya Sensei was fond of, “Katte kara kabuto no o wo shime yo” which means After victory, tighten your helmet. Never let your guard down even if you think you have won. That just might be what your opponent wants you to think.
  • The moment when you stop has great dramatic importance. What comes last sticks in the mind as an exclamation point. Best time to stop is after a victory. Keep going, and it will lessen it’s effect, or even reverse it.
  • “Nothing can be more important than to close your examination with a triumph. So many lawyers succeed in catching a witness in a serious contradiction; but, not satisfied with this, go on asking questions, and taper off their examination until the effect upon the jury of their former advantage is lost altogether. “Stop with a victory” is one of the maxims of cross-examination” - Francis L. Wellman, The Art of Cross Examination
• Bad luck teaches you patience, timing and the need to be prepared for the worst. Good luck deludes you into making you think your brilliance will carry you forward. And when inevitably misfortune comes you will lack adequate preparation.
• As it’s taught in riding school: you have to be able to control yourself, before your can control the horse.
  • And even when you can control yourself, there will be people forcing you to push forward. Be careful, and manage them. Feed them with small victories, but don’t allow yourself to be engulfed in the momentum and go all in.
• “A man famed for his tree-climbing skills once directed another to climb a tall tree and cut branches. While the fellow was precariously balanced aloft, the tree-climber watched without a word, but when he was descending and had reached the height of the eaves the expert called to him, ‘Careful how you go ! Take care coming down !’. ‘Why do you say that ? He’s so far down now that he could leap to the ground from there,’ I said. ‘Just so,’ replied the tree-climber. ‘While he’s up there among the treacherous branches I need not say a word – his fear is enough to guide him. It’s in the easy places that mistakes will always occur.’ Lowly commoner though he was, his words echoed the warnings of the sages.” - Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness

Don’t appear too perfect. Don’t boast.

• By making others aware of their inferior position, you are only stirring an unhappy admiration, this is, envy.
  • To show envy, is to admit your inferiority, and that is why people don’t normally admit it.
  • “Of all the disorders in the soul, envy is the only one no one confesses to.” - Plutarch
  • Cosimo de’ Medici avoided such issues by being simple on the outside, and only showing his wealth, elegance and opulence on the inside (of his house, for example).
    • “There is in the garden a plant which one ought to leave dry, although most people water it. It is the weed called Envy.” - Cosimo de’ Medici
• Kierkegaard believed that the creator of envy is as much to blame as the person who feels envy. Don’t crow about your victories and superiority.
  • The naturally perfect are the ones that need to work the most to hide their features. One does not require innate characteristics to aquire money and power, in contrast to bearing sharp natural intellect and bodily features considered to be beautiful.
• A sudden increase in power or promotion are dangerous. Downplay them, don’t flaunt them, and attribute them to luck, since luck is possible to all.
• Be careful of false modesties that can be seen through. Put on a good act. Otherwise it will only create more envy.
• People cannot envy power that they themselves have bestowed upon a person.
  • When Ivan the Terrible died, Boris Godunov knew he was the only one on the scene who could lead Russia. But if he sought the position eagerly, he would stir up envy and suspicion among the boyars, so he refused the crown, not once but several times. He made it point for people insist that he take the throne. George Washington used the same strategy to great effect, first in refusing to keep the position of Commander in Chief of the American army, second in resisting the presidency. In both cases he made himself more popular than ever.
• If needed, pay a high price to keep envy in check.
• “Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay” - Thoreau
• “It takes a great talent and skill to conceal one’s talent and skill” - La Rochefoucauld

Rationality and Control

• In the face of a hot headed enemy, an excellent response is no response.
• Nothing is as infuriating as a man who keeps his cool, when others are losing theirs.
• Petulance is not power, it is a sign of helplessness.
• Only use raging tirades if you are in control of them, with precision, and very rarely. They are a (dangerous) tool.
• “Wise men [should be] like coffers with double bottoms: which when others look into, when opened, they see not all that they hold.” - Sir Walter Raleigh

Use your words and actions wisely

• Once your words are out, you cannot take them back. Keep them under control and be particularly careful about sarcasm. The momentary satisfaction you get from your biting words will be outweigh by the price you pay
• “Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.” - Leonardo Da Vinci
• “If you are not in danger, do not fight” - Sun Tzu

Be strategic in your approach

• When in a position of power, don’t be completely predictable, as that could be exploited. when is a position of serving others, be careful when doing that, because it might make you be seen as unreliable, or even having a psychological pathology.
• Attach yourself to the real decision maker, not people with titles. As seen for Richelieu, who attached himself to King Louis XIII’s mother, instead of the king himself, since she was the one calling the shots. As a result, Richelieu rose quickly through the ranks.
• Winston Lord had worked on a report for days, which Kissinger handed back with the notation “Is this the best you can do?”. Lord rewrote and polished and finally resubmitted it; back it came with the same curt question. After redrafting it one more time–and once again getting the same question from Kissinger–Lord snapped, “Damn it, yes, it’s the best I can do.”. To which Kissinger replied: “Fine, then I guess I’ll read it this time.”
• North wind and the Sun made a bet on who could make a man take off his coat. First, the North wind gushed one him, but that only made the man hold on to it more tightly. Then, the Sun provided a warm heat that made the man take off top coat, and then blazing heat which made the man strip and bath in the river. Persuasion is more effective than force.
• “MAN: Kick him-he’ll forgive you. Flatter him-he may or may not see through you. But ignore him and he’ll hate you” - Idries Shah

Resources

Focus your energies

• What’s concentrated, coherent, and connected to it’s past, has power.
• Concentrate your forces: Intensity beats extensity every time. You gain more by finding a rich mine and digging it deeper, than by fleeting from one shallow mine to another
• Dispersion can be a good strategy when your opponents are stronger.
• Caveat: if the sole person providing you power dies or leaves the scene, you will be in trouble. Protect yourself against that risk by having different concentrated sources of power. As seen with Cesare Borgia’s transgression of this, who derived his power mainly from his father, the Pope, who gave him armies to fight with. When his father died, he was as good as dead.
• Do not spend time, attention or energy on things you cannot have. Your attention, or lack of, is a form of power. When King Louis wanted to punish someone on their court, he would just ignore them and cut them off.
• “I had far rather be confined to one element, and be admired in that, than be a Goose in all.”

Focus on the important things

• Paranoia over small ticket issues are often destructive in the end. As seen when Kissinger made a recommendation to create a group to “plug the leaks” after the publication of the Pentagon Papers. The Plumbers, as they became known, eventually broke into the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate Hotel, setting off the chain of events that led to Nixon’s downfall.
• When you make a mistake, treat it lightly. When a petty enemy attacks you, make none of it, show contempt. Show contempt publicly, but keep track of it privately. Don’t let a small problem or foe become a cancerous cell that gains power and overtakes you. Deal with them as appropriate.
• “To disregard, is to win regard” - Italian proverb

The value of Time

• Time is a human construct. Perception of time is subjective. Younger people feel like time is going slowly. Older people feel like time is whizzing by.
• Three types of time: Long, Forcing, and End Time:
  • Long Time: happening on a years time scale, and must be managed with patience and gentle guidance. Key is to not react impulsively, and wait for the right opportunity.
  • Forcing Time: when people are indecisive, give them a deadline. Never give them time. As seen with successful art dealer Joseph Duveen, who when dealing with indecisive clients, would mention that another tycoon would be interested, something happened and he had to leave the country, etc. This strategy works as long as the party does not know what you are up to.
  • End Time: when a plan must be executed with speed and force.
• Patience is worthless if it doesn’t conclude with action. A period of waiting that does not lead into an action is a sign of indecision and procrastination. Timing is important.
• “Space we can recover. Time, never” - Napoleon Bonaparte

Despise the free lunch

• Nothing is more costly than something given free of charge.
• What is worth, is worth paying for. Always pay the full price, there is no cutting corners to excellency, for bargains are often accompanied by a complicated psychological price tag.
• Generosity is a sign, and a magnet for power. Keep money in constant circulation.
• The powerful understand they need to protect their most precious resources. Indepence, time, energy and room to maneuver. By paying the full price they keep themselves free of dangerous engagements and worries.
• Avoid bargain demons (who only consider the explicit price tag, and not the cost in time, energy, dignity and peace of mind), the money sadists (who abuse their payer position power, by for example making you wait for a payment), the indiscriminate givers (who likely are looking qualm a emotional need, are emotional drains, and want to be loved; if they give to everyone, why should you feel special?)
• The powerful must have have grandiosity if spirit, and should never reveal any pettiness. Money is the most visible arena in which to display either grandior or pettiness.
• And if you want to meddle with the work of the creative people you hire, at least pay them well. Your money will more easily buy their decision, rather than your shows of power.
• Powerful people give freely, buying influence, rather than things.
• Consider strategic generosity: give when you are about to take.
• A one time gift given at a sudden unexpected time, bears more force and impact. It will not spoil your children, but rather keep them under your thumb.
• The more the money you spend on gifts and acts of generosity that play with sentiment, the more powerful they are.
• Don’t give in to greedy and inconsequent “El Dourado”s that will only exhaust your time and energy.

Relationships

Perils of Isolation

• Do not create a fortress around you, it will make you detached from the world and make you an easy target, since it will be easy to know where you are, and be attacked.
• Pontormo, a painter who spent 11 years secluded inside a chapel painting for his patron. Terrified of being copied by others and growing more and more afraid of fellow humans, he died, and his paintings / frescos did not survive him. Vesari, who saw his paintings, described them as being embodied by madness. Perspective flaws, too many characters, several compositional flaws, figures that overlapped one another. Pontormo obsessed over details, and lost track of the composition.
• Shakespeare was well known because many people knew about his works, he didnt work in isolation.
• Isolation is good to gather one’s thoughts and escape the claws of conformity by society, but this should be done judiciously.
• The more time you spend isolated, the harder it is to come back to society. Make sure you always have a way to come back to society.

Enemies, and Friends

• Without enemies we grow lazy. Having enemies sharpens our wits. If you don’t have enemies, find them
• Without a worthy opponent, a man, woman or group cannot grow stronger.
• You are better having declared opponents, instead of not knowing where they lie.
• You need people who deliver results, not that appease you.
• Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit. Gratitude is felt as a burden, revenge as a pleasure.
• A brahman, a great expert in Veda who has become a great archer as well, offers his services to his good friend, who is now the king. The brahman cries out when he sees the king, “Recognize me, your friend!”. The king answers him with contempt and then explains: “Yes, we were friends before, but our friendship was based on what power we had. I was friends with you, good brahman, because it served my purpose. No pauper is a friend to the rich, no fool to the wise, no coward to the brave. It is two men of equal wealth and equal birth who contract friendship and marriage, not a rich man and a pauper. An old friend—who needs him?” - The Mahabharata
• “To have a good enemy, choose a friend: They know where to strike” - Diane De Poitiers, 1499-1566, Mistress of Henry II of France

Succession

• The formulas used by the successful father worked well for him, because he had nothing to lose, and gave him his kingdom and fortunes. The son, who lives in a different set of circumstances, could have his father’s ways imposed onto him, in a domineering and oppressive way, imposing his lessons on the son. Instead of trying to put the son in a new direction, the father tries to put him on his own shoes, perhaps secretly wanting the son to fail, as he often resents his youth and opportunities. Resulting in the son to be cowed and cautions and fearful of losing what the father had gained.
  • Alexander the Great only wanted to outdo his father. To obliterate his name from history. He resented that his father conquered most of Greece, leaving not much for him to conquer. He wanted to out his successful father in the shadows, instead of the opposite. Which he did.
  • As a young rebel grows older, his struggle with his father often wanes, and he gradually comes to resemble the very man he used to defy.
  • The presence of the “father” must be constantly slain and kept in check. The old ways, the father, the comfort, are enemies of progression and power.
  • Keep an eye on the young, since they will do the same to you. Identify them and keep them under control.
• It would seem easy for the son or successor to build on a grand foundation left for him. But in the realm of power, the opposite is true. The pampered indulged child, almost always squanders their inheritance, for it doesnt start with a need to fill a void. As seen with Louis XIV, XV, XVI. Louis XIV, while navigating through troubled times, built Versailles instead of taking over his father’s palace, the Louvre, and reigned for (mostly glorified) 55 years. The last years of his reign were difficult, but it was hoped that his child would develop into the kind of strong ruler who would reinvigorate the land and add to the firm foundation that Louis XIV had laid. Instead, his son, Louis XV gave himself over to pleasure. Worn out by debauchery, his country and his own finances were in horrible disarray. His grandson Louis XVI inherited a realm in desperate need of reform and a strong leader. But Louis XVI was even weaker than his grandfather, and could only watch as the country descended into revolution.
  • “Necessity is what impels men to take action, and once the necessity is gone, only rot and decay are left” - Niccolò Machiavelli
• In Sumatra, the king would be killed ritually in a brutal fashion, in order to limit his boundless power and give space for the new generations.

Strategies

Strike the Shepherd, and the sheep will disband

• Athenians found an effective way to deal with socially undesirable individuals. They didn’t fight, punish, or re-educate them. They ostracized them.
• Cancer begins with a single cell. Be quick and swift to isolate bad seeds from the group, before they infect a critical mass.
  • It’s better to isolate them, rather than destroy them. It’s less brutal. For in a game power, isolation spells defeat. Ostracize, limit their power. Spare no time arguing with them.
  • Swindlers isolate their targets from their normal social circles, making them more vulnerable to influence and manipulation. Apart from the void left I’m the sheep
  • Lure the poisonous person away, while staying away from their attacks, as seen with Pope Boniface’s isolation of Dante from the “Whites”, leaving a power void upon their faction. As a resultm Florence was taken over by the “Blacks”.
  • “If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared” - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
• “When the tree falls, the monkeys scatter” - Chinese psroverb
• Alternate harshness with mercy to soften your target. Play on their fears, but also their loves. Target primary emotions: Love, hate, jealousy.

Mirror effect

• Dr. Milton H. Erickson, when faced with a couple with problems in bed, Erickson observed the same dynamics when they talked how they liked to dine. He didn’t address the problem directly, but rather them to schedule a dinner where both would have their desires met (for one desired a slow pace, the other a big meal). It worked as expected, and they transferred the lessons aquired in the dining table into their bedroom.
• Addressing people head-on will often lead to conflict. Instead, mirror their actions so they can reflect at their own time and pace, and fix themselves without admitting fault. They will think to have achieved it on their own, without anyone realising it. But be careful when being too obvious, as it will make them think you are manipulating them, undermining your efforts.

Reformation Perils

• People know that change is needed, and are ok with superficial changes, but are deeply troubled when the changes are deep and affect their core beliefs, structures and habits.
  • Change is upsetting to the human animal, even when it’s for the good. If change is needed, find ways to disguise it. Sweeten the poison.
  • As seen from Cromwell’s beheading due to his role in the overly ambitious reform and uprooting of Roman Catholicism.
• When you destroy the familiar, you create a void that people will rush fill. The past is powerful. Borrow from its legitimacy to create a comforting and familiar presence. It will sustain your actions with a familiar and romantic feel, cloaking the nature of the changes you are attempting.
  • Because the past is buried and dead, it gives you the flexibility to interpret it as you see fit.
  • The Roman used this when transforming monarchy to republic
  • Romans used this device when they transformed their monarchy into a republic. They may have installed two consuls in place of the king, but since the king had been served by twelve lictors, they retained the same number to serve under the consuls. The king had personally performed an annual sacrifice, in a great spectacle that stirred the public; the republic retained this practice, only transferring it to a special “chief of the ceremony, whom they called the King of the sacrifice.” These and similar gestures satisfied the people and kept them from clamoring for the monarchy’s return.
  • When Romans declared Christianity to be Rome’s official imperial religion, the evocation of light and fertility (Saturnalia, Festival of Lights, Germanic celebrations of the re-birth of the Sun which all happened in December) could not be ignored. In 354 AD, the Christian church co-opted the birthday of Mithras (the Aryan god of light), and declared December 25th to be the birthday of Jesus Christ.
• The ones that finish a revolution are rarely the bones who started it.

How you Show Up

Be flexible, assume formlessness

• Just like an animal’s shell protects them from dangers, it also makes them slower and inflexible to change. Same can be said for governments and systems that build protections that ultimately make them more rigid and vulnerable to change.
  • Rigidity heightens the desire for change.
• In a Chinese tale, a farmer observed a hare running straight into a tree, breaking it’s neck. Afterwards, he waited in front of the tree waiting for the same thing to happen. He never caught another one, and was ridiculed. Same could be said for someone who tries to govern using the same strategies as those of early kings. They would be acting no differently than the tale’s farmer.

Presence dilution

• “Love never dies of starvation, but often of indigestion” - Ninon de Lenclos
• “Absence diminishes small passions, and inflames greater loves. Just as wind douses a candle, and fans a fire.” - François de La Rochefoucauld

Reputation and Respect

• Be the master of your fate, and your reputation.
• Reputation is a critical resource. When you have it, protect it.
• “When the great lord passes, the peasants bow deeply and silently fart” - Ethiopian proverb

Symbology

• A symbol is a powerful form of expression that summaries several concepts
  • For example, the Sun King symbology created for Louis XIV which symbolized his provider god like status.
  • Or Diana the mistress of king Henri II of France, who dodged the common fate shared by many other elder mistresses of abandonment, by scattering around the reign multiple symbols related to her (Diana’s favorite colours [black and white] imprinted in several buildings and images, associations with goddess of hunt Diana), and creating a motif intertwining her initials and the king’s, which king Henri disseminated widely. There was no escaping her presence. Until his death, in 1559, he remained faithful to her.
• A symbol is a shortcut of expression, containing in itself several dozen meanings. Symbols are generally subtler and less threatening than words, which can be too incisive.
• Primacy of sight amongst the senses: “Truth is generally seen, rarely heard” - Baltasar Gracián

2024-10-13 08:00:00

Keeping up with the theme on capturing lessons from content I consume, I’ve recently seen an interview from Lex Fridman to Gregory Aldrete, an historian specializing in ancient Rome and military history, in which Gregory eloquently spoke about many of the fascinating details on the rise and fall of ancient rome. Here are my takeaways from it.¹

Rise and Fall of Rome

Romans were obsessed with the past

Romans were absolutely obsessed with the past, especially with their own family.

Entering an aristocrat Roman’s house, the first thing you would see would be a big wooden cabinet with several rows of wax death masks. These masks were imprints of Roman aristocrats at the time of their death.

Every child in the family had obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors: their career, what offices they held, what battles they fought in, what they did.

At a funeral, people would talk about all the things their ancestors had done. The children would take out these masks, tie them onto their own faces, and wear them in the funeral procession. They were wearing the face of their own ancestors. You, as an individual, weren’t important. You were just the latest iteration of that family, and was a huge weight to live up to the deeds of their ancestors.

Brutus honors the past, kills Julius Caesar, Roman Republic dawns

Rome started out as a monarchy. They had kings and were not happy with their kings. Around 500 BC, they held a revolution and they kicked out the kings, and the Roman Republic started at that point. One of the people who played a key role in this was a man named Lucius Junius Brutus.

500 years later, Julius Caesar² came along as the culmination of a sequence of generals trying to overtake Rome and declare themselves as kings. Even though he was populist who provided entertainment to the state, Julius Caesar was arrogant, didn’t hide his power, ignored the senate, and got several people angry. Romans don’t like kings.

Just so happens that one of Caesar’s best friends is Marcus Junius Brutus. People went to Brutus’ house and wrote graffiti saying “Remember your ancestor” or “You are no real Brutus”. He had no choice. He forms a conspiracy, and on the Ides of March, 44 BC, he and 23 other senators take daggers, stick them in Julius Caesar, and kill him for acting like a king.

Brutus killed his best friend because of something his late ancestor did.

Filling Julius Caesar’s power void

Julius Caesar and left a power void. There are many contenders for filling it up:

• Mark Antony: a relative and supporter of Julius Caesar. Most expected him to be the new Ceaser.
• Lepidus: another of Caesar’s lieutenants.
• Senate: which wants to reassert its power, to become the dominant force in Rome again.
• Assassins who killed Caesar: Led by Brutus and Cassius.
• Pompey’s son: Pompey was Caesar’s great rival. Pompey’s son, Sextus Pompey, was at the time a warlord who seized control of Sicily, one of the richest provinces, and amassed a whole navy.
• Octavian: Julius Caesar’s 18-year-old kid grand nephew. When Caesar’s will was opened after his death, he posthumously adopted Octavian as his son.

Octavian emerges victorious

By now being Caesar’s son, Octavian gets to rename himself Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, and it just so happened that in the Mediterranean, there were about 12 legions full of hardened soldiers following the orders of a man named Gaius Julius Caesar.

As such, Octavian inherits an army overnight and becomes a player in this game for power, and a civil war starts.

Octavian emerges from it as the victor. He wasn’t a good general and lost almost every battle, but was politically savvy and very good at manipulating public image and propaganda. Octavian waged a propaganda war against Antony, portraying Antony as a foreign aggressor allied with an enemy queen, Cleopatra, and who was an official enemy of the Roman state). Octavian takes what’s a civil war and makes it look like a war against a foreign enemy.

Octavian is the “king”, but can’t act like one

Octavian now becomes the sole ruler, essentially a king, but could not take the same approach as Julius Caesar, otherwise he would end up murdered all the same.

Instead, he was very modest, lived in an ordinary house like other aristocrats, wore just a plain toga, was respectful to the Senate, and ate simple foods. He’s someone who cared about the reality of power, not its external trappings. He wanted real power, not the appearance of it.

In terms of government, everything seemed the same from the outside, but in reality Octavian was able to retain absolute power. He did by resigning from all public offices to give that appearance, but at the same time got voted to have the powers of a consul, by which he could command armies, he got tribune power, to control meetings at the Senate, he could veto anything, and got several other powers.

Each year elections are held, and notionally, these people are in charge. But floating off to the side, there Octavian, who can just appear and say that “I don’t like this, let’s change it”

Nor can he be named like a king

Octavian wondered what to call himself. He couldn’t call himself a king, or anything that could suggest it, so instead he picked ambiguous names, that when joined an interpret in a certain way, would proved to be powerful:

• Augustus: Augustus could mean that someone is very pious, or could mean that something is divine.
• Princep³: Meaning, first citizen. Could be interpreted as a citizen just like everybody, or the first citizen, superior to all the others.
• Imperator: traditionally something that soldiers shout at a victorious general who’s won a battle. Octavian took this as a permanent title, implying he was a good general⁴.

What being Roman meant

It’s wonderful to contemplate how the roman empire in about 100 AD overlaps with the regions where olives could be grown. Romans consumed olives, grapes, wheat. Barbarians meat, dairy, beer. When you are a farmer, you tend to stay in the same place, when you raise cattle you follow them around. They are two fundamental forms of living. Diet was a big part of their culture and one of characteristics that was considered fundamentally Roman. Not having their diet was barbaric.

Roman empire crumbles

There are many factors that could explain the fall of Rome, and there is not a single clear cut explanation. Even the date of the empire fall is debated.

Geography, climate, religion, disease (there were a whole series of waves of plague that started to hit under Marcus Aurelius and continued after him, which seemed to caused real serious death and economic disruption), Marcus Aurelius leaving is succession to his child (who turned out to be deranged), instead of picking the best suited person for that role ⁵, as it was done on the previous 80 years, which is often regarded as the high point of the Roman Empire.

Power of the past

No way to escape the power of the past

Gregory and his wife wife wrote The Long Shadow of Antiquity: What Have the Greeks and Romans Done for Us?”, where they provide several examples of things that we think are just in truly unique parts of our culture or things that we think are just innate to human nature, that are actually rooted in the past, such as government, education, art, architecture, language / words, culture, medicine, habits, law, the way we get married, the calendar (Julius Caesar was the one who basically came up with the 365 days, 12 months, leap years).

We’re the accumulation of the knowledge of several generations that have come before us. Everything we do is based on that. Otherwise, we’d all just be starting at ground zero.

Understanding the past to mold the future

It’s vital to have some understanding of the past in order to make competent decisions in the present. Not just in your own life, but it’s in understanding others. You need to understand where they’re coming from, where they came from, and what shaped them, and what forces affect them.

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see: and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.

― Livy, The History of Rome

People from antiquity had different environments, technologies, and information available, but were just as sharp as we are nowadays. They were not stupid. Even though it might seem that many concepts and ideas were invented by our contemporaries, many lessons, successes and mistakes were already discovered in the past ⁶. The real challenge is to incorporate them into our own lives.