I recently want to write about many things. Some ideas are controversial and will lead to tension with some people. But I recently made the decision to do less self censorship. As Nassim Talib puts it:
“There is No muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without consequence, change without aesthetics, age without values, life without effort, water without thirst, food without nourishment, love without sacrifice, power without fairness, facts without rigor, statistics without logic, mathematics without proof, teaching without experience, politeness without warmth, values without embodiment, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, friendship without investment, virtue without risk, probability without ergodicity, wealth without exposure, complication without depth, fluency without content, decision without asymmetry, science without skepticism, religion without tolerance, and, most of all: nothing without skin in the game.”
Opinion without consequence.
Speaking of Nassim, I felt a vacuum after finishing “Skin in the game”. I finally decided what I am reading next. In the middle I bought three books “Thank you for joking Mr. Feynman”, “Girl, wash your hair”, and “Win Bigly”.
Win Bigly was Scott Adams story of how he predicted Trump’s winning and why he supported him. He considers Trump a “master persuader” which there aren’t many like him on the planet. I tried reading the book but it was so boring for me because it was explaining lots of psychological concepts that I already know and many of the examples were from the days of Trump campaign which I wasn’t following.
Girl, wash your hair was on the most read list of Amazon. I picked it up because I am interested in what feminists talk about. I don’t know if I can be classified as a feminist because the word lost its meaning (same with racist). I tried reading it but it turned to be Jordan Peterson for females. Probably that’s why it has so much appeal. Sorry, self help isn’t my genre.
And last but not least, Thank you for joking Mr. Feynman. It is the biography of Feynman. It was boring for me because I don’t feel any connection to him. I am not that interested in Physics either. I bought Einstein’s biography but never listened to it. So I couldn’t continue that one.
On the weekend I watched this Marty Cagan talk “Ordinary people, extraordinary results“. I felt pressure to watch it because everyone at work was talking about it. I watched it and was so disappointed (and I don’t use “so” lightly). It sounded to me that he was stating the obvious and I still fail to see the reason people are impressed. Maybe it is because the European audience is not exposed to the valley culture much. Maybe because I have been thinking recently about the same topic and wrote about it two days before the talk. I don’t know.
I still have three long form posts to write. One about stakeholder management, one about my experience writing and sending the developer newsletter inside the company, and one about how much product managers should intervene in the team’s work (that one was based on a discussion I had with a coworker).
BTW, I forgot to tell you which book I settled on. Because this post is random thoughts I decided to not edit and add a paragraph in the middle. So we will continue the conversation here.
I ended up picking another Nassim book “The Black Swan”. I also ordered “The book of why” which I think is arguing on the opposite side. Nassim argues you can’t rationalize to find causality. The 2nd book argues you can. I will hopefully read both and have my own thoughts on what makes sense when. Will see.
One final thought is that those random thoughts posts sometimes scare me. I feel I emptied everything I have on mind and won’t have something to talk about tomorrow. I am sure this is not true. I think, I exist, I write. As long as I am thinking, I will have something to write about.