#109: lands of opportunity

We no longer know how to sit at peace with time.

That time must be spent on beating a goal, and when we check social media in an attempt to slow down our brains for a second, we are met with others posting about their own goals, making us feel that overwhelming sense of guilt and return to whatever act of our life we are in the midst of gamifying.

To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success with a society that provides opportunities for all.

The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty four is two-tens-four and so on. That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster that American children.

Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don’t reach forty until they’re five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills. The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily.

But this isn’t really about your job.

It’s about your relationship to resources and value.

It’s about whether you are building a conservative nest egg along the conventional tracks or a bold empire on the frontier. This is, after all, the point of quitting your job and exploring: to find the new lands of opportunity in which you will build an empire.

Any low-risk bet comes likewise with low returns.

The highest returns of life and glory come from taking hard bets on your best visions of the future and being able to make them work through dedicated struggle.

Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

Stop trying to be cool.

Be nerdy and obsessive about the things you love.

Enthusiasm will get you farther than indifference.