If this week’s mail hit your inbox twice, this is not my fault. There was something wrong with Substack and they fixed the problem quickly. Thank you for your understanding. Here is a potato.
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🐦2 Tweet Threads:
Here is good advice for quality books instead of an MBA degree. I know it is over-simplification when you say you do not need an MBA degree if you read these books. However, these are really good gems.
My favorites:
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Hit the issue number 13 for the summary of this book.
Here is a good overview of learning techniques you can utilize for your next project.
My favorites:
Project-Based Learning
The Feynman Technique - you need to make an elaborate read on this technique. Start here.
📘 1 Book Summary:
This is a late post actually, since it is Camus. Camus is like the toy that you never want to share with anybody easily. The life story, although I will not be dealing in detail here, is worth taking a look at.
In my book “Happy Anyways” we talked about the idea of the silence of the world. Human beings are looking for answers. Answers to the meaning of their existence. This cannot be just it, we say. The answer, deafening silence of the world.
There are also the silences of sunlight—the calm of siesta time in Algiers, when the calls of Arab vendors underscore the lush sluggishness of time and the hush of the empty streets. But there is also the hammering silence that overwhelms Mersault on the beach in Algiers moments before he kills the Arab in The Stranger, the stillness of plague-ridden Oran in The Plague, and the ominous quiet of the primitive classroom on an isolated plateau in “The Guest”, when the teacher, Daru, realizes that words are useless and dialogue impossible. Silence, in short, is never merely physical or aural. For Camus, it is also metaphysical and ethical. In the beginning was silence: the peace of a prelapsarian world.
Okay there is silence and absence of meaning. What are we going to do? Kill ourselves. No Camus says. We have to rebel against it. There is no greater meaning to the world, you as the individual has to create that meaning.
The absence of meaning is not a call to despair or an invitation to leap joyfully into the abyss. Instead, the world’s stubborn silence leads us to acknowledge our common predicament and spurs us to rebel against it. In response to both the German nihilist and the Christian believer, Camus still refuses a “greater meaning” to the world. But, he continues, something in the world does have meaning: namely, man. We alone, Camus observes, “demand that meaning exist.” Our dignity and everyday nobility reside precisely in that insistence. Rather than “mutilating” man, as the Nazis did, we must safeguard the ideal of justice that man alone is capable of conceiving.
To have an original idea is a hard business. You are bounded by your external realities. The realities you consume. To come up with original ideas, the ones that you own, read more books, expand your network, get involved in more projects out of your reach. Push yourself.
We polish and transform them according to the societies and the men we happen to meet. It takes ten years to have an idea that is really one’s own—that one can talk about.
Sartre says “hell is other people.” Camus seems to agree here. You need other people to understand you, care about you, listen to you, laugh with you, cry with you. When you create, you need their appreciation or criticism. Hell is other people, you are dependent on them.
When we do not live in ourselves but in others, it is their judgments which guide everything.
When you do not find any meaning you do not have to cry. It can be magnificent. You may become an optimistic nihilist. Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience, but it should not become a dead end.
A certain kind of literature makes the mistake of believing life is tragic because it is miserable.” Nothing could be further from the truth: “Life is tragic precisely because it is overwhelming and magnificent.” It is for this reason, Camus concluded, that the “affirmation of life’s absurdity cannot be an end, but only a beginning.
You are an actor in this life and your job is to become the perfect possible actor. In every play of your life, act your best.
I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most exciting and serious there is. And I want to be this perfect actor.
Your most important asset is your attention. The quality of your work and your life will depend on it. You have to find ways to create concrete attention spaces for anything you do.
The good man is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses.
It is good to have a life philosophy. Some guides and beliefs to lead the way. However remember that there always comes new shackles with every new value added to your arsenal. You need some flexibility.
Each time man creates new values, he creates new shackles.
I loved this description of intellectual:
His assent was short-lived: stupid ideas, Camus quickly understood, make for a stupid world. In his journal, Camus proudly described himself as an intellectual—in other words, “someone whose mind watches itself.
You will always change. Do not fear changing your politic views, life philosophy, your values, your hobbies, the things you love and hate. They always have to be in constant change. That is just being human. You are nothing more than a flowing river.
Up to now I was going in the wrong direction. I am going to begin all over? The public would ridicule him, of course: but what of it? Especially when, as Camus insists, the philosopher would thus be “giving proof that he is worthy of thought.” 19 A different order of understanding and ethics was necessary, one that encompassed others rather than isolating the individual subject. Society, not the individual, was now the measure of meaning. As Camus scribbled, the absurd “teaches nothing.” How are we to act—what are we to do—in a world shorn of God or meaning? The answer, Camus concluded, lay in the solidarity of human beings.
+ “Victories will never be lasting.”
- “Yes, I know that. But it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.”
📝 2 Articles:
This article is a little gloomy for us aged below 40 or so. There are sound arguments I think you need to know:
Stuff was really cheap because the cost was transferred to somewhere else, but not anymore.
Stuff wasn’t just cheap. It was artificially cheap. Very real costs were “externalized,” which is economist-speak for “left for someone else to pay.” Who? Well, let’s go through a few of them. Labour costs were artificially cheap because American companies were rewarded for “offshoring” jobs to countries where things like unions and even basic human rights didn’t really exist.
The problem come to the point that the planet cannot deal with anymore. Think of chip shortages, covid lockdowns, ocean pollution. We consumed the world.
Our planet can’t deal with it. Support it. Our earth can’t enable our addiction to cheap stuff anymore. It’s trying to have an intervention.
Second article comes from James Clear, the Diderot Effect. I did not know there was a term like this but I am familiar with the feeling.
The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption which leads you to acquire more new things. As a result, we end up buying things that our previous selves never needed to feel happy or fulfilled.
If you want to get out of the rut of buying things again again here are some rules:
Set boundaries. Tell yourself my limit is just 100 dollars of shopping every month.
Buy one give one. Make a rule that whenever you buy something you have to give away something from your wardrobe.
Quit social media, or minimize it. You need to lower your exposure to better, bigger, higher things.
Postpone the decision making process. When you decide on something, take a one week break. At the end of the week you most probably lose your enthusiasm.
📺 1 Video:
So much to learn in 30 minutes:
📽️ 1 SERIES / FILM or DOCUMENTARY:
This film is a good classic and the one that sparked my interest in the communication and persuasion field.
The lessons:
Do not follow the crowd. Be true to your own soul, think the exact opposite even if it is just for a little bit.
If you want to be a leader, persuading your fellow man is your first job. However, you need to make them feel like they changed their views on themselves. You just need to help them find the way.
Learn Socratic Method. Internalize it. Treat it like a holy guide. A guide will be coming, for now start off with this one.
📜 2 Quotes:
Be curious, not judgmental.
― TED LASSO
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
—MARCEL PROUST
📼 1 Playlist:
Sometimes while working or creating your art, you need easy way to gather all your attention together. This playlist is one of my favorites. Sometimes I cannot believe I belong to the same species as Bach and Vivaldi.
Song of the week: Maybe I Maybe You
you look up to the sky
with all those questions in mind
all you need is to hear
the voice of your heart
in a world full of pain
someone's calling your name
why don't we make if true
maybe i, maybe you
Try this cover-y version, I love covers that are better than original ones.
In case you might have missed the news or forgot donating money and receiving your book, here is my book and Instagram post for the details. The book is in Turkish, compiles a lot of dear thinkers and quotes into one to make sense of our messy world and our quest to catch happiness.
Total amount donated to charities: 12.300 TL.
📱 2 Useful App/Website/Tool:
This week’s useful tool is downforeveryoneorjustme.
Whenever you cannot connect to a website or an app, just check from here if it is a general problem for everybody. Or is it just you ?
Second one is not that useful, but it shows you how the websites evolved UI-wise. The site is called web-archive.org. It instantly shows you old versions of your favorite websites. Netflix from 2012 for example, was just like below : Ba-dummm!