12 Quiet Rituals of Enormously Successful Humans

May your actions speak louder than your words.  May your life preach louder than your lips.  May your success be your noise in the end.

4.  They gradually turn life’s obstacles around.
Many of the most iconic novels, songs and inventions of all time were inspired by gut-wrenching pain and heartbreak.  Therefore, the silver lining of these great challenges is that they were the catalyst to the creation of epic masterpieces.
An emerging field of psychology called Post-Traumatic Growth has suggested that many people are able to use their hardships and traumas for substantial creative and intellectual development.  Specifically, researchers have found that trauma can help people grow in the areas of interpersonal relationships, contentment, gratitude, personal strength, and resourcefulness.
When our view of the world as a safe place, or as a certain type of place, has been shattered, we are forced to reboot our perspective on things.  We suddenly have the opportunity to look out to the periphery and see things with a new, fresh set of beginner’s eyes, which is very conducive to personal growth and long-term success.

5.  They learn by stretching themselves to their limits.
You learn best when you’re stretching yourself beyond your previous level of comfort.
Sure, getting into a routine is great.  “Flow” is great too.  But neither is the best way to learn.  You want to be stretched to the edge of your ability sometimes.  It needs to be hard and uncomfortable.  That’s how your brain grows.  We learn when we’re in our discomfort zone.
When you’re struggling, that’s when you’re growing stronger and smarter.  The more time you spend there, the faster you learn.  It’s better to spend an extremely high quality ten minutes growing, than it is to spend a mediocre hour running in place.  You want to practice at the point where you are on the edge of your ability, stretching yourself over and over again, making mistakes, stumbling, learning from those mistakes and stretching yourself even farther.

12. They keep their pride in check.
Last but not least…
To admit they made a mistake.  To say they are sorry.  To know that they can’t possibly know it all.  To have big dreams. To admit they owe their success to others too.  To poke fun at themselves from time to time.  To ask for help when they need it.
To make mistakes and fail.  And to try again, willingly.
There are no permanent jobs or absolutes on this planet.  We are all just interning and exploring here.  Learn from everyone, remain humble, and don’t forget to have a good time along the way.
That’s what successful people do.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

A spastic visual tone poem in glorious hyper-saturated 3D about cars, guns, beer, God, family, and country, Transformers 4 is every bit an accurate portrait of not just the American Dream gone buck wild on steroids, meth, and high-fructose sugar, but what America dreams of itself: Our rich, dark, loud, staggering, overwhelming, relentless id writ so large it’s blinding, almost seizure-inducing.

- Transformers 4 is the Greatest Film Ever Made About 21st Century America

Memory-Saving Devices Snag US Research Funds

US researchers are banking on the hope that electrical devices implanted in the brain might one day restore memory to people who have lost it. On 9 July, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded a total of US$37.5 million to two research teams to study how memories are formed and retrieved and to develop devices to stimulate these processes in the brain. Here Nature offers a preview of the research to come from these awards.

Where is the money coming from?
DARPA is one of three US agencies to receive funding this year through the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which President Barack Obama announced in April 2013.DARPA has said that it plans to use its share of the money — $50 million this year — to fund study of brain disorders common to soldiers and veterans, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and memory dysfunction caused by traumatic brain injury. In May the agency awarded $56 million to support two teams in creating brain-stimulation devices to treat disorders such as PTSD and depression, and to map the neural circuitry involved in these conditions. The latest round of grants is focused on the use of such devices to restore memory function.

How will the devices be developed?
Both teams will initially be working with people with epilepsy who have entered hospital to have electrodes temporarily implanted into their brains to help locate where their seizures originate. The researchers will ‘piggyback’ off the implants, using them to monitor other brain activity, such as the electrical patterns that occur when the brain is storing or retrieving a memory.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

The year was 1987, but it might as well have been the Summer of Love: I was twenty, had hair down to my shoulders, and was dressed like an Indian rickshaw driver. For those charged with enforcing our nation’s drug laws, it would have been only prudent to subject my luggage to special scrutiny. Happily, I had nothing to hide. “Where are you coming from?” the officer asked, glancing skeptically at my backpack. “India, Nepal, Thailand…” I said. “Did you take any drugs while you were over there?” As it happens, I had. The temptation to lie was obvious—why speak to a customs officer about my recent drug use? But there was no real reason not to tell the truth, apart from the risk that it would lead to an even more thorough search of my luggage (and perhaps of my person) than had already commenced. “Yes,” I said. The officer stopped searching my bag and looked up. “Which drugs did you take? “I smoked pot a few times… And I tried opium in India.” “Opium?” “Yes.” “Opium or heroin? “It was opium.” “You don’t hear much about opium these days.” “I know. It was the first time I’d ever tried it.” “Are you carrying any drugs with you now?” “No.” The officer eyed me warily for a moment and then returned to searching my bag. Given the nature of our conversation, I reconciled myself to being there for a very long time. I was, therefore, as patient as a tree. Which was a good thing, because the officer was now examining my belongings as though any one item—a toothbrush, a book, a flashlight, a bit of nylon cord—might reveal the deepest secrets of the universe. “What is opium like?” he asked after a time. And I told him. In fact, over the next ten minutes, I told this lawman almost everything I knew about the use of mind-altering substances. Eventually he completed his search and closed my luggage. One thing was perfectly obvious at the end of our encounter: We both felt very good about it.

- Sam Harris, Lying

Wisdom Of The Week

A small knowledge of probability can lead to worse results than no knowledge at all.

There is an ingratitude factor in warning people about something abstract (by definition anything that did not happen is abstract). Say you engage in a business of protecting investors from rare events by constructing packages that shield them from their sting (something I have done on occasion). Say that nothing happens during the period. Some investors will complain about your spending their money; some will even try to make you feel sorry: “You wasted my money on insurance last year; the factory did not burn, it was a stupid expense. You should only insure for events that happen.” One investor came to see me fully expecting me to be apologetic (it did not work). But the world is not that homogeneous: There are some (though very few) who will call you to express their gratitude and thank you for having protected them from the events that did not take place.

This week I started reading Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto) and as always, I am learning so much from Taleb (with a smile).

Finally, I have to confess that upon finishing my writing of Part I, that writing about the genius of Solon’s insight has carried an extreme effect on both my thinking and my private life. The composition of Part I made me even more confident in my withdrawal from the media and my distancing myself from other members of the business community, mostly other investors and traders for whom I am developing more and more contempt. I believe that I cannot have power over myself as I have an ingrained desire to integrate among people and cultures and would end up resembling them; by withdrawing myself entirely I can have a better control of my fate. I am currently enjoying a thrill of the classics I have not felt since childhood. 

I am now thinking of the next step: to recreate a low-information, more deterministic ancient time, say in the nineteenth century, all the while benefiting from some of the technical gains (such as the Monte Carlo engine), all of the medical breakthroughs, and all the gains of social justice of our age. I would then have the best of everything. This is called evolution.

The Dawn of the Planet of Apes

“Cheaters never prosper, we tell ourselves. But the ape in us knows it's not true. Clumsy, untutored, cheats never prosper. They are discovered and suffer the consequences... But what we apes despise is the clumsiness of their effort, the ineptness, the gaucherie. The ape in us does not despise the cheating itself...” 

- Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness

There ain't much difference between us and Apes - that's the message of the movie. Enjoyed the movie very much but I liked the Rise of the Planet of the Apes better. 

Quote of the Day

We have seen in this book numerous ambiguous texts that can be interpreted in two different ways: as an assertion that is true but relatively banal, or as one that is radical but manifestly false. And we cannot help thinking that, in many cases, these ambiguities are deliberate. Indeed, they offer a great advantage in intellectual battles: the radical interpretation can serve to attract relatively inexperienced listeners or readers; and if the absurdity of this version is exposed, the author can always defend himself by claiming to have been misunderstood, and retreat to the innocuous interpretation.

- Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

Maximus and Me

Quote of the Day

I went back to my conversation with Siegfried that morning; we had just about decided that the man with a lot of animals couldn't be expected to feel affection for individuals among them. But those buildings back there were full of John Skipton's animals - he must have hundreds. Yet what made him trail down that hillside every day in all weathers? Why had he filled the last years of those two old horses with peace and beauty? Why had he given them a final ease and comfort which he had withheld from himself? It could only be love.

- James Herriot, All Creatures Great and Small

Spitznagel & Taleb On Inequality, Free Markets, & Inevitable Crashes

The two men recently sat down to discuss Spitznagel’s new book, The Dao of Capital, as well as their reactions to and criticisms of Thomas Piketty’s book (transcript of their conversation here):

Taleb:

• First that intervention — in general, whether medical, governmental, or other — has side effects and needs to be treated exactly as we do with other complex systems: only when extremely necessary.
• Second, counter to naïve conservatism, nature is not conservative, it destroys and creates species every day, but it does so in a certain pattern: Its destruction has the effect of isolating the system from large-scale harm. It does not try to preserve the past; it only tries to preserve the system.
• Finally, liberty is not an economic good, but an existential one. The economic good is a mere bonus. The argument that liberty is good for economic activity or for growth of the system feels lowly and commercial (an argument used by consequentialists). If you were a wild animal, would you elect to be in a zoo because the economy is better over there than in the wild?  Liberty is my raison d’être.

Spitznagel:

• Yes. The Daoist scholar Zhuangzi once said, upon being offered the prime ministership about 2,500 years ago, “Would the dead and adorned turtle in the king’s palace not prefer to be alive and free in the mud? So too would I.”
• Here’s how I would reconcile my own position with yours: I agree that liberty is an end in itself, and is not to be valued merely as an instrumental means to something else. But precisely because of that, even if hypothetically you could convince me that a certain government intervention in the market were extremely necessary, as you say — for instance, would likely lead to greater economic growth or lower unemployment — I would still reject it on principle, because my support for property rights and a sphere of individual autonomy free from political meddling is not ultimately based on a utilitarian criterion. By all means, let’s brainstorm and see if there are ways to alleviate these problems and provide relief to the suffering. But any proposal that involves using coercion on unwilling citizens should be off the table. Anything else is a slippery slope to what we have today from these serial crises. To say this by no means demonstrates that I’m an ideologue or unscientific.
• What we get from this is a self-organization that often seems chaotic to our myopic eye, yet when we take a step back we can see how the ecosystem ultimately and optimally steers itself. It was Zhuangzi, as I discuss in my book, who first articulated this idea of spontaneous order — whereby order naturally emerges from bottom-up individual interactions when things are left alone rather than from top-down control — a concept developed later by Menger and Hayek. We live in an economic age where we’ve simply lost our ability to look at the world in this way, though I suspect we’ll be reminded of it again sooner rather than later. Perhaps our takeaway from economic crises will finally be different the next time around.