Superfluous How-Tos? 💎 Issue #58
Plus: how google makes people more curious, stoicism and OOP in a gif.
Happy Friday👋
What’s up?
And now on to what were the best things I found on the Internet this week.
New to me 💡
How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught | 4 min read
🐒 The first of two apparently superfluous How-Tos on today’s newsletter. But like all things everyone has been doing forever, our auto-pilots are probably bored by now, stopped practicing to keep their skills sharp, and are only most of the time sober.
👨🏫 If school taught you how to think instead of how to remember the right answers you are in luck. If not, here’s the difference between two types of thinking to help you understand where you are most of the time and get into the right path: “Easy thinking means taking a few minutes here and there, getting the gist of a problem, and making a decision. Hard thinking is understanding the problem, understanding the variables and the nuances, thinking through the second and third-order effects, and often understanding that a little pain now will make the future a lot easier.”
How to Work Hard | 15 min read
🛠 Of all the How-Tos on the Internet, this has to be one of the weirdest ones to tackle. Paul Graham makes a beautiful premise: “Some of the best work is done by people who find an easy way to do something hard.” It must not depend exclusively on willpower though. Even “working hard” might have some process behind it in how to improve and get better at it, right?
👨🍳 But I hear you ask “how?” and, in a very summarized version, it’s delivered in recipe form like this: “You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result.”
Stoicism is Not Enough | 10 min read
⚔ I got to admit I’m fascinated by what I hear and read of Stoic philosophy. I even bought Meditations, the book mentioned in the article, as a gift for my brother without reading it simply because how engaging Internet random quotes from Marcus Aurelius were. Also Gladiator.
🧭 That’s why this article comes in handy. It turns a mirror against what Stoicism is and points some of its potential faults (depending on how you approach life and look after) in such a humbling manner that it’s almost an ode to it: “Too strong a stoicism, like any individualist philosophy, scales poorly. A philosophy emphasizing only this inner work, though it may personally work well, gives no guidance as soon as you have enough responsibility to participate in society. What worked well for Marcus was entirely inadequate to save the empire.”
Please help me grow this newsletter! I’d love if you shared it with your more curious friends.
A most curious tweet 🐈
This week in a gif 🚛
High note ⚡
This issue cover picture comes from here.
Last issue most clicked link was 100 Very Short Rules for a Better Life.
I hope you enjoyed these last minutes as much as me putting this together.
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Until next week,
Filipe