November 2024 — Brooklyn, NY

Click here for Part I

From Part I:

In February of this year, my friend John and I set out to make something and make something we did.

Long story short, we created a device, called verba, that is a display for quotes and affirmations. The device has a sleek design and e-paper display (think e-reader screen), so uplifting quotes are always within sight. The device has a free app and extensive library of quotes, so that you see exactly the sort of inspiration that you want to see.

Without further ado, here are three more lessons that we have learned throughout the process.

IV — On Online Advertising

Online advertising is a very weird thing. It quite literally allows the internet to function (allowing countless “free sites” to be free). But what percentage of people a) know this and b) know how it works? I would guess about 1% of people.

After all, why would you notice? Online advertising is as invisible, yet important, as ball bearings or the crushed stone that is used to make concrete. If you think about ball bearings or concrete aggregate, you are a) weird and b) likely the type of weird that is conducive to success. Yet, we would all certainly feel the consequences if any one of these three things disappeared even momentarily.

Given that verba is a product that is sold exclusively online (hopefully just for now), my business partner John and I learned about this strange art out of both pure necessity and curiosity. And so, here I am to report back our findings.

So, what is online advertising?

The big picture of online advertising is very simple. We all use free sites like Google and Instagram, and the toll that we pay is that Google and Facebook (now Meta), allows companies (advertisers) to show their products to us in exchange for a fee.

What fee do advertisers pay?

It seems that most online advertising is billed either by the number of clicks (cost per click (CPC)) or by thousand views (cost per mille (CPM)). If you’re selling a product, you’ll pay by click on Google (CPC) and by thousand views on Facebook (CPM).

For the sake of brevity, here are some of the things we discovered:

1. Audience is king. You could have the greatest ad ever conceived, but show it to the wrong audience and you are toast. As a small advertiser, you don’t want to pay for a single set of eyeballs that isn’t potentially interested in your product. Big advertisers can afford to do this to a degree in the name of “brand awareness” and name recognition.

2. Algorithms are incredible tools at matching audiences and products IF (and only if) there is sufficient data to do so. The advertising algorithms are probably wonderful for selling things like skincare products or shirts, simply because there is so much data. For a niche product (without much sales data) like verba, algorithms are less capable and less capable means expensive.

3. The cost of acquiring a customer often decides a product’s life or death. In other words, if you have to spend $100 in advertising costs to sell a product that sells for $50, you do not have a marketable product. This might seem obvious, but like the obvious fact that a bite from a venomous snake can be fatal, sometimes you remember too late.

4. Not all advertising is created equally. In other words, advertising on Facebook or Instagram is fundamentally different than say advertising on Google search. One is not necessarily better, but they are totally different.

   1. Without getting into the weeds, advertising on a platform like Facebook is known as interruption advertising. Picture jumping in front of someone on Fifth Avenue and saying “Ever heard of our device? Here’s why you need one”.

   2. In contrast, when advertising on Google, you might be dealing with people searching for “gifts for readers”. Thus, we are dealing with people with what’s known as “intent”. They are already looking to purchase something.

V — Anything Worth Doing Takes Forever

One of my new favorite writers is Hunter S. Thompson, the madman and father of Gonzo Journalism. If you’ve ever read Hemingway, Hunter’s early writing has a similar style, except that with Hunter, everything feels much more real in a way that is hard to describe. I like him so much that I ordered a book of his letters that he wrote when he was young.

In one of his letters, he says that he’s discouraged by the fact that all of his stories so far have been rejected by publishers.

In the letter, Hunter notes that Hemingway, one of history’s best writers, didn’t sell a story for 8 years. And yet he kept writing. That astonished me. Underneath is the same story for F. Scott Fitzgerald. He hung 122 rejection letters around his room. And yet he kept writing.

The cruel thing about history is that it has been scrubbed clean of all details like this. Nobody wants to hear that even the greatest writers struggled for many years.

Perhaps this reads to you as the same trite “never give up” rah-rah story that we’ve all learned to tune out. But, hopefully not. I find it much more real to learn that even for the greats, there was no shortcut, just continuous improvement and iteration.

VI — Simplicity is Intelligence

This is another counterintuitive truth that I have come to realize. Those who have true mastery over something and are intelligent make everything simple.

For a great example of this, look no further than physicist and renaissance-man Richard Feynman (and his fantastic memoir). Despite being a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Feynman speaks with such clarity and simplicity that it’s intoxicating.

So, how does this relate to business?

As I’m sure is no surprise, business ideas often appear to us as vague, ugly, blobs of jargon and confusion. These blobs probably started off as insightful ideas passed down from teacher to student, but became slightly corrupted with each iteration, almost like a giant game of telephone. But at the core of these frustrating blobs, are fascinating truths.

So, what are these fascinating truths?

As we discussed last time, a product is simply a solution to a problem, and a market is a collection of people with the same problem. Doesn’t that feel like breathing in a breath of fresh mountain air?

Let’s do the same for the revenue of a company that sells products. You might tense up after reading revenue, but remain calm.

Fundamentally, revenue is the product of:

1. How many customers you have

2. How many orders your customers make

3. The average order value of your customers’ orders

That’s it.

So, if you’d like to increase the revenue of a company, you can:

1. Find out how to make your product appeal to more people (& solve additional problems)

2. Make a case for why your customers need more than one of your product (it’s a great gift etc.)

3. Create additional accessories / add-ons that would enhance your customers’ experience with your product

Doesn’t that feel like an epiphany?

Simplicity is intelligence. Be wary of any and all who are incapable of concise and jargon-free explanations.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed these additional three lessons. I certainly did.

If you are interested in learning more about the device, visit verbawords.com

October 2024 — Brooklyn, NY

In February of this year, my friend John and I set out to make something, and make something we did.

Long story short, we created a device, called verba, that is a display for quotes and affirmations. The device has a sleek design and e-paper display (think e-reader screen), so uplifting quotes are always within sight. The device has a free app and extensive library of quotes, so that you see exactly the sort of inspiration that you want to see.

What follows is not an advertisement for the device (although, we would not be upset if it piques your interest), but with the hope of telling a good story (and helping with SEO for the website), I figured that I would talk about some of the unexpected realizations we had throughout the process.

You see, creating a consumer product feels like trying to navigate an obstacle course in the dark, with a light that only turns on for a split second at random intervals, except it’s somehow immensely exciting. Without further ado, here are the lessons.

I — What is a Product?

Upon reading this, some of you may roll your eyes, but I promise you there is a lesson here. The beauty of life is that complicated things can be made simple. So, while we started off with a very vague idea of what a product is, we learned a good answer along the way.

So what is it?

Fundamentally, a product is a solution to a problem. And a market is a collection of people with the same problem. That’s it!

People buy things to address some fundamental need that they are experiencing.

As consumers, this part is unconscious, but in fact it’s a very accurate way of putting it. Even when we think we are just buying things without a need, we are likely just trying to avoid feeling bored or sad etc.

Why do you buy gas for your car? You need gas to get from point A to point B. Why do you prefer these (insert brand) shoes over $20 Walmart shoes? Not only because you need shoes to walk places, but because wearing a certain brand suggests that you are a certain type of person (wealthy, stylish, athletic, etc.)

So, if you would like to sell something, your product needs to either deliver something positive to the customer (think health, wisdom, happiness) or liberate them from something negative (think insecurity, pain, etc.).

If this all smells a bit manipulative, I promise it’s not. The key is that we must deliver the thing that we promise. If we promise something without actually delivering it (think about magic balance wrist bands etc.), that’s called a scam.

II — Not All Competition is Bad

Until fairly recently, I operated under the assumption that all things equal, if you have a product, you would rather have no competition than competition. Sounds logical right?

You’re probably picturing something like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Pepsi gains customers, Coke loses customers. They share a relatively fixed pie.

To say that this reflects the entire business world makes a crucial assumption. The assumption is that, like the soda market, most markets are mature, meaning that growth is slow and people tend to know about the existing products in the market.

In reality, if you have a young (or non-existent) market, competition is actually your friend. Strange, right?

Competition is your friend because in this sort of market, you need to make people aware of the problem that your product is a solution for. And so, if you have 7 competitors all running ads to try to sell their products, you actually benefit from the awareness that they are paying for with their ads.

Think about something silly like fidget spinners. Before they were invented, people did not know that they would enjoy having something to play around with at their desk.

In the case of Verba, since there are not many competing products, our ad budget and other awareness tactics alone must make people aware of our device and the problem we’re solving.

For this reason, many say not to come up with a product and then find a market, but to find a market (a group of people with a common problem) and then create an excellent solution (a product) to a niche within that market.

With verba, the product came first and then the market, which fortunately appears to be working, but is admittedly a harder battle.

III — Everything is Made by People

I feel like, especially in the internet age, the world can often feel like it’s fixed and controlled by invisible forces. There’s a Steve Jobs quote to the effect that once you observe that everything is created by people, life will never feel the same.

We often take inventions and progress for granted, but every lamp post, every door handle, and every chair was somebody’s vision.

By realizing that everything is made by people, the world transforms from something cold and static to something brimming with life. It reminds us that we have the power to change things, no matter how small, especially as Americans.

If something annoys you, try to take it as an opportunity to improve it. Put pen to paper and try to sketch out a better design. No need to invent the next iPhone, but just try. Such a small act may change your perspective and maybe your life.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed these three lessons, and I hope to write about three more in a subsequent post.

If you are interested in learning more about the device, visit verbawords.com

We can perhaps think of complexity as both the number of decisions that we make every day and the number of options that we have for each decision.

Modern times feel more complex because we are faced with more daily decisions, and each of these decisions has more options.

To appreciate this, picture the life of an average subsistence farmer versus the life of an average American now. The subsistence farmer certainly had more to be genuinely afraid of, but he did not need to memorize passwords, use touchscreen electronics, navigate online banking, or file his own taxes. It takes great effort just to exist as a modern human.

Knowing this, it is incredible and perhaps inspiring to think about just how few people elect to drop out of society or go mad. Modernity demands a lot from us.

This is not to say that modernity is bad and that a primitive lifestyle is good. It is simply to say that modern life is more complex. But, this complexity can feel overwhelming and even oppressive. It does not seem that we were designed to make so many choices every day.

All of this is likely no surprise and perhaps even painfully obvious. Modernity is a time of abundance and abundance means more choices. This abundance is certainly a net positive thing (no need to return to subsistence farming), but like many things it has its unpleasant side effects. Its main side effect is that all of these choices can overwhelm and paralyze us. After all, we have the same brain as we did in 5000 B.C., and yet we do more and more with it every day.

Enter Buridan’s Donkey

Our lives can often resemble that of a donkey imagined by French philosopher Jean Buridan.

In Buridan’s paradox, a donkey finds itself precisely between two identical piles of hay. Unable to choose between the two equally-spaced piles, and preferring food that is closest rather than farthest away, the donkey starves.

Although, we thankfully do not starve to death regularly, as modern people, we are likely to empathize with the donkey’s paralysis in the face of a simple decision. The most insignificant decisions can cause us to freeze and feel as though making any choice would be painful.

To free ourselves from the oppression of options, we must first admit that the majority of decisions that we make are trivial (that is they have no effect on the long-term trajectory of our lives). Our choice of take-out on the night of March 13th, 2021 is not going to make or break our dreams and aspirations.

Instead, it seems that just a few key decisions shape our lives (remember the Pareto Principle?). For instance, think of deciding to go to college, deciding to have a family and settle down, or deciding to experiment with drugs at a young age. We can call these decisions “non-trivial”, as they alter the course of your life.

The Case For Coin Flipping

The case for coin flipping states that trivial decisions can be decided with a coin flip.

Put differently, when we are faced with the discomfort of making an inconsequential decision, we should let random chance decide. By letting go of the responsibility of making a decision, we unburden ourselves and avoid the shame of choosing incorrectly.

While the coin rotates through the air, we invite spontaneity back into our lives. We temporarily free ourselves from the hyper-rational, overly-optimized thinking that modern existence requires. We loosen our grip on life. We allow ourselves to wander, instead of always having a destination in mind. In that moment, we simply exist, guided by faith in a higher power.

When the coin lands, there is nothing to fear. Afterall, our coin made its choice and it is always the right decision to flip the coin (sort of like a CEO hiring consultants — it’s always the right decision to hire “experts”, even if they happen to give bad advice).

So, what does this look like in practice?

We can flip a coin to decide:

• whether or not to order take-out,

• if we should have that third cup of coffee,

• what movie to watch,

• or any trivial decision.

“But I Don’t Usually Have a Coin”

The coin flipping gods will laugh at an excuse like this. Such excuses fail to grasp the bigger picture. The coin is simply a convenient tool. It allows us to have fate and randomness make decisions for us. To benefit from this idea, all we need is something that generates randomness.

Instead of flipping a physical coin, we can:

• Ask siri (or Google) to flip a coin.

• Check the time and treat even minutes as “heads” and odd minutes as “tails”.

• (With n options) Ask siri to pick a number between 1 and n.

Happy flipping.

Pictures:

AI generated images inspired by Edward Hopper’s paintings

Upon seeing someone, our minds immediately place them into one of many buckets:

• threat or non-threat,

• potential mate or non-mate,

• trustworthy or untrustworthy.

At first, all of this might seem unfair. Afterall, why should we put people into categories purely based on appearances? It turns out there’s a pretty good reason for it.

The most likely explanation is that we developed this behavior when the world was a more dangerous place. In the distant past, telling friend from foe often meant life or death. Those that took too long perished and those who were capable of quick judgement survived. Thankfully, the world is much different now, but we’ve retained the same ability.

You can test this the next time you're in a public place. Scanning the area, you'll notice that you can quickly place people into general buckets.

This person probably works in business, this person probably works in the arts, and this person probably works in tech. We simply look at a person's posture, demeanor, and clothing and draw connections based on our previous experiences.

What we wear shapes how others think of us. It affects the bucket we get placed into in the minds of others. As a result, we can think of clothing as a form of nonverbal communication.

Admittedly, all of this might sound quite vain. Why should we care about what others think of us? Why should we care so much about our appearance?

But consider the following: No matter what we do, people are going to instinctively categorize us. Why not consciously make sure they put us in the correct category?

Perhaps you would like to be thought of as kind, refined, and intelligent. Why not use style to convey that?

The case for good style:

Consider the following picture.

Take a second to notice your judgements about each side of the picture.

Chances are, you would be more likely to trust the man on the right than the man on the left. Perhaps you would even say that the man on the right is wealthier, more attractive, and more powerful.

But on both sides, it is the same man wearing the same suit. The only difference is the suit’s cut. On the right, we can clearly see that the suit has been tailored. Something about it is pleasing to the eye. It conforms to the unique angles and proportions of the man's body. It looks expensive.

Although the man on the right looks wealthier, ironically, this is not necessarily the case. All we know is that the man on the right invested about $50 and an hour of his time to tailor his suit. But it doesn't seem like this. Our involuntary judgments scream out to us that something is different.

All of this might seem like a fairly ordinary observation. Of course we should wear clothes that fit us, and tailor our suits or dresses, and look presentable. We've all heard that dozens of times from our parents and grandparents.

But we encounter an interesting lesson when we take it one step further and ask why.

Dressing well can make you appear more credible:

Given that we judge people unconsciously, an interesting side-effect is that we tend to trust people who are well-dressed.

Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine that you are traveling alone in a foreign city and get lost. Your phone is dead and you decide to ask for directions.

Would you ask the woman in sweatpants or a woman wearing well-fitting and flattering clothing? Chances are, you'd ask the well-dressed woman. For better or for worse, we've learned to associate good style and attractiveness with competence. And it's likely not a bad assumption.

Dressing well takes effort (not much, but effort nonetheless), and if you take the time to present yourself well, you likely take the time to improve the other areas of your life too. You're more likely to be a serious person and thus a better resource.

You might have experienced this phenomenon in your own life. When you start dressing well and taking care of yourself, you'll likely find that confused tourists are attracted to you like moths to a flame.

• "Where is the nearest bank?"

• "How do I get to XYZ place?"

Admittedly, this is not a very appealing side-effect. Few people want the constant attention of lost strangers. But the good thing is that this effect is not unique to Italian tourists.

Instead, being well-dressed carries over to all interactions, with your boss, with your peers, and with strangers. The more you resemble a serious person, the more people will take you more seriously.

Who would willingly choose to be perceived as less trustworthy and less competent?

Dressing well is a form of politeness:

Unless we live in a cave or deep in the Amazon Jungle, we exist among people. As nice as it would be to truly not care what others think, it’s a foolish mindset. We depend on others.

As a result, it’s in our best interest to show others respect and to be polite.

For instance, consider ordering a cup of coffee. If you're polite, you'll likely take the time to say the words "please" and "thank you". These words soften your request. They turn a command into something more like a gentle ask. Of course it's possible to order coffee without using these words, but how much more helpful and friendly are people when we show them respect?

You might have already grasped the parallels with good style. It is exactly the same.

Good style is another gesture of respect that we can pay to others. In exchange for making the world a slightly more beautiful place, we earn the respect and goodwill of others.

Again, of course it's possible to go through life without doing this, but how much better would our experiences be if we simply put in the small amount of effort to dress well?

What is good style?

Truthfully, there is no objective answer. It's the sort of thing that you likely struggle to encapsulate and describe, but when you see it, you know it.

What is it not?

Good style is not about wearing three-piece suits or wedding dresses everyday. And it's not necessarily about always being formal. In fact, formal clothing does not always suggest competence. If you'd like to get laughed out of a room, try wearing a three-piece suit to a venture capital meeting on the west coast.

It’s not about obsessing over your appearance and pleasing others all of the time. We can communicate verbally in a purely people-pleasing manner, but ideally we say things that are true and elevate those around us. Style is no different.

Good style is being intentional about what you wear. It springs from the realization that what we wear is a form of communication and that we have the privilege of choosing what to signal. It is the artful pairing of the message you would like to convey with your clothing and your environment.

All of this is vague purely by necessity. It would be foolish to try to pinpoint an exact set of parameters for “good style”.

The truth is that each of us must define the term ourselves. What matters is that we’re intentional about what we wear and what it says.

Even when you don’t intend to communicate anything, you still are.

Why not choose the message?

Chances are, our relationship with reading is unpleasant. It’s not something that we would like to do voluntarily.

When we do read, we are often pursuing a greater end, say reading a dense leadership book to improve our management skills or a “sophisticated” novel to impress others.

There is an unmistakable element of pain and sacrifice to all of this. It is no different than taking a spoonful of bitter medicine to deal with an illness.

Let’s investigate why.

A brief history of why most people hate reading:

For the vast majority of people, reading is an activity done in school. We read books for our literature courses, chapters for our chemistry courses, and so on. Perhaps some of us read for leisure, but even so, the lion’s share of reading was assigned by our teachers and professors.

As a result, reading becomes inseparable from academia. Reading is school and school is reading. This has a few interesting effects.

First, since curriculums are controlled by teachers and administrators, students have little say over the material that they read. As a result, the vast majority of a student’s reading experiences are with material that they did not choose themselves.

Second, since most reading occurs during school, the underlying motivation is not the material itself, but success (or not failing) in school. As a result, reading is usually no more than a means to an end.

Put more simply, think of your favorite hobby, let’s say cooking.

Imagine being forced to cook nearly every day for 12 to 16 (to far more than 16) years of your life. Although you love to cook, some days you might prefer to order take out, and you might be forced to cook something you think is not worth eating. This friction is bound to be unpleasant.

One day, you wake up and decide that you aren’t someone who likes to cook.

This is arguably how even someone who loves to read can have their interest crushed by academia. This is all not to say that academic reading should be abolished, but simply that it has potent side-effects.

Today, we will attempt to reverse this damage.

I. Reading is fundamentally about curiosity

If you’re reading this, you’re curious. If you weren’t, you would have clicked away.

Boredom and excitement are two powerful natural filters. If we simply pay attention to what excites us, we’ll know what we are curious about. This point might seem obvious but consider many people’s experiences with reading for leisure.

A person might pick up an “interesting” novel or a “bestselling” book, read the first 15 pages and begin to feel bored. Remembering that this book is supposed to be “interesting” this person might ignore these feelings of boredom and continue reading. Eventually, this person calls it quits and decides that reading is simply too difficult and unpleasant.

Philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb (of Black Swan fame) offers us a better strategy.

“The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether - when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement.

The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of the pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research” (Source)

Regardless of the opinions of critics and the general public, at the end of the day reading should excite us. If it’s not, we’re simply reading the wrong thing.

II. Reading is its own reward

Reading is not a status symbol. Our ultimate goal of reading is ideally not simply to say that we read. Instead, we should simply seek to explore our curiosity.

The first step to unlearn the habit of using “number of books” as our north star and metric of choice.

The reason this mindset is silly is that it assumes all books are the same. It’s similar to counting the number of states you travel through on a road trip as a proxy for distance. On your short trip from Maine to Rhode Island, you might pass through 5 states. But from Maine to Alaska, you might pass through 2.

If you must focus on a metric, perhaps the number of pages is a better alternative. However, our fundamental motivation can simply be to consistently read what we find interesting.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

III. Books are tools

At their core, books are devices for exchanging information. They are tools. As readers we can treat them as such. This means unlearning many of the practices that academia preaches.

The beauty of books is that no matter what the cover looks like or when they were printed, the words are the same. As a result, used books are fundamentally the same as new ones. Used books are also often sold at an 80%+ discount to the price of new copies.

Once we have our book, it’s our property. We can do whatever we please with it, unlike a library or schoolbook.

This means doing whatever helps us to remember and enjoy whatever we’re reading:

• Highlighting,

• Underlining,

• Writing in the margins,

• Creasing pages, or

• Ripping out pages.

Obviously, this all boils down to personal preference, but give it a try. If you mess things up, just order another copy for ~$4.

IV. Reading is a conversation

This last point is arguably the most important. It turns an obligation into an opportunity. The best way to think about reading is as a conversation, albeit a one-sided one.

It’s an opportunity to listen to the brightest and most interesting individuals from the past few thousand years. It’s a way to communicate with the dead, with Roman emperors, ancient philosophers, and holocaust survivors.

Books are simply one medium of learning. And there is nothing fundamentally wrong with other mediums. However, you’d be hard pressed to find a video or podcast interview with Aristotle or Nietzsche.

The content that books offer is nearly limitless.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, clearly something has struck a chord. If you don’t currently read and you’d like to, the key is to simply start. Order a $4 used book, write in it, fold the pages, read it in the shower, read it at the beach. If it’s not for you, donate it or use it as an oven mitt.

All that matters is that you keep the flame of curiosity alive.

“One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind” — Arthur Schopenhauer (Source)

Resources:

Thriftbooks.com — great website for used books

“Retaining and Applying What You Read” — great further reading

Our world is complex, a lot more complex than we’d like to think. But we prefer it simpler. As a result, we smooth over life’s rough edges and snip off the pieces that jut out. We make a series of simplifying assumptions that turn the complex into the understandable.

All of this is no critique of human nature. Without these simplifying assumptions, we would be paralyzed to act. Each decision would require a thorough analysis of the nuances of each system that we were dealing with.

Today, we’re going to shatter this simplified model of reality that we rely on, but for a big payoff.

An interesting simplification that we tend to make is regarding our actions.

Generally, we seem to weigh our actions equally. For instance, we rarely stop to think “this is the most important thing that I’ll do all day”. Perhaps some people live like this, but likely not many.

In reality, our actions are not of equal importance. We can investigate this with the following thought experiment. Looking at each aspect of our work (or school life), we could ask ourselves: Would I get fired (or flunk out) if I stopped doing this?

If you stopped going to division-wide zoom meetings that could be re-formatted as emails, you would likely not get fired.

If you stop responding to your boss’s emails or skipped presentations that you were asked to give, you almost certainly would get fired eventually.

If all of this seems silly and reductive, that is beside the point. The point is that a few of our actions drive a disproportionate share of the results. Some even claim that five or so key decisions, determine our lives.

To leverage this idea, we can do more of what matters and less of what doesn’t, and accomplish more within the same twenty-four hours that everyone is given.

We can formalize all of this by looking at what is known as the Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 principle).

The Pareto Principle:

The Pareto Principle (or 80/20 principle) broadly states that in many domains, just 20% of actions (inputs) drive 80% of the results (outputs). This observation originates from, Italian economist and polymath, Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that just 20% of Italy’s population owned approximately 80% of the land.

It is important that we do not fixate on the numbers 80 and 20 (although they do have a nice ring to them). Every relationship that can be described by the principle is not necessarily 80/20.

Instead, relationships can be more or less extreme. For instance, in Sweden just 1% of the population is responsible for 63% of the country’s crime and in the United States just 5% accounts for nearly half of all health spending. In each case, a small number of inputs drives the majority of the outputs.

Once we discard the numbers 80 and 20, we are left with an incredibly useful general lens. The Pareto principle implies that life contains asymmetries and concentrations. Acknowledging them is often the key to finding the most effective solutions.

To make matters less abstract, we can apply this thinking to our own lives.

Application of the Principle:

As it turns out, this principle is not only valuable to Swedish criminologists and American health care professionals. Our own lives are full of asymmetries. Once we are aware of them, we can use them as leverage. We can emphasize what disproportionately drives results and deemphasize what doesn’t. As a result, just a small number of changes can lead to material improvements.

I. On Happiness:

It would be naive to think that there is a universal recipe for happiness. However, what we can say is that certain things lead to a disproportionate amount of both our happiness and unhappiness.

Imagine, you have a daily habit of stepping into a knee-deep puddle during your commute. We’re not sure why you’d do this but imagine. This habit is an act that takes mere seconds, but ruins hours of your day (an asymmetry).

However, consider what would happen if you broke the habit. Say you chose a different commute to work, one without a puddle, or wore rain boots. This decision would cost you essentially nothing, and dramatically improve your quality of life (the same asymmetry).

This example is purposely silly, but chances are there is something in our lives like this. Perhaps it is rushing in the morning to get ready for work or school. Perhaps it is eating a certain food that makes us feel sick. What would happen if we changed our ways? Small effort, large return.

To study your own life, take a piece of paper and draw a line down the center. On the left, write down small things, things that take little effort or time, that materially improve your quality of life (think coffee, exercise, etc.). On the right, write down small things that bring you unhappiness (think feeling rushed, feeling sick, etc.).

By maximizing items on the left and minimizing items on the right, we can materially improve our lives with little effort.

Ultimately, we’re not here to give prescriptions, but simply to provide the framework for positive change. It is up to you dear reader to make the changes.

II. On Work and Productivity:

As previously discussed, not all work is created equally. Some actions drive the lion’s share of our desired results, and some are merely distractions that make us feel good. An ability to discern between the two is a tremendous edge.

Let’s say you work in sales. For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that precisely 20% of what you do drives 80% of the results (perhaps it is more like 50% driving 80% etc.).

Since you work in sales, the obvious metric for “results” is how many dollars of product you sell. Let’s say you’re selling something by calling people on the phone. The distribution suggests that just 20% of your phone calls generates 80% of your sales. This means that the remaining 80% of your day is more or less wasted, or is at least significantly less productive.

How might we use this information?

We’re not advocating for you to coast and simply do a fifth of the work, although you almost certainly could. The bar is often quite low.

Instead, you could sit down and look for patterns within this 20% of calls. Perhaps they tend to take place in the morning or at the end of the workday. Perhaps the clients tend to be mostly from a certain demographic, say wealthy divorcées. Whatever the patterns, the obvious solution is to drop the unproductive 80% and try to find more prospects that resemble the 20% that drives most of the results.

We understand that this may all seem obvious. However, chances are that you are not using this strategy at your own job. Chances are you’re wasting your energy on certain things (think: division-wide meetings, religiously reading the news, obsessively checking your emails). And chances are you aren’t focusing enough on what actually matters.

Similar to before, if you would like to improve your work with very little effort, turn to the Pareto Principle. Take a plain piece of paper and draw a line down the center of it. On the left, write down the things that consume your time, but don’t drive results. On the right, write down what drives results. Minimize the items on the left and maximize the items on the right.

If you want to progress through hard work alone, know that you’ll face a tough road. The elites of the world both work hard and don’t tend to play by the rules. They tweak the system to make sure that their 24 hours in the day are effectively more than yours. The Pareto Principle can allow us to do the same.

Conclusion:

We hope you enjoyed this discussion of the Pareto Principle. Armed with this knowledge, we trust that you’ll identify countless ways to improve your own life almost overnight.

Nobody is going to do it for you.

Based on ideas from:

The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Of course, some can navigate without one, but given that its cost is trivial, why take the risk?

Any good to-do list should serve two primary purposes:

1. Help you remember your longer-term goals and daily tasks; and

2. Force you to rank them from most to least important.

In other words, a good to-do list is both a memory tool and a brutally honest filtering mechanism.

Our list will force us to decide what is truly important and what is simply the busy work that we indulge in to make ourselves feel accomplished, all the while making precisely zero real progress.

Here’s one way to create a highly effective to-do list without being a nerd about it. 

Principles:

Like any good thing, it doesn’t hurt to have some support from fancy sounding principles and laws.

As you’ll see though, these ones are actually useful.

I. The Eisenhower Principle

If there is anyone to consult for advice on effectiveness, it is Dwight D. Eisenhower, American President and World War II general.

In short, he observed that there are “two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."

To address this, he came up with a two-by-two grid known as the Eisenhower Matrix, which allowed him to categorize tasks as important and urgent, not important and not urgent and so on. With these categories, he was able to see through the fog and noise of both war and presidency.

We will keep this Matrix in mind when we are building our list.

II. Parkinson's Law

Parkinson’s law is an observation that tasks will often expand to fill the time allotted for their completion.

For instance:

• Give yourself two weeks to complete a project and it will likely take two weeks.

• Give yourself five days to complete the same project and it will likely take five days.

If this feels like an oversimplification of the real world, consider a time when you had an unexpected conflict and still managed to complete your regular tasks with a fraction of the time.

We can take advantage of Parkinson’s law by setting aggressive, but realistic time expectations for tasks.

Our Beloved List:

Keep in mind that there is no one correct way to keep a to-do list. Any list that helps you remember things and prioritize is a good list.

The list is comprised of five sections: essential, nice to have, extra, work (current), and work (long-term).

ESSENTIAL:

At the top of the page, this section is most important. It is comprised of both time-sensitive tasks and tasks related to long-term goals. As its position and name suggests, the essential box is to be checked off first. Ignore this rule and anger the to-do list gods at your own peril.

If this sounds abstract, imagine that you have a doctor’s appointment today and that you’d like to improve your writing and learn to code.

Your section might include the following bullets:

• Doctor’s appointment at 9 AM

• Write for 12 minutes

• Solve one coding interview problem

Notice that each bullet is specific. There is no grey area. You cannot “kind of” write for 12 minutes. It is binary: yes or no.

The grey area is our enemy. It clouds our perception of progress, so that we can feel good about ourselves, all the while accomplishing precisely nothing. We need objective measures.

NICE TO HAVE:

This section should be fairly self-explanatory. It is comprised of tasks that are less urgent and less important than in the previous section, but still worth doing.

For example:

• Return Amazon package

• Message Billie

• Get cash at ATM

EXTRA:

Extra is what is left over from the other two buckets. These items are neither important nor urgent. In other words, our lives would be largely unchanged if we were unable to check these off.

Say:

• Buy a tennis racket

• Buy new cologne

WORK (CURRENT) and WORK(LONG-TERM):

You get the picture. The current is what needs to be done today, and the non-current is what can wait. Although these sections may seem trivial, they are far from it.

They guarantee that:

1. You’ll never forget what you need to be doing. Nobody’s memory is better than ink on paper; and

2. You’ll always be addressing the most important tasks and items first.

No matter how much we romanticize hard work, it is no match for being discerning and efficient.

Bonus: getting things done in less time

With a red (or simply non-black) pen. Write a target time next to each important task that is on your list (think the essential and work (current) sections). The target time should be aggressive. If something might take an hour to do, give yourself 40 minutes.

Then, set a timer and work for that amount of time.

You’ll find that you vastly overestimate the time certain tasks will take (think Parkinson’s Law), especially when you are focused. At the very worst, you won’t completely finish what you set out to do, but you gave it X minutes of focused work.

Conclusion:

We hope that after reading this, you are convinced of the immense benefits of keeping a thoughtful to-do list.

To summarize, this habit will not only help you remember what it is that you need to do but allow you to consciously decide what is the most important use of your energy.

If this all sounds intense, then make it easier. There is no objectively right list. Any list is better than no list. Write your tasks and goals on a sticky note or a tissue. There’s no wrong answer. Just start.

Who can honestly say that they wouldn’t like to accomplish more?

Materials:

Unlined Pocket Notebook (~$17.50)

Sharpie Pens (~$4.50)

Let’s recap where we left off.

Shocks can make systems stronger in largely two ways:

— by returning resources to the broader system; and

— by freeing up space.

With a new abundance of resources and space, newer and better components of the system are allowed to grow.

The result is a stronger and more diverse system. That is creative destruction.

So, what happens when systems are deprived of these shocks?

Back to the forest

As previously mentioned, fire is a terrifying thing. It is unquestionably a force of destruction. Up until this point, we’ve addressed forest fires in isolation. We’ve ignored the human element.

Creative destruction or not, forest fires are a tremendous danger to people and property. And as such, we should work to limit and prevent their destruction.

If forest fires harm people and their property, then the obvious proposal is to simply put out every fire. But it turns out this is quite a dangerous solution.

Let’s discuss why.

Forest fire 101

Just as the tallest tree starts from a tiny seed, a forest fire starts from a small spark. Unfortunately, the majority (about 85%) of these initial fires are caused by human carelessness like cigarettes and campfires. The remainder occur naturally from lightning and the sun’s rays.

This initial spark or flame grows by engulfing dead and decaying material in the forest. We can think of this material as fuel. Think of the size of fires as related to the amount of fuel that they have access to.

This brings us to the central issue.

more fuel = more material to burn = a larger fire

What happens when we put out every fire?

For nearly a century, our American approach to forest fires was to extinguish fires as soon as they started. As a result, brush and other fuel that would have been burned up was left to accumulate. With more fuel, future fires became larger and burned hotter, leading to greater destruction.

As it turns out, by extinguishing every fire, we only make subsequent fires more destructive. Thus, what seems like the right decision is actually no better than kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with. In fact, it’s worse than that.

This seems to be true of many good-intentioned interventionist decisions.

Welcome to complex systems.

So, what should we do?

As is often true, the optimal solution lies between the two extremes.

It turns out that what appears to be the correct method of forest management is to start our own fires. However, when we play God and create volatility, we get to choose the dosage. Rather than waiting for nature to do it for us, brush is now gathered up and ultimately burned during the Winter in many fire prone areas. As a result, forests enjoy the benefits of fire without locals bearing the cost with their lives and property.

If systems crave volatility and shocks, then we have no choice but to give it to them. To believe otherwise is pure ignorance. Let us be the architects of creative destruction.

Back to society

Now that we have taken a good look at our forests and how to properly maintain them, it is time to turn the lens onto ourselves.

You have likely already grasped the point of this fire discussion, but the message is so important that it bears repeating.

— shocks are vital aspects of systems

— suppressing these shocks often leads to paradoxically worse outcomes

Just like before, as silly as it sounds, we can learn quite a bit from our forests.

As a society, we have declared war on shocks and volatility, and for good reason. And we’ve largely succeeded. At a high level, this is unquestionably a good thing. Life is more predictable, more regular, and largely free from violence and crisis (whether or not this is sustainable state is a question for another day).

The issue is that in achieving this, it seems that we’ve completely written off shocks and volatility as strengthening tools.

Just as we do controlled burns of brush in forests, perhaps we could use small, controlled shocks to strengthen our systems. If this all sounds too abstract, let us clarify with a few small observations.

On Language courses

Language courses are largely devoid of volatility, or to put it differently, surprises. Students learn one set of terms or concepts, take a test, and then move on to the next set of terms. The issue with this system is that it is a poor reflection of reality. Speaking a language is full of surprises because life is full of surprises.

Perhaps a better system also incorporates the following:

We could provide students random prompts, questions are difficult to answer and incorporate current events or terms. The key is that these prompts should be a stretch. The intent of the exercise is for students to come up short or to fail to answer the question.

Just as a forest fire or controlled burn eliminates the unimportant and makes space for new organisms, these exercises would perhaps reinforce the truly important concepts and induce new growth: useful but unknown words, phrases, and concepts.

Volatility can often be a filter. The unimportant falls through the cracks leaving only what matters.

On Learning how to ride a bike

To make this more amusing, say we needed to teach a class of students how to ride a bike. Our current system would more or less suggest that we teach the mechanics of riding a bike and then let them loose to ride on their own in the real world.

We would first start with illustrations showing the correct way to pedal and the ergonomically correct method of holding the handlebars. Students would be encouraged to take detailed notes, as this material will be on the final exam (a multiple-choice test). In subsequent courses, we would perhaps discuss how the sprocket interacts with the bike chain and how the friction between the brake pads and the wheels allows us to slow down. No detail would be spared.

After years of rigorous instruction, our brightest minds would be ready to bike.

However, those who are especially gifted, may choose to spend another few years pursuing an advanced degree, ultimately perhaps choosing to pass on this wisdom and their own extrapolations as an instructor.

In an alternative reality, we could teach eager students through a combination of learning and doing (and failing). First, we would teach the basic mechanics of bike riding, only the most vital details. We would perhaps cover how to adjust the seat, how to peddle, turn, and stop. This would not take long.

Then our students would take to streets on bikes with helmets, elbow pads, and all. Immediately, they would encounter volatility (surprises), things they hadn’t studied, things they hadn’t planned for.

One student might run over a pothole, another might encounter the raised edge of a sidewalk tile. Many would fall. And that’s the point. These mistakes are harmless and useful information. A mistake is a clue that something doesn’t work. With enough practice (and falling) these students would be prepared for anything.

We can learn a lot more from experience than from pretending that our little model of the real world is the real world itself.

The end of part II/II

That brings us to the end of the creative destruction series. We hope that you learned something and found our use of forest fires as a metaphor more helpful than annoying.

Thanks for reading.

Based on ideas from:

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Paintings:

Edward Hopper (1882–1967)

If we are confused by some natural event or trend, it is often simply because our lens isn’t big enough. We are fixating on one component of the system instead of the system itself. Adjusting our lens, we would see that although something might harm a component (such as a tree or an ant), it is often beneficial or at the very least neutral for the system (such as a forest).

How?

Our elementary school science courses taught us the following example:

A tree dies of some cause.

Small organisms help to decompose the tree and return its nutrients to the soil.

The rest of the forest benefits from these newly released nutrients.

Thus, what is locally bad is actually helpful for the system as a whole.

This is only the beginning.

Forest Fires

In the wild, naturally occurring forest fires are not pointless displays of destruction.

The important word here is pointless. Forest fires are certainly destructive. In the mind’s eye, the phrase almost certainly produces images of an unconquerable wall of flames and blackened wastelands. Fire is synonymous with hell.

Fire is death.

But as it turns out, from these blackened wastelands, life begins again and with even greater resilience. That which knows how to bend will not break.

How?

Recycling Resources

Within the forest ecosystem, fire is a purifying force. It consumes the dead and decaying material on the forest floor, as well as the weak and ill-suited plants. A fire is a reset. When burned, this material returns its nutrients to the soil. From death and ash comes important building blocks of life: nutrients like magnesium, calcium, potassium, and phosphorous.

Thus, again, what is bad for some components of the system, is good for the system itself.

Reallocating space

Given enough time and resources, systems tend to create inefficiency and waste. Good times often create stagnation and bloat.

In the case of the forest, overgrowth occurs. Plants, seeking to soak up every drop of sunlight, expand their systems of leaves and block light from reaching the forest floor. As a result, new growth is suffocated.

Fire is again the much-needed reset. Fires clear out areas of overgrowth and can help thin the canopy above the forest floor. This newly cleared and nutrient dense space combined with improved access to sunlight, likely allows for a variety of new plants to grow, thus improving biodiversity.

A more biodiverse forest is a more resilient forest. And thus, through destruction, nature sculpts a better system.

That is creative destruction.

This is All a Metaphor

Despite all of the fascinating details of forest fires, they are admittedly not directly helpful for our everyday lives. Tragically, forest fire knowledge is unlikely to help us mend from heartbreak or find direction in trying times.

Or so we would think.

Creative destruction is not unique to forest fires. It is applicable to countless other systems and invaluable as a lens to view the world through.

Think of an economy, as our system of interest, as a forest. Good times allow for businesses to grow and grow, with some of these businesses becoming bloated and inefficient. These bloated and inefficient firms then crowd out newer and potentially better-suited companies from forming.

It is only after an economic shock like a recession, a forest fire of sorts, that these companies go under and return resources and space to the broader economy. Just as forest fires actually promote biodiversity rather than destroy it, these shocks give innovative companies a chance to grow, promoting economic resiliency and productivity growth.

If this is all too intangible, think of your own life.

Think of the unpleasant times that you have might have experienced: heartbreak, unemployment, an injury. Provided that these shocks aren’t ruinous, they are often moments of clarity. Only in sickness can we appreciate our usual health.

Away from the noise of normal life, and reduced to our worst, our priorities and values become clearer.

Just as a fire makes space and frees up resources, these personal shocks remind us to focus on what is important, whether that’s family, friendship, personal growth, or something else.

A life without shocks and volatility is a life of stagnation.

As a society, we don’t tend to focus on the positive effects associated with disruption and the concept of creative destruction. We prefer to think in absolutes, mainly that crises and volatility are bad, and that stability is good.

In fairness, perhaps it is best to think like this. When the world is black and white, it seems comprehensible and familiar. Trouble arises when everything is a unique shade of gray.

To say all of this is neither to look down on society nor advocate for these crises, but simply to point out something that is overlooked.

But we know.

And armed with this knowledge of creative destruction, we can perhaps be more level headed in the face of crisis. We can acknowledge that not only that crisis is a natural part of systems, but that it can improve them. And that our crises can improve ourselves.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

In part II, we will discuss what happens when we try to stop forest fires and deprive systems of volatility.

Based on ideas from:

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Really? Vitamin D?

Yep, buckle-up and put on your thinking caps. Here at the Absurd Journal, we pride ourselves on first principles thinking and, in this issue, we’ll apply that logic to vitamin D. Specifically, we’ll investigate what it affects and why we should all probably be supplementing it. Let’s keep things simple though.

Enter the Letter D Vitamin:

At least for me, vitamin D was one of those things that I knew of but didn’t fully appreciate. Here’s what we all probably know about it: sunlight hits our skin, something happens in our body, vitamin D is created, and all of this is somehow good for us. Sounds familiar, right? Conveniently, this explanation is just vague enough for us to conclude that we’re probably fine. Our skin does the job for us after all. Do we need to worry that our stomachs are doing the right thing or think about our heart beating? Probably not.

Here's what we’re missing though: we just don’t get enough sun as modern people.

Think about it. The average person is probably indoors for the vast majority of the day. Things are even worse for office workers. Personally, I’d estimate that I’m only outside for a couple hours a day and that’s only with an average work week of 40 hours or so.

Intuitively, something should feel very wrong about this. We’re missing the most important piece of the vitamin D puzzle: Sunlight in, vitamin D out. No sunlight, no vitamin D, end of story. Of course, some of our foods (like milk) are fortified with vitamin D, but this does not seem to fill the gap. And this is exactly what current research reflects. According to study by the NIH, 42% of Americans are vitamin D deficient, with another study finding similar results in Europe (A deficiency rate of about 40%). Researchers have even nicknamed it “an invisible epidemic” and a “pandemic”.

But despite these scary statistics and nicknames, it doesn’t seem to be a mainstream focus.

Of course, scientists study it, but it doesn’t appear to be a priority. I’d guess that it’s simply because vitamin D isn’t considered “prestigious” in the scientific community. Disagree? Close your eyes. You’re now a scientist. Would you rather devote your life to studying some complex mRNA treatment (pretending to know science here) or a vitamin that they add to milk? How many things are we missing or ignoring because they’re not “prestigious”? Scientists aren’t safe from being insecure and status seeking. And since the complex is viewed as higher status than the simple, it’s no wonder why we keep ignoring simple, boring potential fixes to problems. Something to think about.

Anyways, what can happen when your body isn’t getting enough vitamin D? Again, let’s keep it simple.

Fatigue — vitamin D plays an important role in the production of ATP.

Bone and muscle weakness — vitamin D plays an important role in calcium absorption.

Weakened immune system — vitamin D plays an important role in regulating the activity of immune cells.

Clearly, we’d all prefer to avoid these things.

Advice:

So, are we doomed to be modern vampires? It doesn’t seem like it to me. Take a second to reflect. Are you getting enough sunlight and vitamin D? I think it’s safe to assume that you’re probably not.

Spend $50 and get your levels checked. Here’s a link to the test that I used (LINK). Whining about $50? Think about it like this: that $50 could potentially reveal a deficiency that when treated, could improve your energy levels and your general health. It truly is a small investment, when you realize that it could potentially improve your life permanently.

If it turns out that you do have a deficiency, speak with your doctor about supplementation and next steps. I’m certainly not a doctor, but I picked up a bottle of liquid vitamin D3/K2 (LINK) and have been taking it with water in the morning and at night. This seems to be the gold standard supplement, as far as they go. My understanding is that it’s important to include vitamin K given that it plays an important role in metabolizing calcium (and making sure it ends up in your bones).

I’ve made some lifestyle and diet changes in addition to supplementing vitamin D, so I can’t say anything for certain, but I find that my energy levels are drastically higher. It seems insane that this isn’t a more commonplace thing.

Don’t write it off. I’m not advocating for aligning your chakras, all of this is very real.

Bonus: A Quick Diatribe Against Society

It seems that as a society, we’ve completely lost sight of our nature. We fail to appreciate even in passing the mismatch between our modern environment and the one that we evolved to thrive in. This is not to say that modern life is horrible and that we should instead wear loin cloths and throw rocks at each other, but we shouldn’t we at least think about it?

It’s frustrating to me that complex things are often viewed as inherently better than simple things, especially in medicine. Pharmaceuticals are often emphasized over supplements. Treatments are often emphasized over preventative measures. It’s ludicrous that we often ignore or believe that we are above things like vitamin D, an essential component of our bodies.

How arrogant is it to believe that we have outgrown our need for the sun?

My point is that we should at the very least acknowledge this mismatch instead of trying to ignore it or sweep it under the rug. Let’s take a second to consider if our fundamental needs are being met. Are we getting enough sunlight, exercise, sleep, etc. If we aren’t, let’s do our best to fix those things and then and only then turn to pharmaceuticals.  

I understand that what I’m advocating here is purely a fairytale. I get it.

This style of thinking will never catch on in society for three very important reasons:

it’s difficult,

it’s time-consuming,

and it’s expensive.

Society seems to optimize based on the opposite criteria. We love anything that is easy, requires little time investment, and costs little to no money. Still not convinced? Next time you’re in public, look at someone (or yourself) scrolling through TikTok. It checks all of the above boxes. It’s very hard to avoid the magnetic pull of something like that.

But, if we can’t control the many millions of people around us, what can we control Thankfully ourselves, specifically our own actions.

Do with that what you will.

It’s impossible to not sound like a middlebrow fake intellectual making this argument, but that doesn’t make it any less true. We treat the world as a purely quantitative place, ignoring that what is qualitative is equally important, and often more important.

How much money will this generate?

How much does it cost to build this?

How many followers will this generate?

Nothing is more qualitative than beauty. Consider beauty and its effect on your own daily life. What is the dollar value of passing by an attractive stranger your age? How valuable is the awe-inspiring building that you pass during your daily commute? Of course, there’s a price that a buyer would be willing to pay and that the seller would be willing to accept, but how valuable is it to you?

This all may sound overly abstract, but I promise you it isn’t. What I mean is that more often than not, as a society, we optimize based on price and price alone. Whatever is cheapest is best.

We more or less do the bare minimum. What’s the cheapest solution that gets the job done? Alright, let’s do that. That’s not to say that we don’t occasionally go above and beyond and build beautiful things. We do. It’s just that beauty is a feature now rather than a necessity, especially with commonplace things like public buildings.

As a society, we tend to believe that buildings are meant to be functional. They exist solely to fulfill their stated purpose. You might stare at me with your mouth open and say that a school just a place where classes can be taught and blink your eyes. A post office is a place where letters and packages are processed. As long as they fulfill their design, they are good buildings. Beauty is irrelevant.

You might think like this dear reader and that’s alright. But which one of these post offices inspires you? Which one of these buildings gives you a sense of awe for human achievement? Grand buildings, regardless of their purpose, motivate us to do great things, by reminding us of what we’re capable of as a people. Imagine a world devoid of beauty, a world where buildings are rectangular and bland shades of beige and gray. We are building that world.

At the very least, you must acknowledge that we’re borrowing from the beauty of the past, and eventually that gift will cease to keep giving. Old buildings, make up the lion’s share of what makes so many areas in our united states beautiful, and eventually these buildings will crumble into dust.

My point is not that we’re doomed as a society because we build crumby buildings or that we should revert to a different time period. In fact, I’m not sure that I have a point, just an observation. I just think that we can do better as a society. Let’s reject the temptation to be mediocre and only fulfill the basic requirements and lowest expectations. Let’s build buildings that inspire us. Let’s acknowledge the importance of beauty.

Antarctica is a place that exists more in imagination than in reality. Sure, we all know that it’s a continent and can point to it on a map. But for some reason, it doesn’t feel real. In the same way, we all know that Mars exists, but not what it would feel like to wander around on the surface.

Afterall, do you know someone who’s been there? Certainly not your Aunt Gertrude. It’s not Myrtle Beach. Well, let’s just say that I know someone that’s been (sort of).

Enter Shackleton

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten to know Ernest Shackleton, the star of Alfred Lansing’s incredible novel, Endurance. The story follows the English explorer Shackleton and his crew of 27 men on an unprecedented journey into Antarctica. The crew intended to make history by crossing the icy continent, starting from below South America, and traversing to the Ross Sea, south of New Zealand. The crew set sail on December 5, 1914. This is their story.

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition

A journey as ambitious as crossing Antarctica, required an equally ambitious ship. Her Majesty’s Ship (HMS) Endurance was custom built for the journey. She was designed with three sails and powered by a coal-fired steam engine, capable of speeds of up to 10.2 knots (about 12 mph). Front to back, she measured about the size of half a football field, at 144 feet. With Antarctic conditions in mind, she was built for rugged strength. Her sides measured between about 2 and 2.5 feet in thickness, with the front of the ship measuring an incredible 4 feet, 3 inches in thickness. Her Norwegian designers selected a mix of Oak, Norwegian mountain fir, and greenheart, a wood weighing more than solid iron, so tough that it couldn’t be worked with ordinary tools.

I know what you might be thinking, dear reader. No matter how thick this ship might be, why make it out of wood? Surely, shipbuilders had access to iron and steel in the 1910’s? To that, I would first ask where you got your ship building degree from, smart guy? I did think the same thing though. It seems that the best answer is simply that wood would have been a more resilient material, given the frigid Antarctic conditions. Specifically, some theorize that wood was chosen because it was more flexible than metal, allowing it to absorb more pressure. At the time, steel contained higher concentrations of impurities making it much more brittle than today, a dangerous property given the immense pressure from packs of Antarctic ice. This brittleness was likely even more of an issue, given the frigid temperatures.

The Endurance set sail from a whaling station on South Georgia, a desolate island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Almost immediately, the expedition encountered difficulties. Two days in, the crew encountered ice. With a ship as formidable as the Endurance, you might think that the crew could simply plow through the pack of ice. Afterall, the front of the ship measured over 4 feet thick. This could not be further from the truth. The crew encountered a pack of ice measuring several feet thick and a half-mile wide. To ram into the ice sufficiently fast would be no different than plowing into solid rock. The men would no doubt have had the fate of the Titanic top of mind, given that it sank just a few years earlier in 1912.

Think about it like this, a journey into Antarctica is a war. Man against ice. The crew can never hope to win this war, but they can hope to not lose. By avoiding the ice, the men live to fight another day. As is true in other areas of life, the best offense is defense. Shackleton knew this all too well.

And so, the ship proceeded carefully, delicately twisting her way through the pack of ice for weeks. In the open ocean, the crew could expect to make 300 miles of progress a day, but in the pack, they would be lucky to travel a 10th of that. It was a snail’s pace. Relief finally came after the New Year of 1915 when the Endurance cleared the pack. The ice had lost its first battle and the crew enjoyed open ocean as a reward. Full steam ahead.

Heading south, Endurance enjoyed a few hundred miles of carefree sailing, dwarfed by icebergs towering more than a hundred feet in the air. But victory doesn’t last long in the Antarctic. The ship once again encountered ice, this time of a different form, a wicked sort of ice. The ship meandered through endless slush, an inviting soup of snow and crushed ice. Following six cold days, the Endurance soon found herself trapped. The slush had frozen into a thick crust that now encircled her. The crew heaped coal into the furnaces, running the engines at full speed ahead in a desparate attempt to break through the ice. For hours, the endurance strained against the ice, without gaining a foot. Defeat.

With falling temperatures and the coming of the Antarctic Winter, Shackleton recognized the futility of attempting to break through. They were stuck.

And so, with Endurance trapped in the ice, its brave crew could only sit and wait out the Winter, drifting with the pack wherever the wind and currents pleased…

To be continued in Part II & III.

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