Month: January 2023

“the main parameters that identify something as a systemic risk are scale and irreversibility”

@normonics

Well, this is a quote of a quote from @normonics, so maybe he said this and maybe not.

The idea that is new for me is the systemic risk idea. “Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” That doesn’t quite describe it. The Fed tinkering with interest rates is more like it. (To head-nod toward a common and pervasive risk that I don’t understand).

It’s a risk that is so huge you can’t see it, or assume it away, or don’t think about it. It’s part of the baseline, the landscape.

Systemic risks are out of my control and the consequences are profound.

It’s not easy to see systemic risks because they are unlikely to occur. We supply don’t see them all that often.

So this little quote is helps me because I ask the question “What is big?” when looking around me. Identifying something large is a step toward identifying fatal risks. We humans are tiny and fragile, after all.

Another way this helps me think in a useful manner is by asking “What is irreversible?” This can give hints toward revealing systemic risks. Not all irreversibles are systemic, though.

Enough of this blathering. The purpose here is to be resilient, to be able to ride out a storm. If the Federal Reserve and Congress fuck up the economy (don’t blame Wall Street because they are gleefully playing the cards that Uncle Sam dealt) how will I be sure that my family will eat and sleep in a warm, dry place every night? Or better yet, how can I be positioned to thrive and grow if everything goes sideways?

That’s what this little quote does for me. It forces my attention to much larger thoughts, beyond writing an SOP for something at work, beyond the immediate and the familiar.

It’s one thing to simply perceive an unbounded risk. It’s quite another to know how to engineer around it. And of course it’s damned hard to actually do the counterintuitive thing you need to do.

As usual, this is me musing to myself. That’s why this site exists.

One obvious answer comes to mind. I stopped vigorously paying down the mortgage at high speed when inflation jumped up. Keep low interest rate debt. That is the smart thing to do, right?

No. The smart thing to do, at when perceiving and building buffers against systemic risk, is to have no debt at all. It’s time to start up the big monthly pay downs again.

What’s important to my life is no different than what was important to my grandfather. The details are different (as a young man he was busy staying alive at Gallipoli and Passchendaele and obviously survived or I wouldn’t be here) but the underlying reality for both of us is the same.

We live. We die. What makes a successful life is the same for me as it was for my grandfather. And his grandfather. And his grandfather.

This is a reminder to myself. Don’t get distracted by the latest iPhone. Or the latest war. Or the shameless venality of our so-called leaders. Or the willful gullibility and cupidity of those around you.

The old answers are not the right because they are old. The old answers are the right answers because they are right.

Trust God. Clean house (literally and metaphorically). Help someone else, with humility.

An earnest application of a few spiritual principles. That’s all it takes. That’s all it has ever taken to have a successful life.

The Last Resolution Standing challenge has opened my eyes to the power of tiny actions.

My resolution: write for five minutes and publish something every day. Today is Day 16 of following through. Yay me.

It takes five minutes at least to create a simple post like this. Sometimes it can take five minutes to edit and polish a tweet.

So five minutes is not nothing. It’s something. It’s enough to create a small pearl, sufficient in itself. Five minutes enough to create the seed of a larger work (which has also happened—the five minutes can create a jump start and I just keep going).

Never underestimate the effort it takes to shoot for the best you can do—even with a tweet. And never underestimate the power of a small beginning.

Yet to be demonstrated (but I believe it to be true): never underestimate tiny actions repeated over a long timescale. Water dripping on a rock.

Make modest goals that are easily achievable. This is the idea of “baseline goals” and “stretch goals.”

Baseline is “no matter what.” E.g., exercise 15 minutes no matter what every day. Stretch is what you really want. E.g., lift 4x per week is what you want. Baseline you can hit even if the wheels fall off your life.

You have to give yourself the experience of achieving a goal with ridiculous ease. You don’t give up the possibility higher achievements by doing so. In fact you give yourself emotional fuel to go for the gusto and hit those higher goals.

This is how you start to build the mindset of knowing (more than just believing) that you can be relentless and unstoppable.

Everything is achievable given enough time and repetition. We are all impatient and want to accelerate our achievements.

Better to start super small and let time’s gravity work for you to build momentum. You choose direction. Time adds momentum. That yields (ta da, physics) velocity — speed in a specific direction.

Specifically how:

• Set a goal. This is directional. It may be over the horizon in your belief. No matter. Set it anyway. Life is a series of daily marches toward the horizon.
• Look at what you’re doing right now. If you’re doing it you can keep doing it. This is your foundation. (E.g., my nutrition goals start with the fact that I eat oatmeal almost every morning. Fiber, etc. etc.)
• There are probably some associated behaviors around that good thing you’re doing that are not helpful. (E.g., I put maple syrup on my oatmeal).
• Start down the path as-is. Keep doing what you’re doing and you will keep getting what you’re getting. It’s easy because you’re doing it now.
• Slowly, slowly subtract the counterproductive and leave the productive standing. Via negativa, to use Taleb’s concept. (Stop putting maple syrup on your oatmeal).
• Don’t worry. You will expand and evolve from here. The “excellent breakfast” habit will stick. It might morph to scrambled eggs instead of oatmeal. Who knows?

Build an almost imperceptible foundation, known only to you and God. But build it.

Easy does it. But do it.

In the 75 Hard days I lived the life that Bob admonished us to live: reading, daily. “The first thing to go is the reading,” he would say.

Well, the reading went.

That means no more Meditations. No more other stuff. Ten pages a day makes a difference. I’m reading, but haphazardly.

And surprisingly the output here and on the other sites has dropped to nil.

Ah well. Time to start the routine again. I have Meditations on my phone. Let’s do it again.

6374.

The way to compensate for 3 follow-through is to use repeated injections of 7 quick start energy.

Maybe that’s why laststanding.app was instinctively appealing to me. It’s another push on the flywheel. These are the types of activities that use quick start energy to build a pattern of follow-through.

Good morning, Marcus. Today I will read what you wrote while among the Quadi.

My work life is overflowing with stuff. If there is such a thing as an effective executive, I ain’t it.

(Side note: The Effective Executive is in the house, ready to read. It’s time to read the classics. The Lindy books. And it’s time to read them slowly. Reading as rumination.)

I choose to get small.

How? And what does “get small” mean?

At a high level it means to 10X my results by shrinking my input actions by 10.

This seems like an absurd way to approach life and business and all that. But I don’t think it is absurd. I think it will yield qualitative improvements. Stripping away one behavior at a time, one resource at a time, one thought at a time will remove friction and distraction.

This does not mean less work. It does not mean less risk.

It means less confusion. or to put it in a “focus on what you want more of” way, it means clarity.

Just remove. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. Etc.

Why? Here is the testable hypothesis behind the idea of getting small. Everything I do, every belief I have exists for a reason. It’s a load-bearing cope. I interact with people the way I do in order to cope with life in a way that is acceptable to my soul.

Let’s remove one load-bearing cope at a time and see what happens. Rather than flit from one place to another in writing, let’s just marinate in this one theme. Via negativa. Remove the obvious. Be sensitive to the impact as the psychic load shifts.

Let’s stare into the abyss, shall we?

Here I sit on Day 2 laststanding.app’s open-ended challenge. I committed to five minutes of writing every day. That might happen here, on my other site, on my other other site, or on my computer on a long form project.

Already the thrill of the new has faded. Already I am negotiating with myself to drop the commitment I made to myself.

On the second day!

How long will this go? How many days in a row will I write for five minutes every day? As currently configured—until I die.

There is only one way to do this: one day at a time.

I can’t do something forever. But I can do something one day at a time, for quite a while.