☕ saturday mornings - December 17, 2022

the nature of life, giants & world travels

Tommy Dixon

Dec 17, 2022

Happy Saturday!

I hope you’re having a great start to your weekend.

What I’ve been up to:

I finished my last exam of the semester and left Spain to meet my Dad in Nuremberg, Germany!
We spent two days in Nuremberg, exploring the old town, touring one of the world's most famous Christmas markets, and learning about the city's history.
On Thursday we caught a flight to Paris. So far, we’ve walked the city and visited the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, and several literary cafes. We're visiting the Palace of Versailles tomorrow and will be in the heart of Paris for France's game in the World Cup Final!

Here's a recap of the most interesting things I've explored this week.

✍️ Quote I’m pondering:

Robert Frost, American poet, on the ceaselessness of life:

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."

📚 Book passage I loved:

Until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words,—‘Wait and hope.’

― The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Four words I will train myself to say until they become a habit so strong that immediately they will appear in my mind. These words will carry me through every adversity.
These four words are: This too shall pass.
When I am heavy with heartache, I should console myself that this too shall pass; when I am puffed with success I shall warn myself that this too shall pass. When I am strangled in poverty I shall tell myself that this too shall pass; when I am burdened with wealth I shall tell myself that this too shall pass.

― The Greatest Salesman In the World by Og Mandino

💡 Idea from me: Standing on Giants

Studying the past may be the best way to win the future.

If you study exceptional people a common pattern emerges: they learn from those that came before them.

Why?

When you study the greats, your learning curve is shorter.

"Billions of human lifetimes have passed" Balaji Srinivasan notes. "You only have one. You can try to figure it all out for yourself in your limited time, or you can gain some leverage from the lessons of history."

You can learn about people's mistakes, and avoid them.

You can learn about people's successes, and replicate them.

Patrick Collison, the brilliant founder of Stripe, is an avid student of history often referring to it as a “way to cheat.” Rather than formulating your own brilliant ideas, Collison explains, you can borrow from our finest ancestors.

David Ogilvy, known as the Father of Advertising, launched his career by asking: "What were the best ideas that were successful before I was alive?"

Marc Andreessen, one of the greatest entrepreneurs alive, has read hundreds of biographies. He writes, "There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments throughout their entire lives... For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone's accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize."

Read great biographies.

The information quality is stratospherically better than most books. There are ideas in biographies that are incredibly valuable.

Sam Walton spent 60 years building one of the most successful retail companies in the world with a diligence that bordered on madness. On his deathbed, Walton distilled all the lessons he learned into a 200-page book you could read in a weekend.

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, similarly co-authored his biography right before death. He needed to share a haunting message: don't do what I did. Kamprad admits he spent every waking hour building his business until he died at 82. In the process, he alienated his wife and missed out on raising his three sons. As he writes, quite beautifully, "anybody that has children knows childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered".

You can also try to track down your heroes, if they're alive.

21-year old Warren Buffett sought out Ben Graham, who Buffett considered the best investor in the world, and offered to work for him for free. Buffett was curtly rejected but eventually hired by Graham 3 years later.

In your area of interest, find giants that came before you. Study them if they’re dead. Go and meet them if they’re alive. Take their best ideas and build on them.

When you explore humanity's past, as Will Durant writes, it “becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach, and carve and sing”.

Biographies will be the only books I read for the next 6 months.

❓ Question for You:

How can I turn my youth into a strength rather than a weakness?
How can I view my age as a strength rather than a weakness?

This question was inspired by hearing David Perell explain how, when leaving the corporate world, he wrote in his journal every single day: “I want to turn my youth into an asset instead of a liability.”