What I’ve Learned So Far

What I said here, also applies here.

Y’all be good.

Y’all know I’m an unabashed John Scalzi fan. Here’s one of the most inspirational things he’s ever written, and it’s grounded in his own hard-won experience:

There is Always Another Way
The most important thing the move taught me was simply this: There is always another way. What is required is the will to confront change from without and roll with it so it becomes change from within. My job came crashing down on me, and I had a choice of accepting it or finding another way. I found another way and and took it. My editors forced change on me; I turned it around and worked to make it a change on my terms. In this particular case I was fortunate that work I had been doing had prepared the way, so I could move quickly — but even had I started from zero, with work another way would have presented itself in time.

Rock on.

Serenity is the ultimate luxury.

–Tim Walker

My wife and I were talking about this the other day, in connection with the Alamo Drafthouse’s Princess Bride quote-along. That film is, of course, loaded with quotable lines, including:

“Inconceivable!”

“You keep using that word . . .”

and, of course

“Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya . . .”

We also recently watched Ghostbusters with our kids, which reminded me of its many quotable lines:

“He slimed me.”

“We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!”

“Dogs and cats, living together . . .”

My all-time favorite film is Raising Arizona, which has at least two dozen memorable lines. A few off the top of my head:

“There’s what’s right, and there’s what’s right, and never the twain shall meet.”

“You go back in there and get me a toddler!”

“. . . or my name ain’t Nathan Arizona!”

“I’ll be takin’ these Huggies, and any cash you got.”

And then there’s the film that I consider the heavyweight champion of the world in this category: Pulp Fiction.

“Royale with cheese.”

“How did I get on brain detail?!”

“If he goes to Indochina . . .”

“You’ve lost your L.A. privileges.”

Et cetera et cetera.

So, what’s your favorite “lines” movie — the one you can quote endlessly with your friends?

When I posted my review of his book last week, I forgot to mention that he has a (free) downloadable manifesto posted on ChangeThis:

The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload & Triple Productivity in 24 Hours

High-value stuff. Some of the things he suggests are very simple. But if you do them and stick with them, they almost can’t help but change the way you live and work.

Here’s the first paragraph of a story that came to me in the shower this morning:

Three lessons had been hammered home to Jason on this fair Tuesday in May, in this order: (1) Never argue with a policeman when he’s operating in an official capacity. (2) Never argue with your wife when you’re 100 percent wrong, she’s 100 percent right, and she’s trying to throw you a lifeline. (3) Never point a gun at anyone unless you’re willing to use it.

What’s the next paragraph?

Two months ago, the NYT published this fascinating Michael Pollan essay on the way that farm subsidies support our national obesity epidemic.

You Are What You Grow

The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

The piece goes far beyond this. It’s sobering stuff, well worth reading and pondering. Makes me want to go out and eat a salad.

(Why yes, I am clearing the decks of a reading backlog in advance of my vacation. Why do you ask?)

One of the things I’ve always loved about Bill James’s baseball analysis is that it’s (a) deeply, deeply about baseball, yet (b) also about the nature of human understanding. How do we know what we know? How are we sure what we know? These are the kinds of fundamental questions that have long driven him to examine the received wisdom handed down in “The Book” of unwritten baseball lore.

This point was brought home in this great WSJ piece on James and his role with the Boston Red Sox. Key snippet:

“People think they understand how to win in baseball much more than they really do,” Mr. James says. This is true of the statisticians as much as it is of traditional scouts. While “Moneyball” treats scouts and analysts as at odds, Mr. James says he learns from the scouts all the time. […] “There is no reason for there to be a conflict. The conflict exists only when people think they know more than they do.”

After a lifetime of studying the game, Mr. James reckons he still has plenty to learn. The internationalization of the game is one source of new wisdom, he says. “One of the great things about the Cubans and the Japanese is that they develop their own traditions and a lot of the things we think they know they don’t necessarily buy into. Incorporating those other traditions is a source of wealth for baseball, and if we’re smart, we’ll do more of it.”

Just so. If you care at all about baseball, give the article a read.

Well, Guy doesn’t mention it, but the lead graf from this blog post tends to support Tim’s views on setting up a job that (a) pays you plenty while (b) leaving you plenty of free time for the rest of your life. If it provides a useful service that promotes human connections (of whatever sort), so much the better.

No Plan, No Capital, No Model…No Problem

Markus Frind, the founder of PlentyOfFish.com is my new hero (James Hong of Hot or Not is a close second). Marcus spends about two hours a day in his underwear managing a free dating website that gets twelve billion page views a year. He is the only employee, and he only has one server. And by the way, he makes $5-6 million/year with Google ads.

Is PlentyOfFish.com something you could emulate immediately? No. But are there other great ideas like it waiting to happen? You bet. Did Frind benefit from an element of luck? Yes.

But so can you.

If you like baseball, you should be reading Joe Posnanski’s blog regularly. This long piece on Bo Jackson may be the best thing he’s done there:

Bo: The Director’s Cut

A choice tidbit:

Bo Jackson was always grouchily unimpressed with himself. Michael Jordan was asked about Bo, and he offered up one of the best quotes ever spoken about sports and the elusive qualities of genius. “Neither of us is very easily amazed,” Jordan told Newsweek. “You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”

This is the quality, I think, that is vastly underrated – it’s rare for someone to have that sort of titanic faith in themselves. I’ve always been amazed by the story of Kurt Warner, who went from stocker at Hy-Vee to Super Bowl MVP – not so much because of what he did on the field, but because when he was stacking cans of Del Monte corn and lining up bags of Funyons, he somehow still saw himself as an NFL quarterback.

Joe’s put his finger on it here. Larry Bird hit all those last-second shots not just because he was an excellent shooter at all times, but because he wanted to nail last-second shots, and he was absolutely convinced that he would hit those shots. You could say the same thing for Michael Jordan, Jerry West, Will Clark, Joe Montana, Reggie Miller, or any of the other great crunch-time players. Regardless of odds, regardless of the game situation, they simply believe that they’re going to do it.