👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
We know more than we’re able to explain. There is some sort of “inarticulate knowledge” — the knowledge that we are not able to articulate to somebody — in all of us.
We have inarticulate knowledge about a lot of things, including other people. One could have tacit knowledge of why they trust somebody. If you ask them to give a specific reason, they wouldn’t be able to put a finger on anything, because it’s probably not any one particular thing. It’s probably a series of things, which most people call a gut feeling. We just have that. And we have the same thing for mistrust.
Unfortunately, this kind of tacit knowledge or inarticulate knowledge is undervalued in our society. It’s undervalued because we always want to be able to explain the science behind, and give the hard reasons against things. But a lot of life doesn’t work like that.
Enough talk! On to this week’s essay. It’s about 1,300 words.
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Q: What makes someone successful?
There is a great king in a far-off country who loves his only daughter more than anything else in the world. The princess is kind and compassionate, and she excels in philosophy, mathematics, history, and languages. But, like him, she is sedentary and unfit.
Advisers, trainers, nurses, and governesses all fail to entice the feeble king and his daughter to exercise. The king knows this is a problem, so when it comes time for her to marry, he invites dozens of princes from lands both near and far to a special one-day competition to win her hand.
Instead of having the suitors joust, fence, or wrestle, he sits them down in the castle’s great hall for a written examination. At the stroke of 9:15 a.m., each prince opens his blue book and has three hours to answer the same question: “What is the best way to exercise?”
The kingdom is never so quiet. As the mighty princes wield their pens, nary a dog barks, horse whinnies, nor door creaks as every living thing for miles around the castle holds its breath.
And then, at 12:15 p.m., pens go down, and the exams are collected, scanned, and posted on the web for all and sundry to read and post comments while the king’s judges meet behind closed doors to pick the winner.
What a diverse, brilliant set of answers!
One of the most popular is a twelve-step program, “Be as Strong as a Lioness,” that alternates many repetitions of moderate weights with fewer repetitions of heavier weights.
Another clever prince writes “Walk, Run, and Live Forever,” a ten-step plan that begins with long walks and then adds short runs that gradually increase to ten miles.
Other crowd favourites are “Seven Minutes or Your Life,” which promises “optimal health” from just seven minutes a day of high-intensity interval training, and “Live Longer than a Caveman,” which replicates a palaeofitness regime with barefoot walking, tree climbing, and rock lifting.
Yet more plans advocate stretching, swimming, biking, jogging, dancing, boxing, yoga, and even pogo sticking. Some of the prescriptions consider genetic variation, others have different plans for men and women, many are designed to maximise weight loss, and one is cleverly tailored to integrate with a woman’s monthly cycle.
While the judges ponder, journalists, bloggers, celebrities, enthusiasts, and trolls fiercely argue the merits of every entry. With each day it seems there is a new consensus favourite.
Then, finally, after a week of waiting and debating, the day of decision arrives.
At noon, just two sentences are posted on the royal website: “After much deliberation, the judges have determined there is no best way to exercise. Come back next year for a better question.”
Today, let’s talk about success. Especially, how do we go about defining what success is. Even though most people want to be successful, there’s a lot of ambiguity when is comes to measuring success and really knowing what success looks like.
Despite claims to the contrary, can there really be a universally accepted best or optimal amount and type of exercise?
What does “best” even mean? Best in terms of how many years of life it adds? Best in terms of time efficiency? Best for preventing heart disease? Losing weight? Avoiding injury? Averting Alzheimer’s?
Even if there were a way to choose a best plan for one of these goals, would the same plan be best for everyone regardless of age, sex, weight, fitness level, and history of injury?
Similarly, the most common career advice is to become the best at what you do. But, how do you define best? How do you even measure it? Is it based on how fast or efficient you are? How much money you make? How fast you climb the career ladder? How much impact you make at your workplace?
Life isn’t a race. As much as we like to treat it as one, it isn’t one. A race usually has only one metric. Success in a race is defined by whoever touches the finish line first. It doesn’t matter who was ahead or behind midway. What matters is who finishes first.
But success in life is more complex and more nuanced than that. And there’s no real finish line. Yet, we define success in life by measuring who is ahead or behind midway, often with ambiguous criteria.
If I were to ask you who is the best actor in Hollywood, you would probably ask, how do we define the “best” in acting? If we go by the number of Oscar wins, it would be Katharine Hepburn. If we go by the amount of money they made from movies, it would (most probably) be Dwayne Johnson. If we go by how much their film grossed in total, it would be Scarlett Johansson. And if you put in cameos and voice acting in the list, it would be…wait for it…Stan Lee. Whoa!
There is no one universally accepted criteria for being the “best” at something. Therefore, depending on which metric you choose, your strategy for success would change.
For example, if you are an actor and you would like to optimise for highest grossing films, then probably you wouldn’t star in many avant-garde cinemas. In fact, you would optimise for mass pleasers and pop movies. If your success criteria is doing the kind of acting that critiques would appreciate, then most probably you’d focus on good roles, probably those which involve method acting. Your goal won’t be how much money the film makes, rather how many awards it wins.
Which is the best country in the world? If you measure by “power” it would be the US because it’s both a natural economic hub and also a military fortress. It’s packed with resources and has more economic arteries like navigable waterways and ports than the rest of the world combined.
But, if you decide to measure by happiness of a nation, then Finland, Denmark, Iceland would rank on top. And, if you rank by economic freedom, then Singapore, Switzerland, Ireland would top the list. If you measure by democratic freedom, then Norway would be on top. If you measure by safety and peace, then there’s no one better than Iceland. And, if you measure by fastest growing economy, then Guyana is a clear winner.
Same goes for health and fitness. Depending on your fitness goals, you do weights for muscles, cardio for hearts, and bungee jumping to terrify parents.
Regardless of whether you exercise for fun or fitness, some amounts and kinds of exercise can be better or worse for your health. Everything depends on your circumstances and what you are trying to achieve.
This is true in almost all fields. Unless you clearly define an unambiguous criteria, you’ll never know where you stand, how far you’ve come, and what you should do next.
You become a banker to have (almost) no fun and make a lot of money. You join a startup to have a lot of fun and a chance to make a lot of money. You go into the social work sector for a lot of fun and almost no money.
There is some wisdom in the genius’s adage for which we often credit Einstein: If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Your life’s strategy should clearly follow the metric you’re trying to optimise for. And it’s important to know that you cannot optimise for everything.
Today I Learned
During the mid-1800s, the rail network was expanding across England, and it required a slew of new railway bridges able to support a fully loaded train.
A bridge to carry a train is harder to design than a foot or traffic bridge. Humans and carriages have some level of built-in suspension. They can deal with a road surface that is moving around a bit. A train has no such tolerance. The track needs to remain absolutely stationary, which makes for some very stiff railway bridges.
In late 1846, a railway bridge designed by engineer Robert Stephenson was opened over the Dee River in Chester. The bridge was longer than previous bridges that Stephenson had designed, but he tightened and reinforced it to help it cope with heavy loads without it moving too much.
It was a classic step forward in engineering: take previous successful designs and make them do slightly more while using slightly less building materials. The Dee Bridge fulfilled both these criteria.
It opened, and it worked fantastically. The British Empire was all about trains, and British engineers prided themselves on their stiff upper bridges. In May 1847, the bridge was modified slightly: extra rock and gravel were added to keep the tracks from vibrating and to protect the bridge’s wooden beams from burning embers produced by the steam engines.
Stephenson inspected the work and was satisfied that it had been done correctly. The extra weight this put on the bridge was within the expected safety tolerances. However, the first train to cross after the work did not make it to the other side.
It was not that the bridge could not support the extra weight but rather that the combination of length and mass opened up a whole new way for bridges to go wrong. It turns out that, as well as vibrating up and down and side to side, bridges can also twist in the middle. Six trains had passed over the bridge perfectly safely on the morning of May 24, 1847, before the extra mass of broken rocks was added that afternoon.
As the next train was crossing the reopened bridge, the driver felt the bridge moving beneath him. He tried to get across as fast as he could (steam trains are not known for their acceleration) and only just made it. That is to say, the driver in the engine made it. The five carriages he was pulling did not. The bridge twisted to the side and the carriages were dumped into the river below. Eighteen people were injured, and five died.
In some senses, a disaster like this is understandable. Obviously, we should do whatever we can to avoid engineering mistakes, but when engineers are pushing the boundaries of what is possible, occasionally a new aspect of mathematical behaviour will unexpectedly emerge. Sometimes the addition of a little bit more mass is all it takes to change the mathematics of how a structure behaves.
This is a common theme in human progress. We make things beyond what we understand, as we always have done. Steam engines worked before we had a theory of thermodynamics. Vaccines were developed before we knew how the immune system works. Aircraft continue to fly to this day, despite the many gaps in our understanding of aerodynamics.
When theory lags behind application, there will always be mathematical surprises lying in wait. The important thing is that we learn from these inevitable mistakes and don’t repeat them.
Timeless Insight
What looks like discipline is often a carefully created environment to encourage certain behaviours. What looks like poor choices is often someone trying their best to use willpower to go against their environment.
The people with the best default behaviours are typically the ones with the best environment. Sometimes it's carefully chosen, and sometimes it's just plain luck. Either way, it’s easier to align yourself with the right behaviour in the right environment.
The way to improve your default behaviours isn’t by willpower, but by creating an artificial environment where your desired behaviour becomes the default behaviour.
Joining groups whose defaults are your desires is an effective way to create an artificial environment. If you want to read more, join a book club. If you want to run more, join a running club. If you want to exercise more, hire a trainer.
Your environment will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you if you align it with where you want to go.
What I’m Reading
We sent whalesong into interstellar space because the creatures that sing these songs are superlative beings that fill us with awe, terror, and affection. We have hunted them for thousands of years and scratched them into our mythologies and iconography. Their bones frame the archways of medieval castles. They’re so compelling that we imagine aliens might find them interesting — or perhaps understand their otherworldly, ethereal song.
— Nick Pyenson, Spying on Whales
Tiny Thought
Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋