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The Practical Polymath #78

Hi Friends,

Greetings from Brooklyn!

Welcome to 12 new joiners! This is the Practical Polymath, a bi-weekly newsletter about finding wisdom in the mundane.

See you in two weeks,

Florian

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Weekly Wisdom

🎧 Little Ways the World Works: I absolutely loved this short podcast by Morgan Housel. His basic tenet is that if you want to get really good about a particular subject, reading everything about it may not actually be the best strategy. Instead, reading across different topics is more useful because you start to realize how universal some principles are across disciplines. In Housel’s words “the best way to learn how the world works is to realize how everything is interconnected.” One of my favorite examples he uses is this one: trees that grow faster are usually weaker because they don’t have time to grow strong roots and their wood is more hollow and subject to rot. On the other hand, slow-growing trees end up lasting for centuries. What’s true for trees applies to business where companies who attempted to grow too fast ended up crashing.  

✒ Hardcore Literature Book Club: If you asked me what website I’d take on a desert island for a year if I had to pick just one, I’d choose YouTube. The site is the Library of Alexandria of modern times. But don’t count on the algorithm to direct you to the good stuff. The really interesting channels are usually the ones with less than 100,000 subscribers. They’re the artisan boutiques of the internet you come across on a leisurely browse. The “Hardcore Literature Club” is a great example and is the kind of channel I wish I had when I was in high school. I’ve always wanted to read In Search of Lost Time by French author Marcel Proust but never made it past 10 pages (the entire thing is seven volumes and 4,215 pages long). This channel might just be what I needed. 

📚 Book of the Week: I’ve just finished “The Scent of Time” by German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. The book is a critique of how our culture of time-optimization and productivity is robbing time of its meaning or “scent” as he puts it. In the book, he opposes the “pilgrim” who is in transition towards his objective to the “tourist” who wants to get there as fast as possible. The former’s experience is enriched by the journey that offers an opportunity for contemplation while the latter hops from one thing to another without much focus. According to the author, we are increasingly living life like tourists. He invites us to regain the contemplative pace of the pilgrim.

Lateral Thought 

We have a bed, we have a child my lady! 

We also have work, yours and mine, have the sun, rain, and the wind so mild. 

One small thing only is missing, oh lady fine, for being free as the birds: And that is time. 

Richard Dehmel, The Worker