The Next Thing

This was originally published in my free weekly newsletter, How It Actually Works.

It’s 5 am eastern time as I write and this is headed to your inbox in 2 hours.

I’m getting on a flight to Utah for Thanksgiving in 60 minutes.

And I just finished another Excel model for Lambda School (where I work) that shows how much money we’re going to make. (It took me, oh, 10 hours, but looks like it should have been done in 2.)

I’m looking forward to some explicit downtime but recognize I’ll be bored again soon and will want to get back on the treadmill of action, only to want another escape shortly thereafter.

The longing for The Next Thing is both good – everyone needs something to look forward to – and bad.

By deceiving ourselves into thinking The Next Thing will make us happy we look past the joy we could be experiencing in the current moment.

The Next Thing comes in many forms: when I get the right job, when I move to the right city, my next vacation, when my latest Amazon order arrives.

It comes and we get high for a moment, but that passes as quickly as all the other joys and we are yet again stuck with being ourselves.

The Links

How Bojack Horseman subverts narrative (youtube)

“Bojack, you are all the things that are wrong with you. It’s not the alcohol, or the drugs, or any of the shitty things that happened to you in your career, or when you were a kid. It’s you.”

Redemption and forgiveness have to be earned. Real life is made up of moments in life. There’s no closure. Existing is hard.

Great video. 15 minutes but worth it.

Bill Goldman emails sent to Bill Simmons

Bill was a huge Knicks fan and glorified in that pain.

Patrick Collison’s page with articles on economics growth

“Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what, exactly?”

Pursuing the cause of economic growth is probably one of the noblest things you could do with your life.

The rise of the resentniks (NYT)

When you can’t compete on merit you find other forms of tribalism.

A tweet about Winston Churchill

“Winston Churchill was 65 in 1939. He had his most important and arguably his best years ahead of him. Why should we retire in our mid 60s? Why not keep fighting on? Life is after all a battle for survival? Or was. To stop is to give up - to stop living? I say: fight on.”

The diminishing returns of science (the atlantic)

There’s evidence that we’re getting less output per dollar invested in science.

5 ways smart people sabotage their success (harvard business review)

Clickbait title but good article. A lot of my friends (and myself) could learn from #5: “Smart people sometimes see in-depth thinking and reflection as the solution to every problem.”

Thinking and analyzing is generally overrated in a world where action is cheap and payoffs can be huge, i.e. in a world where the Internet exists. You’re better off doing something and getting it out in to the world than you are thinking about what the best possible thing is.

That’s why my newsletters are so often different or of varying degrees of finish. The upside of sending nothing is always zero, and the expected value of sending anything is always greater than 0. So it’s rational to always send.

This was originally published in my weekly newsletter, How It Actually Works.