Essentialism is an answer to the Multiarmed Bandit problem: how are we supposed to do real meaningful things when our time and bandwidth is being sucked by everyone around us? The answer is a three step cycle: Explore, Eliminate and Execute (or to put it in non-businessy, corporate terms to become effective Explore-Exploiters).
I. Explore
Exploring means to look through a wide variety of options of tasks, jobs, and experiences. It is why colleges have introductory classes, corporations have rotational programs, and drinkers get flights. The advantage of exploring is that it is a focused process. Whereas often times exploration is something that we do reactively (saying "yes" to new options), when we do it proactively we can cover ground a lot faster.
Exploration is made up of two substeps, escaping and selecting.
I. 1. Escape: in order to figure out what options to select, one must create and defend time and spaces where exploration is possible. This should be a scheduled period, where interesting topics and ideas can be quickly breezed through. I almost want to say "This is your Wikipedia time directly countering your [Social Media Cancer of choice] time."
I. 2. Select. Once choices- projects to work on, goals to pursue, schools to apply to- have been brought for, they must all go through an important sieve: "Does this actually matter to me?" To determine that you can start by setting minimum specifications, and then ramping them upwards until you have a set of the best possible options.
II. Eliminate
Once options have been assembled, they need to be eliminated. But not only eliminated in a way to make a choice, but the final choice itself has to be whittled down. The final choice needed to be edited, revised... to be made essential! It needs to have clarity, and be obvious to you now and in the future what it means for that goal or desire to be achieved.
The process of eliminating also becomes a giant shield: asks will bounce off because you've already committed to some course of action. It gives you an excuse (mostly to yourself) about what you cannot do because you can literally not do it.
III. Execute
The final step of the cycle (which is really a concurrent step with the other two) is to execute. With the design chosen, and the final specs laid out, this is rather easy: break the goal into a bunch of tiny, constituent parts and do them one after another in a way that gets you a lot of "small wins".
IV. Review
This book reflects a lot of thought that I've had in my own life. I used to be very much a "minimalist" college student (probably because I didn't have any money) but I still have a revulsion to 'clutter' in terms of "owned objects" that don't have any value. I also see the "nonessentialist" worldview in a lot of high school/college classmates. These are the students who never have any time to just chill because they're doing research, in CRU, leading a club, founding a new club and taking 18 credits worth of classes and they're not even doing any of it very well. I've also seen the opposite in some of my classmates: everything they're doing points in the same direction and though each individual component is small the sum of tiny undirectional efforts is something that launches them to Princeton or Stanford.
The book is filled with lots of self-help, rah-rah business filler. "Make sure you sleep", "Don't fall into the Sunk-Cost fallacy," and a whole host of other Daniel Kahneman inspired nuggests of information. But if you're prepared to skim through those parts and try to figure out the best parts to have a happy, leaner life, this is a good read.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
I am drained.
Two months of free, uninterrupted time immersed in the history of a singular, totalitarian culture and civilization is draining. It sucks the soul from the reader while binding them to the words by inspiring a sick fascination. "How did they do this?" "Why did nobody stop them?" "What atrocity comes next?"
And among all these thoughts, there is the ultimate question pounding at the back of the mind: "Can it happen again?"
How did they do this: Hitler was the right man, at the right time, in the right place to take power. He alone had the experiences of being an "Austrian waif" along with the single-mindedness and background that would allow him to rise above his fellow German soldiers. Germany was broken, not just militarily or economically, but psychologically. Collectively the hopes of an entire people were crushed under Allied artillery fire.
Why did nobody stop them: Lots of people tried. The police fired on the Nazi Party's Beer Hall Putsch. Churchill tried to rally the British Parliament. The central European countries called out for help again and again. The generals and officers of Valkaryeie tried blowing up Hitler numerous times.
The most consistent thread of failure is this: division amongst Hitler's enemies allowed Hitler to conquer them.
* Hitler rose to power due to an alliance with conservative factions who thought they could control him. Social democrats and communists were too divided to combine their efforts against him.
* Poland would not allow Russian troops through her land, making an agreement between Britain, France, and Russia impossible.
* Chamberlain had an extreme reluctance towards dealing with the Russians, and preferred to manage the constellation of central and eastern European states... but those states distrusted each other and wanted the lands of their neighbors!
* Once Hitler had finally been nearly successfully killed, the officers of the Wehrmacht who had joined the conspiracy failed to rally to the conspiracy and attempted to slink away.
By playing his enemies off each other, or by their own mistaken divisions, Hitler was able to destroy them one by one by one.
The second reason why nobody stopped him was simpler: nobody believed him. He wrote it all out. Mein Kampf was literally Hitler's primary source of income before he achieved even a hint of power. It spelled out every goal he had and was the source of German grand strategy from the rise of the Nazi party to his suicide in the Berlin bunker. When a man says he is going to expel an entire group of people from your country, that they're the reason your people are suffering, and that he will use violence against them, you should believe that man.
What atrocity comes next: a dizzying array. While reading, I lurched from historical marker to historical marker with my preexisting knowledge. I knew he rose to power in 1933. I knew he purged out the SA with the more elite SS. I knew the slow motion escalation of terror that led to the Holocaust. I knew he declared war on Poland in 1939, that America would join in 1941, and he would fall in 1945.
But what I didn't know is how slow it was. "One day Germany was the Weimar Republic, and the next day it wasn't" is a naive way of thinking about it, but that's how I thought about it. Instead, Nazi power grows like a weed. First, it's an election where they have a viable minority. Then they gain a couple million more votes in the next. And then they're allied with the conservatives. Hitler is ruling. They've begun purging the violent radicals (who they framed)... they've begun purging the moderates. Hitler and the Nazi legislature are in absolute control. Hitler is now in absolute control. Hitler is now the final and total arbiter of life and death.
But within those steps are weeks and months. Death did not come for the world with a knock at the door; it came for the world with its robes loudly shuffling.
Can it happen again: Obviously, yes. It has happened again. The world has sat by while tyrants destroy those that make a mess of their pure dystopias. The world has sat by as mobs bring machetes, sticks, and stones across the faces of children. But could it happen in a rich country? Could it happen in a country that is richer than modern day South Africa or Indonesia (which have a similar GDP per capita to pre-war Germany)?
Certainly. All it takes is:
* An economic crisis. [✓?]
* Racial and class resentment [✓]
* A demagogue to inspire the people to violence [✓]
* A demagogue who pursues societal purity [✓]
* A demagogue that consistently repeats calls for international war [✓]
* A divided and broken opposition [???]
Since finishing the history, I have one question in my mind now: Are we divided and broken?
Two months of free, uninterrupted time immersed in the history of a singular, totalitarian culture and civilization is draining. It sucks the soul from the reader while binding them to the words by inspiring a sick fascination. "How did they do this?" "Why did nobody stop them?" "What atrocity comes next?"
And among all these thoughts, there is the ultimate question pounding at the back of the mind: "Can it happen again?"
How did they do this: Hitler was the right man, at the right time, in the right place to take power. He alone had the experiences of being an "Austrian waif" along with the single-mindedness and background that would allow him to rise above his fellow German soldiers. Germany was broken, not just militarily or economically, but psychologically. Collectively the hopes of an entire people were crushed under Allied artillery fire.
Why did nobody stop them: Lots of people tried. The police fired on the Nazi Party's Beer Hall Putsch. Churchill tried to rally the British Parliament. The central European countries called out for help again and again. The generals and officers of Valkaryeie tried blowing up Hitler numerous times.
The most consistent thread of failure is this: division amongst Hitler's enemies allowed Hitler to conquer them.
* Hitler rose to power due to an alliance with conservative factions who thought they could control him. Social democrats and communists were too divided to combine their efforts against him.
* Poland would not allow Russian troops through her land, making an agreement between Britain, France, and Russia impossible.
* Chamberlain had an extreme reluctance towards dealing with the Russians, and preferred to manage the constellation of central and eastern European states... but those states distrusted each other and wanted the lands of their neighbors!
* Once Hitler had finally been nearly successfully killed, the officers of the Wehrmacht who had joined the conspiracy failed to rally to the conspiracy and attempted to slink away.
By playing his enemies off each other, or by their own mistaken divisions, Hitler was able to destroy them one by one by one.
The second reason why nobody stopped him was simpler: nobody believed him. He wrote it all out. Mein Kampf was literally Hitler's primary source of income before he achieved even a hint of power. It spelled out every goal he had and was the source of German grand strategy from the rise of the Nazi party to his suicide in the Berlin bunker. When a man says he is going to expel an entire group of people from your country, that they're the reason your people are suffering, and that he will use violence against them, you should believe that man.
What atrocity comes next: a dizzying array. While reading, I lurched from historical marker to historical marker with my preexisting knowledge. I knew he rose to power in 1933. I knew he purged out the SA with the more elite SS. I knew the slow motion escalation of terror that led to the Holocaust. I knew he declared war on Poland in 1939, that America would join in 1941, and he would fall in 1945.
But what I didn't know is how slow it was. "One day Germany was the Weimar Republic, and the next day it wasn't" is a naive way of thinking about it, but that's how I thought about it. Instead, Nazi power grows like a weed. First, it's an election where they have a viable minority. Then they gain a couple million more votes in the next. And then they're allied with the conservatives. Hitler is ruling. They've begun purging the violent radicals (who they framed)... they've begun purging the moderates. Hitler and the Nazi legislature are in absolute control. Hitler is now in absolute control. Hitler is now the final and total arbiter of life and death.
But within those steps are weeks and months. Death did not come for the world with a knock at the door; it came for the world with its robes loudly shuffling.
Can it happen again: Obviously, yes. It has happened again. The world has sat by while tyrants destroy those that make a mess of their pure dystopias. The world has sat by as mobs bring machetes, sticks, and stones across the faces of children. But could it happen in a rich country? Could it happen in a country that is richer than modern day South Africa or Indonesia (which have a similar GDP per capita to pre-war Germany)?
Certainly. All it takes is:
* An economic crisis. [✓?]
* Racial and class resentment [✓]
* A demagogue to inspire the people to violence [✓]
* A demagogue who pursues societal purity [✓]
* A demagogue that consistently repeats calls for international war [✓]
* A divided and broken opposition [???]
Since finishing the history, I have one question in my mind now: Are we divided and broken?
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