I have no ability to focus at this moment. Yet, in a sense I can. I’m writing this message to you.I’m feeling a mix of exhaustion, excitement, and energy. Not all at once, but seemingly so.My mind wants sleep, food, and to solve a problem at work. Not all at once, but… I want to write, and read, and contemplate new ideas. Not all…Everything, everywhere, not all at once….…but seemingly so.

The absurdity of life is that in our attempt to make the most of everything, ultimately, everything gets frozen over and we die. Nothing lasts forever. But in spite of knowing that, we work and work and work and work – the grind, grit, and the rigor of it all. Actors often share that the way to play comedy is to not play comedy. To approach a comedic scene “straight” means to approach the scene with the seriousness of a Shakespeare play. The audience sees the obvious in-congruence – seeing something silly done by someone who appears unaware of its silliness – and laughs. If the actor were to break, or join in on the joke, then the scene may cease to be funny. However, perhaps joining in the joke is an appeal for some. Again, we’re met with the absurdity of comedy – attempts to play it straight reveal it for what it truly is – life – and perhaps that’s the real joke.Inspired by Jason Zinoman’s NYT article Losing It on Live TV. Quote:“Breaking is a failure. That’s also its appeal. After all, human weakness is comedy’s greatest subject.”

Here’s a position I hold (perhaps irrationally):Students entering colleges are making decisions about the future, and they are not suited for such decision making on their own.First — in my experience, forecasting is more art than science. Students leaving high school are making forecasts about their next four years, and perhaps about their careers. For example: leaving high school I wanted to be a music teacher; and since high school I have been amazing at doing the exact opposite. If I made forecasts like that in my current job, where I forecast revenue, I would be out of a job. Second — colleges are expensive. And expensive in terms outside of tuition. Consider the time, energy, and stress required to source, apply for, and wait for decisions for colleges. What opportunities are lost because of the search and admission costs? The time spent in college pursuing a degree that may not pan out to a desired career, what opportunities are lost because of that investment? What high school student considers opportunity costs (much less debt) as a function of their decision making?John J Conlon and Dev Patel, researchers at Harvard, came out with a study — What Jobs Comes to Mind? Stereotypes about Fields of Study. Here’s an abbreviated excerpt of their conclusions: “Across multiple survey samples, time periods, and elicitation methods, we find that U.S. undergraduate students greatly oversimplify the college-to-career process. Students appear to stereotype majors (“Art majors become artists,” “Political science majors become lawyers”), exaggerating the share of college graduates who are working in their major’s stereotypical job…. We show that this bias appears important for understanding students’ choice of major and has potentially important welfare consequences as it boosts demand for risky academic paths… our results may help to partly explain several striking and perhaps puzzling facts about students’ human capital decisions. For example, more American undergraduates are currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in journalism than there are journalists in the entire country. Psychology majors outnumber accounting majors in the United States, and yet there are eight times as many accountants as psychologists. Students take on considerable debt to fund Master’s programs with appealing but unlikely associated careers (e.g., film studies)… Ex ante, of course, rational mechanisms could have fully explained these patterns: e.g., students with correct beliefs might rationally pursue certain career paths which, though very unlikely to pan out, they feel are worth the risk (e.g., journalism or film), or students may realize that certain majors (e.g., psychology) provide a general education not intended for use in any particular sector. Our findings suggest that mistaken beliefs may also contribute to these patterns: certain fields of study may appear especially appealing because students believe they lead to attractive stereotypical jobs with exaggerated likelihoods. These human capital investments carry substantial monetary and opportunity costs, and therefore it may be beneficial to find ways to help students make better informed decisions or to steer them toward less risky academic paths.“My takeaway: people entering college are bad forecasters and don’t consider enough the opportunity costs. Okay, let’s say a person is real with themselves about their ability to forecast the future and want to maximize their time, what would that person do? I see three steps.Identify your obsession and invest your time into it. Make the costs related to college search about finding teachers (future mentors) who are obsessed about what you’re obsessed about and go to those schools. Say you find and go to one of those schools from step 1: Develop a portfolio of work centered around your obsessions and use that to enter the job market — obsessed candidates have a comparative advantage over candidates not obsessed.Once you’re out of school, find a company that obsesses over what you obsess about and makes a product that leaves ripples upon ripples of social good — apply there! Make a career, and make a life.Perhaps my take is contrarian — but also — perhaps that Harvard study may suggest that we need to find ways to better set up tomorrow’s leaders and innovators. Said more simply: what got us here won’t get us there.

In Ancient Mesopotamia, people might have drank beer daily. I wonder if the Ancient Mesopotamians also dealt with gout too. Fascinating article. Links to a page with a how-to video and taste test.I’ve quit drinking beer — gout — and for the most part I believe abstaining from alcohol is an overall net benefit for me. But you don’t need to consume alcohol to wish good health to a fellow time traveler…. so in that spirit: Prost, Sláinte, Salud, Kampai, Tagay, geonbae, l’chaim, egészségedre, Cheers!

I experienced a procedure the other day that, by all accounts, is not comfortable and unpleasant. The professionals who supported me through the procedure did their best to treat me with dignity, and I love them for it. This is not about them…I approach, and often embrace, the weird daily. I enjoy weird ideas, points of views, and exploring weird world views. I find taboo fascinating, and I love a contrarian take. I am not accustomed to weird invasive medical procedures though… that’s a first for me… and I noticed something that helped, prostrating myself before the weird, embracing it, and welcoming it into my life with a cheerful heart.So much of life’s weirdnesses and ackwardnesses can be assuaged and cooled with a cheerful and fun loving heart. I reminded myself that eventually I will die, and to allow this weird thing to bother me is absurd. And when you embrace the absurdity of life you quickly begin to laugh and find the funny in it. Life affords so many opportunity for humor and cheer. I am thankful I find more and more opportunities daily to embrace those moments. Not only does it enhance my enjoyment of the weird, it helps others step through life a little bit less stressfully too. Life’s short.Don’t take yourself too seriously.At one point we all shit our beds, gurgled our food, got caught with our pants down, and walked over to our neighbor’s house with a proton pack on and offered to clean their homes of ghosts… what you never did that?

“Every forest is a hyperobject, an enormously complex environment that’s shaped not just by its location, landscape, and climate but also by the history of humans in that place… what you see in the woods depends on the eyes that you are see it through.” — Deb Chachra, “How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World”When I look at the hospital system, from yesterday’s post, I see the hospital system through the lens of someone that helps business optimize their customer experiences for maximum success and revenue potential. I don’t see the system as a system administrator. When I see the forest system, I see it through the eyes of someone fascinated by how things interact with other things. When I think of humans, I think of humans through the eye of someone that’s still figuring out what it means to be his own human…. I suppose everything is a matter of perspective.

Consider that the world changes gradually.Culture and social norms don’t change overnight. It’s thought our brains process information at 10 bits per second (a fraction of your Internet speed).On net, everything usually works out. Traffic will always suck.You could always eat one less doughnut.There will always be predators, and there will always be prey.V will more often always precede I, unless you intend to deceive and go to a German Sixth chord, which is really a reverse tritone substitution (for the musicians). Seeing reality as it is and not as we hoped it would be makes reality a bit more tolerable.Most things are tolerable.Except BTS.

Dear system,At first glance, you appear optimized for patient care and respect. At second glance, I wonder if you’re optimized for billing efficiency. You make important checks that suggest you care about my privacy. You ask my birthday, you ask my address, and you ask for my name. I appreciate you thinking about my privacy and being sure you have the right patient. Thank you. You make it efficient for me to check in. I don’t fill out as much paperwork as I used to. You ask if I have different diseases, and here you fail. I, as an actor in the system, might have no idea if I have or don’t have a disease. In fact, I may be the very wrong person to make such a claim without more evidence. I recommend you adopt a mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive framework to your questions and add the option: “Unknown.”You ask me to do things like leave personal items in lockers. You also let me know that you’re not responsible for my items that you do not allow me to keep on my person. Have you taken a step back to observe the obvious paradox? Last thing, when confronted with a concern about my privacy and the desire to keep valuable things on my person, your staff says things like “maybe you shouldn’t have brought that…” Here, you fail again because your system isn’t optimized for my satisfaction or success. If it was, you would call me in advance and prime me to be successful. “Hey, so you have the most successful event, here’s what we recommend and why…. oh, just so you know, at this particular location, here’s what to expect….” Imagine that. level of personalization before an event? Even though I don’t pay you directly, I am a consumer of your service. And as a consumer of your service, I believe it’s possible to optimize for my success… and success doesn’t mean satisfaction.Many customers are happy and satisfied paying nothing for service. That’s not ideal. What’s ideal is customers realizing more value than their investment and getting the outcomes they hoped for and more. Optimizing your system for maximum success ensures repeat customers, increased trust, probably less complaints (which are a cost), and (hopefully) more revenue or better margins. The tweaks are easy and obvious. Your level of commitment is the x factor. Best,David

Something about the cold converts.Outside to inside,Extroversion to introversion,Wild to peace,Active to sleep.A re-balancing of energy.Restorative.

Cows are a renewable resource — in a sense. They can regenerate, but not instantaneously — there is a delay. So you can’t erode your stock of cattle in the name of growth, nothing natural lasts forever. That’s what some Brazilian farmers are discovering:“BARRETOS, Brazil—In the dead of night at a slaughterhouse in Brazil’s southeastern farming belt, a group of men splattered in blood gathered around the entrails of a cow to see if they had hit gold.‘Just look at the size of that,’ one worker said as he pressed the animal’s flesh through a sieve to reveal a hardened dark orange lump almost as big as a golf ball, glistening under the fluorescent light.There it was: a gallstone.One of the most prized ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine, cattle gallstones have become so valuable that traders are willing to pay as much as $5,800 an ounce—twice the price of gold—for the nuggets of hardened bile.” - Samantha Pearson, of The Wall Street Journal (link)Farm hands report sifting through bloody entrails looking for gallstones. Once found, the stones are placed in a safe located in a secure backroom. I’m reminded of scenes from action thrillers where people go to secure rooms to open up some type of hazardous or precious material. For some, gallstones are that precious.A market is a system. Where there’s demand meets supply. My fear is that the high demand may cause people to seek growth opportunities at the expense of their resources. I share that same concern for the world outside of Brazil and her cows.