I recently found myself reflecting on a few of these quotes and thought it would be nice to share some of my favorites in one place.
Enjoy…
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“When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that is love. And between these two, my life flows.” – Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
“The great source of both the misery and the disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another… some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to the others but none can deserve to be pursued with the passionate ardor which drives the rules of either prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from remembrance of our own folly or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.” – Adam Smith
“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Perhaps that wasn’t true. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.” – Ernest Hemingway
“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” – John Maynard Keynes
“The greater the artist the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.” – Robert Hughes
“The man who said, ‘I’d rather be lucky than good.’ saw deeply into life.” – Woody Allen
“A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.” – Winston Churchill
“We do not rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” – Archilochos
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman
“Observing the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions, forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments…. For the uncertain future has yet to come, and with every possible variety of fortune.” – Solon
“Many shall be restored that are now fallen, and many shall fall that are now in honor.” – Horace
“A man who has committed a mistake and does not correct it, is committing another mistake.” – Confucius
“Wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.” – Aristotle
“They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.” – Robert Prising
“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” – Machiavelli
“He who wishes to be rich in a day, will be hanged in a year.” – Leonardo Da Vinci
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” – Mark Twain
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett
“It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” – William of Occam
“Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.” – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
“But the essential difficulty in creating strategy is not logical; it is choice itself. Strategy does not eliminate scarcity and its consequence—the necessity of choice. Strategy is scarcity’s child and to have a strategy, rather than vague aspirations, is to choose one path and eschew others. There is difficult psychological, political, and organizational work in saying “no” to whole worlds of hopes, dreams, and aspirations.” – Richard Rumelt
“On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good… If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily.” – Sam Harris
“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.” – Shakespeare
It is a principle of advertising that people who make big life changes are susceptible to marketing. Events like birth, death, marriage, and moving all interrupt our normal patterns of behaviour and thereby open space to pursue new avenues of consumption.
In the wake of SARS-COV-2 pandemic, the world is undergoing the largest pattern interrupt in modern history. We’ve been collectively catapulted into the quarantine lifestyle, and the result is we are doing a lot of online shopping, often a lot more than we would like.
The Diderot Effect – How Identity Influences Your Shopping Habits
On a fundamental level, we buy more at ‘life events’ because we are doing things differently and therefore have new problems to solve. If we were perfectly rational, that would be the end of it. Each purchase would happen in isolation. To paraphrase Marx; for each need an Amazon order, and to each need an actual problem.
But we are not rational, and far from being mere tools in service of our goals, the things we buy are enmeshed with our self-image to the degree that a mismatched sweater or sofa can feel like a mismatched limb. This feeling of disharmony has the potential to catalyze a spiral of consumption in which we pursue a mental unity through unity in our possessions.
My own experience of quarantine shopping has borne this out. Does this sounds familiar….
I bought a kettlebell and now that it’s arrived; I’ve realized that I really need another one or two to do the same kettlebell workout I did at the gym. With that many kettlebells, I’ll probably want a kettlebell rack, and a pullup bar to decompress my spine, a new yoga matt so I can do yoga at home now, which of course means I’ll need a foam roller to get that fascia mobilized and so on…
Our knives weren’t as sharp as I’d like them. So I bought a knife sharpener. In the process of buying that sharpener, I thought “hey since you’re cooking at home more; you should get a nice paring knife.” So, I bought the sharpener and the knife, and now every time I stick that fancy knife in the drawer, I think what I really need now is a knife holder…
This tendency to seek unity of self through unity in our possessions was first noted by the French philosopher Denis Diderot and later named after him as the Diderot effect. Diderot first identified this phenomenon after he purchased a beautiful new robe. Almost immediately, the brilliance of his new garment cast a kind of shadow over his other possessions that made them seem shabby and out of place. The result was an epic shopping spree that nearly bankrupted him. He wrote,
“I was absolute master of my old dressing gown, but I have become a slave to my new one … Beware of the contamination of sudden wealth.”
The implication of the Diderot effect is that when we think we are just putting together our wardrobe or our living room, we are unconsciously toying with the fabric of our identities.
My Patagonia Habit & Diderot’s Two Principles
I first learned of the Diderot effect from a fantastic YouTube video by the Nerdwriter. In his video, the Nerdwriter points out that the Diderot effect is built on two psychological principles:
“All the products purchased by a consumer aim to be cohesive with that consumer’s identity.”
“The introduction of a new product, in any way deviant, can trigger a process of spiraling consumption.”
In my own life, I admit to a penchant for Patagonia clothing and other expensive outdoor gear that, within the confines of my sedate urban lifestyle – the most likely scenario for me ending up on a mountain top is falling out of an airplane – cries out for explanation.
The Diderot effect explains that I buy Patagonia because it has created an identity of environmentalism and outdoorsmanship, something I consume as much as I do the garments themselves. That is to say that even though I don’t do that much for the environment (certainly zero activism) and I don’t spend that much time in real wilderness, just by buying Patagonia clothing, I can feel like these things are part of who I am.
Buying Patagonia is, in a sense, an offering towards the person I’d like to be. And this is the unsubtle genius of their marketing approach. Would some other brand’s clothing do the job? Maybe, yes… actually, I don’t really know… And in the space of this uncertainty creeps the justification for building my identity around their branding. A process that ends with the rationalization that my money is going to go somewhere; it may as well go to them.
Attention and The Delicate Balance
The Diderot effect describes the way that we require the things we own correspond to the internal construct of identity. But the Diderot effect seems to me to be only one aspect of the way we project ourselves into the things we own and use.
Take, for instance, my recent spiral of gym equipment purchases. Having more than two kettlebells, a yoga mat, and a foam roller to go with them is still about me, but it’s about a different aspect of my identity then say, my fashion choices.
Our possessions act as something like a three-way mirror:
They react, each upon each other, (coherence in the system);
they reflect back on us, casting an identity back at ourselves (coherence with our internal identity);
and they project outward to the world who we are (coherence in our outward identity).
My kettlebell problem is about achieving coherence in an externalized system (coherence in the system). This is an aspect of my identity because when I feel like I have a more complete system, I feel more complete, as if some good part of me has been externalized. By the same token, when a system is incomplete or even less than elegant, its failings are also a reflection on me.
I make this point to illustrate the fact that all our passions exist in a state of delicate equilibrium, both between themselves and against our own mental constructs of them. An equilibrium that is mostly maintained by an absence of attention. For if we look hard enough at any part of our lives, we’ll begin to see the possibility of improving some aspect of our systems, and that, as we’ve seen, has the potential to spark a chain-reaction of consumption. So be careful what you pay attention to.
Schrodinger’s Shopping Cart – How the Stuff You Need Creates the Things You Don’t
Another important implication of the Diderot effect is that that contrary to our intuitions, each purchase does not bring us closer to having ‘enough’ or being ‘complete’ but instead, takes us a step further down a rabbit hole of consumption.
In this way, our consumption resembles something like an infinitely branching decision tree where each step forward opens the door to several more likely purchases. This means that that from a probabilistic perspective, buying a kettlebell is in effect a decision buy both the kettlebell and half a kettlebell rack.
This fact is no secret to retailers who are increasingly building and refining tools that capitalize on this principle, injecting it into the infrastructure of our online experience. The case in point being Amazon’s “frequently bought together” suggestions which feature on almost every page of its website.
Reinforcing the Habit – The Pavlov’s Shopping Drone
The psychological undercurrents of our compulsive shopping are neat. But to lay the blame squarely on these niceties of our psyche risks missing the more obvious but no less potent fact that shopping is itself habit-forming. We are sitting at home, bored as hell, and buying things is fun.
You know how it goes, you’re wandering around your apartment and something catches your eye so – a problem to solve! So you go online to find a solution, maybe you spend a few minutes (or a few hours) doing the modern equivalent of celestial navigation; comparing, contrasting and triangulating between, stars, reviews and prices until finally, target locked, and emboldened by strong drink and the prospect of free shipping and returns, you smash that checkout button, and you get:
A. the satisfaction of having solved the problem to a degree in your mind, and;
B. the joy of anticipating when that solution will come.
I presume that I am not alone in manically checking my shipping updates when I buy something.
Then, finally, the thing arrives, and you have the dopamine hit of opening it and playing with it, putting it in the neat little place where it solves your problem (maybe) and then roving around your home like a drone looking for the next thing to buy. And thus, with every purchase, you are reinforcing your Pavlovian predilection.
Minimalist Mental Jujitsu – Hacking the Diderot Effect Through Identity Shift
While there are many powerful tactics to curb out-of-control shopping (get rid of Amazon Prime), one that combats the Diderot effect most directly is consciously shifting our identity towards one that values things other than consumption.
To do this, all you have to do is visualize solving the problem through a different identity. For instance, think of the minimalist version of yourself, the thrifty version of yourself, the survivalist version of yourself. How could that person figure out a way to solve the same problem with what they already have or at a fraction of the price?
I recently employed this tactic in my own life when after seeing the difference between chlorinated water and filtered water had on my sourdough bread, I decided I needed a water filter. To try and counter-act the urge to buy my way through this ‘problem’, I re-framed the problem to, how I could set up filtered water without buying anything? After some quick research, I realized I could boil the water and then put it into a container I already owned which could then act as my filtered water source for my drinking and cooking needs.
Looking at my problem in this way was helpful in two ways. First, in the short-run, the challenge to do it myself gave the little hamster on a wheel in my mind something to do without going online shopping. And second, in the long-run, I got the superior satisfaction that comes from MacGyvering through a problem, instead of just Amazoning it. I say superior because solving the problem through your own ingenuity endures in a way that goes far beyond the happiness you’d get from just pointing and clicking your way to a fix.
Whether it’s a minimalist or creative mindset, by shifting our identity, we hack the Diderot effect to our advantage. By re-imagining who we are, we perform a kind of mental Jiu-jitsu in which we flip satisfaction we would get from buying something into another container and in doing so, we become more complete by integrating into ourselves the virtue of the things we don’t have, instead of extending ourselves into the inevitable disappointment of buying another thing we don’t need.
I’ve been listening to Walter Isaacson’s Biography of the polymath Leonardo Da Vinci. A few anecdotes from his life struck me as worth sharing here.
Leonardo The Reluctant
In 1504, both Leonardo and his rival Michelangelo were commissioned to create paintings that would face each other at The Hall of the Five Hundred in Florence. The intention of this dual commission was to spark a competition between the two greatest artists in Italy.
So it is ironic that both Leonardo and Michelangelo hated painting. Of Leonardo, many contemporaries noted that “He couldn’t stand to look at a brush.” What he really wanted to spend time on was science and engineering.
Michelangelo also hated painting. He thought of himself as a sculptor. While working on the commission in Florence, he wrote in his journal, “I am not in the right place and I am not a painter.”
The lesson I take is that it doesn’t matter how good you are, sometimes you just have to work on things that aren’t that interesting to you. Even geniuses sometimes have to take what the market is offering.
The Anatomy of Failure
Leonardo is famous for the way he was able to blend his love for science and discovery with art. Among the most famous of these pairings is the anatomical drawings he created based on his dissection of cadavers.
His keen mind allowed him to discover things that wouldn’t be known for another 100 years (such as how blood flows through the human heart) and his abilities as an artist lead to renderings of the human body that to this day stand unmatched for their accuracy and aesthetics.
Yet his achievements languished undiscovered in his notebooks until the modern era. This is because Leonardo never published his work. His partner in his anatomical studies died of plague and Leonardo did not have the discipline or inclination to bring the project to term.
The lesson is that insight and output do not necessarily correspond. Without a clear vision, discipline and perhaps a good partner, even the brightest minds can achieve less than their potential. As Walter Isaacson notes,
“One of the things that would have most benefited Leonardo in his career was a partner who could push him to follow through and publish his work.”
Leonardo Da Vinci The Original Consultant
As Europe awoke to the fact that there was a new world laying across the ocean, Leonardo’s home city-state of Florence realized that it would need to acquire a port to get in on the action. This meant conquering a nearby city and Pisa was chosen as the most attractive option.
Pisa was vulnerable if the Florentines could divert the river Arno from its course, effectively cutting it off from supplies. Leonardo was put in charge of figuring out how to do this.
Leonardo knew he had to dig a massive channel in order to divert the river. He calculated that it would entail the movement of over one million tons of earth. Knowing this, he had to determine how many men and how much time it would take. But instead of blindly estimating, Leonardo conducted the first of what has now come to be known as a time in motion study.
Using a watch he studied how long it took a man to fill a bucket of dirt and move it to a machine he’d designed to carry it away. Based on his measurements, Leonardo calculated that it would require over fifty thousand worker-days to complete his project.
After making his designs and calculations, Leonardo left instructions for the project and returned to Florence. Unfortunately, the person who was selected to oversee the actual operation went against his wishes and started digging two canals, instead of one.
Leonardo and his compatriot Machiavelli tried to pressure the engineer into sticking with the original plan but failed. In the end, despite heavy rains, the two half as deep canals failed to divert the river and the plan was abandoned.
The lesson in this is that you can have the most brilliant strategists but if the actors don’t play their part, the plan will fail.
One of the reasons for this blog is to share different frameworks of thought that I’ve found helpful or interesting with others. I am the kind of person who really enjoys having a conceptual framework for why, what and how I go about doing just about anything.
In the introduction to his book, The Idea of Justice, the economist Amartya Sen makes an eloquent case for his attempt at crafting a theory of justice. What I love about the passage that follows is that you could replace the word justice for any number of things such as: nutrition, monetary policy, relationships, investing, meaningful work, and have a compelling argument for why we should strive to build a theory around our actions and the actions of others:
The identification of redressable injustice is not only what animates us to think about justice and injustice, it is also central, I argue in this book, to the theory of justice. In the investigation presented here, diagnosis of injustice will figure often enough as the starting point for critical discussion. But, it may be asked, if this is a reasonable starting point, why can’t it also be a good ending point? What is the need to go beyond our sense of the word justice and injustice. Why must we have a theory of justice?
To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning. We have to ‘read’ what we feel and seem to see, and ask what those perceptions indicate and how we may take them into account without being overwhelmed by them. One issue relates to the reliability of our feelings and impressions. A sense of injustice could serve as a signal that moves us, but a signal does demand critical examination, and there has to be some scrutiny of the soundness of a conclusion based mainly on signals. Adam Smith’s conviction of the importance of moral sentiments did not stop him from a seeking a ‘theory of moral sentiments’. Nor from insisting that a sense of wrongdoing be critically examined through reasoned scrutiny to see whether it can be the basis of a sustainable condemnation. A similar requirement of scrutiny applies to an inclination to praise someone or something.
*Sen, Amartya Kumar. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard U, 2011. Print.
As compelling as this is for me, there are, I’ve been told, some people who consider an intellectual framework to be superfluous, if not downright stupid. To such people, a theory is nothing more than an extra layer of unnecessary complexity around a problem. Instead of theoretical frameworks for action, such people assign value only to their intuition and unique personal experiences.
For example, people often dismiss the need for an intellectual framework in the context of weight-loss and exercise. They say things like, “If I want to lose weight, I just eat less and exercise more.” or “If I want to get stronger, I just go to the gym and lift heavy weights.” And in some sense these people are right, they recognize that often it is doing simple and effective things that make real progress and over intellectualizing can be a waste of time and energy.
The problem with this type of thinking is that it runs a dangerous risk of oversimplification and ignores the role that generalizable framework plays in improving the lives of others.
I say improve the lives of others because meaningful lives are the result of good decisions (on average) and good decisions are the result of understanding how the world works. In light of that understanding, the failure to try and think beyond our own intuition and experience can be viewed a failure from a moral dimension.
The failure to attempt to think beyond ourselves is a moral failure because it means we never stop to ask if and how our experiences manifest the underlying reality of the world. Such an approach to life precludes the possibility of creating a generalized framework that can be communicated, tested and then shared to better the lives of others.
That said, there are good reasons to be skeptical of theory. Sometimes theories are bullshit.
