I didn’t publish on Sunday as I was roadtripping with the family to CA’s central coast. We stayed in San Luis Obispo and put a list of things we enjoyed at the end of this post if you’re interested.
Today’s Munchies are my favorite aphorisms from Dee Hock, the founder of Visa. He wrote a couple books at the end of his life. I listened to the Founder’s episode where David Senra rattles off his favorite lines and mine are selected from those. Double distilled you might say.
As a young child born in a tiny cottage in a small farming village in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I discovered three principal loves of my life, nature, reading, and unstructured learning. With school and church came increasing confinement, demands for conformity and crushing boredom, along with sharp, rising awareness of the chasm between how organizations professed to function and how they actually did. When I was 14, the fourth love of my life appeared, a beautiful brown-eyed girl. We married at 20. Sidetracked into business to support a growing family, I vowed to escape as soon as possible. It took 35 years. As partial recompense for a dislike of business, I continued to read and study voraciously.
As you’ll see Hock is a huge fan of reading and experience while being deeply skeptical about formal education.
I organized my favorite bits by topic.
- A fool is no less a fool when a wise man errs.
- There's them that talks and them that does. And them that does gives them that talks something to talk about.
- We judge others harshly by the standards we profess rather than those we practice, yet we resent it bitterly when they return the favor.
- Nothing satisfies weak, dull people more than publicly confronting strong, creative people with a list of their sins.
- Complaining about life is like hurling sand against the wind.
- If you attempt something new and innovative, do not think people will remove obstacles from your path. Expect them to add a great many more.
- Those who require little of themselves have even less to give others.
- Someone has to be original or else others would have nothing to copy.
- If you never test your courage and strength, how can you measure the validity of your fears?
- The wise make great use of adversity, the foolish whine about it
- Enjoy the convenience of prosperity but treasure the benefit of adversity.
- There are two ways to look at opposition. I want to do it and they will not let me, or they want to prevent me and I won't let them.
- A meaningful life cannot be made from denial. It must be made from affirmation.
- Fear, when it adds nothing to safety, is pain without utility.
- Every mistake is a bargain if you learn the lesson it contains and remember it well.
- Impatience is a perpetual barrier between desire and realization.
- You can't reason your way to hope. You can't logically arrive at hope. You can't beg, borrow, buy or steal hope. You either hope or you do not.
- The troubles of life are rarely as terrible in reality as they are in imagination.
- I have done many great things perfectly, the ones I imagined but never attempted.
- Delaying what we must do eventually does nothing but lengthen the time and distance we must carry the burden.
- Those who will not venture before taking everything into account, never venture at all.
- Every child endowed at birth with biological capacity for 10,000 different lives is destined to live but one. Choice makes all the difference.
- Educational systems are giant abstractions in which people forego experience, humanity, and wisdom in favor of symbolism, rationalization, and indoctrination.
- An academic education too easily prepares one to make a living at the expense of life, to be narrowly expert while broadly ignorant, to know much and understand little.
- Few adults of great achievement were cooperative, conformist children. More often, they were shunned, iconoclast, protecting themselves as best they could from the contempt and persecution of conformists. Social conformity is not virtue. Young students who are not naturally docile are often labeled as having a disorder and drugged into submission. Conformity and docility are poor qualities for anyone who would be curious, creative, and free. That students should be drugged into tolerance of banal, boring curriculum and shoddy teaching is tragic.
- Originality and creativity do not result from calculated effort, but from the natural state of consciousness, an open mind at play.
- Use your head, but follow your heart is my advice to all my grandchildren. Come to think of it, it's not bad advice for adults as well.
- That which fails to fiercely protect and enhance the spontaneous lust to learn inherent in all children cannot be education.
- If one knows how to formulate penetrating questions and assiduously seeks answers, education with or without schools is inevitable.
- The happiest and best parts of formal education are haphazard experiences with others and the eclectic reading of excellent books.
- Genius merely articulates what your heart already knows.
- Theory, frenzy, and fanaticism can destroy in a day what it took wisdom, foresight, and prudence centuries to construct. [I filed this under education and not nature of reality for a reason]
- The new and novel should be viewed with suspicion. For it is improbable that one generation can be wiser than all ancestors combined. [Chesterton’s Fence and a classic definition of conservatism]
- Teach children to think deeply, read precisely, write concisely and stimulate their curiosity about everything. Skip the rest of the stuff.
- When disagreeing with those you love, deal only with the moment, neither resurrecting the past nor anticipating the future.
- You can't make a good child by abusing a bad one, but you can easily make a bad child by abusing a good one.
- Make it your business to create not compare, contemplate not critique, compliment not condemn.
What to expect from reality
- Life is never indifferent and never in balance. We are steadily overcoming our problems or they are steadily overcoming us.
- There is no shortage of men who would set civilization on fire to warm their fingers.
- It is not the poor and humble who are desecrating the earth, waging wars, and demeaning people. It is the rich, the educated, the honored and acclaimed.
- We push our children out the door with one hand, urging them to conquer the world, and clinging to them tenaciously with the other, wishing they would remain with us forever. Fortunately, neither is our choice to make.
- We should always keep in mind that the world is replete with those who preach like angels and behave like beasts.
- Trusting a politician to put the public interest before his own is like trusting a dog to deliver a pound of hamburger to your neighbor.
- Life offers everyone truth and comfort. Choose carefully. You rarely can have both.
- In the gratification of every desire lies the creation of more demanding ones.
- You can't reason with ideology any more than you can with deceit.
- Two centuries ago, it took a year to send a message around the globe. Now it takes a fraction of a second. We have no idea what this means or what the consequences may be. Man's knowledge and ability have dangerously exceeded his capacity to understand either.
- We always pretend to know what will result from our actions. Yet they always have unintended consequences. From this we have learned neither humility, nor caution.
- We spend the first 30 years wanting to be older, the next 30 years wanting to be younger, and the remainder just wanting to be.
- Great accomplishment often consists of doing little things well.
- The more egregiously flawed people's judgment and beliefs, the less doubt they have about them. [Dunning Krueger]
- Stupidity is much more predictable than intelligence.
Recs from our road trip to SLO County, CA
Hearst Castle: self-recommending
Cal Poly campus: SLO and Cal Poly don’t seem like places conducive to studying
Morro Bay: 8-yr-old is obsessed with otters so we went to see them on consecutive days
Sand Dollar Beach: fiat shells? NGMI. But don’t tell the kids that.
Avila Beach: beautiful beach and surrounding setting
Pismo Beach: reminded me of Jersey Shore. The Seaside Heights version.
Shell Beach: amazing tide pools, uncrowded, picturesque. Felt like Orange County if you ditched about 90% of the population and the rattlesnake flags. Made me pull up Zillow ngl.
Firestone Grill: tri-tip sandos deserve the hype. But whole (small) menu is great
Luna Red & Piadina: Just ok. Pizza at Piadina was notable
Scouts Coffee: Not memorable but good
McConnell's: This is my favorite ice cream brand (I published a ranking years ago). They started in Santa Barbara in 1949. This was the first time I went to one of their shops. You can buy it in supermarkets.
Seeds: Really liked the smoothies
Dockside: Typical divey seafood spot on a Morro Bay dock. Unbelievable value though. $10 clam chowder in a sourdough bowl does not miss. Best thing I ate on the trip.
???I listened to the East Bay Yesterday podcast on the way back from SLO. Specifically a 3-part series about the history of the Canyon neighborhood (many might have heard of the Canyon School) in Oakland. A fascinating story right in our backyard.?
It wasn't intentional but the series?is food-for-thought on topics of self-reliance and the large overlap between traditional conservative and liberal values which seems almost paradoxical in our political climate.?
It's also on Spotify/Apple/etc
