Syntopica on Janusworx

The Psychology of Money

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 15:36:56 +0530

I heard Morgan Housel on the latest episode of the Shane Parrish podcast recently as well as a while ago on Vishal Khandelwal’s podcast, and most of what he said resonated with what I learned and found out on my own independently over the years.
So I went and got his book.

Take the best of Taleb, Danny Kahneman, and your grandma, put them into story form with an earnest tone, and you get this book. It’s lovely.

Realise that you’re unique. You have your scars. Realise that colours everything that you see and do.
Stop idolising individuals. The patterns lie in large numbers. Not in a single individual’s story, no matter how inspiring you think it is. You have no clue of which butterfly flapped its wings to create Bill Gates’ wealth.
The aim ought to be enough. Which you get to decide. But there has to be a point where you say enough.
The gains from compounding occur at the end. The only reason Buffett has the money he has now (~90 billion dollars), is because he started investing at 10. Had he started at 30, he’d only be worth ~20 million. Like Housel says,

Effectively all of Warren Buffett’s financial success can be tied to the financial base he built in his pubescent years and the longevity he maintained in his geriatric years.

His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works.

Making money is one thing. It’s the keeping of the money that’s harder. How does one do this? Stay in the margins. Survive. And use Taleb’s Barbell.
Have options. You never know which one might pan out. Also realise that options are another way of saying that one of your individual bets could die for the sake of your bigger aim, and you’ll still be ok. An individual stock might not work, but the index has always inched upwards for decades.
The best freedom, to paraphrase Taleb, is the ability to say, “Fuck this!” to things you don’t want to do. Or to actually quote him …

This kind of sum I’ve called in my vernacular “fuck you money” —a sum large enough to get most, if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects, such as having to attend a black-tie charity event and being forced to listen to a polite exposition of the details of a marble-rich house renovation. […] Beyond a certain level of opulence and independence, gents tend to be less and less personable and their conversation less and less interesting.

Housel puts it much more eloquently …

The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”

People want to become wealthier to make them happier. Happiness is a complicated subject because everyone’s different. But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives.

The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.

Stop playing the Keeping up with the Kumars¹.
Save money.
Being reasonable is greater than being rational.

You’re not a spreadsheet. You’re a person. Do not aim to be coldly rational when making financial decisions. Aim to just be pretty reasonable. Reasonable is more realistic and you have a better chance of sticking with it for the long run, which is what matters most when managing money.

You cannot spend your time and energy watching the world and waiting for the “best” time to make a investment. Save money. Invest it. Let it compound.
Margin of Safety. That ought to be one of the main weapons in your mental arsenal. Always have room for error. Always have slack.
You will change over time. Learn to be kind to your future self. Make sure you’re not wedded to past decisions. Make your circumstances adapt to you.
Nothing’s free. What are you willing to pay to get what you want?
Note to self: Learn Statistics. Learn probabilities. They’ll teach you more than stories that folks weave. And yet paradoxically, when you want to convince folks? Use stories. They are always more powerful!
Manage and invest your money in a way that helps you sleep at night.
The best “shortcut” to do better with your investments? Increase your time horizon and let compounding work for you.
What works for others will not work for you. They are not you. Make your own mistakes. And your own decisions. There is no single right answer; just the answer that works for you.

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Deep cut silly joke, if you loved the Kumars and Goodness Gracious me.
The Jones at No. 42 were Indian. ↩︎

Bread and Roses

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 13:59:42 +0530

Click the image to see the much larger, original

If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy flowers,
for bread is food for the body,
but flowers are food for the mind.

— Galen of Pergamon

Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.

— James Oppenheim

Reading this beautiful conversation on Tumblr, led to this lovely page on Wikipedia.

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P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Several Corroborative Thoughts on Pacing Yourself

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 14:28:43 +0530

That is what I should have called, yesterday’s post.

Pace yourself!

Be disciplined.
Show up.
Do the work.
And know when to quit.

And in more serendipitious bathing and reading hijinks I came across several folks who resonated with that thought. Slowly pacing yourself and doing the work, leads to big things.

Here’s Ryan Holiday, in 37 (Or So) Lessons From A 37 Year Old.

I struggle with calibrating how to have high standards without hanging oneself on them. Of course, deciding willy-nilly what time you start each day is a recipe for slowly, steadily drifting towards starting later and later. On the other hand, sweating five minutes here or there—especially when what you’re rushing through is school dropoff or traffic that’s outside your control—is a recipe for misery and missing the point. A book, for instance, is a project that takes months and years. Pace yourself accordingly.

And Cory Doctorow in his very, popular Memex Method

These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.

That’s how blogging is complimentary to other forms of more serious work: when you’ve done enough of it, you can get entire essays, speeches, stories, novels, spontaneously appearing in a state of near-completeness, ready to be written.

And then there’s Cal Newport with his Slow Productivity.
I don’t even need his words to describe what he does. I have followed him and his output long enough to know his modus operandi.
The only thing I don’t know is how he latches on to some topic.
But once that happens, he starts blogging about it. (and now talking about it on the pocdast).
His very popular Deep Work was published around 2016. A cursory search for the word “deep” in his blog archive will show you what I’m talking about. You can see him writing, thinking, refining and coming to the core of what he wants to convey.
Further refinement happens over on his New Yorker column.
And then finally, after all that slow, steady drumbeat of work comes the book.
Small wonder, they then turn out to be evergreen titles.

So there! Like Cal espouses,
1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality

The Rest Is Memory

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 17:01:54 +0530

Priyanka, hoping Hedwig will carry her to Hogwarts.
Click the pic for a bigger image

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

— Louise Glück, Nostos. (via @ashstfu on Tumblr)

Be Nobody but Yourself

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 20:22:04 +0530

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

— E.E. Cummings, via The Marginalian

Iron Widow

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 09:22:44 +0530

courtesy, Xiran Jay Zhao

What happens when you take all the pulpy goodness from Indian soaps and K-dramas, mash it up with Pacific Rim and Robotech, infuse it with a lot of authentic Chinese history, and aim it at teens (err, young adults)?

You get Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao, that’s what!

I wish someone takes Indian history and creates such awesome fictional worlds from them.
This was such a crazy, rollicking ride! I cannot wait for their next.

My highlights, from the book
#

In hindsight, I was such a fool to have assumed Qieluo would stand by me just because she’s also female.
It was my grandmother who crushed my feet in half.
It was my mother who encouraged me and Big Sister to offer ourselves up as concubines so our brother could afford a future bride.
It was always the village aunties who’d sit around gossiping about which girl hadn’t been married off yet, despite complaining nonstop about their own husbands. And then they’d congratulate new mothers for being “blessed” to have a boy, despite being female themselves.

How do you take the fight out of half the population and render them willing slaves? You tell them they’re meant to do nothing but serve from the minute they’re born. You tell them they’re weak. You tell them they’re prey.
You tell them over and over, until it’s the only truth they’re capable of living.

Babel

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 09:12:29 +0530

image courtesy, Harper Collins India

Reading Babel, constantly gave me strong déjà vu as I leafed through its pages.¹
Until I realised what I was experiencing was an author enjoying their words, their lines, their exquisite craft. Where words themselves crawl into your mind, and say yes, we are. We will tell you this story. You need not make any effort here.
Richard Powers’, The Overstory was that way. So was Arundhati Roy’s, The God of Small Things. And Tamysyn Muir, with her Locked Tomb books.

This is alternate history Empire. The British still rule the world, but here they do so, on the strength of magic, silver-work and words and language.
Kuang then uses all that heft to bash our brains in.²
There’s Robin and Ramy and Victoire and Letty and it’s them against the world³

This was one of those rare books⁴ where I wanted very little to do with the story and just wanted to lose myself in the world. I wanted to study languages the way they did, and do magic the way they did. The way some of them come to choose violence reminded me of Bhagat and Azad.

The history’s wonderful.
The way she uses language and words, even more so!

My highlights, from the book
#

Inside, the heady wood-dust smell of freshly printed books was overwhelming. If tobacco smelled like this, Robin thought, he’d huff it every day. He stepped towards the closest shelf, hand lifted tentatively towards the books on display, too afraid to touch them – they seemed so new and crisp; their spines were uncracked, their pages smooth and bright. Robin was used to well-worn, waterlogged tomes; even his Classics grammars were decades old. These shiny, freshly bound things seemed like a different class of object, things to be admired from a distance rather than handled and read.

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.)

‘But that’s impossible for me,’ said Ramy. ‘I have to play a part. Back in Calcutta, we all tell the story of Sake Dean Mahomed, the first Muslim from Bengal to become a rich man in England. He has a white Irish wife. He owns property in London. And you know how he did it? He opened a restaurant, which failed; and then he tried to be hired as a butler or valet, which also failed. And then he had the brilliant idea of opening a shampoo house in Brighton.’ Ramy chuckled. ‘Come and get your healing vapours! Be massaged with Indian oils! It cures asthma and rheumatism; it heals paralysis. Of course, we don’t believe that at home. But all Dean Mahomed had to do was give himself some medical credentials, convince the world of this magical Oriental cure, and then he had them eating out of the palm of his hand. So what does that tell you, Birdie? If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage. The English are never going to think I’m posh, but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’

‘Does Mirza really mean “prince”?’ Robin asked, after he’d overheard Ramy declare this to a shopkeeper for the third time.
‘Sure. Well, really, it’s a title – it’s derived from the Persian Amīrzādeh, but “prince” comes close enough.’
‘Then are you—?’
‘No.’ Ramy snorted. ‘Well. Perhaps once. That’s the family story, anyhow; my father says we were aristocrats in the Mughal court, or something like that. But not anymore.’
‘What happened?’
Ramy gave him a long look. ‘The British, Birdie. Keep up.’

After all, we’re here to make the unknown known, to make the other familiar. We’re here to make magic with words.’

‘Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?’
‘That’s an impossible question,’ said Victoire. ‘Either you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. You’re always giving something up.’
‘Is faithful translation impossible, then?’ Professor Playfair challenged. ‘Can we never communicate with integrity across time, across space?’
‘I suppose not,’ Victoire said reluctantly.
‘But what is the opposite of fidelity?’ asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of this dialectic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. ‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?’

we can think of etymology as an exercise in tracing how far a word has strayed from its roots. For they travel marvellous distances, both literally and metaphorically.’ He looked suddenly at Robin. ‘What’s the word for a great storm in Mandarin?’
Robin gave a start. ‘Ah – fēngbào?’
‘No, give me something bigger.’
‘Táifēng?’
‘Good.’ Professor Lovell pointed to Victoire. ‘And what weather patterns are always drifting across the Caribbean?’
‘Typhoons,’ she said, then blinked. ‘Taifeng? Typhoon? How—’
‘We start with Greco-Latin,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Typhon was a monster, one of the sons of Gaia and Tartarus, a devastating creature with a hundred serpentine heads. At some point he became associated with violent winds, because later the Arabs started using tūfān to describe violent, windy storms. From Arabic it hopped over to Portuguese, which was brought to China on explorers’ ships.’
‘But táifēng isn’t just a loanword,’ said Robin. ‘It means something in Chinese – tái is great, and fēng is wind–’
‘And you don’t think the Chinese could have come up with a transliteration that had its own meaning?’ asked Professor Lovell. ‘This happens all the time. Phonological calques are often semantic calques as well. Words spread. And you can trace contact points of human history from words that have uncannily similar pronunciations. Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics.

And the influences on English were so much deeper and more diverse than they thought. Chit came from the Marathi chitti, meaning ‘letter’ or ‘note’. Coffee had made its way into English by way of Dutch (koffie), Turkish (kahveh), and originally Arabic (qahwah). Tabby cats were named after a striped silk that was in turn named for its place of origin: a quarter of Baghdad named al-‘Attābiyya. Even basic words for clothes all came from somewhere. Damask came from cloth made in Damascus; gingham came from the Malay word genggang, meaning ‘striped’; calico referred to Calicut in Kerala, and taffeta, Ramy told them, had its roots in the Persian word tafte, meaning ‘a shiny cloth’.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week. ‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”. Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.

He waved a hand, gesturing at an invisible map. ‘It’s junctures like that where we have control. If we push in the right spots – if we create losses where the Empire can’t stand to suffer them – then we’ve moved things to the breaking point. Then the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’⁵

Oxford, and Babel by extension, were, at their roots, ancient religious institutions, and for all their contemporary sophistication, the rituals that comprised university life were still based in medieval mysticism. Oxford was Anglicanism was Christianity, which meant blood, flesh, and dirt.*

‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’

‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I saw.’ He rested his elbows against the bridge and sighed. ‘Rows and rows of flowers. A whole ocean of them. They’re such bright scarlet that the fields look wrong, like the land itself is bleeding. It’s all grown in the countryside. Then it gets packed and transported to Calcutta, where it’s handed off to private merchants who bring it straight here. The two most popular opium brands here are called Patna and Malwa. Both regions in India. From my home straight to yours, Birdie. Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.’

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’

‘Eventually.’
Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.
— FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox

‘It’s so odd,’ Robin said. Back then they’d already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. ‘It’s like I’ve known you forever.’ ‘Me too,’ Ramy said. ‘And that makes no sense,’ said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. ‘Because I’ve known you for less than a day, and yet . . .’ ‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’ ‘Because you’re fascinating.’ ‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

ok, I swiped on my Elipsa. But you get the idea! ↩︎
in a good way ↩︎
a lot like Bardugo’s, Six of Crows ↩︎
the only other one for me, was The Lord of the Rings. I suspect Kuang, just like Tolkien, had the words and the language and the world ready. And then she just when and wrote a book to show some of it. ↩︎
reminds me of Steve Jobs, and his dent in the universe. ↩︎

Note to Self, Bookmark Your Work, Coda

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 10:24:45 +0530

courtesy Liniers, Comics Kingdom
click to enlarge

With all the hullabaloo yesterday, on how you’d go about organising your day, and things to let go of, and marking your place, I forgot the overarching Note To Self.
Please remember. Never lose sight of what’s important.
Never forget why you’re doing all of this.

Note to Self, Bookmark Your Work

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 08:34:05 +0530

This started with a note to self on leaving breadcrumbs, and ended with a stream of consciousness journey on how I reached this conclusion. So what I’m trying to say, in a slightly rambling manner, is that this is a slightly incoherent, rambling post.

Courtesy, Delgrosso, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, on Flickr

I’m running my days now to slow, daily, consistent tiny amounts of progress.
And I am seeing results. When there are so many demands on my time, prioritising them and then doing them slowly yet consistently is yielding fruit.
While I certainly enjoy the deep dive, full of focus, lost in work sessions a lot more, I have too much life happening to allocate that kind of time and attention to everything.
The first thing I did, when I kinda-sorta revamped the way I went about my days¹, was to drop as many hot potatoes as I could, and then d-d-d-ed all the small yet important things in my life.
And then came to the sobering realisation that the rest of life just had to be done and dealt with. Even things I don’t like.

A couple of pieces then had to fall into place, before I gained some semblance of sanity and progress.

I can’t do it all. Some things, important things even, will fall through the cracks. Somethings that I really want to do, will get pushed to someday/maybe and some will just never get done. I have to make my peace with it.
Knowing what I am giving up, the things that I am doing? They better be worth it.
Making the time to think this through, and having mental muscle to do the thinking² helped.
Everything does not have to be good and perfect. Good enough, is good enough.
Yes, stuff is hard and unpleasant, but then you have a blessed life. There are so many people with hard lives. Suck it up. And go do something about it. Deal with it. Leaving stuff unattended in the recesses of your mind, is a sure way to rust and ruin.³. At the same time, while you are hard and focussed on the work, be kind to yourself. Find that balance.
Alright, mentally set. Now how do I go about the doing?
By doing as much or as little as you can, depending on how you prioritise it.
By doing it consistently. Set a schedule. Hit it.
If you think you don’t want to do it, do 10m regardless.⁴ And then move on.⁵
If interrupted, deal with the interruption. Come back. And continue.
Dealing with interruptions does not mean giving in to it. It means figuring out just what it is, and figuring out what to do about it. Most stuff can be jotted down and scheduled for later. Make sure the significant folk in your life know what you are up to, so that they know when they can expect you to be present and when you are off doing your own thing.⁶
Doing stuff this way is slow. And that’s ok. If your life permitted focussed deep work, you’d be doing it. But that’s not how it is. So find islands of focus. And do the best you can.
Do the best you can, does not mean going all out. Slow, sure, steady. That is your drumbeat. Slow, sure, steady. Unflustered. Calm. Measured.

So what happens once you do this? And what hiccoughs did you run into? And what do you do about it?

Stuff gets done! It doesn’t look like this ought to work, but it does.
Leaving stuff undone, putting things down for the day, causes lots of mental turmoil.
Also whenever you go back to stuff, there’s a lot of going back before your minds grasps where it was at, and only then does it go forth.
And that brings me to the crux of why I began writing this dastardly note in the first place.
Log. Summarise. Review!
1. Log how long you take for your tasks. Don’t judge yourself. Just dispassionately do it.
2. Every time you think you’re done with something for the time being and are putting it down? Spend the time to write down what you did and what future you needs to be doing. Create bookmarks. Give directions. Do this no matter how tired you are. No matter how shitty the note.
3. Review. This is the most important bit. Review at regular intervals and at various depths.⁷ And only then make your plans accordingly. Daily time logging & summarising leads to daily review leads to a better sense of what is done, how far you’ve come, what to change, where to swerve, what to do next, and where to go. Review, gosh darn it. Review!

It’s been working well the past three months. It’s reduced a lot of friction, and quite a bit of time. It makes it easy to get into the swing of things.
I’ll come back in six months and write about how it went.

it was a slow, gradual process. ↩︎
Thank you, meditation practice! ↩︎
oft used phrase in the Cosmere ↩︎
be as foul minded and potty mouthed and grumpy as you want. But do it. ↩︎
unless you get into the groove. ↩︎
if you are busy doing work all day, then that’s a sign. You need to get your life back into some semblance of balance. It’s ok doing this shit for a measure of time. This cannot be your whole life ↩︎
I’m good at the nitty gritty and the big picture (daily / quarterly reviews). I struggle with the medium term (weekly) ↩︎

On Invisible Inequity and Entrenched Privilege (In Open Source and the World)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:27:18 +0530

courtesy, R.F. Kuang & Carlton Gibson

I was reading R.F. Kuang’s Babel and watching Carlton Gibson’s talk on surviving open source¹ a few days ago.
They both touch upon ingrained privilege in their book/talk.
The popular proverb urges us to engage with the world as it is, not as we would have it be.²
But sometimes, we are so caught up that we need other, wiser eyes to see. That’s what Rebecca & Carlton have done for me :)

Here’s Carlton. I paraphrased the relevant bits from his talk. It begins at around the 10m, 10s mark. (all emphases mine.)

We’re not getting paid. But we don’t always act like we know that.
We give far more than is reasonable given the fact that it’s a volunteer thing that we are doing

It has a consequence.
Open Source skews overwhelmingly white, male and English speaking.
The bottom line is that contributing to open source is a privilege that only a few can afford.
We like to think it’s meritocracy. Well, you do the time, you do the hard yards, you work on your project, you get the rewards, but well Sorry! Meritocracy, my arse!

What’s really going on is that pre-existing economic relations are being reinforced by contributors leveraging the inequality of opportunity that those economic relations provide.
Sorry!
In English.
If you let it, Open Source extracts such a cost; physical, financial, and emotional, that the only folks who can do it are the global rich and of those, only the ones that are either directly supported by, or can make their way around the patriarchy. English speaking, white, men.

And these series of quotes from Babel.

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.)

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.

Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’

Watch the talk.
Read Babel.
You’ll be better off, having done both.

not at the same time. I know I’m cuckoo, just not that cuckoo. ↩︎
I love this one from Saul Alinsky’s, Rules for Radicals:
“I start from where the world is, as it as, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be–it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.” ↩︎

Publish! Show Your Work! You Don’t Have Leonardo’s Genius or Luck

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 20:12:18 +0530

Leonardo da Vinci, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The only reason we know that both, an emperor as well as a slave, both practiced the same philosophy that inspires people even now in this day and age, is because the former’s personal notes and the latter’s words compiled by a student, have come down to us through the ages.

The only reason that Leonardo Da Vinci has such a legacy, is that the few pieces of his work that were created and displayed, have somehow, miraculously lasted the ravages of the past half century. But so much of his work was unpublished, stowed away in private journals, never to be seen for centuries. How much more would we have known, or learnt if only? If only.

Decades of stunning art, never released. No one knew the genius of Vivian Maier, when she was alive.

From John Maloof’s, Vivian Maier, Maloof Collection

Like David Kadavy writes,¹

Finishing what you start is overrated.
[…]
Contrast this with many other things Leonardo never finished. The observations that lie hidden in his notes would have advanced humanity by centuries in the fields of medicine, flight, geology, and more. These sketches and notes weren’t finished – but, most tragically, they weren’t published.
You don’t have to finish to have an impact. You do have to publish.

Honoré De Balzac had it right,

“For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed”

On which Austin Kleon expounds²

If you just focus on getting really good, Martin says, people will come to you. I happen to agree: You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. I think there’s an easy way of putting your work out there and making it discoverable while you’re focused on getting really good at what you do.

Imagine if your next boss didn’t have to read your résumé because he already reads your blog. Imagine being a student and getting your first gig based on a school project you posted online. Imagine losing your job but having a social network of people familiar with your work and ready to help you find a new one. Imagine turning a side project or a hobby into your profession because you had a following that could support you.

Or imagine something simpler and just as satisfying: spending the majority of your time, energy, and attention practicing a craft, learning a trade, or running a business, while also allowing for the possibility that your work might attract a group of people who share your interests.

All you have to do is, Show Your Work.

From Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work

all emphases mine ↩︎
in his book Show Your Work ↩︎

Create New Scars (or Calluses)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 13:37:55 +0530

I wrote about creating with your experience, your scars, the other day.
And the best way to do that is to develop your calluses, your own scars in the first place.

Herbert Lui writes …

On either fence of, “Write what you know,” I tend to lean towards writing about what I don’t know; “Write What Obsesses You,” as Meg Wolitzer describes it.
[…] Some people say in order to write a book, you need to live it. While I lived aspects of Creative Doing, the more accurate way to say it would be, the writing process changed me, and that I live the book now. I wrote the book I needed to read, not just in the past, but also in the future.

Indeed, you become what you write about, (or what you do)!

This is what I’m trying to do with this slow writing thing.
Which also drives home, what Kushal is still nagging me about and what I am still procrastinating at. That I do the same with my work. With the stuff that I want to learn.
This is my stake in the ground, Kushal. I’ll do this.
I don’t know how good I’ll get. But I will begin the practice.

The best role model, I have, for a craftsman.
He spent a life at his art and had the calluses and the scars to show for it.
I know this, because I felt them everytime he caressed my cheek as child.
Daddy was the best, there ever was.

Use Your Scars

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 07:39:40 +0530

I was catching up with my Cal Newport episodes this morning, when I heard this little clip above, at around the 44m mark It reminded me that the things in life, that you can talk most easily about (with authority), are the things that you have the most experience with; the things that you carry the scars of.

Like Mandy Brown or Taleb do.
Like Cheryl Strayed does.
Like Roosevelt’s, Man in the Area.
Like Rachel.

The best things happen the easiest, when you use your scars.
Write that fucking book, indeed.

Cashflow for Creators

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 09:00:00 +0530

If you want to someday make money from your skills and your craft, you owe it to yourself to read this.
If you have never read Lucas, you owe it to yourself to read him.
Buy Cashflow for Creators!

My highlighted notes from the book follow …

Craft is the nuts and bolts of how you do The Thing. For a writer, it’s stuff like grammar and spelling and reading. For a glass artist, it’s not mixing different COEs or—at the highest levels—how to mix different COEs. Painters need to understand that light and pigments blend colors very differently, how to prep and clean a canvas, and so on.

Art, as a verb, is how you express yourself through your craft. Stephen King and Danielle Steele both work with the same tools of the craft, but they create totally different books.
Art illuminates an ideal.
As a noun, art is the finished product; the book, the painting, the song, the Thing.

Trade is the business of the finished art. Once you have mastered your craft, you need to master your trade. For writers, it’s how to format a manuscript and how to sell your books. For an artist, it’s how to get into galleries and garner commissions. Maybe it’s how you use Redbubble, Etsy, and eBay. It’s how you pay your taxes and siphon off money to pay the mortgage.

Professional artists must master craft, art, and trade.

The trickiest part about a creator learning their trade?
Never letting the trade into the creative process.
Thoughts like “this will never sell” or, worse, “this will sell millions!” are death to creativity.

A creator with a stressful job must put aside their concerns to create. You can’t fret about your stock portfolio and carve a masterpiece. When you step into your creative space, discard these business concerns in exactly the same way. I promise you that when you finish the day’s drawing or writing or sculpting, those concerns will still be there, ready to be picked up. They won’t even miss you.

Think of art and business as hats.
When you put on the Art Hat, you are purely a creator. You are expressing your innermost self through your craft to create a piece of art. During that moment, you must utterly believe in yourself. Other people have the exact same craft you do. The only thing you own, all you can express, is your sincerity and personal truth. Without letting yourself do that, you have no art. When you finish your work, take a moment to admire it. Tell yourself you did okay. Creative work is still work, so give yourself a chance to rest.
Then take off the Art Hat, and put on the Business Hat. You’ve expressed your personal truth, now it’s time to trade that work. Don’t even think about the creation process while you’re wearing the Business Hat. Don’t consider the trade while you’re wearing the Art Hat. They must be wholly separate.
Even long-time creators have trouble with this. I just had a discussion with a writer whose artistic side is demanding she write a certain novel. Her business mindset keeps shrieking, “You don’t want to be known for this!” Truth is, her inner creator is going to write the book. The only question is, will she come along quietly or will her Muse drag her by the handcuffs? Maybe she’ll put on the Business Hat afterwards and say “No, this can’t go into the trade.” That’s fine. Everybody occasionally creates unsaleable work. Maybe she’ll give it for free to her most dedicated fans, or bury it in the trunk for her literary estate to discover.

Chapter 4: The Long Slow Slog

A creative business that makes money but doesn’t yet pay all your bills is in the Long Slow Slog. You’re making money, just not enough. The Slog might last years. It might last decades. You’re not making enough yet.
“Yet.” That’s the key word. You’re still learning how to make money, improving your artistic skills, and figuring out how everything fits together. So long as you continue improving, you will get there.

The Long Slow Slog is an absolutely critical stage of your career. It’s not an easy time. You’re still doing some sort of day job to keep the roof over your head and food in your belly. It’s also when you learn how the trade (the business of your art) works in the real world.
How do you trudge through this endless era and build a long-term business?
With a support system that includes your family and your attitude.

Keep Creating

The Long Slow Slog started because you love The Thing so much that you kept doing it. You improved at it enough that you started to bring in money for it. That made you think that maybe you had a business here. Perhaps you could even make a living with your art.
Whatever you do: never stop creating.
Money comes from practicing your art. You must keep making new things. One best-selling book or one perfect painting is not a career.

Deliberate Practice

People don’t want more of the same. They want the same, only different. They want the thing they love, plus something extra. They want their creators to achieve new heights, new depths, new something. If you want a career, your art must constantly improve. Without adding new things, your fans will drift away. The cash flow will dry up, and your fans won’t be able to tell you why.
The only way to achieve “the same but different” is through practice.

Deliberate practice focuses on honing one aspect of the art at a time.

How much do you create?
I’m a writer. I wrote four books last year. Easy. How many copies of each book I sold doesn’t really matter in this discussion.
If you make something more tangible, like beads or clay figurines or capybara parachutes, your inventory is the number of them you made. If the items are all similar, a simple tally when you finish each piece will start. If you create different types of thing, you’ll need a separate column for each type.
You also need to know how much you sell of each thing. The way you track this depends wholly on what you make and how you sell it, so I can’t recommend any specific system. Talk to other professionals in your craft. Do what they do.
Also track how much time you spend working on your craft. This isn’t only the time you spend actively sewing or writing or working the welding torch. If you have a dedicated workspace that needs cleaning, count that time. I do all my writing on a dedicated computer in my home office. In theory, I can’t possibly get dirty or make a mess doing it. Even so, I must swill the filth out of my garret every month or two.
If you decide to go full time, this knowledge will be precious—and there’s no other way to get it other than you recording it during the Long Slow Slog.

A small business owner has two rules for spending money.

If it can be a business expense, it is a business expense
Spend money on needs, not on wants

These rules are directly contradictory, except when they aren’t.

So many folks dream of creating to pay their rent. Remember, a dream is something you don’t control. Transforming that dream into a concrete, actionable goal requires knowing how to get there. It requires a way to measure success and risk. You must continuously improve your art, understand business, and run your life as if it’s a business.

there is zero shame in deciding you don’t want turn your art into your living. Relying on your art to feed the kids is not for everyone. You entirely own the choice and the responsibility. Once you accept both, any choice you make is correct for you.

The Bucket shows you how everything averages out, however. Experience has shown me that four books in a year lets me at least scrape by.

the Bucket is a business machine that converts those irregular bursts of cash into a smooth, steady stream. My life is a hole in the bottom of the Bucket. The bigger the hole, the faster the Bucket drains. Rent and food and expenses are predictable, and subject to my control. Before I can control them, though, I must know what those expenses are.

discussing financial disasters is easiest when you aren’t under financial pressure. If you get laid off, you’ll come home with a spinning head, churning emotions, and a pounding heart. You could find a worse time to make financial decisions, but it would probably involve black market organ transplants and an armored car heist.
If your income drops, what expenses will your household cut? What must you keep? The time to decide this is when everyone’s employed, not under pink slip pressure. This discussion doesn’t need to involve everyone; there’s no need to worry the kids. (Once they’re teenagers, having them listen to the discussion might be a useful education.) All decision makers must be included, though, and that’ll vary depending on who’s in your household.

My budgeting vastly improved once I looked in the mirror and conceded that I was an idiot who was going to buy books before food, and set aside money for it. ¹

When the money level drops below Yellow, you’ve crossed the Red threshold. Your business cannot sustain you. It’s time to get back in the straight workforce.
Front-loading decisions relieves huge amounts of stress. Nightmares of going bust have awakened me at stupid o’clock more than once.

Yes, I discuss the Bucket with my family. Money is our society’s last big taboo, but the successful creators I know all discuss money with their families. If you trust your family with your children and the capybara and to sign for you to have emergency surgery when you’re unconscious because you caught the gangrene, you can discuss business with them too. Your family will call you on your daft decisions, point out perfectly obvious things you never considered, and in general help keep you from driving into the ditch.

Where Red is about recovering from failure, the Yellow threshold is about lifestyle. How long are you willing to endure living at Essential Expenses to have the job you want? No extras. No vacation. No cable TV, no meals out, no nothing. Bupkis. You are deliberately deciding to scrape by for this length of time. This is where you say “I’m gonna give it a year and see what happens.”
If you have family, the answer gets more complicated. Your family wants you to keep doing your art, because it makes you happy. But how many months are they willing to live at Essential Expenses level so that you can have the job you want? That’s the core question. Maybe you’re willing to go forever, but your spouse says a year. Or five years. Or never; it’s full expenses or nothing. Get this all out before you set a number of months.
If you can’t reach agreement, you’re stuck with the time demanded by the person with the shortest tolerance. To do otherwise declares your business is more important than your loved ones.

We haven’t discussed income much, because you don’t control it. While working hard, improving your craft, practicing your art, and learning your trade all enhance your chances of making money, other people’s purchasing decisions are beyond your control. What matters is how much the Bucket’s level rises over a year, or two years, or even five years.

If you made over a year’s worth of Essential Expenses last year, maybe you could make a go of it. If you made over five years’ worth of Full Expenses over the last five years, you could almost certainly make a go of it.
My Essential Expenses for both home and business total $2,500 a month. That’s $30,000 a year. Did I add more than $30,000 to the Bucket last year? If so, and if spending the additional time at my art and my craft has a reasonable chance of increasing my income, I have a decent chance.
If I added less than $30,000 to the Bucket, it’s a lot more iffy. How confident are you that working like an obsessed artist will boost your income?

Your life hits a crisis. Should you jump into full time as a creative? If your business’ yearly income exceeds your Essential Expenses, or even your Full Expenses, and your Bucket is way up in Green, do it.
Again, this never happens. In the real world, we have to act on experience, logic, and hope for just a touch of luck. Everybody’s decision is unique.
In my case, I had chosen a technology job that gave me a lower salary in exchange for being treated like an actual person and a total18 absence of company stupidity. Five years later, the company went under. If I returned to a standard corporate gig, my salary would double. So would my stress and my weight. Family dinners would vanish, just like the bad old days. Over on the artistic side, though, I was making nearly as much from my art as from the day job. The Bucket was in the lower end of Yellow and making more than Essential Expenses.
I discussed the situation with She Who Must Be Obeyed. We agreed that I should jump to writing full time. We would go on Essential Expenses for a year and see what happened.
For the next year, I wrote like an obsessed maniac scribbling on his padded walls. A standard corporate job demands nine- and ten-hour days from their technology staff. I treated my craft and my trade like such a job and refused to spend a penny that wasn’t absolutely necessary. I wrote seven books that year and published six of them. At the end of the year, I broke into Green.

If you can’t drain Essential Expenses from the Bucket every month without slipping into the Red, your trade is not yet viable. It is not yet the time to jump to full-time creation.

Knowing your personal Red and Yellow Thresholds, and documenting your Essential and Full Expenses, lets you easily make those decisions.

Me! ↩︎

A Love Letter to Books

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 18:38:32 +0530

Despite financial troubles there’s a sense in which my childhood was immensely privileged — a pauper in the material world, I was a sultan in the world of ideas.

— Erik Hoel

I started by wanting to share that quote and link on my microblog and then my thoughts turned into a blog post sized comment.
I decided to post it here too, then.

That quote describes my life to a T, even now.

I might be financially down in the dumps, but when it comes to books, my friends and kinfolk, have always somehow found a way to keep me happy and occupied.

The school librarian knew I used the library for what it actually was, a repository of magic and wisdom, and not what most folks used it for, a sick bay.
Which meant at least once a month, I would tell my teachers I was sick, go to the library and read books for an hour and after a year, the librarian would turn a blind eye to my presence too.
I was lost in Verne and Poe and Dickens.

The roadside vendor at the railway station, who I would buy books second hand from, would always keep the keep the newest ones for me.
If I couldn’t pay, he’d lend them to me on the condition, that I return it in day or two
This is where I got to read epic fiction. Tolkien’s worlds and McCullough’s Rome, all entranced me.

As a young hardware engineer making calls all over the city, I got to know the nooks and crannies of Bombay and more importantly I learnt where I could find the books that I wanted to read.
The Strand, and the roadside vendors at Fountain and Matunga and other nooks and cranies across the expanse of my tiny (in area) city became intimate friends.
Crazy animé, Golden age Marvel, “Banned” books, Old scifi and fantasy authors like Asimov and Niven/Pournelle and and newfangled ones like Gaiman and GRRM and the ones who would merge story telling and philosophy like PKD or Anthony DeMello and Carroll.

Friends, family, bosses, coworkers have all been indulgent too.
I own the Ultimate Sandman, and the Complete Calvin and Hobbes, and the Complete Asterix, and a Niven novel that Asimov signed, and lots of Gibran, and lots of Anthony DeMello, and lots and lots and lots of hardbacks thanks to their generosity.

In a life, that has been constantly buffeted by storms, books have been my solace.

I may not not have graduated college, but books have been my education.
Books have gotten me over breakups.
Books have taught me how to save money and make it grow.
Books have made me a better human by passing on the wisdom of the ancients to me.
Books made me healthier by teaching me how to lose weight sustainably.
Books gave me a leg up in life.
Books are helping me reinvent my work life as I change careers to programming.

Books give me a leg up in life.
With books I have been truly privileged and truly blessed!

Ryan Holiday’s Question to Change Your Reading Life

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 05:45:00 +0530

Ryan Holiday, writes about a question, he purports will change your reading life.

And this was somehow surprising to me, because as a bookworm, I have been slipping this question (or a variant of it) into casual conversations with folks all my life.
If I need my reading queue to be always full, I need to always be closing :)

And since it has helped me so much, it’s only fair, I share it with you :)

Here’s Ryan,

Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admired, I would ask them:

What’s a book that changed your life?

And then I would read that book.

[…]

Which books should I read? Should I read books about physics or books about history or books about self-improvement? And even if I knew the genre I preferred, which authors should I read and why? Should I read new books or old books? The books getting rave reviews or the classics or the ones on the featured table in the front of the store?

I didn’t know.

If a book changed someone’s life — whatever the topic or style — it was probably worth the investment. If it changed them, I thought, it might at least help me.

This style of reading, might appear chaotic.
But in my experience, it has brought me the best books with the best lessons, at just the right time.

When I was neck deep in debt, I learnt about money, because I asked people who were good with theirs, on how they did it and what they read.
I learnt about computers, because my vocational teacher at the time (I was learning to fix televisions) thought it apt to shove copies of Tim Ramteke’s Networks, Malvino’s Digital Electronics and Jon Stoke’s Inside the Machine into my greedy little hands. (really expensive books which were way beyond my means.
I went in there to learn to fix televisions and came out learning to fix computer hardware.
I went to my grandpa to learn religion and he taught me the value of being open to good, universal values across all faiths, by giving me copies of both the Bible and the Upanishads. (It’s another matter that I haven’t learnt a thing from either set of books :P but I’ve learnt that kindness, being good, doing good, is universal)
I looked online to see how people dealt with unbearable stress and grief, and I learnt about the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca.
I wanted to have an intentional outlook to life, and I found Shane and his mental models, and through him I found Munger and Taleb.

Each of those moments and authors and books, I listed above, changed my life in fundamental ways, moulding me into what I am today.

It did not matter if the book was contemporary or ancient. (actually, the older the better)

And that brings me to another part of the post I love. To make the ancients and the dead greats your teachers and confidants!

Here’s old man Munger himself,

I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, making friends among the eminent dead, but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better in life and work better in education. It’s way better than just being given the basic concepts.

And here’s Ryan,

We should seek out the literature that has shaped the people we admire and respect — we can cut down even on the discovery costs of looking for those books. They’ve given us a shortcut to the treasure map.
Everybody seems to want a mentor. Meanwhile, they’re passing up the opportunity to learn directly from the people who taught the people you aspire to be like. When someone like John McCain spends his whole life raving about For Whom The Bell Tolls, why would you not check it out? Clearly, it got him through some shit. Peter Thiel credits Rene Girard and Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of The World with shaping his worldview. Clearly, it’s made him some money—you’re not going to pick that up? Angela Merkel—Forbes’ number 1 most powerful women twelve of the last thirteen years—lists Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as her favorite reads. Add them to the list!

And of course, the ancients had already figured this out :)

Seneca writes,

Cherish some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them. […]
We can get rid of most sins, if we have a witness who stands near us when we are likely to go wrong. The soul should have someone whom it can respect, – one by whose authority it may make even its inner shrine more hallowed. Happy is the man who can make others better, not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts!

Choose therefore a Cato; or, if Cato seems too severe a model, choose some Laelius, a gentler spirit. Choose a master whose life, conversation, and soul-expressing face have satisfied you; picture him always to yourself as your protector or your pattern. For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler.

So, go on then.
Ask folks what books changed their lives.
And then go read them and be transformed!

Doing the Verb, is Enough

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This week’s message is stolen, lock stock and barrel from an old Austin Kleon post.
I’ve often wanted to riff off this message, ever since I read it in his book and it changed my life.
But it is perfect and short as it is.

Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work.

“Forget about being a Writer,” says novelist Ann Packer. “Follow the impulse to write.”

Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb).

Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far more interesting than just wanting the noun.

Hat tip to this awesome Ryan Holiday post, which sent me to Austin’s delightful post.
Ryan’s post spoke to what you’d feel like, once you gotten it all. (spoiler alert: nothing at all)

Which is why you need to know your enough.

Quoting a quote from the post,

There is a story I wrote about in Stillness is the Key in which Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, the authors of Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22, respectively, were once at a fancy party in New York. As they stood in the home of some billionaire, Vonnegut needled his friend.

“Joe,” he said, “how does it feel that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel has earned in its entire history?”

“I’ve got something he can never have,” Heller replied.

“And what on earth could that be?” Vonnegut asked.

“The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Enough.

This is actually the best place to work from, to live from.

I agree.
As I age, I’m kind of falling in love with the craftsman’s approach.
The work, the process, the action, the doing, the joy of discovery, the building of grit; all of this is the reward.
And to me, that is enough.

Free! Not Cheap.

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 05:45:00 +0530

I found this image on Austin Kleon’s blog a few days ago, and it set me to thinking about these newsletters of mine.

I would love to think of them, the same way.
They are free, but definitely not cheap :)
Not to toot my own horn, but for all their recent brevity, it still is a process that involves a lot of reading, and thinking and curating and writing. (and a whole lot of slogging)

So yes, in that sense, it’s an expensive labour of love.
I’d like to think of it as something more than free, definitely not cheap but a gift, my gift to you.
Like Seth writes,

A gift costs the giver something real. It might be cash (enough that we feel the pinch) but more likely it involves a sacrifice or a risk or an emotional exposure. A true gift is a heartfelt connection, something that changes both the giver and the recipient.

So true! It works because you accept my gift with grace.
Like our traditional “Namaste” or the Zulu, “Sawubona”, you truly see me.
You acknowledge me and give of your time and your attention and your insight.

And most importantly, you push me to do more.

More Seth,

The key is that the gift must be freely and gladly accepted. Sending someone a gift over the transom isn’t a gift, it’s marketing. Gifts have to be truly given, not given in anticipation of a repayment. True gifts are part of being in a community (willingly paying taxes for a school you will never again send your grown kids to) and part of being an artist (because the giving motivates you to do ever better work).

Plus, giving a gift feels good.

Yes, it does. And I’m grateful you choose to love this craft of mine.

Some Words on Reading

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 05:45:07 +0530

image courtesy, Suzy Hazelwood

Austin Kleon, quoting Octavia Butler on reading more than a book at a time.

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

Ryan Holiday meanwhile, extols the virtues of reading a page a day, books.

Although I certainly read on some days more than others, I work hard to make sure I read something everyday.

That means I am spending time each day with whatever book I am trying to get through, but it means I spend time, daily, with a few specific books (and authors) that I benefit from each time I pick them up. Which is why I am sending this special Reading List Email with some recommendations of books (and sites) I try to look at every single morning.

A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy believed his most essential work was not his novels but his daily read, A Calendar of Wisdom. As Tolstoy wrote in his diary, the continual study of one text, reading one page at the start of each day, was critical to personal growth. “Daily study,” Tolstoy wrote in 1884, is “necessary for all people.” So Tolstoy dreamed of creating a book comprised of “a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people…Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal.” As he wrote to his assistant, “I know that it gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness to communicate with such great thinkers as Socrates, Epictetus, Arnold, Parker… They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning of life and about virtue.” It would take seventeen years for this book to be published, then ninety-three more for the English translation, titled A Calendar of Wisdom.

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Of course, I don’t actually read my own book each morning, but I did design that book to mimic a ritual I have, which is to pick up and read one passage from the Stoics each morning. Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, I want to put something from them in my brain each morning. Unfortunately, there was no book that put them all together until we made The Daily Stoic (which has now sold 500,000 copies and is translated in more than 30 languages). We also put out an email version (and a podcast) for DailyStoic.com that has continued the same service. More than 250,000 people check in with these texts this morning because it’s important. You want to start your day off with wisdom and when it comes to wisdom, there is nobody better than the Stoics.

Amongst other things Ryan also recommends James Clear’s, 3-2-1 Thursday & Maria Popova’s, Brain Pickings.

The Fastest Way to Raise Your Level of Performance

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 05:45:00 +0530

The fastest way to raise your level of performance:

Cut your number of commitments in half.
#

— via James Clear’s latest 3–2–1 missive

Jack Butcher puts it even more eloquently …

Do!
#

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

On Writing as a Discipline, a Practice

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 05:45:00 +0530

My brain is too scattered, so here are a few scattered thoughts on writing and why I write.

On the why?
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Writing, to me, is cathartic exercise.
It acts like a pressure release valve.
It makes me calmer.
The very act of writing clarifies my thoughts, and helps sharpen my mind.
It gives me distance from my thoughts, makes me more objective.
It helps me learn better.
As I was learning Maths last year, the teacher constantly reminded me that learning, true learing and understanding, comes from written practice. Knowledge, he’d say flows upwards, through the pen to your fingers, through your brain and into your mind.

On how often?
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Should you write regularly?
Thrice a day? Once every day? Once a week?
That does not matter.
The point is that you do write.
Often.
And to a rhythm, you find comfortable.

We need a routine.

Tim Ferriss on getting back to basics.

but without a regular writing practice, books eventually became terrifying. It was like committing to an Ironman every few years without doing any training in between. Even if you can muscle things on game day, and even if the outcome looks great from the outside, the lead-up and the internal experience are likely to be anxiety-ridden and unpleasant.

All because I stopped blogging.

Private journaling is a step in the right direction, but it’s not a replacement. I need to face the squirmy discomfort that comes both before and after publishing. So…

I’m getting back in the writing game, and I’m going to publish something on this blog at least once per week.

[…]

I hope that some of the writing will be decent, but a lot of it will be worth taking behind the barn and shooting in the head. Some of it will be long (e.g., unpublished chapters from secret book projects), and some of it will be short (e.g., terrible haiku out of desperation). As long as I publish something — anything — once a week, it doesn’t matter.

On writer’s block
#

Thing you will get stuck? I assure you, you will. :)
I do, all the time.
This post was supposed to be an quickie.
And ~~forty five minutes~~ two hours later, I am still trying to grasp at what exactly I want to share.

The best way out, is through.
Power through the block.
The Daily Stoic, has sage, stoic advice.

What about when a writer gets stuck? What about when the words don’t seem to come? John Avlon, the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Beast described writer’s block as “getting stuck in a desert, a nightmare.” Similarly, Esquire writer Cal Fussman has said this on his ten year war with writer’s block on a particular article: “On the sunniest day of summer the fact that I couldn’t write that piece hung over me like a dark cloud.”

The first key is simple: Do not despair. As Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself as consolation: “Not to feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit you’ve embarked on.” Marcus talked a lot about rhythm, about how important it is to return to it, to stick with it.

Again, this is why routine matters so much.

So you build a habit and a routine to write no matter what—that’s how you overcome writer’s block. John Avlon who we mentioned earlier has said that “writing is a muscle: it gets stronger the more you use it. If you let yourself fall out of the habit, it can be hard to get back in form.” Same goes for author Jeff Goins: “What do I do when I feel blocked? I write through the block.” How would you get rid of runner’s block or talker’s block? By doing those very things.

Of course it’s not just about putting your ass in the chair. The Stoic advocate and bestselling author Tim Ferriss has talked about how his routine involves just “two crappy pages a day.” The goal is just to make progress, anything more ambitious can be intimidating or cause paralyzing anxiety. But those pages add up and eventually crappy pages can be polished and refined in editing.

Being disciplined and establishing a routine can help you beat writer’s block, but the bigger lesson is this: Creating a habit and a routine is true for just about any profession and any desire to live a better life. Routine and habit are the only way to do it. You can’t just randomly improve. You don’t do great work or make great decisions on accident—not, by definition, with regularity anyway.

Routine is everything. In writing, philosophy and in life.

Like Seth says

Streaks are their own reward.
Streaks create internal pressure that keeps streaks going.
Streaks require commitment at first, but then the commitment turns into a practice, and the practice into a habit.

Read my summary of Atomic Habits, to help you build sustainable routines.
If you need more detail, go buy the book. I promise you it’ll be the best two hundred bucks, you will ever spend.

Writing is work
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I used to think, that I could write whatever, I wanted, quite easily.
My language is fairly good. I have a decent vocabulary.
How hard could it be?

But now, after years of writing, it still hasn’t gotten easier much.
It might be easy for other folk, but I still struggle, every time, I put pen to paper.
One thing to note though, if I keep to my rhythm, the flow stays and the words come easier.
So all I need do, is to just keep ~~swimming~~ writing.

Susan Fowler agrees. This is her, reflecting on her writing.

Becoming a Better Writer (and Writing a LOT)
This year was transformative for me as far as my writing skills are concerned. I got to the point where I can now sit down and knock out 3000-5000 good words in one sitting, even when completely exhausted at the end of a long workday. My day job as an editor made all the difference here: since I’m so used to thinking of writing and editing as work, I no longer get writer’s block and writing has lost most of its mythical quality (which is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned). In addition to finishing my memoir, I also wrote a couple of pieces for the Times, two novels (which I am currently revising), and one very joyful screenplay.

Writing Isn’t Magic; It’s Hard Work I used to struggle to get my thoughts onto the page because the first time I put them down, they were complete crap. The second time I put them down, they were also crap. And the third time. And the fourth time. And the fifth time. But each time, what I was writing got a little bit better, and eventually I realized that by approximately the fiftieth time I revised something, I’d have something really good; therefore, if I wanted to write something worth reading, all I had to do was put in the time and effort to revise it enough times. This is a general lesson that I think applies to most things: if you want to get better at something, you have to do it over and over and over again and incrementally improve with each new try; given enough time, you can take something from crap to good (and maybe even to great).

But in the end, it’s worth it.
You’ll become calmer, more objective, more kind, more thoughtful.
You’ll become as immortal as you’d ever be, with your words carrying your thoughts after you are gone. Like Sam says,

That’s what death is, isn’t it?
Forgetting. Being Forgotten.
If we forget where we’ve been, and what we’ve done, we’re not men anymore, just animals.

Writing gives me, us, our humanity!
And so, I write.

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

RIP, Rutger Hauer

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 15:40:28 +0530

I’ve, seen things, you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire, off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams, glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those, moments, will be lost, in time, like, tears, in rain.
Time, to die.

Blade Runner was the first movie I saw, that had a morally ambigous ‘hero’.
And the villain is not bad?
And he saves the hero?
This was the first movie that made me look at the world in shades of grey, in shades of acceptance.

And all that, because of the pitch perfect Roy Batty, speech.
Like Robert Caro writes,

There are sentences that are said to you in your life that are chiseled into your memory.

Tears in rain was the earliest of those for me.
Rest in peace, Rutger Hauer.
And thank you, for changing my life.

Trying to Be Perfect Is a Waste of Time

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 06:00:00 +0530

“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”
— Charlie Munger

That quote opens Shane’s post on the work required to hold an opinion, which remains one of the mental models I use most often.

Which is why I had my ears and my mind open, when Shane began one of his latest posts with,

“Trying to be perfect is a waste of time.”

I’ve inherited dad’s sense of perfectionism, and I always thought that should be something I ought to aspire to, at every skill I attempted to learn.
And for someone to come and say it isn’t so makes me squirm in my head.

But like Anne Lamott writes in Bird by Bird,

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die.
The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”

Shane too, using Taleb-ian ideas of optionality and antifragility makes a wonderful case for why good enough trumps perfect.

The post ends with a swift kick in the rear, to go forth and do …

Don’t be afraid of a challenge.
Don’t be afraid of not being the best.
When you routinely put yourself in situations where you aren’t the most skilled, you learn, you grow, and eventually you adapt.
You build your repertoire of traits and talents, so when change hits you have a wide array of skills.
This flexibility can also give you the confidence to seek change.
The mammal could explore and find new opportunities, but that bird was never going to leave the trees.

Read the whole post here. Will you be as convinced as I?

P.S. If you liked this, you will like more of what I share too :) Go subscribe!

Thank you, Kushal!

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 09:13:25 +0530

Began reading The Warren Buffett Shareholder today.
This is from the preface.

Many contributors to this book remark upon Buffetts’s distinctive teaching style, which tends to instruct people how to think rather than what to think.

And

John Bogle has attended one Meeting, but attests that even one can change your world.

A couple of pages later

Our premise was that Berkshire’s intrinsic value owes a lot to the Meeting and the shareholder community.
Buffett wrote in his 2014 letter …

… This culture grows stronger every year, and it will remain intact long after Charlie and I have left the scene.

Berkshire Hathaway has created a culture of intelligence, inquisitivness, integrity and learning. This culture is part of the “company” in both the corporate meaning of that word and in its sense as a society of people coming together (com) to break bread (pan).

Replace Warren with Kushal, Berkshire with the DGPLUG IRC channel and the shareholder meeting with the Summer Training.
And, nothing changes.

Amidst all the shouting and the craziness, that is the channel generally, it all goes up a hundredfold when the training happens.
Tempers flare. The kids are unruly. Mayhem ensues.

Yet, it all settles down soon enough.
Folks learn earnestly.
Wisdom is shared.
Bonds are made. Friendships built.
Across time and space.

And the Atlas who holds this little world on his shoulders is Kushal.
It is he, who literally, wrote the book on what we learn.
It is he, who pays for and maintains much of the infrastructure we need.
It is he, who conducts quite a few of the topics we learn.
It is he, who bribes, and cajoles old mages to come share their wisdom, with callow, inexperienced youth.
And it is he, who keeps this little corner of the world, warm and cozy and friendly, year after year after year.

The number of folks who owe their careers to him are many.
And the folks who have their lives changed by the training, many more still.
I don’t remember if I ever said this to him, but he has given more to humanity in ten years, what others haven’t in their entire lives.
And somewhere in the middle of the chapter, I found what succintly summarises the way I feel about the Summer Training.

And amid their decades of lessons, they get to the core message of all shareholders at the Berkshire Annual Meeting: if you’ve never been, go; if you always go, keep going.

And for everything you do, thank you Kushal!
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On Writing as an Important Career Skill

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 21:00:00 +0530

Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp, and prolific blogger on why writing is important and how (and why) he uses writing as a hiring filter.

First, in an interview with Chase Jarvis on youtube.

CJ: What are some other really key things that you look for, that you’ve built into your company? Just some of the ones that are maybe more important to you well yeah how do you think about it?

JF: Well a lot of it is the things we don’t want. That’s how we think about it primarily.

… We don’t want to sit in meetings all day, so we don’t have a meetings heavy culture. which means that we write a lot of things down versus say them out loud. So we write write long form and write in detailed passages, so people can absorb everything on their own time versus having a meeting to pull people off their work yeah to sit in a room together, to talk about something that has nothing to do with right now, but you’re having the meeting right now. It’s very inefficient actually, a very inefficient way of doing it, so to do that (work efficiently), to facilitate that we have to hire great writers.

So we don’t hire people who can’t write. Very, very, very, important. That’s actually the probably number one hiring criteria after like, can they do the work? Are they good at the thing? But, the next thing is can they write? And if they can’t write well, we will not hire them.

CJ: So do you do a test? A written communication test?

JF: They do the test for us essentially by submitting coverletters. we look at the cover letter first. We don’t look at the resume, don’t care about previous experience, don’t care about where they went to school, don’t care about any of that stuff. We look at the cover letter, and if they don’t have one, resume gets tossed. Alright, they have to be able to write to us, saying like why they want this job, who they are, what’s important to them why is this was it this job, and not just any job yeah or if it is any job just say that too, but like I want to be able to read it.

And you read the letter and you quickly can tell.
This person can write, this person can communicate, they can express themselves, they’re clear minded, they’re thoughtful, they’re good at nuance, are good at the subtleties that matter, that separate them from somebody else.

They know how to persuade and persuasion is super important in any line of business because you’ve gotta sell, not like sell to a customer always, but selling an idea internally, to your team, whatever it is, right, so, so, so the cover letter is fundamental for us and we’re very very careful about that.
So that’s the writing test it’s not a test, but it is.

And then on a podcast with Tim Ferris

TF: You mentioned, since we’re talking about Warren Buffett, clear thinking and clear writing, which you seem to value very highly. In doing a little bit of homework for this conversation, I’ve read, and you can tell me if this is true or still the case, but how one of your top hiring criteria is whether the person is a great writer. Whether the person can communicate well in written form. I’d love for you to say whether that is still the case or not and why that is the case.

JF: It’s definitely the case. It’s sort of been the case forever for us. It’s the case because first of all, most communication is written these days. First of all, let me step back. We’re a remote company, so especially most communication is written. If you’re going to have, if you’re a local company and you’re having meetings all the time, sometimes verbal is enough. But in most cases, people are writing more and more and more than they ever have before.

One of the most costly and inefficient things is having to repeat yourself, or answer questions about something that should’ve been clear in the first place. If you can’t communicate clearly, you’re communicating probably three or four times more frequently than you need to. That can be really inefficient and really frustrating, extremely frustrating. So, we’ve always looked at clear writing as a prerequisite for every position we have at the company because everybody is supposed to communicate with themselves, with the rest of the company, with their team. Most of it’s done via the written word.

We also, for example – by the way, the first sort of gatekeeper of it is the cover letter. When people apply for a job, if they just send a résumé or whatever, they’re out instantly. It’s not even something we look at. I always want to see a cover letter of some sort. It can just be an email, of course, with an attachment of the résumé or whatever, but I want to see how you open the conversation. How do you describe yourself? Why are you applying for this job and not just any job? You can tell very quickly if someone can explain themselves, if someone can advocate for themselves and advocate for their ideas and their position and who they are and why they should work here.

If they’re clear minded, if they’re friendly, all that stuff comes through in writing. I think if you pay enough attention to the words, you can see a lot of that. Also, for example, when I hire designers, I look at their design, but I look at their writing almost a little bit more. Whenever we hire a designer, when we get down to the last five candidates that we really think could be finalists, we hire them to do a project for us. $1,500 a week and they do a project for us so we can kind of see their actual work. But even more importantly, is we ask them to write up why they did what they did because there’s a lot of great designers out there. But people have to advocate for themselves. I want to see why they did what they did and I want to read their point of view and their line of thinking and how they came up with the solutions.

When I read that, it helps me understand what would it be like to work with that person for real. Are they able to explain why they did what they did? Are they glossing over little details that actually matter? What is it? How do they see their work and how do they write about it? It’s a very important part of the job here at Basecamp. So, yeah, writing’s important in every position. It doesn’t matter what position you’re in, you still have to be a great writer. We typically start by looking at the cover letter. The actual work assignments to get hired here typically involve writing, no matter what the position. I think it’s always proven, in our case, to be a really good indicator of someone’s success here.

Whenever we hire someone, we’re like, I don’t know, the writing wasn’t quite right. It almost always pans out that it turns out that they’re not the right fit for the company, even if their work was great. But they’re just unable to really convince people and persuade people based on a missing bit of – it’s not magic, but I’ll call it that – in the writing. Where you read something and you go, this is great.

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My highlights, from the book #

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My highlights, from the book #

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A Love Letter to Books

Ryan Holiday’s Question to Change Your Reading Life

Doing the Verb, is Enough

Free! Not Cheap.

Some Words on Reading

The Fastest Way to Raise Your Level of Performance

Cut your number of commitments in half. #

Do! #

On Writing as a Discipline, a Practice

On the why? #

On how often? #

On writer’s block #

Writing is work #

RIP, Rutger Hauer

Trying to Be Perfect Is a Waste of Time

Thank you, Kushal!

And for everything you do, thank you Kushal! #

On Writing as an Important Career Skill

My highlights, from the book
#

My highlights, from the book
#

Cut your number of commitments in half.
#

Do!
#

On the why?
#

On how often?
#

On writer’s block
#

Writing is work
#

And for everything you do, thank you Kushal!
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