Ray Dalio writes in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order that there is a natural sequence that leads to the rise of empires:

1. New leadership takes initiative to create a good system,
2. that involves investing in strong education,
3. including work ethics and civility,
4. which leads to innovation and the creation of new technologies,
5. improving the productivity and competitiveness of the country.
6. This creates great economic output,
7. revitalizing the country’s capital markets.
8. When the country opens up, the world is willing to trade,
9. which positions the currency as a major reserve currency,

It seems to me that there’s a translation of these dynamics on a personal note. Something along these lines:

1. Learn.
2. Apply what you’ve learned in inventive new ways.
3. Use that differential knowledge or skill to turn it into income.
4. Reinvest that income in personal growth.
5. Accumulate savings over time and achieve financial freedom.

In New Atlantis, Francis Bacon describes Salomon’s House, the great scientific institution on the island of Bensalem. When one of its Fathers (a senior member) explains its purpose to the European visitors, he says:

“The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”

One post from the Framework 13, running Omarchy. Testing the git plugin.

I liked the dance between the characters. I loved the visuals. But I was a bit removed from the story. I never really cared too much.

Sirat is a crazy journey. First into the senses. Then into the land. Then into despair. Finally into a fight for life.

I will not forget it in a long while.

The backdrop of the very real to highlight the existential. Looks like a documentary, feels like poetry. It’s Herzog.

What did I just saw?

Same weird vibes as The Vegetarian. What is this about? Weird extents people can take kindness to? The images are powerful, though. I couldn’t take my eyes from them, even when they were repulsive. Some Kubrick, some Almodóvar, some Tarantino. World building in a world which is our own but slightly off, then progressively more off.

The ideal when playing is to react quickly, move fast, and remain precise. That’s how thinking should work too.

To reach that level, you need deliberate practice: first internalize the foundational moves, then build upward from there.

This follows an evolutionary process: simpler elements combine to form more complex ones, and so on. For complex patterns to emerge, the simpler ones must be executed with almost zero effort.

Darran Anderson can see through the drapes of culture and provide insight into what beliefs are responsible for a piece of media. It’s like a decoder of the Matrix and a pleasure to read. I love that I found a hub for his writings at Unherd.

As I ride my bike through the streets of San Sebastián, I glance back at Dámaso riding behind me, checking whether he’s keeping up. His injured knee could slow him down; the steady stream of pedestrians crossing the bike lane might spell trouble.

Coincidentally, I stumbled upon Orpheus attempt at bringing Eurydice from the dead, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for which he accepted “that he must not turn his eyes behind him, until he emerged from Avernus”:

They took the upward path, through the still silence, steep and dark, shadowy with dense fog, drawing near to the threshold of the upper world. Afraid she was no longer there, and eager to see her, the lover turned his eyes. In an instant she dropped back, and he, unhappy man, stretching out his arms to hold her and be held, clutched at nothing but the receding air. Dying a second time, now, there was no complaint to her husband (what, then, could she complain of, except that she had been loved?).

The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima — a story as small as the island where it unfolds.

In an age deafened by the noise of grandiose narratives, world-shaking events, how rare it feels to listen instead to a small, private story. The murmur of the waves in the shore, I guess.

But within that small place, everything is contained: the trembling wonder of first discovery, the fierce joy of competition, the quiet nobility of desire pursued with honor.

It reminds us that there’s no need to change the world in order to live fully. For two young people on a forgotten island, life already brims with meaning.

A rich life is about HOW, not WHAT.

Parable of the Sower is the terrifying narration of a world too plausible. Or maybe it’s that Lauren is so relatable. She’s a sharer, but it’s us who share her pain and hope through her journey.

Simple words, first person view, like coming along the ride with someone you first relate too, then like, then admire.

Earthseed is a good name. In every disaster there’s the seed of growth, watered by hope. From the ashes of this world, amid the survivalist instincts of people regressed into animals, a light can shine to bring us back into compassion, community and development.

God is change, that I know.

A pencil is forgiving. It gives you permission to suck.

A pencil is daring. Be bold. Who cares?

A pencil is a beginners tool. Beginners only have upside. Beginners are enthusiastic.

A pencil thinks outside of the notebook box. It draws, it writes big fat headers, it creates diagrams… it is actually uncomfortable following those lines.

A pencil, in the end, frees you from expectations, lets you be playful, releases whatever you hold inside. Who wouldn’t want that?

Buy a pencil, use your pencil, embrace your pencil mindset.

Ardalén is the best comic I’ve read in a long while. Pure poetry: the premise, the visuals, the story. What role does memory play in our sense of self? What happens when our memory fails? Can we appropriate the memories of others?

The beauty of an image, of an idea: a castaway ashore.

Speed as the most important non-functional requirement of a tool. Speed is achieved through lightness. Or is it the other way around?

The pattern of a stream and it’s sediment. In accounting, the journal and the balance sheet. Events flow in the journal, but they consolidate in the balance sheet. The balance sheet represents a point in time picture of something. The journal represents the constant flow of events, each one altering—to a higher or lesser degree—the balance.

This pattern is relevant in note taking, as I see a stream of notes coming in and out, and my understanding of the world gets changed. But, at any point in time, I could draw a picture of what that understanding is.

Notes captured are events in the journal. My own writing and publishing activity, my balance sheet at the point of writing.

I wake up and don’t want to meditate, or workout.

There are two ways to deal with this.

One is through will: overcome your mood, overpower your mind.

The other is through presence: realize this is just your mind doing its things, accept it as a natural, dissolve its power.

“All that you touch You Change.
All that you Change Changes you.
The only lasting truth Is Change.
God Is Change.”
—Earthseed @ The Parable of the Sower

Just finished Come and See. What a trip. What an experience. Like it’s coming from a place that is not rational or logic and where storytelling is not about touching minds but about punching your gut. Some shots and scenes are indelibly strong. A Tarkovsky war game. I can see how this has inspired so many others.

“Everything changes and nothing is lost.”
—Ovid, referred to by Annea Lockwood in 32 Sounds.

When designing for cognitive bandwidth:

If you need to organize a bunch of items, it’s better to see them all.

If you need to process a bunch of items, it’s better to do it one by one.

The email interface should reflect this. When I want to organize emails—trash some, flag some as important, archive others, etc—it’s ok to see the full list. But when I want to deal with them, it’s better to NOT see the list. That sidebar is killing me every time I pretend to process my email.

(In the previous example, I’m assuming that the organization of emails can be done without processing them, i.e. just by looking at sender and quick summary, I can decide where to place it)

“I think this question of why do we like music is a really profound question,” Brian Eno said. “It’s as interesting and as deep as ‘How did the universe start?’ It’s a huge question.”

“Last day with 10 years,” said Fer today.

Indeed maybe I should start celebrating the last day before my birthday. Celebrating what we had and we’re losing, more than the milestone. I thought it was genius.

You can understand something but you still don’t know it. Only if you experience it you know it. Being a father or losing one. You can understand them. You don’t know them until you have experienced them.

It’s like those AI agents I had to talk about. I didn’t knew them until I programmed them. The exposure to their reality is a different space. It’s impossible to put it into words. I did understand, but didn’t know. Nothing significant changed in my understanding, in that logic, but still everything changed in my relation to the topic. I cannot put it into words.

Only experience counts. Cult of done. Cult of experience. Don’t write about what you think, only write about what you have done.

“But I do nothing worthy!” Wrong. We do many things. They might not be Guinness worthy, but we do them. They are significant. They teach you. But you need to live them.

Being alive and being thinking is a tragedy. While you think you are not truly knowing. You are just understanding. You are simply living a decaffeinated version of life. A bland version. A watered down version.

As easy as biting your next orange with your full attention… as easy as taking your next breath in full awareness. Only when you do this you are aware of its significance. In the realm of reason, it won’t break any record. In the realm of life, it brings the color back.

Maybe being punctual is based on the same underlying pattern as being productive.

What was dark is now light. What once was cold is now warm. How many more of these? Truly the texture of life. Unqualified, it is the cycle, the vibration, that creates the texture. No right or wrong. No good or bad. It’s the alternation of states that create texture.

As per methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Always state principles before designing the method.

A hidden notebook in the glovebox of an old car.
An abandoned project due to lack of funding.
A judicial report that was never processed.

Industrial Revolution created dreams of possibility. Verne captured everyone’s imagination with his, but there’s so many others.

Those dreams shaped generations. Because one thing of this species is true: our intentions shape the world.

AI will repeat the cycle. Let those dreams come through, and let those dreams be expansive, inclusive and nurturing.

Reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I keep coming back to the idea of caring for one’s tools. I had a similar thought while watching Silo: when everyone is given the same rooms to live in, the true difference lies in how each person tends to theirs.

So I reflect on my own tools—what is it that I should be tending to? The answer is clear: my body, my mind, my time. These three require constant care. Those who tend to them with steady attention—not with obsession, but with presence—and who respond to what the moment demands, are the ones who truly succeed.

Dump: just write down whatever you capture. You can be wasteful. You can be verbose. You shouldn’t think too much.

Distill: summarize in concise bullet points that someone can process in 30sec.

Do: commit to take some action.

I don’t know what it is with this show but I love it. I can find all characters relatable and I cannot wait for the drama to unfold. Sam Walter’s appearance is glorious. Walton Goggins has a predictable story but the guy s so cool that I just don’t care.

Probably the weakest of the 3 seasons, but I binge-watched it anyway.

From the suggestions of Sam Altman on productivity:

• Prioritize for momentum. It’s not choosing for maximum impact, but choosing for maximum momentum. If you’re starting up, it’s not a major move, but a small one that will get things going.
• Make lists. Yep.
• Full spectrum LED light. I’m trying it now. It does help.

As long as one acknowledges an arrow of progress/evolution/development, then a prevalence order is established, a hierarchy. Something is better than other thing. Someone is better than someone else.

But the late discourse on diversity and inclusion has been rooted in the idea of: “everyone is equal”. That idea is incompatible with the arrow above.

The wielding of good natured ideas like diversity and inclusion by shallow individuals does more harm than good.

While we are all constructed around a common scaffolding, people are born with different capabilities and tendencies. We all establish a different relationship with life’s resistance, and therefore develop in different ways.

Everyone grows; everyone is in a certain common line, but we’re all at different positions on that line. And some, even though it’s hard to say, are more advanced than others.

The point is what that we cannot agree on what that line is and therefore the relative position can be inverted just by interpreting the right direction of the arrow.

The fact that machines will soon surpass human thinking will divide people into two groups: those with low consciousness and those with high consciousness. High-consciousness individuals will harness these tools to improve themselves and benefit those around them. In contrast, those with low consciousness will either use the technology to exploit others or be exploited by it. Navigating this future will require a deep presence of mind—an ability to discern what truly furthers one’s growth from what is merely convenient. This journey has already begun; what’s changing now is the speed. It’s about to accelerate—massively.

One day, an old donkey falls into a deep well.

The farmer tries to figure out what to do, but decides, given the age of the animal and the danger of the deep open well, that the best course of action is to fill the well and close it off.

He begins to shovel dirt into the well. After several hours of work, the farmer is nearly done filling the well, when suddenly, to his amazement, the old donkey leaps out from the dirt-filled well and trots off into the pasture.

The farmer realizes: Rather than resigning itself to its fate with each shovel of dirt that hit its back, the donkey had shaken the dirt off and stepped up on top of it.

As the farmer had continued to shovel dirt into the well, the clever donkey _used the dirt_ to get closer to its escape.

“He who seeks truth shall find beauty.
He who seeks beauty shall find vanity.
He who seeks order shall find gratification.
He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed.
He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self-expression.
He who seeks self-expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance.
Arrogance is incompatible with nature.
Through nature, the nature of the universe and the nature of man, we shall seek truth.
If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.”

—Moshe Safdie, architect.

Have we created a weapon of mass destruction for that critical age where we’re developing self-awareness?

Bullying and abuse is nothing new, but we might have exponentially increased their incidence and impact with social media.

Not sure how to protect them. Limiting access is not a choice.

That was weird. The atmosphere was great, though. Great photography. That shot in the house, in the dark, in the home office, showing the depth of the kitchen.

In any case, one more unique character in the Nicolas Cage filmography that is now nothing short of legendary.

A well-known story, executed impeccably. Gothic horror crafted by someone who clearly loves the genre. The script is sharp, and every actor feels perfectly cast—Lily-Rose Depp, Ralph Ineson, and of course, Willem Dafoe.

And yet… something’s missing. It’s all stunning form, but lacks emotional depth.

If you stretch the story too much, you stop caring. At least the spectacle was magnificent. And Denzel… he’s like 3 notches above everything else.

Modern luxury is the ability to think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly, and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four.

—Justin Welsh

1. A hopeful actress from the provinces arrives in LA.
2. She loses a coveted role to a girl backed by the mafia.
3. Despite the rivalry, they begin working together and fall into a relationship.
4. The mafia girl starts flirting with the director.
5. Consumed by jealousy, the provincial actress kills her.
6. The mafia captures the actress, but they crash while taking her away.
7. She escapes and hides in a remote house where…
8. GOTO 1

The story is conventional, uninteresting. It’s the how that makes the picture relevant.

Natalie Goldberg writes in Writing Down the Bones that “if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.”

I think I understand now what details mean. Nothing new will be said, but the details will make the difference.

There’s a piece of advice I still struggle with, but that I’m more and more convinced lies at the heart of meaningful productivity, successful creative work, and a more vibrant life in general. That advice is: act fast. Move quickly. When you get a good idea, make it your default policy to put it into practice as soon as you reasonably can.

–Oliver Burkeman

—What do you have for breakfast to have all that energy?
—I have good news for breakfast. That’s what I have. Good news.

…that he is craving attention, a sucker for likes; that when one has tasted the sweet drug of admiration, one is trapped by it, and will forever seek the love of others and therefore will be a slave. And social media will catalyze the drug, and will have you posting and checking, and looking at the heart count, and posting and checking again, in a cycle that will administer the drug until it kills you.

Designed to minimize the time it takes to repair or adjust.

How does a system change when the priority is not to optimize its function but optimize the ability to be repaired?

Some times this is not a trade-off but some times it is.

Elisa Gabbert makes us doubt whether a memory failure is really a failure of the multiverse matrix, a loophole into an alternate reality that somehow you had access to, and now you access it randomly.

The Big Short is a great lesson of first principles thinking. Never assume anything just because it’s commonly understood to be that way. Ask why and how sufficient times do that your 10 year old kid can understand it. If you cannot explain to a 10 year old, you haven’t reached the first principles. Even then, if you haven’t seen it with your eyes, you might not understand it still. Always look at the source code.

I bought Pedro Paramo in Mexico, as one does. I started reading it with a Mexican voice. Slowly faded in a Spanish one when I came back home. What a pity that I couldn’t hold it for longer. Maybe I should read it again when I’m back in Mexico.

They are all dead, or maybe not, maybe it’s all a dream, maybe it’s just my imagination. I don’t know what I’m reading anymore. So blurry, so entangled. But I stay for the images. The images are powerful. Remind me of my childhood, in father’s village. The water drops, the long rainy days, the light of the sun in el patio. My mind wandered back to those days of my past. Or is it my future? Or is it where I’ll go when I’m dead?

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke. It’s a comic but it’s a documentary or a visual essay or… I don’t know what it is. But it’s good. It looks at loneliness from all angles, the emotional, the biological, the cultural, the personal. It’s an inspiration in form and in approach. An example to follow. Austin Kleon books are books with pictures. This is a comic that reads like an essay. Remarkable.

A question and a blank space can trigger you or can block you.

A question and a sample answer can inspire you or can limit you.

To act compulsively is to be driven by impulse.
To act rationally is to weigh each step.
To act consciously is to align with what the moment demands.

Just watched the documentary The Greatest Night in Pop about the making of the song We are the World.

I noticed how some of the most talented singers during that night didn’t make it to supernova stardom while others, without such musical or vocal gifts, did.

People shine because of their inner energy, they project a vibe that you connect with. Then you cannot get enough of it. Some talent is necessary, but it’s the energy projected that you want.

The only way to radiate that energy is to remove all layers of expectations, fears and self-awareness, and expose yourself fully.

I don’t think everybody carries that energy, but if you do, then only full abandon will work.

And now I should start singing ‘Let it go, let it gooo 🎵’

It’s a meh for me. Loved the first act. Stylistically remarkable. The message doesn’t hit. A bit childish.

Sometimes you have an idea. You explore some ramifications. You go on a detour. Some paths lead you nowhere. Some others open new ideas. After those explorations, you might end up in the same place, together with your original idea. You might think it was all a waste of time. But in reality you are a different person even if you returned to the same place. You gained depth. Depth is hard to define but we all recognize it.

After years, I’ve been unable to type Dvorak unconsciously. I still need to think about the keypresses. After even more years, I’ve been unable to type Querty consciously, I mean, not look at the keyboard and know exactly where the keys are. But because I can type Querty unconsciously, I actually type faster in Querty.

So that’s my dichotomy: Dvorak is more satisfying but taxing; Querty is faster but more frustrating.

The algorithm has offered me this. I think I’m in the next level now. Will keep you posted.

You can design the best canvas for the content, or you can design the best canvas for the receiver. We naturally do the former, but we should actually do the latter.

When you build a presentation, you naturally follow the content, so the presentation gets shaped according to it. What I argue is that the presentation should be shaped according to the receiver, so that, given a receiver, all presentations should have the same canvas, and then you cram the content within it.

Finding this use case of ChatGPT very useful: choosing music to pair with what I’m reading.

Last ones:

• The White Book by Han Kang with Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt.
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo with Async by Ryuichi Sakamoto

Oh, wow. I was done with the printing on my DZines and the I saw this

I’m certainly back to trying a printed media.

It is that neat office that gets into my head. Everything in it’s right place. Not a single item out of place. 4 hangers for 4 employees. Zero waste as a design principle. And yet… all that space. So much empty space. Whitespace. Is it peaceful or is it eerie?

Your blog post is a fascinating blend of personal creativity and tech innovation, how do you see this approach scaling within a banking environment?

Self-expression happens in specific conditions between slack and tension. Just like a guitar string—too tight, it’s out of tune and might snap. Too loose, it won’t make a sound. Get it just right, and it will sing.

A banking environment (or any other public company of a certain size, for that matter), is a difficult environment to cultivate this condition for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s subject to the pressure of having to compete against others to become the preferred option of our clients, while delivering the expected returns to shareholders. These tensions tighten the string.

Second, the string is built of many different individuals with very different breaking points and resonance frequencies. Getting all of them to sing under the same string tension is very difficult.

Besides, the adaptive nature of these conditions makes it impossible to articulate recipes that one can apply and expect the same results. Fostering innovation and personal creativity becomes, for all we know right now, the art of surfing waves that are not fully in our control but we can aim to perceive, interpret and respond to.

Perhaps one day our understanding of the human condition will allow us to read the patterns of the water and apply well known formulas.

I dread that day.

1. When managing IT, this LTS frame is always helpful:
   1. People
   2. Service
   3. Risk/Audit
   4. Finances
   5. Projects
2. You transform by “including and transcending”, not by “replacing the existing”.
3. When you accept your limitations, you start appreciating team work, you seek collaborators that complement you, you truly appreciate diversity.

Tools, methods and artifacts should be limited to the span of the human attention, to the cognitive bandwidth of our minds.

There’s no point in having 400 different components eligible to assemble a new application. A human will not be able to hold them in her mind.

But interestingly, AI can assist curating and sifting through the complexity.

When you start a wave, you ride it till the end, then you paddle up to catch a new one.

You don’t stop in the middle of a wave just because you saw a better one coming.

Driving on ice. Try. Try again. You can think of the physics, but it’s the body who learns, not the mind. Try again. I see it now. Yes, I’m starting to get it. Try again. Yes. I got this.

At that point, you are on to the next level. Basic moves are internalized and new concerns become visible, available. Everything works through this type of composition. Notes, melodies, chords, chord progressions. You level up to higher levels of abstraction, integrating the lower ones as you internalize them as second nature.

There’s an arrow of development, and it’s that of assembling components into higher and higher levels, for which you need to integrate the lower ones, and only repetition does it, not thought.

A human being has a lifespan of 80 years ≈ 1.000 months.
It takes 9 months to build one.
Build time is % of lifespan.

Through a patchwork of images of the past and the present we assemble the picture of grief and confusion and discovery and connection.

The book is very brief but reads slowly. So much whitespace give the words a mythical aura of poetry, of private journals, of intimacy.

As you let yourself get drawn into the images and the thoughts and memories evoked, it feels like a prayer.

I loved the heartfelt portrayal of Warsaw.

I read it listening to Arvo Pärt, specially Spiegel im spiegel.

Two tools can help internalize an idea:

• Images
• Stories

When communicating an idea, always use at least one of the two.

“One of the techniques they teach to get rid of a resentment toward somebody is to pray for him or her to get everything that you want for yourself in life—to be loved, to be successful, to be healthy, to be rich, to be wonderful, to be happy, to be alive with the light and the love of the universe. It’s a paradox, but it works.”

— Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

43 reading tips from Naval Ravikant

1) Read what you love until you love to read.
6) The smarter you get, the slower you read.
14) Most books should just be summaries so I leave most books unfinished and only make it all the way through a few. The best ones can’t be easily summarized.
8) If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it.
9) Read books, avoid news.

It the beginning was the personal page. Think Geocities for those that were online back then.

Then was the blog, a simpler form of publishing, restricting the user to a chronological sequence of entries.

Then was the social network, where the social graph allowed the Feed to exist: a chronological sequence of entries of everyone you followed.

Then came the social media, where platforms started introducing algorithmically curated content in your feed, trying to hook you in the screen for longer.

Today, there’s just digital media an algorithmic feed of content with unclear chronology and unrelated to your social network.

Austin Kleon regularly uses 4 notebooks:

• Pocket notebook for random annotations on the go.
• Logbook for recording everything he does in a day.
• Commonplace book for capturing quotes.
• Diary where he writes daily at least 3 pages, in a more creative fashion (collages, new designs, etc).

This technique of interviewing yourself as a way to structure ideas and get them out of your head.

You need to really step out of yourself to ask the relevant question. What would an audience be more interested in knowing?

You really need to step out of yourself to feel that someone else is asking you the question. Imagine yourself in a stage.

Train your body as you want your mind to be.

Want to be more flexible? Train flexibility.
Want to be more mentally strong? Train strength.
Want to be more resilient? Train resistance.
Want to have a faster mind? Train speed.

If someone would have arrived at my wedding, someone vaguely known, a face that is barely recognizable, an old friend of my father, perhaps, he would have come and said: you see the suspenders you are wearing now, the ones you bought for the wedding because you had none? Those very same suspenders will hold your son’s overpants when he does his motorcycle test, when he is 15 years old. If someone would have said that, it would have blown my mind away.

What happens when she decides to regress into a plant?

One responds with shame. The shame that comes from the fear of not fitting, of not following the established course.

One responds with lust. The lust that comes from craving the new, the different, the unique. Something that will brought us from anonimity.

The last responds with love and compassion. The compassion that comes from not understanding and not caring about it anymore. From understanding that some things are beyond reason and probably within those there are truths that are deeper than the ones we’re fed with.

I read this book listening to Metamorphosis, by Philip Glass.

Excluding others is (perceived as) the most accessible way to belong to a group one is desperate to fit into.

Those who fear exclusion are often the ones who exercise it most aggressively.

Vicious cycle fueled by basic survival instincts, rooted in fear.

How to break this?

Philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche on enjoying the process: 

“The end of a melody is not its goal.”