Guide your learning through pain.
The unflattering truth of life is that the bulk of history is filled with astronomical failures
One of society’s problems is that we are eager to share the stories of the successful 20% while ignoring the bottom 80%. So it doesn’t surprise me when a person who wants to take on a particular venture deliberately ignores all the individuals who failed down the same road, making his future success seem almost certain.
But the unflattering truth of life is that much of history is filled with many failures. Successes were the exception, not the rule. But we chose to ignore this fact and exactly how does it end?
Here are my recommendations for the month:
What I Learned losing a million dollars by Brendan Moynihan and Jim Paul.
Reading about failed ventures makes my heart squeeze. You get this feeling when genuine ambition fueled by a “track record” of successes comes crashing down in a failed business venture, relationship, family, but-loads of debt, and worse; wasted time.
Failure is never fun to hear about, but there is so much we can learn from it. As explained by Taleb, the Via Negativa principle suggests that we know what is wrong with greater clarity than what is right. Simply because what is right now, just hasn’t failed yet. but we know for sure what has failed will not work. The catch, however, is that we can only learn from failure if we don’t encounter a failure that kills us, that is, we don’t blow up.
This book is a repository of the experiences of a failed trader in the financial markets. His unprecedented rise and eventual fall. It is not funny to read but it is full of insights.
Although I read it twice, I still made the same trading mistake in the crypto market of May 2021, even though I didn’t get completely wiped out.
A must-read for every investing Millennial or GenZ.
Man’s Search for Meaning by: Viktor E. Frankl
The past month has been filled with a but-load of pain. But man has to be a man. This book was my sincere companion in those dark times. Surprisingly the accounts of the prisoners in this book strike me as similar to my experiences in High School.
It was refreshing to gain knowledge of individuals who, despite their seemingly hopeless predicament, could transcend their present difficulties, face “the ubiquity of suffering” and discover an adequate guiding truth.
One painful excerpt from this read is when the writer who on watching a fellow prisoner going through a visibly excruciating nightmare, contemplated whether to wake him to end his pain but soon realized that whatever was in that dream would be better than the reality of their situation and decided not to.
If I gained anything from this book, it would be these two things:
First is that an individual’s experience of pain is all-consuming, however great or small. So we cannot say person A’s pain is small compared to B’s. Regardless, said pain consumes the person’s mind when he/she thinks about it. Second is the instrumentality of logotherapy, particularly the fact that anticipatory anxiety can be counteracted by hyper-intention.
Try reading this book.
See you guys next month! Don’t forget to share with your friends.