Book Club 13 - Same As Ever
The following was originally published for Patrons on January 5th 2024. Get caught up at your own pace by joining at the "Post Parisian" level or above!
Morgan Housel’s newest book, Same As Ever, didn’t strike me quite as strongly as his last, but there were still a lot of gems to walk away with. I’ll start this quote he included from James Baldwin:
I’ve spent a lot of the last few years questioning the value of what I always wanted to do for a living, essentially what I find myself lucky enough to do for one right now. When I was younger there was no doubt. Even as I served alongside medical staff in West and Central Africa, my calling to tell stories felt worthy (I never fell pray to the “I’m not curing cancer” doubt demon). But it was a calling I aspired to.
It wasn’t until I found myself telling stories for a living that I suddenly felt unsure that it was a substantial, meaningful vocation. What value could I possibly bring to the table with words and pictures? I had existential whiplash.
I realize now that it wasn’t a unique doubt in the work itself. It was the same feeling I always had with the work at hand. Just the way I doubted my value working IT for an NGO, or supporting doctors across America in my brief-yet-too-long stint as a consultant. What lay beneath was a more pernicious doubt. A doubt that I hold anything of value to offer in the moment - regardless of what I’m doing - a doubt of my self worth.
In a coaching call a few weeks back, the only one in which I opted to really ask a question, I wrote: “My why can’t matter if I don’t believe I matter.” That’s one of the core pillars of my ongoing struggle, but one on which I’m happy to say real ground has been won. I've learned to stand on my own two feet. I’m not without doubts, but I lean into them now and wear them down with persistence.
Mathematically Inevitable
How about some fun ideas that Housel jumps into (but also felt like he visited in his last book)? One that I keep thinking about is the concept that, mathematically, miracles should be happening to us at a rate of once a month.
This is compounded by the fact that we can see the once-in-a-lifetime events that happen to almost anyone anywhere instantaneously on our phones. When the world was disconnected and all you heard about was local news, with occasional punctuations of world events weeks after they’d transpired, it didn't feel like there was a whole lot going on.
A nearby farmer’s sheep fell ill, the school play was a resounding success, and the old bakery has rats again. If a one-in-a-million catastrophe is going to happen, it’ll take decades before it happens to a sleepy town of a thousand residents. But connect us to all eight billion people, and one-in-a-million events are happening to someone every day. Both for good and for ill (but unfortunately mostly for ill), we hear about those events happening whenever and wherever they occur. We know instantly when a plane explodes in Japan, and minute-by-minute updates of whatever atrocity is being carried out in a part of the world you couldn’t pin on a map.
It doesn’t mean the world is going to hell (though it doesn’t disprove that theory either). It just means we can see things that have always been happening in ways we were never able before. It does give me some comfort. And for the better, it means that if you just keep trying, whatever it is you’re pursuing, you increase the odds of its inevitability.
Just Keep Running
Which brings us to Alice in Wonderland:
It’s an imperative to keep running. It’s like that Tweet said that Casey Neistat turned into a short film: “Life is like going the wrong way on a moving walkway. Stand still and you go backwards. Walk and you stay put. Gotta hustle to get ahead.”
This can feel exhausting, especially with the word ‘hustle’ thrown in there. But there’s encouragement in it too because, as Housel notes, competitive advantages are often exactly what lead to their own demise. It’s a warning to anyone who has an advantage, because getting ahead often leads one to rest on their laurels. But for those of us sprinting on that walkway to catch up, there’s a good chance that those ahead of us have slowed their run to a walk. If you keep at it, you’re gaining ground.
This Week’s Haul
This week has been lighter on content consumption, so it’s a bit of a flighty collection, however I still found a few gems that might tickle your fancy.
The B1M did a rundown of the 10 biggest construction projects expected to finish in 2024 and the first three are all in Paris. I stopped watching after those because I’ve been a littlebusy this week, but it was nice to get caught up on the Olympics, cleaning of the Seine, and the projection that Notre Dame will actually open by the end of the year.
Speaking of rundowns, Ordinary Things’ 2023 recap was a gem and reminded me of just how much happened in the last year. Half of it felt like a decade ago. It also highlights the above point, that we are so well-connected that the events of a single year can feel overwhelming.
Looking for a networked video storage solution? I am. Or at least I’m dreaming of one (they’re so expensive), and Standard Story Company delivered on my fantasy. This video is painfully long for anyone not interested in the subject, I’m sure. But if you are overburdened with 4k video files, you might watch to the end. That’s me confessing that I did, in fact, watch to the end.
And one final nerdy insert: have you ever wondered why Apple USB cables are so dang expensive? In fact, why are there such massive disparities between cheap little cables and ridiculously pricey ones? Adam Savage has you covered - again I didn’t watch the whole thing but the visuals they produce scanning these cables stuck with me all week.
What have you been reading? Let me know in the comments below, and have a great weekend!
Almost finished reading “Sea of the Unknown” and I am loving it. Thank you Jay.