Fire and Knowledge

Remarkable coincidences are rare. But they do happen.

I ran into this one the other day. Puzzle expert Cory Calhoun noticed that this text from Shakespeare:

To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

can be rearranged (anagramed) into:

In one of the Bard’s best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

Sometimes remarkable coincidences are, in fact, just remarkable coincidences.

I have onset insomnia. I lie awake at night for a couple hours thinking about all the things I’m going to do or what I did that day. I think about new ideas. I think about new businesses I could start, projects I should do, essays I should write. It’s ridiculous, but I’ve done it ever since I can remember.

I was browsing Tim Ferris’s blog and found out he has the same thing. Here is what he does about it:

I have — as do most males in my family — what is called “onset insomnia.” I don’t have trouble staying asleep, but I have a difficult time falling asleep, sometime laying awake in bed for 1-2 hours.

There are two approaches that I’ve used with good effect without medications to address this: 1) Determine and set a top priorities to-do list that afternoon for the following day to avoid late-night planning, 2) Do not read non-fiction prior to bed, which encourages projection into the future and preoccupation/planning. Read fiction that engages the imagination and demands present-state attention.

I’m often guilty of reading non-fiction before bed. The worst is if I read something about business or entrepreneurship or new ideas. I’ll end up thinking about it for hours while I stare at the ceiling.

Writing a to-do list the day before is a great idea. I’ve been trying to do that simply because it helps to have a focus as soon as I start my day. But this gives me another reason to do it.

If you don’t make mistakes you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.

—Frank Wilczek, as quoted in Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007), p. 279.

Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth.

—Niccolo Machiavelli, as quoted in Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007), p. 220.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.

—An African proverb as quote in Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat (2005), p. 114.

Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting article on “late bloomers” in The New Yorker. He argues that some artists have their best works young, and others when they are old — two kinds of geniuses.

I guess that means some of us have a second chance!

Once on an airplane, I leaned over to tie a shoelace just at the moment that the person in the seat ahead of me threw his seat back into full recline, and I found myself pinned helplessly in the crash position. It was only by clawing the leg of the man sitting next to me that I managed to get myself freed.

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. 249.

A task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline…. The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus…. Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

—Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007), p. 75.