Success is a mess

I’m someone who learns by doing. I need exposure, practice, and feedback so I can continue to improve and hone my craft.

I'd go so far as to say we are all this someone. We all learn different things from doing different things, but I'm not aware of anybody who doesn't learn things by doing things.

Your experience resonates with me and mine, and I too am trying to figure out where the lines are, how best to balance the productivity gains we’re making today and the opportunity cost we’re paying for those gains.

It’s a dog eat dog world...

Unless and until we decide otherwise.

The Blog fka the Blog with No Name is now dba The 1001.

Everything is a tradeoff.

Pep Guardiola is first a dancer, second Mourinho's nemesis, and third a genius endlessly troubled by the impossibility of the game he loves providing him with the control he craves.

Mikel Arteta, Pep's disciple, is first and foremost a sicko.

There's all sorts we can learn from these two madmen and their race for the title, starting with how everything is a tradeoff. When you start looking at your favourite game as a short blanket, always forcing the choice between a cold head or cold feet, it makes more sense. 

Despite the best efforts of the just try harder and be better at everything crowd, the same goes for the workings of the “real world”. Few easy fixes. No free lunch.

If you've been enjoying the Blog, please consider subscribing via Substack! No slop, no spam, and it really helps with the wretched algo, and therefore with the impact. (Nothing at all to do with my ego you understand.)

Give my Blog a name!

At long last, a way to save lives cost-effectively and get your name on the building.

A younger me was on record saying he’d sooner sit in a bath of beans than run a marathon. Sacrificing a portion of dignity still seems preferable to sacrificing both knees. These days, though, I’m more based, so I’m putting something more precious than my knees or my dignity up for sale to the highest bidder.

Blind auction. All proceeds to GiveWell. Deadline day Sunday, 26 April.

Nerd Blog Power Rankings.

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

And in the process explains how our best and brightest consultants naming F1 fantasy teams after their employer proves we need regulation of AI right now.

Thanks for reading, and especially for commenting!

There are a few reasons for training on golf:

• Biographical. I was introduced to golf as a teenager, not chess, and I spent thousands of hours since then playing and watching it. Maybe there are stories like Rory's in chess, grand masters who persevered through a decade of struggle to overcome the odds and themselves, in which case I'd like to read those stories too.
• Social. As far as I can tell Rory is much more famous than any chess player, and therefore faced greater social pressure to perform. Stress does strange things to us, and it's useful to study people in high-stress environments. (And I expect his fame makes his story more likely to get clicked on, which also helps if your goal is to be an on-ramp.)
• Environmental. There are some "real life" environments more like chess, and there are some "real life" environments more like golf. One difference is the highly chaotic nature of golf. It isn't amenable to being solved algorithmically, at least not with the algorithms we currently have. Imperceptible differences in stance, swing, contact, and so on and so on, can be the difference between a slice, a hook, or a peach. (And how you get from conscious thought to motor control via the nervous system is its whole own thing.) Its vagaries are one reason why in some important respects it's a more accurate model of the hardest problems we face than chess is, and why it's a better teacher even than other sports of the humility, patience, and self-acceptance we'll need to solve those problems.

This is art.

Saudi Arabia are also trying to buy Mo Salah, which I only realize is an EA tie-in now - after having written a personal essay about all the counterfactual lives he saved. Thank you for joining the dots.

The layers! I promise you this is the question I asked before I knew this bit of the bit:

With McIlroy at the Masters.

Success is a mess.

Golf, if you allow it, teaches forbearance.

Doing hard things is hard. One of the hardest things to do is hit a tiny ball in a tiny hole hundreds of yards away. Tiny errors cause terrible outcomes. Control is a phantom. The promise and perils don’t bear thinking about.

When it all comes together, though, my goodness, it’s a hell of a party.

If it’s worth going where you’re aiming, there’ll be no straight line from here to there. Next time you’re stuck, remember Rory and what we went through with him.