What to do when things go wrong
Roger Federer life lessons. Peter Gray critiques of Haidt. Trevor Rainbolt GeoGuesser goes travelling. How to be a tech blogger, Marques Brownlee. Economics: Ray Dalio on geopolitics.
Life: what to do when things go wrong
Life: Roger Federer life lessons
Education: Peter Gray critiques of Haidt and social media thesis
Climate: Chevron, SCOTUS, transition arc
Life, travel: Trevor Rainbolt GeoGuesser goes travelling
Life: how to be a tech blogger, Marques Brownlee
Economics: Ray Dalio on geopolitics, long cycles
Theatre: Mark Ravenhill exercises continue
Art: Michael Craig-Martin
Art: Lonnie Holley, American assemblage art
Archive: Home Education: Naomi Fisher podcast
Archive: what my 12 yo thinks
Roger Federer only won 54% of the points he played. He commented on this at a commencement address at Dartmouth.
“The truth is, whatever game you play in life, sometimes you're going to lose. A point, a match, a season, a job.”.
Federer by all accounts was an anger prone young tennis player who mellowed (or focused his anger) as an adult player.
He recalls:
I spent years whining... swearing… throwing my racket… before I learned to keep my cool.
I think people have been drawn to his speech not only because of his charisma and life journey but because he draws on life trials with classic lessons but well lived.
in tennis... like in life... discipline is also a talent. And so is patience.
Trusting yourself is a talent. Embracing the process, loving the process, is a talent.
Managing your life, managing yourself... these can be talents, too.
Some people are born with them. Everybody has to work at them.
Emphasising discipline and patience as important whatever talent you might have.
But also highlighting the mindset for successful tennis.
…When you’re playing a point, it is the most important thing in the world.
But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you... This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point… and the next one after that… with intensity, clarity and focus.
The truth is, whatever game you play in life... sometimes you’re going to lose. A point, a match, a season, a job... it’s a roller coaster, with many ups and downs.
And it’s natural, when you’re down, to doubt yourself. To feel sorry for yourself.
And by the way, your opponents have self-doubt, too. Don’t ever forget that.
But negative energy is wasted energy.
You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments. That to me is the sign of a champion.
The best in the world are not the best because they win every point... It’s because they know they’ll lose... again and again… and have learned how to deal with it.
You accept it. Cry it out if you need to... then force a smile.
You move on. Be relentless. Adapt and grow.
Work harder. Work smarter. Remember: work smarter.
I think what keeps this from being twee is the fact that many of us have seen the highs and lows of his career. I don’t view his words as empty.
The feelings of a bad day are hard to recreate in a practice environment. I recall the footballer Rio Ferdinand commenting the same for penalty shoot outs, the emotions and the pressure can not be recreated adequately in training.
Life experience of various kinds of set backs and failures are an instrumental (and perhaps only) way of learning about them.
That is a long wind up to saying recently I had a bad day. Something I was responsible for lost a lot of value. The events were outside my control. The events seemed unreasonable and unfair to me.
There were limited things I could do. The blend of feelings - the biochemical sensations our brains interpret as emotions - must vary to a degree from person to person - like in grief - but mostly I think it is a set of emotions we understand.
What to do with them?
Federer potentially has an advantage in tennis that some aspects of the game are in your control. You can not control what your rival does, but you can control what you do.
One thread I hear from young people who are climate anxious is this sense that they can not control their destiny. The forces of climate change and beyond their ability to impact.
People mostly can not control what the stock market does either.
Is there something practical here? I think it is finding the aspects you can improve and you can control. And, if possible, to limit the whining (!) Mostly the whinge doesn’t make you (or anyone else) feel better.
…It is only a point…
I went back to the process I used and looked at what could be improved - if anything, or was it (bad) luck. (Bad luck happens often, can you make yourself feel OK with that?) Can I do things in the now or the future which can help? What actions actually help? Who can I talk to?
This bias to action, this ability to use your choice and agency - I think is vitality important to humans (to all conscious animals too) in helping us recover from inevitable set backs. Eating well, sleeping well, moving well are important but they often seem to me to be the foundational blocks that helps us with our actions, not necessarily aims within themselves.
Perhaps this is an important aspect of play - both childhood and later - the ability to foster risk, setbacks and overcoming « the next point »
A challenge with time on Instagram and social media is not so much the picture of enticing things but the time lost to play. That’s an argument Peter Gray has in favour of play.
Along with using agency, the ability to critically examine claims - especially social science claims - is another sub theme of my blogs.
It seems to me many of the strong forms of social science claims are overstated. Mostly this is because underlying factors motivating humans is complex and experiments can not disaggregate them easily, and natural experiments are mostly tied to a particular time, place and people. What seems to be true for one thing, in one place with one particular set of people may well not hold - or not hold as strongly - for a different time, place or people.
I have a weak belief that this is an underlying factor in why macroeconomic models hold for certain times but then seem to not hold. The world of 1820 is different to 1920 is different to 2020 and forces of human behaviour are not as constant as the speed of light.
So Peter Gray - who is very supportive of the idea of play - critiques and summarises the view that Jon Haidt’s arguments for the negative impacts of social media on children.
https://petergray.substack.com/p/45-the-importance-of-critical-analyses
The totality of the work certainly seems complex and so my own conclusion is that the impacts are likely overstated - like the marshmallow test. There may be some impacts because time on IG may be lost to time doing better things. Most people don’t have to worry too much about social media. Although there are enough exceptions and individual cases that you may not want to dismiss the ideas completely.
While we are on education, intellectual Zvi has his round up of higher education research thought here. He goes into more depth, across more papers than I do. You can see his previous round ups on his blog too.
Noting the idea of online world to offline world, my family is taken with the story of Trevor Rainbolt.
Rainbolt has unbelievable skills in playing GeoGuessr. A random image of the world is taken from Google Earth and he can tell you where it’s from, extremely quickly.
Back in 2021, a 22-year-old from Arkansas named Trevor Rainbolt shuttered himself in his Los Angeles apartment to memorize the world. For months, he spent his time studying Google Street View from his desk chair. Delivery drivers handed over his meals; a barber came to style his hair. After a while, his memory grew planetary. When you see cabbage-like plants thriving along the sides of a Russian country road, he learned, you’re most likely looking at Sakhalin Island. On a bridge lined with pea-green pavement? You’re above a river in Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan province. If your vista, but for the sweep of golden grasslands, screams South Africa, you’ll be in Eswatini.
His time and skill at the game has also transformed him from someone who mostly saw the world in front of his computer to someone who left his computer behind to go travelling and see for himself the world.
Rainbolt knows nearly nothing about lands beyond Street View’s reach. Up until a year and a half ago, he owned no functional passport and had never left North America. Late in 2022, though — after an evening spent, as usual, on GeoGuessr — he felt an unfamiliar pull. He imagined himself strolling the exotic roads he had memorized on his screen. He thought about glimpsing distinctive bollards I.R.L., seeing the world’s telltale street lamps in 3-D fullness. He had a yearning to view streets.
So Rainbolt sold his possessions, gave up his apartment and decided to live off earnings from his GeoGuessr content. He applied for an expedited passport; the day after it arrived, he purchased a flight to Germany. Back then, the country’s most recent Street View images were from 2009, and he was curious how the streetscapes might have changed.
There are plenty of stories of the personalities who perform outrageous acts and build their following through outrage.
Lesser known are those who build themselves in a more wholesome way. One is British tech blogger reviewer, Mrwhosetheboss aka Arun Rupesh Maini who recently used 500 drones in his wedding speech (H/T Oscar)
Another is US tech blogger and reviewer, Marques Brownlee . Brown was recently on the Ben Thompson podcast about his life career from single shaky video review to full time tech reviewer.
YouTube tech reviewer Marques Brownlee (MKBHD). Brownlee, who has been posting tech reviews to YouTube for 15 years, has over 19 million subscribers to his primary YouTube channel, and every video he posts — including a recent interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook — gets millions of views. Brownlee has also recently started a second YouTube channel called Auto Focus about cars; Auto Focus recently surpassed 1 million subscribers in its own right. I wrote about Brownlee in April after his negative review of the Humane AI Pin led to critiques that Brownlee was too powerful.
In this interview we discuss how Brownlee became a prominent YouTuber, what it’s like to be famous, and why — unlike so many of his peers — he is still energized to be doing what he does. We also get into the nitty gritty of his business, including YouTube strategies, how monetization works, interacting with tech companies, building a team, and why success flows from putting viewers first.
Podcast here and transcript here.
If you want a model for all those budding child social media starts than I think Brown is a good podcast to put on for them.
I mentioned a few items in climate world last week. In particular, you can try out TransitionArc which has just launched in beta.
Potentially significant from legal world is a recent SCOTUS, US Supreme Court, decision on « Chevron ». Some blogs on it here (Pielke) and here (Claude via Tyler Cowen).
It is likely to weaken the powers of US federal agencies - in particular for climate - the environmental agency and tilt power to the judiciary.
Agencies will be more restricted in how they can interpret uncertainties in regulatory law.
The problem being that uncertainties are often a feature not a bug…
I remain firmly an optimist. In the UK we’ve had a peaceful transfer of power from a right leaning nexus of government to a left leaning nexus of government.
We have another set of hard working people tackling the problems of our age.
When is the best time to be born? The answer is still NOW. Not before.
That said, I read the more pessimistic views all the time. Ray Dalio has become increasingly more pessimistic because of polarization, great power tensions and his view of long cycles of history. Worth looking at from someone who is very American rooted, but somewhat sympathetic to China.
I believe there are now and have always been five big, interrelated forces that drive how domestic and world orders change. They are the 1) the big debt/credit/money cycle, 2) the big internal order/disorder cycle 3) the big external order/disorder cycle, 4) acts of nature (i.e., droughts, floods, and pandemics), and 5) human innovation that leads to advances in technology. Today, I am focusing on why I believe we are approaching the point in the internal order-disorder cycle when you will have to choose between picking a side and fighting for it, keeping your head down, or fleeing.
I was privileged to be at a friend’s wedding recently. One aspect of weddings I like - aside from the usual celebrations - are the moments before the service and the rituals.
These are like the moments before the play or performance starts. The ritual of anticipation.
In any event, I wish them and everyone who is committing to life long partnerships, all wonderful things.
My year in Harvard was special for many reasons. My father had died a few weeks before. I was on a scholarship which allowed me to - more or less - explore any subject I wished if I could convince the professors to enrol me.
Along with neuroscience, I studied poetry, dramaturgy, play writing, directing, photography - a few other things (eg basic reading Spanish) and amongst them - sculpture.
I learned to use an arc welder. I built things. I deconstructed things and reconstructed them again.
Patrick Strzelec was my teacher (interview here). Echoes of my arts training traced back to high school (Andrew Bateman) and even primary school (my pottery teacher influenced me, for sure).
One aspect that enticed me was how objects hang and how they make shapes and form in space. The space they make by “negative” area - the space objects do not occupy.
Another aspect is revealing a facet of an object - some underlying aspect - by re-shaping that object from its typical role.
I recall finding a chair by the roadside. Mostly wooden, still robust, with cushioned and padded seating. I deconstructed it, reshaped it, pulled out the stuffing - re-balled it and strung the balled insides - making the balled stuffing hang like a pendulum - in the middle of a maze of chair-like but not chair like pieces.
I hammered the sculpture into a wall and it hung.
Sadly, I don’t have an image of it.
But I can see I was working in the tradition of American assemblage. I was influenced by looking some of the American sculptures around me.
An artist in this tradition is showing at London Camden’s art centre. Lonnie Holley.
This is a 5 star review of the work in the Guardian.
A re-imagining of the detritus around us - although one woman's rubbish is another woman’s treasure (see my podcast with Florrie Evans).
Lonnie Holley: All Rendered Truth is at Camden Art Centre, London, from 5 July to 15 September.
Michael Craig-Martin is having a major show at the Royal Academy soon. He was a teacher to many of the YBA artists in the UK and he has influenced theatre performers such as Tim Crouch. (Cf. Oak Tree) Crouch has influenced a generation of performance artists himself.
This the interconnected-ness of the humanities of arts thinking.
This is the FT lunch profile of him.
Links:
Mark Ravenhill theatre writing exercises
The effective ban on onshore wind farms in England has been lifted, just a few days after Labour took power. Planning barriers cut, so "onshore wind applications will be treated in the same way as other energy development proposals" https://x.com/adamvaughan_uk/status/1810255898503242190
How the British elite lost its way. Or, what to do about talent in elite civil, political roles. H/T Munira via @civic_future. https://x.com/benyeohben/status/1807764341598327032