Can you sit quietly in a room alone? According to many ideas in the book “Unlimited Memory“, it’s a great thing to do.

They start with a quote from Blaise Pascal that brought the title of this post:

“All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Related was a quote from Pythagoras, who said:

“Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb.”

It kind of led to this main point by author Kevin Horsley, who shared:

Stop overwhelming yourself by continually changing the channels of your mind. Sharpen your intellect by making it a habit to do one thing at a time. Rediscover the value of consecutive tasking, instead of settling for the diluted quality that comes from simultaneous tasking. Exceptional work is always associated with periods of deep concentration. Nothing excellent ever comes from a scattered effort. When you are “all there,” your brain power and resources will be all there, too.

While I’m not great about specifically “sitting quietly in a room”, I try to make time to just get away and think. The idea of a “clarity break” is something that resonates with me, and it’s something I try to get away and do at least once a week or so. This post from a few years ago unpacks how I do that.

Even if you’ve never done it on purpose, you’ve seen the benefits of it when you get a great idea while you’re in the shower or out for a walk. It can be pretty awesome.

One way or another, sitting quietly with no interruptions can have huge advantages. You can stare out the window, sit quietly in a room, go outside for a clarity break, or do one of a hundred different things.

Do you ever intentionally take time to do nothing? How does that work for you?

I try to predict the future at times, and my results are hit or miss. With every decision that we make in life, though, we’re being forced to try to predict an unknown outcome.

In his book “Farsighted“, author Steven Johnson explains it like this:

Complex decisions force us to predict the future. Most decisions, big or small, are fundamentally predictions about the future. I choose vanilla ice cream over chocolate because I can predict, with an accuracy long-buffered by experience, that I will enjoy the vanilla more than the chocolate.

While accurately choosing the right flavor of ice cream is generally a safe bet, many decisions aren’t. Worse yet, it can be hard to make an accurate prediction if things went in an unlikely direction last time. From “Poor Charlie’s Almanack“, Charlie Munger shares:

For instance, a man foolishly gambles in a casino and yet wins. This unlikely correlation causes him to try the casino again, or again and again, to his horrid detriment. Or a man gets lucky in an odds-against venture headed by an untalented friend. So influenced, he tries again what worked before—with terrible results.

There are many cases where a good decision can lead to a bad outcome (or a bad decision lead to a good outcome), and it’s important to notice those situations.

Every decision will force you to predict the future to a degree, so understanding the quality of your past decisions will help increase the odds of a good decision next time.

If I asked you to look back 10 years and talk about how much you’ve grown, you’d likely have many stories to show your increased compassion, knowledge, income, and many other things.

On the other hand, if I asked you about your potential growth in the next 10 years, most people don’t see themselves changing very much. This is known as the “end of history illusion“.

In a great article in the Harvard Business Review, author Benjamin Hardy shares this thought:

Despite awareness that our past self is clearly different than our present self, we tend to think that who we are right now is the “real” and “finished” version of ourselves, and our future self will be basically the same as who we are today. Gilbert puts it simply: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

While I have things that I do every week to help improve myself (reading, this blog, exercise, etc), it’s indeed a fuzzy picture of where I’d like to be in a decade.

Hardy shares some great tips in the article, but I found the biggest to be the idea of changing your identity narrative. In his words:

Your identity narrative is the story you tell about yourself: past, present, and future. If your identity is rooted in your past and present alone, that fixed mindset can make personality feel permanent. But if you focus on envisioning your future self, instead of fixating on your current self, it becomes possible to change your identity narrative.

It’s similar to what Carol Dweck shared in her TED Talk called “The power of believing that you can improve”, seen here:

In her case it was more about helping those that know they’re struggling, but it can apply to all of us. Of course, it doesn’t just happen by itself. You’ll get a little better at things as time goes on, but generally speaking experience isn’t the same as practice. If you want to get better, you need to work on it.

Your future self is not someone you discover, but someone you decide to be. I’m happy with where I am these days, but I hope I’m not the same 10 years from now.

We’re at an amazing point in history, and one that will be changing (for the worse?) as AI continues to develop. Between tools like YouTube (free), summaries of books (many free) and the books themselves (not free, but more easily available than any time in history), you can learn whatever you want whenever you want.

In a recent episode of the Founders podcast, David was talking about the book “Working Backwards” about the history of Amazon. From the show:

You’ll be shocked. If you go through this book, you’ll be shocked at how many ideas Jeff (Bezos) got from reading a paper, reading a book, having a conversation that he used inside of Amazon. If you’re paying attention, the whole world is a classroom.

The alternative, as Seth Godin recently shared, is to be “willfully uninformed“:

Today, if there’s something I don’t know, it’s almost certainly because I haven’t cared enough to find out.

I don’t understand molecular biology, the history of Sardinia or much of agronomy–but that’s my choice. Now that information is widely and freely available, our sense of agency around knowledge needs to change.

As Seth says, it’s clearly your choice. You don’t have to read and you don’t have to find educational videos to deepen your knowledge. You can make the decision to stay willfully uninformed, but you also get to deal with the consequences of that, whatever they may be in your current stage of life.

With almost every book that I read, I read with the intention of digging in deep and then blog posts just happen to come out of it. A good example of that was Adam Grant’s “Think Again“, where I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, and it just happened to generate a number of great ideas for posts.

That was flipped when I recently read “Tribe of Mentors” by Tim Ferriss. Once I understood how the book was laid out, I read it specifically to put together a long series of posts about questions from the book.

So which way is better? I really don’t know.

I tend to think that both are valuable, just in slightly different ways. In either case I’m still digging in to learn and understand what they’re trying to say, so I don’t think there’s a downside to either technique.

Going forward I’ll still likely treat most books as I did with “Think Again”, largely because I don’t know what blog posts might even exist in them until I get there. I enjoy digging in and finding surprises along the way, and that’s what I’ll continue to do for most everything I read.

I was recently listening to an episode of Founders where they were talking about the book “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon“. One quote that they shared really stood out to me:

“I know a bunch of middling entrepreneurs, who aren’t that successful, and they don’t read at all. And then yet I spend time with all these billionaires and they read all the time. It’s like, why do billionaires read so much?”

The question is kind of tongue-in-cheek, but there are a few ways to think about it. The main thought I had was this: do billionaires read more because they’re billionaires and they have more time to read, or did all of that reading help them get there?

• Bill Gates was a voracious reader earlier in life, and today he still reads more than almost anyone.
• Before he co-founded Paypal, and way before he became the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk would read for up to 10 hours every day.
• Charlie Munger said that his kids used to “think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”

Of course, many of us didn’t read as much as we should have in our younger years, but that doesn’t mean we get to just bail on it. Starting today is better than starting tomorrow. For example, I don’t know about their earlier lives but:

• Warren Buffett spends 5-6 hours a day reading, often newspapers and financial documents.
• Mark Zuckerberg tries to read a book a week “with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies”.
• Mark Cuban reads three hours every day, and he says that this worked wonders at the start of his career.

Charlie Munger summed it up very well when he simply said: “In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time — none, zero.“

It’s easier said than done, for sure. Between your work and your family, not to mention entertainment and rest, finding time to read can be challenging. The good thing is, it’s unlikely that anyone is forcing you to do it so it’s entirely up to you.