Edmond Chan

Antifragility, Guardian Angels, Eating Less Meat, Banh Mi, Booksmart

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Hey there!

This week I’ve been reading

a corking article about US Air Force Pararescuemen (also known as PJs) who are the guys that Navy Seals call when they’re wounded and need help behind enemy lines. PJs are elite combat medics who can provide expert medical help and rescue in the most hostile environments.

The article is: The Savior Elite: Inside the Special Operations Force Tasked with Rescuing Navy SEALS They are the military’s “guardian angels.” They are trained paramedics, paratroopers, and combat divers. This is the story of one such airman, and the mission of a lifetime.

It tells the story of a civilian vessel hundreds of miles from the nearest port and hospital which had had an explosion that left several sailors with horrific burns and life-threatening injuries. The surgery that needed to be done in tight, fearsomely hot confines is compelling and just another of Esquires’s excellent long-form reads.

From the Esquire article:

The seven airmen rise. At the next command—“HOOK UP!”—they clip their parachutes’ red static lines to a steel cable running over their heads.

Fifteen hundred feet below, their target: the Tamar, a commercial shipping vessel two thirds into its voyage from Baltimore to Gibraltar. Earlier that morning, there had been an explosion onboard, some unknown ignition that had set fire to four sailors working inside the hull. In his distress message, the ship’s captain wrote that the men had been burned from head to toe. They were in the middle of the Atlantic; the nearest land—the Azores Islands—was over five hundred miles to the east. They were out of range of both U.S. and Portuguese Coast Guard helicopters as well as rescue boats. The men’s injuries were severe, requiring expert attention. The captain’s message was routed from Lisbon to Portsmouth, then to Boston, and on to the airmen in Long Island. Within hours of the explosion, two of the sailors died. The two other men—charred, skin flayed—wait now without pain medicine.

(image taken from the Esquire article)

I also read an excellent primer to Nassim Taleb’s idea of Antifragility (Nassim Taleb: A Definition of Antifragile and its Implications). The main idea is this: the opposite of fragility is not ‘robust’ or ‘resilient’; its opposite is actually ‘anti-fragility’. Something ‘fragile’ breaks under stress and volatility. Something that is ‘anti-fragile’ becomes stronger under stress eg. the mythical Hydra, which when one head was cut off, two would grow back in its place.

From Taleb (and quoted from the Farnam Street blog):

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet.

Here is the ‘triad’ of antifragility (taken from Farnam Street blog and in turn taken from Taleb’s book):

Eating more veg and less meat

I’m trying to eat more veg and less meat and this is a cracking video from the NYT Cooking channel on how to do so:

Make your own finger-licking Banh Mi

I had a hankering for Banh Mi yesterday so I had to make it. Never done it before. YouTube offered this corker from one of my favourite cooking channels, (Sam the Cooking Guy):

Instead of pork, I used a rotisserie chicken from my local supermarket, and shredded it into rough pieces. I used a soft giraffe baguette, and lots of coriander, lime juice, fish sauce, white vinegar, Kewpie mayo, and siracha. Definitely try this!

Movie this week

Angelique wanted to watch Booksmart. I was a bit skeptical at first but it was really good. (Think Superbad updated for the 2020s. (Can you believe Superbad was released in 2007?!))

Booksmart is whip-smart funny, warm, kind-hearted, and has two great performances from the two leads, (Beanie Feldstein as Molly Davidson and Kaitlyn Dever as Amy Antsler). Check it out on Amazon Prime Video.

Quote for the week

“If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it.”

Muhammad Ali

Have a great week ahead!

Best, Ed

Better Ideas, Exposure Therapy, Daily Dad

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Hey there!

This week I’ve been reading

A great article in Esquire called Exposure Therapy and the Fine Art of Scaring the Shit Out of Yourself On Purpose. In it, the author describes how her fear of heights has periodically debilitated her life, such as not being able to climb to the tops of cathedrals on holiday, and how it’s probably impacted what she’d like to do such as rock climbing. She uses new research into exposure therapy to systematically reduce her immediate physical and mental fear when in a heights situation.

From the Esquire article:

Exposure therapy is basically an inversion of a well-known psychological technique known as classical conditioning. If you can teach an animal to expect pain from, say, a blinking red light by repeatedly combining the light’s appearance with an electrical shock until the animal reacts fearfully to the light alone, it makes sense that the twinning of stimulus and fear can be unraveled too. Show the animal the red light enough times without an accompanying shock, and eventually it will no longer fear the light—a process known as extinction. I was determined to extinguish my fear by proving to myself that I could climb a cliff.

This idea of dealing with eliminating your fears and weaknesses reminded me of some of David Goggins’s advice. He says don’t work on your strengths (what you know you can do); instead, work on your weaknesses. So if you’re scared of heights, or big-bodied, hairy spiders, or sea swimming, or huge snakes, then he exhorts us to tackle these head-on. Imagine your life with less fear, fewer weaknesses, and the confidence to methodically excise the shackles you don’t think about or want to look at.

Daily Dad

I heard about Ryan Holiday’s daily newsletter, Daily Dad, when he was interviewed on Noah Kagan’s excellent podcast, Noah Kagan Presents.

As a recent first-time dad, I signed up to Daily Dad, and it gives you daily wisdom. Check this out from their email from 29th Jan 2020:

It’s interesting to think about the steady decline in expectations for kids when it comes to reading. Not long ago, kids were taught Latin and Greek and they were taught Latin and Greek so they could read the classics…in the original language. Think of Aesop’s Fables. Think of children being read Plutarch’s Lives by their parents. This is heavy stuff. When you read old school books, you’re struck by a few things. Sure, there is the racism and the historical inaccuracies, but there is also an assumed familiarity with obscure figures from the ancient world and a willingness to wrestle with morally complex topics. 

There is a quote from George Orwell, which dates to the early 20th century, that accidentally illustrates how much things have changed. “Modern books for children are rather horrible things,” he said, “especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petronius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators.”

How many adults even know who Petronius is? (He was a writer who lived in the court of Nero). And how many adults today probably winced at the idea that a book should teach kids how to be manly? Even the idea of “wholesome” is controversial!

It shouldn’t surprise us that the children and young adult sections of bookstores these days are filled with so much infantilizing or absurd nonsense. Is that because kids are dumber than they were in Orwell’s time? Or back before that? No. It’s that we’ve stopped believing they are capable of reading challenging books. So we provide “kids editions” and give them silly picture books. We haven’t built their muscles and then we wonder why they can’t handle heavy stuff. 

Well stop it. Push them. Push yourself. They aren’t babies.

Inspiring stuff!

Sign up to Daily Dad’s free daily emails here.

YouTube video of the week

Quote for the week

“Change is the essence of life; be willing to surrender
what you are for what you could become.”

Reinhold Niebuhr

Have a great week ahead!

Best, Ed

First published on my weekly email newsletter at Substack on 09 Feb 2020

Diamonds, Clayton Christensen, and the Most Sporting Team in the World

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Hey there!

Clayton Christensen

Renowned management guru Clayton Christensen passed away this week, and Adam Grant shared a link to one of his most famous articles on Harvard Business Review: How will you measure your life?

In this article, Christensen encourages us to not measure our lives by money, status etc. but instead by what we truly consider to be most important: relationships with friends and family, and finding meaningful work. He points to contemporaries of his at HBS such as Jeff Skilling, the former CEO of Enron, who Christensen remembers as a “good guy” back in college. But Skilling went on to make less than good choices, Christensen contends because of measuring his life against the wrong things.

The article reminded me of the book by the same name which expands on as well as having different material to the article above. In the book, Christensen recommends not basing a career choice on hygiene factors and instead concentrating more on motivators.

From this article in Fast Company:

This thinking on motivation distinguishes between two different types of factors: hygiene factors and motivation factors. On one side of the equation, there are the elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are the hygiene factors: status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices. It matters, for example, that you don’t have a manager who manipulates you for his own purposes–or who doesn’t hold you accountable for things over which you don’t have responsibility. Bad hygiene causes dissatisfaction.

But even if you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. They’re not the same thing at all.

On the other hand:

So, what are the factors that will cause us to love our jobs? These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you and inside of your work.

Here’s an excellent obituary on Clayton Christensen in the New York Times.

Diamonds

The New Yorker is consistently one of the best long-form reads in the world. Here’s an absolute corker about the modern-day diamond industry and how Eira Thomas and her company Lucara Diamond is shaking up the industry.

I loved the sense of it still being a totally speculative industry, where people give up on mines, then others take a punt on it and find jewels the size of rocks. It’s an industry for optimists.

The most sporting team in the world

The FT had a story this week on How rugby club Saracens taught executive skills — but hid the cheating. Saracens have dominated English and European Rugby Union in recent years, but were recently found guilty of breaching financial strength rules. In order to have greater fairness in Rugby, rules were introduced to cap salaries that could be paid. This was supposed to ensure that the richest clubs couldn’t snap up all the best players and dominate purely because of their financial muscle.

In the comments of this depressing story, a reader contrasted this with the most sporting team in the world, Corinthians FC. From their Wikipedia page:

Corinthian Football Club was an English amateur football club based in London between 1882 and 1939.[1]

Above all, the club is credited with having popularised football around the world,[2] having promoted sportsmanship and fair play, and having championed the ideals of amateurism.[3]

The club was famed for its ethos of “sportsmanship, fair play, [and] playing for the love of the game”.[4] ‘Corinthian Spirit, still understood as the highest standard of sportsmanship, is often associated with the side. This spirit was famously summed up in their attitude to penalties; “As far as they were concerned, a gentleman would never commit a deliberate foul on an opponent. So, if a penalty was awarded against the Corinthians, their goalkeeper would stand aside, lean languidly on the goalpost and watch the ball being kicked into his own net. If the Corinthians themselves won a penalty, their captain took a short run-up and gave the ball a jolly good whack, chipping it over the crossbar.[5]

How refreshing.

This was first published in my weekly email newsletter on Substack on 02 Feb 2020.

Renaissance Technologies, Tolstoy, and Teslas for $78/month

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Hey there!

This week, I’ve been reading

an essay in the FT by Simon Schama on What Tolstoy’s War and Peace can teach us. One of the things that Schama talks about is when a ‘brigadier’ saw him reading it in a lunch bar and asks him if it’s his first time. When Schama says yes, the brigadier almost sighs with contented and kind-hearted envy. If you haven’t read it yet, then I contentedly and kind-heartedly envy you too. It’s a life-changer. As Nietzsche (I think) said, there are books where you mark your life as before you read it and after you read it. It’s up there in my top 5 books. Treat yourself to the Rosemary Edmonds translation and see you in about 3 months. Well that’s how long it took me :). The first couple of hundred pages read like The Sopranos on steroids and set in Napoleonic-era Russia. The character list is like a huge ensemble cast on the stage. Schama himself re-reads the Monster semi-regularly. It’s been 17 years since I first read it. Maybe it’s time to do it again.

Books I’m reading

I’m halfway through the book about Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Greg Zuckerman). It’s good but it’s not yet a book that’s going to make it onto my list of non-fiction life-changers (think Legacy, Shoe Dog, 12 Rules of Life, Tipping Point, Freakonomics, A Short History of Nearly Everything etc). If you liked Zuckerman’s The Greatest Trade Ever about John Paulson and his firm’s huge bet against sub-prime in 2007 and 2008, you’ll enjoy this book too. It goes into the personalities of the people who built Renaissance, people you wouldn’t think were your typical Masters of The Universe. These men were world-class mathematicians, academics in tweed jackets, many of whom had no background in finance. Yet they went on to help create the most successful investment firm of all time.

Money

Graham Stephan is a very entertaining money guy on YouTube. He’s 28, got a huge property portfolio and makes millions on YouTube. What’s appealing about him is how savvy he is. He’s frugal, finding a way to live in his house for almost zero dollars and also buying a Tesla for $78/month! Here he is on how to save 99% of your income:

First published on my email newsletter on Substack sent on Jan 26 2020.

Level 11s and 11 stars – Google super-developers, audiophile headphones and stellar customer service

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Here’s some tasty articles for your reading pleasure:

Books I’m reading this week: What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz and The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman.

This was an email newsletter first sent through my Substack on Jan 14 2020.