January 25, 2022

Tuesday Letter #29 - Daily Decisions, Plato's Apology and Building Wealth

Hey, Happy Tuesday!

Let’s get straight to the Newsletter. I hope you enjoy it. As always if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please, let me know.

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📜 Quote of the week

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. (Location 514)

Atomic Habits by James Clear

🤯 This is a great thought from the Atomic Habits books. It is very short, yet makes me feel a lot of things.

🎛️ First, it makes me feel hopeful, as I know that the person I am and will become is in my full control. I make decisions every day that make me (hopefully better).

😨 But at the same time, if every decision is a vote for the person I will become, that means that the stakes are high. I make a ton of decisions during the day, and if a decision I make is not good, that means I am becoming worse off.

📈 In this situation it is crucial to remember that all the decisions you make during the day, sum up. And the most important thing is that they sum up to a 1% improvement each day. If that’s true then the compounding effect will help us get ahead as time goes by.

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Plato’s Apology

✅ Last week I told you that I’m starting my journey of Liberal Education, or in other words reading books from the “Great Books of the Western World” series. The authors of this set have created a 10-year plan. The idea is that the works that are listed in that plan, increase in complexity as the years go by. This gives readers the gentlest introduction to the Great Books and the Great Conversation.

🙏 This week I’ve completed Plato’s Apology. I really enjoyed this book and would love to share with you what I’ve learned.

🔈 Plato’s Apology is a record of the speech given by Socrates in court as he tries to defend himself in 399BC against the accusations of “corrupting the young, and by not believing in the gods in whom the city believes”.

There are three parts to this work (Spoiler Alert).

1. Socrates defends himself against accusations.
2. Socrates argues for various punishments after the jury finds Socrates guilty.
3. Socrates’ last words after the jury condemns Socrates to death.

😍 These are 3 very different “scenes”. And we get to see Socrates in each one of them. It is fascinating to see what arguments Socrates comes up with and how he presents them to the public. It is very inspiring to see how a man handles himself when sentenced to death.

📓 For me, this work has the highest ratio of notes to words (ie. how many notes I took compared with the size of the work).

🧠 Here are some life lessons that I have picked up from this work: - You should always show humility by assuming that you don’t know something. If you always assume that you know everything, you can’t really learn anything new. - We only fear death because we know nothing about it. In fact, death is the ultimate test to “we fear what we don’t know” since it is likely we will never find out what happens after death. - Start by trying to improve yourself, not others. - “Good men” don’t spend much time thinking about how to avoid death, but rather they think about doing good deeds. That’s all that matters.

📈 Some interesting stats, from the Apology:

• You can see that the themes of truth and death are repeated a lot.
• Meletus is one of the guys who accused Socrates of bad deeds.

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😄 Person of the Week

I checked with my Obsidian database and I have most notes with reference to Jordan O’Connor, founder of Closet Tools.

Jordan is a huge inspiration when it comes to most of the things that I value in life. He has built a fantastic business, great life that is focused on his family and his hobbies. When it comes to decisions I make in life, I can certainly look at Connor’s tweets and blog for advice.

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🐔 Tweet of the week

I’ve been thinking about this model for the whole week. This seems like a perfect strategy to start building wealth. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme, but a solid plan that has almost no downsides.

There is only one problem, it is freaking scary to implement it. For me, a Russian citizen living in the US, not knowing what I’ll be doing in 3 years, and where I’ll be doing that is scary. But I want to start building such wealth as early as possible, and I’m already 25. I’m sure this is a scary plan for other people too, not only international people.

Sometimes we just need to get over our fears and start doing things that make sense.