15 Things I Know
A summary of the key lessons I've learned from reading 15 excellent books.
It’s taking me a while to finish my next 2 blog posts (a visual walk through number theory / let’s build a computer from scratch), so this month, I decided to do something different. I couldn’t help but stumble into a wonderful post called 30 Things I Know – and I thought the general style and the notes there were wonderful, so I decided to kick off 2026 with a bang and do a post of my own. Here, I’ll include 15 things I learned from some of the favorite books that I’ve read over the last few years. Hopefully readers here will find some of my notes helpful. I highly recommend reading all of the books mentioned below. I’m simply including some of the key lessons that stuck with me after reading each one.
Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
Being well read and having many different mental models and vast knowledge is a major asset in life. Most people fall prey to “man with a hammer” syndrome, where if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. A person trained only in economics will see every issue through that single lens, leading to distorted thinking and poor decisions. To overcome this, we must acquire and use the big, reliable ideas from the world’s major disciplines. You don’t need to become an expert in each field, but you must understand their fundamental principles so they can work together in your mind. Wise judgment in investing requires a latticework of mental models and some of the most important ones are provided below:
Compound Interest: A small force, sustained over time, creates an overwhelming result (applies to finance, knowledge, trust).
Permutations and Combinations: Understanding how probabilities work (e.g., knowing that a chain of small risks leads to a large total risk).
Fermat’s Principle: Looking at the logical extreme of a situation to understand its constraints or limitations.
Critical Mass (physics + chemistry): Many systems require a threshold of input to trigger a massive, non-linear output.
Incentives: Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome. Never underestimate the power of rewards/punishments to drive behavior.
Confirmation Bias: The tendency to seek out and interpret information that confirms one’s pre-existing beliefs.
Lollapalooza Effect: When multiple biases (e.g., social proof, authority) combine, they create extreme and irrational outcomes.
Evolution: Systems that adapt through variation, selection, and retention are incredibly robust.
Everything is connected: A change in one part of a system (a company, a market) will inevitably lead to predictable and unpredictable changes elsewhere.
Comparative Advantage: Do what you do best relative to others and trade for the rest. Specialization is a fundamental driver of prosperity.
Economies of Scale: The massive benefits that accrue to size (e.g., economies of scale in production or distribution, and informational advantages).
Margin of Safety (engineering): Build in a buffer for error or unforeseen events. This is central to value investing, engineering, and risk management.
Inversion: Think backward—instead of asking “how can I succeed?” ask “what must I absolutely avoid doing to fail?” By focusing on guaranteed failure, you can simplify the path to success.
The profound importance of having many models lies in their synthesis. Real-world problems are not labeled “economics” or “psychology”; they are complex puzzles that require multiple angles of attack. It is important to use a mental checklist based on these models to avoid blind spots.
Prometheus Rising (by Robert Anton Wilson)
We all see reality through very narrow tunnels and we actively ignore the things that don’t match our own reality tunnel while actively looking for evidence to reinforce the tunnel that we believe in. This “reality” that we experience isn’t reality at all: it’s mostly our own nervous system, imprinted and conditioned into rigid patterns. We have both the burden and the possibility of loosening those patterns and re-educating ourselves.
Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, the individual who learns to meta-program their own brain is seizing a power that was previously reserved for accident, tradition, and authority. Humans possess the neurological potential to intentionally transcend their current limitations and become self-directed agents of their own psychological and evolutionary development, and they can do that by forever testing hypotheses and dismantling the apparatus of perception to see what, if anything, lies beneath its gears. Curiosity and continual questioning and discovery are the true key to our own liberation.
The Millionaire Fastlane (by MJ DeMarco)
There is the slow way of obtaining wealth (by working for someone else, investing, saving) and a fastlane approach (producing something that has value). Slowlaners buy depreciating assets like cars and electronics; fastlaners buy appreciating assets like patents, businesses, and cash flows. Fastlaners view time as their most important asset and making something of value as their primary means of wealth accumulation.
A few examples of fastlane projects: write a book (lots of work, but then it makes money forever without you having to put in more work), make an invention (lots of work, but then you get royalties for a long time), or generally obtain an income generating asset or assets. The key to the fastlane is producing instead of consuming. Don’t be the guy who buys a franchise, be the guy who sells franchises.
The key to creating and having wealth is by working hard today on something that people value in the future. Around 80% of millionaires make their wealth by either starting their own company or working for a small company that has explosive growth.
Some keys to success in starting a business:
The amount of money a business earns is a reflection of the amount of value it has provided.
The harder it is to enter your business, the better you business will be.
There are levels of business scale: community, city, state, region, national, and international. The larger your scale, the bigger your leverage. Profit = units sold * profit/unit. Maximize your scale / leverage as much as possible.
Investment of time: can the business be automated? Are margins large enough to hire others to do your work? Could you (eventually) get the business to operate without spending much of your time on it? Your business should allow you to eventually have abundance of your most precious resource (time) – if it doesn’t do that, then it is not a great pathway to wealth.
Don’t guess on whether there is demand for your product. The best way to figure out where to go is to listen to the rest of the world. You should come out with a minimal version of your product and then see how customers react. Their reactions will guide you during your next iteration and so on and so on.
Being wealthy is not about money, fancy cars, expensive vacations, or vacation homes in Fiji. Being wealthy means being healthy, being surrounded by great friends and family, and the freedom to live life how you want to live it. Faux wealth is the illusion of wealth. It’s having nice, flashy things that you can’t afford which take away your freedom and make you even more dependent on your existing sources of income. Faux wealth is not real wealth.
Your time is precious, don’t waste it and don’t trade it away for pennies. Your time is finite and always decreasing — it is your most precious and most valuable resource. Treat it as such.
Daily Rituals (by Mason Currey)
Consistency matters. A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.
Stephen King writes every day of the year, including his birthday and holidays, and he almost never lets himself quit before he reaches his daily quota of two thousand words.
“A modern stoic,” he observed, “knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.”
In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein confirmed that she had never been able to write much more than half an hour a day—but added, “If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year. To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day.”
How the World Really Works (by Vaclav Smil)
Everything that constitutes our modern world—its food, its infrastructure, its technology—is a product of the conversion of energy. The history of human progress is, in large part, the history of harnessing more powerful and concentrated energy sources.
A useful way to grasp our energy consumption is to equate it to human labor. The annual energy consumption of an average person in 2020 is equivalent to having about 60 adult servants working non-stop. For a person in an affluent country, that number rises to 200 or even 240 servants. This illustrates the sheer scale of the work done by inanimate energy converters on our behalf.
There are 4 pillars that the modern world is built on:
Ammonia is the “gas that feeds the world.” It is the critical ingredient in synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, and without it, we simply could not grow enough food to feed our current global population. It’s estimated that ammonia-based fertilizers are responsible for sustaining roughly half the world’s people. Almost all industrial ammonia today is made from hydrogen plus nitrogen, and that hydrogen usually comes from natural gas (methane) or sometimes coal. Ammonia accounts for a noticeable chunk of global CO₂ emissions.
Plastics: These versatile materials, derived from fossil fuel feed-stocks, are ubiquitous in packaging, medicine, construction, and consumer goods. Plastic production depends very heavily on fossil fuels, in two ways: as a raw material and as an energy source. Most conventional plastics are made from petrochemicals derived from oil and natural gas. Their problem is not utility but disposal, creating a massive waste management challenge.
Steel: This alloy is the skeleton of modern civilization. It defines the look of our world, from skyscrapers and bridges to cars and appliances. Its production in blast furnaces is a process of extreme heat, typically generated by burning coal. Steel production today still depends a lot on fossil fuels, though the amount varies by process and country.
Cement: The key ingredient in concrete, cement is the most widely used human-made material; it is the backbone of modern construction and infrastructure. Cement production still depends heavily on fossil fuels because making it requires extremely high kiln temperatures, which are usually produced by burning coal, petroleum coke, or natural gas, and also because heating limestone releases CO₂ as a chemical by-product.
Despite decades of discussion about transition, the global energy system remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. Their share of the world’s primary energy supply has decreased only marginally, from about 87% in 2000 to 84% in 2020. This is not for a lack of trying, but because of the sheer scale of the existing infrastructure. Replacing it is the work of generations, not decades – and we’re just getting started.
Economics in One Lesson (by Henry Hazlitt)
Almost all bad economics comes from focusing only on what is immediately seen—the short-run effect on one visible group—while ignoring what is unseen: the longer-run effects on everyone. The “one lesson” is that the art of economics is to trace all consequences of a policy, not just the first ones and not just for the most visible beneficiaries.
As an example, government expenditure is often lauded for the jobs it creates, but where does the money for that spending come from? Yes, it comes from taxes. The funds taken through taxation are money that would have been used by private citizens for investment, consumption, or savings, all of which would have also created jobs. The unseen consequence is the lost private investment and production that never occurs because the funds were seized by the state.
Another example are tariffs: they protect a small number of domestic producers by allowing them to charge a higher price. The unseen harm is that all domestic consumers must pay a higher price, effectively being taxed to subsidize the protected industry. Furthermore, it prevents efficient foreign producers from earning dollars they would have used to buy American exports, thus harming domestic export industries.
Another example are minimum wages. They clearly benefits workers who can keep their jobs at a higher rate. This benefit is visible. The unseen consequence is that businesses, unable to afford the higher cost, will hire fewer workers or replace some with automation, leading to unemployment for the least-skilled workers. The policy intended to help all low-wage workers instead helps some at the expense of others.
The final, indispensable takeaway is that the art of economics lies in training oneself to see not just the immediate, visible consequences of a policy or action, but to trace out its longer-term effects on all groups. It requires looking beyond the obvious beneficiaries—the subsidized industry, the hired workers, the funded project—to recognize the unseen victims: the consumers who pay higher prices, the taxpayers whose wealth is diverted, the entrepreneurs whose capital is unavailable, and the opportunities that are never born. Good economics is therefore an exercise in disciplined empathy and imagination, demanding we count all the costs, not just the loudest or most politically convenient ones, and remember that society loses when we favor the seen at the expense of the unseen.
QED – The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (by Richard Feynman)
The book is a guided tour of quantum electrodynamics—the theory that explains how light and matter interact—told with almost no formal math. Instead of equations, Feynman uses little clocks to represent probability amplitudes.
To calculate the probability of where a particle ends up, we assign each possible path a “probability amplitude” (visualized as a tiny spinning arrow, or clock hand). The arrow’s direction is determined by the path’s phase, which is related to the time taken. We then sum the arrows for all paths. The paths whose arrows point in roughly the same direction reinforce each other while those pointing in opposite directions cancel out. This “sum over histories” explains why, in the aggregate, light appears to take a straight line or a classical reflection path; the neighborhoods of paths of least time cooperate while others which take longer cancel each other out. Really though, there is no ‘one path’ that light really takes. Nature at the quantum level doesn’t behave like tiny ‘billiard balls’ or ‘smooth waves’ or tiny things ‘bumping’ into each other; instead, photons actually take all possible paths from point A to point B into account and move according to the path of least energy / time.
Feynman’s genius was to decode this algorithm not as a wall of equations, but as a lucid, almost playful procedure—giving us not just the how of light and matter, but a humbling glimpse into the foundational software of reality. The theory’s immense success (it predicts measurements with unmatched precision) forces us to accept that this is not a model of reality, but a reliable description of how reality actually behaves. It provides us with a picture of what reality actually is: a very complex system which can only be modeled through a huge degree of computational complexity and not a simple dynamical one with simple rules.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things (by Ben Horowitz)
This is a brutally honest and practical guide to building and running a startup. Drawing from his tumultuous experiences as a founder and CEO, Horowitz delves into the “hard things”—like firing executives, demoting friends, managing your own psychology, and making agonizing decisions with no good options—that most business books ignore.
Some key lessons and quotes from the book:
You must believe that there is an answer no matter how much the odds may be against you. During his time with LoudCloud, they were close to losing a major customer (called EDS which accounted for 90% of their revenue) and talks about how he won them back: found out that the executive from EDS was not happy with their software and preferred something called Tangram. Ben found out that Tangram was public and was worth around 6 million dollars at the time, so decided to acquire them for 10 million which made EDS’s executive happy and played a huge role in saving the deal and company.
Almost as soon as the EDS crisis was resolved, they hit more trouble yet again from competitors: three new clients were fading away and excellent new competitor was eating their lunch. Told employees that they had 6 months to really work hard and play catch up with BladeLogic or else they were dead. This meant working over-time and weekends and talks about the time and stress and toll this took on the team, although some team-members ended up having a great experience from this.
Had to really decide whether to prioritize requirements from existing customers or whether to pursue something else that they thought would help. “It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage.” His answer: “I don’t care about any of the existing requirements; I need you to reinvent the product and we need to win.”
Lead bullets: talks about facing challenges with Netscape (and with Microsoft challenging them) as well as with his issues with OpsWare (their number one competitor was dominating them). Many people suggested they shift business strategies or go into a different market. He refused to do so: with Netscape, they made their servers faster than Microsoft and ended up beating BladeLogic. Instead of running from problems, they faced them head-on and made the product better.
His general advice: “There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?”. In other words, face your competitors and issues head on instead of running from them.
Embracing the struggle: there are lots of struggles and many young companies go through them. Ben went through major struggles at almost every point of his life, but he prevailed. “Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through the Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is the Struggle. The struggle is where greatness comes from.”
The keys to over-coming a struggle:
Don’t put it all on your own shoulders (share the struggles with the team): “You won’t be able to share every burden, but share every burden that you can. Get the maximum number of brains on the problems even if the problems represent existential threats.”
Persistence: the technology business is complex and there are always moves you can make to save your company / rescue the situation. He took a company bleeding money and IPO-ed at the worst time ever and made it, so you can too. “Play long enough and you might get lucky. In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.”
Take care of the people, the products and the profits, in that order. It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work. Most workplaces are far from good.
The main takeaway is that there is no secret formula for success during crises; instead, true leadership is about mustering the courage to make tough choices, persevering through sheer will when all seems lost, and accepting that struggle and doubt are not signs of failure but the core, unavoidable components of the entrepreneurial journey. The secret to winning it seems is simply being determined and not giving up.
“Starting a company is hard. If you want to be great, start a company – if not, then don’t.”
- Ben Horowitz
Build (by Tony Fadell)
Build products which people want (and follow with the correct technology after) – don’t put technology before product – the product must always come first. If you’re not solving a real-world problem, there is no need for your product. Also, the whole customer journey from start to finish is vitally important:
Design at Nest: every minute, from opening the box to reading the instructions to getting it on their wall to turning on the heat for the first time had to be incredibly smooth.
Customer panels don’t do well in design. People can’t articulate what they really want clearly enough definitely point in one direction or another. Customers will always be more comfortable what exists already despite it being terrible.
Story Telling: the story of your company, your product and your team should drive everything you do. The story isn’t there just to sell your product: it’s there to help you define it, understand it, and understand your customers – and it all starts with why? Why does the product exist? What problem does it solve? Use great analogies in telling your story (people can relate to them) and tell a story that others can connect with.
Your product isn’t your only focus: it’s the whole user experience. Don’t just build a prototype of your product; map our the entire user experience. Map out and visualize how your customer discovers, considers, installs, uses, fixes and ever returns your product. It all matters. Make models. Draw pictures. Sketch out the bones of the process in wire-frames. Write imaginary press releases. Created detailed mock ups. Put it all out and make it visible: how can you delight your customers in every possible way.
Always seek out new ways to disrupt yourself. If you make something truly disruptive, your competition should not be able to easily replicate it.
Companies that become too big and don’t innovate eventually die.
No matter what you build – it’ll take some time. The iPad took 3 generations and around 3 years to reach profitability. Google also wasn’t remotely profitable for 3 years and Facebook initially focused on growth rather than what their business model was going to be. The first version of the product should always focus on the customer journey and everything else will come later.
In Cold Blood (by Truman Capote)
If there’s one key lesson that I obtained from reading this, it’s that 1) small things matter and 2) chaos rules our everyday lives. The murders at the heart of In Cold Blood are not the result of some grand plan or deep personal vendetta; they come from a string of minor choices, misunderstandings, and bits of bad information. A rumor about a safe full of money, an offhand comment in a prison cell, a moment of idle curiosity—these small details, which could easily have led nowhere, instead set in motion a sequence of events that destroys an entire family. Capote shows how the line between “ordinary life” and catastrophe is much thinner than we like to admit.
At the same time, the book keeps circling back to how random and unfair this all is. The Clutters are not targeted because of anything they did; they just happen to be the family that fits a half-remembered description. Perry and Dick, too, are shaped by accidents of birth, trauma, and circumstance as much as by their own choices. This doesn’t excuse what they do, but it complicates the story. There is no neat moral accounting where the “bad” are punished and the “good” are spared. Instead, we see a world in which chance meetings, childhood injuries, timing, and geography all combine into something that feels almost senseless.
Capote’s style reinforces this sense of fragile order sitting on top of chaos. He gives us painstaking details about the town, the family’s routines, the layout of the house, the highways the killers drive along, as if documenting everything could make it understandable, controllable, safe. But the more we know, the more we see that knowledge does not prevent randomness; it only highlights how much had to align for this tragedy to happen. The book suggests that we live with an illusion of stability, and that behind our schedules and habits there is always a degree of unpredictability we cannot fully master.
In the end, In Cold Blood is not just about a crime; it’s about how we try to make sense of a world that often doesn’t make sense at all. Small actions ripple outward in ways no one can foresee, and lives intersect in patterns that feel almost arbitrary. The key message, for me, is both unsettling and sobering: we should never underestimate the weight of small decisions, and we should recognize that much of what happens to us—good and bad—is shaped by forces we don’t see and can’t fully control.
“Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will-depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living.” – Truman Capote
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (by Bruce Perry & Maia Szalavitz)
Written by child psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz, the book is a collection of harrowing yet hopeful case studies that explore how extreme trauma affects the developing brains of children. It takes readers through Dr. Perry’s clinical experiences with children who have faced unimaginable neglect and abuse—including a boy raised in a cage, children from the Branch Davidian cult, and survivors of genocide. Rather than viewing these children as damaged goods, Perry uses these stories to illustrate how traumatic experiences physically alter brain biology, shifting the focus from “what is wrong with this child?” to “what happened to this child?”
The key message of the book is that the brain develops based on repeated experiences. Trauma disrupts this development, often locking children into a persistent state of “fight or flight” that hinders their ability to learn and connect. As an example, one of the chapter’s discusses a 16 year old boy called Leon who committed 2 murders. Leon feels no remorse for his murder other than the remorse of being caught. He has two loving parents and an older brother, but Dr. Perry figures out that Leon’s parents would would regularly leave him alone in his crib and leave to go out for walks for hours at a time when he was a young baby; leaving him alone and crying in his crib for many hours. After some time, his mother recounted that Leon stopped crying so much (a huge red flag), so she believed that this regimen had helped him. In reality, her neglect, however innocent, had deprived Leon of the important loving and physical affection experiences an infant needs to form family bonds and later maintain healthy relationships. This isn’t the first story where this type of neglect occurs: in another story, a couple recounts hiring a baby-sitter who would come in during the morning and leave the baby alone for hours at a time, only to come back to change his diaper. Both children ended up with major development disorders, with Leon getting the worst of the bunch.
Even though many of the recounted stories of neglect are absolutely awful, Perry argues that because the brain is plastic, it can be healed. The most powerful tool for this healing is not medication or complex medical procedures, but patterned, repetitive human connection. The book emphasizes that recovery requires meeting a child at their developmental age rather than their chronological age and that healthy, consistent relationships are the ultimate engine of healing.
As an example, Perry and his team learned many valuable lessons from the children in Waco. He would usually get the question: why do some children overcome trauma with minimal or no long-lasting emotional scars, while others do not move past it, or move past it but continue to bear the weight of it, unable to live “normal” lives. His answer: relationships were the key to their ability to move forward and claim a “normal” life for themselves, or not. Children who were placed into stable, loving homes, where consistency and support were constants and they were able to develop deep supportive relationships, whether with blood relatives or foster families, were much more likely to lead normal adult lives. Those children who were less fortunate in their placements and did not develop supportive relationships, were much less likely to lead normal adult lives.
150 years ago most families lived in communities of 20-150 people, many of them family, where everyone knew everyone else, and supported everyone else, but by the 1950’s this was closer to 10 people in community and now the average family is 4 people and 25% of Americans live alone. This lack of connections coupled with our propensity to spend more time watching TV (or our cell phones) than interacting with one another even when we are together lowers both the number and quality of the relationships we are in compared to 100 years ago; this lack of deep relationships in turn heightens our children’s risk for bad and dangerous relationships while lowering their ability to rebound after trauma happens.
Crime and Punishment (by Fyodor Dostoevsky)
The book changed the way I see the world. You look at a man or woman across from you and you might not give too much thought to the fact that inside his or her head, they are making sense of the world just like you are. Yes, everyone you meet has an inner life as crowded and haunted as your own. The drunk in the tavern, the inspector in the office; even killers have their own stories and mental models which they live by. The book shows a murderer’s stream of consciousness. Through it, it also shows that you cannot simply just call someone a monster and walk away. To understand someone, you must know what story he is telling himself, what lies he believes in and what wounds he is hiding. Since this is impossible in the real world, the act of judging someone is possibly the greatest arrogance of all. Can you assume that if you wore the same boots and embarked on the same road that you would have walked a better path? Dostoevsky tries to show you that we are all made of the same stuff and that the line that separates us is very thin one. It taught me to judge less and to observe more, because in the darkness of our own minds, we are all stumbling toward the same light.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (by Carl Sagan)
As the world increasingly dominated by technology but plagued by scientific illiteracy, humanity risks sliding back into the darkness of superstition and ignorance. The scientific method—characterized by skepticism, observation, and the demand for evidence—is the only reliable tool we have to illuminate reality and protect ourselves from the “demons” of pseudoscience, whether they take the form of faith healing or political propaganda.
There is a baloney detection kit we all can use:
Independent Confirmation: Wherever possible, there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
Quantification: Wherever possible, use numbers and data. Vague claims are hard to evaluate; quantified claims can be checked.
Substantive Debate: Encourage knowledgeable proponents of all points of view to engage in substantive debate on the evidence.
Occam’s Razor: When faced with competing hypotheses, prefer the simpler one that requires the fewest new assumptions. It’s not a guarantee of truth, but a guiding principle.
In science, there are no authorities; at most, there are experts. Arguments from authority carry little weight—”authorities” have made mistakes in the past and will do so again.
Every step in an argument must be solid. A single weak link can break the entire chain of reasoning.
Constantly test hypotheses and question authority. Skepticism is not a negative force, but a constructive one that shields us from manipulation. A society dependent on science and technology in which hardly anyone understands science and technology is a prescription for disaster. A future where the public is unable to distinguish between genuine expertise and charlatanism, leaving them vulnerable to demagogues who can exploit their ignorance. Scientific literacy is not just an academic luxury, but a fundamental pillar of a free society.
The values of science—open debate, the lack of ultimate authority, and the willingness to be proven wrong—are identical to the values of a healthy democracy. Skepticism is a patriotic duty. Just as science requires us to question our hypotheses to find the truth, democracy requires citizens to question their leaders to maintain their freedom. The Bill of Rights exists for a reason; the freedom of speech and the freedom to question are essential checks against the errors of government. Without a skeptical, educated citizenry willing to ask difficult questions, the democratic experiment itself is in jeopardy. The right to question is the most precious freedom we have, and exercising it is the only way to keep the candle burning.
The Fiddler in the Subway: The Story of the World-Class Violinist Who Played for Handouts. . . And Other Virtuoso Performances by America’s Foremost Feature Writer (by Gene Weingarten)
One cold January morning, the world’s best violinist (Joshua Bell)—fresh from sold-out concert halls where tickets cost hundreds of dollars—stood disguised by the escalators of a Washington metro station and played Bach and other virtuoso pieces on a multi-million-dollar Stradivarius violin. For about three quarters of an hour, more than a thousand commuters passed within a few steps of him. Fewer than a dozen stopped to listen to Bell; most hurried by without even turning their heads. The few people who did stop; the children who instinctively wanted to listen to him were pulled away by their parents; and the few who did actually recognize him could not believe what they were witnessing. For the most part, his performance pretty much went unnoticed and he earned about 30 dollars in change from the experience.
The experiment shows how much our sense of value depends on context and how little attention people pay to the things going on around them. If we are unable to stop, even briefly, to hear one of the finest musicians in the world playing some of the finest music ever written, what else, in our haste, do we fail to see? How much beauty going on around us are we ready to miss due to being preoccupied by life’s diversions, and what does that say about us?
The Old Man and the Sea (by Ernest Hemingway)
The story is a simple one. It is about an old man who fishes alone. He has gone many days without taking a fish. He prepares his gear. He rows out into the dark. He goes out farther than anyone else dares to go. He hooks a giant marlin. The fish is strong and he is old, but he holds the line. For three days they are locked together. The line cuts his back and his hands cramp and he is hungry. He eats raw tuna to keep his strength. He talks to his hand. He talks to the bird. He respects the fish. He calls him brother. He loves him, but he has to kill him. That is the way of the world. It is the pride of the man against the dignity of the fish. Then the sharks came. They came to take what was his. He fights them for a long time, but in the end they win and the great fisherman is left with nothing but fish bones.
The story doesn’t have a great plot. It doesn’t have any outstanding twists and turns. The stream of words that Hemingway produces though are beautiful and will leave you stunned. The story taught me that victory and defeat are not as simple as they look. Although the old man came back with almost nothing, the boy sees the marlin’s great spine and tail and admires the old man. The real win is not made in an achievement or what it produces, it is the fact that the old man went far out, fought well, did not break, and came back with great hope. A man can be destroyed but not defeated. Your body can give out. Your catch can be taken. Your luck can run dry. What is left is how you carry yourself when you are alone—doing what you were born to do, even if it breaks you.
Happy 2026 everyone and once again a big thank you to all of the paid subscribers to this Substack!!!