📚 Boundless Reads #122: Bullshit, Peter Thiel & Homeownership
Greetings from Taipei. Anything I should be reading these days?
Five Good Reads
⚖ #1 Universal Laws: Morgan Housel’s essays are a must read. I loved learning about Wiio’s laws:
“In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.”
and Brandolini’s law:
“The amount of energy needed to refute bullsh*t is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
+More If you think our world is awash in bullshit, check out the timeless essay On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt too
👨 #2 Peter Thiel: While quite a long article, I found pieces of this essay about Thiel to to be fascinating, esepcially his obsession with Rene Girard’s ideas:
“Thiel credits Girard with inspiring him to switch careers. Before he internalized Girard’s ideas, Thiel was on track to become a lawyer. He worked as an associate for Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City, where the hours were long and the competition was cutthroat. As Thiel recounts, all the lawyers competed for the same shared goals. They ranked themselves not by absolute progress towards a transcendent end goal, but by progress within their peer group.”
As Peter Thiel recounted:
“When I left after seven months and three days, one of the lawyers down the hall from me said, ‘You know, I had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz.’ Of course that was not literally true, since all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back. But psychologically this was not what people were capable of. Because their identity was defined by competing so intensely with other people, they could not imagine leaving… On the outside, everybody wanted to get in. On the inside, everybody wanted to get out.”
💊 #3 Health: I found this post from Ben Greenfield to be incredibly useful in terms of understanding digestion and my health.
🏠 #4 Own or Rent?: This is the best post I’ve ever seen on the own vs. buy debate.
⚒ #5 Work, Work Work: I explored the nine schools of work that shape our modern work beliefs. Which ones influence you?
Thanks for reading Boundless Reads! I started this in 2016 as a way to share what I was reading and as a way to engage with others who want to go deeper and explore different ideas.
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