Happy Sunday Friends!

Short one this week! Short, but I think a very needed reminder.

Here is 1 quote I’m musing, 2 Ideas, 3 of my favorite things from the week, and 1 question. If you find it useful or interesting, please feel free to forward this along to some friends or others!

One Quote I’m Musing

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own”

-Epictetus

Rereading Epictetus and thinking about this while I’ve been on leave and ahead of a couple weeks of travel.

Simply put, our first, and most important task is to put things into two buckets. Those things that are up to us, and those things that aren’t up to us.

Making that honest assessment allows us to choose where to focus our energy. Do we want to focus and spend that energy on things that have already happened? Things that might or might not happen? Are we going to focus our energy on wishing things weren’t happening to us or weren’t the way they are, or are we going to accept them for what they are and focus on how we’re going to deal with them?

We don’t control what the boss decides, who gets to do things, or what our adversaries (business or otherwise) do. But we can control things like our judgements, our motivations, desires, and aversions.

We can take our first principal task and decide what is in and what isn’t in our control. Then focus our actions accordingly.

-e

Two Ideas From Me

Doing our part well is the Determining factor in success. If succeeding is the only thing that will determine our outlook, then we have to control every aspect of the endeavor. But we almost never do. There are many players, many cogs in the business, the program.
Be thankful for the difficult and troublesome people in your life. Their actions and character challenge us to improve our own.

Three Favorite Things From Others

New take on describing LLMs/AI - Daniel Miessler has a great write-up on the thought process. Not just predicting next tokens but working more like we do as humans with examples. Daniel Miessler - Unsupervised Learning | More
Gallup released its 2023 Global Emotions report, measuring emotional temperature for countries all around the world via Experience Indexes (positive and negative). It’s an interesting study with reports on specifically how they conducted their surveys. Pretty interesting research, if a small sample size (about 1k people per country) | More
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” | Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

One Question

If you could meet and apprentice with anyone, present or past, what would you learn from them?

Have a wonderful week,

I’ll see you Sunday.
-e