Very interesting post. I study leadership and there is a divide among research about "skills and "traits." Traits was used decades ago and has been replaced by skills in the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately for many, some things cannot be learned. They can be refined, but not learned. An example of this is taking risks. Someone who walks away from work to go back to school in their late thirties and moves across the country is a trait, not a skill. Now, along the way that same person can learn new skills (and refine talents) to improve their leadership and personal communication. But some either "are" or "are not" an their is nothing wrong with either. God gave us each unique traits and society should focus on the refinement of these rather than trying to be the next [insert celebrity entrepreneur]. Because chances are that even if someone reads the same books as Elon and attends the same classes and has the same social circles... they are not Elon. They are themselves.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. Your distinction between skills and traits is important, and one I could’ve done a better job making. My sense reading @maximsmith Substack and listening to him on recent podcasts is that it’s one he grapples with as well.
I contend that whatever activities seriously captured your interests when you were a subteen poised to become a teenager are the ones that will give you the most contentment as an adult
I have no science or research to substantiate this assertion; only my life experience. For example, at the impressionable age I cited, I was fascinated with being a diplomat, college instructor, airline pilot, international businessman, military officer.
As a science fiction reading teen, apart from one exception, how I acquired these interests at that point in my impressionable youth is a great mystery,
The sole exception: my father was responsible for pushing me to become a pilot. One memorable recollection of his ambition for me was placing me in the cockpit of a P51 Mustang. I can still see those mysterious cockpit dials to this day.
So, I decided to kill two birds with one stone: Go to college; enroll in ROTC, become a military officer and apply for pilot training. College was simply a necessity to achieve two of my ambitions.
I even have an aviation record: I was the pilot of a B707 that set a world record -- the fastest time between two points of earth: Moscow and Tel Aviv
I later became a commissioned Foreign Service Officer (diplomat), international businessman and taught college as an adjunct instructor. It's been a rich ride despite the mystery: what was the origin of the none aviation interests.?
Wow. You’ve had a fascinating career. My son graduated college earlier this year, then joined the Air National Guard as part of a plan to be a commercial airline pilot. He’s finishing Tech school next month
He'll have a great career. Curious, however, where he acquired his interest in becoming a military officer and a pilot. Neither are easy paths. Believe it or not: eye + hand coordination important for flying. If he played sports, he's got it.
Great material, JD!! Never quite figure out how you write so eloquently, but I enjoy the read! Are you still in the 11:00am Wednesday accountability group or in another one now?
Their pronoun is they & wherever they go they're there.
I like The Preparation of the I of the storm that is each individual you … who learns to swim by not sinking.
(Or learns something about certain limits by testing uncertain limits. I bodysurfed the storm surge. Learned about hydraulics. Almost drowned. Miss Camille was a good teacher.
But … good teachers are always a function of, are contingent upon good students. The student pre-exists, comes first in the order.
I’m sure that is mentioned somewhere in the NEA brochure. And in all the other “I’m a teacher” brochures, too.)
But I also like to remember, remember the fifth of November & all the uncounted & so unremembered/unknowns that do sink. And that are sunk. Or that survive overt attempts to sink them …
… Like the survivors of the USS Liberty, for just one example out of the near infinity of examples that trainees are engrained to ignore.
Sunk costs uncounted is the skew the squirrels slush-fund squirrel away to squander-generate so many reigny-rainy days. “They” have been modifying that weather forever.
(Aretha Connections: Chain-chain-chain … Chain of Fools, R-E-S-P-E-C-T-ing those chainlinks … Forever (Forever), and ever (Yeah) • You'll stay in my heart and I will love you • Forever (Forever), and ever (Ever) • We never will part, oh, how I love you • Together (Together), together (Together) • That's how it must be to live without you • Would only mean heartbreak for me (Ooh-hoo) …
DC Connections: Don't need reason, don't need rhyme • Ain't nothin' I'd rather do • Goin' down, party time • My friends are gonna be there too, yeah … I'm on the highway to hell …
Edison/Tesla connections [&Westinhouse&JPMorgan&&&]: Get enough mites in a democracy trundle-bed & that makes right.)
Markets are about price discovery. And price is discovered by counting. Counting Everything. Which people are mostly untrustworthy to do … but incapable of doing, too. It takes a meta to get mo betta, & that meta is competition in free markets.
Not counting the many ones that didn’t make it, as well as not counting all the ones who could never make it, is the stuff of government-front budgets … not to mention un-efficient “market” hypotheses not trained-in at uni-party “business” schools.
All the uncounted pawns do count even tho they are not counted by the counters who claim to be the ones, the only ones, that count.
Call allllllll that criminal malfeasance The Count of Monte Christo “paradox”?
Cartels & monopolies of counting ~ which is to say miscounting ~ are exactly analogous to mythologies & ideologies & all the calendar-slotted holy days.
Mental malinvestments/misallocations that distort prices & make discovery impossible … & illusions/delusions inescapable … is, would it weren’t, Humanifest Destiny & the Hard Drive that must, & does, fly apart at the seems we screwed the pooch yet again!
Good too to think about how addictive random reward (schedules) very definitely is. And how much dopamine/ngineering has always gone on.
Who learns to swim by not sinking … Including not sinking to the commodified lowest common denominator levels called schools - & then staying there, continuing on as a trumpeter in the molten alumni blob.
(Miles Davis: Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.)
(Hmmm. Alumni. Aluminum. Exley [like the detective in L.A. Confidential] counts the costs of lucky #13 on the periodic /rewards/ chart, &, no surprise, the TBTF bankruptcy is continuously tragic-commons ongoing.
I highly recommend his substack ~ Dr. Christopher Exley ~ & his book ~ Imagine You Are An Aluminum Atom.
Peruse too his stack to see what “his school,” in cahoots with the abounding lowest common denominator price-hiders, did to him.
Spoiler punchline to the bad joke of cooking & burning books is that Exley is now ex nihilo ex-schoolman & relegated, perhaps, to Substack scientist.)
((Trumpeter Miles Davis dropped Julliard school in favor of education.))
I like the observational scrutiny that points out that that Preppie trait/skill/personality is written into some slates, but not others, & the recognition-admission that blank slates are bunk(mates in the penitentiary of unpenitents … because it was already written, @conception, that un-COLA was the recipe … no cost of living adjustments for youse).
But the notes that back-mask “they” tune the Spector solid wall of of sound that preps for the I of Sauron…
… In both mirror image directions, too … the eye that stares(ways to heaven) at itself & the swoosh of one hand clapping the face its attached to is … Fight Club nihilism unknown - & unknowable to the know thyself-nots.
If the artist’s audience isn’t the artist himself/herself, then the dance is become macabre.
The great fun reptilian Christopher Walken:
“A man can be an artist... in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasy's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece.”
But of course anti-art murder-for-hire isn’t art … no matter what Sun Tsu said contrary.
“There’s trained & there’s untrained” conflation-murders education & learning … calls/names the elephant everything but “elephant.” And authoritatively insists - lies - circus elephants are educated, are learned learners.
“They said for you to give me your share” isn’t creative destruction, either, despite propensities for mistaking what that does to bankers bank accounts & accoutrement collections.
Thanos. Long that a, good student. Theynos.
Thomas Malthus becomes Thanos Malthus because tech “advancements” 6-million dollar un-manned him to the task of getting rid of all the useless-dangerous eater they’s.
That’s Yuval Harari thru a Marvel Comics lens darkly.
Or, for specimens like Harari, a dating app photoshop ka-ching … that’ll never eventuate in anything approaching correct copulation … which is good because too many such people get produced as is. The design of homo is hom-oh-so self-limiting.
The carbon monoxide leaks into enclosed places, lungs & cranial vaults, thusly:
Parents, just as they were sacrificed, offer their children up to twelve year sentences that institutionalize the domesticated-delinquency in good & hard.
Many in-the-process-of-wiring-up pups internalize the Stockholm Syndrome offense so deeply that they self-cut scarify four, or more, years on top of that initial sentence.
After all that, the “teacher-student” thing is just a reflex taken for granted by most.
(Or a reflux matched to a loose LES.)
As is “this is learning.”
As is “this is your brain on drugs.”
So the never-marked-to-marketplace is a BAR exam-legitimized bar stocked chock-a-bloc to the ceiling with well-to-premium inebriants & intoxicants that have untruth-in-labeling “teachers” & “mentors” plastered on the bottles that plaster.
And those bars are always crowded. With drinkers. With pourers. With pretty cocktail waitresses. And handsome devils.
Going into that drug dealing “business,” & going to those pushers for drugs to consume, are neck-&-neck in the race to the bottom of the barrels, bottles, stems & rocks glasses that these rock-throwers live in (yes: STEM’s, too … “Now I have become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds).
It’s Cheers, where everybody knows your name & they are always glad you came & the laugh-track “teaches” all those theys what’s funny & when to play their laugh-along parts.
Good on you if you can dissect-scrutinize the formative’speriences because a lot of that is deforming. “They” are not interested in your interests. Or the interests: The actual interests that honest accounting reveals.
Else-wise the solid wall of sound & fury signifying nothing refrain is go (a)long to get short, & shorter, & shorter still.
Napoleon was one short story of countless, but that chapter’s murder-suicide pact-people/students several abreast circled the globe before Parisible Elba-St. Helena swapped in some new midgets to keep the macabre dance going under “different” assumed names & faces - just as other “different” faces/names preceded the Corsican.
(Munchkins, some even named Mnuchin, with educated technology, are giving Russia the old college try to this very day … because Waterlooters are wired to reproduce, & reduce - to rubble - not learn, not build. Status quotidian amphibians & scorpions aback & neither creature can ‘just say no’ to the drug that is the other.)
The best possible crystallization of what we endeavor to accomplish. Thank you, JD!
Very interesting post. I study leadership and there is a divide among research about "skills and "traits." Traits was used decades ago and has been replaced by skills in the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately for many, some things cannot be learned. They can be refined, but not learned. An example of this is taking risks. Someone who walks away from work to go back to school in their late thirties and moves across the country is a trait, not a skill. Now, along the way that same person can learn new skills (and refine talents) to improve their leadership and personal communication. But some either "are" or "are not" an their is nothing wrong with either. God gave us each unique traits and society should focus on the refinement of these rather than trying to be the next [insert celebrity entrepreneur]. Because chances are that even if someone reads the same books as Elon and attends the same classes and has the same social circles... they are not Elon. They are themselves.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. Your distinction between skills and traits is important, and one I could’ve done a better job making. My sense reading @maximsmith Substack and listening to him on recent podcasts is that it’s one he grapples with as well.
Thanks, JD. Great mini presentation of the program. Hope to talk to you again sometime soon!
Thank you, Maxim. Would be my honor.
I contend that whatever activities seriously captured your interests when you were a subteen poised to become a teenager are the ones that will give you the most contentment as an adult
I have no science or research to substantiate this assertion; only my life experience. For example, at the impressionable age I cited, I was fascinated with being a diplomat, college instructor, airline pilot, international businessman, military officer.
As a science fiction reading teen, apart from one exception, how I acquired these interests at that point in my impressionable youth is a great mystery,
The sole exception: my father was responsible for pushing me to become a pilot. One memorable recollection of his ambition for me was placing me in the cockpit of a P51 Mustang. I can still see those mysterious cockpit dials to this day.
So, I decided to kill two birds with one stone: Go to college; enroll in ROTC, become a military officer and apply for pilot training. College was simply a necessity to achieve two of my ambitions.
I even have an aviation record: I was the pilot of a B707 that set a world record -- the fastest time between two points of earth: Moscow and Tel Aviv
I later became a commissioned Foreign Service Officer (diplomat), international businessman and taught college as an adjunct instructor. It's been a rich ride despite the mystery: what was the origin of the none aviation interests.?
Wow. You’ve had a fascinating career. My son graduated college earlier this year, then joined the Air National Guard as part of a plan to be a commercial airline pilot. He’s finishing Tech school next month
He'll have a great career. Curious, however, where he acquired his interest in becoming a military officer and a pilot. Neither are easy paths. Believe it or not: eye + hand coordination important for flying. If he played sports, he's got it.
Great material, JD!! Never quite figure out how you write so eloquently, but I enjoy the read! Are you still in the 11:00am Wednesday accountability group or in another one now?
Thank you, Scott. Very kind of you to say.
Their pronoun is they & wherever they go they're there.
I like The Preparation of the I of the storm that is each individual you … who learns to swim by not sinking.
(Or learns something about certain limits by testing uncertain limits. I bodysurfed the storm surge. Learned about hydraulics. Almost drowned. Miss Camille was a good teacher.
But … good teachers are always a function of, are contingent upon good students. The student pre-exists, comes first in the order.
I’m sure that is mentioned somewhere in the NEA brochure. And in all the other “I’m a teacher” brochures, too.)
But I also like to remember, remember the fifth of November & all the uncounted & so unremembered/unknowns that do sink. And that are sunk. Or that survive overt attempts to sink them …
… Like the survivors of the USS Liberty, for just one example out of the near infinity of examples that trainees are engrained to ignore.
Sunk costs uncounted is the skew the squirrels slush-fund squirrel away to squander-generate so many reigny-rainy days. “They” have been modifying that weather forever.
(Aretha Connections: Chain-chain-chain … Chain of Fools, R-E-S-P-E-C-T-ing those chainlinks … Forever (Forever), and ever (Yeah) • You'll stay in my heart and I will love you • Forever (Forever), and ever (Ever) • We never will part, oh, how I love you • Together (Together), together (Together) • That's how it must be to live without you • Would only mean heartbreak for me (Ooh-hoo) …
DC Connections: Don't need reason, don't need rhyme • Ain't nothin' I'd rather do • Goin' down, party time • My friends are gonna be there too, yeah … I'm on the highway to hell …
Edison/Tesla connections [&Westinhouse&JPMorgan&&&]: Get enough mites in a democracy trundle-bed & that makes right.)
Markets are about price discovery. And price is discovered by counting. Counting Everything. Which people are mostly untrustworthy to do … but incapable of doing, too. It takes a meta to get mo betta, & that meta is competition in free markets.
Not counting the many ones that didn’t make it, as well as not counting all the ones who could never make it, is the stuff of government-front budgets … not to mention un-efficient “market” hypotheses not trained-in at uni-party “business” schools.
All the uncounted pawns do count even tho they are not counted by the counters who claim to be the ones, the only ones, that count.
Call allllllll that criminal malfeasance The Count of Monte Christo “paradox”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFCSYhCjHLQ
Cartels & monopolies of counting ~ which is to say miscounting ~ are exactly analogous to mythologies & ideologies & all the calendar-slotted holy days.
Mental malinvestments/misallocations that distort prices & make discovery impossible … & illusions/delusions inescapable … is, would it weren’t, Humanifest Destiny & the Hard Drive that must, & does, fly apart at the seems we screwed the pooch yet again!
Good too to think about how addictive random reward (schedules) very definitely is. And how much dopamine/ngineering has always gone on.
Who learns to swim by not sinking … Including not sinking to the commodified lowest common denominator levels called schools - & then staying there, continuing on as a trumpeter in the molten alumni blob.
(Miles Davis: Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.)
(Hmmm. Alumni. Aluminum. Exley [like the detective in L.A. Confidential] counts the costs of lucky #13 on the periodic /rewards/ chart, &, no surprise, the TBTF bankruptcy is continuously tragic-commons ongoing.
I highly recommend his substack ~ Dr. Christopher Exley ~ & his book ~ Imagine You Are An Aluminum Atom.
Peruse too his stack to see what “his school,” in cahoots with the abounding lowest common denominator price-hiders, did to him.
Spoiler punchline to the bad joke of cooking & burning books is that Exley is now ex nihilo ex-schoolman & relegated, perhaps, to Substack scientist.)
((Trumpeter Miles Davis dropped Julliard school in favor of education.))
I like the observational scrutiny that points out that that Preppie trait/skill/personality is written into some slates, but not others, & the recognition-admission that blank slates are bunk(mates in the penitentiary of unpenitents … because it was already written, @conception, that un-COLA was the recipe … no cost of living adjustments for youse).
But the notes that back-mask “they” tune the Spector solid wall of of sound that preps for the I of Sauron…
… In both mirror image directions, too … the eye that stares(ways to heaven) at itself & the swoosh of one hand clapping the face its attached to is … Fight Club nihilism unknown - & unknowable to the know thyself-nots.
If the artist’s audience isn’t the artist himself/herself, then the dance is become macabre.
The great fun reptilian Christopher Walken:
“A man can be an artist... in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasy's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece.”
But of course anti-art murder-for-hire isn’t art … no matter what Sun Tsu said contrary.
“There’s trained & there’s untrained” conflation-murders education & learning … calls/names the elephant everything but “elephant.” And authoritatively insists - lies - circus elephants are educated, are learned learners.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqlkHzKoPPU
“They said for you to give me your share” isn’t creative destruction, either, despite propensities for mistaking what that does to bankers bank accounts & accoutrement collections.
Thanos. Long that a, good student. Theynos.
Thomas Malthus becomes Thanos Malthus because tech “advancements” 6-million dollar un-manned him to the task of getting rid of all the useless-dangerous eater they’s.
That’s Yuval Harari thru a Marvel Comics lens darkly.
Or, for specimens like Harari, a dating app photoshop ka-ching … that’ll never eventuate in anything approaching correct copulation … which is good because too many such people get produced as is. The design of homo is hom-oh-so self-limiting.
The carbon monoxide leaks into enclosed places, lungs & cranial vaults, thusly:
Parents, just as they were sacrificed, offer their children up to twelve year sentences that institutionalize the domesticated-delinquency in good & hard.
Many in-the-process-of-wiring-up pups internalize the Stockholm Syndrome offense so deeply that they self-cut scarify four, or more, years on top of that initial sentence.
After all that, the “teacher-student” thing is just a reflex taken for granted by most.
(Or a reflux matched to a loose LES.)
As is “this is learning.”
As is “this is your brain on drugs.”
So the never-marked-to-marketplace is a BAR exam-legitimized bar stocked chock-a-bloc to the ceiling with well-to-premium inebriants & intoxicants that have untruth-in-labeling “teachers” & “mentors” plastered on the bottles that plaster.
And those bars are always crowded. With drinkers. With pourers. With pretty cocktail waitresses. And handsome devils.
Going into that drug dealing “business,” & going to those pushers for drugs to consume, are neck-&-neck in the race to the bottom of the barrels, bottles, stems & rocks glasses that these rock-throwers live in (yes: STEM’s, too … “Now I have become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds).
Rock Star (is a fun tune that fits):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmeUuoxyt_E
The Lottery (is a fun/damental rune/stone that fits):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZyhVg31iaQ&t=16s
It’s Cheers, where everybody knows your name & they are always glad you came & the laugh-track “teaches” all those theys what’s funny & when to play their laugh-along parts.
Good on you if you can dissect-scrutinize the formative’speriences because a lot of that is deforming. “They” are not interested in your interests. Or the interests: The actual interests that honest accounting reveals.
Else-wise the solid wall of sound & fury signifying nothing refrain is go (a)long to get short, & shorter, & shorter still.
Napoleon was one short story of countless, but that chapter’s murder-suicide pact-people/students several abreast circled the globe before Parisible Elba-St. Helena swapped in some new midgets to keep the macabre dance going under “different” assumed names & faces - just as other “different” faces/names preceded the Corsican.
(Munchkins, some even named Mnuchin, with educated technology, are giving Russia the old college try to this very day … because Waterlooters are wired to reproduce, & reduce - to rubble - not learn, not build. Status quotidian amphibians & scorpions aback & neither creature can ‘just say no’ to the drug that is the other.)
Sink, or swim. This … is … spARTa!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aof9KxIJZo
Perspire, glow, sweat The Preparation.
Or be The Usual Suspects in The Perparation. In which case who, really, is Keyser Söze?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmSazfinf0U
the author a typical phony says college is not for most kids but I sent my kids there. college is where kids go to learn how to hate white people