Here we go

Off into the New Year, which kicked off somewhat inauspiciously in me allowing myself to get frustrated by other people being slow to get things done. For the millionth time, I had to remind myself that I can't control other people and that they live their own lives. I can only take care of my own stuff, of which there is more than enough.

Many years ago, I first had the realization that a key thing for my happiness was to try to limit what I was trying to do, what was in scope for me. Then I read in about a million places that others had figured that out long ago. Only more recently did I come to understand that finding and maintaining good teams and fleets of other people who knew how to do specific things better than I did was essential.

When he died in 2017 a lot of articles were published about the rolodex of David Rockefeller, which contained entries for about 200,000 people and detailed each interaction. Henry Kissinger, a close friend of Rockefeller's, had 35 cards, which listed out meetings the two had had since they first met in 1955. Similarly, Fischer Black -- the genius/geek who was one of the two progenitors of the Black-Scholes options pricing formula and who was present at the table through much of the quant revolution in finance until his untimely demise in 1995 -- had a full room adjoining his office at Goldman Sachs for his own personalized card catalog of ideas or thoughts he considered worth noting, each catalogued according to a system of his own concoction. Which reminds me (and I'll stop shortly), of how Phil Knight of Nike noted in Shoe Dog that his first employee, Jeff Johnson, a somewhat quirky hyper-energetic runner who was first a super-salesman and then did a bit of everything before retiring from Nike, lives in what he calls his "Fortress of Solitude" in New Hampshire, a house filled with reading rooms, reading chairs and books -- all organized by a card catalog system of his own making.

In reality, these are all just extreme examples of how we all live our lives, encountering other people, ideas, and texts (and other cultural artefacts) and trying to keep track of it all. Finding a balance between experiencing, interacting and retaining information and then directing and influencing others is key. Then we have let go and understand we won't retain it all, nor will we get it all done.

(While I was writing this, Graham got up, made his pancakes, and let me know he'd like to finish up his college essays for a few schools today. So now I transition to that).