Next Moves, Bucket List, and America
Three stories that stood out for me in the last two weeks:
There are many books aimed at building personal development strategies. I must have browsed through many but I didn’t find anything nearly as captivating as Your Next Five Moves by Patrick Bet-David. Honestly, I don’t remember how I stumbled across this book. Moreover, I hadn’t heard about Bet-David earlier (perhaps, I was living under a rock all these years). Bet-David is the founder of Valuetainment, a YouTube channel for entrepreneurs. The book takes a lot of inspiration from chess moves, and what stood out for me was a matter-of-fact conversational tone that runs through it. Perhaps the credit goes to Bet-David’s ghost writer Greg Dinkin for doing a fantastic job. Coming back to why I found this book interesting is the practical advice it is laced with. For instance, Bet-David recommends doing a personal identity audit right in the beginning and doing this exercise threw up some interesting reflections for me. He then goes on to advice on how to build the right team and keep the members motivated, how to scale (relevant for entrepreneurs but equally so for corporate managers) and finally some master moves on how to beat competition. The book makes for a breezy read but one that I am re-reading a few chapters again to pick up the nuggets.
“I wish someone had told me that the end of a life is a mathematical equation. At 35, the doctors tell me I have Stage IV colon cancer and a slim chance of survival,” so starts this moving essay by Dr. Kate Bowler. As her days are approaching an end, she is nudged by her counsellors to make a bucket list of experiences and hobbies she would like to cover in her remaining time. In the process she stumbles across the bucket list from her childhood. She does a brief recounting of the history of the bucket list and how the term even came about. She refuses to make another one though. “A bucket list disguises a dark question as a challenge: What do you want to do before you die? But is the answer to that desire a set of experiences? Should we really focus on how many moments we can collect?” she counter argues instead. “All of our accomplishments, ridiculous. All of our striving, unnecessary. Our lives are unfinished and unfinishable. We do too much, never enough and are done before we’ve even started,” so she reasons.
Niall Fergusson wrote this commentary in The Economist on America leaving Afghanistan in chaos and how that’s a sign of the waning power of the country. He compares America’s situation with that of Britain’s global dominance once many decades back. Does Britain’s experience help us understand the future of American power, he asks. While the two situations are not exactly comparable (for instance, there is no American empire), there are some similarities between the two. For instance, the mountain of debt that America currently faces is comparable in magnitude to that of erstwhile British empire and the relative decline of economic output where China is poised to overtake America, including on technological advances. American military presence oversees is almost as ubiquitous as Britain’s once was. “America’s empire may not manifest itself as dominions, colonies and protectorates, but the perception of international dominance, and the costs associated with overstretch, are similar,” writes Fergusson. Further, Fergusson postulates that the move to withdraw from Afghanistan is a sign of the waning power and such a move will not be a painless withdrawal.
A quote that I came across:
The trick is what one emphasises. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of the work is same.
