THE CHAOS THEORY

“The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This is not a book about how to spot a Black Swan event, but rather a book that is trying to prove that we’re all helpless in the face of a Black Swan event.

The concept of Black Swan comes from the discovery of a literal black-coloured swan in Australia, that destroyed the common believe among ornithologists that all swans are white. Before this discovery even the empirical evidence were all pointed to swans being only white, which, according to the author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge.”

He then continues, “One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.”

This is the core premise of the book, the highly unexpected occasion when our widely held perceptions are destroyed into pieces in an instance, and we have to bear the consequences of the risk associated with it. The book covers Black Swans in many different areas of life, including psychology, business, finance, and natural science, among others; analysing limitations, how humans deal with knowledge, when smart people are dumb, even the unpredictability of war.

Taleb (or what he likes to refer himself to as NNT, even use NNT to talk about himself in a third person’s point of view, which was weird) expands this thesis by categorising events into 2 camps: Mediocristan vs. Extremistan.

Mediocristan is an utopian province where particular events do not contribute much individually, but only collectively. The idea behind it is “when your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total. The largest observation will remain impressive, but eventually insignificant, to the sum.” Weight, height, and calorie consumption are from Mediocristan, so do income for a baker, a small restaurant owner, an orthodontist, a prostitute, or random statistics such as gambling profits, mortality rate, IQ, or car accidents. “Mediocristan”, as NNT remarks, “is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted.”

Meanwhile, Extremistan is a place where inequalities are such that one single observation can highly impact the aggregate or the total. Almost all social matters are from Extremistan, such as wealth, income, name recognition as a celebrity, book sales per author, book citation per author, number of references on Google, populations of cities, number of speakers per language, uses of words in a vocabulary, damages caused by earthquakes, sizes of planets, sizes of companies, stock ownership, height between species, financial markets, commodity prices, inflation rates, economic data, deaths in war, deaths from terrorist incidents, and so much more.

Interestingly, before the advances of modern technology wars used to belong to Mediocristan, as it can only occur locally and it is quite difficult to kill so many people at once. But today, with weapons of mass destructions, all it takes is a button, a crazy person, or a small error to wipe out a population. As NNT remarks, “Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.” This is where Black Swans live.

Moreover, NNT also introduce the concept of the turkey problem. As he explains, “Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race “looking out for its best interests,” as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey [getting slaughtered]. It will incur a revision of belief.”

Indeed, this is another core argument of the book, that we’re all living life like the turkey, being conditioned to the daily routine under the illusion that everything is normal and becoming oblivion to the huge risks that are facing us.

The book also teaches us to see the other side of the coin, to be a successful turkey – so to speak – where our victories or achievements are actually the result of dumb luck or a streak or dumb lucks that cannot be replicated anymore even with huge efforts (AKA, positive Black Swan). And after about 30% of the book, after all the important theories have been discussed, that’s all that NNT is talking about, the stupidity of people.

In what becomes a tiringly repetitive and bulky rants, he then proceeded to provide “examples” when experts from many different fields are wrong. For instance, he is mocking those who predicted a landslide win of Al Gore against George W. Bush (but Gore did win the popular vote by a landslide, but then Bush + Fox cheat through the electoral college recount in Florida – ironically THIS will be a Black Swan moment, one that NNT failed to address and instead blame it on the economic failures of the Clinton-Gore era).

He also mocks the bell curve as an intellectual fraud, and dedicate one whole chapter 15 about it. He insulted Nobel Prize winners in economics Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe for creating the Modern Portfolio Theory (which he called phony), insulted another Nobel Prize winners in economics pair of Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, he even mocks Plato for creating the “Platonic fold” to understand reality (and use “Platonic” word as a derogatory term throughout the book), while also disagreeing with [the followers of] Karl Marx and Adam Smith.

Meanwhile, throughout the book he also tries so hard to portray himself as an intellectual, by inserting stories about him being invited to multiple intellectual gatherings, which reminds me of the behaviour of the Sophist in Ancient Greek, that would do anything they can to appear sophisticated by any means necessary other than their actual intellectual arguments.

Because what is his intellectual argument, really? His basic premise is all experts whether it’s scientists, economists, bankers, investors, are all successful not because of their skills, but down to luck. Except for him and his favourite philosophers (of course). He even use Orwell’s 1984 as a failed prediction over the future (who’s going to tell him?).

Surely not all experts or all predictions are just dumb luck? There are patterns, early signs, and experts that can predict a Black Swan before it happened. Like Paul Tudor Jones famously predicted the Black Monday 1987 crash during the weekend, highlighting a pure competency. Or those traders who placed a huge sums of put options starting from 5 September 2001 all the way to 10 September 2001, before 9/11 occurred, highlighting insider information that were not readily available to the rest of the world.

To be fair, NNT did somewhat address this, in what he call a reverse turkey move: “From the standpoint of the turkey, the nonfeeding of the one thousand and first day is a Black Swan. For the butcher, it is not, since its occurrence is not unexpected. So you can see here that the Black Swan is a sucker’s problem. In other words, it occurs relative to your expectation. You realize that you can eliminate a Black Swan by science (if you’re able), or by keeping an open mind.”

But still, rather than teaching us how to spot a Black Swan event early (maybe by diving deeper into those who did predict the 1987 crash or who were in the know of 9/11 beforehand), he dedicate the entire book to ridicule experts for being unaware of Black Swan events and unable to cope with them.

Ironically, he himself said in the book that when pressed by the press to provide examples of the upcoming Black Swans, he couldn’t answer it. He even tell the story when one time a business was trying to hire him to be a forecaster of events, but he said he doesn’t do forecasting, in which the business promptly dropped him (and he mocks them for being closed minded when it comes to predictions). Oh the huge ego on this fragile diva.

NNT’s thesis reminds me of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which argues that asset prices always reflect all available information, making it hard to achieve return in excess of the market’s average. It is an utopian view of the market, a good benchmark but not a realistic view in the real life where in reality human behaviour matters more in the ever inefficient market that can produce higher returns for those who understand market psychology.

Likewise, in his thesis NNT failed to highlight those who have inside information, the perpetrator, or even the early receiver of the information, – AKA all the reverse turkeys – over the upcoming Black Swan. This makes him similar like the Efficient Market Hypothesis hardliners that refuse to budge, even during the market meltdown in 2008 that was not supposed to happen in an efficient market.

Which is a bit of an anti-climax for the book. Because NNT doesn’t provide any way to spot a Black Swan, and instead only encourages us to adopt a mindset that accepts the randomness of reality, get comfortable in uncertainty, and prepare for the unexpected. Because by doing so, we get to minimize the impact of any Black Swans. In this regard, just like the Efficient Market Hypothesis supporters, he really is a Black Swan purist that is unwilling to compromise his utopian thesis.

But still, what can we learn from a person we grow to disagree? When we strip away the ego and the intellectual douchebaggery, quite a lot, actually. Here are some of the better insights from him, on the fascinating world of randomness:

1. The dynamics of the Lebanese conflict had been patently unpredictable, yet people’s reasoning as they examined the events showed a constant: almost all those who cared seemed convinced that they understood what was going on. Every single day brought occurrences that lay completely outside their forecast, but they could not figure out that they had not forecast them. Much of what took place would have been deemed completely crazy with respect to the past. Yet it did not seem that crazy after the events.
2. I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible “because”; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations. But silent evidence masks this fact.
3. Mistaking a naïve observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.
4. Matters should be seen on some relative, not absolute, timescale: earthquakes last minutes, 9/11 lasted hours, but historical changes and technological implementations are Black Swans that can take decades. In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly—it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build.
5. We have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world—these instances are always easy to find. Alas, with tools, and fools, anything can be easy to find. You take past instances that corroborate your theories and you treat them as evidence. For instance, a diplomat will show you his “accomplishments,” not what he failed to do. Mathematicians will try to convince you that their science is useful to society by pointing out instances where it proved helpful, not those where it was a waste of time, or, worse, those numerous mathematical applications that inflicted a severe cost on society owing to the highly unempirical nature of elegant mathematical theories.
6. The fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world; it is particularly acute when it comes to the rare event.
7. We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our heads.
8. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
9. Think of the world around you, laden with trillions of details. Try to describe it and you will find yourself tempted to weave a thread into what you are saying. A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived “chaos of human experience.”
10. People in professions with high randomness (such as in the markets) can suffer more than their share of the toxic effect of look-back stings: I should have sold my portfolio at the top; I could have bought that stock years ago for pennies and I would now be driving a pink convertible; et cetera. If you are a professional, you can feel that you “made a mistake,” or, worse, that “mistakes were made,” when you failed to do the equivalent of buying the winning lottery ticket for your investors, and feel the need to apologize for your “reckless” investment strategy (that is, what seems reckless in retrospect).
11. How can you get rid of such a persistent throb? Don’t try to willingly avoid thinking about it: this will almost surely backfire. A more appropriate solution is to make the event appear more unavoidable. Hey, it was bound to take place and it seems futile to agonize over it. How can you do so? Well, with a narrative. Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You feel less guilty for not having avoided certain events; you feel less responsible for it. Things appear as if they were bound to happen.
12. If you work in a randomness-laden profession, as we see, you are likely to suffer burnout effects from that constant second-guessing of your past actions in terms of what played out subsequently. Keeping a diary is the least you can do in these circumstances.
13. It happens all the time: a cause is proposed to make you swallow the news and make matters more concrete. After a candidate’s defeat in an election, you will be supplied with the “cause” of the voters’ disgruntlement. Any conceivable cause can do. The media, however, go to great lengths to make the process “thorough” with their armies of fact-checkers. It is as if they wanted to be wrong with infinite precision (instead of accepting being approximately right, like a fable writer).
14. Adding the “because” makes these matters far more plausible, and far more likely. Cancer from smoking seems more likely than cancer without a cause attached to it—an unspecified cause means no cause at all.
15. The first question about the paradox of the perception of Black Swans is as follows: How is it that some Black Swans are overblown in our minds when the topic of this book is that we mainly neglect Black Swans? The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and b) those nobody talks about, since they escape models—those that you would feel ashamed discussing in public because they do not seem plausible. I can safely say that it is entirely compatible with human nature that the incidences of Black Swans would be overestimated in the first case, but severely underestimated in the second one.
16. We learn from repetition—at the expense of events that have not happened before. Events that are nonrepeatable are ignored before their occurrence, and overestimated after (for a while). After a Black Swan, such as September 11, 2001, people expect it to recur when in fact the odds of that happening have arguably been lowered.
17. The economist Hyman Minsky sees the cycles of risk taking in the economy as following a pattern: stability and absence of crises encourage risk taking, complacency, and lowered awareness of the possibility of problems. Then a crisis occurs, resulting in people being shell-shocked and scared of investing their resources.
18. Terrorism kills, but the biggest killer remains the environment, responsible for close to 13 million deaths annually. But terrorism causes outrage, which makes us overestimate the likelihood of a potential terrorist attack—and react more violently to one when it happens. We feel the sting of man-made damage far more than that caused by nature.
19. He tells you that his cousin (with whom he will celebrate the holidays) worked in a law office with someone whose brother-in-law’s business partner’s twin brother was mugged and killed in Central Park. Indeed, Central Park in glorious New York City. That was in 1989, if he remembers it well (the year is now 2007). The poor victim was only thirty-eight and had a wife and three children, one of whom had a birth defect and needed special care at Cornell Medical Center. Three children, one of whom needed special care, lost their father because of his foolish visit to Central Park. Well, you are likely to avoid Central Park during your stay. You know you can get crime statistics from the Web or from any brochure, rather than anecdotal information from a verbally incontinent salesman. But you can’t help it. For a while, the name Central Park will conjure up the image of that poor, undeserving man lying on the polluted grass. It will take a lot of statistical information to override your hesitation.
20. Now, I do not disagree with those recommending the use of a narrative to get attention. Indeed, our consciousness may be linked to our ability to concoct some form of story about ourselves. It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places.
21. The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.
22. These nonlinear relationships are ubiquitous in life. Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand.
23. Making $1 million in one year, but nothing in the preceding nine, does not bring the same pleasure as having the total evenly distributed over the same period, that is, $100,000 every year for ten years in a row. The same applies to the inverse order—making a bundle the first year, then nothing for the remaining period.
24. Let us separate the world into two categories. Some people are like the turkey, exposed to a major blowup without being aware of it, while others play reverse turkey, prepared for big events that might surprise others.
25. A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient. Likewise, the risk of a Black Swan is invisible.
26. In fact, economic growth comes from such risk taking. But some fool might argue the following: if someone followed reasoning such as mine, we would not have had the spectacular growth we experienced in the past. This is exactly like someone playing Russian roulette and finding it a good idea because he survived and pocketed the money.
27. I am not dismissing the idea of risk taking, having been involved in it myself. I am only critical of the encouragement of uninformed risk taking.
28. I insist on the following: that we got here by accident does not mean that we should continue to take the same risks.
29. We have been playing Russian roulette; now let’s stop and get a real job.
30. The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort.
31. Evolution is a series of flukes, some good, many bad. You only see the good. But, in the short term, it is not obvious which traits are really good for you, particularly if you are in the Black Swan–generating environment of Extremistan. This is like looking at rich gamblers coming out of the casino and claiming that a taste for gambling is good for the species because gambling makes you rich! Risk taking made many species head for extinction!
32. Worse, in a Black Swan environment, where one single but rare event can come shake up a species after a very long run of “fitness,” the foolish risk takers can also win in the long term!

“Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend” by Patrick Symmes

This is a highly amusing book where the author, journalist Patrick Symmes, traced back the journey that Ernesto Guevara and his buddy Alberto Granado took in 1952. Armed with a little more than Ernesto’s and Alberto’s diaries of the trip, in 1996 Symmes rode his BMW R80 G/S motorcycle and followed the footsteps that both Ernesto and Alberto took nearly 50 years before, searching for the people they met and places that they visited.

And it was pretty impressive, as he met Chichina herself (Ernesto’s girlfriend that they visited in the trip), traced down Oscar Von Puttkamer (whose family hosted Guevara and Granado during their trip), visited the fire station where the 2 boys helped to save a cat in a house fire, got himself written in a small town newspaper in Chile (just like Ernesto and Alberto), visited the lepers hospital that the 2 boys had come to see in Peru, among many others, including drinking himself blind in Cuba at the end of the trip with none other than Alberto Granado himself.

Along the journey, Symmes fill up the political, economic, and social contexts of each country that he visited; describing what’s going on during the 2 boys’ trip in 1952 and what have happened since then. Starting from the background of Ernesto’s family, his upbringing, even giving the context of Germans living in Argentina (which predated the fleeing Nazis). He then provided the explanation of the Chilean economic miracle (where as it turns out the rich got richer and the poor get poorer), the brutality of the Pinochet regime, and later told the stories of everyday struggles of people in Peru and Bolivia.

And as the trip proceeds he also paints a clearer picture on what happened with Ernesto that turned him into the fabled Che Guevara not long after the 1952 trip. To his credit, Symmes isn’t one of those groupie or blind follower of Che, but an objective journalist that can see both the positive and negative parts of things, including on Che’s conducts. Which makes this book objectively pleasing. And perhaps the best part of this book is, you don’t really need to read Ernesto’s diary beforehand (or watch The Motorcycle Diaries movie) as this book also narrates the 2 boys’ journey alongside his.

Moreover, the book is also Symmes’ tale of adventure by his own right, with him being a “gringo”, driving past the steepest mountains and the driest deserts, through wild animals and thieves and guerilla fighters. With crazy stories such as running out of gas in an Argentine desert, falling from the motorcycle and fracturing a rib cage, got bitten by a dog, meeting Douglas Tompkins (the founder of North Face and Esprit) and hanging out with him for a while, eating at a whorehouse, sleeping on top of a mass grave, sleeping at an abandoned gas station, witnessing rain in the Atacama desert (yes, there’s no recorded rain there, but there are short burst of rains every now and then), fell in love with almost every woman he met in Peru, visiting a prison to speak with the Shining Path revolutionaries, interviewing a man who was one of Che’s soldiers in Cuban revolution, speaking with Alberto Diaz Gutierrez (the photographer who took that most-famous picture of Che one overcast day in March 1960 – that became the icon of Che Guevarra), and so much more.

Near the end of the book, when Symmes was in Bolivia (Che’s final resting place long after the 1952 trip), he encountered several more books about Guevara: one written by his father, the other one written by Che’s travel companion in 1954, while Symmes also found Che’s diary in Bolivia. And it provides a much clearer picture over the Ernesto of 1952 that evolved into the Che of 1966, who became world famous for being the number 1 Guerilla, who has amassed a giant ego, and a lust for cold bloodedness.

All in all, the book is so very well written, even poetic at times, with bits of comedy every now and then that makes it thoroughly enjoyable to read. Absolutely superb.

“How to Work a Room: The Ultimate Guide to Making Lasting Connections – In Person and Online” by Susan Roane

According to a study on social anxiety reported in New York Times, a party with strangers is listed as the number one fear. In fact, it is said that if you didn’t have some anxiety about this, you would not be normal.

So how come some people looks very at ease when meeting strangers, and can operate among the crowds with effortless grace? This book might have the answer to this.

Written in 1988 and published in over 13 countries with multiple languages, this book has stood the test of time over more than 3 decades to be one of the formidable guides in this subject. And it immediately shows from the very first few paragraph, how the author herself, Susan Roane, aims at writing a simple but powerful book that will slowly guide us into the masters of social situations.

Here’s the main premise: We not only want to be comfortable in a social situation, but also want to make other people feel comfortable with us.

The book then breaks down the points into small sub-chapters and use stories as examples, covering multiple settings from professional, to casual, to reunion with old friends, to as gloomy as funerals. And in this 25 anniversary edition (2013) the book is also updated with skills in social media, although some of the things mentioned in here are already outdated today (like how to utilize Twitter’s 140 characters limitations, or how it still dwelling on Google+).

Unfortunately there are quite a few repetitions in the book and a lot of gibberish that makes the book unnecessarily longer than it needs, complete with cliche buzzwords every now and then. But the essence of it are still very good and important.

Here are the essence that I took from all over the place in the book: from the sub heading, part of a list, a quote in the middle of a sentence, the reverse meaning of a negative sentence, rephrasing of a sentence, a thought inspired by a sentence, or indeed the full sentence verbatim:

1. Leave an impression that you’re the nice person that you are.
2. Sincerity is the glue: Be warm and sincere, establish an honest rapport.
3. Practice does makes it perfect. Attend as much gathering as you can to make you familiar with it.
4. No one is boring when you discover their passion.
5. Don’t wait to be properly introduced, instead introduce yourself.
6. Try to find common interests. Or better yet, try to find common interests before you meet them = planning. Also figure out the general theme of the gathering, so that you can be prepare beforehand.
7. Be an interested listener. Don’t judge.
8. A good guest notice other guests who are standing alone, and start a conversation with them, and introduce them to other guests.
9. A good guest pay attention, talk to spouses, significant others, and children.
10. If you’re not sure, ask.
11. Mindful of the theme of the gathering/party, prepare for it and dress accordingly. Bring a gift if appropriate, but not a gift that require additional work (like putting a flower in a vase and water them often).
12. Be punctual, arrive 15 minutes earlier.
13. Circulate, talk to everyone, and excuse yourself graciously.
14. Read a lot, follow the news, so that you can have plenty of topics to talk about. But avoid controversial topics if you still don’t know where they stands.
15. If someone makes a statement that you don’t agree with, just say “that’s one way to look at it”, or “that’s not the way I see it” or just simply a non-committal “Hmmm” or “interesting.” Avoid heated discussion, embrace a lively discussion.
16. Help out the host, can be as little as helping to clear up the table.
17. Snack before you go, and avoid overindulging on food and drink at the gathering.
18. Do not text at a party, and never while talking to someone. Excuse yourself, go to somewhere discreet, send the text, and then go back to the scene. Avoid holding your phone at all.
19. If someone is rude to you. Just move on, don’t waste your time trying to win them over.
20. The most important trait millionaires have is their rolodex, their contacts or connections.
21. Charm is a combination of warmth, good nature, positive attitude, a good sense of humor, charisma, spirit, energy, and interest on others. We can practice it, one by one.
22. There is no more effective way to work a room than to be nice to everyone in a room. Treat people the way they want to be treated.
23. Proofread for punctuation, spelling, and flow, before sending an online message.
24. Never post anything on social media that you wouldn’t want your favourite grandpa or grandma to see.
25. Embrace your shyness. Don’t wing it, but be genuine about it and still be accessible, make eye contact, smile, have few interesting topics to talk about, listen and pay attention.
26. Practice your handshake. Not too strong, not too jelly, but firm and confidence.
27. Avoid eating garlic and onion, or anything else that can leave a trace of smell on your breath.
28. When about to enter a room, have a quick scan of where the main event is, where the food are, the exit, the stage maybe. And see where it’s best to position yourself (if it’s a standing party). And enter the room with confidence, walk towards people that you know or vaguely know (and introduce yourself).
29. Or go together with a buddy, so that you always have each other to navigate the event with.
30. If wearing a name tag, place it at the right side of your chest. Because it’s on the same line of sight as your right hand, making it easier for anyone to shake your hand and immediately see your name tag.
31. Never ever ask, “do you remember me?”
32. Avoid approaching 2 people that are having an intense conversation. You will just be disrupting.
33. If someone interrupts you, acknowledge their presence or attempt to talk other topics, say to them that you need to finish this first and promise to catch up with them later. And actually catch up afterwards.
34. To approach a group who are having fun, place yourself into the proximity of the group, first respond to their jokes or talks by facial expressions and joining the laughs, until you are included into the conversation, only then you start to also talk (but don’t divert the topics away).
35. Always be mindful when you’re in the group and there’s someone else that is trying to join the conversation.
36. End a conversation gracefully. Can be as simple as “excuse me”, or “I hope you enjoy the rest of the evening/party/conference/etc.” Or finish a comment, then smile, and extend you hand for a handshake, by saying it was nice talking to you. And move to the other side of the room.
37. Before you leave, be sure to thank the host or hostess.
38. When you’re wrong, sincerely apologize.
39. Adapt a conversation according to age, profession, interest, etc.
40. If possible, talk to the audience members before giving the talk. It will establish the personal connections needed before the talk even begun.
41. A toast is not a roast. Be careful of spilling information that were meant to be private.
42. Don’t presume informality, until it is offered.
43. In a networking event, do not sit with your friends. You could do that at your leisure time eating pizza. You’re here to expand your network.
44. Don’t be a know-it-all (even if you do know it all), it kills the conversation.
45. Don’t ask “what’s your plan” to a potential retiree. It could put them in an awkward position, unless they tell it first themselves. Instead, congratulates them and tell stories about other retirees that could become an inspiration.
46. Any connection made at an event, it means little unless you follow up the next day or two, in order to establish more connection.

“Madilog: Materialisme, Dialektika, dan Logika” Tan Malaka

This is an incredible insight into one of Indonesia’s intellectual thinkers, Tan Malaka. He was a controversial figure, who is now only historically famous for being one of the most influential early PKI members (the now-banned Communist Party) who set the ideological foundation of the party. But from reading his thoughts about so many range of knowledge, it seems that the censorship on him or the oversimplification of who he was, fail to capture his essence.

Hence my utter surprise when reading this book, where I had expected a leftist propaganda on communist thoughts, but found a very well-read person who seems to know a lot of things from a lot of things. And it is reflected in this book.

In here, he writes about his deep understanding of religion from Egyptian mythology, to “Hindustan religions”, to the Abrahamic religions, all the way to the arguments of atheism and the existence of ghosts. He talks science, even discussing the theories founded by the likes of Darwin, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Democritus, Gauss, Rutherford, and Einstein, among many others, including stories about Madam Currie. He covers history as diverse as Hitler’s Germany, the Nordic, the Hindustan, Aria and Tartar, Britain, France, Syrian, Roman, Jewish, African, and more. He also goes in depth with philosophy from Marx and Engels to Hume, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Gandhi, and many more.

And the best part is, he did not only present these knowledge to show off, but he showed how they are being implemented in various different cultures and societies in history. He then use all of these impressive knowledge to form his own formulation of an ideal state of thinking, which would eventually influence the formation of secular Indonesia.

But what is it really about? In its essence, the book explores the concept of his 3 main ideas: materialism, dialectics, and logic. It was written in 1943 during the Japanese occupation with the objective to teach the Indonesian people to move away from mystical thinking (that hinder progress and independence) and instead teaches a more scientific-based rational approach to understand and function in the world.

Firstly, materialism. Malaka argues that material reality is more essential to understanding the world, rather than supernatural, superstitious, or mystical forces (which was – and still is in some places – the main way of thinking in Indonesia). And he instead emphasized the role of economic and social conditions in measuring reality.

Secondly, dialectics (or investigating/discussing the truth of opinions), where he applies dialectical thinking to analyze social and economic occurrences, focusing on contradictions and conflicts that drive changes.

And then thirdly, logic, where he highlights the importance of logical thinkin in analyzing problems and in decision making, encouraging us to adopt a more rational and scientific approach.

The book particularly highlight the importance of education, and Malaka deeply ingrain these knowledge into his nationalist ideology where he advocated for Indonesian independence. And it is in the detailed examples that this book excels, where Malaka showed – for example – how even scientific findings by top scientists can be investigated and challenged.

All in all, despite being written even before Indonesia’s independence in 1945, the book’s teachings remain relevant today; underlining the importance of critical thinking, scientific approach, rational decision-making, and perhaps most importantly the intellectual courage to challenge the status quo.

These are things that are sadly still not very well taught in Indonesia even after 80 years, with the book was even banned during the Suharto regime for obvious reason (if the people are smart, they will be harder to control). Hence, the importance of this book and the urgent need to spread its ideas today.

“The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey” by Ernesto Che Guevara

One day in the 1950s, a 23-year-old medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna decided to travel across Latin America on a motorcycle alongside a buddy, a 29-year-old biochemist Alberto Granado. They began their adventure from inside their native Argentina (December 1951) and proceeded to Chile (February 1952), Peru (March 1952), Colombia (June 1952), Venezuela (July 1952), and Miami by plane (Late July 1952), before returning back to Argentina by plane on August 1952.

Both men had decided to do this travel after one drunken night talking BS, with minimum planning, and they did so with only limited understanding of the continent from the history books.

This book is Ernesto’s diary entries from this trip. And it shows the rich cultures that they encountered, the interesting and kind people that they met, and the many crazy stories they had especially with their unreliable Norton motorbike La Poderosa II (“the mighty one”). It is filled with energy and wonder, bizarre antics from being broke, even humor and epic stupidness from many travel-adventure stories.

Stories such as entering Pachamams Kingdom and chewed coca leaves, visiting the ancient city of Cuzco, visiting Machu Picchu, getting into a local newspaper in Chile, visiting a leper colony, sleeping at strangers’ homes, many strangers’ homes, hitchhiking to everywhere (after La Poderosa totally collapsed), assisting fire fighters rescuing animals from fire, working as a crew member at a boat, walking across desert, meeting an indigenous village, sailing down the Amazon River using a made-up raft, fell asleep in their raft and accidentally entered the Brazil’s side of Amazon, joining a local football match, playing another football match in Peru (this time alongside a butch-looking nun), and another football match in Colombia (where he as a goalkeeper saved a penalty in a cup final that they joined).

And like plenty of other travel-adventure stories they also had numerous unfortunate shortcomings, such as falling from their bike several times, had a diarrhea, got trampled by a horse, got their path disrupted by a landslide, running away from an unpaid meal, being chased by furious dancers in a village, finding themselves in a politically heated Colombia with several open revolts in the countryside, had a flat tire in Venezuela, had numerous asthma attacks throughout the journey, and very often being hungry and needed the mercy from the locals to feed them.

But more importantly, the diary also shows the development of Ernesto’s views on the often-unreported everyday realities of the majority of the people in that continent. Starting with the sick elderly woman that he met in Valparaíso, then the poor miners in Chuquicamata, and perhaps the most touching the friendly Indians or Mestizos who saved them when they were so close to freezing to death. Indeed, during this trip, he also saw all sorts of poverty and injustices from the ground up that opened his eyes and awakened his political views, making this trip his formative journey that has since turned him into the fabled Che Guevara.

After this trip, Ernesto formally graduated as a doctor in 1953 and almost immediately set for another journey around Latin America, from Bolivia (where he witnessed the Bolivian Revolution), to Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, and Guatemala (where he met Antonio Lopez, a young Cuban revolutionary). In Guatemala 1954 he saw the overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Jacobo Arbenz by US-backed forces (unleashed by the United Fruit Company), an event that profoundly radicalized his political views, where he then escaped to Mexico and contacted the group of Cuban revolutionary exiles.

In 1955 he finally met Fidel Castro and immediately enlisted in the Cuban guerilla expedition to overthrow the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, earning the nickname “Che” (a popular form of conversational address in Argentina). After Batista eventually fled on 1 January 1959, Che filled several positions in the new Cuban government, first as head of the Department of Industry of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, then as president of the National Bank, Minister of Industry, as well as becoming a central leader of the political organization that in 1965 became the Communist Party of Cuba. Che also represented Cuba around the world, heading several delegations and speaking at the UN and other international forums.

Che left Cuba in April 1965, initially to lead another guerilla mission to support the Congo revolution. But he returned to Cuba secretly in December 1965 to prepare for another guerilla force for Bolivia, only to be wounded, captured, and eventually killed by CIA-trained Bolivian troops on 8 October 1967, at the age of 39.

It is pretty astonishing that 16 years prior to his tragic death Ernesto was travelling from Buenos Aires at the south to Caracas at the northern tip of Latin America as a young and free doctor. But the Ernesto that left Argentina was not the same person that arrived in Venezuela more than half a year later.

It is actually a story that inspired me to take on a backpacking journey on a shoestring during my university years (in Europe, for 3 weeks, where I eventually met my future wife), after I first watched The Motorcycle Diaries movie more than 2 decades ago. It was (and still is) one of my top favourite movies of all time.

“What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures” by Malcolm Gladwell

This is a series of essays by Malcolm Gladwell that were featured in the New Yorker, where Gladwell has been a staff writer since 1996. These dozen+ selected essays are handpicked by Gladwell himself, which he said to be his favorites from his entire career span at the New Yorker. And they are indeed the most mind-bending bunch.

The book is broken down into 3 sections. The first is about obsessive people and minor geniuses: not Einstein, Churchill or Mandela; but true to Gladwell’s style he writes about amazing successful people who are nearly unknown outside their area of expertise, like the founder of Chop-O-Matic, or the writer Ben Fountain, or the criminal behaviour analyst that looks straight from a Criminal Minds episode. The second section is dedicated to theories: how we should see the collapse of Enron, or plagiarism, or disaster such as the crash of JFK Jr’s plane. The third section dives deep into predictions: how do we know whether someone is smart, or bad, or capable of doing something extraordinary.

And this is where the Gladwelian twist comes, as Gladwell explains, “In the best of these pieces, what we think isn’t the issue. Instead, I’m more interested in describing what people who think about homelessness or ketchup or financial scandals think about homelessness or ketchup or financial scandals. I don’t know what to conclude about the Challenger crash. It’s gibberish to me — neatly printed indecipherable lines of numbers and figures on graph paper. But what if we look at that problem through someone else’s eyes, from inside someone else’s head?”

Indeed, seeing a problem through someone else’s perspective, like in the case of Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer. Just with the touch of his hand, Millan can amazingly calm down even the angriest and most troubled dogs. We must be wondering what is going on inside Millan’s head as he performs his miracles? Or better yet, what goes on inside the dog’s head?

This is what this book is ultimately all about, what the dog saw.

“Indonesia Tidak Hadir di Bumi Manusia: Pramoedya, Sejarah, dan Politik” by Max Lane

In the world of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the author of this book, Max Lane, should not need any introduction.

Like the fifth Beatle to John, Paul, George, and Ringo, I consider Max Lane as the “fourth member” of the mighty force of Hasta Mitra publishing trio: Pramoedya Ananta Toer (writer), Joesoef Isak (editor), and Hasyim Rachman (editor in chief); plus Max Lane as the unsung hero who translated the books into English language and spread them to the international stage.

And as Pram’s translator, and as the only remaining one of the 4 that is still alive, his insight into Pram’s ideas can be considered as the closest thing to Pram’s own way of thinking.

This book is exactly that, Lane’s memoir into Pramoedya and his works. While “Indonesia out of Exile” (by Lane as well) was the biography of the Hasta Mitra trio, this book dive deeper into Pram’s views and how his harsh experiences shaped his ideas for the books.

For example, it’s been established in plenty of Pram’s biographies that he was arrested in 1960 by Soekarno’s regime for his writing. But this book explains more about which writings in particular: his essays that criticize the government for subjected the Chinese community of abuse, banning them from doing business outside the provincial capital cities, with right-wing politicians scapegoating them for the economic troubles (with all of the essays then compiled into a book “Hoakiau in Indonesia”).

This book also shows that despite being jailed by the Soekarno regime, Soekarno himself had nothing to do with it and was unable to release Pram from prison, and that Pram remains loyal to Soekarno’s vision of Indonesia and that the “revolution is not over yet.” It shows how chaotic 1950s-1960s politics were in Indonesia, where Soekarno’s backers such as PNI and PKI were outnumbered by the Military (who had seats in the parliament) and right-wing parties.

However, it is also important to note that although Soekarno did not initiate the discriminative laws, he also did not stop it for going into effect, because his priority is political stability between the nationalist, religious, and communist factions. A political compromise at the huge cost of the Chinese and subsequently Pramoedya’s unjust imprisonment.

Indeed, the book shows the chaotic reality of Indonesian revolution. Not only in the 1940s struggle for independence, but also in 1950-1960s unstable era of post-independence, the Suharto dictatorship era, and even way back in the Majapahit era by discussing Pram’s trilogy of “Arok Dedes”, “Arus Balik”, and “Mangir” that show the DNA of nationalism without mentioning the name Indonesia and the uprising against unjust rulers (something that has never changed, hence it is why Pram said the revolution is not over yet).

All in all, the book feels like a director’s cut of a great movie, a further commentary over Pram’s greatest thinking and greatest works. But it can also treated, if you must, as a cheat book to read if you don’t have the time to read all of the 2000 pages of Buru Quartet or his many other books. This book alone meets the very minimum for a basic introduction to all of his main ideas.

But of course, if you only read this one you’re missing out on Pram’s masterpiece deep dive into Indonesian history, and the many ideas of one of the greatest Indonesian thinkers of all time.

“This is Not A Drill: Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield” by Paul Carter

In his first memoir, first published in 2006, Paul Carter said see you in 15 years. And that’s exactly what he did with this 2nd book. This time around he is more mature, more serious, and writing a memoir that shows his growth as he progressed up the corporate ladder in the oil industry.

Just kidding. This 2nd book was written merely 1-2 years after the first one, and in this one our “Pauli” is still the same legend that seems to attract chaos and drunken shenanigans wherever he goes.

This time around he travelled to exciting places once again, from Japan, to Bangladesh, to West Africa, and a lot more in between, including Scotland where he got so drunk at one time that he ended up tongue-kissing a border collie. In this sequel he also got stuck in the middle of the Russian sea on a rig staffed by colourful rig-mates with nicknames such as Sickboy, Vodka Bob, or my favourite The Cunt of Monte Cristo. He tells the story when he witnessed a pistol duel, almost died in a rig collapse, meeting a Hannibal Lecter type of character, and the most epic story: going out with his childhood friends that ended horribly wrong involving a poop in a purse and stealing a taxi.

Granted, this time around the book really does feel a tad bit more serious, where Pauli dived deeper into the politics of oil, especially during the time when he was on the ground in Afghanistan and seeing first-hand the devastating impacts from wars in the name of oil. He also dwell even deeper at the last chapter when he writes about his real view on the oil industry as the engine of global capitalism, which shows the rare perspective from an honest executioner of the drilling.

This second book also feels more mature and intimate, where he shares his story about reconnecting with his father (and had an epic night out with his dad’s friends at a gentlemen’s club), tells about his proposal to Claire, proceeded with the wedding, and the upcoming kid. Indeed, our boy is finally growing up, and while the ending of book 1 feels a bit sudden (and leaving me to want for more) this 2nd book nicely concludes his epic tale with an apropriate end.

“Alyosha the Pot” by Leo Tolstoy

This short story is so refreshing, looking at life from a completely different angle. Published in 1905, it teaches us that we don’t have to have ego and opinion to live this life, and instead we can just work hard at anything that’s being given to us, with a smile on our face, without any complain and comparison.

Yes, as we see in the story, the downside of this approach is we don’t get to dictate our lives the way we want (which is part of ego), but life looks so much lighter and easier when leaving all to faith or nature or circumstance, without having to bother or worry about personal ambition.

Of course, I can never live the way Alyosha lived, I think none of us can. Heck, even he eventually cracked when he found someone he loves but wasn’t allowed to marry. I guess that’s just being human.

But I see the novel as somekind of utopian mind state that we cannot possibly achieve but serves as the ideal goal. Who knows, maybe getting as close as we can to that mind state (i.e. living life with less ego, less opinion, less complain, less comparing, and – dare I said it – less ambition) might just be the healthy antithesis of living a stressful life because of our struggles to reach our ambition, our opinions on what things should be, our complain of injustice or hardship; all of which are making it harder to bear.

And in contrast, look at how it ended with Alyosha. Sure, he had nothing, knew little, achieved little, didn’t get what he wants; but he also live life lightly, with no burden, with no friction between what’s happening and what he thinks should happen, without a care in the world, and with an incredible calm acceptance of his last fate. Now that at least mount to something.

“A Swim in a Pond in a Rain” by George Saunders

This is a book written by a writing teacher that focuses on 7 short stories written by 4 Russian legends: Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Gogol.

These legends all came from a period of 70 years of artistic renaissance in the 19th century Russia: The time of indeed Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol; but also Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Ostrovsky, Tyutchev, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and many more.

The 7 short stories were selected on purpose. Some are purely great, others are great in spite of certain flaws, while some are great because of their flaws. But all have similar characteristics: simple, clear, elemental.

As the author, George Saunders, remarks “For a young writer, reading the Russian stories of this period is akin to a young composer studying Bach. All of the bedrock principles of the form are on display. The stories are simple but moving. We care about what happens in them. They were written to challenge and antagonize and outrage. And, in a complicated way, to console.”

They were all resistance literature, Saunders added, “written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer’s politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution. The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.”

And through dissecting the anatomy of these 7 stories Saunders teaches us about what to see in a construction of a story; analyze them one paragraph at a time; and guide us through the mind of the writers, on why he chose this particular setting, or that particular mood (and the reason why the character is sad or happy); and why put an emphasis on something or overly descriptive over something, and so on.

It is such a fascinating perspective on how to read a literature interactively, perspective that once you understand it you can then apply it yourself when writing your own book (if you choose to do so).

Here are some of the best insights from the book (and yes I took a lot of notes, like a lot a lot):

1. “The Russians, when I found them a few years later, worked on me in the same way. They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.”
2. “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?”
3. For a story to ask these sorts of questions, we first have to finish it. It has to draw us in, compel us to keep going. So, the aim of this book is mainly diagnostic: If a story drew us in, kept us reading, made us feel respected, how did it do that?
4. “The basic drill I’m proposing here is: read the story, then turn your mind to the experience you’ve just had. Was there a place you found particularly moving? Something you resisted or that confused you? A moment when you found yourself tearing up, getting annoyed, thinking anew? Any lingering questions about the story? Any answer is acceptable. If you (my good-hearted trouper of a reader) felt it, it’s valid. If it confounded you, that’s worth mentioning. If you were bored or pissed off: valuable information. No need to dress up your response in literary language or express it in terms of “theme” or “plot” or “character development” or any of that.”
5. The main thing I want us to be asking together is: What did we feel and where did we feel it? (All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)
6. In a way, Saunders is teaching us how to read: “Once you’ve read each story, I’ll provide my thoughts in an essay, in which I’ll walk you through my reactions, make a case for the story, offer some technical explanations for why we might have felt what we felt, where we felt it.”
7. “To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer’s) across space and time. What we’re going to be doing here, essentially, is watching ourselves read (trying to reconstruct how we felt as we were, just now, reading).”
8. “Why would we want to do this? Well, the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.”
9. “In Buddhism, it’s said that a teaching is like “a finger pointing at the moon.” The moon (enlightenment) is the essential thing and the pointing finger is trying to direct us to it, but it’s important not to confuse finger with moon. For those of us who are writers, who dream of someday writing a story like the ones we’ve loved, into which we’ve disappeared pleasurably, and that briefly seemed more real to us than so-called reality, the goal (“the moon”) is to attain the state of mind from which we might write such a story. All of the workshop talk and story theory and aphoristic, clever, craft-encouraging slogans are just fingers pointing at that moon, trying to lead us to that state of mind. The criterion by which we accept or reject a given finger: “Is it helping?” I offer what follows in that spirit.”
10. One way would be to track our mind as it moves from line to line. A story (any story, every story) makes its meaning at speed, a small structural pulse at a time. We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises.
11. Whatever you answered, that’s what Chekhov now has to work with. He has, already, with this first page, caused certain expectations and questions to arise. You’ll feel the rest of the story to be meaningful and coherent to the extent that it responds to these (or “takes them into account” or “exploits them”).
12. In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We’d better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.
13. Of all the people in the world he might have put in this cart, Chekhov has chosen an unhappy woman resisting the charms of springtime. This could have been a story about a happy woman (newly engaged, say, or just given a clean bill of health, or a woman just naturally happy), but Chekhov elected to make Marya unhappy.
14. If a story begins, “Once there was a boy who was afraid of water,” we expect that a pond, river, ocean, waterfall, bathtub, or tsunami will soon appear. If a character says, “I have never once in my life been afraid,” we might not mind it so much if a lion walks in. If a character lives in perpetual fear of being embarrassed, we have some idea of what might need to happen to him. Likewise with someone who loves only money, or confesses that he has never really believed in friendship, or who claims to be so tired of her life that she can’t imagine another.
15. When we talk about fiction, we tend to use terms like “theme,” “plot,” “character development,” and “structure.” I’ve never, as a writer, found these very useful. (“Your theme’s no good” gives me nothing to work with, and neither does “You might want to make your plot better.”) These terms are placeholders, and if they intimidate us and block us up, as they tend to do, we might want to put them aside and try to find a more useful way to think about whatever it is they’re placeholding for.
16. We might think of structure as simply: an organizational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask.
17. We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.
18. Before we launch into our in-class critique, I’ll sometimes ask the workshop to come up with what I call the “Hollywood version” of the story—a pithy one- or two-sentence summary. It’s no good to start making suggestions about a story until we’ve agreed on what it’s trying to do. (If a complicated machine showed up in your yard, you wouldn’t start altering it and “improving” it until you had some idea of its intended function.) The “Hollywood version” is meant to answer the question “What story does this story appear to want to be?”
19. A specific description, like a prop in a play, helps us believe more fully in that which is entirely invented. It’s sort of a cheap, or at least easy, authorial trick. If I am trying to put you in a certain (invented) house, I might invoke “a large white cat, stretching itself out to what seemed like twice its normal length” on a couch in that house. If you see the cat, the house becomes real.
20. Here, the road’s “growing worse.” A particular authorial choice; it would be a different story if the road were getting wider and drier and opened into a meadow awash with new flowers. What does it “mean,” that the road is growing worse? Why did Chekhov choose to make the road worse?
21. Marya was created unhappy and lonely and has become more specifically unhappy and lonely with every passing page. That is the energy the story has made, and must use.
22. Chekhov has, with Hanov’s exit, denied himself the obvious, expected source of resolution. Who knows how Chekhov arrived at this decision, practically speaking, but we can observe what he did: he got rid of Hanov. Now there’s no danger that the story will take that easy route.
23. Just so in a story: we should always be pushing the new bead to the knot. If you know where a story is going, don’t hoard it. Make the story go there, now. But then what? What will you do next? You’ve surrendered your big reveal. Exactly. Often, in our doubt that we have a real story to tell, we hold something back, fearing that we don’t have anything else. And this can be a form of trickery. Surrendering that thing is a leap of faith that forces the story to attention, saying to it, in effect, “You have to do better than that, and now that I’ve denied you your trick, your first-order solution, I know that you will.”
24. A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.
25. The movie producer and all-around mensch Stuart Cornfeld once told me that in a good screenplay, every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way.
26. Having seen the difference between Marya’s internally narrated version of herself and her actual position in the world, I find myself feeling more tenderness for her, and more protective of her. This more complicated, endangered Marya is the one I take with me to the end of the story.
27. Imagine these things on a table: a gun, a grenade, a hatchet, a ceramic statue of a duck. If the duck is at the center of the table, surrounded closely by the weapons, we feel: that duck is in trouble. If the duck, the gun, and the grenade have the hatchet pinned down in one corner, we may feel the duck to be leading the modern weaponry (the gun, the grenade) against the (old-fashioned) hatchet. If the three weapons are each hanging precipitously over one edge of the table and the duck is facing them, we might understand the duck to be a radical pacifist who’s finally had enough. That’s really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another.
28. A linked pair of writing dictums: “Don’t make things happen for no reason” and “Having made something happen, make it matter.”
29. A short story is not just a series of events, one following after another. It’s not a lively narrative that briskly continues for a number of pages, then stops. It’s a narrative that compels us to finish reading it, yes, but that, in the midst of itself, somehow rises or expands and becomes…enough.
30. So, we tell a certain story, starting at one time and ending at another, in order to frame that moment of change. (We don’t tell the story of the week before those three ghosts show up to haunt Scrooge, or Romeo’s tenth-birthday party, or that period in Luke Skywalker’s life when not all that much was going on.) Why did Chekhov choose to narrate this day in Marya’s life? To ask it another way: What has changed, today, for Marya? Is she a different person from the woman we met on the first page?
31. What we’re really asking is: What might happen (what needs to happen) over the remaining seven paragraphs to elevate this into a story?
32. We’ve said that a story is a system for the transfer of energy. Energy made in the early pages gets transferred along through the story, passed from section to section, like a bucket of water headed for a fire, and the hope is that not a drop gets lost.
33. We might think of a story this way: the reader is sitting in the sidecar of a motorcycle the writer is driving. In a well-told story, reader and writer are so close together that they’re one unit. My job as the writer is to keep the distance between motorcycle and sidecar small, so that when I go right, you go right. When I, at the end of the story, take the motorcycle off the cliff, you have no choice but to follow.
34. Chekhov once said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” “Formulate them correctly” might be taken to mean: “make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.”
35. Have everybody silently read the first page, then ask, as we did above: (1) What do you know so far? (2) What are you curious about? and (3) Where do you think the story is headed? (What bowling pins are in the air?) Toward the end of the story, pick a place at which to truncate it and ask the “Is it story yet?” question.
36. A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were. Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response.
37. What I stress to my students is how empowering this process is. The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf (spend on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf). But inside us is what Hemingway called a “built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it. And that part of the mind is the one that reading and writing refine into sharpness.
38. A story with a problem is like a person with a problem: interesting.
39. If you closely observe your reading mind, you’ll find that as you encounter an excess in a story (some non-normative aspect), you enter into a transactional relationship with the writer.
40. The heart of “The Singers” is, of course, the singing contest. That’s what the story is “about,” what it has to offer, what its component parts are there to serve. (The “Hollywood version” of “The Singers” would be something like: “Two men have a singing contest in a Russian pub. One wins, one loses.”) But we might notice—well, I’m pretty sure you did notice—that the contest doesn’t even start until we’ve waded through eleven long, somewhat meandering pages. So, by the earlier-mentioned Ruthless Efficiency Principle, we have a right, a responsibility, even, to ask: What are those first eleven pages for? Do they earn their keep? Are they worth the struggle?
41. What gives this type of story its meaning? If we just say it that way (“A and B meet in a contest of skills”), why do we care who wins? We don’t. We can’t. A is equal to B is equal to A is equal to B. Nothing is at stake if the contestants are identical. If I say: “Two guys got in a fight in a bar across from my house and, guess what? One of them won!”—that’s not meaningful. What would make it meaningful is knowing who those guys were. If A is a saintly, gentle person and B a real stinker, and B wins, the story will be felt to mean something like “Virtue does not always prevail.” If A has trained for the fight by eating only celery and B by eating only hot dogs, A’s victory might be read as an endorsement of celery.
42. I always offer my students this optional assignment: photocopy the story and go through it with a red pen, cutting it down to what feels like a more contemporary pace. Give it a faster clip, while trying to preserve the good things about it. Retype it, if you’re feeling ambitious. Read it fresh. Is it still working? Working better? Can you trim it by 20 percent more? Then another 10 percent? When do you first start to feel that you’re cutting into the bone, i.e., divesting the story of some of the mysterious beauty that, in spite of its wordiness, is there in the original?
43. Imagine that you spent the first twenty years of your life in a room where a TV was constantly showing glamorous footage of Olympic sprinters. (This room is right down the hall from the one where those other writers are dancing for their lives.) You, inspired by all of those years of watching sprinters, have developed a cherished dream of…becoming a sprinter. Then, on your twenty-first birthday, you’re released from that room and, in the hallway, stumble upon a mirror to find that you are six foot five and thick with muscle and weigh three hundred pounds (not a born sprinter), and when you go outside and run your first hundred-yard dash, you come in last. What a heartbreak! Your dream is ruined. But as you walk away from the track, depressed, you see a group of people built like you: shot-putters, practicing. In that instant, your dream may come back alive, reconfigured. (“When I said I wanted to be a sprinter, what I really meant was that I wanted to be an athlete.”) Something like this can happen to writers too.
44. This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.
45. We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he wanted to express, and then he just, you know, expressed it. That is, we buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.
46. He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them. In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.
47. Early in a story, I’ll have a few discrete blocks (blobs? swaths?) of loose, sloppy text. As I revise, those blocks will start to…get better. Soon, a block will start working—I can get all the way through it without a needle drop. The word that sometimes comes to mind is “undeniable,” as in “All right, this bit is pretty much undeniable,” which means that I feel that any reasonable reader would like it and would still be with me at the end of it.
48. A block, revised, starts telling me what it’s for; sometimes it asks a question (“Who is this Craig of whom they are speaking?”) or seems to want to cause something to happen (“Fern has offended Bryce and he’s about to blow”). Once I have a few “undeniable” blocks of text, they start telling me what order they’d like to be in, and sometimes one will say that I really ought to cut it out entirely. (“If you get rid of me, Block B, then Blocks A and C will abut, and look at that—that’s good, right?”) I start asking questions like “Does E cause F or does F cause E? Which feels more natural? Which makes more sense? Which produces a more satisfying click?” Then certain blocks start to adhere (E must precede F) and I know they won’t come unstuck.
49. As the blocks start to fall into order, the resulting feeling of causation starts to mean something (if a man puts his fist through a wall, then joins a street protest, that’s one story; if he comes home from a street protest and puts his fist through the wall, that’s another) and starts to suggest what the story might want to be “about” (although part of this process is to shake off that feeling as much as possible and keep returning to that P/N meter, trusting that those big thematic decisions are going to be made, naturally, by way of the thousands of accreting microdecisions at the line level). But all of this, at every step, is more felt than decided.
50. I once heard someone say that “given infinite time, anything can happen.”
51. I once heard the great Chicago writer Stuart Dybek say, “A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.”
52. Let’s say I gave you an apartment in New York City, one that I’d had decorated. That would be nice of me. But it might feel a little impersonal (since I don’t know you). Say that I then allowed you to redecorate it, at my expense, in one day. The result would be much more like you than my initial attempt. But it would still be limited by the fact that I gave you only one day in which to do it. The result would reflect, we might say, only one of the many possible people that you are.
53. Now let’s say that, instead, I let you take out one item a day (today the couch, tomorrow the clock, the next day that ugly little throw rug) and replace it with an item of equal value, of your choice. And I let you do that for, say, the next two years. By the end of that two years, that apartment will have more “you” in it than either one of us could have imagined at the outset. It will have had the benefit of the opinions of literally hundreds of manifestations of you; you happy, you grouchy, you stern, you euphoric, you blurry, you precise, and so on. Your intuition will have been given thousands of chances to do its best work. That’s how I see revision: a chance for the writer’s intuition to assert itself over and over.
54. Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it. You don’t need an idea to start a story. You just need a sentence. Where does that sentence come from? Wherever. It doesn’t have to be anything special. It will become something special, over time, as you keep reacting to it. Reacting to that sentence, then changing it, hoping to divest it of some of its ordinariness or sloth, is…writing. That’s all writing is or needs to be. We’ll find our voice and ethos and distinguish ourselves from all the other writers in the world without needing to make any big overarching decisions, just by the thousands of small ones we make as we revise.
55. A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to feel respected by the writer.
56. To review: the fundamental unit of storytelling is a two-part move. First, the writer creates an expectation: “Once upon a time, there was a dog with two heads.” In the reader’s mind arises a suite of questions (“Do the heads get along?” “What happens at mealtime?” “Are other animals in this world two-headed?”) and the first intimations of what the story might be about (“The divided self?” “Partisanship?” “Optimism vs. pessimism?” “Friendship?”). Second, the writer responds to (or “uses” or “exploits” or “honors”) that set of expectations. But not too tightly (using those expectations in a way that feels too linear or phoned in) and not too loosely (taking the story off in some random direction that bears no relation to the expectations it has created).
57. One time-honored way of creating an expectation: enactment of a pattern.
58. I sometimes joke with my students that if they find themselves trapped in exposition, writing pages and pages in which their action doesn’t rise, all they need to do is drop this sentence into their story: “Then something happened that changed everything forever.” The story has no choice but to respond.
59. As we saw in our discussion of “In the Cart,” once a specific person has been made (via facts), we then know, of all the many things that could happen to her, which would be meaningful.
60. We tend, in discussion, to reduce stories to plot (what happens). We feel, correctly, that something of their meaning resides there. But stories also mean through their internal dynamics—the manner in which they unfold, the way one part interacts with another, the instantaneous, felt, juxtaposition of elements.
61. If we set out to do a thing, and then we (merely) do it, everyone is bummed out. (That’s not a work of art, that’s a lecture, a data dump.) When we start reading a story, we do so with a built-in expectation that it will surprise us by how far it manages to travel from its humble beginnings; that it will outgrow its early understanding of itself. (Our friend says, “Watch this video of a river.” The minute the river starts to overflow its banks, we know why she wanted us to watch it.)
62. The writer’s task is to place gas stations around the track so that the reader will keep reading and make it to the end of the story. What are those gas stations? Well, manifestations of writerly charm, basically. Anything that inclines the reader to keep going. Bursts of honesty, wit, powerful language, humor; a pithy description of a thing in the world that makes us really see it, a swath of dialogue that pulls us through it via its internal rhythm—every sentence is a potential little gas station.
63. Of all the questions an aspiring writer might ask herself, here’s the most urgent: What makes a reader keep reading? Or, actually: What makes my reader keep reading?
64. And come to think of it, what we’re doing (or at least what I’m doing, when I revise) is not so much trying to perfectly imagine another person reading my story, but to imitate myself reading it, if I were reading it for the first time.
65. Since everything is invented, we read in a continual state of light skepticism. Every sentence is a little referendum on truth. “True or not?” we keep asking. If our answer is “Yes, seems true,” we get shot out of that little gas station and keep reading.
66. “Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth’s exact whereabouts and essential properties,” wrote Nabokov. “Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched.” Tolstoy sought the truth in two ways: as a fiction writer and as a moral preacher. He was more powerful in the former but kept being drawn back to the latter.
67. “Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth’s exact whereabouts and essential properties,” wrote Nabokov. “Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched.” Tolstoy sought the truth in two ways: as a fiction writer and as a moral preacher. He was more powerful in the former but kept being drawn back to the latter.
68. Well, of course, the writer is not the person. The writer is a version of the person who makes a model of the world that may seem to advocate for certain virtues, virtues by which he may not be able to live.
69. but I would go so far as to say he is not even the spokesman for his own ideas. When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.
70. The magician doesn’t really have to saw the assistant in half; he just has to look like he’s doing so, for the short duration of the performance, with the advantage of being observed by an audience located some distance away that, aware that it’s an illusion, has agreed to play along. That audience is us, and we agree to play along because, for some reason, we like to watch one of our fellow human beings doing a passable version of God, telling us in the process how God sees us, if God exists, and what God thinks of the way we behave.
71. For most of us, the problem is not in making things happen (“A dog barked,” “The house exploded,” “Darren kicked the tire of his car” are all easy enough to type) but in making one thing seem to cause the next. This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.
72. Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.
73. A well-written bit of prose is like a beautifully hand-painted kite, lying there on the grass. It’s nice. We admire it. Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up. The kite is then a beautiful thing made even more beautiful by the fact that it’s doing what it was made to do.
74. The preferred, most efficient, highest-order form of energy transfer (the premier way for a scene to advance the story in a non-trivial way) is for a beat to cause the next beat, especially if that next beat is felt as essential, i.e., as an escalation: a meaningful alteration in the terms of the story.
75. “Always be escalating,” then, can be understood as “Be alert, always, to the possibilities you have created for variation.”
76. if we want change to appear to happen in our stories, the first order of business is to note specifically how things are now. We write: “The table was dusty.” If, later, we write, “The newly dusted table gleamed,” this implies that someone who had previously neglected it has now dusted it: someone has changed.
77. Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.
78. We don’t have to become an entirely new person to do better; our view just has to be readjusted, our natural energy turned in the right direction. We don’t have to swear off our powers or repent of who we are or what we like to do or are good at doing. Those are our horses; we just have to hitch them to the right, uh, sled.
79. If I assign you to write a story in which the characters are a cellphone, a pair of gloves, and a fallen leaf, chatting away in a wheelbarrow in a suburban driveway, could that story be truthful? Yes. It could be truthful in the way it reacts to itself, in the way it responds to its premise, in the way it proceeds—by how things change within it, the contours of its internal logic, the relationships between its elements.
80. One model of writing is that we strive upward to express ourselves precisely, at the highest levels of language (think Henry James). Another is that we surrender to our natural mode of expression, flawed though it may be, and, by way of concentrated work within that mode, raise it up, so to speak, creating a poetic rarefication of that (inefficient) form of expression.
81. Personally, I’ve never met a person who was evil in the classic Hollywood mode, who throws down happily on the side of evil while cackling, the sworn enemy of all that is good because of some early disillusionment. Most of the evil I’ve seen in the world—most of the nastiness I’ve been on the receiving end of (and, for that matter, the nastiness I, myself, have inflicted on others)—was done by people who intended good, who thought they were doing good, by reasonable people, staying polite, making accommodations, laboring under slight misperceptions, who haven’t had the inclination or taken the time to think things through, who’ve been sheltered from or were blind to the negative consequences of the belief system of which they were part, bowing to expedience and/or “commonsense” notions that have come to them via their culture and that they have failed to interrogate.
82. In a Gogol story, when something impossible happens, either: (1) no one notices, or (2) they notice but misunderstand it and then proceed to miscommunicate about it. This includes the narrator, who keeps failing to comment on oddnesses we notice, and misinterpreting things and providing explanations we don’t buy, and failing to provide reasonable methods by which the things he is narrating could have occurred.
83. What is the exact flavor of the thrill? The writer doesn’t have to know. That’s what he’s writing to find out.
84. We could feel, channeled through Toby, Chekhov’s humor and tenderness and slightly cynical (loving) heart. It was like having Chekhov himself there in the room with us: a charming, beloved person who thought highly of us and wanted, in his quiet way, to engage us.
85. Let’s say that, in a story, Mike has to borrow money for his son’s operation and goes to ask his father for it. A fader switch appears, labeled “Mike’s Relationship with His Father.” If they’re very close, that’s one story; if they haven’t spoken in twenty years, that’s another. The writer has to choose where to set that fader switch. “Mike’s Father Himself” is another fader switch. He might be wealthy and generous, say, or wealthy and frugal (or poor and frugal, or poor and generous).
86. Kurt Vonnegut used to say that part of what makes Hamlet so powerful is the fact that we don’t know how to understand the ghost of Hamlet’s father: Is it real or only in Hamlet’s mind? This infuses every moment of the play with ambiguity. If the ghost is imaginary, it’s wrong for Hamlet to kill his uncle. If real, it’s necessary that he do so. That ambiguity is part of the play’s power.
87. One of the dangers of writing a book about writing is that it might be perceived to be of the how-to variety. This book is not that. A lifetime of writing has left me with one thing: the knowledge of how I do it. Or, to be completely honest, a knowledge of how I have done it. (How I will soon do it has to remain a continual mystery.) God save us from manifestos, even mine. (“An explanation does not go up to the hilt,” said Tolstoy.) The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.
88. We can’t know what our writing problems will be until we write our way into them, and then we can only write our way out.