If you dive into the self-help canon, you will stumble across the advice to discover your talents. We are all born, the story goes, with a unique set of fixed strengths: intelligence, creativity, athleticism, musicality, even our personality—abstract qualities like neuroticism and extraversion—end up etched in stone. So too, our interests, whether we prefer art and music over science and math or vice-versa, become inherent to who we are.

The obvious conclusion of this thinking is that, in order to make the most out of our education and careers (to be "successful") we should match these pursuits to our own strengths, qualities, and interests. We should respect our learning styles, cultivate our talents, find our passions, and follow our hearts.

This is awful advice.

Not because this line of reasoning is flawed but because the underlying assumptions are fantasy. In all the cases that matter, you are more flexible and adaptable than you are fixed or predetermined. You are, fortunately, a growing, adapting, dynamic mess of a person.

That's not to say you are a blank slate. On the contrary, each of us is born with a palette of preferences, occupying a unique, amorphous region on the personality-intelligence spectrum. Whether these early tendencies are ultimately genetic or environment, you remain a being of the biological world, and that world sets some hard limits. But with the right strategies, your initial position need not limit you. The abilities and qualities that define you most are the abilities and qualities most open to development.

Take innate talent. Sure, you probably won't flourish in the NBA if you're 5'2", but disqualifiers of this extreme are rare in ordinary life. As for measurable versions of "intelligence" and "creativity," scores like IQ and various creativity quotients are largely a farce [1] that is propped up by a fraudulent psychometrics industry peddling self-perpetuating pseudoscience. In the knowledge and service economy what matters are skills and tools—skills anyone can develop and tools anyone can acquire.

The same for "personality." Even the standard-bearers of the psychological literature (the 5and 6-factor models, aka OCEAN and HEXACO) have rather unimpressive predictive power outside the confines of the academic questionnaire.¹ Your personality is too high-dimensional and dynamic to reduce to a limited set of fixed constants. Derivative ideas like a "learning style" fare even worse.[2]

In their defense, personality measures can be a source of useful vocabulary and good old-fashioned fun. But personality measures decide hiring practices, the fun stops. Just as flexible skill trumps static talent, what decides your behavior is not an immutable core of personality but a learned set of habits. Once you understand how habits form and fade, you will understand that your behavior and its outcomes are yours to shape. No personality needed (though certainly appreciated).

Even grit, the shiny new kid on the self-help block turns out to be a poser. It is not so much about imperturbable grit and will-power but unthinking, habitual momentum. Will-power is for suckers. Experts cultivate laziness—a special kind of laziness. They engineer their surroundings to make focus easy and undesirable behavior impossible. They know that the agent is only as static as the environment forces them to be. Change the input; change the output.

But most of all, the follow-your-heart cult fails because their foundational pillar, passion, is not innate.

Passion, like intelligence, creativity, and personality, is not hard-wired. To reiterate, we do already display different preferences at birth—for such things as faces, toys, and crying nonstop. However, preferences do not a passion make. (What fraction of three year olds actually ends up becoming firemen?) The causal link is opposite the standard picture: it is rare to acquire a sustainable, lasting passion before practicing it in person. Only by sowing the seeds of effort may we reap the fruits of passion. Rather than a hedonistic pursuit of spurious passions, we should consult the more durable pursuit of meaning. Do not do the things you impatiently want to do. Do the things that matter.

To find sustainable meaning, pursue higher purpose, and create lasting passion is the mission of a lifetime, and it does not come naturally. One has to train this ability with the right set of heuristics, tools, and systems. There's enough to fill a book.

But the message fits a paragraph…

Do not follow but lead your heart. Start with subtle preference without the expectation of enamoration. Find what matters and what is meaningful, not your heart’s destiny. Fuel your progress with the unstoppability of habit, and equip yourself with the skills and tools you need to achieve your higher goals. Once you chart a course, you will discover that passion follows close behind.

Footnotes

As a temporary recluse. . . isolation can help you to gain perspective. Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think. . . . The danger is, however, that this kind of isolation will sire all kinds of strange and perverted ideas. You may gain perspective on the larger picture, but you lose a sense of your own smallness and limitations. . . Be careful to keep your way back into society open. — The 2 Areas/3 Notes/3 Sciences/0 Mathematics/AM3D Axioms, postulates/48 Laws of Power/48 Laws of Power (18. Do not build fortresses to protect yourself: isolation is dangerous).

As ever, Greene is right: isolation can be either an indispensable tonic or lethal toxin; it all depends on the dosage. What escapes him is that in the information age, the value of regular and extended bouts of solitude has exponentially increased while the associated risks have nearly vanished. It is easier than ever to reconnect to the world after a long pause and more advantageous than ever to occasionally escape it.

Observance of the Law

In 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen read about the MITS Altair 8800 in the January issue of Popular Electronics. The Altair was soon to become the first commercially successful personal computer, and Gates and Allen, like many other geeks of their period, could see they were crossing the threshold of a new age. Soon hardware would become so affordable that software would enter the realm of consumer business.

The two called up Ed Roberts, founder of MITS, to announce they had an interpretor for BASIC that ran on the Altair. Would he be willing to license it? Not only innovators in software but also in sales strategy, Gates and Allen were prototyping what would become known as "vaporware"—a fancy synonym for "lying". They had no interpretor nor even an Altair to test code on. Skeptical but indulging, Roberts arranged for future Microsoft to demo its code several weeks later at the MITS headquarters in Albuquerque. [1]

What followed was a binge of—well—Gatesian proportion. First, they needed to procure an Altair. They settled for emulating one on the PDP-10 in Harvard's Aiken lab. While Allen was busy writing an emulator (with only the Altair's instruction manual as reference), Gates was already storming away at the BASIC interpretor code, content to write on yellow legal pads until the emulator was ready.

Gates gave up studying for exams and even his obsession with poker. For eight weeks, Gates and Allen, along with Monte Davidoff (who they had hired to write the math module), spent day and night perfecting the code.

“He’d be in the middle of a line of code when he’d gradually tilt forward until his nose touched the keyboard,” Allen said. “After dozing an hour or two, he’d open his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume precisely where he’d left off—a prodigious feat of concentration.” [2]

The miracle above all other miracles is that, at the end of this marathon, when Allen flew down to demo the interpretor in person, it worked. Their code had never seen the Altair in person, yet it did what it was supposed to. It is rumored that the demo gods have never again been so indulging.

Interpretation

Today's software developers tend to stick to one of the many agile methodologies: Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), etc. The overarching idea is that development should be iterative, incremental, and evolutionary. Shorter build sprints that clash more regularly with actual users exerts pressure on products to solve real-world needs rather than the whims of—let's admit it—not particularly representative software developers.

Agile development is anti-isolationism manifested as a software philosophy, and its popularity is worth celebrating: software today is, on the whole, vastly more user-friendly than it used to be. Even so, we should not altogether discount the value of the occasional creative binge in technology. Some types of products need to be more complete before they can be put out into the real world: a BASIC interpretor is one such example, others include product with sensitive usecases, such as in security and healthcare. Like a good wine, these products require a period of isolation to reach maturity. There is never just one answer to building great products.

Keys to Power

In technology occasionally, in science often, and in the arts usually, isolation is a wonderful stimulant of creativity.

Bill Gates still organizes a semiannual reading and thinking week. He retreats to an isolated cabin cut off from internet and restricts his input to only written material and outsourced meals. Clarity of thought requires time and distance.

"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings." — Nikola Tesla

Tesla may have died a pauper, but, in posthumous compensation, few other technologists are remembered for such breadth of influence. That the electric vehicle company is named "Tesla" rather than "Edison" goes to show who really won that competition.

In physics, the year 1905 will forever be remembered as Einstein's annus mirabilis. He published four ground-breaking papers (each of which might have independently warranted a Nobel Prize): on the photoelectric effect (for which he actually got the prize), on Brownian motion (which paved the path to experimentally verifying the atomic theory of matter), on special relativity, and on his famous $e=mc^2$ formula. All while Einstein was spending his working week at a patent office—in his words, the "worldly cloister" that "hatched [his] most beautiful ideas" [3].

Gregor Mendel conducted his pioneering work on genetics as a monk at an actual cloister: the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in what is now Brno, Czechia [4]. That said, it was not quite the secluded outpost you might imagine it to be; the monastery had been a center of learning in the area for centuries [5]. Nor was Mendel entirely without scientific connections. He published his work abroad and lectured before dozens of scientists, including the leading biologist Carl Nägeli. Still, one doubts¹ whether Mendel could have had as much success in a more urbane setting. His breakthrough results demanded years of patience, and few other employments would have afforded him this luxury in such abundance. Mendel's major weakness seems to have been the externally imposed kind of isolation rather than the self-imposed kind. The scientific community ignored his results until decades later, well after his death. Who knows where we might be today if only Darwin and Mendel has cross-pollinated their ideas.

Moreover, we ought to retire into ourselves very often; for intercourse with those of dissimilar natures disturbs our settled calm, and rouses the passions anew, and aggravates any weakness in the mind that has not been thoroughly healed. Nevertheless the two things must be combined and resorted to alternately—solitude and the crowd. The one will make us long for men, the other for ourselves, and the one will relieve the other; solitude will cure our aversion to the throng, the throng our weariness of solitude." — Literature Notes/Essays/De Tranquillitate Animi (Seneca)

The world of art, in particular, is filled with the stories of successful semi-isolationists. Impressionists like Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Morisot, and later post-impressionists like Gaugin, van Gogh, Cézanne, Seurat—all routinely retreated to the countryside where they could capture landscapes unencumbered by academic expectations. They eventually had to return to major cities to display their own works and share inspiration ², and it was by alternating city and country that art finally escaped the shackles of photorealism. Progress often means forgetting the old, and people do not readily forget when together.

"I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being."— The Black Swan (Nicholas Nassim Taleb)

As in the visual arts, so in music. Eric Satie, who might today be diagnosed a hoarder (among many other clinical labels), spent decades mostly holed up in a tiny falt in Arcueil, dressed in an invariable costume of grey velvet. He was in contact with other artists (see, for example, the ballet Parade jointly produced by Satie, Cocteau, and Picasso), but, all-in-all, he consummates the ideal of recluse. João Gilberto, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, none of these were quite as eccentric as Satie, but all demonstrate that moderate reclusiveness need not impede musical brilliance.

We come finally to the written word. The most famous literary recluse is likely J. D. Salinger, who lived most of his life at an unknown address in Cornish (the middle of nowhere, more or less). He granted one interview in 1953, felt betrayed by the interviewer, then built a fence around his property and rarely spoke to the press ever again [6]. His example is not particularly vindicating of isolationism since his output dwindled to nothing during his self-imposed exile. Still, there are plenty of literary recluses who managed to publish throughout the years of solitude: Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Pynchon, even Harper Lee ultimately wrote a sequel.

Isolation might not win you Greene's political variety of power. But it can be a worthy tool in pursuing the more productive varieities of power—technological, scientific, artistic. Our interconnected world makes it easier than ever to return to the world at large after a protracted absence. In principle, anyone has a chance on the activity feeds of Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, HackerNews, etc. True, some of these platforms are less than conducive to long-form, thought-intensive content, but, at least, spending a decade as a hermit no longer means you have to spend the rest of your life meditating in the same cave.

Meanwhile, most of us have lost our attention spans to the surveillance algorithms. We're locked in cycles of endless consumption, thus unable to produce by ourselves. When you feel that pressure, take a page from the history books, and consider stepping away from the multitude.

As a very practical takeaway, start group brainstorms with a silent individual brainstorm—without already committing yourselves to any particular solution. When we argue our cases from the start, the net result tends to be a dilution rather than concentration of the best ideas.³ Otherwise, the initial anchor prevents you from covering new ground—you constantly cycle through the same ideas, unable to step outside.

In sum, whatever the concentration—a five minute pre-meeting meditation or five year prison sentence—isolation is invaluable if you just take the opportunity.

"Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe." — Literature Notes/Books/Philosophy/Tao te ching (42)

"So much depends on reputation," Greene's fifth law begins, that you should "guard it with your life."

As usual, this law contains a weighty nugget of truth—perhaps something more like a deep well of truth, a California-gold-rush-inspiring vein's worth of truth.

That's because even the most virtuous person in the world will not go far without reputation. It takes little effort for an adversary to seed crippling rumors, and the higher you go, the more unrelenting the attacks. Were Socrates to have preemptively challenged the claims of his being a rabble-rouser, he might have lived a little longer, roused a little more rabble.¹

On the other side, many an unworthy figure have succeeded in disseminating the immaculate image of benevolence. Think of Mother Theresa, a figure revered by both devout insiders and heretical outsiders, who kept her dependents in squalid conditions and denied them essential medical care [1]. This is the woman who said, "[t]here is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering" [2]. We lose much in revering false saints.

Often, the less-than-perfectly moral person finds redemption in precisely those qualities which leave room to be desired. We love ourselves a bad boy: a Jobs, Napoleon, Caesar, Cleopatra, Genghis, you probably have your favorite. One's sins become the mark for which we most celebrate these psychopaths.

So in short, yes, Mr. Greene, reputation matters.

Where Greene goes wrong is that reputation is not a sustainable center of attention. You will never have full control over your reputation, and you should not hope to. Instead, turn your attention to laying the foundation from which reputation springs—good old-fashioned character.

The fifth law of cooperation is "so much depends on character: let it speak for itself." Focus on cultivating virtue, and the reputation will, with only minor corrections, follow suit.

Observance of the Law

Marcius Porcia Cato (2 Areas/3 Notes/4 Humanities/15 History/L,O History/People/Historical/Cato the Younger) grew up during a particularly turbulent period of Roman history—even by the standards of his contemporaries.

He was born in 95 BCE, six years after the Roman Republic had narrowly won the Cimbrian War, the first serious threat to Rome in over a century. Several decades earlier, millions of Germanic and Celtic people (the "Cimbri") began to descend southward through Europe on a collision course straight for the Italian heartland. Having crushed the Romans in their first encounters, these alien hominids posed a very real risk of Roman extinction.

Only the august leadership of Gaius Marius would delay the Republic its day of reckoning. And, as is the case whenever most needed, victory came at a price: a redefinition of what it meant to be Roman. Before the war, Rome had still been Rome the city. The Italian peninsula was a pastiche of different cultures and peoples unified only in military capacity. The war started Italy's path to homogeneity.

During the fighting, Marius extended Roman citizenship to Italian allied soldiers. This was perhaps necessary on the battlefield, but it inadvertently set up the next crisis. When Rome finally restored peace, her allies petitioned the senate to extend this privilege to all Italian citizens. Rome, in her paranoid fear of vulnerability, was not going to give in without a fight. War was brewing.

It is during this interbellum that Cato was born. "Even from his infancy," Plutarch writes[3], Cato was different from other kids.

"[I]n his speech, his countenance, and all his childish pastimes, he discovered an inflexible temper, unmoved by any passion, and firm in everything. He was resolute in his purposes, much beyond the strength of his age, to go through with whatever he undertook. He was rough and ungentle toward those that flattered him, and still more unyielding to those who threatened him."

Plutarch relates an illustrative anecdote from Cato as toddler. A delegate from the allies came to Cato's home to plead his case before Cato's uncle, a prominent statesman and popular advocate for the allies. After finishing his presentation, the delegate surveyed the response to find the room in uniform approval save one detractor—little Cato silent in apparent denial. Teasing the young rascal (what we might today call child abuse), the delegate held Cato out of the window by the feet and shook him a few times. To no avail. Cato remained ever silent. The delegate was the first to realize that brute force would never compel Cato to change his mind.

Cato's intransigence in justice and invulnerability to force would characterize him all his life. In adulthood, he was to become the premier advocate against the creeping authoritarianism and corruption of his day, a last bastion against the tyrannical Sullas, Pompeys, and Caesars who conducted the final act of the Roman Republic.

Soon after the above anecdote took place, Cato's uncle was assassinated. This was the Ferdinand moment that promptly triggered the "Social War" (so named after the Latin for allies, socii). War lasted from 91 to 87 BCE and ended with the allies (at least the cooperative ones) getting exactly what they had longed for: Roman citizenship. Unfortunately for them, the price to entry was the demise of their own identities. Political Romanization meant cultural Romanization; broadening the citizenry enabled Rome to finally realize her synechdochial aspirations for Italy and eventually the entire Mediterranean.

The Social War would do for Lucius Sulla what the Cimbrian war had done for Gaius Marius—Rome now possessed two equally powerful, popular, and capable generals. In full Thucydidean fashion, a clash was inevitable. The next six years (until 81 BCE) would see Marius and Sulla jockey back and forth—the one claiming control and exiling the other only for the tables to turn the other way, then back again.

Sulla won the resulting civil war at the cost of twice having marched his army on Rome (which would give Caesar his precedent) and of installing himself as dictator. And, in the immediate aftermath, Sulla launched a reign of terror to inspire Robespierre, massacring close to 10,000 noblemen and women—many of them former allies of Marius. The Roman Republic began its death spiral.

By this time, Cato, barely a teenager, was a favorite of Sulla. Unlike others (who were liable to receive a death sentence), Cato had almost free license to criticize and condemn Sulla in public (it helped that they were distant cousins). Plutarch reports that Cato, at the height of killings, asked his tutor to "[g]ive me a sword, that I might free my country from slavery." The tutor, knowing Cato's resoluteness, made sure to not leave Cato unattended anymore in the capital. Fortunately for Sulla, the dictator gave up absolute power before Cato could realize his tyrranicidal intentions. Sulla retired to country life and died soon after. Evidiently, Roman culture's traditional shaming of autocrats remained too strong for Sulla to resist.

As a man with senatorial ambitions, Cato followed the cursus honorum ("course of honors" or "ladder of honors")—the standard hierarchical sequence of public offices taken by all aspiring politicians.

He began his political life with the prerequisite decade of military service as the commander of a legion stationed in Macedon. Extremely popular with his legionaries, Cato received well beyond the normal allotment of legionary love. According to Plutarch, this stemmed from his unwavering consistency of character:

Whatever he commanded to be done, he himself took part in the performing; in his apparel, his diet, and mode of travelling, he was more like a common soldier than an officer; but in character, high purpose, and wisdom, he far exceeded all that had the names and titles of commanders, and he made himself, without knowing it, the object of general affection.

As recurs often throughout Cato's life, it was precisely his disregard for popular opinion that made him so popular. There was no pretense, no posturing. Cato was a figure who tried his very best—and usually succeeded—in living in accordance with what he thought to be just.

Cato returned to Rome in 65 BCE to take the next step on the ladder. He started in the senate as an entry-level quaestor (treasurer). As with every other office, Cato is remembered for being a particularly scrupulous quaestor. He began by prosecuting former quaestors who had embezzled funds and Sullan minions who had escaped justice.

The same consistency that made Cato so popular with the common people made Cato unpopular with many of his fellow senators. As Plutarch puts it, "[n]o virtue, by the fame and credit which it gives, creates more envy than justice, because both power and credit follow it chiefly among the common folk". There is nothing the corrupt hate quite so much as the incorruptible. For the rampant corruption of the senate and absolute incorruptibility of Cato, he soon gained some powerful adversaries.

In 63 BCE, Cato became a tribune of the plebs—the foremost representative of the common people. He faced his first major crisis in the Catiline conspiracy, a plot to overthrow Cicero's consulship. After Caesar advocated to treat those involved with mercy (that is to say, a fair trial), Cato succeeded in convincing the senate to vote for direct execution—he believed no other measure would successfully deter future anti-republican plots.

Unfortunately for Cato, capital punishment was not enough to deter the autocratically ambitious. The very same year of the Catiline conspiracy witnessed the less covert conspiracy of the first triumvirate. The three most powerful men in Rome—Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus—joined in an informal alliance to undercut the Senate and empower themselves.

Cato's next years would be years of resistance. Both Pompey and Caesar, after genociding vast swathes of the East and West respectively, returned to Rome in the hope of both organizing a Triumph (an extravagant military parade and procession—the dream of every Roman general) and obtaining a consulship. Through debate and fillibuster, Cato forced the generals to choose between the two. Cato meant to keep private armies and public office separate as long as possible.

Caesar chose for consulship (Pompey, two years earlier, had chosen the Triumph) and tried to pass some agrarian reforms, which included redistributing highly arable land to Pompey's veterans. Cato was so adamant in bashing this measure publicly that Caesar had Cato arrested. The act backfired in that twist of nonviolent resistance so familiar to today's activists: Caesar's unrequited forcefulness made him seem the bad guy. Cato won a tiny victory of public opinion in an unwinnable war.

Occasionally, Cato's strict adherence to justice backfired. When he received an official commission to annex Cyprus, Cato had to accept however reluctantly—it was his legal duty even if the obvious extralegal intention was to get him out of the way and even if the republic needed Cato more than Cyprus did.

So too it is possible to argue that Cato's intransigence was the final spark that started the Republic's final civil war. In 54 BCE, two years after the triumvirate had disbanded, Cato succeeded in passing a resolution that ended Caesar's proconsular command. Caesar tried to negotiate and was willing to concede much if only to preserve the legal immunity. Despite Pompey approving the concession, Cato would not—could not—back down. Should it surprise anyone that Caesar chose civil war over public trial and certain exile?

As we all know, Caesar won the public war on Rome. But he never won his private war on Cato. In 46 BCE, Caesar finally hunted Cato down to the Tunisian town of Utica. Cato knew that Caesar would likely pardon him if he capitulated. He also knew that he would never be able to live with himself if he were to capitulate. So he took his own sword and tore open his stomach, the eternal master of his own fate. Only Cato was unsuccessful at first. His family intervened and summoned a doctor who stuffed the trailing intestines back where they belonged and sutured the wound. But no mere mortal could long resist Cato once he had made up his mind. When he recovered enough energy, he thrust the doctor away and ripped open the wound.

As he entered the world with unparalleled force of will, so he left.

Interpretation

Cato was steeped in Stoicism, a hellenistic school of thought founded in the third century BCE by Zeno of Citium.

Along with Aristotelian ethics, Stoicism is one of the founding approaches to virtue ethics. The Stoics regard virtue as supremely important; the only path to the highest forms of happiness is the practice of wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

For the most part, Cato was the consummate stoic—his life reads almost like the official how-to guide to stoicism. He walked barefoot to the senate all his life, was always the first to arrive, and was painstaking with every responsibility he had. He sought justice for crimes that had been committed a decade earlier, never accepted a bribe, and constantly railed against the corruption of his age.

The stoics taught that actions, not words, are the true test of character, and character, not reputation, is the true test of personhood. By all accounts, even those of his foes, Cato appears to have passed. His character was a sledgehammer, often strong enough to counter generals and their armies, often the very last barrier between Republic and Empire.²

There was the occasional peccadillo—a tendency to overindulge in wine, for one (granted: all of Rome would be alcoholic by our standards). And he was maybe a tad too stubborn. Never compromising when he thought justice at a stake, Cato made a few errors in his cost-benefit calculations. Stripping Caesar of proconsular rights may be the "right thing" to do when you see his time has elapsed, but it becomes less defensible when you look ahead and see the alternative is empire. And killing traitors without trial seems to us hardly justifiable.

Still, Cato would be hardly human without some faults, and he would be hardly Cato without being the first to admit so. But all in all, his character has continued to inspire for millennia.³ That's because Cato represents something almost unheard of today: a politician with integrity—a public figure who cares less about public perception than private goodness.

Our actions, for the most part, are not the consequences of our reputations but of our character. Do we abandon our friends because we prefer not to be associated with them or because we are too cowardly and uncommitted to justice to stand up against the mob? Do we spend hours binging Instagram because we want to remain in touch with our friends or because we've let our temperance muscles atrophy. Do we agree with the popular opinion because we are afraid of what people will think of us or because we refuse to exercise wisdom?

So much depends on character. Almost everything.

The best way to keep a good reputation is to get to the point that you no longer have to worry about it. Character sustains reputation and speaks for itself.

Footnotes

Why are there no pan-European news agencies?

Sure, there are English-language newspapers and magazines that feature a section on "Europe": the Economist, the BBC, the Guardian—but these are British news agencies before anything else. On the other side of the channel, national newspapers like France's Le Monde, Germany's der Spiegel, and Italy's ANSA also report on European affairs but always through regionally fogged-up glasses.

Europe needs high-quality news that is European first and national second. That is because news is the substance of public discourse, and a healthy public discourse is prerequisite to a stronger Europe.

That's important because the world needs a strong Europe to set an example in the fight against climate change, to counter an aggressive Russia in its East, and to buttress against the Chinese Communist Party in the event that America isolationism continues to resurge.

So we need European news.

It's now, for the first time since Napoleon, that a European news agency has become possible. This is for two reasons:

1. Language. An entire generation of Europeans is entering adulthood with a common tongue. The EU speaks English much more fluently than it used to (compare any set of grandparents and grandchildren).
2. Changing definitions of "European". The open borders of cyberspace have changed the feeling of being European—many of this latest generation feel more solidarity with contemporaries across the border than compatriots across church aisles.

For these reasons, European news has an able and eager audience.

In the last few years, we've seen the first entrants try to meet this latent demand. "Are We Europe?" is a quarterly magazine that offers "borderless journalism from the next generation of storytellers." "Into Europe" is a YouTube channel that publishes video essays on European news and topics. The most successful example is probably that of "TLDR News EU" at a quarter of a million subscribers.

Still, something's missing. "Are We Europe?" is more a long-form humanities pastiche than concise source of European news. Unfortunately, most of us just don't have the attention spans. That's something "TLDR News" understands much better (it's in the name). But both "TLDR News" and "Into Europe", though they have wonderful content, produce only videos. Today's consumer expects wider ranging media such as interviews, articles, and email newsletters à la Axios.

That's where Romulus comes in. Romulus's mission is to provide Europe its much-needed news content. It's starting with regular YouTube videos, which it supplements with interviews and guest-written articles. And there's an ongoing newsletter giving regular updates on what's happening across Europe.

Romulus is still early-stage, so it's too early to say whether they will really pull off creating a novel news agency. But I think they can do it for three reasons:

1. Team. Founders Elmer Hoogland and Renier de Bruin have had lots of practice. While at Room For Discussion (RfD), the University of Amsterdam's interview platform, the two interviewed the likes of Pete Hoekstra, former US ambassador to the Netherlands, Feike Sijbesma, CEO of chemical corporation Royal DSM, Harold Goddijn, CEO of TomTom, and, Jordan Peterson, yes the JP. They're well-connected and have the know-how.
2. Idea. Elmer and Renier understand that a news company today can't look like the New York Times Magazine. It has to be more like Axios—sleek, multimedia, extremely to the point (whence this liberal usage of bullets and lists), and data-driven. With their technical backgrounds, the founders know that news companies today have to be technology companies. And they are flexible enough to act accordingly.
3. Execution. Not paralyzed by the typical European perfectionism, Romulus's team knows that what matters most is the amount of content. Moreover, their extensive networks mean that Elmer and Renier can outsource a lot of writing to third parties. With interviews, they can quickly churn much more content than hand-crafted videos. And by sheer dint of will-power, they will transcend the limits of the typical Dutch work-life balance to sacrifice short-term well-being for long-term world domination¹.

For those reasons, I think Romulus deserves a chance—and by chance, I mean your support. You can give them a newsletter sign-up or subscribe. Best of al it's for a good cause—you get informed and Europe gets your participation.

Footnotes

Outline

• Body
  • Countering Sedentarism
  • HIIT: Getting Fit
  • The 20/20/20 Rule: Preventing Myopia
• Mind
  • Heart Rate Variability: Recharging Will-Power
  • The Focused and Diffuse Modes of Thinking: Getting Unstuck
  • Reflection & Planning: Getting on Track
• Conclusion

Two months ago, I was invited to my first "Work Marathon". A few hundred people would get together in a shared Zoom call for four days of working near maximum capacity. The organizers, Team Ultraworking, guaranteed that the combination of accountability and structure—work was to be divided into "cycles" of 30 minutes of working and 10 minutes of reflecting and preparing—would make me four times as productive as normal. If the promise held up, it would be well worth the $100 investment. So I signed up.

A day and a half into the marathon, I realized it was not for me. The shared Zoom call was a source of stress—not of healthy accountability. The mere knowledge of several hundred eyeballs staring out of one of the many windows I had minimized in my menu bar was a distraction—if not the premise for an Orwellian nightmare.

Meanwhile, the regular breaks felt disruptive and annoying—not the boon of structure I had longed for. I hd never had much success before with the Pomodoro technique¹, so I really shouldn't have been surprised. The allure of mythical productivity gains had swept me up and suppressed my better judgment.

So I ended up dropping out of the marathon to return to my one-big-chunk-of-uninterrupted-working-time ways. The Ultraworking Team made good on their guarantee, and I got the money back, in exchange for the sinking feeling that I had failed my fellow productivity supplicants.

As much as I tried to convince myself that I had made the right call—that I had laughed the sunk cost fallacy demon in the face yet lived to tell the tale—I couldn't shake the idea that perhaps I was in the wrong. That I hadn't tried hard enough to stick to the work marathon to see the benefits mature.

So I returned to the laboratory that is my agenda and spent a few weeks deep in the Pomodoro and all its variations. Supplemented with all the research I could find, my experiments led me to switch camps: I now believe that the best and really only sustainable way to structure your work is in half hour-ish blocks of time with at least a few moments to take pause in between.

In the rest of this article, I would like to take you through the reasons why you should consider incorporating more breaks in your daily routine.

Body

Countering Sedentarism

We've all heard that "sitting is the new smoking". Barring the fact that sitting still is not nearly as bad for us as actual smoking [1], it is not good for us. Worst of all are long periods of uninterrupted sitting.

From Dunstan et al. [2]:

"Intriguingly, adults whose sedentary time was mostly uninterrupted (prolonged unbroken sitting) had a poorer cardio-metabolic health profile compared to those who interrupted, or had more frequent breaks in their sedentary time [49]. These associations were observed even when accounting for total sedentary time and time spent in moderate-to-vigorous-intensity physical activity."

Quitting our sedentary jobs is not a possibility for most of us, but at least we can stave off the worst impacts of sedentarism by getting up frequently. Dunstan et al. point out there are not yet any "definitive recommendations on how long people should sit . . . or how often people should break up their sitting time," but moving around for thirty seconds every half hour certainly will not hurt. This has been my baseline: let's call it "30m/30s".

As for standing desks², 30m/30s still seems like a reasonable injunction. Sitting wreaks more than just "cardio-metabolic" havoc; there's also the musculoskeletal component. And I dare say that not moving in a standing position for long periods of time will not do your joints and muscles much better than not moving in a sitting position for long periods of time.

HIIT: Getting Fit

Taking frequent breaks is not just a tonic against sedentarism but also the founding principle behind that voguest of workout trends: high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Minute-for-minute, we know that HIIT is more efficient than its continuous, lower-intensity alternatives [3]—so much so that a single seven-minute workout a day can have a major effect (for example, decreasing waist circumference by 4cm in only six weeks)[4].

If so, why not view your working sessions as extended breaks in a day-long HIIT circuit? Even a 30s break is ample time to get your heart-rate up, and, in my own experience, a quick set of jumping jacks is the perfect way to recharge my energy levels.

Don't content yourself to just maintaining your current health level against the blight of sedentarism. Use your breaks to one-up that nefarious rogue and get fit for minimum input.

The 20 rule: Preventing Myopia

Next to our cardiometabolic and musculoskeletal health, there's eye health to think about. The 20/20/20 rule recommends us to take 20 seconds every 20 minutes to look at an object at least 20 ft in the distance.

Conventionally, opthamologists tout this rule as an antidote to eye strain. Less conventionally, amateur biohackers follow the 20/20/20 rule an preventive measure against screen-induced myopia. In fact, the End Myopia community³ recommends longer breaks: five minutes of distance-viewing for every 20 minutes of close work or a longer one-hour break every three hours.

Mind

Heart rate variability: Recharging Will-power

Will-power is finite. In a single session, the more you use, the less you will have left over at the end [5]. This phenomenon, known as "Ego Depletion", is why we are most susceptible to binging Netflix, junk food, etc. at the end of a long day of will-power-heavy work.

Fortunately, there are tricks to recharge will-power. A key angle of attack is to increase heart rate variability (HRV), the variation in time intervals between heart beats. Within limits (let's say anywhere less than full-blown atrial fibrillation), a higher HRV is associated to higher self-control [6].

Your break is a perfect time to increase heart rate variability and, in turn, recharge will-power. This you can accomplish through slow breathing techniques [6] or quick bursts of exercise [7]. You need breaks not just for physical health but for your mental ability to focus.

The Focused and Diffuse Modes of Thinking: Unstucking Yourself

Our brain operates in one of two distinct modes: the task-positive network and task-negative network. These systems are mutually exclusive—at any given moment you occupy either one or the other but not both. [8]

As its name suggests, the task-positive network (also "focused" mode) is well-suited to completing clearly defined tasks and close-ended problems. Meanwhile, the task-negative network (also "default mode network" or "diffuse" mode), is well-suited to creative work where tasks are not clearly defined and the problems open-ended [9].

Excelling in the information economy requires a balance between the two systems, but the conventional workday overemphasizes the focused mode. This is great for minimizing distraction but is more likely to get stuck—you fail to see the bigger picture and are blind to indirect solutions.

When we end up stuck on a problem, one of the best things we can do is to take a few minutes away from the problem in the diffuse mode. Our unconscious machinery will continue working on the problem until we have one of those "a-ha!" moments, usually while doing something totally unrelated to the problem at hand.

So take a break to free up your full mental arsenal. A quick walk can do you wonders.

Review & Reflection: Ontracking Yourself

Let us come back to the work marathon: Team Ultraworking recommends a 30m/10m cycle because the 10m break affords ample time to reflect on how the previous cycle went and to plan what you will do for the next cycle.

They provide an app, Headquarters, that helps you schedule these work cycles. It begins every cycle by asking you questions like "What am I trying to accomplish this cycle", "How will I get started", and "Do I anticipate any hazards and how can I mitigate them?" It also asks you to log your energy and morale—so you know when to do some jumping jacks or get a glass of water. It ends every cycle with questions like "Did I complete this cycle's target", "Was there anything noteworthy or distracting", and "What can I improve for next cycle?"

Ostensibly, these questions help you iteratively get better at reducing distraction and planning your work. But I actually think the more impactful consequence is that these moments of pause help you catch yourself when you have gone astray—for example, if after watching an educational YouTube video, you have accidentally stumbled into the YouTube death spiral. The cyclical work structure limits the amount of damage that any lapse in will-power can inflict.

This is especially helpful for open-ended tasks that are hard to estimate. The guided reflection helps you make the abstract goals a little more tangible and concrete.⁴

Conclusion

All in all, we should be taking frequent breaks in our work day not just for the sake of our physical health but for the sake of the work itself.

Key to making the most of these breaks is to impose some structure. Impose a time limit and do not let the pause become an excuse to scroll Reddit or Instagram or Twitter or whatever platform your digital Achilles's heel tends to be. Instead, keep your mind free and undistracted.

The reason I had little success with the Pomodoro technique in the past was that I had absorbed the idea that interruption was equivalent to distraction. I felt that the breaks of the Pomodoro circuit were brakes to productive work. This was wrong. So long as you actually treat the break as a break, you will find it incredibly easy to slip back into whatever problem you were working on. To a large extent, the ability to drop into flow is something you can train and facilitate with the right external structure.

Exactly how to structure the break is up to you and to the work at hand. When I have several hours to spend on grunt work—on simply getting through a list of tasks, I tend to keep my breaks a little longer and put more effort into planning each cycle. When the work at hand has a more restricted focus that will require several cycles (such as writing this article), I prefer shorter breaks to keep my mind closer to the problem.

At the very least, take 30 seconds to stand up, move around, and look in the distance. At the most, take 10 minutes to reflect and plan, run outside, squeeze in a seven-minute work out, get a cup of tea, go to the bathroom, and do a bit of tidying up.

I'll be coming back to the work marathon in the future (if not on Zoom then in spirit). And I'll be continuing to integrate work cycles into all of my workdays. It's not so much a nicety (or because Pomodoro timers are so hip and trendy) but a must when you spend 10 hours a day behind the screen.

If you're interested in trying this out yourself, Team Ultraworking is running a work marathon this very week. Check it out to get started. I trust you will have more success knowing everything I didn't know than I did.

Footnotes