Banana

Impinging upon another successful pursuit of circumnavigating around the sun, I am thrust into the position to document my wins and woes. Perusing the happy and bitter happenstances about the past year, I have encountered a few useful adages that, if I practice the rule of frequent reflection, would prove useful. Without further temperance with verboseness, here goes:

You define your individuality by interacting with others, but too much time spent with a homogenous aggregate circumvents ideas. It is paradoxical. 

A greater virtue than amassing knowledge is reading people, a personal practice habituated by living in cities bigger than life itself. A person who portrays himself as poised often rests under a layer of pretense. Next, the highest functioning institutions have extremely meticulous pruning processes, so it makes the most sense to practice it yourself too. Some good qualities to have for friends are high tolerance, persistence, situational awareness, and mental fortitude. Consequently, you reciprocate by not bringing up topics that will repulse others, being supportive of ideas, ask thoughtful questions that pertains to others, and contributing positively to those who are worth being positive toward.

Uncooperative agents need not your attention; prune these people out of your life. Uncooperative agents are fully cognizant of their unpleasant nature. Trust that all implicit insinuations coming from the other party are direct signals for actionable items. In other words, pay especially close attention to low SNR circumstances. In these situations, remember carefully that people don't change from tolerance; people change from punishments.

The pretext of selectivity rests upon a suite of abundant strategies that makes someone high-value. Some of these strategies are practicing risk mitigation, persistent discipline and assumption of responsibilities, and continuous problem-solving. Additional good qualities to have: duality, optionality, high flexibility. I have always believed that defense is the best offense and that persistent intentionality will prevail over sporadic and mottled one-shots.

All those who respect you align your moral compass with theirs, or you have some particular trait that they value above all else (one trait that supersedes the weight of your cumulative bad traits), or some resource that obliges their allegiance. The adoption of a moral compass is the hardest to sever, and resource dependency is the easiest to sever.

Watch how people make you want to seek their validation. Is it by establishing that they are esteemed in society? Is it by proving their likeness to you? Is it by over-saturating the conversation with compliments? Also watch carefully when the patterns of disrespect become apparent, such as pointing out your mistakes in logic, mistakes in etiquette. The act of pointing out mistakes is in itself a confrontation of one philosophy against another: there is no singular correct philosophy. In most cases, the truth will remain opaque.

Some interesting questions that I've struggled to answer:

1. One hundred ants are dropped on a meter stick. Each ant is either traveling to the left or the right with constant speed 1 meter per minute. When two ants meet, they bounce off each other and reverse direction. When an ant reaches an end of the stick, it falls off. What is the average amount of time it takes for all ants to fall off, assuming they are uniformly distributed with a random direction to start?

2. Do you learn by positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement?

3. Why didn't you go to a private high school?

Perhaps the answer to everything is a bright spring day, or a pleasant dream. Go eat a banana.