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  1. #76
    a500lbgorilla's Avatar
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    Any rolemodels?

    What book(s) are you reading?

    Top 3 books you've read?
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  2. #77
    spoonitnow's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
    Any rolemodels?
    Hey man, thanks for the questions.

    On the topic of role models, there are a few in particular that stand out, and they're probably kind of atypical, but here goes.

    Role Model #1?: Agathocles of Syracuse

    Maybe this isn't so much of a role model in the general sense as it was a role model in one very specific way. I guess ignoring 99.99% of what someone did doesn't make them much of a role model, but here we go.

    Knowing how Agathocles came into power and how he was able to stay in power of Syracuse after basically just murdering the entire elite made a big impression on me in my early teens in a weird way because it showed me that you could do something that almost everyone else fails at as long as you plan it correctly. He was able to remain in control of Syracuse for a long time even though he came into power by force under really shady circumstances, and this is something that very few rulers were able to do. I'll provide a brief explanation since I know that sounds kind of brutal, though it wasn't the brutality that mattered to me so much as the concept and the lesson.

    [TL;DR alert] In The Prince, Machiavelli developed this idea of the "new prince." A new prince is essentially someone who accumulates power through his own deeds instead of having it given to him along the lines of a family lineage. He wrote on a few of the different ways that a new prince can acquire power. One of those was by what he called by "criminal virtue," and that basically means taking power through what would be considered obviously immoral actions (murder, genocide, kidnapping, systematic rape, etc.) He advised that the new prince who acquires power in this way must plan things out so that he can do all of this dirt at one time so that he doesn't have to continue doing dirt for the rest of his reign. The point of this approach is that it allows your reputation to recover and gives you the maximum chances of staying in power in the long term. Agathocles is widely considered the best example of this approach because he's one of the only tyrants in history who was able to come to power through these types of means and stay there for a reasonable amount of time. (Cliff notes: He gathered all of the ruling class and had soldiers kill them all at once to leave himself the only person in control of Syracuse.)

    Role Model #2: Stringer Bell

    I don't know if this is really a role model in the traditional sense, but he was easily the single character that I most identified with in any television show, book or movie ever. In my experience, the favorite character of most people for The Wire is either Bunk or Omar. For me it was Stringer. He had this overwhelming drive to rise to a higher class and get away from the bullshit that he grew up in. That resonated with me in a major way because, if we're being fair, I probably should have grown up to be a notch above pure trailer trash. For some reason, I have this huge drive to do more, and it's something that really stuck with me because I'd never really connected with anyone who had the same kind of drive. It was a little weird for me that it was a fictional character.

    Role Model #3: Tigran Petrosian

    Petrosian was the world champion for chess during most of the 1960s. His style was exceptionally prophylactic, and he made a point to be very in tune with how he was feeling each day so that he was able to play openings that led to more types of positions that he would be emotionally and psychologically comfortable with based on that.

    He affected me both in terms of chess, but also in terms of how I deal with people. He was likely to be the best defensive player of all time, and his focus was on preventing his opponents from having good plans instead of building up the advantage for an attack himself. While this led to a high number of draws against strong competition, it also made him the likely the single hardest player to score a win against in history.

    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
    What book(s) are you reading?
    I reread Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power about twice a year, and I'm in the middle of that now. From one point of view, it could be seen as a handbook to impersonating an sociopath. From another point of view, it could be seen as the first effective treatment of realism when dealing with people.

    I'm also reading from David Sklansky's latest book DUCY? which is partially about gambling, but not so much that it's boring. It's some really interesting stuff and covers everything from parallel parking to boosting revenues at casinos and allowing people to pay to park in handicap spots without a placard.

    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
    Top 3 books you've read?
    The 48 Laws of Power (Greene is my favorite writer, and the 50th Law [his book on fear] is one of the most underrated books of our time)
    The Brain That Changes Itself
    Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig is my intellectual hero)
  3. #78
    I just got "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" for Christmas, and I'm 99% sure I was sizing up "The Brain That Changes Itself" as a possible read before as well. You just made the decision for me, and I guess I'll give "The 48 Laws of Power" a whirl while I'm at it.

    I can't really post without asking any questions so: do you speak a second/third language? If not, have you ever considered learning a foreign language?

    I've enjoyed reading your responses, gg.
    Erín Go Bragh
  4. #79
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    Quote Originally Posted by seven-deuce View Post
    I just got "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" for Christmas, and I'm 99% sure I was sizing up "The Brain That Changes Itself" as a possible read before as well. You just made the decision for me, and I guess I'll give "The 48 Laws of Power" a whirl while I'm at it.

    I can't really post without asking any questions so: do you speak a second/third language? If not, have you ever considered learning a foreign language?

    I've enjoyed reading your responses, gg.
    I'm glad to have been helpful.

    I took three semesters of French in high school and four semesters of Spanish in college. Unfortunately, I was still in the mode of doing the minimum I could to get by and make good grades, so I have very little functional knowledge of either.

    I would be very interested in learning Spanish just because it would be so useful here in the United States. Even if I never go back to finish my undergrad, I may take classes and things for that just to learn it.
  5. #80
    a500lbgorilla's Avatar
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    What did Pirsig teach you about Quality?
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  6. #81
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    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
    What did Pirsig teach you about Quality?
    Cliff Notes/Practical Answer: I was able to use his teachings as the basis for my understanding of performance psychology and for my understanding of how people relate to each other.

    My first experiences that I could relate through his metaphysics of quality (MoQ) were from chess. Inside of a year of tournament play, I had maybe ten or twelve positions in the late middlegame where I ran into the same sort of situation. That situation is that I would have two different moves that worked towards my plan and improved my position, and they both seemed to be fine, but I would have a strong feeling of preference for one over the other. In my post-game analysis of almost all of the 10-12 positions, there was something I had missed in my initial calculations during the game that could have put me at a major disadvantage if I'd taken the option that I didn't feel the preference for.

    It's probably important to note that I do not think in the terms that the MoQ framework uses, but I think it's extremely important to see how he really worked hard to flesh out a logical framework for these things. Along these lines, I've noticed that major portions of how I view learning are extremely similar to the pursuit of quality ala the MoQ. In fact, focusing in on quality and treating it as being isomorphic (for lack of a better term) to tao is probably extremely useful as a mental trick to give yourself something to "believe in" to get you through the difficult portions of learning something.

    One of the most important lessons from his first book that I've been able to use to teach other people is as follows. If he's working on the motorcycle and strips the head off of a screw in the wrong place, then the value of that screw drastically changes. In fact, the value of handling the screw correctly can become almost the entire value of the motorcycle itself because failing to handle it correctly would render the motorcycle useless (and not worth much). The lesson here is that the values of things are constantly changing, and the only way to keep up with what the current values are is by staying present in the moment. For example, when you are assessing the value of something in the present based on its evaluation even just a few moments in the past, you open yourself up to major mistakes. To tie this into poker, tilt is a good example. A lot of people let something that's happened in the recent past affect their evaluation of the current situation in a not-so-good way, and this happens when they aren't maintaining presence.

    Simply put, presence is the single most important thing that affects performance outside of skill level. The better your presence, the better your evaluations of the situations you're in for the present moment, and the closer you're able to perform to the best of your ability.

    I realize this is probably a bit hard to follow for people who aren't familiar with his work at all, and I apologize for that. Consider the following:

    Jared Tendler jumped into the scene a few years ago carving out a very specific niche of being a performance psychology coach for poker. In a framework that he has used before, he identifies four stages to learning something, and I'll summarize those stages:

    1. You aren't aware that you aren't competent.
    2. You are aware that you aren't competent.
    3. You become competent on a conscious level.
    4. You become competent on an unconscious level.

    A good example for this is with a baby learning to walk. In stage 1, he doesn't know that he doesn't know how to walk. In stage 2, he realized that he can't walk or that he can't walk well. Stage 3 sees the baby able to walk, but only if he's focusing on every little movement, and everything is really slow and choppy. Finally you reach stage 4 where things have been learned on the unconscious level, and you're able to do it on "auto-pilot" without having to think about it because your brain is handling it on its own without needing your conscious input.

    Once you reach stage 4, you start to be able to "feel" for how it works, and the task becomes a mental extension of your body in a lot of ways. There are different things that you can use to refer to this like intuition, feel, unconscious competency or whatever else, but whatever you call it, you know what I'm talking about.

    Robert Greene called this level 'mastery' in his most recent book (titled Mastery), and it's a pretty decent read. Josh Waitzkin talks about how achieving mastery in multiple disciplines put him in a position where he was able to think in terms of one while doing the other, and vice versa. Carol Dweck described the mindset required to achieve this level of mastery in her book Mindset which I've referenced several times here on FTR, and she also did a lot of cool experiments on children that helped her to flesh things out. The book mentioned earlier in this thread The Brain That Changes Itself looks at the biological basis for the changes in the brain that happen to get it to this stage.

    And Pirsig's idea of quality comes at the center of all of this if you believe mastery to be the pinnacle in pursuing quality, which I do. That's the impact his work had on my life. In short, it's the center of how I relate to pretty much everything.
  7. #82
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    Thank you everyone for taking part in this AMA.

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