Episode #77. Hey Sunday reader 👋🏼

This Sunday, The Timestamp is here again to help you! You will get your weekly dose of summaries from the articles, books, or podcasts you may have missed in tech, future of work, or philosophy applied to your daily life.

Last Sunday was dedicated to writing and it seems you really enjoyed it looking at the number of likes, shares, and new (free) subscribers! Thank you 🙏

#1. Learn with Real Dictators

Well, let me clarify, this podcast is not teaching you how to become a real dictator. It covers the life of famous dictators as pictured by historians. Real Dictators is an award-winning podcast that will help you get genuine facts about Staline, Hitler, or … Napoleon.

I know, it may surprise some French readers that Napoleon was perceived as one of the toughest emperors on the planet. As a matter of evidence, Spanish parents still warn their 5-year-old kids that they will call Napoleon if they do not listen. If France, they call the phantoms from the dark…

As I am a big fan of history, I started listening to Episode 1 about “Napoleon: the humble Corsican” and I must admit it was full of fun facts I completely ignored:

Napoleon was born in 1769 in Corsica… just 1 year after this Mediterranean island became a French territory. Napoleon was a young opponent to France … years before becoming one of its fiercest defenders.
Napoleon went to military school in France arriving directly from Corsica… he was not speaking French. He had no idea that winter in the region of Champagne, where he stayed to study, could be so cold that it could freeze.
Napoleon had a hard time during school; he was a foreigner that was very different from his French fellow students coming from the French ‘aristocracie’… even though Napoleon was coming from the Corsican upper class.

I hope this small text will give you the motivation to listen to the entire podcast 👆(click on the image above to access the episode on Spotify). If you want to pick another Real Dictator, enjoy some other episodes of this podcast.

#2. Highly-successful people and you?

I get the feeling that Sahil Bloom is an infinite source of inspiration for curious people. This Twitter thread is about highly successful people: what is their secret? Here are my top 3 picks from his list of 10 (I am not a spoiler):

“Enjoy being wrong”. Winners do not enjoy losing but… highly successful people are not afraid of being wrong. Learning is a process that works much better under stress. “Embrace new information that forces you to change your viewpoint”. Success is often a matter of change: make sure you implement software updates regularly.
“Paranoia: Highly-successful people share a surprising fear that all of the success is suddenly going to disappear”. Enjoy the moment but be aware that going from hero to zero can be very sudden. Success is partly built (you having an impact on it) and partly made of luck (external conditions you do not control that will make your success possible).
“Focus on questions, not answers”. Winners enjoy asking questions to others and to themselves. This is a sign of humility. Humility is often a sign that you are open to improve, and ready to embrace change. The more you focus on questions, the more you will build confidence.

I will let you discover the full Twitter thread here 👇 (click on the below):

Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom

10 fascinating traits of highly-successful people: 1) Enjoy Being Wrong: The most successful people legitimately enjoy being wrong. They’ve learned to embrace new information that forces you to change your viewpoint—these "software updates" improve upon the old. (read on)

#3. Taleb’s Black Swan

Reading the Black Swan from Nassim Nicolas Taleb can be a disturbing experience. If you think that life is only deterministic, this bible about uncertainty will certainly change your viewpoint.

The high-level idea is that the unexpected is always… what you should expect to have the most impact.

“We do not spontaneously learn that we don’t learn that we don’t learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don’t learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don’t seem to be good at getting”.

The Black Swan is a book that will first show you all the biased mental models we witness in life. Confirmation bias, narrative fallacy; be aware that humans love enjoying stories that create an explanatory framework to what you observe.

Get the difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan. Mediocristan is the linear, limited difference between individuals for example. Any human being will be in a very limited range of weight or height even if you consider the entire population on earth: “You can’t lose a ton of weight in one day”. Extremistan is an area where the unexpected is possible and can be sudden: think of a crash of the financial markets, it is possible to lose a ton of money in a day.

The book warns us not to think like … a turkey. “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. It will incur a revision of belief.”

That was just an intro to this fabulous book I hope you will get the motivation to read it soon. I get the feeling that the highly improbable events are accelerating in times of uncertainty. Look at the virus outbreaks, financial crashes, and wars. Building robustness by embracing the highly unexpected will make you stronger.

#4. Philosophy with Socrates x Charles Pepin

It is said that France is the country with the highest density of philosophers. Like anybody who enjoyed going through the final year in a French “lycée”, you probably remember at least a year of studying philosophy.

This past week I listened to a great podcast by Charles Pepin that could probably be a great recommendation for a kid starting to study philosophy 👇 (click below to listen).

Charles Pepin goes through the famous saying in France “prendre les choses avec philosophie”. In English, shall we take things with philosophy?

A philosopher should not necessarily stay calm and wise in any situation. Philosophers like to see themselves as engaged and strongly opinionated. Plato for example, a famous student of Socrates, jumped into philosophy as a reaction to the injustice his master went through when he died.

But what is philosophy all about? Maybe it is the way to prepare oneself for any tough situation one may encounter in life: losing a close friend or parents, reflecting about life and death.

The podcast gave me the curiosity to dig further into the mystery of Socrates. The famous philosopher never wrote anything down. I found this article which deserves at least a mention here 👇.

Socrates is mostly known through the writings that Plato and Xenophon produced. But Plato and Xenophon were students of Socrates and they were 40 years younger than Socrates… which means that they have known the older version of Socrates only.
The man who knows nothing is a contradictory version of Socrates who said he enjoyed learning by inquiry above anything else. “The man who seeks to know rather than teaching” is however depicted as very opinionated… which can be close to the behavior of a professor.
Even though the mystery of Socrates will probably remain unsolved. Plato is believed to be the biographer that described the most accurate version of Socrates.

I will let you continue to enjoy Plato, Socrates, or Charles Pepin by yourself. Let’s wish a great year to the young kids who will discover philosophy in the next few days.

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See you next Sunday!

The Timestamp

History > about real dictators🎧- Self…