Daily Insight:

The Cost of an Extraordinary Reading Life

I like hustle culture.

But why?

I always talk shit about the grindset mentality, and I stand by it; obsession corrupts, and when it reigns freely with the glimmering promise of moremoreMORE, it ends with tired eyes and broken hopes.

And yet it's ten times better than the opposite extreme.

Many subscribe to the crab bucket ideology: every time a crab almost manages to crawl out, a swarm of rival pincers pull it back down. Every individual has the strength to escape, but the collective refuses to ever let it happen. Crab traps fellow crab.

If I can't escape, then neither will you.

Man is not much different; many are quick to ridicule hard work, and unlike the crabs, it is rarely by blind impulse.

Perhaps they see the effort as a mirror into their own deficiency.

Perhaps they inject their own wishy-washy philosophy to reframe it as something negative.

Perhaps envy is at play, where it's not enough to merely want what someone else has, but to actively deprive them of it through insult and derision.

Envy can even coexist with love.

In his youth, Thomas Sowell worked hard and became more educated than the rest of his family; normally this is a cause to celebrate, but his aunt had more bitter feelings:

I am guilty of this sentiment. There's times I felt real frustration towards other creators; they were doing well, I was falling behind, and it genuinely pissed me off. It felt unfair.

A healthy ego wants to win - that's normal - but it should not manifest as loathing or jealousy, but instead motivate your internal struggle.

Now, I applaud their effort.

Their victory is not my loss.

It pains me to admit, but my position against theirs was because I was lazier, less dedicated, and ultimately less deserving of the results.

Hustle culture and the "monk mode" idea is why I have a channel in the first place—I tunneled in during college, rejected distractions, and willfully surrendered the "work-life balance," even if temporarily.

I don't blindly recommend it to anyone, but there is nothing more pathetic than telling others to lay off and relax just because you couldn't do it yourself.

I recently applied this to how I read.

A daily sixty minutes is good . . . but is "good" all we want?

Consistency is half the question - yes - but for an effort as mediocre as this one . . . ?

I like to watch political and social commentary, but it frustrates me just as much as I enjoy it.

Not because they are to my left, nor my right, nor do they crush my worldview—it's because whatever they argue, their knowledge of history, philosophy, and geopolitics is leagues ahead of mine, and I simply stand no chance of keeping up.

What was my hour of reading going to do?

Most of my videos exist to make reading more accessible, but at some point, we ought to move past the beginner stuff.

If you want an extraordinary reading career, you need to pay an extraordinary price.

Even if it means waking up at 5:30am.

Even if it means wrangling with Homeric poems on a summer holiday.

Even if it means spending months on a single book.

You must resist the siren song of shallow "easy reads."

You must learn that friction is a sign of growth.

You must do more than others are willing to do.

If it sounds like flagellation, that's your image to change; you can learn to love it on a deeper, more meaningful level, as if the many hours of reading are bubbles of peace, introspection, and prayer to a higher truth.

This is the sacrifice and joy of a vigorous reading life.

Yours,

Odysseas

(plus there's a video coming out soon on how you'll set this into motion) (it's a personal curriculum)

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Links

Article - My Lifetime Reading Plan (Ted Gioia)

If you don't want to wait for my slow editing, this is the best place to start for building a vigorous reading life, and it's coming from the Substack hall of fame.

Gioia is one of those thinkers I aspire to be like, and I revisit this article every now and then to remember why I started and what I must do to get there.

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Podcast - Do You Know What Your Food Ate? (Nat's Notes)

As lucky victims of modernity, we tend to forget that food doesn't spawn on supermarket shelves.

This podcast hosts the authors of What Your Food Ate, and it explores how different farming choices affect food quality: the impact of pesticides, plowing, antibiotics, fertilizer, and how animal diets affect the nutrition profile of their meat.

Thirty minutes of listening, and a lifetime of better choices at the store checkout.

Not a bad deal.

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Painter - Charles-Antoine Coypel

Coming from a long lineage of court painters, Coypel grew up in the Louvre, and after decades of instruction from his father, he inherited the title of Premier peintre du Roi, the "First painter to the King."

It's quite the flex when your boss is Louis XV.

Aside from the many royal commissions, Coypel's magnum opus was his Don Quixote tapestry series, which dominated the visual interpretation of the novel across the 18th century. I recommend finding some high resolution pictures and having a scan through. Here's one:

And this is the painting I discovered him through, from the last newsletter:

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