No Stupid Questions

I mean my favorite definition of play I can't remember who it was I think it was a philosopher said that the definition of play is the voluntary overcoming of unnecessary obstacles.

I had Dr. Doolittle books. I think they talked back though, didn't they?

They did. Those were the outliers. Those were the talkative animals. Fiction and all that. Oh, fiction.

And he is an economist. I want to say he's at the University of Minnesota. And this was a paper from a long time ago and Joel subsequently wrote a book that revolved around this.

It was called Screw Genomics and made the point that economists look at gift giving a little bit differently than most people might.

In her 1994 book, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media in a chapter called Genies and Witches.

a king promised a man anything he wanted on condition that the man's neighbor whom he envied would receive double instead of being pleased by this extraordinary offer again it was anything he wanted instead of being pleased by this extraordinary offer the man obsessed and disheartened by his neighbor's even greater good fortune asked the king to pluck out one of his eyes just so that his neighbor would lose both

I remember reading an article that made me think like, oh, I'm so glad there is this science. This is a paper by Richard Cook, Adam Eggleston and Harriet Over. And it's called the cultural learning account of first impressions.

Their thesis is that when you meet somebody that you don't know, very quickly, you come to first impressions. Just like we said, their explanation for this is that we have these associations, these correlations of sort of like, oh, when I see people who are this, I often find that they are that.

I have to point to some of the, I think best thinking about this, which was done by Roy Balmeister and his co-conspirators.

Roy Balmeister is a social psychologist. He wrote this article, I think more than two decades ago now, on forgiveness and grudges.

Roy's point is that when we say I forgive you, we use that phrase for when you forgive someone a debt, some monetary transaction or piece of property.

But also we say that when it has nothing to do with monetary compensation, you didn't borrow anything. You lied to me, you cheated on me, you tripped to me, you hurt me, and I'm going to use that same word.

And the reason why I think Roy Balmeister is so interested in the etymology of forgiveness, which I am proposing is the opposite of holding a grudge, is that there is something about restoring the value of a relationship that happens when we forgive someone and there is the refusal to do that when we hold a grudge.

I'm reading this book on chasing happiness by Bertrand Russell, also a philosopher who says more or less the same thing.

And what I want to say about that is there's a paper that I read recently that I loved and I think it was called The Rich Life by Aaron Westgate and somebody else.

And it made a striking claim, which is that when people think about the good life like what they want in life, there's some element of that which is happiness, like feelings of joy and pride and comfort, the absence of negative feelings.

People probably think of their relationships and how they have meaning and purpose, but they also think about The Rich Life, which they defined as essentially the curious life, the life of stimulation and of learning.

He thinks that they were embarrassed.

He wrote this paper called 'Who Is Embarrassed by What?' Published in 2000.

And he says there are three categorically different reasons why we get embarrassed.

He wondered whether there was something else going on in those Milgram studies that nobody really understood.

Maybe it's a situation he was like, no, people are just embarrassed.

Years ago, I was wondering between the stacks of books at a university library. I chanced to open a book in which I encountered one of the most powerful significant ideas I've ever come across. The essence of it was this, between stimulus and response, there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

I read "Setting the Table". It's a really good book.

It makes me think of a paper by Sophie Calder Wang It's called 'Diversity and Performance in Entrepreneurial Teams'

Judging from the titles of popular songs one can be addicted to just about anything including love Robert Palmer Orgasms the buzzcocks danger iced tea and base pure tone however Neuroscientists reserve the term addiction more specifically for the compulsive and uncontrollable engagement in a particular behavior in spite of its harmful consequences to the user

According to Berry's 1987 memoir, Chuck Berry, The Autobiography, he felt taken advantage of early on in his music career.

There's the well-known book The No-Ip-Pole Rule There's this entire philosophy around If you hire people who are good and kind people Then a lot of problems kind of work themselves out But how do you do that?

The story is from psychiatrist George Valiant's 1977 book Adaptation to Life.

Also Angela misremembers the name of Robert Frost's most famous poem. It is in fact titled The Road Not Taken not as she calls it the road less traveled.

He's in his mid eighties now and this book he wrote some years ago is called quite directly Don't Choke, a champion's guide to winning under pressure.

The book is not really about choking. It's more of a manual for how Gary Player approached the game generally.

I had brainwashed myself to be enthusiastic about everything good in my game and to keep building my own confidence. That enthusiasm is what carried me from the golf course to the gym to keep working hard at getting better. Focus 100% on what you are busy with. Immerse yourself in it and do it with enthusiasm.

And that you could call willpower, but the way he describes it, it's a very exuberant form of willpower.

Gary Player, the way he defines it, enthusiasm is a force and he actually describes it as ingrained hereditary trait, which I have a hard time believing that's true.

I do know a little bit about the work of the psychologist George Valiant. I'm sure you know much more. I love George. So George wrote about aging well. That was the name of the book.

So much of his professional life. He was a psychiatrist at Harvard. I think he's emeritus now. He followed this cohort of several hundred people. Many of them were Harvard graduates, but they're also a sample of Boston residents who are not Harvard graduates.

And the people who started this study are not alive anymore. Even the subjects of the study who started off in their teens. Most of them I think have passed. So this is a study where you can follow people for an entire life and you can ask like what's a good life? What are the secrets to aging well?

Well, here's what he says are seven factors that do predict positive aging, not being a smoker or having stopped smoking young, adaptive coping style, mature defenses, absence of alcohol abuse, healthy weight.

Those are physiological and potentially cognitive drivers that would make a retirement better. But then here we go. Stable marriage, as you referred to, exercise and years of education.