Derek Magill

Close your damn computer and read

Some books I’ve read recently or want to read soon

 

I have a fear that one day I’ll receive a report for the amount of hours I’ve spent browsing the web aimlessly while I should have been reading a good book.

When I was a kid — it feels weird to write that — I pulled a similar report from my World of Warcraft account and the amount of time I’d spent logged in was so absolutely unbelievable I desperately wanted to believe it was an error.

The realization was in fact so painful to me I suspect it made me forget the exact hour count, as I can’t for the life of me remember it. Even scarier is that I know the time I’ve spent aimlessly browsing the web over the years far exceeds the days and days I logged playing WoW.

The time just flies by and suddenly minutes turn to hours which turn to days which turns to months all the things you wanted to do were left undone. You need a constant reminder to do otherwise.

In Ancient Rome, for example, it is said that during a Triumph, a general would have an Auriga whispering in his ears “Memento homo” (remember you are (only) a man) to avoid that the excess of celebration could lead the celebrated commander to lose his sense of proportions.

Likewise, Herodotus tells us the Persian King Darius had a slave whisper “remember the Athenians” in his ears at dinner so that he never forgot his anger for their route of his forces at the Battle of Marathon.

Of course, it would be weird in today’s age to hire a person to whisper in your ear, but think I’m going to place reminders on my phone, computer, and workspaces that regularly tell me “close your damn computer and read.”

If you consciously cut just 30 minutes from your screen time every day to just read 25 pages from a book, you could read nearly 10,000 pages a year.

That’s 182.5 hours a year of reading books, or 7.6 full days. Wouldn’t that be a nice report to pull on your habits one day?

Close your damn computer and read.

Currently reading:

Bitcoin is Cash, Not a Club

He has brought you the truth and you condemn him? The arrogance!

There are two types of people involved with Bitcoin today.

There are those who want Bitcoin to be digital cash for themselves and whole world and those who want it to be a club for agoraphobic “cypherpunks” and an excuse to sneer at and mock the unenlightened.

To the former, Bitcoin is a tool to enable more wealth and freedom for themselves and to individuals everywhere. There are no requirements and no demands made. They welcome anyone and everyone who wants to try out Bitcoin, on whatever terms they wish, from whatever mindset they have, from any level of knowledge and expertise, it doesn’t matter.

To the latter, Bitcoin is a symbol of their self-granted superiority, a cudgel to be used against outsiders, a holier-than-thou badge that tells newcomers “go away unless you bend the knee to our way of thinking.” It’s a blank check on rudeness. It’s a way to signal knowledge to a small closed group of peers and acolytes. A circle jerk.

The former does things like help businesses set up BitPay for their websites. They send small amounts of Bitcoin to friends. They show grandma how to set up a wallet on holidays. They don’t care whether someone goes through the same initiation ritual they did or whether they deeply understand every part of the technology, only that they are excited and can grasp how to use it for their own lives.

The latter tells people, like I heard on the CoinsBank Cruise, to go away if they haven’t read the sacred texts (Szabo, et all). They say things like “Bitcoin isn’t for people who earn less than $2 a day” or laugh at people for wanting to buy a cup of coffee with their Bitcoin. When they see a store use BitPay, they boycott and slander because BitPay doesn’t meet their standards for “commitment to Bitcoin.” They might want adoption in theory, but only in a way that preserves the hierarchies and rules of their club. They’re used to feeling special and desperatley don’t want to lose that feeling as more people get excited about Bitcoin. How dare you use Bitcoin in a way I don’t approve of!? How dare you think it’s for daily use?! Read Szabo or shut up, they say. They are like the priests who tried to prevent the Bible’s translation because they knew they would lose their authority if it ever spread to everyday people.

And this latter group of Bitcoiners know their time has come. They are scared that the world is moving on without them. The truth is, they are not particularly important to Bitcoin and never have been. They’ve been able to maintain a delusion for a long time because Bitcoin was so small. They imagined themselves, as Daniel Krawisz says, to be kings of narnia, but now they’re learning a hard lesson:

Bitcoin is not a friend group. It’s not a club. It’s not a community. It’s not a way to signal knowledge superiority. It’s not a right of passage or a hobby or a science project. It doesn’t care who you are or how much you know or don’t know.

It is peer to peer digital cash and the people who know that are going to push it forward whether they like it or not.

Guest hosting Bitcoin.com Weekly in Barcelona!

I ran into Roger Ver today in Barcelona while I was grabbing a drink with the Bitcoin.com team and got to guest host the Bitcoin.com Weekly Show today with him and Mate Tokay off the coast before our cruise departed!

September 7th is a lucky day for me. Last year this exact day I ran into the writer of Braveheart in Hawaii and spent an hour talking to him about the creative process, apprenticeship instead of college, and the backstory of writing the film.

This year, I got invited to guest host last minute on a YouTube show I’ve watched every week since its launch.

My hobbyist involvement in Bitcoin (BCH) is the gift that keeps on giving. As I said on the show, don’t miss out. The space is still so new that the opportunities for everyday people to do big things is massive.

If we taught bike riding like we teach careers

What would happen if we tried to teach bike riding like we teach careers today.

If that were the case, you would go to school for bike riding, but instead of riding the bike:

  • You would study bike theory and mechanics.
  • You would study the history of biking.
  • You would study gender and biking.
  • You would study how the bike is a tool of capitalist oppression.

You’d do all this, but you’d graduate at the end of college and still be unable to ride a bike. As Isaac Morehouse writes:

We’d celebrate and buy them something (but not a bike). Then they’d go out and try to obtain a bike in a highly competitive market. If they were able to purchase one, they’d have to learn, for the first time after two decades of studying but never trying, to ride.

It sounds ridiculous, right? And yet that is exactly how we teach young people to prepare for careers today.

If you are a marketing student, you will study the history of marketing and marketing theory, but you will never do real marketing. If you’re a journalism student, you’ll study the ethics of journalism but you will never publish. And if you are a computer science student, you will study theory and code, but you probably won’t make anything. Predictably, this does not work well.

And yet we don’t need something new. The solution to the problems of higher education is not novel or radical. It is rediscovering the simple truth about learning that we grasp intuitively when we learn to ride a bike: start pedaling.

Full Talk

Atlas Shrugged Day

It’s September 2nd, the day Ayn Rand began writing Atlas Shrugged in 1946, and the first calendar day in the novel.

My grandma sent me a copy of the novel when I was in 8th grade with a note on the inside flap that it would be one of the best reads of my life. It was. More than any other fiction book than perhaps The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged has shaped my philosophy and the practical course of my life.

Since I’ve been writing a lot recently about college, here’s one quote from Rand on credentialism, or what I call “Keating-ization,” in Atlas Shrugged:

Wesley Mouch came from a family that had known neither poverty nor wealth nor distinction for many generations; it had clung, however, to a tradition of its own: that of being college-bred and, therefore, of despising men who were in business. The family’s diplomas had always hung on the wall in a manner of reproach to the world because the diplomas had not automatically produced the material equivalents of their attested spiritual value.

…In high school, Wesley Mouch had been one of the worst students and had passionately envied those who were the best. College taught him that he did not have to envy them at all.

And here’s one more related passage from the novel:

Dan Conway was approaching fifty. He had the square, stolid, stubborn face of a tough freight engineer, rather than a company president; the face of a fighter, with a young, tanned skin and graying hair. He had taken over a shaky little railroad in Arizona…and he had built it into the best railroad in all of the Southwest.

He spoke little, seldom read books, had never gone to college. The whole sphere of human endeavors, with one exception, left him blankly indifferent; he had no touch of that which people called culture. But he knew railroads.

I like to think of Rand as the anti-academic. She was an intellectual of self-made soul and self-made body. Her “credential” was her mind and its practical application in writing some of the most influential novels in American history and the most important philosophical essays ever.

Do yourself a favor today and pick up a copy. You won’t regret it.

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