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Epictetus has a wonderful quote. He is talking about moral / philosophical improvement specifically but I find it more broadly applicable when overly high expec

Epictetus has a wonderful quote. He is talking about moral / philosophical improvement specifically but I find it more broadly applicable when overly high expectations paralyse me from doing a thing: "What then? Because I have no natural gifts, shall I on that account give up my discipline? Far be it from me! Epictetus will not be better than Socrates; but if only I am not worse, that suffices me. For I shall not be a Milo, either, and yet I do not neglect my body; nor a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property; nor, in a word, is there any other field in which we give up the appropriate discipline merely from despair of attaining the highest."

danShumway 4y ago
I'll add to this a general take I have about "improving" the world: there is a metric ton of stuff to do in the world, and there aren't enough people to do it, and being the best at what you do is in no way necessary if your goal is to be useful or to produce meaningful things that make people's lives better. There are so many problems in the world that aren't solved literally because nobody has solved them, because the scope is gigantic and the people available who want to work on them or who are willing to work on them is very small in comparison. Many of those tasks aren't sexy, and they might not have broad appeal, but... I mean, I ported another person's gameboy emulator to a format that worked in NodeJS and had basically one API change so that you could run the project headlessly without a graphics stack, and so you could advance the emulator frame-by-frame after inspecting memory. It's a garbage project, I have no idea how emulators work. And yet, I've had people contact me on Discord and ask questions about it and go through support chats and thank me for building it. Was I the best suited person to do that? No. Could pretty much anyone at all with any experience build a better end result then I did? Yes. Heck, it would be trivial for someone to jump in, fork my project and improve it. And yet. The very specific niche case I coded it for didn't have a solution, and then it did have a solution. Sometimes that's enough. People underestimate how easy it is to be useful and to make the world better in small ways. It does not require you to perfect a skill, it just requires showing up and putting in some work and doing the best work that you can. And sometimes it means not asking "what's the biggest impact problem in the world", and instead asking "what's any problem that's close enough to me to solve that nobody is paying attention to?"
shele 4y ago
That’s an amazingly modern take.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Epictetus is very good in general. If you find a good modern translation (Robin Hard is good), I emphatically recommend reading the discourses. Don't cheap out and suffer through some stuffy 19th century translation.
  - genghisjahn 4y ago
    Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca are all excellent reads.
  - slothtrop 4y ago
    At the other end of the spectrum, I've suffered through some overly-simplified/modernized translations of fiction (e.g. Dostoevsky's the Gambler) that was complete butchery, but I guess this is less likely to occur with non-fiction.
- nathell 4y ago
  Stoicism in general has aged very well. When I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, I was amazed at how relevant the thing still is, even though it’s 1.8K+ years old at this point.
  - spit2wind 4y ago
    It's often claimed that the Meditations are actually Marcus Aurelius's own words. When I traced the lineage of the text, the best I could find was something like several hundred years back with the primary text being possessed by the church. None of this takes away from the relevance of the text—it stands on its own. Does anyone know of an accounting of the primary text which shows that it wasn't written by a monk or priest of the Catholic church?
    - racktash 4y ago
taneq 4y ago
“…but better by far than a master of one.”
johnchristopher 4y ago
> discipline "discipline", hu, not motivation ? Duly noted and pointed out :) edit: oops, no more internet for me today :).
- j33zusjuice 4y ago
  Discipline meaning “branch of knowledge,” or “area of work/study,” in this case. In the other sense (obedience/adherence to something), motivation is often considered temporary or fleeting. “Motivation gets you started, discipline keeps you going.”
  - johnchristopher 4y ago
    Oooooh, oups my bad, I realize now I am on edge and chose to interpret the word in such a way that it reminded me of another post and I triggered myself. Guess it's time to unwind for the week-end and call it a day :).
- stavros 4y ago
  It means "job" or "hobby" here.
hammock 4y ago
"Perfect is the enemy of good" Robert Watson Watt wrote in 1999: "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes." Voltaire wrote in 1770: "A wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of the good." Montesquieu wrote in 1726: "The better is the mortal enemy of the good." Shakespeare wrote in 1606: "Were it not sinful then, striving to mend, to mar the subject that before was well?" (don't fix what ain't broke) Chinese proverb says: "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one."
- nradov 4y ago
  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2004: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." (The troops who got blown up due to lack of armored vehicles might not have fully appreciated his brilliance.)
  - karmajunkie 4y ago
    That quote is damning to his legacy, whatever it might have been: we went to a war we started, that was unnecessary, and which will taint every history of the Bush administration.
  - guhidalg 4y ago
    Troops enlist knowing they may die, not sure what your point is. There is no army that fights a prolonged conflict without loses, no equipment is perfect.
    - nradov 4y ago
      At the time there was a distinct shortage of armored vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many troops were dying in IED and RPG attacks, and they were forced to improvise additional armor in the field out of scrap metal. There are always risks in combat and casualties are inevitable, but in retrospect the Defense Department leadership could have done a lot more at the time to accelerate production and deployment of additional armored vehicles and kits.
    - 4y ago

danShumway 4y ago

I'll add to this a general take I have about "improving" the world: there is a metric ton of stuff to do in the world, and there aren't enough people to do it, and being the best at what you do is in no way necessary if your goal is to be useful or to produce meaningful things that make people's lives better. There are so many problems in the world that aren't solved literally because nobody has solved them, because the scope is gigantic and the people available who want to work on them or who are willing to work on them is very small in comparison. Many of those tasks aren't sexy, and they might not have broad appeal, but... I mean, I ported another person's gameboy emulator to a format that worked in NodeJS and had basically one API change so that you could run the project headlessly without a graphics stack, and so you could advance the emulator frame-by-frame after inspecting memory. It's a garbage project, I have no idea how emulators work. And yet, I've had people contact me on Discord and ask questions about it and go through support chats and thank me for building it. Was I the best suited person to do that? No. Could pretty much anyone at all with any experience build a better end result then I did? Yes. Heck, it would be trivial for someone to jump in, fork my project and improve it. And yet. The very specific niche case I coded it for didn't have a solution, and then it did have a solution. Sometimes that's enough. People underestimate how easy it is to be useful and to make the world better in small ways. It does not require you to perfect a skill, it just requires showing up and putting in some work and doing the best work that you can. And sometimes it means not asking "what's the biggest impact problem in the world", and instead asking "what's any problem that's close enough to me to solve that nobody is paying attention to?"

shele 4y ago

That’s an amazingly modern take.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Epictetus is very good in general. If you find a good modern translation (Robin Hard is good), I emphatically recommend reading the discourses. Don't cheap out and suffer through some stuffy 19th century translation.
- genghisjahn 4y ago
  Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca are all excellent reads.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  At the other end of the spectrum, I've suffered through some overly-simplified/modernized translations of fiction (e.g. Dostoevsky's the Gambler) that was complete butchery, but I guess this is less likely to occur with non-fiction.
nathell 4y ago
Stoicism in general has aged very well. When I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, I was amazed at how relevant the thing still is, even though it’s 1.8K+ years old at this point.
- spit2wind 4y ago
  It's often claimed that the Meditations are actually Marcus Aurelius's own words. When I traced the lineage of the text, the best I could find was something like several hundred years back with the primary text being possessed by the church. None of this takes away from the relevance of the text—it stands on its own. Does anyone know of an accounting of the primary text which shows that it wasn't written by a monk or priest of the Catholic church?
  - racktash 4y ago

taneq 4y ago

“…but better by far than a master of one.”

johnchristopher 4y ago

> discipline "discipline", hu, not motivation ? Duly noted and pointed out :) edit: oops, no more internet for me today :).

j33zusjuice 4y ago
Discipline meaning “branch of knowledge,” or “area of work/study,” in this case. In the other sense (obedience/adherence to something), motivation is often considered temporary or fleeting. “Motivation gets you started, discipline keeps you going.”
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  Oooooh, oups my bad, I realize now I am on edge and chose to interpret the word in such a way that it reminded me of another post and I triggered myself. Guess it's time to unwind for the week-end and call it a day :).
stavros 4y ago
It means "job" or "hobby" here.

hammock 4y ago

"Perfect is the enemy of good" Robert Watson Watt wrote in 1999: "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes." Voltaire wrote in 1770: "A wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of the good." Montesquieu wrote in 1726: "The better is the mortal enemy of the good." Shakespeare wrote in 1606: "Were it not sinful then, striving to mend, to mar the subject that before was well?" (don't fix what ain't broke) Chinese proverb says: "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one."

nradov 4y ago
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2004: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." (The troops who got blown up due to lack of armored vehicles might not have fully appreciated his brilliance.)
- karmajunkie 4y ago
  That quote is damning to his legacy, whatever it might have been: we went to a war we started, that was unnecessary, and which will taint every history of the Bush administration.
- guhidalg 4y ago
  Troops enlist knowing they may die, not sure what your point is. There is no army that fights a prolonged conflict without loses, no equipment is perfect.
  - nradov 4y ago
    At the time there was a distinct shortage of armored vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many troops were dying in IED and RPG attacks, and they were forced to improvise additional armor in the field out of scrap metal. There are always risks in combat and casualties are inevitable, but in retrospect the Defense Department leadership could have done a lot more at the time to accelerate production and deployment of additional armored vehicles and kits.
  - 4y ago