Best 📚 Passage + 📺 Content

Mar 20, 2023

Hey friend!

I have been a little busy these days with Freelancing work and setting up my own little website (I’m super open for feedback 🤓). So there is no video / blogpost today, but I still wanna share with you my favorite book passage of the week and some of the best content that I have been bingeing on lately!

Hope you find it valuable :)

📚 Best Passage

This Passage is from the Series of Books "Incerto" by Nassim Taleb. It touches in the issue of "Hope".

Giovanni Drogo is a man of promise. He has just graduated from the military academy with the rank of junior officer, and active life is just starting. But things do not turn out as planned: his initial four-year assignment is a remote outpost, the Bastiani fortress, protecting the nation from the Tartars likely to invade from the border desert—not too desirable a position. The fortress is located a few days by horseback from the town; there is nothing but bareness around it—none of the social buzz that a man of his age could look forward to. Drogo thinks that his assignment in the outpost is temporary, a way for him to pay his dues before more appealing positions present themselves. Later, back in town, in his impeccably ironed uniform and with his athletic figure, few ladies will be able to resist him.

What is Drogo to do in this hole? He discovers a loophole, a way to be transferred after only four months. He decides to use the loophole.

At the very last minute, however, Drogo takes a glance at the desert from the window of the medical office and decides to extend his stay. Something in the walls of the fort and the silent landscape ensnares him. The appeal of the fort and waiting for the attackers, the big battle with the ferocious Tartars, gradually become his only reason to exist. The entire atmosphere of the fort is one of anticipation. The other men spend their time looking at the horizon and awaiting the big event of the enemy attack. They are so focused that, on rare occasions, they can detect the most insignificant stray animal that appears at the edge of the desert and mistake it for an enemy attack.

Sure enough, Drogo spends the rest of his life extending his stay, delaying the beginning of his life in the city—thirty-five years of pure hope, spent in the grip of the idea that one day, from the remote hills that no human has ever crossed, the attackers will eventually emerge and help him rise to the occasion.

At the end of the novel we see Drogo dying in a roadside inn as the event for which he has waited all his life takes place. He has missed it.

The more you focus on hope, the more you waste your life. Hope is in the distant future, whereas your life only exists in the present. For all practical purposes, I like to think that the past is a fiction and the future an illusion.

"I think in general it's bad to live a life full of hope... Because it's throwing today away -- It's too much living in the future." 
- Naval Ravikant

(Video of Naval on this issue)