Week 4: Haruki Murakami, Fixing America, and Bullshit Jobs

Welcome to Week 4 of my weekly newsletter, where I share interesting ideas I’ve come across for the week. This is different than my Substack blog, which will primarily serve long-form essays, infrequently posted.

Personal Updates

No new podcast episodes this week, but there will be 2 new episodes published in the coming week, including one where I’ll be featured as a guest!

If you’ve listened to my recent podcast episode with my best friend a few weeks back, I’ve decided to relearn Mandarin for purposes revealed later.

The last time I seriously touched this language was all the way back in 7th grade, so as expected, it meant starting back from ground zero.

Currently, I’m incorporating the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) toward language learning, first memorizing and applying the most common 100 vocabulary words into my toolkit.

If you’re a fluent Mandarin speaker who has advice on learning this language most effectively and efficiently, feel free to let me know!

Learnings

1: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

As I mentioned last week, I listened to Founders Podcast Episode #357 on Japanese novelist and runner Haruki Murakami. Inspired to learn more about his story, I read his 100+ page memoir on running. Here are my highlights:

• No matter how mundane an action may appear, do it long enough → contemplative.

• Stop every day right at the point where you feel like you can do more. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. The challenge = getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed.

• Find work that suits your personality. Long-distance running suits my personality, the most helpful, the most meaningful.

• It's precisely because people are different from others that they're able to create their own independent selves. The fact that I'm me and no else is one of the greatest assets.

• When you're young, figure out in what order you should divide up your time + energy. If you don't get a system set by a certain age → you'll lack focus → out of balance.

• The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.

• The most important quality one has to have = talent. No matter how much enthusiasm + effort you put into your work, if you totally lack talent → forget about being a x, y, z.

• Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest.

• “I’ve tried my best never to say something like, 'Running is great. Everybody should try it.' If some people have an interest in long-distance running, just leave them be, and they’ll start running on their own.”

2: How to Fix America

You’d think a book on fixing America would come from some sort of book that focused on politics. Well, you’d be wrong. This actually came from a Christian leadership book, Call to Follow.

This book single-handedly challenged my pre-conceived notions on leadership and offered a compelling case for faithful followership. I’m no devout follower of Christianity (yet), but I highly recommend it for all alike.

3: “Bullshit Jobs” by Jack Raines

If there’s a stance I’m extremely adamant about, it’s the simple fact of how bullshit work has become in society, especially in your stereotypical office-setting, corporate job.

We’ve lost the capacity to even reconsider how fun work can actually be, and so many grown-ups convince us that doing spreadsheets and basic arithmetic could somehow be the source of our fulfillment for 40 years straight.

Here’s an article I read from writer Jack Raines:

• “Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” - Sebastian Junger

• Most corporate work = aggressive indifference. Most trade time → paycheck, with no regard for the actual work being done.

• “Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers - as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing.” - David Graeber

• Prestige = lie we tell ourselves to justify "bullshit jobs."

• Prestige allows the show to go on. But if you adjust your values, and if prestige loses its luster, the nothingness of these jobs becomes impossible to ignore.

• We have replaced work with a glut of the unnecessary.

• Many jobs = unplugged controllers. Work would get done, whether or not we take part.

Conclusion

Here’s a somewhat controversial quote to finish off this week:

Determine your own truths,

Jeston