the outlier

everyday pleasures, expected value and the waves

hello,

Last week was exhausting and the pre-Christmas commitments are ramping up. This week’s letter will be a little shorter than usual but while I’m feeling under pressure to be festive, I’ll be forcing you to do the same when you get my Christmas Gift Guide!

Last year’s went down a treat so I’ll be doing it again. Expect it in the next couple of days to give you some time to shop.

I had some lovely responses to last week’s letter but fewer people saw it than usual. If you missed it, here it is.

the outlier

Then if you want to find out how to publish a book or you just want to support this letter, consider a paid subscription.

the books📖

The next couple of weeks is pretty back to back but largely with fun stuff. I’ve got some sponsored content to make with exciting clients, I’m off to the Hay Festival Winter Weekend with TikTok, learning how to tie my new bowtie for the TikTok end of year awards and then heading up to Manchester to run an athlete career day for UK Sport.

My books are beginning to take on a bit of a life of their own with the odd interesting opportunity crossing my inbox without doing anything outbound. Besides fulfilling your lifelong dreams, it’s one of the more useful outcomes of writing a book. More and more people are asking for book project advice and while I can point them to the session I ran on Substack the other week, perhaps a dedicated post or course would be a useful thing to create.

Once this little busy period is over I’ll be looking forward to Christmas activities and thinking about next year. It’s going to be an exciting one.

for your interest

everyday pleasures, expected value and the waves

everyday pleasures

As I get older, I get less and less bothered about Christmas gifts. It’s become something of an effort to think of answers when people ask what I want each year. Not only do I have to rouse myself and make an effort to consider how best to gift me things, I feel a little dull, a little unimaginative when I end up asking for replacements for things I already own. I do actually feel a rush of pleasure at receiving a new pair of thick socks, despite their inability to be go in the tumble dryer.

In There's Always This Year (£0.99 on amazon / independents), Hanif Abdurraqib writes about watching his father eat:

Of the many possible ways to do close readings of pleasure, among my favorite is being a witness to people I love taking great care with rituals some might consider to be quotidian. And my father was a man who enjoyed a meal.

And he’s right. In the same way interested people feel interesting, there’s a great pleasure in seeing someone turn their routines into rituals. I love to make my morning coffee with my Aeropress, one of this year’s replacement requests, perhaps this time in a splashy colour. I can go without all the kerfuffle but for me it’s not a pain. The process is part of the pleasure and now, when I think about what to give people besides books, I wonder what they might use a lot, what might give their normal days a little bit of zest.

I’ll have a think about what I’d give and get it to you in the next couple of days.

expected value

This week’s reading recommendation profiles someone who is doubtless unusual and perhaps psychopathically concerned with probabilities.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the FTX crypto exchange, considered all his decisions through the framework of ‘expected value’, or ‘is this really worth doing?’ And despite the nefarious ends to which he bent this theorem, he does have an interesting perspective on how most people are swept up in worrying about what might happen:

It was that the odds of the bad thing happening were low, and any time spent thinking about it was wasted. “It was a random series of completely disassociated concerns, most of which were really overblown, stated very forcefully,” said Sam. “The only way to calm them down was for a new concern to come along and distract them from the other ones.”

Of course some things are worth worrying about, some bad things need only happen once to be catastrophic, but given most things are beyond our control, SBF might have a point. I expect the value of his advice to be quite high, just think twice before handing him your cash.

the waves

Virginia Woolf is one of those authors I’m yet to really engage with. A Room of One’s Own is all time but until this week, I was unaware of this beautiful opening to The Waves:

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

I’m going to use this lovely piece of composition as a lazy segue into some photos from my weekend in Scotland, test-driving a beautiful cabin by a loch. It’s perfect for a quiet, considered retreat and I’m hoping to head back up there in the spring when it properly opens to the public. If nothing else, the ripples on the water make for great pictures.

a book

Going Infinite by Michael Lewis is not one of his very best (like The Undoing Project or The Big Short) but it’s much better than I’d been led to believe by various reviews.

The conclusion was one I’d not heard from any other media covering the Sam Bankman Fried story and while the book seemed more sympathetic to its central antihero, it never condones his actions. Rather, it suggests how he might have come to take the decisions he did and how maybe, the greatest financial fraud of all time was perhaps not a fraud at all. Except for the bit where he illegally bet everyone’s money (amazon / independents).

Then if I didn’t convince you last week, make like everyone else who bought Orbital by Samatha Harvey in the wake of her Booker Prize win (amazon / independents).

a listen

These guys are becoming my road trip band.

a quote

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

– John Steinbeck

lastly

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