Friday Recap - 2025/03/14
Inspiration from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and David Deutsch.
This week, inspiration from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on carving your own career, and one profound idea from David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity on the attitude to take towards problems.
Work like Mycroft Holmes
Originally published on giolodi.com - 2025/03/12.
Here’s how Sherlock Holmes describes his brother Mycroft to the trusted Dr. Watson:
[Holmes:] “You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he is the British government.”
[Watson:] “My dear Holmes!”
“I thought I might surprise you. Mycroft draws four hundred and fifty pounds a year, remains a subordinate, has no ambitions of any kind, will receive neither honour nor title, but remains the most indispensable man in the country.”
“But how?”
"Well, his position is unique. He has made it for himself. There has never been anything like it before, nor will be again.
– The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Notice the last paragraph. Mycroft’s position is unique. He has made it for himself. There never was and never will be anything like it.
Admittedly, Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft are works of fiction, figments of Sir Conan Doyle great imagination. We cannot draw real life lessons from them, but nothing stops us from being inspired.
When reading about Mycroft, I was reminded of Kevin Kelly in Excellent Advice for Living:
Don’t be the best. Be the only.
On the same wavelength was Naval Ravikant post on X:
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
Being the only, creating a unique position for yourself, is what I think of when describing the synergist engineer, someone with deep knowledge and in curated number of subjects, which they combine to offer one original and valuable service.
Be careful not to gloss over the “valuable service” part of the recipe. When thinking about being the only, at least in the context of work, what you offer has to be valuable. That is, people have to be willing to pay for it.
Your personal combination of interests and skills already makes you unique, but it might not necessarily make you valuable in the marketplace. Then again, many people have turned unique hobbies into businesses and now make a living on YouTube or by selling online.
Technology and progress expand the ways people can earn a living. This is the best time to take inspiration from the Holmes brothers and create a unique position for ourselves.
If you need more inspiration from Sherlock Holmes, see The Sherlock Holmes Information Diet.
The inspiration for this post came from listening to the Sherlock Holmes Short Stories podcast narrated by Hugh Bonneville. It’s a well produced podcast, on par with any audiobook, and lovely combo for a Sherlock Holmes and Downtown Abbey fan such as myself.
Problems are inevitable. Problems are soluble.
Originally published on giolodi.com - 2025/03/14.
Of all the ideas in David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, “problems are inevitable; problems are soluble” stood out to me from the very first reading. It’s an observation on reality, a warning to stay vigilant, and a challenge to be bold and take action. Like all great wisdom, it’s simple to understand, yet the more you reflect on it the more depth you discover.
Problems are inevitable
From the book:
Problems are inevitable. We shall always be faced with the problem of how to plan for an unknowable future. We shall never be able to afford to sit back and hope for the best. Even if our civilization moves out into space in order to hedge its bets, as Rees and Hawking both rightly advise, a gamma-ray burst in our galactic vicinity would still wipe us all out. Such an event is thousands of times rarer than an asteroid collision, but when it does finally happen we shall have no defence against it without a great deal more scientific knowledge and an enormous increase in our wealth.
And later on:
In addition to threats, there will always be problems in the benign sense of the word: errors, gaps, inconsistencies and inadequacies in our knowledge that we wish to solve – including, not least, moral knowledge: knowledge about what to want, what to strive for.
Maybe I’m just lucky that most of my problems are first world problems — challenges instead of threats — but I find that framing gives license to focus entirely on solutions. There’s something reassuring about how David explains problems as an inevitable part of life. Maybe I’m just lucky that most of mine are first-world problems—challenges rather than threats—but that framing helps me to focus entirely on solutions.
When something is inevitable, all energy spent complaining about it is wasted. Take that option away, and all that’s left is to get serious and start working on it.
Understanding that problems are inevitable also puts them into perspective. Because when a problem is solved, a new problem arises:
A solution may be problem-free for a period, and in a parochial application, but there is no way of identifying in advance which problems will have such a solution. Hence there is no way, short of stasis, to avoid unforeseen problems arising from new solutions. But stasis is itself unsustainable, as witness every static society in history.
Problems are inevitable. The best you can hope for is to move toward ones that are more interesting to solve.
Problems are soluble
Again from The Beginning of Infinity:
Since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally important truth about people and the physical world is that problems are soluble. By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them.
If recognizing that problems are inevitable is the spark to start searching for solutions, then knowing they are soluble is the fuel that keeps the search alive.
If the laws of physics permit it, it’s possible. The challenge is figuring out how, generating the wealth to make it real, or both.
The YouTube channel Kurzgesagt – In a nutshell has many videos exploring ideas that are theoretically possible but out of reach because we haven’t yet solved the technological problems to build them. Space elevators, Dyson swarms, Mars terraforming, and skyhooks , to name just a few.
David adds an important caveat: problems can be solved, but they won’t solve themselves.
It is not, of course, that we can possess knowledge just by wishing for it; but it is in principle accessible to us.
Also:
That problems are soluble does not mean that we already know their solutions, or can generate them to order. That would be akin to creationism.
With “problems are inevitable; problems are soluble,” David sums up some things all doers intuitively understand: Everything is figureoutable. Complaining and protesting are wasted effort. The only productive thing to do is to roll up your sleeves and get to work.