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The Story Phase

This passage that I came across while reading The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene led me back to something I’ve been thinking about for a very long time: that a simple board game can mimic real life in a surpassingly accurate way.

In 1865 the Prussian councillor Otto von Bismarck wanted Austria to sign a certain treaty. The treaty was totally in the interests of Prussia and against the interests of Austria, and Bismarck would have to strategize to get the Ausmans to agree to it But the Austrian negotiator, Count Blorne, was an avid cardplayer. His particular game was quinze, and he often said that he could judge a man’s character by the way he played quinze. Bismarck knew of this saying of Blome’s.

This is the first time I’ve come across the game Quinze, so I obviously haven’t played it before. But I immediately mapped this out onto Monopoly, which is a game I’ve played many times.

At first, I took this to mean that the true character of the player is revealed in a game like this, where things get intense in a way that mimics real life. But I realize now that this is too broad a conclusion. What it really seems to reveal is judgment under constraint, especially how people balance expansion and stability, which matches a very similar pattern to how they would make decisions in real life.

In Monopoly, the player who hoards cash and refuses to buy property usually loses. They stay safe, but miss the chance to build any real advantage. The player who buys properties too aggressively and leaves no cash buffer usually loses too, often even faster. They try to expand too quickly, and in return become financially fragile in the long run. The player who tends to do well is usually the one who can live in that uncomfortable middle, where they commit enough to grow while holding back enough to survive.

And in many ways, this mirrors real life.

Seen this way, Monopoly is such an interesting game. Every purchase improves your future dominance in the game while weakening your immediate financial flexibility. The game compresses delayed consequences into something visibly quantifiable. You can watch people overprotect, overextend, hesitate, chase false assumptions, or mistake liquidity for financial power.

Life is not entirely a monopoly, of course. Most of life is not a zero-sum game. But these tradeoffs map onto real life almost perfectly. If you commit nothing, you never build anything. If you commit too much, you eventually lose everything. The real question is how to judge the right balance point.

The Structure Phase

One way to think about this structurally is through the concept of reserve versus commitment.

• Reserve is what you have not yet tied up in anything: time, energy, attention, emotional capacity, credibility, or room to recover.

• Commitment is what you have already built or promised in pursuit of a positive outcome: projects, obligations, relationships, money, and reputation.

• Judgment is knowing how much reserve to trade for commitment without becoming fragile in the long run. In other words, this is the boundary where the best life often lives.

Too much reserve, and nothing meaningful happens. On the other hand, with too much commitment, even a small shock in the system can make all your plans collapse under their own weight.

A person can say yes to too many commitments, where progress starts to look stable only because the corresponding bill has not come due yet. Even relationships follow the same pattern: too much distance, and no meaningful relationship is built; too much unguarded sacrifice, and there is no emotional reserve left.

“Love never dies of starvation,” she wrote, “but often of indigestion”(p. 119)

—48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene

The real mistake is to think that the all-in solution to all these tradeoffs life throws at you is courage, when very often that is just one end of a spectrum, and the best possible outcome lives somewhere in the middle.

The Interface

Seen this way, even a simple board game can illuminate some hard truths about life.

How much of yourself can you safely tie up—in a project, a new venture, a relationship, a risky financial move, or an ambition—before your willingness to sacrifice resilience for growth makes you lose your mark?

Where in life are you mistaking expansion for long-term stability simply because the pressure of a future cost has not arrived yet?

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The Story phase

Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher, once apologized for the length of a letter with a line that has resonated with writers for centuries: “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

This reverses a very common assumption about writing. We often treat long, elaborate writing as the more serious kind, as if verbal abundance were mere proof of intellectual depth. But Pascal points in the other direction.

The harder thing isn’t expansion. It’s reduction.

This idea was brought home for me when I was reading the book Clear and Simple as the Truth, where the same concept appears in one unforgettable line: “My style will not be at all florid; my expressions will be simple as the truth.”

Seen this way, the whole point of writing starts to make sense, and it applies to any type of communication. It’s a responsibility to show the truth, especially when people would otherwise not notice it, in the clearest, most concise way possible, without drawing attention to the writing itself.

Concision and truth also work together naturally. When a sentence, or any piece of writing, is stripped to its bare bones, the point being made gets clearer and clearer. The writer exposes the reader to the truth with no language in the way.

This is such a fundamental element of communication that it applies to any art form. A good example is Picasso’s famous bull painting. He goes through many iterations, reducing the drawing through successive states until what remains is nearly skeletal. The final painting has almost no muscle, no shading, no ornament, but it’s more legible because that serial reduction was exactly the right choice to bring the point across.

The point isn’t bareness for its own sake, of course. It’s that removal often can make the truth more visible.

But this raises an immediate question: what if what we think is the truth isn’t actually the truth?

What if we’re wrong?

For one thing, it’s still far better to make a clear point—even at the risk of being proven wrong—than to hide uncertainty in language. And more importantly, even when you are proven wrong, that at least provides a data point that moves the world in the right direction.

The Structure phase

A way to visualize this is through the concept of signal and noise, the kind you’d see from a digital instrument.

Here is some data collected from one.

The shaded areas are the noise. The black circles are the real data. The black line is a model fitted to that data. Even though this line doesn’t capture the true shape of the data, you technically can’t rule it out, because the noise covers such a large area that it leaves room for many interpretations, so many possible truths.

But there should only be one.

Now take the same system, measured with a better instrument, one with a much stronger signal-to-noise ratio.

This time, the noise is almost negligible. The truth comes into focus, and the model clearly doesn’t capture the true shape of the data. The noise isn’t there to obscure that anymore.

What a good instrument does, then, is exactly what good writing does: it clears away the distortion so the truth has nowhere to hide, even at the risk of exposing an uncomfortable one.

A good instrument, in this sense, isn’t the one that produces the most activity on a screen. It’s the one that gives the cleanest signal with the least distortion. In practice, that means at least three things.

• Less noise means more recoverable truth: The point isn’t to maximize output but to make the underlying truth easier to see.

• A wrong reading is still informative if it’s clear: When the signal is clean enough, the error can be recognized and corrected. But when noise dominates, almost any interpretation can be made to look plausible.

• More freedom can produce bad interpretations: A noisy dataset can often be fit in many flexible ways, and that freedom can feed into the trap of wishful thinking, producing conclusions that feel sophisticated but have no real truth beneath them.

The interface

This is what purple prose amounts to. It’s just noise. It confuses the reader and makes it hard to see the truth.

In this sense, clarity is less about minimalism and more about accountability on the part of the writer.

Only the language that is precise enough to be wrong is good enough to be useful.

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
- Sir Ken Robinson

In your work, your relationships, and your everyday life, where does vagueness create the appearance of depth and sophistication while preventing you from seeing the real truth?

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The Story phase

Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. — Vladimir Nabokov

For the past six years, I have been reading roughly a book a week. And for most of those six years, I was doing it wrong. But not in any obvious way, so I couldn’t see it until very recently.

My instinct, like most readers’, was to slow down at anything that felt important while I’m reading: underline it, sit with it, and try to extract its meaning on the spot. The logic seemed sound, that the more carefully you read, the more you take away.

But here is the problem I kept running into. I would finish a book and realize that the passages I had treated as important in chapter three meant something entirely different by chapter eleven. Or even worse, some of the things I had moved past without a second thought turned out to be the most load-bearing ideas in the whole argument of the book. I hadn’t missed them because I was careless. I had missed them because I didn’t yet know what the book was really about.

That’s the strange thing about reading a book for the first time. You are inside it. You don’t yet know its shape, its priorities, or what will eventually matter most. So you can’t yet ask the right questions, because the right questions only become visible once you’ve seen the whole thing.

The advice on these two reading approaches—read as quickly as possible and revise carefully, or read really slowly—are balanced almost equally. But the more I read, the more clear it became that finishing the book as quickly as possible and spending more time revising it gave me the biggest returns.

But why is that? Can I rationalize this?

The Structure phase

There is a branch of psychology called Gestalt psychology that holds the answer.

Gestalt psychology describes a threshold in perception, a point at which fragmented parts suddenly resolve into a coherent whole. Before you cross this threshold, the pieces don’t add up, and nothing makes much sense. You can study each one carefully and still miss the pattern, because the pattern only shows itself when that threshold is passed.

In other words, the mind understands things as organized wholes, not just as a collection of separate parts.

It is like solving a jigsaw puzzle.

• Before enough pieces are in place, your attention can mislead you. You start filling gaps with assumptions. A piece looks important because it looks interesting or unusual, not because you actually know where it belongs. Because at this point, you are judging significance from a partial view.

• So instead of looking at the blank spaces and then the hundreds of pieces scattered across the table, starting from one place and building the picture up is the right choice. And at one point, we start to see the picture, and everything becomes clear, and those pieces that we’ve been turning over without putting any effort to place somewhere now automatically go to the right place.

• That is why moving quickly toward the full picture is not superficial. In many cases, it is the most effective way to read. You are not rushing past meaning. You are trying to reach the point where meaning can actually take its shape.

And that is also why the real work begins after the picture comes together, not before. Once the whole is visible, you can go back to the individual pieces and finally see what they are doing. Before that, it’s mostly just guesswork.

The interface

So in this sense, the first read of a book is best used for accumulating enough pieces to cross the gestalt threshold, and almost nothing useful can be extracted before you’ve crossed this mark. For most books, if they are of high quality, this mark comes at the second half of the book, or even at the very end.

This reframes the conventional notion of what the first read is actually for. It is not for the site of understanding. It is the precondition for it. The review phase where the rereads, taking notes, or writing a review happen is not what you do after the real reading. It is the real reading. The first pass is what makes it possible.

This applies to anything else in life, too.

As Dave Chapelle said in his comedy special, Equanimity (2017),

They call this phenomenon “standing too close to an elephant.” The analogy being that if you stand too close to an elephant, you can’t see the elephant. You gotta step back and give it a better look.

So on that spirit, What in your life might make more sense if you stopped pressing harder on the details and gave the whole thing a second look?

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The Story phase

“I know it’s full of evils, full of human injustice, greed, folly, waste. But it is also full of good, of beauty, vitality, achievement. It is what a world should be! It is alive, tremendously alive—alive, despite all its evils, with hope. Is that not true?” (Page 389)

When I first read this quote in The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, I interpreted it as “The world is okay as it is.” But when I revisited it while writing the book review, I realized it’s much sharper than simple acceptance.

The quotes brings about the idea that a world worth living in can’t be sterilized. If there’s vitality, there’s chaos. If there’s beauty, there’s waste. In fact, good exists only because bad exists. We see the beauty and achievement through the vantage point of waste, greed, and injustice.

We can’t have it both ways. Aliveness has a price.

So here’s the tension: when we feel frustration, disappointment, and pain, can we justify it as inevitable—the price we pay for achieving our goals? Or are these struggles just avoidable costs we’re accepting by default?

The Structure phase

Economists have a blunt name for this: opportunity cost.

It’s not “what something costs.” It’s what you give up when choosing a certain path, the best alternative that becomes impossible because you went the other way.

A more concrete way to see it: every “yes” pays in a different currency. In everyday life, we pay not just in time, attention, and money, but in reputation, energy, and relationships. When we say yes to something, we automatically say no to something else, too.

The bill is often invisible. We see the path we chose but rarely look back to notice the unchosen one.

So all the inevitable struggles we face right now have been free choices until the point where we decided to price the alternative. Greed can be what we get when status is priced higher than belonging, for example. Injustice can be what we get when convenience is priced higher than fairness.

As Thomas Sowell mentions in his book, Basic Economics, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.

The interface

The story phase: “the good exists with the bad.”

The structure phase: “everything comes with an opportunity cost.”

The interface: The life we choose to live isn’t judged by whether it contains ugliness or not, but by whether we recognize which ugliness is a tradeoff we’re consciously buying, and which ugliness is just an unpriced habit.

Question: In your real life right now, what “bad” are you tolerating as if it’s unavoidable, that might actually be the hidden opportunity cost of a choice you’ve made without much thought, a choice you still have the opportunity to revisit?

There are two types of readers when it comes to quitting a book before it ends.

There’s the completionist reader who says, “We must finish what we started.” And on the other end, there’s the selective reader who says, “life is too short to finish a bad book.”

I’ve been both of these types in the past.

When I’m reading a book, if the first part was interesting but the second half gives me nothing, I still used to push myself to the end.

I was stuck in the sunk cost fallacy.

But I’ve been on the opposite end, too. When I couldn’t connect with a book, I’d quit instantly, without even questioning why, just because I “didn’t feel like it.”

It took me a while to realize neither of these approaches actually solves the real problem, that is, how to read more books?

Because quitting a book doesn’t guarantee the next one will magically be better.

It just wastes time you could’ve spent reading a better book.

This actually led me to read less. The number of books I read per year kept getting low.

And this isn’t just me. Gallup’s 2021 report shows that Americans are reading fewer books than ever before. So the struggle to stay engaged with a book is a widespread reading pattern.

After some time, I realized what the missing piece of this puzzle was: I never asked why I didn’t like the book in the first place.

Once I started doing this, everything made sense.

Picking up a book you won’t like is inevitable—it happens more often than we’d like it to happen. So quitting isn’t a failure; it’s just a part of the process.

But understanding why I had to quit a certain book reduces the odds that I’ll quit the next one.

Eventually, I can choose books with a high chance that I’ll actually finish them.

This is how you read more books by quitting more—by quitting deliberately.

Read the full post here.