Invisible battles

I would be more impressed by Einstein if he had learned to be nice to the people around him.

If you are as smart as Einstein, and physics comes so naturally to you, then improving at the things you are not good at would be the boss move.

In Awe of Life

I vividly remember sitting next to my best friend at school. I think we were around 9 years old.

The teacher was explaining something about math and numbers.

“I don’t really think numbers exist,” I thought.

I looked over at my friend, who is a straight-up financial genius now, and I saw that he absorbed everything the teacher was explaining. He got it.

“How is this possible?” I thought.

I have never seen a number bouncing around in reality. But my friend getting it is one hundred percent legit. I trust that he knows better than me.

“If this is important, I thought, I should remember this moment.”

Yesterday, 28 years later, I thought about that moment again and what was so special about it. I thought about it for hours. I don’t know why, but it kept coming back.

I was missing something, but I didn’t know what.

I still don’t think that numbers are a fundamental part of reality. I also think the use of numbers to describe things is very impolite. If my mom asks who is in the room and I say, “Three people,” she is legitimately going to yell at me.

Then I thought about how this is exactly how Mother Nature has built our universe. It’s a system based on trust. I trust my friend because he knows better than me. In return, he knows that I know things better than him.

At first, I thought maybe he uses a different part of his brain more. He is also very good at games like Memory. On the other hand, the subjects a person likes also say a lot about them. My friend is a very practical thinker who solves things easily. He is also somebody who wants a clear understanding that we are talking about the same thing. In that case, something like math or numbers is a more suitable language. They work better if you want to present how you look at things through causal rules you can establish beforehand. For example, 1 + 1 = 2.

I would think: Which 1 plus which 1? An apple? There are no two identical ones, even if 1 + 1 = 2. Look, even here, one is in this row and the other is in another part of the text, so they are not the same.

Then I thought: Maybe this is my place in life. I am simply in awe of what others can do, and I am fine with that. I loved seeing him excel and make it to the top of the financial world.

Order of Things

I think one of the most fundamental differences between a language like math and something like religion is the order of things.

With math, you first have to create a mutual understanding of the rules governing reality. You want to establish certainty about what something is before you start making distinctions.

Religion is the opposite. You start with nothing, or with the idea that anything can be anything. You have zero certainty about how things are going to end, and you reflect afterward. This is a much bigger gamble when it comes to understanding reality, but it is also more spectacular because you start with zero certainty.

A better common ground between science and religion would be sound, since sound has the advantage of having a “none.” The opposite of sound is silence.

The opposite of math can still be everything, which is confusing. The opposite of religion has the same problem.

So sound is the best option, the best common ground, which is also metaphorically speaking beautiful, like so many things in this universe.