Soul in the Game

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

What is a meaningful life? Vitali takes on his journey filled with wisdom and experiences and tells beautiful stories that resonate. Topics such as life, wisdom, writing, and classical music are taken up with humor, emotion, and clarity.

🎨 Impressions

It was one of the better ones. Writing this review, listening to Chopin again filled with understanding of his life and his motivations, and discovering new composers such as Berlioz makes it worth it. Katsenelson writes; It was common thinking in the early 19th century that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was the be all and end all of symphonies. Listening to On the Nature of Daylight by Max Richter makes me appreciate time and history even more and that there is always room for more beauty.

How I Discovered It

I have paid attention to Vitaliy Katsenelson for a while, and this is my first read of his major works.

Who Should Read It?

I think this book is a mature one, and young minds, to narrowly focused cannot sit back and fully appreciate its wisdom. It is a book for fathers.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I am more focused on the greatness of life, and the greatness of simplicity.

✍️ My Top Quotes

The winters are cold and dark; Murmansk makes Seattle look like a sunshine city. For six weeks every winter we lived without daylight.
When I was a teenager, a few years before we left for the US, Russian bureaucrats figured out that if you grind fish, you can feed it to chickens. Suddenly we had an abundance of chickens. Unfortunately, the chickens that were fed fish tasted like fish. When I moved to the US, I could not eat chicken for ten years.
When people of science see a loved one facing death, they’ll cling to anything, even the empty promises of pseudoscience.
Stoic philosophers have a practice called negative visualization. You imagine you are going to lose something or somebody. There are two reasons to do this. First, it may make a loss less painful; and second, you’ll appreciate that thing or person. This is great advice for anyone.
Russia had a draft army. It was not concerned about recruitment and thus treated its soldiers very poorly (an understatement). The pay was only high enough for soldiers to afford the postage to write home asking for money. Russian youth looked at serving in the Russian army as akin to a two-year prison sentence (at least when I was there; I have been told that has changed).
Let’s start with soul – that’s the immaterial part of us, our essence, the dearest part of ourselves. The game is whatever creative endeavor we are deeply involved in, be it running a company, creating art, writing, investing, or making sushi – any creative pursuit that you believe is worthy of your effort and time. When you have soul in the game, this pursuit has all of you, every ounce of your attention and strength and love.
Skin in the game can be summed up in one sentence: You want to associate with people who will share not only upsides with you but also downsides.
After ten years of apprenticeship, Jiro finally allows his apprentice to make an egg custard (tamagoyaki). That becomes the apprentice’s sole focus for months. He goes through 200 batches before Jiro is satisfied with his egg custard and calls him shokunin – an artisan.
Artisans have sacred taboos. They won’t break them for financial benefit.
For an artisan, the love of his craft (which often borders on art) is his primary motivation; financial considerations are always secondary.
Maintaining the attitude of being a perpetual learner, being openminded to new knowledge, is paramount in preventing your ego and your success from fossilizing and stifling your learning and self-improvement.
Finally, to have soul in the game, your pursuit has to be a net positive for society as a whole. This one is less tangible, but it doesn’t make it less important.
I called my father and shared with him my “happy” news and my concerns about it. He was calm; I could sense him smiling on the other end of the line. He said, “There are six billion people in the world. There are billions of parents out there. They’ve figured it out; so will you.”
“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” — John F. Kennedy
“Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.” — Charles R. Swindoll
You might see a “painting,” a Malevich square, painted in one color from side to side. That’s it. A joke goes, “Every time Malevich’s square was stolen, the security guards were able to recreate it before the museum opened the next morning.”
Albert Einstein said, “As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.” We should welcome “the circumference of darkness” wholeheartedly.
Most things in the US are less than a hundred years old. Some tables in European coffee shops are older than that.
I call it a half-binary decision: Full-binary would be “Yes” or “No”; half-binary is just “No.”
Stick with my diet religiously when I am in Denver, but when I travel I have no diet; I can eat anything my stomach (or brain) desires. I instituted this strategy because I found that it was often difficult, inconvenient, and frustrating to stick to my diet when I am not in Denver.
Go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day (even on weekends). Mother Nature programmed into us a circadian rhythm – a roughly 24-hour physiological cycle that regulates the rhythms (including temperature) of our body. It is impacted by light and temperature (more on this later).
As James Clear writes, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
I have a good friend – an orthodox rabbi. He was at my house and he told me that he had gained a lot of weight. He said, “I eat too much bread.” I told him that he needed to change his identity to that of a person who doesn’t eat bread. He was puzzled. I said, “Well, how much energy does it take you not to eat pork?” He said, “None. I don’t eat pork.” Do the same with bread, I said. He did. He called me a few months later, thanking me for the weight he had lost.
Now, being present, not goal-focused, has become my goal. (Yes, I do get the irony of this sentence.
Meditation increases emotional intelligence. It’s about those few extra seconds. You know, those few seconds that you need in order to take a deep breath before you respond to a stressful event. Meditation gives them to you.
“Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates.  At the first gate, ask yourself ‘Is it True?’ At the second gate ask ‘Is it Necessary?’ At the third gate ask ‘Is it Kind?’” — Rumi
Was living in Russia; the Cold War had just ended. Capitalist American books suddenly became very popular. Carnegie’s was one of the first to be translated into Russian and was “the book to read.” Everyone wanted to be a capitalist, and this book was supposed to make me a better one. I decided, however, that it was stuffed with disingenuous fluff – that it taught the reader how to not be authentic; it turned you into a fake.
“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”
As the son and I were talking about his upcoming fatherhood, I asked him what kind of father he wants to be. He said, “I don’t want to be like my father.” I was a bit surprised and asked why. He said: After my father passed away, his friends would tell me how he was this larger-than-life, gregarious man. I never saw that man. My father worked 16-hour days, seven days a week. He worked in the basement – he’d come up for dinner and go back down. He never spent time with me or my sister. My mom did everything, from driving us to school to taking me to football practice. I always felt like I was raised by my mother. I don’t want to be like that. I want to be there for my kids.
My father thought till the last moment that he’d beat the cancer, and so he never expressed his true feelings to me or my sister. A year later my father’s friend told me that my father confided in him that he wished he’d spent more time with us kids.
Tim Urban estimated that by the time you finish high school, you have spent 93% of the total time you’ll ever spend with your parents.
“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life.  Now, take what’s left and live it properly.” — Marcus Aurelius
Realized over the years what Mark saw then: That our wants are unlimited and will always exceed our income
Warren Buffett says that envy is the stupidest of all the deadly sins – at least you get some pleasure from the other ones.
This is where mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness is thinking about thinking, or being aware of making decisions.
Stoic philosophy offered to me what religion could not – an operating system for this life without any promises of an afterlife, no relationship with a friend
Stoicism was started in ancient Greece around 300 BC by Zeno, a wealthy merchant who lost all his wealth in a shipwreck and barely made it out alive himself.
For a while Zeno’s philosophy was called Zenoism – but maybe because Zeno did not want it to become a cult of Zeno, he named it after a place in Athens where he and his students gathered, the Stoa Poikile (“painted porch”).
A few millennia later, this tradition was borrowed by the hedge fund industry in the US, which named their companies after places where the founders grew up, had their first kiss, etc.
My favorite quote from Seneca is only three words long: “Time discovers truth.” It epitomizes a lot of things in life, for instance, it slices to the core of what investing is. As an investor, my goal is to discover the truth (what a company is worth) before time does.
“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is” (which has been ascribed to that great American philosopher Yogi Berra).
There is an Asian proverb:¹¹ “Knowing and not doing is not knowing!”
Stoics have this wonderful concept: pre-emotion (propatheia). Pre-emotion is an innate, unjudged, unevaluated feeling.
“One day you ordered a Happy Meal for the last time  and you didn’t even know it.” — McDonald’s.
As the great Freddie Mercury put it, “Time waits for no one.”
The Last Time visualization is a useful daily repetition (or prayer, if you like).
“A good person dyes events with his own color … and turns whatever happens to his own benefit.”
Nobody is perfect, yourself included. Remind yourself how many times you were wrong.
Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate physicist, said, “You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”
First, he constantly seeks out people he disagrees with so he can learn from them.
You are an average of your five closest friends.
Covet away! But covet the whole package. The antidote to coveting is holistic coveting.
“As an investor, you get something out of all the deadly sins – except for envy. Being envious of someone else is pretty stupid. Wishing them badly, or wishing you did as well as they did – all it does is ruin your day. Doesn’t hurt them at all, and there’s zero upside
Buffett has a friend who survived the Holocaust. When she looks at people, she only asks one question: Would they hide me? Buffett said, “When you are 70 and you look back at your life, and you have a lot of people who would hide you, then you’ll have had a very successful life.”
I remember hearing a story of my grandpa threatening to divorce my grandma in his late 70s when she hid his swimming trunks. Grandma called him “old fool” in a vain attempt to prevent him from swimming in the sub-ze ro weather.
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”
“Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.”
The Stoics viewed money as an external advantage. The goal, however, is not to acquire as many external advantages as possible but to use them wisely.
“If this, then…” thinking, is like saving sex for old age.
“There is beauty in the struggle, ugliness in the success.”
Stoic philosophy is an operating system for real life, and it’s a way of life that require s practice.
“We don’t get paid for activity; we get paid for being right. As to how long we’ll wait, we’ll wait indefinitely.”
To quote the not-so-great Joseph Stalin: “Quantity has a quality of its own.”
Went to lunch with a guy who ran a Fortune 500 company, and I asked him what he looked for in the people he hired. He said, “Look for the two C’s: Competency and character. Hire people that will own a task.” This is what I do. Someone gave me another piece of advice that I also took to heart: Hire slowly, but fire fast.
There are four modes of communicating: preacher, prosecutor, politician, and scientist.
If you are in preacher mode, you are fully convinced of your belief and are trying to get others to embrace your gospel. A politician is trying to win the approval of others with a message he may or may not believe in. A prosecutor is trying to build an argument to convince you to change your mind.
Steve Jobs, in addition to being a visionary, had the talent of being able to convince others to do what seemed impossible. Apple employees called it “Steve’s reality distortion field.” Jobs was in preacher mode.
However, scientist mode has its own appeal. A scientist treats ideas as hypotheses that need to be tested. Ideas are just malleable starting points (as opposed to hardened truths) for further investigation.
What stands between other modes and the scientist mode is our ego. I keep coming back to Epictetus when he says, “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
“I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.”
Admit where your arguments are weak. This goes to the core of intellectual honesty. This will only make the search for the truth more expeditious.
Here is another example. Intellectual debate is deeply embedded in the Jewish legal system. By Jewish law, a court will not accept a capital punishment verdict if it was delivered by a unanimous decision of 23 judges who decide upon capital cases. Yes, you read that right. There has to be at least one dissenting opinion for the death penalty verdict to be accepted. The court wants to make sure there was at least one voice in the proceedings that forced judges to confront the opposing argument. In other words, the court wants to make sure the decision was not merely tribal, but was debated.
The premiere of Rachmaninoff’s first symphony in Saint Petersburg in 1897 was an utter disaster. How bad? One music critic compared it to the ten plagues of Egypt. It was under-rehearsed by the orchestra, and there is even a theory that the conductor was drunk. Rachmaninoff wrote, “If the public were familiar with the symphony, they would blame the conductor (I continue to ‘assume’), but when a composition is both unknown and badly performed, the public is inclined to blame the composer.”
“Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”
Author Tom Clancy once said, “Writer’s block is just an official term for being lazy, and the way to get through it is work.”
My teachers turned Russian literature into Mark Twain’s definition of classic s : Books that people praise and don’t read. I am still trying to get back into Russian literature.
Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) was a master of emotions. He was a neurotic, highly sensitive person, full of phobias. For instance, he had a phobia that his head would fall off when he was conducting. (He eventually overcame this phobia, since at times he had to earn a living as a conductor.) His music is ridden with emotions; it is the manifestation of his emotions. It is his emotional confession.
“I hope to be able to make something of myself, but who can do anything after Beethoven?” – Franz Schubert
At the beginning of the 20th century, the American public did not care for Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, but today it is one of the most-performed piano concertos.
Craft is a skill that accumulates with time and is formed by experience, practice, learning, and usually a lot of repetition. It is a fundamental layer of any creative endeavour.
And then there is art. Art needs tension. This tension is caused by the uncertainty, the fogginess, that lies between the present and a final outcome. It is filled with conflicting emotions.
“Little kids don’t let you sleep; big kids don’t let you live”
Pablo Picasso’s “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
It was common thinking in the early 19th century that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was the be all and end all of symphonies
Heard a story about the French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. He was a perfectionist and had an incredibly hard time completing his paintings. Often, when he would encounter one of his paintings hanging in someone else’s house, he’d stare at it intensely for a while and then ask the owner of the painting whether he or she would mind lending it to him so he could finish it. Who could say no to this? As the story goes, sometimes the owner would never get the painting back, as Degas would ruin it in the process of trying to make it perfect.