How to live well | Gift giving

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Hi Friend Arts - Investing - Personal/Autism

Happy Holidays! Thanks for staying in touch. Let's do more real world mingling and meeting in 2018.

Two highlights (on a life well lived and gift giving ideas) this week (tho more on blog), before I go back to the festive goose. My roast goose variant only takes 50 minutes to cook! (30 mins prep, 30 min rest). (Goose details here)

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How to live a life, well lived. Bernie (Blue) De Koven is a fun theorist. A shaman of fun and play (Wired Interview). He is also terminally ill. Through supporting a game of legacy, I asked him these questions:

-How do you live, a life well lived?
-If you would do life differently - what would you do?
-What would you tell your 40-year-old self?
-If these are the better days of an early nation, what should I do?”

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High "return on investment" gifts: Last minute Christmas gifts. Economists argue that buying presents is a value loss as recipients do not value the gifts at the same value as bought.

These economists suggest cash is the best gift as economic value is not destroyed. Tim Harford in the FT (Link here, behind paywall) in 2016 looked at Joel Waldfogel’s notorious research paper, The Deadweight Loss of Christmas, Waldfogel showed that gifts typically destroy value, in the sense that the giver had to pay more to buy the gift than the recipient would ever have been willing to spend on it.

Richard Thaler might disagree (post here) arguing rational “hominem economist” is fantasy. Cash gifts are frowned open.

I have several gift ideas which have a high RoI. These gifts utilise the equation:

Time + Unique + You = Priceless a gift of time and attention and thought.

Poetry/Writing: Write them a poem. Write them out your favourite poem. Record a video or audio of you reading a poem (or short story) to your loved one.

Even for the young child who has everything, they won't have a video of you reading their favourite book.

Write a letter about a time together or why they are important to you.

Recipes: Collect recipes from friends and write them in a book. A short story about their importance is a welcome touch.

If you take the time to create/make/cook some thing, this has “positive value” both economically and socially. There are many items in the read/eat/drink category that most people enjoy.

Cook some thing, make a cake; confit a duck leg (recipe here, keeps for 6 months); order some green coffee beans, roast them yourself for a coffee lover, present them with roasted beans (worth over 10x the green bean value plus 30 minutes or so roasting time, I’ve done it in a pan similar to this). You can brew your own gin, ginger ale, make lemonade.

You can make simple jewellery, with a little more time you could learn to knit or something to actually make a garment, though I appreciate that is probably above what can be easily achieved.

You can make them a mix tape / CD / on line mix -- with personal commentary. The mix tape was a teenage rite of love in decades past.

Busy parents might appreciate a "voucher" for baby sitting time offered by the gifter. We value experiences more than objects when it comes to happiness.

More on the gift giving ideas on 3 min blog post. Some social anthropological thoughts on Lewis Hyde's Gift here (3 mins)

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Randomness: An unexpected view in California

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Charlie Munger Advice: First, be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you will only master this one habit you will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, howsoever great.

Charlie Munger advice

68,392 unread emails. That’s my inbox. If I spent 30 seconds on all those emails, it would cost me >566 hours or 56 working days assuming I did nothing else. Not feasible.

I take 30 to 60 minutes in my day, semi-scheduled to go through emails. I read all headlines. If I think I can deal with in a minute or so, I answer immediately. If it’s of no value I move on. If I need to consider it, I click it open / mark it. If I think I might forget, I note it down physically. How I organise my email (2 mins). Update: Tim Hartford in the FT agrees with me!

Brilliant Stuff from Friends and others:

Was chatting to the brilliant Share Action people. This was their 2017 in review.

Great, re-connecting with people from a decade ago! Chatted with Viv Stern. Understood a little bit more on the UK university system. Viv wrote this piece on the UK universities staying international, post brexit.

Thanks for keeping in touch. Ben

P.S. Some of you may be on here from the Mingle or Linkedin (or possibly Facebook), if this is not for you just hit unsubscribe below. I’m not offended (much). I’d much rather you spent your time on items that do matter to you, such as… go on make a call to someone you love and tell them (Matt Haig life tip #5).

Quick hits on jobs and projects (Arts/Diversity/Pharma):

National Gallery looking for 2 new trustees. (1) Scientists and (2) a Public Engagement champion - with a strong thread of diversity. If you love paintings, and want more diverse audiences to attend - go for it! (22 Dec)

Sustrans is the charity making it easier for people to walk and cycle. “We connect people and places, create liveable neighbourhoods, transform the school run and deliver a happier, healthier commute. We are now seeking to appoint a new trustee to join Sustrans’ Board and to chair our London Advisory Board.”

Asthma UK is looking to recruit Trustees with a financial, commercial and/or fundraising background. “We are also actively seeking one Trustee with clinical experience relevant to asthma.”

Lessons from Autism

Everybody is somebody's weirdo. What unites humanity is vast and wonderful. (5 Lessons)

... On Welcome to Holland... "I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland." "Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! ... All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. ...But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned." And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

from Anoushka's blog on thinking about the Future: "

In her New York Times article, Cammie McGovern very eloquently and movingly describes her struggles with the process of securing provision and, ultimately, employment for her autistic son.

I have not become inured to setting out in plain words, the ways in which my child is not like other children.

When Spike was younger, detailing our concerns was quite a simple exercise, "He is not pointing. His words are not coming quick enough. He seems obsessed with fans." His eccentricities formed a collection of off-beat quirks, which belied the inherent seriousness of their presence or absence. As he got older, those differences fleshed out and took on weight. It takes longer to paint a picture in words of our autistic child, who perceives his peers as primarily a source of unwanted sensory disturbance, or who finds that his teacher's words turn from concrete, meaningful symbols to water as her language moves into a more sophisticated register. Detailing the many points of divergence between Spike's development and what is typically expected is an exercise running to many pages. We read them back to our selves, checking for balance and veracity. By our hand, these accounts are merely quick sketches of Spike, but we try very hard to be faithful to our boy, so that he is there, among the words. A bright, cheerful boy with passions and interests, a creative streak...." A post on it here.

No one ever clicks on these archive links, so I’m just going to highlight a couple, if you’re having a bored moment. But there really is a lot of good stuff here, if you want to have a random browse...

Neil Gaiman's brilliant commencement address on making brilliant mistakes - the ones only you can make. (wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes).

Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude, her commencement address speaking about the sudden death of her husband.

Selected Archive links. The life lesson collection: Nassim Taleb's life lessons commencement address; Ursula K Le Guin on literature as an operating manual for life; Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes. Matt Haig's 20 life tips. Charlie Munger on "always invert".

There is also Anne Lamott on writing and truth as paradox. And Oprah on gratitude and service. JK Rowling on the benefits of failure. Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude or investor Ray Dalio on on Principles.

Annie Proulx on the hope in stories.

A free carbon model and code from Google scientists; What makes effective teams from Google Research. Boom/Bust economics from Minsky.   Latest Memo from Howard Marks. Mankiw on Economist as scientist or engineer.

An overview of Bitcoin - not an investment, but a currency possibly. And the sustainability issues of bitcoin.

Ray Dalio on populism and risk,   Richard St John's success secrets, David Ogilvy on (1) advertising and (2) management; How to choose a font. Le Guin on writing craft. Elon Musk on how best to do corporate communication.

The work of painter-poet David Jones;   A visit to one of the last traditional bucket makers in Japan