Halo! Welcome to this week's digest. This week is a super special 'Vacation' edition, where I took a week off and really mailed it in ;D This week's topics include stand-up comedy, ancient wars, bullshit excuses, and neurological rationality. Enjoy!

• TELEVISION - HBO: Crashing
• BOOK - Xenophon's Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War (My full Kindle notes)
• FORUM POST - Indie Hackers: Efficiency Is An Excuse To Not Do The Actual Work
• PODCAST - Waking Up #119: Hidden Motives

• I learned early on to suppress my emotions and respond to danger with great composure. I was never the plaything of fear or greed.
• Only one way is always open, and that’s the way of sympathy.
• I deeply believe that leaders, whatever their profession, are wrong to allow distinctions of rank to flourish within their organizations. Living together on equal terms helps people develop deeper bonds and creates a common conscience. Those who live together are far less likely to desert one another in a crisis; those who live apart are far more likely to pursue their narrow self-interest.
• Success always calls for greater generosity—though most people, lost in the darkness of their own egos, treat it as an occasion for greater greed... If we choose this moment to indulge ourselves, we’ll miss a great opportunity to strengthen our ties of brotherhood.
• Freedom, dignity, and wealth—these three together constitute the great happiness of humanity. If you bequeath all three to your people, their love for you will never die.
• If success means that a man has to give up seeing his best friends, then it’s completely overrated!
• The modest person, I told them, will do nothing blameworthy in the light of day, but a true paragon of self control— which we all should strive to be—avoids unworthy actions even in the deepest secrecy of his private life.
• Convinced that it’s impossible to feel hatred toward those who treat us with love, I never lost an opportunity to reward my warriors, even if I remained uncertain of their loyalty.
• In my experience, men who respond to good fortune with modesty and kindness are harder to find than those who face adversity with courage.
• I was haunted all my life by a strange sense of unease... Yet even this feeling served me well. It kept reminding me that, despite my rank, I was only a man—a man who might at any time be seized by the power of evil.
• ...every leader must actively raise up his followers, and you must win their hearts by the kindness that springs from love.

• If you’re trying to do something efficiently you’re probably stalling.
• So much "work" is merely distracting ourselves from the reality: we have no customers, we don't know what people want, we don't have a sales channel, and on and on.

• [Robin] I don't know the details, so I defer. I am happy not having opinions on many of these subjects... I only want to express an opinion on things I've actually studied and I have something to tell you about.
• [Sam] (Determinism) is a huge enabler of your capacity to forgive... When you just look at evil people doing bad things, on some level they are malfunctioning robots, they have brains that we don't completely understand... At a certain point ... human evil will look like a neurological problem and it may admit of a cure... Then you would recognize that everyone in human history up until that moment who had been evil was just unlucky, on some level a victim of biology and all the other influences that led to them having the brains they have.