Tucker has this unique ability to reflect on things that haven’t happened yet. It’s pretty subtle normally, but when you start to look for it, it sort of feels like that TV show where the guy gets tomorrow’s newspaper today and Tucker has already seen the article about himself.

At first, I would get so sucked in that I’d just take for granted that they already happened and be right there alongside him in that hypothetical world. Then, I started to notice it more and got angry, like it was dishonest or maybe delusional. Now, I’ve realized that it’s almost identical to something that I do which is to get a taste of an experience, extrapolate it to its end and then move on to the next lesson. I think that’s why I’ve been able to cram so much inside the last two years. I’m not so upset or judgmental about it anymore because, well now I think I get why I reacted that way.

This is the main tenet of stoicism, ultimately. That if you’re going to spend any time thinking about people’s actions, maybe you should start with your own.

Here’s an exercise:

You know when you read biographies of people long since dead and someone says something like “it’s interesting how kind he was to his employees but was so cruel to his relatives” and you think, man I wonder if they ever questioned themselves about that. Or you read memoirs and the person sort of casually mentions how it took them twenty years to realize they were a workaholic or half a decade to figure out that they hated their life and the other half digging themselves out of that impossible hole.

I think a good, but unending job is to endeavor so that no one ever questions something about your life that you haven’t already fully turned over in your head from every possible angle. That you should never realize something about yourself in some momentous epiphany because you’ve institutionalized incremental reflection. The role of a biography is not to work out the problems that you’ve been living every single day because in fact, that’s what every single day is for.

The exercise then is to consider what a stranger would think if the facts were all laid out on the table. What would they question? What have you missed? Finally, what can you do now that would cut off their assumptions–to answer their doubts with actions and avoid the surprise of a cliché?

In the middle of a research binge for Robert Greene. I’ve never read this many books in my life. 6 in one week was my previous record and yesterday finished my 10th since the previous Tuesday.

Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter by James Hirsch

Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson (reread)

The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom (looks at why poets write the way they do, has a premise that with the exception of Shakespeare, no poet has ever completely surpassed their predecessor)

Black Boy by Richard Wright

Socrates by A.E Taylor (short, very good. was Socrates the wisest because he knew that he knew nothing?)

American Courage by Herbert Warden (inaccurate, basic. might be worth it from the bargain section)

Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers (stopped halfway, decent)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (good, no reason it had to be so dense though)

The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes (spectacularly simple and well written)

My Life and Battles: By Jack Johnson (the boxer. great book)

American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett by Buddy Levy

Joe Louis, Man and Super-Fighter by Edward Van Every (Louis’s strategy in the ring is fantastic)

Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by Edward J. Renehan (‘always be an owner, never be a minion‘ too bad he was also crazy from syphilis)

The Camera My Mother Gave Me by Susanna Kaysen

Joe Louis as a Key Functionary: White Reactions Toward a Black Champion Evans, Art Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Sep., 1985) (great example of an academic completely missing the point)