168: Enough
A short one from the seaside, on wanting and what we already have
👋 Hey, Leo here. Antifragile Intelligence is where I explore how leaders think, decide, and build in uncertain environments shaped by technology and change.
Each edition is a reflection, a principle, or a field note from the work itself.
Hey Friends,
Welcome to the 168th edition of Antifragile Intelligence.
A shorter edition, as I’m enjoying some time away at the seaside, but I didn’t want to break my weekly streak, standing tall at 168 editions.
For the last three days, my whole life fit in a beach towel, and it was, I want to say, enough. It was more than enough. Being at the seaside with my child, my wife, and my friends made me realize we should cherish what we have more often.
I especially missed the constant feeling of being behind. That there is a version of you: one invoice, one race, one revenue engagement ahead, and you will get to be happy once you catch him.
You never catch him. That is the whole trick of it. He runs at least as fast as you do.
Probably faster.
Seneca saw this two thousand years ago, and he was not writing about seaside towns or getting invoices paid, but he might as well have been.
“Nothing satisfies greed, but even a little satisfies nature.”
Seneca
I love this one because it is not moral scolding; it is arithmetic. Nature, the actual animal you are, needs a shockingly small amount to be content. Food, rest, the people you love within arm’s reach. The wanting is a separate system, bolted on top, and it has no off switch by design. It is not supposed to be satisfied. So when you feel the pull of more, it helps to ask which system is talking. Nine times out of ten it is not the animal. The animal sits fine on the beach.
“Do not think of what you do not have as though it were already yours. Instead, pick the finest of the things you do have, and reflect on how much you would have longed for them had they not been yours.”
Marcus Aurelius
He is saying: take the thing you walk past every day, the thing that has gone invisible from familiarity, and imagine you do not have it. Your family, your friends, your good health. Imagine it gone, and then feel how hard you would have prayed for exactly this life. The one you are currently too busy to notice.
Now, I am not going to sit here and tell you to want nothing. That would be a lie, and worse, it would be bad advice. I am building things myself. I have goals and aspirations. I want to be good at this.
Ambition is not the enemy. I am not writing an anti-ambition newsletter from a man who very obviously has not stopped ambitioning.
The enemy is a specific confusion. It is mistaking the next thing for the missing thing. Believing that contentment lives on the other side of the acquisition, when it turns out contentment is a muscle you use now or never use at all.
Epictetus, who owned almost nothing and was calmer than most billionaires, put the whole discipline in one line:
“He is wise who does not grieve for the things he does not have, but rejoices for those he has.”
Epictetus
Until next time,
Leo
Recommendations:
The musician Glen Hansard passed away this week, and while there is some controversy around his life, I have to recommend one of the best movies I have watched.
A more technical explanation of how “the transformer architecture,” which sits at the basis of LLMs, works.
FDEs, or Forward Deployed Engineers, are the hottest job right now, and if you are into AI, you should understand what they do.
Thank you for reading.
If this resonated, forward it to someone who might benefit from it.
Stay antifragile.
Leo
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