"Life is lived in the arena. You only learn by doing. And if you’re not doing, then all the learning you’re picking up is too general and too abstract. Then it truly is Hallmark aphorisms. You don’t know what applies where and when.
And a lot of this kind of general principles and advice is not mathematics. Sometimes you’re using the word rich to mean one thing. Other times you’re using it to mean another thing. Same with the word wealth. Same with the word love or happiness. These are overloaded terms. So this is not mathematics.
These are not precise definitions. You can’t form a playbook out of them that you can just follow like a computer. Instead, you have to understand what context to apply them in. So the right way to learn is to actually go do something, and when you’re doing it, you figure something out about how it should be done.
Then you can go and look at something I tweeted or something you read in Deutsch or something you read in Schopenhauer or something you saw online and say, “Oh, that’s what that guy meant. That’s the general principle he’s talking about. And I know to apply it in situations like this, not mechanically, not a hundred percent of the time, but as a helpful heuristic for when I encounter this situation again.”
