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Life and Trading Lessons from Hemingway

  
  Education
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As I work on brushing up writing skills for a potential book on my journey as a caregiver to my wife for 30+ months, I happened across a collection of advice for writers Hemingway sprinkled through his correspondence with colleagues over the years. Wisdom for the ages?

Life lesson:

“Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you are going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go in to a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice. When you’re in town stand outside the theatre and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars. There are a thousand ways to practice. And always think of other people.”

And for traders as well as writers:

“Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.”

It makes me think of all the injustices bestowed upon newer traders; complexity, bad prices, one’s own emotional state, the non-obvious inner circle game– the list is endless.

On Man’s Search for Meaning

  
  Education
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This book serves as an introduction to Dr. Frank’s theory of logotherapy through his experience of three years within the Nazi concentration camps. This existential analysis theory is based on finding meaning to one’s existence and seizing responsibility for it. A gripping story and a very educative and enlightening read within the psychology genre.

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- “The prisoner passed from the first to the second phase: the phase of relative apathy, in which he achieved a kind of emotional death.”

2- “At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”

3- “Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow.”

4- “Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love an in love.”

5- “This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past.” (more…)

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