you're one year closer to your death

The  Book of War from Random house, with Caleb Carr as 'series editor', is a combination of two books :  

- The Art of Warfare, Ballantine Books ( part of Random House), 1993, translated by Roger Ames  

- On War, Random House, 1943,  translated by O. J. Matthijs Jolles 

The new book, comprising of the two originals, plus gratuitous commentary, notes, prefaces .. etc serves to extend the copyright protection on the original works. 
Jolles is 'considered by modern scholars' to be the best translation, so that checks off On War from my list.

What remains are , in various combinations of have-possessed and have-read - 

- Prince (Machiavelli wrote in modern English to save us the trouble of evaluation translations via google search )

- The Book of Five Rings

(and this one's a stretch,)

- War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

I plan to leave this list alone

Just a reminder , the D.C Lau translation of the Tao Te Ching was my staple possession for a long time, and, if I remember right, has the best few opening passages..  here's a pic of him from the Guardian

Chuang Tzu keeps coming up but haven't found a good one yet. The ideas of anarch

While Thomas Cleary's works are everywhere, and all-encompassing, they are dry. The Tao of Pooh helped me more, probably, than TCs TTC...

I didn't see ToP in Blossom's this time, and will remember to not buy it again, coz the paper books only add clutter and mites, and competition with my existing reading list, stacked deep and wide, next to my desk.

This is supposed to be the year of tiny actions, accumulated, compounded ..

My original operating system was harmony, but without a base and defined sense of self and boundaries, it quickly degenerated into me becoming docile and pliant and using 'being ego-less' as a rationalisation for failure. The amount of 'escapes' accumulated in the form of 'gathering knowledge' and 'doing-something-else' is at an all-time high.

So this years' metrics are 

- no escape, go where you're afraid,  do the work, doing the unpleasant, doing the pushups(1) with faith

- work for a full hour on a thing

- harmonious increase and profitability in worldly matters, without apology

- system of monthly goal writing at the start of the month, and reviewing at end of month, including finances

- an annual goal writing exercise, with six month reviews ! 

- budgeting for holiday fun, and purchases, and learning ! And ensuring 10% spend on learning and fun

- more networking, coz people are the elements of this ecosystem, not matter, and lots of people can still use what I already have, without the 'flowering' that  I believe is needed

- taking all the shit that comes from home and office, and not hating

- h1bac becomes top burning priority

- I thought, based on some video I watched (Jordan Peterson taking down a woke white girl), that I'd be in the world one percent. Hilariously no. Still, that's a nice illusion to target

- fasting is the prime tool from Taoism, to refactor/baseline/normalise perception. Fasting of the body, fasting of the mind.

- Codie S says accounting is the dumb skill that makes you most money. That.

- re-iterating tony - only one thing gives you power , and that is action. 

- the therapist also says that - your prime weapon against anxiety is action

- this is the endgame, way past the middle. If not now, there will never be a time to be happy, do the happy things. Finish off the bucket list, else I'll be too old. Buy a big car, go on a Europe trip, write a book etc. Time is stored in the things it is spent on.

- to work with the constant confounding, that is something to accept and come to terms with

- turn into the FOMO skid. Let whatsapp,telegram messages in forums pile up. let linkedIn posts lie. Let Youtube shorts go on. let us focus on our yesterday and move it to a better tomorrow

- and some others that I will fill in later.... 

Spinoza (to me, it seems) aligns with the Buddha ( and Guru Ramana) that the main job of the human is to understand, and once done, the mind is now advanced one more step.

I write this down, otherwise

(1) My grandfather , when I was in my 7th or 8th standard, instructed me to do buskie and dandal , a hundred of the first, and around 20 of the second. It's hard to imagine how things would've been if I had just done those daily, till date, but I got seduced by western push-ups, wu-shu from the book we got from the gandhi-nehru library, beach running ,thanks to Rahul, etc