Host of the Nectar of Time podcast; in this second official episode he shares his own path back into fiction via a pandemic book club and Haruki Murakami.
Where it appears 12
how fear disguises as logicHost of Nectar of Time. Here he describes himself as very analytical and wary of his intuition, and admits that returning to the self feels scary to him.
the forbidden wonderland of murakamiHost of Nectar of Time and an avid Murakami collector who owns every US first edition (paperback and hardcover) of Murakami's books; came to Murakami via a COVID-era book club in 2020.
portal to the unknownHost of Nectar of Time. In this episode he shares his love of endurance sports and dark literature, his struggle with overthinking, and his fear that a distorted intuition could make him betray his destiny.
love has no dark sideHost of Nectar of Time. In this episode he shares that he runs two businesses and struggles to be present, that he grew up going to synagogue with his father, and that he finds more spirituality on a mountain or a long run than in ritual.
the elixir of authenticityHost of Nectar of Time. In this episode he shares his own stories: changing the car music on dates, and finding that the more self-help books he read, the less personality he had. He also reads from Alan Watts's preface to 'This Is It'.
merchant of masksHost of Nectar of Time and founder of a software company. He shares stories here (the London Drugs confession booth, sharing short stories instead of whole books) and his own frameworks, including fiction as a tonic for empathy and the decimation of decorum.
ghosts of griefHost of Nectar of Time; shares his own story of illness dissolving his ego and reads excerpts on grief from Hesse, Yu Miri, Murakami and C.S. Lewis.
the realm of dreamsHost of Nectar of Time and runner of the Vancouver podcast studio where he met Samantha. A Murakami devotee who turned to fiction through a COVID-era book club; in this episode he shares his precognitive dreams, unbidden recall of decades-old dreams, and his study of the Oracle of Delphi.
how to win at pinball & lifeHost of Nectar of Time and a startup founder; in this episode he shares stories of his bare early-startup studio, a health crisis and a mentor's lesson, and his own 75 Hard, and brings in Murakami, Kipling, the Gita, and Stoicism.
don't pretend you aren't confusedHost of Nectar of Time; in this first episode he shares his own reading history, from early-20s self-help to discovering Murakami during the pandemic, and stories about entrepreneur meetups and his superpower wish.
Connections
Hosted
Influenced by
Mentioned alongside
- Tyler's first impression of Tamir
Seven years ago, after Tamir's first haircut, where he talked about a new Odyssey translation and his plans, Tyler told coworker Roland that Tamir was in that sweet, brief period when you…
- Tamir's story read by Samantha
Samantha read a story Tamir wrote and says it left her deeply confused and comfortable at once. It wasn't unsettling but gave her the feeling that there is more than what she knows herself…
- The unplanned podcast studio
Ian points out that Tamir never planned the studio they're sitting in. He followed an impulse to set up an office and studio, and it became the most booked-out studio in the city. Tamir…
Stories told
- Satisfied Customer excerpt from Troll
Tamir reads an undated page-15 excerpt from Troll by a user called 'Satisfied Customer'. It is a stream of a young person's online mind: irony pulled over the eyes, Mario speedruns, vanilla…
- Murakami wrote at the kitchen table
Tamir recounts that Murakami, at 30, ran a bar and after getting home late at night would sit at his kitchen table for two hours writing by hand, producing Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball…
- Ryan Holiday on the Oracle
Tamir happened to be studying the Oracle of Delphi when Ryan Holiday spoke in Vancouver and told how a philosopher asked the Oracle for the best source of wisdom and was told 'the dead'…
- Car music on dates
In his twenties Tamir always switched the car music to whatever the woman he was driving liked. An article made him ask why he was bending over backwards, and whether she might want to know…
- Conor McGregor lost the fire
Tamir recounts McGregor's masterful win over Eddie Alvarez at Madison Square Garden and his monk-like early interviews, then money from the Mayweather fight, whiskey and loss after loss…
- Ferris wheel and pan flute in Greece
Sputnik Sweetheart's images stick with both men. Salih sees Miu whenever he sees a Ferris wheel and recently reread the passage in Greece; Tamir thinks of the novel's mysterious pan flute…
- Mentor laughs at 'one trough of sorrow'
In his early twenties, after surviving a gut disease, a hospital stay, and a breakup, Tamir told a business mentor in his 50s he'd come through the trough of sorrow. The mentor laughed…
- Murakami story as homework
Within hours of meeting Samantha at his studio, Tamir gave her Murakami's 'Sleep' from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman as homework due the next week. She took it as a sign from the universe…
- Rise of Rajneeshpuram (intro)
Tamir's cold-open history: in 1972 in India, 22-year-old Sheela fell in love with Bhagwan and devoted every waking moment to him. 'Whatever he willed, Sheela made it happen.' When they had…
- Zoe's two-moon mural
Tamir's artist friend Zoe painted a mural in his studio while listening to all 40 hours of 1Q84, adding glow-in-the-dark twin moons. She almost wanted to hate the book but found it too…
- Alan Watts: the devil is also you
Tamir's paraphrase of Watts: you privately declare 90 days free of a bad habit to keep the devil away, then wonder why resistance peaks the next day. Who do you think the devil is? You are…
- Discovering Murakami in a pandemic book club
In early 2020, still reading heavy classics like the Odyssey, the Ramayana and Siddhartha, Tamir joined a book club so he wouldn't control the picks. When Murakami came up, he chose…
- Dreams that come true
Tamir has dreamt events that happened 'pixel for pixel' up to three months later. Samantha often wakes knowing a specific person will reach out, and when they do, they say they just 'got…
- Guard rails in lucid dreams
Both have noticed that when they become lucid and start controlling a dream, something in the dream becomes aware of it and signals 'you're not supposed to be doing that.' Tamir notes the…
- Seeing Ryan Holiday in Vancouver
The week before, Tamir saw Ryan Holiday speak in Vancouver, contrasting religion's focus on avoiding hell after death with the Stoics' daily practice for avoiding the hell created on earth.
- Seneca's consolations amid tragedy
Tamir recounts that Seneca lost family members, was exiled and eventually killed by Nero, yet made consolation his role, writing to the bereaved and telling his mother from exile not to…
- Tamir can't answer 'die complete'
Asked what he'd need to do today to die complete tonight, Tamir says his brain 'produces an error code'. So much of his life is spent on future business goals and visions that today feels…
- Tamir opens up to therapy
Tamir sees a therapist every couple of weeks. His hardcore Ironman and ultramarathon friends find it crazy that someone else could give you answers about yourself. It took him a while to…
- Tamir's Nosferatu night and dark tastes
Tamir recalls seeing Nosferatu in a theater and finding its possession and madness strangely appealing. He jokes that he is a masochist because he loves the discomfort of endurance sports…
- Tamir's first Murakami on a long walk
During COVID in 2020, Tamir, then reading only business and self-help, joined a book club. After Neil Strauss's online club chose Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Tamir proposed it to his group. He…
- The London Drugs confession booth
Tamir found a gag mini confession booth at London Drugs, with curtains and seats. Press the button, it says 'tell me your sins', then 'you are forgiven'. Its booklet on confessing got him…
- Tom Holland manifests Spider-Man
Tamir recalls that Tom Holland declared he'd play Spider-Man and marry Zendaya, and it came true. He sets this against survivor bias: others manifest the same things and get hit by a truck…
- A book club pulled him back to fiction
Tamir, a software entrepreneur with a shelf of non-fiction, joined a book club in 2020 to read fiction. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World made him feel transported, with…
- Barry Sonnenfeld sat in that chair
Tamir tells Grant that director Barry Sonnenfeld, the Coen Brothers' longtime cinematographer, recently sat in the same studio chair, and jokes that some Hollywood luck may rub off.
- Book club turned Tamir to fiction
About four and a half years earlier, during COVID, Tamir joined a book club and set his non-fiction aside. Most of the novels were 'pretty cool' but changed nothing; Murakami was the one…
- Custom-bound Hear the Wind Sing
Tamir shows a one-of-a-kind copy of Murakami's Hear the Wind Sing, custom bound from an old book by a bookbinder he found through his Murakami book club.
- Dad already knew Marcus Aurelius
Tamir gave his father a Hebrew translation of the Meditations. After a couple of chapters his dad said, 'I already know all of this', and when asked if he liked it, 'I don't know, it's…
- Dreaming of a house by the water
Tamir describes his own picture of the future: a house by the water within walking distance of the beach, opening the curtains each morning to sunlight on his face. He uses it to show that…
- Everything is negotiable
At an entrepreneur wellness meetup in Squamish, everyone shared morning routines and 'non-negotiables': river dips, runs, special drinks. When his turn came, Tamir said 'everything is…
- Krishnamurti: the devil and the truth
Tamir retells Krishnamurti's parable: the devil drops the truth from his pocket and a passerby picks it up. His companion asks if he's worried; the devil says no, 'he's going to organize…
- Meeting Ian at a forest retreat
Tamir drove to a day retreat Ian facilitated, a cold plunge, sauna, and meditation facility 30 minutes into a valley outside Squamish with no cell service, realizing too late he hadn't told…
- Meeting at a Squamish day retreat
Tamir and Nev met at a day retreat in Squamish, British Columbia. A few weeks later she left on her own for the Balkans, a solo move into the depths that Tamir frames as walking through a…
- Murakami's epiphany at the ballpark
Tamir retells how Murakami, who ran a jazz bar with his wife, had a flash of inspiration at 30 while watching his favorite (and long-losing) baseball team, which went on to win the league…
- Naps that feel like months
Tamir describes a deep three-hour nap that felt like living three months, Samantha a 30-minute nap that felt like three days, and Tamir notes surgery patients feeling hours pass as a minute…
- Narrator switch in 1Q84 Book 3
Listening to 1Q84 on audiobook without realizing it was three volumes, Tamir was stunned when Book 3 opened with Ushikawa chapters read by a new narrator, a perspective shift that 'blew my…
- Synagogue as a social club
Tamir grew up going to synagogue with his father, where many people just chatted, and religion felt like a social activity. He finds more spirituality climbing a mountain, on a hike, or 'at…
- Tamir's bare startup studio
In his startup's early days Tamir lived in a bachelor studio with no bathroom (shared with three units), no full kitchen, no art or family photos, just IKEA desks and a mattress on the…
- Tamir's ever-positive 77-year-old father
Tamir sees Sheela's optimism in his father, about to turn 78, who had a very difficult childhood and life but was always positive and having fun, never depressed or dwelling on the past…
- Tamir's superpower: summoning anyone
Asked what superpower he'd want, Tamir skips invisibility, flight and infinite money: he wants an emperor's power to summon anyone in the kingdom, so he could end the enigma of why people…
- The six-foot housefly dream
While washing dishes, Tamir will suddenly recall, with no trigger, a dream from 20+ years ago, such as a childhood dream of a six-foot housefly chasing him around Yaletown. It happens with…
- Vancouver bookstore owners love Dance Dance Dance
Hunting first editions in Vancouver's used bookstores, where Murakami books 'fly off the shelf', Tamir asked four owners (older, seemingly unmarried men who resemble Murakami characters)…
- Illness that broke Tamir's ego
Tamir had ill health for a while and had to drop out of university; looking in the mirror he realized he wasn't 'all that' and didn't like that person. Something died in him through…
- Master Key wall-staring exercises
At 21, Tamir followed The Master Key System's weekly exercises: week one, sit and stare at a wall; week two, imagine a square on it; week three, identify every thought; week four, isolate a…
- Meeting entrepreneurs in Indigo's non-fiction aisle
In the first half of his 20s, Tamir was addicted to non-fiction and kept running into his entrepreneur friends in the non-fiction section at Indigo, and never in any other section.
- Muay Thai, soccer and tennis
Tamir did Muay Thai for years and played soccer, where you can blame the ref, the pass or the ball. Now in tennis and especially fighting, there is no one else to blame, which keeps the ego…
- Tamir's 'little bit of a cult' program
Tamir says he is currently in a program he calls 'a little bit of a cult' and plans a separate episode on it. Its claim that the mind isn't real reality and only the body in the present…
- Tamir's 75 Hard and lat injury
Tamir did 75 Hard the previous year, doing both workouts in the evening when flying to New York and New Jersey; by the end it was so habitual it felt weird not to do it. He stopped only…
- Tamir's first-edition collection
Tamir owns every US first edition of Murakami's books, in paperback and hardcover, and buys first printings when he can.
- Book club hated his generous scores
In a pandemic book club scoring out of nine, Tamir gave high scores to books he disliked because the author had done a good job. Members hated it as a 'good effort ribbon'; he argued a book…
- Cringing at old Facebook posts
Tamir describes the mind's aperture widening between 16 and 19, like stepping out of a cold plunge, then cringing at old Facebook posts he once thought were great. Mia's response: give…
- Met in a high-school play
Tamir and Mia first met in high school while acting in the same play, the root of their shared love of fiction and storytelling.
Words spoken
What do you think, you can just exchange your fun coupons for time now, for your youthful 20s?
- Fiction teaches you to value people without status
A narrator who shows you a character's trials makes you respect someone with no Bugatti, six-pack, or partner; extend that to people you rank below you and you realize you're not as low as…
- Greatness includes painting the picture
The poem moves from discovering new land to painting pictures on the walls, showing that greatness spans every archetype, not just conquest; the manosphere's single template reveals a lack…
You feel like your trigger is valuable and you don't want to let them go. They're like infinity stones of trauma or something that you're holding in your gauntlet.
For a while I would be obsessed with self-help books and this and that. And I realized the more self-help books I read, the less of a personality I had.
The reason these women are sort of written in a shallow way is because they're not actually women, are they? These are Jungian animas.
My wings are not capable of this flight.
The Stoics realized that their daily practice is preventing the hell which exists on earth.
The time to be David Goggins is when you're running and you need to get to the finish line. But you don't need to be David Goggins all the time. Sometimes you have to be Seneca the philosopher. Sometimes you have to be the scientist. Sometimes you have to be the poet.
- The shadow doesn't leave; it becomes an ally
Integration doesn't remove the shadow. Your relationship to it changes until you can 'give a wink' to each other. Like Murakami's well, the darkness stays the same but stops being…
- The weird is an antidote to nihilism
Murakami's disruptions (the missing cat and wife in Wind-Up Bird) rescue protagonists from lives drifting into obscurity; let life's strangeness in rather than shutting it out with work and…
This is my world. The wall is here to hold me in. The river flows through me. The smoke is me burning.
- Untouchable rules give the shadow shelter
Moral structures that can't be questioned, such as rigidly held religious law, are exactly where the shadow hides, because it knows you won't go in. Religion, like the shadow, has to be…
Apple pushes a new operating system every year. When was the last time I pushed out a new operating system for myself?
If you're creating structures that cannot be touched, that's where the shadow is going to hide. And it knows you're not going to be able to go in.
It's one thing to know that I'm going on a long run and I feel suffering and I feel pain and I'm not going to let it bother me. But it's another thing to actually say, why am I running? Where am I even going?
- A book can be good but not for you now
Judge a book's quality apart from its appeal to you at this moment: the same book can be bad for you today and good in 20 years.
It's like a snake eating its own tail. It's very difficult for the computer with a bug to unbug itself, to fix itself. There has to be new code that's pushed to fix the bug.
The best fiction-making machine that we have is our mind when we go to sleep at night. You're building worlds and stories every single night, and a novel is just that same thing in a pill format.
- AI makes human writing a luxury
As AI floods the world with text, human-made writing becomes like a tailored suit in an age of fast fashion: rarer, pricier, and a delicacy.
If you get addicted to self-help you're going to look at the mirror every day and realize you're not good enough.
All they end up doing is adding one veneer to the next veneer, adding one layer of masquerading to the next layer of masquerading.
There is meaning. You have to allow the meaning to come in. Don't block yourself away from it.
- Build your own pinball practice
Since you can't anticipate wins or losses, design your own daily practice, unique to you, as an operating system for self-transformation.
You can't be in 2026 running Windows 95. It's not going to work. It's going to be too slow. You're going to get bad results.
Curiosity. That's how you get compounding interest for your brain, and how to fix your operating system is curiosity.
People think they're making progress in their life because they're cutting people out of their life. This is not progress. This is the equivalent of Joe Pesci digging a hole in the desert and putting a body in there.
Even if you hit a high score, the end of every pinball game is a loss. You can't actually win the pinball game.
I've called fiction a tonic for empathy. Non-fiction is teaching you things that you don't know; it lives most of the time in the knowledge realm. With fiction specifically, it lives in the emotions.
I look at grief as almost a shadow of love, like love's shadow or love's ghost. And just as love is its own unique thumbprint, I guess so is grief, because it's just that reflection.
If you keep saying I'm going to be happy when I hit this goal, you're going to be miserable your whole life.
It's easy to be curious when things are easy. It's difficult to be curious about the things that make us uncomfortable.
Purist Murakamians like ourselves would say every word is perfect. I need to know exactly how he's cooking his pasta.
Every once in a while you're going to want to read that handmade, human-made stuff, and that's going to be a delicacy for the mind.
If you put yourself in that same lens, if someone wrote a story about you, you'd probably be a lot more empathetic towards it.
Today's episode is about authenticity. That is to say, today's episode is about imperfections, the true hallmarks of beauty. These blemishes are insignia of the sublime.
That's the ultimate litmus test for me: in order to judge a tree, you have to judge it by the fruit that it bears.
- Keep visuals of your why on the wall
During the grind of his early startup, Tamir put up visuals such as 'Makers of Empire' to remind himself why he was doing what he was doing.
To me literature is a tonic for empathy. It's something that you can take and all of a sudden feel in ways that you weren't able to feel before.
- Make the time, even late at night
Like Murakami writing two hours a night at the kitchen table after work, carve out time despite money, circumstances and space.
- Mind and body as pilot and co-pilot
Mind and body each have superpowers, so they should trade control as needed rather than one ranking above the other. Nev adds that 'be in your body' is an overcorrection to a century of…
Most men die at 30 but they're not buried till they're 80.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is not some simulation theory. This is a matter of fact scientifically.
- Novelists distill the non-fiction
Great novelists absorbed the knowledge of their era (Hesse drew on Jung), so fiction is a tool for joy and for understanding the world and yourself, not a mere pastime.
Stories are useful, and in particular novels are portals into the multiverse. Imagine that your problems in your life have already appeared to other people before, and they have overcome it, and they can liberate you from the burden that you think is so unique and so your own.
Walls crumble and empires fall... the rotting nations drop off from time's bough, and only the things the dreamers make live on.
The way people become immortal is through books. Every time you open a book, if you open up Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, you're talking to the dead.
- Optimization alone flattens you
Reading only to optimize and grow makes you efficient but personality-less; you miss a whole other side of the world.
If you're just optimizing all the time, you're going to become really efficient and you're going to have no personality.
- Pinball is played for transformation, not score
You can't anticipate wins or losses, but you can anticipate your practice; the purpose of playing is to be transformed by the highs and the drops, then hit replay.
- Plotless books become internal plots
When a novel like Dance Dance Dance barely has an external plot, the plot moves inward into the labyrinth of the protagonist's psyche, which takes a more sophisticated lens to enjoy.
- Read fiction alongside non-fiction
Keep a hybrid reading diet: pair self-improvement non-fiction with fiction for perspective, reflection and imagination.
The scenes in Murakami novels you carry with you in your backpack for the rest of your life.
- Seeking afterlife answers is seeking certainty
Researching the afterlife or the simulation is mostly another way humans search for certainty; unless you're on physics' front lines, leave those questions be and focus on living well here.
- Self-help can widen the gap it means to close
Even a book telling you it's okay not to be enough creates a new struggle to feel okay; self-help is a tool, but stuck in it you keep measuring the chasm between where you are and where you…
A lot of times as humans we get to a point where we must shed a skin or we will continue to suffer.
Sincerity is authenticity. It's understanding what's going on in a lighter way, not in this heavy, fake, pretentious type of way.
If someone's doing surgery on me, I don't want them to be in the body. I mean, I want them to be in my body, but I want them to be in his mind or her mind.
- The Gita reconciles conflicting desires
The Bhagavad Gita is special because it reconciles the desire to win with the desire not to harm, through acting fully while being detached from the fruits of action.
There is a fear of returning to the self because in some ways it feels like the answer is too easy. It must be hard. I must summit the mountain.
My qualm with religion is that these are books that have decided what the future is, and I really don't like that, because I like the idea of exploration, of discovery.
The longer you've committed and the longer you've made a decision, the more difficult it is to put it under scrutiny. It's painful.
- There's no redemption without the trough
Deliverance only means something because there is terror, suffering and malice to be delivered from, which may be why darkness in films and literature pulls at us.
It seems to me from my research and personal experience that love is dangerous as much as it's beautiful. There are thorns on the rose for a reason.
- Triumph is as much an illusion as disaster
If Kipling's triumph and disaster are both impostors, then even getting the Bugatti, the house, or the job is still maya; real stability has to come from the daily practice, not the result.
People don't like to necessarily see the truth. They like their version of the truth: the truth plus the mask that goes on top of the truth, and that's more palatable.
It's interesting when you have your own thumbprint of your mistakes, your talents, your attributes. But when you hide that, that becomes a problem.
- Visions gotten from outside are a problem
'Makers of Empire' starts with vision lying within the soul; if you're getting your visions exogenously, from the culture, that's a problem.
Who do you think the devil is? The devil is also you. You are both the fixer and the problem.
For some of us, it's difficult to just go from feeling into the vault. We have to think our way into it. And that's really where we stumble.
- Women as divine messengers
Murakami's women work like Athena disguised before Telemachus: messengers who send the protagonist to discover something, usually within himself, which explains why they can seem thinly…
It might be the antidote. It might be the thing that saves you from the analytical, logical, toxic, recursive loop.
People hide their imperfections. Social media, you hide your imperfections. Authenticity is about showing your imperfections and continuing to be yourself despite your imperfections.
It has that aura of boredom, and it's too long, and it's old, and classics are just a euphemism for boring. Obviously that's not the case, but you have to be willing to go on that adventure.
- Convert friends with short stories
To introduce someone to Murakami, gift a short story collection and point to one specific story instead of a 600-page novel; Tamir finds nine out of ten people actually read it.
To have curiosity is the superpower of the current paradigm that we're in.
Don't get bamboozled, don't join a cult, read a book. Your life will be better.
- Early success erodes the hunger
Passion is hard to sustain, especially after early success. Fighters and pop stars told they're the best stop producing what made them great.
Those expectations are real. Those expectations have gravity and they carry weight, and it's difficult to conduct yourself without consideration of those expectations.
We've gone through many upgrades, and we're certainly in a new version of civilization OS. The question for me genuinely is: are these masks a feature or a bug in the system?
For me fiction is a tonic for empathy, and it's a tonic for any emotion that we choose to identify with.
Everybody knows the silence after finishing an audiobook, and I thought to myself, holy s***, I did not know a book could do that to me.
I remember finishing it and just thinking, holy... I didn't know a book could do that to me.
- It's never too late to start writing
Murakami didn't begin until 30; you often don't know what to write until later in life, and some would argue 30 is even early.
There is no perfect model, but there are improved models, and then there are models that do not get improved.
You don't have time to read a book because you're not reading books.
An enigma is neither good nor bad, it's a why. It's not a hooray and it's not an oh no, it's just a what the f***.
There is plaque that can accumulate in our minds that can affect performance in every area of our life, and they create these boundaries. And the problem with these boundaries is you cannot really truly think your way out of it.
Everything that we don't know that you believe in until it becomes a science is going to be a pseudoscience, or some sort of weird woo-woo thing. Doesn't make it not true. It just means it still needs to be proven.
Fighting the unknown is like trying to put up a fight against the ocean or the sea. It doesn't matter how hard you punch it, nothing's going to change it. And if anything, it's a Gordian knot where the more you try to unravel it, the deeper and deeper you drown.
Rating Murakami books if you're a Murakami fan is basically impossible. It's like asking which child is your favorite.
- Reading about action is not action
Reading a book can feel like the equivalent of acting on chapter one's advice; things are often as simple as doing the thing, which is why we overcomplicate them.
I read books with such awe. I'm like, wow, I don't even know how you came up with this stuff. I'm just impressed that you were able to put a book together.
- Reading satisfies because it is work
Like exercise, reading releases its pleasure because it is effortful. It is an active activity, not a passive one, which is also why it meets more resistance.
They're going to give you interesting refractions, but they're not going to give you very good reflection. What you really need is to develop a mirror.
- Self-help readers overrate their self-awareness
In the self-development world, people feel self-aware after a few books, and those same people are the clients. Tamir calls it a recursive snake eating its own tail: the blind spot is by…
The answer is bespoke. It's tailored. It's customized. It's a thumbprint for you and you only.
We're building this virtual reality environment in many cases for training, where we have our own virtual reality, the best virtual reality headset, just by closing our eyes.
Something dies in you, and you can use that to dissolve that ego and destroy it and build something new. Of course the ego always regenerates in a new terrible devil, but going through it is useful.
It's okay to cut people off after they've had their day in court. But it's another thing to go and just execute someone willy-nilly.
A lot of people think that if they jump off a cliff and build the plane as they're coming down... a lot of times they don't build the plane, and then they just crash.
- Vibe over content
With Murakami scenes it's often not the content but the vibe: two people with whisky or coffee feel like they've slipped into another universe.
When I write, it's like an exorcism. I'm trying to remove something from my body.
- Give the author the benefit of the doubt
When a section displeases you, first ask whether you're failing to understand it before blaming the author.
- Join a book club outside your taste
Join a book club that picks books you'd never choose yourself, to expose yourself to new ideas; this is how Tamir found Murakami.
- Join a book club to stretch
Tamir joined a book club in 2020 specifically to read fiction he would never pick up on his own.
- Practice beats journey
'Practice' is a better word than 'journey' because it implies guardrails: watching Netflix all day can be called a journey, but not a practice.
- Read with the benefit of the doubt
Approach every author with the benefit of the doubt and awe at the effort behind a book; Tamir rarely rates a book below three stars and assumes he may simply not 'get it' yet.
- Simplicity is the marker of intelligence
Thinking isn't the problem; overthinking is. Making complex ideas simple is the sign of understanding, and making them more complex suggests you're not there yet.
I don't actually know how self-aware I am, because the definition of the blind spot is that you can't see it.