ReadGlobe · morning brief · archive
Sunday 11 October
1 · The text
A Reflection
Watching the rush of the world go past from just outside it.
1 min · Kate Chopin · The Awakening and Selected Short Stories · 1899 · public domain
Some people are born with a vital and responsive energy. It not only enables them to keep abreast of the times; it qualifies them to furnish in their own personality a good bit of the motive power to the mad pace. They are fortunate beings. They do not need to apprehend the significance of things. They do not grow weary nor miss step, nor do they fall out of rank and sink by the wayside to be left contemplating the moving procession.
Ah! that moving procession that has left me by the road-side! Its fantastic colors are more brilliant and beautiful than the sun on the undulating waters. What matter if souls and bodies are falling beneath the feet of the ever-pressing multitude! It moves with the majestic rhythm of the spheres. Its discordant clashes sweep upward in one harmonious tone that blends with the music of other worlds—to complete God’s orchestra.
It is greater than the stars—that moving procession of human energy; greater than the palpitating earth and the things growing thereon. Oh! I could weep at being left by the wayside; left with the grass and the clouds and a few dumb animals. True, I feel at home in the society of these symbols of life’s immutability. In the procession I should feel the crushing feet, the clashing discords, the ruthless hands and stifling breath. I could not hear the rhythm of the march.
Salve! ye dumb hearts. Let us be still and wait by the roadside.
2 · One idea · Risk & strategy
Optionality
Aristotle tells a story about Thales of Miletus, the first philosopher, whom people mocked for being clever and poor.
One winter Thales predicted a large olive harvest. He paid small deposits to rent every olive press in Miletus and Chios, cheaply, because nobody else wanted them yet.
When the harvest came in and everyone needed a press at once, he rented them out at whatever price he liked.
He had not bought the presses. He had bought the right to use them, which cost little and could only go one way. That is an option, some two thousand years before anyone called it that.
In one line. Optionality is having choices with limited downside and large potential upside — keeping options open so you can benefit from good outcomes while capping your losses on bad ones. It is valuable precisely because the future is uncertain.
Worked example
Taking a side project that costs a few evenings but could become a business: the downside is some lost weekends, the upside is unbounded. A portfolio of such small, capped bets needs only one to hit to pay for all the misses.
How to use it, and where it fails3 · One number
Enrolment in higher education, as a share of the university-age population, world
19719%
202444%
5.0 times the 1971 level.
University went from something for the few to close to an ordinary path within one working lifetime.
Source: Our World in Data, world estimates, read 2026-09-24.