The Norton Juster Experience

Thoughts derived from the iconic "children's" book

One of the first books I ever read was The Phantom Tollbooth, and though it’s hard to truly attribute formative thoughts to a five-year-old (is it a humblebrag if you point it out?), I can’t stop recommending or thinking about this book every time I ever start to type out “I’m bored” in a text conversation. The book itself is one of the wittiest “children’s” books I’ve ever read, and I still recommend it for anyone and everyone to read no matter the age as the wordplay and the ideas are so delightful. I have a hard time containing myself when people finally do take me up on that suggestion, because I could rave about every passage and quote and would just end up repeating the entire book.

“I can’t see the point in learning to solve useless problems, or subtracting turnips from turnips, or knowing where Ethiopia is or how to spell February.” And, since no one bothered to explain otherwise, he regarded the process of seeking knowledge as the greatest waste of time of all.”

Much to my chagrin, a gripe of the common grade-schooler is “why do I need to learn the quadratic formula?”, in what is either a serious misunderstanding of the point of learning or a shameless attempt to beat a dead horse for laughs. Particularly about math, I do not understand the mentality of proudly stating “Oh, I suck at math.” After all, it’s not like you’d announce to your in-laws “I can’t read, LOL”. Math is one of the most innately intuitive things you could ever grasp, and it is sad to see how standardized education programs “bucket” kids in accelerated, regular, and slower tracks. Nobody is innately bad at math - they are told they aren’t good by the system. After all, even birds have an innate sense of how to count, and a dog can tell which hand contains more treats than the other up to a point. As such, when a proof clicks, no matter the complexity, it is unalterable. There is no source confirming or fact checking required - by the rules of the universe (or the axiom of choice, whichever nomenclature you prefer), it has to be true. The point of learning the quadratic formula, for example, isn’t because everything you learn has to be practically applicable (otherwise everyone really should be taking Home Ec instead). Learning simply widens the universe of things you might want to ask “why does this work?” about. I loathe calculus and physics - my mind doesn’t process functions as cleanly as I would like - but the neatness of simple abstract algebra is endlessly pleasant. If you don’t like math, it’s not because you’re bad at it - you probably just haven’t found the part of it you’ll enjoy.

“Ordinance 175389-J: It shall be unlawful, illegal, and unethical to think, think of thinking, surmise, presume, reason, meditate, or speculate while in the Doldrums. Anyone breaking this law shall be severely punished!”

“That’s a ridiculous law,” said Milo, quite indignantly. “Everybody thinks.”

“We don’t,” shouted the Lethargarians all at once.

“And most of the time you don’t,” said a yellow one sitting in a daffodil. “That’s why you’re here. You weren’t thinking, and you weren’t paying attention either. People who don’t pay attention often get stuck in the Doldrums.”

Obviously, everything we do cannot be meaningful or self-improving. Your body will either innately limit how much cognitive exertion you can put forth or it will start to break its regulatory patterns leading to a different set of problems. However, the mind needs to be kept sharp. The rumors of cognitive decline have been greatly exaggerated - by and large, the people who complain about “not being able to do what they used to” haven’t been consistently maintaining their mental acuity. In the chess world alone, you have players like Viktor Korchnoi who lasted forever playing at a Grandmaster level because the passion to learn, improve and focus never went away. Of course, he dropped off from his peak ELO, but not nearly as much as you would think - at age 48, he was still the #3 ranked player in the world, and by 72, his rating was only a few dozen points lower, and he was still ranked #48. Though we can’t expect to retain as much mental fortitude as Korchnoi, making sure you do something to exercise your brain each day, as hard as it can seem sometimes to not just zonk out in front of a TV, is just as useful as going to the gym for your physical health.

“He took a battered suitcase from the gatehouse and began to rummage busily through it, mumbling to himself, “No … no … no … this won’t do … no … h-m-m-m … ah, this is fine,” he cried triumphantly, holding up a small medallion on a chain. He dusted it off, and engraved on one side were the words “WHY NOT?”

“That’s a good reason for almost anything—a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.”

Nihilism is certainly in nowadays (nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everyone is going to die. Come watch TV?). But the implicit caveat to “everything is meaningless” that everyone forgets is the addendum “so why not allocate your brainpower to anything that comes to mind?”. The thing about self-improvement is that it’s also self-defined. It doesn’t have to go on your resume and you don’t have to sell the image to other people. From an internal point of view, reasons like money, career, etc. are essentially arbitrary reasons to section yourself off from devoting your mental attention to improving at something. What’s the big deal if you take a video game seriously? I spent countless hours playing chess, and yes, if I had learned to program instead, I could have created and named Venmo after myself, sure. But the opportunity cost is not marked at what you could have done as valued by other people. The only wasted mental effort is letting your daily cognitive strain allocation go to waste - that is, simply not using your brain.

“To be sure,” said Canby; “you’re on the Island of Conclusions. Make yourself at home. You’re apt to be here for some time.”

“But how did we get here?” asked Milo, who was still a bit puzzled by being there at all.

“You jumped, of course,” explained Canby. “That’s the way most everyone gets here. It’s really quite simple: every time you decide something without having a good reason, you jump to Conclusions whether you like it or not. It’s such an easy trip to make that I’ve been here hundreds of times.”…

“The only way back is to swim, and that’s a very long and a very hard way.”…

“I don’t like to get wet,” moaned the unhappy bug, and he shuddered at the thought.

“Neither do they,” said Canby sadly. “That’s what keeps them here. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it, for you can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do.”

Especially in the age of appeal-to-authority and “fact-checking”, people like to lord over knowledge without actually knowing what they’re talking about. This ranges from “believe science” fanatics to “GME market QQQanon” conspiracy theories. I certainly have a lot of opinions myself on things I know very little about, but there is a difference between assuming something is true and intuitively making an initial “best guess”. Too often, questioning things and searching for nuance is condescendingly called “enlightened centrism” or “both-sides’ing” as societal thought correlates more and more. Instead of having a low bias/high variance regime of thinking, people are generally more addicted to lording over people and outright dismissing the fact that other perspectives exist. “Staying informed” does mean that you are skeptical and “both-sides’ing”, but how you learn is through a low bias towards your own viewpoint as you try and get closer to the truth. It’s better to be lost in the Sea of Knowledge rather than spending all your time jumping to Conclusions.

“And, in the very room in which he sat, there were books that could take you anywhere, and things to invent, and make, and build, and break, and all the puzzle and excitement of everything he didn’t know—music to play, songs to sing, and worlds to imagine and then someday make real. His thoughts darted eagerly about as everything looked new—and worth trying.

“Well, I would like to make another trip,” he said, jumping to his feet; “but I really don’t know when I’ll have the time. There’s just so much to do right here.”

While human beings are innately great at specializing (the whole “RPG assign your skill points system” is far more accurate than one would initially think), markets are where generalists turn the tide. The system is too vast and tied together to ever dismiss anything outright. Every lens possible - macro view, stat arb, liquidity, fundamental analysis, technical analysis, whatever - when looked at with low bias to incorporate into your purview can only improve your ability to assess. In a broader sense, no matter the field, there is always something to learn. After all, quantitative finance is pretty much an endless cycle of “take modeling from a different field and throw it into markets”. This is also why I dislike the mentality of “STEM superiority”, or the viewpoint that fiction isn’t worth reading. Nonfiction can teach you facts, fiction teaches you perspective. To arbitrarily section off which fields you think are worth looking at or not worth your time, or arbitrarily define swathes of literature as worth reading or not, is to allow other people to define your self improvement. And what’s the fun in that?

It’s odd to label a book as formative when it comes to you at such a young age, but it encompasses the essence of the anti-boredom, always learning mindset that is wholly imbued in my own mentality. Truly, I cannot think of a more important book to me that I’ve ever read (other than maybe Trading and Exchanges, as I happen to bring it up like 20 times a week). Rest in peace, Norton Juster.