Peeling an orange in one piece is not a superpower—it’s OCD.

Or is it?

I enjoy an orange daily. As such, I get plenty of practice in peeling them more and more efficiently.

More days than not, I am successful in getting the peel off in one piece.

So, why does this resonate with me today? I’m glad you are curious...

I’ve been reading the book Antifragile, and within its pages, he blasts that as a society we have become averse to putting in the work. To putting in the practice.

In this “information” age, we are surrounded by advice. The Internet is vast library of accounts from people who have done all of the work and practice before us. Why reinvent the wheel, right?

Yet something is lost when we give up our natural curiosity of “how things work.” We just want it fixed, but trial and error potentially takes too long... so just look up how this jackass did it.

Oh, did I mention how much BAD information is online? How does one sort the good information from the bad? We don’t know that this guy didn’t actually fuck up his iPhone by drilling a headphone jack into the place it used to reside...

When I was a boy, I used to be plagued by dead batteries in my Walkman. You see, I’d take the headphones off, but I’d fail to hit stop, so it would play the cassette, flip sides, play the cassette, flip sides, and so on... until the batteries were exhausted.

So, I decided I needed a visual cue that the Walkman was still running. There was an LED light that was used to show the FM broadcast it was receiving was in stereo...

I took the Walkman apart, and decided to multi-purpose that light. I found a spot on the board that was only hot when the cassette deck was running, and jumped it to the light. I put it all back together, crossed my fingers, hit play, and HOLY SHIT, it worked! As designed.

At some point, a friend introduced me to the almighty Internet... and my innocence slowly trickled away.

Someone else has done it. Why reinvent the wheel?

This is how academics think. This is why we read how to do things... or watch videos on how to do things... yet frequently don’t do the thing we “learned” how to do.

Of course, reading isn’t a bad thing. But the more I read, the more I realize that, while knowledge may come from books, wisdom does not.