Culture – Abnormal Capitalist

The Asymmetric Returns of Sowing: Van Gogh, Daily Habits, and the Law of the Harvest

Out in my garden in the Parisian suburb, tending to the in-ground plants and flowers, the reality of growth is always inescapable: it is quiet, it is slow, and it demands absolute consistency. Watering the earth over a weekend doesn’t yield a sudden, miraculous bloom by Monday. Growth operates on its own stubborn timeline, requiring a profound trust in the unseen. This intrinsic law of nature is something we intuitively understand when our hands are in the dirt, yet we routinely forget it when it comes to building our own lives, character, and capital.

Vincent van Gogh captured the brutal, beautiful essence of this delayed gratification in his 1888 painting, The Sower. Against a sprawling, luminous, almost overwhelming sun, a solitary figure strides across a plowed field, casting seeds into the earth. The sower isn’t looking at a harvest; his eyes are on the mud. The painting doesn’t romanticize the reward, but rather elevates the routine itself. Sowing is an act of profound faith and deliberate, repetitive action. The sower is trading today’s energy for tomorrow’s potential, acting as an investor in a future he cannot yet see.

This agricultural reality mirrors an immutable spiritual and practical law. In his message The Power of Your Daily Routine, Pastor Craig Groeschel breaks down the architecture of our habits through the biblical principle of sowing and reaping, anchored in the Book of Galatians. By examining the spiritual physics of the harvest, we uncover the true engines behind any outsized success—and the agonizing mechanics of rebuilding a life.

First, you reap exactly what you sow. The input strictly dictates the output. The Apostle Paul writes in Galatians 6:7, “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.” I know this not just as an abstract theory, but as a lived, painful reality. There were seasons of my life where my daily routines were wired for escape rather than endurance. I was consistently sowing the wrong things, trading my long-term baseline for short-term relief. I learned the hard way that you cannot plant seeds of self-destruction and expect to harvest peace, clarity, or prosperity. The earth, much like God’s divine order, returns exactly the nature of what it is given.

Second, you reap more than you sow. This is the principle of asymmetric, abnormal returns. A single seed does not yield a single seed; it produces a stalk bearing dozens. Jesus spoke of this exponential multiplier in Mark 4:8, describing seed that fell on good soil: “It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.” In finance, we call this compound interest. In life, it’s the exponential power of atomic habits.

I have felt the crushing, suffocating weight of negative compounding firsthand. A single destructive habit doesn’t stay isolated; it multiplies, demanding more and more of your life until you are entirely bankrupt. But the beautiful, redeeming flip side is equally true. When you finally change the seed, the positive compounding begins. The daily reading of a few pages, the quiet refusal to give in to an old impulse, or the simple act of showing up compounds into a harvest that vastly outweighs the grueling daily cost of the transition.

Finally, you reap after you sow. This is the holding period, and it is the most dangerous phase of any turnaround. There is a necessary, intensely frustrating gap between the effort and the outcome. When you are desperately trying to break a dark cycle and wire a new way of living, the delay between your effort and your result is agonizing. You walk out under the blazing sun, make the hard, right choices day after day, and your field still looks entirely barren. The mental and physical toll of the waiting period screams at you to give up and return to what is easy.

It is here that Galatians 6:9 provides the ultimate mandate for the sower: “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Our culture demands immediate dividends, but real change, true wealth, and deep, lasting recovery are formed entirely in the waiting.

Building abnormal capital—whether financial, intellectual, or spiritual—requires us to fall in love with the routine of the sower. We have to learn to find deep, abiding meaning in the mundane, difficult act of casting the right seed, trusting that if we master our daily habits and refuse to grow weary, the harvest is already guaranteed.

40 Years Later: Sade, “Promise”

But then, wrapped around the constant hum of this existing tension, is an album that isn’t necessarily about love, or even about surrender, but about giving your heart over, repeatedly, and enduring the failures that come with the exchange.

• • •

Time has stopped, and the world where loss has taken on a new and different shape has to begin. The song ends on a fade-out, a repetition that grows smaller, and smaller, and then gone. This revelation, too, isn’t for you, even if you need to hear it. Even if you need the reminder that it’s still worth running after the possibility of love. It’s still worth imagining that someone could love you. They may love you and later leave you. They may love you and then die, or you may die. You may hold their hands in a gray and unromantic hospital room, and then they’ll be gone. But at least, for a little while, you had hands for reaching, and hands that reached back.

→ Longreads

Akira Toriyama, Creator of ‘Dragon Ball,’ Dies at 68

As far as I can remember, every kids I know of started drawing by sketching Dragon Ball characters—somewhere at home or at school—out of boredom for our mortal world. And so did I and so did my nephews…

さようなら, l’artiste.

The only relevant piece I could find on the man and his creation, from Writers Write :

Toriyama’s world lives and dies on a sense of fun and a welling up of adventurous spirit. The artwork feels effortless yet controlled. The story feels like an unfolding mystery that could go on forever.

Toriyama thrives on chaos. His world is so random and colourful. It contains elements of magic science and religion that should not go together. However, the light-hearted nature of that reality allows it all to blend together into a seamless free flowing narrative.

• • •

Not to delve into Roland Barthes’ Death Of The Author, but Toriyama’s indifference to meaning and story really created a world that people could project their own fantasies onto.

Very much like Star Wars, Dragon Ball is a place that you could see yourself living in. Apart from the various universe ending threats that always seem to get dealt with just in time, it seems almost like a utopia.

→ The New York Times

The $40-Million Elbow

Brett Ratner for Vogue Hommes International, 2005

Wynn turned around again. He put his pinkie in the hole and observed that a flap of canvas had been pushed back. He told his guests, “Well, I’m glad I did it and not you.” He said that he’d have to call Cohen and William Acquavella, his dealer in New York, to tell them that the deal was off. Then he resumed talking about his paintings, almost, but not quite, as though he hadn’t just delivered what one of the guests would later call, in an impromptu stab at actuarial math, a “forty-million-dollar elbow.”

A few hours later, they all met for dinner, and Wynn was in a cheerful mood. “My feeling was, It’s a picture, it’s my picture, we’ll fix it. Nobody got sick or died. It’s a picture. It took Picasso five hours to paint it.” Mary Boies ordered a six-litre bottle of Bordeaux, and when it was empty she had everyone sign the label, to commemorate the calamitous afternoon. Wynn signed it “Mary, it’s all about scale—Steve.” Everyone had agreed to take what one participant called a “vow of silence.”

And a similar story on fixing a Monet on Hyperallergic.

→ The New Yorker

The Gospel of Jodeci

Perverse? Yes. Blasphemous? Maybe. But not irreconcilable. To contemplate the meaning of Jodeci is to grasp at the intersection of religion and excess, of devotion and abandon, of agape and eros—a space where holiness and hedonism coincide. Sacred and erotic poetry, after all, are not dichotomous, but rather the most intimate and ancient of bedfellows, from Sufi mysticism to Ovidian elegy. The meme may be “If the Love Doesn’t Feel Like ’90s R&B I Don’t Want It,” but literary history knows that Jodeci’s ars amatoria continues a millennia-old poetic program that welds the object of affection to something of the divine, a slippage between the beloved and the god, which the poet-scholar L. Lamar Wilson describes as “sacrilegion,” a never-ending hunger for the unattainable object of erotic perfection.

→ Oxford American