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The outline method is one of the most common, but still one of the best note-taking methods. It reduces editing and reviewing time of your notes. We explain how it works and discuss it’s pros & cons.

Thread by @G_S_Bhogal: My peoples, the time has come for a MEGATHREAD. In 40 tweets I will explain another 40 concepts you should know. Strap in. Here we go: Abstraction: There are scales of explanation. A human...…

Bayes' theorem is heavily used in machine learning, AI, statistics, and other areas. But it's also a useful tool to lead a more rational life.

The biggest takeaway from history is that the characters change but their behaviors don’t. The technologies, trends, tragedies and winners – the events that take place – are always in flux and can be nearly impossible to predict. But the behaviors that drive people into action, influence their thoughts and guide their beliefs, are stable. They’re the same today as they were 100 years ago and will be 100 years from now. Markets change, but greed and fear never do. Industries change, but ambition and complacency don’t. Laws change, but the tribal instincts of politics don’t. My deepest forecasting belief is that you can better understand the future if you focus on the behaviors that never change instead of the events that might. And those behaviors have a common denominator: They follow the path of least resistance of people trying to simplify a complex world into a few stories that make sense and make them feel good about themselves. Simple stories, feel-good stories. Those are some of history’s most seductive beliefs, and they always will be. A few that stick out: 1. An illusion that other people’s bad circumstances couldn’t also happen to you. Most of history is slow progress amid constant bad news and occasional terrible news. A seductive story when hearing about tragedy is to believe this awful thing happened to this person, company, or nation, but it almost certainly couldn’t happen to me. And you may be right about that. Your country may be more stable than the one that collapsed, your business may be stronger than the one that went bankrupt, and your health may be better than the person diagnosed with cancer. The problem is that people don’t like to think in probabilities; it’s so much easier to think about risk as black or white, it will happen or it won’t. So rather than thinking your business has a 10% chance of failure, it’s easier to think that what happened to Sears and Lehman Brothers could never happen to you. Before 2008 you didn’t think there’s a 5% chance of a banking collapse in America; you just looked at what had been happening in Latin America for decades and thought, “that can’t happen here.” Most of the world didn’t look at Wuhan China last February and think, “there’s a 25% chance that this is our future.” You thought, “I can’t even imagine my town being on lockdown.” Couldn’t even fathom it happening here. That was easier to understand and made you feel better. When you go through life thinking low-probability events are zero-probability events, you’re bound to get stuck in an illusion that what happened to someone else couldn’t also happen to you. That’s especially true when you add up the low odds of lots of unfortunate events. If next year there’s a 1% chance of a new disastrous pandemic, a 1% chance of a crippling depression, a 1% chance of a catastrophic flood, a 1% chance of political collapse, and on and on, then the odds that something bad will happen next year – or any year – are … pretty good. “History is just one damn thing after another” the saying goes. A few years ago I interviewed Yale economist Robert Shiller. He talked about the possibility – not quite a forecast – that home prices could decline adjusted for inflation for a decade or longer. I asked him why he thought that, or how it could happen. “Well, it happened before,” he said. Real home prices fell for most of the 20th century. “So of course it could happen again,” even if it seems crazy. 2. Imagining an unrealistic world where progress and success don’t demand a fee, and a belief that hassle, nonsense, disagreement and uncertainty are bugs rather than a cost of admission to getting ahead. Jeff Bezos recently talked about the realities of loving your job: If you can get your work life to where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing. Very few people ever achieve that. Because the truth is, everything comes with overhead. That’s reality. Everything comes with pieces that you don’t like. You can be a Supreme Court Justice and there’s still going to be pieces of your job you don’t like. You can be a university professor and you still have to go to committee meetings. Every job comes with pieces you don’t like. And we need to say: That’s part of it. That’s part of it. It’s part of everything. His advice applies to so much more than careers. A simple rule that’s obvious but easy to ignore is that nothing worth pursuing is free. How could it be otherwise? Everything has a price, and the price is usually proportionate to the potential rewards. But the price is rarely on a price tag. You don’t pay it with cash. Most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress, doubt, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other peoples’ conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, and general bullshit. That’s the overhead cost of getting ahead. A lot of times that price is worth paying. But you have to realize it’s a price that must be paid. There are few coupons and sales are rare. A seductive belief throughout history is people expecting an idealized world where you demand perfection and assume that having little tolerance for error, variability, and disagreement is an asset. It’s a simple story, and it feels good. I wish it were true. But it’s so at odds with reality that it leads to people never achieving what they want because they’re unwilling to pay the required price, and over-idolizing those whose success was harder than it looks and not as fun as it seems. 3. An assumption that your view of the world is the view of the world, and a belief that what you’ve seen and experienced are the sights and experiences that explain how the world works. Harry Truman once said: The next generation never learns anything from the previous one until it’s brought home with a hammer … I’ve wondered why the next generation can’t profit from the generation before, but they never do until they get knocked in the head by experience. Here’s at least one reason why: No lesson is more persuasive than the one you’ve personally experienced. You can try to be empathetic and open-minded to other people’s lives, but when you’re trying to figure out how the world works nothing makes more sense than the unique circumstances of what you’ve lived through firsthand. And the idea that you’ve never seen or experienced 99.999% of what’s happened in the world is hard to swallow because it’s intimidating to admit how little you know. A more comforting story is convincing yourself that what you’ve experienced is the story of how the world works. This is how your career went, so that’s how economics works. These policies benefited you, so this is how politics works. You think what you’ve seen is a reflection of how the world works. What could be more seductive? Yet given how oblivious everyone is to the majority of experiences, what could be more wrong? So everyone goes through life a little blind to the lessons that have already been learned by other people. And it goes well beyond generations: There are massive experience gaps between different nations, socioeconomic classes, races, industries, religions, educations, on and on. The person who grew up in poverty thinks about risk and reward in ways the child of a wealthy banker cannot fathom if he tried. The person who grew up when inflation was high is scared in a way the person who grew up with stable prices isn’t. The stockbroker who lost everything during the Great Depression experienced something the tech worker basking in the glory of the late 1990s can’t imagine. The Australian who went 30 years without a recession has experienced something no American ever has. It leads to all kinds of issues. One is that we’re constantly surprised by events that have been happening forever. Another is that it’s hard to distinguish people who have experienced something you haven’t from people who aren’t smart enough to understand your experiences. A third is that topics like risk, greed, and fear are not the kinds of things that we can learn about and master as a society, like we did with, say, agriculture. As Michael Batnick says, “some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.” Every generation has to learn on its own, over and over. The question, “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers. But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that would make you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?” 4. An assumption that history is a guide to the future and that things will continue working as they did in the past. A $45 million dam in Colorado designed to prevent flooding turned out to not really be needed because the river it blocked slowed to a trickle. In Rotterdam, the opposite: A dam needs to be replaced a quarter-century sooner than once estimated because it’s under unprecedented stress. Journalist Shayla Love explained the common denominator: Stationarity is the idea that, statistically, the past can help you predict and plan for the future—that the variations in climate, water flow, temperature, and storm severity have remained and will remain stationary, or constant. Nearly all the infrastructure decisions with which we live have been made with the assumption of stationarity. Engineers make choices about stormwater drainage pipes based on past data of inches of rain. Bridge engineers design foundations that can withstand a certain intensity of water flow based on the severity a certain location has experienced in the past. Reservoirs are designed to hold water based on historical information about water flow, and the historical water needs of a community. A seductive belief that exists in almost every field is that things will keep operating like they always have. It’s an almost necessary belief in a world where you have to base a prediction off something. But as Stanford professor Scott Sagan says, “things that have never happened before happen all the time.” All the tim

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I’ve been publishing controversial thoughts, essays, books and software for half my life. It has endowed me with a thick skin to repel the haters, and kept me going whatever they said. But after close to two decades of having my work often judged favorably, I’m still no better at dealing with gestures of adoration. In fact, I think it’...

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Yesterday, I announced on Instagram that my newest book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, is available for preorder. It will be my 12th book in 10 years, and so there were a bunch of comments from people who wondered how I was able to get another one done so quickly.  How do you write books faster than I read them?  What’s your secret to writing so many books?  The answer is that I have a system, a process that helps me be productive. It’s not my system exactly, as I’ve taken many strategies from the greatest writers to ever do it. Although I talk about the creative process at length in my book Perennial Seller (which for some reason is currently $1.99 everywhere you get your ebooks), I thought I would detail some of my rules that I follow as a writer. I think they can help anyone be more productive.  [1] Read. Read. Read.  A book is made of books. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book,” Samuel Johnson said. As I was putting together the bibliography for Courage, I counted something like 300 books I was directly sourcing from.  [2] Always be researching The bulk of the work is researching—collecting stories, anecdotes, and data to marshal your argument. The writing is stringing those pieces together. I’ve found stuff I’ve used in in-flight magazines, discovered snippets on social media, even heard things mentioned on TV. As Shelby Foote put it in an interview with The Paris Review: “I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.” [3] Put good advice where you work Print and put a couple of important quotes up on the wall to help guide you (either generally, or for a specific project). When I was working on Ego is the Enemy, I had this quote from Machiavelli on the wall to inspire its style and ethos: “I have not adorned this work with fine phrases, with swelling, pompous words, or with any of those blandishments or external ornaments with which many set forth and decorate their matter. For I have chosen either that nothing at all should bring it honor or that the variety of its material and the gravity of its subject matter alone should make it welcome.” I have another quote that I put up for this book from Martha Graham: “Never be afraid of the material. The material knows when you’re frightened and will not help.” [4] Make commitments I turn in a book proposal for my next book before my latest one comes out. When I have a commitment that I know I have to meet, Resistance doesn’t have the time or space to creep in. Right now I am on a book year path for the next four years. It keeps me honest and keeps me working. Meet deadline, or death.  [5] Work with great people Success requires greater investment in the creative process. Pay for professional help. There’s that saying: if you think pros are expensive, try hiring an amateur.  [6] Have something to say “To have something to say,” Schopenhauer said, “by itself is virtually a sufficient condition for good style.” [7] Have a model in mind Thucydides had Herodotus. Gibbon had Thucydides. Shelby Foote had Gibbon. Every playwright since Shakespeare has had Shakespeare. Everyone has a master to learn from. For me, it’s been Robert Greene [8] Know where you’re going You don’t “find the book as you write.” You have to do the hard work of solving the problem first. You have to figure out the best route, too. One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got was to–before I started the process–articulate the idea in one sentence, one paragraph and one page. This crystallizes the idea for you and guides you—Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile that every sentence in the book was a “derivation, an application or an interpretation of the short maxim” he opened with.  [9] Focus on What You Control As Epictetus says, there’s some stuff that’s up to us, some stuff that’s not. The work is up to you. Everything else is not. If you’re in this for external rewards, god help you. A Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by publishers. After the author’s suicide, it won the Pulitzer. People don’t know shit. YOU know. So love it while you’re doing it. Success can only be extra. [10] Embrace draw-down periods You need what the strategist and theorist John Boyd called the “draw-down period.” Take a break right before you start. To think, to reflect, to let things settle. I started Courage is Calling on my birthday, but not before I took an extended period of just thinking.  [11] Listen to the same song on repeat I’ve found that picking one song—usually something I am not proud to say I am listening to—and listening to it on repeat, over and over and over again is the best way to get into a rhythm and flow. It not only shuts out outside noise but also parts of my conscious mind I don’t need to hear from while I’m writing.  [12] Make little progress each day One of the best rules I’ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” It’s by carving out a small win each and every day—getting words on the page—that a book is created. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right (I actually have that on my wall as a reminder).  [13] Don’t let the tools distract you  Great artists work. Mediocre artists talk a lot about tools. Software does not make you a better writer. If classics were created with quill and ink, you’ll probably be fine with a Word Document. Or a blank piece of paper. Don’t let [...]