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Pitching Nirvana

Thanks to everyone for the amazing response to the Times essay and my subsequent post. Clearly, there is some serious pent-up interest out there in these kinds of tools. I’ve received so many…

This week’s edition of the Times Book Review features an essay that I wrote about the research system I’ve used for the past few years: a tool for exploring the couple thousand notes and quotations…

If you view knowledge for its utility, you will never fully appreciate it.

The definitive guide to the dollar cost averaging vs. lump sum decision.

Untangling my task and project management approach, at last.

What is the optimal amount of wealth?

This is an internet re-post of a piece by Bryan Goldberg that is no longer available online. - by Bryan Goldberg About a year ago, my sales operations

Are you curious about how curation really works?

A question to help you avoid accepting invitations you’ll later regret.

Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling. By definition, you can’t control or manage an unraveling. You can’t cure the midlife unraveling with control any more than the acquisitions, accomplishments, and alpha-parenting of our thirties cured our deep longing for permission to slow down and be imperfect...

When I was a teenager, I’d play bass in bands, sing horribly and toy with the idea of being a songwriter. This is a letter I wish somebody had written to me when I was 17. Strive to be prolific. Notice I didn’t say ‘aim to be great,’ or ‘just…

John D. Rockefeller was the most successful businessman of all time. He was also a recluse, spending most of his time by himself. He rarely spoke, deliberately making himself inaccessible and staying quiet when you caught his attention. A refinery worker who occasionally had Rockefeller’s ear once remarked: “He lets everybody else talk, while he sits back and says nothing. But he seems to remember everything, and when he does begin he puts everything in its proper place.” When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem: A wise old owl lived in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard, Why aren’t we all like that old bird? Rockefeller was a strange guy. But the more I read about him the more I realize he figured out something that now applies to tens of millions of workers. Rockefeller’s job wasn’t to drill wells, load trains, or move barrels. It was to make good decisions. And making decisions requires, more than anything, quiet time alone in your own head to think a problem through. Rockefeller’s product – his deliverable – wasn’t what he did with this hands, or even his words. It was what he figured out inside his head. So that’s where he spent most of his time and energy. This was unique in his day. Almost all jobs during Rockefeller’s time required doing things with your hands. In 1870, 46% of jobs were in agriculture, and 35% were in crafts or manufacturing, according to economist Robert Gordon. Few professions relied on a worker’s brain. You didn’t think; you labored, without interruption, and your work was visible and tangible. Today, that’s flipped. Thirty-eight percent of jobs are now designated as “managers, officials, and professionals.” These are decision-making jobs. Another 41% are service jobs that often rely on your thoughts as much as your actions. Here’s a problem we don’t think about enough: Even as more professions look like Rockefeller’s – thought jobs that require quiet time to think a problem through – we’re stuck in the old world where a good employee is expected to labor, visibly and without interruption. The point is that productive work today does not look like productive work did for most of history. If your job was to pull a lever, you were only productive if you were pulling the lever. But if your job is to create a marketing campaign, you might be productive sitting quietly with your eyes closed, thinking about design. The problem is that too many workplaces expect their knowledge workers to pull the proverbial lever – today in Microsoft Office form – 40+ hours a week when they’d be better off doing things that look lazy but are actually productive. The result is that most people have thought jobs without being given much time to think, which is the equivalent of making a ditch-digger work without a shovel. Maybe this is why productivity growth is half of what it used to be. If you anchor to the old world where good work meant physical action, it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that the most productive use of a knowledge-worker’s time could be sitting on a couch thinking. But it’s so clear that it is. Good ideas rarely come in meetings, or even at your desk. They come to you in the shower. On a walk. On your commute, or hanging out on the weekend. I’m always amazed at the number of famous ideas that came to people in the bathtub. But tell your boss you require a mid-day soak, and the response is entirely predictable. Look at famous thinkers who didn’t have to impress anyone by looking busy, and you see a theme: They spent a lot of time doing stuff that didn’t look like work, but in fact was stupendously productive. Albert Einstein put it this way: I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination. Mozart felt the same way: When I am traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep–it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Bill Gates got his best work done on what looked like vacation: “Hi, thanks for coming,” said Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, appearing eager for company after four days alone at the waterfront cottage. He was there for his “Think Week,” a seven-day stretch of seclusion he uses to ponder the future of technology and then propagate those thoughts across the Microsoft empire. This meshes with a Stanford study that showed walking increases creativity by 60%. Everyone eventually has to sit down and produce their work, and are held to goals and quotas. But as the economy shifts to knowledge work, we should respect that what actually produces good work can at first look lazy, and (even more so) vice versa. In investing, where there’s the potential to win by pure luck, it’s wise to judge someone by their process, rather than their outcome. Work may be the opposite. Judge people by their outcomes, not by the visibility of their process, which is often hidden inside their head.

Insurance for your mind.

Deliberate practice is the key to expert performance in writing, teaching, sports, programming, music, medicine, therapy, chess, business, and more. But there’s more to it than 10,000 hours. Read to learn how to accelerate learning, overcome plateaus, turn experience into expertise, and enhance focus.

The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of "Writer's Block"

The jazz guitarist's amazing pre- and post-show routine—plus, a request for your patronage!

Nat Eliason's Monday Medley Newsletter for Apr 18, 2022

173 votes and 67 comments so far on Reddit

Everything happens in cycles. You never know when opportunity comes knocking at your door. Showing up every day helps you to be ready.

You might have a list of them. In fact, many of us do, and consult it quite often. The list is defective for a number of reasons: It’s not accurate. There are things that aren’t right i…

Commoditizing tweets’ complement (the algorithm) will increase usage and rebuild trust

How I made $357 today on walks with my family

One hundred billion people have walked this planet. Nearly eight billion of them are alive today. Each has a story, few have a microphone. Each has seen something different and thought something unique. Most know something you can’t fathom, and you have experienced stuff they wouldn’t believe. But so many behaviors are universal across generations and geographies. Circumstances change, but people’s reactions don’t. Technologies evolve, but insecurities, blind spots, and gullibility rarely does. This article describes 17 of what I think are the most common and influential aspects of how people think. It’s a long post, but each point can be read individually. Skip the ones you don’t agree with and reread the ones you do – that itself is a common way people think. 1. Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking. Tribes are everywhere – countries, states, parties, companies, industries, departments, investment styles, economic philosophies, religions, families, schools, majors, credentials. Everyone loves their tribe because there’s comfort in knowing other people who understand your background and share your goals. But tribes have their own rules, beliefs, and ideas. Some of them you might disagree with; some are even abjectly terrible. Yet they remain supported because no one wants to risk being shunned by a tribe that’s become part of their identity. So people either willingly nod along with bad ideas, or become blinded by tribal loyalty at how bad the ideas are to begin with. 2. What people present to the world is a tiny fraction of what’s going on inside their head. The Library of Congress holds three million books, or something like a quarter of a trillion words. All of the information accessible on the internet is estimated at 40 trillion gigabytes, which is roughly enough to hold a high-def video lasting the entire 14 billion years since the big bang. So much of history has been recorded. But then you remember, that’s just what’s been publicly shared, recorded, and published. It’s a trivial amount of what’s actually happened, and an infinitesimal amount of what’s gone through people’s heads. As much as we know about how crazy, weird, talented, and insightful people can be, we are blind to perhaps 99.99999999% of it. The most prolific over-sharers disclose maybe a thousandth of one percent of what they’ve been through and what they’re thinking. One thing this does is gives a false view of success. Most of what people share is what they want you to see. Skills are advertised, flaws are hidden. Wins are exaggerated, losses are downplayed. Doubt and anxiety are rarely shared on social media. Defeated soldiers and failed CEOs rarely sit for interviews. Most things are harder than they look and not as fun as they seem because the information we’re exposed to tends to be a highlight reel of what people want you to know about themselves to increase their own chances of success. It’s easiest to convince people that you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you’re not. When you are keenly aware of your own struggles but blind to others’, it’s easy to assume you’re missing some skill or secret that others have. Sometimes that’s true. More often you’re just blind to how much everyone else is making it up as they go, one challenge at a time. 3. Prediction is about probability and putting the odds of success in your favor. But observers mostly judge you in binary terms, right or wrong. There’s a scene in the movie Zero Dark Thirty where the CIA director questions an analyst team who claim to have located Osama Bin Laden. “I’m about to go look the president in the eye,” he says. “And what I’d like to know, no bullshit, very simply, is he there, or is he not f*cking there?” The team’s leader says there’s a 60% to 80% chance Bin Laden is in the compound. “Is that a yes or a no?” the director asks. A young analyst jumps in. “One hundred percent chance he’s there,” she says. Everyone is stunned. “OK fine, 95%, because I know certainty freaks you guys out. But it’s 100%.” It’s a good example of how uncomfortable probability can be. The idea that something can be likely and not happen, or unlikely and still happen, is one of the world’s most important tricks. Most people get that certainty is rare, and the best you can do is make decisions where the odds are in your favor. They understand you can be smart and end up wrong, or dumb and end up right, because that’s how luck and risk work. But almost no one actually uses probability in the real world, especially when judging others’ success. Most of what people care about is, “Were you right or wrong?” Probability is about nuance and gradation. But in the real world people pay attention to black and white. If you said something will happen and it happens, you were right. If you said it will happen and it doesn’t, you’re wrong. That’s how people think, because it requires the least amount of effort. It’s hard to convince others – or yourself – that there could have been an alternative outcome when there’s a real-world outcome sitting in front of you. The core here is that people think they want an accurate view of the future, but what they really crave is certainty. It’s normal to want to rid yourself of the painful reality of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Someone who tells you there’s a 60% chance of a recession happening doesn’t do much to erase that pain. They might be adding to it. But someone who says, “There is going to be a recession this year,” offers something to grab onto with both hands that feels like taking control of your future. After the Bin Laden raid, President Obama later said the odds placed on whether Bin Laden was actually in the target house were 50/50. A few years ago I heard one of the SEALS involved in the mission speak at a conference. He said, regardless of whether Bin Laden was in the house, the team felt the odds they’d all be killed in the mission were also 50/50. So here we have a 75% chance that the raid would have ended in disappointment or catastrophe. It didn’t – but that alternative outcome isn’t a world many pay much attention to. 4. We are extrapolating machines in a world where nothing too good or too bad lasts indefinitely. When you’re in the middle of a powerful trend it’s difficult to imagine a force strong enough to turn things the other way. What we tend to miss is that what turns trends around usually isn’t an outside force. It’s when a subtle side effect of that trend erodes what made it powerful to begin with. When there are no recessions, people get confident. When they get confident they take risks. When they take risks, you get recessions. When markets never crash, valuations go up. When valuations go up, markets are prone to crash. When there’s a crisis, people get motivated. When they get motivated they frantically solve problems. When they solve problems crises tend to end. Good times plant the seeds of their destruction through complacency and leverage, and bad times plant the seeds of their turnaround through opportunity and panic-driven problem-solving. We know that in hindsight. It’s almost always true, almost everywhere. But we tend to only know it in hindsight because we are extrapolating machines, and drawing straight lines when forecasting is easier than imagining how people might adapt and change their behavior. When alcohol from fermentation reaches a certain point it kills the yeast that made it in the first place. Most powerful trends end the same way. And that kind of force isn’t intuitive, requiring you to consider not just how a trend impacts people, but how that impact will change people’s behavior in a way that could end the trend. 5. There are limits to our sanity. Optimism and pessimism always overshoot because the only way to know the boundaries of either is to go a little bit past them. Jerry Seinfeld had the most popular show on TV. Then he quit. He later said he killed his show while it was thriving because the only way to identify the top is to experience the decline, which he had no interest in. Maybe the show could keep rising, maybe it couldn’t. He was fine not knowing the answer. If you want to know why there’s a long history of the world blowing past the boundaries of sanity, bouncing from boom to bust, absurdity to absurdity, it’s because so few people have Jerry’s mentality. Opportunity is scarce and people don’t want to leave any on the table. So they insist on knowing where the top is. Most things in the world are a mix of facts and emotions. How much steel can this factory produce (a fact), and what are investors willing to pay for that output (an emotion). The important thing is that emotions aren’t something you can predict with a formula. What is bitcoin worth? How high can Tesla go? How much crazier can politics get before voters revolt? The only way to answer those questions is to know what kinds of moods people will be in in the future – how optimistic they’ll feel, what they’ll want to believe, and how persuasive storytellers are. Which is impossible to know. I don’t know what kind of mood I’ll be in tonight, let alone how a bunch of strangers will feel years in the future. The only way to find the limits of people’s moods – the only way to find the top – is to keep pushing until we’ve gone too far, when we can look back and say, “Ah, I guess that was the limit.” It’s tempting to watch things go from boom to bust and think, “Why are people doing this? Are they crazy?” Probably not. They’re just rationally looking for the limits of what everyone else can handle. 6. Ignoring that people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like. A recent profile of Eliud Kipchoge, the world’s best marathon runner, wrote: Cramped in a dull room with hours to kill, the Olympic medallists did what most would do: they opened their phones, logged into wifi, a

Learn how to create an eBook and sell it online. In this article, we cover all you need to know, from the basics to getting paid, and more!

A comprehensive guide on digital product ideas and examples. We also cover the basics of digital products, the benefits, what to sell, and much more.