Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid. When one need is fulfilled a person seeks to fulifil the next one, and so on. Every person is capable and has the desire to move up the hierarchy toward a level of self-actualization. Unfortunately, progress is often disrupted by failure to meet lower level needs.
Photo by Stas Knop on Pexels.com A troll on Reddit[1. Can you believe such a thing?] had a post in r/books that berated anyone who considered listening to an audiobook “reading.” Their …
Here are the best books to help you build a personal knowledge management system. From atomic notes to Zettelkasten, these books will teach you how to build a digital note taking system.
Listen now (8 min) | If you are not a subscriber of The Pomp Letter, join 215,000 other investors who read my personal opinion on finance, technology, and bitcoin each morning. To investors, Algorithmic stablecoins elicit intellectual curiosity from people across disciplines. Whether you are coming from the technology industry, finance, or academia, creating a digital currency that holds stable value without being pegged to another asset is a fascinating problem. The value of this type of asset is obvious, but no one has been able to figure it out.
You probably need to do fewer things right now. Prioritization, the other definition There’s two loose definitions of prioritization. Prioritization(1): Ordering a todo list. You make a giant list of things you could do, things you should do, things you’d like to do… and then you put a unique number...
The Imperfectionist: 3/3/3, a method for structuring the day
3/3/3, a method for structuring the day Those of us who spend our working days doing things with computers and ideas and words (instead of, you know, actually building hou...
A few lines I came across recently that got me thinking: “It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.” – Nassim Taleb “Survival is the ultimate performance measure.” – Vicki TenHaken “Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history.” – Kelly Hayes “My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions.” – Naval Ravikant “I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.” – Jack Benny accepting a Emmy “Half the distinguishing qualities of the eminent are actually disadvantages.” – Paul Graham “It is difficult to remove by logic an idea not placed there by logic in the first place.” – Gordon Livingston “The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” - Richard Powers “Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity.” – Sebastian Junger “Technology finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.” – Jared Diamond “All behavior makes sense with enough information.” – My brother in law, a social worker “It’s very common to be utterly brilliant and still think you’re way smarter than you actually are.” – Munger “Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” – Sebastian Junger “Psychology is a theory of human behavior. Philosophy is an ideal of human behavior. History is a record of human behavior.” – Will Durant “No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.” – Kolossus “If something looks irrational – and has been so for a long time – odds are you have a wrong definition of rationality.” – Taleb “If you want these crazy ideas and these crazy stages, this crazy music, and this crazy way of thinking, there’s a chance it might come from a crazy person.” - Kanye West “I want to live in a way that if my life played out 1,000 times, Naval is successful 999 times. He’s not a billionaire, but he does pretty well each time. He may not have nailed life in every regard, but he sets up systems so he’s failed in very few places.” – Naval “Young brains are designed to explore; old brains are designed to exploit.” – Alison Gopnik “I learned early that people will admire your work more if they are not jealous of you.” – Benjamin Franklin “Show me a man who thinks he’s objective and I’ll show you a man who’s deceiving himself.” – Henry Luce “History as usually written is quite different from history as usually lived. The historian records the exceptional because it is interesting.” – Will Durant “The cure for imposter syndrome is to realize that all the other people are just convincing imposters, too.” – Alison Gopnik “Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society’s bad moods.” – Paul Graham “I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.” - Hans Rosling “The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” -Twain “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” – Amos Tversky “The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” – Niall Ferguson “If you can get your work life to where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing. Very few people ever achieve that.” - Bezos “Risk means more things can happen than will happen.” - Elroy Dimson Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works invariably evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.” “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” —Ralph Hodgson “No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.” – David McCullough “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.” —Richard Cavett “The most surprising thing I found about business was the large concern for finance and low concern for service.” – Henry Ford “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.” – Twain
In 2021 I began to dissect my lifelong problem of severe procrastination, instead of just wrestling with it. I used to see it as a simple character flaw, a ball and chain hanging from my wrist as I tried to fulfil life’s requirements. Now I think of my capacity for getting things done (or not) more as a semi-functional Rube
You Actually Should Do Something That Scares You Every Day - RyanHoliday.net
All the data about taking cold showers is bullshit to me. Sure, some research says that they can reduce anxiety, improve your immune system, increase metabolism to assist in weight loss, reduce the number of days you call out sick from work, and potentially even improve cancer survival. But I don’t care about any of that. The reason I interrupt my warm showers by cranking the knob to the side is far more simple, in fact it’s nearly tautological. I do it to do it. It’s making a statement about who is in charge. In one of his letters, Seneca describes himself as a “cold-water enthusiast.” He would “celebrate the new year by taking a plunge into the canal, who, just as naturally as I would set out to do some reading or writing, or to compose a speech, used to inaugurate the first of the year with a plunge into the Virgo aqueduct [present day Trevi Fountain].” But then he gives the real reason: “The body should be treated more rigorously that it may not be disobedient to the mind.” I think about that every morning just before I crank the knob. Who is in charge? The courageous side of me or the cowardly side? The side that doesn’t flinch at discomfort or the side that desires to always be comfortable? The side that does the hard thing or the side that takes the easy way? In a Sports Illustrated story by Greg Bishop about the Los Angeles Rams’ difficult path to becoming Super Bowl champions, we learn that Rams General Manager Les Snead is a cold-water enthusiast. “As Les Snead watched his grand football experiment unfold over the course of the 2021 season,” Bishop writes, “he decided that, starting on Jan. 1, he would borrow from the Roman philosopher Seneca and plunge into the Pacific Ocean. And he did that, every morning, every week, all the way until Super Bowl Sunday.” It wasn’t so he could improve his immune system to make it through the long season. It wasn’t to increase his metabolism. It wasn’t to reduce anxiety. Those things might have been nice ancillary benefits but they were not the point. The purpose was to become the kind of person that could do it—that could crank the handle or dive into the surf even though that’s almost certainly not going to be pleasant. Because that guy is also the guy who can trade a quarterback he just signed to an enormous contract. That guy is also the guy who can say ‘Fuck those draft picks’ even though everybody else in the NFL thinks that insane. As I write about in Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, we can’t just hope to be brave when it counts. Courage has to be cultivated. No athlete just expects to hit the game-winning shot—they practice it thousands of times. They take that shot in scrimmages, in pickup games, alone in the gym as they count down the clock in their head. You know there’s that cliché: Do one thing each day that scares you. It’s hokey but it’s actually not bad advice! How do you expect to do the big things that scare you—that scare others—if you haven’t practiced them? Why do you think you can endure the cold reception of a bold idea if you can’t even endure cold water? How can you trust that you’ll step forward when the stakes are high when you regularly don’t do that when the stakes are low? What gives you any confidence you’ll do the hard thing when people are watching if you can’t do that even when no one is watching? The person who does something scary every day is less fearful than someone who can’t. The person who does something difficult every day is tougher than someone who doesn’t. And life? Well life is scary and it is tough. There is nothing worth doing that isn’t. You need those traits…unless you plan to cower and hide or get really lucky. We treat the body rigorously to remind it who is in charge. We push ourselves in little ways so the big ways stop seeming quite so big, quite so out of character. We minimize fear by making the act of overcoming it routine. We test ourselves to prepare for the tests of life. Courage, self-control—all of the virtues are habits. They are superlatives paid for over the course of a life of virtuous decisions. They are not something you declare, like bankruptcy, they are something you earn, that become part of you. Just as a writer becomes one by writing—we build them by doing. By doing things like them. We can crank the knob in the shower to cold. We go for the run even though we’re tired. We pick up the phone and start the conversation we’ve been dreading. We agree to try what we have never tried before. We do something difficult, something scary, something good every day. We do it to do it. We do it because we’re in charge. We do it so we can do it when it counts. P.S. .S. Also I’m excited to announce we’re re-opening Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life. It’s a 14-day course designed to show people how to integrate philosophy into their everyday lives. Along with the 14 custom emails delivered daily (~20,000 words of exclusive content), there are 3 live video sessions—what we call office hours—with me where I’ll be taking all your questions about Stoicism. It’s one of my favorite things to get the chance to interact with everyone in the course—I would love to have you join us. You can learn more here! But it closes March 21 at Midnight so don’t wait. Tweet Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn
Steven Pressfield wrote for 30 years before publishing The Legend of Bagger Vance. His career leading up to then was bleak, at one point living in a halfway house because it had cheap rent. He once spoke about the people he met living there: The people in this halfway house, we used to hang out in the kitchen and talk all night long, were among the smartest people that I ever met and the funniest and the most interesting. And what I concluded from hanging out with them and from others in a similar situation was that they weren’t crazy at all. They were actually the smart people who had seen through the bullshit. And because of that, they couldn’t function in the world. They couldn’t hold a job because they just couldn’t take the bullshit, and that was how they wound up in institutions. The greater society thought, “Well these people are absolute rejects. They can’t fit in.” But in fact they were actually the people that really saw through everything. This may not have been Pressfield’s point, but it reminds of something I’ve long believed. If you recognize that BS is ubiquitous, then the question is not “How can I avoid all of it?” but, “What is the optimal amount to put up with so I can still function in a messy and imperfect world?” If your tolerance is zero – if you are allergic to differences in opinion, personal incentives, emotions, inefficiencies, miscommunication and such – your odds of succeeding in anything that requires other people rounds to zero. You can’t function in the world, as Pressfield says. The other end of the spectrum – fully accepting every incidence of nonsense and hassle – is just as bad. The world will eat you alive. The thing people miss is that there are bad things that become bigger problems when you try to eliminate them. I think the most successful people recognize when a certain amount of acceptance beats purity. Theft is a good example. A grocery store could eliminate theft by strip-searching every customer leaving the store. But then no one would shop there. So the optimal level of theft is never zero. You accept a certain level as an inevitable cost of progress. BS, in all its forms, is similar. A unique skill, an underrated skill, is identifying the optimal amount of hassle and nonsense you should put up with to get ahead while getting along. Franklin Roosevelt – the most powerful man in the world whose paralysis meant the aides often had to carry him to the bathroom – once said, “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say ‘that’s all right,’ and drink it.” Every industry and career is different, but there’s universal value in that mentality, accepting hassle when reality demands it. Volatility. People having bad days. Office politics. Difficult personalities. Bureaucracy. All of them are bad. But all have to be endured to some degree if you want to get anything done. Many investors have little tolerance for a bad year or a stretch of underperformance. They think it’s noble. “I demand excellence,” they’ll say. But it’s just unrealistic. The huge majority of them won’t survive. Compounding is fueled by endurance, so sitting through market insanity is not a defect; it’s accepting an optimal level of hassle. Same in business. My friend Brent Beshore says running a company is like eating glass while being punched in the face. “Often nothing works. Emotions run wild. Confusion reigns.” He’s also equated it to a daily battle where you wake up every morning, grab your knife, fight off challenges, and pray you make it home alive. But dealing with that hassle is the entire reason why it can be lucrative. “Where there’s pain there’s profit,” he often reminds people. There’s an optimal level of hassle to accept, even embrace. Another upside: Once you accept a certain level of BS, you stop denying its existence and have a clearer view of how the world works. I was once on a flight with a CEO – he let everyone know that’s what he was – who lost his mind after we had to change gates twice. I wondered: How did he make it this far in life without the ability to deal with petty annoyances outside of his control? The most likely answer is that he lives in denial over what he thinks he’s in control of, and demands unrealistic precision from subordinates who compensate by hiding bad news. Good advice for a lot of things is just, “Identify the price and be willing to pay it.” The price, for so many things, is putting up with an optimal amount of hassle.
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