mindsets

What happens when you argue with an idiot? You become one.

By age 35, Akinola Bolaji had already spent two decades scamming people online, posing as an American fisherman to con…

The ancients were fond of an expression: Character is fate. It means that character is deterministic, that who you are determines what you will do. Self-discipline is one of those special things that is both predictive and deterministic. It both predicts that you will be great, AND it makes whatever you are doing great. It is not a means to an end. It is not just something we value until we get something we think we might really value—this job title, that amount of money, winning the biggest game, landing the best opportunity. No. Discipline is the win. When you are disciplined about your craft…you win. When you know you put your best into something…you win. When your self-worth is tied to things you can control (effort, for example)…you win. This is what I mean when I say, as I titled my latest book, Discipline is Destiny. Who we are, the standards we hold ourselves to, the things we do regularly—in the end, these are all better predictors of the trajectory of our lives than things like talent, resources, or anything else. So here, adapted from my latest book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, are 25 habits that will put you on the best trajectory possible. 1. Attack the dawn. The morning hours are the most productive hours. Because in the morning, you are free. Hemingway would talk about how he’d get up early because early, there was, “no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.” Toni Morrison found she was just more confident in the morning, before the day had exacted its toll and the mind was fresh. Like most of us, she realized she was just, “not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.” Who can be? After a day of banal conversations, frustrations, mistakes, and exhaustion. 2. Quit being a slave. On an ordinary afternoon in 1949, the physicist Richard Feynman was going about his business when he felt a pull to have a drink. Not an intense craving by any means, but it was a disconcerting desire for alcohol. On the spot, Feynman gave up drinking right then and there. Nothing, he felt, should have that kind of power over him. At the core of the idea of self-mastery is an instinctive reaction against anything that masters us. We have to drop bad habits. We have to quit being a slave—to cigarettes or soda, to likes on social media, to work, or your lust for power. The body can’t be in charge. Neither can the habit. We have to be the boss. 3. Just be about the work. Before he was a big time comedian, Hasan Minhaj was asked if he thought he was going to make it big. “I don’t like that question,” he said. “I fundamentally don’t like that question.” Because the question implies that doing comedy is a means to an end—the Netflix special, selling out the stadium, doing this, getting that. “No, no, no,” he said, “I get to do comedy…I won. It being predicated on doing X or being bigger than Y—no, no, no. To me, it’s always just been about the work. I’m on house money, full time.” 4. Manage the load. “Absolute activity, of whatever kind,” Goethe said, “ultimately leads to bankruptcy.” No one is invincible. No one can carry on forever. We are all susceptible to what the American swimmer Simone Manuel has helped popularize: Overtraining Syndrome. Even iron eventually breaks, or wears out. 5. Do the hard things first. The poet and pacifist William Stafford put forth a daily rule: “Do the hard things first.” Don’t wait. Don’t tell yourself you’ll warm up to it. Don’t tell yourself you’ll get this other stuff out of the way and then…No. Do it now. Do it first. Get it over with. 6. Keep the main thing the main thing. “I wish I knew how people do good and long sustained work and still keep all kinds of other lines going–social, economic, etc,” John Steinbeck once wrote in the middle of the long grind of a novel. The truth is, they don’t! It is impossible to be committed to anything–professionally or personally–without the discipline to say no to all those other superfluous things. 7. 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). 8. Be kind to yourself. The Stoic philosopher Cleanthes was once walking through the streets of Athens when he came across a man berating himself for some failure. Seeing how upset he was, Cleanthes–normally one to mind his own business–could not help himself but to stop and say kindly, “Remember, you’re not talking to a bad man.” Discipline isn’t about beating yourself up. There’s a firmness involved, for sure. Ultimately, after a lifetime of study of Stoicism, this is how Seneca came to judge his own growth—“What progress have I made?” he wrote. “I have begun to be a friend to myself.” It is an act of self discipline to be kind to the self. To be a good friend. To make yourself better. To celebrate your progress, however small. That’s what friends do. 9. Bring distinction to everything you do. Plutarch tells us about a general and statesman in Greece named Epaminondas who, despite his brilliance on and off the battlefield, was appointed to an insultingly minor office in Thebes responsible for the city’s sewers. In fact, it was because of his brilliance that he was put in this role, as a number of jealous and fearful rivals [...]

1.“For me, first of all, dopeness is what I like the most. Dopeness. People who want to make things as dope as possible, and, by default, make money from it.” As everyone who is dope knows, “dopene…

Three rare and powerful skills: 1. Understanding how people justify their beliefs in a way that makes you respect their delusions. A rare and useful skill is understanding that people you find to be deluded likely suffer from the same shortcomings you do. Historian Will Durant wrote in his book The Lessons of History that we should learn enough from history to respect each other’s delusions. He explained: Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. I think this boils down to three points: Everyone is heavily influenced by what they’ve experienced firsthand, because what you’ve experienced is more persuasive than something you read about. Even our understanding of firsthand experience is sketchy, because we oversimplify what happened and self-justify our involvement. Those who didn’t experience an event firsthand have an even weaker grasp on reality because they can cherry pick the oversimplified, self-justified arguments and data from people with firsthand experience. So everyone has delusions about how the world works. You, me, everyone. We are all prisoners to our past, products of our generation, and influenced by who we’ve met and what we’ve experienced, most of which has been out of our control. Some are worse than others, and some are more aware of their blindspots. But everyone has a firmly held belief that an equally smart and informed person disagrees with. Good questions to ask to combat this reality are: What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive to how something works? Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation? What do I desperately want to be true, so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not? Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different? But an even better skill is realizing that everyone else struggles with those questions and winces at the potential answers. You don’t have to agree with others’ delusions or put up with their collateral damage. Just accepting that everyone wants easy and comforting answers in a complex and painful world is a rare skill. 2. Quitting while you’re ahead, or at least before you’ve had too much. Commenting on how he lived to 97, John D. Rockefeller’s doctor said the oil tycoon “gets up from the table while still a little hungry.” It’s another rare skill, and one that applies beyond eating. The temptation to exploit every drop of opportunity leads many people to push relentlessly for more, more, more. They only discover the limits of what’s possible when they’ve gone too far, when the momentum of decline is often unstoppable. Businesses that don’t want to hold inventory push so hard for efficient supply chains and just-in-time manufacturing, stripped of all shock absorbers and room for error. Then a pandemic hits, and supply chains crumble. Young workers eager for promotion push themselves until they’ve hit burnout, when they physically can’t continue in their positions and quit, which often marks the end of compounding their skills and work relationships. People on social media push relentlessly for more likes and retweets until their audience is sick of them. In each case there’s value in saying, “I could have more and do more, but this is good enough.” But it’s such a rare skill. People don’t like leaving opportunities on the table, and it’s counterintuitive to realize that you’ll likely end up with more than those whose appetite for more is insatiable. 3. Getting to the point. Perhaps the most critical communication skill. Be brief. Use as few words as possible to say what you need, and everyone will appreciate it. Mark Twain said kids provide the most interesting information, “for they tell all they know and then they stop.” Adults lose this skill and falsely associate the number of words with the amount of insight. After writing every sentence it helps to ask “Would the reader still get my point if I deleted that line?” Not “Does that sentence make sense?” Millions of unnecessary sentences make sense. Treating words like they cost you something is the right mindset. A writer once recommended imagining someone pays you $100 for every word you remove from your draft. Another quipped: “Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.” Poor communicators ramble. Good communicators leave out unnecessary details. Great communicators treat words as the scarcest commodity.

David Foster Wallace's remarkable 2005 commencement speech, this is water, is a timeless trove of wisdom for living a meaningful life. Here is a full transcript along with audio.

Navigating the status games of today

Entrepreneur Shaan Puri’s uncommon tactics for uncommon results.

The only secret is that it’s a lot safer for people to mirror your behavior than to do something radically different.

It’s normal to feel it. It changes our careers, our dress and even the way we live our lives. The question is: is it caused by external or internal forces? More often than not, it’s sim…

Here are 10 razors, or rules of thumb, that help simplify decision-making, inspired by a list curated by the investor and thought leader Sahil Bloom.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Nostalgia for another way of working

Life is a never ending maze of decisions. I’d love to make the right decisions all the time. I’d also like to have George Clooney’s charming good looks. Those two outcomes are equally likely. Instead of obsessing over the right decisions, which is hard, we can simply avoid the worst decisions, whi

Fifty-four years ago this month, in a push for publicity, The Sunday Times offered £5,000 to whoever could sail solo nonstop around the world the fastest. It was technically a race, but that was an afterthought, as no one had ever completed the feat. There were no qualification requirements and few rules. Nine men joined the race, one of whom had never sailed. Just one man finished, 312 days and 27,000 miles later. But it was two participants who never completed the race that generated the most news. One ended up dead, the other found himself happier than ever. Both outcomes came from decisions made at sea, but neither had anything to do with sailing. The two men, Donald Crowhurst and Bernard Moitessier, are astounding examples of how the quality of your life is shaped by whom you want to impress. Their stories are extreme, but what they dealt with was just a magnified version of what ordinary people face all the time, and likely something you’re facing right now. Donald Crowhurst was a tinkerer who came up with his own boat modifications. Convinced his innovations could propel him to win the Sunday Times race, he faced just one obstacle: he was broke, and stood no chance of financing the race himself. Crowhurst struck a deal with an English businessman who agreed to cover the cost of the race under two conditions: They would orchestrate a media frenzy, portraying Crowhurst as a sailing savant. And if Crowhurst didn’t finish, he would owe all the money back. Crowhurst left Teignmouth on October 31st, 1968, the last day participants of the race could begin their voyage. His boat, the Electron, had been so heavily modified, so weighed down with half-finished gizmos and gimmicks, that it was barely seaworthy for a short sail near home, let alone a solo trip around the globe. Crowhurst knew it. He broke down in tears in front of his wife the night before he left. Two weeks into the race, as Crowhurst had covered less than half his intended distance, the Electron sprung a leak. “This bloody boat is just falling to pieces due to lack of attention to engineering detail,” Crowhurst wrote in his diary. In the calm waters of the South Atlantic, the small leak posed little threat and could be bailed with a bucket. But continuing on to the treacherous Southern Ocean would bring certain catastrophe. So Crowhurst seemed to have two options: Continue the race and face ruin at sea, or return home and face bankruptcy and humiliation. He in fact chose a third option, which was outright fraud. By mid-November Crowhurst began loitering in the south Atlantic, drifting in circles in calm water. He then began sending fake coordinates back to England, giving the impression that he was still on track, rounding Cape Horn, on his way to circle the globe. He went virtually nowhere for months, which was the plan: By mid-summer, when enough time had passed to have plausibly circled the globe, Crowhurst hoped to quietly sail back to England, “finish” the race, and hope no one noticed that during his round-the-world voyage he never actually left the hemisphere. As Crowhurst sailed back to England he realized he did not want to appear to win the race, because if he did the media and judges would scrutinize his logs and uncover the deception, whereas no one cares about the runner-up. After receiving word on the location of other race participants, Crowhurst timed his return so that he would finish the race in third place, which seemed good enough to maintain dignity yet low enough to avoid suspicion. But then the boat that was in second place sank. And after miscalculating his return time, Crowhurst was suddenly on track to beat the sailor who had been in first place. Crowhurst was now going to cruise into England with what looked like the fastest time. He was going to win the race. The BBC had a crew prepared to meet the man who defied the odds to become the world’s greatest sailor – which, ironically, is the kind of attention a fraudster desperately wanted to avoid. On June 29th, Crowhurst wrote in his diary: I have no need to prolong the game … It has been a good game that must be ended … It is the end of my game. The truth has been revealed. It is finished. IT IS THE MERCY. Soon after he sent his last fake coordinates to his team, and shut his radio off. The Electron was found 11 days later, adrift in the Atlantic. There was no major damage, no sign of an accident – and no sign of Crowhurst. He had presumably thrown himself into the sea. Left behind were his diary and two log books: one real, one fake. Three months before Crowhurst took his life, another sailor in the Sunday Times race made an equally astonishing life decision at sea. Bernard Moitessier was an expert sailor, and five months into the race, he was on track to legitimately win. Moitessier loved sailing but despised the commercialization of his sport. Or, more accurately, he hated the sport side of sailing. He just liked sailing for sailing’s sake. The personality required to spend nine months alone at sea selects people who are fine detaching from society. Moitessier was an extreme version of that, and the idea of sailing for someone else’s pleasure – to perform for the press, the race organizers, the sailing magazines, the fans – was so detestable that midway through his voyage he’d had enough. He wrote in his diary: I really feel sick at the thought of getting back to Europe, back to the snakepit … I am really fed up with false gods, always lying in wait, spider-like, eating our liver, sucking our marrow. I charge the modern world – that’s the Monster, trampling the soul of men … returning to [England] feels like returning to nowhere. But being on his boat, Joshua, was a different story. He loved it, loved being on the water. Moitessier later recalled: There were so many beautiful days on this beautiful boat that it really made time change dimensions … I was just feeling totally alive. And that was just fantastic. As he sailed around Cape Horn – a position Crowhurst could only dream of – Moitessier began contemplating the unthinkable: Abandoning the race and sailing somewhere else. Thinking of his family and friends, he wrote: I do not know how to explain to them my need to be at peace, to continue toward the pacific. They will not understand. I know I’m right, I feel it deeply. I know exactly where I am going, even if I do not know. On March 18th, Moitessier threw a jerrycan onto the deck of a passing commercial ship, whose captain caught it on the fly. Inside was a note addressed to the Sunday Times’ editor. It read: Dear Robert, today is March 18th. I am continuing non-stop toward the Pacific Islands because I am happy at sea, and perhaps to save my soul. Moitessier shouted for the captain to take the message to the French consul. He then changed course, off the race’s path, and set sail for Tahiti. Moitessier wrote in his diary: Now it is a story between Joshua and me, between me and the sky; a story just for us, a great story that does not concern the others any more … To have the time, to have the choice, not knowing what you are heading for and just going there anyway, without a care, without asking any more questions. He anchored in Tahiti in June, where he remained for years. He built a house on the beach, grew his own food, and wrote a book about sailing. “You can’t understand how happy I am,” he wrote. In a twist of irony, Tahiti was so far out of the way and required so much backtracking that, despite dropping out of the race, Moitessier did circle the globe, and set a world record for the longest ever nonstop solo sail – more than 37,000 miles. There is no mention of that fact in his book. He didn’t seem to care. Anyone alone at sea for nine months will start to lose their mind, and there’s evidence both Crowhurst and Moitessier were in poor mental states when their decisions were made. Crowhurst’s last diary entries were incoherent ramblings about submitting your soul to the universe; Moitessier wrote about his long conversations with birds and dolphins. But their outcomes seemed to center on the fact that Crowhurst was addicted to what other people thought of his accomplishments, while Moitessier was disgusted by them. One lived for external benchmarks, the other only cared about internal measures of happiness. They are the most extreme examples you can imagine. But their stories are important because ordinary people so often struggle to find balance between external and internal measures of success. I have no idea how to find the perfect balance between internal and external benchmarks. But I know there’s a strong social pull toward external measures – chasing a path someone else set, whether you enjoy it or not. Social media makes it ten times more powerful. But I also know there’s a strong natural desire for internal measures – being independent, following your quirky habits, and doing what you want, when you want, with whom you want. That’s what people actually want. Last year I had dinner with a financial advisor who has a client that gets angry when hearing about portfolio returns or benchmarks. None of that matters to the client; All he cares about is whether he has enough money to keep traveling with his wife. That’s his sole benchmark. “Everyone else can stress out about outperforming each other,” he says. “I just like Europe.” I think Moitessier would approve.

David shares why highly successful people put their faith in one big idea. Read here.

Some gadgets come with batteries and some don’t. Same with people. And if you’re a leader, the only kind to hire are those with batteries included.

Make sure you're playing the real game, not some more complicated game you've made up for yourself.

Leisure is more enjoyable when work is no longer an option.

If you leave your cheese out and the mouse eats it, the mouse is simply being a mouse. While it might be nice if the mouse didn’t wreck your dinner, that’s his job. Often, we show up wi…

Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given.

I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I only recently figured out why. I had to tackle a simple question do so: Why does this matter? I realized that I’d never forced myself to answer this honestly. As Paul Graham has pointed out, these systematic gaps in conversation should raise suspicion — they often indicate when you’re wrong about something important. I was wrong in thinking that my work mattered to me, and I avoided asking myself this question because I knew the answer would be painful.

​ ​ ​ How to have ideas (and other ideas) One reason I love writing The Imperfectionist is that it gives me a chance to go deep into the ideas and practices I'm currently captiv...