mindsets

My friend Lynn coined this phrase, and it really resonated with me. Parents or other adults who are irrationally committed to a kid’s well being make a huge (perhaps the biggest) difference i…

Don't set goals. Passion is bullshit. Mediocre skills are valuable. These are just a few of the unexpected truths you'll discover in Scott Adams' new book. Here are 10 more takeaways.

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Thomas McCrae was a young 19th Century doctor still unsure of his skills. One day he diagnosed a patient with a common, insignificant stomach ailment. McCrae’s medical school professor watched the diagnosis and interrupted with every student’s nightmare: In fact, the patient had a rare and serious disease. McCrae had never heard of it. The diagnosis required immediate surgery. After opening the patient up, the professor realized that McCrae’s initial diagnosis was correct. The patient was fine. McCrae later wrote that he actually felt fortunate for having never heard of the rare disease. It allowed his mind settle on the most likely diagnosis, rather than be burdened by searching for rare diseases, like his more-educated professor. He wrote: “The moral of this is not that ignorance is an advantage. But some of us are too much attracted by the thought of rare things and forget the law of averages in diagnosis.” A truth that applies to almost every field is that it’s possible to try too hard, and when doing so you can get worse results than those who knew less, cared less, and put in less effort than you did. It’s not intuitive, so it can drive you crazy. And it’s hard to pinpoint when it occurs – maybe McCrae’s professor was being appropriately cautious? But there are mistakes that only an expert can make. Errors – often catastrophic – that novices aren’t smart enough to make because they lack the information and experience needed to try to exploit an opportunity that doesn’t exist. Two big ones: Being an expert from an era that no longer exists Investor Dean Williams once said, “Expertise is great, but it has a bad side effect. It tends to create an inability to accept new ideas.” Henry Ford banned his factory workers from documenting new ideas that didn’t work, because he feared it would create a list of things people refused to try again even when new technologies improved their chances of success. What was impossible in one era might later not only be doable, but the key to success. Ford wrote in his biography: I am not particularly anxious for the men to remember what someone else has tried to do in the past, for then we might quickly accumulate far too many things that could not be done … Hardly a week passes without some improvement being made somewhere in machine or process, and sometimes this is made in defiance of what is called “the best shop practice.” Marc Andreessen explained how this has worked in tech: “All of the ideas that people had in the 1990s were basically all correct. They were just early.” The infrastructure necessary to make most tech businesses work didn’t exist in the 1990s. But it does exist today. So almost every business plan that was mocked for being a ridiculous idea that failed is now, 20 years later, a viable industry. Pets.com was ridiculed – how could that ever work? – but Chewy is now worth more than $10 billion. Experiencing what didn’t work in 1995 may have left you incapable of realizing what could work in 2015. The experts of one era were disadvantaged over the new crop of thinkers who weren’t burdened with old wisdom. The same thing happens in investing. Michael Batnick has made the point that having experienced a big event doesn’t necessarily make you better prepared for the next big event. Interest rates have mostly fallen for 40 years, so few bond investors – even grizzled veterans – have lived through a sustained rise in interest rates. But, he writes: So what? Will the current rate hike look like the last one, or the one before that? Will different asset classes behave similarly, the same, or the exact opposite? On the one hand, people that have been investing through the events of 1987, 2000 and 2008 have experienced a lot of different markets. On the other hand, isn’t it possible that this experience can lead to overconfidence? Failing to admit you’re wrong? Anchoring to previous outcomes? Of course. It happens all the time. The feeling of power you get from hard-fought experience is stronger than the urge to change your mind, even when it’s necessary. Career incentives can push complexity in a field where simplicity leads to the best outcomes. Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal says there are three ways to earn money as a writer: Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke. Some variation of this applies to many fields, especially service industries where someone pays for an expert’s opinion. There can be a difference between knowing what’s right and making a living delivering what you know to be right. This may be most common in investing, law, and medicine, when “do nothing” is the best answer, but “do something” is the career incentive. Sometimes it’s amoral, but it can be an innocent form of “cover your ass.” Mostly, though, I think an advisor just feels useless if they tell a client, “we don’t need to do anything here.” In the quest to be helpful they add complexity even when none is needed, or when it might backfire. Years ago Jon Stewart interviewed Jim Cramer. When pressed on CNBC content that ranged from contradictory to inane, Cramer said, “Look, we’ve got 17 hours of live TV a day to do.” Stewart responded, “Maybe you can cut down on that.” He’s right. But if you’re in the TV business, you can’t. Most of this I think is truly innocent. Experts believe their complexity adds value because reality is too painful to bear, especially in a competitive career with stress and long hours. A doctor once told me the biggest thing they don’t teach in medical school is the difference between medicine and being a doctor – medicine is a biological science, while being a doctor is often a social skill of managing expectations, understanding the insurance system, communicating effectively, and so on. The gap between the two, which applies to many fields beyond medicine, can lead to mistakes only experts can make, or only an expert can advise. “Half of the 15,000 mutual funds in the US are run by portfolio managers who do not invest a single dollar of their own money in their products,” the FT writes. Doctors have their own version, as one article highlights: Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo. The trouble is that even doctors who hate to administer futile care must find a way to address the wishes of patients and families. Imagine, once again, the emergency room with those grieving, possibly hysterical, family members. They do not know the doctor. Establishing trust and confidence under such circumstances is a very delicate thing. People are prepared to think the doctor is acting out of base motives, trying to save time, or money, or effort, especially if the doctor is advising against further treatment. It’s a huge problem that affects many fields, and I don’t know a good solution. But it’s good to acknowledge: There is one set of skills that comes from being an expert, and another that comes from being a novice, unburdened by the weight of experience or incentives. The former is obvious, the latter too easy to ignore.

This list is inspired by Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and my recent EconTalk interview with him. Some of these rules show up in…

A subtle constraint on work & life

On evading the hall monitors in the world and in your head

The antidote to overconfidence is our relationship with knowledge. The antilibrary is the solution according to Nassim Taleb.

If your plan, your idea or your art doesn’t involve any significant hurdles in moving forward, it’s probably not worth that much. If it were easy, everyone would do it. The tactic is to…

You’re one among millions, not one in a million.

Only dead fish go with the flow. A nice reminder to swim your own path in life and be true to yourself.

Read our article - On Needing to Find Something to Worry About — Why We Always Worry for No Reason. The School Of Life has a huge collection of interesting articles, read now.

Today, I turn 35 years old. This feels incredibly weird to me because I vividly remember writing a version of this article on my 25th birthday, on the eve of the release of what would be my first book. But that is the nature of life, as you get older, long periods of time—like the famous Hemingway line—slowly and then all at once, feel like short periods of time. And so here I am, entering the second half of my thirties, reflecting on what I’ve learned.  In those ten years, I wrote more than 10 books. I got married. I had two kids. Bought a house. Then a farm. Then a 140-year old building to open a bookstore in. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve read a lot. I’ve made a lot of mistakes (as I wrote about last year). I’ve seen some shit (a pandemic?!?). I’ve learned some stuff, although not nearly enough.  As always, that is what I wanted to talk about in this annual article (check out my pieces from 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, and 26). Rules, lessons, insights, trivia that I’ve learned in the last year…as well as the last thirty five years. You may agree with some and find others to be incomprehensible or outright wrong (but that’s why it’s my article).  So…enjoy.  –Don’t compare yourself to other people. You never know who is taking steroids. You never know who is drowning in debt. You never know who is a liar.  –There’s a sign by the track I run at in Austin, put there by Hollywood Henderson (who paid for the track). It says, “Leave This Place Better Than You Found It.” To me, that’s the meaning of life, in things big and small (but mostly small).  –I’m continually surprised at how much even very famous, very rich, very powerful people appreciate a kind word about their latest TV appearance, accomplishment or project. The point of this isn’t that “celebrities are people too,” it’s that if praise from a friend/acquaintance still registers even at that level, what do you think it means to your kids or to your co-worker/employees or to your siblings and friends? –You don’t have to explain yourself. I read one of Sandra Day O’Connor’s clerks say that what she most admired about the Supreme Court Justice was that she never said “sorry” before she said no. She just said “no” if she couldn’t or didn’t want to. So it goes for your boundaries or interests or choices. You can just say no. You can explain to your relatives they need to get a hotel instead of staying at your house. You can just live how you feel most comfortable. You don’t have to justify. You don’t have to explain. You definitely don’t need to apologize. –You don’t have to be anywhere. You don’t have to do anything. All that pressure is in your head. It’s all made up. –On your deathbed, you would do anything, pay anything for one more ordinary evening. For one more car ride to school with your children. For one more juicy peach. For one more hour on a park bench. Yet here you are, experiencing any number of those things, and rushing through it. Or brushing it off. Or complaining about it because it’s hot or there is traffic or because of some alert that just popped up on your phone. Or planning some special thing in the future as if that’s what will make you happy. You can’t add more at the end of your life…but you can not waste what’s in front of you right now.  –The older you get, the harder it is to see how subpar—or outright crazy—the things you accepted as totally normal once were. You notice this trend when you have kids and people proudly (see: judgmentally) explain to you the insanely dangerous or cruel things they used to do to their kids. We used to let our kids…You see this with some of the COVID analogies people make (pointing out all the other dangers we accept as if it’s totally reasonable for so many people to die of heart disease or car accidents). It’s important to push back against this—to not let cognitive dissonance prevent you from enjoying a better, safer, different present/future.  –Speaking of a process that happens when you get older, I absolutely hate that expression that says, “if you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, and if you’re not conservative when you’re older, you have no brain.” Put the dubious politics of that aside, the implication there is that you should stop listening to your heart as you get older. That’s the opposite of what you want. The goal should be to get kinder, more compassionate, more empathetic as you go.  –Just drink more water. It’s very unlikely you’re drinking enough and a veritable certainty that you’re not drinking too much. Trust me, you’ll feel better.  –Same goes with walking. Walks improve almost everything. –One of my all-time favorite novels is What Makes Sammy Run? After spending the whole novel hoping that the main character “gets what’s coming to him,” the narrator finally realizes that the real punishment for Sammy is that he has to be Sammy. His life, having to live inside that head—even with all the trappings—that is the justice he was hoping would fall upon him. I have found that this observation held true with many of the people who have tried to hurt me or screw me over in my life. Comeuppance did not come in the form of some sudden event, but like Schulberg said, it was a subtle, insidious daily thing.  –This backlash against “elites” is so preposterously dumb…and I say that as a proud college dropout. Everyone and everything I admire is elite. The way Steph Curry shoots. The way Robert Caro writes. What a Navy SEAL can do. This idea that we should celebrate average people and their average opinions [...]

is it speed or certainty that you crave?

Bertrand Russell’s ten commandments for living are as relevant today as when originally formulated. Read this article to learn more ...

The following is an excerpt from Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love.

The thermometer read 19 degrees. The wind whipped louder than waves crashing on a beach. And I was zipped tight in a sleeping bag on top of a mountain. Action carried me away from comfort, and it was the only thing that could bring me back.  I wanted nothing more than a hot breakfast by t

Thirty-seven thousand Americans died in car accidents in 1955, six times today’s rate adjusted for miles driven. Ford began offering seat belts in every model that year. It was a $27 upgrade, equivalent to about $190 today. Research showed they reduced traffic fatalities by nearly 70%. But only 2% of customers opted for the upgrade. Ninety-eight percent of buyers preferred to remain at the mercy of inertia. Things eventually changed, but it took decades. Seatbelt usage was still under 15% in the early 1980s. It didn’t exceed 80% until the early 2000s – almost half a century after Ford offered them in all cars. It’s easy to underestimate how social norms stall change, even when the change is an obvious improvement. One of the strongest forces in the world is the urge to keep doing things as you’ve always done them, because people don’t like to be told they’ve been doing things wrong. Change eventually comes, but agonizingly slower than you might assume. Dunkirk was a miracle. More than 330,000 Allied soldiers, pinned down by Nazi attacks, were successfully evacuated from the beaches of France back to England, ferried by hundreds of small civilian boats. London broke out in celebration when the mission was completed. Few were more relieved than Winston Churchill, who feared the imminent destruction of his army. But Edmund Ironside, commander of British Home Forces, pointed out that if the Allies could quickly ferry a third of a million troops from France to England while avoiding aerial attack, the Germans probably could, too. Churchill had been holding onto hope that Germany couldn’t cross the Channel with an invasion force; such a daring mission seemed impossible. But then his own army proved it was quite possible. Dunkirk was both a success and a foreboding. Your competitors can probably innovate and execute as well as you can. So every time you uncover a new talent you’re proud of, temper your thrill with the acceptance that other people who want to win as badly as you probably aren’t far behind. Notorious BIG once casually mentioned that he began selling crack in fourth grade. He explained: They [teachers] was always like, “Take the talent that you have and think of something that you can do in the future with it.” And I was like, “Well, I like to draw.” So what could I do with drawing? What am I gonna be, an art dealer? I’m not gonna be that type. I was thinking maybe I can do big billboards and shit. Like commercial art. And then after that I got introduced to crack. Haha, now I’m thinking, commercial art?! Haha. I’m out here for 20 minutes and I can make some real, real money, man. Incentives drive everything, and most of us underestimate what we’d be willing to do if the incentives were right. Before launching themselves into space on rockets, NASA astronauts ran tests in high-altitude hot-air balloons. A balloon flight on May 4th, 1961, took American Victor Prather to 113,720 feet, scraping the edge of space. The goal was to test NASA’s new spacesuit. The flight was a success. The suit worked beautifully. As Prather descended back to earth, he opened the faceplate on his helmet when he was low enough to breathe on his own. He landed in the ocean as planned, but there was a small mishap: Prather slipped from his craft while connecting himself to the rescue helicopter’s line, falling into the ocean. The spacesuit should have been watertight and buoyant. But since Prather had opened his faceplate, he was now exposed to the elements. Water rushed into his suit. Prather drowned. Think of how much planning goes into launching someone to space. So much expertise, so many contingencies. So many what if’s and what then’s. Every detail is contemplated by thousands of expert workers. But even then – despite so much planning – a tiny thing no one had considered invites catastrophe. As Carl Richards says, risk is what’s left when you think you’ve thought of everything. When Barack Obama discussed running for president in 2005, his friend George Haywood – an accomplished investor – gave him a warning: the housing market was about to collapse, and would take the economy down with it. George told Obama how mortgage-backed securities worked, how they were being rated all wrong, how much risk was piling up, and how inevitable its collapse was. And it wasn’t just talk: George was short the mortgage market. Home prices kept rising for two years. By 2007, when cracks began showing, Obama checked in with George. Surely his bet was now paying off? Obama wrote in his memoir: George told me that he had been forced to abandon his short position after taking heavy losses. “I just don’t have enough cash to stay with the bet,” he said calmly enough, adding, “Apparently I’ve underestimated how willing people are to maintain a charade.” Irrational trends rarely follow rational timelines. Unsustainable things can last longer than you think. When the Black Death plague entered England in 1348, the Scots up north laughed at their good fortune. With the English crippled by disease, now was a perfect time for Scotland to stage an attack on its neighbor. The Scots huddled together thousands of troops in preparation for battle. Which, of course, is the worst possible move during a pandemic. “Before they could move, the savage mortality fell upon them too, scattering some in death and the rest in panic,” historian Barbara Tuchman writes in her book A Distant Mirror. There’s a powerful urge to think risk is something that happens to other people. Other people get unlucky, other people make dumb decisions, other people get swayed by the seduction of greed and fear. But you? Me? No, never us. False confidence makes the eventual reality all the more shocking. Some are more susceptible to risk than others, but no one is exempt from being humbled. Dr. Dan Goodman once performed surgery on a middle-aged woman whose cataract had left her blind since childhood. The cataract was removed, leaving the woman with near-perfect vision. A miraculous success. The patient returned for a checkup a few weeks later. The book Crashing Through writes: Her reaction startled Goodman. She had been happy and content as a blind person. Now sighted, she became anxious and depressed. She told him that she had spent her adult life on welfare and had never worked, married, or ventured far from home – a small existence to which she had become comfortably accustomed. Now, however, government officials told her that she no longer qualified for disability, and they expected her to get a job. Society wanted her to function normally. It was, she told Goldman, too much to handle. Every goal you dream about has a downside that’s easy to overlook. Historian John Meecham writes: When we condemn [the past] for slavery, or for Native American removal, or for denying women their full role in the life of the nation, we ought to pause and think: What injustices are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those who come after us? This applies to so many things. What is the modern version of cigarettes, which were doctor-recommended just a few generations ago? We didn’t know dinosaurs existed 200 years ago, which makes you wonder what else is out there that we’re oblivious to today. What company is the modern Enron, so obviously a fraud? What do most people – not a few wackos, but most of us – believe that will look something between hilarious and disgraceful 100 years from now? A lot of history is just gawking at how wrong, how blind, people can be. Disastrously wrong, embarrassingly blind. Millions of people, all at the same time. When you then realize that today will be considered history in a few generations … oh dear. It’s unpleasant. But also fascinating. Apollo 11 was the first time in history humans visited another celestial body. You’d think that would be an overwhelming experience – literally the coolest thing any human had ever done. But as the spacecraft hovered over the moon, Michael Collins turned to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and said: It’s amazing how quickly you adapt. It doesn’t seem weird at all to me to look out there and see the moon going by, you know? Three months later, after Al Bean walked on the moon during Apollo 12, he turned to astronaut Pete Conrad and said “It’s kind of like the song: Is that all there is?” Conrad was relieved, because he secretly felt the same, describing his moonwalk as spectacular but not momentous. Most mental upside comes from the thrill of anticipation – actual experiences tend to fall flat, and your mind quickly moves on to anticipating the next event. That’s how dopamine works. If walking on the moon left astronauts underwhelmed, what does it say about our own earthly goals and expectations? John Nash is one of the smartest mathematicians to ever live, winning the Nobel Prize. He was also schizophrenic, and spent most of his life convinced that aliens were sending him coded messages. In her book A Beautiful Mind, Silvia Nasar recounts a conversation between Nash and Harvard professor George Mackey: “How could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof, how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world?” Mackey asked. “Because,” Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, “the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.” This is a good example of a theory I have about very talented people: No one should be shocked when people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you don’t like. Unique minds have to be accepted as a full package. More: The Psychology of Money Five Lessons From History Death, Taxes and a Few Other Things

Skepticism is a virtue. It requires a willingness to question conventional wisdom, and the guts to accept something after you discover that it’s actually true. Denialism, on the other hand, i…

This is arguably the most important short reading I’ve done in a while. - Tim Ferriss

I collect books like the last one was printed yesterday . I can never have too many.  When my wife and I moved to our new home last year, I decided it was time to buy new book shelves. I wanted a matching set, and I wanted enough shelf space to hold my ever expanding collection. 

When a crisis looms, first choose your group. The bigger the crisis, the less likely you are to survive it alone. Find people that you want to be with, then agree who does what. "I used to think I was not much good in a crisis, but over the years, I have realized there is no such thing as being individually good or bad in a crisis. Humans either deal with crises in effective groups, or not at all"

After I posted Tuesday's newsletter about how I hit an "invisible wall" at the edge of a map of my understanding, I came across these two familiar quotes: 1. "A

Mariko Yugeta’s comeback story shows that regret doesn’t have to drag us down.