mindsets

Have you ever wondered why successful people continue to be successful? I address why those with early advantages are able to maintain them over time.

What is the optimal amount of wealth?

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 chaos monkey is a smart piece of software and a brilliant idea from engineers at Netflix. The chaos monkey deliberately switches off servers in live environments at random. It takes the pain of disappearing servers and brings that pain forward. By deliberately sabotaging their own systems it created strong alignment for the team to design-in redundancy and automation for the necessary resiliency and reliability in the face of random failures. Training for this randomness helps make stronger, more resilient and fault-tolerant systems and software and keeps your movie streaming so you can keep chilling without interruptions. The chaos monkey is a great metaphor and trigger to actively work on what life could throw at your system before it happens. More monkey inspiration for writing and for bananas.

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

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 often used fantasy as a vehicle for escapism. Some people, when they fantasise, think about sex or dragons or wildly unlikely events like winning the lottery. I fantasised a…

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

You spend years trying to learn new stuff but then look back and realize that maybe like 10 big ideas truly changed how you think and drive most of what you believe. Brent Beshore recently listed the biggest ideas that changed his life. A few of mine: Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking. There is little correlation between climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation. That’s an extreme example, but everyone has views persuaded by identity over pure analysis. There’s four parts to this: Tribes are everywhere: Countries, states, parties, companies, industries, departments, investment styles, economic philosophies, religions, families, schools, majors, credentials, Twitter communities. People are drawn to tribes because there’s comfort in knowing others understand your background and goals. Tribes reduce the ability to challenge ideas or diversify your views because no one wants to lose support of the tribe. Tribes are as self-interested as people, encouraging ideas and narratives that promote their survival. But they’re exponentially more influential than any single person. So tribes are very effective at promoting views that aren’t analytical or rational, and people loyal to their tribes are very poor at realizing it. Psychologist Geoffrey Cohen once showed Democratic voters supported Republican proposals when they were attributed to fellow Democrats more than they supported Democratic proposals attributed to Republicans (and the opposite for Republican voters). This kind of stuff happens everywhere, in every field, if you look for it. Everything’s been done before. The scenes change but the behaviors and outcomes don’t. Historian Niall Ferguson’s plug for his profession is that “The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” The biggest lesson from the 100 billion people who are no longer alive is that they tried everything we’re trying today. The details were different, but they tried to outwit entrenched competition. They swung from optimism to pessimism at the worst times. They battled unsuccessfully against reversion to the mean. They learned that popular things seem safe because so many people are involved, but they’re most dangerous because they’re most competitive. Same stuff that guides today, and will guide tomorrow. History is abused when specific events are used as a guide to the future. It’s way more useful as a benchmark for how people react to risk and incentives, which is pretty stable over time. Multi-discipline learning: There’s as much to learn about your field from other fields than there is within your field. Most professions, even ones that look wildly different, live under the umbrella of “Understanding how people respond to incentives, how to convincingly solve their problems, and how to work with others who are difficult to communicate with and/or disagree with you.” Once you see the roots shared by most fields you realize there’s a sink of information you’ve been ignoring that can help you make better sense of your own profession. I didn’t appreciate how important communication is to providing investment advice before reading about how many doctors struggle to communicate effectively with patients, leading to patients who don’t stick with treatment plans and are resistant to lifestyle change. There are millions of these dots to connect. Probing beyond the confines of your day job is more fun anyways. Self-interest can lead people to believe and justify nearly anything. Think about businesses trying to survive competition being run by people trying to prove their career worth, and the incentive to run with the option that provides the cleanest path to the next win is huge, even when that option is something you wouldn’t accept in less-stressful circumstances. I have seen investors justify strategies and sales techniques they fiercely argued against at previous employers, coming around the moment their career depended on it. These are good, honest people. But self-interest is a freight train of persuasion. When you accept how powerful it is you become more skeptical of promotion, and more empathetic to those doing the promoting. Room for error is underappreciated and misunderstood. It’s usually viewed as a conservative hedge, used by those who don’t want to take much risk. But when used appropriately it’s the opposite. Room for error lets you stick around long enough to let the odds of benefiting from a low-probability outcome fall in your favor. Since the biggest gains occur the most infrequently – either because they don’t happen often or because they take time to compound – the person with enough room for error in part of their strategy to let them endure hardship in the other part of their strategy has an edge over the person who gets wiped out, game over, insert more tokens, at the first hiccup. Sustainable sources of competitive advantage. This might be the most important topic in business and investing because other than luck it is the only path to long-term success. The only truly sustainable sources of competitive advantage I know of are: Learn faster than your competition. Empathize with customers more than your competition. Communicate more effectively than your competition. Be willing to fail more than your competition. Wait longer than your competition. Everything else – intelligence, design, insight – gets smashed to pieces by competitors who are almost certainly as smart as you. Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people. Start with the assumption that everyone is innocently out of touch and you’ll be more likely to explore what’s going on through multiple points of view, instead of cramming what’s going on into the framework of your own experiences. It’s hard to do. It’s uncomfortable when you do. But it’s the only way to get closer to figuring out why people behave like they do

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…

​ ​ ​ For subscribers in the UK: the paperback edition of my book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals will be published by Vintage next Thursday! It's currently ava...

@jordanbpeterson: 42 Rules for Life: 1. Tell the truth… or, at least, don’t lie. Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word. Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource. I...…

The best summary of Dale Carnegie's famous How to Win Friends & Influence People—one of the best-selling self-help books of all time.

I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but as I’ve said, the absolute craziest was deciding to open a bookstore. Running a small business is always difficult, running a small business during a pandemic is damn near impossible but a small town book store in rural Texas?  But here we are, a year later, not just still standing but doing great!  We’ve learned a lot…about business, about books, and about ourselves.  I made a YouTube video about the experience, but I wanted to expand it here into a fuller explanation of all the lessons that The Painted Porch has taught me. I share them here so you can get something too—and perhaps learn a little from my experiences and hopefully go create something cool of your own out of it. Here are 29 lessons from the first 12 months of owning The Painted Porch.  – It always takes longer than you think it’s going to take. That’s Hofstadter’s law. From the moment my wife suggested we open a small-town bookstore, everything has taken longer and been harder than we expected. If you can’t pass the marshmallow test of delaying gratification and deferring things into the future, you’re just going to get crushed.  – For most of my life as an author and entre­preneur, my work has been digital. Close to half of the sales of my books are audiobooks and ebooks. Every morning, I send out the Daily Stoic and Daily Dad emails to over 500,000 people. I put out a podcast that’s had 80 million downloads. As satisfying as it is to reach large numbers of people through the enormous scale of the internet, there is even more satisfaction in doing something in real life, for real people, even at a much much smaller level. Every time I walk by or to the bookstore, I think, Wow, I made that.  – I think one of the best decisions we made was making our book tower. It’s 20 feet tall and made of some 2000 books, 4000 nails, and 40 gallons of glue. It was not cheap to do. It was not easy to do. It took forever. We had to solve all sorts of logistical problems to make it work. But it’s also probably one of the single best marketing and business decisions we made in the whole store. Because it’s the number one thing that people come into the store to take pictures of.  – You want to have a unique proposition. You want to have something that only you could do. Most bookstores have thousands and thousands of books. But what we decided here was that we’d have only a couple hundred books, only my absolute favorite books, only the books I put in my Reading List Email. It would only be those books. So not only did this make it cheaper and easier to run the bookstore, it makes us stand out.  – There’s this great story of when Jeff Bezos had the idea for Amazon. He was working on Wall Street at the time. He and his boss go for a walk in Central Park and after he tells him his idea, his boss says, “that sounds like a great idea for someone who doesn’t have a job.” Meaning that somebody else should do it, not Bezos. If there’s something crazy that you’re thinking about doing, maybe you should get serious about actually doing it. On the other side of the risk and the crazy leap can be something that changes your life, that changes your community, that changes the world. – Doing something cool means risk…but just because you take a big risk doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of little ways to take risk off the table. My office is above the bookstore. I rent part of the building out to another business, etc.  – There are lots of easier ways to make money than a physical bookstore in 2022…so everyday I try to remind myself this project was not about making lots of money. Remembering why you did something and how you measure success helps you calibrate your decisions properly. I’m happy enough to be putting books out in the world, making this community better, having a physical space, challenging myself, etc…as long as I don’t lose lots of money, that’s a win.  – Start small. The problem is when you have really high standards, when you expect a lot of yourself, it’s hard to be comfortable with something that’s kind of crappy or mediocre or not all the way there. But there’s a reason most tech start ups think in terms of a minimum viable product.  – Related to that there’s a great Hemingway line—we actually have a shirt with it, and I have a print of it on my wall—it’s one of my all-time favorite quotes: the first draft of everything is shit. I love how The Painted Porch is now, but it took weeks and months to get it to where it is. It’s been a continual process of improvement and growth and making changes. – Lengthen your timeline. I mentioned Hofsteader’s Law above—it was important to remind ourselves many times that the building we were in was nearly 150 years old. It can be very easy on a project to get caught up in the immediacy of what’s in front of you…but you miss the big picture and you miss the reality that most things that work are set up to work for a long time. We sell books in our store that were written 2,500 years ago! Who cares if the project took 13 months longer to open than we thought? – As Zeno said, books are a way to have conversations with the dead. You can learn from people who came before you. They can also inspire and reassure you. Some books I leaned on often throughout this were The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and A Calendar of Wisdom [...]

Elon Musk said he had lunch with Charlie Munger in 2009. Munger allegedly told the whole table all the ways Tesla would fail. It “made me quite sad,” Musk tweeted last week. “But I told him I agreed with all those reasons & that we would probably die, but it was worth trying anyway.” It’s both sad and inspiring. It’s also, I think, more complicated than it looks. Munger was recently asked an unrelated question that adds a layer to Musk’s point. Asked, “You seem extremely happy and content. What’s your secret to living a happy life?” 98-year-old Munger replied: The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results good and bad as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism. I think these guys are making the same point. And it’s an important point. Musk is right that some things that will probably fail are worth trying anyway. That’s true for everyone in almost all areas of life, because we live in a tail-driven world where a few events drive the majority of outcomes. It’s a world that demands you become comfortable with a lot of things not working, lots of things failing, and constant disappointment, because “success” means you tried ten things and eight of them fail miserably but two change your life. Munger is right that unrealistic expectations assure misery, for two reasons. One is that the world is a fragile and volatile and complicated place, and the only way to avoid disappointment is to expect it. Second is that progress tends to move the goal post. So the only way to enjoy the modern world is if your expectations rise slower than its progress. The common denominator between both guys is the superpower of having low expectations. That’s not intuitive, because low expectations make you think of a mopey pessimist who’s accomplished nothing. But I want to convince you: it’s the opposite. 1. Tails, you win Late last year Musk was asked about one of the hardest problems on SpaceX’s plate. Its massive Starship has to cut weight everywhere it can so that the cost of each launch becomes low enough to launch the things all day. Step one was cutting the landing gear. Rather than the rocket returning to Earth and landing on its own, the new design means it’ll come down with its bottom exposed, aiming itself at a giant tower on the ground. Just before hitting the ground, two enormous rods shoot out of the tower and grab the rocket like a parent catching a falling child. It’s wild. Musk explained: We’re talking about catching the largest flying object ever made on a giant tower with chopstick arms. It’s like Karate Kid with the fly, but much bigger. He then laughed, and added the most important line: “This probably won’t work the first time.” He says that often about his endeavors. When a rocket failed to land five years ago, he said, “Didn’t expect this one to work, but next flight has a good chance.” Talking about Starship’s challenges last month, he said “success is one of the possible outcomes.” He tweeted two years ago: To be frank, in the early days, I thought there was 90% chance that both SpaceX & Tesla would be worth $0. The press & aerospace / automotive industry at the time (correctly) agreed with me. I don’t think any of that is casual irreverence or cocky risk-taking. Purposely low expectations is the only way to survive in a world that’s not kind enough to reward every ambitious person with success. When people say, “higher risk equals higher return” they should actually be saying, “higher risk means I’ll probably earn lower returns most of the time but there’s a small chance I’ll earn very good returns that make up for it.” That’s the distinguishing feature of higher risk: The greater prevalence of failure, not the smaller chance of success that has the potential to offset it. The key part is that low expectations and accepting frequent losses increase the odds of sticking around long enough to eventually be right enough to make up for it, and then some. And that applies to ordinary people, not just maniacs like Musk. In a boring index fund of 500 stocks, fewer than 20 companies make up most of the returns in any given year. Sometimes it’s fewer than five companies. The rest – literally 80%+ of companies – range from OK to disastrous returns. So if you track every individual company, bring your pitifully low expectations. That’s how the world works. 2. Getting the goalpost to stop moving President James Garfield died in 1881 because the best doctor in the country did not believe in germs, and probed a bullet wound with an ungloved finger, likely contributing to his fatal infection. There are so many examples of the primitive lives the most privileged people lived in different eras it’s astounding. Charlie Munger was born in 1924. The richest man in the world that year was John D. Rockefeller, whose net worth equaled about 3% of GDP, which would be something like $700 billion in today’s world. Seven hundred billion dollars. OK. But make a short list of things that did not exist in Rockefeller’s day: Sunscreen. Advil. Tylenol. Antibiotics. Chemotherapy. Flu, tetanus, measles, smallpox, and countless other vaccines. Insulin for diabetes. Blood pressure medication. Fresh produce in the winter. TVs. Microwaves. Overseas phone calls. Jets. To say nothing of computers, iPhones, or Google Maps. If you’re honest with yourself I don’t think you would trade Rockefeller’s $700 billion in the early 1900s for an average life in 2022. But that’s hard to admit, because all the insane luxuries Rockefeller didn’t have are now considered basic necessities. Everything works like that. All luxuries become necessities in due time. It’s why “everything’s amazing and no one’s happy,” as Louis C.K. says. The only way to counter that truth is going through life with purposely low expectations. Don’t expect a lot of economic growth. Don’t expect great investment returns. Don’t expect a ton of innovation. Don’t expect politics to improve. Expect occasional catastrophes. Be OK with things staying roughly the way they are right now, or worse. Because for most people the way things are right now is indistinguishable from magic relative to how things used to be. Then any little improvements that happen to come along feel incredible. You appreciate them more. Low expectations don’t make you depressed – they do the opposite, making little gains feel amazing while bad news feels normal. It’s not easy, because the knee-jerk way to set expectations is to anchor to what everyone else has right now. But imagine the tragedy of unbelievable progress throughout your life and enjoying none of it because you expected all of it. My friend Brent has a theory about marriage: It only works when both people want to help their spouse while expecting nothing in return. If you both do that, you’re both pleasantly surprised. It’s a good model for a lot of things.

I originally wrote this as a doc, and did a talk w/ slides in Fall 2020 at Convoy. This is very focused on how to work in a software engineering team (surprise! that’s most of what I know about!) but I’ve had friends say they’ve shown this to their partners,...

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

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

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.

Listen now (12 min) | This week’s podcast (12 minutes) is on a crucial difference, between planning to start, and planning to finish. We talk a lot about the difference between more and less planning, on the spectrum between full waterfall and full agile, and like most of you, I share a bias towards less planning.

The author of "The Black Swan" and "Skin in the Game" on what it's like to have true financial freedom.

A summary of Carol Dweck's book Mindset, which explores our two mindsets (fixed and growth) and how they impact not only our attitudes and learning but also our outcomes.

Taking the leap is, in fact, a very rational thing to do. Here's why.

The best game to play is the one that requires no scoreboard in the first place.

Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, says he doesn’t have any extraordinary skills. He’s a pretty good artist. He’s kind of funny, an OK writer, and decent at business. But multiply those mediocre skills together and you get one of the most successful cartoonists of all time. A lot of things work like that. A couple ordinary things you don’t notice on their own create something spectacular when they mix together at the right time. One of the big leaps forward for humanity is when we mixed copper, which is soft, with tin, which is like paper, and created bronze, which is hard and made great tools and weapons. It was like two plus one equals ten. Same with the weather. A little cool air from the north is no big deal. A little warm breeze from the south is pleasant. But when they mix together over Missouri you get a tornado. Same with people. It’s tempting to want to find the one big skill that will set you apart. But most incredible things come from compounding, and compounding isn’t intuitive because the incremental inputs are never exciting on their own. A few little things that are easy to ignore yet work wonders when combined together: Curiosity across disciplines, most of which are outside your profession. A well-calibrated sense of your future regret. The ability to endure risk vs. assuming you can avoid it. Respecting luck as much as you respect risk. The willingness to adapt views you wish were permanent. Low susceptibility to FOMO. A sensitive bullshit detector. Valuing your independence over someone else’s priorities. Respecting history more than forecasts. Respecting the difference between rosy optimism and periods of chaos that trend upward. Quitting while you’re ahead before you’ve exhausted or outgrown what made you successful. Outperforming by merely “doing the average thing when everyone else around you is losing their mind.” Thinking in probabilities vs. certainties, including the idea that a good decision can result in a bad outcome and vice versa. Acknowledging that some things are unknowable and not fooling yourself into thinking you can figure them out. Identifying what game you’re playing and not being persuaded by people playing different games. Expecting the ridiculous and absurd vs. assuming the world is always governed by rational decisions. Accepting some inefficiency and hassle without losing your cool. Knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Deserving the good reputation you have. Getting along with people you disagree with. None of these are too exciting, but maybe that’s the point: Most things that look like superpowers are just a bunch of ordinary skills mixed together at the right time.

Peter Thiel asks this one question when he interviews someone to determine their future.

How to solve problems quickly and cheaply? Add more mental models to your thinking toolbox. Check the best mental models For problem-solving.

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.

I was living on the beach in Santa Monica, California, and life was perfect. I was in paradise, and deeply happy.