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It was a complete fluke, a random and thoughtless bit of dumb luck that became the most important decision of my life—far more important than every intentional decision I’ve ever made—or ever will make.
Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I’d take.
As financial advisor Carl Richards says, “Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”
A common storyline of history goes like this: Things get better, wealth increases, technology brings new efficiencies, and medicine saves lives. The quality of life goes up. But people’s expectations then rise by just as much, if not more, because those improvements also benefit other people around you, whose circumstances you anchor to. Happiness is little changed despite the world improving.
There is no such thing as objective wealth—everything is relative, and mostly relative to those around you. It’s the path of least resistance to determining what life owes you and what you should expect. Everyone does it. Subconsciously or not, everyone looks around and says, “What do other people like me have? What do they do? Because that’s what I should have and do as well.” And this, I think, is a window into understanding why we yearn for the 1950s, despite today being better by almost any measure.
Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough.
Rockefeller never yearned for Advil because he didn’t know it existed. But social media today adds a new element, in which everyone in the world can see the lifestyles—often inflated, faked, and airbrushed—of other people. You compare yourself to your peers through a curated highlight reel of their lives, where positives are embellished and negatives are hidden from view. Psychologist
people don’t really communicate on social media so much as they perform for one another.
Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth.
Actual circumstances don’t make much difference in all these cases. What generates the emotion is the big gap between expectations and reality.
spend so much effort trying to improve our income, skills, and ability to forecast the future—all good stuff worthy of our attention. But on the other side there’s an almost complete ignorance of expectations, especially managing them with as much effort as we put into changing our circumstances.
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.
My friend Brent has a related 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.
That may perfectly sum up how extremely successful people operate. Of course they have abnormal characteristics. That’s why they’re successful! And there is no world in which we should assume that all those abnormal characteristics are positive, polite, endearing, or appealing.
People love the visionary genius side of Musk, but want it to come without the side that operates in his distorted I-don’t-care-about-your-customs version of reality. But I don’t think those two things can be separated. They’re the risk-reward trade-offs of the same personality trait. Same for John Boyd. Same for Steve Jobs, who was both a genius and could be a monster of a boss. Same for Walt Disney, whose ambitions pushed every company he touched to the razor’s edge of bankruptcy.
One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
Stanford professor Ronald Howard asked them to write a percentage representing the likelihood that they had responded correctly next to each answer on the tests he gave. If you said you were 100 percent confident that your answer was correct and it turned out to be wrong, you failed the entire test. If you said you were zero percent confident and your answer happened to be correct, you got no credit. Everything in between gave you a confidence-adjusted score. I’ve never heard of a better way to teach people that life is about managing probabilities. And what an amazing way to scare the
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Probability and uncertainty are just so difficult for us to comprehend.
But one accident in ten thousand parks is pretty good. If you drive twice a day, it’ll take you fourteen years to park ten thousand times. One bent fender every fourteen years is a driving record your insurance company won’t bat an eye at. But try explaining that to your boss, who had to file so many damage reports they got to know the insurance claims adjusters by name. You’ll get no sympathy. It’s so much easier to say, “You guys are clearly being reckless. Slow down or you’re fired.”
Stories are always more powerful than statistics. The best story wins.
Good stories tend to do that. They have extraordinary ability to inspire and evoke positive emotions, bringing insight and attention to topics that people tend to ignore when they’ve previously been presented with nothing but facts.
What Sapiens does have is excellent writing. Beautiful writing. The stories are captivating, the flow is effortless. Harari took what was already known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. The result was fame greater than anyone before him could imagine. Best story wins. It’s nothing
went into old hymnals and old song books and I had someone plunk them out on the piano. And whenever something hit me I’d go, “That one!” And then we’d go into a studio with a session musician and probably do thirty different recordings. Burns says
In a perfect world, the importance of information wouldn’t rely on its author’s eloquence. But we live in a world where people are bored, impatient, emotional, and need complicated things distilled into easy-to-grasp scenes.
Stephen Hawking once noted of his bestselling physics books: “Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.” Readers don’t want a lecture; they want a memorable story.
Perhaps no one has mastered the art of storytelling better than comedians. They are the best thought leaders because they understand how the world works, but they want to make you laugh rather than make themselves feel smart. They take insights from psychology, sociology, politics, and every other dry field and squeeze out amazing stories. That’s why they can sell out arenas while an academic researcher who discovers a great insight about social behavior can go unnoticed.
Mark Twain said, “Humor is a way to show you’re smart without bragging.”
Ken Burns once said, “The common stories are one plus one equals two. We get it, they make sense. But the good stories are about one plus one equals three.” That’s leverage. The most persuasive stories are about what you want to believe is true, or are an extension of what you’ve experienced firsthand. Poet Ralph Hodgson put this well when he said, “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” Poor evidence can be a very compelling story if that story scratches an itch someone wants to go away, or gives context to a belief they want to be true. Stories get diverse people to focus attention on
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