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But we live in a world where people are bored, impatient, emotional, and need complicated things distilled into easy-to-grasp scenes.
The valuation of every company is simply a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.
because they understand how the world works, but they want to make you laugh rather than make themselves feel smart.
“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.
Visa founder Dee Hock once said, “New ways of looking at things create much greater innovation than new ways of doing them.”
Some of the most important questions to ask yourself are: Who has the right answer, but I ignore because they’re inarticulate? And what do I believe is true but is actually just good marketing?
Historian Will Durant once said, “Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.” And it often is, which can drive you mad if you expect the world to work in rational ways.
Some things are immeasurably important. They’re either impossible, or too elusive, to quantify. But they can make all the difference in the world, often because their lack of quantification causes people to discount their relevance or even deny their existence.
“The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.”
Sometimes great athletes choke. Sometimes dark horses win.
Athletic performance isn’t just what you’re physically capable of. It’s what you’re capable of within the context of what your brain is willing to endure for the risk and reward in a given moment.
Last is the power of stories over statistics. “Housing prices in relation to median incomes are now above their historic average and typically mean revert” is a statistic. “Jim just made $500,000 flipping homes and can now retire early and his wife thinks he’s amazing” is a story. And it’s way more persuasive in the moment. It’s
Surprise has six common characteristics: Incomplete information Uncertainty Randomness Chance Unfortunate timing Poor incentives With
The irony of good times is that they breed complacency and skepticism of warnings.
It’s hard to convince someone they’re in danger of a risk they assume has been defeated.
Paranoia leads to success because it keeps you on your toes. But paranoia is stressful, so you abandon it quickly once you achieve success. Now you’ve abandoned what made you successful and you begin to decline—which is even more stressful. It happens in business, investing, careers, relationships—all over the place.
What calm planting the seeds of crazy does is important: It makes us fundamentally underestimate the odds of things going wrong, and the consequences of something going wrong.
People’s desire to get rich far exceeds the number of easy and obvious opportunities.
The second is realizing the power of enough. Being more like Seinfeld.
Warren Buffett once joked that you can’t make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. You’d
Huge animals tend to have short, squatty legs (rhinos), or extremely long legs relative to their torso (giraffes).
A human exiting a bathtub has perhaps a pound of water dripping off them—no big deal. A wet mouse, on the other hand, must lug around its body weight in excess water, and a wet fly is effectively pinned to the ground. The same action at different sizes produces massively different problems. “For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form,” Haldane wrote. A most convenient size. A
Nassim Taleb says he’s a libertarian at the federal level, a Republican at the state level, a Democrat at the local level, and a socialist at the family level. People handle risk and responsibility in totally different ways when a group scales from 4 people to 100 to 100,000 to 100 million. Same
A management style that works brilliantly at a ten-person company can destroy a thousand-person company, which is a hard lesson to learn when some companies grow that fast in a few short years.
Robert Greene writes: “The greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience, the almost inevitable desire to hurry up the process, express something, and make a splash.”
The same people with the same intelligence have wildly different potential under different circumstances.
Laundromats were also invented in the 1930s after sales of individual washing machines fell; they marketed themselves as washing machine rentals.
World War II began on horseback in 1939 and ended with nuclear fission in 1945. NASA was created in 1958, two weeks after the Soviets launched Sputnik, and landed on the moon just eleven years later. Stuff like that rarely happens that fast without fear as a motivator.
Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle, the struggle—even if you don’t win it.
Entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson echoed the same when he said, “Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.”
Growth always fights against competition that slows its rise. New ideas fight for attention, business models fight incumbents, skyscrapers fight gravity. There’s always a headwind. But everyone gets out of the way of decline. Some might try to step in and slow the fall, but it doesn’t attract masses of outsiders who rush in to push back in the other direction the way progress does.
The idea of “complex to make, simple to break” is everywhere.
A 2010 Yale study showed that one of the leading causes of the increase in obesity is not necessarily people eating larger meals; it’s eating more small snacks throughout the day.
Neither country would start a war with a big bomb. But would they launch a small one? Probably. And would a small bomb justify retaliating with a big one? Yes. So the small bombs increased the odds of the big bombs being used.
A new virus transferred to humans (something that has happened forever), and those humans interacted with other people (of course). It was a mystery for a while (understandable), and then bad news was likely suppressed (bad, but common). Other countries thought it would be contained (standard denial), and didn’t act fast enough (bureaucracy). We weren’t prepared (overoptimism), and could respond only with blunt-force lockdowns (panic, do what you gotta do). None
Pessimism is more intellectually seductive than optimism and captures more of our attention. It’s vital for survival, helping us prepare for risks before they arrive.
Remaining optimistic while accepting the reality of despair is fascinating to witness.
What Gates seems to get is that you can only be an optimist in the long run if you’re pessimistic enough to survive the short run.
The trick in any field—from finance to careers to relationships—is being able to survive the short-run problems so you can stick around long enough to enjoy the long-term growth.
The more perfect you try to be, the worse you’ll end up doing.
Psychologist Amos Tversky once said that “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
we’re set on the idea that a typical work day should be eight uninterrupted hours seated at your desk.
A lot of thought jobs basically never stop, and without structuring time to think and be curious, you wind up less efficient during the hours that are devoted to sitting at your desk cranking out work.
Everything worth pursuing comes with a little pain. The trick is not minding that it hurts.
This is one of the most useful life skills—enduring the pain when necessary rather than assuming there’s a hack, or a shortcut, around it.
Same goes for diets, finances, marketing . . . everyone wants a shortcut. It’s always been this way, but I suspect it’s getting worse as technology inflates our benchmark for how fast results should happen.
You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.”
If you can get your work life to where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing. Very few people ever achieve that.
Most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other peoples’ conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, long hours, and constant doubt. That’s the overhead cost of getting ahead.
