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If you recognize that inefficiency—“bullshit,” as Pressfield puts it—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?”
The other end of the spectrum—fully accepting every incidence of nonsense and hassle—is just as bad. The world will eat you alive.
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.
“The tendency for evolution to create larger species is counterbalanced by the tendency of extinction to kill off larger species.”
The career version of this is the Peter Principle: talented workers will keep getting promoted until they’re in over their head, when they fail.
Being a one-trick pony is common, because people and companies that are very good at one specific thing tend to be the highest paid during the boom.
Author Safi Bahcall notes that Polaroid film was discovered when sick dogs that were fed quinine to treat parasites showed an unusual type of crystal in their urine. Those crystals turned out to be the best polarizers ever discovered.
There’s a theory in evolutionary biology called Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection. It’s the idea that variance equals strength, because the more diverse a population is, the more chances it has to come up with new traits that can be selected for. No one can know what traits will be useful; that’s not how evolution works. But if you create a lot of traits, the useful one—whatever it is—will be in there somewhere.
The same thing happens in careers, when someone with a few mediocre skills mixed together at the right time becomes multiple times more successful than someone who’s an expert in one thing.
“The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit.”
There’s a saying—I don’t know whose—that an expert is always from out of town. It’s similar to the Bible verse that says no man is a prophet in his own country.
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.
Since they’re crafting the image, it’s not a complete view. There’s a filter. Skills are advertised, flaws are hidden.
Instagram is full of beach vacation photos, not flight delay photos. Résumés highlight career wins but are silent on doubt and worry.
What most of us see most of the time is a fraction of what has actually happened, or what’s going on inside people’s heads. And it’s stripped of all the hard parts.
Only when you get to know someone well do you realize the best you can do in life is to become an expert at some things while remaining inept at others—and that’s if you’re good.
Everyone’s dealing with problems they don’t advertise, at least until you get to know them well. Keep that in mind and you become more forgiving—of yourself and others.
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.
Scamming people is easier to justify in your head when you’re starving.
“How many people in the world would be willing to do something crazy if their incentives were right?” I’d say, oh, easily 50 percent or more.
Franklin once wrote, “If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.”
Incentives fuel stories that justify people’s actions and beliefs, offering comfort even when they’re doing things they know are wrong and believe things they know aren’t true.
incentives lean heavily toward not rocking the boat. So everyone keeps paddling long after the market becomes unsustainable.
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.
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. Three
A good question to ask is, “Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?”
It’s not until your life is upended, your hopes dashed, your dreams uncertain that people say, “What was that wild idea we heard before? Maybe we should give it a shot.
When someone helps you get out of an emergency situation and into a better life, then you’re going to give them your support.
World War II soldiers who left basic training full of bravado and confidence, eager to fight when they joined the front lines. Then they get shot at, and everything changes.
Unexpected hardship makes people do and think things they’d never imagine when things are calm.
Hard times make people do and think things they’d never imagine when things are calm.
Chris Rock once joked about who actually teaches kids in school: “Teachers do one half, bullies do the other,” he said. “And learning how to deal with bullies is the half you’ll actually use as a grown-up.”
“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
What’s easy to forget is that people in mansions can get the flu, have psoriasis, become embroiled in lawsuits, bicker with their spouses, feel wracked with insecurity and annoyed with politicians—which in any given moment can supersede any joy that comes from material success.
Future fortunes are imagined in a vacuum, but reality is always lived with the good and bad taken together, competing for attention.
Everything worthwhile has a price, and the prices aren’t always obvious. The real price of long term—the skills required, the mentality needed—is easy to minimize and often summarized with simple phrases like “Be more patient,” as if that explains why so many people can’t.
Saying you have a ten-year time horizon doesn’t exempt you from all the nonsense that happens in the next ten years.
“The future is much like the present, only longer.”
A lot of it comes from the gap between what you believe and what you can convince other people
Eventually being right is one thing. But can you eventually be right and convince those around you?
changing your mind is hard because fooling yourself into believing a falsehood is so much easier than admitting a mistake.
“The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.”
The more flexibility you have, the less you need to know what happens next.
Permanent information is harder to notice because it’s buried in books rather than blasted in headlines.
an enduring quirk of human behavior: the allure of complexity, intellectual stimulation, and discounting things that are simple but very effective,
When you give an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated. . . . The sore truth is that complexity sells better.
Complexity gives a comforting impression of control, while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness.
Things you don’t understand create a mystique around people who do. If you say something I didn’t know but can understand, I might think you’re smart. If you say something I can’t understand, I might think you have an ability to think about a topic in ways I can’t, which is a whole different species of admiration.
Wounds Heal, Scars Last
