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what works best in most cases is to appeal to a man’s interest.
to the extent that you do become wise, diligent, objective, and especially able to persuade in a good cause, then you’re adding value.
But hasn’t that legal complexity consumed a lot more of companies’ resources over the last few decades? The answer is yes. There’s hardly a corporation in America that isn’t spending more on lawsuits and on compliance with various regulations than it was 20 years ago. And yes, some of the new regulation is stupid and foolish. And some was damn well necessary. And it will ever be thus, albeit with some ebb and flow.
Einstein has a marvelous statement on that: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no more simple.”
It’s crazy that people don’t have those reasons. The human mind is not constructed so that it works well without having reasons. You’ve got to hang reality on a theoretical structure with reasons. That’s the way it hangs together in usable form so that you’re an effective thinker.
still like its emphasis on the desirability of making human systems as cheating-proof as is practicable, even if this leaves some human misery unfixed.
The first helpful notion is that it is usually best to simplify problems by deciding big no-brainer questions first.
The second helpful notion mimics Galileo’s50 conclusion that scientific reality is often revealed only by math as if math was the language of God.
The third helpful notion is that it is not enough to think problems through forward. You must also think in reverse,
that is why the great algebraist Carl Jacobi so often said, “Invert, always invert,” and why the Pythagoreans51 thought in reverse to prove that the square root of two was an irrational number.
The fourth helpful notion is that the best and most practical wisdom is elementary academic wisdom. But there is one extremely important qualification: You must think in a multidisciplinary manner.
The fifth helpful notion is that really big effects, lollapalooza effects, will often come only from large combinations of factors.
We can see from the introductory course in psychology that, in essence, we are going into the business of creating and maintaining conditioned reflexes. The Coca-Cola trade name and trade dress will act as the stimuli, and the purchase and ingestion of our beverage will be the desired responses. And how does one create and maintain conditioned reflexes? Well, the psychology text gives two answers: 1) by operant conditioning and 2) by classical conditioning, often called Pavlovian conditioning to honor the great Russian scientist. And since we want a lollapalooza result, we must use both
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The best way to avoid envy, as recognized by Aristotle,54 is to plainly deserve the success we get.
The situation reminds me of the old-time Warner & Swasey ad that was a favorite of mine: “The company that needs a new machine tool and hasn’t bought it is already paying for it.”
One partial cure for man-with-a-hammer tendency is obvious: If a man has a vast set of skills over multiple disciplines, he, by definition, carries multiple tools and therefore will limit bad cognitive effects from man-with-a-hammer tendency.
Moreover, we can believe in the attainability of broad multidisciplinary skill for the same reason the fellow from Arkansas gave for his belief in baptism: “I’ve seen it done.” We all know of individuals, modern Ben Franklins, who have 1) achieved a massive multidisciplinary synthesis with less time in formal education than is now available to our numerous brilliant young, and 2) thus become better performers in their own disciplines, not worse, despite diversion of learning time to matter outside the normal coverage of their own disciplines.
there is an old two-part rule that often works wonders in business, science, and elsewhere: 1) Take a simple, basic idea and 2) take it very seriously.
more imitation of the investment practices of Berkshire Hathaway in maintaining marketable equity portfolios with virtually zero turnover and with only a very few stocks chosen.
In the United States, a person or institution with almost all wealth invested long-term in just three fine domestic corporations is securely rich. And why should such an owner care if, at any time, most other investors are faring somewhat better or worse? Particularly when he rationally believes, like Berkshire, that his long-term results will be superior by reason of his lower costs, required emphasis on long-term effects, and concentration in his most preferred choices.
One other aspect of Berkshire’s equity investment practice deserves comparative mention. So far, there has been almost no direct foreign investment at Berkshire and much foreign investment at foundations. Regarding this divergent history, I wish to say that I agree with Peter Drucker66 that the culture and legal systems of the United States are especially favorable to shareholder interests compared to other interests and compared to most other countries. Indeed, there are many other countries where any good going to public shareholders has a very low priority and almost every other
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Rather than encourage such models, a more constructive choice at foundations is long-term investment concentration in a few domestic corporations that are wisely admired.
I suggest that when the financial scene starts reminding you of Sodom and Gomorrah, you should fear practical consequences even if you like to participate in what is going on.
the truth of Benjamin Franklin’s observation in Poor Richard’s Almanack: “If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.” The man changed his silly view when his incentives made him change it and not before.
The ethos of hard science is so strong in favor of reductionism to the more fundamental body of knowledge that you can wash the discoverer right out of history when somebody else handles his discovery in a more fundamental way.
Fatal unconnectedness, leading to man-with-a-hammer syndrome, often causing overweighing of what can be counted
The only antidote for being an absolute klutz due to the presence of a man-with-a-hammer syndrome is to have a full kit of tools. You don’t have just a hammer, you’ve got all the tools. And you’ve got to have one more trick: You’ve got to use those tools checklist-style, because you’ll miss a lot if you just hope that the right tool is going to pop up unaided whenever you need it. But if you’ve got a full list of tools and go through them in your mind, checklist-style, you will find a lot of answers that you won’t find any other way.
And when I call it Kiplingism, I’m reminding you of [Joseph Rudyard] Kipling’s77 stanza of poetry, which went something like this: “When Homer smote his blooming lyre, he’d heard men sing by land and sea, and what he thought he might require, he went and took, the same as me.”
Extreme success is likely to be caused by some combination of the following factors: Extreme maximization or minimization of one or two variables. Example, Costco or our furniture and appliance store. Adding success factors so that a bigger combination drives success, often in nonlinear fashion, as one is reminded by the concept of breakpoint and the concept of critical mass in physics. Often, results are not linear. You get a little bit more mass and you get a lollapalooza result. And, of course, I’ve been searching for lollapalooza results all my life, so I’m very interested in models that
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there’s a famous story about Max Planck that is apocryphal: After he won his prize, he was invited to lecture everywhere, and he had this chauffeur who drove him around to give public lectures all through Germany. And the chauffeur memorized the lecture, so one day he said, “Gee, Professor Planck, why don’t you let me try it by switching places?” So he got up and gave the lecture. At the end of it, some physicist stood up and posed a question of extreme difficulty. But the chauffeur was up to it. “Well,” he said, “I’m surprised that a citizen of an advanced city like Munich is asking so
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The cash register did more for human morality than the congregational church. It was a really powerful phenomenon to make an economic system work better, just as in reverse, a system that can be easily defrauded ruins a civilization. A system that’s very hard to defraud, like a cash register–based system, helps the economic performance of a civilization by reducing vice, but very few people within economics talk about it in those terms.
Life is interesting with some paradox. When I run into a paradox, I think either I’m a total horse’s ass to have gotten to this point or I’m fruitfully near the edge of my discipline. It adds excitement to life to wonder which it is.
Keynes said, “It’s not bringing in the new ideas that’s so hard. It’s getting rid of the old ones.” And Einstein said it better, attributing his mental success to “curiosity, concentration, perseverance, and self-criticism.” By self-criticism, he meant becoming good at destroying your own best-loved and hardest-won ideas. If you can get really good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.
Keynes: Better roughly right than precisely wrong.
the safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.
If the cathedral is full of people at the funeral ceremony, most of them are there to celebrate the fact that the person is dead.
there’s no love that’s so right as admiration-based love, and such love should include the instructive dead.
the acquisition of wisdom is a moral duty.
learning all the big ideas in all the big disciplines, so I wouldn’t be the perfect damn fool the professor described. And because the really big ideas carry about 95 percent of the freight, it wasn’t at all hard for me to pick up about 95 percent of what I needed from all the disciplines and to include use of this knowledge as a standard part of my mental routines.
My advice to you is to be better than I was at keeping insights hidden.
Cicero is famous for saying that a man who doesn’t know what happened before he’s born goes through life like a child. That is a very correct idea. Cicero is right to ridicule somebody so foolish as not to know history. But if you generalize Cicero, as I think one should, there are a lot of other things that one should know in addition to history. And those other things are the big ideas in all the disciplines.
The way complex adaptive systems work, and the way mental constructs work, problems frequently become easier to solve through inversion. If you turn problems around into reverse, you often think better.
So faithfully doing what you’ve engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. Of course you want to avoid sloth and unreliability.
avoid is extremely intense ideology, because it cabbages up one’s mind.
When you announce that you’re a loyal member of some cult-like group and you start shouting out the orthodox ideology, what you’re doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, pounding it in. You’re ruining your mind, sometimes with startling speed. So you want to be very careful with intense ideology. It presents a big danger for the only mind you’re ever going to have.
Another thing that often causes folly and ruin is the self-serving bias, often subconscious, to which we’re all subject.
Self-pity is always counterproductive. It’s the wrong way to think. And when you avoid it you get a great advantage over everybody else, or almost everybody else, because self-pity is a standard response. And you can train yourself out of it.
you also want to get self-serving bias out of your mental routines. Thinking that what’s good for you is good for the wider civilization and rationalizing foolish or evil conduct based on your subconscious tendency to serve yourself is a terrible way to think. You want to drive that out of yourself because you want to be wise, not foolish, and good, not evil.
The correct persuasive technique in situations like that was given by Ben Franklin. He said, “If you would persuade, appeal to interest, not to reason.” The self-serving bias of man is extreme, and should have been used in attaining the correct outcome.
Perverse associations are also to be avoided. You particularly want to avoid working directly under somebody you don’t admire and don’t want to be like. It’s dangerous.
