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a. Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life. People who achieve success and drive progress deeply understand the cause-effect relationships that govern reality and have principles for using them to get what they want.
Where would you put yourself on it?
wanted crazy amounts of each, was thrilled to work hard to get as much of them as possible, and found that they could largely be one and the same and mutually reinforcing. Over time I learned that getting more out of life wasn’t just a matter of working harder at it. It was much more a matter of working effectively, because working effectively could increase my capacity by hundreds of times.
1.2 Truth—or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality—is the essential foundation for any good outcome.
Most people fight seeing what’s true when it’s not what they want it to be. That’s bad, because it is more important to understand and deal with the bad stuff since the good stuff will take care of itself.
1.3 Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.
None of us is born knowing what is true; we either have to discover what’s true for ourselves or believe and follow others.
a. Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change.
Learning is the product of a continuous real-time feedback loop in which we make decisions, see their outcomes, and improve our understanding of reality as a result.
If they are “believable” people (and it’s very important to know who is “believable”16), you will learn a lot from them.
b. Don’t let fears of what others think of you stand in your way.
I wouldn’t feel good about myself if I let my fears stand in the way.
radical truth and transparency is in improving my decision making and my relationships.
c. Embracing radical truth and radical transparency will bring more meaningful work and more meaningful relationships.
1.4 Look to nature to learn how reality works.
For example, our ability to
fly or to send cell phone signals around the world came from understanding and applying the existing rules of reality—the physical laws or principles that govern the natural world.
Man’s most distinctive quality is our singular ability to look down on reality from a higher perspective and synthesize an understanding of it.
more developed in humans). This struggle causes people to confuse what they want to be true with what actually is true.
1. Top down: By trying to find the one code/law that drives them all. For example, in the case of markets, one could study universal laws like supply and demand that affect all economies and markets. In the case of species, one could focus on learning how the genetic code (DNA) works for all species. 2. Bottom up: By studying each specific case and the codes/laws that are true for them, for example, the codes or laws particular to the market for wheat or the DNA sequences that make ducks different from other species.
Seeing things from the top down is the best
way to understand ourselves and the laws of reality within the context of overarching universal laws. That’s not to say it’s not worth having a bottom-up perspective. In fact, t...
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By looking at nature from the top down, we can see that much of what we call human nature is really animal nature. That’s because the human brain is programmed with millions of years of genetic learning that we share with other species.
Man is just one of ten million species and just one of the billions of manifestations of the forces that bring together and take apart atoms through time. Yet most people are like ants focused only on themselves and their own anthill; they believe the universe revolves around people and don’t pay attention to the universal laws that are true for all species.
While mankind is very intelligent in relation to other species, we have the intelligence of
moss growing on a rock compared to nature as a whole. We are incapable of designing and building a mosquito, let alone all the species and most of the other things in the universe. So I start from the premise that nature is smarter than I am and try to let nature teach me how reality works.
a. Don’t get hung up on your views of how things “should” be because you will miss out on le...
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I assume that I’m wrong and try to figure out why what nature is doing makes sense. That has taught me a lot. It has changed my thinking about 1) what’s good and what’s bad, 2) what my purpose in life is, and 3) what I should do when faced with my most important choices. To help explain why, I will give you a simple example.
worse. I now realize that nature optimizes for the whole, not for the individual, but most people judge good and bad based only on how it affects them. What I had seen was the process of nature at work, which is much more effective at furthering the improvement of the whole than any process man has ever invented. Most people call something bad if it is bad for them or bad for those they empathize with, ignoring the greater good.
b. To be “good” something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded. For example, if you come up with something the world values, you almost can’t help
but be rewarded.
c. Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything.
Knowledge, for example, is like DNA in that it is passed from generation to generation and evolves; its impact on people over many generations can be as great or greater than that of the genetic code.
only a rare few have kept reinventing themselves to go on to new heights of greatness. All machines eventually break down, decompose, and have their parts recycled to create new machines. That includes us. Sometimes this makes us sad because we’ve become attached to our machines, but if you look at it from the higher level, it’s really beautiful to observe how the machine of evolution works.
From this perspective, we can see that perfection doesn’t exist;
d. Evolve or die. This evolutionary cycle is not just for people but for countries, companies, economies—for everything.
The key is to fail, learn, and improve quickly. If you’re constantly learning and improving, your evolutionary process will look like the one that’s
1.5 Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward.
personally believe there is a good chance man will begin to evolve at an accelerating pace with the help of man-made technologies that can analyze vast amounts of data and “think” faster and better than we can. I wonder how many centuries it will take for us to evolve into a higher-level species that will be much closer to omniscience than we are now—
While I’m not an expert at this, it seems that it’s because evolution has produced a) incentives and interactions that lead to individuals pursuing their own interests and resulting in the advancement of the whole, b) the natural selection process, and c) rapid experimentation and adaptation.
a. The individual’s incentives must be aligned with the group’s goals.To
b. Reality is optimizing for the whole—not for you.
c. Adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable.
There are at least three kinds of learning that foster evolution: memory-based learning (storing the information that comes in through one’s conscious mind so that we can recall it later); subconscious learning (the knowledge we take away from our experiences that never enters our conscious minds, though it affects our decision making); and “learning” that occurs without thinking at all, such as the changes in DNA that encode a species’ adaptations. I used to think that memory-based, conscious learning was the most powerful, but I’ve since come to understand that it produces less rapid
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d. Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing—and decide what you want to be.
Through our own eyes, we are everything—e.g., when we die, the whole world disappears.
However, when we look down on ourselves through the eyes of nature we are of absolutely no significance.
Earth is just one of about 100 billion planets in our galaxy, which is just one of about two trillion galaxies in the universe. And our lifetimes are only about 1/3,000 of humanity’s existence, which itself is only 1/20,000 of the Earth’s existence.
In other words, we are unbelievably tiny and short-lived and no matter what we accomplish, our impact will be insignificant.
e. What you will be will depend on the perspective you have.
