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November 20, 2017 - January 31, 2018
blah. I decided to raise my price anyway—incrementally at first, then I doubled it. Now I have twice as many inquiries, and people even negotiate with me less. I wish I’d done it earlier. It’s given me much more freedom. As
a successful CEO talk about his philosophy for hiring people. When his company grew and he ran out of time to interview people himself, he had his employees rate new candidates on a 1–10 scale. The only stipulation was they couldn’t choose 7. It immediately dawned on me how many invitations I was receiving that I would rate as a 7—speeches, weddings, coffees, even dates. If I thought something was a 7, there was a good chance I felt obligated to do it. But if I have to decide between a 6 or an 8, it’s a lot easier to quickly determine whether or not I should even consider it.
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel.
I talk to myself a lot, and this quote helps me sort out my fears and deal with them. The more you run from your fears, the bigger they get, but the more you go into them, the more they tend to vanish like a mirage.
“I am too busy” is not only the most inauthentic, it is also the laziest.
It means you would rather be doing something else that you consider more important. That “thing” could be sleep, it could be sex, or it could be watching Game of Thrones.
Am I spending enough time on looking for, finding, and working toward winning a great job? Am I constantly refining and improving my skills? What can I continue to get better and more competitive at? Do I believe that I am working harder than everyone else? If not, what else can I be doing? What are the people who are competing with me doing that I am not doing? Am I doing everything I can—every
every single day—to stay in “career shape”? If not, what else should I be doing?
If you don’t work harder than everyone else, you will not get ahead. Further, if you are looking for work-life balance in your 20s or 30s, you are likely in the wrong career. If you are doing something you love, you don’t want work-life balance.
Everything by Matt Ridley. Matt is a scientist, optimist, and forward thinker. Genome, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist—they’re all great.
“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
It’s okay to have a desire. But pick a big one and pick it carefully. Drop the small ones.
The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.
Ignore the unfairness—there is no fair. Play the hand that you’re dealt to the best of your ability. People are highly consistent, so you will eventually get what you deserve and so will they. In the end, everyone gets the same judgment: death.
Wait But Why receives more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month and has over 550,000 email subscribers. Tim
“Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator,” has received more than 21 million views.
because I’m a child—it actually helps me focus. I’m a kinetic thinker—the kind of person who paces constantly when on a phone call.
you think of your potential readers as pegs, this advice is about trying to mold yourself into the right-shaped hole—a hole that will fit a lot of readers or draw in a bunch of readers quickly, or some other means of getting a writing career going.
will absolutely love what you’re doing. I started out basically imagining I was writing for a stadium full of replicas of myself—which made things easy because I already knew exactly what topics interested them, what writing style they liked, what their sense of humor was, etc. I ignored the conventional wisdom that online articles should be short, frequent, posted consistently—because I knew the Tims in that stadium didn’t care about those things—and instead focused on a single type of
When it comes to my work “yes” list, I think about what I might call the Epitaph Test. When I find myself with an opportunity, I ask myself whether I’d be happy if my epitaph had something to do with this project. If the answer is a clear no, it probably means it’s not actually very important to me.
We discourage failure and by doing so we subtly discourage success.
people. When they’re told that some people or ideas are wrong, hateful, or offensive, a light bulb should go off in their
I wear a SubPac M2 Wearable Physical Sound System while I commute on the subway to my office, and
Sam Barondes’ book Making Sense of People has had a big impact on my thinking, and I sometimes give a copy to people in the midst of hiring someone or even deciding whether to get engaged.
one Barondes describes in his book. The model is called the “Big Five” or OCEAN: open-minded, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable, neurotic. The academics who developed the model clumped every English adjective that could be used to describe someone into categories and reduced them to as small a set of factors as they could. The Big Five is considered the equivalent of gravity in the academic literature on personality. There
book Changing on the Job.
recently bought the FINIS swim paddles (under $20; hat tip Ben Greenfield blog). They magically lengthen out my freestyle stroke, and combined with Cressi fins ($29) it feels like I’m flying through water.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. The greatest work of fiction I’ve ever read, with the simplest theme: All of us come with baggage and wounds and pain; all of us. But recognizing that common, human bond is what helps us transcend that pain.
The Back Buddy by the Body Back Company is my favorite purchase from the past five years, bar none. Most
called “Money and You,” devised around the ideas of Buckminster Fuller. I attended the four-day course in Kuala Lumpur. The first two days focused on money and the next two on “you.” It was very balanced, taught me to look at money differently, and imbued me with a sense of enterprise at a young age. It cost me $500.
Today, when I look back at my scribbles from when I was in high school, it gives me great joy to notice how far I have come intellectually and career-wise. I am living my dream. I used to journal frequently as a student, growing up. My diary looked like a scrapbook, with illustrations and quotes that inspired me. I journal at least thrice a week now, and the time dedicated to it is proportional to my state of mind. If I am contemplative or confused, it tends to be a long session. I maintain one diary that has everything: my to-do list (which I divide into personal and professional),
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The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (translated
watched the Kurosawa classic Seven Samurai more than 100 times (really),
Over the last couple decades, I’ve noticed that the best, most enduring partnerships in business (and in life) are among people who are constantly growing together.
If the person you choose to depend on is constantly striving to learn and improve, you too will push yourself to new levels of achievement, and neither of you will feel like you have settled for someone you eventually outgrow.
Disambiguation: The version you want is a 5-hour, 9-minute lecture. You can recognize it by the cover, which is a close-up of a hand flashing a peace sign. It starts slow, but then gets revolutionary. Do *not* get any versions of the printed book, which has the same title.
Note that criticism is not failure. If you’re not being criticized, you’re probably not doing anything exceptional.
The Baroque Cycle would be required reading. It is way over the top in capturing the character of Newton and his contemporaries, and the science sometimes (intentionally) becomes magical, but with the interwoven sex and violence, it is way too much fun to put down.
I told one of my clients who blamed her husband for everything to take 100 percent responsibility for her part in their interactions. “This way,” I said, “you will be free of trying to control him, and you will be able to find constructive solutions in your relationship.” When she left, I realized that the same advice could help me as well. Taking 100 percent personal responsibility would help me to stop blaming or complaining and achieve a sense of flow.
But my favorite concoction, which I created three years ago, is a medley of cabbage, onion, avocado, and pear. It’s incredibly delicious, extremely healthy, and fast to prepare.
The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. Mark my words, Abercrombie will go down in history as one of the greatest fantasy novelists of all time.
student with straight As is irrelevant if the student sitting next to him with Bs has more passion.
if someone tells you that X is true, ask yourself—(i) what would they say if X really is true, and (ii) what would they say if X is false? If the answer to (i) and (ii) is “they will say roughly what they just said now,” then their words provided you with exactly zero information.
The books Superforecasting (by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner) and How to Measure Anything (by Douglas W. Hubbard) have some good advice on how to improve your ability to make accurate predictions. And Decisive (by Chip Heath and Dan Heath) explains four of the biggest judgment errors (like framing your decision too narrowly, or letting temporary emotions cloud your judgment) and gives tips for combating them.
principle: Uncertainty over expected value (EV) just gets folded into EV. So, if I know that one of option A or B is going to be great, and the other’s going to be a disaster, but I’m totally unsure which is which, then they have the same expected value. That’s a powerful reframe. Thinking to yourself, “One of these options is great and the other’s terrible, but I don’t know which is which” is paralyzing—but thinking to yourself, “These options have the same expected value as each other” is liberating. (Of course this assumes you can’t cheaply purchase more information about A and B to reduce
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Annie’s Analysis,
I like to gift The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness: A True Story by Joel ben Izzy.
So when I hear sophisticated investors or financial commentators say, for example, that it makes no sense how energy stocks keep going lower, I know that energy stocks have a lot lower to go. Because all those investors are on the wrong side of the trade, in denial, probably doubling down on their original decision to buy energy stocks. Eventually they will throw in the towel and have to sell those energy stocks, driving prices lower still.
Stay Covered Big Wave SUP leash ($36). It doesn’t break, which I have been immensely grateful for in some hairy paddle
