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by
Rolf Dobelli
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May 9 - June 19, 2021
Living a good life has a lot to do with interpreting facts in a constructive way.
I always mentally add 50 percent to prices in shops and restaurants. That’s
Precommitment, they call it in psychology: pay first, consume later. It’s a form of mental accounting that takes the sting out of payment.
You’re basically already dead, and everything that follows is a gift.
All partnerships have to be consistently nurtured. The most common misunderstanding I encounter is that the good life is a stable state or condition. Wrong. The good life is only achieved through constant readjustment.
Dwight Eisenhower said, “Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.”
Uncompromisingly. It’s easier to stick to your pledges 100 percent of the time rather than 99 percent.
By themselves, radical acceptance and black box thinking are not enough. You’ve got to rectify your mistakes.
“If you don’t deal with reality, then reality will deal with you,” warns author Alex Haley.
Illich called this effect counterproductivity. The term refers to the fact that while many technologies seem at first glance to be saving us time and money, this saving vanishes into thin air as soon as you do a full cost analysis.
That a big part of the good life is about steering clear of stupidity, foolishness and trends instead of striving for ultimate bliss.
It’s just that you owe the willpower you’re so proud of to the interplay between your genes and environment.
Remind yourself daily that everything you are, everything you have and can do, is the result of blind chance. For those of us blessed with good luck—i.e., for you and me—gratitude is the only appropriate response.
So take other people’s feelings very seriously, but not your own.
A dog is authentic. You’re a human being.
Charlie Munger’s five-second no as a counter-tactic: “If you say ‘No’ ninety percent of the time, you’re not missing much in the world.”
It’s called the focusing illusion. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it,”
Overcoming the focusing illusion is key to achieving a good life. It will enable you to avoid many stupid decisions. When you compare things (cars, careers, holiday destinations), you tend to focus on one aspect particularly closely, neglecting the hundred other factors. You assign this one aspect inordinate significance because of the focusing illusion. You believe this aspect is more critical than it really is.
By focusing on trivialities, you’re wasting your good life.
the two happiest days in a yacht-owner’s life, he observed laconically, are the day you buy it and the day you sell it.
Fuck-you money is freedom. More important even than material independence is that fuck-you money allows you to see and think objectively.
Two: don’t react to minor fluctuations in your income or assets.
Basically, don’t think so much about money. It won’t multiply more quickly the more often you think about it.
Three: don’t compare yourself with the wealthy.
Four: even if you’re filthy rich, live modestly.
life around this idea, because a radical focus on your circle of competence will bear more than monetary fruit.
single outstanding skill trumps a thousand mediocre ones. Every hour invested into your circle of competence is worth a thousand spent elsewhere.
“You don’t have to be brilliant,” as Charlie Munger says, “only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long time.”
Luckily, the skills we’ve mastered are often the things we enjoy doing.
Next time you’re meeting a friend, keep track: you’ll spend 90 percent of the time talking about other people.
Brooks uses the marvelous term “approval-seeking machine” to describe what people can become if they’re not careful.
The world is fundamentally meaningless. So stop looking for the “larger meaning of life.”
It’s not money that makes you happy or unhappy, it’s whether or not you realize your ambitions. The equivalent holds true for other life goals, too.
My suggestion is not to avoid making long-term plans, but once they’re in place to focus wholly on the now. Make the most of your present experiences instead of worrying about future memories.
In terms of your overall assessment, only the peak and end of the holiday matter (the peak–end rule
You will remember a film that’s exciting throughout but which ends unsatisfactorily as a bad film. Ditto for parties, concerts, books, lectures, homes and relationships.
What point is there in “being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy”?
It’s best to switch between meaningfulness and enjoyment. So if you’ve saved a small piece of the world, then I think you deserve a glass of fine red wine.
American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr put it this way: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
The greatest challenge of success is keeping quiet about it, as they say. If you’re going to be proud of anything, be proud of that.
Because successes achieved through prevention (i.e., failures successfully dodged) are invisible to the outside world.
“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted,”
“To know what you want to draw,” he said, “you must begin to draw.”
“Technology will find its inventors,” argues Ridley, “not vice versa.”
That’s the curse of science: individual researchers are fundamentally irrelevant. Everything there is to discover will, at some point, be discovered by someone.
“Most CEOs are along for the ride, paid well to surf on the waves their employees create. [… ] The illusion that they are feudal kings is maintained by the media as much as anything. But it is an illusion.”
The things that happen to you across the course of your life, especially the more serious blows of fate, have little to do with whether you’re a good or a bad person. So accept unhappiness and misfortune with stoicism and calm. Treat incredible success and strokes of luck exactly the same.
“If almost everybody has a college degree, getting one doesn’t differentiate you from the pack. To get the job you want, you might have to go to a fancy (and expensive) college, or get a higher degree. Education turns into an arms race, which primarily benefits the arms manufacturers—in this case, colleges and universities,” wrote John Cassidy in the New Yorker.
“The prospect of improvements in living standards, however remote, limits pressure for wealth redistribution,”
