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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ozan Varol
Read between
February 2 - March 7, 2023
“If I have seen further,” Newton famously said, “it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
the lone genius lore be damned.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Most of us go after the mice instead of the antelopes. We think the mouse is a sure thing, but the antelope is a moonshot. Mice are everywhere; antelopes are few and far between. What’s more, everyone around us is busy hunting mice. We assume that if we decide to go for antelopes, we might fail and go hungry.
“The story of the human race,” psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote in 1933, “is the story of men and women selling themselves short.”13
there’s a second half to the Icarus myth—one that you probably haven’t heard. In addition to telling Icarus not to fly too high, Daedalus also told him not to fly too low, because the water would ruin his wings.
Here’s the thing: The hurdle to taking moonshots isn’t a financial or practical one. It’s a mental one.
Go for mediocrity, and mediocrity is what you’ll get—at best.
You can’t always get what you want, as the Rolling Stones remind us. But if you course-correct in the direction of the Moon—as opposed to the ground—you’ll soar higher than you would have before.
They are not that smart. They just know what most of us have never learned: There’s far less competition for antelopes. Everyone else is busy chasing mice in the same crowded, rapidly shrinking territory.
This means you can’t afford not to take moonshots.
Discovery, as Einstein also explained, “is not a work for logical thought, even if the final product is bound in logical form.”
“Convergent thinking alone is dangerous because you’re just relying on the past. What will succeed in the future may not resemble what succeeded in the past.”
Schwarzenegger’s solution to stagnation was to shock the muscles—to give them exercises of varying types, repetitions, and weights that his muscles hadn’t adapted to yet.
Regular makes vulnerable. Irregular makes nimble.
Neuroplasticity is a real thing. Your neurons, just like your muscles, can rewire and grow through discomfort.
“What we usually consider impossible are nothing but engineering problems,”
To be a universe-denter, you must be unreasonable enough to think you can dent the universe.
Often, our moonshots aren’t impossible enough. If people want to chuckle at your seeming naivete or call you unreasonable, wear it as a badge of honor.
Today’s laughingstock is tomorrow’s visionary.
Once we have our wacky ideas, we can collide them with reality by switching from divergent to convergent thinking—from idealism to pragmatism.
“The best ideas come from great teams,” Felten says, “not great men.”
The first stage, where wacky ideas collide with reality, is called rapid evaluation.
“As for the future,” Antoine de Saint Exupéry once wrote, “your task is not to foresee, but to enable it.”
Forecasting takes all our problematic assumptions and biases and propels them into the future. In so doing, it artificially restricts our vision of what is feasible, given the current circumstances.
“The best way to predict the future,” Alan Kay says, “is to invent it.”83 Instead of letting our resources drive our vision, backcasting lets our vision drive the resources.
“Detailed dreams blind you to new means.”
We often fall in love with a destination, but not the path.
With this reorientation, you also condition yourself to derive intrinsic value from the process rather than chasing elusive outcomes.
sunk-cost fallacy.
To counter the sunk-cost fallacy, put the monkey first—tackle the hardest part of the moonshot up front. Beginning with the monkey ensures that your moonshot has a good chance of becoming viable before you’ve poured massive amounts of resources into a project.
“kill metrics,”
In our lives, we spend our time doing what we know best—writing emails, attending endless meetings—instead of tackling the hardest part of a project.
What’s easy often isn’t important, and what’s important often isn’t easy.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” George Bernard Shaw famously said, but “the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”90
A problem well defined is a problem half solved.
When we immediately launch into answer mode, we end up chasing the wrong problem.
The difficulty lies, as John Maynard Keynes said, “not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”4
Einstellung effect.
“Preconceived solutions and limited searches for options,” Nutt concluded, “are recipes for failure.”
“When you see a good move, don’t make it immediately. Look for a better one.”
The answer is often embedded within the question itself, so the framing of the question becomes crucial to the solution.
When we reframe a question—when we change our method of questioning—we have the power to change the answers.
spending time viewing the problem from different angles, the more creative individuals keep an open mind as they enter the solution stage and stand ready to make changes to their initial definition of the problem.
An exposed, layered bedrock is the closest thing there is to time travel. A bedrock is like a history book. It shows us exactly what happened a long, long time ago, on this planet far, far away.
In each case, we pursue technology for the sake of technology. We lose the forest for the trees, the purpose for the method, the function for the form.
A strategy is a plan for achieving an objective.
the actions you take to implement the strategy.
But tools, as author Neil Gaiman reminds us, “can be the subtlest of traps.”
People who don’t regularly use hammers are less likely to be distracted by the hammer sitting in front of you.
