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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ozan Varol
Read between
February 2 - March 7, 2023
Just as you can reframe questions to generate better answers, you can also reframe objects, products, skills, and other resources to put them to more creative uses.
functional fixedness.
“mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem.”
If you didn’t know what you know, what else could you do with it?
the Doppler effect—
“Invert, always invert” (Man muss immer umkehren).
“George Costanza theory of management.”
Breakthroughs, contrary to popular wisdom, don’t begin with a smart answer. They begin with a smart question.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”11
Once we form an opinion—our own very clever idea—we tend to fall in love with it, particularly when we declare it in public through an actual or a virtual megaphone.
When your beliefs and your identity are one and the same, changing your mind means changing your identity—which is why disagreements often turn into existential death matches.
Opinions are defended, but working hypotheses are tested.
“not for the sake of the hypothesis, but for the sake of facts.”14
The Stanford scientists were experiencing a phenomenon known as “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”18
As Chamberlin explains, the hypothesis “grows more and more dear to [its author], so that, while he holds it seemingly tentative, it is still lovingly tentative, and not impartially tentative.… From an unduly favored child, it readily becomes master, and leads its author whithersoever it will.”22
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
The Large Hadron Collider is a seventeen-mile particle accelerator that smashes together subatomic particles called hadrons.
When hadrons collide, they actually glide through each other, and “their fundamental components pass so close together that they can talk to each other.”27 If this symphony plays out the right way, the colliding hadrons “can pluck deep hidden fields that will sing their own tune in response—by producing new particles.”28
“It is easier to register the presence of something than its absence.”
Each time we validate what we think we know, we narrow our vision and ignore alternative possibilities
“One mark of a great mind,” Walter Isaacson said, “is the willingness to change it.”
Our goal should be to find what’s right—not to be right.
“One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination,” Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling once observed, “is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”
“The road to self-insight,” psychologist David Dunning said, “runs through other people.”
In the end, it takes courage, humility, and determination to find the truth instead of the convenient.
“If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.
Behind every rocket unlaunched, every canvas unpainted, every goal unattempted, every book unwritten, and every song unsung is the looming fear of failure.
Doing anything groundbreaking requires taking risks, and taking risks means you’re going to fail—at least some of the time.
It’s only when we reach into the unknown and explore ever-greater heights—and in so doing, break things—that we move forward.
A moratorium on failure is a moratorium on progress.
Treating failure as an option is the key to originality.
We should be celebrating the lessons from failure—not failure itself.
“Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections,” Vilfredo Pareto wrote, “You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.”
“The best thing for being sad,” the author T. H. White wrote, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it.”
“Failure is success if we learn from it.”
there’s a difference between a single failure and final defeat.
Breakthroughs are often evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Take a look at any scientific discovery, and you’ll find there is no magical it.
From a scientific perspective, failure isn’t a roadblock. It’s a portal to progress.
That’s how you change the world. One problem at a time.
(NFL) coaches change their lineup after a one-point loss, but don’t change it after a one-point win—even though these minor score differences are often poor indicators of player performance.42
“Failure hovers uncomfortably close to greatness,”
By taking the pressure off the outcome, you get better at your craft. Success becomes a consequence, not the goal.
“What would you do even if you knew that you might very well fail? What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?”46 When we switch to an input-focused mindset, we condition ourselves to derive intrinsic value out of the activity. The input becomes its own reward.
Curiosity takes a failure, turns the volume of drama all the way down, and makes failure interesting.
Every time you make a mistake, every time you fail at something, you should throw your arms in the air and say, “How fascinating!”51
You can reward intelligent failures, sanction poor performance, and accept that some errors are going to be inevitable when you’re building things that may not work. People should be held accountable not for failing intelligently, but for failing to learn from it.
“There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it.”
