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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ozan Varol
Read between
February 2 - March 7, 2023
Psychological safety means, in Edmondson’s words, “no one will be punished or humiliated for errors, questions, or requests for help, in the service of reaching ambitious performance goals.”
“Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes,”
Exposing your vulnerability can make you more desirable in the eyes of others. But there’s one caveat. You must establish your competence before revealing your failures.
Think of this as vaccination: Just as introducing weak antigens can stimulate “learning” in our immune system and prevent future infection, exposure to intelligent failures can allow us to recognize and learn from them.
“What have you failed at this week?”
Success is the wolf in sheep’s clothing. It drives a wedge between appearance and reality.
success is “a lousy teacher” because it “seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
“Whom the Gods wish to destroy,” wrote literary critic Cyril Connolly, “they first call promising.”
Luck, as E. B. White put it, “is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”
The moment we pretend an activity is routine is the moment we let our guard down and rest on our laurels.
“Human beings,” social psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, “are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
The modern world doesn’t call for finished products. It calls for works in progress, where perpetual improvement wins the game.
“regularity and uninterrupted success are a problem and a sign of weakness rather than an unequivocal sign of strength.”43
When we succeed, we stop pushing boundaries.
“You have to disrupt yourself,” Steve Forbes says, “or others will do it for you.”
“If you’re not humble,” said former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, “life will visit humbleness upon you.”
Even though the actual risk of failure remains the same after a near miss, our perception of the risk decreases.
Ask yourself, What went wrong with this success? What role did luck, opportunity, and privilege play? What can I learn from it? If we don’t ask these questions, luck will eventually run its course, and the near misses will catch up with us.
Backcasting works backward from a desired outcome. A premortem works backward from an undesired outcome.
Even when minority opinions are wrong, “they contribute to the detection of novel solutions and decisions that, on balance, are qualitatively better.”
No, the ritual takes place because history instructs. History informs. History, if you look carefully, can provide invaluable lessons.
Killing the Bad One often gives rise to the Worse One. In attacking the most visible causes, we unleash a Darwinian process of creating a more insidious pest.
Measures intended to decrease risk sometimes backfire. Humans compensate for the reduced risk in one area by increasing risk in another.
The safety net may be there to catch you if you fall, but you’re better off pretending it doesn’t exist.
“If you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there.”2
The journey cannot end once the mission is accomplished. That’s when the real work begins. When success brings complacency—when we tell ourselves that now that we’ve discovered the New World, there’s no reason to return—we become a shadow of our former selves.
We must keep devising thought experiments, taking moonshots, proving ourselves wrong, dancing with uncertainty, reframing problems, testing as we fly, and returning to first principles.
“However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling, we cannot remain here,” Walt Whitman wrote. “However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters, we must not anchor here.”12
