More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I think the smartest people can explain things to a child.
The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t rederive from the basics.
If you can’t rederive concepts from the basics as you need them, you’re lost. You’re just memorizing. [4]
The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.
What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality.
What you feel tells you nothing about the facts—it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts.
A contrarian isn’t one who always objects—that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform.
Our egos are constructed in our formative years—our first two decades. They get constructed by our environment, our parents, society. Then, we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy. We interpret anything new through our ego: “How do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be?” [8]
“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.”
Any belief you took in a package (ex. Democrat, Catholic, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles.
I try not to have too much I’ve pre-decided. I think creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth.
To be honest, speak withou...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious.
We each have a contrarian belief society rejects. But the more our own identity and local tribe reject it, the more real it likely is.
Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.
Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.
It’s really important for me to be honest. I don’t go out of my way volunteering negative or nasty things. I would combine radical honesty with an old rule Warren Buffett has, which is praise specifically, criticize generally.
If you have a criticism of someone, then don’t criticize the person—criticize the general approach or criticize the class of activities. If you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who is the best example of what you’re praising and praise the person, specifically. Then people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you. They work for you. [4]
Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. [71]
Decision-making is everything. In fact, someone who makes decisions right 80 percent of the time instead of 70 percent of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more.
If you can be more right and more rational, you’re going to get nonlinear returns in your life.
The best mental models I have found came through evolution, game theory, and Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett’s partner. Very good investor. He has tons and tons of great mental models. Author and trader Nassim Taleb has great mental models. Benjamin Franklin had great mental models.
If you don’t have the underlying experience, then it just reads like a collection of quotes. It’s cool, it’s inspirational for a moment, maybe you’ll make a nice poster out of it. But then you forget it and move on. Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge. [78]
I believe we are fundamentally ignorant and very, very bad at predicting the future. [4]
Julius Caesar famously said, “If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.” What he meant was, if you want it done right, then you have to go yourself and do it. When you are the principal, then you are the owner—you care, and you will do a great job. When you are the agent and you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad job. You just don’t care. You optimize for yourself rather than for the principal’s assets.
The smaller the company, the more everyone feels like a principal. The less you feel like an agent, the better the job you’re going to do. The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent. [12]
An example of compound interest—let’s say you’re earning 10 percent a year on your $1. The first year, you make 10 percent, and you end up with $1.10. The next year, you end up with $1.21, and the next year $1.33. It keeps adding onto itself. If you’re compounding at 30 percent per year for thirty years, you don’t just end up with ten or twenty times your money—you end up with thousands of times your money. [10]
If it doesn’t make falsifiable predictions, it’s not science. For you to believe something is true, it should have predictive power, and it must be falsifiable. [11]
If I’m faced with a difficult choice, such as: Should I marry this person? Should I take this job? Should I buy this house? Should I move to this city? Should I go into business with this person? If you cannot decide, the answer is no. And the reason is, modern society is full of options. There are tons and tons of options. We live on a planet of seven billion people, and we are connected to everybody on the internet. There are hundreds of thousands of careers available to you. There are so many choices.
You’re biologically not built to realize how many choices there are. Historically, we’ve all evolved in tribes of 150 people. When someone comes along, they may be your only option for a partner.
Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term. What’s actually going on is one of these paths requires short-term pain. And the other path leads to pain further out in the future. And what your brain is doing through conflict-avoidance is trying to push off the short-term pain.
So you generally want to lean into things with short-term pain, but long-term gain.
Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce. [3]
Read what you love until you love to read.
You almost have to read the stuff you’re reading, because you’re into it. You don’t need any other reason. There’s no mission here to accomplish. Just read because you enjoy it.
A tweet from @illacertus said, “I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.”
Reading a book isn’t a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.
Everyone’s brain works differently. Some people love to take notes. Actually, my notetaking is Twitter. I read and read and read. If I have some fundamental “ah-ha” insight or concept, Twitter forces me to distill it into a few characters. Then I try and put it out there as an aphorism. Then I get attacked by random people who point out all kinds of obvious exceptions and jump down my throat. Then I think, “Why did I do this again?” [4]
Pointing out obvious exceptions implies either the target isn’t smart or you aren’t.
I don’t believe in delayed gratification when there are an infinite number of books out there to read. There are so many great books.
The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.
Most books have one point to make. (Obviously, this is nonfiction. I’m not talking about fiction.) They have one point to make, they make it, and then they give you example after example after example after example, and they apply it to explain everything in the world.
It’s not about “educated” vs. “uneducated.” It’s about “likes to read” and “doesn’t like to read.”
Study logic and math, because once you’ve mastered them, you won’t fear any book.
No book in the library should scare you. Whether it’s a math, physics, electrical engineering, sociology, or economics book. You should be able to take any book down off the shelf and read it.
Because most people are intimidated by math and can’t independently critique it, they overvalue opinions backed with math/pseudoscience.
The best way to have a high-quality foundation (you may not love this answer), but the trick is to stick to science and to stick to the basics. Generally, there are only a few things you can read people don’t disagree with. Very few people disagree 2+2=4, right? That is serious knowledge. Mathematics is a solid foundation.
Similarly, the hard sciences are a solid foundation. Microeconomics is a solid foundation. The moment you start wandering outside of these solid foundations you’re in trouble because now you don’t know what’s true and what’s false.
