PROGRESSION Quotes

“2. Craftsmanship goes from an outlet for aesthetic expression to being dominated by functional considerations; craftsmanship wanes as a place to cultivate aesthetics and the romantic.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“In all spheres of life, cultivating a sense of aesthetics, and developing a sense of the romantic, leads to both a deeper engagement with the world and greater thriving and success.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“You have homeostatic pressures. Don’t naively assume they’re “real” – reason through them to the root cause.   2. You have default entrained responses – don’t deploy them blindly without occasional checking and re-checking them, searching for better ways.   3. Your brain naturally matches and finds patterns – don’t be satisfied until you’ve fully explored what other patterns might be more applicable or superior for your situation.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“All told, this leads from going with naive intuition – which was the eventual downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte and Wilhelm II – to a more honed intuition that includes studying the world, deciphering the true patterns, being skeptical of one’s own behavior – so that you can constantly plot a good course through reality.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“This means not embracing the first answer that comes to you, or any “default way of being” that you’ve been doing, even if you’ve been doing it for a number of decades.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“Situations are always fluid. Continuing your default responses to internal pressures is a very dangerous thing if your situation changes or evolves.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“On his death bed, he wrote his famous Dokkodo – final principles for the students of his school.   The third principle is, “In all things, have no preferences.”   The fourth principle is, “Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.”   These two, to me, elegantly defend against the downsides of naive intuition.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“Napoleon’s intuition was a mix of homeostatic pressure – strong urges felt whenever he saw opportunity or felt threatened – followed by his default responses through entrained behavior over the years as an artillery officer and commander, and likewise matching patterns of unfamiliar situations to previously known situations.   In order to have secured France’s place in the world, Napoleon would have needed to start acting against his intuition at some point, and taking a counter-intuitive position (to him) in regards to opportunities and threats.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“we also see two things that are very salient for Napoleon –   1. Whenever he saw an opportunity, he immediately felt a strong desire to seize it with bold and lightning-quick action.   2. When threatened or in a dangerous situation, his default inclination was to attack.   A lot of his success came from #1 – this is where came his bold actions to join the French army, to defect from one of his posts (where he was luckily rewarded with a promotion instead of a court-martial; it could have gone either way); his hurrying back to France from Egypt in the chaos of Second Coalition defeats of France; etc.   But later it became the first piece of his eventual downfall, the opportunistic seizing of the Throne of Spain and betrayal of his Spanish allies. It was not reasoned-through or carefully planned enough – he saw the weakness of the Spanish monarchy and just immediately seized upon it.   A lot of his success likewise came from #2 – Austerlitz is the most famous – but eventually, he followed this pattern into the Russian Campaign with disastrous consequences.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“The “best guess” as to what you’ll do in any given situation is easy to make –   Guess you’ll do the same thing you did last time.   It’s painfully simple and stunning in its accuracy.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“It was previously understood across many cultures that your thoughts might just be enemy soldiers putting you under siege.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“Invent, build, celebrate, elevate people.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“3. You need to do empiricism – study reality diligently, independently of your morals – to remain on solid ground. 4. An empirical set of observations will show you that insufficient cash reserves are potentially fatal. 5. Thus, in Causal Mode, you always ensure you have adequate cash reserves. 6. You ensure you have those cash reserves. 7. Thus, causally, you stay alive in business.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“To modernize it a bit, lavish and excessive benefits during boom times won’t be remembered enough if you ask for pay cuts or do a round of layoffs during bad times. The moral desire to really be generous is fatal if it leads to insufficient cash reserves.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“But what shall we think of a governor's playing such pitiful tricks, and imposing so grossly on a poor ignorant boy! It was a habit he had acquired. He wish'd to please everybody; and, having little to give, he gave expectations.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“Higher-Order Thinking is one of the defining abilities of people that are able to make really great things happen. It applies to everything from your smallest personal habits, to the largest multi-billion and multi-trillion dollar investments in infrastructure and international affairs.   Our method of doing it is relatively simple –   1. Break down decisions into the component parts and outcomes.   2. Prioritize what matters. This doesn’t need to be advanced; any thinking-through of priorities gets most of the gains here. (Though for whatever reason, people resist prioritization.)   3. Get very curious and/or paranoid to unearth hidden consequences, implications, root causes, opportunities, and risks. Do this solo on paper and in dialog if anything is significant enough.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“Paranoia is sort of like a forwards-looking curiosity.   It’s asking,   “Why could go wrong here?”   “What else matters here?” “What are we missing if anything?”   “How could this affect stuff we weren’t anticipating?”   “Are we leaving any huge gains on the table?”   “Are we taking any risks here that we don’t want to take?”   There’s no magic to curiosity or paranoia – you just do it, thoroughly.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“The vehicle will not start. (the problem) 1. Why? The battery is dead. (first why) 2. Why? The accelerator is not functioning. (second why) 3. Why? The alternator belt has broken. (third why) 4. Why? The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced. (fourth why) 5. Why? The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, the root cause)”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“If you were a military official doing weapons procurement, it’s not-at-all obvious what you should prioritize for different military units. Do you want higher-precision rifles that are more liable to fail under the harshest conditions, or do you want lower-precision weapons that keep working but at a lower level of accuracy?   One of the reasons that Higher-Order Thinking is hard to do is the natural tendency of people to say “I want it all.”   Obviously, you should get all the fundamentals and easy gains.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“At first, I found the whole thing vaguely offensive. Marvin Katko came to burgle, to commit a crime, he didn’t care at all about Edward Briney, and now Briney has to pay him money after Katko got hurt during the commission of his crime by that shotgun booby-trap.   But if you think a little closer on Katko v Briney, you can see a deeper reasoning of the Court’s, which is –   Do not set booby traps on your property. It is not okay no matter what.    The first-order consequence is that Briney, that poor fellow who had to deal with Marvin’s burgling attempt, now has to pay the burglar money. Yes, on some level this is offensive.   But the second-order consequence is that knowledge of that decision spreads through Iowa and all of American society, and property owners are on notice not to set traps.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“I’ll say it again – I think most people are not great at higher-order thinking, even if it “sounds obvious” at a first glance.   I also think it’s surprisingly hard to learn and execute well.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“Take the Toyota assembly line example: it’s not at all obvious that stopping the entire production line for a small defect, incurring a half million dollars of costs and stopping the entire factory, will lead to a company that is the most profitable and effective.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“to govern oneself, to govern and manage an institution or in business, to govern a city or country – you need to be able to study, understand, reflect on, anticipate, and adjust to second-order consequences, third-order consequences, and so on.   If I were forced to pick just one attribute that would make someone “gold souled,” it would be simply that – the ability to see all the cascading consequences of immediate actions.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“First-order consequences of Prohibition: alcohol is made illegal, legitimate producers of alcohol go out of business, decrease in drinking.   Second-order consequences of Prohibition: alcohol starts getting produced by organized crime, the law starts getting flaunted, a thriving black market in alcohol emerges.   Third-order consequences of Prohibition: the law is repealed, the status quo is restored – but with the organized crime that bootstrapped itself off alcohol still existing.   Boo; hiss. Bad outcome.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“Third-order consequences: Toyota winds up with the highest quality rates, lowest defect rates, and most efficient factories in the world.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“Policy: pay money for dead cobras.   First-order consequence: cobras hunted and killed, less cobras.   Second-order consequence: cobra breeding starts taking place.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“Assume your service is bad. It can’t hurt, and it will force you to improve.”   1. Acknowledge the truth of things. 2. Commit to competence, including all the hard work and downsides. 3. Study your domain rigorously. 4. Do the work.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“Most people think they’re just marvelously terrific, and who cares if they’re on time? They’re special and lovely.   The mindset shift to the opposite is powerful. No luxury. No preening. No bombast. Just competence. Mere competence.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“Every domain has different components needed for mastery.   It’s not hard to figure out what they are. Study everything rigorously and implement everything you find.   This is the theme you see over and over again at really outsized successes: at Walmart, Sam Walton studied everything. At Toyota, they studied every aspect of making automobiles and tried to refine every single one of them to perfection. Under the leadership of Wozniak, Jobs, and Ive among others, Apple of course became fanatical about getting the tiniest details perfect.   It’s not complicated.   You study everything in your domain.   If something does fail or go wrong, you don’t sweep it under the rug – you study it relentlessly, and put new policies in place, and then train them up.”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION

“If you’re both lucky and everything runs smoothly, it will take 27 minutes to reach your destination.   On average, it will only take 41 minutes to get through this journey.   But if you want to always be on time, you need to budget… the whole 55 minutes it could possibly take.   If you do, you’ll be early most of the time. (Bring a book, newspaper, or some work to do.)   What do most people do, though?   They give themselves 30 minutes – and are late pretty much always.   Or they give themselves 40 minutes – and are late consistently.   Or they give themselves 50 minutes – and are still late sometimes!”
― Sebastian Marshall, PROGRESSION