This Week I Learned #71
“Go to bed smarter than when you woke up”
Top 10 Learnings from Q3 (Part 2)
2019-08-14
Reread Derek Siver's book: Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur. Couple quotes that struck me on the third reread.
"When you're onto something great, it won't feel like revolution. It'll feel like uncommon sense" - Derek Sivers
"In the end, it's about what you want to be, not what you want to have. To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. To be something ( a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point." - Derek Sivers
2019-08-16
Pascal's Wager: Per the French Mathematician, physicist. If God was real, then believing would result in infinite gain while not believing will result in infinite loss. But, if God were not real then believing would result in finite loss and not believing would result in finite gain. Hence, believing results in infinite gain in upside and finite loss in downside. Hence one should believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager; A foundational perspective on investing. Heads I win big and tails I don't lose much. It may be wise to look for Pascal's wager in every possible decision making scenario.
2019-09-01
Lecture piece with Dr. Jordan Peterson on Circumambulation. Carl Jung believed we circled around our destiny and only by being conscientious would we recognize the various signs in our life to circle closer to the "center". In the beginning, this can result in lot's of "overshooting" where the path may not seem efficient at all. But value of overshooting is that one is still shooting. Most don't bother acting on fear of going off course from some "optimal" path. But only by constantly pushing down the path and being wrong will you learn to course correct and learn to refine further in the future. Besides, the inefficient journey may be the more interesting journey. The interesting journey may actually result in a life well lived I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5KvIgvwbwQ
2019-09-17
Learning from the "Life is Short." Essay:
"The saddest windows close when other people die. Their lives are short too. After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her. I lived as if she'd always be there. And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But an illusion it was. I think a lot of people make the same mistake I did." Parents will never tell their children that time is ending for them. They won't worry their own children and will prefer they push on with their lives.
"Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do. Don't wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don't need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait. Just don't wait."
2019-09-19
Learning from the "How to do what you Love." Essay:
"If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school"
"As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it." The mindless time is the rest you take in order to be more effective in the work you care for. This can also be incorporated with the "personal hourly rate" Jordan Peterson and Naval Ravikant talks about. If you were to give yourself an hourly rate of $100, would you rather pay someone less than your hourly rate to do the work you just did in that hour?
"Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like."
"Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious." In investing, great businesses now are less likely to be great investments now because it's obvious. Same for prestige. If you go for something that is already prestigious, is it not like buying a bank stock? No big returns to come from there.
"It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious."
"If you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one"
"The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?"
"Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it—finding work you love does usually require discipline." Amen.
"Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche"