Thread by @OrtegaTalks

What if you could have your learning experience compressed in one THREAD?

The Ultimate Learning Guide: @farnamstreet and @ryan_reeves13 👇👇👇

"To achieve anything we need a view of both the micro and the macro, the forest and the trees — and how both perspectives slot together."

It’s easy to focus on other people; it’s much harder to look inward and face complex challenges.

Incredibly successful people focus their time on just a few priorities and obsess over doing things right. This is simple but not easy.

Pain is something we all try to avoid, both instinctively and consciously. But if you want to do amazing things in life, you need to change your relationship with pain

The easy path means being the same person you were yesterday. It’s easy and comfortable to convince yourself that the world should work differently than it does, that you have nothing to learn from the pain.

The harder path is to embrace the pain and ask yourself what you could have done differently or better or what your blind spot was. It’s harder because you stop living in the bubble of your own creation and start living in reality.

Velocity and speed are different things. Speed is the distance traveled over time. I can run around in circles with a lot of speed and cover several miles that way, but I’m not getting anywhere. Velocity measures displacement. It’s direction-aware.

“…two of the most important forms of intelligence: the ability to read other people, and the ability to understand oneself. Those are the two kinds of intelligence that you need to succeed at chess — and in life.” — Pandolfini

There are three fundamental quirks of human nature. We fall in love with what we already have. We focus on what we might lose, rather than what we might gain. We assume that other people will see the transaction from the same perspective as we do.

Power of Price: When told that the drug cost $2.50 per dose, nearly all of the subjects reported pain relief. When told that the drug cost $0.10 per dose, only half of the subjects reported pain relief.

Average performers believe their errors were caused by factors outside their control: My opponent got lucky; the task was too hard; I just don’t have the natural ability for this. Top performers, by contrast, believe they are responsible for their errors.

==The Feynman Technique==
1.Choose a Concept
2. Teach it to a Toddler
3. Identify Gaps and Go Back to The Source Material
4. Review and Simplify (optional)

The rate at which you learn and progress in the world depends on how willing you are to weigh the merit of new ideas, even if you don’t instinctively like them.

Open-minded people see disagreement as a thoughtful means to expand their knowledge.

Should we become specialists or polymaths? Is there a balance we should pursue?

Best Option: A generalizing specialist has a core competency which they know a lot about. At the same time, they are always learning and have a working knowledge of other areas.

"If we see someone throwing money away, we call that person crazy. This bothers us, in part, because money has value. Wasting it seems nuts. And yet we see others — and ourselves — throw away something far more valuable every day: Time."---Seneca.

"Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthy and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next — and disappear."--Foer

"Solitude is an important aspect toward accomplishing great things, creative or otherwise. In fact, it’s one of the commonalities found amongst the routines of great writers and artists."---Hemingway

"That’s not to say that if you lock yourself in a room, you’re going to turn into something great. It does suggest, however, that there is something to being alone with your thoughts."---Hemingway

"Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not."---Susan Cain

Warning: Side effects of reading more may include
(1) increased intelligence;
(2) an uncomfortable silence when someone asks you what happened on Game of Thrones last night and you say “Game of what?”;
(3) better ideas; and
(4) increased understanding of yourself and others.

"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”--Steve Jobs

“What the pupil must learn, if he learns anything at all, is that the world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities. If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson.”

"If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence."--Munger

"I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up."---Munger

We tend to either dismiss new evidence, or embrace it as though nothing else matters. Bayesians try to weigh both the old hypothesis and the new evidence in a sensible way.

"If people tell you what you really don’t want to hear — what’s unpleasant — there’s an almost automatic reaction of antipathy. You have to train yourself out of it. It isn’t foredestined that you have to be this way. But you will tend to be this way if you don’t think about it."

"We only give a couple of instructions to people when they go to work for us: One is to think like an owner. And the second is to tell us bad news immediately — because good news takes care of itself. We can take bad news, but we don’t like it late."--Buffet

"When contemplating a moral action, imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person.”--Michael Shermer

Look out for the Law of Unintended Consequences:
1. Damage-control lawsuits can lead to negative media attention and cause more harm
2. Abstinence-based education invariably causes a rise in teenage pregnancies.

“You’re not entitled to take a view, unless and until you can argue better against that view than the smartest guy who holds that opposite view. If you can argue better than the smartest person who holds the opposite view, that is when you are entitled to hold a certain view.”

"Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got."

Good strategy is not just “what” you are trying to do. It is also “why” and “how” you are doing it. … Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests.

How to Get Promoted?
1. be visible;
2. emphasize the aspects you’re good at;
3. make those in power feel good about themselves;
4. if you must point out a mistake by someone in power, blame the situation or others; and
5. shower those above with flattery.

Remember that anything really worth doing is probably hard work, and will absolutely require you to do things you don’t currently do, which will feel uncomfortable for a while. This is a “hard truth” we must all face. If it was easy, everyone would already be doing it.