@farnamstreet podcast with @naval is probably the best thing I have read in a while. Here are some amazing nuggets of wisdom 👇
1/n. I have very poor attention. I skim. I speed read. I jump around. I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books.
1/n. I have very poor attention. I skim. I speed read. I jump around. I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books.
2/n. At some deep level, you do absorb them and they become part of the threads of the tapestry of your psyche. They do kind of weave in there.
3/n. I think you do have to be irrationally optimistic to succeed and passionate. You also have to really know your stuff.
4/n. Habits are good. Habits can allow you to background process certain things so that your neocortex, your frontal lobe, stays available to solve brand new problems.
5/n. I think the hard thing here is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth.
6/n. Negotiations with high-integrity people are usually very easy. You’re giving each other things to make sure the other person is happy enough that the deal survives. Unhappy deals get unwound and they become short-term relationships, which don’t have any compounding benefits.
7/n. A big habit the I’m working on, which is going to be really hard to explain in any way that any normal human being will understand this, but I’m trying to turn off my monkey mind.
8/n. I think, when we’re born as children, we’re pretty blank slates. We’re living very much in the moment. We’re essentially just reacting to our environment through our instincts. We’re living in, what I would call the “real world.”
9/n. When puberty comes along, that’s the onset of desire, it’s the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning for it. Because of that, you start thinking a lot and start building an identity and an ego to go and get what you want.
10/n. My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health.
11/n. I try and set up good systems and then the individual decisions don’t matter that matter much
12/n. To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things.
13/n. Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and
the reality of what is, the way it is.
the reality of what is, the way it is.
14/n. I don’t believe that I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, what I try to do is try to eliminate what’s not going to work. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments.
15/n. I don’t believe in any short-term thinking or dealing. Let’s say I’m doing business with somebody and they think in a short-term manner with somebody else, then I don’t want to do business with that person anymore.
16/n. I think all the benefits in life come from compound interest. I only want to be around people that I know I’m going to be around with for the rest of my life. I only want to work on things that I know have a long-term payout.
17/n. I think if you take a very long-term point of view and if you take the emotion out of it, then I wouldn’t consider those things mistakes anymore.
18/n. All the real scorecards are internal.
19/n. Macroeconomics is a combination of voodoo complex systems and politics. You can find macroeconomists that take every side of every argument. I think that discipline, because it doesn’t make falsifiable predictions, which is the hallmark of science, it’s become corrupted.
20/n. I gave up macro and I embraced micro. I think it’s all micro. It’s like change yourself, then maybe change your family and your neighbor before you get into abstract concepts about I’m going to change the world.
21/n. Someone who makes decisions right 80% of the time instead of 70% of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more. With modern technology and large workforces and capital, our decisions are getting leveraged more and more.
22/n. I used to identify as libertarian, but then I would have to find myself defending positions that I hadn’t really thought through just because they’re a part of the libertarian canon.
23/n. If all of your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious because they’re prepackaged and put together.
24/n. Science is, to me, the study of truth. It is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions.
25/n. I think almost everything that people read these days is designed for social approval.
