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Jim OShaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

17 Oct

1/ "Your success isn’t about you and your performance. It’s about us and how we perceive your performance...Or, to put it simply, your success is not about you, it’s about us...success is a collective phenomenon rather than an individual one...

2/ The most successful among us have mastered our networks, using them to achieve a place in the collective consciousness, snapping up valuable real estate in the brains of unlikely people. In other words, the network found him useful and chose to amplify his success."

3/ This composite quote is from Albert-László Barabási's book "The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success" and gets at a central reason why I believe that distributed intelligence networks like Twitter have given talented people a huge and new advantage to present their

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Jim OShaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

9 Jul

It’s *what* is said that’s important, not *who* has said it, a thread

1/ I have long recommended reading outside of the field of finance and investing in order to gain useful insights that help you learn how to become a better investor. There is one book, in particular,

2/ that I have been re-reading and contemplating ever since I was 18—“The Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tzu.

I recently re-read some threads (included below) that tried to illustrate how studying Lao Tzu’s ideas are very helpful in this regard. But when I was going through some

3/ old journals (also something I’ve done since age 18) I realized that we often change in ways so subtle that we don’t recognize them until we read thoughts from our earlier self. / When I was younger, I wanted to know as much as I could about the author of what I was reading.

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Jim OShaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

28 Jun

1/“Think of a flabby person covered with fat. That is what your mind can become—flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover. It loses its alertness, its aliveness, its flexibility and goes to sleep.”

2/ “What are these layers? Every belief that you hold, every conclusion you have reached about persons and things, every habit and every attachment. In your formative years you should have been helped to scrape off these layers and liberate your mind.”

3/ “Instead your society, your culture, which put these layers on your mind in the first place, has educated you to not even notice them, to go to sleep and let other people—the experts: your politicians, your cultural and religious leaders—do your thinking for you.

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Jim OShaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

1 Jun

1/ “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”
~Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."
~Henry David Thoreau

Context--A thread

2/ One of the things that challenges our perceptions and mental models today is a seeming lack of context. Many articles and thought pieces I read today all too often judge a historical figure or idea by the generally accepted standards of today, ignoring the prevailing views

3/ of the society in which that person lived, acted and thought. Art offers us an excellent example.

The Uffizi Museum in Florence houses some of the greatest masterpieces from the Italian Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries. Masters such as Sandro Botticelli painted

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Jim OShaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

31 May

@asterionwealth

@asterionwealth 1/ Alas, I think you're correct. I've experienced it first hand--when I was 21, I started getting "Cluster" headaches. When I got the first one, I really thought I was having an aneurysm and was going to die. When I was diagnosed with them, my doctor told me they were the

@asterionwealth

@asterionwealth 2/ worst pain a man could feel (childbirth being the worst) and that they used to be called "suicide" headaches because more people with them killed themselves than the normal population. My point is that after a cluster period went away, I would realize there were huge swatches

@asterionwealth

@asterionwealth 3/ of time that I essentially had no memory of--I would look at my journals and see entries I had no active memory of making. Mercifully, I stopped getting them in my 40s, but it certainly made me more empathetic to people who had gone through horrible physical pain. I think

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Jim OShaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

30 May

1/ An interesting benefit of having written journals going back to 1979 (When I started keeping them at age 19) is a constant reminder of how it is a feature, not a bug, of our memories to automatically augment (read change) them to make them consistent with current conditions

2/ and for that process to be completely outside of our conscious awareness. Our brains are *designed* to make "hindsight bias" a constant demon of evolution's design. I speculate this is so in order to give us a constant "illusion of control" and allow us to see both the world

3/ and our life as a constant, consistent narrative that makes sense. What sparked this was my pulling out all of my old journals and going through them where I was struck by the generally accepted narrative that the country has never been as polarized as it is now in 2020.

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