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Tips from peoples’ therapy

She may not always love me the way I want her to, but she’s loving me the best she knows how.

When you say “I feel that this action was inconsiderate” the other person can’t say you don’t feel that way.

The problem is you’re thinking rationally when dealing with somebody who’s irrational.

You’re responsible for your actions, not others’ reactions.

Every time you resist feeling an emotion it goes down to the basement to lift weights.

Other people having it worse does not make your pain any less real, someone else’s broken ankle doesn’t mean yours isn’t sprained.

If you can imagine the worst thing, you can imagine the best thing. Both things are imaginary. Say the positive outcome out loud and repeat it until it feels more real.

Don’t attempt to understand why a dysfunctional person does what they do. Dysfunction has no logic behind it.

Relationships are as subject to the sunk cost fallacy as anything else. They shouldn’t be held onto at all costs simply because they’re long standing. No matter how good it once was or for how long, if it’s not serving you any more (or has become toxic) it’s okay to end it.

Don’t compare yourself to other people or compare yourself to fantasy versions of how your life would’ve turned out had you made a different choice. That’s the most dangerous mind game of all.

Thoughts aren’t facts.

Tell people when they upset you instead of hoping they will notice your changed behavior towards them.

Listen to what people say but watch what they do.

For intrusive thoughts and rumination: schedule a short daily time to allow it, and when the thought comes into your head just put it off until that time. Eventually you may forget to do your daily ruminating and it just passes.

Stop expecting something someone does not have to give.

Ask why people do and say things, instead of assuming you know why. You never know what someone is thinking until you ask them. Save yourself the effort of mindreading (misreading) and ask.

 

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Velociraptors

Sure the velociraptors are still on the loose, but that’s no reason not to reopen Jurassic Park.

Rather than double down on our containment efforts, we’ve decided to dissolve the velociraptor containment task force altogether, focusing instead on getting people back into the park as quickly as possible.

I want to take a moment to thank our Jurassic Park EMTs. They’re the real heroes here, right? In the process of responding to velociraptor attacks, many of our EMTs get mauled and dismembered by velociraptors themselves. That’s why, as a sign of appreciation, we will be repainting the Jurassic Park ambulance with the words “Hero Mobile.”  We think this is a far more meaningful token of gratitude than the salary increase they requested.

I know many of you are going to be hesitant about returning to Jurassic Park knowing there’re still velociraptors roaming the preserve, but rest assured things will return to normal sooner rather than later. The life expectancy of a velociraptor is only 15-20 years, so these attacks will eventually run their course.

In the meantime, will more visitors die? Yes. Will more Jurassic Park staff die? Yes. But know that their sacrifice will not be forgotten – we plan to erect a small plaque dedicated to all of the velociraptor attack victims.


The biggest outbreaks are in prisons, religious ceremonies, and workplaces, such a meat packing facilities and call centers. Any environment that’s enclosed, with poor air circulation and high density of people, spells trouble.

Most infection events were indoors, with people closely-spaced, with lots of talking, singing, or yelling. The main sources for infection are home, workplace, public transport, social gatherings, and restaurants. This accounts for 90% of all transmission events. In contrast, infections while shopping appear to be responsible for 3-5% of infections.

Indoor spaces, with limited air exchange or recycled air and lots of people, are concerning from a transmission standpoint. We know that 60 people in a volleyball court-sized room (choir) results in massive infections. Same situation with the restaurant and the call center.

The important principle is viral exposure over an extended period of time. In all these cases, people were exposed to the virus in the air for a prolonged period (hours). Even if they were 50 feet away (choir or call center), even a low dose of the virus in the air reaching them, over a sustained period, was enough to cause infection and in some cases, death.

If you are sitting in a well ventilated space, with few people, the risk is low.

Importantly, of the countries performing contact tracing properly, only a single outbreak has been reported from an outdoor environment (less than 0.3% of traced infections).

There have been recorded incidents of infections occurring on planes, but for the volume of air traffic, the incidence is low. They have great air filtration on board most modern planes.

Those immediately around you on the plane and fomite transfer from surfaces are your major concern.

Be super cautious using the bathroom, put the seat down and then flush!

………………………………………………….

The above two stories were excerpted from these two places:

SURE, THE VELOCIRAPTORS ARE STILL ON THE LOOSE, BUT THAT’S NO REASON NOT TO REOPEN JURASSIC PARK

The Risks – Know Them – Avoid Them

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How change happens

These words are so unlikely to be seen together that they could be a Jerry Seinfeld punchline, “Jews with foreskins.” What would it take to cause a cultural shift to leaving  Jewish baby boys intact? In this century, there have been two big societal impacts which could be triggers.

Maybe while NYC was recovering from the 9/11 terrorist attack, there must’ve been a significant time period when nonessential activities weren’t pursued. During that window of time how many Jewish male infants near the World Trade Center weren’t circumcised after the attack because of the disarray? And after things returned to normal and those babies were older maybe some parents let it slide.

Now it’s 2020, and those baby boys are young men with foreskins intact and maybe some have decided they like their foreskins.

Even if they might like the cut look, considering what they’d have to endue to get it, they decide against enduring that pain and drama of getting circumcised.

And now it’s May, 2020 and the US is still on lockdown. Is the same scenario taking place for recently born male Jewish babies? Just a thought, but change often occurs in unexpected ways.

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Surprising information

I’m a hunter gatherer of surprising information. Some of it is useful, some is truly surprising, and some is no more useful than a wristwatch in Mexico. Here’s some to ponder:

As someone with a different name, studies of names usually get my attention. Names including an infix, e.g. David van Mitchell instead of David Mitchell, ranked 43% higher in perceived social status. People will rate a piece of writing 14% better when the author’s name includes a middle initial.

Using plastic bags has become uncool. But taking a 30,00 foot view of the environmental footprint, the issue becomes murky. Reusable organic cotton bags must be used 149 times to offset the effects of traditional plastic bags on climate change, and they must be used 20,000 times to offset all combined environmental effects.

Timing is import. For example, you’ll get better results from a bureaucrat after lunch than before lunch when they might be hangry. Unfortunately, often you can’t control timing. After the LSU football team loses a game, Louisiana juvenile court judges hand out 6.4% longer sentences on average. And the longest sentence lengths are handed out by judges living closest to LSU.

We used to obsess about celebrities. Then social media caught on, we started obsessing about one another. Facebook gives you the impression that everyone else in the world is having a better time, and that if you are not cataloging your life, you’re not really living it. You only see pictures of others having a great time at the best party. People are developing a chemical addiction to their phones. A gambling addict feels that rush of brain chemicals not when they win but when the roulette wheel is spinning. When someone pulls out their phone to see if someone has commented on the photo they posted, they get that same rush.

This is crazy. No person born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

There’re some surprising casualties of smart phone use. Worldwide, growth in the fragrance industry is lagging behind cosmetics and skincare products, because ‘You can’t smell a selfie’.

The human mind is very powerful (or maybe gullible). Placebos are so effective that placebo placebos work: A pain cream with no active ingredients worked even when not used by the patient. Just owning the cream was enough to reduce pain.

No wonder it’s hard for some folks to find their boot straps to pull themselves up with. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says, “Where you are born is more predictive of your future than any other factor.”

It’s hard to believe that mammals are doing as well as we are. Scientists have identified about 120,000 species of fungi in 2019, but estimate there are as many as 3.3 million species in all. By comparison, all living mammals comprise fewer than 6,400 species.

Do you like yams and sweet potatoes? The sweet potato provides more nutrients per farmed acre than any other staple.

The human mind is weak. Expensive placebos work better than cheap placebos.

God bless Google, I searched for what happened in the year of the last four digits of my cell phone. The corncob pipe was invented 1869.

Don’t tell Lamborgini owners this. A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transport.

Hey vegans. People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because harassing rich women is safer than harassing motorcycle gangs.

It’s hard to believe that there are people who think that the Earth is flat or that climate change is a hoax. You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.

Don’t tell Louie Vitton this. Luxury isn’t about owning a lot of stuff. It’s about feeling unrushed.

A tidbit for the anti-vaxers.You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

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Money

The world is not fair and nature doesn’t care if you’re happy. You have to set your own goals and try to achieve them.

Money helps a lot of people. Pretending it doesn’t is misguided if you’re living in a capitalist society. Money improves people’s circumstances. It just does. What’s enough varies from person to person, you don’t necessarily need a lot of money, but you need enough.

But what always stays the same is our desire to live longer, to live better, and to avoid suffering. It can’t be emphasized enough: have money. In general, the person with the most options will have better outcomes. The top predictor of health, around the world now and throughout history is wealth. And if you can get it without compromising your sense of purpose or connection to others, or your  moral decency so much the better.

We’re constantly trying to reduce our level of anxiety. At the most basic level, organisms react in one of two ways, by approaching something or by avoiding something. Our consistent motivations are reproducing, living longer, living better, and avoiding suffering. Not having money cuts down the number of options we have.

Where can you trade money for time? Where can you spend money that creates more time tomorrow or next week? That’s almost always a good investment.

In a capitalist system, you become rich by living in a nation with the things you need to become rich. Some of those things are infrastructure, education, and a workforce, and mostly, a population of people who can afford to buy things.

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2019 update of “so far”

When you’re used to a website, noticing changes on it can be tough.

So here’s a heads up. I’ve just updated the “so far” page for this blog. “So far” is where I’ve compiled some of the best ideas from more than 600 blog posts.

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Lotteries

Facts about lotteries fromTyler Cowen:

The $29.8 billion Americans spent on the lottery in 1995 worked out to about $112 per capita. Today, per capita spending is up to $225 dollars a year. Part of that is the result of more states jumping on the lotto bandwagon.

If we subtract the 73 million people under age 18, and divide the remaining 250 million in half (since only 49 percent buy a lotto ticket in a given year), it works out to $600 a year in expenses for the average lotto player.

Some survey data show that a disproportionate share of regular lottery players fall into low-income brackets.

Massachusetts leads the nation with an astonishing $767 in annual per capita lotto spending. It’s followed by West Virginia ($594), Rhode Island ($513), Delaware ($421) and New York ($421).

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Deep Survival

It’s not what’s in your pack or even what’s in your mind.
The first lesson is to remain calm and not panic.
Only 10 to 20 percent of untrained people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency. They’re the ones who can perceive their situation clearly, plan, and take correct action, the key elements of survival. Confronted with a changing environment, they rapidly adapt.
Adaptation is another word for survival.
Those are some highlights from “Deep Survival” by Laurence Gonzales, a book about wilderness survival stories. It gives insights from survivors of the worst situations and insights from the mistakes made by those who didn’t make it.
In a post a couple of years ago, I said the key to survival is a good attitude and having a down jacket.
Plus, if you work your way through obtaining shelter, water, fire, then food you’ll probably do ok.
Here’re some other highlights I made in “Deep survival:”
The first rule is to face reality. Good survivors aren’t immune to fear. They know what’s happening, and it does “scare the living shit out of” them. It’s all a question of what you do next.
Moods are contagious, and the emotional states involved with smiling, humor, and laughter are among the most contagious of all.
Laughter makes the feeling of being threatened manageable.
Survivors joke about dark situations because if you get too serious, you’ll get too scared, and once that devil is out of the bottle, you’re on a runaway horse. Some fear is good. Too much fear is not.
Plato understood emotions could trump reason and that to succeed we have to use the reins of reason on the horse of emotion.
“Cognition” means reason and conscious thought, mediated by language, images, and logical processes. “Emotion” refers to a specific set of bodily changes in reaction to the environment, the body, or to images produced by memory. Cognition is capable of making fine calculations and abstract distinctions while emotion can produce powerful physical actions.
Emotion is an instinctive response aimed at self-preservation involving numerous bodily changes in preparation for action. The nervous system fires more energetically, the blood changes so it can coagulate more rapidly, muscle tone alters, digestion stops, and various chemicals flood the body to put it in a state of high readiness for whatever needs to be done.
The quality which is perhaps the only one for survival success is self-control.
There’re at least two separate brain systems that can generate behavior. The way they work, the way you capture experiences, and turn them into learning (memories), can influence your ability to survive.
Unconscious operations of the brain is the rule rather than the exception throughout the evolutionary history of the animal kingdom.
From the point of view of an organism in desperate trouble, an organism that evolved by relying on emotions as the first line of defense, cognition is irrelevant and gets set aside. It’s slow and clunky so there’s no time for it.
Because the system is designed to work without the assistance of logic or reason, there’s now an answer to the question: What were they thinking? They weren’t. The whole point of the system is that you don’t have to think.
We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.
When the bad outcome connected with a given response comes into mind, however fleetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling. Using that system, you can choose very quickly and may be unable to explain your choice afterward. The best and worst decisions are made that way. You don’t have to think about it. It just feels right.
A dog is like the amygdala, when anyone comes to the door, it barks before I even hear anything.
Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little.
Mismatching the abilities of people in the outdoors is a sure way to get into trouble. People routinely fail to realize that they have to travel at the speed of the slowest member.
Generally, they’d be wiser and safer to stay put and get as comfortable and warm as possible, but many feel compelled to push on, urged by subconscious feelings.
A working definition of being lost is the inability to make the mental map match the environment.
Admitting that you’re lost is difficult because having no mental map, being no place, is like having no self. It’s impossible to conceive, because one of the main jobs of the organism is to adjust itself to place.
The organism’s main task is to map the self, map the environment, and keep the two in harmonious balance. Without the balance, the organism dies.
Those who die can do so surprisingly quickly, and hypothermia is usually the official cause. Hypothermia is frighteningly insidious, but in some cases people just give up.
It’s simple. Fail to update your mental map and then persist in following it even when the landscape (or your compass) tries to tell you it’s wrong.
Whenever you start looking at your map and saying something like, ‘Well, that lake could have dried up,’ or, ‘That boulder could have moved,’ a red light should go off. You’re trying to make reality conform to your expectations rather than seeing what’s there.
Everyone who dies out there dies of confusion.
There can be a destructive synergy among numerous factors, including exhaustion, dehydration, hypothermia, anxiety, hunger, injury. It’s called “woods shock.”
Being lost, then, is not a location; it is a transformation. It is a failure of the mind. It can happen in the woods or it can happen in life
Dougal Robertson, at sea for thirty-eight days, advised thinking of it this way: “Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of…the survival voyage.”
She looked to herself, took responsibility, made a plan.
The survival instructor kept talking about Positive Mental Attitude. It was the number one item on the checklist he’d given us.
A survival situation is a ticking clock: You have only so much stored energy (and water), and every time you exert yourself, you’re using it up. The trick is to become extremely stingy with your scarce resources, balancing risk and reward, investing only in efforts that offer the biggest return.
In survival situations, people greatly underestimate the need for rest.
You should operate at about 60 percent of your normal level of activity and rest and rehydrate frequently. If the weather is cool and you’re sweating, you’re working too hard.
Purpose is a big part of survival, but it must be accompanied by work.
The survivor plans by setting small, manageable goals and then systematically achieving them.
Don’t get comfortable. Get confident.
It’s amazing to see what a fire can do for your outlook. Like making art, making fire is a deeply human act. Through it, we know our world in a way that no animal ever will.
Bruce Chatwin wrote “The Songlines” about Aboriginal methods of mapping.
Each child in Morey’s school selects a “secret spot” in the woods. Every day, the students are directed to spend some time at their secret spot. They do this through all the seasons. They learn to stop and think. They learn to be calm and alone. They will never feel that the woods are alien. So, if they ever get lost or otherwise disoriented they can comfort themselves.
You can learn to turn around and see where you’ve been, which is a means of paying attention.
Starting the moment an accident occurs, it’s necessary for a survivor to take control of his situation. Turn fear into focus – the first act of a survivor.
When the personality is ripped away there has to be a core remaining to carry the person through. If a person can carry all his support within him then it matters little what the external environment comprises. It’s not that cool people are unafraid. They’re very afraid. But they are “Afraid to panic.”
In the heat of a crisis, the only thought you can allow yourself concerns your next correct action.
Callahan dove underwater at night into his damaged, sinking sailboat to retrieve his emergency supply bag. He had just saved his life by risking it, which is the essential task of every organism. No risk, no reward. Then he set up a small, attainable goal. He was giving himself something to do and a chance for success both of which are necessary early in the survival scenario.
A sense of humor is not a luxury, it’s vital for survival.
“I’ve got to do the best I can,” he told himself. “The very best. I cannot shirk or procrastinate. I cannot withdraw.” Begin taking delight in small achievements, celebrating early victories. You must help yourself.
Callahan constantly reminded himself of the basic things, the important things: “The important thing is to keep calm…. I can only afford success. Don’t hurry. Make it right…. Patience is going to be the secret, and strength.”
Admit the situation’s reality and adapt to it. Be here now. Place yourself in relation to it and say: Before I came here, the world was as it is now; after I am gone, it will be that way still.
To experience wonder is to know this truth: The world won’t adapt to me. I must adapt to it. To experience humility is the true survivor’s correct response to catastrophe.
Privacy is essential to life. Life itself can be seen as arising from a self-organizing force that gathers certain materials, hoards and tends them, and protects them from becoming part of the rest of the world, even while delicately interacting with, finding a place in, taking from and giving to the world. Privacy is life, but so is community. It’s another balancing act, to have boundaries and not be completely alone. At times when nature is trying to reclaim the materials of life, to turn you into the raw stuff of the world.
Gratitude, humility, wonder, imagination, and cold, logical determination: those are the survivor’s tools of mind.
“Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.”
Leadership, order, and routine are all important elements of survival.
The best survivors spend almost no time getting upset , especially in emergencies, about what has been lost, or feeling distressed about things going badly. For this reason they don’t usually take themselves too seriously and are therefore hard to threaten.
To make a pattern, to use rhythms, means quite literally to live.
Epictetus said, “Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will. And add this reflection on the occasion of everything that happens; for you will find it an impediment to something else, but not to yourself.”
Not being lost is not a matter of getting back to where you started from; it is a decision not to be lost where ever you happen to find yourself. It’s simply saying, “I’m not lost, I’m right here.”
Don’t feed that amygdala any scary raw data. A survivor must compartmentalize and set small goals. It would kill him not to.
Some instructors at survival schools use the acronym STOP—stop, think, observe, plan.
We come from cities and learn to expect things to stay the same. But they don’t in the wilderness. And it kills us, quickly or slowly.
Don’t think that just because you’re good at one thing, it makes you good at other things.
 NOLS says ‘The summit is not the only place on the mountain.’ So turn around when conditions warrant it.
Set up small, manageable tasks. Survivors quickly organize, set up routines, and institute discipline.
Horace Barlow, a neurobiologist, says that intelligence is a matter of “guessing well.”
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Advice from “Tribe of Mentors”

These are some highlights I made in “Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World” by Timothy Ferriss. Tim sent out a list of questions to lots successful folks across a wide range of pursuits.

While Tim can sometimes be a bit of a self promoter and a gadfly he’s generally pretty insightful and has access to many high achievers who provide good advice.

I highlighted and bolded some of the ideas I liked, quotes I liked, and books that sounded like they might be interesting. Most the advice and ideas are given without an attribution because I don’t think it adds anything important, and the advice can stand on its own.

BTW, you can use an app called Bookcicion to get your Kindle highlights corralled into one handy PDF file.

Here’s some of the stuff I highlighted:

It’s not how well you play the game, it’s deciding what game you want to play.

What you seek is seeking you.

“You Are Not So Smart” by David McRaney

To do what you desire to do, you have all you need.

Cheer others on with the full knowledge that their success will undoubtedly be your own.

I realized that I had to let people leave my life, never to return. Every relationship I have in my life, from family and friends to business partners, must be a voluntary relationship. Sometimes you have to do a “crowd-thinner.” One wrong person in your circle can destroy your whole future.

You won’t take a bullet for pleasure or power, but you will for meaning.

Busy is a decision. Saying we’re too busy for something is shorthand for “not important enough.” You don’t find the time to do something; you make the time to do things.

What might look like luck is simply hard work paying off.

If you’re doing something you love, you don’t want work-life balance.

“Total Freedom” by Jiddu Krishnamurti is a rationalist’s guide to the perils of the human mind.

Happiness, or at least peace, is the sense that nothing is missing in this moment.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower.

Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.

The mind is just as malleable as the body. We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies, while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youth, accepting the voice that talks to us in our head all the time as the source of all truth. But all of it is malleable, every day is new, and memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present.

Follow your intellectual curiosity over whatever is “hot” right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll be paid extremely well. Do everything you were going to do, but with less angst, less suffering, less emotion. Everything takes time.

Ignore: The news. Complainers, angry people, high-conflict people. Anyone trying to scare you about a danger that isn’t clear and present. Don’t do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone’s watching, but because you are. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You’ll always know.

Ignore the unfairness—there is no fair, so play the hand you’re dealt to the best of your ability. People are highly consistent, so you will eventually get what you deserve and so will they. In the end, everyone gets the same judgment: death.

Don’t wait.

I aspire to only work with people who I can work with forever, to invest my time in activities that are a joy unto themselves, and to focus on the extremely  long term. So I have no time for short-term things: dinners with people I won’t see again, tedious ceremonies to please tedious people, traveling to places that I wouldn’t go to on vacation.

Memento mori—“remember that you have to die.” All of this will go to nothing. Remember before you were born? Just like that.

“The Double Helix” by James D. Watson and “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins.

Specializing – the great human achievement is to specialize as a producer of goods or services so that you can diversify as a consumer. Self-sufficiency is another word for poverty.

I can reframe conflicts as a chance to experiment with solutions.

We need a new diversity, not one based on biological characteristics and identity politics but a diversity of opinion and world views.

George Saunders imagines people as “nectar in decaying containers.”

“Making Sense of People” by Sam Barondes. The most useful mental model I’ve found to help understand what makes people tick. It’s called OCEAN: open-minded, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable, neurotic. The developers clumped every English adjective that could be used to describe someone into categories and reduced them to as small a set of factors as they could. The killer combination is high open-minded, high conscientious, low neurotic.

The responsibility to fully own the role of source rests with the source themselves.

Today when I speak with anyone about anything, I try to hold the perspective that the knowledge that they, and I, have very incomplete maps of reality.

“Integrity is the only path where you will never get lost.”

Ego is about who’s right. Truth is about what’s right.

I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

You should use common words to say uncommon things.

The Back Buddy by the Body Back Company is my favorite purchase from the past five years, bar none.

“The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov

Whenever there is any doubt about doing something important, there is no doubt about not doing it.

The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting.

The barnacles of the good life tend to slow you down, get used to risk-taking early in your career.

“Under Saturn’s Shadow” by James Hollis, a Jungian analyst.

The secret to change and growth is not willpower, but positive community.

Garret Keizer’s “The Enigma of Anger.”

”The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes

I’ve read everything Philip Kerr has written about the fictional Berlin policeman Bernie Gunther.

My advice is to choose a profession that’s really easy for you to do and also allows you to be creative. If it’s easy for you to do and somewhat difficult for your peers to do, you won’t have to work too hard to be successful and you’ll have enough spare time to enjoy life. You’ll also be able to put in extra hours to blow the others out of the water. If, on the other hand, you have to work long hours all the time just to be competitive, you’ll burn out and not enjoy life.

The best skill is to be able to communicate efficiently both in writing and speaking.

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” –Joseph Campbell

If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.

“There is nothing that the busy man is less busy with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.” –Seneca

A stoic is always ready for any disaster and ready to embrace it, to turn it into opportunity. My wife used to ask me, “Why are you happy when something bad happens?” I am not happy, I am just not unhappy. I focus on removing what is wrong.

“Book of Strange New Things” by Michel Faber.

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” –Henry David Thoreau

Persistence matters more than talent.

Things are never as good or as bad as they seem.

A lawyer, asks his client, who is being accused of being a spy, “Aren’t you worried?” His answer: “Would it help?” That’s the pivotal question that I ask myself every day. If you put everything through that prism, it’s a remarkably effective way to cut through the clutter.

Our culture puts such a premium on the notion of originality, but when you really examine just about any “original” thought or work, you find it’s a composite of previous influences. Everything’s a remix.

I want to be the chess player, not the chess piece.

When something goes badly, I don’t automatically assume I did something wrong. Instead I ask myself, “What policy  produced this bad outcome, and do I still expect that policy to give the best results overall, occasional bad outcomes notwithstanding?” If yes, then carry on! Even the best policies will fail some percent of the time, and you don’t want to abandon them (or beat yourself up) as soon as one of those inevitable failures pops up.

The books “Superforecasting” by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner and ‘How to Measure Anything” by Douglas W. Hubbard have good advice on how to improve your ability to make accurate predictions. And “Decisive” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath explains four of the biggest judgment errors (like framing your decision too narrowly, or letting temporary emotions cloud your judgment) and gives tips for combating them.

One distraction I’ve learned to avoid is consuming media that’s just telling me things I already know and agree with (for example, about politics). I broke my media addiction by, essentially, reminding myself how much time I was wasting not learning anything.

There is no urgency to have it all figured out.

Every smart person and stable person I know both walks and meditates.

“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ideas Uncategorized

The changing American psyche

It doesn’t seem like Trump is “making America Great Again.” More and more he seems to be encouraging and fostering an America that promotes the sentiments of this quote I saw somewhere, “African-Americans know what it feels like to be ignored by those in power. Thanks to Trump, the rest of America is getting a taste of that now.”