Same as Ever

People like to say, “To know where we’re going, you have to know where we’ve been.” But more realistic is admitting that if you know where we’ve been, you realize we have no idea where we’re going. Events compound in unfathomable ways. (Location 322)

Nassim Taleb says, “Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.” That gets to the heart of it. Risk is dangerous when you think it requires a specific forecast before you start preparing for it. It’s better to have expectations that risk will arrive, though you don’t know when or where, than to rely exclusively on forecasts—almost all of which are either nonsense or about things that are well-known. (Location 442)

“If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.” (Location 482)

That may perfectly sum up how extremely successful people operate. Of course they have abnormal characteristics. That’s why they’re successful! And there is no world in which we should assume that all those abnormal characteristics are positive, polite, endearing, or appealing. (Location 694)

The world breaks about once every ten years, on average—always has, always will. Sometimes it feels like terrible luck, or that bad news has new momentum. More often it’s just raw math at work. A zillion different things can go wrong, so at least one of them is likely to be causing havoc at any given moment. And given how connected we are, you’re going to hear about (Location 861)

How many great ideas have already been discovered but could grow one hundred times or more if someone explained them better? How many products have found only a fraction of their potential market because the companies that made them are so bad at describing them to customers? (Location 1045)

Economist Per Bylund once noted: “The concept of economic value is easy: whatever someone wants has value, regardless of the reason (if any).” (Location 1177)

Not utility, not profits—just whether people want it or not, for any reason. So much of what happens in the economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to make sense of. (Location 1179)

If you want to know why there’s a long history of economies and markets blowing past the boundaries of sanity, bouncing from boom to bust, bubble to crash, it’s because so few people have Seinfeld’s mentality. We insist on knowing where the top is, and the only way to find it is to keep pushing until we’ve gone too far, when we can look back and say, “Ah, I guess that was the top.” (Location 1329)

That’s the balance—planning like a pessimist and dreaming like an optimist. That mix is counterintuitive, but it’s so powerful when done right. (Location 1847)

take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination. (Location 1964)

Mozart felt the same way: When I am traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep—it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. (Location 1966)

“My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.” (Location 1980)

There’s a scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia in which Lawrence puts out a match with his fingers and doesn’t flinch. Another man watching tries to do the same and yells in pain. “It hurts! What’s the trick, then?” he asks. “The trick is not minding that it hurts,” Lawrence says. This is one of the most useful life skills—enduring the pain when necessary rather than assuming there’s a hack, or a shortcut, around it. (Location 2037)

Many managers have little tolerance for nonsense. They think it’s noble. I demand excellence, they say. But it’s just unrealistic. The huge majority of them won’t thrive in their careers. Compounding is fueled by endurance, so sitting through periods of insanity is not a defect; it’s accepting an optimal level of hassle. (Location 2111)

I was once on a flight with a CEO—he let everyone know that’s what he was—who lost his mind after we had to change gates twice. I wondered: How did he make it this far in life without the ability to deal with petty annoyances outside of his control? The most likely answer is that he lives in denial over what he thinks he’s in control of and demands unrealistic precision from subordinates who compensate by hiding bad news. A good rule of thumb for a lot of things is to identify the price and be willing to pay it. The price, for so many things, is putting up with an optimal amount of hassle. (Location 2119)

Evolution is the study of advantages. Van Valen’s idea is simply that there are no permanent advantages. Everyone is madly scrambling all the time, but no one gets so far ahead that they become extinction-proof. (Location 2219)

When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles—generally three to twelve of them—that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles. (Location 2699)

But a truth that applies to almost every field is that there are no points awarded for difficulty. It’s possible to try too hard, to be too attracted to complexity, and doing so can backfire spectacularly. (Location 2752)

important component of human behavior is that people who’ve had different experiences than you will think differently than you do. They’ll have different goals, outlooks, wishes, and values. So most debates are not actual disagreements; they’re people with different experiences talking over each other. (Location 2766)

But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?” (Location 2848)