Weekly Wisdom Roundup (5/28/20)
Where Are My Newsletters!?
So I start a lot of newsletters and then they get out of hand and too complicated and I get over them.
Here’s a list of all the ones I started in the past month.
And I’ve published none of them.
I’m not happy with that, and you shouldn’t be either.
So I’m going to start 2 new strategies and see how this goes.
Break up the big daddy newsletters in to parts and post them over time.
Start sending out a round up of various shorter posts that are too big for IG but too small to be worthy of a full newsletter.
Sound cool? Great. Here’s some tidbits of wisdom from the past week.
5 Questions To Ask Yourself When Dreading Something Or Fearing A Negative Outcome:
1. Am i actually thinking about this objectively, or am i only thinking about how it could go wrong?
2. How many times in the past have I felt like this yet things actually went pretty well?
3. Is it possible for me to actually have a really great time? how? What would a positive experience look like?
4. Is there anything i can do to make this positive outcome more likely?
5. If it truly does go as horribly as I fear, how can i repair or recover from the damage?
If You Want To Achieve More And Work Less, This Is The Single Most Important Thing You Need To Know
Stop putting in more hours.
Start putting in more to each hour.
Ask:
What is the 20% of things I do that provide 80% of my results?
What is the 20% i do that causes 80% of my suffering?
What is the 20% I do that costs 80% of my time (and how can i do less of it or make it take half as long)?
What is the 20% I do that costs 80% of my energy (and how can I do less of it or make it half as hard)?
Embed the 80/20 principle in to your brain and in only a few years you’ll be working half as many hours, getting twice as much done, making 5x as much money per hour.
Being A Good Person And Taking Advantage Of Things Are Not Mutually Exclusive
The world is unfair. There are unique leverage points that have massive asymmetric returns.
And sure, some of them are unethical.
And sure some people don’t care and will use them any way.
But to throw out leverage entirely as a concept because some people use it in negative ways, is more destructive than doing those unethical things.
“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.”
I would change this to:
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing that actually gets any traction or actually helps.
You can waste all your energy doing ineffective things that have no impact, feeling morally self righteous, but you are in reality just putting your own grandiosity and narcissistic need to feel important above the problem you are actually trying to solve.
The refusal or failure of good people to learn leverage and influence and strategy is the real cause of human suffering.
Stop complaining. Start strategizing.
On The Arrogance Of Intellect
Intelligence is over rated as an end all be all metric of utility.
Yes, it's the single greatest predictor in aggregate, but that doesn't mean that any given individual will be more useful than if they were less intelligent.
There are plenty of extremely intelligent people who are completely useless (or worse, destructive), as well as plenty of that not-that-intelligent people who are extremely useful.
The biggest mistake intelligent people can make is to expect that it ipso facto means they deserve money, connection, power, or status.
Your intelligence only makes it so that if you do the right things, you will get there faster than a less intelligent person doing the right things.
If you are doing the wrong things, your intelligence is of no utility and in fact is likely to make your life worse because you're smart enough to be able to create some (wrong) framework in your head that is seemingly internally consistent and then wade down in to it for years, completely disconnected with reality, meanwhile more pragmatic and practical people are able to get feedback from reality to course correct much easier.
If you let your intellect lead to arrogance, superiority, and complete detachment from reality, you will doom yourself to a miserable, ineffectual, and resentful life.
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