- "Technological revolutions tend to involve some important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information"
- Machine learning makes prediction cheap
- This increases the value of tasks that complement prediction and decreases the value of substitutes
- Some problems will be reframed as prediction problems
- E.g. semiconductors made arithmetic cheap, so we started to digitalize everything (e.g. photos)
- E.g. driving: rather than program exact decisions based on environmental factors, we now ask the computer to predict what a human would do
- Humans activities have five high-level components: data, prediction, judgment, action, and outcomes
- Data was made cheap with computers and communications networks (search)
- Prediction has been made cheap with AI
- Human judgment based on data and predictions will be key
- "The most urgent decisions are rarely the most important ones." -- Eisenhower
- "Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action." -- Tim Ferris
- Four quadrants:
- Urgent and important: do it immediately
- Urgent but not important: delegate
- Important but not urgent: decide when to do it
- Not urgent or important: do it later (or drop it!)
- Distinguish between important and urgent!
- Don't put off important tasks; give them the proper amount of time or you'll likely have to spend even more time on it later
- Don't put yourself in a position where you'll have to fix problems made by past reactive decision making
- "It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent" -- Charlie Munger
- Habits:
- Understand deeply: know what you know, and understand the simple deeply
- Make mistakes
- Raise questions: to find connections that are otherwise invisible
- Follow the flow of ideas: see where ideas came from, and where they'll take us
- Change: embrace it and improve
- Deliberately practice, and intentionally practice the hardest and most tedious
- Measure your skillset visibily
- Practice and work in chunks, so much that you can only sustain it for that chunk
- Take responsibility for your failures; improve your skills and planning for next time, learn from the failure
- Focus on variety, reps, and feedback during improvement
- Make routines out of unimportant decisions, save your energy for important tasks
- Exercise
- Understand the forces at play (what's important and who's gaining from them)
- Know what you know and where your competencies lie
- Understand how your subconscious might be leading your astray (e.g. psychological factors)
- "Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance"
- New paradigm:
- Manage energy
- Seek stress: push ourselves beyond our limits, systematically
- Life is a series of sprints: fully engage, and then refuel in-between
- Downtime is productive time
- Purpose fuels performance rituals rule: look at what you're effective at and figure out what habits and rituals you follow that make you so
- Power of full engagement
- Sources of energy:
- Physical
- Emotional
- Mental
- Spiritual
- Learn to hold ourselves accountable for how we manage our energy
- Don't aim to just keep the ship running, to go along for the ride and make it up the ladder; aim to make a difference and be yourself
- People expect (and reward) conformity; ask why and if that's positive
- Ask your own questions, set your own goals and worthwhile desires
- Moral courage: "the courage to stand up for what you believe"
- "Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it" -- not learning someone else's ideas
- Remember to slow down and concentrate -- most of your best thought needs time to be cultivated
- Find our own reality; hear your own voice; discover your own path
- The hard part is figuring out which problems to solve, not how to solve them
- Most people struggle with daily problems, not annual strategic ones
- Reframe your problems
- Why is the problem actually happening? What are people complaining about? What are they feeling? Why does it need to be fixed?
- "The point of reframing is not to find the 'real' problem but, rather, to see if there is a better one to solve"
- Practices:
- Establish legitimacy: get others accustomed to reframing problems
- Bring outsiders into the discussion: get their unentrenched perspective
- Find a boundary spanner who is able to speak their mind
- Ask for inputs, not solutions
- Get people's definitions in writing: see what people actually think the problem is, and how they frame it
- We can try to imagine different perspectives, but we often get it wrong
- Ask what's missing: what is missing from our definition of the problem (or why we think it's happening)?
- Consider multiple categories: what do we think categorizes the problem? Are there any other categories we haven't considered?
- Metacognition: thinking about how we think
- Analyze positive exceptions: what was different when the problem wasn't a problem?
- This also makes the discussion less threatening and confrontational
- Question the objective: what do people actually want (their hidden agenda)? Clarify and then challenge.
- "Tools can be the subtlest of traps" -- Neil Gaiman
- "New catchwords hide from us the thoughts and feelings of our ancestors, even when they differed little from our own" -- Bertrand Russel
- Related to recency bias; we can only affirm and relate to what we know well (more likely recent things)
- Greek philosophers (e.g. Plato) thought about behaviour psychology long before modern science
- Don't mistake relative for absoltue values
- Intellectual humility is both a moral and mental trait
- Be careful of the automatic association your brain makes between similar Us people vs. who you think are They people; stop to notice and think about if you've made a correct judgement
- We're always more favored and forgiving towards Us people, and more quick to judge and spiteful toward Thems (confirmation bias)
- Supposed rationality is often just rationalization (to fool ourselves)
- We're most hostile between envy and disgust
- We're most likely to associate between pride and envy
- Lots of tragedies happen when we transform a group from low warmth and high competence into low warmth and low competence
- When a group is low warmth and low competence, it's easy to destroy as Us are trained to think they're disgusting
- Distrust essentialism, err on individualism
- Focus training on one specific goal at a time, and then transitioning to another in a planned schedule
- At the end of a schedule, cycle back to the first goal
- Two types:
- Linear: Break attributes you want to obtain into 4-6 week (or however long) blocks
- Non-linear: Work on different attributes on different days (i.e. blocks are one day each)
- Attributes are things like agility, endurance, power, etc rather than a specific muscle group (think generalized end goal vs. specific physical or knowledge domain)
- Key is to focus on one specfic thing during a single block of time!
- Distill your general goals (by asking who and where motivation comes from, specific targets) into specific attributes
- Know where you are now and where you'd like to be
- Break your end goal down into building blocks and assess where you need the most improvement
- "Priorities are like arms – if you think you have more than two, you’re crazy." – Merlin Mann