FS | BRAIN FOOD
Sunday Brain Food: a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights for life and business.
FS
What we achieve, how we think, and how we act, can be influenced by the expectations of those around us.
Explore Your Curiosity
★ "The risk of becoming too steeped in any one framework is you start to be "subject" to that framework, you can only look through its lens, not at the lens. I recommend trying to hold a handful of frameworks in your mind simultaneously in order to maintain flexibility."
★ "The verb decide has deadly interesting origins. Though it came through Middle English deciden, Old French decider, and Latin decidere, you can tell that there's the prefix de-, kind of meaning "off" ... It's the other part of decide that's surprising: -cide. ... All the roots trace to the Latin verb caedere, meaning "to cut". The death-related words are connected because of the correlation between "cut" and "kill", a side meaning which later evolved from the word, and decide is connected because when you make a choice, you cut out all the other possible choices."
— Choices
Timeless Insight
"An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that's filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power."
— David Dunning
Knowledge Project
Annie Duke on how hard it is to realize our mistakes:
"Do we accept the pain or reject it? The first choice is accepting the pain because I know in the long run it's going to help me learn. I'm going to go in and I'm going to examine my decisions. I'm going to see where maybe I could've improved, where I could've made a better decision that would've increased the likelihood that I had a better outcome. The short term is going to take a hit but in the long run, I'm going to feel better about myself and I'll obviously have a more positive narrative of my life story over the long run, if I'm willing to do that. The second choice is avoiding the pain. People make this choice when they don't want to face reality… when they want to preserve their self-narrative. They don't want to take the hit so I'm going to blame it on luck. In the short run, that feels good, because you don't need to do any kind of identity update. You don't need to admit you were wrong. You don't need to update your beliefs in any kind of way, or say that those beliefs were wrong, or that you made poor choices, or that you caused these things to happen, but it's devastating to learning. It's devastating to long term results."
Tiny Thought
What seems like a difference in talent often comes down to a difference in focus.
Focus turns good performers into great performers.
Two keys to focus are saying no to distractions and working on the same problem for an uncommonly long time. Both are simple but not easy.
| Sponsored by Morning Brew |
There's a reason over 2.8 million people start their day with Morning Brew––the daily email that sums up the latest business news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Unlike traditional dry and dense business news, Morning Brew keeps you informed and entertained. Check it out.
__
Stay safe,
Shane
P.S. My kids love this weekly enrichment program spun out of the school Elon Musk created for his kids so much that I invested.
No comments:
Post a Comment