Playing Your Own Game
Don't look left or right, just down and ahead.
Hi everyone,
Thanks for joining me this week. I’m now settled in London, and it’s been a hectic past week for me. I’ve gotten used to the new weather (no more summer all year round), but significantly less luck with the time zone (this jetlag is painful) and the food (it’s like having the flu because you can’t taste any flavour). Hopefully by the next newsletter things will have improved, but for now on to what you came for.
This Week’s Sponsor
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Work and Performance
Do Ten Times as Much: “Either that, or admit that you’ve got higher priorities. No one succeeds at everything. If you’re not willing to do ten times as much, just level with yourself: “I’ve got better things to do than learn a foreign language.” “I’ve got better things to do than become a great economist.” “I’ve rather raise my kids in the modern world than be a family of earnest Orthodox Jews.” If you take all of the time you dabble away in a hundred quixotic ways and concentrate it on two or three goals you truly prize, you’ll probably succeed at what you value the most. Pick your battles, friends. And wherever do you choose to fight, do ten times as much.”
Wow. Not much to say except that. Do ten times as much.
Thinking Better
The Value Chain of Capital: "I know over the last few decades, especially the last decade, when VCs were viewed as superstar investors; why? Because we saw stories of incredible success. This is selection bias in what we read. And also, some VCs are relentless self-promoters. They try to promote themselves as people who can judge businesses as amazing guagers of whether a business will pay off. I've never believed this about VCs. I think most successful VCs share more with successful traders than they do successful investors. They play the pricing game. What does that mean? They get judged on timing. When they enter and when they exit."
You don’t have to be particularly interested in VC or the finance world to take away this simple idea - anything which has a “market dynamic” (whether financially like in housing, or metaphorically like in dating) often ends up as a Keynesian beauty contest at some point. There’s always a temptation to be guided about how others might think, but eventually there’s a great reset where that doesn’t matter, which can mean great suffering if the former is all you’ve been guided by.
Storytelling - Tellability: “A story gets told if it is worth telling to the would-be teller, and is tellable. Just as an essay gets written if it is essayworthy to the would-be essayist, and essayable. It’s like whether a flight plan gets flown. The flight plan has to be tripworthy it for the pilot to do the actual flying, and the plane has to be flyable. Skill matters only after these two conditions are met, and the second one is the more basic one. Even a skilled pilot can’t make a bus fly. Not even if you put a gun to his head to make it worthwhile.”
I have friends who lead the most exciting lives, but whenever they tell their story, it just falls flat. And on the other hand, there are some who are creatures of habit, but they make each of their weekends sound eventful. I hope that in the future I’ll have some great stories of my own which I will be able to tell well, but since I’m now lacking the former, I’ll just do my best Kevin Hart impression.
Against 3X speed: “Mike is so busy preparing for the future that he never steps into it. The satisfaction of binge consumption brings instant gratification, so why try anything else? The problem is that shoving information into your mind can create the illusion of knowledge, especially when you rush it. True learning requires contemplation. And implementation. And a commitment to reflecting on great ideas over and over again.”
I realise the irony of this after I’ve shared Bryan Caplan’s post about doing 10X as much. But I think there are good arguments for doing less if it means you’re more efficient, and that perhaps life is not just about being as ambitious as you can (or maybe the joke is that 10X is okay but not 3X). Just something to think about.
Human Behaviour
Solving invented problems: “First, it might be a situation, not a problem. You’re stuck on an elevator. The repair people have been called. They will come when they come. There’s no way for you to make anything better… there’s no available solution to your current predicament–it’s a situation and the only thing to do is wait.”
Some situations are just inconvenient situations, not problems. I’ll just leave this here.
Have a good week ahead.
Talk soon,
Louis