Timeless Ideas | March 7, 2021
Here’s your weekly dose of timeless ideas to sharpen your mind, make smarter decisions, and live better.
Quotes
I.
Peace is not something you wish for. It's something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away.
— Robert Fulghum
II.
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
— André Gide
III.
Learn all you can from the mistakes of others. You won't have time to make them all yourself.
— Alfred Sheinwold
Ideas
I.
Let’s say that your significant other has been paying less and less attention to you. You realize he or she has a busy job, but you still would like more time together. You drop a few hints about the issue, but your loved one doesn’t handle it well. You decide not to put on added pressure, so you clam up. Of course, since you’re not all that happy with the arrangement, your displeasure now comes out through an occasional sarcastic remark. “Another late night, huh? I’ve got Facebook friends I see more often.” Unfortunately (and here’s where the problem becomes self-defeating), the more you snip and snap, the less your loved one wants to be around you. So your significant other spends even less time with you, you become even more upset, and the spiral continues. Your behavior is now actually creating the very thing you didn’t want in the first place. You’re caught in an unhealthy, self-defeating loop.
Kerry Patterson in Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High
II.
When we’re in scientist mode, we refuse to let our ideas become ideologies. We don’t start with answers or solutions; we lead with questions and puzzles. We don’t preach from intuition; we teach from evidence. We don’t just have healthy skepticism about other people’s arguments; we dare to disagree with our own arguments. Thinking like a scientist involves more than just reacting with an open mind. It means being actively open-minded. It requires searching for reasons why we might be wrong—not for reasons why we must be right—and revising our views based on what we learn.
Adam Grant in Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
III.
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?
Peter Thiel in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Articles Worth Reading
I.
You can figure everything out if you just spend enough time and break it down into its simplest component parts. When Arne Alsin, the founder of investment firm Worm Capital, wrote about investing in disruptive companies two years ago, one commentator called it “one of the dumbest articles ever written.” After a 274% year, Alsin isn’t the one who looks dumb.
II.
The teenage day-trader who lit the markets on fire
History repeats itself. Long before WallStreetBets existed, there was teenage day-trader Jonathan Lebed. In 2000, he was prosecuted by the SEC for stock manipulation. He was making $800,000 trading on stocks he promoted on Yahoo Finance forums before school. According to Jonathan's statement, "If it wasn't for everybody manipulating the market, there wouldn't be a stock market at all.
III.
The man who turned credit-card points into an empire
Brian Kelly is the reigning king of cheap travel. He's the writer of the eponymous blog "The Points Guy" that publishes articles about how to maximize credit-card rewards and airline miles. But in 2020, he had to grapple with the question: What are all those points and miles worth in a global pandemic?
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