Timeless Ideas | October 17, 2021

Here’s your weekly dose of timeless ideas to sharpen your mind, make smarter decisions, and live better.

Quotes

I.

If past history was all that is needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.

― Warren Buffett

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II.

You do not change people's minds by defeating them with logic.

― Herbert A. Simon

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III.

People are trying to be smart—all I am trying to do is not to be idiotic, but it’s harder than most people think.

― Charlie Munger

Ideas

I.

The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses: millions of other employees all over the world. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves. It is your responsibility to protect this personal business of yours from harm and to position it to benefit from the changes in the environment. Nobody else can do that for you.

Andrew S. Grove in Only the Paranoid Survive

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II.

The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?

Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers: The Story of Success

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III.

The tricky thing about life is, on the one hand having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having the wisdom to stop exploring when you’ve found something worth sticking around for. That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. Balancing those two things—the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying—and getting the ratio right is very hard. I think my 70-year-old self would say: ‘Be careful that you don’t err on one side or the other, because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are.’

Timothy Ferriss in Tools of Titans

Articles Worth Reading

I.

The Great Resignation Is Accelerating

Derek Thompson | The Atlantic

Job openings are sky-high. Many positions are going unfilled for months. Meanwhile, supply chains are breaking down because of a hydra of bottlenecks. Running a company requires people and parts. With people quitting and parts missing, it must kinda suck to be a boss right now.

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II.

Being alone with your thoughts is a skill you can practice

Rémy Furrer | Psyche

The thoughts we create shape the lives we live, hence it is to our benefit to occasionally spend some time thinking for pleasure. While initially challenging, with a little practice, we have at our disposal the cognitive abilities to derive pleasure from simply entertaining our own thoughts. In a world in which the external environment demands so much of our attention, I believe we could all benefit from occasionally retreating inwards to derive both meaning and pleasure from within.

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III.

Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore

Ethan Siegal | BigThink

Long ago, the universe was smaller, denser, and hotter. How far back can we take this extrapolation? Mathematically, it’s tempting to go as far as possible: all the way back to infinitesimal sizes and infinite densities and temperatures, or what we know as a singularity. This idea, of a singular beginning to space, time, and the universe, was long known as the Big Bang. But physically, when we looked closely enough, we found that the universe told a different story. Here’s how we know the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore.

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