I discovered what I call the Bill Gates effect. That is, the more successful you are, the uglier you get.
Whenever you have money, reputations, power, ego, and complexity in play, it is irrational to assume you are seeing objective science.
The most effective way to stop people from trying to persuade me is to say, ‘I’m not interested.’ You should try it. Don’t offer a reason why you aren’t interested. No one can say why a thing holds interest for some and not for others. There’s no argument against a lack of interest.
You often hear advice from successful people that you should “follow your passion.” That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it.
A smarter approach is to think of learning as a system in which you continually expose yourself to new topics, primarily the ones you find interesting. My.
You might be familiar with a television show that was called The Dog Whisperer. On the show, Cesar Millan, a dog-training expert, helped people get their seemingly insane dogs under control. Cesar’s main trick involved training the humans to control their own emotional states, because dogs can pick up crazy vibes from their owners.
The prediction models are more about persuasion than science.
Just remember to keep your eye out for ways to maximize your schedule freedom in the long term.
No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day.
The challenge was that the bad ideas sounded terrific to the uninformed person. You couldn’t kill these particular bad ideas with logic because the arguments against them would be too complicated. You had to go in through the back door.
Confirmation bias isn’t an occasional bug in our human operating system. It is the operating system. We are designed by evolution to see new information as supporting our existing opinions, so long as it doesn’t stop us from procreating. Evolution doesn’t care if you understand your reality. It only cares that you reproduce.
Make a claim that is directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration or factual error in it. Wait for people to notice the exaggeration or error and spend endless hours talking about how wrong it is. When you dedicate focus and energy to an idea, you remember it. And the things that have the most mental impact on you will irrationally seem as though they are high in priority, even if they are not. That’s persuasion.
Success caused passion more than passion caused success.
Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen.
Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness.
Confirmation bias looks exactly like knowledge gained from doing your own research.
On the other hand, if your boss routinely asks you to work overtime for no good reason other than to claw through piles of brain-deadening administrative work, you probably need to look for a new job.
There are two types of people in the world, my young friend. One type is people-oriented. When they make conversation, it is about people – what people are doing, what someone said, how someone feels. The other group is idea-oriented. When they make conversation, they talk about ideas and concepts and objects.
Our language and our minds are too limited to deal with anything but a fixed reality, regardless of whether such a thing exists. The best we can do is to update our delusions to fit the times. We live in an increasingly rational, science-based society. The religious metaphors of the past are no longer comforting. Science is whittling at them from every side. Humanity needs a metaphor that allows God and science to coexist, at least in our minds, for the next thousand years.
I’m saying that people claim to believe in God, but most don’t literally believe. They only act as though they believe because there are earthly benefits in doing so. They create a delusion for themselves because it makes them happy.
According to Dr. Andrew Huberman, you can hack your dopamine reward system by reframing your work today as essential to the kind of future you want. That gives you a reason to be happy every day. I call it preferring systems over goals. If you are following a good system, the reward is that you followed the system.