Noteworthy Nonsense
Notes on Communication, Decision-Making and Business & Investing
Direct vs Indirect Communication: Why What’s Meant Isn’t Always What’s Said
With direct communication, politeness and tact isn’t the emphasis. Instead, the primary concern is the information itself. Where indirectness can allow too many costly misunderstandings to gum up a system, directness is clear as day. That’s one takeaway.
Indirect communication can have a softer touch as it suggests, implies, or indicates. This flanking maneuver doesn’t oppressively tell, which can antagonize egos, but instead it asks the audience to play a part in understanding.
Hanlon’s Razor: Improve Your Social IQ
There are these small misfortunes in daily life, where a little mistreatment thrusts itself upon us.
If you’ve ever been left off an important e-mail, not saved a seat, criticized unfairly in public, or struck by a passive-aggressive comment, you’ve probably experienced this.
How to Guarantee a Life of Miscommunication
In the spirit of Carson and Munger’s speeches, I share with you my own recommendations, but for a different subject: how to guarantee a lifetime of miscommunication (so that you may avoid this).
And like them, I speak from experience.
Maya Angelou: How You Made Them Feel
What matters most in your daily interactions isn’t so much the specific actions we take or the words we say that people remember most, but how someone was made to feel: listened to or ignored, included or left out, amused or exhausted, or big instead of small.
Reframing Failure: What Did You Fail at Today?
Sarah Blakely, businesswoman and founder of Spanx, grew up with her father asking her, “What did you fail at today?”
90 Years Young and Crushin’ It
Tom Rice: at 97, the WWII veteran parachuted into France (his second time) for the 75th anniversary of D-Day.
14 Ways to Become More Successful
“We should just study successful people more. Like how’d they do this?…And there’s a very superficial version of that in the media all the time. But like actually trying to figure out how they did it. To me it’s one of the most interesting topics.”
