Noteworthy Nonsense
Notes on Communication, Decision-Making and Business & Investing
The Wisdom in Finding Out for Yourself
The way I see it, you’re either filled up to the ears with people’s thoughts or, periodically, you check for yourself. The best diet for most people may not be the one that winds up working for you. They may be meant for endurance exercise where you’re meant for the gym. The population may have genetics that predispose them to higher relative levels of Vitamin D whereas you need to take 5,000 IUs/day. Your friends (who are probably right) warn you about dating them, but you must know for yourself.
Exploring vs Exploiting: My Potbelly’s Experience
One day, perhaps a month shy of graduating, I was nearby a Potbelly’s and hungry. It was right there. I figured “What the hell, let’s explore”. Not knowing what to order, I asked an employee what they’d get: “A Wreck on multi-grain” was suggested. I watched him whip one up and send it through the oven.
On The Art of Changing Someone’s Mind
“As Kahneman suggests, the reasons people give for their beliefs are rarely the whole story—and direct confrontation usually fails to change those beliefs on the spot.”
Problem Solving: Avoiding The Silver Bullet Approach
As you move forward in life, you’ll continually be faced with problems of varying difficulty. Unlike grade school problems, many real world ones will tend to be tangles and tangles of causes—especially when people are involved. If you’re routinely blinded by the one-big-thing approach, you’ll miss valuable solutions.
But if you’re looking to improve your lot in life by solving important problems, you’ll want to avoid silver bullets by always looking for two causes.
Direct vs Indirect Communication: Why We Don’t Always Say What We Mean
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.
Wearable Fitness Trackers: Shaping the Culture
Through temperature and heart rate measurement (sensors), smartwatches will provide readily available insights (data analytics) that ought to nudge users in healthier directions. With emerging technology like virtual assistants that have ChatGPT-like capabilities (AI assistants)
Why Leaders Overpromise
“Overpromising may be necessary to get the resources. It may be necessary to get the initial enthusiasm that is needed to do anything at all. There is so much inertia that realistic promises are at a major disadvantage. They’re at the major disadvantage because everybody else is over-promising.” - Daniel Kahneman
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.