Noteworthy Nonsense
Notes on Communication, Decision-Making and Business & Investing
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.
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.