Noteworthy Nonsense
Notes on Communication, Decision-Making and Business & Investing
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.
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.
System 1 and System 2 Thinking: How We Make Decisions
You might think we make all of our decisions the same way, but it turns out we have two very different decision-making systems.
Nobel Prize winning Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, details two cognitive processes for decision-making: fast System 1 and slow System 2.