Ideas

Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be excellent. Instead of asking "How can i help my company?" you should ask, "What's hurting my company the most and how can i avoid it?" Identify obvious failure points and steer clear of them.

We often say the opposite of what we mean, especially in political contexts. This allows us to lie while looking like we're telling the truth. As George Orwell famously wrote in 1984, "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck. Counterintuitively, if you break down the entire system and optimize each component individually, you'll lower the effectiveness of the system. Optimize the entire system instead.

We lie about our true opinions and conform to socially acceptable preferences instead. In private we say one thing but in public we'll say another.

A man once sold his soul to a demon in exchange for knowledge. At first it seems like a smart trade but the man lost in the long run. Tragically, what the man lost was more valuable than what he earned. In short, he won the battle but lost the war, ergo => prioritize long term benefits over short term benefits.

Humans are like sheep, we don't know what we want so we imitate each other. Instead of creating our own desires, we desire the same things as other people. The entire advertising industry is built upon this idea.

People who are similar are more likely to fight than people who are different. That's why civil wars and family feuds create the worst conflicts. The closer the two people/parties are and the more equality between them, the greater the potential for conflict.

Avoid competition. Stop copying what everyone else is doing. Life is easier when you don't compete.

Most people think of secrets as Easter eggs. They assume that if a secret is important, it's necessarily going to be hard to find. The best ideas can come from things that are so well-known that they aren't well-seen.

The structure of our social media feeds blinds us to history, as it causes us to live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption. The structure of the Internet's modern websites pulls us away from traditional modes of life.

The harder something is to do, the fewer people can & will do it. For example; raise the price of a product and fewer people will buy it. Lower the price and more people will buy it, Economics 101.

The world usually always makes sense, but it can be confusing at times. When it is, your model of the world is misaligned. So, things that don't make sense are essentially a learning opportunity. Big opportunities won't make sense until it's too late to profit from them.

Logic is the key to scientific truths, but paradoxes are the key to psychological ones. When it comes to the human condition, the deppest truths are often coutner-intuitive. When you find two opposites that are both true; get curios & start exploring.

Most marketing strategies have a short window of success, as click-through rates decrease as tactics mature. For example; the first banner-ad has a click-through rate of more than 70%. Now we avoid them with ad-blockers.

Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax - even though they are the same thing.

By reading this, you are choosing not to read something else. Everything we do is in this vain; doing one thing requires giving up another. Whenever you explicitly choose to do one thing, you implicity choose not to do another thing.

You can control thought without limiting speech. You can do it by defining the limits of acceptable thought whilst allowing for the lively debate within these barriers. For example; Fox News & MSNBC set limits on what political thoughts they consider acceptable, but in the grand scheme of things, they're both fairly conventional. The political spectrum stretches far beyond the ideas they entertain. but ideas outside their limits are shunned.

Science dosen't progress because people change their views. Rather, each new generation of scientists has different views. As old generations pass away, new ideas are accepted and the scientific consensus changes.

A group of people working on a project will fight over the most trivial ideas. They'll ignore what's complicated. They'll focus too much on easy-to-understand ideas at the expense of important, but hard to talk about ideas. For example, instead of approving plans for a complicated spaceship, the team would argue over the color of the astronaut's uniform.

This idea comes from poker, when you're advised to choose your opponents carefully. That means you shouldn't compete against the best people. You don't need to get good at doing difficult things if you get good a avoiding difficult things. If you want to win, pick an easy table and nail your execution.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. One hospital took too long to admit patients so a penalty was given for 4+ hour wait times. In response, ambulance drivers were asked to slow down so they could shorten wait times.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.

Work expands to fill the time available. People don't want to look like they're lazy, so they find extra tasks to tackle, even if they're trivial. If you have six months to complete a project, it will take six months to complete. Set deadlines accordingly.

The world tends towards disorder. That's why your room becomes messier and messier over time. It's also why an internal combustion engine only converts roughly ~35% of its energy into useful work. Time moves towards increasing entropy.

Focus isn't as constraining as it seems. In the era of modern Internet, when everybody has access to Google search and personalized social media feeds, differentiation is free marketing. The more specific your goal, the more opportunities you will create for yourself. Narrowing your aperture can expand your horizons.

When things interact, they often birth new, unpredictable forms. Therefore, the sum of a system is more than its component parts. As a system evolves, its structure can transform - just like how water becomes cold water until it turns into ice.

If there are multiple explanations for why something has happened and they are equally persuasive, assume the simplest one is true. In the search for truth, remove unecessary assumptions. Trust the lowest complexity answer.

The opposite of Occam's Razor. In a complex system, problems usually have more than one cause. For example, in medicine, people can have many diseases at the same time that contribute to their overall condition.

A low dose of something can have the opposite effect of a high dose. A little bit of stress wakes you up, but a lot of stress is bad for you. Lifting weights for 30 minutes every day is good for you but lifting weights for 6 hours a day will destroy your muscles. Stress yourself, but not too much.

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. It's a design guideline for software and a good rule for life; Hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold others to.

We are blind to what we cannot measure. Not everything that counts can be measured, and not everything that can be measured counts. But people manage what they can measure, so society repeats the same mistakes over and over again.

Extreme opposites tend to look the same. For example, a far-right movement and a far-left movement can be equally violent or desire a similar outcome. People on both sides are more similar to each other than they are people in the center.

A self-reinforcing cycle that creates collective beliefs. An idea will gain traction once it enters the mainstream, which triggers a chain reaction, which causes lots of people to adopt to it not because it's true but because it's popular.

Change starts away from the spotlight. Then, it moves towards the center. That's why the most interesting ideas at a conference never come from the main stage. They come from the hallways or the bar after sunset.

The more we learn about astronomy, the less it seems that the Earth is special. It's a small part of the universe and each human is a small part of the Earth. We are all spinning through the solar system - nowhere near the beginning or end of time.

Corporations reward conformity, but the internet rewards people who are unique. If you work in a creative field, strive to be the only person who does what you do. Find your own style, then run with it. Create intellectual real estate for yourself.

Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect was found guilty by every judge, they were deemed innocent. Too much agreement implied a systemic error in the judicial process. Unanimous agreement sometimes lead to bad decisions.

Economists assume demand is linear, but people's behaviour totally changes once an action costs money. If the inventors of the Internet had known about it, spam wouldn't be such a problem. If sending an email cost you €0.001, there'd by way less spam.

Markets aggregate knowledge. Rising prices signal falling supply or increased demand, which incentivizes an increase in production. The opposite is true for falling prices. Prices are a signal wrapped in an incentive.

The average outcome for an event over time. They're like batting averages for life and they work best with big sample sizes. For example, if you're starting a business, avoid the resturant business where margins are low and competition is high.

Define the limits of your knowledge. Hint: the limits are smaller than you think. That's because being an expert in one area dosen't make you an expert in anything else. Be clear about what you know and don't know.

If you want to be lucky, look for opportunities with big upsides and low downsides. In addition to increased optionality, your errors will benefit you more than they harm you. Convex payoffs let you tinker with your way to success and innovation.

Large gaps between accelerating technologies and stagnating social norms create lucrative new business opportunities. But they are only available for a short time when people can capitalize on the difference between the real and percieved state of the world. For example, 2007 was the perfect time to launch the iPhone, but Google Glasses launched too early.

When we have a problem, our natural instinct is to add a new habit or purchase a fix. But sometimes, you can improve your life by taking things away. For example, the foods you avoid are more important than the foods you eat.

We pay too much attention to what is being said. But the medium of communication is more impactful. For example the Internet's impact on humanity has a bigger influence than anything that's said on the Internet.

Countries with an abundance of natural resources such as fossil fuels tend to have less economic growth and worse development than countries with fewer natural resources.

The average quality of information is getting worse and worse. But the best stuff is getting better and better. Markets of abdundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer but good for conscious consumers.

Reality will never match the elegance of theory. All models have inconsistencies, but some are still useful. Some maps are useful because they're inaccurate. If you want to find an edge, look for what the map leaves out.

They key to good hospitality is to delight your guests with an unexpected gift. If you run a hotel, leave a chocolate on the bed. If you run a bakery, give your customers one extra bagel.

In economics and business decision-making a sunk cost (also known as retrospective cost) is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Individuals commit the sunk cost fallacy when they continue a behavior or endeavor as a result of previously invested resources (time, money or effort).

In regards to the metaphysics of identity, the ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its lost components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The most logical proposed resolution is that there is a gradual loss of identity.