Reading Time: 2 minCharlie Munger shared a humorous story at the USC Law School Commencement in 2007, which goes as follows: I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and […]
Learning
Make friends with the eminent dead
Reading Time: 2 minWe live in an amazing time. Right this very moment, you can summon the knowledge from some of the smartest people who ever lived. Books (or Kindle/Audible) are very inexpensive, and you can even use your local library to make it free. In a bit of a meta twist, the examples I’ll share today are […]
But I’m not good at that
Reading Time: < 1 minThere are a lot of things that I’m not very good at, but I try to handle the situations properly when issues or questions come up. Sometimes that means that I try to learn to solve the problem myself; if there is an issue with our company that I don’t know how to handle, I […]
What’s a good reading goal?
Reading Time: 2 minIn looking at reading goals, it can be kind of tricky to set a decent metric to measure against. Most people default to “number of books read” (including myself), which isn’t bad. The problem is that it can create some bad incentives, particularly later in the year. I know one person that was short of […]
Emulating the values of Charlie Munger
Reading Time: 2 minI finally finished reading “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” (which I first mentioned last month) and it was fantastic. I’ve heard a lot about Charlie Munger over the years, but the depth of this book was amazing. The book technically wasn’t written by Charlie, but it was his full of his content — text of talks and […]
We seem like slowed-down whale songs
Reading Time: < 1 minI consume a lot of content in order to learn, and many others consume far more than I do. It feels like a torrid pace, but compared to AI tools it’s laughably slow. Back in 2016, Sam Altman (the man behind OpenAI, which is behind ChatGPT) shared this idea: “There are certain advantages to being […]
You can’t do it, or you’re still learning?
Reading Time: < 1 minThere are many things that I can’t do, and a subset of those are things that I’m trying to learn to do. The difference is subtle, but can make a huge difference. In “Excellent Advice for Living“, Kevin Kelly shares: The fact that you “can’t do” something can be embarrassing. But if you are “learning […]
You can’t just download information into your brain
Reading Time: 2 minI wish the title of this post wasn’t true, as it’d be quite awesome if you could just push a button to add the knowledge that we want to our brain. Perhaps it will be possible in the future, but it’s certainly not here yet. That said, it sort of is already, at least compared […]
Your notes are not my notes
Reading Time: 2 minWhile sharing notes with other people can be helpful, it’s often troublesome because the notes that you take are generally far more valuable to you than anyone else. In his book “Outsmart Your Brain“, author Daniel Willingham shares more: The notes you get from someone else will not be the same as those you take […]
Intentional frequency illusion
Reading Time: 2 minThe Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, commonly known as the “frequency illusion”, is typically nothing more than annoying. It’s when you buy green Ford Explorer to be a little different, and then suddenly you seem to notice green Ford Explorers everywhere. Whatever is top of mind you tend to notice lot. However, I’m finding that intentionally manipulating this […]