Reading Time: < 1 minI spend a good deal of time memorizing information. This could be cards I put in Anki, doing my “Daily Review” in Readwise, or any number of other things. Memorizing information isn’t bad, but it’s worthless if you stop there. In a recent episode of “Founders”, host David Senra shared thoughts on some time that […]
Learning
The compound interest of knowledge
Reading Time: 2 minMost of us are familiar with the amazing power of compound interest when it comes to money. There’s a famous quote (attributed to Einstein, but likely wasn’t from him) that simply says: “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” Charlie Munger shared similar thoughts throughout his life. Compounding interest with money is […]
I need to repeat myself
Reading Time: 2 minI’ve shared a few times on here my desire to repeat myself more often, so I guess this post is kind of a self-fulfilling success! This really comes from a few different angles. As Robert Carnes shared in his book “The Story Cycle”, repetition is essential in marketing because your audience only hears what you […]
Dance incoherently or just admit that you don’t know the answer
Reading Time: 2 minI’m a big believer in admitting when you don’t know the answer. That kind of truthfulness in meetings leads to better results, and ideally leads to additional learning by being less wrong than I was before. In “Poor Charlie’s Almanack“, Charlie Munger compares people who think they’re never wrong with bees that don’t know how […]
Chauffeur knowledge versus true knowledge
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 […]
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 […]