Location 149 I cannot tell you what businesses will dominate the next decade. But I can tell you how business leaders let success go to their heads, becoming lazy and entitled and eventually losing their edge. That story hasn’t changed in hundreds of years and never will.
Location 292 this book’s premise—to base predictions on how people behave rather than on specific events. Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I’d take.
Location 354 Put another way: There is rarely more or less economic uncertainty; just changes in how ignorant people are to potential risks. Asking what the biggest risks are is like asking what you expect to be surprised about.
Location 434 Montesquieu wrote 275 years ago, “If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”
Location 457 Median family income adjusted for inflation was $29,000 in 1955. In 1965 it was $42,000. In 2021 it was $70,784.
Location 543 Peter Kaufman, CEO of Glenair and one of the smartest people you will ever come across, once wrote: We tend to take every precaution to safeguard our material possessions because we know what they cost. But at the same time we neglect things which are much more precious because they don’t come with price tags attached: The real value of things like our eyesight or relationships or freedom can be hidden to us, because money is not changing hands.
Location 630 Something I’ve long thought true, and which shows up constantly when you look for it, is that people who are abnormally good at one thing tend to be abnormally bad at something else. It’s as if the brain has capacity for only so much knowledge and emotion, and an abnormal skill robs bandwidth from other parts of someone’s personality. Take Elon Musk.
Location 655 Reversion to the mean is one of the most common stories in history. It’s the main character in economies, markets, countries, companies, careers—everything. Part of the reason it happens is because the same personality traits that push people to the top also increase the odds of pushing them over the edge.
Location 764 The decline of local news has all kinds of implications. One that doesn’t get much attention is that the wider the news becomes the more likely it is to be pessimistic.
Location 797 The inability to forecast the past has no impact on our desire to forecast the future. Certainty is so valuable that we’ll never give up the quest for it, and most people couldn’t get out of bed in the morning if they were honest about how uncertain the future is.
Location 862 Even within a good story, a powerful phrase or sentence can do most of the work. There is a saying that people don’t remember books; they remember sentences.
Location 909 In a perfect world, the importance of information wouldn’t rely on its author’s eloquence. But we live in a world where people are bored, impatient, emotional, and need complicated things distilled into easy-to-grasp scenes. If you look, I think you’ll find that wherever information is exchanged—wherever there are products, companies, careers, politics, knowledge, education, and culture—the best story wins.
Location 924 Mark Twain said, “Humor is a way to show you’re smart without bragging.”
Location 939 Poet Ralph Hodgson put this well when he said, “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” Poor evidence can be a very compelling story if that story scratches an itch
Location 1051 Every investment price, every market valuation, is just a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.
Location 1079 The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a never-ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.
Location 1093 Author Robert Greene once wrote, “The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.”
Location 1188 A common irony goes like this: • Paranoia leads to success because it keeps you on your toes. • But paranoia is stressful, so you abandon it quickly once you achieve success. • Now you’ve abandoned what made you successful and you begin to decline—which is even more stressful. It happens in business, investing, careers, relationships—all over the place.
Location 1212 Jerry Seinfeld had the most popular show on TV. Then he quit. He later said the reason he killed his show while it was thriving was because the only way to know where the top is, is to experience the decline, which he had no interest in doing. Maybe the show could keep rising, maybe it couldn’t. He was fine not knowing the answer.
Location 1321 “You might well expect a machine built in haste to fail quicker than one put together carefully and methodically, and our study suggests that this may be true for bodies too,” Neil Metcalfe, one of the researchers, said.
Location 1502 A carefree and stress-free life sounds wonderful only until you recognize the motivation and progress it prevents. No one cheers for hardship—nor should they—but we should recognize that it’s the most potent fuel of problem-solving, serving as both the root of what we enjoy today and the seed of opportunity for what we’ll enjoy tomorrow.
Location 1568 Good news is the deaths that didn’t take place, the diseases you didn’t get, the wars that never happened, the tragedies avoided, and the injustices prevented. That’s hard for people to contextualize or even imagine, let alone measure. But bad news is visible. More than visible, it’s in your face. It’s the terrorist attack, the war, the car accident, the pandemic, the stock market crash, and the political battle you can’t look away from.
Location 1773 But Tversky’s point is that if your job is to be creative and think through tough problems, then time spent wandering around a park or aimlessly lounging on a couch might be your most valuable hours. A little inefficiency is wonderful.
Location 1805 A lot of thought jobs basically never stop, and without structuring time to think and be curious, you wind up less efficient during the hours that are devoted to sitting at your desk cranking out work. This is the opposite of the concept of “hustle porn,” where people want to look busy at all times because they think it’s noble. Nassim Taleb says, “My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.” More than a measure of success, I think it’s a key ingredient. The most efficient calendar in the world—one where every minute is packed with productivity—comes at the expense of curious wandering and uninterrupted thinking, which eventually become the biggest contributors to success.
Location 1864 A coworker of mine at an old employer once hired a social media consultant. During a three-hour session, the consultant walked us through hashtags, what time of day you should post on Twitter, how threading posts increases engagement, and a slew of other hacks. He was nice. But he never mentioned the most effective social media trick: write good stuff that people want to read. That’s because writing good stuff isn’t a hack. It’s hard. It takes time and creativity. It can’t be manufactured. It works, with a near 100 percent success rate. But it is the social media equivalent of a heavy workout. Same goes for diets, finances, marketing . . . everyone wants a shortcut. It’s always been this way, but I suspect it’s getting worse as technology inflates our benchmark for how fast results should happen.
Location 1882 Harvard Business Review once pointed out to Jerry Seinfeld that part of the reason he ended his show was writer burnout. The magazine asked if he and show cocreator Larry David could have avoided burnout and kept the show going if they used a consulting company like McKinsey to create a more efficient writing process. Seinfeld asked if McKinsey is funny. No, the magazine said. “Then I don’t need them,” he said. “If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting.” If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way.
Location 1911 If you recognize that inefficiency—“bullshit,” as Pressfield puts it—is ubiquitous, then the question is not “How can I avoid all of it?” but “What is the optimal amount to put up with so I can still function in a messy and imperfect world?”
Location 2099 Facebook similarly began as a way for college students to share pictures of their drunk weekends, and within a decade it was the most powerful lever in global politics. Again, it’s just impossible to connect those dots with foresight.
Location 2121 The same thing happens in careers, when someone with a few mediocre skills mixed together at the right time becomes multiple times more successful than someone who’s an expert in one thing.
Location 2138 The window-dressed version of ourselves is by far the most common. There’s a saying—I don’t know whose—that an expert is always from out of town. It’s similar to the Bible verse that says no man is a prophet in his own country. That one has deeper meaning, but they both get across an important point: It’s easiest to convince people that you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you’re not. Keep that in mind when comparing your career, business, and life to those of others.
Location 2333 Chris Rock once joked about who actually teaches kids in school: “Teachers do one half, bullies do the other,” he said. “And learning how to deal with bullies is the half you’ll actually use as a grown-up.” It’s real experience with risk and uncertainty, which is something you cannot fathom until you’ve experienced it firsthand.
Location 2353 Future fortunes are imagined in a vacuum, but reality is always lived with the good and bad taken together, competing for attention.
Location 2408 Another point about long-term thinking is how it sways the information we consume. I try to ask when I’m reading: Will I care about this a year from now? Ten years from now? Eighty years from now? It’s fine if the answer is no, even a lot of the time. But if you’re honest with yourself you may begin to steer toward the more enduring bits of information. There are two types of information: permanent and expiring. Permanent information is: “How do people behave when they encounter a risk they hadn’t fathomed?” Expiring information is: “How much profit did Microsoft earn in the second quarter of 2005?”
Location 2423 The point, then, isn’t that you should read less news and more books. It’s that if you read good books you’ll have an easier time understanding what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to in the news.
Location 2474 In finance, spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is perhaps 90 percent of what you need to know to do well. But what’s taught in college? How to price derivatives and calculate net present value. In health it’s sleep eight hours, move a lot, eat real food, but not too much. But what’s popular? Supplements, hacks, and pills. Mark Twain said kids provide the most interesting information, “for they tell all they know and then they stop.” Adults tend to lose this skill.
Location 2534 So most debates are not actual disagreements; they’re people with different experiences talking over each other.
