2018 in Books, Part II
The end of the year is a time when you can either look backward with regrets, or forward with hope, or backward with longing, and forward with dread. I guess it depends on how your year went.
For me, I look backward with fondness and forward with determination.
I love the pictures above. My son Dax is 2 years old and loves books like a mad man. We went to the doctor a few months ago and he said Dax is an advanced talker for his age. Now, every child is different and they develop at different speeds. What works for one will be different for another. But when it comes to Dax, I have a hypothesis on why he can talk as well as he can. And it doesn’t have to do with me; it has everything to do with how often I come home from work and find Dax and Camden deep in a book.
I’m grateful for my wife Camden, who works tirelessly and never slips into madness even when she reads The Little Blue Truck for the 98th time in one day. Books are an important part of our family. Recently, I was asked what my wife and I do for fun. The only things I could think of are play catch while we talk and go to bookstores. We anchor our day trips and vacations around bookstores.
I’m grateful to be a part of this little man’s journey as we all learn something new every day.
This post is to continue a record of the books I read during the second half of the year. Part 1 includes the first 30 books I read this year from January to June. You’ll notice that in Part 2, I only read 11 books. After I finished Part 1, I did some reflecting on what I was trying to accomplish with the reading I was doing.
My wife read High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard and shared the following quote with me and it set me on a path to try and think through my personal curriculum.
High performers are very clear about the skill sets they need to develop now to win in the future. They don’t draw a blank when you ask them, “What three skills are you currently working to develop so you’ll be more successful next year?” When I’m brought in to work with Fortune 500 senior executives, I have them open their calendars and talk me through their upcoming days, weeks, and months. It turns out that executives who score higher on the HPI tend to have more blocks of time already scheduled for learning than do their peers with lower scores. There’s an hour blocked out here for taking an online training, another there for executive coaching, another for reading, and yet another for a mastery-oriented hobby (piano, language learning, cooking class, and so on). They’ve built a curriculum for themselves and are actively engaged in learning. What’s clearly linking all these blocks of scheduled time is the desire to develop specific skill sets. The online training is about how to code or manage finances better; the executive coaching is focused on developing listening skills; the reading focuses on a specific skill they’ve been trying to master, such as strategy, listening in meetings, or story development; the hobby is something they take seriously — they aren’t doing it just for pleasure, per se, but to actively develop mastery. Here’s the big distinction: High performers are also working on skills that focus on what I call their primary field of interest (PFI). They aren’t scattershot learners. They’ve homed in on their passionate interests, and they set up activities or routines to develop skill in those areas. If they love music, they laser in on what kind of music they want to learn, and then study it. Their PFI is specific. They don’t just say “music” and then try to learn all forms of music — playing guitar, joining an orchestra, singing with a band. They choose, say, a five-string guitar, find a master teacher, and make time for practice sessions that focus more on skill building than on casual exploration. In other words, they know their passions and set up time to dial in the skills that will turn those passions into proficiencies. This means high performers approach their learning not as generalists but as specialists.
1. Think about your PFI (primary field of interest) and write down three skills that make people successful in that field.
2. Under each skill, write down what you will do to develop it. Will you read, practice, get a coach, go to a training? When? Set up a plan to develop those skills, put it in your calendar, and stay consistent.
3. Now think about your PFI and write down three skills that you will need in order to succeed in that field five to ten years from now. In other words, try to imagine the future. What new skill sets will you likely need then? Keep those skills on your radar, and start developing them sooner rather than later.
I’ll lay out my personal curriculum in a separate post at some point, and I’ll be rolling out the project that Camden and I spent the majority of our time on sometime in January. But for now, the result was fewer books with a bigger focus on learning to live intentionally.
I said this before, and I’ll say it again. This is a long post. This isn’t meant for casual consumption, so if you’re here at all, you’re a brave soul. This is meant, more than anything, as a repository for me to remember what struck me as I read, and as summaries of books I don’t want to forget. The desire to read has raced so much further ahead of the desire to comprehend, and I want to make sure that I do everything I can to improve my comprehension. I included all the quotes that I underlined or highlighted as I read. I included images of the book covers so you can quickly scroll from book to book if you’re curious.
Educated
This was an interesting book for me, not only for the same reasons that it was interesting to people like Bill Gates, but because in the book Tara talks about going to the Pembroke King’s Programme at Cambridge, UK. It’s the same program I went to in 2014 right before I got married. She talks about some of the same professors that I had. And that experience had a drastic impact on my life and the potential that I saw myself as capable of. This book was a fascinating exploration of the impact people’s upbringing can have on them, but also the potential that anyone has to expand beyond their scripting and learned bias’.
Some Quotes:
“I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.” (John Dewey)
“There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama.”
“We understood that the dissolution of Mother’s family was the inauguration of ours. The two could not exist together. Only one could have her.”
“All the decisions that go into making a life — the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment, then rock.”
“Learning in our family was entirely self-directed: you could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done. Some of us were more disciplined than others.”
“Dad lived in fear of time. He felt it stalking him. I could see it in the worried glances he gave the sun as it moved across the sky, in the anxious way he appraised every length of pipe or cut of steel. Dad saw every piece of scrap as the money it could be sold for, minus the time needed to sort, cut and deliver it.”
“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”
“All my life those instincts had been instructing me in this single doctrine — that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself.”
“I walked back to the kitchen, comparing the clean, balanced equation to the mayhem of unfinished computations and dizzying sketches. I was struck by the strangeness of that page: Dad could command this science, could decipher its language, decrypt its logic, could bend and twist and squeeze from it the truth. But as it passed through him, it turned to chaos.”
“The women moved toward the door, but the door was blocked — by loyalty, by obedience. By her father. He stood, immovable. But the woman was his daughter, and she had drawn to herself all his conviction, all his weightiness. She set him aside and moved through the door.”
“I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.”
“I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others — because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”
“Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”
“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.”
“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money. My professors came into focus, suddenly and sharply; it was as if before the grant I’d been looking at them through a blurred lens. My textbooks began to make sense, and I found myself doing more than the required reading.”
“I’d wanted moral advice, someone to reconcile my calling as a wife and mother with the call I heard of something else. But he’d put that aside. He’d seemed to say, “First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”
“The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you,” he said. “Professor Steinberg says this is Pygmalion. Think of the story, Tara.” He paused, his eyes fierce, his voice piercing. “She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”
“Positive liberty is self-mastery — the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.”
“Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman.”
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
“If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second?”
“Who writes history? I thought. I do.”
“But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”
Dear White People
This is a very different book than what I typically read, in large part because its more like a storyboard than a book that you underline and take passages out of. There are some really spectacular visuals, drawing, decision trees, etc. I think one of the best things you can do when you recognize you’re part of a powerful majority is to tread thoughtfully. You can’t always change the system that you’re a part of, you can’t help but be born the race that you are, but you can be thoughtful about the impact that your words, and actions, and even subconscious bias’ have on those around you. And then, if at all possible, go ahead and try and change the system you’re a part of.
Barbarians at the Gate
As someone working in private equity, this is a book that is recommended to me constantly. Very different from my day-to-day, and even the specifics of the firm I work at, but the essence is mind-boggling. This is something I think will become a growing trend in the near future, where people start to rethink the “grow at all costs” mentality that has become more common, and focus on building more sustainable businesses. The story of RJR Nabisco is one of a sustainable business soiled by greed and excess.
Some Quotes:
“Everyone knew LBOs meant deep cuts into research and every other imaginable budget, all sacrifice to pay off debt. Proponents insisted the companies for us to meet steep debt payments grew lean and mean. On one thing they all agreed: the executives who launched LBOs got filthy rich.”
“Tony Peskett, who imbued Johnson with a lifelong belief in creative uses of chaos, put it another way: “The minute you establish an organization, it starts to decay.“
“Sage wasn’t at all sure an LBO was the solution to RJR Nabisco’s problems, and as a general matter, he didn’t enjoy seeing America’s great companies replace good, old-fashioned shareholder equity with bank debt. One of American industry’s great strengths, Sage and men of his generation felt, was its capital base. At at time when the country faced stiff competition in world markets, he hated to watch that advantage being squandered. Business, he felt, should be creating jobs and new products, things it couldn’t do if it was focused on paying back debt. More to the point, he wasn’t at all certain Johnson’s free-spending style could be reconciled with the rigorous demands and cost cuts demanded by high levels of debt. Still, he kept his doubts to himself.”
“During the 1950’s Lou Roberts often took his teenage son George along to business meetings. At an American Petroleum Institute conference one year, father and son sat by a dirt-caked wildcatter in cowboy boots while listening to a speech by the chairman of Humble Oil, the predecessor to Exxon. “Which one of those two men would you like to be? Lou Roberts asked his son afterward. “I’d rather be like the guy up on the stage, the businessman,” young George answered. The businessman, his father explained, had 50,000 employees to watch over, a long, tiring workday, and could expect a pension of several hundred thousand dollars on retirement. The wildcatter, on the other hand, had maybe 30 employees, several dozen oil wells that pumped away while he slept, and was probably worth $5 million. “Now who would you rather be?” Lou Roberts asked.
“I always had the impression Henry just wanted to show he was doing better than his father.”
“The two estimated how much money they could make at Bear Stearns over the next decade, compared to going their own way. Bear won. Kravis left anyway.”
“The Internal Revenue Code, by making interest but not dividends deductible from taxable income, in effect subsidized the trend. That got LBOs off the ground. What made them soar was junk bonds.”
“The only ones hurt were the company’s bondholders, whose holdings were devastated in the face of new debt, and employees, who often lost their jobs. In the sheer joy of making money, Wall Street didn’t pay too much attention to either group.”
“To Forstmann the junk bond was a drug that enabled the puniest acquisitors to take on the titans of the industry, and he held it responsible for twisting the buyout world’s priorities until they were unrecognizable. No longer, Forstmann believed, did buyout firms buy companies to work side-by-side with management, grow their businesses and sell out in five to seven years, as Forstmann Little did. All that mattered now was keeping up a steady flow of transactions that produced an even steadier flow of fees — management fees for the buyout firms, advisory fees for the investment banks, junk-bond fees for the bond specialists. As far as Ted Forstmann was concerned, the entire LBO industry had become the province of quick-buck artists.”
“Today’s financial age has become a period of unbridles excellent with accepted risk soaring out of proportion to possible reward. Every week, with ever-increasing levels of irresponsibility with debt that has virtually no chance of being repaid. Most of this is happening for the short-term benefit of Wall Street’s investment bankers, lawyers, leveraged-buyout firms and junk-bond dealers at the long-term expense of Main Street’s employees, communities, companies, and investors.”
“Ross,” John Gutfreund asked, “do you think that the board is really against you?”
“Well, the relationship only goes so far,” Johnson said. The threat of lawsuits tended to spoil even the best friendships. “They’re not against me,” he explained, “they’re for themselves. It’s a pretty big damn difference.”
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion
I’m part of a Junto, a group that comes together to discuss thought-provoking ideas and work towards mutual improvement. As a group, we decided to read this book. As we worked through it, we continued to discuss the models that Haidt uses to describe our thought processes and it was spot on. One of the quotes that stuck out to me the most revolves around this idea of our reason acting as an internal lawyer to justify our actions:
“Why do we have this weird mental architecture? As hominid brains tripled in size over the last 5 million years, developing language and a vastly improved ability to reason, why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or scientist? Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why, rather than using all that brainpower just to find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe? That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation.”
Everything I’ve read about in behavioral economics has reinforced this idea that what most of us see as rational and logical determination of reality is actually often pretty irrational. And what I read in Righteous Minds presented this idea that even when we think we’re using external data to support our reasoning, it’s often selected based on our ability to confirm our existing beliefs. And that’s dangerous if you’re trying to focus on what’s actually true.
In addition to this, within our Junto I noticed that everyone reading the book jumped right to “how do I convince people that I’m right?” There are a crap ton of articles talking about how to convince people when you’re arguing about politics. What struck me was that no one really stopped to think about “how do I stop and reflect on how maybe I need to allow myself to be convinced?” If everyone is spending the same time figuring out how to convince each other they’re right when, according to Haidt, we’re all just reinforcing our existing beliefs with limited data, how is anyone ever going to actually change their mind?
Some Quotes:
“I hope to have given you a new way to think about two of the most important, vexing, and divisive topics in human life: politics and religion. Etiquette books tell us not to discuss these topics in polite company, but I say go ahead. Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together.”
“The linkage of righteousness and judgmentalism is captured in some modern definitions of righteous, such as “arising from an outraged sense of justice, morality, or fair play.” The link also appears in the term self-righteous, which means “convinced of one’s own righteousness, especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrowly moralistic and intolerant.” I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.”
“If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.”
“People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.”
“The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear.”
“Piaget wanted to know how the extraordinary sophistication of adult thinking (a cognitive butterfly) emerges from the limited abilities of young children (lowly caterpillars).”
“They don’t understand that the total volume of water is conserved when it moves from glass to glass. He also found that it’s pointless for adults to explain the conservation of volume to kids. The kids won’t get it until they reach an age (and cognitive stage) when their minds are ready for it. And when they are ready, they’ll figure it out for themselves just by playing with cups of water.”
“Kohlberg’s most influential finding was that the most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who had frequent opportunities for role taking — for putting themselves into another person’s shoes and looking at a problem from that person’s perspective.”
“If you want your kids to learn about the physical world, let them play with cups and water; don’t lecture them about the conservation of volume. And if you want your kids to learn about the social world, let them play with other kids and resolve disputes; don’t lecture them about the Ten Commandments. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t force them to obey God or their teachers or you. That will only freeze them at the conventional level.”
“Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong.”
“Schools and families should therefore embody progressive principles of equality and autonomy (not authoritarian principles that enable elders to train and constrain children).”
“When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn’t protect somebody from harm, then it can’t be morally justified. It’s just a social convention.”
“Were people really condemning the actions because they foresaw these harms, or was it the reverse process — were people inventing these harms because they had already condemned the actions?”
“We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.”
“Timaeus adds that a man who masters his emotions will live a life of reason and justice, and will be reborn into a celestial heaven of eternal happiness. A man who is mastered by his passions, however, will be reincarnated as a woman.”
“Given the judgments (themselves produced by the non-conscious cognitive machinery in the brain, sometimes correctly, sometimes not so), human beings produce rationales they believe account for their judgments. But the rationales (on this argument) are only ex post rationalizations.”
“We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.”
“We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments. Yet friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: they can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments (link 3) that sometimes trigger new intuitions, thereby making it possible for us to change our minds. We occasionally do this when mulling a problem by ourselves, suddenly seeing things in a new light or from a new perspective (to use two visual metaphors). Link 6 in the model represents this process of private reflection. The line is dotted because this process doesn’t seem to happen very often. For most of us, it’s not every day or even every month that we change our mind about a moral issue without any prompting from anyone else.”
“The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.”
“If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way — deeply and intuitively — you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.”
“When does the elephant listen to reason? The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs. When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges. But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants (that’s the social persuasion link in the social intuitionist model) or by good arguments given to it by the riders of those friendly elephants (that’s the reasoned persuasion link). There are even times when we change our minds on our own, with no help from other people. Sometimes we have conflicting intuitions about something, as many people do about abortion and other controversial issues. Depending on which victim, which argument, or which friend you are thinking about at a given moment, your judgment may flip back and forth as if you were looking at a Necker cube.”
“But the bottom line is that when we see or hear about the things other people do, the elephant begins to lean immediately. The rider, who is always trying to anticipate the elephant’s next move, begins looking around for a way to support such a move.”
“Why do we have this weird mental architecture? As hominid brains tripled in size over the last 5 million years, developing language and a vastly improved ability to reason, why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or scientist? Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why, rather than using all that brainpower just to find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe? That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation.”
“Glaucon’s thought experiment implies that people are only virtuous because they fear the consequences of getting caught — especially the damage to their reputations.”
“Reason is not fit to rule; it was designed to seek justification, not truth.”
“In fact, I’ll praise Glaucon for the rest of the book as the guy who got it right — the guy who realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.”
“What, then, is the function of moral reasoning? Does it seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted (by natural selection) to help us find the truth, so that we can know the right way to behave and condemn those who behave wrongly? If you believe that, then you are a rationalist, like Plato, Socrates, and Kohlberg. Or does moral reasoning seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes? If you believe that, then you are a Glauconian.”
“Exploratory thought is an “evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view.” Confirmatory thought is “a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view.”
“Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply: (1) decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience, (2) the audience’s views are unknown, and (3) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy.”
“Leary suggested that self-esteem is more like an internal gauge, a “sociometer” that continuously measures your value as a relationship partner. Whenever the sociometer needle drops, it triggers an alarm and changes our behavior.”
“The sociometer is part of the elephant. Because appearing concerned about other people’s opinions makes us look weak, we (like politicians) often deny that we care about public opinion polls. But the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.”
“The findings get more disturbing. Perkins found that IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that “people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.”
“The social psychologist Tom Gilovich studies the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs. His simple formulation is that when we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe it?” Then (as Kuhn and Perkins found), we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks. In contrast, when we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Must I believe it?” Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it. You only need one key to unlock the handcuffs of must.”
“Westen found that partisans escaping from handcuffs (by thinking about the final slide, which restored their confidence in their candidate) got a little hit of that dopamine. And if this is true, then it would explain why extreme partisans are so stubborn, closed-minded, and committed to beliefs that often seem bizarre or paranoid. Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.”
“In the same way, each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).”
“You can change the path that the elephant and rider find themselves traveling on. You can make minor and inexpensive tweaks to the environment, which can produce big increases in ethical behavior. You can hire Glaucon as a consultant and ask him how to design institutions in which real human beings, always concerned about their reputations, will behave more ethically.”
“Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second.”
“We supported liberal policies because we saw the world clearly and wanted to help people, but they supported conservative policies out of pure self-interest (lower my taxes!) or thinly veiled racism (stop funding welfare programs for minorities!). We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals.”
“Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.”
“Virtues are social constructions. The virtues taught to children in a warrior culture are different from those taught in a farming culture or a modern industrialized culture. There’s always some overlap among lists, but even then there are different shades of meaning. Buddha, Christ, and Muhammad all talked about compassion, but in rather different ways.”
“As the neuroscientist Gary Marcus explains, “Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired — flexible and subject to change — rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.”
“Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality — people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.”
“If we had no sense of disgust, I believe we would also have no sense of the sacred. And if you think, as I do, that one of the greatest unsolved mysteries is how people ever came together to form large cooperative societies, then you might take a special interest in the psychology of sacredness. Why do people so readily treat objects (flags, crosses), places (Mecca, a battlefield related to the birth of your nation), people (saints, heroes), and principles (liberty, fraternity, equality) as though they were of infinite value? Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.”
“All five of us were politically liberal, yet we shared the same concern about the way our liberal field approached political psychology. The goal of so much research was to explain what was wrong with conservatives. (Why don’t conservatives embrace equality, diversity, and change, like normal people?) Just that day, in a session on political psychology, several of the speakers had made jokes about conservatives, or about the cognitive limitations of President Bush. All five of us felt this was wrong, not just morally (because it creates a hostile climate for the few conservatives who might have been in the audience) but also scientifically (because it reveals a motivation to reach certain conclusions, and we all knew how easy it is for people to reach their desired conclusions). The five of us also shared a deep concern about the polarization and incivility of American political life, and we wanted to use moral psychology to help political partisans understand and respect each other.”
“It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.”
“Tomasello believes that human ultrasociality arose in two steps. The first was the ability to share intentions in groups of two or three people who were actively hunting or foraging together. (That was the Rubicon.) Then, after several hundred thousand years of evolution for better sharing and collaboration as nomadic hunter-gatherers, more collaborative groups began to get larger, perhaps in response to the threat of other groups. Victory went to the most cohesive groups — the ones that could scale up their ability to share intentions from three people to three hundred or three thousand people.” (Reminded me of Sapiens regarding the importance of narrative and the role it plays in social cohesion.)
“For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosis was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes. Most of them failed within eight years, and there was no correlation between sacrifice and longevity.”
“As Wilson puts it: “Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.”
“People belonging to such a [religiously cohesive] society are more likely to survive and reproduce than those in less cohesive groups, who may be vanquished by their enemies or dissolve in discord. In the population as a whole, genes that promote religious behavior are likely to become more common in each generation as the less cohesive societies perish and the more united ones thrive.”
“Perhaps the reason atheism has become more commonplace is because society operates so efficiently that communities are preferences rather than necessity.”
“Even John Locke, one of the leading lights of the Enlightenment, wrote that “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.”
“Things changed in the 1990s, beginning with new rules and new behaviors in Congress. Friendships and social contacts across party lines were discouraged. Once the human connections were weakened, it became easier to treat members of the other party as the permanent enemy rather than as fellow members of an elite club. Candidates began to spend more time and money on “oppo” (opposition research), in which staff members or paid consultants dig up dirt on opponents (sometimes illegally) and then shovel it to the media. As one elder congressman recently put it, “This is not a collegial body any more. It is more like gang behavior. Members walk into the chamber full of hatred.”
“We’re not just talking about IQ, mental illness, and basic personality traits such as shyness. We’re talking about the degree to which you like jazz, spicy foods, and abstract art; your likelihood of getting a divorce or dying in a car crash; your degree of religiosity, and your political orientation as an adult. Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.”
“Future liberals were described as being more curious, verbal, and self-reliant, but also more assertive and aggressive, less obedient and neat.”
“But when liberals try to understand the Reagan narrative, they have a harder time. When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations — Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity — I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.”
“If you find yourself in a Whole Foods store, there’s an 89 percent chance that the county surrounding you voted for Barack Obama. If you want to find Republicans, go to a county that contains a Cracker Barrel restaurant (62 percent of these counties went for McCain).”
“If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness. As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy. And if you really want to open your mind, open your heart first. If you can have at least one friendly interaction with a member of the “other” group, you’ll find it far easier to listen to what they’re saying, and maybe even see a controversial issue in a new light. You may not agree, but you’ll probably shift from Manichaean disagreement to a more respectful and constructive yin-yang disagreement.”
“As Robert F. Kennedy said: “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
My Brilliant Friend
Special thanks to my wife Camden for exposing me to this book. Camden reads a lot but it’s a much higher bar for her to talk about a book she truly loves. I think her own review is enough.
Some Quotes:
A young girls mother in regards to her daughter’s ability to continue her education – “We can’t pay for the lessons, but you can try to study by yourself and see if you pass the exam.’ I looked at her uncertainly. She was the same: lusterless hair, wandering eye, large nose, heavy body. She added, “Nowhere is it written that you can’t do it.”
“If you don’t try, nothing ever changes.”
“When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of the cities.”
“She told me that her brother, who at first had been skeptical about the possibility of making money with the shoes, had now begun to count on it too heavily, already he saw himself as the owner of the Cerullo shoe factory and didn’t want to go back to repairing shoes. This worried her, it was a side of Rino she didn’t know. He has always seemed to her only generously impetuous, sometimes aggressive, but not a braggart. Now, though, he posed as what he was not. He felt he was close to wealth. A boss.”
“I kept on day after day, committed to asserting, with increasing thoroughness, to the teachers, to my classmates, to myself my application and diligence. But inside I felt a growing sense of solitude, I felt I was learning without energy.”
“However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full.”
“What was I, who was I? I felt pretty again, my pimples were gone, the sun and the sea had made me slimmer, and yet the person I liked and whom I wished to be liked by showed no interest in me. What signs did I carry, what fate?”
“The beautiful mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon faded and it will be as if she had never had it.’ It was the regret, as if the teacher was realizing that something of Lila had been ruined because she, as a teacher, hadn’t protected and nurtured it well.”
Essentialism
I have put off reading this book, though now I’m not sure why. This had a huge impact on the way I think about productivity. I’ve always been the kind of person to want to say yes to as much as possible. The chart that had the most impact on me was this one.
More than anything I realized the drain on my energy that came from wanting to do so many things in so many directions. Instead, targeting my energy towards the most important things. That doesn’t mean the most important things can be limited to one single activity in your life, but that the things that are NOT most important cannot be allowed to take away from that energy.
Thanks to Tayler Tanner for recommending this book to me back in 2015.
Some Quotes:
‘If he couldn’t answer a definitive yes, then he would refuse the request. And once again to his delight, while his colleagues might initially seem disappointed, they soon began to respect him more for his refusal, not less.’
‘Instead of making just a millimeter of progress in a million directions he began to generate tremendous momentum towards accomplishing the things that were truly vital.’
‘Essentialism: only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.’
‘Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin? Have you ever felt both overworked and underutilized? Have you ever found yourself majoring in minor activities? Do you ever feel busy but not productive? Like you’re always in motion, but never getting anywhere? If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the way of the Essentialist.’
‘The way of the Essentialist isn’t about setting New Year’s resolutions to say “no” more, or about pruning your in-box, or about mastering some new strategy in time management. It is about pausing constantly to ask, “Am I investing in the right activities?”’
‘Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.’
‘The difference between the way of the Essentialist and the way of the Nonessentialist can be seen in the figure opposite. In both images the same amount of effort is exerted. In the image on the left, the energy is divided into many different activities. The result is that we have the unfulfilling experience of making a millimeter of progress in a million directions. In the image on the right, the energy is given to fewer activities. The result is that by investing in fewer things we have the satisfying experience of making significant progress in the things that matter most.’
‘In many cases we can learn to make one-time decisions that make a thousand future decisions so we don’t exhaust ourselves asking the same questions again and again.’
‘The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.’
‘As it turned out, exactly nothing came of the client meeting. But even if it had, surely I would have made a fool’s bargain. In trying to keep everyone happy I had sacrificed what mattered most.’
‘“Why is it,” I wonder, “that we have so much more ability inside of us than we often choose to utilize?” And “How can we make the choices that allow us to tap into more of the potential inside ourselves, and in people everywhere?”’
‘As Peter Drucker said, “In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time — literally — substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.”’
‘The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple “first” things. People and companies routinely try to do just that. One leader told me of his experience in a company that talked of “Pri-1, Pri-2, Pri-3, Pri-4, and Pri-5.” This gave the impression of many things being the priority but actually meant nothing was.’
‘Instead of asking, “Is there a chance I will wear this someday in the future?” you ask more disciplined, tough questions: “Do I love this?” and “Do I look great in it?” and “Do I wear this often?” If the answer is no, then you know it is a candidate for elimination. In your personal or professional life, the equivalent of asking yourself which clothes you love is asking yourself, “Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution toward my goal?”’
‘Essentialism is about creating a system for handling the closet of our lives. This is not a process you undertake once a year, once a month, or even once a week, like organizing your closet. It is a discipline you apply each and every time you are faced with a decision about whether to say yes or whether to politely decline. It’s a method for making the tough trade-off between lots of good things and a few really great things. It’s about learning how to do less but better so you can achieve the highest possible return on every precious moment of your life.’
‘“What do I feel deeply inspired by?” and “What am I particularly talented at?” and “What meets a significant need in the world?”’
‘What if schools eliminated busywork and replaced it with important projects that made a difference to the whole community? What if all students had time to think about their highest contribution to their future so that when they left high school they were not just starting on the race to nowhere?’
‘What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?’
‘“If you could do only one thing with your life right now, what would you do?”’
‘This experience brought me to the liberating realization that while we may not always have control over our options, we always have control over how we choose among them.’
“Think of Warren Buffett, who has famously said, “Our investment philosophy borders on lethargy.” What he means is that he and his firm make relatively few investments and keep them for a long time. In The Tao of Warren Buffett, Mary Buffett and David Clark explain: “Warren decided early in his career it would be impossible for him to make hundreds of right investment decisions, so he decided that he would invest only in the businesses that he was absolutely sure of, and then bet heavily on them. He owes 90% of his wealth to just ten investments. Sometimes what you don’t do is just as important as what you do.” In short, he makes big bets on the essential few investment opportunities and says no to the many merely good ones.”
“The overwhelming reality is: we live in a world where almost everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable.”
“ Trade-offs are real, in both our personal and our professional lives, and until we accept that reality we’ll be doomed to be just like Continental — stuck in a “straddled strategy” that forces us to make sacrifices on the margins by default that we might not have made by design.”
“ They said, “We had him try out a lot of different things, but as soon as it became clear an activity was not going to be his ‘big thing’ we discussed it and took him out of it.” The point here is not that all parents should want their children to go to Harvard. The point is that these Essentialist parents had consciously decided their goal was for their son to go to Harvard and understood that that success required making strategic trade-offs.”
“ One paradox of Essentialism is that Essentialists actually explore more options than their Nonessentialist counterparts. Nonessentialists get excited by virtually everything and thus react to everything. But because they are so busy pursuing every opportunity and idea they actually explore less.”
“ To discern what is truly essential we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep, and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make.”
“ In other words, twice a year, during the busiest and most frenetic time in the company’s history, [Bill Gates] still created time and space to seclude himself for a week and do nothing but read articles (his record is 112) and books, study technology, and think about the bigger picture. Today he still takes the time away from the daily distractions of running his foundation to simply think.”
“ As someone once said to me, the faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory.”
“ Sleep, the authors of the study concluded, allowed these top performers to regenerate so that they could practice with greater concentration. So yes, while they practiced more, they also got more out of those hours of practice because they were better rested.”
“ If we search for “a good career opportunity,” our brain will serve up scores of pages to explore and work through. Instead, why not conduct an advanced search and ask three questions: “What am I deeply passionate about?” and “What taps my talent?” and “What meets a significant need in the world?” Naturally there won’t be as many pages to view, but that is the point of the exercise. We aren’t looking for a plethora of good things to do. We are looking for the one where we can make our absolutely highest point of contribution.”
“ When I ask people, “What do you really want out of your career over the next five years?” I am still taken aback by how few people can answer the question.”
“ Every use of time, energy, or resources has to justify itself anew. If it no longer fits, eliminate it altogether.”
“ The author Henry Cloud tells a story about just this kind of situation in his book Boundaries. Once, the parents of a twenty-five-year-old man came to see him. They wanted him to “fix” their son. He asked them why they had come without their son, and they said, “Well, he doesn’t think he has a problem.” After listening to their story Henry concluded, to their surprise: “I think your son is right. He doesn’t have a problem.… You do.… You pay, you fret, you worry, you plan, you exert energy to keep him going. He doesn’t have a problem because you have taken it from him.”
My Story by Elizabeth Smart
As I listened to My Story on the drive to Utah for Thanksgiving, I was repeatedly reminded of a quote from Righteous Minds:
“Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong.”
When listening to the story of Elizabeth Smart and how she was forcibly taken from her home at the age of 14 and kept hostage, and repeatedly raped, I couldn’t help but think again and again, “how can someone inflict that kind of harm?” How are there people who engage in child sex trafficking, torture, abuse? How can we come from that childhood moral matrix of being against harm and fall so far to inflicting that kind of harm?
And more than that, I’ve never been more impressed than I am by Elizabeth Smart’s ability to acknowledge the suffering she endured and work tirelessly to ensure no one else has the same experience. In some part, I’m sure, that comes from following her mother’s advice.
Some Quotes:
Advice from her mother after she was rescued: ‘Elizabeth, what these people have done to you is terrible, and there aren’t words strong enough to describe how wicked and evil they are. They’ve stolen nine months of your life from you that you will never get back. But the best punishment you could ever give them is to be happy, is to live your life, is to move forward and do all of the things that you want to do. Because by feeling sorry for yourself and holding onto the past and reliving it over and over and over again, that’s only allowing them to steal more of your life away from you and they don’t deserve that. They don’t deserve another single second more of your life. So you be happy and you move forward.”
Saints: Volume 1
I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This year, they released a volume of history on the church from the time it was founded to the death of Joseph Smith. Regardless of how you feel about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I have a lot of respect for their desire to collect and chronicle history. The church has worked very hard to save massive amounts of records and history and make it available through a number of projects. This is just the latest in that effort.
The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
I’ve read a number of books on behavioral economics since first taking a class on it in 2016. But this was something a little bit different, where it dove into the lives and careers of the fathers of behavioral economics, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Both men had massive intellects and were incredibly thoughtful. And I think the result of behavioral economics revolves around the ability to be thoughtful and analytical in a way that questions much of what you think to be simple reality.
Some Quotes:
“Why had so much conventional wisdom been bullshit? And not just in sports but across the whole society. Why had so many industries been ripe for disruption? Why was there so much to be undone?”
About Danny Kahneman — “His defining emotion is doubt,’ said one of his former students. ‘And it’s very useful. Because it makes him go deeper and deeper and deeper.”
“But it was the start of a pattern: seizing on some idea of ambition with great enthusiasm only to abandon it in disappointment. ‘I’ve always felt ideas were a dime a dozen,’ he said. ‘If you had one that didn’t work out, you should not fight too hard to save it, just go find another.”
“Danny would tell students, ‘When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.’ That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it.”
“He compelled himself to be brave until bravery became a habit.”
“He would say, for example, ‘You know, in an Israeli university meeting, everyone jumps in to speak, because they think someone else might be about to say what they want to say. And in an American university faculty meeting everyone is quiet, because they think someone else will think to say what they want to say…’ And he’d be off on a disquisition on the difference between Americans and Israelis — how Americans believed tomorrow will be better than today, while Israelis were sure tomorrow would be worse; how American kids always came to class prepared, while Israeli kids never did the reading, but it was Israeli kids who always had the bold idea, and so on.”
“The Princeton philosopher Avishai Margalit said, ‘No matter what the topic was, the first thing Amos thought was in the top 10 percent. This was such a striking ability. The clarity and depth of his first reaction to any problem — any intellectual problem — was something mind-boggling. It was as if he was right away in the middle of any discussion.”
“Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid embarrassment,’ said his friend Avishai Margalit, ‘and he himself decided early on it was not worth it.”
“The nice thing about things that are urgent,’ he liked to say, ‘is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.’ ‘I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that,’ recalled his old friend Yeshu Kolodny. ‘And he would say, ‘No. You don’t.’ And I thought: lucky man!”
“Amos liked to say that stinginess was contagious and so was generosity, and since behaving generously made you happier than behaving stingily, you should avoid stingy people and spend your time only with generous ones.”
“Israeli intellectuals were presumed to have some possible relevance to the survival of the Jewish state, and the intellectuals responded by at least pretending to be relevant.”
“Danny said to me, ‘It’s okay, just learn the books.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean just learn the books?’ And he said, ‘Take the books with you and memorize them.’ And so that’s what Avi had done. He returned to Danny’s classroom just in time ford the final exam. He’d memorized the books. Before Danny handed back the exams to the students, he asked Avi to raise his hand. ‘I raised my hand — what did I do this time? Danny says, ‘You got 100 percent. And if someone gets a grade like this it should be said publicly.”
“You don’t study memory. You study forgetting.”
“That was another thing colleagues and students noticed about Danny: how quickly he moved on from his enthusiasms, how easily he accepted failure. It was as if he expected it. But he wasn’t afraid of it. He’d try anything. He thought of himself as someone who enjoyed, more than most, changing his mind. ‘I get a sense of movement and discovery whenever I find a flaw in my thinking,’ he said.”
“There was a relentlessness in the way Danny’s mind moved from insight to application. Psychologists, especially the ones who became university professors, weren’t exactly known for being useful.”
“You have completed a three-year program in psychology. You are by definition professionals. Don’t hide behind research. Use your knowledge to come up with a plan.”
“Someone once said that education was knowing what do when you don’t know. Danny took that idea and ran with it.”
“Danny found problems where none seemed to exist; it was as if he structured the world around him so that it might be understood chiefly as a problem.”
“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.”
“If human judgement was somehow inferior to simple models, humanity had a big problem: Most fields in which experts rendered judgements were not as data-rich, or as data-loving, as psychology. Most spheres of human activity lacked the data to build the algorithms that might replace the human judge. For most of the thorny problems in life, people would need to rely on the expert judgement of some human being: doctors, judges, investment advisors, government officials, admissions officers, movie studio executives, baseball scouts, personnel managers, and all the rest of the world’s deciders of things. Hoffman, and the psychologists who joined his research institute, hoped to figure out exactly what experts were doing when they rendered judgements. ‘We didn’t have a special vision,’ said Paul Slovic. ‘We just had a feeling this was important: how people took pieces of information and somehow processed that and came up with a decision or a judgement.”
“He didn’t have any great hope that his paper would be read outside of his small world: What happened in this little corner of psychology tended to stay there. ‘People who were making judgements in the real world wouldn’t have come across it,’ said Lew Goldberg. ‘The people who are not psychologists do not read psychology journals.”
“The stories we make up, rooted in our memories, effectively replace probability judgements. ‘The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking,’ wrote Danny and Amos. ‘There is much evidence showing that, once an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it any other way.”
“Images of the future are shaped by experience of the past,’ they wrote, turning on its head Santanyana’s famous lines about the importance of history: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgement of the future. ‘We often decide that an outcome is extremely likely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.”
“People often work hard to obtain information they already have. And avoid new knowledge.”
“He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”
“As Kahneman and Tversky long ago had pointed out, a person who is making a prediction — or a diagnosis — is allowed to ignore base rates only if he is completely certain he is correct. Inside a hospital, or really anyplace, Redelmeier was never completely certain about anything, and he didn’t see why anybody else should be, either.”
“And if we are fallible in algebra, where the answers are clear, how much more fallible must we be in a world where the answers are much less clear?”
“What is it with you freedom-loving Americans? Live free or die. I don’t get it. I say, ‘Regulate me gently. I’d rather live.”
“A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.”
“So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative.”
“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
“It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”
“Both Amos and Danny thought that voters and shareholders and all the other people who lived with the consequences of high-level decisions might come to develop a better understanding of the nature of decision making. They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes — whether it turned out to be right or wrong — but by the process that led to it. The job of the decision maker wasn’t to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.”
“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”
“Adult minds were too self-deceptive. Children’s minds were a different matter.”
“When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.”
“The absence of definite information concerning the outcomes of actions one has not taken is probably the single most important factor that keeps regret in life within tolerable bounds,’ Danny wrote. ‘We can never be absolutely sure that we would have been happier had we chosen another profession or another spouse… Thus, we are often protected from painful knowledge concerning the quality of our decisions.”
“If people could be systematically wrong, their mistakes couldn’t be ignored. The irrational behavior of the few would not be offset by the rational behavior of the many. People could be systematically wrong, and so markets could be systematically wrong, too.”
“The way it feels to me is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think.”
“Science is a conversation and you have to compete for the right to be heard.”
“With the passage of time, the consequences of any event accumulated, and left more to undo. And the more there is to undo, the less likely the mind is to even try. This was perhaps one way time heals wounds, by making them feel less avoidable.”
“He thought by talking.”
“Even sophisticated doctors were getting from Danny and Amos only the crude, simplified message that their minds could never be trusted. What would become of medicine? Of intellectual authority? Of experts?”
[One of the opponents of Danny and Amos’ work] “argued that as man had created the concept of rationality he must, by definition, be rational. ‘Rational’ was whatever most people did. Or, as Danny put it in a letter that he reluctantly sent in response to one of Cohen’s articles, ‘Any error that attracts a sufficient number of votes is not an error at all.”
“In some strange way Danny contained within himself his own opponent. He didn’t need another one.”
“Amos changed,’ said Danny. ‘When I gave him an idea he would look for what was good in it. For what was right with it. That, for me, was the happiness in the collaboration. He understood me better than I understood myself. He stopped doing that.”
“He did what critics sometimes do: He described the object of his scorn as he wished it to be rather than it was. Then he debunked his description.”
“Danny added, ‘On a day on which they announce the discovery of 40 billion new galaxies we argue about six words in a post script… It is remarkable how ineffective the number of galaxies is as an argument for giving up in the debate between ‘repeat’ and ‘reiterate.’”
“The brain is limited. There are gaps in our attention. The mind contrives to make those gaps invisible to us. We think we know things we don’t. We think we are safe when we are not.”
“Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”
The Innovation Blind Spot
I first heard about Village Capital when I was an intern at the University Venture Fund in 2015. From there, I’ve always respected them as a firm from afar and had the chance to go to one of their events at Autodesk this year to better connect investors and social entrepreneurs. As part of the event, I was given a copy of Ross Baird’s book. If you’re looking for a perspective on impact investing, this is an incredibly valuable one.
Some Quotes:
“Investors everywhere have blind spots, and as a result, we’re overlooking most great ideas. Three quarters of venture capital goes to founders in just three states: New York, California, and Massachusetts. Some 10 percent goes to women founders, and just 1 percent to African Americans. That’s not right — and it’s not smart. We need everybody on the playing field if we’re going to remain the most innovative, entrepreneurial nation in the world.”
“Huge parts of the system aren’t working. New firm creation in the United States is at a thirty-year low. The biggest investment firms in the country’s wealthiest cities aren’t delivering the best financial returns. And the structural problems in the system make all our other problems nearly impossible to solve. Even though we have more computing power in our pockets today that the entire world did fifty years ago, our food systems struggle to feed the world’s growing population, and our health and education infrastructure an’t take care of the current generation, let alone prepare the next one to lead.”
“The idea that entrepreneurship is a meritocracy is a myth. In the real world, money flows to the ideas that are the most convenient to find or the most familiar, not necessarily those that are the best. Simply put, the blind spots in the way we innovate — the way we nurture, support, and invest in new ideas — make all our other problems even harder to solve.”
“The blind spot: we artificially separate our jobs and our careers from our values.”
“Instead of solving the biggest problems of the day, we’re putting billions of dollars into how to make mobile advertising and clickbait news more effective, and nudging people to buy more stuff.”
“The [2016] election illustrates one basic truth that no poll can capture in full: many people feel that the basic social contract of the American Dream — if you have a great idea, solve problems, and work hard, you’ll be successful — is not true in an ever-globalizing world.”
“Investors like to follow patterns; they often use the phrase ‘pattern recognition’ to justify decisions regarding where to invest their money.”
“Because venture funds are under extreme pressure to deliver quick profits to investors, they prioritize short-term value capture over long-term value creation.”
“Over time, smaller funds significantly outperform larger funds.”
“If you’re unable to raise the money you need, investors often say you should ‘bootstrap’ — self fund your company. But most founders don’t have enough cash on hand to start their dream company — particularly since the Great Recession of 2008. Nor do founders necessarily have wealth in the form of home equity: the US home ownership rate in 2016 fell to its lowest since 1967. To add to the problem, student debt has grown over 100 percent in the last twenty years, particularly among graduates from for-profit and two-year colleges, which low-income people disproportionally attend. And founders who are in debt are less likely to start their own business after graduation.”
“If you invest outside the hotbeds where everyone else is, and the company succeeds, on average you’ll pay 35 percent less to get the same end financial result.”
“From a customer’s perspective, it doesn’t matter what a company’s founder looks like or where they went to school, only whether they make a great product.”
“Many people describe their personal philanthropy as ‘giving back.’ But as eBay founder Pierre Omidyar once said, ‘Giving back implies, at one point, that you were taking. We’re dissociating what we do from what we value, and it’s becoming very difficult to improve the world as a result.”
“I had an economics professor at the University of Virginia who said, ‘Decisions are a combination of information and values. This class teaches you the information. You have to develop your own code of values.”
“The financialization of the economy means that what we invest in is no longer entrepreneurs making goods and producing services, but the creation and leverage of intermediaries who extract tolls, rents, and capital gains. The most valuable companies in the world, from Amazon to Walmart to Facebook to Google, do not produce goods or services but instead are trading companies who mediate financial transactions between producers and consumers.”
“The simple fact is that selling YouTube to Google or Instagram to Facebook realizes success more quickly than investing in a clean energy company that will require years of research and development, or a healthcare company that needs to wait for FDA approval. ‘Investment’ for the short term is capturing value quickly. ‘Investment’ for the long term is creating value that lasts.”
“It’s now who you know, it’s who you get to know” (Chris Matthews, Hardball)
“Experts blamed economic cycles and cautioned the industry to ‘wait and see,’ but Bob hit the road and started talking to his customers” — reminds me of Warren Buffet’s ism of “be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.”
“Bob understood that when your’e investing where no one else is, you can outperform those who are following the same patterns.”
“Makers were better evaluators of new ideas; they tended to view their peers’ ideas not through a lens of ‘How well does this act resemble what has worked in the past?’ but rather ‘How likely is this to succeed in the future?”
“The Maker looks at the idea and thinks of all the reasons why it will succeed. Whereas an assessment is an evaluation against a fixed framework, a forecast evaluates a probability that a certain outcome will happen.”
“Later-stage venture capital and private equity investors deploying tens of millions of dollars in growth capital have years of evidence of a company’s performance and are able to make decisions based on assessing a company’s growth trajectory. But investing in new ideas is a forecasting decision, and we have substantial evidence that entrepreneurs are better at predicting whether an idea and its early execution will be successful.”
“Whether it’s changing the funding process or encouraging a different pipeline, innovations around who gets a chance to access capital yield better outcomes.”
“Have you ever heard of someone telling a middle-schooler they expect them to be a great entrepreneur.” (Jim Clifton, CEO, Gallup)
“Broader societal trends back up what I’m seeing at a ground level: 69 percent of millennials value the impact of their investments over their financial returns.”
“Buffett and other two-pocket thinkers are making two arguments. First, they’re arguing that nonprofits are better than companies at addressing social problems. Second, they’re arguing that companies without a social mission are better than mission-driven companies at making money. I believe these are both myths. Even if the first argument were true — if nonprofits were better at solving the world’s biggest problems — we would still run into another problem: the philanthropic sector is so small that even the most effective philanthropy in the world wouldn’t solve systemic problems. But the second argument is problematic, too. There is growing evidence — from customers, founders, employees, and investors — that it pays off, on the bottom line, to have a long-term mission that matters.”
“In both the cases of Ben & Jerry’s and SKS, as the firm grew, the company often faced difficult decisions between company growth and social capital. But bigger may not always be better: I asked Vikram Gandhi, an investment banker who handled the SKS IPO, what went wrong, and he said, ‘The company wasn’t growing like a bank. It raised all this Silicon Valley money and was trying to grow as fast as a tech company. In its desire to look like a Silicon Valley tech company, it lost an understanding of the problem it was trying to solve.’”
“Kim remembers, ‘I learned that the most important way to be happy is to codify what you want to be: What do you care about? And how can all aspects of your life — work, family, home — reflect that?” Kim recognized early on that the secret to happiness was one-pocket thinking.”
“Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a high and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper its foundation.” (St. Augustine)
“Investors’ blind spots are almost always the result of good people trying to do the right thing and getting overloaded, rather than someone trying to be actively harmful.” — similar to heuristics in behavioral economics.
“Type 1 errors occur when you pick the wrong idea; type 2 errors happen when you don’t ever look at the right idea.”
“Type 2 solutions share a common trait: they are proactive. They involve going out and finding ideas — and the people and places from which they come — as well as viewing those ideas through a different and possibly unfamiliar lens. There are no shortcuts to avoiding type 2 errors; you have to invest the time in building the pipeline you want to invest in.”
“The trait most strongly correlated with success was self-awareness. Let’s say an innovator is disorganized, but she’s aware of it. Or an entrepreneur is a jerk, and he knows it. Both are fine — and positively correlated with success. The second trait most correlated with success is whether a firm has a female cofounder. Based on the data, here’s my top piece of advice to any guy starting a company: be more self-aware, and get a woman as a cofounder.”
“Know what you own, and know why you own it.” (Peter Lynch)
“Bryce noticed something curious: the organizations Blue Sky was supporting were more interrelated than he would have thought. He imagined a woman who used to work at a strip club instead working for a living wage at Scarlet’s Bakery, which an investor could support, and living in an affordable home in Louisville, which an investor could also back. He had unintentionally created a portfolio in his mind. Bryce saw the future. To invest in this portfolio, he founded a firm he would call Access Ventures, in the process of becoming one of the world’s foremost one-pocket thinkers that you’ve likely never heard of.”
“Most investors don’t price social and environmental risk in public equities until it’s too late.”
“But many of these apps are dependent on venture capital subsidies. Uber lost $1.2B in the first half of 2016 — and passengers paid only 41 percent of the cost, with the rest subsidized by venture capital. Blue Apron has raised $200M, and Zeel has raised $13M. And the pensions of most Americans are subsidizing these perks. Venture capital funds are often raising capital from teachers and firefighters in New Mexico and Minnesota to subsidize food and massages for tech employees in San Francisco. In my experience, the kinds of technology that venture capital is investing in today is doing a tremendous amount for well-educated people on the coasts while doing little for middle-class America.”
“In a one-pocket world, the cities, states, and countries that are managed with the lowest social and environmental risk are the ones that are the most prosperous.” (How do you measure this though?”
“We don’t see more ESOPs because our current investment world is ‘one size fits all.’ One investment banker I spoke to at a well-known bank investigated how ESOPs could create more middle-class wealth. He discovered that ESOPs, if structured thoughtfully, are relatively a straightforward model for founders who want to sell shares in their company to members of their team. He asked his bank, ‘Why don’t we do this more often?’ He learned that the fee incentives that investment bankers received from ESOPs were substantially lower than they would be for a straight transaction: as a result, investment bankers had no incentive to do the hard work of helping founders sell their companies to their team members.”
“We know that diverse teams have a competitive advantage: teams in the top quartile of gender diversity outperform teams in the bottom quartile by 15 percent, and teams in the top quartile of racial diversity outperform teams in the bottom 35 percent.”
“Government has historically played a major role in economic development; federal, state, and city governments have offices that provide cash and tax incentives to bring in new jobs. But although we know that small businesses and new businesses create the vast majority of new jobs, economic development offices tend to focus on getting big businesses to move to their city or state. Government should build, not buy.”
“The problem: most businesses that create jobs are highly illiquid for a while. These startup businesses are often too risky for a bank to lend to, and usually aren’t going to grow fast enough, or big enough, to fit into the venture capitalist’s box.”
“The wrong way to find innovation, Hwang and Horowitt maintain, is to look for the next great idea; instead, investing in the right ecosystem creates an environment in which unexpected ideas can arise and thrive. Topophilia (From Greek topos “place” and -philia, “love of”) is a strong sense of place, which often becomes mixed with the sense of cultural identity among certain people and a love of certain aspects of such a place) is one way to describe why an ecosystem works: people love and invest in where they are.”
“People don’t write books because they’ve got a great deal of wisdom to impart to somebody; they write books because they want to find the answers for themselves and share the search. It’s not ‘I have a thing to tell you,’ even if you say it is. It’s an exploration and a discovery.” (Shelby Foote)
“Our heads-down drive for progress has hollowed out many communities. The thinking behind Peter Thiel’s maxim for entrepreneurs — ‘Be a monopoly’ — has caused a lot of people to lose their livelihoods and their dreams.”
“The problem: When large conglomerates touch every part of everyday life, local problems are harder to solve. Today Walmart executives in Bentonville, Arkansas, and Facebook leadership in Palo Alto make centralized decisions about highly sensitive local problems, and we have fewer local leaders with an independent base and the knowledge of our communities’ problems needed to be able to solve them. As Justice Louis Brandeis once warned, we are becoming a nation of clerks.”
“And big institutions don’t necessarily need to be the enemy — they just need to not be “too big to fail.” Google and Facebook will have better news and content and more relevant ads if they empower, rather than crowd out, local content producers. Banks, venture capital firms, and financial services institutions need to figure out how to invest at the topophilia level if they are going to get truly different, interesting, and profitable ideas. For our innovation economy to succeed in creating a better future, we need to create conditions where everyone is able to play in the innovation game.”
“Do we change the system, and then hope that people’s values change? Or do we change people’s values, and then hope that the system changes to match?”
“But I think the question assumes a false choice. The economic decisions we make are composed of values plus information. But in a big-data world where we are pushing to maximize quarterly earnings and focusing on the most perfect information possible, we have lost sight of the values we care about. We prioritize the quarterly share price of Lowe’s, Walmart, and Home Depot and then later worry about the social fabric of Orange, Virginia, but we don’t recognize that they are interconnected. We can’t price the long-term social and environmental risks that we create with a two-pocket world, so we don’t value them.”
“I didn’t start Village Capital — or write this book — because I think I know all the answers to what’s wrong. I do know that the system isn’t working, and I hope that my career can help me figure out how to make things better.”
Profiles In Courage
I stumbled upon this book at Pioneer Book in Provo, UT, one of my favorite places to find oldies buy goodies. What I repeatedly noticed was the feeling that most of these men had that the intelligent members of their constituencies would be able to understand their course of action. Operating under the expectation of an informed electorate is key to an effective democracy, though I sometimes struggle to believe that this is representative of the majority of the population.
Some Quotes
“President Kennedy was fond of quoting Dante that ‘the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crises, maintain their neutrality.’”
“The energies and talents of all of us are needed to meet the challenges — the internal ones of our cities, our farms, ourselves — to be successful in the fight for freedom around the globe, in the battles against illiteracy, hunger and disease. Pleasantries, self-satisfied mediocrity will serve us badly. We need the best of many — not of just a few. We must strive for excellence.” (Robert F. Kennedy)
“What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us.” (Robert F. Kennedy)
“In Washington I frequently find myself believing that forty or fifty letters, six visits from professional politicians and lobbyists, and three editorials in Massachusetts newspapers constitute public opinion on a given issue. Yet in truth I rarely know how the great majority of the voters feel, or even how much they know of the issues that seem so burning in Washington.”
“We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles. We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves.”
“I implore that Spirit from whom every good and perfect gift descends to enable me to render essential service to my country, and that I may never be governed in my public conduct by any consideration other than that of my duty.” (John Quincy Adams)
Referring to John Quincy Adams — “In spite of a life of extraordinary achievement, he was gnawed constantly by a sense of inadequacy, of frustration, of failure. Though his hard New England conscience and his remarkable talents drove him steadily along a road of unparalleled success, he had from the beginning an almost morbid sense of constant failure.”
A letter written by John Quincy Adams to his father John Adams, at the age of 9 — “Dear Sir: I love to receive letters very well; much better than I love to write them. I make but a poor figure at composition. My head is much too fickle. My thoughts are running after bird’s eggs, play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me a studying. I own I am ashamed of myself. I have but just entered the third volume of Rollin’s History, but designed to have got half through it by this time. I am determined to this week to be more diligent. I have set myself a stint to read the third volume half out. If I can but keep my resolution, I may again at the end of the week give a better account of myself. I wish, sir, you would give me in writing some instructions with regard to the use of my time, and advise me how to proportion my studies and play, and I will keep them by me, and endeavor to follow them. With the present determinations of growing better, I am, dear sir, your son.”
“It is significant to note that the two Adamses, father and son, were the only Presidents not elected for a second term in the first fifty years of our nation’s history. Yet their failures, if they can be called failures, were the result of their own undeviating devotion to what they considered to be the public interest and the result of the inability of their contemporaries to match the high standards of honor and rectitude that they brought to public life.”
“Inconsistencies of opinion arising from changes of circumstances are often justifiable. But there is one sort of inconsistency that is culpable: it is the inconsistency between a man’s conviction and his vote, between his conscience and his conduct. No man shall ever charge me with an inconsistency of that kind.” (Daniel Webster)
“Mr. Webster has assumed a great responsibility,’ he wired his paper, ‘and whether he succeeds or fails, the courage with which he has come forth at least entitles him to the respect of the country.”
“Necessity compels me to speak true rather than pleasing things… I should indeed like to please you; but I prefer to save you, whatever be your attitude toward me.” (Daniel Webster)
“To some extent he had attempted to shrug off his attackers, stating that he had expected to be libeled and abused. To those who urged a prompt reply, he merely related the story of the old deacon in a similar predicament who told his friends, ‘I always make it a rule never to clean up the path until the snow is done falling.”
“I value solid popularity — the esteem of good men for good action. I despise the bubble popularity that is won without merit and lost without crime… I have been a Senator 30 years… I sometimes had to act against the preconceived opinions and first impressions of my constituents; but always with full reliance upon their intelligence to understand me and their equity to do me justice — and I have never been disappointed.” (Thomas Hart Benton)
“I almost literally looked down into my open grave. Friendships, position, fortune, everything that makes life desirable to an ambitious man were about to be swept away by the breath of my mouth, perhaps forever.” (Edmund Ross)
“Who was Edmund G. Ross? Practically nobody. Not a single public law bears his name, not a single history book includes his picture, not a single list of Senate ‘greats’ mentions his service. His one heroic deed has been all but forgotten. But who might Edmund G. Ross have been? That is the question — for Ross, a man with an excellent command of words, an excellent background for politics and an excellent future in the Senate, might well have outstripped his colleagues in prestige and power throughout a long Senate career. Instead, he chose to throw all of this away for one act of conscience.”
“My countrymen! Know one another, and you will love one another.”
“If [a Senator] allows himself to be governed by the opinions of his friends at home, however devoted he may be to them or they to him, he throws away all the rich results of a previous preparation and study, and simply becomes a commonplace exponent of those popular sentiments which may change in a few days… Such a course will dwarf any man’s statesmanship and his vote would be simply considered as an echo of current opinion, not the result of mature deliberations.” (Lucius Lamar)
“I am, however, so firmly convinced of the righteousness of my course that I believe if the intelligent and patriotic citizenship of the country can only have an opportunity to hear both sides of the question, all the money in Christendom and all the political machinery that wealth can congregate will not be able to defeat the principle of government for which our forefathers fought.” (George Norris)
“Has the time come when we can’t even express our opinions in the Senate, where we were sent to debate such questions, without being branded by the moneyed interests as traitors?” (George Norris)
“Liberalism implies freedom of thought, freedom from orthodox dogma, the right of others to think differently from one’s self. It implies a free mind, open to new ideas and willing to give attentive consideration. When I say liberty, I mean liberty of the individual to think his own thoughts and live his own life as he desires to think and live.” (Robert Taft)
“I shall set an example to my children which shall teach them to regard as nothing any position or office which must be attained or held at the sacrifice of honor.” (John Tyler)
“There are few things wholly evil or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of Government policy, is an inseparable compound of the two, so that our best judgement of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.” (Abraham Lincoln)
“The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragey. A man does what he must — in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures — and that is the basis of all human morality.”
“The stories of past courage can define that ingredient — they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.”
