Author: Reality Laughs

Sebastian Marshall’s podcast (episode 18) contained an interesting question.

When told that someone is really good, his response is a question: good on a normal scale or good on the elite scale?

You’re a good basketball player. Really good. In what context? Normal person good means something different than NBA good. And even NBA players—who are elite by any standard you care to use—can’t measure up to the truly elite-elite scale where you find Kobe Bryant, Kareem, and the like.

Shooting for really, really good in the real world and by the real world’s scale is a fine accomplishment. So is shooting for elite performance.

Just know how you are judging your performance.

The natural inclination is to go for elite performance. But is that what I want? Really? Am I willing to do what elite performers do, just as table stakes? Not even to dominate, just to be in the game.

There is something in me that says I would rather be in the bottom decile of elite than the top 1% of ordinary. It’s just a hunger. I can’t explain why.

Am I willing to put some muscle behind that arrow?

Everything on the internet is persuasion. Everything on the internet is designed to make you do something.

You must see this if you wish to think well.

You think you rationally arrived at an opinion or decision. No you didn’t. You (speaking to myself now) are dumb and believe the last thing you hear. You opinions have been handed to me and then reinforced by propaganda.

Fortunately I have some training to be skeptical and look for the other side of the argument. Do I use this consistently? No. I am as dumb as every fish who ever saw a shiny with a yummy on it and decided it was lunchtime.

Eventually I wake up though.

Why am I hearing this? Why am I hearing this now? Who or what receives the benefit of my action or passive assent to the message?

These questions, when asked regularly, make me smarter.

Even better? Just ask why the dog isn’t barking. What’s missing from the picture? What is not being said? As often as not, truth is found in the void, in what is omitted.

Sins of omission. Look for them.

“If you do it right 51 percent of the time you will end up a hero.”

Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.

Legendary chairman of General Motors.

Side note: Tim Cook presides over Apple, Inc. in its Alfred Sloan era of General Motors existence. Apple has long since transitioned into Fat American Corporatism.

Back to Alfred Sloan.

It’s heartening to think about this. You don’t have to be right all the time. Not even most of the time. In fact, it’s probably better to not focus on being right.

Alfred Sloan’s admonition can probably be revised to read as follows:

“If you do it right when it matters, it doesn’t matter how many times you do it wrong.”

Me.

This is not original, of course. Nassim Taleb theory of life, as far as I can understand his books.

Make mistakes when the downside doesn’t matter so much, but make lots of decisions. Or more precisely, do lots of things. Because decisions don’t matter. Actions matter.

Naval Ravikant talks about why Tim Cook gets paid huge money. Naval’s theory is that someone who is right 10% more than the next person will, with the effect of compounding, create outsized returns. If Tim Cook is right 70% of the time but someone else is right 60% of the time, then the fact that Tim Cook is piloting a huge enterprise means the compound effect of that extra 10% “right” will create billions of dollars of wealth.

That’s right, but be right about what matters. Being 10% better at decisions with low payoffs is of little value.

Let’s summarize:

• Don’t be concerned with being right all the time.
• In fact, be happy to be wrong frequently.
• Focus more on the payoff of the right and wrong decisions. Improve your decision-making in the payoff space, not the probability space.

In personal life this means understanding deeply what is true. This is where the #Lindy idea is useful. Then understand the Stoic perspective: what is within your control and what is not. Personal payoffs (peace of mind, living up to your principles, etc.) are where your principles are #Lindy and your actions are within your control.

In other words, the title to this post is wrong. The right title would be “What should I be right about?”

I want to lose weight. Ten pounds: from 180-ish to 170-ish.

That’s not really my intention. What I really want is to have a healthy, strong body. And not just for its own sake (though that matters to me). I want a healthy, strong body so I can look good.

Yes. Vanity.

That’s not the point of today’s entry, but it’s an interesting revelation of truth that didn’t come about until I started hammering the keyboard.

Here’s what I came to say.

The exercise of dropping weight (for me, the layer of fat around my waist) isn’t a purely physical exercise. It isn’t all about the things I do: what I eat, how much I eat, when I eat, how many calories burned, what I do for exercises to burn more calories.

In fact that is the lesser part of the effort.

Let me say it clearly. I was afraid of the physical sensation of hunger. That’s not my biggest impediment. Hunger pangs are rare, transient, and can be handled with a bottle of water or a cup of coffee and some chewing gum.

The greater part of the exercise is emotional. Am I willing to be in occasional distress (the inside man) in order to change my appearance (the outside man)?

Am I willing to be agitated, lonely, sad, bored . . . all of those things . . . and stay away from the refrigerator?

I contend that losing weight (there must be a better mental framing for this project) is really an inside job. How many times have I gone to the freezer and grabbed some ice cream for no reason, as if compelled to fall to the ground by gravity? “Eat your feelings” indeed.

Run straight into this shitstorm. Welcome the feelings. Sit, aware of them. This, too, shall pass.

That’s what works for me. The weight is slowly, slowly falling away. It’s an inside job.

You already know the answer.

The outside reading, conversations with friends, all of that? Essential.

They’re just ways to help you uncover what you already know.

The Kingdom of God is within.

Ancient wisdom survives.

Over thousands of years, ideas are tested. The filter of time is how we can see truth, because dumb dies and smart survives. Nassim Taleb’s Lindy Principle succinctly describes this idea.

But ancient folly can survive for a long time, too.

It’s easy to look at modern “wisdom” and predict that it will disappear in time. Socialism and communism seem to be examples. The “true Scotsman” fallacy is applied by the proponents of these ideas . . . again and again. Yet the application of these ideas seems to fail . . . again and again. Unfortunately, we live in the testing era, and some of us must suffer from the malignant application of folly. In this regard, it is instructive to watch the proponents of such ideas and discern their true motivations. That insight will tell you why the ideas of socialism and communism must fail. The fundamental motivation is at odds with the objective.

But that’s an aside. The basic point is that modern fallacies persist, sometimes for a long time. Eventually, however, bad ideas die, along with their disciples.

And if modern fallacies persist for a few hundred years before they fall prey to the filter of time, why should not other bad ideas last even longer? A thousand years? Sure. That’s possible.

Do not mistake an idea’s longevity for truth. It’s a good marker, but it isn’t definitive.

I woke up at 4 am. And immediately started thinking about These Challenging Times and what Those People Are Doing to America.

That’s a recipe for disaster and insomnia.

For some reason — probably because I say it over and over to myself in my head! — I remembered how the Stoics look at things. What’s inside your control? Your thoughts, mostly. What’s outside of your control? Everything else. If you’re disturbed, it’s probably because you’re focusing on things outside of your control.

Me? Disturbed? Check.

What is wrong with me?

I am working on the wrong side of the Stoic equation. I am putting my intellectual and emotional energy into things outside my control: biological (the damn virus thing) and political forces (the presidential election); the behavior of fallible humans. There’s not a damn thing I can do about them.

What is within my control? My own thoughts. My own actions. So I lay there and remembered the spiritual principles in action. The next thing I remember is looking at my clock to see it was 6:30 am and time for a cup of coffee.

The saying goes “Strike while the iron is hot.” The point is to keep the iron hot. The first thing to go is the reading. It’s time to pick up Seneca again and keep in (spiritual) shape.

“No kind of distress is worse than the feeling you are trapped.”

I feel trapped when there are external conditions that limit me. Every way I turn, I see barriers and impossibilities. Most of the time, though, I manufacture my own barriers and impossibilities.

Here is an example that plays around in my head from time to time. I think about moving to another place instead of where I live right now. This is what happens next:

“I cannot move to (Random Place), because I know no one there. I will be alone. Plus I might not like it there. I will pick a bad neighborhood to live in. The house will be terrible. I might not like the weather. I will have to start from scratch again with my business and I might fail. I will be sad and alone.”

These are made-up reasons, from my own head. I can think of a dozen more reasons to explain to myself why I cannot move to (Random Place). All of them are wrong, and all of them are made up from some kernel of truth.

Yes, I know no one in (Random Place). This is true right now, while I am living where I live. I haven’t even visited (Random Place). How could I possibly make any judgments about the place?

Does the conclusion (“I cannot move to (Random Place) because . . .”) follow from sound premises? Of course not. This is faulty logic. I start from the true assertion that I do not know a soul in (Random Place) and reach the conclusion that I will never have a friend in (Random Place).

Will I forever know no one and be totally alone if I go to (Random Place) and live there? No. When I say it like that it doesn’t make sense.

Etc. Examine every impossibility and see if it comes from your own brain, manufactured from a tiny seed of current truth, but embellished with an enormous amount of speculative fiction.

And isn’t it interesting that the speculative embellishment of the future usually seems to be of the “doom and gloom” variety?

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the brain said instead, “Why not move to (Random Place)? You know what will happen? In two years you will have so many new friends that you won’t have time to take a nap.”

My point here is that I am distressed because I feel trapped by things I think are true, but they are not. They are created by my own thinking, my own imagination. They aren’t real.

I am trapped by my own lies told to myself, which I believe.

How much better would it be to tell myself nothing? Let the future unfold as it will.

Or even better, find the way to self-talk so I experience a future that I truly desire.

Put aside pleasure and pursue the arduous.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about this. There are thousands of internet fingerpainters who will tell you what he really meant. Ignore them all—the inferior quality of discourse will make you sad. What they say is informational—about the fingerpainters’ mentality, not St. Thomas Aquinas or his ideas.

I care about the idea of deliberately choosing the harder way and avoiding the easier, softer way.

Not merely because it is the harder way. But because that’s likely to be where treasure is to be found.

Treasure is an experience, not the objective. Treasure is the result of doing the harder things. You do not choose the harder way because you expect to be given a trophy at the end. No, the reward of the harder way is in itself, regardless of the outcome.

I’ll give you a simple example. Pull-ups. The next-to-last and last pull-up you can do are hard. The easier, softer way would be to pound them out while they are easy, and quit before things get tough. You look awesome to all of those people watching you.

Those last straining, wobbly ones are not fun. You’re struggling at the edge of your abilities. But that where you get stronger physically—and mentally. Where you look weakest, where you struggle and perhaps fail? That’s where you find the treasure.

“I can do hard things that hurt.”

There is power in knowing this truth about yourself.

If you face a decision and don’t know what to do, choosing against the easier, softer way is a reliable choice. Even if you’re wrong you will get stronger.

Or, put it another way: in life, run straight into your shitstorms.