Clear Thinking - Shane Parrish

• We must first create the space to reasonin our thoughts, feelings, and actions; and second, we must deliberately use that space to think clearly
• Time is the friend of someone who is properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned.
• What a lot of people miss is that ordinary moments determine your position, and your position determines your options.
• It doesnt matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today.
• Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder. It all depends on whether you're thinking clearly.
• Never forget that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets.
• "What were you thinking, you idiot?" The truth of the matter is, you weren't thinking. You were reacting.
• we are naturally prone to defend our territory
• Our identity is part of our territory too. When someone criticizes our work, status, or how we see ourselves, we instinctively shut down or defend ourselves.
• The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy.
• The social default: we tend to confirm to the norms of our larger social group
• The inertia default: we're habit forming and comfort seeking. We tend to resist change, and to prefer ideas, processes, and environments that are familiar.
• People who master their defaults get the best real-world results.
• Anger at a rival prevents your from doing what's in your own best interest. Fear of losing an opportunity pushes you to cut thinking short and act impulsively.
• Emotions can multiply all of your progress by zero.
• his desire to defend his self-image ("I can do more than the job I'm in, but they won't give me more")
• He just wanted a role in line with how he saw himself.
• Our ego tempts us into thinking we're more than we are.
• Having your team depend on us for every decision makes us feel important and indispensable
• powerful
• we become a prisoner of the circumstances we created
• when you stop putting in 100 percent of what you are capable of because you feel underappreciated. The ego grabs your unconscious, throws your long-term goals out the window, and sets you sailing on a path toward destruction.
• quiet quitting
• I rearranged the world in such a way that I came out on top. I had unconsciously organized the world in a way where I could be above him and feel better about myself.
• Most people go through life assuming that they're right... and that people who don't see things their way are wrong. We mistake how we want the world to be with how it actually is.
• Professional clappers, called a claque, have been used since at least emperor Nero. ... Once a few people start clapping, our social default takes hold and we find ourselves clapping without knowing why.
• When everyone else is doing something, it's easy to rationalize doing it too.
• The onyl way to outperform if you're doing undifferentiated work is to work harder than everyone else.
• Within this paradigm, the ditchdigger who takes a week off to experiment and invent the shovel seems crazy.
• Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely.
• If you do what everyone else does, you'll get the same results that everyone else gets.
• If you want better-than-average results you'll have to think clearly. Thinking independently. break free of the social default.
• The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct.
• The inertia default pushes us to maintain the status quo. Starting something is hard but so too is stopping something.
• Inertia keeps us in jobs we hate and in relationships that don't make us happy.
• One reason we resist change is that keeping things the way they are requires almost no effort.
• Joining groups whose default behaviors are your desired behavior is an effective way to create an intentional environment
• Establishing rituals is the key to creating positive inertia.
• Rituals force the mind to focus on the next play, not the last one.
• Well, I have news for you. It's all your fault. (You're in charge of your own life)
• "Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be." - Jeff Bezos
• Dont blame the bus for being late. Buy a car.
• In fact, no one cares about your excuses at all, except you.
• Complaining does nothing to change the present situation you find yourself in. Things about how it wasnt your fault doesnt make anything better. The consequences are still yours to deal with. Always focus on the next move, the one that gets you closer or further from where you want to go.
• You can put energy into things you control or things you dont control. All the energy you put toward things you dont control comes out of the energy you can put toward the things you can.
• The path to being exceptional begins when you decide to be responsible for your actions no matter the situation.
• One of the most common mistakes people make is bargaining with how the world should work instead of accepting how it does work.
• Focusing on the next move, rather than how you got here in the first place, opens you up to a lot of possibilities.
• If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.
• youre refusing to accept something that already happened - and thats crazy
• yes its already happened. you cant argue with it
• You need self-confidence to think independently and to stand firm in the face of social pressure, ego, inertia, or emotion.
• self-confidence gives you the strength to acknowledge those deficiencies. This is how you learn humility.
• Confident people stay focused on completing the task at hand, even if it involves relying on the help of others to do so. Every successful task only further serves to deepen your trust in yourself, and thats how confidence is earned.
• Comes from how you talk to yourself
• That little voice should also remind you of the many hardships and challenges you've overcome in the past and the fact that you persevered.
• It's important to talk to yourself about the adversity you've faced, because past hardship is where you get the confidence to face future hardship.
• your breath is a powerful tool that helps you calm your mind.
• we rarely think of how the words we say to ourselves impact us.
• people who are confident arent afraid of facing reality because they know they can handle it. Confident people dont care what other people think about them, arent afraid of standing out, and are willing to risk looking like an idiot while they try something new.
• they also know that to outperform the crows, you have to do things differently sometimes.
• Self-confidence is also the strength to accept hard truths. We all have to deal with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. The quicker you stop denying inconvenient truths and start responsing to dificult realities, the better.
• The quicker you accept reality, the quicker you can deal with the implications.
• Most of the time, needing to wait for the right moment to do a hard thing is just an excuse: a way to raionalize putting off what needs to be done. There is no perfect moment. There's only the desire to continue waiting for one.
• People with self-confidence are honest about their own motivations, actions, and results. They recognize when the voice in their head might be ignoring reality. They also listen to the feedback the world gives them, instead of shopping around for other opinions.
• The groups we surround ourselves which encourage us to think the prolem is with the world and not with us. We think we are right and everyone else is wrong, denying reality at the expense of the energy and focus we need to adapt and improve.
• And we continue wondering, deep down, why we aren't getting the results we want. We wonder why some people get better results than we do, and what they're doing differently.
• The most valuable people are the ones with the ability to quickly change their minds. They were focused on outcome over ego.
• They're too focused on proving they're right instead of being right.
• Admitting you're wrong isn't a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength.
• It takes courage to tell yourself something is not working. It takes courage to accept feedback that bruises your self-image.
• She spent a lot of time and effort defending herself.
• Many people feel the same way: they think they'll be worthless if they're not right.
• I had my identity wrapped up in being right.
• i didnt care about getting the credit; I cared about getting the results.
• Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people.
• We unconsciously become what we're near
• Champions behave like champions before they're champions. They have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.
• "Is this your best work?"? ... if not ... come back ... "Okay, now I'll read it."
• We are territorial about how we see ourselves and tend to dismiss information that challenges our self-image.
• We are practically experts about where our colleagues and friends are weak. It's hard to accept, however, that others might see us just as clearly in kind.
• Purging your home of all junk food is a safeguard.
• Safeguarding strategy: increasing the amount of "friction" required to do something thats contrary to your long-term goals.
• Improve our judgement: replacing decisions with rules.
• Every day, you have to choose to work out or to skip dessert
• making all these choices requires a lot of sustained effort.
• Why not bypass individual choices altogether and create an automatic behavior - a rule - that requires no decision-making in the moment and that gets no pushback from others?
• "I don't drink soda at all."
• people typically dont argue with your personal rules. They just accept them as features of who you are. People question decisions, but they respect rules.
• "never say yes to a request on the phone."
• I find it hard to go to the gym three days a week, so my rule is I go every day.
• The biggest mistake people make typically isn't their initial mistake. It's the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it.
• Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
• Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work, not the starting point.
• Purely negative criteria aren't decisive: they dont narrow the field of optoins down to one
• When you're clear on what's important, evaluating options becomes easier.
• A lot of managers secretly enjoy being the bottleneck.
• ego default at work: it puts a ceiling on how far you will go. It tries to convince you that you're the best; that you're so smart, so skilled, so insightful that only you can make the decisions. In reality, youre just getting in the way of the team performing at its best.
• There is only one most imporant thing in every project, goal, and company. If you have two or more most important things, you're not thinking clearly. This is an important aspect of leadership and problem-solving in general: You have to pick one criterion above all the others and communicate it in a way that your people can understand so they can make decisions on their own.
• If you want to know whether people will pay for something, try to sell it before you even create it.
• Evalute peoples motivations and incentives
• If you absolutely must rely on someone elses information and opinions, you have a responsibility to think about the lens through which they view the situation.
• It helps to think of each persons perspective as a lens onto the world. When you put their glasses on, you see what they see.
• Withhold your own judgement as long as possible.
• When you're gathering information, your job is to see the world through other people's eyes
• Just ask questions, keep your thoughts to yourself, and remain curious about other perspectives.
• Experts love sharing what they've learned when they know it'll make a difference
• Poker players know it. They can play their hand perfectly and still lose. Nothing is guaranteed. All you can do is play the hand you're dealt as best as you can.
• Comparison is the thief of joy.
• In my 89 years, I've learned that happiness is a choice - not a condition.

"The meaning of life is that it ends" - Franz Kafka

Reasons not to worry - Brigid Delaney

•  In ancient Stoicism I found people, just like us, longing to find meaning and connection, to feel whole and tranquil, to love and be loved, to have a harmonious family life, fulfilling and meaningful work, intimate and nourishing friendships, a sense of contributing to your community, belonging to something greater than yourself

1. acknowledge that you cant control much of what goes on in your life.
2. See that your emotions are the product of how you think about the world.
3. Accept that bad things are bound to happen to you from time to time, just as they do to everyone else.
4. See yourself as part of a larger whole, not an isolated individual; part of the human race, part of nature.
5. Think of everything you have as not your own, but simply on loan, that one day will be taken away

• The Stoics had a penchant for looking life in the face, seeing it for what it was, loving it fiercely anyway (despite everything... because of everything) and then finally - letting go
• ataraxia is a state of contentment or peace where the world can be falling in around your ears, but your equilibium is undisturbed
• requiring that you do your best, be rational, strive to be virtuous [...] that is all that you can do and all that can be done.
• Dont waste your energy trying to change people
• Whatever can happen at any time can happen today - seneca
• Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking - marcus aurelius
• Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune - seneca
• life is random and arbitrary, bad things happen even if you take all precautions
• treating every occasion with my parents as if it will be the last has sharpened my enjoyment of their company
• so many of us never actually begin our lives. were too busy working and making money, promising that one day well stop and properly rest and luxuriate in the present
• stoics were highly attuned to time, seeing it as the only true currency we have. 
• our most democratic curreny: everyone is given an allotment of time
• an ancient stoic would see excessive use of the internet as an extremely poor use of tie. Would I take a bunch of money and just throw it in the bin? No. But somehow I squander my time online without a second thought.
• Can you show me even one person who sets a price on his time, who knows the worth of a day, who realises that every day is a day when he is dying?
• until we reach this mysterious end point called "one day"
• But looking back, having a wealth of time felt better and more magical than having a lot of money in the bank.
• time - and how you spend it - is a much more important question than status and how much you get paid.
• The things we can control: our character, the way we treat other and our actions and reactions. Epictetus then urges us to forget trying to control the rest. To do so is just a waste of time and energy.
• You work out first what you can control, and place your efforts there, and dont waste time and energy worrying about what you cant control
• There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will
• The stoics strived to maintain was their tranquillity - and not let their equilibrium be disturbed too much by what was outside those few things that they could control.
• When the number of options available is limited, it is foolish to fuss and fret. We should instead simply choose the best of them and get on with life. To behave otherwise is a precious waste of time and energy.
• The first step is to acknowledge a change in reality and then to try to adapt. requires not resisting the change. not looking back and mourning what was. acklowledging that change is a part of life.
• The universe is change - our life is what our thoughts make it
• Alive time or dead time
• freaking out, get nothing done, netflix, weed, social media
• grow, utilize the day, be constructive
• preferred indifferents
• its preferable to have health and wealth than not but ultimately you should be indifferent
• that means not clinging to things or falling apart if you lose them
• so while it fine to be wealthy, you just have to be okay with (or indifferent to) losing all your wealth
• you should be okay with having them - and okay with not having them
• diogenes simple values and lack of material possessions were meant to show that we waster our lives working and striving for things that are not necessary or meaningul for life. that you need nothing material to have a good life. If you owned nothing and wanted nothing, then you have taken your power back, because you are not trying to get anything from anybody.
• If you fix your mood to something outside you [a boss,...], then your inner state will always be outside your control.
• unperturbed - without inner trouble
• ataraxia
• the tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say, or think, or do. Only what you do.
• When you get rid of your fear of failure and what other people think, everything becomes more relaxed and fun. You just enjoy the ride.
• Our cognitive biases swinging towards pessimism a lot of the time.
• If we dont form a judgement about something, were less likely to rumiate on it or cling to it and become attached. Just let life unfold. Experience things in a non-reactive, open way. Tasks, relationships with others and just the experience of life become a lot easier when you're not loading every little thing up with a judgement.
• When we stop labelling things, life suddenly gets a lot easier. It just happens. One thing follow the next, and we dont get stuck,
• life is for us, not against us
• We wouldnt talk to our worst enemy the way we often talk to ourselves.
• The "should have" loop... Instead we just accept the situation - the present moment - as is. ... We are suddenly not fighting with life, wishing it were different.
• Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
• Everyone is living with their own view of reality
• You can change your experience of the world by realising that your perceptions, and your place in the world can be changed and improved by adjusting your focus and your clarity.
• A thing is not good or bad, it is thinking that made it so, wrote Shakespeare in Hamlet
• We want more from the present moment than it is providing; we have reactions, projections, and old sore spots that get triggered. We create a story around things or people - and it is the story, not the thing itself, which creates our disturbances or our desires.
• One of the most important shifts a person can make is to recognise "reality" instead of existing in a fantasy of subjective perception.
• Ackowledging reality causes less suffering.
• How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life.
• We suffer mor in imagination than in reality.
• I have begun to be a friend to myself
• Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him
• how much better to heal than to seek revenge from injury ... would anyone think it normal to return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog
• We demand that others not cause us discomfort
• Eat merely to relieve your hunger, drink merely to quench your thirst, dress merely to keep out the cold, house yourself merely as a protection against personal discomfort
• Moderation? The work never stops. In being moderate we must resist all the siren songs of abundance that are everywhere in todays world
• moderation is the key to feeling, thinking and looking good
• be moderate with food and drink and then, with the excercise of your self-control muscles, youll find moderation spreads to other areas of your life that might be unruly or unbalanced one way or the other
• reframing
• delicious meats are corpses of animals
• cooked animal carcasses
• He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has
• wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants
• away with all these treacherous goods! They look better to those who hope for them than to those who have attained them.
• 
  

AI Value creators - Rob Thomas, Paul Zikopoulos, Kate Soule

•  Thomas Edison: "Vision without execution is hallucination."
• KISS - Keep it simple silly
• The landscape of data acumen is ever-changing. We like to tell people to think of their data and data acumen like a gym membership
• Internet of things -> Internet of everything -> Intelligence of everything
• "We live in an age disturbed, confused, bewildered, afraid of its own forces, in search not merely of its road but even of its direction. There are many voices of counsel, but few voices of vision; there is much excitement and feverish activity, but little concent of thoughtful purpose. We are distressed by our ungoverned, undirected energies and do many things, but nothing long. It is our duty to find ourselves" - Woodrow Wilson - 28th president of the USA in 1907
• The most important ingredient: the innate curiosity in the people you hire
• You will never go wrong hiring people who are naturally curious
• all the educational head start that formally educated staff had will fade away as time marches on
• While guidance (learning plans) and learning from others are important, true mastery and capability come from within.
• a candidates GitHub is often a curiosity calling card
• Do you know what always separates spinners and winners? Curiosity! In today's economy, jobs require skills, not (just) degrees
• Because empowered curious employees will find what they need or come to you for help to get it.
• you look for people who can demonstrate how they constantly embrace innovations that make stuff better, go faster, be more accurate, are more streamlined, and more.
• 
  

"If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will" - Gregory McKeown

Priority is singular

Data and Reality - William Kent

• data models are techniques for representing information, sufficiently structured and simplistic as to fit well into computer technology
• A model is more than a passive medium for recording our view of reality. it shapes that view, and limits our perceptions. if a mind is committed to a certain model, then it will perform amazing feats of distortion to see things structured that way, and it will simply be blind to the things which dont fit that structure
• language defines experience for us
• Think of a small army of technical personell (also applies to other groups of people and their terminologies and structures and language) who have been indoctrinated in a particular way of conceptualizing data, and who have mastered the intricacies of a new language and the attendant operational procedures.