No. 586 – July 21, 2024
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Black swans are the unexpected outliers, the rare and unpredictable events that defy our usual expectations and profoundly impact our world. They are the surprises that no one sees coming, the game-changers that reshape the landscape of the possible.
Insights
“There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
— Christopher Morley
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”
— Howard Aiken
Charles Schulz, creator of Charlie Brown, on hard work, committing to your craft, and getting better every day:
“One of the hardest things for a beginner to do is merely to get started on his first set of comic strips. It is strange that most people who have ambitions in the cartoon field are not willing to put in the great amount of work that many other people do in comparable fields. Most people who have comic-strip ambition wish to be able to draw only two or three weeks’ material and then have it marketed. They are not willing to go through many years of apprenticeship.”
Tiny Thoughts
“A risk with watching your competition too closely is that you get drawn into playing their game and lose focus on your own.”
“It’s not enough to simply apply effort; you must work on the right thing.
One hour solving the right problem beats ten hours on the wrong one.
Spend time thinking about what to focus on.”
“The happiest people want the lowest profile.”
Reading
In his autobiography, football legend Johan Cruyff wrote about the importance of putting yourself in a position for success, even when that means turning a disadvantage into an advantage:
From the age of five, when I went to help out with Uncle Henk at the stadium, I always took my bootbag with me as well. You never knew if the team might be a man short for training or a practice match and I was often lucky, though usually only because they felt sorry for me. I was a bag of bones, I looked like a shrimp, and they took pity on me, which meant that even though I had no business being there, and wasn’t even in the youth team, I was playing with the Ajax team from a very early age. It was another example of a belief that I have always had and tried to pass on – that you can turn a disadvantage, like my scrawny appearance, into an advantage.
— Source: My Turn: A Life of Total Football (Members can access all 55 of my Kindle highlights here).
Thanks for reading,
— Shane
P.P.S. If you’ve been thinking about getting a copy of Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results (or buying a few copies as gifts for colleagues), now is the best time! It’s the lowest price I’ve seen in the US.
P.P.P.S. All four books in The Great Mental Models are available for pre-order. The first three volumes have been revised, including all new conclusions to each model. The fourth version was never published before.