Brain Food – No. 573 – April 21, 2024
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Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights you can use in life and work. (Read the archives).
FS
“Species that are more responsive to change can gain a relative advantage over the ones they compete with and increase the odds of survival. In the short run, these small gains don’t make much of a difference, but as generations pass the advantages compound.”
Insights
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“Sadness will not kill you. Depression won’t, either. But fighting it will. Ignoring it will. Trying to escape it rather than confront it will. Denying it will. Suffocating it will. Allowing it no place to go other than your deep subconscious to embed and control you will. Not that you’ll take your life or destroy everything “good” you do receive (though you might). But it will kill you in that it will rob you of every bit of life you do have: You either let yourself feel everything or numb yourself into feeling nothing. You cannot select emotions.”
— Brianna Wiest
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“In the long-run, prioritization beats efficiency.”
— James Clear
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“Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it’s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.”
— Paul Graham
Tiny Thoughts
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It’s more advantageous to structure decisions to be easily reversible than to take too much time trying to make the perfect choice.
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Success is often a product of environment.
While a polar bear might thrive in the Arctic, it would not thrive in a desert. People are no different. The person who excels in one environment fails in another.
Understanding how environments impact performance changes how you hire. Employees who thrive in one environment easily fail in another if their performance was contingent on the workplace conditions. This is why hiring a superstar away from a competitor, without understanding the role of environment on performance, often fails.
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If you’re not willing to bet on yourself, don’t expect other people to bet on you.
(Share Tiny Thought one, two, or three, on X).
TKP Podcast
Frank Slootman on the difference between skills and behaviors:
“Performance is something that we will give more time; behavior we won’t. And that’s because behavior is a choice, not a skill set. When you come in as a new leader, everybody’s watching not just what you’re doing but [also] what you’re not doing. So if you’re not moving on things that everybody is seeing, your leadership brand is already in question because apparently you’re blind and apparently you’re hesitating or you’re tolerant of behavior that you shouldn’t be tolerant of.“
— Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or jump to this part on YouTube.
Thanks for reading,
— Shane
P.S. A visual look at kinetic and elastic energy.
P.P.S. This tea set makes an excellent Mother’s Day present.