No. 589 – August 11th, 2024
Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights you can use in life and work. (Read the archives).
Not subscribed? Learn more and sign up.
Insights
“So much can be accomplished in one focused hour, especially when that hour is part of a routine, a sacred rhythm that becomes part of your daily life.”
— Dani Shapiro
“Solitude is a condition of peace that stands in direct opposition to loneliness. Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union.”
— Kent Nerburn
“When people worry about your mental diet, they tend to fret about the junk you’re pouring into your brain—the trashy videos, the cheap horror movies, the degrading reality TV, and … I’m not so worried about the dangers of mental junk food. That’s because I’ve found that many of the true intellectuals I’ve met take pleasure in mental junk food too. Having a taste for trashy rom-coms hasn’t rotted their brain or made them incapable of writing great history or doing deep physics. No, my worry is that, you won’t put enough really excellent stuff into your brain. I’m talking about what you might call the “theory of maximum taste.” This theory is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you spend your time only with run-of-the-mill stuff. The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming.”
— David Brooks (lightly edited for clarity)
Tiny Thoughts
“A positive mindset won’t carry you to victory, but a negative one guarantees defeat.”
“The truth may sting, but silence can leave a scar.
We see the barriers holding back the people we work with, just as they see ours. But telling them is hard.
Telling the truth might hurt them, but not telling harms them.”
“The truth shrinks as the crowd grows.
In a large meeting at work, people hold back their honest opinions. The resulting conversation offends the fewest people but is often not the truth.
Smaller groups are more likely to find truth than larger ones.”
Podcast
Brian Halligan on what we get wrong with hiring and why you shouldn’t hire the person with the fewest weaknesses:
“My analogy for being a CEO is that it’s like you’re an ice climber going up the ice, and it’s treacherous and you could easily slip, and what you’re looking for are executive members who have been up that same sheet of ice, but in the last three or four years. What you don’t want is somebody who is 20 years over you or someone who spent their whole career on top of the hill looking down on the ice climbers. You want somebody just a little bit ahead of you on that ice-climbing mission. So that’s one thing I think people get wrong.
I think most people are bad interviewers, including me. I’ve missed a bunch, and I think the core reason for that actually isn’t the interview; it’s the interviewees. Interviewees are so good at interviewing. … I think everyone, including me, overvalues their ability to select talent in the interview process. I see that as overconfidence.
I also see it with the CEOs I work with, and as companies get bigger, you get a panel of four people evaluating Shane as a potential VP. If all four people like Shane versus two people love Shane and two people are like, “Meh, I’m not sure about Shane,” you almost always go with the person with the least weaknesses and that lowest-common-denominator hire. I think that’s a failure condition. We’ve noticed that over time, [things work out better when we] take two loves and two mehs over three likes. I think that’s a best practice that people should be doing, and I think people should be obsessed with reference checking—calling the references and getting good at finding people in your network who have worked with them.”
— Source: Scaling Culture From Startup to IPO. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
+ Members can access a transcript here, including my personal reflections on this episode.
Thanks for reading,
— Shane
P.S. I’m not usually a cat person, but this video.
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.