No. 486 — August 21st, 2022
Brain Food is a weekly newsletter full of timeless insights.
FS
“Life is an iterative and compounding game. In the words of Peter Kaufman, it pays to “go positive and go first.” Also, remember that people make mistakes. Assuming there is no maliciousness, it pays to forgive.”
Insight
“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”
— Leslie Lamport
Tiny Thought
A simple question you can ask yourself that often changes behavior:
Is what I’m about to do a step toward or away from what’s important?
(Share this Tiny Thought on Twitter)
Ideas
At a recent event, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jaime Dimon, offered three ideas worth thinking about.
- “A lot of people are inefficient with E-mail, phone calls, reading. They are always hurried. They should be thoughtful about their calendar. They need to take care of themselves.”
- “Don’t get into this binary thing where you’re looking at Fox or CNN. Read the other side. Some of your fellow citizens have good reasons to believe something different than you do. I try to think sometimes about where are they right? Not are they wrong. You’ll become a better thinker. And you earn peoples’ respect. By telling the truth, being a team player. Team player doesn’t mean you don’t complain. It means you complain if we are doing something stupid.”
- “We have mentoring. Doesn’t always mean the mentor will give you the best advice. I think people should seek out other people to learn from so you have a network of people that will give you feedback.”
Etc.
Rituals → “The thing that grabbed me here is that rituals create a sense of belonging. You show that you belong to the group by participating in the ritual… It seems especially relevant these days when so many of us are atomized and physically separated from our teammates. That ineffable sense of belonging can make all the difference between a job that you do and a role that feeds your soul.”
Semiconductors → “When Fabs were thought of as cost centers, outsourced to Asia, and disposed of at the earliest possible convenience for the fabless company to flourish. If there is a pendulum of the importance of having a fab, we likely swung from peak fabless and fab-light to a geopolitically fab-hungry world. The entirety of 2020 amplified that.” (Pair with our Everything You Wanted to Know about the Semiconductor Industry)
Return on Brain Drain → “You can’t put a price on the energy and time I’ve lost fighting this case.” (Man overcharged 20 rupees for India train ticket wins 22-year legal battle.)
Caffeine → How it works and what it does to your body (video).
P.S. Worth it.