No. 669 – February 22, 2026
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Tiny Thoughts
All battles are internal ones.
When you are at peace, you don’t pick fights, create drama, or worry about what others think of you.
Stubbornness and flexibility aren’t opposites; they’re responses to different inputs.
Be impenetrable to social pressure and quick to adapt to evidence.
Insights
Philosopher Lao Tzu on real wisdom:
“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.”
Ella Fitzgerald on persistence:
“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.”
Rick Rubin on trying to win by pleasing others:
“Do you know the biggest mistake most musicians make?” He said. “Their first album comes from love, heartbreak, passion, or depression. They have no expectation of how the world will respond. They write it from the heart, and if it catches on, they’re validated by the world. But then they start writing their second album, and they don’t necessarily write it based on love, heartbreak, or passion. They write the album they think the world will want.”
The Knowledge Project
Nicolai Tangen is the CEO of the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. He is responsible for managing $2.1 trillion. That’s roughly 1.7% of every listed company on earth.
Some parts of the conversation that stood out to me.
- You save time by being quick at responding (clip)
- His answer to ‘What does success mean to you?’ (clip)
- The relationship between conviction, stubbornness, and changing your mind (clip)
A few of the Tiny Lessons I took away:
- “If you have really high ambitions, you achieve great things even if you fail. If you have low ambitions, you achieve nothing even if you succeed.”
- “You don’t have to be disliked even though people disagree with you.”
- The people who feel weird, different, and misunderstood are the ones who change the world.
- Asking for advice makes people think you’re smart because you are clever enough to recognize how clever they are.
- The faster you reply, the less you need to say. If you reply in a minute, you can say two words. If you wait a day, it’s a paragraph.
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Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish