No. 612 – January 19, 2025
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Tiny Thoughts
Bureaucracies make everyone feel productive while doing very little useful work.
Your mistakes aren’t the best teacher—just the most expensive.
You can start at the bottom of the mountain and make every mistake from scratch on the way to the top, or you can take a sherpa with you and master the best of what other people have already figured out.
The successful learn vicariously; the foolish insist on firsthand pain.
Being brilliant won’t save you if no one can count on you.
It can be hard to appreciate just how much reliability impacts opportunity. It’s fun to outperform people who are way smarter than you by being more reliable than they are.
Reliability isn’t just a virtue – it’s a competitive advantage that compounds over time.
Insights
Alexander Hamilton on the duty to tell the truth:
“I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be.”
Oprah Winfrey on character:
“Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”
Greek philosopher Bion of Borysthenes on adapting yourself to circumstances:
“We should not try to alter circumstances but to adapt ourselves to them as they really are, just as sailors do. They don’t try to change the winds or the sea but ensure that they are always ready to adapt themselves to conditions. In a flat calm they use the oars; with a following breeze they hoist full sail; in a head wind they shorten sail or heave to. Adapt yourself to circumstances in the same way.”
Mental Models
A mental model is a simplified explanation of how something works.
V4 | General Thinking Tools | Inversion
“A lot of advantages can be gained simply by avoiding the standard paths to failure.
Inversion is not the way we are taught to think. We are taught to identify what we want and explore things that will move us closer to our objective. However, by identifying and avoiding things that will ensure we don’t get what we want, we dramatically increase our odds of success.
Often, we get so fixated on solving a problem in a particular way that we miss simpler, more elegant solutions. Inversion forces us to consider the opposite side of the equation. Instead of asking, “How do I solve this problem?” inversion asks, “What would guarantee failure?”
Instead of asking, “How can I achieve this goal?” it asks, “What is preventing me from achieving it?” We gain insights that our standard thought patterns might miss by inverting the question.
The next time you find yourself struggling, try inverting your thinking. Ask yourself how you could guarantee failure. The answers may surprise you and open up new avenues for possible solutions.”
— Source: The Great Mental Models v1: General Thinking Tools
Reading
Estée Lauder’s biography Estée: A Success Story is one of the best I’ve ever read. Not only is it full of sage wisdom about life, but it’s jam-packed with business wisdom. Here are a few highlights I made.
“You never realize that you are making a memory at the moment something is actually happening.”
“Rose Kennedy once told me that good luck is something you make and bad luck is something you endure, a very wise observation indeed. People do make their luck by daring to follow their instincts, taking risks, and embracing every possibility”
“I was single-minded in the pursuit of my dream.”
“If we had to please investors, we’d have stringent financial controls, we’d have to explain and justify every decision. That would be bad business for people who rely on strong feelings about what’s right rather than on black and white “facts,” which often turn out to be false. If you’re your own boss, you can move fast. When ideas have to be implemented overnight, speed, flexibility, and authority to make decisions without consulting shareholders are of utmost importance.”
+ Members can access all 90 of my highlights from Estée: A Success Story and hundreds of other books.
Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish
P.S. A good reminder that perception, not reality, often prevents us from doing things.