No. 648 – September 28, 2025
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.
Tiny Thoughts
Make your mood, or it makes you.
Most complexity is unnecessary, but we manage it instead of removing it because deletion requires courage that addition doesn’t.
We avoid doing simple things that work because they don’t make us look smart.
Smart people feel stupid doing simple things, so we invent complicated alternatives that accomplish less but feel more intellectually satisfying.
Meanwhile, the people who dominate their fields are doing embarrassingly basic things, but they do them better than everyone else.
Insights
Investor Charlie Munger on life long learning:
“I think that a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.”
Actress Lucille Ball on the myth of overnight success:
“Remember that there are practically no “overnight” successes. Before that brilliant hit performance came ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty years in the salt mines, sweating it out.”
Advertising exec David Ogilvy on tolerating genius:
“Tolerate genius.
My observation has been that mediocre men recognize genius, resent it, and feel compelled to destroy it.
There are very few men of genius.
But we need all we can find. Almost without exception, they are disagreeable. Don’t destroy them. They lay golden eggs.”
Outliers
Ed Stack built Dick’s Sporting Goods from a struggling family store into an empire of more than 800 stores and billions in sales.
This episode is the story of what he did, how he did it, and the lessons you can learn.
Here are a few short takeaways:
1. Never rely on the kindness of strangers.
2. Your name is your biggest asset.
3. Good businesses don’t need debt, and bad ones can’t handle it.
4. Become someone people want to help.
5. If you go into a deal with a win-win mindset, it almost always works out.
6. Always let people keep their dignity.
+ Listen now on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Web/Transcript/Key Ideas
+ 32 short takeaways from this episode
+ 10 lessons from this episode
Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish