I want to use this blog not only for long, thought out, posts but also for as a seed bin for things that I plan to put in dirt and water and to see if anything decides to sprout.
I will tag these sorts of posts as #quickhits.
Undeveloped ideas, quotes, and ponderables follow:
- You can be a leader no matter what your job is. You need merely do any task better than you would expect it to be done. Going beyond the call of duty is a noble act of self-expression.
- Goal-oriented competitiveness is boring and ugly. It requires that you take credit for luck when you win and to blame luck when you lose. How much sweeter it is to make your goal practice and improvement. This requires that you see luck for what it is and to take credit for those times you applied a skill well. Win or lose any particular match, you’re winning the bigger game.
- Adopt this attitude: “assume not the ill intent of others”. This will help to remove the focus on blame, which is easy to do. It will lower your blood pressure. And it not give you less to justify any desire on your part to act-out in response. (This applies especially to friends and loved ones – there is always a reason for the things they do, even if it’s not pretty.)
- “You must find the most important words a man can say” (Gavilar Kholin in The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson)
- “Come with me if you want to live”. Imagine this being said, not by a super-human man/robot from the future but by a real someone leading an expedition to do great things.
- As adults, we get to choose how to respond to upsetting events. We can choose how we act (or not to act). This is power. We can’t directly change how we feel but we can influence how we feel by working with the the levers we have: exercise, food, avoiding blaming narratives, not asking “why” when there is no way to answer it.
- Scott Adams says I can use daily affirmations to focus my mind and my energy to make things happen in my life. But it’s hard to start new habits. I think my first affirmation will be an affirmation on the power of affirmations. That seems like a good idea. Either it will take root or affirmations don’t work after all.
Notes and Quotes from Tim Ferriss at QA Expa
- Scratch your own itch
- If I can guarantee that I will not lose money and then figure out that something works, only then do I plow money in after it.
- If you can managed to cap your downside, you can afford to do many experiments and the upside will eventually take care of itself if you’re formulating good experiments
- If you want to scale, build systems assuming you are 10x-100x the size, so that you are not the single point of failure (read: single point of decision making authority)
- Keep this in mind: We don’t all die of old age. Lifestyle design is focused on present or near-term. VC-backed startup is usually deferred lifestyle
- There should be no division between mind and body. If you want to perform well cognitively, you need to take care of the whole system.
- You will not do well at something toward which you don’t choose to dedicate mental resources.