The best ideas from all the books I read in 2023:
Expectations before happiness.
"Your happiness depends on your expectations more than anything else."
— Morgan Housel (Same as Ever)
A good hobby should be a little embarrassing.
"A good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that's a sign you're doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome."
— Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks)
A life without problems (to solve) is meaningless.
"The state of having no problems is obviously never going to arrive. And more to the point, you wouldn't want it to, because a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing, and would therefore be meaningless."
— Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks)
It's surprisingly easy to create problems when trying to solve problems.
"I'm more interested in questions like, When you make progress against an individual problem do you create additional problems? What are those additional problems, and are those new problems bigger, the same as, or less than the problems you've just solved?"
— Alain de Botton (Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?)
Some problems become even worse when you try to eliminate them.
"What's easy to miss is that there are bad things that become bigger problems when you try to eliminate them. I think the most successful people recognize when a certain amount of acceptance beats purity."
— Morgan Housel (Same as Ever)
Your job is to reduce stress.
"This is one of the most valuable reframes in the book. Usual Frame: Stress comes with the job. Reframe: Reducing stress IS your job. We work for a variety of reasons, but work is only one part of a larger system for reducing stress. I don't earn money just to have it. I earn money to make my life more pleasant, which includes reducing my stress about surviving."
— Scott Adams (Reframe Your Brain)
You gotta tolerate some bullshit if you want to get ahead.
"A unique skill, an underrated skill, is identifying the optimal amount of hassle and nonsense you should put up with to get ahead while getting along. Franklin Roosevelt—the most powerful man in the world, whose paralysis meant his aides often had to carry him to the bathroom—once said, 'If you can't use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say 'that's all right,' and drink it.' Every industry and career is different, but there's universal value in accepting hassle when reality demands it."
— Morgan Housel (Same as Ever)
It's okay to strategically underachieve.
"You'll inevitably end up underachieving at something, simply because your time and energy are finite. But the great benefit of strategic underachievement—that is, nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won't expect excellence of yourself—is that you focus that time and energy more effectively."
— Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks)
Stay on the fucking bus.
"The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen dramatizes this deep truth about the power of patience with a parable about Helsinki's main bus station. There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one—and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops. Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction—perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes—and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you're dismayed to be told that your pictures aren't as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn's bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else's path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you're informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own. What's the solution? 'It's simple,' Minkkinen says. 'Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.' A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki's bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That's where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience."
— Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks)
Maximize connections over specific connections.
"Usual Frame: Success depends on who you know. Reframe: Success depends on how many people you know."
— Scott Adams (Reframe Your Brain)
Take the 10x/0x bet over the 1.10x bet (some of the time).
"'[The EA executive] said, 'Why would I give you a dollar knowing I'm gonna get $1.10 back when I can give Chris $10 million and either make $100 million or get a tax write-off?''"
— Jason Schreier (Press Reset)
The digital economy has no need for "second-best".
"'Rightfully so, rightfully so. Thus, from that we can conclude even if it were only minimally worse, there would be no reason to use the second-best search engine. Winner takes it all. Loser gets nothing. In the digital economy, nobody needs the second-best product, the second-best provider, the second-best social network, the second-best shop, the second-best comedian, the second-best singer. It's a superstar economy. Long live the superstar, fuck the rest.'"
— Marc-Uwe Kling (Qualityland)
Blockbuster didn't respect or learn from their competitors.
"Respect and Learn from Competitors. This is obvious to anyone who has ever been in a competitive retail business, but it was never a part of Blockbuster's DNA."
— Alan Payne (Built to Fail)
Don't neglect risk by omission.
"'Aunt Minnie has died and left each of you $100,000. You have an investment choice to make. You can invest it all at 7 percent for five years, or you can invest it at 7.5 percent for ten years.' After they had time to reflect, they unanimously chose 7 percent for five years. When I asked them what risk they'd undertaken with this decision, they said, 'None.' Their justification was that by staying short, future inflation wouldn't erode their returns as much as the longer term, and they'd have optionality after the five years. But they were missing the reinvestment risk. They were so focused on what would happen during the investment period, they neglected to look beyond the five years. Not a problem if rates stayed at 7 percent or higher. But if they dropped? Problem. Once the [MBA] students understood there is risk by omission as well as by commission, my objective was accomplished."
— Sam Zell (Am I Being Too Subtle?)
There's opportunity in the gap between supply and demand.
"Opportunity is very often embedded in the imbalance between supply and demand. It could be rising demand against flat or diminishing supply, or flat demand against shrinking supply."
— Sam Zell (Am I Being Too Subtle?)
Want to understand someone? Follow the money.
"Usual Frame: Predicting people's actions involves many variables. Reframe: Follow the money. That's all you need."
— Scott Adams (Reframe Your Brain)
Good motives don't always generate good results.
"Yet the best motives do not always generate the best results. As experience amply demonstrates, a never-ending ethnic preference program that accentuates ethnic distinctions is likely to achieve the opposite of its intended results."
— Jens Heycke (Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire)
Perfectionism is dangerous.
"I think many of the worst movements in history have been born out of the minds of people who believed in perfectionism — scientists, politicians, and others who thought that we could straighten things out, once and for all."
— Rudyard Griffths (Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?)
No groups = no group conflict.
"It is an inescapable truism: without groups, there can be no group conflict."
— Jens Heycke (Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire)
To lie is to deny others access to reality.
"By lying, we deny our friends access to reality—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate."
— Sam Harris (Lying)
A simple interface is better than a simple implementation.
"It's more important for a module to have a simple interface than a simple implementation."
— John Ousterhout (A Philosophy of Software Design)
Write twice. Commit once.
"Designing software is hard, so it's unlikely that your first thoughts about how to structure a module or system will produce the best design. You'll end up with a much better result if you consider multiple options for each major design decision: design it twice."
— John Ousterhout (A Philosophy of Software Design)
If you can't sleep tonight work harder tomorrow.
"Usual Frame: I can't get to sleep. Reframe: I didn't work hard enough."
— Scott Adams (Reframe Your Brain)
