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Altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Another answer the question now it's a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
Hello boys and girls ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is, my job, as always to deconstruct world-class performers, including those who study world-class performers to tease out the habits, routines favorite books, rituals Frameworks, whatever it might be, that you can apply to your own lives. And my guest today is Shane Parrish Shane parish is the entrepreneur and wisdom secret behind a Farnam Street and the host of the knowledge project podcast where he focuses on
In the best of what other people have already figured out. And he has many, many top investors and thinkers on his podcast, his popular online course decision by design, has helped thousands of Executives leaders and managers around the world. Learn the repeatable. Behaviors that improve results. Shane's work has been featured in The New York Times The Wall Street Journal and Forbes among many other outlets. He is the author of the brand new book, clear thinking turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. You can find
Him on Instagram at Farnam Street, that's spelled f. Arna M Street on Twitter at Shane. A parish last name PA are is H and all things Farnam Street including the knowledge project you can find @f s dot blog. And without further Ado please enjoy a very wide-ranging conversation with Shane Parrish
Sashay in there are million one places we could start. So my understanding is you were straight D student, total grade 10. If I'm getting that right. Yeah, and maybe this is a Segway, maybe it isn't. But why was the book The stopwatch gang important to you and could you provide some context for how that appeared in your life? So my parents are in the military. I live with my mom, my step father and my biological father lives, somewhere else and we moved every
So, every year I had a new school, I think, the first school that I went to two years in a row is great, 10 and 11 to put things in context. Same school, two years in a row for grade eight. I decided I was going to live with my biological father, so I moved across the country live with him. And for various reasons, this was a disaster. Somebody who really didn't have a lot of experience parenting Me growing up. All the sudden has a teenager my stepmother. All the
In inheriting a teenager living, in the middle of nowhere. I'm already a borderline delinquent. I almost got kicked out of school in grade 7 for skipping school. Like, I skip school for like seven or eight weeks as you go see a child psychologist to make sure as a condition of not being expelled. That I was like, there was nothing seriously wrong with me. And so in grade 8, I just started getting in more and more trouble. I started hanging around the wrong. People, your environment sort of determines your behavior a lot. Not only your physical environment, but the people you surround.
Yourself with and it's just the slow escalation. And you know, if somebody said, hey, you're going to go break into somebody's house, you'd never do it. But if you start with vandalism and you start staying out late, you start doing things that are not supposed to use. All of a sudden breaking into a house, is like the next logical step. So we're doing this book report for grade eight, and I go to the library. And I'm like not interested in Reading. I'm not even interested in doing my school, work at all. And I just
Happened to land in this true crime section at this Elementary School, which is like four books long. And there's one book called the stopwatch gang and I was like, what's this about a pick it up? It's not a bunch of bank robbers. And I was like, oh, this is, this is awesome. Like this is my kind of book. Why is nobody shown me that you can like, read about this stuff. So I get home and I'm like, reading this book and a few days later, my friends, like knock on the door and we all had like dirt bikes. So we're all, like, living on 20 acres, you're commuting by dirt bike. To your friend, says, they knock on the door.
Where are you at this point in time? This isn't carp. Ontario Canada. Got a look at just to place it for people. Yeah. So so they knock on the door and they're like come out with us and let's have some fun. And I was like one chapter away from the end and I don't know, you probably read a really good book and you want nothing to like interrupt you in that moment. You're like no, like the world doesn't exist. I need to finish this book, there's nothing more important. So I like lied because if I told them I was reading a book that would go over like a lead balloon.
But I was like, you know, I'm not really feeling that well tonight, I'm going to stay in, I'm sorry about that. And so they go out and they end up breaking into somebody's house and getting caught, and whole, bunch of bad things happened as a result of that. And if I was there, I probably would have been doing that with them, but luckily, I wasn't there. I didn't do that with them. I found out about what happened and this is a chance event. This wasn't me like thinking about anything saying no to this thing. It was just pure
% lock, but I sort of got a little bit scared straight after that. Not in terms of like, I'm going to devote myself to school work and like get better grades, but straight in the sense of, I don't want to do this, I don't want to get into this trouble. And then from that moment on books, sort of became an outlet for me, to live in an imaginary world, in to escape the world. I was actually in and to sort of be part of something else. Have you ever had a book? Do that to, you know, for sure, I literally yesterday, this is not something I should probably advertize.
Ty's broadly, I'm not proud of it, but I was listening to the second of three books in this Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie and I had six minutes left in this very, very good chapter. And my mom had arrived a little bit early to go to dinner and so I was banking on having that extra time before the pickup to finish this chapter and it was it bothered me so much that I got up. I said I really had to go to the bathroom.
Way to
the bathroom. And I just walked around outside. The restaurant for six minutes and finished. This chapter in the audiobook, that was last night. So yes, I definitely know the feeling that's awesome, right? And you're like, how dare you show up early? Yeah, that's which is not the tone I want to take with my mom, but I was like, oh, okay, yeah. Forgot my OCD as it applies to time, should not be imposed on all other people. So, and that's okay. And took a little loitering Meander, as a bathroom break.
At dinner. That's okay. Got it done. And then, in Grade 9, Like My Grade 9 Teacher wrote in my report card, that Shane would be lucky to graduate from high school. So, what happened? I mean, a couple of observations number one if you had been convicted of, I'm not sure what the legal equivalent is something like felony or whatever. That was with your friends that certainly I would imagine would have complicated later work in government on some level. Oh, totally or it could have but what were the inflection points that led to you being?
Employable, especially at an intelligence agency in 2001. Okay? So that is also like a crazy story because intelligence agencies, I mean, they vet people up down. So they interviewed neighbors. They interviewed teachers, they interviewed the references that I put down, they talked to people that I didn't put down, like they want to know about your life and they want to know who you are as a person, especially for students. And for people like me who have a bit, more of a, it's a troubled.
Ground, right? Like I don't not a straight A student, I didn't go to the best schools in life, I had a clean record but I didn't, you know, if you look at this sort of supporting evidence, it's like well this person's been in trouble over the course of their life. And, you know, they talk to my professors and like one of my professors hated me and so that conversation was like it was just so weird. We had this, I don't know if other people had this button physics first year physics, that had this computer program that generates
Your assignments for you. So everybody in the class, literally had this different assignment, and each question was different. There was like 10 versions of question 1. Then all the numbers were different. Even if you had the same version of question one, that, you know, you could find somebody else with it. You had the same version, you would have different numbers. So you couldn't just copy the answer. And so, all the kids in school, all the rich kids, basically bought the same tutor and this tutor for 20 bucks or whatever he just
Like you gave him your sheet and he spit at the answers for you because he had all the ten versions of the question. He would just plug in your numbers and you go to school and the way to submit your assignment, wasn't you actually submitted paper. This is like the dawn of the internet like 1998 ish and so you would submit your assignment almost like over tell them that you would log in and it would say what's your answer to question one and you would submit your answer and I was like this takes a lot of time. I got to work full-time. I don't know if
I can spend the 20 hours a week. It actually takes to do this, but I was in computer science. It was like I'll write a little program. It just sort of like, goes from negative 1,000 positive, 1000 and guesses in increments of like point one. And so, I did this little program and it worked great. I got 20 out of 20 on every assignment until March of my first year, the teacher comes in and he's one of those transparencies and I don't know if people remember transparencies but like basically like another overhead projectors
It was like a PowerPoint graph that he puts on this projector and it's like average guesses on the y-axis and student number on the x-axis and like the average number of guesses. Per question was, I don't know like 17 or something and - like, in the
millions. So just like, I want to see this student
after class and I was careful. Like I had read all the policies and procedures and it says unlimited guest. So you're submitting like a million guesses via telnet. Yeah, exactly.
Thing. I just basically there's no downside for number of guesses. Your only rewarded for getting the answer right in one of those guesses. Exactly. And I so why not? Yeah, I read all the policies and procedures, right? Like, I was very careful but reading all the rules to make sure I wasn't violating any roles, but I would go to bed and I would just basically like hit run on this program. And I would wake up and I would have my full assignments submitted 20 out of 20. So, Shane gets retained after class visit to discipline you.
And wag a finger at you or was there something else that came with the conversation? Oh so he was like, you're going to get zero on all your assignments and I was like, what? That's not fair at all. And he's like, well, we're sort of retro actively changing the rules and I was like, that doesn't make any sense. That's not fair. All the rich kids are like hiring tutors. I can't do that. Like it doesn't make sense. Just go with my exam. Mark as my bar and he said no and basically the assignments were so heavily weighted that I ended up failing physics because of this, who is
So crazy. And when I'm getting my job, they actually talk to this teacher. Now, how did you come in touch with? I understand why he would have an axe to grind, or at least. It sounds like the kind of guy who would have maybe something scornful and spiteful to say, how did you even get connected with an intelligence agency? Where they recruiting in certain centers nearby to they canvassed the whole country? I don't know how it works. Yeah, it was just sort of luck. I was doing computer science at a time.
When the rise of the internet, I didn't want to work for like nor towel or any of these big companies. I really wanted to work for an intelligence agency. I thought that would be really fun and coincidence that they happen to be at my school. I like problems that are not really solvable, right? That are intractable that are big and gnarly and that you can sort of like, you can never quite solve, but you can get better at my parents were in the military. So I had a patriotic sense of giving back to my community.
Tree, like, how fortunate am I to be born into a country with freedom and good school system, and a good health care system and I was taught and brought up in a way that you have an obligation to give back. And for anybody, that knows me. I mean, I'm not going to give back standing on the front lines with the machine gun, that's like just dangerous for everybody involved, but if I could use my brain in a way that was giving back to the people and the community and the country in which I grew up, I thought that that was a really good sort of
Win-win interesting problems, giving back at the same time, they came to the school I applied for a job and if I didn't get it I was basically going to go back and do my MBA right away and do something else, but I ended up getting it ended up working with an incredible group of talented people starting what then went on to become the largest part of the intelligence agency. I think, now we're the most valuable part of it and for people in the u.s. what would that agency be comparable to if you
And say, would it be comparable to the NSA comparable to CIA comparable to other three letter acronym? Yeah, that would be the NSA. Okay, got it. And I'm going to take a hard left here. Yeah, ask you about maybe it since you like intractable problems to ask you about one that I know a lot of my friends are contending with which is thinking about how moving around helps or handicaps their kids. You moved around a ton you have kids, how do you
That experience of moving from place to place school to school, affected, you positively, and negatively, or in the pro and con columns, so to speak. And how do you think about that or how would you suggest other people think about that if they currently have very mobile lives and are wondering how that will affect their kids, there's a couple different ways to think about that as it relates to my experience, which is
I knew I was moving, so I knew at the end of the year, I was going to be in a different school. I mean, that became apparent sort of at least by grade 6 or 7 and so every year I could experiment with myself and not consciously but I could emphasize different parts of myself. Just do I fit in with the jocks do I fit in with the Nerds? What is my group of people? And I could play a role for a year? The downside is I knew that I was moving in.
A year. And so I knew all of these relationships were sort of transitory. So I think the biggest impact it had on me is even in adulthood it took me a long time to develop. This person's going to be in my life for a long period of time. This isn't like a transitory relationship and transitory means. It's just going to go and so you don't invest in it. You don't invest in the same way that you would invest in your best friend or somebody like that because you knew
The closer you got to that person at the end of the year, the harder it would be to leave. And so at that point in time, it was really difficult for me coming out of that becoming a university student and then joining the workforce to not have this mental. Default of this is going to go away or I might not see this person. But in flip side it's like I'm going to work with this person for the next 15 years and I think that was really hard for me to sort of catch on to. It took a few years for me too.
Really start investing in those friendships and those relationships. And the way that I wanted to. If you were sitting at a dinner table with some, let's say, the relatively new parents, they have kids under the age of 2, right? So the kids aren't going to school for a little bit, but it's not the distant future and they have a life where they spend X number months in one place, and why number of months in another and maybe they're thinking about living in a different state or different country, but they don't want
Through their kids up. Yeah. In maybe indulging those Explorations at the same time. They're not sure if they want to be in one place in a fixed way. What would you say to those people? I mean my advice for what it's worth is. I don't think it really matters much until they're sort of like grade 7 and 8 and certainly in high school. It matters a lot in high school, the consistency, the friend group, the sort of knowing what to expect. If I'm at myself to just my kids and their age, there's a lot of
T in their life. There's a lot of things going on that we don't see. And then adding on to that sort of like, you're going to be a different school with the different system with the different teachers. You can't really thrive in that environment easily. That doesn't mean you can't Thrive. It just means you're making it harder than it has to be. But before that I would say up until grade 6 again just going on my experience with my kids. What they're really learning in school and from friendships is like how do we be social, how do we interact?
With other people, how do we get in the habit of going to school? How do we learn to read and learn to do basic math and that you can sort of get anywhere in the world really, really easily grade 7 at least for my kids is when it started to change and that's in part because of the schools that I sent them to you, I think it starts to matter in grade 7, increasingly and definitely in high school. What type of schools did you send them to? I'm a big believer that kids should be challenged, and I don't think that the schools around my house
challenge the kids. So I found a school in Ottowa that I had to drive to and drop off my kids and I'm the type of parent that's like you can do things. You don't believe you're capable of. And so starting a great seven, my kids were getting 90 minutes of homework a night. They were taking School in a different language and they were pushed and challenged and the standards of this school, and I took a lot of flak, for those even from friends of mine, but the standards of the school are unrelenting
They don't care how you feel and that, you know, is very countercultural and today's message, but if you go in there and you haven't done your homework, it does not matter. You get a zero and to put things in context, we went to my grandmother's funeral and met and they were one day late, getting there sa n. And they were one day later, they get 10% off their essay because there were one day late and the school's approach to this is like, look, we want to produce effective.
It's and that means you're going to fail in grade 7. You're not going to fail academically because everybody there is really smart. You're going to fail at these little life things that you should have taken that into account when you planned your essay submission and they put it on the students and they do it in such a way that the kids at first, like my son was crying like every night because he is naturally, really, really smart. And he goes to the school and it's in a different language, and now it's 90 minutes away.
Good night. Is it French? Which he's like, French. I don't speak French. Like I didn't speak French to him at home. He had spoken French for like two and a half years because of covet basically and all the sudden he's thrust into a French school and their unrelenting. So he was so naturally Spar it, he didn't have to work for anything and that's cool eliminates that they're like no you have to work and if you don't work, you can't get good grades and it was so
Hard on him and like I'm the parent. He's like, hey I love you. I know this is really hard, I know, you can do it. Let's shift our mindset around this and by the end of the I would say December. He was like, loving it. He's love being challenged and you know what? It came. Time to pick a high school. He literally his filter was. What school is going to challenge me the most and I was like oh that's cool. Did an awesome job. I'm so happy that that's the way he's thinking about this because it's not about grades. I mean I would rather him basically
Fail at doing something hard. Then really succeed at doing something easy because I feel like we get wrapped up as parents, our kids success is our success and so, their grades become our success. But really, what we want to do is produce independent adults who are capable of handling the ups and downs of life. And that means that they're going to fail. They're going to struggle. They're going to have teachers that don't like they're going to get grades that maybe they do or don't deserve. And so, I think about all of
These things. I'm a I would say an example of a similar experience in the sense that I went to a very easy reasonably disorganized set of schools up until the end of my freshman year in high school and then was transferred. And this was my idea. But I transferred to a very difficult school for me, at least in New Hampshire, boarding school and I got absolutely crushed his schooling.
Six days a week mandatory Sports every semester you had classes. Also 6. I think it was after Sports and then you would have seated meals with coat and tie. And so on several times a week and the whole nine and it was so challenging. I went from being easily top of the pack to maybe bottom of the middle of the pack, maybe lower right? I was suddenly undistinguished from any intellectual perspective.
Active and kids, who were at this school st. Paul's knew how to work to a lot of them and I'm so grateful for it because they were incredibly tough. Discipline was demanded and everything after that was relatively easy even Princeton. And, and so on, I mean, the workload was no problem and I think in retrospect that it was really critical to my formation, that's also where I was introduced to
Is another languages and had my exchange experience which changed everything for me, but being taught early that the world will not conform to all of your unique needs and preferences is like you said, it's very countercultural. I don't think if you train a child to expect, this is true for train. Anyone to expect that they are going to drive decisions, what they want is always going to be taken into account. What they like is always going to be at the top of other priority list, it's setting them up.
Up for a lifetime of disappointment and disorder and depression probably all in one. So anyway, that's maybe a strong response but I agree. I agree with the approach pause for once. I want to know you said this was your decision, what made you decide that? Where did that come from? See, I came from, I guess it was informed by a couple of other inputs. So one was, I was very lucky. I mean, luck plays into the all of this so much one friend of mine.
Had escaped Long Island and he had gone to st. Paul's and he came back and he basically said you got to get out of here. You have to escape and it happened that at around the same time, I think it was a math teacher and one other teacher effectively said, the same thing like Tim, I can't go any faster, but you're not going to get what you need here. And there wasn't really a strong suggestion as to a solution in that case. But those things all
find to piquing my curiosity about these things called boarding school. I didn't know what boarding schools were really outside of a few stories from my friends experience. So I went to the local library back when you had to do this and took out these really thick guides to boarding schools, tried to figure things out, and ultimately got a few scholarships and then my whole extended family helped pay for this thing. So, it's expensive and my family didn't have my immediate family didn't have very much money so
Very lucky that my grandparents and other people also chipped in to make it happen. And I think that fundamentally I had also been competing in sports and I recognized in sports. Like, if you're not losing routinely, you're not training with the right people. Does that make sense? At least in wrestling. It's like if you were to train on a tennis team and your goal was to become the best, tennis player possible, if you were just annihilating
On your team, you're a kind of on the wrong team if your goal is to compete in larger and larger Arenas. So I appreciated that and enjoyed that with respect to competition I was very competitive but I couldn't really apply that to the academics in any meaningful way until I went to st. Paul's and then I got my ass kicked but it was the beneficial adaptive ass-kicking that. I think I really needed. I think we miss that, right? School has become almost too easy.
Easy, we're not challenging the kids and we're not holding them to a high enough standard and it's causing all these Downstream problems later on in life, at least that's my view. And I want my kids to be challenged, I want them to fail. I want them to learn how to overcome these obstacles and you must have gone through something similar, right? When you're going from, sort of like lead, dog to maybe bottom middle of the pack. Like, where's my identity? You're not just dealing with how do I develop the systems to study and get the work done?
And all these people already know it, so I'm behind, but you're dealing with all these identity crisis in terms of your ego, and how you think about yourself. Oh totally. It was for the first six months. I felt like I was always behind, I was always behind. I was always having to choose what I wouldn't finish because I just was not fast enough. I was not organized enough, did not have the time management skills and figuring out when I could take a 20-minute nap so that I could then stay up.
Extra the, you know, hour and a half after dinner to finish a b and c and then managed to do this other thing and preparations that I be well prepared for athletic practice the next day after a full day. Of course work after Chapel every morning just about, I think it was six days a week. We had Chapel, see the five or six days which is mostly roll call of sorts and announcements, but they're also hymns in this. That, the other thing, it was a very, very full schedule, and I'm grateful for that and people listening of probably heard the expression,
If you want something done, give it to a busy man could be woman, of course, but the idea being, if someone is busy and they have a full schedule, they learn how to juggle that full schedule. And if you have an incomplete schedule, I think especially in those formative years in high school, you do not by necessity develop the time management skills that if you really want to charge hard later in life you are going to need and feel like a very, very lucky. I mean if I hadn't had that friend, who was the proof of concept, who knows where I would be, you know,
Let's come back to your life story. What was 68? 131 think it was dot blogger.com? If I'm getting that right? What was that? So when I was working at these intelligence agency, I started two weeks before September 11 literally, two weeks later. The world changed and everybody was thrust into roles and responsibilities over the coming sort of like decade basically that they weren't ready for. Nobody could have prepared you for you just had
To sort of do your best. And I remember being put in charge of something that I didn't feel like, I could quite handle, and I'm making decisions that sort of impact myself and impact my team and impact my country and impact troops in theater. And I have no idea what I'm doing. And so I went to my boss one day after a particularly challenging operation. I said, you know, here's how I thought about it.
Think I'm ready for this job. I don't think I can do this, and he basically, just looked at me and he was like, you're all we got like, what else are we gonna do? Like, we're all just doing the best we can get back to work and I was like, that's the worst pep talk. I have ever heard in my life and so I was like, well, I think people deserve better than me and what can I do if I can't sort of, like, get out of this role. So I started following people around in the organization. I was like, how did these people make decisions? What can I learn from them? And I went back and sort of did an MBA.
Say and when I was doing my MBA I just rediscovered Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett and part of my MBA. It was so useless and I don't mean that in a negative way. It just wasn't giving me what I needed at that particular moment to get better at the things that I wanted to get better at my Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett were. And so I created this website, which was 6813 1-14 40. Blogger.com, which I don't own today. Somebody else is like taking this over probably because I
But it a lot, but the website was basically the zip code for Berkshire Hathaway Dash the unit number of Berkshire Hathaway and cute Plaza and it was my online Journal. Now, keep in mind, this is like, I don't know what year it is, but I'm not allowed to have a LinkedIn profile. I'm not allowed to have any social you Google me. I do not exist. The intelligence agency would be livid if you had any sort of public profile any sort of anything at all. And here I am. I'm like, oh I'm just going to create this online journal and this is
How I'm going to Chronicle my Learning and Development, I'm just going to take notes and I'm going to connect these ideas and I'm going to synthesize them and I'm going to compress them and that is the act of reflection. So I'm going to basically learn things on my own. I'm going to reflect on them and then I'm going to write about them. And so I started this website and then eventually I don't even know how at this point. We got to think it was like 25 thousand readers or something and then all of a sudden, I started getting these emails which
Like I hate typing in the name of your website. Can you basically like change the name? And I was like, fine, I'll just call it Farnam Street, which was the omage to Buffett and Munger who I know have played like such a critical role in your life too. Yeah. Yeah. They have a man. I remember somebody. I can't recall who it was. But dug up the video of my wavering voice at the Berkshire. Hathaway shareholders meeting when I asked my
Question from the mic from the nosebleed seats. I have been informed by them for sure. I mean I have incredible respect for both of them. Were you introduced to them by Buffett? The making of an American capitalist or how did you get introduced to them? Yes, I read Buffett. The making of an American capitalist, I think in University, but sort of like, everything got put on the back burner, once I joined the intelligence agency and like the world change, September 11th, changed everything, I didn't really come up. I mean I work
Six days a week, 12 hours a day for years. Didn't really have a lot of vacations didn't have a lot of long weekends and everybody else was doing the exact same thing and it was the best time of my life. If that makes sense to not only your working incredibly hard, you're working on Amazing problems that you're really attracted to and you're working with a group of highly intelligent dedicated people like it doesn't really get much better than that, from quality of life, point of view. But everything sort of like all these outside interest got put on hold
I mean I'm coming home. I'm like sort of like spending a little bit of time with the woman who is my girlfriend at the time and then I'm going to bed and I'm waking up and like just repeating on rents. And then the NBA was sort of a way for me to step back from that for a couple of years. Do a less intensive role. There will doing a full-time MBA and that was, when I got reconnected, I was like, oh yeah, this Warren, Buffett, guy and Charlie. Munger, but what are they doing? They're making decisions in the real world and they seem really good at it. So what can I learn from them?
So, when you had the somewhat awkward numerical string, right? When you have the ZIP code, as the URL, what were some of the if you remember? Were there any particular pieces that struck a chord with folks? Those are non-trivial numbers you're talking about in terms of readership where there any particular threads or pieces that come to mind that really struck a chord in the early days I have to go back to be sure but I think there's stuff
About, I was trying to figure out how Daniel Kahneman came up with cognitive biases and Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger didn't really talk about cognitive biases but seemed to avoid them. And so I spent a lot of time trying to like reconcile how cognitive biases can help you in the real world. And so what I sort of hit on at least from my point of view is like cognitive biases are really good at explaining why you
Mistake in the past with a really poor preventing you from making mistakes in the future. They're intellectually very satisfying, but they don't really prevent you. Like, if you create a checklist of cognitive biases and you're a smart person, you just basically going to outsmart yourself. Am I overconfident now? I'm not overconfident. I got this. I did the work and so the story you tell yourself, you sort of like talk yourself out of them in a lot of ways which is a bit of an irony to them. Tell me more about that. What do you mean by talking yourself out of them?
Well, you come up with a checklist. I like a lot of people have tried this. They come up with a checklist of cognitive biases, and they're like, okay. I'm going to see if this applies to me. So sunk cost fallacy. This that and the other thing expectancy bias or whatever might be putting together, a list of things that one is intending to avoid, all right? Yeah. And then consider sunk cost, right? So you make a decision and then you pull out your checklist and you're like well am I considering sunk cost or am I just making this fresh and you've already?
Decided at this moment, right? So you're just justifying and rationalizing. The decision you already had. I see ya. You tell yourself a story about why sunk cost doesn't apply in this situation or why you're not overconfident in this situation and the smarter you are formation bias to address your other biases. Exactly. Right. And the smarter you are the better those stories get in the more believable they get.
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I'd love to get your help to fining a phrase just suppose explaining a phrase then segueing into conversation around mental models and cognitive biases. And so on. So ordinary moments determine your position and your position, determines your results. So what is meant by that line and what is meant by position. So the counter intuitive Insight that I had about decision-making from studying, sort of Buffett and Munger.
Peter Kaufman and a host of other people who've influenced my thinking is that they almost never find themselves out of position. And if you want to think of it as position as your circumstances, they're never forced by circumstances into doing something that they don't want to do. And often that means they look like an idiot in the short term, but in the long term they went, and if you consider Buffett, for example, of we talked about, you know, we close this down as partnership during a bull market in the 60s because he doesn't know
Know how to invest anymore. He's lost touch! He can't find what worked for him. You reopens it later in terms of Berkshire, Hathaway Time Magazine, I think it was 1999. He's on the cover as being out of touch 2001, stock market verse right now, today, I think, as of last quarter's got 150 billion dollars on the balance sheet. And so what he's always doing is, he's everybody thinks he's at a touch and he looks like an idiot, but he always wins because, no matter what the outcome is.
Wins. If the stock market goes up, he wins if the stock market crashes, he wins because he's put himself in a position where no matter what happens, he can take advantage of circumstances, rather than having circumstances, take advantage of him. And I think that that's a key element. We don't realize if you put Warren Buffett in a bad position or all of his options are bad. It doesn't matter how smart he is, he doesn't matter how Warren Buffett is everybody. Looks like an idiot when they're in a bad position and everybody looks.
Like a genius when they're in a good position. Do you then create that position by having a handful of Commandments? And I'm making these up, I'm not saying this is what Buffett does because I haven't tracked him as closely as you have. But for instance, I know someone who's of a similar cut from a similar cloth and he's like no short positions, no leverage that that he has four or five rules that he follows, which means he doesn't always beat the S&P 500. Let's say, but he's very rarely in a position where he's at
Stressed seller or is forced into a bad position. So he's able to play a very long game. So I guess I'm wondering how you consistently create that type of position. So let me talk about it in terms of finance and then apply it to something else. That's totally. You would think it doesn't apply to. So, in finance like, right, you can think of load at you can think of saving money, you can think of always having dry powder. It doesn't matter if you have the best idea in the world, if you can't,
Take advantage of that idea. You might as well not have the idea. You have to be in a position to take advantage of the ideas that you have and you have to be in a position where somebody can't call you in at the exact wrong moment because that's really expensive as everybody sort of learned during the great financial crisis and is now forgotten. We seem to relearn these lessons over and over again, but positioning applies to so many other things that we don't think about, you can think about it, basically, as in your sleep, right? Did
Workout, are you healthy? Are you eating? Well, are you investing in your relationship with your partner? What position am I in? In the moment that I get into a fight or argument or disagreement with my partner or my spouse and we don't think about the position we're in at that moment, but if you imagine that, there's a patch of grass between you and them, is that grass dry or is it wet? Have I watered that for months in which case the spark isn't going to let it on fire? Or is this smallest little spark going to start this forest fire.
And the position that we bring into those arguments matters, a lot in terms of the quality of the outcomes that we get, I'll give you another example. We were talking about kids earlier and I assume a lot of people listening have kids. One of my kids came home with an exam and he got a really terrible Mark and he hands it to me and he's like a teenager. So he like hands it to me. He's like I did the best I could walks away and normally the conversation ends there and I was like, okay well that was not the moment that we're going to talk about this because
No at this teenage attitude thing going on, but we're going to circle back to this. And so later that night I was like, talk to me about what it means to do, the best you can. And what he told me about the best you could was like when he sat down to write that test, from 10 to 11, he focused all of his energy and all of his effort on it. He made the best decisions possible from 10 to 11 but what he forgot or didn't really appreciate his, what position was he in at? 10:00 a.m. when he sat down to write?
At that test. Did he fight with his brother in the morning? Yep he did. Did he eat a healthy breakfast? Nope he didn't. Did he get a good night's sleep? Know he was up late. Did he study now? He's sort of half-assed it. And so what happened was he was in a bad position at the moment. He sat down to write that test, he was ill-prepared to write the test, but yes, he did the best he could in that moment. And so often we think about life in terms of how do I do the best I can in this particular moment rather than
How do I put myself in the best position? And part of that is like we're always predicting we're predicting creatures and so we're always trying to gauge what the outcome is and maximize towards that outcome. I want to go all-in on Tesla. I want to go all in on whatever because I want to maximize my return and what we don't think about is like okay well what is the cost of doing that? What if I'm wrong? And how do I position myself for multiple possible? Futures where, what if my idea is not correct? Can I still survive? And can I thrive on that?
That and if you look back and you sort of look back at Carnegie and Rockefeller and all these, you know, historical people who built these great businesses including Buffett, they always take advantage of a weakness in somebody else's position when their position is strong, who else would you? And I know you mentioned a few names but outside of Buffett and Munger, who else would you put on your short list and not to make you pick favorites, I'm sure that you could give a very long list but just off the cuff if you had to pick,
Five to ten people, let's just say could be for but, you know, blood, same, 45 or slightly more people who you really respect as incisive. Deliberate decision makers, who would make that list. So we have mutual friend of all ramakant, he be up there. Patrick Collison would sort of be up there. Kat Cole, who works at Atlanta moments, one of my favorite people. She's always one step ahead.
Head. She's amazing. I think that there's very few people who are well positioned in everything. Like if you look at somebody who's extremely good at one thing, like Buffett they comes with extreme weaknesses, you can have a list of exemplars in your head, almost of different people who are good at different positions, but you have to pick what direction you're going. And then what positions do you need to be good at to be good in that direction? And so for me, like I Circle back to
Of like course things, which people don't really think about but their core to everything we do in terms of like health and relationships, and friendship and purpose and Community. Am I working on something that I want to be working on? Am I moving closer to my destination and is my destination? The place I want to go and I think those questions are stuff that we don't really ask ourselves. We're always so focused on like, how do we accomplish the outcome we want? Rather than what are the key elements to this process? That allow me to play it for a long time.
Time. Am I going in the right direction? And do I want to get to where I'm going? So I am going to come back to just the broad question of how to incorporate thinking, about cognitive biases from saying that correctly and or mental models, not really, I guess those are different. I'd love to have you. Let's begin there. How would you distinguish or Define mental models? Then I'm going to go micro and then we'll zoom out. So, a great way to think about mental models, is the source of all bad decisions is
Had spots mental models, allow you to see a problem through a different lens. You can adopt a different Persona. A great example of a mental model is like, Howard. Tim Ferriss think about this and then I adopt what I know about you and I try to see the problem from your perspective. And if I can see the problem from your perspective, now, I've done the one thing that actually gets me out of cognitive biases, which is the source of all cognitive biases are. Basically, we believe that, what we see is all there,
Rizz and we learn about the sort of in physics, right? In Grade 9, I think where you're standing on this train and you're carrying this ball and the train is moving at 60 miles an hour and how fast is the ball moving well relative to you? The ball is not moving but if you're watching the train, go by the balls moving at 60 miles an hour. And so, the source of all of our problems is that we only see that where this person on the train holding this ball and we can't see that there's a person outside. It was a completely different view into the exact same situation that we see. So we
Mentally use these tools to sort of accommodate how we can look into the world from a different person's eyes, or through a different lens be that biology or through thinking or through. I mean, the most useful ones tend to be like and then what just asking yourself? That simple question, I accomplish this. And then what then, what happens in version. How do I avoid all these negative outcomes that I don't want to get in the stoics? You've talked about this in the past, the stoics have been doing.
This for a long time, they call it a pre-mortem. I think that those are just really helpful ways and what they're really doing is they're just allowing us to put a different lens onto the problem and see it through a different light. And by seeing it through a Different Light, we slightly reduce our blind spots into the problem. Yeah, totally. I found I haven't read these in decades so caveat Lector or for anyone who picks these up. But some of Edward de Bono's work, I think he's originally Maltese, but some de Bono's two words, but we're actually, he may just be
A Maltese citizen, I can't Peg. The nationality doesn't really matter. He wrote a book called lateral thinking, he has another one. I think it's called the six thinking hats or something along those lines, which similarly very helpful just for forcing yourself as a portion of a practice to look at the same situation with a different lens of different set of questions, that different perspective. I'd love to talk to you about Farnam Street but more broadly building a business / life /
Enos has on content on advice on writing and also certainly audio. But if you look back, post Intelligence Agency on what you have built, what are some of the more important decisions that you have made, or more important experiments that you have run. Whether they turned out as you had hoped or not. I think building a business on content is really hard. I think, I never set out to
Old a media company. What I set out to do was learn Timeless ideas from other people and master the best of what other people have figured out and share that with the world, as a means of giving back. And part of what I want to do in life is leave the world a better place than I found it and I believe in equal opportunity and not equal outcome, but how can we have equal opportunity if we don't share information with people and make it accessible?
So that's how I stumbled into Farnam Street and there's been these pivotal moments along the way and some are intentional and some are just completely random and example of which is, I never had email. I never got people to sign up for email until feedburner. Remember, when feedburner went away? Oh, I do, I do, right? So, I lost like three quarters of my audience overnight, because Google decided to shut down this thing. And then at that moment, it dawned on me, how can
Buddy else. Take away my audience from me. No, that's not cool. How do I solve for this problem? So I started an email list and now we have like 600 or 700 thousand people and there's the email list and I sent out an email every Sunday, basically, what I'm learning but that was the moment I'd never thought about how do I create an email list or I need this. It was like somebody took away, my Facebook is done the same thing like Twitter to varying. Extents is done the same thing. They basically take your audience away from you.
And then you become platform dependent and I don't want to be platform dependent. I don't want anybody to be between me and the people who've chosen to read me and get my ideas, what are the components of your business? As it exists today and then I'm happy to have a conversation about this. I'm just fascinated, a different people approach things, especially since we're talking about among other things, decision-making, and so on. So I'd love to know how it breaks down currently because you've got online courses,
You have the podcast, you have other things. So how does the business so to speak? Break down as it stands right now? So we do a few things. You remember that diagram from Disney in the 60s and they have like theme parks and merchandise and how it all interconnects. You can look this up online or don't but I would love to find it. All right, I'll find it. So with 50 put in the show notes, yes, oh my, I do with Farnam Street was sort of how do I create more surface area for people to discover Timeless content or the
They Master the best of what other people have figured out. So it's literally not about me, it's about other people's ideas, I don't really have any original ideas. I sort of if anything maybe compressed other people's ideas in an interesting way and so we started with a website and then we went to a podcast and then the podcast I'll interesting side note here navall ramakant saved the podcast because I was like doing this podcast and I was like nobody's listening to this podcast and I had just recorded with the Vol and I was like that's the last
For serving and I do. And then of course that episode goes like parabolic and all roads lead to nerve. All right I was like oh my God I can't give up on this anymore like cuz I wasn't at the time I wasn't having fun doing it now I'm having a lot of fun doing it. Then we created these series of books called the Great mental models and the idea behind the great mental models was basically what are the Big Ideas you would have learned in University and can you apply those outside of the context of the domain that they
Were learned in. So I think that that's we've talked about one in terms of like the frame of reference that you're using to. Look at a problem matters a lot in terms of what you see. So we wanted to make that accessible for people and then we branched into a course called decision by Design. We used to have an in-person workshop on decision-making and we learned a lot about how people make decisions in the real world. But covet, shut down all of these online events. And so, we created a decision
Design as a means to not take the same material we were doing in person because what we were doing in person was very specific to being in person. It was learning from the people at your table, it was non-transferable in a way to online. So we took a more prescriptive approach which are like what are the things that practical tools that people use in the real world to make decisions and we share it with people. And an example of that is separating problem, definition from problem solution, having two separate meetings for
That. And a lot of people go into these meetings, they have one meeting and they're like, What's the problem? And then, of course, we work with incredibly intelligent people, and most of them are type A. And so you come in and the first statement that sounds reasonable everybody jumps into. Okay, here's how we solve for that. Nobody like takes a step back and it's like, wait is this problem? We're solving is this problem the real problem because we jump into these solutions, could you give an example could be? Hypothetical could be real life.
Of scrutinizing. The problem statement, I think this is really important. I don't do it nearly as much as I should. Could you maybe walk through what that process looks like. If you have an example, great, otherwise it could be in, the more abstract, my belief is that the person who makes the decision has to come up with a problem statement for the decision. And that does a couple things that forces, the person who's making the decision to really understand the problem. They can take input from everybody else, but ultimately, they're accountable for taking the
Problem statement and determining what that problem is and then communicating what that problem is and also identify which solutions for of work and fit for that when we don't do that. And we just sort of throw a problem on the table. It really backfires. I'll give you one of my own maybe we can we can Workshop. Yeah. So for instance I have tons of Legacy email addresses in boxes and it's at least it Face Value. The story.
I tell is that it is a huge pain in the ass and there are different. Maybe security, vulnerabilities and issues with having different platforms and things scattered all over the place. So the problem in a sense has not been that well-defined, it's just overall kind of angsty hand-wringing and a couple of identified risks then we've jumped straight into Solutions and there are any host of different solutions that I won't bore you with. But
but it's going to take some time and I think I have a pretty good bead on what the right direction is for this, but just for purposes of
Using the exercise. How would you scrutinize that, right? I come in. I say, hey, this is a problem. We don't have things centralized in one modern inbox with all of the Enterprise level security that would include therefore we should decommission these following in boxes and blah blah blah. But I'm taking for granted that that is the right definition of the problem. Right? Exactly. So it's like who's the check and balance on? What are we solving for? And it goes back.
Something we talked about earlier, like, what direction, my getting closer to the destination and is the destination, the one that I want to get to. So in this case is the problem that you're solving. I want access to all of these materials through one inbox or is the problem something different, which is, I don't feel these in boxes are really that secure and I don't know how to manage them and the way that you frame that problem will determine in a large part, what Solutions you see is available and maybe
E, it's something different. I mean we're just sort of like spitballing this on the spot here. Yeah totally but your surface area is large. So all these email addresses increase your surface area of attack, if that's your sort of the way that you're thinking about it and if your goal is to reduce it one way of reducing, it might be to consolidate it one way of reducing, it might be to eliminate them. One way of reducing. It might be something completely different. Yeah, totally. And this is timely for me, because, as I was walking through,
Hoarding a screenflow for my team related to this. I realized about halfway through because I was talking about next actions and I said, actually wait a second, My ultimate objective here is to spend substantially less time an email and I think may be compared to a reference point. That would be say an average of my friends. I do spend a lot less time and email but I would like to spend more time on certain creative projects and larger needle moving.
Dedicated blocks of time, 3 to 4 hours for fill in the blank project or experiment. I realized pretty quickly. That if my advice were implemented directly, it would just be taking this burden because it's not just attack vectors. It's also just lots of unsolicited inbound, it would be taking all of that and just moving it to a different mailing address. And I was like, okay, that's sort of partially solves one issue, but it does not at all address. This separate issue
Which is maybe on some level the bigger issue. Even though I tend to run a little paranoid, the unsolicited inbound is probably a bigger problem currently than the attack Vector stuff because I have pretty good security as it stands, probably excessive security and a lot of respects. But I realized halfway through trying to prescribe the solution. I was like, wait a fucking second. I might be giving the best advice possible for solving the wrong thing. Yeah. Totally, and that is in and of itself a good reason to separate these things, but
Also, when you're the boss, your suggestions become Direction. So you might be just thinking out loud, but the people hearing that are like, oh, Tim once this here, here's how we solve for this. And then in your head, you're like, oh, that sounds like a good solution, but you solve the wrong problem. And so this is why separating these meetings between like what is the problem? Like, can we get clear on what the problem is? And you don't have to go first, but like whatever your process is, it's to get that information or to people in terms of what they see is the
Problem, you can take that mull, it over and be like, we'll have another meeting tomorrow and we'll determine Solutions or maybe next week. If it's, if it's not timely and people think this slows you down, this is the biggest thing that I hear when I talk to people about this is, they're like well, that'll just slow us down and prevent us from taking action. Actually, the exact opposite is true because it's sort of, like, you're thinking in terms of speed, but speed doesn't have a Direction, so it doesn't matter how fast you're going. If you're running in circles, you really want to get to the best outcome possible.
Abel in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of effort. And that means you're allowing your team to maximize their thinking. A lot of people don't think, well on the spot. So having these group meetings where everybody is required to contribute a lot of people mull it over, they go for a walk after or they're walking home after work that night and then they get this idea this spark and they're like no I don't see it that way and then they can't contribute at that point. So you've tied one hand behind your back in terms of maximizing the talent on your team to figure out what the problem is and then to solve it.
And so it makes a lot more sense to be like, hey we're going to have a 30-minute meeting here and a 30-minute meeting here instead of 160 minute meeting and these meetings are going to be highly structured and we're just going to talk about what the problem is. Can we agree on what the problem is? What do you see as the problem? What do you see into this lens? That I don't see cuz I'm not you I can't see it. That's a way also, to get out of this, I don't know. People like to posture and meetings, it drives me crazy. They like basically repeat the executive summary in their own words and like meetings.
Go nowhere. And so a good way to avoid that is just to assume that everybody has read the required material and ask them what their unique contribution to. This problem is that they don't think anybody else sees and so now instead of rewarding just are time. Now you're rewarding unique contribution to the problem and you get social signal out of having unique lens into the problem, which is much more effective. That makes perfect sense, and are there other questions that you find useful?
In the problem, defining sessions, for instance, I mean I can imagine one of the questions that I would want to ask my team in addition to emphasizing what you just emphasized. Right? Individual perspective and contribution over restating the executive summary that was sent as reading for the meeting to begin with. Is this really a problem? We're assuming this is a problem that needs to be solved but like it is this significant enough for us to
Kate attention and resources to it compared to other things. I'm probably using very clumsy wording but what other types of are there? Any other questions that you've seen? Be very helpful in these problem defining meetings. And then what is a great question. So if we switch to a new email platform and then what so you can imagine you can do a thought experiment on what your day would look like. But we often neglect all of these other things which is like this software doesn't do this thing that I actually do a lot so they
For now, we have to develop a workaround or the software is completely different. Everybody has to be trained on it or this software is not as supported and doesn't update as much. There's all these sort of lenses, but I love the end. Then what question because it's like, okay, if we solve this problem, what state are we in? And what is the cost? In terms of time, money effort, brain drain, we don't think about brain drain, very often to solve this problem and the bigger your team is. The more you tend to solve these problems that aren't really
Problems because you're sort of like creating busy work for you and I think we both run very small teams. And so we think through like okay if we solve this problem then what happens how do we develop the most leverage possible? But I think a lot of people don't tend to think through that, you know, I've seen this all the time where organizations have worked with have switched out software, and they switch out the software to solve one problem and they're ignorant to the 67 other problems. They just created by solving that one,
And it feels good. It feels like you're doing work but at the end of the day, you're in a worse position than you were in because you didn't ask yourself and then would write. So love to segue for a minute to automatic rules. Because of for myself, at least, especially running a small team, where the default I suppose flow of things is that a lot of decisions flow to me and I try not to be an unnecessary bottleneck, but I have a few, a very small team, a few employees and
Automatic rules and policies are very helpful here. So for instance, I have a blog post. I put up it's like I'm not reading any new books this year, which solves a lot of issues as you might imagine. And I have these blanket policies for at least five to eight years. I didn't know speaking engagements, effectively. I've made a few exceptions recently but for a long period of time, I did none of that for another. I think I want to say probably three to four years. No, Angel Investing. And these were rules.
Prevented decision fatigue and just allowed me a lot more cognitive bandwidth and emotional and physical bandwidth. So what are some of your automatic roles? I've got a few here, work out every day. No days off, invest in an index fund every month. No meetings before. 12, do you want to spend maybe a few minutes on those? And then any other examples that come to mind before I get into a few more examples? Like let's back up for a second?
Automatic rules turn your desired Behavior into your default behavior and they do it when you're at your best and so, you can pre-decide a lot of things and why are rules effective, instead of just a pre-decision, you need it to be a rule. In the word, rule is very specific and very useful and I got this idea from Daniel Kahneman and we were talking and he said, I have a rule. I never say yes, on the phone. He was
Explaining why he had just told somebody that he talked to them again tomorrow and follow up with them and they had asked him to do something and I was like, that's really interesting. Why? Why do you have that rule? And he said that rule is so that I don't end up saying, yes, because I feel social pressure to say yes to these things. And I want to please other people like all of us. Want to please other people. And he's like, I learned over years and this is like, fascinating will blow your mind, will change your life. He's like I learned over the years people.
Don't argue with rules and I followed them. So we're taught our whole life to follow rules but we've never thought of like how can we create rules for our self that we just follow? When we're at our worst, when we're sort of like in the worst situation possible, we all know, no matter how bad our day is, we shouldn't speed on the highway because it's against the rules. What we don't think about is how do we use rules to our advantage?
A great example, I had a friend who basically lost a whole bunch of weight using this Rule and he basically said every time I go out for dinner and he ate it for dinner, a lot in his life for work, my rule is I ordered the healthiest thing on the menu and I don't drink meaning, no alcohol meaning, no alcohol. And he didn't order a dessert that was his sort of like, third row. And if you think about dessert desserts, an interesting one because I think we can all relate to it. You go out, you celebrate with your friends, the wine comes.
Of the champagne comes out, the dessert comes out and all of a sudden you're doing things that may be the best version of you doesn't want to do. But you're in a social situation, you feel pressure, you can tell people, I'm not eating dessert, you know, I don't want dessert tonight but that relies on Willpower. So every time you say I don't want dessert tonight you're using willpower to get out of that situation and eventually everybody loses the battle with willpower. So how can you create a system to get out of this willpower thing where it's like I'm not using willpower I created.
Magic rule, I don't eat dessert, that's my rule. And when you say that to your friends, you might have to say it twice but they definitely push back a lot less as long as you're consistent with that rule, but that rule puts you in the best position possible for Success until like, I have a couple of these rules, right? When I'm out after a talk with the people who organized the talk, my rule is. I stopped drinking at 9:00, nothing. Good happens after nine. And so look, you just choose in advance and a great.
Way to think about this again is going back to what we talked about earlier Direction. Destination, what does a person who achieves this destination? What do they behave like can I create automatic rules in my life? And they're so context-specific. They're so specific to you because they're also things. You don't do naturally. Like I hate working out but I want to be healthy. It's really important to me to be healthy and I was struggling and this is where the work out every day. Rule came in. I was struggling to go three times a week because I would get into this negotiation
And with myself and that negotiation was like, you know, I normally work out on Wednesdays, but that little voice in my head is like, you didn't sleep. Well last night, you have a lot of work on your plate and then all of a sudden I'm like, I'll do extra tomorrow. I'll catch myself doing this sort of talk. And I'm why am I negotiating with myself like who's in charge here? I'm in charge of this situation and so I changed it and I like, I am going to work every day and it doesn't mean I go to the gym every day.
Day and it doesn't mean I go for 60 minutes. I can reduce the scope or sort of like duration of my work out but I'm going to work out every single day and that workout might be a 5-mile walk. It might be something else, it doesn't matter, but there's going to be some form of exercise involved and that single rule has changed so many people's lives that I've shared it with because you start exercising every day because the negotiation in your head now is like, what do I fit in today? How
Can I fit this in? It's not. Should I work out? It's like oh I don't have a lot of time. Maybe I'll just do 20 minutes. Maybe I'll just go to the gym and do squats.
And all the sudden you get in this habit, you're consistently working out. So your health starts to get a lot better. It's mind-blowing how this simple principle can have profound impact. Do you have any rules for yourself? I've so many. I want
to hear some of yours. Yeah. Well I
will say that as you're talking to my father for instance has and the last spin very fast. Actually. It may be in the last two to three months has lost 50 pounds and
He's done that by following the Slow Carb Diet in the 4-Hour Body or as described by the for our buddy. People can find it online. Certainly without having to buy any book but the key there, one of the keys is having a very straightforward Rule and the rule is you don't have to give up your favorite foods for the rest your life. You just have to give up your favorite foods for six days at a time and you have a set cheat day every week and that also allows you to get off the hook or to successfully negotiate.
It with yourself or with your friends because you say it's my policy that I only have cheat day once a week on Saturday. So if you want to have dessert booze, whatever, it might be not in my dad's case with with those two, but I'm happy to do it but it's got to be on a Saturday, right? And then all of a sudden the negotiation is over. There is no negotiation. Yeah so I would say when I am my best self, which I am right now, let's say another rule would be if I want to follow the Slow Carb Diet, have pre-made meals ready to go in the refrigerator for at least three to four days at a time.
I did that today for instance because if I start to run out of food and I'm picking at the dregs of whatever I have sitting around and I'm starting to starve but lo and behold I have a podcast to do, I'm going to go buy something fast that is not going to conform to the diet. So batch processing buying or having bought food so that it's ready to go. I mean I have a lot of policies. So as it relates to inbound and I have an autoresponder that kicks back a lot of this stuff. I'll tell you some of the rules that have existed for a while.
While generally speaking, no speaking engagements and I could explain why that is? That was particularly hard one when I made the decision because speaking engagements, for authors who have best selling books is very lucrative and it is in fact to the main source of income for a lot of authors. Yeah. And I just realized categorically, I had to say no because it was very hard to moderate my commitments with speaking engagements. Yeah. And it's addictive.
Right? Like you hide is a Dane, get this big check and then you could do it all over again and then you end up booking your life out, nine months in advance and it crowds out a lot of other things. So like the metaphor of is sort of apocryphal story of the professor asks his students to fit the two rocks and handful of Pebbles and then the sand into the jar and the lesson is you got to put in the big rocks first and then the Pebbles and then the sand but you can't do it the other way around. You can't do in any other order or the big rocks won't fit. And I realized for
Myself, that was true speaking engagements. What I did do is an interim for that is when I would say yes to speaking engagements, I had a complete barbell approach. So either do free. So it had to be so incredibly compelling. Maybe that's because it's cause based and I really aligned with a very narrow band of things that I commit myself to on that side or it had to be a paid gig matching or above my previous high water mark. So, whatever the highest amount that I had been paid, was it
To match or exceed that never below and that automatically constrained, the volume of things that I could commit to and made it manageable. And by the way, the people who are willing to do that, we're always the easiest to deal with. You would think maybe intuitively that the people who pay the most would be the most demanding, the most difficult that is not been my experience at all. It's actually completely the opposite and I have many other rules. So the no new books would be another one if anyone tries to rush me into a decision.
Via email or on the phone? The answer is no, it's not just that. I postponed giving an answer. The answer is no. If I feel like someone is rushing me into a decision, the answer is no if someone's rushing me because they don't reading between the lines. They don't want me to have enough time for a proper legal review. A lot of startups do this, it's very annoying or they'll send you docs on like Friday afternoon and say, well we need to close this round and like we need to get signatures back by 10:00 a.m. on Monday, and I'm like, then it's a fucking no. I'm sorry, I'm an adult and I don't play these games.
So
there are a handful of things like that. I'll give you another one for the podcast and I'm going to ask you a similar question for the business side of things for you and the creative side. But I'd love to hear any. So, for instance, for the podcast, everything is prepaid, all invoices are prepaid and that is something that very few podcasts can do. It's something that very few podcasts, I think can manage given the business Norms generally its net, 30, or net, 60 or some type of net payment terms.
But to manage that, you either need to have a reasonably large team, you need to have someone fully dedicated to chasing down payment or you need to work with outside agencies to pick up that burden. I didn't want to deal with any of that and so I said, look, this is, I recognized a trade-off and with these rules, I think you would probably agree. There are trade-offs, there are always going to be trade-offs, but if decision is like, decision-- kind of like incision like The Cutting away. That's fine. So you're cutting away a certain possible outcomes.
But if I make a rule that everyone has to prepay a few things happen. Number one, the universe of possible sponsors. We need to consider goes down dramatically. Secondly, the people are willing to do that again. Counter-intuitively, are generally people who are measuring twice cutting wants and are going to be the easiest to deal with later. And we don't always bat a thousand, but we do pretty well. So those would be some of the roles I've got all sorts of other ones.
Dude, as you were saying that there's a couple things that came to my one is I can often determine from an initial Outreach of an investment. Whether I want to do the deal before I even know the specifics because it's like how fair is this to me? And if the deal is like one-sided towards you an example of which is like hey I need this. You can't get it legally reviewed or you have to get your lawyers working overtime. I need it by Monday. Well, I don't want to be a partner with that person and so that's it. That's the honeymoon phase.
Should be easier. I know it. So that's an easy. No, but like, often like when we're investing in a lot of private businesses, that aren't necessarily startups that are profitable businesses, I can tell by the valuation, the pitch, like what people are looking for, what their optimal scenario is, if I want to be a partner with that, because if you're presenting a deal, that isn't fair to me right now, you're never going to be fair to me in the future, so it has to be win-win, and people don't understand, like, there's literally, for permutations of a relationship. There's wind
Win-win lose-lose win and lose lose. And only one of those permutations can survive time. And what do we want with time? We want to compound relationship. You want to invest in companies where you don't have, to review the legal documents, because you trust the people involved. You've worked with them before they're consistent, they show up, they do what they say they're going to do, and maybe the investment doesn't work out, but that's not what you're thinking about. You're not worried about them, stabbing you in the back. And so so often we do things that just take us off this compound.
Being trained. And I think it was no Vale said, you know, one of the big lessons from compounding, is that all the gains come at the end. They don't come at the start and so you have to stay on this timeline. So, every relationship has to be win-win. And for like the podcast, we do like, no paid speaking, which is so interesting. I'm sure you get these pitches to. It's like here. I'll give you a hundred grand to come on your show. I'll pay in advance yada yada and then I always look up these people and I'm like, oh now I know the podcasts like accept my yeah for guest speaker.
Hers. But we do the same thing with this prepaid stuff. And this came back to bite us because I'm a high. Trust person. I operate on trust. I don't want to be in business with you, if we need a contract, that's generally my motto. It doesn't mean we don't have contracts, but it means if I feel the need of a contract, it's an easy know for me if you need a contract to protect you from someone, you don't really trust your plan a gambler's game. But often you don't even think that you don't trust them, but you'll think of the contract, and then you'll need a contract. And that's the first indication that
Something's amiss in this relationship and so we've never used advertising contracts but drink Ovid. This came back to bite us because we would invoice a lot of our advertisers once a year and we invoice them on. March 31st, after we have delivered all of their advertising for the past year and we've worked with people for years and then all of a sudden were delivering these invoices, March, 31st 2020 and people are like we're not paying. Yeah. I'm like what do you mean we're not paying this. Like, that doesn't make any
Any sense, we've worked together for four years. How is this even possible? Am I missing something? And they're like basically soup, like, like, what is going on here? This is crazy. Interestingly enough, a few of them have come back and try to advertise with us, and they're like, we'll pay our old invoice and I'm like, you should pay that and then we'll talk. But there's no way I'm gonna like sign outfit work with you. No, thanks. And the speaking thing again, that comes back to like, where do I want to get to in life? I do the exact same thing except I
Sort of limited. I'm like here's the number of speaking engagements I can do this year, it's like six or 10 depending on the year depending on sort of like what I want to do that year and then we use price as a function to modulate that in the sense of, I love your high water, mark idea. I think that's really important and that's a great way that I'd never thought about doing it and I just use hey I only do six a year. Here's the cost and it just eliminates most people and to your point the people that say yes are the easiest freaking people to deal with.
In the world and they want you there. And there's no, like 16 hours of pre calls and like all of this other stuff they've decided they want you as a speaker. You're not one of ten. They will gladly accept, that's when you get into all sorts of comms overload and brain damage. If you had to double down on one or two things you are already doing, what would you double down on? Definitely the email list. I think that that is the key, right? If you can pick one primary,
Because for this, you need to be able to reach your audience. Need to be able to communicate with them and however, you do that with you, do it building it through Twitter or Instagram, you want sort of all past to lead back to your email list and the person who does this, the best is James, clear as a machine, he's a machine right, like Instagram points back to his website Facebook points back to his website, Twitter. You know, he's just really, really smart at this. So if you're going to model yourself off somebody and you want to build an email list, like he's the person,
A sort of like think about. You also have a huge audience for email. I do. Yes, I'm very grateful very methodical to mean I've thought about it all the like you didn't think about it at all until a few things happened, including feedburner sending a notification. We are about to turn off everything and then began emailing, however, long ago was yeah, which has been a great actually really fun process for me because five bullet Friday serves as my diary effectively, I don't have a separate diary
He's fun to look back. The two years ago is like, there's one that comes out every week and I can look back two years ago. Oh yeah, I remember that exact week locked in the Amber, like some prehistoric in a mosquito or something and I can revisit and you also realize how like stupid you were, or at least I do, when I look back at some of my old newsletters was like, oh, what was I thinking? But that's also a really positive sign because you're growing, but going back to the question. I would focus on email and I would ditch podcast at this point and just
Double down on email and long form content. Counter-intuitively on the web. Let's just say I was like wish granted, boom poof podcasts. Just dissolves into The Ether with a rainbow and you know, some whinnying of unicorns and it's all wonderful but that that has come to a close and then you're doubling down on email and what was the phrasing that you just used? But it was sort of online long form, content law for Content. How would you do that? Like what might things look like in the next?
Three months. If you are doubling down on those things just for context, I was operating under the guise of starting from, okay, right? Yeah. So I would pick a vector and that Vector would be sort of creating content that people find useful and Timeless. And it's super important that we're Timeless is really important there because you want the compounding effect, you want the cumulative effect to work to your advantage. So if you're creating content that is easily consumed, but no longer relevant,
In a week, a month, even a year then that content can't work for you when you're not working but a lot of the stuff that you do on your blog and definitely the stuff that we do on FS dot blog is it's always relevant, its Evergreen. We just re-aired that interview with Navarre avocado, we recorded it. Six years ago, people thought it was recorded yesterday. We don't talk politics, you know, we avoid these certain subjects so I think what I would do is like I would focus on creating the best content I could I would get
People who come to the website to give me their email address and I would think about not expanding that surface area like just creating better. How do I write the next article? How do I make it useful? And then spending a lot of time thinking about how do I share that? We're two people who are like me who will find this interesting? Where do they hang out? How can I let them know about it? What people tend to do is the two mistakes I see in, I guess if people are trying to do sort of like what we've done or we're doing is they spread themselves too thin?
In so they're like, oh, I'm gonna start a blog. I'm going to create a podcasting and just do an email newsletter and it's like man, you have no idea how much work all that stuff is like, good luck. And the other thing that I see a lot of people doing is just sort of like thinking it's going to be easy and so they get into this trap of like oh I said something that's really popular or wrote an article is really popular and now I'm going to write another one on the same thing and another one on the same thing, by the end of the year, you're just posting the same stuff and
That's aggressive sort of like tweets or something. You just become something you wouldn't read. And so I don't look at stats on the website. I look at the email stat sort of like once a week but I never look at like, what's the most popular article? Because I never want that to guide. The next article, I just really want to follow what I'm interested. In what I'm curious about where my energy is and I feel like that a cohort of people will find that and be like Oh I found my tribe like this is my person I'm so glad that
There's somebody else interested in this other than me, and that sort of like, how I think about building it. But you have to find that thing for you. And I think it's really, really critical that you don't spread yourself too thin and try to do everything and then you can sort of like, create these systems in your life that allow you to do that, which is, let's say, you want to do that. And you want to work full time at the same time, but you want to slowly build up this body of content that works for you while you're working. Well, one way to do that is right. Every morning from five until six.
So you just block off the best hour of your day for rent. Most people, do it the other way, they block off the worst hour of their day which might be at night. And so they come home after all this baggage and all this work and then they spend all their time and effort sort of like trying to focus instead of like, actually just letting it flow and writing I mean, as far as rules go right. I mean, the Evergreen / Timeless piece has always been important to me for all the reasons that you're mentioning including the
Energy giving because if we were to look at it from different perspective, if you are competing for attention and I don't want to make it seem zero-sum, but if you are trying to draw people to what you are producing in some capacity, if you choose timely, news driven, topics or people or stuff that's getting sensationalized or stuff, that's really controversial, and polarizing you are stepping into the bloodiest. Most
Crowded Arena imaginable. The Timeless stuff, where the Evergreen stuff is hard to do, you're also capping, I think a lot of your growth frankly but that's okay, you grow slower but you increase the timeline you have for growth, right? Like the runway becomes longer. Even if you're growing slower in the short term, exactly, you have compounding gains in the form of audience growth. And so on that will be more sustained as opposed to Fairweather readers or listeners.
Who are just chasing whatever the algorithm serves them on any given day in any given minute. So question, just on the compounding thing because navall of course is an incredible investor. I'd love to know a bit about how you personally think about investing. So it seems like you do some private deals. Also seems like you invest in an index fund or index funds. Could you say more about that and could you also speak to whether or not you think investing in De sees? I guess it is has
Substantially changed now that as I understand it big Tech factors very heavily into at least some of the indices are indexes, a musher, which the proper word is to use here, but how do you personally think about investing? So I use the cash flows from Farnam Street to invest and one of the advantages to being you or me that a lot of people don't have is deal flow so you get deal flow that the best VC's in the world would be envious.
Us of and to some extent. So do I? And so you've created this vehicle that wasn't primarily for investing but has this big benefit to it, where you're able to get deal flow because of all the other things you do not because you're focused on Deal flow every day and so I wanted to use that to my advantage in terms of how do we get into good deals? How do I create something sustainable? How do I create something long term? And how do I apply this knowledge that I'm having fun applying I like investing? I don't do a ton of ECM.
Staying I try to invest mostly in terms of check sighs. It's almost all allocated to companies that are making money or something that I really understand. The path of I occasionally invest with friends. When I invest with friends, my rule is go back to rules. I write that investment off, 20 the minute. I write the check because I never want my investment with friends to affect our friendship. So my head is just as the donation to check comes out. Yeah, it's a donation to them and I'd rather be wrong supporting her.
Friend. Then right not supporting them like it doesn't that doesn't do anything for our friendship. And so I think about like the things that I understand and then diversifying, I don't use outside money, there's no outside investors, there's Shane. And so I think about like, how do I survive? Not how do I maximize my returns in the short term. How do I maximize my returns in the long term? Rule number one from Warren Buffett, tone lose money from rule. Number two is like serial number one. So I want to diversify
When it makes sense. But I also want to be in a position where I can flow to whatever makes sense. Like we have a real estate company where we invest in real estate, but we'll wait until there's a lot of distress until we put more money into that and then I can be patient. I can go years without making an investment. Is that mostly residential commercial or residential? Yeah. All residents. Yeah. So it's multi filming at scale and so like I just want to do things where there's a long Runway I'm working with people, I trust the financial returns,
Are sort of like justifying the investment, but also the advantage to being you or I or this one person sort of team is you can put yourself in a position where, like you said, you stopped VC investing for years. You don't have to make an investment nobody's emailing you going. Tim, why haven't you met an investment? Nobody's emailing you going? What are you doing with my money? All of a sudden, you can just let cash pile up on the balance sheet. You can just let it accumulate in the bank account. And then when you see an opportunity where the risks and rewards, sort of,
The Kate that this is favorable and you have an edge in this particular investment, then you can write a large check in like 12 hours. There's no investment committee to go through. There's nothing to do. It's just you making a decision and so I like that aspect of it and I think about it that way I like to do the index fund thing. It's sort of outside all of that which is I like fail-safes I don't know about you, but I hide money from myself at times. So like the real estate company when I log into my bank, it doesn't
Can show up on the list of companies we have it's just like the separate entity that I log into once a year to get the financial statements for the accountants. But mentally I've convinced myself it doesn't exist which I think is like a really powerful way for me because I don't want to convince myself that I'm smarter than I am at any of this stuff. And I also always want to think that I'm in a worse position than I am. Because I really want to increase and improve my position as your thinking on index and
Testing changed over the years or is it a little bit? Like I see often times, you know people saying it's not timing the markets time in the market so just keep buying, right? Just keep buying with respect to an index or any number of different index funds. How was your thinking, remain, the same or changed, with respect to index investing. The weighting of the top companies is definitely caused me a little bit of hesitation. What I do with indexing is while I invest in an index fund every month, I don't always invest the same.
Amount of money in the index fund. So if you want to think of this sort of very simplistically when there's panic and nobody wants to emboss'd, I tend to put more money in and when everybody is investing and we're reaching all-time highs, I tend to put lesson, I don't know if that's an effective strategy for everybody else. It's just sort of what I do to regulate money going into index funds, but we haven't seen with index funds that worries. Me is with the rise of index funds, we
And seen massive for selling of index funds and how that impacts the funds. And so I'm actually sort of counter-intuitively thinking the rise of activist investors. They just went through this 10 years spell where they didn't outperform and they're really smart. I'm kind of thinking, like, oh now might be the time to allocate more money into that pocket because I think that there might be an opportunity when index funds are no longer what we're thinking.
Thinking of as index funds and they always go up and all of a sudden stock-picking comes back in Vogue and you can buy some of them like you can buy perishing Square. I don't know what today's prices but like a 30% discount to its net asset value. And I remember doing this drink Ovid, so March 2020 Bill Ackman got on TV and he's like, I have these like asymmetric bats and I was like, oh, bills are really smart guy. I know him. So I started looking at the net asset value Pershing Square and it's like the market is tanking at the same.
The net asset value is like going parabolic. So I was just buying all the shares I could and that's all publicly available information but you have to be in a position to take advantage of that information with cash. Otherwise your your for selling something to do it. How do you think of it Index Fund investor? What do you do with your money? I'm in the process of tremendously. I don't want to say d risking because that would presume that I accurately can identify
And understand all the various risks out there which is kind of ridiculous would be a ridiculous thing for me to claim. But I have realized that many, many, many of my investments are highly correlated, and I've always been growth first and I have friends. I'm not going to name names. But friends were like, look, there is no role for Bonds in your portfolio. You don't need the cash, like you should be 100%, go go go. And these are very smart people who have done very, very well over long periods of time. And
Actually let's first of all say I'm not a financial advisor. I do not recommend anyone. Take that advice but this is advice that a few of my friends were giving to me based on their understanding of my life. And what I came to realize is that while academically that might be true, it actually makes it harder for me to sleep. So I am making a number of decisions right now that for anyone who is type A super driven successful
Peaceful.
Gross minded investor would look at askance and consider probably pretty stupid. But for me I'm realizing number one, I don't need to chase extra gains necessarily I mean I have areas where I feel like I have informational Advantage with early-stage stuff. If I decided to years from now, I want double triple down or 10x down on that sector. I could do that pretty easily. So I'm going to try an experiment for a few years. I'm in the process of doing this.
Right now where I'm going to be moving, a lot of my cash from growth positions. I can't do that in all cases, because a lot of my stuff is locked up in private, but I'll be moving a lot from areas that are high growth, but that are high complexity and difficult for me to understand that applies to a bunch of stuff overseas, where I don't think the world is as siloed as it once was. I mean, Nassim taleb. And I were talking about this recently, where the idea that you're protected
From the ups and downs of say the US by being in Western Europe is kind of ridiculous and that's true even further afield. So I'm trying to I suppose at this point optimized for sleep, that's it. Yeah. And I'm sure I'm going to look back a few years from now and say fuck man, the opportunity cost was so high but there are periods of time where I've been red hot and I've been able to strike most notably when I had much less cash.
Instead of 2008 to 2012, let's say which was a in incredible vintage and period for startup investing. If someone were to give me my starting Capital that I had then now even adjusted for inflation, say, go get them tiger, I would not succeed. I really don't think I would be able to do what I did. Then the world has just changed the valuations and the deal structuring all these things have changed. However, there have been these Pockets where I've been able to make good decisions.
Only because I have extra powder and right now. I feel like I'm at least over the last handful of years pretty fully deployed where I could get in a position. If I screw up my planning where I'm a forced seller or at least a distress seller, right? Not in any kind of bet the farm way, but it adds stress. And I think that after so long and really focusing so hard and for periods of time working so hard,
To get to a point where I don't need to fortunately in. There's a lot of luck involved but worried about my expenses, like to manufacture a complicated strategies for life that add that stress back in is kind of ridiculous. It's completely absurd. So, I'm trying not to do that. And I noticed among my friends, like almost all of them do this and we laugh about it. It's like, oh yeah. I managed to remove this stress. Let me figure out a really sophisticated. Like,
Sabotaging subconscious way to add all that stress right back in. So that's a long answer to a short question but it's so interesting because you hit on a couple things there that really resonate with me and how I approach things the first was you really like the opportunity cost is huge well no because you're only considering the measurable opportunity cost, you can't measure your sleep at night as easily write and write. And so that decision makes perfect sense. Like why risk what you have and don't
Don't need for, like, what you don't have and don't want to begin with. Yeah. But it doesn't make sense to take those risks that a certain. When you're young, it makes sense to take a lot of risk in order to sort of get ahead. But as you get older, and you have more to lose, sure, you can keep pushing that button as long as you want. But at some point, it doesn't always have to be a pure financial decision. An example of that is, when I left sort of working for the intelligence agency, I had this amazing pension and they're like, well, starting at 55. We're going to pay you this much money every year.
And it's a pretty big sum of money. Like I worked a lot of years there and get a really decent salary, and I was like, no cash it in my account was like, what do you mean? Cash it in? Like that is the worst financial decision you can make and I'm like, it's the worst financial decision but it's the best psychological decision because if I know somebody's coming to save me, I'm going to behave differently. I need all the chips on the table in front of me and I need to know what's on me and I know that doesn't make sense to you. But for me, that's the
the only way that I'm going to have a shot at being successful at this also may not to State the obvious, but let's go for it past shelter, food, all the basics, and then a couple of extra curricular fun things here and there beyond that, even for that the extracurriculars. I mean, presumably the money is used to improve your quality of life. So if you're doing things to make money that are decreasing your quality of life,
Of antithetical, to the whole name of the game, 100% some respect, which I'm saying in part to remind myself of X, I'm making a lot of decisions right now, which for me, provoke a visceral angst because I have been so during periods. I've made some terrible decisions to let's be very clear. I made some very terrible, very expensive decisions. But there have been these Sprint's of say four or five years where I've made,
A series of very good decisions that tend to be opportunistic. The podcast is a great example that was nowhere in a 3 5 or 10-year, plan is very opportunistic, and the timing was really fortunate. And therefore what I start moving as I am right now, quite a bit into, let's just call it safer stuff. That's Up For Debate, but let's just call it safer stuff. It's very counter to my conditioned way of being in the world, you know? I mean, totally,
It's an experiment. I'm also viewing it like look, yeah I'm going to pay a bunch of hits here and there and I'm blah, blah, blah tax, this tax that. Let's not let that Tail Wag the Dog if we can avoid it, but I'm going to do it for. Let's just call it two years and see how I feel. Right if I'm happy, I did it. Great, and if I'm sleeping better, great, and if I'm like, okay, that was an interesting experiment but actually I want to get back in The Fray and roll up my sleeves and like really go at it and this full-contact sport notice all this early stage stuff.
If, you know then fine. It's not a permanent decision. I think that's an interesting way to think about it. I mean, you could also if you feel the need to keep going, you've accomplished so much and you've done really well. You could also just put money aside enough money aside that if everything else went to zero you'd be okay hide that bank account from yourself basically invested in, you know, sort of like safe, reliable stuff and then pretend, it doesn't exist and then go nuts, right? And then like with all the other stuff you can sort of like,
These little mind games on yourself, where it's like all of a sudden I'm worthless. I got to make more, right? And if that's your goal is to do that. But I'm totally with you and like money should improve the quality of life that you're living. And a lot of things that that looks like it's counterintuitive to most people because it looks like time it looks like you buying time. I know we're winding to closed shortly, but I want to ask you perhaps just broad Strokes. How should people think about becoming better at making decisions?
Ins, and here's the backdrop for that, you know, in the room next door, I have poor Charlie's Almanac. I love reading about mental models. However, I sometimes run into this
Cognitive indigestion when I try to force feed myself, too many rules, cognitive biases, fill in the blank. I get to a point where I fail from too much information. Not too little information. Just like if a friend of mine and this has happened a lot who has no exercise habit, no controlled diet to speak of comes to me and says, hey, give me an index card with like, the 20 things I should do to get whatever six pack abs by the end of the year.
Here it never works. It works exactly zero percent of the time, and I have found that sometimes I try to take on too much at once. Sometimes I find looking at decisions retroactively to be helpful, but I'm not sure there are people who would say, well, we don't actually learn that much from our failures, I think Peter teal would probably underscore that. How would you suggest people go about getting better?
At making decisions what are some of the approaches or tools in the toolkit? I think we hit on a couple things during this episode and I'll tie this in a second. So most of the time when we know we're making a decision, we tend to do fairly well in that moment, given the information we have because we're rational about the sense that we're mostly rational, we don't get a perfect but we're directionally correct. If you're thinking about marrying your partner, you know, you're making a decision
Asian. If you're thinking about buying a house you know you're making a decision and those moments we tend to be more rational you know we might be wrong in the end but we're not really wrong especially given the information we have at the time or generally. Correct. So when it comes back to General decision-making, like here's how you undo yourself, you can marry the best person in the world for you, but if you don't invest in that relationship at all multiplies by zero and investing in that relationship, becomes not a decision because you're not thinking about it as a decision, you start living with somebody.
And then all the sudden, you know, you're arguing over how you loaded the dishwasher and you know, it turns into not talking to each other. Well, if I tap you on the shoulder in that moment and I say, hey Tim, you're about to put gas or water onto this situation. What would you like to choose this? What I do with my kids and they're always like, oh water but what I'm really doing is like hey you're making a decision to escalate here is that the decision you want to be making no judgment on my part but like I'm just going to alert you to the fact
Fact, you're making a decision and that tends to help a lot in terms of making better decisions. So how are the moments that happen in everyday life? How do we recognize that their decisions? And I would say the biggest Aid to judgment in decision-making is the position you're in at the time you're making a decision comes back to a lot of what we talked about today. There's three sort of aspects to decision-making that I think about that are very counterintuitive, which is the position. You're in at the time you make the decision. Can you manage your emotions?
Jen's not eliminate them, manage them, your temperament, right? You don't want to be making a decision when you're hungry. Angry lonely, tired. You don't want to be making a decision when you're focused on proving yourself, right? Rather than getting the best outcome. I have this phrase or remind myself with which is outcome over ego. Am I focused on getting the best outcome or my focus on satisfying myself improving myself, right? Because the minute I'm proving myself. Right? What tends to happen is I ignore all this information
Ian that says that I'm not right? And then all the sudden I'm not focused on the outcome so by reminding yourself to focus on the outcome you sort of like open your idea and you get this when you run a business, is tends to be a little easier in some ways because you're so tired and wed to this outcome that you're looking for ideas. No matter where they come from, you're looking for the best idea to get you to the outcome you want. And the third aspect is sort of thinking independently, are you thinking independent of the circumstances or
The circumstances thinking for you are you thinking, independently of what the crowd is doing? Or is the crowd thinking for you? Because if those are happening, if circumstances or the crowd are thinking for you, you're not really thinking at all. But what do you have to do to think independently? You have to be well positioned so that you can think independently. All right, one last question, before we land the plane and that is
If it's possible. What is the short explanation for why we should write in the age of AI writing, is the process by which we realize, we don't understand what we're talking about. And it's only when you sit down and put pen to paper or even type out and idea that you have a decision you're making an idea. You're wrestling with that, you sort of see where you don't understand it. And the process of writing is not only
Refining that idea and helping you reflect on it. But you actually generate new ideas in the process of writing and I think it's so easy. My kids do this right there just like oh insert these little variables into chat GPD outcomes an essay and I'm like you can't use that. You can you can feed it your essay and ask it like where the weak points are that's a different way of using it. Then sort of getting it to write these essays for you but the question they have is like why would I write like this doesn't make sense. This thing will do it for me and I'll get a good grade and
and the other aspect of it say that's important to writing is you learn humility. You learn to give up on an idea that you have. You keep trying to fit this idea in and you've probably experienced this too and you really want this idea to work. Maybe you have a great opening sentence to a paragraph but it just doesn't make sense and you can't make it make sense. So you have to give up on it. You have to delete it. You literally have to delete something from your mind and be like, no, that doesn't make sense. No, that's not good enough. And I feel like there's a certain humility to that that we're almost
Locking in today. Yeah, you're not going to be able to examine your own thinking if the source material is produced by chat GPT. Yeah, well what you're really doing is like you have all these thoughts, right? And you're making the invisible visible and by making the invisible visible, now, I can see it now, I can play with it. Now. I can see where it's, we can wear it strong, and how it interacts with other ideas I have. But when it's just in your head, then you can't see it. So you can't reason with it, you can't play with it. You just end up playing these mental games with yourself, where you
You trick yourself into thinking something that you don't actually think. Yeah. I mean I'm bullish on so many facets of AI so I'm not a Luddite who's trying to keep the the horse and buggy at its Pinnacle or anything like that. However, I do think there's a risk of us subjugating our own faculties in the same way that most of us have lost the ability to navigate without Google Maps or some equivalent, if you
Move your long-form thinking and remove the habit of putting that down in some form, such that you can cross examine it and identify where you're just not making any sense, or maybe there's a shred of something that comes out spontaneously. They makes a whole lot of sense, but if you hadn't captured it, you would never would have noticed it as it passed through your mind, I can't help but think that you will be incredibly weakened over time. And if we're either getting stronger or weaker,
Or let's say directionally we want to go towards the former when possible. Yeah definitely one of the crazy things is like writing is often the process by which we learn to think. Yeah yeah for sure. Yeah. You're not writing down what you think you're writing in order to think right now, it's just journaling this morning. In fact and one of my lines which was borrowed from my some of my friends in the military super simple. I mean this is not a
Incredibly granular rule but just as a guiding philosophy, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Do not fucking Rush. In other words like when I rush, I make mistakes those mistakes cost me more time in the long run just like, trying to make decisions quickly before defining the problem correctly. If you want to be fast in the long-term psychic for me at least, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Shame, the new book is clear. That's a good one, clear thinking, turning ordinary moments,
Into extraordinary results. People can find that wherever find books are sold and people can find the Farnam Street website at f--, s dot blog. If I'm not mistaken, anything else that you would like to mention anything, you would like to add maybe recommendations or requests of the audience. For we come to a close. I'd love to if you want to email me a chain, it FS top log. I read everything but I don't respond to everything. I would love to
No, about sort of the ideas from this episode, that connect two ideas that you have in terms of decision-making and positioning, and what your best ideas are for, how you position yourself to sort of survive in different environments and adapt to whatever the situation requires a dig it. All right, folks, you got it. God be with you Shannon, your
inbox, a shame, that a stop
Flying, and really nice to spend some time together. Shane. Thank you for
Blocking it out and making the time to get together. Really appreciate it. This was awesome. Looking forward to getting together in person seen. Yeah, definitely. And for people listening as always, thank you for tuning in, you can find the show notes, including the Disney diagram will hunt down and everything else. We referred to at Tim top log / podcast and until next time just be a bit Kinder than is necessary. Not only to others but to yourself and thanks for tuning in.
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