51–60 of 839 posts
In my case go homeless or die is what it means to fail.
edit: granted I'm not trying to split an atom or something crazy like that, but yeah. The fear of failure is always in the back of my mind.(currently means lose job/debt or generally just making an ass of myself eg. in meetings/srum/professional convo)
"It's not done when you can't add to it, it's done when there's nothing left to take away." Ken Segall (former ad executive that worked with Steve Jobs) shared this during a talk in Ann Arbor at the Michigan Theater in 2018.
That idea is from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, actually.
Nothing (or nearly nothing) is black and white. It's shades of gray. Understand where _this thing_ is at on the spectrum.
"Nothing is ever personal." The way people treat you, has nothing to do with you. They are just living out their own stories. Related idea: "You train others how to treat you." Think reinforcement learning as applied to training a dog. (And I love dogs, have the deepest respect for them). The concept isn't that different when applied to our social interactions.
> Flawless Consulting, A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used by Peter Block (2011)
It's hard to explain the precise way in which an understanding of the central limit theorem has changed my life. However, knowing how any random distribution sums up to a Gaussian has subtly changed how I perceive and comprehend the world around me. Over time, this has added to a significant number of choices and decisions that I've subconsciously made, informed only by rough estimates of a mean value and it's standard deviation.
I was disillusioned with myself. I was performing badly in highschool(even dropped out) I couldn’t understand why.
I wanted so badly to do something epic. I feared being an average guy and living an ordinary life.
I didn’t understand this advice at first. However, I decided that I couldn’t take the life I was living, so I decided to change.
If you accept that the universe is essentially mechanical, then you accept that there is nothing actually standing in your way. You do not have inherent bad luck, and you aren’t cursed.
Probably the best example of this is Elon Musk. The guy watched his entire fortune burn as his companies crumble. He worked 20 hour days. But what separated him was a very specific ability, and it wasn’t just his ability to work hard.
“Most people when confronted with a disastrous scenario start to make bad decisions. When that happens to Elon, he becomes hyper-rational. I’ve never met someone with his ability to take pain.”
This is a paraphrased quote from Musk’s biography, from a Tesla engineer who knew Musk personally when the company was on the verge of collapse. The ability to make hyper-rational decisions during hardship is one of the most important traits of a leader.
This advice got me through that period. I understood that everything had a cause and effect, so I decided to change. Reading made me more prepared for anything. Building and making things made me more friends.
The second you understand that we live in a mechanical universe is the second you are given the key to changing it. I may never become the next Elon Musk(asking myself how can I do it better, but that's another subject if you want to talk about it I'm happy to do so) but my life will be so much happier because I understand that it can change according to rules.
Rationality and a cause-effect mindset is an incredibly tough road to go down because there are no easy answers. When you do, however… you can change anything.
"Nothing is ever personal." The way people treat you, has nothing to do with you. They are just living out their own stories. Related idea: "You train others how to treat you." Think reinforcement learning as applied to training a dog. (And I love dogs, have the deepest respect for them). The concept isn't that different when applied to our social interactions.
You have to accept the world doesn't revolve around you. and that's hard for people.