“Become Abnormal”: traits to cultivate for top performance

Yeah, that research didn’t hold up.

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Long-run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-being

http://www.nber.org/papers/w24667

We surveyed a large sample of Swedish lottery players about their psychological well-being and analyzed the data following pre-registered procedures. Relative to matched controls, large-prize winners experience sustained increases in overall life satisfaction that persist for over a decade and show no evidence of dissipating with time. The estimated treatment effects on happiness and mental health are significantly smaller, suggesting that wealth has greater long-run effects on evaluative measures of well-being than on affective ones. Follow-up analyses of domain-specific aspects of life satisfaction clearly implicate financial life satisfaction as an important mediator for the long-run increase in overall life satisfaction.

Does Money Buy Happiness? A Longitudinal Study Using Data on Windfalls

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/ajoswald/march...

The most fundamental idea in economics is that money makes people happy. This paper constructs a test. It studies longitudinal information on the psychological health and reported happiness of approximately 9,000 randomly chosen people. In the spirit of a natural experiment, the paper shows that those in the panel who receive windfalls -- by winning lottery money or receiving an inheritance -- have higher mental wellbeing in the following year. A windfall of 50,000 pounds (approximately 75,000 US dollars) is associated with a rise in wellbeing of between 0.1 and 0.3 standard deviations. Approximately one million pounds (1.5 million dollars), therefore, would be needed to move someone from close to the bottom of a happiness frequency distribution to close to the top. Whether these happiness gains wear off over time remains an open question

I think it's because I was able to connect with people so well when I was young that I went down this path.

It was just a game at the end of the day. Make the right moves, win the right prizes. But like any game, you lose the magic after a while. And unlike video games, you can't just step back and take a break from doing it, it's an unavoidable part of being human.

But you're not off-base. At this level you definitely lose touch with everything people find "normal." I've found myself not caring about other people or their problems. Why would I?

Group dynamics are emergent behavior that's coded into our DNA to increase survival, prisoner's dillema style. If someone does nothing for me or adds nothing to my life, why would I give them any of my empathy? Can't they fix their own problems? Do they wish some knight in shining armor would ride in and save them? Do they want a handout? My empathy, for free? How selfish is that.

Every problem has a solution, endless complaining gets one nowhere. When I was broke and homeless, I'd get my own hands dirty. Now that I'm comfortably wealthy, I can throw money at whatever problem pops up.

Whatever problems, emotional, physical, mental, sociological, economical, yada yada yada, that you have are your own responsibility. No one really gives a shit about anyone else; all relationships are transactional, and if you're not offering me gold beads, you're not getting my muskets.

Ranting aside, that's a brief intro to my experience and worldview. If any particular piece resonated with you strongly, please leave a reply. I'm always interested in seeing original ideas, how infrequent it may be.

I think "touched a nerve" should be a last assumption. If you can't point to any obvious things wrong with the article maybe people are reacting to it negatively for emotional reasons. But I think it's uncharitable to just jump to that straight away. So let me lay out for you a reasonable alternative that we can prefer as an explanation for why people are responding negatively: Because it's a fundamentally bad article. I'll make that case.

The first point that the article tries to push is "Don't make reasonable excuses". To justify that point he tells a story about a woman that was successful despite facing incredible challenges. Here's the problem with that though: She succeeded, but that's got nothing to do with reasonable excuses. Did she make reasonable excuses? I don't know. Why are we taking the message from her story that we should not accept reasonable excuses? Surely a story to justify not making reasonable excuses should actually involve someone succeeding because they didn't make reasonable excuses. And this underlines a fundamental issue with the article - it's true that by definition the most successful people are abnormal. But it's not useful. The least successful people are abnormal. The important bit is how you're abnormal.

This is exacerbated by the fact the article is so basic and formulaic in its structure. It's the old 7 habits of highly effective people. You make a pithy statement, you write a little bit explaining the claim that doesn't really justify the statement - it justifies a very specific reading of the statement to the point of the pithy statement being meaningless, and then it tells you an anecdote. The anecdote doesn't justify the claim whilst simultaneously wildly over-stating the importance of the claim. John Wooden won basketball games because he stopped worrying about things he couldn't control! Great! Firstly, that's not abnormal, and secondly I'm fairly certain practicing basketball had more to do with his success.

All I'm saying is that the structure and style of this article is bad. You can argue about the merits of the things he's proposing, but they're proposed in such a 1990s self-help way of presenting these things, and it's not even well executed. As a result it's really easy to bash.

Handy people can truly appreciate how true that statement is.

If you fix enough things, you build a collection of tools and techniques that let you fix just about anything. You also build a lot of confidence in your own repair skills.

Two years ago, I bought my first motorcycle. I was afraid to change the oil on it. I'm currently rebuilding a motorcycle engine. A lot of that knowledge carries to bicycles and cars, so in a sense, it compounds.

Make more mistakes. I learned to cook by messing up dishes. I've messed up enough dishes to know how not to mess up.

You have to be comfortable with making mistakes and being bad at things, because it happens a lot when you're just getting started.