1 The wilderness and dry land will be joyously glad!
The desert will blossom like a rose and rejoice!
2 Every dry and barren place will burst forth with abundant blossoms,
dancing and spinning with delight!Isaiah 35:1-2, TPT
(I was too engrossed in the book that I did not get to take down notes so massive thanks to the above resources, which will be useful when refreshers are needed.)
And all of these jobs were physically demanding, some of them even damaging if performed month after month. Now, I am an unusually fit person, with years of weight lifting and aerobics behind me, but I learned something that no one ever mentioned in the gym: that a lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. You feel it coming on halfway through a shift or later, and you can interpret it the normal way as a symptom of a kind of low-level illness, curable with immediate rest. Or you can interpret it another way, as a reminder of the hard work you’ve done so far and hence as evidence of how much you are still capable of doing—in which case the exhaustion becomes a kind of splint, holding you up.
(emphasis added)
“Perhaps I keep circling back to grace because it is one grand theological word that has not spoiled. I call it ‘the last best word’ because every English usage I can find retains some of the glory of the original.”
The great Christian revolutions come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when somebody takes radically something that was always there.
H. Richard Niebuhr
We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and shortsightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite . . . But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude.
The General’s Speech, Isak Dinesen
There is perhaps no one of natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it. Struggle with it. Stifle it. Mortify it as much as one pleases. It is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself. . . . Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.
Benjamin Franklin
“Religious faith—for all its problems, despite its maddening tendency to replicate ungrace—lives on because we sense the numinous beauty of a gift undeserved that comes at unexpected moments from Outside. Refusing to believe that our lives of guilt and shame lead to nothing but annihilation, we hope against hope for another place run by different rules. We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.”
It is a terrible thing, I found, to be grateful and have no one to thank, to be awed and have no one to worship.
“Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.”
“Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.”
“Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.”
“Paul—‘the chief of sinners’ he once called himself—knew beyond doubt that God loves people because of who God is, not because of who we are.”
Grace is free only because the giver himself has borne the cost.
“What would it mean, I ask myself, if I too came to the place where I saw my primary identity in life as ‘the one Jesus loves’? How differently would I view myself at the end of the day?”
“Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: you become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible’s astounding words about God’s love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?”
Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more . . . and grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.
“Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more—no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less—no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.”
But God’s forgiveness is unconditional; it comes from a heart that does not demand anything for itself, a heart that is completely empty of self-seeking. It is this divine forgiveness that I have to practice in my daily life. It calls me to keep stepping over all my arguments that say forgiveness is unwise, unhealthy, and impractical. It challenges me to step over all my needs for gratitude and compliments. Finally, it demands of me that I step over that wounded part of my heart that feels hurt and wronged and that wants to stay in control and put a few conditions between me and the one whom I am asked to forgive.”
Henri No
“The word resentment expresses what happens if the cycle goes uninterrupted. It means, literally, ‘to feel again’: resentment clings to the past, relives it over and over, picks each fresh scab so that the wound never heals.”
“Forgiveness offers a way out. It does not settle all questions of blame and fairness—often it pointedly evades those questions—but it does allow a relationship to start over, to begin anew.”
You recreated your past by recreating the person whose wrong made your past painful.
Lewis Smedes
Forgiveness is a remembering of the past in order that it might be forgotteb.
Paul Tillich
Forgiveness is not just an occasional act: it is a permanent attitude.
Martin Luther King Jr.
We’re all oddballs but God loves us anyhow.
“I sense in Jesus’ approach a fulfillment, not an abolition, of the Old Testament laws. God had ‘hallowed’ creation by separating the sacred from the profane, the clean from the unclean. Jesus did not cancel out the hallowing principle, rather he changed its source.
You may hate the sin, but you are to love the sinner.
Dr. C. Everett Koop
But I know that this (divorce) is no worse than the slander, the lie, the gesture of pride of which I am guilty every day. The circumstances of our life are different, but the reality of our hearts is the same.
Paul Tournier
To love a person means to see him as God intends him to be.
St. Augustine says ‘God gives where He finds empty hands.’ A man whose hands are full of parcels can’t receive a goft. To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.
C. S. Lewis
“Can God forgive you? Of course. You know the Bible. God uses murderers and adulterers. For goodness’ sake, a couple of scoundrels named Peter and Paul led the New Testament church. Forgiveness is our problem, not God’s. What we have to go through to commit sin distances us from God—we change in the very act of rebellion—and there is no guarantee we will ever come back. You ask me about forgiveness now, but eill you even want it later, especially if it involves repentance?”
It is the saints who have a sense of sin. The sense of sin is the measure of a soul’s awareness of God.
Father Daniélou
“I once read that proportionally the surface of the earth is smoother than a billiard ball. The heights of Mount Everest and the troughs of the Pacific Ocean are very impressive to those of us who live on this planet. But from the view of Andromeda, or even Mars, those differences matter not at all. That is how I now see the petty behavioral differences between one Christian group and another. Compared to a holy and perfect God, the loftiest Everest of rule
“Who is my enemy? The abortionist? The Hollywood producer polluting our culture? The politician threatening my moral principles? The drug lord ruling my inner city? If my activism, however well-motivated, drives out love, then I have misnderstood Jesus’ gospel. I am stuck with law, not the gospel of grace.”
“Jesus declared that we should have one distinguishing mark: not political correctness or moral superiority, but love. Paul added that without love nothing we do—no miracle of faith, no theological brilliance, no flaming personal sacrifice—will avail (1 Corinthians 13).”
Attack the false idea, not the person who holds that idea.
Martin Luther King Jr.
“The church works best as a force of resistance, a counterbalance to the consuming power of the state. The cozier it gets with government, the more watered-down its message becomes. The gospel itself changes as it devolves into civil religion.”
“In an odd way, the government hostility ultimately worked to the church’s advantage. Shut out of the power structures, Chinese Christians devoted themselves to worship and evangelism, the original mission of the church, and did not much concern themselves with politics. They concentrated on changing lives, not changing laws.”
The largest and deepest reference of the Gospel is not to the world or its social problems, but to Eternity and its social obligations.
P. T. Forsyth
“Perhaps Christians should work harder toward establishing colonies of the kingdom that point to our true home. All too often the church holds up a mirror reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a different way.”
Of one hundred men, one will read the Bible; the ninety-nine will read the Christian.
Dwight L. Moody
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.
Simone Weil
“. . . one of our main tasks, perhaps the main task, is to make ourselves known to God. Good works are not enough—‘did we not prophesy in your name?’—any relationship with God must be based on full disclosure. Tha masks must come off.”
We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him.
Thomas Merton
“. . . as I seek to look at the world through the lens of grace, I realize that imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks.”
“Our wounds and defects are the very fissures through which gracemight pass. It is our human destiny on earth to be imperfect, incomplete, weak, and mortal, and only by accepting that destiny can we escape the force of gravity and receive grace. Only then can we grow close to God.”
God in heaven holds each person by a string. When you sin, you cut the string. Then God ties it up again, making a knot—and thereby bringing you a little closer to him. Again and agin your sins cut the string—and with each further knot God keeps drawing you closer and closer.
So tonight, I asked Him to speak to me and He used Genesis 36 and the opening of 37 to speak to me. Genesis 36 in and of itself is a simple and straightforward account of Esau’s descendants and how the blessing spoken to his ancestors also came to pass in his life. He was now an overlord of many tribes in Edom; he was clearly well-established in the land. On the other hand, this is how Jacob’s account opened: “So Jacob settled again in the land of Canaan, where his father had lived as a foreigner.” Genesis 37:1
Footnote: In ch 36, Esau was well on his way to power and prosperity; by contrast, Jacob, still waiting for the promise, settled in the land as a foreigner, like his father. He was still a temporary resident with a single family. Worldly greatness often comes more swiftly than spiritual greatness. Waiting for the promised spiritual blessing while others prosper is a test of patience, faith, and perseverance.
This footnote says it all. It could not have been any more exact. What kind of greatness was I after whenever I wonder about things of the world forgone? Nothing wrong that if that’s what You are calling me to do but it’s not; and we both know what happens if I follow the ways of the world — or even my own fallen, personal will.
Tonight, I surrender afresh to the greatness that comes from You.
And it’s all because of you, Jesus
It’s all because of you, Jesus
It’s all because of your love
And my soul will live
— Scandal of Grace, Hillsong United
Tonight I was reminded about Who I am doing this for.
Journal Entry | September 10, 2019
This is one of my dad’s favorite dishes so I cooked this for him this Father’s Day. 👔
Ingredients
700g beef kalitiran
1/2 cabbage
3-4 stalks of pechay
9-10 small potatoes
1 onion, quartered
Ground pepper
Salt
Butte.r
Milk
Procedure
2 | United Airlines 173
“That is one of the ways that closed loops perpetuate: when people don’t interrogate errors, they sometimes don’t even know they have made one.”
“Practice is not a substitute for learning from real-world failure, it is complementary to it.”
3 | The Paradox of Success
“This is the paradox of success: it is built upon failure.”
“Science is not just about confirmation, it is also about falsification. Knowledge does not progress merely by gathering confirmatory data, but by looking for contradictory data.”
“Feedback, when delayed, is considerably less effective in improving intuitive judgement.”
“If a culture is open and honest about mistakes, the entire system can learn from them.”
“Claims and lawsuits made against the University of Michigan Health System, for example, dropped from 262 in August 2001 to 83 in 2007 following the introduction of an open and disclose policy.”
“Mechanisms designed to learn from mistakes are impotent in many contexts if people won’t admit to them.”
“The underlying problem is not psychological or motivational. It is largely conceptual. And until we change the way we think about failure, the ambition of high performance will often remain a mirage, not just in healthcare but elsewhere, too.”
4 | Wrongful Convictions
Type One error – an error of commission
Type Two error – an error of omission
“When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs.”
Cognitive dissonance – the inner tension we feel when, among other things, our beliefs are challenged by evidence
“It is only when we have staked our ego that our mistakes of judgement become threatening. That is when we build defensive walls and deploy cognitive filters.”
5 | Intellectual Contortions
“How can one learn from failure if one has convinced oneself—through the endlessly subtle means of self-justification, narrative manipulation, and the wider psychological arsenal of dissonance-reduction—that a failure didn’t actually occur?”
Counterfactual problem – the situation is complex and you can’t rewind the clock to see if an alternative approach would have worked better
“If it is intolerable to change your mind, if no conceivable evidence will permit you to admit your mistake, if the threat to ego is so severe that the reframing process has taken on a life of its own, you are effectively in a closed loop. If there are lessons to be learned, it has become impossible to acknowledge them, let alone engage with them.”
“Intelligence is often deployed in the service of dissonance-reduction. Indeed, sometimes the most prestigious thinkers are the most adept at deploying the techniques of reframing.”
“This is surely a warning sign that instead of learning from data, some economists are spinning it. It hints at the suspicion that the intellectual energy of some of the world’s most formidable thinkers is directed, not at creating new, richer, more explanatory theories, but at coming up with ever-more tortuous rationalisations as to why they were right all along.”
“It is precisely those thinkers who are most renowned, who are famous for their brilliant minds, who have the most to lose from mistakes. And that is why it is often the most influential people, those who ought to be in the best position to help the world learn from new evidence, who have the greatest incentive to reframe it.”
“But avoiding failure in the short term has an inevitable outcome: we lose bigger in the longer term. This is, in many ways, a perfect metaphor for error-denial in the world today: the external incentives—even when they reward a clear-eyed analysis of failure—are often overwhelmed by the internal urge to protect self-esteem.”
Confirmation bias – “another reason why the scientific mindset, with a healthy emphasis on falsification, is so vital. It acts as a corrective to our tendency to spend our time confirming what we think we already know, rather than seeking to discover what we don’t know.”
“Most people get stuck in a narrow and wrong hypothesis, as often happens in real life, such that their only way out is to make a mistake that turns out not to be a mistake after all.”—Paul Schoemaker
“Intelligence and seniority when allied with cognitive dissonance and ego is one of the most formidable barriers to progress in the world today.”
6 | Reforming Criminal Justice
“Memory is a system dispersed throughout the brain, and is subject to all sorts of biases. Memories are suggestible. We often assemble fragments of entirely different experiences and weave them together into what seems like a coherent whole. With each recollection, we engage in editing.”
“The very fact that memory is so malleable may lead us astray when it comes to recollection. But it could also play a crucial role in imagining and anticipating future events.”
“Memories should be coaxed out of witnesses with sensitivity to the biases that might otherwise contaminate the evidence.”
Drive-bys – an eyewitness is taken by police to see a suspect on the street, or at their place of work
Line-ups – a suspect and a number of fillers are placed side by side in a room
Double-blind sequential line-ups – a line-up administered by an officer who doesn’t know the identity of the suspect and where suspects and fillers are shown one at a time rather than simultaneously
7 | The Nozzle Paradox
“Progress had been delivered not through a beautifully constructed masterplan (there was not plan), but by rapid interaction with the world.”
“Evolution is a process that relies on a ‘failure test’ called natural selection. Organisms with greater ‘fitness’ survive and reproduce, with their offspring inheriting their genes subject to a random process known as mutation.”
Cumulative selection – results of one selection test are fed into the next, and into the next, and so on
“In markets, on the other hand, it is the thousands of little failures that lubricate and, in a sense, guide the system. When companies go under, other entrepreneurs learn from these mistakes, the system creates new ideas, and consumers ultimately benefit.”
Top-down reasoning vs. bottom-up iteration
“Tinkering, tweaking, learning from practical mistakes: all have speed on their side. Theoretical leaps, while prodigious, are far less frequent.”
Temporal difference learning – TD-Gammon, a program to play backgammon, made moves, predicted what would happen next, and then looked at how far its expectations were wide of the mark, updating its expectations and taking it into the next game in the process
Narrative fallacy – “We are so eager to impose patterns upon what we see, so hardwired to provide explanations, that we are capable of ‘explaining’ opposite outcomes with the same cause without noticing the inconsistency.”
“The narrative fallacy, in effect, biases us towards top-down rather than bottom-up. We are going to trust our hunches, our existing knowledge, and the stories that we tell ourselves about the problems we face, rather than testing our assumptions, seeing their flaws, and learning.”
Andre Vanier and Mike Slemmer, 1-800-411-SAVE
“Test early, and then iterate rapidly while receiving feedback from consumers, thus developing new insights.”
Perfectionism – a pre-closed loop behaviour wherein one spends so much time designing and strategising without getting a chance to fail at all (at least until it’s too late); “You are so worried about messing up that you never even get on the field of play.”
The lean start-up – plays on the value of testing and adapting; “Instead of designing a product from scratch, techies attempt to create a ‘minimum viable product’ or MVP. This is a prototype with sufficient features in common with the proposed final product that it can be tested on early adopters.”
Agile scrum development, fail-fast approach, and failure-based notions
Guided-missile approach – “Success is not just dependent on before-the-event reasoning, it is also about after-the-trigger adaptation.”
8 | Scared Straight
Counterfactual – all the things that could have happened, but which, in everyday experiences, we never observe, because we did something else
Randomised control trial (RCT) – “By isolating the relationship between an intervention (bloodletting, a new website, etc.) and an outcome (recovery from illness, sales) without it being obscured by other influences, they clarify the feedback.”
Selection bias – only considering outcomes that lean towards or favor a certain end
“It doesn’t require people to be actively deceitful or negligent for mistakes to be perpetuated. Sometimes it can happen in plain view of the evidence, because people either don’t know how to, or are subconsciously unwilling to, interrogate the data.”
9 | Marginal Gains
Marginal gains – breaking down a big goal into small parts, improving on each of them, and delivering a huge increase when put back together
“When it comes to really big issues, it is very difficult to conduct controlled experiments. To run an RCT you need a control group, which is not easy when the unit of analysis is very large. This applies to many things beyond development aid, such as climate change (there is only one world), issues of war and peace, and the like.”
“Instead of debating whether aid is working as a whole (a debate that is very difficult to settle on the basis of observational data), you can find definitive answers at the smaller level and build back up from there.”
“Marginal gains is not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn’t.”
“Success is a complex interplay between creativity and measurement, the two operating together, the two sides of the optimisation loop.”
“Every error, every flaw, every failure, however small, is a marginal gain in disguise. This information is regarded not as a threat but as an opportunity.”
External validity – the extent to which the results of one RCT can be applied to new contexts
10 | How Failure Drives Innovation
Problem phase of innovation – “The creative process (starts) with a problem, what you might even call a failure, in the existing technology. . . . Creativity is, in many respects, a response.”
“The encouragement of debate—and even criticism if warranted—appears to stimulate more creative ideas. And the cultures that permit and even encourage such expression of differing viewpoints may stimulate the most innovation.”
“Contradictory information jars, in much the same way that error jars. It encourages us to engage in a new way. We start to reach beyond our usual thought processes (why would you think differently when things are going just as expected?).”
Two environments where epiphanies often happen:
“Innovation is highly context-dependent. It is a response to a particular problem at a particular time and place.”
Pixar: “We are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process—reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.”
“It is when we fail that we learn new things, push the boundaries, and become more creative. Nobody had a new insight by regurgitating information, however sophisticated.”
11 | Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114
Circular firing squad – a mutual exercise in deflecting responsibility
“It is only when people trust those sitting in judgement that they will be open and diligent.”
Forward looking accountability – the accountability to learn from adverse events so that future patients are not harmed by avoidable mistakes
Fundamental attribution error – the brain just plumps for the simplest, most intuitive narrative
Hindsight bias – once we know the outcome of an event, it is notoriously difficult to free one’s mind from that concrete eventuality
“The reason that it is commercially profitable for papers to run stories that apportion instant blame is because there is a ready market for them. After all, we prefer easy stories; we all have an inbuilt bias towards simplicity over complexity. These stories are, in effect, mass-printed by-products of the narrative fallacy.”
12 | The Second Victim
“Trying to increase discipline and accountability in the absence of a just culture has precisely the opposite effect. It destroys morale, increases defensiveness and drives vital information deep underground.”
13 | The Beckham Effect
Error Related Negativity (ERN) – a negative signal, originating in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain area that helps to regulate attention
Error Positivity (Pe) – observed 200-500 milliseconds after the mistake, associated with heightened awareness; a separate signal from ERN
Fixed Mindset – belief that basic qualities (intelligence or talent) are largely fixed traits
Growth Mindset – belief that most basic abilities can be developed through hard work
“Compared with those at the extreme end of the fixed spectrum, those in the Growth Mindset had a Pe signal three times larger.”
“At some point you have to make a calculation as to whether the costs of carrying on are outweighed by the benefits of giving up and trying something new.”
“When we see failure without its related stigma, the point is not that we commit to futile mistakes, but that we are more capable of meaningful adaptation: whether that means quitting and trying something else or sticking—and growing.”
14 | Redefining Failure
Failure Week at Wimbledon High School in South-west London by Heather Hanbury
Failure parties at Eli Lilly by W. Leigh Thompson
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”—Henry Ford
Self-handicapping – a pre-emptive dissonance-reducing strategy; “What is the point of preserving self-esteem that is so brittle that it can’t cope with failure?”
Coda | The Big Picture
“When you have top-down approaches competing with each other, with a failure test to determine which of them is working, the system starts to exhibit the properties of bottom-up.”
“Success, at the level of the individual as well as at the level of the system, will increasingly hinge on adaptability.”
“This is the notion we need to instil in our children: that failure is a part of life and learning, and that the desire to avoid it leads to stagnation.”
Pre-mortem – assumption that an endeavor has failed then soliciting possible solutions and workarounds based on the failed outcome; “Prospective hindsight, as it is called, increases the ability of people to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%.”—Gary Klein
8 | “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience with the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for me, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth.”
“We want cattle who can finally be food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.”
“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
13 | “When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.”
18 | “This impossibility He calls love, and this same monotonous panacea can be detected under all He does and even all He is—or claims to be.”
“Thus He is not content, even Himself, to be a sheer arithmetical unity; He claims to be three as well as one, in order that this nonsense about Love may find a foothold in His own nature.”
25 | “He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.”
“The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both.”
30 | “In this, as in the problem of cowardice, the thing to avoid is the total commitment. Whatever he says, let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it ‘for a reasonable period’—and let the reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last. It need not be much shorter; in attacks on patience, chastity, and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight.”
“Up to a certain point, fatigue makes women talk more and men talk less. Much secret resentment, even between lovers, can be raised from this.”
31 | “But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realised what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone. . .”
Screwtape Proposes A Toast | “They are capable, you see, of real repentance. They are conscious of real guilt. They are, if things take the wrong turn, as ready to defy the social pressures around them for the Enemy’s sake as they were to defy them for ours. It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.”
0 | Preface
“When I said that I’m most interested in minor geniuses, that’s what I meant. You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.”
“Self-consciousness is the enemy of “interestingness.”
“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. … It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’d really like to be.”
2 | The Ketchup Conundrum
“Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preferences. But that makes it easy to forget that sometimes happiness can be found in having what we’ve always had and everyone else is having.” 🥫
3 | Blowing Up
“We’re more willing to gamble when it comes to losses, but are risk averse when it comes to our gains.”
“It’s like you’re playing the piano for ten years and you still can’t play ‘Chopsticks’ and the only thing you have to keep you going is the belief that one day you’ll wake up and play like Rachmaninoff.” 📈
“(Spitznagel) is there to remind Taleb that there is a point to waiting, to help Taleb resist the very human impulse to abandon everything and stanch the pain of losing.”
“There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.” 📉
4 | True Colors
“’Because I’m worth it’ and ‘Does she or doesn’t she?’ were powerful, then, precisely because they were commercials, for commercials come with products attached, and products offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation.”
“As Herzog knew, all of us, when it comes to constructing our sense of self, borrow bits and pieces, ideas and phrases, rituals and products from the world around us—over-the-counter ethnicities that shape, in some small but meaningful way, our identities.”
8 | Million-Dollar Murray
“It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.” — Philip Mangano, on the power-law problem of homelessness 🏘
10 | Something Borrowed
“But everyone gets to steal (your invention)—after a decent interval—because it is also in society’s interest to let as many people as possible copy your invention; only then can others learn from it, and build on it, and come up with better and cheaper alternatives.”
“The point instead is that in the ordinary case—indeed, in practically every case except for a narrow range of exceptions—ideas released to the world are free.” 💡
“He knew enough about music to know that these patterns of influence—cribbing, tweaking, transforming—were at the very heart of the creative process.”
Borrowing that is transformative vs. Borrowing that is merely derivative
“Old words in the service of a new idea aren’t the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea.”
“The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.”
11 | Connecting the Dots
creeping determinism – “the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable
12 | The Art of Failure
“We live in an age obsessed with success, with documenting the myriad ways by which talented people overcome challenges and obstacles. There is as much to be learned, though, from documenting the myriad ways in which talented people sometimes fail.”
explicit learning vs. implicit learning (“learning that takes place outside of awareness”)
“Stress wipes out short-term memory. People with lots of experience tend not to panic, because when the stress suppresses their short-term memory they still have some residue of experience to draw on.”
perceptual narrowing
“Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.”
panicking – conventional failure (“pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome”)
choking – paradoxical failure
stereotype threat
13 | Blowup
normal accident – can be expected in the normal functioning of a technologically complex operation
real accident – caused by one massive, venal error
risk homeostasis – “under certain circumstances, changes that appear to make a system or an organization safer in fact don’t. Why? Because human beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.”
14 | Late Bloomers
prodigies – conceptual, rarely engage in open-ended exploration/research, finds, ex. Picasso
late bloomers – experimental, searches/seeks, ex. Cézanne
“Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods.”
“The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.”
patrons and a dream team
“We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.”
15 | Most Likely to Succeed
Students of a very bad teacher will learn half a year’s worth of material in one school year vs. very good teacher will learn a year and a half
“Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.”
Teacher effects > class size effects
Teacher-student interaction competency
16 | Dangerous Minds
homology – agreement between character and action
Organized vs. Disorganized crime
17 | The Talent Myth
talent mindset – deep-seated belief that having better talent at all levels is how you outperform your competitors
differentiation vs affirmation
3 Types of Flawed Managers
fixed vs malleable intelligence
“(Companies) don’t just create; they execute and compete and coordinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star.” ⚡️🛳
“The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around.” ⚡️🛳
18 | The New-Boy Network
“When we make a snap judgment, it is made in a snap. It’s also, very clearly, a judgment: we get a feeling that we have no difficulty articulating.”
“Apparently, human beings don’t need to know someone in order to believe that they know someone.”
“The first impression becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: we hear what we expect to hear. The interview is hopelessly biased in favor of the nice.”
“Social progress, unless we’re careful, can merely be the means by which we replace the obviously arbitrary with the not so obviously arbitrary.”
19 | Troublemakers
“It doesn’t work to generalize about a relationship between a category and a trait when that relationship isn’t stable—or when the act of generalizing may itself change the basis of the generalization.” 🐕👳🏿♂️
Hi. 