In this final episode of 2023, I share personal stories from Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, comment on others’ ‘Best of’ Lists & Quotes, and share an update on the near-future of the podcast.
Here’s what’s covered in this final episode of 2023:
Top 5 Wealth Killers by Peter Mallouk
- By a landslide: credit card debt
- High student loans without a high earning degree
- House(s) / car(s) beyond needs and with a higher carrying cost than you can afford
- A partner that encourages excessive spending
- Personal lifestyle creep
Louis L’Amour was one of the world’s most popular authors. My friend, Joseph Wells (@josephcwells on X), who wrote How to Become the Richest Man in Babylon, in October 2019, read L’Amour’s autobiography in 2023, and wrote the Top 10 Lessons he learned:
- Expect rejection and be pleasantly surprised by success.
- Don’t let school interfere with your education.
- Only judge people of the past based on standards of the past.
- Ideas are everywhere. All you have to do is pay attention.
- Just because you disagree with someone doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them.
- Having an opinion is not the same as thinking. The latter is more valuable than the former.
- “Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.”
- The best way to be a bad manager is to act before you understand a situation.
- “Talent is nothing but long patience.”
- “Let people know what you’re looking for. Often the best information will come from the least likely sources.”
By the way, I’ve been reading Joseph Wells’ The Lake Street Journal for 4 years. It’s sent to my Inbox every Friday morning. I recommend it.
According to @MrSeduceher on X, by age 40, you should be smart enough to realize these Simple Unspoken Rules for Men:
- Don’t make the first offer in a negotiation.
- Never make the first offer in a negotiation.
- Dress well no matter the occasion.
- No one will come to save you. Your life is 100% responsibility.
- Your inner circle MUST be focused on Money, Success and starting a family.
- The family you create is more important than the family you come from.
- Don’t take everything too personally.
- You’re a reflection of the 5 people you spend the most time with.
- Stay silent. Not everything needs to be said.
- If you are not invited don’t go.
- Protect who’s behind you and respect who is beside you.
- Don’t beg for a relationship.
- Never pose with alcohol.
- Be honest.
- If you work on yourself you don’t struggle.
“Gurwinder” (@G_S_Bhogal on X) said he learned hundreds of useful concepts in 2023. Here are 20 of the best to equip you for 2024:
- Licensing Effect: Believing you’re good can make you behave bad. Those who consider themselves virtuous worry less about their own behavior, making them more susceptible to ethical lapses. A big cause of immorality is self-righteous morality.
- Moravec’s Paradox: What’s easy for humans is hard for AI, and vice versa. For instance, differential calculus requires far less compute than merely climbing steps. Thus, AI will likely replace most white collar experts before it replaces most blue collar laborers.
- Tarzwell’s Razor: Emotion causes bias. But it also causes motivation. As such, we’re most likely to act when our judgment can be trusted least. Solution: Don’t trust thoughts you have while emotional. Instead, pause, and wait for the feeling to pass before acting.
- Dartmouth Scar: In 1991, psychologist Robert Kleck pretended to paint a scar on people’s faces, then sent them into job interviews. They reported discrimination due to the scar—even though they had no scar. Few things victimize us more than the belief that we’re a victim.
- Golden Mean: Good character is not about maximizing virtues but moderating them: to be sensitive without being fragile, confident without being cocky, steadfast without being stubborn, driven without being reckless, focused without being obsessed.
- The Reading Recession: There is more text than ever, yet people are reading ever less and outsourcing writing to chatbots. This is dangerous because language is the basis of thought, and if you can’t read or write well, you won’t think well.
- Bandwidth Tax: Being poor is expensive; constantly managing scarce resources requires such mental effort (intellectual and emotional) that there’s little brainpower left for anything else. Thus, poverty makes it hard to escape poverty.
- Purva Paksha: You won’t understand an opposing view till you earnestly try to argue in favor of it. Doing so will override your natural inclination to straw-man the argument, and force you to confront its strongest, most reasonable form, which is usually its actual form.
- Cynical Genius Illusion: Cynical people are seen as smarter, but sizable research suggests they actually tend to be dumber. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute for it, a way to shield oneself from betrayal & disappointment without having to actually think.
- Weber–Fechner Law: Each bottom square contains 10 more dots than the one above. This is noticeable when the dots are few (left) but not when they’re many (right). This blindspot is why you care about saving $10 when buying a burger but (foolishly) not when buying a car.
- Benford’s Law of Controversy: We tend to fill gaps in information with emotion. We fear what we don’t understand, love what we naively romanticize, etc. As such, the things that fire people up most are usually the things they understand least.
- Rothbard’s Law: If a talent comes naturally to someone, they assume it’s nothing special, and instead try to improve at what seems difficult to them. As a result, people often specialize in things they’re bad at.
- KISS Principle: The design of everything is gradually being stripped down, because simple is easy & safe; the less there is, the less there is to offend or justify. But such rampant minimalism comes at a cost; our cultures are losing their uniqueness and identity.
- Explore-Exploit Tradeoff: The young own little so have little to lose, and are free to experiment and overturn norms. The old own much so can’t risk experimenting, and need stability to safeguard the lives they’ve built. A key reason people become more conservative with age.
- The Arc of Happiness: Self-reported happiness graphed by age is “smile-shaped.” The optimism of youth becomes cynicism as responsibilities mount & dreams collide with reality. But after midlife, happiness rises again as people accept reality and learn to enjoy the small things.
- Galloway’s Razor: Research shows people enjoy possessions less than they expected, and they enjoy experiences more than they expected. In the end, people value what they did much more than what they owned. So, if you want to buy happiness, choose adventures over luxury goods.
- Epistemic Luck: You know that if you’d lived in a different place or time, read different books, had different friends, you’d have different beliefs. And yet, you’re convinced that your current beliefs are correct. So, are you wrong, or the luckiest person ever?
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