Hi all,
It’s nearly winter time. I’ve never played hockey on a pond. But it’s quite a different game than hockey with actual boards. Actually, without those constraints, is it still a game?
Constraints define games. Constraint limit action and choice. They streamline your focus and can create the tension required to form a compelling story, game or business.
Ending on a questing: what constraints define you?
Have a good weekend,
—Brendan
I enjoy underlining certain passages in books to convince myself I’m retaining what I’m reading. Over the years I’ve probably underlined thousands of sentences that I’ve since forgotten about… until recently.
This week I’m sharing round 3 of some wisdom nuggets that I believe you’ll find insightful and practical. Check out round 1 or round 2 if you missed them.
Wisdom Nugget #1:
Twyman’s Law "Any figure that looks [exceptionally] interesting or different is usually wrong."
—Tony Twyman
There is one nerdy, data science-y way to interpret this: challenge unusual findings and try to falsify what you see, just how any good scientist with a PhD would. A theory that survives violent attempts at proving it wrong is that much stronger.
There is another way to interpret the law, too: if something is too (unusually) good to be true, it probably is.
Below is a screenshot from Alameda Research’s 2018 pitch deck (kudos to Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory for digging this up here):
In the investment world, guaranteeing a fixed return with “no risk” is a huge red flag. As it turns out, that data point was too good to be true.
Wisdom Nugget #2:
“Are we obliged to be faithful to our errors, even if we perceive that by this faithfulness we do damage to our higher self? No—there is no law, no obligation of that kind; we must become traitors, act unfaithfully, forsake our ideals again and again. We do not pass from one period of life to another without causing these pains of betrayal, and without suffering from them in turn.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (Human All Too Human)
Girls are impressed by seersucker pants. Voting is a waste of time. Nothing matters in life because eventually everything I do will eventually be forgotten. These are all things I used to believe. Thankfully, I changed my mind about them.
We are constantly learning and making new discoveries. Sometimes, we discover we’re wrong. Nietzsche encourages us to disown these wrong beliefs. There is no law obligating us to remain faithful to them forever. Only ego and pride.
Here’s a rule of thumb from Ray Dalio for measuring your personal rate of change:
“If you don’t look back on yourself and think, ‘Wow how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year.”
Wisdom Nugget #3:
"No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are, we are who we are in relating to others."
—James Carse (Finite and Infinite Games)
What is the sound of one hand clapping? *Eye roll* That’s the famous Zen koan. Here it illustrates something fundamental: a single hand makes no sound, no signal, no impact. You need two.
What is one person in a vacuum? One human on Earth? A physician with no patients? A cook with no hungry eaters? You get the point. Most meaning in life is tied up in the lives of other people. Serving, teaching, and loving them. If life is a game, we need other people to play it with.
Sometimes this quiet truth is forgotten in a culture preoccupied with loudly expressing individual achievement. But no man is an island. We’re critically all connected. And speaking of connections…
Wisdom Nugget #4:
“We tend to think of someone as being well connected if he or she knows a particular world very well. But Watts and Newman’s research shows that the best-connected people are really the ones who have the most diverse group of contacts.”
—Eric Beinhocker (The Origin of Wealth)
I recently wrote about the importance of putting yourself in situations to meet new random people (e.g. serendipity), something I don’t particularly excel at. Even a little randomization can have a sizeable impact on your connectedness. In Watts’ and Newman’s experiment, increasing the percentage of a person’s friends who were “random” (i.e. outside their normal social circle) from 0 to 25% reduced their average degree of separation with others from 40 to 3.6.
Random connections can unlock access to brand new communities… and opportunities. In a world in which higher education is prohibitively expensive and the good jobs are extremely competitive, a strong network can make all the difference. And a strong network is (partially) a random one.
Thanks for reading! I love when these thoughts lead to conversations with readers. Did you find anything interesting or surprising? Reply to me and let me know.