Intelligence is widely distributed. There are a lot of smart people. And so if you think about what actually differentiates those who do well, it's often the complements to intelligence — things like work ethic, integrity, the ability to get along with others, and emotional stability.
Markets are really good conventional wisdom distillers and that's actually very valuable. In other words, people will say that as a sneer, they're like, 'Oh, this is just conventional wisdom.' And I like, 'No, that's actually really good.'
Intelligence is not sufficient for success. The world is full of intelligent people who don't succeed, and the reason is that intelligence has complements — things like drive, emotional stability, the ability to work with others, and good judgment — and those complements are often more important than intelligence itself.
Most of us have ideas about what we're looking for in a romantic partner. But psychologist Paul Eastwick says these preferences are surprisingly poor guides for finding love.
Intelligence is probably not the limiting factor for most intelligent people. If you're smart enough to be in the game, the question is really about the other stuff — your ability to stay humble, to keep learning, to manage your own psychology.
Stories, he says, are fundamentally about the negotiation of social life. They're about conflicts between characters, conflicts between desires, conflicts between values. And when we immerse ourselves in stories, we are essentially running simulations of human experience.
Intelligence is probably one of those things where there's a certain level you need, but beyond that, the marginal returns are pretty low. And actually the things that matter much more are the complements to intelligence — things like work ethic, emotional stability, intellectual honesty, and the ability to sit with uncertainty.
Intelligence is probably the most overrated trait in investing. The thing that actually matters is whether you can sit with uncertainty, whether you can be wrong for a long time and still hold your position, and whether you have the emotional stability to not panic when things go against you.
Intelligence is widely distributed, but the complements to intelligence — things like the ability to sit quietly in a room alone, to not need external validation, to be patient, to be willing to look foolish — those things are much more rare.
Intelligence is broadly useful, but if everyone is smart, then intelligence doesn't differentiate who wins. What differentiates who wins are the complements to intelligence — things like judgment, temperament, and the ability to act under uncertainty.
Intelligence is probably not the binding constraint on investment performance. The binding constraint is much more likely to be things like emotional stability, patience, the ability to hold an unpopular view, or the willingness to be wrong for a long time before being right.
Intelligence by itself, has very limited value. What matters is what complements it — things like the ability to do hard things for a long time, the ability to be honest with yourself, to have good values, to care about the people around you.
Intelligence is probably not the limiting factor for most intelligent people. The limiting factor is more likely things like courage, or open-mindedness, or patience, or emotional balance — the complements to intelligence.
Stories are how we make sense of the world, how we communicate with each other, and how we understand ourselves. But stories can also mislead us, by making the world seem more coherent and predictable than it really is.
It's not that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it because we are afraid to say no, because we don't have the confidence to say no because we don't have the discipline to say no.
Intelligence is probably the thing people spend the most time thinking about in this business, and I think it's one of the least important factors in long-run success. The returns to intelligence are just not that high in investing, and the reason is that markets are pretty efficient.
When you think about a terrorist attack or any historical turning point, it's not the thing that happens. It's how you react to it like that shows your freedom and your and your character and I I just think we have to recognize that we blew it and that the the next time that there's a crisis, we have to react better than that
When you're sleep-deprived, you're often the last to know it. People who get six hours of sleep think they're doing just fine, but when you test them, they're performing as badly as people who've been awake for 24 hours straight.
I'm a huge believer in low self-esteem. You know, it's the key to success. If you don't think you're the smartest person in the room, you just shut up and you pay attention.
We tend to think that what we want will make us happy. But psychologists have found that we're remarkably bad at predicting what will actually bring us satisfaction. We imagine that major life events — a promotion, a new relationship, a bigger house — will transform our happiness, but their effects are often smaller and shorter-lived than we expect.
We want to get the thing we're comparing our life to, but when we get it, we start comparing ourselves to the next rung up the ladder. So there's this moving goalpost that keeps shifting higher and higher, and that's really the hedonic treadmill.
We think if we just get that next thing — the promotion, the relationship, the house — we'll finally be happy. But the research suggests that we're not very good at predicting what will make us happy, and we're especially bad at knowing how long that happiness will last.
Most of us believe that we know what we want. We imagine that if we just got that thing — the job, the relationship, the house — we'd be happy. But research suggests that we're not very good at predicting what will make us happy, and that we often adapt to good things far more quickly than we expect.
We don't experience our lives in global terms. We don't think of ourselves as having a good life. We think of ourselves as having a good morning or a bad morning. And so the quality of your life is largely determined by the quality of your experiences, your moments, but the moments aren't equal.
We assume that if we just get that promotion, or find that perfect partner, or move to that new city, we'll finally be happy. But research suggests that we're wrong about what will make us happy, and we're also wrong about how long that happiness will last.
AI is essentially looking at patterns and trying to guess what the next word should be. And such that it's a regression to the mean. AI takes everything to the average and people aren't interested in reading average or average doesn't grab your heart. It's something that's an outlier that you haven't seen before that resonates with you.
The bigger the hype, the greater the chance that you overheat the economy in the short run. that for the day job of the Fed, the more promise there is, the more the more temptation, the more tendency to spend today based on the promise of what is to come. And that you got to be careful about because that's just old-fashioned overheating right now.
We tend to think that if we're unhappy, something must be wrong with our lives. But research suggests the opposite is also true: when we're unhappy, we look for things that are wrong with our lives. Our emotional state shapes what we perceive and remember, so that unhappiness itself can generate the very evidence we use to explain it.
Most of us believe that bad things shouldn't happen to good people, and when they do, we struggle to make sense of it. But psychologists have found that this belief — sometimes called the 'just world hypothesis' — can lead us to blame victims for their own misfortune, because it's more comforting to think that people get what they deserve than to accept that life is fundamentally unpredictable.
I don't stay up at night, which might be dumb, right? There's a lot of very smart people who think AI is going to murder us all. There's a bunch of smart people who think it's going to, you know, become a god and save us all. I tend to be really focused on like, oh, there's actually a lot of like humans are flexible.
Those who uh don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. And I am here before you today to say even if you know your history, you're doomed to repeat it. Because the you know the if when you're in the moment, you have no historical perspective. You see things in terms of your your impulses, your your you know what's good for you.
great investors should look for world-class strengths rather than an absence of weaknesses, and why expanding the ways we recognize talent can raise the bar rather than lower it
The magical thing when you do less, when you eliminate the inessential, when you stop saying yes to things that don't matter, when you stop getting caught up in busy work and nonsense, he says you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better.
Most of us assume that negative experiences will harm us, and positive experiences will help us. But psychologists have found that bad experiences are often more instructive than good ones — we learn more from our failures than from our successes, and we grow more from adversity than from ease.
Most of us believe that bad things happen to bad people, and good things happen to good people. We call this the 'just world hypothesis.' The problem is that it's not true — and our commitment to this belief can lead us to blame victims of misfortune, rather than help them.
We're supposed to be able to predict and control what happens to us. And when bad things happen to good people, it's a violation of that assumption. It threatens our belief in a just world — the sense that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
The venture business is a strange one because you're making decisions about things that don't yet exist, trying to figure out whether the founder has the capacity and the ability and the drive and the intelligence and the resilience to do something with an idea that hasn't yet been tested in the marketplace.
4w ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
