On Self-Deception

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Friendly AI researcher and contributor to the blog Overcoming Bias:

“Never try to deceive yourself, or offer a reason to believe other than probable truth; because even if you come up with an amazing clever reason, it’s more likely that you’ve made a mistake than that you have a reasonable expectation of this being a net benefit in the long run.”

Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on October 21, 2008 at 1:03 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Mental Models

John T. Reed, author of Succeeding:

“When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.”

Charlie Munger, vice-president of Berkshire Hathaway and business partner of Warren Buffett:

“What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together o­n a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

“You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct o­n this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience o­n a latticework of models in your head.

“What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models because if you just have o­ne or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does…

“It’s like the old saying, “To the man with o­nly a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple models.

“And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in o­ne little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

“You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly wise person. And, of those, o­nly a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.“

Full text of Mr. Munger’s excellent speech, “The Art of Stockpicking,” available here.

Bonus “man with a hammer” example: Tim Wu reviews The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on October 19, 2008 at 12:29 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Success

John T. Reed, author of Succeeding:

“Each field of endeavor has a bunch of tricks, shortcuts, best practices, rules, whatever you want to call them. If you want to succeed in that field, you must learn them and master them. The great news about them is that everybody can master these things, but many of the more talended people will not master those things and you will beat them out as a result.”

Marcus Buckingham, The One Thing You Need to Know:

“The one thing you need to know about sustained individual success: Discover what you don’t like doing and stop doing it.“

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple:

“I get asked this a lot and I have a pretty standard answer which is, a lot of people come to me and say “I want to be an entrepreneur”. And I go “Oh that’s great, what’s your idea?”. And they say “I don’t have one yet”. And I say “I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you’re really passionate about because it’s a lot of work”. I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life. If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure its been done but its rough. Its pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.”

Jason Fried, partner at 37signals:

“… What’s success? Do you need to make Google money? Do you need to have Microsoft market share? Do you need to have Apple’s brand loyalty? Nope.

So what do you need to be successful? Luckily that’s entirely up to you. Success is relative.

The best way to be successful is to define your own success. Success can be tiered too. If you want to eventually run a public company you can still be successful on your way there. If you want to stay small you can fight growth and remain successful too. It’s up to you, not up to someone else.

A small company with a few employees pulling in $25,000/month can be successful. Another company with a couple thousand paying customers can be successful. And another company that just breaks even but stays happily afloat can be successful. You don’t need to win every medal to be successful.”

Hat tip to workhappy.net.

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on at 12:02 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Work

Frank Lloyd Wright, architect:

“I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.”

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States:

“I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

Peter Drucker, father of modern management theory:

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”

Jean De La Fontaine, 17th century French poet:

“By the work one knows the workman.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan:

“Screw the money. No money can compensate for being turned into a rat in a cage… We’ve got plenty of slaves. You can identify them because they wear neckties.”

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on October 14, 2008 at 3:36 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Academia

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan:

“Academia has nothing to do with producing knowledge. They produce PR. The four most important thinkers of modern history – Freud, Marx, Einstein, Darwin – none was a conventional academic.” (Source)

A.N. Wilson, English historian and columnist:

“In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity – or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity – by being opinionated rather than by being learned.”

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on at 3:26 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

On Complexity

Scott Adams, cartoonist and creator of Dilbert:

“As a general rule, wherever you find a large group of people who are baffled by complexity, you will find a smaller group of people making a good living screwing them.”

Dennis Prager, radio talkshow host:

“One of the great mind-destroyers of college education is the belief that if it’s very complex, it’s very profound.”

Edward de Bono, creativity expert:

“Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple.”

Edwin Way Teale, naturalist, photographer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The American Seasons:

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.

Alan Perlis, computer scientist at Yale University:

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”

This entry was written by Josh Kaufman, posted on at 2:55 pm, filed under Quotes. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.