Curiosity Chronicle

What have you changed your mind on recently? Egocentric Bias says that we convince ourselves of the accuracy of our own personal perspective—that we view ourselves as unimpeachable—and therefore struggle to acknowledge any perspectives or data that may alter our understanding of the world.The parable of The Blind Men and The Elephant tells the story of six blind men who examine one part of an elephant and each come to very different conclusions on what an elephant is. They are all partly right, but also all entirely wrong.The information you have about the world represents a tiny fraction of the information available, yet you use it to form a view of how the world works.Remember the Blind Men Razor: "Never attribute to malice, ignorance, or stupidity that which can be adequately explained by different information."

Confession: I am a nervous public speaker. But confident public speaking is a critical skill, so we need a set of strategies to increase our confidence and perform as the best version of ourselves.Prep Strategies: (1) Study the best speakers and learn from them, (2) Create a clear storytelling structure, and (3) Build "lego blocks" but avoid rote memorization.Pre-Stage Strategies: (1) Address the Spotlight Effect and ask "so what?" about your worst fears, (2) Get into character and turn on the best version of yourself, and (3) Eliminate stress with a simple breathing technique.Delivery Strategies: (1) Cut the tension in the crowd at the outset, (2) Use big, broad gestures and avoid touching your pockets or torso, and (3) Move with purposeful, slow steps.

In the early 1970s, Stanford psychology researcher Dr. Mark Lepper conducted a study with a group of young children that found those who had received a reward for completing a task experienced lower intrinsic motivation to perform that task in the future.The Passion Paradox: We have a deep desire to chase our passions, but by chasing them, we may actually reduce our passion for them.Three strategies for escaping the paradox: (1) Keep play as play, (2) Let work be work, and (3) Make work more playful.

You're firing on all cylinders personally and professionally—inspired and motivated. Then, suddenly, you aren't. Things become very, very difficult. You're in a rut.I've developed a useful set of principles for managing these swings and working out of them. My three-step method to work out of a rut: (1) Stop digging, (2) Change direction, and (3) Create movement.Ruts will happen. When they do, slow down and allow yourself to work through them. The worst thing you can do is push the engine harder and risk taking yourself out of the game for a longer period than if you had worked through it.

A Reddit post I shared that read, "PSA: 20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids" sparked a lot of online dialogue last week.Our default setting of work worship may be slowly, methodically robbing us of joyful, fulfilling, comprehensively wealthy lives. Perhaps it’s worth questioning the default setting—to begin living by design, rather than by default.I am of two minds on this: (1) Being present and spending time with those you love is the most important thing in the end and (2) Having the people you love see you work hard on things you care about is a principle they'll remember for the rest of their lives. Understanding, navigating, and balancing the tension across these two minds is how you ultimately "win" the game.

In the 1980s, Microsoft founder Bill Gates began an annual tradition he called the Think Week. Gates would seclude himself in a remote location, shut off all of his communication, and spend an entire week dedicated to reading, learning, and thinking.While I knew I didn't have an entire week to dedicate to it (due to early career demands, family priorities, etc.), I figured I could adapt something with a similar core ethos and vision. The Think Day was my creation—and I want to share its value with all of you today...Pick one day each month (or quarter) to step back from all of your day-to-day professional demands. Seclude yourself (mentally or physically), shut off all of your notifications on your devices, and put up an out-of-office response. The goal is to spend the entire day reading, learning, journaling, and THINKING.

While in Omaha at the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, I got into a long conversation with a friend and mentor on one particularly impressive facet of the show: The effortless air about Buffett and Munger's entire performance, the ease and elegance with which they operate in what looks like a pressure-packed situation.The term sprezzatura has come to be defined as a "studied carelessness" in the modern English language. I think of it as earned effortlessness.The Paradox of Effort: You have to put in more effort to make something appear effortless. Effortless, elegant performances are often just the result of a large volume of effortful, gritty practice. Small things become big things. Simple is not simple.

We all struggle with some degree of self-doubt and fear of failure. It's particularly common among ambitious high-achievers, who, by definition, are constantly putting themselves in situations that are on the edge of their current competency level.Character Invention: Create a character in your mind who can show up in the way you want to and teach yourself to "flip the switch" to become this character when necessary.Character Invention in three steps: (1) Identify the situations where you'd like to show up as the best version of yourself, (2) Envision the character you would like to embody in each situation, and (3) Get yourself some reps by turning on this character in those situations.

Investor Graham Duncan coined the phrase "Time Billionaire" as someone who has over one billion seconds to live.To me, being a “Time Billionaire” isn’t necessarily about having the actual time, but about the awareness of the precious nature of the time you do have. It is about embracing the shortness of life and finding joy in ordinary daily moments of beauty.Treat time as your ultimate currency—it’s all you have and you can never get it back. Spend it wisely, with those you love, in ways you’ll never regret.

We live in a culture that endlessly promotes and celebrates the achievement of the extraordinary—of those who accomplished some supreme feat in a single, narrow domain.The Trap of the Extraordinary is that we conflate success with the achievement of the extraordinary. Winners are those who achieve the extraordinary, losers are those who do not.To escape the trap, there are two mindset shifts to focus on: (1) It’s not about achieving the extraordinary, it's about finding purpose, joy, and fulfillment in the ordinary along the way; and (2) The prize is not the achievement you strive for, but the striving itself.

The Spotlight Effect is a common psychological phenomenon where we overestimate the degree to which other people are noticing or observing our actions, behaviors, appearance, or results.Pre-conditioned fear of placing yourself in "spotlight situations" means you shrink yourself down from your true potential. This is a tremendous drag on growth.To fight back: (1) Develop an awareness of the Spotlight Effect and when it may hit, (2) Focus on being interested rather than interesting, and (3) Ask "So what?" to confront your fears.

The Learning Pyramid indicates that teaching is a much more effective driver of retention than reading or lecture. The goal should be to move rapidly to teaching in order to cement new learning.The Feynman Technique is a learning model that leverages teaching and prioritizes simplicity to help you develop a deep understanding of any topic.The four key steps of the Feynman Technique: (1) Set the Stage, (2) ELI5, (3) Assess & Study, and (4) Organize, Convey, & Review.

The 1-in-60 Rule says that a 1-degree error in heading will cause a plane to miss its target by 1 mile for every 60 miles flown. Tiny deviations from the optimal course are amplified by distance and time. A small miss now creates a very large miss later. This highlights the importance of real-time course corrections and adjustments.The end of each calendar quarter presents us with a valuable opportunity to reflect on the quarter that was in order to make any necessary adjustments to our goals and systems that will ensure the next quarter is better than the last.The Personal Quarterly Review involves three steps: (1) Reflect, (2) Assess, and (3) Adjust. You can download a free printable PDF of the template at the link in the newsletter.

The Four Idols framework says that everyone is driven by the pursuit of one (or more) of the following idols: Money, Power, Pleasure, and Fame.We make most of our daily decisions based on our worship of our idol. The downside: As we strive to get “closer” to our idol, we find ourselves on an endless chase for more. We incorrectly assume that this chase will lead us to the promised land of happiness.We do not need to reject our idol. The goal is to develop a conscious awareness of your idol—to become aware of what is motivating and driving you, and to understand the separation between this chase and your lifelong pursuit of fulfillment and happiness. The Four Idols exercise is simple: Use a process of elimination to identify your primary idol. Reminder, there is nothing wrong with any of these idols—they are perfectly natural. The key is to become aware of your idol—to understand the role and influence it has in your decision-making and life, and to realize that chasing this idol will not lead to happiness on its own.

Complexity is a silent killer of focus, clarity, and performance. This statement is true for businesses, but even more so for your work and life. It's easy to let complexity and disorder slowly seep in—we tend to add, but rarely subtract.The Simplicity Audit examines four key environments of your life: Physical, Digital, Mental, and Social.For each item in each environment, ask: (1) Is this necessary? (2) Is this creating energy? If "Yes" to both, keep it. If "No" to both, remove it. If "Yes" to one, think on it.

We're often told that we should live life according to a core set of values. The challenge, of course, is in determining and defining what these core values are.The Deathbed Regret List is the most efficient and illuminating process I've discovered for defining and clarifying the core values with which we should live our lives. It forces you to begin with the end in mind.The exercise has three steps: (1) Make a list of your most likely deathbed regrets; (2) Formulate a set of 3-5 core personal values that are highlighted by your regret list; and (3) For each core personal value, determine the actions you can take today to behave in line with that value (and avoid the eventual regrets).

The Boot Up Sequence is a fixed set of actions and environmental cues that mentally and physically mark the start of your work session. While it can be used for any work session, I find it particularly impactful and valuable in priming for a deep work session (daily focused work on the "most important thing").The Boot Up Sequence is built around the five senses: Touch, Taste, Sight, Sound, and Smell. Engaging each of these allows you to quickly and consistently enter your flow.If you aren't able to execute your full, ideal Boot Up Sequence, simply aim to nail 3 out of the 5 senses of the sequence. My experience suggests that 3 out of 5 is achievable under a variety of circumstances, and it's enough to create the mental and physical entryway into your flow.

A parable is broadly defined as a succinct story that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. My view is that these parables have a sort of “Lindy effect” signaling, whereby their survival and re-telling across the generations is a signal of their usefulness and value.The Parable of the Farmer and the Horse is about cultivating a "maybe" mindset. The villagers constantly tell the farmer that he has had good or bad luck, but he simply replies with "maybe" each time.Two powerful lessons: (1) Life is cyclical—the seeds of destruction are sewn during creation and the seeds of creation are sewn during destruction; and (2) Dispel the narratives—allow events to simply flow with and past you as they are, not as you want them to be.

One of the most significant obstacles we face on our journey to progress is intimidation at what the progress will require. Sometimes the notion of needing to commit to a string of actions is enough to stop us from taking the first action."Any success takes one in a row. Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more. Over and over until the end, then it’s one in a row again." - Matthew McConaugheySo the next time you find yourself struggling with the intimidation of the future, change the narrative: Just focus on executing one-in-a-row. Do one thing well, then another, then another. Then do it again.

The Surfer Mentality: When a surfer gets up on a wave, they enjoy the present moment, even though they know with certainty that the wave will eventually end. They fully enjoy THIS wave, with the wisdom and awareness that there are always more waves coming.5 ideas of applications of this mentality: (1) enjoy your next wave and embrace the present moment, (2) be strategic about your positioning in between waves, (3) pass on more waves rather than jumping at the first one that comes your way, (4) always get in the water and stop sitting on the shore, and (5) roll with the punches that life deals you.Follow-up book recommendation: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Audiobook is highly recommended.

In my discussions for the Life Lessons from 1,000 Years, one of my 90-year-old participants shared a piece of poignent wisdom on lies: "The most damning lie is the lie you tell to yourself."I began reflecting on what lies I've been telling myself, as well as ways to reframe them to fight back.Here are the 10 most dangerous lies we tell ourselves (and reframes that will help change the internal narrative).

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was known for his prolific, almost otherworldly productivity. His secret: He never confused the urgent with the important.The Eisenhower Matrix is a 2x2 visualization tool that forces you to differentiate between the urgent and the important in order to prioritize and manage your time more effectively.The Goal: Manage urgent and important tasks, spend most of your time on the not urgent and important tasks, and spend less time on the not important tasks.

The Oxford Languages English dictionary defines luck as "success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions."But all you need to do is perform a simple search of the phrase "quotes on luck" to reveal a great many perspectives that differ from this definition. Maybe there is more to luck than meets the eye. Perhaps it's possible, as these quotes suggest, to manufacture luck.This episode covers the most valuable framework I've encountered for thinking about luck: The 4 Types of Luck. The 4 types of luck are (1) Blind Luck, (2) Luck from Motion, (3) Luck from Awareness, and (4) Luck from Uniqueness.

Every year on my birthday (January 5), I like to conduct some interesting exercise that will push me to grow in a new way. This year, I asked a number of 90-year-olds a simple question: "If you could speak your 32-year-old self, what advice would you give?"The responses were...incredible. They range from fun, playful, and witty to deeply moving. I'd encourage you to read through them with your loved ones and reflect on those that hit you the hardest.

In 1666, a young Cambridge University student left campus in the midst of a plague ravaging Europe and moved home to his small village. In the year that followed, he would make major discovering in mathematics, physics, and more. The young man was Sir Isaac Newton, and 1966 became known as his miracle year.This story is not about discovering gravity or inventing calculus—it's about the amazing possibilities of one year. It's about the incredible potential energy held within—waiting to be released.This piece contains 23 actionable ideas for making 2023 your miracle year—segmented into categories across work, health, money, and personal.

This annual planning process has been an immensely helpful exercise to which I would credit many of my greatest achievements. I hope that it will spark you to conduct your own before year-end. You can download a beautiful (and free!) printable PDF of the template at the link in the newsletter.

While somewhat arbitrary, the end of the calendar year does present us all with a valuable opportunity to reflect on the year that was, and plan for the year that will be. It's easy to glaze over the former and focus on the latter, but failure to reflect will eventually manifest as a failure to grow.It's easy to glaze over the former and focus on the latter, but failure to reflect will eventually manifest as a failure to grow.I started conducting a Personal Annual Review 10 years ago as I was nearing the end of my college years. It has been an immensely helpful exercise to which I would credit many of my greatest areas of progress.This episode shares the template for my Personal Annual Review. I hope that it will spark you to conduct your own before year-end, as I'm highly confident you will gain the same value that I have from the exercise.Here are the 7 simple questions that may change your life...Note: You can download a beautiful (and free!) printable PDF of the template at the link on my website.

Today at a Glance:There is one tool that has been used with near perfect consistency by history's greatest men and women. From artists and inventors to entrepreneurs and athletes, they have all understood the immense power of this one, simple tool: the walk.There is a tremendous body of research to support the mental and physical benefits of walking. Improved creativity, improved cardio health, improved memory retention, and many more benefits have all been found in recent, peer-reviewed research.The four types of walks to consider implementing: (1) Active walks, (2) Passive "tech free" walks, (3) Morning sunlight walks, and (4) Break walks. Start small and build the habit over time!

Today at a Glance:The Learning Pyramid indicates that teaching is a much more effective driver of retention than reading or lecture. The goal should be to move rapidly to teaching in order to cement new learning.Richard Feynman developed a learning framework grounded in teaching and iteration that was highly effective for him during his illustrious academic career.The Three-Step Learning Model: (1) Read & Research to build a base, (2) Teach to cement learnings and highlight knowledge gaps, and (3) Assess & Iterate to fill the gaps.

Today at a Glance:Humans have a tendency to manufacture complexity. We make progress in our lives—personally or professionally—and decide that the best way to celebrate that progress is to sprinkle on a new bit of chaos.We can all laugh at this tendency to complicate life, but we should also find ways to simplify it.Here are 50+ short, timeless insights for simplifying your world—"hacks" for your life, careers, relationships, health, money, and more.

Today at a Glance:When compared to our ancestors, our lives appear to be filled with significantly more attention-grabbing pulls in a variety of directions. Our attention is more divided than ever.Attention residue is the idea that there is a cognitive cost to shifting your attention from one task to another. When our attention is shifted, there is a "residue" that remains in the brain and impairs our cognitive performance on the new task.To fight back: (1) Work in deep focus blocks, (2) take regular walks or breathers between higher value tasks, and (3) batch processing times for messages. Implement these three strategies and you will immediately see a difference in your work quality and efficiency.

Today at a Glance:The highest performers embrace software updates. They treat their minds like a code base that requires consistent updates and resets to improve upon the old.There are a variety of baseline rules for life that are deeply ingrained into our minds and in dire need of an update. Many of these rules are culturally ingrained, meaning they have been repeated and passed down with no regard for their continued accuracy, or the quality of their underlying assumptions.Today's piece shares 8 rules that have been commonly repeated, but that we should probably start breaking.

Today at a Glance:Becoming a father has changed a lot of things about my life. My relationship with time—specifically my awareness of the passing of time—has fundamentally morphed.The Paradox of Time: We are aware of the incredible value of our time but constantly take actions that are disrespectful of that value. We know how important our time is, yet we ignore its passage and engage in low value activities that pull us away from the things that really matter.Our time is finite, but we often fail to recognize it until it's too late. Asking the hard questions and doing the simple math that they require is how you can bring awareness to the surface and rethink your priorities and tradeoffs.

Episode at a GlanceAncient culture was marked by an embrace of friction. Modern culture is marked by an avoidance of friction.In our obsessive quest to reduce friction, we may be eliminating some of the moments, experiences, and texture that made us uniquely human.My Prediction: In a world of steadily decreasing friction, it will be those who are willing to embrace friction that will thrive. To become one, start by finding small ways to choose the hard way even as the easy way stares you in the face.

Today at a GlanceA high performer is a person who consistently executes their craft at a top-1% level over an extended period of time.I'm very fortunate to be able to spend time with many such people during the normal course of my "work"—from CEOs to athletes to investors to artists. This means I have a front row seat for direct observation of what makes these people tick.This piece lays out 12 non-obvious traits of high performers, including the ability to modulate intensity, focus on questions, embrace healthy paranoia, and more.

Today at a Glance:I spent most of my life as the “busy” guy. If anyone asked how I was doing, I would always respond with some variation of “so busy!” or “good, but really busy!” I was actually busy, but it also became part of my identity—a weird brag I developed to try to signal my value and improve my own self-worth.In the modern era, everyone seems really busy. We say we are busy as a status signal and for self-protection—we feel we are busy due to over-connectedness, obsessive optimization, and failures of prioritization.Busyness has a whole host of negative effects on our lives. We work more but actually get less done on the things that really matter. What's more, busyness negatively impacts our physical and mental health, as well as our enjoyment of daily life.Escaping the Busy Trap involves three key steps: (1) reframe the goal to focus on output per unit input, (2) prioritize what truly matters, and (3) embrace boredom and free time.

Today at a Glance:Whether we admit it or not, we spend a good portion of our lives protecting ourselves from reality. But there are times when our rose-colored glasses hold us back. In certain situations, when we fail to see the world as it is, we make sub-optimal decisions and miss out on critical growth and learning opportunities.Today's piece shares the "harsh truths" I've observed as life changing in their importance to our decision-making and progress.This piece is not intended to be dark or morbid. It's intended to make you think—to hopefully question some underlying (yet flawed) assumptions and spark active discussion with those around you.

Today at a Glance:The most successful people in the world achieve compounding success through incredible focus on a small number of projects and opportunities.You have a personal flywheel. Before it gets spinning, saying yes will help you identify the actions that will get it moving. Once it gets spinning, saying no will help you ruthlessly prioritize the actions that accelerate its pace.Use the 2-list strategy for establishing core priorities: Make a list of 25 priorities, circle the top 3-5 items on the list, mark everything else as the avoid-at-all-costs items.One helpful razor for saying no: If you don't want to do something RIGHT NOW, it's probably a no.

Today at a Glance:Warren Buffett is the most famous investor of all time. He is a treasure trove of frameworks, ideas, and insights, most of which apply well-beyond investing.Today's piece shares 8 of my favorite frameworks from the so-called Oracle of Omaha, including their application to your business, career, and life.

A “razor” is a rule of thumb that simplifies decision making.Humans are wired to take shortcuts in our decision-making. These shortcuts can lead us astray—but when used appropriately, the shortcuts can be extremely valuable.Today's piece shares a long list of powerful decision-making razors to help you make better decisions, faster than ever before.

Today at a Glance:Studying the daily routines of people you admire is a worthy pursuit. You can learn a lot about a person's priorities by breaking down their typical day. You may also learn something that will dramatically improve your own systems, habits, and processes.Benjamin Franklin was one of the most prolific entrepreneurs, thinkers, and leaders in history. I expected his daily routine to be a reflection of his incredible output: long, unrelenting, and complex. But the beauty of this schedule is in its pristine simplicity: two core questions and six blocks of time.The 6 core principles to apply: (1) Establish a fixed sleep schedule, (2) Create Clarity Questions, (3) Become a polymath, (4) Work in sprints. (5) Create order, and (6) Make time to unwind.

Episode at a glance:Incentives are a powerful and ubiquitous force. "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome" - Charlie Munger. Thoughtfully-designed incentives are likely to create wonderful outcomes. Poorly-designed incentives are likely to create terrible outcomes.Goodhart's Law says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Because of Goodhart's Law, incentive systems often suffer from unintended consequences.Poorly-designed incentives typically exhibit the McNamara Fallacy (what can't be measured isn't important), a narrow focus (missing the forest for the trees), or an obsession with vanity metrics (what looks impressive versus what actually matters).The 6 principles to consider in crafting thoughtful incentives: (1) Objectives, (2) Metrics, (3) Anti-Metrics, (4) Stakes & Effects, (5) Skin in the Game, and (6) Clarity & Fluidity.