The Weekly Grind Newsletter - 21/07/2023
The Weekly Grind #20- Read Time: 4 Minutes
Espresso Shots of Wisdom
‘I never pay attention to anything by ‘experts’. I calculate everything myself.’
In the information age ‘experts’ have become a dime a dozen.
As we watch fitness ‘gurus’ rattle off the science behind optimal fitness or finance ‘gurus’ share ‘signals’ from investment charts, we must be mindful that these ideas are rarely based on personal research.
Worse yet they are seldomly even based on research they have taken the time to read themselves, but on the ideas espoused by other influencers further up the hierarchy.
Never has it been more imperative to exercise due diligence in the media we consume and to take the responsibility to calculate things ourselves.
(Richard Feynman)
‘Take the facts into your own hands; look, and see for yourself.’
Price’s Law states that 50% of any given result is generated by the square root of the number of those who contribute to it.
Therefore in any given sector, the majority of research and development is carried out by very few people.
Yet millions of people hold strong views on complex conundrums based on secondary information, Youtube videos and online articles, or worse yet, little information at all.
We live in a world where audience trumps authority, crowds cloud credibility, and exclamation eclipses expertise.
The only way to avoid this is to do the work yourself - pick your field and become a genuine authority.
(Louis Agassiz)
‘If you never fail, you’re only trying things that are too easy and playing far below your level.’
Failing is integral to the development process - so much so that science has found the perfect ratio between failing and succeeding to ensure that we are engaged in deliberate practice and learning optimally.
Statistical analyses of learning, in both physical and mental scenarios, indicate that a level of difficulty where there is a fail rate of ~15%, thus as success rate of ~85%, is optimal.
It is posited that failed attempts provide increased focus, thus enhancing the learning process.
For educators and life-long learners, we should create scenarios that approximate this ratio, to ensure that learner achievements are celebrated and that they feel motivated, while also ensuring they are stretched and challenged.
(Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Cappuccino Contemplations
What are the hidden costs of trying to get ahead?
Our desire to get ahead can be The Achilles’ Heel of our creativity and curiosity.
Former Yale professor, William Deresiewicz, spoke of the World Class Hoop-Jumpers he taught who were more concerned ‘about getting A’s and adding bullet points to their resumes than using their time at one of the world’s best universities to follow their curiosity’.
‘Prestige is a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy’
(Paul Graham)
Are you buying into cruel optimism?
With the explosion of social media, cruel optimism has become the new currency creator.
Cruel optimism, a term coined by Johann Hari, describes;
‘when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture - like obesity, or depression, or addiction - and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon - but it is, in fact, cruel because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.’
(Johann Hari)
Worse yet, when the solution does fail, which is inevitably the case for 98%+ of users, the individual blames themselves and not the system, creating further anxiety.
So before you sign up to a program that promises to help you make the jump to a lucrative career, change your lifestyle or body composition within the next 90 days, be sure the system is reliable, repeatable and reputable and that you are not fuelling and funding cruel optimism.
Americano And Chill
With the weekend upon us, I look forward to doing some writing, a long cycle and watching the end of the Tour De France.
Unfathomable performance for Jonas Vingegaard in the TT stage.
Have a great weekend,
David.