Introspect Yourself
dcgross.com
dcgross.com
There are so many persuasion filters here "Partner at Ycombinator", "Co-Founder", "Director", "Apple", "High Achiever writer in general". With this many strong credentials, it would be very very difficult to critically read such advice and then think of alternative ideas.
"If you don’t retrain your model based on input from the crowd, you’ll never converge on truth." This is true for machines.
Other high achievers believe in the alternate version.
"Reasonable men adapt to the world around them; unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men." Edwin Louis Cole
"truth is my goal. Controversy is my gym. I'll do a hundred reps of controversy for a 6 pack of truth" - Kanye west.
"Your life goal should be not to win any particular game, rather to win the sum of all games." This metaphor of everything is a game really really works well for certain people. I personally witnessed it.
It would be a sad life if you turn everything you do in life as a game where you need to compete with others to win and never question the nature of the game itself.
"Do what you love" is an over all long term approach that sustains your energy and focus for long term.
Most ideas of high achievers are very contradictory, in general its a good idea to listen to so many of them and pick something that meets your style.
I've got the problem of being too introspective, which can lead to a lot of beating yourself up, but after 30 years I get myself, which is nice. I'm not sure you can do that if you're constantly chasing what a lot of people value though which is success, "influence", money, a social life, etc. Those are all great indicators of success, but if you don't slow down how can you really stop and think about yourself? Not to introduce Trump (okay, going to do it anyway), but that's a guy who has spent 70 years chasing stuff, being addicted to fast food and TV. Has that guy ever stopped and thought about what's wrong with himself? What he can do better? Strongly doubt it. Much of our society is that, caught up in some loop where they never have the ability to do anything but react.
If we're honest with ourselves, much of what the world values is stupid if not outright evil. When people don't see that I don't believe they've really thought things through. That's pretentious, but we gotta get real about how we and others work or nothing will change.
Guess what I'm saying is by all means be introspective, but really be introspective. Don't measure yourself against bad yardsticks, be honest about your flaws and strengths. Don't do it because it's some game to maximize your utility, do it because if you don't do it, you are worse off.
I'm currently reading Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin that covers the fundamentals on how to think. 200+ pages on how the mind works from common misjudgements to systems thinking. Highly recommend it to anyone interested in self-improvement, especially better decision-making.
I frame it as living more deliberately. Every moment is an opportunity to better yourself, better your position, better your brand, or help others better themselves. Introspection is the means to identify those opportunities and build habits around them.
This concept as a whole is a conversation that, in my opinion, happens all too infrequently. Everyone should try to find someone that they can talk to about this concept because there's a ton of value in being able to vocalize these internal monologues. Talking to someone about your introspective processes and conclusions brings another level of intellectual honesty to the entire process.
I'd also ask "why" to this one repeatedly (socratic method perhaps). In my mind that leads to "purpose of life" - which is, I suppose, a philosophical question with no easy answer.
It has helped me have a more holistic view of myself through a wide range of question and topics, and especially from the answers my friends have shared.
Firefox 59.0.2
The summary of it is ask what questions not why questions. "Asking “why?” in one study appeared to cause the participants to fixate on their problems instead of moving forward."
[0] https://ideas.ted.com/the-right-way-to-be-introspective-yes-...
"What's the meaning of the phrase 'Chip on your shoulder'?
"A perceived grievance or sense of inferiority."
-- https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/chip-on-your-shoulder.ht...
"Having a chip on your shoulder" indicates you get into many fights.
Would anyone be able to help unpack this? I feel there is some depth to this idea but am not quite making the connection.
In card games like Magic or Hearthstone, there's a lot of randomness. Sometimes you don't draw the cards you expect. A common problem for new players is that they'll focus specifically on these scenarios, and they'll say, "well, the game is just luck."
But the point of games like these are to increase your win percentage. Variance is expected. A good deck is not one that wins 100% of the time but one that, over time, increases its win percentage.
Now, whether or not a game has elements of luck, there will still be scenarios outside of your immediate control where you lose. You may not know enough to win, you may not have enough practice or discipline to win. Even in this scenario, your goal is (often) not to win every single game you play - it's over time to increase your win percentage.
Or in other words, in both a luck and skill-based world it might still be worthwhile to lose a 'game' if it means you can win two in the future. In particular, this comes up a lot in entrepreneurship - a good entrepreneur is one who harnesses variance to their advantage, rather than focusing on just the immediate challenge or project in front of them.
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Note that I don't believe this is universally true. It's true for some games, and it's an important point to learn if you're trying to deal with variance. However, there are certain scenarios where failure is incredibly costly, and you can't focus on the long-term in those scenarios. So, overall it's good advice, but you should still take it with a grain of salt.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to apply yourself to areas where 90% of the result is determined by luck (unless you truly enjoy it).
I mentioned above that there are scenarios where failure is incredibly costly, but the opposite is sometimes also true. Job hunting comes to mind.
I use luck to describe anything with variance that I can't control. So by that measure, job hunting has a ton of luck involved. But I don't need to have a good win rate for job applications - I just need one job application to succeed.
That's something I can play the odds with - if I have a 10% chance of getting hired at any given company, I can send out 10 applications and have... what, a 60% chance of getting hired? I'm bad at math, but you get the point.
In Hearthstone terms, aggressive decks also used to use this strategy as well. I don't know if this still works, but at one point at least all a deck needed was a >50% win rate and enough games to hit legend because wins gave you more points than losses removed. Something like that, I forget the exact mechanic.
People would play decks that won or lost based on randomness very early - their overall percentage was pretty bad, but because they were just effective enough, and because their games were incredibly fast, players could take advantage of the fact that (at least at the time) wins were more valuable than losses.
Again, take that with a grain of salt. This wouldn't hold true for games where you get limited tries, or where losses matter a lot more than wins, etc. You have to figure out whether or not it makes sense for the specific 'game' you're playing.
For anyone interested, it's that you gain/lose 1 "star" with each win/loss. And if you're on a "win streak", you gain extra stars, but never lose extra stars for being in a losing streak. So a win on average is slightly more than 1 star when you consider streak bonuses.
So you get a deck with roughly 50% winrate that can play matches as fast as possible. And then hope that in your 50/50 coin flip of a game, you end up getting "heads,heads,heads,tails,tails,tails" instead of "heads,tails,heads,tails,heads,tails". And it turns out doing this quickly can rank you up faster than slow games with a much higher winrate.
But also to your point, in Hearthstone terms reducing your randomness is also a significant part of strategy. For example a deck I run now has a card "Draw the lowest cost minion from your deck".
This card is valuable not just because it instantly puts a monster in my hand, but because it also gets it out of my deck. Reducing the chance that I will draw a low-cost minion in the late game, increasing my odds of drawing the high-cost cards I do want.
Like if you were playing Blackjack and had the option to "remove a 2 from the deck". Super useful when you want a face card. Not useful at all when you're holding a 17.
Those actors might take steps to maximize those states, and their success or failure in the short term (ie. the duration of their own life) can easily be considered "winning".
In the context of life, it is ok to lose. It is ok to not be the best, to not ever find your niche, to never really feel like you've succeeded, be lazy, or make mistakes. It's even ok not to give it your all. You don't have to be the winner, it's ok just to be.
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/82497106398146150...
> Retrain your model based on input from the crowd... [to] become an enjoyable player to be around.
Regarding this introspection:
> I [am] always thinking that I should have done that thing better. This is a dangerous propellant. It pushes me. But left unchecked, it means I’m rarely happy.
I've suffered from this, too. What's helped me most is gratitude. Every morning I think of five things I'm grateful for. I got this habit from Tal Ben-Sharar - the professor of "The Happy Class" (Harvard's most popular course ever).
How are people tracking these factors? There's a whole movement around this, called "Quantified Self". The concept it simple: track a set of variables and try to glean some insight however I'm having trouble implementing this in my life.
Track what? Track how?
Helping others, having empathy, not hurting others.. those presumably wouldn't be worthwhile things to do if they didn't help one "win".
In this article, such actions are worth doing only because they're means to winning, not (say) because you actually value other people, their thoughts, and feelings. The impression one gets is that to the author they're just pawns in his game, and if he could "win" by trampling all over them he would.
This impression is strengthened by the reductionistic, instrumentalist analogies (like the mind being a computer program) sprinkled throughout the article. If people are merely computer programs and life is just a bunch of games that you're trying to win, why be nice to them? Oh, it's because if you're not they might not let you play.