No great harm can come to you for being thoughtfully wrong. You will make lots of decisions today. Your decisions will be informed by assumptions. Your assumptions are generated from your observation of the world. Your observation of the world is gelled over by your bias. Your bias formed as a result of your life. Your life was never yours to start. The first principles that guide your decisions may not be accurate; and you are likely wrong more than you’re right. It’s best to get it off your chest and admit it. Why? You get the benefit of perspective. Considering multiple perspectives and inputs gives you the intel you need to make your work better.

It’s a question I don’t have an answer to; but I am thinking about.

Are beliefs developed through the acquisition of knowledge? I wonder how many beliefs people have that aren’t a result of knowledge.

Are beliefs developed through repetitive storytelling? I think I’m closer.

People tend to believe the things they hear over and over again. It’s possible they start to pay attention when that story is about survival, waging war against the forces of evil, or about a hope eternal. Are these stories knowledge? I don’t know.

Wednesdays are a struggle for me. Typically, it’s an information overload day. I struggle to find a way to manage. Here’s what I’m doing:Spend more time heads down in work. I pay for brain.fm, put on nice head phones, and go at my work.Turn my phone off. I got rid of social media years ago, and I do my best not to look at my phone. My family and friends probably hope I pick it up more often than I do. Write things down. The company I work at uses clickup.com. When I owe someone something, I make a clickup task for myself. I follow through by scheduling time to work on these clickups later. There are things I wish I did more that I don’t do. I know why I don’t do it. I don’t schedule time for it. That’s on me. There are only so many hours in a life. I don’t know how many hours I have left. I know I need to get better at using the ones I have. And like any form of prioritization, there are things that end up on the cutting room floor. Life strategy is like business strategy. It’s all about what you don’t do.

Someone asked me to define my sense of humor. I said “just only slightly nuts.” I’m proud of that.I believe life is absurd. Think about.How many suns are in our galaxy? How many galaxies are there in the universe? How can life really be so stressful when you consider the vastness of it all? That said, I still can’t stand my mother’s dog. Like I said, “just only slightly nuts.”

The skilled leader must play the lion and the fox as required.And, if the leader chooses not to play the part of the lion, others must believe the leader can.

That’s not a real request. People rarely want the truth when they want your opinion. When people make that request, they really want your support and confirmation of their effort in a realistic way. Give that to them.The most powerful way to influence people is to influence the story they tell themselves about themselves. If you think someone’s work sucked and told them that, you crush that story. Instead, try to inhabit the person’s worldview. What might have been important to them? What details might they have focused on? Comment on that. Say what you noticed. Being indirect and not saying what we truly mean is an essential — albeit frustrating — part of what makes us human. You do it. I do it.

“Our foolish naive persistence defied what many thought impossible – what I had thought was impossible.” - Natasha Lance Rogoff, Muppets in Moscow.Is that all you need to defy the odds? Yes.All that you have is the present. In this present you can decide to start, stop, or continue. The present doesn’t care if you give up or slog through life; the present doesn’t know past or future. The present knows what you do now. I don’t know what the future holds — perhaps that’s naive. I know that what I do now sets the stage for what’s to come. If I want to be more than what I think I am, I must decide and act that way now.

I’m learning about friction and heat. I don’t have an expert understanding, but I think I am learning. I think I understand that force of friction equals the coefficient of friction multiplied by normal force. The coefficient of friction is a dimensionless number. It represents the number of frictional characteristics of a surface. Friction converts kinetic energy into heat — which is then transferred between objects due to thermodynamics. Why should you care? Why do I care?Gather many types of people into a room and try to solve a problem. Gather people from all walks of life. How easy will it be to create consensus without argument? Each area of diversity adds to the coefficient of friction in the room. The group will birth a marketplace of ideas as they try to attack the problem. Ideas will be tested, edited, cut, and rebuilt. The winning idea will rise to the top. The winning idea gets implemented. Work ships, energy gets transferred.Change happens.

I like to know what’s going to happen before it happens. Please, spoil the movie for me. At the same time, I enjoy making surprises. Surprises are an experience. A good surprise disrupts someone’s worldview — their reality. One minute they believe one thing about the world, and the next second that world is completely different. A good surprise creates a reaction — a laugh, a cry, a gasp.How do we create more happy surprises for those we serve? Inhabit the mind of those you seek to serve. Understand their worldview.Imagine what benefit could you give that person that would materially change their world and be unexpected.Determine how you can give that person that thing at a time where they least expect it.Surprise.We need more of the right kinds of beautiful surprises in our life.

I like these five questions. Would I go job-by-job and ask these questions? Maybe. Interviewers often look for “red flags.” Long employment gaps, negative perceptions of past employment, or the wrong word said at the wrong time — all can be considered “red flags.” What makes these red flags? Employment gaps — some people have them. I have them. Does that make me less employable? An interviewer might wonder what caused that large gap — perhaps something happened. An involuntary exit from a past employer is almost assumed. A skilled interviewer gets curious.Skilled recruiters are self-aware. They know what they don’t know, and they know that humans are unpredictable. A “red flag” in one circumstance could be “gold” in another circumstance. Expert interviewers ride that middle line of curiosity and probe further. “Tell me about that gap, what were you focused on? What did you learn from it? What did you get from that gap that you can take here?”Harry Stebbings, the interviewer from the video I linked above, offers you and I “the five questions to ask every potential new recruit.” I might rewrite it as, “a set of five questions you can ask every potential new recruit… if you’re skilled enough.”HT to Tyler Cowen from Marginal Revolution for sharing the link