Black Swan :

-Iam skeptical about confirmation, not about disconfirmation. A single instance can disconfirm even though plenty of data can confirm.
-I worry less about small failures, more about large, potential ones.
-I worry less about advertised and senstaional risks, more about vicious hidden ones. I worry less about terrorism than diabetes.
-I do not worry a lot, I try to worry about matters I can do something about.

-I try to stay light on my feet, reduce my surprises, I want to be broadly right than precisely wrong.

-Every morning the world appears more random than it did the day before.
-Someone who is marginally better can easily win the entire pot, leaving the others with nothing.
-A person can get slightly ahead for entirely random reasons, and everyone flocks to him. The world of contagion is so underestimated.
-In academia, cliques of people who quote one another are formed. Those who got a good push in the beginning of their scholarly careers will keep getting persistent cumulative advantages throughout life.

-Of the 500 largest US companies in 1957, only 74 were still part of S&P500, forty years later. Most shrank or went bust.

Chapter 13
What you should avoid is unnecessary dependence on large-scale harmful predictions-those and only those.
-Maximize the serendipity around you.
-

Most Productive People: 6 Things They Do Every Day

1) Manage Your Mood

Most productivity systems act like we’re robots — they forget the enormous power of feelings.

If you start the day calm it’s easy to get the right things done and focus.

But when we wake up and the fray is already upon us — phone ringing, emails coming in, fire alarms going off — you spend the whole day reacting.

Here’s Tim:

I try to have the first 80 to 90 minutes of my day vary as little as possible. I think that a routine is necessary to feel in control and non-reactive, which reduces anxiety. It therefore also makes you more productive.

Studies demonstrate happiness increases productivity and makes you more successful.

As Shawn Achor describes in his book The Happiness Advantage:

…doctors put in a positive mood before making a diagnosis show almost three times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a neutral state, and they make accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster. Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56 percent. Students primed to feel happy before taking math achievement tests far outperform their neutral peers. It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.

So think a little less about managing the work and a little more about managing your moods. 

2) Don’t Check Email In The Morning

Why is checking email in the morning a cardinal sin? You’re setting yourself up to react.

An email comes in and suddenly you’re giving your best hours to someone else’s goals, not yours.

You’re not planning your day and prioritizing, you’re letting your objectives be hijacked by whoever randomly decides to enter your inbox.

Here’s Tim:

…whenever possible, do not check email for the first hour or two of the day. It’s difficult for some people to imagine. “How can I do that? I need to check email to get the information I need to work on my most important one or two to-dos?”

You would be surprised how often that is not the case. You might need to get into your email to finish 100% of your most important to-dos. But can you get 80 or 90% done before you go into Gmail and have your rat brain explode with freak-out, dopamine excitement and cortisol panic? Yes.

Research shows email:

1. Stresses you out.
2. Can turn you into a jerk.
3. Can be more addictive than alcohol and tobacco.
4. And checking email frequently is the equivalent of dropping your IQ 10 points.

3) Before You Try To Do It Faster, Ask Whether It Should Be Done At All

Everyone asks, “Why is it so impossible to get everything done?” But the answer is stunningly easy:

You’re doing too many things.

4) Focus Is Nothing More Than Eliminating Distractions

Top CEOs are interrupted every 20 minutes. How do they get anything done?

By working from home in the morning for 90 minutes where no one can bother them:

They found that not one of the twelve executives was ever able to work uninterruptedly more than twenty minutes at a time—at least not in the office. Only at home was there some chance of concentration. And the only one of the twelve who did not make important, long-range decisions “off the cuff,” and sandwiched in between unimportant but long telephone calls and “crisis” problems, was the executive who worked at home every morning for an hour and a half before coming to the office.

5) Have A Personal System

Great systems work because they make things automatic, and don’t tax your very limited supply of willpower.

What do we see when we systematically study the great geniuses of all time? Almost all had personal routines that worked for them.

(“Give and Take” author Adam Grant consistently writes in the mornings while Tim always writes at night.)

How do you start to develop your own personal system? Apply some “80/20” thinking:

1. What handful of activities are responsible for the disproportionate number of your successes?
2. What handful of activities absolutely crater your productivity?

6) Define Your Goals The Night Before

Research says you’re more likely to follow through if you’re specific and if you write your goals down.

From Eric Barker's https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2019/05/kids-successful/

This Is How To Make Your Kids Successful: 4 Secrets From Research

You want your kids to grow up and be more than just… older. You want them to be successful and fulfilled.

What’s the latest we’ve been hearing? 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, grit, early specialization, tiger moms…

Are you skeptical about any of these? Good, you’ve come to the right place. (Here, take a seat next to me.) Luckily, someone has done the research and has clear answers for us…

The estimable David Epstein, author of the excellent NYT bestseller The Sports Gene, has a new book out that turns a number of these ideas on their head. (And he’s not just a fantastic author – he’s also a new father.)

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World is already one of my “Best Books of 2019.” (It’s so good that I’ll be interviewing David about it, at a live event, on 6/18. If you’re in LA, swing on by.)

Okay, so you want your kids to be successful, happy, and as cool as the other side of the pillow?

Let’s get to it…

1And there’s no doubt — the elites do spend more time on deliberate practice than non-elites. You know it must be true because I have a chart:

Because there’s another athlete’s story you don’t hear as much. This kid didn’t relentlessly focus on one sport. He was skiing, wrestling, swimming, skateboarding, playing basketball, handball, badminton and soccer.

He tried everything and was serious about nothing. It wasn’t until his teens that he started to focus on tennis…But that kid became Roger Federer.

And it turns out that the Roger path is actually much more common than the Tiger path. At young ages, Tiger is the exception, not the rule, among elites:

From Range:

Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can later draw; they learn about their abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.

Yeah, but that might only be true of sports, right? Nope. Same pattern is evident in music.

From Range:

…the students classified as exceptional by the school came from less musically active families compared to less accomplished students, did not start playing at a younger age, were less likely to have had an instrument in the home at a very young age, had taken fewer lessons prior to entering the school, and had simply practiced less overall before arriving – a lot less.

And what were the best music students like? They “turn out to be those children who distributed their effort more evenly across three instruments.” Again, more Roger, less Tiger.

10,000 hours is good. But they don’t have to happen between ages 0-10. In fact, they shouldn’t. 

2) Real Learning Is Slow And Frustrating

I’ll repeat that: “the problem might be that kids are doing too well in school.”

Good grades are wonderful. But if they’re coming fast and easy, chances are your kid isn’t really learning all that much that they’re really going to retain. The research is clear: to really learn, studying must be hard. They even have a clever name for this: “desirable difficulties.”

From Range:

“Some people argue that part of the reason U.S. students don’t do as well on international measures of high school knowledge is that they’re doing too well in class,” Nate Kornell, a cognitive psychologist at Williams College told me. “What you want is to make it easy to make it hard.” Kornell was explaining the concept of “desirable difficulties,” obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term.

So good performance early can be bad. Sound crazy? Oh, it gets crazier… As a corollary, “great” teachers are often terrible.

How many times did you cram for a test, do fine, but then 24 hours later you couldn’t remember a single thing you studied? Exactly.

That wasn’t early onset dementia. Studies show learning too fast or too easy doesn’t stick. Struggling is essential. In fact, trying hard and being wrong can be better than initially being right.

From Range:

In one of Kornell’s experiments, participants were made to learn pairs of words and later tested on recall. At test time, they did the best with pairs that they learned via practice questions, even if they had gotten the answers on those quizzes wrong. Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful.

Yes, it’s very impressive to have a kid easily getting all A’s. But if you really want your child to grow up to be a top performer, you don’t want your kid to be a prodigy.

3) Too Much Specialization Makes You Narrow

From Range:

…And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands – conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem and apply it in an utterly new one.

Kids need to learn a variety of things and how to make connections between them.

From Range:

Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains… Research on thousands of adults in six industrializing nations found that exposure to modern work with self-directed problem solving and nonrepetitive challenges was correlated with being “cognitively flexible.”

4) When You’re Young, Quit May Be Better Than Grit.

Being a bit flaky can be good, especially when you’re young, because it gives you the chance to learn about yourself in different environments. As London Business School professor Herminia Ibarra says, “Be a flirt with your possible selves.” 

Sum Up

Here’s how to make your kids successful:

• Children need a sampling period: Raise your kids like a Roger, not a Tiger.
• Real learning is slow and frustrating: I have deprived you of lasting knowledge by making this easy to read and the guilt is overwhelming.
• Too much specialization can make you narrow: A one-trick pony often becomes a very dumb, boring, unsuccessful horse.
• When you’re young, quit may be better than grit: Skip the youthful mistakes and they become middle-aged mistakes — where they’re a lot more costly.

This post is focused on kids because that’s where this knowledge is most useful. But let me tell you a little secret…

It all applies to you too. Keep sampling. Keep learning. Don’t get narrow. Don’t be afraid to quit something that isn’t working and try something new.