What’s Asymmetry? Consider a coin-flip gain where you earn $1 if you guess correctly and lose $1 if you guess incorrectly. The coin’s fair, and so your expected winnings are $0. Your odds here are said to be symmetric. Consider now the same game, except you lose $1 if you guess incorrectly, but win $3 if you guess correctly. The odds are now in your favor and the win-loss sides are asymmetric....
The Need For Control It’s human nature to be a “control freak.” We all want control. We want to control how much money we have coming in. We want to control how our coworkers behave. We want to control our chronic health conditions. We want to control our reputation. We want to control our problems. We want to control how other people perceive us. Control is certainty. And it’s human nature to want certainty because as hunter-gatherers, certainty means survival....
Don’t Force It, Most Of The Time Forcing outcomes can be good in some cases, but pretty bad in most cases. Here’s some examples of what I mean: You have some bad codebase and there’s a bug. The outcome is to just patch the bad code so your manager doesn’t breathe down your neck. You “force” the outcome by writing really ugly code to fix the bug. The code becomes even more unmaintainable....
99% Of Everything Is Garbage Trying to go back to the US from Spain and flying United. Was at the airport and in the check-in counter they were super slow. 50 passengers lined up and only 1 counter open. And no, they weren’t understaffed. It was one person working on a counter and 5 people stsanding behind her playing with their phones. I recorded this because I wanted to make fun of them on social media....
Freedom Is Important Freedom to go anywhere you want, whenever you want is important. I believe it’s one of the main ingredients for a fulfilled and happy life. Consider this: given the same health and money, would you prefer to have more options in life or less? Answer’s obvious. This post shows the high-level framework that I think is important in achieving max freedom. Framework > Results Only People have grandeur plans of financial freedom (FI)....
Stable Marrige Problem In this post, I hope to show you an example of why you shouldn’t just let life happen to you and why you should be as proactive as possible. There’s a math problem called the stable marriage problem. As stated on Wikipedia: Given n men and n women, where each person has ranked all members of the opposite sex in order of preference, marry the men and women together such that there are no two people of opposite sex who would both rather have each other than their current partners....
Kobe is legendary for working hard and was one of the best ballers in history. Elon Musk is known for working hard and is the world’s richest man. It’s very tempting to draw the connection that working hard is a necessary and sufficient condition for success. Alas, if working hard is all that’s needed to win, everyone would win. Someone could work 10X hours the next person and earn half as much....
When I was an emo teenager, I thought that optimism was the same as naivete. It is not. Being naive means ignoring facts and making foolish decisions. Being optimistic means being hopeful for good results despite knowing that challenges exist. Naivete results from a lack of experience. Optimism results from having tons of experience. Many folks are pessimists so they can protect themselves from disappointment when things go wrong. This is a fool’s errand and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy....
In the Top 5 Regrests Of The Dying, one of the most common regrets of the dying is: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. The wiki article also states: A 2018 study reached similar conclusions, finding that people were more likely to express “ideal-related regrets”, such as failing to follow their dreams and live up to their full potential....
What Is First Principles Thinking First principles thinking is when you think about a problem with almost no assumptions. The only assumptions you’d make are provable concepts, like basic physics. This is tiresome because almost everything would be “derived from scratch.” But at the same time, it unleashes infinite creativity because you’re not putting artificial constraints to the problem. With your mind as a blank slate, anything is possible. What was previously “unsolvable” with artificial constraints is now solvable....
A week ago, a guy in a gas mask threw a couple of smoke grenades in a crowded NYC subway car and shot 10 people. This happened in a neighborhood called sunset park, where Wikipedia says: In 2018, an estimated 29% of Sunset Park residents lived in poverty, compared to 21% in all of Brooklyn and 20% in all of New York City. Given the increase in crime and their increased publicity, it’s rational for any NYC resident to simply take a rideshare/taxi instead of the subway just to save a few bucks....
My girlfriend and I are traveling across Europe currently for a month. We’re eating and drinking, happy as ever in the beautiful European summer heat. We’re healthy and our household income is more than half a mil a year. I was posed the question: Do you ever kick back, relax and realize you “made it” in life? Out on vacation w/ GF in europe, basking in the sun, eating good food drinking high quality alcoholic beverages?...
As mentioned in the previous post, nobody really cares when you complain. People have their own thing going on. Further, nobody truly cares about your problems; they’ve got problems of their own. You’re a CEO of a company? Great. Your employees don’t care about your vision, or how you or the business is doing. They care about being paid and getting raises and promotions for a minimal amount of effort....
As I write this, my TAP Portugal flight for 8:15 AM was cancelled. Slept at 1AM and woke up at 5AM to catch this flight. They didn’t send an email about the cancellation, so we found out only when we got there. We then went to the counter to ask about this and they told us that we changed our seat (we didn’t) – as if that was the reason the entire flight was cancelled (we didn’t the flight)....
There are 2 categories of things in life: Things you can control, and Things you can’t control. For the latter, just accept the situation and move on. Think: how does worrying about events you cannot control productive? It’s not. Too many of us worry about things we can’t control: how other people think of us, the outcome of some interview, and other things that’s already happened. Conversely, not enough of us worry about things we can control....
The 3 Big Things We All Want Wealth Health Happiness We want wealth so we can spend money on things and live a life of abundance. We want health because being unhealthy is a bad quality of life. And we want to be happy because why live a miserable life? What Order Of These Things Should You Focus On? I hypothesize that you should focus on these things, in this order:...
In The Grand Scheme Of Things… Consider the following: There are about 1e25 planets in the observable universe. And about 70 quintillion estimated in the universe in total. The Earth is about 4.543 billion years old. The Universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Homo Sapiens have existed for around 200,000 years. Suppose you’re Elon Musk and let’s say you hypothetically extend the human race to have another 2 million years before extinction....
3 weeks ago, I was watching my favorite Youtube (Mark Wiens) eat in Lisbon as part of my travel research. Going to Portugal, it’s important to me to eat authentic food. I feel like I’m absorbing the culture better if “I eat what the locals eat.” So when Mark Wiens couldn’t find an authentic Portuguese restaurant and had to end up in an Indian place to eat samosas and curry, I laughed my ass off....