No. 506 – January 8th, 2023
Ideas and insights for life.
Brain Food is a weekly newsletter with ideas and insights you can use in everyday life.
FS
The Munger Two Step
A simple and easy approach to decision-making that prevents us from manipulating ourselves. First, understand the forces at play. Then, understand how your subconscious might be leading you astray.
— Source
Insight
“The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go.”
A question to ask yourself: What seeds are you planting today for next month? Next year?
Tiny Thought
If you wait until you’re motivated, you’ve already lost.
Surgeons don’t always feel like doing surgery. Teachers don’t always feel like teaching. Parents don’t always feel like cooking. Firemen don’t always feel like rushing into a burning building.
If you let motivation dictate your actions, inertia conspires to keep you in place.
Action creates progress. Progress creates momentum. Momentum creates motivation.
(Share this Tiny Thought on Twitter)
Etc.
Formula 1’s Toto Wolff:
“You need to push people out of their comfort zone.”
— Source
How Science Stagnates (1947):
“First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific output; but by going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game. Some things would be considered interesting, others not. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion, too.”
— Source (h/t to David Chapman)
Cheers,
— Shane
P.S. An ingenious place to store water.