Month: August 2023

Appreciating the limits of your predictive power is crucial to being a wise person.  Consider the track record of predictions made about

Tomorrow’s weather, next winter snowfall, and the number of hurricanes

Costs for commodity products like oil, grain, and copper

Outcomes of political elections

Which geopolitical events will drive the news

Who gets cancer or has a heart attack or stroke

We should humbled by our miserable ability to accurately predict the future.

You know those scenes in Star Trek and Star Wars where Spock and C-3PO calculate the odds of successful whatever (e.g., navigating an asteroid field)?  Great fun, helps drive the plot, but impossible.  They can’t calculate the odds because they don’t have enough information.

The realistic approach when you don’t have enough information is to run simulations many times.  We know these simulations are based on incomplete information, so they’re inherently “wrong but useful.”  We can get some idea of the range of possibilities, rather than a specific number.  We can see where our “gut” response might be wildly off, or relatively aligned.

Confidence is a key factor when you’re making a presentation, persuading someone on an idea, or making a sale. 

There is your internal confidence level.  That’s built and reinforced through preparation and practice.  Preaching to yourself helps. 

The other side of the confidence coin is whether your audience or prospect has confidence in you.  How you dress, your physical presentation, smiling, standing tall, the sophistication of your slides or handouts, etc. – all play a role in how people perceive your credibility.  There’s a reason why someone chooses a $1200 suit over the $125 suit, or why taller and attractive people succeed in certain roles. 

Savvy leaders polish both sides of the confidence coin.

“That makes no sense.  No sense at all.  Why would they do that?” 

If you believe the universe is nothing but a bunch of particles randomly slamming into one another on the long path to eventual heat death of the universe, then curiosity isn’t valuable, because there is no meaning behind what you observe.

That’s not my worldview. The instinctive drive to create a story out of what we observe tells me that no one has a purely material worldview by default. 

When you see something crazy, odd, strange, and (to you) senseless, remind yourself that people make decisions and behave in certain ways because it’s logical or rational to them.  Even if it’s just the least problematic way to live.  No one is consciously irrational. 

There is a Why in there somewhere.  There are usually multiple reasons.  There is “schtuff” below the visible waterline.  There is history. 

Dig deep for these when you need to understand why something is the way it is. 

The status quo inherently trends to mediocre.  Excellence requires pushing past the status quo. 

This is deeply uncomfortable.  We like being comfortable and safe.  Most of the time we prefer reading about adventures rather than tackling them on our own.  These factors are what give the status quo its weight, it’s gravitational pull. 

Understanding this is the first step in conquering the status quo.  This is the below-the-waterline enemy you’ll fight when leading change. 

One of the reasons why existing systems tend to crash and shatter before they can be reformed is that the people with the power to change a system benefit from the status quo. 

Plenty of legislators have vowed to simplify taxes.  What’s one of the biggest levers of power that legislators have and use?  The power to write tax law that favors some over others.  A flat tax with almost no line-item deductions is anathema to virtually every lobbyist. 

I’m sure you can think of other examples where change is slow-to-never because everyone has figured out how to benefit from the status quo.  Health care. Judicial systems. The local school system. The family reunion.

Another reason why big changes are difficult is that someone, inevitably, has to say, “I was wrong about X and we should change it.”  That’s a big ask. 

Ptolemy of Alexandria popularized the idea that the earth was the center of the universe, and everything revolved around it.  Practically everyone thought this way for about 1400 years until Nicolaus Copernicus convinced people that the sun was the center of the solar system.  (Sorry, Aristarchus of Samos, most people never heard of you, even if you beat Copernicus by 900 years.)  Many people were still struggling with heliocentrism for about a century after Copernicus – it was simply hard to believe smart people were so wrong.

There’s a similar story about canals on Mars. Right up to 1965 when Mariner 4 did a close fly-by, the conventional thinking was a civilization existed on Mars because of all the straight lines you could see in telescopes of the day. 

I’m sure there is something we’ll discover in the future which unseats something we all believe firmly today, and it will be hard to accept.

Recommended questions to ask your mentor:

“I’m in [this situation].  What am I not asking, or not seeing?”

“What have noticed are blind spots for people in positions like mine, at this stage in my career?”

“How do I _______?”  [Must be something that you can’t Google an answer for.]

You can often follow-up good responses and insights with “What else?”

It’s easy to stumble on Jesus’ command in his Sermon on the Mount:

“Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:58)  How can we be commanded to be perfect?

The Greek word we translate as ‘perfect’ is teleios (pronounced tell-ee-oss).  It means ‘complete,’ ‘brought to fullness.’  Teleios is being all you are meant to be.

Not all blessings are easy and light.  Paul wrote to the Corinthian church “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” (2 Corinthians 4:17)  Struggles are a blessing because they’re a means to growth, to our teleios.

…

Our real work is work that only we can do.  

Read that again:  Our real work is work that only we can do.  

Our real work is self-ish in this way.  Not our low, muddled, miserable selfishness, but our higher self.  Our teleios calls us forward. 

Let’s be frank — we’re going to do a lot of work which is not our real work.  There are things that need doing.  No one is above the meanest service.   This work shapes our character, too, and is valuable to our families and communities.  

You might think, “But many people do something just like what I do.”  Yes, but only you are doing it for the people in your sphere of influence.  Many people are accountants, nurses, drivers, teachers, managers, etc., but they bring their uniqueness to a unique set of people.  Many people write blogs like this one, but there are people reading this blog because it resonates with them.  

…

We live in a world rich in signs and meaning.  There is a steady stream of signs and insights that we can use — when we’re paying attention.  You’re not special; this is true for all of us.   These signs are both for us and to shape us to better become what we’re meant to be on behalf of others.

My current hypothesis is that we’ll do better when we pursue whatever our interests are, running down trails that make us curious.  The process of exploring has its own virtue.  In time we figure out how all the bits come together.  It’s very difficult to project the path forward, but looking back we see how all the dots connect.

5% inflation means that your money will lose ~50% of its purchasing power in just 14 years. 5% interest means your money will nearly double in value in 14 years.

1 year is 1.25% of your lifetime if you live to 80 years old. 

This purchase represents ___ days of salary — after taxes.

I have to sell ___ to get the profit to buy that.

It is likely that more data will be created in 2024 than in all previous years combined.  Data is neither information nor wisdom.  How we use and interpret data is up to us.  

There are those who naively believe that more data will automatically be a superior option.  Statistically speaking, the larger the pile of data, the more false positives and negatives will be present.  Weak correlations often fool us.  Cause and effect are only rarely close in time or space.  The more data, the more noise in the system.  [Example case:  The FBI had tips about a curious situation where Saudi men were only interested in learning how to fly planes but not land them.  This was one of many thousands of active tips in the first half of 2001.  “Why didn’t they connect the dots?” citizens demanded to know.  This was a very weak correlation with threat compared to hundreds of other tips which appeared highly likely.]

This is true even when all the data is authentic, real, true.  The presence of even unintentional errors like reversing two digits compounds the problem. Things become even messier when people lie and intentionally generate & spread falsehoods.  Deepfakes.  

In a world of abundance you must make better decisions than ever.  Your time and attention are precious.  Don’t squander them.   

Perhaps the challenge of our generation is to be wisely selective about which data is worth further assessment.  How do we properly select which data stream or pool to tap, and then use a trust-and-verify approach?

Leaders using multiple communication channels to deliver content and messaging, and manage work in flight: email, Slack, instant messaging, text, 1:1 or group in person meetings. 

What is the ratio of messaging that you initiate and drive compared to reactive responses?  What is the ratio of proactive vs. reactive content?  How many conversations and topics are you creating and driving, vs. being in the flow of conversations others are driving? Make this a positive ratio. Be the initiator, creator, driver.