This book explores the aspects of human behavior and the world that remain consistent over time, arguing that understanding these unchanging elements is more valuable than trying to predict specific future events.

Introduction: What Never Changes

The dead outnumber the living… fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.
—Niall Ferguson

Housel kicks off by stating he doesn’t know what the future holds in specifics (stock market, elections, dominant businesses), but he is confident about the enduring patterns of human behavior: greed, fear, tribalism, the tendency for success to breed complacency. These things are the same as ever.

Philosophers have spent centuries discussing the idea that there are an infinite number of ways your life could play out, and you just happen to be living in this specific version. It’s a wild thing to contemplate, and it leads to the question: What would be true in every imaginable version of your life, not just this one? Those universal truths are obviously the most important things to focus on, because they don’t rely on chance, luck, or accident.

He brings up Naval Ravikant’s idea of succeeding in 999 out of 1000 parallel universes by factoring out luck.
That’s the book’s goal: identify the truths that hold across all possible scenarios.

Hanging by a Thread: Chance, Unpredictability, Compounding

The world is incredibly vulnerable to chance and tiny accidents. Given this, Housel focuses on two things:

(One) Basing predictions on behavior (greed, fear, etc.) rather than specific events.
Events are too hard to forecast because of the “and then what?” problem.

A simple cause-and-effect chain (like higher gas prices -> less driving) quickly becomes complex with secondary and tertiary effects (fuel efficiency, political responses, innovation, potential price crashes, shifting demographics) that make the final outcome unpredictable.

(Two) Having a wider imagination for what’s possible. Things can change drastically due to small, unforeseen events.
Compounding applies to events too, not just money, meaning small beginnings can lead to massive, unintuitive outcomes.

The Butterfly Effect mirrors Housel’s second point: tiny inputs create massive, unpredictable outputs. A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, and weeks later a tornado forms in Texas. Not because the butterfly caused it directly, but because complex systems compound tiny variations into wildly different outcomes.
The most important events in your life probably began as tiny, overlooked moments that compounded in ways no one could have anticipated.

Risk Is What You Don’t See

We’re bad at predicting the future, specifically the surprises, which are often what matter most.

As financial advisor Carl Richards says, “Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”
That’s the real definition of risk—what’s left over after you’ve prepared for the risks you can imagine.
Risk is what you don’t see.

The biggest risks and most consequential events are the ones we don’t anticipate. Covid, Russian invasion of Ukraine – recent events that come to mind immediately.
They weren’t on most people’s radar with any serious weight before they happened.

Housel mentions Nassim Taleb’s advice:

“Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.”

This captures it perfectly. Prepare for the unknown, don’t pretend you can predict it.

Expectations and Reality

Your happiness depends on your expectations more than anything else. So in a world that tends to get better for most people most of the time, an important life skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. It’s also one of the hardest.

Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough.

Great quote.

When asked, “You seem extremely happy and content. What’s your secret to living a happy life?” ninety-eight-year-old Charlie Munger replied:

The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results, good and bad, as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism

Wild Minds

People who think in unique ways often do so in ways you’ll like and dislike.

But the idea that crazy geniuses sometimes just look straight-up crazy is nearly unavoidable.

He uses Newton’s deep interest in alchemy as an example. The personality traits that drive incredible achievements (determination, optimism, relentless confidence, risk tolerance) are often the same ones that lead to going overboard, misjudging risks, or pushing things too far.

This brings up the important point about choosing role models. Naval Ravikant’s thought experiment is powerful here:

One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life… You have to be that person… If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.

Yep, agree. Have been thinking this for so many years. You can’t cherry-pick parts of someone’s life; you have to consider the entire package, flaws and all.

Wild Numbers

People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty.

This is key. We struggle with probability, especially with large numbers.

Mosteller’s Law (“With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is apt to happen”) explains why the world seems crazy and rare events feel common.
With 8 billion people, a one-in-a-million daily event happens 8,000 times a day. A one-in-a-billion event affects hundreds of thousands over a lifetime. And thanks to media, we hear about them constantly.
Freeman Dyson’s math shows “miracles” (one-in-a-million events) should statistically happen to each of us about once a month.

But we shouldn’t be surprised that the world feels historically broken in recent years and will continue that way going forward. It’s not—we just see more of the bad stuff that’s always happened than we ever saw before.
The world breaks about once every ten years, on average—always has, always will. Sometimes it feels like terrible luck, or that bad news has new momentum. More often it’s just raw math at work. A zillion different things can go wrong, so at least one of them is likely to be causing havoc at any given moment. And given how connected we are, you’re going to hear about it.

Bad things happens all the time. There’s always something wrong. It’s just plain statistics. An unimaginable amount of trials (probabilities) occur daily. Of course bad things will happen every day.
And since we’re as connected as we are in the modern world, everyone hears about it. And because the bad news is overrepresented, we think the world is going to shit. Hans Rosling has been correcting the record in Factfulness. And I’m seeing a surge of optimism. That’s what we need.

The world isn’t necessarily more broken; we just have higher visibility into the constant stream of statistically inevitable negative events.
The important thing is distinguishing catastrophic risks (like a pilot crashing frequently) from the run-of-the-mill, statistically expected bad events.

Distinguishing between unfortunate odds and recklessness is hard when risk has painful consequences. It’s easier to see black and white even when the odds are apparent.

Best Story Wins

Stories are always more powerful than statistics.
The best story wins.
Not the best idea, or the right idea, or the most rational idea. Just whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads is the one who tends to be rewarded.

Great ideas explained poorly can go nowhere, while old or wrong ideas told compellingly can ignite a revolution. Morgan Freeman can narrate a grocery list and bring people to tears, while an inarticulate scientist might cure a disease and go unnoticed.

If you have the right answer + good storytelling, you’ll likely win.
If you have the wrong answer + good storytelling, you might win (temporarily).
If you have the right answer + poor storytelling, you might go nowhere.
We’ve always told each other stories. No wonder it’s such an important skill to have.

Stories act as leverage, especially for complex topics. They simplify and convey meaning efficiently, like Richard Feynman explaining physics concepts through analogy. The more complex something is, the more necessary it becomes that you tell a story.

The most persuasive stories are about what you want to believe is true, or are an extension of what you’ve experienced firsthand.
Poet Ralph Hodgson put this well when he said, “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” Poor evidence can be a very compelling story if that story scratches an itch someone wants to go away, or gives context to a belief they want to be true.

This creates hidden opportunities: many great ideas or products haven’t reached their potential because they’re poorly explained. Like how some startups fail just because people don’t get it, no matter how revolutionary the technology is.

Dee Hock’s idea that “new ways of looking at things create much greater innovation than new ways of doing them” applies here.
Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens didn’t present new facts but reframed existing knowledge compellingly. Sometimes you just need a new angle.

Some of the most important questions to ask yourself are: Who has the right answer, but I ignore because they’re inarticulate? And what do I believe is true but is actually just good marketing?
They are uncomfortable questions and difficult to answer. But if you’re honest with yourself you’ll see how many people, and how many beliefs, fall into these buckets. And then you’ll see the truth—that the best story wins.

This is a pretty good case for reading extremely technical material (long-form or papers).
It helps bypass the potentially misleading layer of storytelling.

Does Not Compute

Jeff Bezos noted that when anecdotes and data disagree, the anecdotes are often right, suggesting issues with how you’re measuring.

Jim Grant’s quote highlights the irrationality inherent in human behavior affecting markets:

To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation’s earnings discounted by the relevant interest rates and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defense of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed.

Every price is today’s number multiplied by tomorrow’s story. The numbers are easy to track. The stories, not so much.

The 1920s were giddy. The ’30s were pure panic. The world was coming to an end in the ’40s. The ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s were boom to bust, over and over. The ’80s and ’90s were insane. The 2000s have been like a reality TV show.
If you’ve relied on data and logic alone to make sense of the economy, you’d have been confused for a hundred years straight.

The danger is becoming too reliant on models, leaving no room for error, surprise, or sheer absurdity.
Unfortunately, the world doesn’t behave according to your rational models.

For a long time I’ve thought that, in order to accurately predict anything, we’d need to be able to simulate reality, basically.
Simulate the universe at step n+1 while we’re at n. Obviously we can’t do that - at least, not yet.
So for now, we’ll just have to recognize that we cannot comprehend all the variables that play into events. Especially not those coming from complex systems like humans — or even worse, the emergent high complexity of societies.

The need to simulate reality to predict future events accurately resonates with the idea of computational irreducibility. This principle, introduced by Stephen Wolfram, suggests that some systems are so complex that the only way to determine their future state is to simulate them step by step — there are no shortcuts to prediction.

In general, I think the issue is our inability to deal with unknowns. We want things to be predictable and rational. But since there are so many unknowns (whether known unknowns or unknown unknowns), we just can’t compute.
The people who really make a dent in society are those who play according to this.
It’s why we respect the “crazy” genius. And why there’s such a fine line between genius and madman. The genius is trying to hit a target that no one else can see - of course what they’re doing seems crazy.
Of course, some times, these targets are the wrong ones — like Newton’s alchemy and Nash’s alien communication.

Calm Plants the Seeds of Crazy: The Irony of Success

There’s an ironic cycle: paranoia fuels success by keeping you alert, but success brings comfort, leading you to abandon the paranoia that made you successful, which then leads to decline and more stress.
We see it all the time. You stop doing that thing that got you here and wonder why you’re regressing. Of course, what got you here won’t always get you there.

When the Magic Happens

Stress focuses your attention in ways that good times can’t.

Big changes and innovations often happen during or after terrible events, when urgency is high and the cost of inaction is unbearable.
I saw a tweet recently saying if you don’t feel overwhelmed, you aren’t getting enough out of yourself. Better to be a little overextended than fall short.

Military history provides many examples (radar, internet, jets, GPS, etc.). Why? Not necessarily superior talent, but exposure to Really Big Problems That Need to Be Solved Right Now. The incentive structure is extreme (“solve this or we all die”). Growth under pressure. We do incredible things when we must.

The same people with the same intelligence have wildly different potential under different circumstances.

The pressure focuses attention, kills procrastination, and demands immediate, maximum effort.
I wonder if there’s some way to harness this without the danger. Perhaps some ideological conviction? Needs to be incredibly strong, though. Maybe you just need to feel like if you don’t do something, the world goes to shit.

“Nothing can become truly resilient when everything goes right,” Shopify founder Toby Lütke said.
“The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!” wrote Nassim Taleb.

There’s a limit, of course. Helpful stress differs from crippling disaster, which hinders innovation. Conversely, periods of ease and abundance can lead to complacency and unproductive behavior. The struggle itself provides meaning.
Andrew Wilkinson’s “Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity” and Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s observation about talented people often being “tortured” rather than happy reinforce this.

Fear and struggle are powerful motivators.
The takeaway: Be careful what you wish for.

Overnight Tragedies and Long-Term Miracles

good news comes from compounding, which always takes time, but bad news comes from a loss in confidence or a catastrophic error that can occur in the blink of an eye.

“Good news takes time but bad news tends to occur instantly” – that’s the core idea.
Progress is slow, often unnoticeable moment-to-moment. Bad news is sudden, dramatic, and commands attention.
Lehman Brothers, Enron, Notre-Dame – decades of existence or stability erased rapidly. There’s no equivalent positive phenomenon.

Tiny and Magnificent

Understanding compounding shifts the focus from “highest returns” to “best returns sustainable for the longest time.”
Small, consistent changes compound into extraordinary results over long periods.

Elation and Despair

Progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist.

Pessimism is intellectually appealing and vital for survival (risk awareness). Optimism is essential for long-term endeavors (believing in future improvement). Balancing these conflicting mindsets is crucial.
I’d rather have more optimists nowadays - but not reckless, just with a bright view of the future and our ability to get there.

The ideal approach is “plan like a pessimist and dream like an optimist.”
This means acknowledging constant problems (pessimism) while maintaining faith in long-term progress (optimism).
I think it’s useful to be optimistic in terms of feasibility and action. Especially over the long term.

Housel calls the middle ground “rational optimism”: acknowledging setbacks but knowing they don’t preclude eventual progress.

The key is surviving short-term problems to benefit from long-term growth. Stay in the game.

Casualties of Perfection

Not all jobs require creativity or critical thinking. But those that do function better with time devoted to wandering and being curious, in ways that are removed from scheduled work but actually help tackle your biggest work problems.
It’s just hard to do that because we’re set on the idea that a typical work day should be eight uninterrupted hours seated at your desk.
Tell your boss you found a trick that will make you more creative and productive, and she’ll ask what you’re waiting for. Tell her that your trick is taking a ninety-minute walk in the middle of the day, and she might say no, you need to work. Another way to put this is that a lot of workers have “thought jobs” without much time to think.

And Housel related this to the Tversky quote: “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

Take time out of your busy schedule to think. Be creative. Do something else.

I’ve done this myself often: coming home from a vacation and saying “now that I’ve had time to think, I’ve realized…”

Take time away from the work to be more creative in your work.

It’s not about working less. It’s the opposite: A lot of thought jobs basically never stop, and without structuring time to think and be curious, you wind up less efficient during the hours that are devoted to sitting at your desk cranking out work. This is the opposite of the concept of “hustle porn,” where people want to look busy at all times because they think it’s noble.

It’s about making more of the hours you do work.

Another form of helpful inefficiency is operational slack.
Just-in-time manufacturing seemed efficient until COVID broke supply chains, revealing the fragility of systems with no room for error. A little inefficiency provides resilience and robustness, which can have huge long-term payoffs.

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll see that a little inefficiency is the ideal spot to be in.

This also recognized that you don’t necessarily have the most optimal way of doing things now.
And it is preposterous to think that you do.

I mean, really. It makes sense to 110% commit to your current routine and process if you know for certain that it is the most effective and efficient. But do you?

Allow for randomness, exploration, inefficiency. It just might make you exponentially more effective.

The more precise you try to be, the less time you have to focus on big-picture rules that are probably more important. It’s less about admitting that we can’t forecast, and more about acknowledging that if your forecast is merely good enough, you can invest your time and resources more efficiently elsewhere.

“Approximately right is better than precisely wrong” (investing quip)

It’s Supposed to Be Hard

Everything worth pursuing comes with a little pain. The trick is not minding that it hurts.

A good rule of thumb for a lot of things is to identify the price and be willing to pay it. The price, for so many things, is putting up with an optimal amount of hassle.

Keep Running

The only thing harder than gaining a competitive advantage is keeping one.

Whenever a once powerful thing loses an advantage, it is tempting to ridicule the mistakes of its leaders. But it’s easy to overlook how many forces pull you away from a competitive advantage once you have one, specifically because you have one. Success has its own gravity. “The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more you can see his ass,” oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens used to say.

That’s hilarious. 🐒

But: the bigger success you have, the more things can work to take it away.
Success itself creates forces that erode advantages.

Five factors erode advantages:

1. Overconfidence: Success breeds hubris, making you vulnerable.
2. Growth Challenges: Strategies for small scale don’t work at large scale (Peter Principle).
3. Complacency: Achieving goals leads to relaxation, removing the paranoia needed for vigilance.
4. Skill Obsolescence: What worked before might not work now.
5. Luck Runs Out: Reversion to the mean unmasks fortunate circumstances.

Takeaway 1: Don’t be surprised when dominant forces fade. It’s common. It doesn’t matter how big you get. Lose your advantage and it’s game over.
Takeaway 2: Keep running. No advantage allows for rest. Complacency seeds demise. You don’t get to sit on your ass. You have to keep running just to stay in place (alive).

The Wonders of the Future

Edison noted how small discoveries lead to cascades of variations and inventions.
Innovation is hard to predict and easy to underestimate because the path from A to Z is complex and often strange. The tech tree is somewhat clear in hindsight, but not so for future innovations. We’re all working together to create these things that turn out to be incredible, but was just a small thing originally.

Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (variance equals strength) applies: diversity in ideas increases the chance of finding useful ones, even if we can’t predict which ones. It’s also a good argument for creating lots of things and seeing what works.

Tiny innovations are seeds for future compounding growth.

Dee Hock’s idea “a book is far more than what the author wrote; it is everything you can imagine and read into it as well” applies to technology too: its value includes what others can eventually do with it.
The value of a technology is not just in what it can do, but what it allows us to do. (Microscopes and petri dishes enabling the discovery of penicillin is a great example of “enabling technologies” – interesting concept).

We underestimate how small things combine into big things (emergent effects). One boring tech + another boring tech can yield something world-changing.

Harder Than It Looks and Not as Fun as It Seems

There’s a saying—I don’t know whose—that an expert is always from out of town. It’s similar to the Bible verse that says no man is a prophet in his own country. That one has deeper meaning, but they both get across an important point: It’s easiest to convince people that you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you’re not.

It’s too easy to put people on a pedestal.

We rarely see the full picture of others’ struggles or imperfections, especially when they cultivate a specific image. “The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit.”

Everyone’s dealing with problems they don’t advertise, at least until you get to know them well. Keep that in mind and you become more forgiving—of yourself and others.

We’re all just humans doing our best. Be careful comparing your reality to others’ curated appearances.

Incentives: The Most Powerful Force in the World

Incentives are the most powerful force in the world and can get people to justify or defend almost anything.

Understanding incentives explains much of the world’s absurdity. Few people are truly crazy, but many would act crazy given the right incentives.

No matter how much information and context you have, nothing is more persuasive than what you desperately want or need to be true

Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
There are so many stories of people doing suboptimal things just because of incentives.

A good question to ask is, “Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?”
If you answer “none,” you are likely not only persuaded but blinded by your incentives.

Now You Get It: The Power of Experience

And even though Warren Buffett says to be greedy when others are fearful, far more people agree with that quote than actually act on it.

Reading about something is different from experiencing it. Intellectually agreeing with a quote like above is easy; acting on it during a panic is hard.

You might think you know how it’ll feel. Then you experience it firsthand and you realize, ah, okay. It’s more complicated than you thought.
Now you get it.

Dreaming of becoming and getting everything you ever wanted feels good. It’s unlikely you imagine that in any negative light. But in reality, if you ever get there, reality won’t be as rose-tinted as in your imagination.

Ryan Holiday wrote a nice post How does it feel to get everything you ever wanted?
Like nothing.

Imagine the market being down 30%. Do you not just imagine current reality, but the numbers being lower?
It’s quite a significant decrease, and there has to be a reason. The world wouldn’t look the same.

New generations seem to want to learn things first-hand.
That’s what this chapter is about.
Oh, you’ve experienced what it’s like today? Now you get it.

Let’s try to not insist on learning everything through trial and error.

Time Horizons

Saying “I’m in it for the long run” is a bit like standing at the base of Mount Everest, pointing to the top, and saying, “That’s where I’m heading.” Well, that’s nice. Now comes the test.

Long-term thinking is easier to believe in than to accomplish.

Long term is harder than most people imagine, which is why it’s more lucrative than many people assume.

Key points for effective long-term thinking:

1. The long run is a collection of short runs: You must endure the short-term volatility and setbacks.
2. It requires buy-in: Partners, spouses, colleagues need to be on board.
3. Patience vs. Stubbornness: Be patient, but don’t let it mask unwillingness to change when needed.
4. Adaptability is crucial: The world changes, so changing your mind is vital. Don’t use long term thinking as an excuse for your stubbornness. Changing your mind is crucial. Identify the few timeless principles and keep everything else open to revision.
5. Flexibility over Fixed End Dates: A long horizon needs flexibility. A fixed 10-year plan ending in a crisis (like 2020) is still subject to luck. An indefinite horizon is better. More flexibility reduces the need for accurate forecasts.

Benjamin Graham said, “The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.” The more flexibility you have, the less you need to know what happens next.
And never forget John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run we’re all dead.”

Being long term isn’t just about setting an end date. You’ll need to be flexible. What if the exact end date you set was in the middle of a downturn? You’d likely want to wait that out.

Trying Too Hard

There are no points awarded for difficulty.

We’re often drawn to complexity, discounting simple but effective solutions.
Why do extra work if a simpler path yields the same or better results?
Spend the extra effort on getting better outcomes, not larger inputs.

in most situations a handful of simple variables drives the majority of outcomes. If you’ve covered the few things that matter, you’re all set. A lot of what gets added after that is unnecessary filler that is either intellectually seductive, wastes your time, or is designed to confuse or impress you.

A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are cousins of something simple. John Reed wrote in his book Succeeding:

When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles—generally three to twelve of them—that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.
This is so vital. In finance, spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is perhaps 90 percent of what you need to know to do well. But what’s taught in college? How to price derivatives and calculate net present value. In health it’s sleep eight hours, move a lot, eat real food, but not too much. But what’s popular? Supplements, hacks, and pills.

Complex topics usually just have some underlying principles that are rather simple and which most advanced concepts are based on.

Computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once wrote:

Simplicity is the hallmark of truth—we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated… . The sore truth is that complexity sells better.

It’s almost like we want to over complicate things. Why?

• Control Illusion: Complexity feels like control; simplicity feels clueless. (There was this study about people placing bets… more information led to more certainty, but not more accuracy.)
• Mystique: Things we don’t understand create mystique around those who claim to.
• Signaling Effort: Length/complexity can signal thoughtfulness, even if unnecessary. (Getting the gist of a book after 2 chapters and the last 13 are just for the author to show they’ve thought a lot…)
• Mental Marathon Feel: Complexity feels like a workout; simplicity feels too easy. (We over complicate because we think we have to in order to do “mental workouts”. It’s a lot harder to take something complex and explain it simply. Try doing that more.)

But a truth that applies to almost every field is that there are no points awarded for difficulty. It’s possible to try too hard, to be too attracted to complexity, and doing so can backfire spectacularly.

“If there are multiple plausible reasons, the simplest is usually right.”
Occam’s Razor is good to keep in mind.

Wounds Heal, Scars Last

Past ordeals leave lasting psychological scars that change how we think about risk, reward, and life, even after the initial “wound” heals.
Getting hit by a car: your physical wounds heal, but you always look 10 times when crossing roads…

This explains many disagreements: people with different experiences naturally develop different perspectives, goals, and values.

most debates are not actual disagreements; they’re people with different experiences talking over each other.

Instead of asking “Why don’t you agree?”, ask “What have you experienced that I haven’t?” This acknowledges that our own views might change if we’d lived differently.

It’s easier to think that people are not thinking clearly (and that you are) just because they have a different opinion. It comes down to perspective and preference in many cases, which comes mostly from your experience. So if you want to know why you disagree, it’s often simply because you haven’t lived the same lives.

It requires humility to admit our experiences limit our perspective.

Concluding Questions

Who has the right answers but I ignore because they’re not articulate?
Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?
What do I desperately want to be true so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not?
What is a problem that I think applies only to other countries/industries/careers that will eventually hit me?
What do I think is true but is actually just good marketing?
What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive about how something works?
What looks unsustainable but is actually a new trend we haven’t accepted yet?
Who do I think is smart but is actually full of it?
Am I prepared to handle risks I can’t even envision?
Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?
What are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly obvious in the future?
What events very nearly happened that would have fundamentally changed the world I know if they had occurred?
How much have things outside my control contributed to things I take credit for?
How do I know if I’m being patient (a skill) or stubborn (a flaw)?
Who do I look up to that is secretly miserable?
What hassle am I trying to eliminate that’s actually an unavoidable cost of success?
What crazy genius that I aspire to emulate is actually just crazy?
What strong belief do I hold that’s most likely to change?
What’s always been true?
What’s the same as ever?