100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late

Highlights

• Rule #001: You can choose the game you play, but not its rules Most frustration and unhappiness in your life will come from not respecting the rules of whatever “game” you’re a participant of – be it love, business, or whatever you chose to involve yourself with, knowingly or unknowingly.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]
• If you think about it, the very important never feels urgent. Instead, most things which feel urgent are important for someone else, not for you.
• There are many reasons for which problems appear. However, there is a single one for which they grow: if they are ignored.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]
• Solving the root cause of problems is always more urgent than solving any problem it produced. Addressing the root cause of problems never costs time; it always gives time.
• The enemy of productivity isn’t laziness but busywork.
• Misstepping once is a bump in your trajectory to success. Mistepping twice means having decided to redirect such a trajectory towards mediocrity.
• Effort doesn’t matter. You do not get any wooden medal for participation. This is not elementary school anymore. Either you paid the right costs, or you didn’t pay anything.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]
• In general (in biological domains), long-term effects are the opposite of short-term ones.
• Willpower is best used to create a short burst of activity whose purpose is not to achieve a result but to create the conditions for sustainable results.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]
• discipline coincides with coercion only when it is needed to serve someone whose interests are not aligned to yours. Instead, when discipline originates from your objectives, it leads to freedom. It is what prevents you from being coerced by others.
  • Tags: [[freedom]]
• our personality is only one of the inputs that determine our behavior. Incentives are another of such inputs;
• Muscles are not only important for posture. The more muscles you have, the less likely you are to develop a lot of diseases. The more muscles you have, the more confident you will be. The more muscles you have, the healthier your life will be, in the broadest meaning of the term.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]
• Happiness isn’t something static. Happiness relates to a transition (from “having a problem” to “having solved a problem”), not to a state. Therefore, it is self-deceiving to believe that there is something that can make us happy forever. Happiness is not a place we can reach and rest in. Happiness is a direction we can walk along.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]
• We shouldn’t wish for a permanent state of happiness that would relieve us from action. We should wish for the opportunity to be able to continuously take actions that make us happy.
• In most cases in which people feel bad in a situation enjoyed by others, it is because they did not learn the skills needed to enjoy it, not because of their personality.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]
• optimizing for a proxy reduces the correlation with the ultimate metric[15]
  • Tags: [[leadership]] [[kpis]] [[metrics]]
• Proxies promote unwanted behavior by introducing unwanted rewards to wasteful actions.
• in situations where ruin is a possibility, the concept of “expected returns” does not apply. For example, situations in which death, bankruptcy, or life sentence a possibility.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]
• By analyzing lagging indicators, you predict the past. By analyzing leading ones, you predict the future.
  • Tags: [[metrics]] [[management]]
• In negotiations, the most important factor is the willingness to walk away.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]
• Growing expenses is more permanent than growing income
  • Tags: [[finance]]
• A philosopher by the pseudonym of Thibault[24] proposed that life is about resisting erosion. What is alive resists erosion, and what doesn’t can be considered dead.
  • Tags: [[personal-growth]]