When you’re young, you can often get the feeling that everyone around you is just randomly unreasonable. That they make their decisions seemingly as the wind changes and the minds of others are filled with chaos. If you don’t pay much attention, this feeling can persist for the rest of your life.

If you do pay attention though, you learn that people definitely aren’t randomly unreasonable. They’re predictably unreasonable. Sure, they’ll make a lot of bad choices. But those choices can make perfect sense once you understand the context of the things that influence their brain.

The most important thing you can learn about other people’s quirks is that – for the most part – they’re consistent across every aspect of their life. If someone is always in a better mood after they’ve eaten, then that will be true at a party, during a fight, when stressed about work, etc. If this person is mad at you, don’t try to assuage them; feed them.

Far too often we take our own mental patterns and project them onto others. “When I’m mad, I want people to apologize profusely to me. So if someone else is mad at me, I’ll apologize profusely to them.” That’s a trap – other people aren’t you.

Know the people around you. If someone is a big part of your life, know their quirks and habits. Predict them. If you don’t – then it’s you who’s unreasonable.

If you really care about some aspect of your existence, some feature of your life that you feel is core to your comfort, then you should care about getting the best version of that thing, whatever it is. And if you care about getting the best version, then go without it for a while.

People are so terrified to go without their basic comforts for even ten minutes that they will often suffer the very worst version of that thing because to switch means disruption.

You’ve met these people; maybe you’re one of them. People who can’t stand to be single for a week so they’re constantly in terrible relationships. People who poorly engineer their lives so they can’t survive a month of unemployment and so they’re endlessly in terrible jobs. People who buy money-pit car after money-pit car because Heaven forbid they walk and take the bus for a few weeks.

Going without for a while will show you what it really means to you. It will let you map the true aches of its absence and so you’ll know which aspects are really important and which ones are shiny advertising. It will make you less susceptible to the dire, desperate need of that thing, and so you’ll be in a position of strength in negotiating for the return of its superior version.

If you even return it at all! The best part of a deliberate period of abstinence is that sometimes you realize you didn’t need the thing at all.

I read an article talking about how “AI Prompt Engineering” (i.e. being able to get better results from AI tools via better wording of the requests) is going to be a skill worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the job market.

This makes a ton of sense to me. An extremely powerful skill in the last ten years has been “being able to Google well.” Search engines always had their own language (and I’m not just talking about the more technical boolean prompts, but also how to word the prompts themselves to cut down on BS and improve usable responses), and in a way search engines were just baby AI.

If you were good at Googling, you were probably 5x more productive than someone with all your exact same skills except that one. AI is still going to follow “GI-GO” (“Garbage In, Garbage Out”) so being good at the sort of social engineering specific to AI is probably going to be worth even more leverage than it was with search engines.

People think that nerdy types are good at this sort of thing because we’re somehow tech-minded or all engineers or something, but that’s hogwash. Nerdy types are good at this sort of thing because at any given point, 20% of our brain is occupied by trying to figure out how to maximize the benefit of our wishes from evil genies who want to twist our words.

That’s a real thing we talk about. A lot. It’s a sort of game you can play, “Monkey’s Paw.” One person makes a wish, and the other person explains how they’d inflict the most terrible anguish on the other person while still staying within the exact letter of the request.

(For example, “I wish I could fly” could be met with “Okay, but you can’t stop or control your direction or speed, and therefore quickly end up dead in space.”)

AI is likely to have at least some overlap with the Monkey’s Paw, so be careful what you wish for. But if you are careful (and clever, and creative), then wish away!

You will never be done getting ready. “Ready” is not a binary state; it’s a sliding scale.

You can always be a little more prepared, a little more knowledgeable, a little more equipped. Sure. You can also be a little older, a little more tired, a little further behind. The marginal cost isn’t always worth it.

Here’s an easy rule of thumb to tell if you’re “over-preparing” or not: can you set a specific endpoint? Can you say, with confidence, “I will be ready on April 10th,” or “I will be ready when both of these pies are done?” Then you’re probably fine. If you’re instead saying, “I’m just not ready yet,” then guess what?

Yes, you are.

You don’t have to do it all at once. You don’t have to feel ready to finish. But you are ready to start. And after you start, you can get ready for the next part while you’re doing the current thing – in fact, that’s what will make you ready.

Pick a target and launch. You’ve only got so much time.

If I take one pint of blood out of you every other month, I can take hundreds upon hundreds of pints total in your life. But if I take six pints out of you all at once, that’s all I’m ever going to get.

No matter what you do with your life, you pay for it in blood. I don’t care if you work in a coal mine or if you’re in public relations, if you push yourself hard enough there’s a point where you won’t regenerate what you lose. You’ll pay in blood you don’t have.

You can do that, more or less, exactly once.

The goal in life isn’t to get the highest possible return on a six-pint bucket of blood. The goal is to pay for everything with resources that are regenerating faster than you’re using them. Money, hours, energy, blood, juice – the point is not to get a good ROI on your deficit. It’s to not run a deficit at all.

When someone dies from blood loss, you can’t bring them back to life by putting more blood into their corpse. There are horizons that can only be crossed one way. Remember that what you’re buying isn’t always worth more than what you’re paying. Especially if you’ve paid in blood.

Everyone has a different level of risk tolerance. While I think there are extremes in either direction that are probably unhealthy, I’m sure there’s no exact correct level. What works for you doesn’t work for me, and that’s fine.

But what I notice is that people are often either extremely inflexible with their level of risk tolerance (leading to only even contemplating a very narrow range of behaviors) or they fail to adjust their behaviors when facing risk outside of their normal tolerance range.

Sometimes both!

Let me give you an example. Bob has a nice job at a mid-sized company making a reasonable salary. He’s good at his job and has a good relationship with his peers, so he isn’t especially worried about sudden job loss. As a result, he saves at a nominal rate.

Bob gets the opportunity to work for a much larger company at a much higher salary, doing largely the same job. He takes it because the raise is nice!

But here’s the thing: at the larger company, his job is less secure. He’s paid more, but larger companies make big decisions regarding their employee population based on many factors. Bob might be great at his job and beloved by his manager, but the company might have to eliminate 10,000 people as a business need and Bob might be one of them. The person making that decision doesn’t even know who Bob is. Any way you slice it, Bob’s job is less stable, even though he makes more money.

That, by itself, might be a fine trade-off! Like I said, everyone’s risk tolerance is different. But you want to know what I’m pretty sure Bob didn’t do? If Bob made 40% more money working for that larger company, I’d bet that Bob didn’t take that extra 40%, drop it immediately into his savings & investment account, and continue to live on the same take-home pay.

Nope. Bob took the higher salary, increased his lifestyle accordingly, and didn’t adjust his risk mitigation strategy at all. Now he’s in a risker position and he has more to lose.

That’s what most people do! They settle into a particular balance of risk/reward, and then if they see an opportunity for a higher reward, they don’t pay attention to the increased risk – especially if that’s the order. People are good at spotting “if I increase my risk, I might increase my reward” scenarios. They’re bad at spotting “my reward is increasing, which likely means increased risk in some way” scenarios.

The lesson here is not to avoid ever going for more reward. It’s that you can go for more reward even with the same level of internal risk tolerance as long as you adjust your risk mitigation strategy accordingly. You don’t have to constrain yourself to one narrow set of behaviors because you have multiple levers you can pull to keep the total risk level constant. You just have to adjust accordingly.

Why is it that my obsession with the perfection of a task is inversely proportional to the importance of that task?

I think perfection is highly overrated. Most of the time, since perfection is so subjective to begin with, you shouldn’t agonize over getting things exactly right, because the marginal benefit to the increased time and effort is almost never worth it. Most other people can’t tell the difference between your 90% and your 100% and even if they could, they’d often prefer the 90% version in a quarter of the time or for a quarter of the cost. I want my heart surgeon to aim for perfection, but few others.

Of course, maybe that’s the answer to my question! When I get truly obsessed over perfecting something, it’s invariably something only I will ever know about. The exact right way to organize my tools, perhaps. Or the perfect little fix to some minor irk that I’ve encountered. Since no one else will no – but I will, every day – the “perfection perception” gap disappears.

You can do things any way you like, but the order matters. Vent before you try to make progress. Stretch before you run. Sharpen your axe before you cut.

If you’re feeling stuck, nine times out of ten, that’s the solution – you’re doing things in the wrong order.

Here’s an interesting little challenge for you: say the phrase “Coca-Cola” three times without your lips touching. Make sure not to let them touch at all!

Did you do it?

Did it sound kind of absurd?

Did you make a silly face while you were doing it?

Okay, now do this: say the phrase “Coca-Cola” normally.

Hahahahahaha

Okay, I wasn’t just playing a prank on you (although it would be pretty hilarious if I just used this platform to troll you every once in a while, I suppose). I also wanted to illustrate a point: sometimes we make things harder because we expect them to be hard.

Nothing in my initial instruction explicitly said that the task was going to be difficult, but the context and phrasing certainly implied that I was asking you to do something that would have a surprising challenge buried within. And so you automatically prepared yourself for that challenge, which included doing things inefficiently!

Some things, occasionally, will be easy – for you. They might be very difficult for other people and so the context of the task assumes difficulty. But be confident in your own abilities. Know what you can do well. And when you’re asked to do such a thing, just do it – don’t make it weird.

The best way to improve at something is to make sure that in small, incremental, and consistent ways you are punished for your mistakes.

You don’t want to be in a situation where you lose a hand for every mistake. You probably won’t lose a hand; instead, you’ll probably be so safe you never learn anything. But you also don’t want to be in a situation where there are no repercussions for your actions at all; in such an environment, no rigor equals no vigor.

But if you get a small amount of negative feedback very regularly whenever you make a tactical error, that will hone the relevant talent or skill to a razor’s edge.

This is what I’ve always loved about the sales profession and the people who take it seriously. If you’re in sales, you’re getting that feedback multiple times per day. Make some minor tweaks to your technique and you’ll get hard data back almost immediately. This enables you to refine and iterate so incrementally that it becomes one continuous process.

With that method, risk becomes virtually non-existent. You don’t have enough to lose from any one decision to be afraid of it, so you have tremendous operational freedom. If you embrace the feedback and dedicate yourself to absorbing the lessons, you can try almost anything and find the very best version.

You can – and should! – look for ways to add feedback loops like this to anything you’re serious about. Taking measurements more frequently, soliciting customer feedback more often, or finding ways to place small bets on sub-tasks with short time horizons are all good ideas. But there’s a secondary lesson here as well: don’t let yourself get put in a position where these things are difficult or even impossible.

A sure way to have your skills atrophy or your intellectual rigor deteriorate is to let yourself fall into an environment where there is infrequent or even no feedback. If you’re in a job that allows you to work for a year before anything you do is evaluated that can sound like a dream… at first. But it turns into a nightmare when you discover that your work’s been terrible for a year and you have no idea why or how to fix it.

And maybe one more lesson – before you trust or believe anything someone says, do a quick check of their environment. Do they get any feedback when they’re wrong? Are they punished? Do they lose bets? If the answer is no, then a massive grain of salt applies!