Talent

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It’s good to be precise in our language. It means we aren’t speaking one thing but meaning something else. 

It means we are impeccable with our word. 

A lot of times we talk about “talent” like it’s a thing. So-and-so is so talented. They’ve got a god-given talent. 

When we talk like this we forget that success is really a talent stack. Success isn’t a number, it’s an addition problem. When someone doesn’t quite make it, it means they were missing a level of the stack. When we don’t quite make it, it means we missed something. Sometimes life is baking and sometimes life is cooking – and we better know the difference when it comes to the talent stack. 

John Cena spoke about his to Joe Rogan (# 2423). 

Every four months, 200 potential wresters enter the WWE development program. Can you imagine if your industry had that treadmill? Want to be on top? Cool, good luck, we are hiring eleven people every week who want the same thing. Some simply won’t make it. Some will have a talent but that’s not enough. 

To make it you need to be an acrobat and a fast talker. 

“But that’s not the only attribute that makes one special. You may be a great joke writer. But man, if you don’t master stage presence, I mean, being a great joke writer with stage presence, but if you can’t lug the tour, you’re not talented for it.”

Lug the tour – what an expression. 

Cena’s a good interview even for non-wrestling fans. His talent stack came from two choices. 

First, always make the harder choice. Don’t do the easy things. It will feel worse first, but it will be better later. 

Second, take risks. It’s easier to take risks when you’re small and no one is watching. And if everyone is watching and you take a risk – and fail – that’s fine. It’s a learning moment and a chance to practice the first, doing hard things. 

How does information flow? 

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As a family we used to play this Nintendo game called Overcooked 2.  The goal was to make food orders. My high school experience at Wendy’s was never this fun. 

In Overcooked, your team must notice orders (they look like thought bubbles), prepare the order (cook meat, chop vegetables, wash plates clean), and deliver the requested combination. 

Like all good games, it’s was just hard enough. That ‘hard enough’ meant there was no doubt about the order. The NPC doesn’t fib or change their mind. 

Life’s different. 

Life is a game of telephone.  

“The goal is to flatten the org structure, not to the point where no one knows who’s in charge, but flat enough so ideas move fast,” Brad Jacobs wrote. 

“I’ve seen org charts where there are nine layers between the customer and the CEO. That’s bureaucracy. The shorter and more direct the line from problem to decision, the better.”

We also tend to measure the easy thing not the right thing. It’s the easy metrics that get us in trouble. 

In my high school class it’s easier to see “time on task” or “quietly working diligently” than learning. So teachers, me included sometimes, get lost and track who’s not doing their work. 

That can be a good proxy. If someone is watching YouTube all the time, they probably aren’t learning. But, man, I’ll tell ya, these kids are an enigma wrapped in a riddle. You just don’t now. 

So sometimes, usually after a calm Sunday, I head back to work wary. Wary of telephone and wary of easy metrics. 

Difficult? Hardly!

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“I was the fastest person in my regiment to be promoted to corporal. And I was in the marching band and I did an excellent drill as well. And, you know, something I take away from some of the commanding officers whom I grew close to, they would tell me that, you know, the ethic of the army was that whatever you imagine is the most difficult thing, you should simply re-conceptualize it as the easiest thing and then you just do it.”

From Conversations with Tyler: Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other, Dec 3, 2025

Do NFL players have the right opinion?

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Each year, the NFL Player’s Association surveys their members (the players) about the quality of each team. Players rate things like the owner, the facilities, how a team treats player’s families, the strength coaches, the training staff, the food and cafeteria and head coach.

“One of our core jobs as a union,” the NFLPA notes, “is to improve the overall working conditions for our players, which includes the daily experience of players at the team facilities away from the lights and cameras.”

But, do working conditions help a team, just win baby?

Not really. With a Pearson’s CORRELation of .192, rely on something else.

Here’s what it looks like as a chart. The Miami Dolphins had the highest rating and Chiefs had the lowest.

There are some shortcomings: change of coaches, change of players, etc. We also don’t know how many players submit the survey. However 1700 respondents out of about 2000 players is a great survey return rate.

Enjoy the game!

Something to Play For

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The new year is a fresh start, time to think about and assess our lives, direction, relationships and so on.

However, if you need a little extra framing, Bill Simmons spoke about how the Celtics are doing so well and why. It might be because…

“Every single guy has some sort of hunger for something. So it’s like Jalen Brown, Tatum’s not here. I’ve always thought I could carry a team like this, so he’s in. Derrick White. I’ve always thought I could do a little more offensively. Here we go. Same for Prichard. Simons, contract here. Cada, I’ve never gotten a chance.Hauser, finally getting more minutes. You’re going down line. Jordan Walsh. I would fucking kill somebody to play 25 minutes a game. Hugo, I’m 19, I’m a rookie. Josh Minot, thank God I’m finally playing basketball.”

It’s great. Each guy, no matter what level, has something to play for.

Monte Carlo Mistakes

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“I’m going to work until my next birthday,” a near retiree friend told me. We were having dinner and she’d already punted on retiring her previous birthday. But this next one would be it – unless she wanted to travel more. 

Alaska was last year, Galapagos is this year, Africa the year after.  “I met with a financial advisor who ran a Monte Carlo simulation,” she said, “if I save a little more and take vacations from my income rather than savings, it’s more likely I’ll be better off.” 

Monte Carlo simulations, I thought, that sounds like a task for an LLM. After entering some approximate figures and going back and forth, Gemini ended with this: The Median Outcome: Even with this safer spending, the median outcome is ending up with $10M+ at age 83. This highlights the “Saver’s Dilemma”—to guarantee you don’t run out of money in the worst 10% of scenarios, you usually end up with a massive surplus in the other 90%.

Humans are feeling creatures, and it was a good feeling to know the spending “floor”.  (See also: Maxims for Thinking Analytically, extremes). In almost all situations $X is your spending floor. 

Decisions are a constant tradeoff of: what kind of mistake are you willing to live with? 

When I returned to teaching the cheating whack-a-mole was a whole new level. Twenty years ago laptops were a minority, now Chromebooks are ubiquitous. 

Imagine you’re running a marathon against one other runner. You’re neck and neck through the first five miles. You pull ahead. But then you notice something. There’s another runner ahead. You misunderstood. You’re running a marathon against a relay team. 

That’s the whack-a-mole challenge. Pop one area, a fresh one arises. 

Teachers have the same choice as retirees running Monte Carlo simulations (and all of us!). What side do I error toward? There’s no bullseye because there’s no right answer, just blunders one way or another. 

In the classroom, I give grace. Punishing a kid who worked hard and had questionable (LLM?) answers is worse than catching the number of cheaters +1. Retirees aim for grace too, only from the market. 

It’s like an alarm system. Do you want it to go off at false alarms or miss real events? 

This is the same spirit at the heart of 4000 Weeks – mistakes are inherent, are we choosing which ones to make?

Framing Resolutions

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Reframing metrics is catnip. In book form this is Moneyball, but there are many posts about framing and metrics.

How might we frame a meaningful life? And what metrics?

“Ultimately, the number of things you did can’t be definition of a. meaningful life. It’s got to be what you did and whether you did it in the spirit of showing up for it.”

That’s Oliver Burkeman’s advice to Rich Roll (November 2025). Burkeman’s book, 4000 Weeks, was one of my favorites last year. Happy New Year.

2026 Calendar

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Last year I bought Jesse Itzler’s Big Ass Calendar but found it to be too much friction. I wanted something to see my plans (which it did well), track activities (less well), and take notes and reminders (not well at all).

The only part I used – but loved – was the year at a glance. A 22″ by 14″ spread, by May it hung above my desk.

But it wasn’t great. I loved planning, doodling, and reflecting on adventures. Though my daily notebook dominated the tracking, noting, and reminders – the year-at-a-glance was a great reminder about what we got to do and what we still might yet.

Here is a Google Sheets version of that calendar. Under print settings, you may need to customize the layout. I print out four pages (January – June with dates 1-16 is one page for example), then craft it together.

This version’s lines are lighter than Jesse’s and the boxes are slightly larger. I use pencil because life happens. I’ll also throw on stickers and crude drawings for events.

The layout is so nice, to see horizontally where we are in a month and vertically where we are in the year. It also makes it easy to see if we are “a month away or more” from events.

What it’s missing is birthdays and holidays, but I’ll post other tweaks as they arise.

How to Make Air Travel Better with Orthogonal Thinking

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Orthogonal thinking and alchemy means solving problems with nonintuitive variables.

A lot of great finance book use orthogonal thinking. Rather than ask: how to shop for Christmas on a budget, orthogonal thinking moves past money and asks something closer to: how to create meaningful Christmas moments.

That reframing changes the variable from dollars/gifts to moments/meaning. To get in that spirit, Blake Scholl told Tyler Cowen how to make air travel better (no indentation).

The other thing that we need to do, and this is part of why it’s not a solved problem, is we need to fix checked baggage. Because baggage check is unreliable and slow, we have people carrying onto airplanes things they absolutely do not want to carry.

If we fix airports such that baggage check is fast and reliable, then we can stop having carry-ons, and we can get on and off airplanes much, much faster than we can today. That would actually be the biggest win. Imagine an experience where you take your Uber to the airport. The bag that today you would carry on is in your trunk. You step out of the car, someone, maybe even a robot, grabs your bag from the trunk. You don’t see it again.

After you land, you get a push notification on your phone that says your Uber’s in slot seven A, and by the time you get to your Uber, your bag is back in the trunk. The customer experience is your bag teleports from the trunk of your Uber at your origin to the trunk of your Uber at your destination. That’s how they should work. Then you don’t carry on all this stuff and it’s much faster to get on and off airplanes.

Reasoning from Extremes

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“No one,” Zach Lowe told Bill Simmons, “is arguing for a longer season. No one wants more than 82 games.”

“I’ve never seen a study,” Dr. Longo told Rich Roll, “showing that if you do 12 hours of fasting a day you’re going to have a problem.”

Both of these November episodes fit within maxims for thinking analytically. Not all of life will include common ground, but when it does, we can start there and decide how much to move away from there.