3 Steps for Life

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Step 1: Pause

Pause in life. Stop. Take a moment. Life is busy, fast, cluttered, and chaotic. Life is Mario Kart at 1,000 cc. Think about it all. Relationships. Work. Hobbies. Books to read and podcasts to listen to. Points of friction. Surprises good and bad.

We have to pause. We’re uncoupled from reality. We yell at our spouse when it’s the person we love the most. We chase investment gains contrary to our investing plan. We get off-track on projects by being on-line.

Take a breath (or sigh). Sit in a church. Meditate.

Step 2: Accept

We must accept the world as it is. You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. No wish casting. No re-roll requests.

Who made you manager of the universe? Don’t think about control. Instead, accept and orient. You’re lost. We all are, only to different degrees at different times.

Step 3: Hope

This requires faith in the connection between past and present. Stocks go up over time, stocks are down now, but stocks will rise again. Consider your myopia, and find your glasses.

Hope is crucial because without hope we have no action. Enter a game you can’t win – how hard are you going to try? Instead, think about the rules of the game, the past turns, how others have played. Did someone win? Did someone not lose? There’s hope: the connection of past to future that leads to action.

It’s a feature, not a bug. Book edition.

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I have long advocated for the efficiency of podcasts. This blog has been published for over 10 years on that very idea. The seed was that idea.

But I might have been wrong.

Much of early podcasting, was authors talking about their book. For years, and it might still be so, Podcast interviews with the best driver of book sales.

The friendly medium to authors, combined with most books having a limited set of ideas, made podcast interviews feel like a thorough and efficient summary.

Lately though, I’ve been listening rather than reading books. Dog walks. Drives to school and volleyball tournaments. House projects, and cleaning.

Audiobooks are a different experience from reading. Narrators offer inflection. Following along, takes more focus, especially for visual people like me. And it’s more difficult to skip around, accelerate, or change the cadence.

So when I listen to books, I spend more time in them. It’s six hours, eight hours, even 14 hours or so.

And that time might be the point!

Baking a cake at 700° doesn’t make the cake cook twice as fast. And the same might go for this. The key factor might not be the information, it’s in a podcast summary, it might be the time thinking about those ideas.

There’s no single best book to read, and there are no bad books. And there’s no bad form of learning. But if you’re like me, and you’ve discounted the time books take, let’s be good busy together, and update our ideas about reading. 

Would you buy a ski chalet? 

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How much money do you need? Make sure it’s at least at least one million. Now, double your number (I will move the goal posts for you). If it’s not at least $20 million, raise your number to that.

Would you buy a ski chalet?

A form of this question regularly rises on a sub-Reddit. 

Business sellers (occasionally it’s sunny stock situations) come into a large amount of money and ask strangers on the internet: *How do I…*. What a time to be alive! Bags of money bring baggage. So, would you buy a ski chalet?

On Reddit answer is no.

And it’s not even close. 

Potential purchasers make three assumptions that posters point out. First, that they will always enjoy skiing and the attractions of a single place. This is unlikely. Retired wealthy Redditors reply that they want to travel more and wider, now that they have more time. That they might get injured while skiing, which takes the shine off. Or their children, who they now want to spend more time with, will lose interest or get injured.

Second, ski chalet’s are in mountains, and mountains are not the most accessible places. It’s probably a plane ride, a rental car, and maybe even connecting flights. The sweet spot, per the commenters, is two hours. Vacation places within two hours get used and enjoyed. It’s logarithmic.

Third, vacation homes away from home are inconvenient to manage. Imagine spending a large amount-though you can afford it and then paying someone the lowest price to keep an eye on it. This is not a recipe for success.

Ultimately, the advice breaks down to three points: do things you enjoy, with people you love, and not too much stress. This is the main point of the story.

And this advice supplies to people who are not in the market for a ski chalet. One of the maxims for thinking analytically, is to take things to an extreme case. If we had all the money we thought we ever needed, How should we spend it? This is an actual question being answered by people who answered correctly and incorrectly.

Do things you enjoy, with people you like, and not too much stress.

It’s not the price of the ski chalet that’s the problem, is that it doesn’t fit with this advice.

Teaching in Verbs rather than Nouns

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There are two ways to teach chess, a master explained.

The first, is to teach chess principles that may apply to life. And the second, is to teach life principles that definitely apply to chess. 

“Could you give me an example of one such principle? Because I love in biology teaching not names, not using nouns, but instead teaching verbs. Because ultimately, if you want to understand, for instance, how the nervous system works, or the immune system, you teach the verb actions of molecules.

And the names of the molecules are important if you decide to go into that field professionally. But otherwise, the principles and verbs are what’s most important. So what’s an example of a principle of chess or a mode of action on the board that you think transfers?”

Yet we teach with nouns and employ nouns because nouns have a lower cost, even though they may not be the right tool for the job.

–

From Huberman Lab: Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life, Jan 27, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/josh-waitzkin-the-art-of-learning-living-life/id1545953110?i=1000685629066&r=5936
This material may be protected by copyright.

Circle of control

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This is Jared Dillian taking a brief detour in a post about Resentment.

I want to take a brief detour here and talk about how unproductive it is to try to control the entire universe with our minds. We worry about bad things happening, thinking that if we worry hard enough, that if we pray for a bad outcome, then it won’t happen. We resent other people, thinking that if we resent them hard enough, they’ll change and we will get what we want. Virtually all forms of non-heritable mental illness come from a desire to control other people and our surroundings. Virtually all forms of non-heritable mental illness come from an inability to accept other people and the world as they are. You can’t control your kid dropping out of college. You can’t control your husband letting out a loud fart when he gets out of bed in the morning. You can’t control the county when they hand you a property tax increase. You can’t control the airport that just rerouted flight patterns over your house. You can’t control who becomes president. The number of things you actually can control is shockingly small. You take the action, and you leave the results up to somebody else. That’s how this game works. Read this paragraph a few times. If you understand it and internalize it, you will never need a therapist again

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Mike again, I just love that framing, control the entire universe with our minds. Right out of Maxims for Thinking Analytically.

Airport tradeoffs

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Every ten minutes someone spends in security reduces spending by 30%. The WSJ video goes on to explain how airports are redesigning to include more commercial spaces.

But what I really enjoyed about this video is the emphasis on trade-offs.

Airports have to manage a whole bunch of things. Safety and security. Movement of giant entities and human beings. Navigation by experienced and inexperienced users. There’s a lot!

Which means there are choices to be made. Denver International Airport has three island concourses. This is great for planes. But not as great for passengers. How aesthetically pleasing can an airport be (which makes people feel better) relative to how efficient so that everything operates more quickly (which also makes people feel better). Don’t forget, it’s all about feelings.

Jobs Theory requires a laser-like look at the tradeoffs. Classically Bob Moesta asks: why do I want a hot dog and when do I want a steak dinner? Those answers are the first step along the path to what destination: the tradeoffs being made.

Smuggling or Selling Cigarettes

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It’s 1943 and Rae and Joseph meet in a Nazi concentration camp. Then, in 1945…

When the war came to an end, Rae and Joseph fled to Hungary, where they were quickly married. The day after the wedding, they trekked through the Austrian Alps and snuck across the border into an Italian displaced persons camp. They applied to come to America, using my grandmother’s last name, Kushner, since my grandfather had accrued a rap sheet from smuggling cigarettes into the camp to provide for his family.

They were accepted into America three years later.

The same day I read this, in Jared Kushner’s Breaking History, someone had been a real jerk. A Lowlife, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, bloodsucking, stiff-legged jerk.

But what’s the context? When is it smuggling cigarettes and when is it selling them? When is someone a jerk and when is someone having their own bad day? Maybe they had to deal with their own snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, bloodsucking, stiff-legged jerk?

JTBD requires an empathetic perspective. Figure out why someone acts the way they do. Not that many people roll out of bed with the express goal of being a stone in our shoe. Instead we can be curious, ask questions. We can conclude if someone was selling cigarettes or smuggling them.

Outgrind?

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The big idea from Outlive is that most health advice centers around avoidance (smoke in the lungs, sun on the skin, cells overloaded with sugar).

The next chunk of advice centers around basic things: move some, cultivate relationships, eat nutritious foods. It’s two 80/20 systems stacked on each other.

But we think about the last mile because we like to feel like we’re doing something. We like to feel that action is progress.

Pretty good is pretty good.

On his great blog, Justin Skycak writes about this in terms of “grind”.

Think of grinding on a project 50% of the time. If you double that to 100% that’s a 2x increase. What might take two years now takes one. That’s a sizeable change.

But “If you’re pushing 80% of the time, then the multiplier drops to 1.25x. You’re getting fairly close to max capitalization.”

Pretty good is pretty good.

This might be a more optimal situation too because of another idea: you have to be consistent before you can be heroic. I often said this to myself during a lot of Zone 2 training during 2024 (ultimately this worked out for me, I set a PR in the half marathon of 1:32:30).

There’s not a lot of return for grinding away at something all the time relative to most of the time. Like with Outlive’s advice, pretty good is pretty good. And, having the extra wiggle room allows for other things like serendipity and consistency.

Living…for time

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Metrics tag.

A huge goal of living well is living intentionally. Do the things I do do align with the things I want to do. Intentionality is why design is such large issue.

We can get lost in the abstraction. Such-and-such leads to end-result but we focus on such-and-such to the detriment of end-result. When my daughters were younger we tried to have family dinners as often as possible. I planned, prepped, and cooked the food. Sometimes they wanted something different, sometimes they wanted to help, sometimes life got in the way and dinner was canceled.

Sometimes this bugged the crap out of me. I put all this time, and effort, and blah blah blah. It was pure ego. And I’d lost sight of the end.

Kelly Starrett has a good podcast with Andrew Huberman talking about this (and many other things!). Kelly frames exercise as “earning credits”. The point isn’t the exercise, the point is to go and spend credits – being physically active with the people you love. Don’t do burpees to see how many burpees you can do in twenty minutes. Do them to have a more enjoyable hike with your kids.

From Huberman Lab: Dr. Kelly Starrett: How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility, Dec 9, 2024
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dr-kelly-starrett-how-to-improve-your-mobility-posture/id1545953110?i=1000679727148&r=8703

Love and Trust and USA Basketball

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One theme here is that information is not enough.

In his book, 10 to 25, about communicating with young people, David Yeager writes that the compliment sandwich doesn’t work because its supply side not demand side.

JTBD works so well because it shifts the focus from me to you, a business to the customers.

The supply side version of a compliment sandwich is what Yeager calls “wise feedback”. Before young people can hear criticism they have to feel safe. Feelings matter. Being in-the-group matters.

Shane Battier tells a story about Coach K’s early Olympic experience. Coach has just come from Duke where he sets a standard. People like us do things like this. But there was one guy on the team who was not very good in pick-and-roll defense.

So, coach lit into him. “You let him know in no uncertain terms that this is not going to fly,” said Battier. “And at that moment, like, you could see the look on this player’s face. He had never been talked to like this.”

Battier had. “I lived it, so I understood where it’s coming from. It was coming from a place of love.” This is Yeager’s wise feedback. It comes from a place of wanting the best. The listener feels safe because the listener and speaker are on the same side – they’re in the same group.

Coach K wises up right way. “It clicked and you realize, oh, this is not appropriate for him at this moment.” He didn’t have the right relationship for that kind of communication. It takes trust and love which take time and effort. We evolved as group members.

Note: Another version of this idea is here: https://moontower.substack.com/p/jokers-everywhere