On deciding...............

 

When you can’t decide, ask yourself: Which option minimizes future regrets?

Then do that.

-Mark Manson, from here

Damn.......................

Your health and financial success hinge on a handful of big, boring decisions, not micro-optimization hacks.

Clarity.................

 

In the movies, there’s plenty of stirring music when the hero has to make their choice. But in our lives, there isn’t a single moment. Instead, there are a million of them.

The way we show up will rarely be perfect. But perfect isn’t the point. Countless tiny decisions add up to a whole. It helps to be clear about the purpose of the work we’re here to do.

-Seth Godin, from here

Teddy, Jr.....................

 

........................as a leader and a hero:

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. did not shape Utah Beach by following instructions perfectly. He did it by understanding something essential about leadership: that sometimes the most dangerous choice is waiting, that responsibility doesn’t always come with permission, and that decisive action—taken at the right moment—can change history. He didn’t start the war from where it was planned. He started it from where it mattered.

a curious inversion.................

 

The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to have total choice over their satellite TV package, yet think it perfectly normal to allow the state to make all the choices in respect of their health care. It’s a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government. 

-Mark Steyn

via

On the art of breaking rules...............

 

Commenting on the behavior of the Bank of England in the crisis of 1825, Thomas Joplin said, "There are times when rules and precedents cannot be broken; others, when they cannot be adhered to with safety."  Of course.  But breaking the rule establishes a precedent and a new rule, which should be adhered to or broken as occasion demands.  In these circumstances, intervention is an art, not a science.  General rules that the state should always intervene or that is should never intervene are both wrong, . . .

-Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises

We decide......................

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night

Removes the colours from our sight.

Red is grey and yellow white,

But we decide which is right

And which is an illusion.

-Graham Edge, The Moody Blues, Late Lament

messy and complicated................

 

Reality is messy and complicated, so our tendency to simplify it is understandable.  However, if the aim becomes simplification rather than understanding we start to make bad decisions.

-Farnum Street (Shane Parrish), The Great Mental Models

Franklin at age 62.............................

The year is 1768.............. 

Above all, as he admitted in some letters, his views were in flux and he was still trying to make up his mind. . . .

     That was the crux of Franklin's dilemma.  He had rendered himself suspect, he noted in a letter to a friend, "in England of being too much of an American, and in America of being too much of an Englishman."  With his dreams for a harmonious and growing British Empire, he still hoped he could be both.  "Being born and bred in one of the countries and having lived long and made many agreeable connections in the other, I wish all prosperity to both," he proclaimed.  Thus, he was intrigued, even hopeful, about securing a government job in which he could try to hold the two parts of the empire together.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, 

cheap, not rare....................

 

People think good decision-making is about being right all the time. It's not. It's about lowering the cost of being wrong and changing your mind.

When the cost of mistakes is high, we're paralyzed with fear. When the cost of mistakes is low, we can move fast and adapt.

Make mistakes cheap, not rare.

-Shane Parrish, from this episode

soul..........................

 

It's the great self-persuasion paradox:  To believe in yourself, you first have to get yourself to believe in yourself.

Aristotle, the most rational of all rational beings, understood that logic rarely persuades on its own.

Choices complicate things.

Bad news, good news.  Stuff happens.  Your response determines what kind of soul you have, and how much you live up to that soul.

Opportunity requires a decision.

Chaotic moments—a sudden promotion or a piece of bad news—don't determine your future.  Your choices do.

-all excerpts from the latest from Jay Heinrichs, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion

here's a concept...........................

 

Ferrari will always deliver one car fewer than the market demands.

-from Ted Lamade as he observes the seduction of "growth"

deliberate decisions.................

 

     Holding the global economy hostage to one of the world's most dangerous political disputes might seem like an error of historic proportions.  However, the concentration of advanced chip manufacturing in Taiwan, South Korea, and elsewhere in East Asia isn't an accident.  A series of deliberate decisions by government officials and corporate executives created the far-flung supply chains we rely on today.  Asia's vast pool of cheap labor attracted chipmakers looking for low-cost factory workers. . . . Washington's foreign policy strategists embraced complex semiconductor supply chains as a tool to bind Asia to an American-led world.  Capitalism's inexorable demand for economic efficiency drove a constant push for cost cuts and corporate consolidation.  The steady tempo of technological innovation that underwrote Moore's Law required ever more complex materials, machinery, and processes that could only be supplied or funded via global markets.

-Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

the quiet moments....................

 

    Why me?

    Why was I spared when so many others weren't?

    Why was I gifted with this extra time?

    And what do I do with this gift?

    This kind of introspection isn't merely a luxury of age, it's a necessity, a way to reconcile the randomness of existence with the purpose I sought.  I realized that the answers weren't in the grand events, but in the quiet moments, in the decisions made when no one was watching, in the way I chose to face each new day.

-George Raveling, What You're Made For: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports

As questions go.............................

 

...........................this one is pretty legitimate.

 Either way, Trump’s salvo brings to the forefront a major unanswered question about the Biden presidency: who made executive decisions in the last four years?

perspectives........................

 

The chief enemy of good decisions is a lack of sufficient perspectives on a problem.

-Alain de Botton

and he has a pretty good imagination..............

 I cannot ever imagine a world where economic volatility is tamed and people stop making financial decisions they eventually regret – no matter how much history of past mistakes we have to study.

-Morgan Housel

be warned...........................

. . . if a new type of technological product is being pushed by government in order to meet national policy targets, that means that it has not been through the filter of large numbers of people freely deciding to buy it and telling their family and friends that it benefited them as individuals.

-from this Samizdata post

deciding................

 

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

-Steve Jobs

The trouble with doing.......................

 

.................economics properly and wisely:

It’s tempting to do economics as if an omniscient and omni-benevolent god were able and willing to hire itself out as the faithful agent to follow the mortal’s policy recommendations. Imagining oneself tapping into god-like knowledge and power is heady, and from that high perch the real-world, with all of its messiness and imperfections, does indeed appear to be in dire need of divine intervention. But economics properly and wisely done . . . takes human nature, including humans’ limited cognitive abilities, as given. Most of the so-called “theoretical exceptions” to the economic case for free trade are relevant only in an alternative reality in which governance of humans’ daily economic and political affairs could actually be turned over to a god or to a mortal transformed into a god.

-Don Boudreaux, from this post