Category: Mental Models

Going after what you desire has utility. Your body runs off chemistry. And the people who win are the ones who can balance delayed gratification with following their desires. Delayed gratification is a popular wisdom to apply. And it’s important. It’s the skill that enables us to invest in ourselves and our future. But often…

The shadow is the place where the power lies. We’re terrified of it. The angry beast inside of us is the thing that could get us kicked out of our tribe. It’s the outlier, it’s the wildcard. We fear how powerful we are because we know it’s true. Looking inside yourself and seeing how capable…

If you’re struggling to focus on the work you care about you’re probably not thinking about the steps that will get you there. You have to live inside your ideas and desires to share them with the world. This is something you have to do if you want results. If you want to get fit…

You can be incredible. But you don’t know what form that incredible will take. Skill sets and accomplishments are developed over time and the path is winding. If you come up with a vision for the person you want to become it can energize you to push towards that identity. But you have to remember…

Nature is beautiful because everything that isn’t beautiful died. Accepting a certain brutality of nature is extremely important to making the right choices in life. Because we are nature. We’ve learned how to protect ourselves most of the time. But we still observe and judge everything according to the value system of survival. So if…

If you find yourself wishing you could just have a normal day for once I highly recommend you give up. When someone finds themselves wishing for a normal day that never seems to come it means they have a mistaken picture of what a normal day is. Because here you are, something went wrong again,…

A large portion of our perfectionism is risk management. We don’t want to mess up and be kicked out of our tribe and starve to death. But the reality of that actually happening is very low. And the cost of the perfectionism slowing you down is often higher than the risk of being seen. In…

Failure causes depression and success causes anxiety. You’ve got something difficult to deal with in both directions. It’s just a different flavor. And many people would argue anxiety is worse. Success causes anxiety because it’s new. When things are working, you have less information than when they didn’t work. Because you’re not used to things…

There’s an expression in the Navy Seals, “slow is smooth smooth is fast.” The less experience we have investing the faster we want the growth and the less money we have in the portfolio the faster we believe we need to make it. But that’s the exact opposite of any learning process. A student begins…

Your mind wants everything. Candy, success, money, fame… it doesn’t matter. Whatever you find yourself chasing, you’ll find that a part of you wants as much of it as possible. Because the panic of daily life optimizes for good things. It doesn’t optimize lots of good things over time. You have to choose that. When…