Category: Expectations
-
Shoot your shot
When actor and former NFL linebacker Terry Crews was a senior in high school, he played on the basketball team. During a practice session, he had an open shot and his coach yelled at him for not passing it to the team’s star player, Craig. When Terry tried explaining himself, his coach stopped practice and…
-
Luck vs. skill
There are parts of how something turns out that are within your control. This set of knowledge, actions, and beliefs, you can call “skill,” “hard work,” or “effort.” Your judgement of what’s in your control is known as “wisdom” or “reason.” For some people, it’s useful to believe that you can achieve positive outcomes largely…
-
Self-belief vs. the odds
Of the 49,000 members of the Actors’ Equity Association, the national union of stage actors, about 17,000 work at a median income of $7,500 in 2013. That’s not considering actors who don’t qualify for or participate in the union, who are likely paid less or working less. The conventional path of an actor is built…
-
How do you think it’s going to turn out?
Imagine that any time a meteorologist forecasted the weather, the prediction changed how the weather would be that day. So for example, if they predicted it would be sunny, then it was more likely to be sunnier that day. If they predicted it would be rainy, then it would be more likely to be rainy.…
-
Ask people to give you what you want
In December 2009, Patrick McKenzie invited Thomas Ptacek out to coffee in Chicago. This was unusual for Patrick, because he wasn’t comfortable writing cold emails at the time. While Patrick’s original intention was to gossip about Hacker News threads—they were the top two users by karma points—the conversation shifted to Thomas asking Patrick about SEO…
-
Re-appraising perfection
The story of perfect: Perfect is free of fault, incompletion, and error. Perfect is safety. Perfect is first place, a gold medal, or 100%. It is happily ever after, the peak of excellence, something to remember while also setting and forgetting. This is the imagined reality we live in, a story based on the assumption…
-
Coping with reality
Imagine you have a bag full of papers you carry with you everywhere. Each paper has a set of instructions. Every time you experience a strong enough negative emotion, you instinctively pull one of these papers. You do that because you know you will feel better after you follow the instructions. You’ve done this for…
-
What’s right vs. who’s right
Shane Parrish was talking to a woman who was one of two candidates to become the next CEO in her organization. She approached him with a difficult problem that the organization faced, and her proposed solution. It would work, but it would be complicated and risky to execute. She also told him there was another…
-
Basketball evolved because its inventor let go of control
On December 21, 1891, there was a big blizzard in Springfield, Massachusetts. Students wouldn’t be able to go outside for days. A thirty-year-old Canadian teacher at the YMCA Training School, James Naismith, had to figure out how to keep his students busy. James started off with a game of indoor football, which was too violent,…
-
The story of Mohini
Mohini was a white tiger who lived at the palace of the Maharaja of Rewa until the director of the National Zoological Park in Washington, DC bought her for $10,000. The people working at the zoo planned to build a natural habitat for her, but it would take several years to complete—so in the meantime,…