Category: Expectations
-
Choose the action, choose the consequence
“When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.” Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory
-
Sweet lemons
I recently took a week off work. The first day off, my nose started running. I got sick. The rest of the week involved me staying in my home, recovering. There are at least two competing truths here: One truth involves me being upset that I didn’t get to do much I wanted to. Another…
-
Five life lessons from playing board games
You can learn a lot about life from playing board games. Here are five lessons I’ve picked up from the past few years: The point is to have fun, not to win. If you want to play competitively, then join a tournament—don’t do that with your friends. The point is to enjoy each other’s company.…
-
Hold yourself accountable
In Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish writes: Self-accountability means taking responsibility for your abilities, your inabilities, and your actions. If you can’t do that, you might never move forward. You might not have someone in your life who holds you accountable, but that doesn’t matter. You can hold yourself accountable. Others might not expect more from…
-
Deconstructing Pat Riley’s guarantee
In The Optimism Bias, Tali Sharot writes a story about Pat Riley, who was head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s and had just won the 1987 NBA Championship: In the midst of the postvictory celebration, Riley was approached by a reporter. The journalist wanted to know if Riley believed the Lakers…
-
Nice vs. kind
In Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish writes: Too often, the people we ask for feedback are kind but not nice. Kind people will tell you things a nice person will not. A kind person will tell you that you have spinach on your teeth. A nice person won’t because it’s uncomfortable. A kind person will tell…
-
To break through perfectionism, take a small step in any direction
In Hidden Potential, Adam Grant writes (I’ve reformatted for a better list read): In their quest for flawless results, research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. In Adversity for Sale, Jeezy writes: I always tell people when you’re feeling stressed out, lost, and overwhelmed, you’re better off taking a small step in…
-
Two kinds of truths
Just a few years before I wrote this, WeWork was valued at $47 billion and raised $1.5 billion in cash. That’s a whopping amount of cash; to put it into perspective, several years before that, Meta had acquired Instagram for $1 billion. Yesterday, WeWork declared bankruptcy. In The Snowball, Alice Schroeder writes, “[Benjamin] Graham used…
-
“You don’t need to get comfortable before you can practice your skills”
Adam Grant shares a learning key from polyglots—people who learned several languages—in Hidden Potential: You don’t have to wait until you’ve acquired an entire library of knowledge to start to communicate. Your mental library expands as you communicate. When I asked Sara Maria what it takes to begin, she said she no longer waits to…
-
“You want to feel a gap between what you expected and what actually happened”
In Same as Ever, Morgan Housel dedicates a chapter to expectations. He writes: What generates the emotion is the big gap between expectations and reality. When you think of it like that, you realize how powerful expectations are. They can make a celebrity feel miserable and a destitute family feel amazing. It’s astounding. Everyone, everywhere,…