Confident answers can be problematic

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Confidence is a good thing. If you can be confident in what you believe, what you know, and who you trust, that’s fantastic. However, if you have to project fake confidence as a way to avoid being seen as vulnerable, that quickly becomes a big problem.

In David Clark’s excellent book “Tao of Charlie Munger“, David shares a quote from Charlie and then gives a bit more context on it.

Charlie said “I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge.”

I agree with that statement, and I love the way David summarized it:

The problem here is one of trust. If people don’t have the integrity to admit when they don’t know something, how can one ever trust them? It is much better to jettison such a person and find someone with a bit more intellectual honesty. Again, Charlie shows that he is as interested in knowing what is unknown as in knowing what is known. The opinion of someone who can’t tell the difference is useless.

This comes up in so many places. A big problem with AI tools today is that they’ll hallucinate and give you fake answers, but they’ll be very confident in their response. We recently saw a lawyer foolishly use ChatGPT in his work, and despite ChatGPT assuring him that the data was real, most of it was completely made-up.

Knowing your shortcomings is a powerful thing, as significant learning comes from being wrong. If you can admit when you don’t know the answer, you’ll gain trust with those around you and you’ll likely learn more and become more wise in the process.

Multitasking makes learning difficult

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I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the idea of multitasking. I know that it’s mostly a myth (you don’t really “multitask”, you just “switch between different tasks quickly”), but I also have three monitors on my desk.

That said, this is a reason why I enjoy devices like the reMarkable tablet and the Kindle Scribe, as they help me focus on a single task with no notifications or interruptions getting in my way. In David Clark’s book “Tao of Charlie Munger“, a few quotes from Charlie are shared along these lines.

First, we have this from Charlie:

“Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading. If you want wisdom, you’ll get it sitting on your ass. That’s the way it comes.”

David shares that reading personal biographies was a huge piece of what Charlie (as well as Warren Buffett) attribute much of their success to.

The second quote from Charlie is much shorter, but I really liked David’s commentary about it. Charlie simply says “I think people who multitask pay a huge price.“, but David explains:

“Many people believe that when they multitask, they are being superproductive. Charlie believes that if you don’t have time to think about something deeply, you are giving your competitors, who are thinking deeply, a great advantage over you. Charlie’s ability to focus intensely and really think about something has been his competitive edge in beating Wall Street at its own game.”

There are large parts of my day where “multitasking” is the right move. Jumping from email to email, helping our team in Slack, hopping on a call with a client, etc. The problems begin when that’s all you’re able to do. If you can’t find some consistent time to get away and just think (like a clarity break), that can be problematic.

Depending on your role and your stage in life, that can be tough to do, but working to find time to make it happen can pay huge dividends.

Learning from the news

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When a news story starts taking attention of a large part of the country, like the recent implosion of the Titan sub or as COVID was sweeping the world, many people become “experts”, as shown in memes like this one:

It’s a tricky place to be. Most people indeed learned more about COVID as it happened, but we saw a lot of the Dunning-Kruger effect where people learned a little and thought that they knew a lot. As I shared a few years ago, the Dunning-Kruger effect is essentially:

… a cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.

The key, as I see it, is to learn what you can from the events, but remember how far you remain from being an expert. Curiosity helps.

The Titan

Using the recent implosion of the Titan submersible, I learned quite a lot about what happened. This may be old news for many of you, but for me it was brand new information:

  • I now know that “1 atmosphere”, like we feel in the air around us, is roughly 14.7 PSI (pounds per square inch).
  • At the depth of the Titanic, the pressure is around 400 atmospheres, or just shy of 6,000 PSI.
  • I learned a lot by watching recent interviews with James Cameron. At first blush it seems like “celebrity pretending to know a lot”, but he’s one of the foremost experts on this in the world. He’s been to the wreck of the Titanic 33 times, and has been to the Challenger Deep, the deepest-know point on earth. The pressure there was roughly 16,000 PSI, and he did it in submersible that he helped to build.

I found the story of the Titan to be heartbreaking and fascinating, but I’m still like 0.01% of the way to being an any kind of expert on it.

COVID

The same happened with COVID for many of us, and I learned things such as:

  • I learned about the amazingly long struggle that Katalin Karikó went through in developing mRNA vaccines for the past 30 years.
  • I learned that with a paper mask it really matters which side goes out. You keep the blue side out because it can help repel moisture (which is how things like COVID-19 travel), and the white side in because it’s absorbent and will help you from spreading germs.

So yes, many people on social media indeed become better informed about how the world works during troubling times, but they do even better when they realize just how little they actually know.

The less you think you know, the better your odds of continuing to improve yourself.

Creativity comes from connected thoughts

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It’s hard to come up with any truly new ideas today, as most of the best new ideas are merely the combination of existing ideas — but that’s a good thing.

In a recent podcast with Adam Grant, author James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) summarized his work in that way:

I haven’t had someone tell me this before, but you just said that I was good at reframing ideas. But that actually might be the only value that I really provide. I mean, the truth is most things that have been covered many times before. I mean, there’s 8 billion people in the world and there’s 100 billion that have lived before us. All this stuff is very well trod ground. It’s very rare that you come across something genuinely new. But maybe I can give somebody a new angle on it, or maybe I can provide clarity to the thought where if someone says, “oh, you know, like I’d never quite heard it put that way before.”

This reminded of a quote I just head in Steve Jobs’ new book “Make Something Wonderful”.

(side note; his new book is a compilation of quotes are stories about him, assembled by his wife and friends, and is 100% free to download and read in a variety of formats)

Steve said:

Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see. You have to have them to connect them. Creative people feel guilty that they are simply relaying what they “see.” How do you get a more diverse set of experiences? Not by traveling the same path as everyone else.

Steve points to two things in there.

First, he mentions “not traveling the same path as everyone else“, which was certainly something he lived by. However, it was the earlier part of the quote that stood out to me: “Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.”

That’s part of what I’m trying to do here. I don’t do a great job of it yet, but this post today is a good example of what I’m trying to do; I combined a 27-year-old quote from Steve Jobs with a snipped I heard on a podcast that was produced last week.

In this case they were mostly complementary quotes, and not a collision of thoughts that lead to a new idea, but the concept is the same. The more thoughts and ideas you open your mind to, the greater the chance you’ll find unique ways to see the world, and perhaps make a difference as a result of it.

Writing a summary is 100x more valuable than reading one

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I’ve recently started listening to David Senra’s “Founders” podcast, and it’s fantastic! Every week he reads a biography of someone interesting and then shares his insights from the book in a ~60 minute podcast.

While I’m enjoying listening to it, and I’ll continue to do so, I can’t help think one thing — David is getting way more out of this than I am.

Reading the entire biography is more valuable than listening a summary, for sure. Beyond that, though, David also takes the time to put together the summary, and then read it for all of us. Some of the main insights from each book he’ll probably look at five or six times by the time it’s done, and we’ll simply have heard him mention it once.

It’s kind of like the idea of visiting your notes more frequently; David is touching this content many more times than a listener like me, and he’s getting way more out of it as a result.

The Productivity Game

It’s similar to something else that a friend just shared with me called The Productivity Game. In this case, Nathan Lozeron shares book summaries in the form of PDFs, illustrations, and videos. Like David, Nathan does a fantastic job of assembling his summaries, but I’m again left feeling like Nathan is learning a ton more in building those summaries than I am in reading them.

Time…

I know what you’re thinking at this point, and you’re exactly right — to do what David or Nathan is doing takes tremendously more time. Looking at David’s work, for example, I simply can’t fit reading another book every week plus generating, editing and publishing a podcast for each one. Summaries are better than nothing.

Blinkist

I’m still a big fan of Blinkist (as I shared here back in 2020), and it’s similar to the examples given above. I read as many full books as I’m able, but there are only so many hours in a day. Tools like Founders, The Productivity Game, and Blinkist are great ways to get a wider range of insight in a limited amount of time.

Ultimately, that comes back to why I write this blog, and why I’ve added new things like the Sunday Summaries. Taking time to summarize what I’m learning is hopefully of some benefit to you, but is likely a much larger benefit to me. Everybody wins.

I’ll keep using tools like Founders and Blinkist to help cover more ground, but to the extent possible I’ll keep my focus on reading full books and then taking the time to summarize the bits of knowledge that I gain from them so I can learn even more.

Visit your notes more often, not less

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There are a lot of tools out there to help automate your note-taking. For example, a recent episode of Tech Talk Y’all shared the Omnivore app, which can automatically move highlights from your Kindle into Obsidian. It’s really slick, but I think it takes things the wrong direction for me. My notes are intended to help me learn, so I need to visit them more often, not less.

Here are two examples.

First, you may have noticed my recent “Sunday Summary” posts. While I hope you gain some value from them, I make it clear in the posts that those summaries are largely for me. They force to revisit my posts again and hopefully make things stick a little longer in my brain.

I also have tools like the Readwise “Daily Review” that forces me to revisit past highlights. I want to see old notes come up again, and do the manual work to connect them to one another. Heck, this goes back to a post from a few years ago about why I’m blogging every day.

Why do you have notes?

Granted, your need for notes might be different. It’s very possible that you literally want to just have a database of thoughts that you can reference later. In that case, tools like Omnivore are probably amazing for you, because it can automate dumping more stuff in your notes for future use.

It all comes down to why you have a place for notes at all. Once you understand that, you can shape your activities to make sure you’re doing things to support your overall goals.

For me, I want my notes to be a place that is constantly evolving to grow more benefits, so visiting those notes more often is the best way to do that.

A little Readwise every day

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Readwise has a lot of great tools to help manage the content you’re reading. I’ve mentioned their RSS reader before, and they do a nice job of pulling over highlights from Kindle and other places.

Ever since I started using it, they’ve been sending these emails called “Your daily Readwise” that I’ve been ignoring. I recently starting using that daily feature a bit more, and I love it!

If you’re a Readwise user you can find it here, and the way it works is quite simple. Every day it will pull a handful of your old highlights for you to review, and it looks like this:

It works a bit like Anki, where it’ll pull in quotes over time so you can get better at remembering them. I treat Readwise quotes as reminders, not as items to memorize. If I really want to memorize a quote, I’ll put it in Anki. For the rest, I’ll just let Readwise surface them for me from time to time to keep them fresh.

Sometimes it’ll pull in a quote that I no longer care about, so “discard” will hide it from showing up again. “Keep” is the default that I click for most of them.

The “Master” button is quite powerful, and you can use that to help remember key pieces of a quote. For example, I could hide the word “afraid” in the quote above, and then next time it shows up I’ll have to remember what that piece was.

This is known as a “Cloze Deletion”, and it’s something that Anki supports as well. If I want to use a Cloze to work on a quote I’ll often put it in Anki, but it’s just so simple to click here in Readwise that I’m finding myself doing it more and more often.

This review only takes me 30-60 seconds a day to run through, but it’s a great way to resurface highlights that I might have otherwise forgotten about. If you use Readwise much at all, I encourage you to give it a shot.

Produce more, because so much of it should be trashed

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It’s difficult to create high-quality content. Whether we’re talking about words, art, video or any other medium, there is a lot of scrap that needs to be created before you get to the good stuff.

In “Excellent Advice for Living“, author Kevin Kelly shares it like this:

The main reason to produce something every day is that you must throw away a lot of good work to reach the great stuff. To let it all go easily you need to be convinced that there is “more where that came from.” You get that in steady production.

This is largely why I publish a post every day — if I do it enough times, a combination of increasing skill and a lot sheer luck means that some good stuff is likely to find its way on here.

This blog is largely written for myself, but if I was writing this for a greater goal (SEO, paid work, etc) I’d take a different approach. I’d likely still write very often, but I’d throw away the bad stuff so that only the good gets shown. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, and it’s ideal in many circumstances, but sharing the bad posts (and you can decide what those are) is how I’ve chosen to do this.

It’s like the analogy of making more pots; you’ll do better work if you keep on practicing rather than just focusing on a single, perfect piece. Keep going, and the good stuff will show up.

Five years of Anki

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A little over two years ago I hit a streak of 1,000 days in a row of reviewing some flashcards in Anki. Most days I studied a few hundred cards, but all you need to review is one card to continue the streak and there were a few days with low numbers.

I first started using Anki near the end of 2015, but I was a little hit-or-miss for a few years. I probably hit 90% of the days in 2016 and 2017, but never built up any good streaks. On June 5, 2018 I didn’t study any cards, and the 173 that I studied the next day started a streak that is still going strong.

As I’ve said before, I admittedly go a little overboard and that’s helped lead to the streak. It’s a decent amount of work each day, but if I miss any cards it adds even more to the next day and leads to a few longer days. I try to be nice to “future Mickey” by keeping up every day.

As I get decks under control (thanks to the spaced repetition algorithm, you study fewer cards the better you know them) I add new ones from time to time.

Recent additions include:

  • A list of all US pro sports teams, including cities, name, and mascot. I knew almost all of these anyhow, but it’s been a good way to solidify new names like the Cleveland Guardians and the Washington Commanders.
  • Similarly, a list of all major college mascots in the US (352 of them). It’s easy for me to remember that Georgia is the “Bulldogs”, but less easy to remember that Alabama A&M is also the “Bulldogs” (much less than Campbell is the “Fighting Camels”). I’m still working through this one, as there are a lot of small schools that I’m still struggling with.
  • Lastly, I’ve added a Spanish deck with the 1,000 most common words in Spanish. I do a bit of Duolingo every day, and this is a nice complement to it.

As I’ve said before, I tend to go a bit overboard with this and you could find huge value in it with far fewer cards. I just enjoy the magic of the system. I can think “it’d be kind of neat to know all the names of the college mascots“, so I toss a deck in there and a year later I magically know them all. Even better, it’s not me that has to learn them; similar to helping my future self, in this case I just let the “other” Mickey deal with those. 🙂

I’ve done the same over the years with geography, the periodic table, the NATO phonetic alphabet and a variety of other things.

It’s just what I do

Once this became a consistent daily habit, things got much easier. It was no longer “will I review Anki cards today?”, but just a matter of doing it. Obviously adding a deck with 352 college mascots (one new card per day) adds a bit to my workload, it doesn’t seem like it. I’m going to be reviewing cards every day anyhow, so I might as well learn other stuff too.

If any of these decks sound interesting to you, most can be found in the official Anki deck repository, but just reach out if you can’t find something and I’ll be happy to share what I have.

Now, will I make it to 10 years of this? I hope to reference this post again in 2028…

Experience isn’t practice

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If you do something often enough you’re likely to get pretty good at it, but simply doing something over and over isn’t the same as practicing it.

In his book “Outsmart Your Brain“, author Daniel Willingham shares his thoughts on this:

Aristotle was right in saying that the doing is vital—a lyre player must play the lyre—but it’s not quite as simple as that. I’ve done plenty of things for decades without improving: driving a car, for example, or baking cakes or typing. How is it possible that I keep doing these things, yet I don’t improve? Simple: experience is not the same thing as practice.

Driving a car is an example that most of us can relate to. While we improve a good bit over the years simply from having seen such a variety of situations, most of us are not professional drivers. I’ve likely driven around 350,000 miles in my lifetime, and I’m likely only a tiny bit better than I was at 50,000 miles.

Typing is another great example for me is typing. As you might guess, I type a LOT. I’m pretty good at it, but I rarely actually practice. It’s one of those things where with some focused practice I could become even better, but I don’t do it often. I got on a brief kick a few years ago and improved my speed a bit, but I’d certainly be far faster now if I had kept up the deliberate practice.

If there is something you really want to improve on, focused practice is your key. Repetition will help, but it will never get you as far as real practice will.