Well, I try my best to be just like I am, But everybody wants you to be just like them
— Bob Dylan from “Maggie’s Farm”
What are we all searching for?
”When it comes to our dreams, each of us seems to be searching for something rather different. Some are chasing a long-held ambition – to become a famous author, or pianist, or bottle-cap collector. Others are searching for the perfect partner with whom they can raise a family. There are those who aspire to great wealth and luxury, while others who yearn for modest simplicity. Still more may be pursuing particular emotional states: to become calmer, less timid, or more present in the world.
Yet, though our dreams look different on the surface, at heart, all of us are searching for pretty much the same thing. The Greeks called this quality eudaimonia: variously translated as ‘fulfillment’ or ‘flourishing. It is the sense that we have achieved our purpose in life; that our particular combination of talents and drives have attained their most ideal end. It’s feeling like we have found our fitting place in the cosmos.
Achieving eudaimonia is no simple task: most of us will spend our lives embarked upon the search. Yet our search is more likely to bear fruit if we begin by investing in two key areas: self-knowledge and resilience. Namely, by gaining a deeper awareness of our personal sources of meaning, and building up the emotional strength required to achieve it.”
— School of Life (link)
Nothing will change your future trajectory like your habits. While goals rely on extrinsic motivation, habits, once formed, are automatic. They literally rewire our brains.
— Farnam Street
We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about
~ Joseph Campbell
People prefer their sources of information to be highly correlated. Then all the messages you get are consistent with each other and you’re comfortable
— Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman on …
- Kahneman On… Logic and Rationality: “Irrational has no meaning for me. Being illogical is normal, it’s human. Being logical would be… Spock. To some extent it’s not even interesting to ask the question whether people are logical or not.”
- Kahneman On… What We Believe In: “We have a sense that we see reality the way it is. We believe that we believe what we believe, because we believe the arguments that come to our mind when we defend it, which is completely the wrong way round. The truth is that you believe in the arguments because they support [your] beliefs. And the origin of the belief comes from your past somewhere, from people or organizations that you trust.”
- Kahneman on… Bias & Noise: “The measure of global error is the square of bias plus the square of noise. Bias and noise are two separate families of error. They’re equally important in principle and you can improve accuracy – without touching bias at all – by reducing noise. This is non-intuitive but yet it’s true.”
- Kahneman On… Getting Trapped in a Local Equilibrium:“Some randomness is needed for creativity, provided that you have the opportunity to get feedback and to see what works – evolution requires some randomness and variability.”
- Kahneman On… Decision Hygiene: “When you are evaluating a prospect or an investment, you can break the problem up into dimensions instead of looking at it globally. Evaluate each dimension separately and objectively and independently. Inhibit any attempt to form a global impression. The real deep principle of hygiene here is ‘delay intuition and delay agreement.’ Intuition if you delay it is truly wonderful, but you have to delay it. If you allow intuition to jump to conclusions, you’ll be noisy.”
- Kahneman On… Suffering: “The way of measuring suffering in an individual [is measuring] how much time you spend in a state you would wish to avoid. It’s a simple definition really. Suffering is very unevenly distributed – 10% of the people do about half of the suffering.”
- Kahneman On… The Crowd Within: “If you pool yourself more than once then you’ll come up with somewhat different judgments and the average of your judgments is likely to be more accurate than any single judgment.”
- Kahneman On… The Future: “Asking me what I’m optimistic about is a non-starter. Asking me what I’m worried about – there’s a long list. The most immediate is populism, the more remote is climate change, even more remote is what AI may do to us. But in the meantime, we’re fumbling along.”