“People spend too much time on the last 24 hours and not enough time on the last 6,000 years.” – Will Durant
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Things that never change are the most important things to pay attention to. Change gets most of the attention, because it’s exciting and surprising. But things that stay the same – how people behave, how they think, how they’re persuaded – is the real meat of history.
- View Highlight
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(highlight:: Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who helped create the bomb, was guilt-stricken about the bomb’s destructiveness and pushed for smaller nukes to reduce the risk. He later admitted that was a mistake, because it increased the odds of a large nuclear attack.
Big risks are easy to overlook because they’re just a chain reaction of small events, each of which is easy to shrug off. So people always underestimate the odds of big risks.)
- View Highlight
-

It’s good to always assume the world will break about once per decade, because historically it has. The breakages feel like low-probability events, so it’s common to think they won’t keep happening. But they do, again and again, because they’re actually just high-probability events multiplying off each other. That isn’t intuitive, so we’ll always discount big risks like we always have.
- View Highlight
-

Tali Sharot, in her book The Optimism Bias, writes (emphasis mine:

Optimism protects us from accurately perceiving the pain and difficulties the future undoubtedly holds, and it may defend us from viewing our options in life as somewhat limited. As a result, stress and anxiety are reduced, physical and mental health are improved, and the motivation to act and be productive is enhanced. In order to progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities—not just any old realities, but better ones, and we need to believe them to be possible.
That last line is crucial. We tell ourselves stories about our potential for progress because if we’re realistic about how common failure and pain is, we’d never get off the couch.)
- View Highlight
-
- [note::This underscores the importance of communicating a clear, compelling, future-oriented vision as a leader]

(highlight:: People believe things that aren’t true, are only loosely true, true but improbable, or true but lacking important context. To do otherwise hurts too much. They tell themselves stories, find statistics, and surround themselves with incentives to make their beliefs seem as real as possible.
They’ve done it forever.
No one should be surprised when they keep doing it, because it’s such a fundamental part of how humans work.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: The inability to feel pain left Gabby unable to distinguish right from wrong in the physical world. It’s one of those things that’s easy to take for granted until you see what happens when it’s gone. One profile summarized a fraction of it:

As Gabby’s baby teeth came in, she mutilated the inside of her mouth. Gabby was unaware of the damage she was causing because she didn’t feel the pain that would tell her to stop. Her parents watch helplessly.

“She would chew her fingers bloody, she would chew on her tongue like it was bubble gum,” Steve Gingras, Gabby’s father, explained. “She ended up in the hospital for 10 days because her tongue was so swelled up she couldn’t drink.”

Pain also keeps babies from putting their fingers in their eyes. Without pain to stop her, Gabby scratched her eyes so badly doctors temporarily sewed them shut. Today she is legally blind because of self-inflicted childhood injuries.
Pain is miserable. Life without pain is a disaster.
I’m not a full-blown stoic who thinks we should embrace pain and go out of our way to experience it. I like comfortable shoes and liberal use of the thermostat, thank you very much.
But there’s something to the idea that pain is the most useful map of what works and what doesn’t. Remove it, and you’re left wandering somewhere between oblivious and reckless.)
- View Highlight
- pain, discomfort, feedback (systems),
- [note::This is actually a really great example of the importance of feedback]

(highlight:: The idea that people are hypersensitive to discomfort and will move mountains to avoid it even when it’s manageable and the act of avoiding it creates bigger risks, is a strange trait. But it’s common. I’d say it’s even default.
It’s part of why people lie.
Why they don’t exercise enough.
And why everyone wants a hack or a shortcut.)
- View Highlight
- discomfort, pain avoidance, human behavior,

(highlight:: Experiencing something that makes you stare ruin in the face and question whether you’ll survive can permanently reset your expectations and change behaviors that were previously ingrained.
It’s the basis of PTSD, and it leaves a mark in cases that have nothing to do with war.
It’s why the generation who lived through the Great Depression never viewed money the same. They saved more money, used less debt, and were weary of risk – for the rest of their lives. This was obvious even before the depression was over. Fortune magazine wrote in 1936:

The present-day college generation is fatalistic. It will not stick its neck out. It keeps its pants buttoned, its chin up, and its mouth shut. If we take the mean average to be the truth, it is a cautious, subdued, unadventurous generation.
It’s why countries that have endured devastating wars have a higher preference for social safety nets. Historian Tony Judt writes of post-war Europe:
Only the state could offer hope or salvation to the mass of the population. And in the aftermath of depression, occupation and civil war, the state—as an agent of welfare, security and fairness—was a vital source of community and social cohesion. Many commentators today are disposed to see state-dependency as the European problem, and salvation from-above as the illusion of the age. But for the generation of 1945 some workable balance between political freedoms and the rational, equitable distributive function of the administrative state seemed the only sensible route out of the abyss.
It’s why baby boomers who lived through the 1970s and 1980s think about inflation in ways millennials can’t fathom.
And why you can separate today’s tech entrepreneurs into two clearly different buckets – those who experienced the dot-com crash, and those who didn’t because they were too young to.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: The question, “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers.
Sometimes one side is selfish, or stupid, or blind, or uninformed.
But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?”
It’s the question that contains the most answers of why people don’t agree with each other.
But it’s such a hard question to ask.
It’s uncomfortable to think that what you haven’t experienced might change what you believe because it’s admitting your own ignorance. It’s much easier to assume those who disagree with you aren’t thinking as hard as you are.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Disagreement is less to do with what people know and more to do with what they’ve experienced.
And since experiences will always be different, disagreement will be constant.)
- View Highlight
-

“People spend too much time on the last 24 hours and not enough time on the last 6,000 years.” – Will Durant
- View Highlight
-

Things that never change are the most important things to pay attention to. Change gets most of the attention, because it’s exciting and surprising. But things that stay the same – how people behave, how they think, how they’re persuaded – is the real meat of history.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who helped create the bomb, was guilt-stricken about the bomb’s destructiveness and pushed for smaller nukes to reduce the risk. He later admitted that was a mistake, because it increased the odds of a large nuclear attack.
Big risks are easy to overlook because they’re just a chain reaction of small events, each of which is easy to shrug off. So people always underestimate the odds of big risks.)
- View Highlight
-

It’s good to always assume the world will break about once per decade, because historically it has. The breakages feel like low-probability events, so it’s common to think they won’t keep happening. But they do, again and again, because they’re actually just high-probability events multiplying off each other. That isn’t intuitive, so we’ll always discount big risks like we always have.
- View Highlight
-

Tali Sharot, in her book The Optimism Bias, writes (emphasis mine:

Optimism protects us from accurately perceiving the pain and difficulties the future undoubtedly holds, and it may defend us from viewing our options in life as somewhat limited. As a result, stress and anxiety are reduced, physical and mental health are improved, and the motivation to act and be productive is enhanced. In order to progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities—not just any old realities, but better ones, and we need to believe them to be possible.
That last line is crucial. We tell ourselves stories about our potential for progress because if we’re realistic about how common failure and pain is, we’d never get off the couch.)
- View Highlight
-
- [note::This underscores the importance of communicating a clear, compelling, future-oriented vision as a leader]

(highlight:: People believe things that aren’t true, are only loosely true, true but improbable, or true but lacking important context. To do otherwise hurts too much. They tell themselves stories, find statistics, and surround themselves with incentives to make their beliefs seem as real as possible.
They’ve done it forever.
No one should be surprised when they keep doing it, because it’s such a fundamental part of how humans work.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: The inability to feel pain left Gabby unable to distinguish right from wrong in the physical world. It’s one of those things that’s easy to take for granted until you see what happens when it’s gone. One profile summarized a fraction of it:

As Gabby’s baby teeth came in, she mutilated the inside of her mouth. Gabby was unaware of the damage she was causing because she didn’t feel the pain that would tell her to stop. Her parents watch helplessly.

“She would chew her fingers bloody, she would chew on her tongue like it was bubble gum,” Steve Gingras, Gabby’s father, explained. “She ended up in the hospital for 10 days because her tongue was so swelled up she couldn’t drink.”

Pain also keeps babies from putting their fingers in their eyes. Without pain to stop her, Gabby scratched her eyes so badly doctors temporarily sewed them shut. Today she is legally blind because of self-inflicted childhood injuries.
Pain is miserable. Life without pain is a disaster.
I’m not a full-blown stoic who thinks we should embrace pain and go out of our way to experience it. I like comfortable shoes and liberal use of the thermostat, thank you very much.
But there’s something to the idea that pain is the most useful map of what works and what doesn’t. Remove it, and you’re left wandering somewhere between oblivious and reckless.)
- View Highlight
- pain, discomfort, feedback (systems),
- [note::This is actually a really great example of the importance of feedback]

(highlight:: The idea that people are hypersensitive to discomfort and will move mountains to avoid it even when it’s manageable and the act of avoiding it creates bigger risks, is a strange trait. But it’s common. I’d say it’s even default.
It’s part of why people lie.
Why they don’t exercise enough.
And why everyone wants a hack or a shortcut.)
- View Highlight
- discomfort, pain avoidance, human behavior,

(highlight:: Experiencing something that makes you stare ruin in the face and question whether you’ll survive can permanently reset your expectations and change behaviors that were previously ingrained.
It’s the basis of PTSD, and it leaves a mark in cases that have nothing to do with war.
It’s why the generation who lived through the Great Depression never viewed money the same. They saved more money, used less debt, and were weary of risk – for the rest of their lives. This was obvious even before the depression was over. Fortune magazine wrote in 1936:

The present-day college generation is fatalistic. It will not stick its neck out. It keeps its pants buttoned, its chin up, and its mouth shut. If we take the mean average to be the truth, it is a cautious, subdued, unadventurous generation.
It’s why countries that have endured devastating wars have a higher preference for social safety nets. Historian Tony Judt writes of post-war Europe:
Only the state could offer hope or salvation to the mass of the population. And in the aftermath of depression, occupation and civil war, the state—as an agent of welfare, security and fairness—was a vital source of community and social cohesion. Many commentators today are disposed to see state-dependency as the European problem, and salvation from-above as the illusion of the age. But for the generation of 1945 some workable balance between political freedoms and the rational, equitable distributive function of the administrative state seemed the only sensible route out of the abyss.
It’s why baby boomers who lived through the 1970s and 1980s think about inflation in ways millennials can’t fathom.
And why you can separate today’s tech entrepreneurs into two clearly different buckets – those who experienced the dot-com crash, and those who didn’t because they were too young to.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: The question, “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers.
Sometimes one side is selfish, or stupid, or blind, or uninformed.
But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?”
It’s the question that contains the most answers of why people don’t agree with each other.
But it’s such a hard question to ask.
It’s uncomfortable to think that what you haven’t experienced might change what you believe because it’s admitting your own ignorance. It’s much easier to assume those who disagree with you aren’t thinking as hard as you are.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Disagreement is less to do with what people know and more to do with what they’ve experienced.
And since experiences will always be different, disagreement will be constant.)
- View Highlight
-