36 Key Insights Of 2017
If we pay close attention to life, we can learn something new every single day (at least that’s what they say).
If we pay close attention to life, we can learn something new every single day (at least that’s what they say).
But usually we don’t.
All too often, we just lurch through our lives. Blindfolded, deaf and ignorant.
And to be honest, I’m still way too fucking ignorant of a lot of things and people (like I’m sure you are too).
In 2017, however, I wrote down down stuff. A lot of stuff. A lot of random stuff. A lot of interesting, boring, important, useless, and fascinating random stuff.
I took notes on everything that felt remotely interesting. And I mean on fucking everything: Quotes, facts, ideas, perspectives. Pulled out of books and articles, movies and documentaries, podcasts and interviews, conversations and discussions, as well as my own observations.
This new habit has allowed me to gain some insight into areas I was previously blind in, as well as to unlock fresh inspiration and ideas.
My collection has 500+ nuggets of insights (so far).
Here are my Top36:
(kind of random, I know. But fuck it, 36 is a great number!)
btw: if there is no source, I didn’t write down any or I have developed the thought myself
ONE 1
“Truth is not determined by consensus or popularity.”
Naval Ravikant
TWO 2
Watch your language when it’s raining. Don’t label external circumstances as something negative that can hold you back from having a good time or achieving something (e.g. it’s raining, it’s such bad weather outside vs. going out because it’s raining and having a good time in the rain).
Inspired by: Josh Waitzkin in a podcast with Tim Ferriss.
THREE 3
In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. Today, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don’t know what to pay attention to, and often spend their time focusing on and debating side issues.
Inspired by: Homo Deus (Y. N. Harari)
FOUR 4
“We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we continually hope to become happy in the future.”
Sam Harris
FIVE 5
You can’t win if you don’t play.
SIX 6
Happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon.
Inspired by: Homo Deus (Y. N. Harari)
SEVEN 7
We tend to attribute the survivors’ success (e.g. super successful business people) to their common skills, knowledge, and attributes because we fail to see if the same skills were being shared by the non-survivors (those who failed at building businesses).
(The survivorship bias wasn’t new to me but I realized (again) how ubiquitous it is in the stories we tell ourselves in many different areas.)
Inspired by: The Black Swan (N. Taleb)
EIGHT 8
Quitting can be necessary for progression.
NINE 9
Mistakes are the price we are paying to gain information, to learn. If we’re smart, we can also learn from other peoples’ mistakes — but that is much harder.
TEN 10
“To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of the ocean by the frailty of its foam.”
Khalil Gibran in “The Prophet”
ELEVEN 11
Not believing in God or an afterlife makes life more meaningful, not less. If you don’t assume that you get to live for eternity, you’ll cherish each moment infinitely more!
TWELVE 12
Information can be bad for knowledge.
The more detailed knowledge one gets of empirical reality, the more one will see the noise and mistake it for actual information. Our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds but rather become more confident.
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
Inspired by: The Black Swan (N. Taleb)
THIRTEEN 13
“Life is not like a journey because the point isn’t to arrive. It’s more like music or a dance, where the whole point is to enjoy the process while it’s going. You’re supposed to enjoy the music while it’s being played.”
Alan Watts
FOURTEEN 14
“Life is not about controlling emotions. Life is about channeling emotions.”
Mark Manson
FIFTEEN 15
Doing extraordinary things is not an end in itself. Being extraordinary for the sake of being different doesn’t make sense.
However, extraordinary things probably strongly overlap with things that are worth being explored and experienced; things that make your life interesting.
In our modern society, ‘ordinary’ things usually don’t provide that (given what our environments select for as ordinary things).
SIXTEEN 16
Do you actually like the climb or just imagine the top?
SEVENTEEN 17
The foundation of happiness is mindfulness. The basic condition for being happy is our consciousness of being happy. If we’re not aware that we’re happy, we’re not really happy.
Inspired by: Thich Nhat Hanh and his books “Peace is Every Step” and “The Heart of The Buddha’s Teachings”
EIGHTEEN 18
It’s easier to build a career than to become a good person. Things that advance our careers are not always congruent with those that make us good persons.
Our world is better at recognizing and building good careers although we actually value good character more strongly.
NINETEEN 19
We are very good at focusing on what could go wrong but very bad at looking at the cost of not doing anything.
TWENTY 20
Only 3% of the weight a rocket carries is cargo. 97% is fuel (or propellant). That makes it so extremely expensive to get stuff to space.
Source: “Tomorrow’s technology” in the Guardian’s Science Weekly Podcast
TWENTYONE 21
Nonlinear relationships are omnipresent in life. Linear ones are truly the exception, we only focus on them in textbooks and classrooms because they are easier to understand.
Inspired by: The Black Swan (N. Taleb)
TWENTYTWO 22
“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”
Jerzy Gregorek
TWENTYTHREE 23
Things didn’t happen in the past, they happened in the now. Things won’t happen in the future, they will happen in the now. The now is an eternal present. When the future comes, it comes as the now.
The present moment is all you will ever have. There is never a moment when your life is not “at this moment”.
Hence, learning to fully immerse into and enjoy the present moment is the only way to really live and enjoy life.
Inspired by: The Power of Now (E. Tolle)
TWENTYFOUR 24
“What is the meaning of life?” is the wrong question.
Instead, we must ask: “How can I make my life meaningful?”
And the answer to that requires action.
TWENTYFIVE 25
“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”
John Archibald Wheeler
TWENTYSIX 26
Your acts and choices change who you really are. Most of your character only manifests in our interactions with other people.
TWENTYSEVEN 27
You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don’t even know.
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.
Inspired by: Paul Graham and his essay on “How To Do What You Love”
TWENTYEIGHT 28
True money lies with investments in successful companies & projects where there wasn’t consensus among investors in the beginning (because consensus gets priced in quickly).
This leads to investments into crazy sounding ideas.
Inspired by: Marc Andreessen in an Econtalk podcast.
TWENTYNINE 29
“Health is a resource for everyday life, not the object of living.”
World Health Organization (WHO)
THIRTY 30
Our subconscious is driving so much of our lives that we need to be careful about what we feed it.
Most of the environments we live in are designed to make us feel incomplete and inadequate, programmed to create cravings and desires, and set up to suppress critical thinking.
Hence, we must be very intentional about what we consume with our minds, which influences we let come close to us and how we receive them.
THIRTYONE 31
Religion is anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures. It legitimizes human norms and values by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws (either word of God or natural laws like human rights). In that sense, humanism is also a religion.
Inspired by: Homo Deus (Y. N. Harari)
THIRTYTWO 32
Mindset over tools. Those with the right mindset are more successful in the long run vs. those who just apply given tools.
Inspired by: Dan Pardi in a Sigma Nutrition Podcast.
THIRTYTHREE 33
Our society’s “mistakephobia” is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them.
We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes.
Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning.
Inspired by: Principles (R. Dalio)
THIRTYFOUR 34
It’s easier to have a theory than to have none. We come up with explanations all the time because we feel uncomfortable not knowing — and admitting that we don’t know.
THIRTYFIVE 35
Be wary of the ideas you inherit. Old conventions and previous forms are often accepted without question and, once accepted, they set a boundary around creativity.
Inspired by: James Clear and his article on “First Principles Thinking”
THIRTYSIX 36
Coca-Cola is green without coloring.
Shoutout:
I was inspired to do this note-taking thing in 2017 by Tré Wee after I read his article on his key learnings of 2016 last year. Cheers mate!
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