Letting Go

You Probably Won't Make it to the Top. David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). m.signalvnoise.com . Nov 22, 2018.

Fallacy: If you really set your mind to it, you can do it… That’s how I did it. I just wanted it more, worked hard, and eventually all my dreams came true. I won’t say it’s easy, but it’s up to you!

How Doctors Die. Ken Murray. www.zocalopublicsquare.org . Nov 30, 2011.

Doctors tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. They go gently into that good night - no heroics; no CPR.

Sometimes, a family really means ‘do everything’, but often they mean ‘do everything that’s reasonable.’ But they may not know what’s reasonable.

Learn when to admit failure

It’s important to have a watershed moment and acknowledge a fundamental problem, instead of dividing it into palatable bite-size mistakes.

LTCM were exploiting market inefficiencies. Other people learned of the tricks. LTCM didn’t lose hope. They borrowed more and more leverage to exploit tinier and tinier margins.

No Clarity Around Growth Mindset. Scott Alexander. slatestarcodex.com . Apr 8, 2015.

Growth mindset: people who believe effort - and not ability - determines success are more resilient, skillful, hard-working, perseverant in the face of failure.

Most of the growth mindset experiments prime their subjects, but recent priming experiments have famously failed to replicate. Dweck’s experiment:

• Group A: easy test (success) -> final bound-to-fail test
• Group B: hard test (told they’re not working hard enough) -> final bound-to-fail test
• Group B outperformed Group A. Explanations:
  • Dweck: Telling As to work harder made them less helpless.
  • Alternative: B’s are used to failing get less flustered than A’s who have been artificially made to succeed.

In Dweck’s work, why do helpless children and the mastery-oriented children always start out performing at the same level? Shouldn’t the fixed-mindset kids already be underperforming? Why do we find enough fixed-mindset students at elite colleges?

Humble Exits. Morgan Housel. www.collaborativefund.com . Oct 24, 2018.

Jack Welch declined $110m for a 10th season of Seinfeld because he was done with the show. He wanted to end the show on the same kind of peak.

The show was based on recreating real events from his and Larry David’s normal life. They were running out of material because it had been so long since they experienced a normal life.