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! Odds are overwhelmingly that you will not make it to the top....

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....

Rationality: From AI to Zombies: Letting Go. Eliezer Yudkowsky. Feb 1, 2015. 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. And their math probably said the leverage was okay....

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....

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....