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## COLLECT MENTAL MODELS

- EVOLUTION: Literally all of the works of mankind and womankind can be
traced down to people trying to solve this problem.
Charles Darwin books then-> Richard Dawkins

- INVERSION: It’s not
about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect
judgments. [4]

- COMPLEXITY THEORY

- ECONOMICS: Microeconomics and game theory are fundamental.
goodunderstanding of supply-and-demand, labor-versus-capital,
game theory, and those kinds of things. [4]
Ignore the noise. The market will decide.

Macro eco: Adam Smith, read von Mises, or read Hayek
communist or socialist ideas: Karl Marx

- PRINCIPAL-AGENT PROBLEm:
When you are the agent and
you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad
job. You just don’t care. You optimize for yourself rather than
for the principal’s assets.
The smaller the company, the more everyone feels like a principal.

- COMPOUND INTEREST: microeconomics textbook
If you’re
compounding at 30 percent per year for thirty years, you don’t
just end up with ten or twenty times your money—you end up
with thousands of times your money. [10]

- Math
you want arithmetic, probability, and statistics.

- BLACK SWANS
Black swans are extreme probabilities.
I have to refer back to Nassim Taleb, who I think is one
of the greatest philosopher-scientists of our times. He’s really
done a lot of pioneering work on this.

- CALCULUS: the principles of calculus—where you’re measuring the change
in small discrete or small continuous events.
It’s not important you solve integrals or do derivations on demand, because
you’re not going to need to in the business world.

- FALSIFIABILITY: . For you
to believe something is true, it should have predictive power,
and it must be falsifiable. [11]

> IF YOU CAN’T DECIDE, THE ANSWER IS NO.

And the reason is, modern society is full of options. There are tons and tons of options. We live on a planet of seven billion people, and we are connected to everybody on the internet. There are hundreds of thousands of careers available to you. There are so many choices.

Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision,
take the path more painful in the short term

What are the most efficient ways to build new mental models?
Read a lot—just read. [2]

Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will
likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within
seven years.

> Reading was my first love. [4]
Read what you love until you love to read.

It’s better to be really great at arithmetic and geometry than to be deep into advanced mathematics. I would read microeconomics all day long—Microeconomics 101.