Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
Author: Peter Bevelin
Even people who are not geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind, as long as they have the right way of thinking. – Charles Darwin
What influences our thinking?
- Gene, reproduction, aversion of risk, pain and uncertainty
List of reasons for misjudgement
- Bias from mere association: automatically connect a stimuli with pain or reward
- Underestimating the power of reward or punishment
- Underestimating the power of self-interest and incentives
- Self-serving bias: overly positive views of ourselves and future.
- Self-deception and denial
- Bias from consistency tendency: being consistent with our prior commitments even when acting against our best interest and facing disconfirming evidence.
- Bias from deprival syndrome: strongly reacting when something we like to have is taken away.
- Status-quo bias and do nothing syndrome: keeping things where they are or preference of default options
- Impatience: value present more than future
- Bias from envy and jealous
- Distortion by contrast comparison: judging things not by their absolute magnitude but by their differences to something presented closely in space or time. Also,underestimating the consequence of gradual change over time.
- Bias from anchoring: over-weighing some initial information
- Overweighting vivid or most recent information
- Omission and abstract blindness
- Bias from reciprocation tendency
- Bias from over-influence by like tendency
- Bias from over-influence by tendency for social proof : peer pressure
- Sensemaking: trying to draw a conclusion; construct explanation trying to fit an outcome
- Reason-respecting: believe something just because we have been given a reason
- Believe first and doubt later
- Memory limitation: memorize selectively
- Do something syndrome: do something without sensible reason
- Mental confusion from say something syndrome: feel the need to say something when you have nothing to say
- Emotional arousal
- Mental confusion from stress
- Mental confusion from pain
Keep in mind
- Evaluate things on their own merits.
- Encourage people to tell you bad news immediately.
- Create a negative emotion if you want to end a certain behavior.
- We don’t improve the man we hang, we improve others by him.
- If we reward people for doing what they like to do, we sometimes turn what they enjoy doing into work.
- Decision-makers should be held accountable for the consequences of their actions.
- There is nothing wrong with changing a plan when situations has changed.
- There are times when you should fight, and there are more times that you should just run away.
- Be self-critical and unlearn your best-loved ideas.
- We want and place higher value on something when we almost have it and lose it.
- Deciding to do nothing is also a decision. The cost of doing nothing could be greater than the cost of taking an action.
- The best way to avoid envy is to deserve the success you have.
- Consider information from zero base level and adjust according to reality.
- Whenever somebody has done something for us, we want to do something back .
- Ask a favor of someone is likely to increase that person’s liking for us. Why? Because people want to be seen as consistent with their behavior.
- How should we act if we are involved in an emergency in a public place and need help? Be specific.
- If we believe that we are the only one who doesn’t understand, we are likely to keep quiet.
- Blind obedience is sometimes an excuses for dumb actions.
- To insure trustworthies, authorities often mention weaknesses before they mention strengths and provide information that seems to be contrary to their interest.
- Our need for making sense makes us even believe in nonsense
- Keep record of important events
- You only have to get rich once
You ability to concentrate is directly proportional to your ability to eliminate distraction
Mastering workflow
- collect
- process
- organize
- review
- do
Horizon of focus
- purpose
- vision
- goal
- areas of focus
- projects
- next actions