Unknown unknowns
CHANGE THE GAME
There are things that we don't know, but if we did know, could CHANGE THE GAME.
Bad beliefs can just take hold for some reason
Ideas just pop into our head. We think yeah drawing IS really hard, I could never be good at it and then spend years avoiding it. The worst part is when when you finally decide to overcome your fear and pick up a pencil, of course your drawing is going to be shitty because you’ve spent your whole life not drawing.
But if you continue to draw, you quickly realize drawing isn't as hard as you thought and you might actually be kinda good at it.
I grew up believing I was bad at math. The exact moment I started believing this was in 6th grade when I found out I didn't qualify for my middle school math team. After that, I went through life genuinely thinking that math was something I’d never be good at. Later in high school, I chose not to test into an accelerated math class and picked debate as my extracurricular instead of math (which many of my classmates did).
I used to think the 200 breaststroke was the hardest event in swimming. This belief can be traced to a humorous article in a swimming magazine that said the 200 breaststroke was the hardest. Unfortunately for me, I was a breaststroker and after I started to believe this, I dreaded swimming the 200 at meets.
Our mental models are sometimes wack
Someone came up with a way of thinking about something a long time ago and we just decided it was right. We might recognize that it's not really a good way of thinking, but no one has come up with something better to replace it.
As a debater, the way you think about debate evolves like the midwit curve meme. At the beginning you are the dimwit and you think debate is a silly game where you have to convince the judge to vote for you with fancy words and smooth talking. Then you get introduced to technical debate and learn about offense differentials and prereqs (you are in the midwit stage). Then you finally realize the way to win is indeed to get the judge to vote for you. Sometimes that's with fancy words and smooth talking, other times with more complicated technical arguments. Some people never get past the midwit stage. They get stuck losing rounds and wondering why the judge screwed them. But in reality, their mental model for the game is what is screwing them.
The way we hire is wrong. Interviews and technical assessments evaluate people over short periods of time while under pressure. For most jobs, people work over longer timeframes and under less pressure. To see how someone would actually do on the job, a work trial makes more sense.
We get stuck using the wrong tools
A tool will be designed for one thing, and then that thing changes over time and the tool is no longer perfectly suited for the job. Or maybe a tool designed for one thing happens to be 90% good for something else so no one makes a specialized tool for the other thing and we end up stuck with a tool that is mostly good but not great.
Web browsers might fall into this category. They were created when the internet was very young and web pages were very different. If you created a web browser from scratch, it’s hard to imagine that the interface would be the same (The reason this hasn’t happened is probably because people are used to the current interface and web browsers are very hard to make)
The word processor is the wrong tool for writing first drafts.
Off-by-an-order-of-magnitude errors
Who decides on what the “reasonable” rate of progress is? Or what is an achievable goal? No one does, but for some reason, we don’t think we can be the ones to decide for ourselves.
You are probably severely underestimating what you’re capable of. Take your goals, your training program, your process… and 10x that shit. Sounds impossible? Maybe, but you should try just to be sure.
I suspect this might be happening to me with my marathon training. On my long runs, my heart rate is very low, averaging less than 135 bpm. There is enough buffer to run 45-60 seconds faster per mile, while keeping a reasonable heart rate. The only way to find out is the try running faster.
This guy who pulled 140% of his max deadlift because he miscounted the plates.
Updates & links
New podcast episode coming out this week, I was traveling all last week and didn’t have time to edit.
I’m a fan of the new Elon Musk biography. It’s an entertaining read + unique perspective that makes him seem incredibly human.
Visited Mogutable, a delightful homegoods store, in Williamsburg.
Discovered that NY pizza is better than Italian pizza (by a significant margin) and Italian gelato is better than American gelato (also by a significant margin).
I want to write my own version of this.
very insight always enjoy these reads