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Charlie Munger offers some great advice: you don’t have to be brilliant or clever or intelligent to get ahead long-term, just try not to mess up.
Don’t swing for the fence and miss, get base hits every day.
In this case, ego-driven badassery is bombastic stupidity, which guarantees failure.
Be nice, be basic: stupidity comes from overdoing it.
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To be in love, like the faith of being a true believer, is to suddenly comprehend all of the insanity the outside world cannot grasp: when you are in it, the contradictions are beautiful epiphanies.
When you are on the outside, it is all idiocy.
Only by doing it can you access the perspective that shifts irrationality into truth.
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Your self-esteem goes down when you “play the victim” and lash out.
Your self-esteem increases when you “own your shit” and accept your part.
The conundrum is, that by standing up for yourself, you lose yourself: when we outwardly scream (tantrum), we are emotionally retreating under our mother’s skirt.
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People look for who they are.
The decision to search implies the self is somehow lost and by seeking it can be recovered.
It is easier (more practical and possible) to quit looking and build who you want to be.
You will know who you are when you deftly handle tasks that were previously daunting: you are a person who creates themself, not someone who picks up found items.
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While uncertainty is a hallmark of rational thought, people and institutions crave bold confidence and decisive action.
Socially, the repercussions of slowing down, pondering, and thinking are seen as indecisive and wishy-washy, which undermines the authority of a leader.
Making wise decisions requires time, and quality forecasting involves information. Which leaders cannot afford lest they lose their leadership.
Unfortunately, humans persistently promote hubristic myopia because we cannot cope with indeterminacy.
(“Acting on pretend knowledge is often the preferred solution.” Dr. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast, and Slow)
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You must have confidence, not trust.
The opposite of confidence is doubt, and if someone sees doubt in your eyes, you will never build a mutual horizontal relationship.
Banks have relationships based on trust; they measure out exactly how much you can pay back. The association is transactional: doubt springs from analyzing the situation and finding risk.
Your job in a friendship is to believe in the other person; their job is to reciprocate with their best effort. You do not bully them with guilt; you allow them to find their best effort and develop pride in themself because you did not undermine them. Instead, your confidence provided them an opportunity to achieve.
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The Trojan Horse was a gift to the gods. It contained not just men as a surprise but, more profoundly, the death of men as a consequence of acceptance.
You could say accepting anything on behalf of the gods is to assume too much; it is to elevate yourself to an agency akin to the gods, which is to invite death.
For are not gods death itself upon contact?
Leaving the tool of death as men.
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When confronted with daily pressure, some retreat into and gain assurance from the ideological or transcendent, but we must face up to the certainties. Which includes our own absurdity and contrivance to escape reality.
“Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me?” Albert Camus
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No argument makes sense until you are conditioned to believe it.
If a secularist reads every holy text (Bible, Koran, Upanishads, etc.) and is convinced by one, this is not a valid decision. Because Christian reasoning works only if you already believe as a Christian. (Kierkegaard)
Belief primes us to use rationality, which makes us reason toward irrationality.
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Both religious and scientific sects believe: they have faith in their truth.
This requires a series of steps, but without possession of all knowledge, a leap is required into the surety of belief, and from belief, we make claims on truth.
In this way, Truth is both fact and not fact, real and fabricated, composed of, confused with, but not synonymous with truth.
To explain: a fact does not require explanation or reasoned steps. And yet, truth is founded on a path or sequence of steps, with each step being a small leap. Truth becomes the consensus of several small beliefs, with a smattering of facts.
