Have you ever wondered what is NOT going to change in the next ten years? Read “Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life”.The behaviours that never change are history’s most powerful lessons because they preview what to expect in the future. The Lindy effect.
We are bad at predicting the future
It’s well-known that people are bad at predicting the future. Despite so much planning, a tiny thing no one considered invites catastrophe.The Economist publishes a forecast of the year ahead each January. Its January 2020 issue does not mention a single word about COVID-19. Its January 2022 issue does not mention a single word about Russia invading Ukraine. The biggest news, the biggest risks, and the most consequential events are always what you don’t see coming.
History knows three things
- What’s been photographed.
- What someone wrote down or recorded.
- The words spoken by people whom historians and journalists wanted to interview and who agreed to be interviewed.
And all three suffer from misinterpretation, incompleteness, embellishment, lying, and selective memory.
Invest in preparedness
It’s impossible to plan for what you can’t imagine, and the more you think you’ve imagined everything, the more shocked you’ll be when something happens that you hadn’t considered. Nassim Taleb says, “Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.” That gets to the heart of it.
The lessons from the book:
- Expectations can alter how you interpret current circumstances.
- People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty
- The stupid are cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubt.
- We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.
- Bad news gets more attention than good news because pessimism is seductive and feels more urgent.
- The brain of man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision.
- Stories are always more potent than statistics.
- The best story wins.
- Athletic performance isn’t just what you’re physically capable of. It’s what you’re capable of within the context of what your brain is willing to endure for the risk and reward in a given moment.
- If you’ve relied on data and logic alone to make sense of the economy, you’d have been confused for a hundred years straight.
- So much of what happens in the economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to understand.
- Stability is destabilizing.
- Crazy is normal.
- The same action at different sizes produces massively different problems.
- People handle risk and responsibility in totally different ways when a group scales from 4 people to 100 to 100,000 to 100 million.
- Most young tree saplings spend their early decades under the shade of their mother’s canopy. Limited sunlight means they grow slowly. Slow growth leads to dense, hard wood, while fast growth leads to soft, airy wood that never had time to densify.
- Nothing can become truly resilient when everything goes right.
- Big, fast changes happen only when they’re forced by necessity.
- Progress always takes time, often too much time to even notice it’s happened.
- It’s good to always assume the world will break about once per decade because, historically, it has.
- The most astounding force in the universe is obvious. It’s evolution. Evolution has been selecting traits for 3.8 billion years.
- Little changes compounded for a long time create extraordinary changes.
- Pessimism is more intellectually seductive than optimism and captures more of our attention. It’s vital for survival, helping us prepare for risks before they arrive.
- An important lesson from history is that the long run is usually pretty good, and the short run is usually pretty bad.
- The more perfect you try to be, the worse you’ll end up doing. There is a huge advantage to being a little imperfect.
- You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
- Walking increases creativity by 60%.
- It’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.
- Everything worth pursuing comes with a little pain. The trick is not minding that it hurts. This is one of the most useful life skills—enduring the pain when necessary rather than assuming there’s a hack or a shortcut around it.
- The only thing harder than gaining a competitive advantage is keeping one. Most competitive advantages eventually die.
- The most dominant creatures tend to be huge, but the most enduring tend to be smaller. T-Rex < cockroach < bacteria. What’s incredible about this is that evolution encourages you to get bigger and then punishes you for being big.
- Evolution is the study of advantages.
- You should never be surprised when something that dominates one era dies off in the next. It’s one of the most common stories in history.
- It always feels like we’re falling behind, and it’s easy to discount the potential of new technology.
- Big innovations don’t come at once but are built up slowly when several small innovations are combined over time.
- All innovation is hard to predict and easy to underestimate. The path from A to Z can be so complex and end up at such a strange point that it’s nearly impossible to look at today’s tools and extrapolate what they might become.
- The value of every new technology is not just what it can do; it’s what someone else with a totally different skill set and point of view can eventually manipulate it into.
- Everything is sales.
- Most things are harder than they look and not as fun as they seem.
- No matter how much information and context you have, nothing is more persuasive than what you desperately want or need to be true.
- People follow incentives, not advice.
- People only hear what they want to hear and see only what they want.
- Unexpected hardship makes people do and think things they’d never imagine when things are calm.
- The long run is just a collection of short runs you have to put up with.
- Saying you have a ten-year time horizon doesn’t exempt you from all the nonsense that happens in the next ten years.
- The future is much like the present, only longer.
- Patience is often stubbornness in disguise.
- The world changes, which makes changing your mind not just helpful but crucial.
- The long-term is less about time horizons and more about flexibility.
- Permanent information is harder to notice because it’s buried in books rather than blasted in headlines.
- If you read good books, you’ll have an easier time understanding what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to in the news.
- Simplicity is the hallmark of truth—we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. Complexity sells better.
- Evolution figured out its version of simplification.
- Wounds heal, but scars last.
- A mind stretched by new experience can never return to its old dimensions.
The book ends with 20 questions
- Who has the right answers, but I ignore them because they’re not articulate?
- Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?
- What do I desperately want to be true so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not?
- What is a problem that I think applies only to other countries/industries/careers that will eventually hit me?
- What do I think is true but is actually just good marketing?
- What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive about how something works?
- What looks unsustainable but is a new trend we haven’t accepted yet?
- Who do I think is smart but is actually full of it?
- Am I prepared to handle risks I can’t even envision?
- Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?
- What are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly obvious in the future?
- What events very nearly happened that would have fundamentally changed the world I know if they had occurred?
- How much have things outside my control contributed to things I take credit for?
- How do I know if I’m being patient (a skill) or stubborn (a flaw)?
- Who do I look up to that is secretly miserable?
- What hassle am I trying to eliminate that’s an unavoidable cost of success?
- What crazy genius that I aspire to emulate is just crazy?
- What strong belief do I hold that’s most likely to change?
- What’s always been true?
- What’s the same as ever?
Other books
The book reminds me of “Resilience” and the little book of mental toughness, but also of “Alchemy“. We spend way too much time in stage one thinking. We are constantly on automatic pilot. We are always distracted. We are losing the ability to dream. We are losing the ability to be bored. We are losing the ability to think. To wonder. To question. To think better.