Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

I’ve seen lots of wannabe cartoonists with sufficient talent to succeed. But rarely do you find one who understands how to get out of ego jail.

Your best defense against the negativity served up by your own filters on the world is to intentionally seek out positive thoughts and stories, which I sometimes call managing your mental shelf space.

From the moment technology allowed us to know which kinds of content influenced viewership the most, the old business model of the news industry was dead media walking. From that point through today, the business model of the press changed from presenting information to manipulating brains.

Once you can embrace the educational value that comes with being wrong, you will find it easier to think, “But I might be wrong this time,” in any given situation. There will be occasions in which you want to dial down your ego to avoid looking like a jerk. For example, sometimes you might need to pretend in front of others that you have some doubt

The best and easiest defense is to have some questions prepared to fill any gaps.

If your opinion is that another person’s idea is terrible, you can only be sure that at least one of you is stupid. You can’t really know which one of you it is except in rare cases in which things can be objectively measured.

I PREFER ORDINARY explanations to extraordinary ones, but that doesn’t always make me right. Sometimes the less ordinary explanation is the correct one. It just doesn’t happen often.

Once you embrace the reality that we all present the “enhanced” versions of our real selves, all the time, you can relax a bit and get into character.

The common situation—and the one you should treat as true—is that we are deeply flawed humans pretending to be otherwise.

People who have good arguments use them. People who do not have good arguments try to win by labeling.