Non-exemplary lives

Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. So equally smart people can disagree about how and why recessions happen, how you should invest your money, what you should prioritize, how much risk you should take, and so on.

The most successful experts also belong to the wider world. “To him who observes them from afar,” said Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, “it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.”

Humans and our behavior cannot be reduced to a linear equation. How we and our lives unfold and evolve is not linear, so fitting our dreams, behaviors, and limitations into a neat equation is reductionist. We’re highly complex creatures moving through a highly complex and interdependent world. We’re constantly changing and in transit

How does one age, gradually replacing action by reflection?

Let us remember that economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.

We might call this the “principle of psychoprofessional gravitation”: the idea that the agony of decline is directly related to prestige previously achieved, and to one’s emotional attachment to that prestige.[20] If you have low expectations and never do much (or do a lot but maintain a Buddha-like level of nonattachment to your professional prest