Optionality: How to Survive and Thrive in a Volatile World

Reading books Most books aren’t worth reading. But the downside is capped: you can bail out as soon you realise it’s a dud, and you’ve only wasted ten bucks. This is an incredibly cheap option to take out, because every once in a while, you find a 'view quake' book which turns your whole world upside down.

Nassim Taleb calls a ‘non-scalable’ career. A plumber can only fix so many taps. A baker can only bake so many loaves. A lawyer can only represent so many clients. Artists—which includes anyone from writers to musicians to entrepreneurs—don’t face this bottleneck. Something idea-based can be sold over and over again with almost no extra time or eff

So the question is not what to cut. Our starting point is that everything gets cut, and has to earn its way back into consideration. The question is: what to load up on?

Conspicuous simplicity will no doubt create its own strange loops: say, interfaces so streamlined that they insult the intelligence of users, or a house so orderly that it can no longer be comfortably lived in. I am not saying we have reached the end of history here, but if conspicuous simplicity becomes the dominant status game, I expect the futur

This gives us the barbell strategy for barbells: short bursts of intense effort on the hyper-aggressive ‘expensive’ end, and lots of low-effort movement on the hyper-conservative ‘cheap’ end (Fig. 3.6). The distribution is highly asymmetrical, so we might aim for 2.5 hours of intense exercise each week, but 25 hours of gentle movement.

There is no fixed, stable ‘you’—only a collection of related mental imprints over time. The continuity between these states is more tenuous than it appears: our memories are generated afresh each time we access them, with most of the fine details fabricated. Outside of the worst cases of arrested development, we’re much more like a series of differ

The reality is that every dollar you save is going to roughly halve in value 30 years from now—and that’s assuming inflation behaves itself, which is no guarantee. Just ask Zimbabwe.

To a surprisingly large degree, we are our own jailers. Continuing to play negative-sum status games and stacking up material possessions past the point of diminishing returns makes about as much sense as banging your head against a brick wall.

Money is just one of many precious Currencies of Life: time, health, mental bandwidth, energy, social status, hedonic pleasure, meaning.