Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

When good and honest people can be incentivized into crazy behavior, it’s easy to underestimate the odds of the world going off the rails.

The army’s early interest in cars and planes wasn’t a fluke of lucky foresight. Go down the list of big innovations, and militaries show up repeatedly. Radar. Atomic energy. The internet. Microprocessors. Jets. Rockets. Antibiotics. Interstate highways. Helicopters. GPS. Digital photography. Microwave ovens. Synthetic rubber.

Disagreement has less to do with what people know and more to do with what they’ve experienced. And since experiences will always be different, disagreement will be constant. Same as it’s ever been. Same as it will always be. Same as it ever was.

The next is accepting that what’s rational to one person can be crazy to another.

Not all jobs require creativity or critical thinking. But those that do function better with time devoted to wandering and being curious, in ways that are removed from scheduled work but actually help tackle your biggest work problems.

But people don’t remember the world when they were born. They remember the last few months, when progress is always invisible.

Or take the stock market. The valuation of every company is simply a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.

There’s an investing quip that it’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Surprise has six common characteristics: • Incomplete information • Uncertainty • Randomness • Chance • Unfortunate timing • Poor incentives

a lot of workers have “thought jobs” without much time to think.