Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

Cato’s injunction: he preferred to be asked why he didn’t have a statue rather than why he had one.

Scars signal skin in the game.

What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing. The more you have to lose, the more fragile you are.

You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.

you want maximal free time, not maximal activity, and you can assess your own “success” according to such metric. Otherwise, you end up assisting your assistants, or being forced to “explain” how to do things, which requires more mental effort than doing the thing itself. In fact, beyond my writing and research life, this has proved to be great fin

many problems in society come from the interventions of people who sell complicated solutions because that’s what their position and training invite them to do. There is absolutely no gain for someone in such a position to propose something simple: you are rewarded for perception, not results. Meanwhile, they pay no price for the side effects that

the principle that you need to eat what you feed others.