SethG

The simple life hack is to lower your expectations, regardless of what you’re entitled to. Create the conditions for the outcome you seek, but leave yourself room if it doesn’t arrive.

Lowering expectations is a way to ensure that tomorrow is even better than you hope it will be.

A question from ​The Strategy Deck​ by Seth Godin:

“Better waves make better surfers. Are you on the right beach?”

spend less time choosing and more time sorting.

take the situation quite seriously, but perhaps not focus so much on taking ourselves seriously.

Uncomfortable ideas

The ideas aren’t uncomfortable, we are.

You don’t have to like the weather to acknowledge that it’s raining.

A manipulator doesn’t care if the story is true. They’ve succeeded by taking advantage of our goodwill, our assumption that things asserted to be true usually are. A manipulator brings us a story that creates emotion–and causes action that the recipient ends up regretting. Manipulation isn’t resilient, because sooner or later, we discover that the ... See more

“Tell me about other strongly-held positions you’ve changed as the result of a discussion like this one...” is a direct way to start a conversation about the argument you’re proposing to have. “What sort of information would make it likely you could see this in a different way?”

An argument, though, is an exchange of ideas that ought to surface insight and lead to a conclusion.

Confusing status with skill

The tenured philosophy professor at Princeton might not even be half as effective a teacher as the adjunct at the community college.

The head of surgery might be relatively better at meetings and politics than they are at actually helping patients.

Having a lot of social media followers doesn’t mean you’re really good at ma... See more