Jennifer Baez

The

global economy is structured around growth — the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed. 

Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing:

More than 2,000 books are dedicated to how Warren Buffett built his fortune. Many of them are wonderful. But few pay enough attention to the simplest fact: Buffett’s fortune isn’t due to just being a good investor, but being a good investor since he was literally a child.

As I write this Warren Buffett’s net worth is $84.5 billion. Of that, $84.2

Fifteen billion people were born in the 19th and 20th centuries. But try to imagine how different the global economy—and the whole world—would be today if just seven of them never existed:

Adolf Hitler

Joseph Stalin

Mao Zedong

Gavrilo Princip

Thomas Edison

Bill Gates

Martin Luther King

Another way to put this is that 0.00000000004% of people were

Once we see the relationship between structure and behavior, we can begin to understand how systems work, what makes them produce poor results, and how to shift them into better behavior patterns

When we bemoan the lack of originality in the world, we blame it on the absence of creativity. If only people could generate more novel ideas, we'd all be better off. But in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation-it's idea selection. In one analysis, when over two hundred people dreamed up more than a thousand ideas for

“Once a core belief is formed, you engage in what’s called a confirmation of bias; information that does not conform to your beliefs is discarded or ignored in favor of information that does.”