Johanna

A lot of extraordinary things in life are the result of things that are first-order negative, second order positive. So just because things look like they have no immediate payoff, doesn’t mean that’s the case. All it means is that you’ll have less competition if the second and third order consequences are positive because everyone who thinks at... See more

It’s crucial for us to understand as many mental models as possible. As the adage goes, a little knowledge can be dangerous and creates more problems than total ignorance. No single model is universally applicable – we find exceptions for nearly everything. Even hardcore physics has not been totally solved.

Sometimes I’ll just ask them a question to see how long it takes to respond. Hiring an unresponsive contractor is a terrible experience so you want to get that out of the way as soon as possible.

But here’s the problem: If global energy prices don’t come down and global supply chains remain tangled by Omicron variants and other natural disasters, we might end up with the worst of both worlds: destroyed domestic demand and constricted global supply. Slow growth and high energy prices could mean the return of the dreaded stagflation.

The supply of time is truly a daily miracle. You wake up in the morning and lo! your purse is magically filled with 24 hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours.

“If parking was charged at the market rate for the rent of the land, then we’d all understand just how much single occupancy vehicle use is currently inadvertently subsidized,”

It’s important to learn that you can learn anything you want, and that you can get better quickly. This feels like an unlikely miracle the first few times it happens, but eventually you learn to trust that you can do it.

What's the purpose of a scientific conference? I think its twofold. One is you want to learn new important things without having to read all those papers. And the second one is meeting other people, making connections, getting into discussions.

This is true for literally everyone, regardless of whether you want to be a writer or not, whether you want to publish or not. Just have a Google Doc in which you add a page a day of whatever’s on your mind. This has a million benefits, but a simple one is just clearing your cache: if you don’t do this, your brain sort of gets clogged by all the

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