Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann

These are my notes from Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann. Each one contains a core idea from the book that stood out. The goal of writing my notes this way is that each could be it's own independent idea with the need for the specific context within the book.

One-Way & Two-Way Doors

Jeff Bezos stressed categorizing decisions as reversible or irreversible. In a message to his shareholders, he gave the analogy of one-way and two-way doors. With one-way doors, if you walk through them, you cannot get back to where you were before. These decisions are irreversible and must be well thought out. Two-way doors can be reopened if you've made a suboptimal choice. The bigger the decision, the more process we try to put into place for making it, causing slowness and unthoughtful risk aversion.

The Third Story

It’s hard to view situations for what they are when we become emotionally invested in them. You may be rationalizing getting back together with an ex for the third time or trying to keep a dying business afloat. The third story helps you see situations objectively by forcing yourself to take on the role of an impartial observer. In doing so, you gain a deeper understanding of what others might really think. The key to effectively telling the third story is in “learning to describe the gap—or difference—between your story and the other person’s story.” Outlined in the book Difficult Conversations, this framing, the third story, breaks down whatever else you may think and feel; you can at least agree that you and the other person see things differently. This is extremely powerful in shifting your frame of reference.

Top of Mind Ideas

Deep work is important to productivity because we can only hold one idea in our head at a time. Making a conscious decision about what we want deeply on is important—suddenly, the answer to your problems will appear. Paul Graham said, "I think most people have one top idea in their mind at a given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift towards when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will tend to eat up all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.” Your subconscious mind has almost infinite creative potential, but it will only go towards the idea that is top in the queue. If you want the benefit of that creative force, you must pick the ideas it goes towards.

Incremental Progress

You get closer to your goals through slow and steady navigation. It's important that you have a vision to guide you along the way. All progress happens incrementally, not overnight. Bill Gates said, "People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in the next ten." Just because progress is incremental doesn't mean you should ignore it or slack off because of the perception of time. Bill wrote this to warn others to not ignore their competitors — don't ignore the threats to your vision that exist today. Everything compounds.

Relaxed Rules = Greater Luck

Luck surface area was popularized by entrepreneur Jason Roberts. As you interact with more people in diverse situations your chances of getting lucky grow. To maximize this surface area you need to relax the rules you have for living. The amount of configurations, or possibilities are smaller with strict rules. Things get too orderly. To be lucky you must increase your threshold for the maximum amount of disorder you can tolerate in your personal maximum entropy. Doing this increases the possible number of situations you find yourself in — therefore increasing your luck.

Mental Models' Role in Society

The more connected the world becomes, the more important having great mental models becomes. Technology and ideas expand at record-breaking speeds. Mental models give you something to spot and analyze these trends through. They provide a strategy to evaluate new ideas and technology.

The Old Guard Holds Old Theories

Gradual, evolving progression of ideas and perspectives rarely ever happen. Thomas Kuhn popularized the idea of paradigm shifts. These happen when enough issues pile up with the current way of thinking or doing something until it breaks. Once a crisis happens, we're forced to adopt new ideas, methods, and processes to get back to stability. Ignaz Semmelweis observed a high death rate in mothers from doctors that handled cadavers versus those that gave birth through midwives. Eventually, he found washing your hands led to a decline, but these theories were rejected by the medical communities and doctors ignored the evidence. He went insane from the rejection he received. 20 years later Louis Pasteur put forth germ theory and Semmelweis's practice of washing hands before procedures became a standard. Eventually, there's a breaking point of thought that causes a paradigm shift.

Idea Inertia

Once we let an idea take hold it requires a significant amount of energy to change the way we think. Inertia states that an object in motion stays in motion. Our ideas aren’t driven by any physical force, but they have inertia due to confirmation bias. Your political, social, and religious beliefs stem from the original ideas you spent the time encoding into your memory and the inertia built by looking for evidence that confirmed them as reality for years. Morgan Housel says "Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what's happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works." It’s hard to change old habits and beliefs once they become engrained. To change them requires a significant amount of friction, but to have the wrong ideas exist in a vacuum allows us to cling to them forever. You should adapt to what is truth.

Unnecessary Assumptions

If we want to be right more, it's critical we remove any assumptions that aren't necessary. The extra assumptions may be a more accurate depiction of the truth, but in including them we only increase the probability that we are equally or less right. Ockham's razor pushes us to get to the simplest explanation. It's important to ask, "Does this assumption really need to be here?" You should seek out evidence that it needs to remain rather than create false dependencies. Without removing unnecessary assumptions, you fall victim to what Daniel Kahneman calls the conjunction fallacy. This happens when we assume two events happening in conjunction are more likely to be true than either one by itself. We tend to believe the more complex we make something, the more likely it is to be true due to specificity. Follow KISS! Keep It Simple, Stupid!

The Positioned Expert

An adoption curve always has a tipping point. At this inflection, the growth bends either into rapid decline or the mainstream. Being an expert in an industry about to hit its tipping point provides a unique advantage. When the idea or technology goes mainstream, your leverage increases without any additional effort. Specializing in an emerging industry before the early majority adopts it gives you a much lower-leverage situation. The best time to become an expert is to head for the highest potential of luck at the beginning of the early adoption phase.

Societal Slopes

Culture undergoes a process of natural selection and evolution on its own. The norms are constantly shifting and changing. You can trace back the path of how ideas, practices, and products have evolved with time. Taste, norms, and new technology do the selecting. A business, movement, or art piece from the past will not have its same success if it was introduced today because society has evolved past that point. The societal slope moved and these old ideas are too far uphill from where society is at present day. If you introduced the radio today, would people even care? Streaming and social media are the new standard and people aren't willing to take a ski lift back uphill to adopt the radio for the first time.

Regret Discounting

Procrastination is the result of our present bias, where we value the short-term more than the future. As time progresses, regrets from procrastination accumulate because your future self will have greater struggles. You must keep these future regrets front of mind and discount the future value of progress back to today. In 10 years, will you regret this action today? Regret discounting helps you put your present efforts into perspective and overcome your present bias. With regret discounting, you're trying to weigh if your actions today will have a net positive or negative for your future self. You have to choose if it's better to spend the time on an activity today or at another time in the future. Most people are constantly borrowing from their future self, and they wonder why they're never fulfilled by their current situation.

Learned Helplessness Holds You Back

One of the downfalls in modern education is learned helplessness. You're taught that there is always someone that has the right answer. People apply this to everyday circumstances decades after they have completed schooling out of habit. You believe you're incapable of learning a new skill, adopting a new mindset, or improving on an area of weakness. You're never incapable of doing something. You just need to spend the time finding the right people to get the proper guidance or take the reps to learn it yourself through trial and error. Naval claims the best things are either self-taught or learned through an apprenticeship because these are the only two ways to overcome learned helplessness.

Inversion

Thinking about problems from an inverse perspective is the key to unlocking new solutions and strategies. Inversion comes from mathematics, popularized by Carl Jacobi, who would say “Invert, always invert.” Inversion is important in helping us know what to avoid. The inverse of being right more is being wrong less. Investors think from inversion a lot. They consider what is the total amount they are willing to lose if the investment goes to zero. When you take this approach, you can make riskier investments that provide you with asymmetric opportunities.