Self talk matters...........................

 It turns out that, if you ask yourself “Can I keep going?” rather than “Can I make it to the finish?” you’re far more likely to answer in the affirmative. 

-Alex Hutchinson, from this essay

via

I would agree.................

 

as liberated from here

Meanwhile, sixty million light-years away..............

 

      via

On saving and investing..................

 I hedge this out by investing like the glass is half full but saving like the glass is half empty.

-Ben Carlson, one fairly smart guy, shares his investment strategy

Creativity as a team sport...........................

 Yes, the actual act of making the work is sometimes a solo activity (drawing, writing, editing a film, etc) but the real driving force behind every creative pro is their community: their clients, collaborators, peers and the rest of the humans in the complex web of symbiotic relationships that give us inspiration, support and (ultimately) an income. Creativity cannot live in a vacuum. We depend on each other, like the members of any other ecosystem.

-Chase Jarvis, as cut-and-pasted from here

The Reasonable Optimist.....................

 The ease of underestimating how bad things can be in the short run and how good they can be in the longer run is a leading cause of bad forecasts, bad decisions, and confused people. It’s common because it’s easier to go all in on either optimism or pessimism – having one foot on each side feels waffling.

But straddling both sides is usually the best stance.

-Morgan Housel, from this post

existential challenge....................

 ". . . the existential challenge of today's capitalism is to break the habit of both companies' and governments' reluctance to encourage innovation, despite their words.

      Schumpeter's 'perennial gale of creative destruction' has been replaced by the gentle breezes of rent-seeking.  Corporate managerialism is gradually squeezing the life out of enterprise as big companies in cosy cahoots with big government increasingly dominate the scene." . . .

". . . The economist Luigi Zingales argues that most of the time 'the best way to make lots of money is not to come up with brilliant ideas and work hard at implementing them but, instead, to cultivate a government ally."

-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works:  And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

Good to remember..........................

 Eliminating the power of choice and action, Popper believed, is what autocrats seek to do.  Identifying choices for ourselves is how we remain free.

-Margaret Heffernan,  Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

On data and reasons.......................

While incentives matter.............................

 ". . . improvements come from reexamining the details of how work is done, not just from cost controls or incentives."

-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy:  The Difference and Why It Matters

Relatively snowy out...............................

 

Fifty years ago.........................................

The Beatles......................................The Long and Winding Road

 

Opening paragraphs........................

 His name was Dave Farkus, and he'd recently taken up fly-fishing as a way to meet girls.  So far, it hadn't worked out very well.

-C. J. Box, Force of Nature

a burgeoning trend......................

 Those who say that indefinite growth is impossible, or at least unsustainable, in a world of finite resources are therefore wrong, for a simple reason:  growth can take place through doing more with less.

      Much 'growth' is actually shrinkage.  Largely unnoticed, there is a burgeoning trend today that the main engine of economic growth is not from using more resources, but from using innovation to do more with less:  more food from less land and less water; more miles for less fuel; more communication for less electricity; more buildings for less steel; more transistors for less silicon; more correspondence for less paper; more socks for less money; more parties for less time worked.

-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works:  And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

Contrasting outlooks...........................

      The difference between Hopper's version of history and IBM's ran deeper than a dispute over who should get the most credit.  It showed fundamentally contrasting outlooks on the history of innovation.  Some studies of technology and science emphasize, as Hopper did, the role of creative inventors who make innovative leaps.  Other studies emphasize the role of teams and institutions, such as the collaborative work done at Bell Labs and IBM's Endicott facility.  This latter approach tries to show that what may seem like creative leaps—the Eureka moment— are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together.  Neither was of looking at technological advancement is, on its own, completely satisfying.  Most of the great innovations of the digital age sprang from an interplay of creative individuals (Mauchly, Turing, von Neumann, Aiken) with teams that knew how to implement their ideas.

-Walter Isaacson, The Innovators:  How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Even more snippets.................................

 The innovative success of a market economy does not result from individuals or firms trying to 'optimize' but from their attempts by trial and error to navigate a world of radical uncertainty.  In practice, successful people work out how to cope with and manage uncertainly, not how to optimize.

It makes sense to live our lives under the assumption that physical laws hold and do not change, but it does not make sense to live our lives under the assumption that the world of human affairs is stationary.

In a world characterised by radical uncertainty, there are many things we don't know, even with hindsight.  And others we know only with hindsight.  But since we are reluctant to acknowledge the role that radical uncertainty—and luck—play in human affairs, we apply hindsight anyway.

Good decisions often work out badly, and bad decisions sometimes work out well.

Different people will make different judgments faced with the same information because, given radical uncertainty, many different interpretations of the same data are possible.

Human intelligence is collective intelligence, and that is the source of the extraordinary human economic achievement.

The abject failure of models in the global financial crisis has not dented their popularity among regulators.

Certainty is unattainable and the price of near certainly unaffordable.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Number

Progress............................

 F. Scott Fitzgerald, describing his own mental breakdown, observed that 'the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.'  And the mark of the first-rate decision-maker confronted by radical uncertainty is to organize action around a reference narrative while still being open to both the possibility that this narrative might be false and that alternative narratives might be relevant. . . . The willingness to challenge a narrative is a key element not only in scientific progress but in good decision-making.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers

On anecdotes and data...............

 "the thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.  There's something wrong with the way you're measuring."

-Jeff Bezos, as quoted here

About models.................................

 Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize for economics at least in part due to the beauty of his models, once quipped that he thought the data left out of his models might be more important that the data that went in.  It is an explosive and challenging remark, revealing the intrinsic difficulty of models:  they will always be subjective and incomplete representations of complex reality.

-Margeret Heffernan, Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

Models, again.............................

 You cannot derive a probability or a forecast or a policy recommendation from a model; the probability is meaningful, the forecast accurate or the policy recommendation well-founded only within the context of the model. . . . And our own experience in economics is that the most common explanation of a surprising result is the someone has made an error.  If finance, economics and business, models will never describe 'the world as it really is'.  Informed judgment will always be required in understanding and interpreting the output of a model and in using it in any large-world situation.

-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty:  Decision=Making Beyond The Numbers

realize.......................................

 22.  It is man's particular distinction to love even those who err and go astray.  Such a love is born as soon as you realize that they are your brothers; that they are stumbling in ignorance, and not willfully; that in a short while both of you will be  no more; and, above all, that you yourself have taken no hurt, for your master-reason has not been made a jot worse than it was before.

-Marcus Aurelius. Meditations, Book Seven

an intuition.........................

      What distinguishes the dark night from a depression is the fact that a person in the dark night normally has an intuition that these trials are going someplace.  One perceives at times the fruits of the dark night in one's changing perspectives such as the growth of a nonjudgmental attitude toward everyone, greater detachment from things and persons, humility, and trust in God.

-Thomas Keating, Intimacy With God

Verse..................................

15 And he said unto them, Take heed, and keep yourselves from all covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. 

-The Holy Bible, Luke 12:15