Shane Parrish Quotes

If you know the first principles of something, you can build the rest of your knowledge around them to produce something new.

the description of the thing is not the thing itself. The model is not reality. The abstraction is not the abstracted.

applied inversion. Here is a brief explanation of his process: Identify the problem Define your objective Identify the forces that support change towards your objective Identify the forces that impede change towards the objective Strategize a solution! This may involve both augmenting or adding to the forces in step 3, and reducing or eliminating the forces in step 4.

no one cares about your excuses at all, except you.

«Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.»

Learning from the experiences of others is much more productive. You need to always approach your circle with curiosity, seeking out information that can help you expand and strengthen it.

Anybody can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

Many people mistakenly believe that creativity is something that only some of us are born with, and either we have it or we don’t. Fortunately, there seems to be ample evidence that this isn’t true. We’re all born rather creative, but during our formative years, it can be beaten out of us by busy parents and teachers. As adults, we rely on convention and what we’re told because that’s easier than breaking things down into first principles and thinking for yourself. Thinking through first principles is a way of taking off the blinders. Most things suddenly seem more possible.

There are three key practices needed in order to build and maintain a circle of competence: curiosity and a desire to learn, monitoring, and feedback.

we are all accustomed to believe that maps and reality are necessarily related, or that if they are not, we can make them so by altering reality.

One reason we resist change is that keeping things the way they are requires almost no effort. This helps explain why we get complacent. It takes a lot of effort to build momentum but far less to maintain it. Once something becomes “good enough,” we can stop the effort and still get decent results. The inertia default leverages our desire to stay in our comfort zone, relying on old techniques or standards even when they’re no longer optimal.

Hadrian’s Wall thus was just one part of the overall strategy to maintain contrast between Roman territory and the tribes of the north.

Most people go through life assuming that they’re right … and that people who don’t see things their way are wrong.

The truth is, the only way we can navigate the complexity of reality is through some sort of abstraction. When we read the news, we’re consuming abstractions created by other people. The authors consumed vast amounts of information, reflected upon it, and drew some abstractions and conclusions that they share with us. But something is lost in the process. We can lose the specific and relevant details that were distilled into an abstraction. And, because we often consume these abstractions as gospel, without having done the hard mental work ourselves, it’s tricky to see when the map no longer agrees with the territory. We inadvertently forget that the map is not reality.

if you can’t prove something wrong, you can’t really prove it right either.