📚 Quinn's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .

One of the most effective tools for building a culture of trust is simply saying, “I trust you to do the right thing.” Backing those words with action shows people that you’re serious. Larry once had about 40 people reporting to him in a research unit of a major consulting firm. As a manager, he was expected to read and approve all travel and expense forms. Since many of these consultants traveled extensively, this would have meant spending a half-day or more on paperwork each week. This struck him as a tremendous waste of time and energy that did not add any value to his unit. At a group meeting, he told the team that he trusted them to stay at a Marriott rather than a Four Seasons hotel, and that he wasn’t going to dive into their expense reports. He realized that the cost of not trusting the group would be far greater than an infrequent upgrade from coach to business class. This not only gave Larry time to do more worthwhile work, but it added to the group’s social capital.11 They knew they were trusted and proved to be trustworthy over the years.

The Smart Mission

Edward J. Hoffman, Matthew Kohut, and Laurence Prusak

The Tension Between Organized Behavior at Scale and Individual Needs Summary: Large-scale organizations aim for legibility and coherence, but this may lead to a lack of diversity and individual needs. The educational system's emphasis on GPA overlooks other important skills and qualities. Transcript: Speaker 2 One of the most influential ideas for me recently has been from James South's book Seeing Like a State. And Scott has this idea that like what large-hill organizations wants its legibility and legibility is a kind of clear coherence that's aggregatable to a kind of higher level view. So a simple version might be like look if you're a CEO you can't have every department have its own obscure little value system. You need a single collective value system or something close to it so you can get production and profit measures and aggregate them in what Scott says is bring the whole organization Into view. So one way to put my worry is that what would be good for human life is an incredible diversity of bottlenecks which work on different often non-metrified systems. If Scott is right large-scale institutions will tend towards is a kind of monolithic measurement system that moves towards let's have a small number of bottlenecks and let's have A unified measure. And so like the heart of my worry is that organized behavior at scale is inevitably in tension with what a diverse population of individuals needs. And that's just an unfixable problem. Let me just give one quick example. In the educational system the dominant measure is GPA. You can add other like I can write in my notes all kinds of other shit about what students are good at. That barely matters because that's not aggregatable. When a law school admissions officer is doing their spreadsheet to do the first main cutoff nothing in my weird little notes is going to make it into that first level cutoff. The big moving forces just look at GPA.

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Don’t attach your identity to something that’s unsustainable. Optimize for sustainability Summary: Avoid attaching your identity to something unsustainable, such as a career, relationship, or investing strategy, as it could lead to devastation when it ends. Instead, focus on sustainability and longevity in all aspects of life, including friendships, careers, investing, and habits. Prioritize maintaining activities and relationships over short-term gains, aiming to live at 80% potential to avoid burnout and ensure long-term sustainability. Transcript: Speaker 1 I think it's super dangerous in any life to attach your identity to something that's unsustainable, whether it's being a model or having a certain career, having an investing strategy, If you attach your identity to something that you cannot sustain, when it ends, you're going to be morally crushed. It's just going to destroy you. And this like back to investing, the variable that I want to maximize for is how long can I do this for? It's not, can I earn the highest returns? It's, can I maintain this investing strategy for another 50 years? And I know that I couldn't earn a higher return this year and over the next five years, if I did something different. But I'm way less confident that I could keep it going and sustain it. And I think it's the same for relationships. Like you might be able to find a more attractive or a wealthier spouse or partner. But can you keep that going? Is it something you can maintain? I'm not interested in anything that's not sustainable. Friendships, investing, careers, podcasts, reading habits, exercise habits, if I can't keep it going, I'm not interested in it. And I think the only way to really do that is if you are going out of your way to live life at like 80 to 90% potential, if you're always trying to squeeze out 100% percent potential for something, Almost certainly it's going to lead to burnout, whether it's a friendship or a relationship or an investing strategy. So I think it's not easy thing to do. And if you're a type A person, it's almost impossible to do. But going out of your way to live life at 80% has always been a strategy that I want to do just because I want to keep it going for a long time.

#702 — Morgan Housel — Contrarian Money and Writing Advice, Three Simple Goals to Guide Your Life, Journaling Prompts, Choosing the Right Game to Play, Must-Read Books, and More

The Tim Ferriss Show

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