📚 Quinn's Highlights

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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

Providing Mental Scaffolding and Tools Drastically Increases Human Cognitive Performance Summary: Scaffolding people's experiences with tools like mind mapping can raise their performance above their innate capacities. Studies have shown up to a 40% increase in cognitive capacity when individuals are taught and encouraged to use tools for problem-solving and understanding. This highlights the significant role of tools in enhancing human cognitive performance, akin to how a computer is described as a 'bicycle for the mind' by Steve Jobs. Transcript: Speaker 1 So but Kotzky was this Russian educational theorist, right? And he and his whole notion was, if you scaffold people's experiences, so just training wheels, right, basically, you can raise the level of their capacity and their performance above And beyond their innate capacities. So mutual friend of Danglish Marktemberg, who's in Jordan Hall's, and I was Zack Stein, as a Harvard psychologist, very thoughtful guy. And he was working with an organization, his whole dissertation was on standardized testing and how whacked it is, right? And how the inequities it bakes into the system and that kind of thing. And they did studies where they would have somebody, you know, fundamentally on an intelligence or cognitive capacity assessment, right, makes sense of your life, makes sense of The world, makes sense of this word problem, whatever it would be. And then, you know, and then someone would score, you know, a 60% or a three out of five on a Leica scale, right? But then they would teach them how to mind map, right, a tool scaffolding, right? And they'd say, okay, so now everything you just said there, now hit the like draw connections, draw bubbles, draw dotted lines, like, sort and establish the relationship here about What you were thinking, and then retested them. And they would score a five out of five. So there's sort of up to this 40% swing in someone's intelligence or cognitive capacity, just based on did you give them a tool, right? It's like Steve Jobs saying, you know, that a computer is like a bicycle for the mind, right? And you're like, oh, okay. So how many bicycles for our minds, right? Can we share and create such that we can all pedal faster?

#11 - Jamie Wheal — Tackling the Meaning Crisis

Win-Win with Liv Boeree

Why Bigger Animals Live Longer: The Relationship between Size, Energy, and Longevity Summary: The larger an animal is, the more efficient it becomes in terms of energy consumption. This is because the self-similar fractal structure of larger animals allows them to save energy. Bigger animals require less energy proportionally to run their bodies due to the massive amount of tissue per gram or per cell. As a result, bigger animals experience less wear and tear and live longer than smaller animals. The reason for less wear and tear is that bigger animals use less energy and create less damage, reducing entropy. This principle can also be observed in machines, where those subjected to less stress and driven at lower revs per minute tend to last longer. Transcript: Speaker 2 So that's why we don't need to double our metabolism when we double our weight. It's that fractal like self similarity that allows us to get these essentially efficient savings in the amount of energy we need. So it's better to be bigger, isn't it? Because you don't need as much energy proportionally to run yourself. Correct. Speaker 1 So you need massive tissue per gram of tissue or per cell. You need less energy, the bigger you are. And by the way, this has huge consequences throughout all aspects of biology and life. And maybe one just to tie it back to the beginning of this discussion where we started out by talking about aging and mortality. This means that the bigger you are, the less hard your cell is working. The bigger you are, there's less wear and tear the longer you live systematically. So this is the origin of why bigger things live longer than smaller things. Speaker 2 And why is there less wear and tear if you're bigger? Speaker 1 You're using less energy and creating less entropy. That is you're creating less damage the bigger you are because simply you're using much less energy if you have an engine, an automobile and you insist on racing it at 10,000 revs per Minute every time you drive it, I can assure you that car will not live as long as a car that's driven by a little old lady or a little old man like me who keeps the revs at about two or three Thousand revs per minute. So you know, cars and machines last much longer, the less stress you put on them.

Scaling 2 — You and I Are Fractals

Simplifying Complexity

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