No. 472 —May 15, 2022 — Read on FS

Welcome to Sunday Brain Food: a weekly newsletter full of ideas and insights that never expire.

FS

+ Math has long been the language of science, engineering, and finance, but can math help you feel calm on a turbulent flight? Get a date? Make better decisions? Here are some heroic ways math shows up in our everyday life.

+ We are just putting the finishing touches on Mental Models for Better Thinking. This course will teach you exactly how to create your own latticework of mental models and put them to use. Click here to be the first to know.

Insight

“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

— John Stuart Mill

As Charlie Munger noted, "I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do."

Tiny Thought

Jim Rohn on how your mindset affects your destination.

"In life, the winds of circumstances blow on us all in an unending flow that touches each of our lives. It’s one thing to create change. It’s another thing—often unavoidable—to have change foisted upon you when you don’t expect it.

We all experienced the blowing winds of change. Yet some of us still manage to reach our intended destinations. What guides us to different shores is determined by the way we have chosen to set our sails. The way that each of us thinks makes the major difference in where each of us arrives.

Unforeseen circumstances happen to us all. We have disappointments and challenges. We all have reversals and those moments when, in spite of our best plans and efforts, things just seem to fall apart. Challenging circumstances are not events reserved for the poor, the uneducated or the destitute. The rich and the poor have marital problems. ... In the final analysis, it is not what happens that determines the quality of our lives, it is what we choose to do when we discover that the wind has changed directions.

When things change, we must change. We must struggle to our feet again and reset the sail to steer us toward the destination of our own deliberate choosing. The set of the sail—how we think and how we respond—has a far greater capacity to alter our lives than any challenges we face. How quickly and responsibly we react to adversity is far more important than the adversity itself. Once we discipline ourselves to understand this, we will finally and willingly conclude that the great challenge of life is to control the process of our thinking."

Source: How to Deal With the Unexpected

What I'm Reading

+ The Weirdest Coaching Staff in Baseball. “If you want to have a wide variety of human beings for players to connect with, you can’t have them all cut from the same cloth.”

+ IRR is a Vanity Metric. "Interim IRR is much too easily manipulated and in some cases incents behavior counter to the long-term benefit of LPs (and GPs)."

+ A Clash of Two Systems. "The war in Ukraine is a confrontation between two systems, one modern, legalistic, decentralized and multicephalous; the other archaic, nationalistic, centralized and monocephalous.

There's a reason over 3 million people start their day with Morning Brew––the daily email that sums up the latest business news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Unlike traditional dry and dense business news, Morning Brew keeps you informed and entertained. Check it out.

Stay safe,
— Shane

P.S. Try this with the kids.