Trevor McKendrick - Optimistic ought to be a verb

Good morning ladies & gents,

It’s gonna be a good week.

Optimism: now, always, and forever.

Trevor

I just bet $100 the CFPB will be ruled unconstitutional (website)

Kalshi is my site of choice for prediction markets. I was excited to see them recently add a bunch of liquidity with Susquehanna.

Prediction markets have a long history - Robin Hanson ran the first corporate prediction market at Xanadu in 1990.

But Kalshi and other places are enabling actual, real betting from large networks of people.

Learned Optimism (book)

Just finished my 3rd read of this underrated book.

I now count myself firmly in the camp that believes how you think can change your world, your body, everything.

Not in some woo woo way… but in that how you explain what happens to you, and how you think about how you fit in with the rest of the world, determines what you do, what you try, whether you give up.

The book gives plenty of evidence that being optimistic is good for you.

At the end he explains how to become more optimistic yourself.

It’s a 10/10 book - for me not being optimistic was a blind spot I didn’t realize I had until later in life. This book helped me how truly pessimistic I had been for at least a decade.

A great book to pair with this is How Champions Think: in Sports and in Life.

So many great quotes:

“Exceptional people… either start out being optimistic or learn to be optimistic bgecause they realize that they can’t get what they want in life without being optimistic.”

“Optimism is often an act of faith, a belief in something that cannot be proven.”

So many successful people are great at celebrating when things go well and remembering that made shot, and also great at forgetting moments where they screwed up and moving on:

“The champion doesn’t care about keeping na accurate record in his own mind.”

And Michael Nielsen’s great tweet: “Optimistic really ought to be a verb. It's something you do, not some property you happen to possess. Sometimes it's easy to do, and sometimes it's darned hard, requiring imagination & determination.”

Trailer for a new M. Night Shyamalan movie (tweet)

“Serial killer Josh Hartnett takes his daughter to a concert but it’s a sting operation to catch him”

What a premise!

In theaters August 9. It’s important to have things to look forward to.

Dwarkesh interviews Mark Zuckerberg (podcast)

Self recommending!

Mark is the most underrated founder/CEO of any big tech company. I think people had written off Meta multiple times in its history, and here they are still one of the most valuable companies in the world, in lockstep with the best AI companies.

Is the Internet the Enemy of Progress? (NYT article, paywalled)

If you look at a picture of someone from 2010 and someone form 2020, you wouldn’t be able to tell which decade the picture was from by their clothes.

This is ostensibly because the Internet pulls us all into one big culture, instead of leaving us be in our many micro cultures.

Share the newsletter…

Here’s a link to today’s newsletter: https://ckarchive.com/b/mvu7h5hgpnnvxbv5oo45wie9vo0qqb3

Sign up for the newsletter…

If you got this from a friend, you can sign up to get the newsletter for free every Monday morning here