April 28, 2024 | #574 | read on the web | Free Version

Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and actionable insights you can use in life and work.

FS

"Not all writing is worth reading. Just because someone can put words on a page doesn’t mean they are worth reading or add value."

— Schopenhauer’s Strategy Against Clickbait

Insights

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"Writing is nature's way of telling us how lousy our thinking is."

— Leslie Lamport

**

“I think one thing that is a really important thing to strive for is being internally driven, being driven to compete with yourself, not with other people. If you compete with other people, you end up in this mimetic trap, and you sort of play this tournament, and if you win, you lose. But if you’re competing with yourself, and all you’re trying to do is — for the own self-satisfaction and for also the impact you have on the world and the duty you feel to do that — be the best possible version you can, there is no limit to how far that can drive someone to perform.”

— Sam Altman

***

“It's good to learn from your mistakes. It's better to learn from other people's mistakes.”

— Charlie Munger

Tiny Thoughts

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If you want to get rich quickly, the biggest factor is luck.

If you want to get rich eventually, the biggest factor is consistency.

**

Long-term thinking eliminates a lot of poor behavior.

***

Writing about one problem often exposes others that are more important.

—
(Share Tiny Thought one, two, or three, on X).

TKP Podcast

This conversation with David Segal is full of motivation for anyone working in the trenches.

“There is no shortcut for the work. Period. There’s no magic pill; there’s no magic elixir. It’s about habits. You have to do things even when you don’t want to do them."

— Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or jump directly to this excerpt on YouTube.

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Thanks for reading,

— Shane

P.S. The kids thought this was crazy.

P.P.S. Amazon US has a sale on Clear Thinking. For international editions and translations, see here.

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