March 2, 2025 - #618 - read online - Free Version

Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter of timeless ideas and insights you can use.

Tiny Thoughts

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What works gets ignored; what fails gets attention.

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Spend time more carefully than money - you only run out of time once.

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Optimism is a performance-enhancing drug that's both legal and free.

While experts predicted failure, Sam Walton opened discount stores in small towns. When critics said 'too risky,' FedEx launched overnight delivery.

While pessimists write reports, optimists write history.

Insights

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Jeff Bezos on thinking big:

“Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

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Kobe Bryant on having the courage to look like a fool:

“if I wanted to implement something new into my game, I’d see it and try incorporating it immediately. I wasn’t scared of missing, looking bad, or being embarrassed. That’s because I always kept the end result, the long game, in my mind.”

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Henry Singleton, who Warren Buffett said had the best operating and capital deployment record in American business history, preferred positioning over predicting:

“I know a lot of people have very strong and definite plans that they’ve worked out on all kinds of things, but we’re subject to a tremendous number of outside influences and the vast majority of them cannot be predicted. So my idea is to stay flexible.”

The Repository

Stephen Schwarzman realized that problems are best addressed indirectly:

“In my final year, I decided to take on the biggest issue of all for Yale’s men: the 268-year-old parietal rules that forbade women staying overnight in a dorm room. I was dating a woman at a local college, so for me, it was as much a personal as a community issue.

The conventional approach would have been to set up a meeting with a university administrator to try to change the situation. But I knew what would happen. He’d sit there in his blazer and bow tie and tell me women would be a distraction. They would stop the young men from studying. They would change the atmosphere in the college dorms. There was a long list of reasons that a young man like me wouldn’t understand. He would smile and nothing would change, as it hadn’t for almost 270 years. I needed a different approach, so I started with the students. I made a list of the university’s likely objections and turned them into a long questionnaire. Do you think changing parietal rules will stop you from studying? Would having more women around be a distraction? And so on.

I recruited eleven students to stand outside each of the eleven college dining halls during mealtimes and hand out the questionnaire to the entire undergraduate body. We had a response rate of close to 100 percent. Then I went to a friend, Reed Hundt, who was deputy editor of the Yale Daily News. (He became head of the Federal Communications Commission under President Clinton.) “Reed, I’ve got this survey about getting rid of parietal rules,” I told him. “It’s dynamite.”

Three days later, the parietal rules were history, and I made the front page of the school newspaper: “Schwarzman’s Initiative: Poll Votes Down Parietals.” The university didn’t want to fight. It was my first lesson in the power of the media.

Source: What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence

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The Knowledge Project: Outliers

Andrew Mellon gave up 100s of millions to become treasury secretary in the 1920s. He put tariffs in place and had the United States in the best financial shape ever. Over 90 percent of people paid no income tax. As the roaring 20s took hold, he warned everyone about the speculative excesses. After the crash, they went after him. I put together a list of ten lessons here.

“Real success comes from making others successful.”

+ Listen and Learn on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | FS | Transcript

Mental Model of the Week

V3 | Systems | Feedback Loops

Feedback loops are the engines of growth and change. They’re the mechanisms by which the output of a system influences its input.

Complex systems often have many feedback loops, and it can be hard to appreciate how adjusting to feedback in one part of the system will affect the rest.

Using feedback loops as a mental model begins with noticing the feedback you give and respond to daily. The model also provides insight into the value of iterations in adjusting based on the feedback you receive. With this lens, you gain insight into where to direct system changes based on feedback and the pace you need to go to monitor the impacts.

Feedback loops are what make systems dynamic. Without feedback, a system does the same thing over and over. Understand them, respect them, and use them wisely.

— Source: The Great Mental Models v3: Systems and Mathematics

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Thanks for reading,

— Shane Parrish
Author of Clear Thinking

P.S. This is brilliant.

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