Mind
How people reason, as against how they are supposed to.
Self-Belief Is the Willingness to Walk Into What You Don't Know
Hard goals are hard because the path to them isn't documented. Self-belief is the willingness to walk into problems you don't yet know how to solve, and you build it with reps.
Talk Is the Enemy of Greatness
Talking about great work feels like doing it, and that feeling is the trap. Here are the levels between talk and real work, and the questions worth asking to find out whether your time goes to the actions that move your highest goal.
How to Keep Doing the Work on Days You Hate It
There are four positions between wanting something and being the person who does it. Find the rung you are actually standing on, then climb one.
Brandolini's law
The energy needed to refute nonsense is an order of magnitude greater than the energy needed to produce it. Alberto Brandolini stated it in 2013, and the asymmetry is why corrections never catch the claims they correct.
Hitchens's razor
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Christopher Hitchens's formulation of a much older rule about where the burden of proof sits: on whoever is making the claim.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs
Abraham Maslow's 1943 proposal that human motives fall into classes — physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization — with the lower ones generally more urgent when unmet. Maslow did not draw a pyramid and did not say the order was strict.
Murphy's law
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Coined on an aerospace test program in 1949, where it was a design rule rather than a complaint: if a part can be installed backward, someone eventually will, so make it impossible.
Regression to the mean
Extreme results tend to be followed by less extreme ones, because part of any extreme outcome was luck and luck does not repeat. Francis Galton described it in 1886 and it is still the most commonly missed explanation for a change in performance.
Satisficing
Choosing the first option that meets a standard you set in advance, rather than searching for the best available one. Herbert Simon coined the term in 1956 for what people actually do when the cost of searching is real.
Sturgeon's law
Ninety percent of everything is crud. Theodore Sturgeon said it in the 1950s defending science fiction, and the defense is the point: the ninety percent is not special to any field, so judging a field by its average is judging nothing.
The hedonic treadmill
The tendency to return to a stable level of contentment after a change in circumstances, good or bad. The gain is real and the feeling of it fades, which is why the next thing has to be larger to register at all.