Honest but scary:

Of course the faith may be mistaken. The gamble come up short. In fact, that’s bound to happen eventually if you place enough bets. Nobody is forever the oracle and all lucky streaks end. But that’s the risk with taking risks. Native to the game. Part of the deal. And not a reason not to play.

Because someone needs to be comfortable starting the fire that can clear the path, despite the danger that it might also burn down your house, lest the company is to stagnate. You have to handle it with care, but ultimately it’s one of the finest duties of founders to embrace that flame.

tamingcomplexity.org

Confused? Are you staring at a screen that lets you view almost every available scrap of information in the world, but you can’t even find a precise description of the problem you want to solve … let alone a clear, trustworthy solution?

Our cherished and time-honored habits of acquiring and communicating knowledge have stopped working for us, precisely because information has become superabundant … and less reliable at the same time. Both idiots and terrorists can — and do — publish to global audiences at no cost to publisher or reader. And you can’t tell the difference between their scribblings and those of truly wise people.

The old ways of extracting meaning from information did work. We need to rediscover and reinvent those ways to meet our new realities.

(Source)

When you know something it is almost impossible to imagine what it is like not to know that thing. This is the curse of knowledge, and it is the root of countless misunderstandings

Fighting complexity is a never-ending cause. Solutions should be as simple as possible.

Smart people who are comfortable with complexity can be especially prone to it!

The more specialized your work, the greater the risk that you will communicate in ways that are incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Fight the curse of knowledge. Work to understand your audience. Try to imagine what it would be like to learn what you are communicating for the first time.

If you want to influence and work effectively with others, you first need to understand them. Actively listen to understand their feelings, ideas, and point of view before you begin trying to make your own thoughts known.

At some point in your career you may find yourself in a role that isn’t a good fit. A bad fit isn’t a character flaw, but it’s a problem you shouldn’t ignore. There may be more than one solution to such a dilemma: you can evolve or the role can evolve.

From this interview with David Sirota

I felt like the movie was mostly about systems and the perceived loss of agency we feel when we can both see what’s wrong with the world and also feel totally powerless to change it, which is not quite the same thing as saying we’re all in collective denial. Nor is it the same thing as calling Americans stupid, which I think was how a lot of people interpreted it.

There’s optimism in the idea that in our tribalized politics somebody would say, “Wait a minute, I am being lied to, and this is not acceptable.” Right now it feels like we are locked in this forever battle between one set of politicians and their followers, and another set of politicians and their followers. And no one wants to look at inconvenient truths that may dispel or debunk what the leader is saying.

And now people are wondering, “Why doesn’t anybody trust the government? Why is there so much misinformation out there? Why do people not trust the media? Why are they going to folks who are pushing all sorts of wild misinformation who are outside of traditional…

… establishment media?” Listen, I’m not saying it’s good that people are pushing misinformation, but we can’t sit here and wonder why people have lost trust in these institutions. Rebuilding that trust is necessary if we’re going to deal with all these crises. We need to rebuild trust between the government, media institutions, and the public in order to ensure that science, especially climate science, lands and actually motivates the right policies. The problem is that sometimes science doesn’t give us black-or-white, yes-or-no answers.

I think it actually went in a productive direction in that 2008 election. People were sick of the Bush administration, which was really a horrific administration, and they actually voted for change. What happened next is one of the biggest tragedies in history that we don’t necessarily recognize as one of the biggest tragedies in history.

The Obama administration came in with this huge mandate and made a series of decisions to use that mandate to try to prop up the current system, to try to just preserve it for a little bit longer. Top-down bailouts, not bailouts that helped actual homeowners, and so on. If you don’t really try to deliver for working people, if you only try to prop back up the system, ultimately that ends up helping the opportunists, the right-wing authoritarian opportunists. And I think there is a direct line from the reaction to that financial crisis to the rise of Donald Trump.

From this Medium post

Maltz came to the conclusion that our self-image is the cornerstone of our mental state, and therefore of all the successes and failures that happen in our lives as a result.

most people let past experiences define them in a negative way. Therefore, they end up behaving in a way that’s not coherent with who they really are, but only with who they “think” they are

The thing to point out is that our brain doesn’t distinguish between imagination and reality; instead, it acts based on the information we send it through our thoughts. Thus, we can imagine a new version of ourselves through our attitude and interpretation of various situations, “describing” the new paradigm to our brain which, in turn, will find a way to make that image come to fruition. However, to reach that new level, we must have a clear picture of the person we want to be.

taking time to relax yields tremendous benefits when it comes to dehypnotizing ourselves from wrong thoughts and convictions. All it takes is thirty minutes a day: find a comfortable spot and let go of all the tension that piled up in your muscles throughout the day

The continuous dwelling on past failures doesn’t simplify the process of getting better; on the contrary, it tends to perpetuate the behavior that you want to change. In a nutshell, it is self-destructive.

From The erasure of JK Rowling

“given the degree to which her integration of ancient lore, magic and mythology with her own fantastical imagination won Rowling her pre-eminent place in the hearts of millions of young readers worldwide, it’s remarkable that her continuing ability to trend on Twitter rests primarily on her insistence on a position that would have been regarded as utterly banal in any other time. Namely, that the word ‘woman’ refers primarily to a state of biological being, rather than a state of mind.”

“various attempts to cancel the woman who famously lost billionaire status only because she gave too much of her money away have pinged gratifyingly off the force field of her not giving a fuck.”

“God-given genius – even in the lower-case sense of mysterious creative spirit – is indeed an unfashionable idea, and there are those who see it as an intolerable affront to the egalitarian ideal.”

“It suggests a quite psychotic detachment from the reality of the creative process, this attempt to actually remove a living author from their creation, to sort of float her free, like a decal transfer from its backing paper. What exactly is the preferred scenario? To pretend that all JK Rowling did was refurbish some sort of pre-existing mythos, like those re-workings of Homeric or Arthurian legend for modern readers? Or that Hogwarts was really a collaborative effort that sprang into being on Warner Bros’ watch, more meaningfully emanating from the genius of Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson than from Rowling herself?”

“Rowling’s assertion, for instance, of the legitimacy of Slytherin House, as part of the magical community, and of Professor Snape in particular, suggests she grasped the necessary acknowledgement of the shadow side, to create an integrated personality.”

“To practise that most wonderfully therapeutic of disciplines: gratitude. To be grateful that you do live in a society that made her creations possible. To be thankful that the combination of qualities – courage to speak her truth, surely among them – that allowed JK Rowling and no one else to give the world Harry Potter, happened along in their lifetimes.”