Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Category: Notes
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Creativity Is Connecting Things
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Avoiding Stupidity
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, ‘It’s the strong swimmers who drown.’
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Futurists and Billionaires
Those who predict the future we call futurists. Those who know when the future will happen we call billionaires.
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Confidence and Position Sizing
There is no point in being confident and having a small position.
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Becoming Something vs Doing Something
One should not dream of becoming something, one should dream of doing something.
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Information and Attention
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
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What Stands In The Way Becomes The Way
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
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Disruption Delta
Disruption is the art of identifying which parts of the past are no longer relevant to the future, and exploiting that delta at all costs.
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Antifragile
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure , risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet. And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk.
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means— crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them— and do them well.