39 ideas that rewired me

july 10, 2026

unconventional ideas i've collected from books, thoughts, anecdotes, and observation. each one is meant to alter the way you see things — an upgrade to your mental software.

This is going to be a long read. Skip to the tl;dr at the bottom and bookmark it for later if you need to.

I collect ideas the way other people collect trading cards. From books, from conversations, from things I notice repeating across domains that don't look like they should be talking to each other. What follows are the 39 that have most changed the way I see the world — from biology and physics to business, capital allocation, and how a person actually thinks.

1. If you find a genius, give them all power

Every so often, you meet someone whose ability is well in excess of your own. A handful of those times, you'll also feel a deeply moral drive underneath the talent. It might only happen 1–5 times in a lifetime. When it does, partner with them.

Lee Kuan Yew took Singapore — a malarial swamp with no shared culture and no common language — and turned it into one of the richest countries in the world per capita. He didn't do it alone. That's another feature of these people: they know how to build a team.

Warren Buffett took a mediocre $15M textile operation and turned it into a $1 trillion conglomerate on essentially no salary, partnered with Charlie Munger. Imagine you'd known a young Buffett. The single decision of handing him your money would have made you billions of dollars richer. You wouldn't have had to lift a finger.

You probably won't meet a Buffett or an LKY. But the pattern holds at every scale. The marketing agency that outperforms the other by 2–3x. The person managing 1–2 people who could manage 10–50. The friend who could do a lot with nothing but has no resources. Life gets easier as you stack tailwinds.

2. You're neither right nor wrong because a poll agrees with you

You're right because your facts and reasoning are right. Because the outcome matched what you predicted. Other people's opinions have nothing to do with the truth. Truth lives by itself.

Until Darwin, every naturalist believed in the independent creation of species. Until Lyell, everyone thought the world was 5,000 years old. Before Copernicus, the Earth was at the center. Before Galileo, heavy stones fell faster than light ones. What society holds to be true at any given moment is fragile. It takes one clean observation to break it.

When Henry Singleton pioneered share buybacks at Teledyne in the 70s, dividends were the only conceivable way to return capital. He was right and alone. By the 90s, everyone did buybacks. In his last interview he said: "If everyone is doing them, then there must be something wrong with them."

3. The key to success is mediocre competition

You are always competing with someone. For attention, a position, a candidate, a customer. Every activity, meal, and plan competes with every other — time is the only real asset.

Winning can be win-win, but that doesn't mean there isn't a loser somewhere. When a customer meets you and then meets your competitor, what determines the win isn't only your performance but how you compare. It's much easier when the other product doesn't work or the other person doesn't show up.

The play is game selection. Pick a game where you have an edge. If you can't tell where your edge comes from, you don't have one — "if you don't know who the patsy is 30 minutes into the game, then you are the patsy."

Niches are big enough to fund a family and growth. If you're the best at something with steady demand, you'll do well. Buffett said the best shield against inflation is being the best lawyer or doctor in town.

4. There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book

Munger told this story near the end of his life. He read an investment magazine every year for 30–40 years and never found an actionable idea in it. Until, one day in the 2010s, he did. He put a couple million into the business, took out $80M in profit, handed the $80M to Li Lu, who turned it into ~$400M. All in under 15 years.

That's how powerful reading is, especially in investing. It only takes one idea. Imagine if you'd known at 10 what you know now. Would you have exercised? Invested? Read? Spent more time with family?

You're not smarter than your former self. You're more knowledgeable. And knowledge is largely speed-runnable. Read 1,000 carefully selected books and decisions get simpler. Whether you read them across one decade or six doesn't much matter for takeaways — but if you do it early, you get five decades of compounding on top.

You don't need to make every mistake yourself. Read about Newton's laws instead of trying to rediscover them. It's a fair shortcut.

5. It's always a skill issue

If you don't get what you want in the long run, it's likely on you. Especially now — the internet and AI have leveled the playing field.

The reframe is:

• From: it's someone else's fault.
• To: it's my fault. I could've done something better.

It's about accountability. Take it and your behavior gets more profitable. Failed the interview? My English or my knowledge is off. Failed the exam? I didn't study hard enough. Can't close a customer? I'm not a good enough salesperson yet.

There's always someone who could do what you're trying to do better than you. Not because they were born with it — they acquired the skill. "The easiest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want."

No one is a natural at anything. Talent affects the rate, but even the most remarkable humans didn't skip the practice. When I read da Vinci's biography I was floored by his obsessive attention to every detail. Talent only takes you so far.

Whatever another person has, you can have (limited to changeable things — 97%+ of cravings). Some summits take more effort and time. There's no rule that you can't reach them. And time passes anyway.

6. Cargo cult science

Feynman gave this speech in the 70s. He warned about people who dress their opinions in the vocabulary of science — the method, the citations, the confidence — without having done the actual work.

The core failure: complex adaptive systems can't be reduced to isolated variables. Every variable is interconnected and the environment keeps changing. True causality is often not determinable. And when people insist anyway, they tend to leave out the failed experiments and only report the data that flatters the conclusion.

Beware of anyone claiming to know something that's really hard to know. The best shield is to research the topic deeply yourself. See how hard it is to stay on the tracks of truth. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."

7. The men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all — Durant

Your output is a function of your leverage and how well you use each unit of time.

• Paid by the hour → linear.
• Paid by the project or a share of the upside → nonlinear.
• Managing other people's time → the foregoing multiplies.
• Managing money and understanding returns on time → everything is at your disposal.

8. Incentives

We repeat what rewards us and avoid what punishes us. If a conversation with a friend was unpleasant, you'll see that friend less often — even if the unpleasantness wasn't personal. We are wired this way.

The genome took billions of years to evolve on an Earth full of catastrophe. Everything in the circuitry is optimized for self-preservation and reproduction. Pain is the body telling you you're being constrained from the thing you live for.

If you want something to happen, align everyone's interests toward it. It will happen. Generosity exists, but there's truth in the idea that no action is purely altruistic. "Reason, justice and equity never had weight enough on the face of the earth, to govern the councils of men." — John Adams. Interest does.

In 1930s–40s Russia there were quotas to fill for arrests. It didn't matter if people had done anything wrong. Any pretext would do.

An organization had two products. The higher-quality one wasn't much more expensive but nobody bought it. Reason: salesmen got a higher commission on the lower-quality product. Management inverted the commission; sales flipped.

Pavlov ran thousands of experiments with dogs. Saliva secretion, naturally triggered by food, could be conditioned onto dozens of stimuli — including the sound of a bell. Organisms' cabling can be reconfigured to suit your needs. Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.

In finance, investment bankers get paid a cut when a deal is struck. So their unconscious pushes for the deal, even when it isn't in the company's best interest. Don't ask your barber if you need a haircut.

A story my father told me: he was in a group meeting; the manager walked in five minutes late, played with the document in his hand, then pounded the table and said, "Gentlemen, are we gonna do what's right or what's in our interest?"

9. Intelligent is different from smart, and both can be stupid

Smart = quick of mind, witty, good at micro pattern-recognition. Intelligent = broader; sees depth; knows what questions are worth entertaining; holds a problem in the head for days. Intelligence builds the mental schemas. Smartness sorts through them fast.

Neither can save you from stupidity. "It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently."

Up to a point, more intelligence makes irrationality easier — you can argue in favor of anything but can't yet spot your own blindspots. You can be a Nobel laureate and blow up Long-Term Capital Management. We fall in love with our creations and overestimate our capacity.

The Nobel laureates in physics seem to have long known how biased human judgment is. They hold their ideas as "the truth as of now," not as True. Studying the history of their field forces that mental switch.

"People who are in the top percentile of probabilistic games have more in common with one another than with people in their own fields." — Mauboussin.

10. Worldly wisdom

Modern education produces specialists. 10–20 years spent narrowing into one vertical, then a lifetime of not wanting to open a textbook again. As a consequence, we leave proficient in one area and neglecting everything else. "You're like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest."

Real problems don't split into neat boxes. To answer anything truthfully you need history, psychology, economics, physics. Problems are multifaceted; disciplines are interconnected. The best decision-makers are generalists who also know their field extremely well.

Beyond that — how do you go through life without knowing? Learning brings profit, joy, and happiness. "You can't expect to dream it up all by yourself — no one is that smart."

11. Education is software for the brain

Without Windows or iOS, a computer is an alien product. Add the OS and it becomes malleable. Add applications, add the internet, and there's almost no problem you can't solve.

Education does that to you. A book adds ideas, vocabulary, and emotional range. The mind acquires new lenses. Lenses compound. Every hour of reading is another layer through which future decisions get filtered.

12. Economies of scale

Manufacturing has large fixed costs. As units sold grow, per-unit efficiency grows with it. The same is true in biology — the larger the organism, the less energy it needs per gram of tissue, and the fewer heartbeats per minute. In geometry, doubling the dimensions gives 4x the area of a 2D object and 8x the volume of a 3D one.

There are also disadvantages of scale — the larger a structure, the less proportional weight it can carry. Which is why ants seem so strong for their size.

Sol Price figured out how to weaponize this in retail. Your margin is someone else's opportunity. Pass the savings from scale onto the customer via lower prices (Amazon, Walmart, HD, Costco) and you're almost impossible to displace.

13. Quality

A teacher reads two essays on the same topic. He asks who liked the first one better. No hands. Who liked the second? Every hand.

You can try to quantify it — sentence structure, comma use, verb ratios, pauses. In the final analysis you don't know why it's better. You just know it is. We have an inner sense of Quality. It's not taste. It's not intuition. It's the switch that flips when all the senses connect.

14. Extraordinary results are 1,000 boring days strung together

Rocks are worn down by drops of water. It takes a decade to make an overnight success. Think about a skill you'd like to be better at. Then think how much better you'd be if you'd practiced it every day for the past three years.

An old musician playing beautifully. A fan came up afterward: "I'd give my life to play like that." The musician replied, melancholically: "That's exactly what I did."

Newton locked himself in a room for months at a time. Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa across ~16 years and spent decades practicing beforehand. Crick and Watson worked on one topic for 2–3 years of frustration before discovering the double helix.

No one double-clicks on the long periods of darkness. Everyone remembers the fame. To be acclaimed in front of everybody, you have to outwork everybody in front of nobody.

15. Stack the bricks

Steve Jobs and an advisor once disagreed about media strategy. The advisor crumpled a piece of paper and threw it — Steve caught it. Then he crumpled five at once and threw them all — Steve caught none. We only have so many mental resources.

Google won by stripping every internet page down to a search bar. Apple won by cutting the iPhone down to one button, then none. If it's not required, delete it — you're just diverting attention.

We look more at buildings than at floors. 100 bricks laid flat get ignored. Stack them into a tower and no one walks by without looking. Businesses market this way too: recurring spend, then all channels concentrated on a single announcement — a launch, a raise, a partnership. Attention compounds when it stacks.

Same logic as Andreessen on venture: returns aren't evenly distributed. A few drive everything. If you can spot the few, concentration is more profitable and less risky.

16. There are multiple ways of thinking

Whenever da Vinci needed to think, he took out a pencil and paper and started drawing. Motion of water, flow of a river, mechanics of sight — he drew.

His river sketches acted as a mental model. When he was working for Cesare Borgia on military ideas, feasibility was determined on paper. Sketching was his simulator; tweaking a sketch was like changing an input.

Learn how you think and lean into it. Some people are visual thinkers. Some think through movement. Some think by writing. Optimize your environment for your nature.

17. Real understanding comes through continued mental exposure

Reading a book (15–35 hours) is not the same as listening to a 1–2 hour podcast on it. And a summary doesn't get you 80% of the way; that's not how it works. Understanding comes from continuously turning something over, layering, and theorizing about how new knowledge fits.

Jung analyzed dreams by "turning them around and around, from every angle." A thesis is often a single sentence — but you don't understand it until you understand what backs it up. What is understanding, if not the capacity to profit from the knowledge?

18. Deep simplicity

Complex systems are a few nodes interacting over a long time. This is true across disciplines:

• 95%+ of biological matter is 4 elements (C, H, O, N).
• With 3 laws and gravity, you can explain and predict the motion of every large body.
• All DNA is sugar, phosphate, and a chemical base — built from 4 nucleobases.
• Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism with 4 equations.

At the bottom, only a handful of elements serve as the Lego blocks. When you analyze anything, look for the 2–5 variables that move the needle.

Milanković spent 30 years trying to explain the Earth's cycle of ice ages and warm periods. He reduced it to three variables:

• Orbital eccentricity (100,000-year cycle).
• Axial tilt (41,000-year cycle).
• Wobble (26,000-year cycle).

By tracking how the three overlap, he solved an "impossible" question.

Bezos did the same thing at Amazon. A leader's job is to identify the 2–3 big ideas and enforce execution on them. Amazon: (1) lower prices, (2) faster delivery, (3) broader selection. "It's inconceivable to me to imagine a world where people don't want that 10 years from now." Those are the things that don't change — which is what makes a business resilient.

19. Tweak a problem slightly and it goes from impossible to easy

Find the piece of information that seems to matter but is actually irrelevant to the result. Then work around it.

Pass a needle through a block of ice? Physically impossible. Heat the ice — it melts. Heat the needle — it slides through. Learning different disciplines lets you spot shortcuts where others see walls.

Thorp got a geometry puzzle: find the volume of the solid left after drilling a hole through a sphere, given only the hole's height. Because the sphere's radius wasn't given, most students thought it was impossible. Thorp imagined the smallest possible sphere — one exactly as tall as the hole. The hole collapses to a point, the ring becomes a solid sphere, and a complex calculus problem becomes a 5-second mental calculation.

20. Systems naturally trend toward decentralization and specialization

Adam Smith on the pin factory: divide labor and you get orders of magnitude more productivity than a factory where everyone does everything. Specialists outproduce jacks-of-all-trades.

Natural selection is the same. Darwin thought that the higher on the scale of nature, the more specialized the organs. General-purpose organs are less fit. Specialization has been the trend in biology.

In economics, Hayek showed a central authority can't set prices well — no single entity can integrate all the ever-changing inputs. Free markets aggregate them via arbitrage and incentives. That's why economies trend toward decentralized pricing.

In governance, emperors gave way to senates, senates to monarchies again, aristocracy to democracy. Democracy emerged as the least-bad selecting machine.

21. Complex adaptive systems

We're used to extrapolating. 1, 2, 3 → 4. Our brain is a pattern machine. This is useful in mathematics and largely useful in physics and chemistry.

In most of life, it leads to terrible results.

Economics, psychology, sociology, weather, people management — each has infinite subtleties. You can't say "rates fell, so asset prices skyrocket" or "she coughed, so she has pneumonia." Most of reality is a compounded feedback loop with an indefinite number of components. One node moves and the whole system moves. The output is indeterminate. The world is its own fastest computing machine.

22. Why thinking what no one else is thinking pays off enormously

At any point, society has a set of currently-held truths. Placeholders. Bound to be displaced.

Darwin got no sympathetic agreement when he first shared his ideas. He published anyway in 1859. After the theory got out, evolution became the truth. When that switch happens, society's mental software updates — new methods, analyses, and fields open up. Wealth expands.

In investing, being contrarian is not enough. You have to be contrarian and right. A building being different for its own sake is worthless — it has to be more beautiful, useful, or resilient. The more people who disagree with you when you are right, the larger the payoff.

Paul Graham's two forcers of this kind of thinking: (i) don't be aware of conventions — if you don't know what people think, you think for yourself by default; (ii) surround yourself with independent-minded people — we're the average of the people around us.

Current example I've been chewing on: Graham Hancock arguing that our record of history is flawed and that there was an advanced civilization lost during the ice age. He pulls from archaeology, astronomy, sociology, geology. Whether he's right or not, watching him try to connect the dots is fascinating.

23. The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones — Keynes

When we learn a new idea, it colors our view of everything. We fall in love with our creations. We twist new facts to fit them. To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Learning an idea costs so much that people don't want it to go to waste. They want maximum use out of it. That's why science moves one funeral at a time.

24. You drift toward the average of your surroundings

We learn by imitation. Parents, peers, admired figures. You can't fully resist it; it's largely unconscious.

I catch myself saying things and think — where did that come from? Then I trace it: Munger. Feynman. Buffett.

If you spend time with people who go to the gym, you go to the gym. Around readers, you read. Around smokers, you smoke. Around people who don't work hard, you don't work hard. It doesn't matter how independent-minded you think you are. We drift toward the average of the 5 people around us.

25. Causes of human misjudgment

The mind breaks in embarrassing ways all the time. You can't avoid it. These failures feel natural — worse, they feel right.

When anger arrives, rationality leaves. Hunger makes your decisions worse and your temperament shorter. You fail to notice change that happens gradually. You twist reality when it hurts. You agree more readily with the opinions of people you like.

To a large extent you can troubleshoot it. You can learn new behaviors. What you can't do is get rid of the intrinsic causes. It's like an addiction — cured one day at a time. The most practical countermeasure is to become aware of the common errors and live in a state of alert.

The one piece of advice that saves infinite trouble: "You can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow if it's such a good idea." — Tom Murphy.

26. Find out what works and do it

Lee Kuan Yew wasn't an ideologue. For every issue, he studied what other nations had done and how it had played out. If it worked and made sense, he copied it — like incentive design for traffic, or tax benefits for multinationals. If it had failed elsewhere, he avoided it — like a traditional central bank at the start.

There's always a place with a higher density of what you're looking for. Startups? SF. Truths? The classics. Mispriced investments? Fish where the fish are.

If you don't look, you won't find. Young Buffett flipped through the entire Moody's manual by hand looking for opportunities. Naturally, he found them. Working hard tilts the odds.

27. After a business gets to scale, capital allocation matters more than anything else

The skillset that takes a business $0 → $1M is different from $1M → $10M, different again from $10M → $100M and beyond. Complexity escalates. Product lines multiply. Markets saturate. Individual sales stop moving the needle. Success starts with product, grows through sales, and stabilizes via operations.

As the business starts printing 10s or 100s of millions in cash, what you do with the inflow matters more than any operational decision. Growth is not guaranteed — markets cap out. Deploying capital into a 5% growth market may not be worth it. Reinvesting elsewhere can create orders-of-magnitude more value.

When Buffett took over Berkshire, it was a $15M textile operation with $175k in profit. He didn't accept it as a textile operation. He built a portfolio, bought See's, bought Blue Chip Stamps, kept redeploying cash flow into M&A and public equities. Berkshire is now a $1T diversified conglomerate. One single investment in the 2010s alone created $100B+.

"What Teledyne makes or sells is less important than the style of the man who runs it."

28. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes — Mark Twain

The world has been through a huge number of permutations. Past conditions are likely to repeat, roughly.

Not knowing what has transpired leaves you handicapped. Chess grandmasters hold hundreds of previous games in their heads — they know what to play given almost any position. Life is less deterministic but works the same way.

Familiarity with past crashes prepares you for future ones. Studying the fall of Rome yields insight about the fall of current powerhouses. Studying what worked and failed elsewhere gives you a sense of what will work at home.

But this lesson is easy to forget. In Lessons of History, a young politician argues to an old general about how history has played out and pushes for two great nations to make peace. The old general smiles and says, "Son, you've forgotten all the lessons of history, and all that nature of man which you describe."

29. Uniformitarianism vs catastrophism

Two sides to this idea:

1. How a system got somewhere.
2. What happened after it got there.

Biology helped me get it. Up to the 19th century, the Bible was the source of truth — species created independently. Then Darwin: small variations per generation, ecosystems selecting the fittest, given enough time you get new species. Gradual, step-by-step — a rejection of the Bible's abrupt catastrophism.

Fast-forward to Stephen Jay Gould in the 1960s. In the fossil record, species went through long periods of stasis, then a punctuated equilibrium (concentrated evolution), then stasis, then punctuation. Fundamentally different from the Bible, but the theme is back in the realm of abruptness.

For "what happens after" — economics. Adam Smith in the 1770s: entrepreneurs get profit when they find an exploitable market. Others jump in and compete. Over time, price falls to the cost of production; no profits remain.

Economists interpreted this as a linear, gradual process. But it's not. Mauboussin's "CAP: The Neglected Value Driver" argued the market was wrong to forecast excess returns being competed away linearly. In practice, a company's moat often disappears almost overnight — excess returns until suddenly, they aren't. It rhymes with Christensen's idea of disruption.

30. Lollapalooza effect

Extraordinary outcomes are the result of a confluence of factors pushing in the same direction at the same time. Multiple things going for something makes it much more likely to happen.

Munger explained the Lollapalooza effect through the interaction of mental models and biases — used it to unpack Coca-Cola's success and the Moonies cult conversion. Its power is that it forces you to think in parallel tailwinds instead of a single cause.

31. Paint the fence

If it's not worth doing well, it might not be worth doing at all. Why do something that doesn't make your soul smile?

Steve Jobs's father worked on their house's fence. Steve noticed he was painting the boards behind the fence too — the ones facing the alley that no one would ever see. Steve took that to Apple. Open up any of their early products and the insides are as beautiful as the outsides.

Self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself. Even when nobody else will know, you will. So do a good job. If you're going to do something, do something useful, beautiful, and well-crafted.

32. The role of technology is to make expensive things cheap and accessible

Von Neumann's first computer, mid-40s — only he and a few others could use it. IBM mainframes two decades later — technicians only, $1M+. Apple's personal computers in the 80s — $500–$3,000, almost anyone could use one. Phones and iPads today — hundreds of dollars, even toddlers can use them because the UI is friendly.

That's what technology does. It takes something highly sought after (computing + memory) and makes it abundant. Price and barrier-to-use both fall.

33. Attractor states

In free markets, no one dictates the price. There are people who want the product (willing to pay from A to Z) and people who'd rather have money than the product (willing to sell from A to Z). Put them in contact and a price emerges. Buyers, sellers, and producers push it around until it settles at an equilibrium — a weighted-average preference.

That price is an attractor state. This mental model of systems converging to an equilibrium shows up everywhere. Your field, your discipline, your job, your interests — there's likely somewhere they're tending toward. Spotting it gives you a real edge.

34. Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler — Einstein

Newton built a framework as fundamental as possible. Four elements:

• Inertia: bodies tend to remain at rest or move uniformly in a straight line unless a force is impressed on them.
• Equal and opposite reaction: when a force is impressed on something, the thing returns the same force.
• F = m·a.
• Universal gravitation, the inverse square law: bodies attract with a force = constant · M₁·M₂ / distance².

From these axioms plus gravity, you can explain planetary orbits, tides, and the precession of the equinoxes.

You can only simplify as far as your understanding permits. But always strive for the simpler framework. If you can't explain it to a 5-year-old, you don't understand it well enough. And you don't get rewarded for complexity — stepping over a one-foot bar can beat stepping over a seven-foot bar.

"For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have." — Oliver Wendell Holmes.

35. Ideas are much older than you think

Three years ago I was reading Bezos's shareholder letters and felt amazed by two ideas: customer obsession and passing efficiency gains to the consumer. Then I looked at Costco — same ideas, earlier. Then Home Depot's founders' autobiography — same ideas, similar framing. Then Sam Walton — same values. And Walton himself points to the source: Sol Price at FedMart, then at Price Club.

This has happened to me over and over. The further I read, the further back the origin of an idea gets pushed. It feels like archaeology — everything keeps being older than expected.

Don't think you're stealing an idea. Chances are the person you thought invented it took it from someone else. Mankind's been around a long time with a similar brain and a similar environment. Most ideas have earlier roots.

36. Do what you love

Life is long enough to do anything, but not long enough to do everything. Choosing what to do means choosing what not to do. For significant decisions, Bezos's regret minimization framework works: "When I am 80, will I regret not doing this?"

Do what you love, for the same reason. No one can beat you at being you. Work on things that feel like a fun hobby to you and heavy lifting to others.

You can fail doing something other people want, so you might as well take a shot at what you want. Failing at your own thing is bearable. Failing at something you didn't even want to do in the first place is a waste.

37. True law is reason — Cicero

Humanity has tried every form of government. Good leaders and bad dictators. Every possible policy. Reason is what ties truth, God, and man together. In any situation, what's reasonable is what should be done.

People have an inner sense for morality. Most cases are black or white. When they're grey, good judgment is what accords most with reason. It's easy for majorities to prevail — but "for something to be rightful, it must be reasonable." — Jefferson.

When asked whether the whole population or a select group should vote, Jefferson said the question was missing the point. The real question is how many people should vote so that the most capable and honest person gets elected.

That democracy has evolved into a combat of extremes — two parties focused on opposing each other rather than on what's useful — is a shame. When anger arrives, reason leaves. We lose by trying to win.

38. You can't teach an old dog to live in chains, and you can't teach old tricks to a new dog

You can't change someone's nature. If they don't want to work hard, you won't convince them. If someone is accustomed to freedom, you can't chain them and teach them how to live with it — they'll revolt. The more we've done of something, the more ingrained it is. Changing that deep wiring is usually an unprofitable bet.

Second half is Buffett on management. There's no true retirement threshold. A 50-year-old manager who loves what they do has decades ahead. It's much easier to get these people right than to bet on unproven talent. Their experience works in your favor — you avoid the mistakes every manager has to learn.

39. Knowers vs non-knowers

Whenever I hear "Adam Smith," the next words are always "the invisible hand." As if the two are inseparable and the phrase contained his whole philosophy.

It turns out the invisible hand is one paragraph, and it's not even about what people usually cite it for. Smith uses it as the thing that causes people to do what's right for society when they do what's right for themselves, "as though moved by an invisible hand."

This happens constantly. People repeat what others say. Very few pay the dues to rightfully acquire the knowledge. The world is full of non-knowers — good at parroting the talk, not so good if you ask them a few questions.

You have to learn to discriminate between knowers and non-knowers. Only then can you rightfully delegate responsibility or assign trust. Two ways to learn it: (1) read the source; (2) become a doer — the real intellectual struggle happens when trying to take something from the idea to execution.

tl;dr — the list

1. If you find a genius, give them all power.
2. You're neither right nor wrong because a poll agrees with you.
3. The key to success is mediocre competition.
4. There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.
5. It's always a skill issue.
6. Cargo cult science.
7. The men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.
8. Incentives.
9. Intelligent is different from smart, and both can be stupid.
10. Worldly wisdom.
11. Education is software for the brain.
12. Economies of scale.
13. Quality.
14. Extraordinary results are 1,000 boring days strung together.
15. Stack the bricks.
16. There are multiple ways of thinking.
17. Real understanding comes through continued mental exposure.
18. Deep simplicity.
19. Tweak a problem slightly and it goes from impossible to easy.
20. Systems naturally trend toward decentralization and specialization.
21. Complex adaptive systems.
22. Why thinking what no one else is thinking pays off enormously.
23. The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.
24. You drift toward the average of your surroundings.
25. Causes of human misjudgment.
26. Find out what works and do it.
27. After a business gets to scale, capital allocation matters more than anything else.
28. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
29. Uniformitarianism vs catastrophism.
30. Lollapalooza effect.
31. Paint the fence.
32. The role of technology is to make expensive things cheap and accessible.
33. Attractor states.
34. Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
35. Ideas are much older than you think.
36. Do what you love.
37. True law is reason.
38. You can't teach an old dog to live in chains, and you can't teach old tricks to a new dog.
39. Knowers vs non-knowers.