-Charlie Munger 2008

Notes:

• We buy a book, we know what we’re getting. There is no other “business model” at play. No other information being (necessarily, relatively) sold. This clarity of contract is especially lucid in physical form. The book has edges. The transaction has edges. The transaction completes. Given time, we complete the book. It has an ending. Contracts are clear. Usually, there’s no tracking.

• The immutability of printed books is their superpower. Remember this, because it’s from this immutability that books derive their dead-simple “contract.”

Attention Monsters: Things that Eat Attention

• The main adversary of books and book publishing is: Anything that eats attention.

• A simple heuristic for determining if something is an attention monster: “Free” apps built around advertising models tend to become attention monsters.1 Especially if they’ve taken on a lot of venture capital, a tendency even further exacerbated if they’re a public company.2

• Instagram is a great example. The more you scroll, the more money they make. Consider the “agreement” into which you’ve entered with the application the next time you find yourself mindlessly scrolling. What’s keeping you there? Why are the algorithms showing you what they’e showing? What benefits are you accruing? What do you feel the need to post what you’re posting? For what are are you trading your time and mental energy?

• over time, attention monster methods of consuming user attention become more aggressive the larger the user base becomes. A once simple contract (“connect with your friends online,” “post photos with cool filters,” et cetera) into which we may have entered with a free app begins to change by small degrees when that app or publication is pushed to increase profitability

• Publications are another example. Most legacy or incumbent news organizations like The New York Times fall into this bucket.

• In contrast, publications like The Information or Stratechery or The New Consumer — recently founded publications — are entirely subscriber based, and thereby shed themselves of attention gorging.

• Netflix is another example, which stated “Sleep is our competitor”. Their internal doctrine might be like - Netflix must become a downtime habit humans cannot live without. The service must become a teat, an irreplaceable and inexhaustible binge conveyance.

Contracts and habits

• Here are two big takeaways that are relevant to our contracts, attention monsters, and books discussion:

1. True behavior change is identity change.
2. “Motion” is the act of researching; “action” is getting your reps in. Never mistake the two.

• Carrying a Kindle and blocking most media on my phone are two core pieces to my system of maintaining, believing in, and strengthening my identity as a “reader

Reading and Attention

• A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end.

• The critical insight is that deep reading is an active exhaustion, the result of burned calories, not the passive exhaustion of an underused body and mind.

” and maintaining what I consider “healthy” contracts with apps and media.

“Any kind of important book should immediately be read twice, partly because one grasps the matter in its entirety the second time, and only really understands the beginning when the end is known; and partly because in reading it the second time one’s temper and mood are different so that one gets another impression; it may be that one sees the matter in another light.” –Arthur Schopenhauer

quotes on reading

• “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” - Harry S. Truman

• “The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat- footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.” - James N. Mattis

• “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.” - Robert Caro in The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives: On a Presidential Paper Trail

• Chess master and tutor Bruce Pandolfini “is teaching [his students] how to think. ‘My goal,’ he says, ‘is to help them develop what I consider to be two of the most important forms of intelligence: the ability to read other people, and the ability to understand oneself.’”

• Li Lu on Charlie Munger: “When Charlie thinks about things, he starts by inverting. To understand how to be happy in life, Charlie will study how to make life miserable; to examine how business[es] become big and strong, Charlie first studies how businesses decline and die; most people care more about how to succeed in the stock market, Charlie is most concerned about why most have failed in the stock market. Charlie constantly collects and researches the notable failures in each and every type of people, business, government, and academia, and arranges the causes of failures into a decision-making checklist for making the right decisions. Because of this, he has avoided major mistakes in his decision making in his life and in his career. The importance of this on the performance of Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway over the past 50 years cannot be emphasized enough.”

• Robet Caro in

Surgeon Don Miguel Ruiz had a near-death experience that caused him to rethink the way he had been living. He developed a set of four agreements with himself to help him life a more fulfilling life:

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally. Don’t swallow poison.
3. Don’t make assumptions.Ask questions.
4. Always do your best.

• The first agreement is to be impeccable with your word. It sounds very simple, but it is very, very powerful. Why your word? Your word is the power that you have to create.

• Taking things personally makes you easy prey for these predators, the black magicians. They can hook you easily with one little opinion and feed you whatever poison they want, and because you take it personally, you eat it up. You eat all their emotional garbage, and now it becomes your garbage. But if you do not take it personally, you are immune in the middle of hell. Immunity to poison in the middle of hell is the gift of this agreement.

• If others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don’t tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate. Even if we hear something and we don’t understand we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don’t have the courage to ask questions.

• Just do your best — in any circumstance in your life. It doesn’t matter if you are sick or tired, if you always do your best there is no way you can judge yourself. And if you don’t judge yourself there is no way you are going to suffer from guilt, blame, and self-punishment. By always doing your best, you will break a big spell that you have been under.

“Sadly, many people spend their entire lives focusing on the wrong questions. They may pursue money, when they really want happiness. They may pursue the respect of people whose favor is really not worthy of being sought. So before you succumb to the temptation to immediately spring to work on the answer, always stop and first ask, “What’s the real question here?” Often the question that seems obvious may not be the question that leads to effective action.”

~ Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking

Somewhere along the way Marc Andreessen went from being pmarca to @pmarca. He took down his popular blog, and years later took up tweetstorming. Which means you can keep up with his current thoughts on Twitter — and also catch up on them (in the form of tweets, podcasts, and op-eds) here.

• .PDF (for printing): http://bit.ly/pmarcablogebookpdf
• .EPUB (for Nook, iBooks, Kobo etc.): http://bit.ly/pmarcablogebookepub
• .MOBI (for Kindle): http://bit.ly/pmarcablogebookmobi

On the spur of the moment, with no particular psychological or literary theory in mind to justify it, I developed my Rule of 50:

Give a book 50 pages. When you get to the bottom of Page 50, ask yourself if you’re really liking the book. If you are, of course, then great, keep on reading. But if you’re not, then put it down and look for another. (Always keep in mind that there’s nothing to stop you from going back to it later, whether that might be in six days or six years. Or 60 years. There is many a book that I couldn’t get into the first time, or even two, that I tried to read it, and then, giving it one more chance, totally fell under its spell. The book obviously hadn’t changed - but I had.)

When you are 51 years of age or older, subtract your age from 100, and the resulting number (which, of course, gets smaller every year) is the number of pages you should read before you can guiltlessly give up on a book. As the saying goes, “Age has its privileges.”

And the ultimate privilege of age, of course, is that when you turn 100, you are authorized (by the Rule of 50) to judge a book by its cover.

source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/nancy-pearls-rule-of-50-for-dropping-a-bad-book/article565170/

• Your brain is an incredible information-processing system and the most complex structure known to humankind. The brain has allowed us to perform extraordinary feats from discovering general relativity to painting the Sistine Chapel, from building airplanes to composing symphonies. And yet, we still forget to pick up milk on the way home. How can this be?

• We have come to believe that the human brain is a master navigator of the river of information that rages steadily all around us. And yet we often feel challenged when trying to fulfill even fairly simple goals. This is the result of interference—both distractions from irrelevant information and interruptions by our attempts to simultaneously pursue multiple goals.

• Our cognitive control is really quite limited: we have a restricted ability to distribute, divide, and sustain attention; actively hold detailed information in mind; and concurrently manage or even rapidly switch between competing goals. We can only speculate that if the neural processes of goal enactment evolved to a comparable degree as our goal-setting abilities, we would not be so encumbered by goal interference. If we could hold more information in mind and with higher fidelity, if we could cast a broader attentional net on the world around us and with greater sustainability, if we could simultaneously engage in multiple demanding tasks and transition more efficiently between them, we would not be so easily distracted and interrupted. In many ways, we are ancient brains in a high-tech world.

• Cognitive Control Limitations

  • Attention * Selectivity is limited by susceptibility to bottom-up influences. * Distribution of attention results in diminished performance compared to focused attention.
    • Sustainability of attention over time is limited, especially in extended, boring situations.
    • Processing speed limitations affect both the efficiency of allocation and withdrawal of attention.
  • Working Memory
    • Capacity, or the number of items that can be actively held in mind, is severely limited.
    • Fidelity, the quality of information maintained in working memory, decays over time and as a result of interference.
  • Goal Management
    • Multitasking is limited by our inability to effectively parallel process two attention-demanding tasks.
    • Task switching results in costs to accuracy and speed performance.

• High-Tech World. The “three “game changers” in our rapidly changing high-tech world: the Internet, smartphones, and social media. Each features, at its core, a commodity that is precious us—information. These technologies have the remarkable ability to grab our attention at any instant with an alert, notification, buzz, beep, or even simply in response to a thought that it must be time to check in and make sure that we have not missed out on anything important in the past few minutes.

• Tackling the Distracted Mind: There are two approaches by which we can diminish the negative impact of interference on our lives: changing our brains and changing our behavior.

• There is quite a wide range in the strength of evidence that has been generated for the many approaches we have considered to aid the Distracted Mind. In our opinion, only physical exercise has reached the highest level of being a truly prescriptive approach. Not far behind this are cognitive exercises, video game training, and meditation, where we see a strong signal in the accumulated scientific literature. There is a weaker signal, but a signal nonetheless, for other approaches that need more evidence to become prescriptive—drugs, brain stimulation, and neurofeedback.

This is how to increase your attention span:

• Stop multitasking: You wouldn’t try to lift 5000 pounds. Your body can’t do that. Don’t try to do your best work while checking email, texting, and posting to Instagram. Your brain can’t do that.
• Exercise: You know it’s good for your body. Guess what? Your brain’s part of your body. (Shocking, I know.) Meditate: Simply put, meditation is attention training.
• Call your mother nature: Looking at a picture of a tree is like a deep tissue massage for your brain.
• Reduce interference: Remove anything from your environment that might distract you. Batch email and social media. Extend the time between breaks to build your attention muscles.
• Having your phone out doesn’t just distract you from work — it also reduces empathy and harms your relationships.

• Law 1 Never Outshine the Master- Law 2 Never put too Much Trust in Friends, Learn how to use Enemies- Law 3 Conceal your Intentions- Law 4 Always Say Less than Necessary- Law 5 So Much Depends on Reputation. Guard it with your Life- Law 6 Court Attention at all Cost- Law 7 Get others to do the Work for you, but Always Take the Credit- Law 8 Make other People come to you, use Bait if Necessary- Law 9 Win through your Actions, Never through Argument- Law 10 Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky- Law 11 Learn to Keep People Dependent on You- Law 12 Use Selective Honesty and Generosity to Disarm your Victim- Law 13 When Asking for Help, Appeal to People’s Self-Interest, Never to their Mercy or Gratitude- Law 14 Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy- Law 15 Crush your Enemy Totally- Law 16 Use Absence to Increase Respect and Honor- Law 17 Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability- Law 18 Do Not Build Fortresses to Protect Yourself. Isolation is Dangerous- Law 19 Know Who You’re Dealing with. Do Not Offend the Wrong Person- Law 20 Do Not Commit to Anyone- Law 21 Play a Sucker to Catch a Sucker. Seem Dumber than your Mark- Law 22 Use the Surrender Tactic: Transform Weakness into Power- Law 23 Concentrate Your Forces- Law 24 Play the Perfect Courtier- Law 25 Re-Create Yourself- Law 26 Keep Your Hands Clean- Law 27 Play on People’s Need to Believe to Create a Cultlike Following- Law 28 Enter Action with Boldness- Law 29 Plan All the Way to the End- Law 30 Make your Accomplishments Seem Effortless- Law 31 Control the Options: Get Others to Play with the Cards you Deal- Law 32 Play to People’s Fantasies- Law 33 Discover Each Man’s Thumbscrew- Law 34 Be Royal in your Own Fashion: Act like a King to be treated like one- Law 35 Master the Art of Timing- Law 36 Disdain Things you cannot have: Ignoring them is the best Revenge- Law 37 Create Compelling Spectacles- Law 38 Think as you like but Behave like others- Law 39 Stir up Waters to Catch Fish- Law 40 Despise the Free Lunch- Law 41 Avoid Stepping into a Great Man’s Shoes- Law 42 Strike the Shepherd and the Sheep will Scatter- Law 43 Work on the Hearts and Minds of Others- Law 44 Disarm and Infuriate with the Mirror Effect- Law 45 Preach the Need for Change, but Never Reform too much at Once- Law 46 Never appear Perfect- Law 47 Do not go Past the Mark you Aimed for; In Victory, Learn when to Stop- Law 48 Assume Formlessness