Codex Audentia

Watched some more talks by Rory Sutherland today, and as always they are amazing. Took notes. - People with data and numbers tend to control conversations and win arguments, because most people like certainty. Usually nobody gets fired for being rational, and most people are terrified of looking silly and stupid. - The problem with using "data" to guide every decision with rigorous rationality, is that your models of the world are wrong. You will never have enough information to accurately capture how humans work. - Any metric that becomes a target, ceases to become a useful metric. When companies…

(Semi-random things I learn or think about in May 2020) May 22 Learning Chinese I've been on a 8-day unbroken streak of using Memrise to learn Traditional Chinese characters. I've discovered the Heisig Method and am using it, and I believe in it. After all it won't be a waste of time in any way! The plan:- Learn to recognize and recall 3000 traditional hanzi, learning 20 per day.- After reaching 1500, start reading and listening to Chinese texts in parallel using LingQ to acquire spoken vocabulary.- After learning Chinese, I'll learn Japanese again. It will be much easier. Learning…

Alex Rodriguez spoke on Ed Mylett's podcast. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9kKEkA-zvE Takeaways: - Alex is all about process. He believes that if you do the little things and stack the little wins consistently (=work ethic), and see them as the big wins - over time they add up to great skill and achievements. The great achievements are not in your control - the little wins are. Don't think so big, think about the little steps. He says that he is most proud about the fact that in all his 25 years of playing professional baseball, he never once missed his pre-game preparation…

Notes from a Tony Robbins' podcast where he interviews Danny Meyers: https://www.tonyrobbins.com/podcasts/from-hot-dog-cart-to-hospitality-empire/ "Hospitality Quotient": as opposed to simply IQ or EQ1. Kindness and Optimism ('...skeptics and cynics don't usually care how other people feel')2. Intellectual Curiosity3. Work Ethic4. Empathy5. Self Awareness6. Integrity Danny says the above cannot be taught and trained, but can be detected through interviews. Interesting hiring practices at Southwest Airlines and Zappos. Danny says that when he gives a talk about company vision and values etc, usually there are a couple people who fall asleep etc. He makes sure that he adds at the end that "Hey,…

I'm a big fan of Masterclass.com, and would be a customer if I had the time commitment. Today I saw that Masterclass.com has a new course by Chris Voss on negotiation: I saw the trailer, and then I watched one sample lesson that talks about the concept of "Tactical Empathy". This only reinforced what I've known before (we call it Emotional Intelligence), but putting it into the perspective like Chris does really helped drill the concept into my head and made it a practically learnable skill. Then I went down the rabbit whole. I watched a TEDx talk by Chris.…