thoughts

Sunday, June 23, 2019

Words of wisdom by Nassim Nicholas Taleb


·         You can mispredict everything for all your life yet think that you will get it right next time.

·         There is no such thing as bad publicity; some people manage to promote your work by insulting it.

·         It is a mistake to use statistics without logic; it is not a mistake to use logic without statistic.

·         Conversations and correspondence with intelligent people is a better engine for personal edification than plain library visits.

·         That which came with the help of luck could be taken away by luck

·         Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor; wild success is attributable to variance.

·         Mathematics is not just a “number game” it is a way of thinking.

·         Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior , not because they won or lost.

·         Volatility seems to be determined not by the actual moves but by the tone of the media.

·         Beware the confusion between correctness and intelligibility.

·         What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or particularly, in the media, is suspicious.

·         A book can make a strong impression, but such an impression tends to wane after some newer impression replaces in the brain.

·         It clearly costs money to look and behave rich, not to count the time demands of spending money.

·        Gambling is best defined as an activity where the agent gets a thrill when confronting a random outcome, regardless of whether he has the odds stacked in his favor or against him.

·         We may be programmed to build a loyalty of ideas.

·         Just listen while shaken by emotion but not with the coward’s imploration and complaints.

·         A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situation of conflict.

·         Unpredictability is a strong deterrent.

·         We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated and tangible ; we scorn the abstract

 
Source: Fooled by Randomness

Saturday, June 22, 2019

John Wooden Lessons on leadership


Winning Lessons


Legendary UCLA basketball coach who Lessons from Coach John Wooden’s Ted Talk: The Difference between Winning and Succeeding.
  1. We are all average in some areas, and there is no fault to be assigned or shame in this. “They thought a C was all right for the neighbors’ children, because the neighbors children are all average. But they weren’t satisfied when their own — would make the teacher feel that they had failed, or the youngster had failed. And that’s not right.”
  2. Be the best version of YOU. “Never try to be better than someone else, always learn from others. Never cease trying to be the best you can be — that’s under your control. If you get too engrossed and involved and concerned in regard to the things over which you have no control, it will adversely affect the things over which you have control.”
  3. Success is not about the outcome rather it is about the journey. “Success: peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you’re capable.”
  4. Nothing is instant. “And I say to you, in whatever you’re doing, you must be patient.”
  5. Past performance is irrelevant to future success. “The shining trophies on our shelves can never win tomorrow’s game.”
  6. Respect time. “Never be late. We start on time. We close on time.”
  7. Unless you are the coach, do not comment on the performance of an athlete. “Never criticize a teammate. I didn’t want that. I used to tell them I was paid to do that. That’s my job. I’m paid to do it.”
  8. There is a difference between belief and hope. “I believe that we must believe, truly believe. Not just give it word service; believe that things will work out as they should, providing we do what we should. I think our tendency is to hope that things will turn out the way we want them to much of the time. But we don’t do the things that are necessary to make those things become reality.”
  9. In the last analysis, it’s all about doing your best. “Don’t whine. Don’t complain. Don’t make excuses. Just get out there, and whatever you’re doing, do it to the best of your ability. And no one can do more than that.”
  10. Winning is irrelevant; don’t speak of it. “You never heard me mention winning. Never mention winning. My idea is that you can lose when you outscore somebody in a game. And you can win when you’re outscored.”
  11. A good sport behaves consistently whether the game is won or lost. “I used to say that when a game is over, and you see somebody that didn’t know the outcome, I hope they couldn’t tell by your actions whether you outscored an opponent or the opponent outscored you.”
  12. The lesson for the athlete in competition is for them to measure their effort to being the best they can be. “It’s getting the players to get that self-satisfaction, in knowing that they’d made the effort to do the best of which they are capable.”
  13. Practice is where the work happens; the game is just a measure of the effectiveness of the work that week. “I liked our practices to be the journey, and the game would be the end. The end result. I’d like to go up and sit in the stands and watch the players play, and see whether I’d done a decent job during the week.”
  14. While your best effort may not yield the results you wanted, that’s okay because the purpose is to give your best effort regardless of the outcome. “That’s what really matters: if you make effort to do the best you can regularly, the results will be about what they should be. Not necessary to what you would want them to be, but they will be about what they should, and only you will know whether you can do that.”
  15. Successful players are not necessarily the stars, but rather those who develop their skills to their maximum capacity. “They [Conrad Burke and John MacIntosh] came close to — as close to reaching possibly their full potential as any players I ever had. So I consider them to be as successful as Lewis Alcindor or Bill Walton, or many of the others that we had.”