Weekly Wisdom #299 - We don't need more knowledge, but we do need more of this

Execution vs. Knowledge, Fooled by Randomness, Losing Weight/Moving Towards Goals & Steve Jobs Quotes

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Happy Sunday!

One of the paragraphs that stood out to me in Fooled by Randomness was the following:

"“One of the most irritating conversations I’ve had is with people who lecture me on how I should behave. Most of us know pretty much how we should behave. It is the execution that is the problem, not the absence of knowledge. I am tired of the moralizing slow-thinkers who pound me with platitudes like I should floss daily, eat my regular apple, and visit the gym outside of the New Year’s resolution. In the markets the recommendation would be to ignore the noise component in the performance. We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures.”

It's a similar sentiment as this excerpt from the recent blog post by Tim Ferriss:

"For most of us, the how-to books on our shelves represent a growing to-do list, not advice we’ve followed.

Several of the better-known tech CEOs in San Francisco have asked me at different times for an identical favor: an index card with bullet-point instructions for losing abdominal fat. Each of them made it clear: “Just tell me exactly what to do and I’ll do it.”

I gave them all of the necessary tactical advice on one 3×5 card, knowing in advance what the outcome would be. The success rate was impressive… 0%."

One of the things that took me a long time to learn and accept was that knowledge of something is not enough.

I know I need to go to the gym. I know I need to avoid junk food. I know I should get to bed earlier, and avoid alcohol before sleep, and all kinds of other things.

It's not the knowledge that matters, it's the execution.

And humans are very, very bad at long-term execution. It's why we need to find all kinds of tricks to get around it.

And it's also why wearables like the WHOOP band I wear, or the fitness watches, or the pedometers have value: because they constantly remind us of what we need to do.

Most of the time, we don't need more knowledge.

We need to remember that the execution is what matters.

Have a great week!

Graham

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Links

📚 Book Notes: Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Apparently I hadn't put together my notes after reading it last time, so I both updated them after my last reading and got them published.

As I mentioned last week, this is one of those books that you read and then can never see the world the same again. Highly recommend, and the notes are a good place to start for some of the big takeaways.

📖 You Don't Need More How-To Advice—You Need a Beautiful and Painful Reckoning - Tim Ferriss - This blog post, an excerpt of which I referenced in the intro, is worth reading in full.

It's a story about someone's weight loss journey, but the lessons can be applied to anything you want to change:

Get started, even if you only have partial knowledge

Find some data to track

Simplify things, come up with some rules of thumb

Find ways to automatically remind yourself

Tweet of the Week

Steve Jobs was clearly a flawed person, but he also created one of the greatest companies of all time, and several of the greatest products of our time.

​This list has a bunch of his best quotes, though it doesn't include my favourite, which is about saying no:

"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things."

MATT GRAY-->

@matt_gray_

This is why Steve Jobs was a marketing genius:

1:20 AM • Jan 19, 2024

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