Success and Convexity Part 3: Generating Positive Convexity

This is Part 3 of Success and Convexity. I will begin to cover the factors that can encourage “positive convexity”.  How can we accrete higher and higher levels of success in our lives? Our careers? How can we use the randomness of the Universe to produce positive outcomes for us, and for those positive outcomes to produce further outcomes?

Factors Generating Positive Convexity

1. Hard work
Renowned golfer Lee Trevino has said “the harder I work, the luckier I get”. He’s right. Recent research has revealed that skilled participants in athletics are more prone to have “streaks” (consecutive positive outcomes). A “streak” would be an excellent example of positive convexity. Life presents random events, but the ability to capitalize on those events is represented by the hard work, “deliberative practice”, etc which goes into skill-building.

Hard work on a challenging topic, which involves out passionate interest, also may generate iterative reflection.  As a young composer (35 years ago), and as a trading system programmer now, I would wonder:  “when is this composition finished? Am I done ? How do I know?” That’s because once a creative person looks at their work, they frequently make changes based on how the work looks to them. This process can go on and on. In fact, The process is not limited to an individual work, but may last a lifetime, as work upon work generates new “answers”, new music, new algorithms, new solutions.

And that is exactly the positive convexity we are looking for. If we can generate a current of interest that carries us along through our work, this concentrates our focus and allows expertise to build on top of expertise.

2. Exploratory behavior
Luck (or what we currently call “luck”), is correlated with exploratory behavior. Whenever you are “out and about”, whether at a bookstore, an event, a family gathering, a class, etc you are bringing your skills and goals with you. The fact that "you are you", tends to “filter” the randomness of your encounters, as you respond to the outside world’s inputs, oriented, as you are, toward your own goals and intentions. You “collapse the wave function” of the world by allowing the world to impinge upon your particular mindset. You literally “see” different “worlds” from other people. Therefore, the more experiences you seek out, the more often a small percentage of those experiences will be relevant to your goals and ambitions.When I am driving with a particular friend of mine, I am always startled that she sees so many new restaurants, stores, etc on the very streets that I drive through every day. She simply “expects” different things from the world, and as a result, she gets them.





We'll continue our series on generating positive convexity in an upcoming post.

Success and Convexity Part 1

I am going to do a series of posts about personal success and Convexity. It’s an interesting word and can be used as a lens to view personal success from multiple angles. In a previous series of posts I explored the metaphor of entropy and personal success. However, recently, as I was reading the magnificent books by Steven Drobny Inside the House of Money and The Invisible Hands , I noticed that many of the brilliant hedge fund managers he interviewed repeatedly used the term “convexity” to define the characteristics of the financial returns they were seeking. Now there are precise financial definitions of this term, but my overall impression was that these investors were using convexity to define an investment that had a strong potential to do increasingly well if conditions were right, but had the additional property of not creating a ruinous loss if things went bad. In short, they were seeking something like this:

Now, this blog has often tried to take concepts from the business and scientific world and examine them for their potential to facilitate personal success. So, it occurred to me one day that Convexity might be one of those concepts.

Simply put, convexity (and here I am speaking of positive convexity), might be defined as opening the door to many good things, while limiting the access of incoming bad things. We seek convex outcomes. Things that could get better and better. And a much-to-be hoped-for corollary of those outcomes would be: we also want to achieve those outcomes at as low a risk as possible. Strictly speaking, we would like an unbounded upside and a bounded downside.

We’ll examine this concept further in upcoming posts.

Success Tools: Google Voice for Idea Capture

Idea capture is a crucial area for personal achievement and success. It is a key component of David Allen's GTD methodology and a key success secret of creatives, entrepreneurs, and innovators of all stripes. No, you are not going to remember that light bulb flash of an idea in 6 hours, or tomorrow, or when you get around to it. You are going to forget about your new concept, that new product you glanced at at the mall, that new restaurant you passed, that short conversation you had with a potential client, etc., unless you record the memo immediately.

Google Voice is my newest favorite success tool for this process, although it does about a million other things. I use it primarily for voice memos, as a companion to the pocket spiral notebook I carry around, surgically attached to my body (OK, just kidding). How many ideas do you have per day? You may never know until you record them in a reliable way. Google voice really helps. Google voice allows me to call, send a voice memo to myself, and also reminds me about it later when a transcript and audio file show up in my email. If I'm in my car, I can't pull out my spiral notebook and record ideas, but I can speed dial Google Voice in a flash.

Case in point: I was wandering around Costco the other day and, today, 4 days later, I happened to review my Google Voice memos from that trip. At least 6 important (and forgotten) items came up, which I had sent to myself 4 days ago. Now multiply this by 365 days and you can imagine the implications of retaining all of those potentially lost inputs. In my own experience I almost never recall everything I dictated to Google Voice.

I am only scratching the surface of what Google Voice does, but it has already proven priceless.

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Success Tools: Thomas Stanley's website

I am an unabashed fan of Thomas Stanley and his breakthrough book The Millionaire Next Door, so it was a great pleasure to come across both a new book Stop Acting Rich: ...And Start Living Like A Real Millionaire and his wonderful website.

Thomas Stanley has studied millionaires for decades, and the results of his research have uniformly shown the rich to be primarily hardworking, unostentatious people, who live far below their means and who very much enjoy hard work, saving, investing, and the simple pleasures of family life . The website also contains a blog, which is useful for continuous inspiration as well as the wonderful nuggets of fact he serves up. For instance, this quote from his blog post Avoiding The Money Pit:

There are nearly three times more millionaire households (1,138,070 versus 403,211) living in homes valued at $300,000 or less than there are millionaires living in homes valued at $1 million or more.

I'm sure I will be heading back to his site frequently for inspiration and instruction

Success tools: Free Startup Consulting

I've been a fan of the StartupNation podcasts for some time. Thanks to my membership on their site I received this link regarding Startmeup, an extensive free business startup consulting service from Resourcenation. The service apparently includes (according to the landing page) :

"A dedicated consultant

A customized startup schedule

Weekly articles, tutorials and advice tailored to the stage of your business

Assistance to help you find the best resources

Support in setting up your legal entity, insurance, marketing and more"

I am constantly amazed at how the ongoing process of disintermediation continues. Layer by layer, in our age, access to knowledge is being democratized, with the ongoing potential for a huge increase in individual productivity. I intend to explore these resources fully.

Success Tools: The Optimism File

I have been experimenting with a technique which I came up with recently. I call it “The Optimism File”. This technique is slightly different from other visualization techniques such as goal-setting or affirmations. With goal-setting, you define a task or state that you would like to exist in the future. With affirmations, you flood the subconscious mind with a statement about the future state of your life, the idea being that the future state will manifest itself as you thoroughly internalize the desired outcome

With the "Optimism File” you stay closer to the here-and-now, concentrating on plausibly positive outcomes of near-term events. You are actually “re-setting your probabilities”. Here’s what you do: consider for a moment some upcoming event , perhaps a sales meeting, an interview, a workout session, an investment, or (in my case) a trade I might make. Now, in any of these types of events it is plausible to have a favorable outcome, or, perhaps, a less favorable outcome. Unfortunately, I sometimes tend to think pessimistically, so, I decided that I would create an exercise where I would write out plausible positive outcomes that actually could occur, related to upcoming events. It’s essentially a “set of optimistic training wheels” to “switch on” an optimistically biased outlook.

The meeting on Friday might end with me getting promoted
The Cubs might win this weekend
This trading system has been 70% profitable so I could make a good profit this week

You get the idea. As Sandra Anne Taylor has suggested eloquently, in her book Quantum Success: The Astounding Science of Wealth and Happiness, we do create our reality. Certainly we can set goals for future achievements (and we should) , and we absolutely should write affirmations and wish-lists. But these techniques deal with realities a bit “further down the road” than the next meeting, the next set of weightlifting reps, etc. So, if you make a written entry in your “Optimism File”, it has a tendency to re-set your inner “take” on reality-as-it-is. Or, at least, reality “right around the corner”. Perhaps within an hour, a day, or a week.

I also make notes when the entries in the file “come true”, in order to further convince myself that it is “OK” to envision good outcomes. So often, we try to “protect” ourselves with statements such as “hey, if it goes wrong, no biggie”, or “this sales prospect probably won’t buy…she never does”. So, the “Optimism File” is a ”safe” zone where you can predict that things will “go right”. At the very least, you feel better as you read the entries, and sometimes there are pleasant surprises as the “Optimism File” entries come true.

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Success Tools: Statistics Tsunami

What do baseball, technical analysis, web-based marketing, politics, medicine, and matchmaking have in common? A lot of profitable businesses based on statistics.

The more statistics we gather, the less reality lies to us. The more we know about which strategies win and which strategies don't, the more we can we can focus our business and personal efforts on the truth.

This focus can a apply to a million-person cohort of teenage consumers, or your own sequential blood lipid readings.

There's nothing wrong with a "gut " feeling. It's a start. it's an inspiration. A hypothesis. But to take results to the bank, start generating the numbers.


But, "anything can be proved with statistics", right? Well, consider that statistics are going to "lie" a lot less when your own prosperity, health, retirement, etc. is on the line. Are you going to cook your own data? Do you want to lie to yourself about what products (from your own company) are selling? What your blood pressure is? What you've been consuming for lunch?





This revolution is occurring because of faster, more powerful computers. Also because of the ease of collecting electronic information: almost all data generated today is generated digitally. It starts digital, and stays digital. Stock prices, mouse clicks, sports stats, Amazon purchases, survey results, etc. All of the data is already in the perfect form to be digested by statisticians and theorists. Not only is your laboratiory super-sophisticated, you have, in essence, an unending supply of experimental subjects

Does that mean the market for originality and creativity is dead? Hardly. The world will always need creative ideas, breakthrough concepts. The good news is that it will be a lot easier to verify those hunches, not just in raw numbers, but with the many tests and measures of validity that statisticians have developed over the years. The behavior you see at your own local mall, that funny feeling you get when you eat the wrong food...all of this can now be checked by huge banks of data. If your hunch is right, the value of that hunch is multiplied a millionfold. if wrong? There's always room for more hunches.



And what about the un-obvious? The non-blockbuster? Now, instead of being tossed aside, your Long Tail product may be far more marketable than in previous generations. Statistics is not just for megahits. Perhaps your soap dish appeals to married woodcutters over 40 but only after the Equinox. You can test for that. Perhaps socks with "Z" in the third letter might all go up on the full moon. Pull up the data and backtest it.

Statistics is going to continually reinvent itself as a powerful tool in all of our lives. We will be learning more about our world, ur neighbors, and ourselves, than ever before...and we are going to profit mightily from it.

Success Tools: Sony ICD-UX80 Digital Voice Recorder

I am loving my new Sony ICDUX80 Digital Voice Recorder. As a devotee of David Allen's Getting Things Done, I have kept small spiral notebooks "surgically attached" to my body for two years, and my daily routines and tasks have been immeasurably clarified , in part, due to jotting down ideas, references, etc. But I produced more notes in five minutes with this device than in a whole work day with the paper notebook. The main reason is that I don't have to appreciably interrupt my routine to stop walking, reach in my pocket, open the notebook, take out the pen, and, finally, scrawl a note to myself. The audio dictation process is actually mores streamlined than writing notes with a pen, and the USB port allows you to plug the device right into your computer and listen to the mp3 files it generates , by clicking on them on the screen.

The device allows a ridiculous 581 hours of recording, has crystal-clear stereo recording quality, and is certainly an evolutionary leap from tape-based voice recorders. I very much look forward to my new surgical attachment.

Success Tools: Topics du Jour

Luciano Passuello has come up with a great twist on journalling: the Topics du Jour. In a terrific blog post he presents a "one journal topic per day" method of journalling about the most important aspects of your life. His post suggests making a 30-item list (one for each day of the month) and then writing a paragraph or to about "today's topic" (Career, Health, Relationships, whatever). Of course you don' need to match 30 topics with a 30-day month. 10 topics will do, or any number, so long as you cycle through them, jounalling on one topic a day.

Passuello argues forcefully that ta many "Top-Down", "Big-Picture" goal-setting excercises tend to freeze the creative portion if the mind, whereas little mini-essays keep your mind free to meditate, fantasize, and create without the straitjacket of heavy duty, organized planning. Please read his post. It's a great idea.

In my posts on the Major Definite Aim (here and here ) I came to a similar conclusion. Just bringing the aim into the mind on a regular basis naturally generates solutions and alternatives. I also agree that these solutions emerge naturally over time, as the mind reflects back on the progress made so far. I have found solutions often tend to evolve over months, and even years, and Passuellos "Du Jour" method is a great way to keep the mind engaged with the important topics of your life. Furthermore, since, in his method, the mind gets a bit of rest between re-appearances of the topic, the unconscious has a chance to come into play, bringing with it many powerful resources. Of course, one of the earliest references to a cyclical method of self improvement was the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin:

I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. I rul’d each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I cross’d these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day.

So, we are in good company.



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Success Tools: Idea Capture

I recently came across an article by Malcom Gladwell about Nathan Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures (thanks to fellow-Twitterite Angela Maiers ). The purpose of this company, Gladwell explains, is "to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them,and then license them to interested companies." While this is not so very different from Thomas Edison's workshop over a century ago, I would argue that the scale of Myhrvold's undertaking is noteworthy. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. Every scientific discipline has branched and sub-branched , and the volume of actionable discoveries and research is of enormous magnitude.

2. The number of actionable problems , those amenable to profitable solutions, has also increased. A century ago we didn't need Universal Remotes, methods of syncing our address books, or even a reliable place to put our car keys. We only knew of a fraction of treatable diseases. In the pharmaceutical field, we didn't know what a receptor was so there was no impetus to do research on blocking them. In fact, separate discipline of just generating problems would probably be a profitable venture.

3. There are a lot of technologies that "work" now. A lot more than 100 years ago. There are infinite ways these working technologies can combine to produce beneficial and profitable outputs. One of the amazing takeaways from Gladwell's article is how much new inventions are feasible just from the combining of already successful technology or research from disparate fields.

Thus, today, we need a lot of ideas. And , as Gladwell's article demonstrates, a good collection of ideas, from various disciplines, can generate , not a few, but hundreds of profitable businesses.

And here is the best part: a lot of these ideas can be monetized without excessive capitalization, or even the creation of a business. Patents can be licensed without building factories. Algorithms can be written for cellphones without building a cellphone. E-books can be published without a printing plant. Songs can be mixed and distributed without building a million-dollar recording studio.

So, the first imperative is: capture those ideas. One of my favorite bloggers, Matthew Cornell has a superb post on idea capture and, in another post, discusses the vast amount of ideas he and others collect... numbers in the 10,000 idea range are discussed!

This is not unusual. Gladwell reports that at an informal dinner, the group from Intellectual Ventures generated eight single-spaced pages and thirty-six different inventions.

Idea capture is crucial. Large numbers of ideas are crucial. In the old model, a business was built from a single idea (Fedex, McDonald's, Starbucks, etc). But now, it is clear that ideas themselves are capital. Ideas themselves are currency. Creativity and knowledge capture is a source of profit apart from the execution of the idea. Exposure to ideas from multiple sources is crucial. Besides patents, other sources of direct profitability from ideas includes: writing, composing music, trading, real estate referrals, algorithm design ,marketing, consulting of all kinds, even Internet site names. I am sure there are many more. I am going to predict that, in the future there will be an ever-decreasing cost of monetizing our ideas.

So I suggest you collect a lot of them.

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Success Tools: Your Own Personal Wiki

Imagine a Wikipedia of your own life. Everything you’re interested in: subjects, people, projects, links, products, methods…all taggable, searchable, and available from anywhere. Well, it’s here, and it’s free. It’s called Tiddlywiki, a personal wiki program, and its online “cousin”, Tiddlyspot,where you can store your wiki for retrieval from any web connection.

As with many of my recent “discoveries”, I was prompted to search for wiki software from a hint dropped by productivity guru Matthew Cornell who mentioned to me that he was using a wiki program. As far as I am concerned, this is an amazing Personal Information Manager or PIM. You can link to your own local files, to the web, and within your own wiki. You can create your own unlimited collection of “tiddlers” (equivalent to Wikipedia entries) and tag them, link them, put them in menus…and I’ve only been at this a few days. Also, you can save your wiki offline and also upload it to the web.

The implications of this are huge.

I went over to my local Apple Store yesterday, borrowed an iPhone, and…in seconds, there was my wiki, with all the data I had entered, available to me on a hand-held device. As the Apple salesman looked on, I entered everything he told me about the iPhone onto my wiki, and, later, when I got home, there it all was.

There is a tremendous amount of support for this product at Tiddlywiki.org as well as on Google Groups. I am only beginning to discover the uses of this flexible, ubiquitous, easy-to-use information tool. But my intuition is: it is nothing less than life-changing.


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Success Tools: Andrea Nierenberg - Networking Expert

Andrea Nierenberg is a networking expert who counts among her clients such global behemoths as Citibank and Astra Zeneca. She has a superb site, which showcases her wide range of skills and services including her books, training programs and keynotes.

One of my favorite parts of the site is the generous article archive, which covers a wide range of topics such as:

Networking With Your "Tribe" - Working Smarter
Vision for the Year
"Prop Up" Your Speaking
Company Picnic Pointers
Maximizing Incentives
The Mirror of Your Mind
How to Make Trade Shows Terrific
Learning News Tricks
Build Office Morale through Building Relationships
The Art of Appreciation
How to Build Credibility in Your Market
Customer Service - From The Inside Out
Good Ways to Deliver Bad News
Dealing with the Creeps
Helping Introverted Employees to Become Better Networkers
How to Motivate a Staff
The Art of Networking
Electronic Etiquette
Dealing with Bad Boss Behavior
Build Your Business Through Smart Networking
Eight Essential Communications Skills
What's in a Word?

I've already printed out a few, and look forward to digging into more of the articles, as well as checking out her books.





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Success Tools: Harvey Mackay's Website

Networking guru Havey Mackay has a great site that I just discovered. The famed author of Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive has included downloadable checklists, podcasts, rss feeds and more. You can't get enough good networking advice in this world, and I reccommend a visit to Mackay's site.

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Success Tools: The Major Definite Aim

If you haven’t read Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich this would be a good time to pick it up. This book is one of the “uber-classics” of success literature, and many successful people re-read it frequently. One of the main concepts in the book is the Major Definite Aim: a short paragraph defining your main goal and how you plan to implement it. The MDA is re-read on a daily basis.

I first tried using the MDA in 1981 when I set a ridiculously high goal for a future income. It worked.

Recently, I set a trading goal using the MDA. I wrote out an exact amount that I wished to attain in my trading account, and I started writing down those actions and approaches I deemed necessary to achieve that goal.

I achieved that goal within 45 days, I am happy to say.

Now, as I reflect upon this gem of a concept, I can see a number of aspects that wise Mr. Hill embedded in this success tool that I did not see years ago when I was starting out in my career.

First, The Major Definite Aim acts as a prioritizing system. If you are constantly stating to yourself what your MDA is, other ideas, opportunities, and distractions are automatically prioritized downward, below our MDA. The existence of the MDA will create cognitive dissonance when you attempt to violate it by focusing on other priorities.

Second, the list of methods that you generate for achieving your MDA keeps you pursuing your main course of action. In the case of my trading MDA it kept me trading my systems day in, day out, without obsessing on any particular daily result. In other words, it worked as a “forcing system” to encourage both persistence and consistency. I have no doubt that there were fewer deviations in my behavior than there would have been had I not been referencing my Major Definite Aim.

Here are a couple of examples of how it worked for me:

I am an emotional, “jumpy” person. I often say and do things that I wish I hadn’t, and my emotional nature has derailed a lot of progress in my life. One of the “methods” that I listed under my MDA was “Maintaining emotional balance and focus, and engaging in behavior that promotes emotional balance and focus”. I was surprised particularly at how I was able to “edit out” behaviors that I knew would cause animosity from other people in my life: I knew I had a particular path to pursue, and I knew that I did not want to be distracted by emotional skirmishes as I pursued that path. Thanks to that same “method”, I also found that I was less apt to engage in over-simulative behavior. I did not want to come into my trading room one morning filled with self-loathing or with a splitting headache. Thanks to the MDA, and my list of methods of achieving it, I was able to stay on an even keel.

Another bad habit is taking “discretionary” trades, outside of my system, usually out of panic. I noticed I tend to lose money on these trades. I listed as one of my MDA “methods” to “take no discretionary losing trades”. I am positive that part of the reason I attained my goal so easily was because I was not “driving with the brakes on” (by losing money when I didn’t have to).

Finally, I want to mention one other benefit I found from the MDA. I found that I was constantly coming up with new methods to add to my list of how I was planning to achieve my goal. I found myself producing a flow of creative ideas related to my Major Definite Aim. I have posted frequently on Mind Power and I believe that a Major Definite Aim produces a response in the unconscious that results in an outpouring of creative solutions directed toward your goal.

Adding it all up, the Major Definite Aim provides a compass to your daily activities. All activities, whether related to the MDA or not, are automatically referenced to the MDA , which you read to yourself frequently. You begin to see each action, each possibility in terms of whether it leads toward, or away from, your Major Definite Aim. Remember also, the Universe is chaotic. Random. It is we, through our minds, wishes, thoughts, and plans, who affect this formless collection of events in ways that lead us to our goal.

I find the concept of the Major Definite Aim of even more value to me today than it was when it first changed my life, many years ago.


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Success Tools: Checklists Revisited

I’ve posted recently about Charlie Munger and his recommendation that people employ checklists. Recently a post by Monica Jackson, which in turn linked to an article in the New Yorker reaffirmed the immense benefits of checklists, especially in Intensive Care settings. But I submit that Charlie Munger’s insistence on the use of checklists has even more far-reaching implications. We associate checklists often with aircraft takeoff procedures, because so many complex and critical procedures need to be performed in a synchronized and (hopefully) error-free manner. However, in our modern lives there are many areas of our lives that are increasingly complicated, and I think that is what Charlie Munger is getting at. As simple a task as going out on daily errands would benefit from a checklist procedure. So would locking up the house before a trip. Or meeting wth a handyman on a range of home improvement tasks. What about meetings which occur rarely, but with important professionals, such as attorneys or doctors?

The simple fact is, the case for “winging it” is weak, and getting weaker. The truly historic results achieved in the ICU environment even regarding well-known and “rote” procedures, is enough to give one pause.

Ok…that’s everything on my list.

Success Tools: Mr. Wang on Goal-Setting

I recently came a cross a unique twist on goal-setting at Mr Wang Says So. He recommends writing a page of goals, at one sitting, every day. This is similar to, but still different, from periodic (quarterly or yearly) goal setting, or even Brian Tracy’s recommendation to write your top three goals every day.

I have been trying this technique, and it seems to awaken more brain activity than other methods. For one thing, I am guessing that the time it takes to write a fill page of goals is enough time to biologically activate more brain centers. I also think that exposing the unconscious to so many goals may allow it to “keep in mind” more goals, as opportunities open up during the day. Furthermore, I think the mind generates a wider variety of goals as it “gets in practice” through each days’ writing.

I think this method is well worth trying.

Techtags: Goals Mr. Wang Brian Tracy Visualization Affirmations

Success Tools: Open Tips' Awesome Website

I Just discovered Open Tips , a huge site with free articles on dozens of topics. Each topic contains dozens of articles. This is one of the most easily accessible and voluminous storehouses of knowledge I have seen. I will be returning to this site often. Here is a current list of topics:


Accounting
Acne
Adsense
Advertising
Aerobics
Affiliate
Alternative
Articles
Attraction
Auctions
Audio streaming
Auto care
Auto parts
Autoresponder
Aviation
Baby
Baby and toddler
Bankruptcy
Bathroom
Beauty
Bedroom
Blogging
Body building
Book marketing
Book review
Branding
Breast cancer
Business
Business loan
Business plan
Cancer
Car
Car buying
Car insurance
Car loan
Car maintenance
Career
Casino
Cell phone
Chat
Claim
Coaching
Coffee
College and university
Computer pc tips
Cooking
Cooking tips
Cosmetics
Craft
Creative writing
Credit
Credit cards
Credit repair
Currency trading
Data recovery
Dating
Debt relief
Diabetics
Diet
Digital camera
Diving
Divorce
Domain
Driving
Ebay
Ecommerce
Emarketing
Essay
Ezine
Fashion
Finance
Fishing
Fitness
Flu
Furniture
Gardening
Golf
Google
Gps
Hair
Hair loss
Hdtv
Health insurance
Heart disease
Hobbies
Holiday
Home business
Home improvement
Home organization
Interior design
Internet tips
Investment
Jewelry
Kitchen
Ladies accessories
Lawyer
Lcd plasma
Life insurance
Lingerie
Love
Mailing list
Make money
Mortgage
Mp3
Music
Network marketing
Online shopping
Paid survey
Pc games
Perfume
Personal injury
Php_uploads
Ppc
Pregnancy
Publishing
Real estate
Recipe
Recreation
Resume
Romance
Rss
Sales letter
Seo
Shoes
Small business
Smoking
Software
Spyware
Trading
Virus
Voip
Web design
Web development
Web hosting
Website traffic
Wedding
Weight
Wine
Women
Writing

Success Tools: Guide to The Logical Fallacies

This post is related to my ongoing fascination with the thought of Billionaire Charlie Munger.

One of the general categories of Charlie Munger’s thought appears to be the area of “human misjudgment”. Day after day we make choices for all the wrong reasons. Our minds, which are supreme gifts, are also fallible: easily misdirected, in much the same way that a magician misdirects us. In our too-fast and media-soaked world, we are bombarded by quick sound-bites that attempt to move us to believe things, buy things or do things.

This can also happen to us with our friends, family, at work, or anywhere someone is trying to convince us of something. And, of course, we can also generate misdirect ourselves in order rationalize our own behavior.

Luckily, our minds are, amenable to help. Over the centuries, rhetoricians and logicians have catalogued the logical fallacies…tangled arguments that lead us away from careful thought…that take advamntage of our weaknesses and eagerness to believe the easy or alluring answer.

Stephen Downes, expert in online learning, content syndication, and new media, has put together a terrific Guide to the Logical Fallacies .

Here is Downes’ description of his collection:

Each fallacy is described in the following format:
Name: this is the generally accepted name of the fallacy
Definition: the fallacy is defined
Examples: examples of the fallacy are given
Proof: the steps needed to prove that the fallacy is committed

The fallacies are themselves
grouped into categories of four to six fallacies each. This grouping is somewhat
arbitrary and is for the sake of convenience only.

I intend to use this guide as a checklist (another Munger recommendation), and to refer to it frequently whenever I feel that some thought or argument just doesn’t “ring true”.

Techtags: Logical Fallacies Charlie Munger Critcal Thinking

Success Tools - Simple*Ology

Zen Habits has a review of Mark Joyner’s Simpleology: The Simple Science of Getting What You Want , a life/goals management system which seems to have a number of interesting techniques. I was particularly impressed with this comment:

The system first asks you to define your Ultimate Life, then asks you to choose
one Long-term Target (6-12 months away), one Medium-term Target (1-6 months
away) and one Short-term Target (2 days to 1 week away). Only one of each,
because if you choose more, you cannot maintain sufficient focus and energy to
get to your target.

This tightly-focused approach is refreshing in the light of how many goals we can generate for ourselves. I remember times when I put my goals on a series of spreadsheets. I found myself overwhelmed and depressed. Currently, I do a lot of GTD techniques, but I have found that I get more done, with less “overwhelm”, if I limit the actual items on my planner to a few, carefully-chosen tasks from my much larger GTD "next-action" list. If I run out of “actions” before I run out of “day”, I can always go back for more.

I look forward to reading Joyner’s book. It seems to have a great grasp of reality.

Techtags: SimpleOlogy Mark Joyner GTD Goals

Success Tools - LifeDev's GTD Cheatsheets

LifeDev has a superb “refresher” series on the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology entitled the GTD Cheatsheet, including the workflow, collecting, and processing of all of your “open loops”. I began my own GTD process about 6 months ago and have been delighted at the results. My mind is uncluttered by reminders. Longer-term projects now have a means of getting easily into my daily routine. I am also able to look much further into the future (well, into the future of things I am “waiting for”). This may sound a bit geeky, but I seriously look forward to my “Weekly Review” every Saturday morning. It increases the serenity of my weekend enormously.

I expect to keep these cheatsheets handy.

Visit the Success Books Store

Techtags: LifeDev GTD