Effectiveness Management

I don't like the phrase "time management."  It doesn't grasp the essence of what is important.  What is actually important is how effective you are with your time.  Time is a bad frame for effectiveness management since you can spend hours doing something without being effective.  How is it that some people can finish a paper in 2 hrs and I need 7 hrs?  How can some people lose 10 pounds in 4 weeks, and I lost 2 pounds in 4 weeks?  What matters is not time spent or money spent, what matters is effectiveness for the amount of resources you put in.

- Working at a higher paying job for the same hours is more effective than a similar lower paying job.
- Quality time with friends talking about life events is socially more effective than playing video games.
- Working out intensely for 25 min is more effective than screwing around in the gym for 1.5 hrs.
- Learning how to interview then going to 5 interviews is more effective than interviewing 30 times without prep.
- Researching what clothes are fashionable and look good on your body, then going shopping is a much more effective way to spend money on clothes.



Sometimes, Working Smart > Working Hard.  Think about how effective you are, and think of ways to become more effective.

Habits

I believe habits to be one of the biggest influences of our actions.  We're lazy, we fear change, and we're risk averse.  How much more likely are you to enter a restaurant if you've already been there before?  How much more likely are you to exercise if you've already done so in the past week?  How much more likely are you to switch your dentist, even if you've had a bad experience last time?

Try a thought experiment.  Say you're Jane Goodall observing monkeys LOL.  And you observe what they like to eat, how much they play, sleeping patterns, social patterns, mating patterns, what they do day-to-day etc.  You spend the time researching and thinking about these behaviors and write a dozen books on monkeys.  Try to take a step back and think of yourself as the monkey, and ask yourself what a book on yourself would look like.  What are your eating and sleeping patterns?  What are your social skills like?  How is your physical health?  Take a few minutes to actually think about what a book on your behaviors would look like.

Then make a conscious decision of what habits you want to keep and what habits you want to change.

*I said I was going to write more about principles, but I'm going to hold off on it for now.

Principles Part 1: The Problem

I'm very intrigued by the process of decision making.  I actually enjoy reading about behavioral biases, about where people go wrong in making decisions.  I like poker because it involves so much game theory.  To study poker is to study how other people make decisions; I think it's really fascinating stuff and you can count on me posting about this stuff later.  But before you're able to make any real decisions, you need principles.  I've gathered this idea from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Covey.

Great so here's a hypothetical situation:

You're 29 and you've planned a week long trip to Greece with your serious girlfriend and her parents, and your senior partner tells you that your big case is being moved up to the same weekend.  You think that if you crush this case, you'll impress senior management because you'll help bring in a huge client, and it'll put you to first in line of becoming a partner within the next few yrs.  You've been with your girlfriend for just under 2 and half years, you've met her parents before, but this trip seems very important to her and everyone involved.  What's the best decision?

Principles are simply the things that are important to you.  At the end of the day, what's going to make you happy?  You see a lot of articles about how to network, how to make money, how to interview, how to talk to girls at the bar, how to this and that.  But these are techniques or tools.  It's like learning the subway system, learning how to drive a car, get gas, etc.  These skills are important, but you first need to know where you're going.  If you want to get to a destination but grab the wrong map, you'll be upset that you've ended up in the wrong place in life.  

"... working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." - Fight Club

Sometimes, we forget what makes us happy.  Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow talks about how our brain will try to simplify questions like "are you happy?" into a question that is much easier to answer like "what's your current mood?" or "has anything good/bad happened in the recent past?"  Sometimes we relate money to happiness or unfortunate events to sadness.  If the stock market swings down 40% and you lose 30% of your net wealth, you might be devastated.  But all you really lost is money...  

In my next post, I'll write about my thoughts on sets of principles and what different "Maps of Life" might look like.

  

Game Changer: Investing

In my mind, investing is something that can help you and your family never have to work another day in their lives.  For me this is a huge game changer.

Being born with wealth is like starting a game of Monopoly with property, extra money, and if you're dad is the owner of some big company, it's like you've already built big beautiful hotels on your property.  This is completely insane and unfair if you think about it.  But life isn't really fair is it?  We're all in a big game of monopoly, and we're actually all doing pretty well (read my last post "Perspective.")  Being born into a middle class family in the US is like collecting lots of money when we pass go, relative to someone born in a 3rd world country.  My family and I are doing very, very well compared to the rest of the world.  Now I'm saying we can do much better if we bought property, just like in the game Monopoly.  **I'm totally not saying money should be the goal in life, that's absolutely not what I'm saying.  Just making an analogy right here.

To help quantify this "much better", the US S&P 500 has grown at something like 10% a year for the past 100 yrs, and if you consider about 3% inflation, you can grow your purchasing power by investing in the market by 7% a year.  That means every 10 yrs you can double your purchasing power.  In your 70 yr lifetime, you can grow your purchasing power by 2^7 or 128x.  For the same amount of money you use to purchase a car when you're born, invested correctly, you'll be able to buy 128 cars.  Okay so there's taxes, maybe the US growth rate will be lower in the future or whatever, but the point remains.  Investing over a long period of time can put your family out of the middle class.  This is the benefit of owning a profit generating asset.  Owning stock is like owning part of a business and will make you rich over time.

An interesting experiment I heard from my high school AP Psych teacher, if you give a 4 yr old the opportunity to choose from an Oreo cookie now or 2 Oreos tomorrow and he chooses 2 Oreos tomorrow, he'll be more likely to become an intelligent man.  Well we all have a very similar situation in front of us right now.

Perspective

Only 63% of the world's population has access to improved sanitation - defined as a sanitation facility that ensures hygienic separation of human excreta from human contact. 2  Source: http://water.org/water-crisis/water-facts/water/

Something like 37% of the world/ 2.6 billion people live very close to their own shit, enough so that they are likely to have health problems because of their unsanitary living conditions.  Something like 11% of the world doesn't have access to fresh water.  

We shit in fresh water.

Stoicism

For some, this could be a game changer or not at all.  For me, this is a very interesting idea.

I actually wanted to talk about one aspect of Stoicism, and that is your control over your will.  (I actually don't agree with many Stoic ideas.)  I recently read an article.  In the essay, former US Navy Admiral James Stockdale wrote about his experiences and described war as a battle of will.  The war ends when one or both sides of the conflict has lost its will.  What an interesting way to view war!  He continues describing how some people are slaves, that we are all slaves to those things we fear.  We can fear losing a job, losing a loved one, we can fear being broke and we can fear death.  And our fear can consume us.  Someone close to me feared losing his job.  He felt so stressed that he had trouble sleeping and even lost his appetite.  It's sounds difficult to do, but he can choose how this event changes his emotions.  

In a talk by Dan Ariely, he mentions a punishment in Greek Mythology where King Sisyphus was forced to push a boulder up a mountain, and once he got to the top, he would watch it roll back down.  And in the book Holes, prisoners were forced to dig holes in order to fill them back up.  LOLL!  These punishments are awful!  And they are awful because they are designed to break a person's will.  US troops were accused of torturing natives in Afghanistan because they forced them to stand.  I believe it was a congressman who countered along the lines of, "Walmart cashiers are forced to stand for the same long periods of time."  The actions are the same, but the will behind the actions are different.  

Everyone has the choice to choose his/her will.  Will is the difference between hope and agony.  If you lose your job, or break up with your girlfriend, you can choose whether or not you become depressed.  If you miss your flight or have an imminent test, you can choose whether or not to be angry or stressed.  Now you cannot change the consequences of these events.  If you lose your job, you may need to save money or move to a smaller home.  You cannot arrive at your destination at the same time or change the score of your test after you've taken it.  But you can choose how you handle yourself and you can choose your will.  You don't need to let something like your job, a possession, a test, etc. control you.  You control you.

"Nobody can hurt me without my permission" - Ghandi

Game Changers

The idea of this blog is mainly for me to write down my thoughts and ideas that I believe are interesting and possibly, game changing ideas.  I've recently graduated college and wanted a place to think freely and write down some crazy ideas.  I want someplace where I can share my ideas with others, and maybe even change the way they think.  I don't necessarily wholeheartedly, 100% agree with everything I write about, but I think they bring new perspectives and are extremely interesting.

Game Changers.  I want to write about ideas that are game changers.  For example, using statistics to draft baseball recruits completely changed the way they scout players.  I want to talk about ideas that are game changing for you and me, mostly on the individual level but perhaps I will include some ideas that affect the bigger picture.  Now if I use the phrase "game changer" in every post, it begins to lack meaning so I'll try to use it less often.  But the point of the blog remains, I want to learn and introduce both old and new ideas to my readers.  Some of these ideas are simply common sense, but sometimes common sense gets lost somewhere along the way.  Thanks for visiting my site!