When we are at school, we see the same people every day by default. If you get to go to university, you can make great friends with more of your own discretion, but we start dividing up as we specialize. The people that we spend time with are other people that we work with. We end up living very different lives.
Genghis Khan was a controversial “successful” historical figure, but his life was not that different from his warriors’ lives. He still lived in a Ger and spent most of his life as a nomad moving with his with his own forces. Now the people in control lead very different lives from other people in institutions, particularly the bigger the organisation gets. As we get more specialised, we stop having a common vocabulary of things we can talk about.
To parse what you hear, you need to find someone whose life resonates with yours. Whose choices resonate with yours. We can give each other some generic guidance, but most advices advice is to a younger version of yourself. Austin Kleon says all advice is autobiographical. A chance to revise your story. I enjoy revising my story. Going back in the past and reviewing the decisions that I've made.
It helps me understand the decisions that I am making now. To understand the work that I need to do to change the way that I make decisions. Like everyone, I am not always aware of all the decisions that I am making. Some of them are made automatically. I believe in Free Will. I just think it is hard. The impact of decisions compounds and restricts the freedom of future decisions without dramatically pressing the restart button. For the most part it is easier to let the random, complex, ambiguous World make decisions for us. That way we don’t have to take responsibility if things go wrong. Planning comes with the price tag that there is no one to blame. That can be a scary or lonely place.
Once you have case studies, you have people who are one page ahead of you. A lot of the studying we did at school was through peers. We taught each other. I learnt much of what I needed to know for exams on the phone with David or Kyle. That is often a better way to learn. ”The curse of Knowledge” is that people forget what it feels like not to know. As something becomes natural and embodied, our consciousness shifts elsewhere. We forget that it was hard to learn to walk.
Professor Dorrington was frustratedly trying to teach my class the concept of “Exposed to Risk”. There was a room full of 40 or so maths loving try-hards and none of us could get it. He could not explain this concept to us. We were all absolutely confused. In hindsight, it seems like a simple concept to me now. And for him, it was a simple concept then. We are exposed to various risks and Actuaries try figure out the probability of that happening by looking at what has happened. It is two numbers. The one is how many times the thing happened. The other is how many people it could have happened to. But as the thing happens, the people it could have happened to shrinks. Or maybe new people join. So every time the thing happens, you need to know how many people were “exposed to risk”.
It is often easier to find someone who has just grasped the concept. They didn't understand it a short time ago, and now they understand it. They remember the path. Those are the people who can help you.
To make money, you need things that you can count. Price acts like traffic lights. It is a signal that indicates if there are enough people providing a solution. If not, we need to shift some resources there. A high price shows what we pay a lot of money to people to do. If we have a lot of people willing to do this, then the price goes down.
In order to solve problems, you need skills and knowledge. Those tend to be specialized. We don’t have the capacity to do everything, which creates a barrier to us solving any problem that needs solving. The world is more complicated, and we are not all farmers anymore.
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