Borsalino Test #17: Unqualified strong opinions
Hi friend,
Most of my beliefs are not grounded in objective reality. All of them come from direct exposure. They help me find a “finger tips feeling” for meaningfulness, so I hold them close to my chest. This is going to be a fairly long read. Treat it like a buffet.
Michele
Unqualified strong opinions
Widespread ignorance is more likely in a closed society than in one open to outside influences.
Doing things for their own sake is the very definition of art.
Reality is neutral. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.
It doesn’t matter whether this is the worst time to be alive or the best. Whether you’re in a good job market or a bad one. Or that the obstacle you face is intimidating or burdensome. What matters is that right now is right now.
People or companies who have a size advantage never really have to learn the process when they’ve been able to coast on brute force.
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
Style is just eccentricity in disguise.
Anxiety is to be physically and mentally tight. Physical looseness combined with mental restraint is powerful, though.
Those who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.
Wealth is the nice cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The watches not worn. The clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. Wealth is what you don’t see.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Most people, myself included, have spent too much time convincing themselves that life has to be hard. A resignation to 9-to-5 drudgery in exchange for (sometimes) relaxing weekends and the occasional keep-it-short-or-get-fired vacation.
Attractiveness is inversely proportional to neediness. The less needy you are, the more attractive to others you will be.
The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible in hindsight. Risk and luck are doppelgangers.
“It’s different this time” are the four most dangerous words in investing.
Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.
The main thing about main things is keeping the main thing the main thing.
Intense relational experiences, positive or negative, are incredibly dangerous. They leave you open to abuse. But rejecting intensity leaves you vulnerable to fear of abandonement.
People tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality those other people often bypass admiring you. Not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired.
Just because other people say that something is hopeless or crazy or broken to pieces doesn’t mean it is. We decide what story to tell ourselves. Or whether we will tell one at all.
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Planning the future is a coping mechanism.
The cultural ban on having sex with your friends is an inevitable offshoot of a societal belief that the only acceptable reason to have sex is to lead to a monogamous, marriage-like relationship.
If you don’t have a day or two every week in your calendar where you’re not always in meetings, and you’re not always busy, then you’re not going to be able to think.
Knowing your own limits is not a sign of weakness, but of strength. It’s only by knowing where they are that you have a hope of changing them.
If you pick the right bets, sitting on your ass can really pay off.
Every admirable trait someone has will drive you insane in some way if you get close enough.
Singles enjoy more freedom to explore, fewer obligations, and the ability to lounge around the house in a holey T-shirt, playing video games, with nobody the wiser. All of which is massively underrated.
Hard knowledge is grounded in substantive facts and systematic reasoning. Soft knowledge is grounded in one or more forms of social proof. Either type of knowledge may be erroneous.
“Anxiety” and “stress” are overly clinical ways to refer to worry, fear and anger.
The only thing all of the people you date have in common is you.
Loneliness and being alone are very different things. Being alone or inhabiting solitude can be a powerful and healing thing. As an introvert, I deeply value alone time, and I often feel the loneliest when I’m with other people.
People enter this world as helpless beings while cultivating a universal desire to escape from that helpless state.
People who have control over their time tend to be happier in life is a broad and common enough observation that you should do something with it.
Deviants are routinely made to feel uncomfortable. So among strangers, people tend to consider “dissident” imprudent.
The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.
Objectivity means removing “you”—the subjective part—from the equation.
Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else.
Many men are taught that they are always supposed to be eager for sex. So if someone comes on to them when they are not ready or not interested, it feels to them unmanly and wrong to say no.
There is no skill called “business”.
Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation.
Nothing builds intimacy like shared vulnerability.
Your worldview is way more determined by your body and your emotions than you think it is.
Lying is a defiance of the truth and bullshitting is a wholesale dismissal of the truth.
When we act out, we are not acting.
It is impossible to achieve understanding in secrecy. Ideas gain clarity and precision when they are expressed publicly and debated widely.
Capitalism is hard. Part of the reason is that getting money and keeping money are two different skills. Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. Keeping money requires humility and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast.
Being praised essentially means that one is receiving judgment from another person as “good”. And the measure of what is good or bad about that act is that person’s yardstick.
Having an edge and surviving are two different things. The first requires the second.
Procrastination is fear.
It’s a very good idea for everyone to learn to live single. To figure out how to get your needs met without being partnered so you don’t find yourself seeking a partner to fill needs that you could equally well fill yourself.
Blessings and burdens are not mutually exclusive.
Disorder and distraction are death. The unordered mind loses track of what’s in front of it and gets distracted by thoughts of the future.
Being bad at emotions is a lack of self-awareness and perception of safety when vulnerable.
There is no legacy. There’s nothing to leave. We’re all going to be gone. In the grand scheme of things, the Universe has been around for ten billion years. It’ll be around for another ten billion years.
Experience leads to overconfidence more than forecasting ability.
It’s not really about hard work. You can work in a restaurant eighty hours a week, and you’re not going to get rich. Hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.
Freedom is being disliked by other people.
Even if you’re really in love, you still won’t automatically lose all interest in others.
The increase in divorce, so deplored by today’s religious right, may simply reflect the economic reality that today most of us can afford to leave relationships in which we are not happy.
People raised as men in Western cultures are taught to push, insist, never take no for an answer. Those raised as women are taught to be coy, duck and dodge, never offer an outright yes. The more polarized we get in this silly equation, the further we push one another away. With results that range from hurt feelings to date rape.
People are not interested in you. They are not interested in me. They are interested in themselves.
Many of us learned to think this way in childhood, from parents who had insufficient affection or attention for us, so we learned that there is only a limited amount of love in the world and we have to fight for whatever we get, sometimes in a cutthroat competition with our siblings.
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. It is the knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.
The phenomenology of the LSD experience is extremely similar to children's consciousness. Diffused attention, more mental noise (or entropy), magical thinking, and little sense of self. Babies and children are tripping all the time.
Living with air pollution increases your odds of dying early by 5 percent. Living with obesity, 20 percent. Excessive drinking, 30 percent. Living with loneliness, by 45 percent.
People don’t want to be millionaires. They want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.
A clearer head makes for steadier hands.
To live single is unusual in most cultures. Most people look at their times of singlehood as temporary, often accidental, and to be ended as quickly as possible.
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
The real test of love is when someone sees our weaknesses, our stupidities, and our smallnesses, and still loves us. Unconditional love is what we want from our lovers, and we should expect no less from ourselves.
Things that have never happened before happen all the time.
Soft skills are more important than the technical side of money.
Non-neediness means you respect yourself AND others. Narcissism means you only respect yourself. Neediness means you only respect others.
Much of the stigma around loneliness comes from how we have defined it and talked about it for years. We used to define loneliness as a gnawing, chronic disease without redeeming features. It was equated with shyness, depression, or possessing bad social skills.
To be truly free to explore our sexual potential to the fullest, most of us need to examine how we have been taught that someone of our gender is supposed to enjoy sex. Many of us were taught that it is natural for men to be sexually aggressive and for women to be passive responders.
Many falsehoods have attained the status of unquestioned truths through reiteration.
Many people call a doctor when all they want is an audience.
Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world. But maybe 80% of how you think the world works.
Things you are fundamentally not proud of are going to damage you sooner or later.
Sleep is when your emotionally salient experiences get integrated into your psyche, and it's possible to get better at that.
Even people who consider themselves tolerant are prepared to regulate public expression, and thus public opinion, when it suits their own political goals.
The choices we’re making to protect our beliefs and ourselves are leaving us disconnected, afraid, and lonely.
It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents.
The person who grew up in poverty thinks about risk and reward in ways the child of a wealthy banker cannot fathom if they tried.
Anyone who wants to build a startup should have to take the same team and sail the Atlantic Ocean together first.
Life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares.
Hard work is really overrated. How hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy. Calibrated judgment is underrated.
Most financial advice is about today, and that’s what’s wrong with it.
Emotions always arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and especially the pitiless glare of irony.
When we all believe we would be better people if we were able to be monogamous, this is internalized oppression.
Modern capitalism is good at two things: generating wealth and generating envy. Perhaps they go hand in hand. Wanting to surpass your peers can be the fuel of hard work.
No one ever asks or cares about what your GPA was in school.
Couples getting married should carefully decide together which of their two last names is more beautiful, and take that as their family name.
Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.
Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.
The secret to getting friends is to be a friend. The secret to getting help when in need is to give help to those in need. The secret to learning is to teach. The secret to getting people to excel is to reinforce their positive qualities.
There are basically only three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
Incomes among siblings are more correlated than height or weight.
We take weakness for granted. We assume that the way we’re born is the way we simply are, that our disadvantages are permanent. And then we atrophy from there.
Your real resume is just a catalog of all your suffering. When you’ll look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you’ve done, it’s all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.
All the real scorecards are internal.
You can’t be brave with your life and your work and never disappoint anyone. It doesn’t work that way.
Two topics impact everyone, whether you are interested in them or not: health and money.
There are two ways to live life. One as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
If it were possible to temporarily experience another person’s mental state, it would feel more like a psychedelic state than a “normal state”, because of its massive disparity with whatever mental state is habitual to you.
Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zero-sum game. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status.
If someone you love hurts you, there is a chance to practice forgiveness. If your business fails, you can practice acceptance.
A small amount of wealth means the ability to take a few days off work when you’re sick without breaking the bank. Gaining that ability is huge if you don’t have it.
Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging but often barriers to it.
Having less sex is not more virtuous than having more.
Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.
Liars get easily attached to the high of secrecy provided by getting away with something.
Most people say they want to be a millionaire, what they might actually mean is “I’d like to spend a million dollars.” And that is literally the opposite of being a millionaire.
In a world where we can beam documents around the world in nanoseconds, chat in high-definition video with anyone anywhere, predict the weather down to the minute, it’s very easy to internalize the assumption that nature has been domesticated and submits to our whim. Of course it hasn’t.
If you want to understand what expanded consciousness looks like, all you have to do is have a tea with a four-year-old.
You absolutely need habits to function. You cannot solve every problem in life as if it is the first time it’s thrown at you.
We’re not special or unique simply by virtue of being. We’re all, at varying points in our lives, the subject of random and often incomprehensible events.
Hedonic adaptation is more powerful for man-made things (cars, houses, clothes, money) than for natural things (food, sex, exercise).
The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.
Most historical naval expeditions had nothing to do with sailing. The secret to their success was the ability of the crews to endure hunger better than the others.
Whatever you think you deserve is also rarely what you’ll get.
Optimization is a trauma response.
Having the advantage of size or strength or power is often the birthing ground for true and fatal weakness.
“In love” sex and “not in love” sex are basically two separate activities.
The mind itself is a muscle. It can be trained and conditioned. It has been haphazardly conditioned by society to be out of our control.
There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.
Most of the time we approach life with an armored front for two reasons: i) we’re not comfortable with emotions and we equate vulnerability with weakness, and/or ii) our experiences of trauma have taught us that vulnerability is actually dangerous.
Jealousy is an expression of insecurity, fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, or feeling left out, not good enough, inadequate, or awful. It may show up as blind screaming rage. Being blind makes it very difficult to see.
If you view all of your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation for how life should “actually” be. Life is just the way it is. When you accept that, you have no cause to be happy or unhappy.
“Hurt people hurt people” includes you too. If you are hurting, you’ve best believe that’s leaking out somehow onto the people closest to you.
The problem in interpersonal relationships is not to avoid fighting, but to learn to fight in ways that are not destructive—physically, morally, or emotionally.
There are a million ways to get wealthy, and plenty of books on how to do so. But there’s only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.
On average, people are average.
We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us.
Thick skin doesn’t work. You want to be transparent and translucent.
Alcohol and tobacco are both significantly more dangerous than cannabis. Ecstasy is safer than riding a horse.
Fear of separation and conformity pressures are not mutually exclusive.
One way to not feel a feeling is to project it onto your partner. Projection is a psychological defense that involves trying to move a painful feeling outside yourself by running your emotional movie on someone else.
The genuine love for reading itself is a superpower.
One of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
The idea is that you have to take risks to get ahead, but no risk that can wipe you out is ever worth taking.
Sharks eat well but live a life surrounded by sharks.
Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires.
Persistence is attempting to solve some difficult problem with dogged determination and hammering until the break occurs. Perseverance happens not just in round one but in round two and every round after. And then the fight after that and the fight after that, until the end.
The best way to get a good spouse is to deserve a good spouse.
People have sex outside their primary relationships for reasons that have nothing to do with any inadequacy in their partner or in the relationship.
The less you talk about your shame, the more of it you have.
The odds of picking a job when you’re not old enough to drink that you will still enjoy when you’re old enough to qualify for Social Security are low. This is true also for life partners.
There are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.
There is no good or bad without us. There is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.
Anyone theorizing about a system without deeply, personally, and specifically interacting with the system over time builds theories that are not worth listening to.
Being successful is just about not making mistakes.
Entering into a relationship while planning to change your partner is not respectful to your beloved and could make big trouble later on.
Action has many definitions. It’s not always moving forward or even obliquely. It can also be a matter of positions. It can be a matter of taking a stand.
The word sex gets used as though everyone agrees on what it means, but if you ask people what they actually do when they have sex, you’ll hear about a huge range of behaviors and interactions.
Many men were raised in such a way as to not express their emotions freely. For whatever reason, they have grown up with deeply embedded habits designed to keep them stifled and bottled up.
There are zero wise people who don’t read all the time.
You’re allowed to earnestly want whatever you do truly want, you just have to accept whatever constraints come bundled with that pursuit.
The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today”.
Precisely because people who express different opinions do get treated differently, individuals default to tailoring their expressions to the prevailing social pressures.
Too many people believe that sexual territoriality is a natural part of individual and social evolution. This is just a heritage of the hunting and gathering society.
All problems are interpersonal relationship problems.
Financial success is not a hard science, but a soft skill.
The individual’s dependence on society and his concomitant fear of isolation have been consistent themes in social thought.
Happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially external things. The fewer desires you can have, the more you can accept the current state of things. The more present you are, the happier and more content you will be.
Infatuation is still real love. Just at a speed and intensity that you aren’t equipped to handle.
It is possible to develop more control over whether and how you fall in love than most people think.
No one is a universal asshole. One is only an asshole in context.
A lot of what you learn in the early years of your career is just muscle memory.
Crowds possess a conservative spirit and are the most obstinate maintainers of traditional ideas. Yet occasionally they shed their immobility with startling suddenness and overthrow venerable institutions. The suddenness is only a superficial effect, behind which must be sought a preliminary and preparatory action of long duration. Unobserved continuities may be a source of observed discontinuities.
Relationships take their own shapes, but the best ones tend to share some basic principles: good boundaries, mindfulness, and a mutual desire for the well-being of everyone involved.
If you ask about a man’s morals, you will probably hear about his honesty, loyalty, integrity, and high principles. When you ask about a woman’s morals, you are more likely to hear about whom she shares sex with and under what conditions. We have a problem with this.
Being ourselves means sometimes having to find the courage to stand alone, totally alone.
Real strength lies in the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist.
Collective conservatism entails resistance to change on the part of a community. Personal conservatism is an attitude against reform on the part of individuals. The latter is not necessarily a condition of the former.
We all grew up in a world in which there was assumed to be nothing between emotionless sport fucking and committed long-term marriage-type relationships, leaving the vast territory in between open to discovery by relationship pioneers of all stripes.
Remote working is leverage against governments.
True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.
It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.
Electoral battles are generally fought on narrow ranges of issues, with differences in details blown up to look like major differences in philosophy.
Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered.
The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time.
Gossip is a universal pastime and soap operas have a huge audience because our minds remain adapted to taking an interest in the affairs of others.
Some people treat sex as a big-game hunt—trying to conquer the unwilling and unwitting victim, as though the object of their attention would never decide to share sex with them unless tricked into it. Believing that a person would have to be a fool to make love to with you is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Being responsible for your emotions doesn’t mean that you have to conquer all your difficult feelings bare-knuckled and solo.
There’s no need to sweat or feel rushed if you are going for the long haul.
Dedicating yourself to helping rich people will eventually make you wealthy too.
In nature, it’s very rare to find carbs and fat together. Maybe in coconuts, mangoes and bananas, but it’s basically tropical fruits. The combination of sugar and fat together is really deadly.
The most important skill is becoming a perpetual learner.
Extremely good and extremely bad circumstances rarely stay that way for long because supply and demand adapt in hard-to-predict ways.
As much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation.
All men should be feminists.
Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is not laziness.
Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it.
Irascible people do not have short tempers. It is only that they do not know that there are effective communication tools other than anger. That is why people end up saying things like “I just snapped” or “They flew into a rage”.
You can be optimistic that the long-term growth trajectory is up and to the right, but equally sure that the road between now and then is filled with landmines, and always will be. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.
In the case of normal waking consciousness, the handshake between the data of our senses and our preconceptions is especially firm.
A basic reason why we consider independence a heroic trait is that it is the exception in human history, not the rule.