Oscar Hong

A few things I'm pretty sure about

Morgan Housel published his list here. I like the frame and wondered what beliefs I hold with a similar level of certainty, let’s say >70%. I hope to one day interrogate some (or all) of these more closely in their own essays. But for now, they’re only things I’m pretty sure about. Here goes:

  1. One tried-and-true formula for success is to take any idea and just take it more seriously than anyone else.
  2. Bright, technical minds in the West have been paid handsomely for doing rather unremarkable tasks for close to three generations now (X, Millennials, and Z). While they’ve gladly accepted this quid pro quo so far, today’s 20-somethings entering the workforce yearn for greater ambition.
  3. Open loops make you anxious and kill productivity. The solution is to have a capture system you can trust. Your brain is for having ideas, not storing them.
  4. The most creative and productive partnerships come from two people with distinct and opposing personalities. They often don’t like each other, but share mutual respect.
  5. Writing is the most efficient pathfinding algorithm. I don’t know what I think about something until I write it down.
  6. Skill acquisition involves rewiring your brain to do the opposite of what your instincts tell you.
  7. The happiest people wake up everyday with a singular purpose. And it doesn’t matter how trivial that purpose might seem to other people.
  8. What people call “innovation” is just domain arbitrage—transposing a well-known idea from one domain to another where it is less well-known.
  9. Kids should play sports because it’s the most clear-cut way to learn both that talent is real, but some of it can be made up for with effort and strategy.
  10. The idea that we travel to “expand our horizon” is from a bygone era pre-globalisation. As Hans Rosling writes in Factfulness, “The main factor that affects how people live is not their religion, their culture, or the country they live in, but their income.” If your goal is to challenge your own worldview, you’d do better to speak with people from different socio-economic backgrounds in your own city.
  11. We infer something must be valuable if it’s well-documented. In reality, something becomes valuable by being well-documented.
  12. Power, money, fame: If you choose to partner with someone, you should know how they stack rank these three. Most interpersonal problems are rooted in a fundamental mismatch in what two people are optimising for.
  13. Leadership is about converting diffused potential energy into directed kinetic energy.
  14. If you don’t find something absolutely fascinating, you just don’t know enough about it yet.
  15. You can usually predict the next trend by inverting the current trend.
  16. Fame is a false idol. The optimal level of notability is where nobody calls you, but anybody would take your call.
  17. The American diner is the ideal setting for small groups to generate and refine ideas.
  18. Ego, insecurity, and envy can all be powerful jolts to get someone off the start line, but they’re brittle in the long run. One should harness these when they’re young, then jettison them for cleaner fuel later on.
  19. A young person should be especially deliberate in choosing where they live because the place they live in largely dictates how their raw ambition gets channelled.
  20. Most things get worse. The things that don’t, or even get better over time—e.g. Costco, Hermes, the United States—need torchbearers who both inherit the will of the founders and inject the project with fresh ideas.
  21. Intelligence is overrated by people who overrate intelligence and underrated by people who underrate intelligence.

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