Signals & Noise: What Caught My Eye

I’m trying out something new. Rather than diving deep on one topic, I will share interesting takeaways from the past week. Same format weekly, but the categories may change. Here’s what caught my eye this past week:

1 Photo From the Camera Roll

We took our one year old daughter to her first activity - swimming class! Early Saturday morning activities sound draining, but I came out of this one refreshed. Almost more refreshed than I would’ve been if I was taking the lesson. It’s hard to describe, but watching her navigate the water with that mix of curiosity and fearlessness—even when getting dunked—was amazing to see

2 Golden Nuggets

Both of my nuggets from the past week are associated with becoming better at making and analyzing decisions. This can be applied to all facets of life - let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Think of decisions as hats, haircuts or tattoos. 

• Most decisions are like trying on hats. You try it, if you don't like it, it’s easily reversible and you try another one. These are no brainers - they have very low risk of bad consequences as you can easily alternate. 

• Some decisions are like haircuts. If you make the wrong one, you might look silly or foolish for a while. But after a certain point, things will return to normal and a year from the decision, you’ll forget all about it. In fact, it's probably a risk worth taking as you will learn something from it or know what not to do going forward

• Some decisions are like tattoos. These are irreversible and permanent in nature. Once you make them, you have to live with them - getting married to someone, choosing a specific career etc. For these, move slowly and think carefully 

Personal takeaway - I often end up spending ‘tattoo-level’ energy on ‘hat-level’ decisions

Speaking of low consequence decisions, another good way to think about this is to change the framing on how you think about mistakes, which is the focus of my second nugget. Make mistakes cheap, not rare

• When the cost of mistakes is low, we adjust and adapt. If the cost of a mistake is high, we are always fearful (interesting parenting nugget in here too in allowing kids to make mistakes)

• Good decision making is not about being right all the time, it’s about being comfortable making mistakes, acknowledging and learning from them

3 Links / Reading Recommendations

• Book → Letters from an Astrophysicist, by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Wonderfully written, easy to understand and lots of interesting takeaways. Highly recommend!

• Blog post → How many pets do you have? By Derek Sivers. TLDR: it’s not about pets. Short, easy to read post on focused attention

• Current affairs → Iran is at a true inflection point. Lot of domestic unrest with anti government protests. This was a good read to help take a step back and understand where Iran could go from here - Original Article . If that link doesn't work because of a paywall, try this --> https://archive.is/hy2PB

Until next week!