All right, no intro music anymore.
Nobody liked it anyways.
Let's just jump right into it.
Something that you see in a lot of fields not just in how people manage their money or manage their investments, but how people manage their careers and their relationships differently is that people tend to be pretty well aware of what they're good at.
Or at least they think they know what they're good at.
But they tend to be blind or ignorant to what they're bad at and what their flaws are.
Flaws are much easier to ignore than the good traits that you have, either because they're hard to think about or they're hard to identify.
Daniel Kahneman, the great psychologist.
He says the long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive.
And I think that advice, that wisdom applies to everything.
It applies to so many different fields.
No matter how you invest your money, what your career is, whatever it is.
In a lot of things in life.
You don't need to make a lot of great decisions if you can go out of your way to avoid the bad stuff.
It's definitely true in investing.
You don't need to be a brilliant stock picker.
You just need to not screw up during the periods when it really matters.
Once a decade when there's a bear market or whatever it is.
And so this episode is called Little Flaws.
I say little flaws because when most people think about what they might be bad at, they're thinking about the big things that are obvious.
I'm not good at basketball, whatever it might be.
Things that you have gotten feedback on over your life, either feedback to you that it's obvious you're not good at this, or other people have told you hey, you need to work on this.
But little flaws, the tiny little things that are nuanced and easy to ignore, I think actually do some of the most damage over time.
Because, since they are nuanced and hidden and you ignore them, their accumulated damage over time can be extraordinary, even if you don't even know that they were occurring.
So what I want to do in this episode is just go through a list of a couple of dozen of these little flaws that I think about for my own life too.
Trying to identify how these impact me and how I might be oblivious to some of these points.
And maybe if you're a little introspective here, you might see how you might be falling for some of these as well.
All right, I'm just going to jump into these.
There's a big long list of these.
They're in no particular order.
They're just a bunch of short statements, short little flaws that I've discovered over time, not realizing that inarticulate and uneducated obnoxious, unqualified and crazy people sometimes have the right answers.
Comparing reality with an idealized alternative.
Overestimating the extent to which your insights are different from your peers.
Assuming that other people think about you as much as you do.
Emphasizing technical expertise while discounting softer topics like communication and empathy.
Assuming experience in one era prepares you for the next.
An insatiable appetite for the hand that feeds you or discounting how much you rely on other people.
Overlooking that some of your opinions would change if your incentives were different.
Being persuaded by the advice of those who need or want something that you don't.
Having a hard time distinguishing between what happened and what you think should have happened.
An illusion that other people's bad circumstances couldn't also happen to you, not realizing that surly people are probably going through something terrible in their life?
The inability to communicate your ideas because you wrongly assume that other people have the necessary background to understand what you're talking about.
Assuming history is a guide to the future, when in reality, things that have never happened before happen all the time, as Stanford professor Scott Sagan says.
Conflating I am good at this with others are bad at this in a way that makes you overestimate how valuable your skills are.
Mistaking a temporary trend for a competitive advantage when serendipity masquerades as skill.
Extreme adherence to a specific worldview in a world that changes all the time.
Underestimating the odds of disaster, because it is comforting to assume that things will keep functioning the way they have always functioned.
Being so emotionally invested in what you do that you cannot delegate tasks to others.
Exaggerating the importance and the influence of your social group, incorrectly assuming that the views of one person reflect those of a broader group that that person associates with.
No preemptive check on your risk, tolerance and ambition, causing you to learn the limits only when you've gone too far, when it may be too late to recover.
An attraction to odds that may be in your favor, but whose downside could cause ruin.
Ignoring the role of luck, because it's too painful to consider, which causes an overestimation of how repeatable your skills are.
Remembering happy events more vividly than bad ones, in a way that leaves you with an unrealistic view of how good the past used to be.
Being so obsessed with data that you discount how influential squishy topics like narratives and stories and feelings and emotions can be.
Assuming that competency in one field leads to skills in another field.
Your expectations rise faster than your results, leading to constant disappointment, no matter how much you have accomplished.
Avoiding negative information that might challenge views that you desperately want or need to be right.
Ignoring the power of tail events.
Because you would be bored if you admitted that 99 of news events won't matter all that much in the long run.
Assuming that what you know and have measured is more important than what you don't know and haven't measured.
Exploiting all opportunities to the fullest extent possible, with no room for error, in a way that leaves you vulnerable during the slightest change in future circumstances.
Excessively rosy views about the decisions that you've made to maintain self-esteem in a world where everyone makes bad decisions all the time.
Having zero tolerance for hassle and inefficiency and nonsense in a way that leaves you frustrated and in search of a perfect world that will never exist.
Excessive ego in a world where humility is the impressive trait that catches people's attention.
Being blind to the stress and struggle and doubt and failures that your role models, who you look up to, have dealt with and still deal with today.
Taking your cues and insights from people who are playing a different game and have different goals than you.
Thinking that saying, I don't know, when you don't know, is a character flaw.
Assuming that statistics alone can persuade other people, when what really changes people's minds are good stories.
Ignorance of the fact that different phases of your career require different skill sets.
Success leading to complacency, which erodes the traits that originally made you successful to begin with.
A failure to identify the true cost of something that you're pursuing with too much emphasis on financial costs, while ignoring the emotional price that must be paid to win a reward.
Underestimating the power of compounding in both good and bad ways, because linear thinking is so much more intuitive.
An attachment to social proof in a field that requires contrarian thinking to achieve above average results.
Ignoring the important fundamentals of a topic that happen to be boring and repetitive.
All right, those are my flaws that I think about.
I'm sure they apply to you in some way, whether you want them to or not.
But I think those are some really important things to ponder and think about and try to figure out which one of those hidden little flaws are impacting you today and slowly chipping away at your results and your performance and all aspects of your life over time.
That's it for this week.
We'll see you again next time.
Thanks again for listening.
