Let me tell you a quick story, one that I think about quite a bit.
On his way to be sworn in as the most powerful man in the world, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to be lifted out of his car and carried up the stairs.
Francis Perkins, who campaigned with Roosevelt and later became Secretary of Labor, said that the most remarkable thing about Franklin Roosevelt's paralysis was how little its hindrance seemed to bother him.
Roosevelt once told her, quote, if you can't use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say that's alright and you drink it.
So here is why I like that story, because I think this is a very useful and overlooked skill, which is what this episode is about today.
And that is accepting a certain degree of hassle and nonsense when reality demands it.
When the situation you are in demands that you have to accept hassle and nonsense and setback and pain and uncertainty, that you accept it.
That is an incredible skill that can do you a lot of good in life.
It is not an enjoyable skill to have, which makes it overlooked in the world, but you realize how useful it can be once you spot somebody who lacks this skill and they struggle to get through the day.
They are upset by the smallest little hassle that they come across.
I was once on a flight with a CEO of a large company.
He let everybody on the flight know that that's who he was and he lost his mind after the flight changed Gates twice.
We had to switch Gates twice and he was ranting and raving in public in front of everybody into the gate agent.
And I wondered, I thought to myself, how did he make it this far in life without the ability to deal with petty annoyance outside of his control?
And I think the most likely answer is he was in denial over what he thinks is in his control and he demanded unrealistic precision from subordinates who compensate by hiding bad news from him.
The ability to accept nonsense and hassle is such an incredible skill.
By the way, I came across that Roosevelt story in a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin called No Ordinary Day.
And of course I found this quote in Readwise, which is an app that I've been using for years to keep track of quotes and stories and highlights that I make in books.
This episode is brought to you by my friends at Readwise.
And if you have not tried it, I highly recommend that you do.
If you are a reader, Readwise is the best by far tool that I have found to keep track of notes and highlights in books and things that you read online.
And if you go to readwise .io slash Morgan, that is readwise .io slash Morgan, you will not only get an extra 30 days for free to try Readwise, but you will get the highlights that I have made in some of my books over the years.
Go check it out. And this topic of finding overlooked skills in the world, I think is really important because like anything in life, most of the attention on a topic goes to what is attractive and obvious and sexy.
And so when you're talking about skills in life, people talk about being charismatic, being persuasive, good technical ability, all important, of course.
But there are so many overlooked skills that I think can take you very far in life.
And that's what I want to talk about in today's episode.
So let me share a couple more with you.
All right, here we go.
Understanding how people justify their beliefs in a way that makes you respect their delusions.
A very rare and useful skill is understanding that people you find to be deluded and wrong likely suffered from the same shortcomings that you do, and that I do, that all of us do.
Will Durant, who is a great historian, he wrote in his book, The Lessons of History, that we should learn enough from history to respect each other's delusions, which is such a beautiful line.
Learn enough from history to respect each other's delusions.
He explained, quote, our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, be clouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship.
Most history is guessing and the rest is prejudice.
I think this is true for virtually any event that we're talking about in the economy, in politics, in business, whatever it might be.
And I think it boils down to three points.
Number one is that everybody is heavily influenced by what they have experienced firsthand.
Because what you have experienced firsthand is more persuasive than something that you read about secondhand.
The second point is that even our understanding of firsthand experience is sketchy at best because we oversimplify what happened and what we saw, and self justify our involvement in that thing.
The third point is that those who didn't experience an event firsthand have an even weaker grasp on reality because they can cherry pick the oversimplified, self justified arguments and data from people who have firsthand experience.
So if I'm trying to learn about something that happened in the world that I did not take part in, I can just go find the explanations for it from other people that are the most persuasive to me.
And so everybody has delusions about how the world works.
You do, I do, everybody does.
I think it makes sense when you realize that we are all just prisoners to our past and products of our generation and the times that we live in, and we are influenced by who we've met and what we've experienced, most of which has been outside of our control.
And look, some people are more aware of their blind spots than others, but everybody has a firmly held belief that an equally smart and informed person disagrees with.
How appropriate maybe that we are talking about this and putting this on this episode during this week of the presidential election, because there is no other spot that you see this more starkly with than in politics.
When someone who is equally smart and informed as you are comes to the exact opposite conclusion that you do.
So I think good questions to ask to combat this reality and a very good and useful skill to have is asking, what haven't I experienced firsthand that leaves me a little bit naive to how something works?
Or asking, which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born into a different country or into a different generation or raised by different parents?
What do I desperately want to be true so much that I think it is true even when it's clearly not?
Like where are my incentives taking me?
That's a good question to ask too.
An even better skill though, I think, is realizing that everybody else struggles with those questions and winces at the potential answers to those questions.
And so you don't have to agree with others' delusions, or you shouldn't put up with the damage that some of those deluded beliefs can cause, of course, but just accepting that everybody wants easy and comforting answers in a complex and painful world is a very rare and useful skill.
All right, number three for our rare and unique skills, which is quitting while you are ahead, or at least before you have had too much.
Commenting on how he lived to age 97, John D.
Rockefeller's doctor said that the oil tycoon, quote, gets up from the table while he's still a little bit hungry.
It's one of those, another rare skill and one that applies to so many things beyond eating, of course.
The temptation to exploit every drop of opportunity leads many people to push relentlessly for more and more and more.
And they only discover the limits of what's possible when they've gone too far, when the momentum of decline is often unstoppable.
They've gone past the point of no return, and now they're doing damage to themselves.
Businesses that don't want to hold excess inventory push so hard for efficiency and their supply chains and just in time manufacturing as they call it.
And they become stripped of all shock absorbers.
They have no room for error.
And then in 2020, 2021, the pandemic hits and the supply chain just crumbles all around them.
They wanted so much efficiency, they could not leave opportunity on the table, that it just ended up blowing up in their face.
You see this too with young workers who are so eager for promotion.
They push themselves until they've hit a burnout when they physically cannot continue in their position and they quit, which often marks the end of compounding their skills and their work relationships.
Like they wanted to get ahead so bad that they were only able to work in this career in investment banking or law or medicine, whatever it might be for a couple of years.
And then they burn out.
People on social media do this too in the relentless quest for engagement and comments and retweets and likes.
They push it so hard that eventually their audience just becomes sick of them.
Happened so many times.
I won't name names, but you know who they are.
In each case, there is so much value in saying, I could have had more.
I could have earned more.
I could have done more, but this right here is good enough.
Knowing when to get up from the table when you're still a little bit hungry, so to speak, is such an important skill, but it's a rare skill because people don't like leaving opportunity on the table and it is counterintuitive to realize that you will likely end up with even more than those whose appetite
for more is insatiable.
All right, next one.
What is this? Number four, respectfully interacting with people who you disagree with.
Another one of these very important during this election week, right?
Confirmation bias gets easier when people are more interconnected on social media, when you can connect with other people, but being connected also means that you will run into more people who disagree with you.
Benedict Evans, who is this technology investor has this wonderful quote that I love.
He says, the more the internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.
Handling that challenge without digging the hole deeper is one of the 21st century's most important skills.
If you are not blessed with perfect empathy, then the trick to opening your mind to those who disagree with you is to find people whose views on one topic you respect, because that checks the box in your head that says this person is not totally crazy.
You respect this person and debate them on topics that you disagree about.
Without the first step, it is too easy to write somebody off before you've heard their full argument.
Find somebody who you generally respect and debate them on the certain topics that you disagree about.
That's one of the best ways to learn how to respectfully interact with people who you disagree with.
All right, next one.
What is this number five?
The ability to have a 10 minute conversation with anybody from any background.
What an amazing, rare and unique skill that is, isn't it?
Curse of handwriting was dropped from the nationwide core education curriculum in 2010.
Most people probably think that's fine, because technology took its place.
We don't need to write in cursive.
I don't know if I can even write in regular writing right now.
I barely write anything outside of signing my name, which is a scribble.
But technology also took the place of many face -to -face conversations, and that has a deeper consequence than foregoing curly writing.
Sitting with somebody who you've never met and looking them in the eye and carrying out a conversation, which used to be so common that it was not considered a skill, is now a competitive advantage in the world where so much interaction takes place on social media and email and text.
To meet somebody face -to -face who you don't know, you don't know anything about that person, and be able to carry on a pleasant conversation with them for 10 minutes is an incredibly rare and important skill.
All right, next one.
Number six. Respecting luck as much as you respect risk.
Both of those, luck and risk, are really the same thing.
It's the idea that outcomes can be influenced by events that are outside of your control.
And so if risk is what happens when you make good decisions but end up with a bad outcome, luck is what happens when you make a bad or mediocre decision but end up with a great outcome.
They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100 % of your actions to dictate 100 % of your outcomes.
Of course, that's always how it's been.
But risk is easy to pay attention to because it gives you an intellectual out when something doesn't go your way.
You're going to say, oh, well, this was risky.
This was risky. Luck is like the opposite.
It is painful to think that some, or even maybe most, or even maybe all of your success was not caused by your actions.
And so luck is downplayed and ignored in a way that risk is not.
And so the ability to recognize that your wins might not signal that you did anything right in the same way that your losses might not signal that you did anything wrong is vital to learning something valuable from real world feedback.
And the last point here, maybe the most important point of rare and unique skills is getting to the point.
Be brief. Use as few words as possible to say what you need and everybody will appreciate it.
Mark Twain once said that kids provide the most interesting information because they tell you all that they know and then they stop.
Adults lose this skill and they falsely associate the number of words with the amount of insight.
The longer the email, the longer the book, the more insight you think it's going to have.
And of course, it's almost never the case.
After writing every sentence, it doesn't matter what you're writing an email, a memo, a text message, whatever it is, it helps to ask yourself, would the reader still get my point if I deleted that line?
Don't ask yourself, does that sentence make sense?
There are lots of unnecessary sentences that still make sense, but treating words like they cost you something is the right mindset.
A writer once said that you should imagine that every word costs you $100.
And if you think about it like that, you will be much more scarce with your words in a great way.
People who are bad at communicating ramble.
Good communicators leave out unnecessary details.
Great communicators treat words as the scarcest commodity.
It's a hell of a skill.
That's it for this week's episode.
Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.
