Transcript: 

My name is Shaun McMillan, and this is the Best Class Ever. 

Review of Previous Strategies

These days we are talking about strategies for dealing with uncertainty. Two weeks ago we spoke about the strategy Tit for Tat in which you trust people unless they act untrustworthy and then begin to trust them as soon as they start acting trustworthy again because morality often pays off in the long game. 

Last week we introduced both the normal distribution and the power law distribution to show that not all time or people are equally productive, but that we often get far more out of very few. If we apply this to how we use our time, there are 3-4 hours of the day in which we are able to accomplish 80% of our work most likely because we are more focused, clear headed, well rested, and undistracted. We should keep that time sacred and make sure to use it wisely. We also looked at how 20% of any given organization is likely to produce 80% of its results, so we must make sure to support that 20% while conducting low cost experiments to find the next great masterpiece, employee, producer, or creative idea. 

We also spoke about the problem of randomness. It is really hard to differentiate between effectiveness and luck. Just because our data shows that we achieved results, it doesn’t mean we’ll be able to repeat those results. Humans are so good at finding patterns, that we tend to find them even amongst random noise where there really is no pattern at all to be found. 

Today I would like to expand on this idea and introduce an ancient Stoic philosophy as a strategy for dealing with the uncertain randomness of life. But first let me define the problem once again as I did in each of the previous lessons. 

Defining the Problem of Uncertainty

The problem is uncertainty. We cannot know the future, and we often cannot even know the past. We see how things turned out, sure, and we can make very reasonable insights as to how we got those results, but because it is so hard to discern between wisdom and luck, we cannot really be sure how reasonable those insights are. If you were to apply your insights in a similar situation would you get the same results? If you act wisely can you 100% guarantee that you will succeed? What if all your success up until now really was just luck? How much of it was luck and how much of it your hard work? Do things always turn out well for the wise? These questions all boil down to the problem of uncertainty. As it says in the Bible in the book of Ecclesiastes,

When life is good, enjoy it. But when life is hard, remember: God gives good times and hard times, and no one knows what tomorrow will bring. In my useless life I have seen both of these: I have seen good people die in spite of their goodness and evil people live a long time in spite of their evil.”

Ecclesiastes 7:14-15

There are parts of our lives that we can control and should take responsibility for. But there are also many parts of our lives that we cannot control. Some of those things are of great concern to us, and may even determine our future. Everything from cataclysmic events, economic crashes, pandemics, the deaths of loved ones, to the evil malicious intents of scary neighbors. Or even when it comes to good fortune, great timing, or unexpected rewards, we have little to no control over these environmental factors. We could ruin our health worrying over these environmental variables but it still would not give us any control. 

We cannot control much of what happens, but we can control how we decide to think about what happens. The Stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome made a conscious effort to focus on the few aspects of their lives that they could control, and not to feel burdened by the elements of life they had no control over. Why feel depressed, anxious, or afraid of something you cannot influence? They believed that we could not determine the way things turned out, but we have tremendous power to deal with the results once they do. 

We can also see this idea adopted in the prayer of serenity used by many 12-step programs that help people to deal with addictions, 

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

– Serenity Prayer

Q: How Should We Define Success?

A simple way to explain this is in this simple but very difficult question. How should we define success? Many people define success by using very specific metrics concerning resources like time, money, or status. If I can earn this much money by a certain age, achieve some amount of credibility, title, or notoriety among my peers, or get so many followers on social media, then that is success. But in reality these are nothing more than vanity metrics, and achieving them will rarely be satisfying enough to relieve the pressure to attain more. 

These metrics are also unreasonable because you have so little control over them. Results are always some combination of hard work and luck aka total randomness. You of course need to be skilled and work really hard, but for every hard working talented player in the top 20% who achieves 80% of the most amazing results, there are 80% of players working nearly as hard with some degree of talent competing for only 20% of the results. If you are lucky enough to be in the top 3% then your opportunities are creating the opportunity for more opportunities, but if not then it is really quite random who the good fortune will go to and when. 

So then maybe we can define success by how skillful we are. Becoming skillful is its own reward. It feels good when your brain releases dopamine as it sees you making progress towards a big goal, so we have every reason to pursue developing ourselves and doing our work to the best of our ability. The Stoics promoted self improvement as does nearly every known philosophy.

The book of Ecclesiastes we quoted from earlier has many cynical ideas in it, and though it is known as the second of three books of wisdom by one of Israel’s wisest kings, King Solomon, it takes mostly a dark philosophical outlook on life. The most common theme throughout this particular book of the Bible is, “All is meaningless. All is vanity.” But amidst his great cynicism he does say that it is better to be God fearing and wise than to be foolish, and that is good for a man to enjoy the fruits of his labor so whatever work you find to do, do it with all your might. 

Avoid the TRAP: Do NOT compare yourself to others. The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Self development works really well as a metric for success so long as you measure your current self against your previous self while making progress towards your ideal self. But it becomes an irrational metric if you fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others. Especially if you consider the Dunning-Kreuger effect. 

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people at sadly low skill levels overestimate their ability which we can call illusory superiority (the illusion of being better than others), and people with relatively high skill tend to modestly underestimate just how much more talented they really are than those of average skill. And ironically, human beings are so biased in their self-assessment that it’s hard to know which extreme we are falling into. The internet only makes this worse, because we now have immediate access to an endless feed of images showing us our competition to further fuel either our superiority complexes or our inferiority complexes, or perhaps even the worst of both. 

Vanity Metrics

If you look at the design of Social media platforms, they deliberately place vanity metrics below the content to feed on our need for confirmation. The number of subscribers, views, and likes don’t tell you almost anything about a video. These are metrics that are only useful for comparing one creator to another or a piece of content to another piece of content, which we already established as a useless trap. We also have little to no control over how many people like or follow us despite what speculation there is over how the algorithms really work or have changed recently. If you know about machine learning then you might know that even the programmers themselves aren’t sure these days how the algorithms actually work. So don’t get caught up in playing a meaningless game you can only ever arbitrarily win. 

It really bothers me that when I tell people that I have a YouTube channel, or multiple YouTube channels, the first question people ask is always the same. “How many subscribers do you have?” You notice that their first question is not, “Is your channel good? What kind of videos do you make? Why?” No. The first question is, how many more subscribers do you have than I do or how many do you have compared to anyone else? People are essentially vain.

If you ask a young child, “How would you like it if you could be more virtuous than all of your friends?” The child would look at you funny. But if you asked him, “How would you like it if you could be bigger than all of your friends?” Then just watch as his eyes light up at the idea of it. But we know that being strangely larger than your peers would only isolate you from them and would not inevitably lead to more happiness.

It’s not totally unreasonable to look at these numbers as there is likely to be some correlation between popularity and quality. And it also serves as a new form of credibility. But as we can see from the common problem of misinformation, it is important that we distinguish between popularity and credibility. Just because a video goes viral does NOT mean it is true or good.

So instead of using vanity metrics to measure our success let us confine it to something closer to our locus of control. We can control how much we decide to train each day, and if we set the bar low enough we can easily achieve some small goals on a daily basis. This will cause our brain to release dopamine which, like a drug, will feel really good and give us that much more positive reinforcement to do it again the next day. If it becomes a cycle, or better yet, a good habit, then this positive reinforcement cycle will create momentum. If you measure that momentum by keeping track of it over time then you’ll be able to see it and measure it. Once you identify momentum that you don’t want to lose, your bias towards loss aversion will kick in making you want to protect your momentum and fight for it each day so that it isn’t taken away from you.

Small Things Accumulating > Memorable Events

Human beings are also notoriously bad at comparing just how much more small things accumulate over time than big things that happen all at once. This bias makes sense because we tend to remember anomalous events like moments when we win big or incur huge losses. These events stick out in our memory and we hope to learn from them. But we tend not to notice things that accumulate over time, and boy do things accumulate over time. To see just how blind we are let’s conduct a thought experiment.

Would you accomplish more by spending an hour on something every day for two weeks, or would you accomplish more if you spent ten minutes working on something only on weekdays for a year? Now I know most of us avoid math and you can already tell that the second option is going to be the answer because you’re all so good at gaming multiple choice questions, but really think about how often you have tried to accomplish a lot in a small burst of motivation. 

If you spend an hour everyday for two weeks that would come to about 14 hours. If you suddenly felt motivated you could really put in some effort, but you know that your motivation would run out at about the two week mark if not sooner. 

But, now consider the second option. 10 minutes everyday, allowing you to miss two days out of the week for small lapses of judgement or days with crazy schedules. 10 minutes requires really very little effort, especially once it becomes a habit. If you spent ten minutes every weekday for a year, that would come to 52 five-day weeks, which is 260 days. 10 minutes each of those days would come to 2600 minutes. That divided up into 60 minute hours comes to 43 hours. Now remember this is compared to the 14 hours fought for over the course of two weeks. Spending an hour focused on something seems a lot more taxing than spending 10 minutes, yet the 10 minutes over the course of a year ends up being 39 more hours. That’s the difference between 14 hours and 43 hours. That’s three times as many hours. And just imagine if you began expanding that 10 minutes to 15 minutes after a couple weeks, and later to 20 minutes. It could increase to as much as 60 more hours or five times more hours while requiring far less effort. 

There are two key things to learn from this thought experiment

1. Set the bar low on small goals, perhaps even daily basis so that you can easily get positive reinforcement loop instead of spending more effort and punishing yourself for not reaching goals
2. Play the long game. Commit to keeping positive habits over a much longer period of time. Much of your competition will likely give up in the meantime. 

I guess I have a lot to say about this subject because originally I was going to make all of this one lesson, but I feel I must end here and save the rest for next week. In the next part we will discuss a Stoic mental simulation for dealing with the scariest parts of making plans and taking action. And we will also discuss the importance of distinguishing between results and success.

How do you deal with uncertainty? How do you go about making big decisions? Have you found any of this helpful. I would love to hear what you think. So as always you can leave a comment to share your thoughts, you can find notes on today’s lesson, and listen to previous lessons by subscribing to the podcast at www.BestClassEver.org.