Think With Alex

Sharper mind. Stronger life. Smarter business.
Notes on mindset, psychology, motivation, tech & growth.

[Think With Alex @AlexMindNotes]

@batagonx I laughed at it. never asked who

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@veyro_xbt 62 trades. I'm Barber and Odean's dataset

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@sterlingmkts wrote his rules down. I use vibes

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MARK CUBAN SOLD HIS FIRST COMPANY FOR $6 MILLION AND RETIRED. FORBES NOW PUTS HIM AT $6.8 BILLION, AND HE SAYS HE HAS ENOUGH.

He posted it this month in plain words: "I have enough. My family has enough."

The first time he had enough was 1990. He sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe and retired. Then he bought a lifetime pass on American Airlines.

I keep tripping on that pass. He'd just sold a company for $6 million, and the purchase he talks about is a ticket to keep moving. That isn't what I picture when I picture enough.

Matthew Killingsworth and two coauthors, Daniel Kahneman among them, studied 33,391 employed Americans in PNAS in 2023 and found something I had backwards. For most people, happiness keeps climbing with income well past $100,000.

The plateau belongs to the unhappiest fifth, whose mood stops rising around $100,000. I had always pictured it as a rich man's problem.

To me Cuban doesn't sound like that unhappy fifth. He sounds like someone who stopped keeping score.

In the What Now? clip he never names a dollar figure. He talks about time, the one asset he says he can't control, and about getting to his kids' basketball games.

I called my own target "enough" for about ten years and moved it every time I got close, like a punch card that grows a new square every time I fill one.

Every budgeting app sells a savings goal with a progress bar. The awkward part is that the bar is easy to fill and hard to stop raising.

I don't know my number yet. I'm starting to suspect his was never a number either.

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@Owlgorithmm my quirk only costs me jackets

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MATT DAMON TALKED HIMSELF OUT OF TED. I KNOW THAT VOICE.

"I passed on 'Ted,'" Matt Damon told GQ this month. "I've never had this experience where I laughed so hard reading a script."

"And then I just got too clever by half." Then the line I keep rereading: "So I overthought it, and I talked myself out of it."

He has said an earlier no, on Avatar, may have cost him about $250 million. Talking to CNN in 2023, he called himself "decidedly unstrategic" about roles.

I laughed at that, then recognized myself in it. For about ten years I called it being careful. It looked like an apartment I kept touring after I already liked it, or a job offer I reread until it started to look like a trap.

Barry Schwartz and colleagues surveyed 1,747 people across seven samples in 2002 and sorted them into maximizers, who hunt for the best option, and satisficers, who stop at good enough. The maximizers reported more regret and less happiness, even though the authors suspect they often end up with better options.

Damon's first instinct was the laugh. Everything after it was a search for a better reason.

I keep tripping on that, because my first instinct is usually right about small things too. The jacket I loved and left on the rack still bugs me. Every comparison site I use earns more from the maximizer in me than from the version that just buys the jacket.

What I can't settle is whether the fix is deciding faster or caring less about the best one, and the paper doesn't tell me which.

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@gosh_sol_eth I still owe that jacket an apology

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@dexmarlow my yes runs out around tab four

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@0x_markus I also round up my contribution

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@sterlingmkts I'd need a weekly sitcom too

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@elixlune I assumed millions. I never checked

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@alfoundr1 I'd blame the guarantee first

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@adelltells 25% a year scares me

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@athensxbt the tax gross-up surprised me

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@noxrae0x she outthought him in the dark

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HOLLAND TAYLOR GOT FOUR EMMY NODS AND NO RAISE. I WAITED TOO.

She said it in an interview last month: "four Emmy nominations, and they never gave me a raise." Six years under contract as the mom on Two and a Half Men, paid, she says, about what she'd made on a series eight years earlier.

I stayed at one job far too long on the same quiet theory. Do good work and the raise shows up on its own, like a tip left on the table.

Managers read it the other way, according to four studies by Matthew Stanley and colleagues with about 1,400 managers, published in 2023. The loyal worker was the one they'd hand unpaid extra work, because loyalty looked like a willingness to sacrifice.

So to them my loyalty read as a discount I was offering. A coupon I never meant to hand over.

In September the Atlanta Fed's wage tracker put a price on staying, with people who switched jobs at 4.7% yearly pay growth, and people who stayed at 3.4%.

Taylor's fix was to stop signing contracts and come back only when she wanted to. That's a move you can make with four Emmy nominations on the shelf. I'm less sure what the move is from a desk in a cubicle row.

Whole apps now sell salary data to workers. The awkward part is that the person across the table has the same chart.

I still can't tell whether I stayed out of loyalty or out of fear of the interview. Probably the second, and I kept calling it the first.

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I'D HAVE SWORN I SAW THE CAR. THE CHATBOT PUT IT THERE.

I trust my memory more than almost anything I own. It's the one record I assumed nobody else could edit.

Researchers at MIT Media Lab, working with Elizabeth Loftus, showed 200 people a short silent security video of a store robbery and split them into four groups. One group was interviewed by a chatbot that slipped in details that weren't there, like a getaway car, and praised people when they went along.

That group got 36.4% of the trick questions wrong. People who skipped the interview and went straight to the same questions got 10.8% wrong. A week later the chatbot group's fake details hadn't faded, and they were more sure of them than the no-interview group.

It's the friend who keeps asking about the red jacket until I can see the jacket. The agreeing seems to do the damage, and my memory files a nod as evidence.

In the video below, Loftus sums up 50 years of this work in one warning: a story told "with a lot of confidence" still might not have happened.

I suspect the chatbots I use are tuned to agree with me, because agreeing keeps me typing.

I don't know how many of my sharpest memories are mine. I've stopped assuming the confident ones are the safe ones.

[Think With Alex @AlexMindNotes]

@xbtkinao the part I can't shake: nobody told her she had rights

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CHAT GPT MADE ME LOOK SKILLED. TAKE IT AWAY AND I'M NOT.

I've been calling it learning every time Chat GPT fixes a spreadsheet formula for me.

Then I read a study by Emma Wiles of Boston University and colleagues at BCG. 487 consultants did 90-minute data science tasks in 2024, some with Chat GPT, some without. On coding, the group without it scored 63 percentage points below real data scientists, and the group with it scored 14 below.

Afterward they all answered a few technical questions with no AI. The Chat GPT group did no better than people who never had it.

Chat GPT worked like a rented ladder. I stood higher for a while, and then it went back to the store.

The part I keep tripping on: the ChatGPT group also got worse at guessing which questions Chat GPT could handle. The authors flag that result as exploratory. It still feels like trusting the GPS most on the streets I never learned.

The video with this note comes from a different study, by Nataliya Kosmyna's team at MIT. She calls words like dumb and brain rot clickbait and lands on something I can use: "do it yourself first," then use the tool.

Every AI course sold as upskilling has the same awkward math. Its happiest reviews may come from people still standing on the ladder.

So which of my skills are actually mine, and which ones am I renting by the month?

[Think With Alex @AlexMindNotes]

IS MY "BUY IT NOW" HABIT WIRED INTO MY BRAIN?

I keep a list on my phone of things I nearly bought after midnight. A week later I want almost none of them, and I still buy about one a month.

A team from Columbia and Yonsei scanned 146 young adults and gave them the old choice: a smaller amount of money now or more later. In JAMA Psychiatry this fall, brain volumes alone explained about 22% of how hard each person leaned toward now. It's a single snapshot of young adults around 22, on one scanner.

The analysis kept landing on the same two spots. One is a reward area that perks up at anything shiny. The other sits behind the forehead and does the planning, like the calendar app nobody opens.

22% sits oddly with me. It's a bit more than one slice of a pizza cut into five. That leaves most of the pull to something else, the bad night or whatever I scrolled past before bed.

Hal Hersh field, a psychologist who studies how we treat our future selves, found something nearby years ago. In a scanner, people think about their future self the way they think about another person, and when he showed people an aged version of their own face in a virtual mirror, they put about twice as much into a pretend savings account.

I recognize that other person. He's the guy who gets my credit card bill.

Pay later buttons are built for the part of me that wants it tonight, and they only have to win once in a while.

I can't settle which came first: a brain that wants it now, or ten years of one-click checkout teaching it to.