Do everything you can to maximize neuroplasticity.
New restaurants. New cafes. New seat in the cafe. New music. New workouts. New hobbies. New languages. New countries.
Yes, consistency is important, but if you want to access new thinking and creativity, you have to have new experiences, and you have to have them often.
The greatest battle of all is with yourself—your weaknesses, your emotions, your lack of resolution in seeing things through to the end. You must declare unceasing war on yourself.
In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell explained why some people succeed and some don't in a single 1-hour talk.
This will permanently change the way you think about talent, effort, and success.
Bookmark & watch today, no matter what.
Persi Diaconis, Stanford mathematician and former professional magician:
"I spent fifty years proving one thing: almost nothing is as random as it looks. The 50.75% that built Renaissance wasn't luck. It was a tiny crack in the randomness, found and repeated a million times."
this free lecture holds the exact idea the thread above is built on. and the man giving it isn't a trader. he's a stanford professor and former professional magician who spent his career on one question: where does real randomness end, and where does a hidden edge begin.
here is his life's finding. a coin, a shuffle, a market, all look random, yet each hides a faint, measurable bias. on its own that bias is nothing, indistinguishable from luck. repeat it enough times and it stops being luck and becomes a law. that faint crack, found and repeated, is the whole distance between a 50.75% win rate and a hundred billion dollars.
none of this is new or hidden. diaconis has taught it for decades, the math runs back to 1713, and the lecture is free. i mapped the full system in my article, expected value, kelly, and this. same point the thread makes: the edge was sitting in plain sight.
here is the part the gurus skip. a faint edge only pays if you survive long enough to reach it, and that takes correct sizing and the patience to trust it through thousands of losing-looking trades. most quit while it still looks like randomness. the math is free. the nerve to hold it is the edge.
People find this claim incredible since everyone insists they are crazy-busy today, but it's well established (and in Enlightenment Now I note the sanity check from my own family: I remember my grandparents working six day a week, early morning to early evening.)
I've noticed that one of the most common mistakes ambitious people make is believing that happiness is waiting on the other side of achievement.
In behavioral science, we call this the arrival fallacy. It's the idea that once you reach the next milestone, get the promotion, earn the recognition, or accomplish the goal, you'll finally feel fulfilled.
But satisfaction doesn't come from arriving. It almost always comes from making progress toward something meaningful. That's why goals are important, but they are not the reward. The pursuit is.
Self-help is dangerous precisely because it easily becomes self-fixation.
A focus on improving the self usually first requires finding problems with the self.
This is quite the pickle.
In a society that rewards problem-solving, you can end up hallucinating or exaggerating unease in order to fix it. This leaves you always in the red, always one step behind. Imagine a dog chasing its tail that has committed to being unhappy until it catches the tail… but it’s always just a few inches short. Still, it whirls around and around, “doing the work.”
Perfection always recedes by one more book, one more seminar, one more habit tracker.
How Does One Brain Speak Two Languages?
Bilingual people exhibit strikingly similar brain activity regardless of whether they are speaking in their first or second language.
This suggests that a single “grammatical engine” in the brain can power multiple languages at once.
https://t.co/83tRehWeDI
Poor sleep habits are linked to greater damage in the brain’s small blood vessels years later — A recent study found that people who regularly slept less than 7 hours or more than 9 hours, experienced frequent insomnia, or took more daytime naps had higher levels of white matter hyperintensities (WMHs), a marker of cerebrovascular damage that is associated with an increased risk of dementia.
These findings suggest that healthy sleep habits may help protect the brain from vascular damage and reduce the risk of cognitive decline.
Maintaining consistent sleep of 7-9 hours each night, while minimizing chronic insomnia and excessive daytime sleepiness, could be an important strategy for preserving memory, thinking abilities, and long-term brain health.
DOI: 10.1002/alz.71457