First Thought Bu Dou

To catch up my first thought every day with drawing

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Charlie Munger spent 50 years studying why intelligent people make catastrophically stupid decisions.

It is the most useful thing I have ever watched:

1. Incentives are more powerful than anyone thinks. Munger says he has been in the top 5% of his age cohort his entire life in understanding the power of incentives and he has still underestimated it every single year. Federal Express could not get their night shift to work efficiently until someone realized they were paying by the hour. They switched to paying by the shift. The problem disappeared immediately.

2. People rationalise terrible behavior when their incentives point that way, and they do not even know they are doing it. A doctor in Nebraska was removing perfectly healthy gallbladders for years. When Munger asked an old colleague whether the doctor knew he was harming patients, the answer was no. he genuinely believed the gallbladder was the source of all medical evil and that removing it was an act of love. That is incentive-caused bias at its most extreme.

3. Psychological denial is real, and it is not just for weak people. A family friend's son flew off a carrier in the North Atlantic and never came back. His mother, a completely sane woman, simply never believed he was dead. Reality was too painful, so she distorted it until it was bearable. Munger says we all do this to some extent, and it causes terrible problems.

4. Consistency and commitment tendency are one of the most powerful forces in the human mind. Once you have stated a position publicly, you are psychologically locked into it. Max Planck said the really important new physics was never accepted by the old guard. A new guard came along that was less brain blocked by its previous conclusions. If this happened to the deans of physics, Munger says, imagine what it does to ordinary people.

5. The Chinese brainwashing system used on prisoners of war worked better than torture. They did not start with big demands. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations and slowly built from there. The same mechanism operates in every cult, every sales system, and every ideology that gets deeply embedded in people's heads.

6. Pavlovian association shapes buying behavior at a level most people never consciously process. Munger estimates three quarters of all advertising works on pure Pavlov. Coca-Cola does not want to be associated with funerals. They want to be associated with the Olympics, wonderful music, heroics. The association itself changes how people feel about the product at a subconscious level. Raising the price of a product can actually increase its market share because price and quality are associated in the human mind, and people use price as a signal of value.

7. Persian messenger syndrome is alive and running every major organization. The Persians killed the messenger who brought bad news. Bill Paley in his last 20 years, did not hear one thing he did not want to hear. everyone around him knew bringing bad news was dangerous. The result was that one of the most powerful men in media made terrible decisions for two decades because reality never reached him.

8. Social proof causes otherwise intelligent people to follow each other off cliffs. When one oil company bought a fertilizer company in the 1970s, practically every other major oil company rushed out and did the same. There was no rational reason for oil companies to own fertilizer companies. But if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil. Every single acquisition was a disaster.

9. The efficient market theory persisted in academia for decades despite Berkshire Hathaway existing as a living contradiction. One economist kept adding sigmas to explain away the anomaly. two sigma, then three, then four, eventually six sigma. Munger's observation: It is better to add a sigma than change a theory just because the evidence comes in differently. That economist later went into money management himself and sank like a stone.

10. Contrast bias warps perception constantly and invisibly. Put your hand in hot water, then room temperature water. It feels cold. Put your hand in cold water, then room temperature water. It feels hot. same bucket. The human sensory apparatus has no absolute scale, only a contrast scale. Real estate agents exploit this deliberately. They show you two overpriced, awful houses first, then take you to a merely overpriced house, and it feels like a bargain.

11. The frog in slowly heating water is the business version of contrast bias. If something bad comes to you in small pieces, you are likely to miss it entirely. Munger says he has known many high-powered brilliant businessmen who were destroyed this way. not because they were stupid but because each incremental change was too small to trigger alarm. The contrast was never large enough to notice.

12. Authority bias is so powerful it can make trained professionals watch a plane crash. In flight simulator experiments, when the pilot, the authority figure, does something that any trained co-pilot knows will crash the plane, 25% of the time, the co-pilot sits there and lets it crash anyway. They have been trained to know better. The authority relationship overrides the training.

13. Deprivation super reaction syndrome explains why people go insane over small losses. Munger's neighbor had a 180 degree view of the harbor. the neighbor put in a pine tree about 3 feet high that turned it into a 179 and three-quarter degree view. They had a blood feud that went on for years. The New Coke disaster is the corporate version. Coca-Cola told customers they were changing a flavor and triggered a deprival super reaction so powerful that Pepsi was weeks away from releasing old Coke in a Pepsi bottle. smart engineers. brilliant lawyers. armies of psychologists. All missed it.

14. Envy and jealousy are far more powerful than greed and almost entirely absent from psychology textbooks. Munger says Warren Buffett has said half a dozen times that it is not greed that drives the world but envy. In a thousand-page psychology textbook, the index entry for envy and jealousy is blank. One of the most powerful forces in human behavior and academia essentially ignores it.

15. Gambling addiction is not explained by variable reinforcement alone. Skinner thought he had fully explained gambling by showing that variable reward schedules pound in behavior more powerfully than fixed ones. But the people who design modern slot machines know things Skinner did not. Lotteries where you pick your own number get far more play than lotteries where the number is assigned to you. People who commit to a number believe it has more validity because they chose it. Near misses on slot machines trigger deprival super reaction syndrome. It is four or five psychological tendencies working together, not one.

16. The most dangerous situations are when multiple psychological tendencies combine toward the same end at once. Munger calls this the lollapalooza effect. Tupperware parties use four or five tendencies simultaneously. Moonie conversion methods combine multiple tendencies and work extraordinarily well. alcoholics anonymous achieves a 50% no drinking rate when everything else fails because it also combines multiple tendencies toward a constructive end. The Milgram experiment is not just about obedience. it involves authority bias, consistency and commitment tendency, and contrast effects all working together. That combination turns human brains into mush.

17. Boards of directors are structurally designed to fail as corrective mechanisms. The top executive is the authority figure. He is doing something questionable. You look around, and nobody else is objecting, which is social proof that it is fine. He flies you around in the corporate jet and raises your director fees every year, which triggers reciprocation tendency. Munger's rule: boards only act when the behavior gets so bad it starts making them look foolish or threatens legal liability. That is the only forcing function that reliably works.

18. John Goodfriend of Salomon Brothers destroyed his career and reputation because he did not fire a trusted employee who had lied to the government. Every psychological tendency pointed toward keeping the man. He was a close colleague. His wife was known. He was part of a group that had made over a billion dollars for the firm. He said he had never done it before and would never do it again. Goodfriend looked into his eyes and believed him. The man did it again. The lesson: everyone who gets caught embezzling says they have never done it before and will never do it again. That is what they all say.

19. Darwin avoided confirmation bias by deliberately seeking out disconfirming evidence. Munger says Darwin was not especially smart by ordinary standards of human acuity. Yet he is buried in Westminster Abbey. Munger studied how Darwin worked and realized he had psychological tricks worth learning. Darwin always paid extra attention to evidence that contradicted his theories. Munger started doing the same and credits it as one of the most important intellectual habits of his life.

20. Why is the most important word in communication? Carl Braun designed oil refineries with spectacular skill, and you got fired in his company if you wrote a communication without explaining why. not just who, what, where, and when, but why. Braun knew that in a complex system where things can blow up, a communication system that always explains the reason behind an instruction works dramatically better than one that does not. Forstein, the general counsel of Salomon, told Goodfriend on multiple occasions that he had to report the employee's misconduct. He explained it was the right thing to do. He never explained what would happen to Goodfriend personally if he did not. he failed to use the most powerful tool of persuasion. Goodfriend ignored him. When Goodfriend went down, Forstein went with him.

[Chris Sky 🧱 @chrissaccocia1]

My first 6 hours in Toronto in 6 minutes. 👍

[Sulekha Tripathi @sulekhat95]

INSTEAD OF WATCHING AN HOUR OF NETFLIX TONIGHT.

This 1 hour Stanford lecture by Joel Peterson will teach you more about negotiation and getting what you want than most people learn in years.

Bookmark it and give it an hour, no matter what.

[Tracy smith @browt1971]

Please Stop claiming your choice was “taken away” during the COVID mandates. Nobody dragged you into a chair and forced that shot into your arm. You made a decision under pressure, just like the rest of us did.

I am a frontline healthcare worker in the ER, and I refused the shot because it was rushed, lacked long-term data, and had too many unanswered questions. I watched what was happening firsthand, and I could not in good conscience take it or push it on patients. I made my choice knowing there would be consequences, and I paid for it with my career when I was unlawfully terminated.

What’s insulting is watching vaccinated people now run to social media claiming they were “forced,” “coerced,” or “blackmailed” to escape responsibility for their own decision. The unvaccinated faced the exact same threats — loss of income, public ridicule, discrimination, isolation, and pressure from every direction — yet many of us still stood firm and refused.

You had a choice. We all did. Some people chose comfort, compliance, and fear over standing up for their rights and freedoms. Others accepted the consequences of saying no. But don’t rewrite history now to make yourselves victims while ignoring the people who lost jobs, reputations, friendships, and stability because they refused to comply.

Own the decision you made the same way the rest of us had to own ours.

[Rise Of Alberta @RiseOfAlberta]

🚨 BREAKING: 301,620 signatures have officially been announced for the Alberta independence petition.

That is far beyond the required threshold to trigger the Alberta independence vote on October 19th.

A massive day for the Alberta Independence movement.

[Manisha Mishra @manishamishra24]

You’re using your brain WRONG.

In 2010, Stanford neurologist Dr Frank Longo gave a 2-hour lecture on how memory really works.

Everything you’ve learned about memory is mostly wrong.

His frameworks:
• The Magic 7 rule
• How sleep moves memories to storage
• Use it or lose it

[Maxime Bernier @MaximeBernier]

My message to Albertans.

[First Thought Bu Dou @FirstThoughtDou]

Yes indeed

[Sandra G @Sandra_____G]

Question
Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?

[First Thought Bu Dou @FirstThoughtDou]

Was it real ?

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

In the 1920s, a Stanford psychologist tracked genius children for 50 years.

Malcolm Gladwell breaks down what he discovered:

Rich families → successful. Poor families → failures.

Not average. Failures. Genius-level IQs that produced nothing.

He spent 60 minutes at Microsoft explaining why we're wrong about success:

The psychologist was named Terman. He gave IQ tests to 250,000 California schoolchildren.

He identified the top 0.1%. Kids with IQs of 140 and above.

His hypothesis: these children would become the leaders of academia, industry, and politics.

He tracked them. And tracked them. For decades.

The results split into three groups.

The top 15% achieved real prominence. The middle group had average, moderately successful professional lives.

And the bottom group? By any measure, failures.

The difference wasn't personality. Wasn't habits. Wasn't work ethic.

It was simple: the successful geniuses came from wealthy households. The failures came from poor families.

Poverty is such a powerful constraint that it can reduce a one-in-a-billion brain to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity.

There's a concept called "capitalization rate."

It asks a simple question: what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing?

In inner city Memphis, only 1 in 6 kids with athletic scholarships actually go to college.

If our capitalization rate for sports in the inner city is 16%, imagine how low it must be for everything else.

Here's something stranger.

Gladwell read the birth dates of the 2007 Czech Junior Hockey Team:

January 3rd. January 3rd. January 12th. February 8th. February 10th. February 17th. February 20th. February 24th. March 5th. March 10th. March 26th...

11 of the 20 players were born in January, February, or March.

This isn't unique to the Czechs. Every elite hockey team in the world shows the same pattern. Every elite soccer team too.

Why?

The eligibility cutoff for youth leagues is January 1st.

When you're 10 years old, a kid born in January has 10 months of maturity on a kid born in October. That's 3 or 4 inches of height. The difference between clumsy and coordinated.

So we look at a group of 10 year olds, pick the "best" ones, give them special coaching, extra practice, more games.

We think we're identifying talent. We're just identifying the oldest.

Then we give the oldest more opportunities, and 10 years later they really are the best.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The capitalization rate for hockey talent born in the second half of the year? Close to zero.

We're leaving half of all potential hockey players on the table because of an arbitrary date on a calendar.

Kids born in the youngest cohort of their school class are 11% less likely to go to college.

11% of human potential squandered because we organize elementary school without reference to biological maturity.

Now here's the part about math.

Asian kids dramatically outperform Western kids in mathematics. The gap is enormous and consistent across decades of testing.

Some people say it's genetic. It's not.

It's attitudinal.

When Asian kids face a math problem, they believe effort will solve it.

When Western kids face a math problem, they believe the answer depends on innate ability they either have or don't.

Here's the proof.

The international math tests include a 120-question survey. It asks about study habits, parental support, attitudes.

It's so long most kids don't finish it.

A researcher named Erling Boe decided to rank countries by what percentage of survey questions their kids completed.

Then he compared it to the ranking of countries by math performance.

The correlation was 0.98.

In the history of social science, there has never been a correlation that high.

If you want to know how good a country is at math, you don't need to ask any math questions. Just make kids sit down and focus on a task for an extended period of time.

If they can do it, they're good at math.

Why do Asian cultures have this attitude?

Gladwell's theory: rice farming.

His European ancestors in medieval England worked about 1,000 hours a year. Dawn to noon, five days a week. Winters off. Lots of holidays.

A peasant in South China or Japan in the same period worked 3,000 hours a year.

Rice farming isn't just harder than wheat farming. It's a completely different relationship with work.

There's a Chinese proverb: "A man who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry."

His English ancestors would have said: "A man who works 175 days a year, dawn to 11, may or may not be hungry."

If your culture does that for a thousand years, it becomes part of your makeup.

When your kids sit down to face a calculus problem, that legacy of persistence translates perfectly.

Now consider distance running.

In Kenya, there are roughly a million schoolboys between 10 and 17 running 10 to 12 miles a day.

In the United States, that number is probably 5,000.

Our capitalization rate for distance running is less than 1%.

Kenya's is probably 95%.

The difference isn't genetic. The difference is what the culture values and where it spends its attention.

Here's the most fascinating finding.

30% of American entrepreneurs have been diagnosed with a profound learning disability.

Richard Branson is dyslexic. Charles Schwab is dyslexic. John Chambers can barely read his own email.

This isn't coincidence. Their entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability.

How do you succeed if you can't read or write from early childhood?

You learn to delegate. You become a great oral communicator. You become a problem solver because your entire life is one big problem. You learn to lead.

80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were captain of a high school sports team. Versus 30% of non-dyslexic entrepreneurs.

By the time they enter the real world, they've spent their whole life practicing the four skills at the core of entrepreneurial success: delegation, oral communication, problem solving, and leadership.

Ask them what role dyslexia played in their success and they don't say it was an obstacle.

They say it's the reason they succeeded.

A disadvantage that became an advantage.

Here's what Gladwell wants you to understand:

When we see differences in success, our default explanation is differences in ability.

We forget how much poverty, stupidity, and attitude constrain what people can become.

We refuse to admit that our own arbitrary rules are leaving talent on the table.

We cling to naive beliefs that our meritocracies are fair.

The capitalization argument is liberating.

It says you don't look at a struggling group and conclude they're incapable. It says problems that look genetic or innate are often just failures of exploitation.

It says we can make a profound difference in how well people turn out.

If we choose to pay attention.

This 60 minute Microsoft talk will teach you more about success than every self-help book you've ever read combined.

Bookmark this & give it an hour today, no matter what.

[Ivanka Trump @IvankaTrump]

Loved this video mashup.

Good luck to all the entrepreneurs doing the hard, meaningful work of building!

1. Value is everything
Build something people genuinely want, not something clever.
A business only works if it creates value and can capture it.

2. Solve real, painful problems
The strongest companies remove friction, save time, or eliminate frustration.
If it feels optional, it likely is.

3. Distribution matters as much as product
A great product without reach is invisible.
Winning companies obsess over how they get in front of people.

4. Focus is a competitive advantage
Most people dilute their energy.
Great founders concentrate on a few high-leverage moves and ignore the rest.

5. Speed compounds
Iteration beats perfection.
Launch, learn, refine, repeat, faster than feels comfortable.

6. Simplicity scales
The best businesses are easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to explain.
Complexity is friction disguised as sophistication.

7. Mindset is not soft, it is structural
Resilience, long-term thinking, and tolerance for discomfort are not personality traits, they are requirements.

8. Build for longevity, not noise
Short-term hacks create spikes.
Enduring companies are built on trust, brand, and consistency.

9. Leverage is the force multiplier that transforms effort into scale.
Technology, media, capital, and people multiply output.
The goal is not to work harder, but to work in systems that scale.

10. Execution is the separator
Ideas are abundant.
Relentless, disciplined execution is rare.

The essence : find a meaningful problem, solve it simply, distribute it aggressively, and execute with focus over the long term.

[Lola @justkeeprunin71]

The curse of awareness.

[First Thought Bu Dou @FirstThoughtDou]

Gosflesh is good

[Peak Thinkers @PeakThinkers_]

This 45 minute study skills masterclass will teach you more about memorization than every “how to study” video you’ve ever watched combined.

Bookmark this & give it 45 minutes today. It’ll be the most productive thing you do this month.