Table of Contents
I started reading “Skin in the game” by Nassim Taleb last week. I had already read Antifragile and thought I would likely feel bored since everything I hear about Taleb’s writings is that if you already read something from him you already read everything, but that’s not what I’ve felt so far. It might be too early to say since I haven’t even finished reading the prologue yet and still I have some other things I need to write down before I go on.
Reality check
The first part of the prologue already got me: I’ve been an “idealistic” person since a kid, I always dreamt and created stories in my mind, some of which helped me to be more creative, but I had a really tough time managing it through my teen/early adulthood years to actually apply them in a functional way. This over-idealistic approach is actually dysfunctional because often times I would find myself dreaming about the best outcome of my efforts but I would quickly give up when I found difficulties or - even worse - I would think (unconsciously) that doing the bare minimum would be enough to reach my objectives. The result? I would get extremely frustrated or the “I am incapable of actually doing anything” thought would suffocate me.
Truth is, reality doesn’t care about my ideas - it just is. You can’t separate anything from what it actually represents in the reality.
What can I actually do about it? The answer is actually pretty straightforward, I need to adapt the mental model I have about reality. This means getting frustrated, reality checks over and over again, and over time, these frustrations can actually improve your mental models and make them more accurate, hence your expectations get some sort of calibration.
Simple and straightforward doesn’t mean it’s easy to apply, yet, just like reality, it’s just the way it is.
But is reality simple?
If reality was simple, then no one would have so much frustration before they all achieve the perfect mental model.
With that in mind, why should you care for other people’s advice, considering that they too have mental models and they might have imperfections?
Taleb pretty much solves it with the idea that you should never hear advice from someone that gives advice for a living (unless they suffer a penalty for being wrong). There, skin in the game.
But responsibility doesn’t stop there, everyone should be accounted for for the things they tell themselves and others; they should never tell everyone how great they are, they must show it, prove it, otherwise, it’s just talk.
This means that someone that is responsible and can be accountable will suffer the consequences, good or bad. Either way, this is an organic way of improvement. Frustration and pain can feel enemies but they’re actually the best things that nurture our capabilities (pathemata mathemata).
When things get hard
When things get complicated, it feels impossible to find a solution. That’s when you should fallback (not only fallback, you can actually just use this concept) to the via negativa. Eliminate every option that is not the solution. That’s the whole idea, and it helps me a lot to crawl out of rabbit holes when I start thinking about personal and professional problems.
In conclusion, there’s no actual painless or frustration-less way of learning and evolving in life, but that should not be a reason to stop, it’s just knowledge and with that knowledge I can improve my “over-idealistic” mental model to something more realistic, more functional (and still maintain my creativity and some of my crazy ideas).