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Managed Reality, Two-Step Potential Theory and Why You Should Die With Zero
The 3 best things I learned last month.
Hey friends! We fly home tomorrow so I’m writing a quick newsletter to enjoy my last day of relaxing.
Here’s a quick recap of a few fun things I learned last month.
1) Managed Reality
I can’t get the concept of “Managed Reality” out of my head.
It was an ethereal concept I had been thinking about for over a year but didn’t have a robust name to describe.
Until 2 weeks ago. Eric Weinstein landed the term on Modern Wisdom and instantly it made sense.
Combine it with this Mike Benz interview with Tucker and it’s hard to believe there is a single entity on the planet responsible for disseminating large swaths of information that isn’t captured by some form of special interest.
People are trustworthy. Organizations are not. Which is a real shame because society only runs because of mutual trust.
Anyone with an ounce of agency feels like they’ve been gaslit enough to be the Hindenburg in the last 4 years.
At this point your best bet is to assume the entire internet has been astroturfed and act in accordance with that.
I’m going to be writing a longer extended distillation on this, it has been digging at me for a long time and I need to write it down to formulate a full understanding.
2) Two-Step Potential Theory
“Two-Step Potential Theory is a lovely blending of individual agency with real-world limitations.
Your efforts have tons of control over your outcomes, within the range that your world’s limitations will allow.
Behavioural genetics teaches us that on average, around 50% of everything we are psychologically is inherited from our parents.
Boo – 50% of our outcomes are limited by our genetics.
Yes, but that also means that 50% of them are up to you.
This is yet another reason to only compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
It’s another reason to try lots of things until you find the intersection of something you love and something you’re good at.
Because somewhere, you will have a pursuit where your range essentially has an unlimited ceiling, and once you find it, it’s all on you to maximize that potential.” - Chris Williamson
3) Die With Zero
An enlightening read from Bill Perkins on why everything you’ve been taught about saving for retirement is wrong.
It gives educated rebuttals to most people’s biggest objections:
What about the kids?
When do I stop working?
But I love my job!
That can’t actually be possible!
I finished it this week while away. Here are a couple of great excerpts:
Another principle: Although we all have at least the potential to make more money in the future, we can never go back and recapture time that is now gone. So it makes no sense to let opportunities pass us by for fear of squandering our money. Squandering our lives should be a much greater worry.
Unlike material possessions, which seem exciting at the beginning but then often depreciate quickly, experiences actually gain in value over time: They pay what I call a memory dividend.
If you really think through the implications of saying that your legacy consists of experiences with your children, the conclusion you reach might be somewhat radical: That is, once you have enough money to take care of your family’s basic needs, then by going to work to earn more money, you might actually be depleting your kids’ inheritance because you are spending less time with them!
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