by Nathan Coumbe

Fractals, recursions, and setbacks in life

In Jurassic Park (pp. 189-190), Ian Malcolm discusses the idea of fractals and recursion.

In short, a small part of something will look the same as a bigger part of that something. For example, the peak of a mountain will look similar in shape to a small piece of that mountain if you were to put it under a microscope.

He claims that this is also true of events.

Think of a graph in the stock market. A line graph mapping a single day in the stock market will look similar to a week in the stock market if you zoom out. Zoom out again; that week will look the same as a year in the stock market if you zoom out. The ups and downs of each frame will look quite similar.

The same is true for each of our lives. The line mapping the “good things” in our lives will go up, and then something akin to a stock market crash will drive it back down.

You’ll see this in your day: perhaps you’re incredibly productive in the morning, but a bad meeting can send your day’s plan careening off in another direction.

Your week will have a series of good days, followed by awful days where someone cuts you off in traffic and sends you flying into a tree. Or perhaps your child comes down with the flu, and you’re cleaning up vomit for the next three days.

You’ll have a series of great months, thinking everything is about to turn around this year, then your father dies, devastating your family and all the plans you had imagined.

Like the stock market, your life will go up, then fall. And if you survive it, you can rest assured it will happen again. It is inevitable.

“We have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational, change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is.” —Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

by Nathan Coumbe

Love and mastery

What topic do you most connect with?

What subject fills you with an almost religious fervor?

What do you spend your time thinking and learning about, regardless of what you’re paid to do?

This feeling of love for a field might be pointing you toward something worth mastering.

by Nathan Coumbe

Expertise must come before audience

We have the process backward for becoming well-known.

The current wisdom is to become famous (most likely on social media) to obtain a big audience. Once you have said audience, you can make a living off them by selling their attention or whatever random idea you decide to push.

However, the opposite approach is not only less sleazy but will also lead to lasting rather than fleeting success.

Imagine building a huge following on social media, then selling financial advice (or God forbid, products!) to that audience without knowing anything about the field. You’d quickly be labeled a fraud or scam artist. (Unfortunately, this happens every day.)

If, instead, you started by building your expertise in the field of finance, then built an audience who would benefit from your knowledge, you would have a group of people who trusted you. And trust is almost as good as currency in the modern economy.

by Nathan Coumbe

Philosophy, History, and Business – You Need All Three

Why is it considered strange that my bookshelves are full of history, philosophy, and business texts? Furthermore, why is there a cultural push to make people choose between those seemingly disparate subjects?

If you want to study business, you must go all in on it. There is no room for history or philosophy. Or so the prevailing wisdom says.

But that’s ridiculous! Let’s put aside the fact that some of history’s most outstanding leaders were business people as well as great leaders, philosophers, and students of history.

You cannot be a well-rounded citizen without these three subjects combined. One helps you understand yourself and what’s right; another enables you to understand the world and why things are how they are; and the third teaches you how to serve others while making a living yourself.

When combined, all three do a bit of each and compound the effects.

We need more polymaths, Renaissance Men (and women!), and multipotentialites, not fewer. Stop stressing over “picking,” and follow your interests wherever they lead.

by Nathan Coumbe

Health insurance doesn’t cover gym memberships

Why not?

Most are outrageously expensive (the one I used to attend just raised its prices to $120 per month).

Most people can’t afford to purchase home gym equipment and do not have the space to store it.

Yet, having a place to go to manage one’s health might be the single best investment these companies could make in their customers.

It would save them, and their customers, a fortune in health care costs (i.e., improve their bottom lines… What they really care about).

This would be a no-brainer if it were actually “health” insurance. But that’s not what they sell—they sell medical care insurance.

It’s a case of reactive thinking (treating the illness) versus proactive thinking (preventing the illness from occurring).

by Nathan Coumbe

Two types of happiness

Hedonic Happiness: Happiness that comes from the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

Eudaemonic Happiness: Happiness that comes from living a meaningful life.

You say you want one, but do your actions speak otherwise?

Subscribe to receive the blog directly in your inbox!

by Nathan Coumbe

Reward the effort, not the outcome

Children flourish if parents reward their efforts rather than outcomes.

Annie Duke’s decision-making education makes it clear that good decisions don’t always result in good outcomes. All decisions involve luck to a certain degree, so neither we nor our children can control how things might turn out.

Sometimes, a good decision leads to a bad outcome, and other times, a bad decision leads to a good outcome. This means we must reinforce good decision-making first and foremost, not just praise decisions that lead to results we like.

This is not to say that all children deserve a participation trophy. It means that we should appropriately reward good effort (i.e., good decisions) and discourage bad decisions, even if they lead to a positive outcome.

The “how” of achievement matters as much, if not more, than the “what.”

Receive the blog directly in your inbox!

by Nathan Coumbe

The “Slip Box” method for career planning

Modern science texts tell high school students that they must first formulate a hypothesis and then conduct experiments to determine whether or not that hypothesis is true.

But that’s the opposite of what Charles Darwin did. He didn’t start out with a developed idea for the theory of natural selection. When he set out aboard the S.S. Beagle and traveled to the Galapagos Islands, he had no hypothesis.

Instead, Darwin set out to observe and collect notes and ideas.

The accumulation of these observations, learnings, ideas, and notes led to the formulation of a hypothesis and the subsequent development of the theory. He worked from the ground up, not from a hypothesis backward, like the “slip box” note-taking approach explained by Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes.*

Cal Newport’s advice in So Good They Can’t Ignore You seems similar in this regard. Common career advice is to find something you’re “passionate” about and find a way to make that passion fit a job or career. But he argues the opposite—passion comes after someone develops experience in a job, skill, or career path. It’s not the catalyst (at least not in most cases).

One could argue that the “Slip Box” approach taken by researchers and scientists—gathering lots of ideas first, then developing an argument—would similarly benefit career planning.

Don’t start with a predetermined passion or career path. Instead, begin with exploration, discovery, and experimentation.

The result will be a fully fleshed-out and rewarding career with passion as the byproduct.

*Ahrens’s book is one of my favorites and directly responsible for my ability to write as much as I do.

The premise is simple to understand: collect ideas and write notes to yourself about your thoughts when reading, studying, or observing without worrying about “what it’s for. Over time, you’ll have collected so many ideas and come up with so many original ideas that different arguments and hypotheses will form almost of their own accord.

by Nathan Coumbe

Atomic writing

Atomic Habits by James Clear consistently tops every bestseller list.

And for good reason: if you follow the ideas, you’ll improve your habits. Improve your habits, and you improve your days. Improve your days, and you improve your life.

What’s the saying? “Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”

Emerson definitely said it better than I. But it means the same thing: your daily habits lead to your lasting legacy.

Which brings me to an idea I presented to someone the other day.

A friend told me he wanted to write. And he’d considered going the “Stephen King” route, writing 2,000 words a day, but he seemed daunted by that prospect.

I agreed. That’s a lot to commit to at the beginning. So I suggested he go the Atomic Habits route instead.

What’s the smallest version of that habit he could reasonably commit to?

My idea: write one sentence every day. Then don’t break the streak.

I find it hard to believe that anyone reading this can’t come up with at least one original thought every day.

It doesn’t have to be brilliant. In fact, I guarantee that 50% of your ideas will be “below average.” But so what? Half my blog posts are below average—that’s the definition!

It doesn’t have to be brilliant—it just has to exist! Do that for 30 days, and the 31st sentence will be infinitely better than the 1st one.

A writer writes. So be a writer and start writing!

by Nathan Coumbe

The greater the risk, the greater the reward

I often ask (and I’m sure you do too) why all these brilliant “bad guys” in the world don’t put their skills to use for good?

Oddly enough, I found an answer in an unlikely (or, depending on your worldview, very likely) place: investing.

Scott Galloway, in his book The Algebra of Wealth, discusses the ratios of risk to reward in the stock market. For many high-risk investments, the reward is outrageous, but the risk is destructive.

So the obvious answer to the question is that bad guys make more money via crime than if they put those same skills to use for a legitimate employer.

They have massive potential upside, potentially millions of dollars.

But the downside is worse than what most are willing to pay: risking lengthy prison sentences isn’t appealing to most people who would also love to make $50 million in a few hours. But for a select few, it’s the lifestyle they want.

So, you probably already knew this, but some things are worth putting into words.