One of my favorite characters in The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the dwarf Gimli. He begins as a pompous, proud dwarf and transforms into someone fiercely loyal, courageous, and funny.
There’s a great moment in the last movie, just as they’re about to make their final assault. They review the plan, and Gimli remarks – “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?”
It’s a line I think about often – partly for the grim humor in facing absurd odds, but mostly for the reminder that courage means acting anyway.
Whenever you’re starting something new, it helps to begin with hypotheses.
Hypotheses aren’t facts or certainties — just assumptions about how things might play out.
The next task is to test them. Use every conversation to stress-test your idea. Harsh criticism is especially valuable because it reveals weaknesses quickly.
After twenty such conversations, your hypothesis will either collapse or sharpen into a thesis worth acting on.
Growing up, we used to have teachers call the television “the idiot box.” Spend too much time in front of the TV and we’ll all become idiots, they’d say. I was reminded of this when I learnt about “the reverse Flynn effect.”
The Flynn effect is the observed, long-term rise in fluid and crystallized intelligence (IQ) test scores across the 20th century, named after researcher James Flynn. In measures of general intelligence (GIQ), verbal intelligence (VIQ) and non-verbal intelligence (NIQ), scores tended up for every decade since world war II…
… until 2010.
Baz, Sezerel, et al, found the trend to be consistently downward since.
Across both boys and girls – with a stronger effect on girls.
While some of the biggest drops came during the COVID-19 pandemic, these trends have been heading downward since before 2020 – across both teens and adults.
That brings me back to the idiot box.
When I was growing up, we needed to go the idiot box, turn it on, and watch.
The difference now is that we’ve got a portable version of this idiot box in our pockets. And these trends are just the first-order effects.
Our phones are not just making us stupid. They’re making us angrier and more depressed.
Either we learn to use them carefully or they use us.
Our World in Data has a useful analysis of how the UK has some of the safest roads on the planet.
It wasn’t always this way. Road deaths per billion miles driven have plummeted since the 1950s.
The first big infrastructure change they made since the 1950s was investment in motorways. Globally, motorways have far lower fatalities due to lesser head-on collisions, no pedestrians, etc.
The second big change was roundabouts. Roundabouts are just way safer than traffic lights and stop signs because there are just fewer collision opportunities and those are mostly slower and sideways vs. head on.
Third, strict enforcement of penalties for drunken driving.
And, finally, strict speed limits have drastically reduced the number of children dying on British roads. I saw this first-hand in London where the speed limit is 20 miles per hour and it is strictly observed.
Overall, these statistics are impressive. There’s a lot everyone can learn from the British transport authority.
There are two big challenges in giving good advice.
1. Tailoring it to the receiver.
It’s easy to simply share what worked (or didn’t work) for us or for someone we perceive to be in a similar situation. It’s harder to empathize with the person in front of us and frame the advice in a way that fits their situation. That’s why useful advice often comes in the form of frameworks derived from first principles. They give the receiver a tool to adapt for themselves.
2. Timing it well.
Even the best advice falls flat if it arrives when the receiver isn’t ready to hear it. This requires empathy, intuition, and emotional intelligence – knowing when someone is open to guidance and when they’re not.
Good advice, as a result, is less about wisdom delivered and more about wisdom received.
It’s okay to have a plan that looks five steps ahead. But overthinking those distant steps usually leads to worry and paralysis.
What matters is the sequence – doing the next right thing, then the one after that.
By the time we reach step five, the landscape will have shifted anyway.
Our ability to generate clarity isn’t a function of accurately predicting the future. It comes from sharing the direction, clearly articulating the sequence of steps, and then moving through it one step at a time.
The long-term effectiveness of any team or organization is inversely proportional to the number of people who optimize for convenience.
That’s why small, mission-driven teams often accomplish so much.
It’s rarely just about exceptional talent.
It’s about a collective willingness to embrace inconvenience – to do the harder, slower, less comfortable thing because the mission/longer term objective matters more.
Much of growing up socially is balancing making the effort to make friends with curiosity and openness while not feeling the need to be someone you’re not.
A Learning a Day 