A Learning a Day

Chinese company BYD’s new Super-E platform is expected to add 400 kms/250 miles in 5 minutes (chart source: The Independent).

My thesis has been simple and unchanging over the past five years – outside of remote areas, electric vehicles will become the default in 20 years. Not because they’re the “right thing to do” or because they’re good for the environment. Simply because they’re better technology.

A key attribute of better technology is faster speed of innovation and improvement. And, in every sense, EV tech has been on a tear in the past five years.

This breakthrough from BYD might be one of the bigger ones of the decade – it solves the “range anxiety” problem for longer distance commutes and makes it no different that stopping for gas.

The crazy thing about the innovation here is just how quickly BYD has pulled ahead of Tesla. BYD’s latest innovation means their battery technology is four times better than Tesla’s Model Y – which was many times better than any alternative just three or so years ago.

Tesla’s Model Y has been the best-selling car globally in the past two years. But such results are a lagging indicator. These results show Tesla being completely outplayed.

It’ll be a while before we see the results of this play out – but it is inspiring to see the pace of innovation delivered here.

John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times had some interesting research to share.

Students aside, adults are also scoring lower in reasoning and problem-solving tests.

The share of adults with “basic” abilities has been rising rapidly across developed nations. As with the previous graph, there’s a notable inflection point around 2012.

Again, we see that inflection point around 2012 followed by a steep rise up in our ability to think/concentrate or learn new things.

I call out 2012 because that was around the time we saw rapid increases in smartphone adoption. As Noah Smith points out – “Everyone worries about the changes to human society and cognition that AI will bring, but social-media-enabled smartphones have already crashed into humanity like a meteor, and we’ve barely begun to adapt or even to reckon with the change.”

An inability to think deeply about problems impacts our ability to work, to make better financial decisions, and to elect leaders who will solve the most important problems.

That’s especially hard to do when the competitor is a catchy 30 second video on TikTok.

Needless to say, this isn’t a good thing.

But the first step to solving a problem is to recognize that it exists.

Money that is saved and then invested compounds over time.

It follows then that we must save and invest consistently.

On the flip side, money invested in an experience also has a long-term impact. When you take an unforgettable trip with people you love, the memories from that experience stay with you and get sweeter over time.

So, money well spent gives out memory dividends over time too.

One isn’t necessarily a better choice than the other. But I think it is fair to say that ignoring either isn’t optimal strategy.

Like most things in life, it is on us to find the right balance between both at every stage in our life.

“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future. If
you want to find someoneʼs true age, listen to them. If they talk about
the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they
did, theyʼve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their
aspirations, what theyʼre still looking forward to – theyʼre young.ˮ | Peter Attia, Outlive

Beautifully put. It resonated.

When Howard Schultz first raised $1.6M for Il Giornale (which would eventually become Starbucks), he pitched 242 investors. 217 said no – a 90% rejection rate.

Good perspective for the next time we feel discouraged about things not going our way.

Aswath shared a post a couple weeks ago that I’ve thought about a few times since.

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There’s a pressure to have goals and wants. We make it a point to ask kids and adults what their goals are. What do you want to be when you grow up?! Where do you see yourself in 5 years?! 

I suppose there are benefits of having a future vision, but goals also take up lifetime and mind space, and make you defer contentment and just be-ing. 

I know of at least a handful of people who wanted to be managers, advisors, or startup founders. They like the idea of it – the title or the perception of being a leader. But they end up disliking the job. I know people, myself included, who want to have a good community and circle of friends, but hate the process of meeting new people. Most people want to look fit, but dislike the routine of exercise and diet. 

For all your current and future aspirations, ask yourself if you’d actually enjoy the day-to-day and whole lifestyle aspect of attaining it and living it once you get it. If not, free up your mind for stuff that does meet the bar or just being at peace. 

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There were two ideas in the post that have stayed with me.

The first about picking goals where we see ourselves enjoying the process. I chuckled at the examples – I’ve either seen them first hand or lived them

The other theme is one about intentional trade-offs. Some goals/objectives are worth the trade-offs. In other cases, trading the goals off gives us peace of mind.

Either way, choose intentionally.

Charles Duhigg wrapped up his book Supercommunicators with an excerpt about the Grant study. 

The Grant study is a famous 85+ year longitudinal study that started in 1938. It tracked a group of adults, then their spouses and kids for over 70 years. The story of the study is in itself fascinating – it was first funded by a businessman trying to figure out what characteristics he should be looking for while hiring storekeepers. After funding the study with $7 million over 20 years, he pulled off funding because he didn’t believe he was getting his money’s worth.

Then, in 1970, a group of psychiatrics pulled out the study results and journals and found an immense wealth of research about participants over time. So they began secured funding and began doing follow ups.

The most fascinating stories were those of people who were expected to succeed before the break. However, many of these turned out to be depressed human beings who were sad and lonely. And vice versa.

When the researchers eventually analyzed seven decades of data, they found some correlations.

Having loving parents made it easier to find happiness.

Possessing genes related to physical hardness and longevity was helpful, as was exercise and eating well.

Access to good education early in life as well as a lifelong commitment to learning also provided a leg up.

But one thing mattered more than anything else in terms of clearly predicting if a person was happy in their life – the quality of their relationships.

The people who were most satisfied in the relationships at age 50 were the healthiest and happiest at age 80. One researcher put it bluntly – “The most defining factor for happiness and satisfaction of life is love, not romantic love, but the love and connection with our friends, family, coworkers and their community.”

In sum, love and connectedness was causal to success and happiness. 

At the end of every round trip around the sun, I write a summary of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt. They’re like software release notes and this is version 36. As I think of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt, I look for the biggest ways I’ve changed how I operate. To learn and not to do is not to learn after all.

To that end, if v35 from 365 days ago looked at v36, here are the 3 most striking changes –

(1) Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome: This was the biggest learning from a challenging experience last year. I love the idea that “words are containers.” My incentives container was shallow and had little meaning attached to it. That experience deepened it and filled it with meaning.

This has transformed how I get things done. I spend significantly lesser time getting upset or annoyed at behavior that seems counter intuitive to me. Instead, I take the time to study the incentive and change it where I can.

It is hard to over-state how much of a change this is. While it has undoubtedly made me more effective, it is hard to overstate how peace it has brought to my day to day.

(2) Daily reading of 5 principles: The toughest experiences are amazing laboratories for learning. The same experience that taught me about incentives also instilled an urgency to crystallize my principles / my approach to life.

I had versions of this floating around – a mission statement, a collection of ideas from stoic philosophy and lessons I’d learnt, etc. I synthesized all these into 5 ideas I now read every morning. It grounds me and reminds me of the “what” and the “how” in my approach to life.

Years of writing here have taught me that effective learning is all about having the right system of reminders. I finally learnt that lesson.

(3) Health as the real #1 priority: I’d begun the journey of moving health to the top of the priority list at this time last year. But I don’t think I’d have foreseen the changes that have followed.

I’ve written extensively about this (thanks to Peter Attia, Casey Means, and Kelly + Juliet Starrett)- from changes to my diet and lifestyle, experiments with the continuous glucose monitor, daily mobility exercises, and so on. The difference, prior to this year, was that health was what I squeezed in when everything else was manageable.

Now everything is squeezed in once health is taken care of.

With that said, onward.

Until v37.

(past birthday notes/version updates :) –35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23).

There was an interesting thread about social identities and communication in Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators.

The first is that a reminder of these identities have a noticeable impact in our behavior. For example, without any intervention, studies with graduate level students found that women consistently performed consistently worse than men in math tests. That’s because, by default, they were aware of a stereotype that women are worse at math than men.

However, in tests where these women were reminded of other identities, e.g. that of a puzzle-solver or a successful sportsperson, the performance differences disappeared.

These identities matter a ton in communication because conflicts escalate when they move from being about the topic to being perceived as threatening the person’s identity.

That’s where motivational interviewing comes in. With tricky issues, motivational interviewing focuses on asking questions to help a person understand both sides of an issue and why they might be for against it.

The goal isn’t to persuade – it is to simply understand both sides of the issues and reinforce that there are other identities they could choose. He made the point with fascinating examples involving polarizing issues such as gun rights and vaccines.

All in all, two takeaways –
(1) Conflicts often escalate because of a perceived threat to a social identity.
(2) Motivational interviewing is a useful tool in such situation to better understand how a person might think of both sides of an issue.

Often, the hard part isn’t acting on feedback. It is being attuned to the environment to know when you got some.