“You are not in the mountains. The mountains are in you.”

<ul><li>While mountaineering isn't everyone's cup of tea, everyone can benefit from the valuable lessons learned on the mountains. One wrong decision can lead to injury or death</li><li>Mountaineering is an inherently dangerous sport, and it requires diligent training, endless planning, and meticulous discipline</li><li>However, there are many important life lessons that can be applied to other parts of your personal & professional life</li></ul>

What climbing mountains can teach you about your personal and professional life

<ul><li>Embracing discomfort is the first step to becoming a mountaineer.</li><li>Push through the discomfort because you know that when you do, you will feel stronger and more capable.</li><li>Find your way of getting out of your comfort zone and challenging your limitations.</li></ul>

Learning how to be comfortable being uncomfortable

<ul><li>In mountain climbing, break each climb into smaller milestones and focus only on making it to the next milestone</li><li>Cherishing small wins motivates you to keep going and eventually, you reach your big goal</li><li>This does not mean you should not strive towards big goals, just give yourself enough credit for small wins.</li></ul>

Focusing on the small wins over the big goals

<ul><li>Turning around and giving up on a summit objective after months of hard training and preparation can be excruciatingly painful.</li><li>When it's not safe for you to continue climbing, your goal of summitting gets deprioritized in lieu of the (hopefully) more important goal of staying alive.</li></ul>

Reframing "failure" into re-prioritization

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

Important Life Lessons I Learned from Mountaineering

A ritual is an activity that eases a person into a focused mindset.  In Zen monasteries, even activities like bathing and eating are ritualized and given the complete attention of practitioners. This encourages a mindful approach to tasks. Rituals can be as simple as taking a walk at a particular time of day, baking bread, or cleaning your space.

Rituals can enrich your life

Routine implies a rigid sense of structure, with time management and prioritized productivity. A ritual might resemble an everyday routine. But instead of limiting yourself to a defined ideal, you focus on the specifics of the process. For example, rituals can be an artistic process, a meditation, a communal celebration, or a simple act of observation.

Ritual vs routine

A ritual may seem overly simplistic or devoid of meaning to outsiders. Artists are inseparable from their creative output. For example, writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras always wears a distinct “muted blue ultramarine” shaded garment when working, as picturing the colour helps her concentrate and enter “a somnambulistic trance.” Likewise, the novelist Toni Morrison would wake at 5 am, make coffee, and watch the sunrise.

Your ritual might seem silly or odd to others

Whether it's a daily or celebratory ritual, experimenting can help to find a ritual that feels good to you. The intent is key. Ensure to have some context for the ritual or an idea of why you're doing it. What is important is the mindset that you bring to the practice.

Experiment and have fun with rituals

What’s the difference between a ritual and a routine? Rituals can help you approach basic tasks with more mindfulness.

habits

Habits

Why we need rituals, not routines

There are two big questions you need to ask yourself here:<ul><li>Why do you want to make a podcast? That's important to keep in mind so that you can stay motivated, even when you're finding it difficult to get a show out.</li><li>Who are you making this podcast for? A lot of smart people talk about creating listener personas or avatars. It's a good idea, sketching out exactly who it is that you'd like to listen to your content. That persona is something to keep in mind every time you plan an episode.</li></ul>

Planning Your Podcast

If you already have an audience built around something other than your podcast, then it's a good opportunity for laying the foundations of the show's fanbase. <ul><li>During the planning stages, you may opt to survey your audience, to find out their current pain points and struggles. This could help you shape your content, going forward.</li><li>You might even choose to find out a bit more about them. This could be anything from demographics and location, to what other podcasts (if any) they enjoy listening to.</li></ul>

Having An Audience Before Starting A Podcast

Most podcasters kick things off by talking “into the void”.Here's some good news: surveys show that potential new listeners don't care if they've never heard of you. In fact, it's the least important factor they'll consider when weighing up whether or not to hit play.

Having No Audience Before Starting A Podcast

Whether you're providing information that will help someone to lose weight, or doing a really entertaining interview with one of your favorite authors you're providing value for your listener.Not only have you given them a reason to listen, but you've also given them a reason to come back for more. It's important to think about this in the planning stages. Can you write down 10-15 potential episodes that you think your target audience would love to listen to?

Give Your Audience a Reason to Listen

<ul><li>Option 1 – The Clever Name: You might think of a really clever name for your show. But remember that people need to be able to find it when they’re searching for information about your topic.</li><li>Option 2 – The Descriptive Name: The searchable choice is to simply call your podcast what your target audience is searching for( for example, The Fitness Podcast).</li><li>Option 3 – Using Your Own Name: This is pretty much a no-no unless you’ve already got an audience. You can incorporate this into your show’s name along with something descriptive (‘Rock Climbing, with Mike Smith’). </li></ul>

Naming Your Podcast

Ultimately your episode lengths should be decided by two things.<ul><li>Your content</li><li>Your audience.</li></ul>How long does it need to be to get the message out? If you asked most podcast listeners, a “short” episode would probably be anything under 15 minutes. And a “long” episode would probably be anything over an hour.Many will reference the time of the average commute (said to be around 20 minutes) as a good length to shoot for. But anything from 20 up to 45 minutes seems to be within the “sweet spot” for an episode length.

The Lenght of A Podcast Episode

The best schedule is normally the most frequent one that you can stick to, on a regular basis. So, if you can only manage once a month, that’s fine. If you can manage every 2 weeks, even better. If you can manage weekly, then that’s great.You can still have a big impact with a fortnightly, or monthly show, but people plan their lives around what day of the week it is. It’s the routine at the forefront of our lives, and tapping into it can be powerful.

How Often Should You Release New Episodes?

Just like choosing a name for your podcast, choosing good, searchable, descriptive titles for your episodes is important.<ul><li>The biggest mistake when it comes to naming your episodes is to call them “Episode 1”, “Episode 2”, and so on. Nobody’s going to know what to expect if they listen. </li><li>Make it clear to people what they will get from listening to your show. And make sure that you are delivering in the episode what you promised in the title.</li></ul>The extra benefit of this is that Apple/iTunes allows searching by episode name.

Choosing Good Episode Titles

The common types of podcast show formats:<ul><li>The Solo Show</li><li>The Co-Hosted Show</li><li>The Interview Show.</li></ul>There are a bunch of other formats that aren't so commonly used but might well suit you.For example:<ul><li>Roundtable – One regular host and a number of guests, talking through one specific topic </li><li>Documentary – A narrator walks you through a range of interviews, conversations, and on-location clips to paint a picture</li><li>Docu-Drama – Offering learning and info, but in an entertaining way.</li></ul>

Choosing a Podcast Format

The bare minimum you need to record a podcast is a computer with a USB microphone and access to the internet. As a general rule, though, the more limited and lower cost of your setup and equipment, the more limited the sound quality of your show will be.Simple USB microphone setups can give good results if you choose the right mic. Plus, you are much better to get started and see whether you enjoy it before forking out big sums of money on audio equipment.

Recording Equipment

When you plug your USB microphone into your computer, you will need some software to actually record and edit the audio. There are a few options for this: <ul><li>Audacity: a good quality, free-of-charge audio editing application. For the majority of people, it caters to all your podcasting needs.</li><li>Adobe Audition: Pro-level production tool – steep learning curve, but great workflow, and feature-rich. It's available through a paid subscription.</li><li>Alitu: The Podcast Maker: the easiest possible experience. This is a web app that can automate audio cleanup, adding music and publishing to your host. </li></ul>

Recording & Editing Software

The intimate nature of podcasting is far more suited to being a conversation, as opposed to a sermon. So try to wean yourself off a fully scripted show with bullet points of everything you want to cover. This will become easier over time with practice until eventually writing a full script will seem unnecessary.The way you open and close your episodes is really important too.

 Scripting your Show

<ul><li>There’s no rule to say your show must have music, but many podcasters stick some at the beginning and end to add that extra layer of professionalism.</li><li>You don’t want to have a piece of music playing on its own for any longer than 10 seconds. If you do this, it can really start to grate (especially for binge listeners) and you're going to train your audience to start hitting the skip button.</li><li>There are many websites that have music you can legally use on your podcast. This type of music will usually be referred to as royalty-free, stock, or library music.</li></ul>

Music for your Podcast

Cover Art. Having attractive cover art that stands out is vital when your show lines up against thousands of others in the Apple Podcasts or Spotify directories.  Choosing Your Podcast Hosting. You’ll need a podcast hosting account, sometimes called a media host. Media or Podcast hosts are services that store your audio and allow your listeners to listen, download, and subscribe to your podcast.

Publishing Your Podcast

These are the places where listeners can discover, subscribe to, and download it.Any good host will have a decent set of auto-submit or guided-submission tools. So, they make it easy to get your show into Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and other popular spots.One common misconception when learning how to start a podcast is that you upload your podcast to places like iTunes. This actually isn’t the case. You need to sign up with a media hosting service to host your audio files, and you can either have a website set up on their site to deliver them, or place them on your own website.

Submitting to Directories

Learn how to start a podcast, and launch your show! This complete step-by-step beginners guide goes from initial idea to going live.

podcasts

Podcasts

How to Start a Podcast: Every Single Step for 2022

Abundance is a paradox. Environments of abundance are bad for the median consumer but extremely good for a small number of conscious ones. Average consumers are doomed to the tyranny of instinct. Meanwhile, consumers at the top are propelled by unlimited access to nutritious food and information.
The best metaphor is health, where obesity rates and the number of people in incredible shape are both rising. That’s why 71% of American adults are obese, while the people I see at Equinox in Manhattan have bodies that are as sculpted as a Greek statue.

Abundance: Both Good And Bad

<ul>
<li>Americans are overweight, not because of scarcity but because of abundance — just like the news. </li>
<li>At the same time, wealthy and health-conscious Americans have never been in better physical shape. </li>
</ul>
The healthiest people control their diet with surgical precision. They have access to state-of-the-art workout facilities, wearable health technology, and fresh foods to match their dietary goals. They walk with six-pack abs and arms like the Incredible Hulk, while they walk with the can’t-lose swagger of Connor McGregor at a UFC fight.

Two Worlds At The Same Time

News and food consumption are near-perfect metaphors. We already use terms like “food for thought,” “I need to digest an idea,” and “she has a thirst for knowledge.” This is also why writing is so healthy for the mind. Just as you’ll improve your food diet if you start cooking, you’ll improve your information diet if you start writing.Just as eating healthy is an everyday battle, the Internet makes it hard to find nutrient-dense information. It’s absolutely possible, but it demands deliberate effort. The Internet increases variance in outcomes. More good and more bad.

Food Is Like News

Gresham’s Law is a finance concept that states that bad money drives out good money until only bad money is left. This law can explain why the median consumer reads low-quality information online. On the Internet, low-quality content drives out high-quality content, as the most wide-read articles are polarizing and emotionally jarring. First, they distort the truth by eliminating nuance and adding emotional charge to important topics. If you check almost any major publication, the most popular stories are opinionated and fear-inducing, drawing readers in.

Gresham’s Law 

The Explore Tab on Twitter is the most important newspaper in the world. It’s littered with celebrity gossip and exaggerated political drama — both of which yield a wide reach but incentivize empty content.
And yet, as the Paradox of Abundance predicts, Twitter is also one of the world’s top intellectual communities. It’s the bedrock of most of our social and intellectual life. It’s a place to make friends, raise your ambitions, and connect directly with people at the top of their fields. And yet, most people use Twitter to consume information with no nutritional value.

The Ocean Named Twitter

Ideally, a world of information abundance would bring the best to the top. Using a classic Econ 101 argument, competition should benefit consumers by improving quality. Practically, curation platforms would wade through millions of posts every day and highlight the best of the best. But that’s not what happens. On most platforms, low-nutrition content is the easiest to find and the most likely to be consumed. Superficial article recommendations sit at the bottom of thousands of articles, pollute the Internet, and tarnish the credibility of media publications.

Theory Vs Practicals

As a society, we can spend less energy following the news and become more informed about our society. The act of reading the news carries symbolic weight. 
People in power won’t fear the pain of a journalist’s bite unless the news maintains its legitimacy. Likewise, even if reading the news isn’t an efficient way to learn about the world, the news industrial complex might be a necessary inefficiency in society.

Less News

Skip the news cycle, but double down on measured consumption. Ignore society’s recommendations for what to consume and refresh your learning habits like you’re shaking an etch-a-sketch. 
Remember, what you should consume looks nothing like what you were taught to consume. Rebel against the mainstream spotlight, find some trusted curators and chart your own path instead.

Make Your Own Way

If you diet, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.

The modern media environment helps a small number of savvy consumers, just as it destroys the lives of millions of mindless consumers who are paralyzed by fear, anger, and misinformation. Careful consumers use the information at their fingertips to compound their wisdom while compulsive ones drown in a volcano of fire-burning rage.On the Internet, your rate of learning is limited not by access to information, but by your ability to ignore distractions. The people you follow online is a leading indicator of your success, your health, and your happiness.

The Minefield Of The Internet

David shares the paradox of abundance and how to make a healthy information diet for yourself. Read here.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

business

Business

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

The Paradox of Abundance - David Perell

Nothing is more impressive than arriving at an interview and being prepared and well informed about the company - its values, goals, history, current events, and who you might be meeting with. Todd Davis, the CPO of FranklinCovey, commented on one particular interview he did. The candidate was well prepared and knew and understood more about the company than many of the existing employees. Davis was so impressed that he directly took the candidate to the CEO's office.

Research the company and the people

Create an effective presentation of who you are and what you offer. Focus on your actual skills that go beyond your resumé. Listing what is already on your resumé can narrow your chances. The hiring manager will evaluate your last job title against the position they're hiring for and may assume you're not the right fit if it doesn't align properly.

Take your own inventory

Both the interviewer and the candidate should feel fully in the moment to bring out the best dialogue. This means listening to what is being said instead of thinking about what to say next.

Be present

When a candidate is invited to an interview, the hiring manager automatically assumes they meet the basic skillset. Look the manager in the eye, speak clearly and thoughtfully and bring some energy to the interview to demonstrate that you're a strong contributor and could work effectively with the entire organisation.

Physical presence

Two questions often seem to pop up. <ul><li>"What is your biggest weakness?" Answering the typical "I'm too much of a perfectionist" is not going to help you stand out. Instead, identify a weakness that has nothing to do with the job for which you're interviewing.</li><li>"What has been your biggest failure?" Quickly address the failure, then direct the attention to what you've learned from the experience, ensuring you emphasise other positive traits.</li></ul>

Turn your past failure into a winning interview

<ul><li>"You have two teleportation devices—where do you place them and why?" is an entertaining question that helps to understand how a candidate thinks logically and imaginatively.</li><li>"If you were on an island and could only bring three things, what would you bring?" This question examines a candidates ingenuity.</li><li>"How many windows are there in NYC?" tests the ability to problem-solve.</li></ul>

Unexpected interview questions

Instead of answering, get them to talk first by asking what the range is for the job. If the range for the job is $70,000 to $80,000 and you answer lower, they will give you the lower amount. But if you expect more than their range, you can negotiate after you've received an offer.

Don't answer the salary question

<ul><li>Come prepared with questions and ensure you ask them. Failure to do so could cost you the job.</li><li>From when you arrive at your interview to when you leave is potentially part of the interview. Make every moment count.</li><li>Don't panic if you can't answer a question. Interviewers are more interested in seeing how a candidate responds to questions outside their knowledge base.</li></ul>

Other interviewing tips

If you want to ace your next job interview, check out these insightful interview tips from top executives in every field.

career

Career

Job Interview Tips from Fortune 500 CEOs and Top Hiring Execs

Having a life plan, a vision of one’s own future is great, but even if we don’t have one, it is enough to know what we want in life. 
Everyone wants to have a better life in the future but most people are killing time until it ends up killing them.
We need to first assess ourselves and then take action, making the required changes in our lives.

Your Five Year Plan

<ul><li>Find some time and space and perform a simple meditation: Ask yourself where you want to be in five years.</li><li>Give this thought your full attention without getting distracted.</li><li>You can also look at yourself in the mirror and ask this aloud.</li><li>Writing it on a piece of paper is a great option too.</li></ul>

Outlining Your Five Year Plan

We all have certain aspects in our lives that hinder our personal and professional growth, like:<ol><li>Toxic people and depressing relationships.</li><li>Our job or our boss.</li><li>Our personal qualities and habits, things we need to change about ourselves(like waking up early!).</li></ol>

Find Stuff That Is Hindering Your Five Year Plan

<ol><li>Break down your grand plan into five life goals.</li><li>Take each goal as a complete project.</li><li>Break it into smaller goals.</li><li>Turn your five-year plan into five stages of one year each that you need to complete, just like a video game.</li><li>Decide what is to be done each week and have small(weekly or monthly) achievements towards your main goal.</li><li>Finally, turn your massive five-year plan into small daily steps and constantly see your progress as it transforms into reality.</li></ol>

The Next Steps For Realizing Your Five Year Plan

Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years? Do you know how to answer this correctly? Discover what you should do to get clear on your path.

productivity

Productivity

timemanagement

Time Management

How to Answer The Question ‘Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years?’ Right

When Elon Musk interviews someone for a job at Tesla or SpaceX, he'll probably ask you: "You're standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?"
Most people correctly state the North Pole, But then Musk will ask where else it could be. Few can find another possibility, which is somewhere close to the South Pole, where, if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the Earth becomes one mile.

Elon Musk's famous interview question

<ul>
<li>The hardest question is, "How many gas stations are there in the United States?" Interviewers want to see how you think more than if you get the correct answer.</li>
<li>"You have one minute to persuade me to buy this pen." Here the interviewer wants to see how well you execute basic sales tactics.</li>
<li>"Where do you see yourself in five years?" The interviewer wants to see your commitment to the company and what your ambition is.</li>
</ul>

Hard interview questions

A calm and methodical approach is more important than the actual answer.
<ul>
<li>Candidates can prepare for some of the questions regardless of the role or industry - for example, 'Where do you see yourself in five years?' and 'What is your biggest weakness?'</li>
<li>A sales-driven challenge like "Sell me this pen" can be answered by focusing on the positive features of the item. </li>
<li>How many gas stations type questions can be answered with a methodical solving process.</li>
</ul>

How to prepare for an interview

In a recent survey, people ranked these questions as the worst to answer during an interview.


communication

Communication

These are the interview questions candidates hate the most

By writing for yourself, you're more likely to write something other people will like. Readers know when your work is authentic—the best way to be authentic is to write for yourself.
When you write for yourself, the process of writing is the reward itself. If you love doing something, you'll keep on doing it.

Write for yourself

Writing is thinking. It is a way to understand and order the world better. Writing is a process of self-discovery. You may start with a specific topic in mind, and as the essay fills out and your curiosity increases, the end result may be different from what you started with.

Write to think

When you publish often, you'll build an audience, and an audience gives you accountability. This accountability will make you want to write more, which will make you better at writing and generating exciting ideas. Edit and polish your piece until it flows. But at some point, press publish. Then listen to feedback and adjust your following pieces.

Publish often

To publish often, you will need a routine. Routines help to establish good habits, enabling you to become better. Focus on systems, not goals. Choose a specific time each day to write. Use triggers to let your brain know it's time to write, such as a cup of coffee or listening to a specific playlist.

Design a writing routine

A deadline helps you to focus on the process and publish regularly. It's a commitment. "I'll publish one article every Wednesday by 4 PM." But life sometimes happens, and you may miss a deadline. Then do everything you can to reach the next one.

Have a deadline

When you first start out, focus on being consistent more than on quality. Your quality will improve when you keep on writing and publishing. Consistent writing will generate more feedback, allowing you to learn faster what you enjoy writing about and what your audience wants.

Quantity over quality

Simple tools offer no distractions. It helps you focus and do more, again and again. George R.R. Martin wrote almost two million words for The Game of Thrones series on WordStar 4.0, a word processor from the 80s. A program such as Text Edit on full-screen is also effective.

Use simple tools

Most ideas come at inconvenient times, such as during a conversation with a friend, a thought while watching a show, a link while you're exercising. <ul><li>Get used to writing ideas down the moment they pop into your head. Don't judge the ideas - just make them intelligible so that the future you can understand what is in your head. </li><li>Ideas are writing prompts. When you start writing it down, there's always something to write about.</li></ul>

Write down ideas

You'll sometimes read something that speaks to your soul. Or a unique idea. A well-told story. A novel way to explain something. When you find one of these, save them to a swipe file or write them on index cards. Over time, you'll build a treasure chest of your favourite things to keep as inspiration when you write.

Keep a swipe file 

When we write, we often want the best resource available online on a given topic. This is impossible and only adds pressure. Instead, consider published essays as incomplete by default. Write what you know about a topic now. Then, when you find a new resource, you can always edit it later or write a new essay.

An essay is never finished

Writing is hard. Never easy. But with practice, it becomes easier. Here are 10 writing lessons I've learned throughout 10 years of writing.

writing

Reading & Writing

10 Lessons from 10 Years of Writing

Companies involved in a long, drawn-out interview process forget that the best candidates only briefly surface on the job market and don’t stay there forever. Surveys indicate that most candidates lose interest in the job if they are kept waiting in line for longer than two weeks.
Recruitment should not be delayed, and if it is due to a valid reason, it has to be communicated to the candidate waiting for a reply.

Finding The Best Candidate

The complicated hiring process is made to hire the best candidate, but that very process often backfires and becomes a hindrance to quality hiring, with the best candidates going to other organizations who value their expertise and time.If companies are unable to make hiring decisions after a decent number(three or four) of interview rounds, it may also signal to the candidate how the company makes decisions internally.

The Hiring Process Backfired

Some companies are asking candidates to attend multiple interviews. But too many rounds could be a red flag – and even drive candidates away.

The rise of never-ending job interviews

Information is freely available. It is everywhere, making it more difficult to know whether the facts are useful or where they lead.
For example, Yahoo has historical financial statements of every public company. Two decades ago, you had to ask companies to mail you hard copies. Twitter creates 200 billion tweets a year, but it barely existed a decade ago.
 A first step when dealing with any kind of information is to separate them into different categories.

Knowing how to use information to your advantage

When you find information that is important to you, ask: "Will I still regard this information as important a year from now? Five? Ten?" E.g. quarterly earnings are useful, but no one cares about 2010 earnings because they ceased to be useful.
Our default is to think that information will be useful forever, leading us into paying attention to what in hindsight was short-term noise.

Useful but expiring information

Permanent information teaches you what to do with expiring information.
Knowing that an investment's price fell may be out-of-date information. But knowing the long history and its impact is permanent information that will stay valuable.

Useful and permanent information

... but useful to someone whose decisions are relevant to you.
For example, long-term investors can benefit from learning how and why traders make decisions. Bubbles can destroy long-term investors, and bubbles are driven by traders. It means valuing information that doesn't directly mean much to you.

Information that is irrelevant to you directly

Irrelevant information may provide small pieces of a puzzle that might increase your understanding of why things happen**.** For example, palaeontology offers insights about how things naturally grow too big for their own good, which has relevance in investing.
You may not use the information directly, but the information can help to understand your field better.

Irrelevant information, but gives insight into how other people think

Every field has interesting or entertaining information. It is useless but keeps you focused, and that makes it valuable.
For example, exposure to a field in the form of blogs or CNBC may be the reason to become interested in investing, making it some of the most important information. The trick is knowing when it is entertainment and when it should influence your actions.

Useless but usefully entertaining information

<ul>
<li>Useful information when combined with other data: Information is seldom useful by itself. It is part of a bigger picture. It is crucial to have a general idea of the scene to know how the information slots into the larger picture.</li>
<li>Irrelevant information in all circumstances: You will know it when you see it.</li>
<li>Information that requires immediate action: This is the rarest form of information.</li>
</ul>

Useful, irrelevant, and urgent information

An 1890 Oxford entrance exam question read: “Give some account of the life of Mary, the mother of our Lord.” William Dawson, in his book The Quest of the Simple Life, writes what happened next: One bright youth, after a feeble sentence or two in which the name of Mary was at least included, went on to say, ‘At this point it may not be out of place to give a list of the kings of Israel.’ Here was something he did know, and it was something not worth knowing. I found that my boys had been educated much the same … with history; they could recite dates and facts, but they had no perception of principles. This may be a bigger problem now than in 1890. The amount of raw, accessible information we have is orders of magnitude more than it was 15 years ago, let alone 129 years ago. Yahoo has historical financial statements of every public company; 20 years ago you had to ask each company to mail you hard copies. Twitter spits out 200 billion tweets a year; it barely existed a decade ago. The firehose makes it easy to mirror the poor Oxford boy: since information is free and ubiquitous but adding context has a mental price, the path of least resistance is to know facts without a clue where they go or whether they’re useful. Michael Batnick wrote about his humble beginnings: “I assumed you could be successful by knowing just two pieces of data, price and earnings. I didn’t even earn the right to call myself a first-level thinker.” Some have four or eight or ten thousand pieces of data but end in the same spot. One step to fixing this is acknowledging different types of information. When you come across a piece of information – any kind of information – I’ve found it useful to bucket it into different groups. 1. Useful but expiring. Take quarterly earnings. They’re useful. But no one cares what Apple’s Q2 2010 earnings were anymore, because its usefulness expired. When finding information you find important it helps to ask, “Will I still consider this important a year from now? Five? Ten?” Expiring information can be useful. But until you ask how long it will be useful for you don’t know how to calibrate that usefulness. And I’ve found that until you ask the question you default to “this will be useful forever,” which is the innocent reason we pay attention to what in hindsight was short-term noise. 2. Useful and permanent. Knowing that an investment’s price fell may be expiring information. But knowing the long history of volatility and its impact on people’s willingness to take risk is permanent information that will be just as valuable in 50 years as it is now. Same with understanding incentives, biases, and the handful of fundamental factors that drive your industry. Permanent information is what teaches you what to do with expiring information. 3. Irrelevant to me but relevant to someone whose decisions are relevant to me. The “signal vs. noise” idea is smart. But investing is the art of figuring out how and why other people make decisions. And something I consider noise may be signal to other people. If an investor’s job is to size up and predict the actions of other people, then what other people consider signals could be useful information to me, even if I think the information is silly and irrelevant. Example: I don’t trade; I’m a long-term investor. But long-term investors can be ruined by bubbles, and bubbles are driven by traders. So long-term investors can benefit from learning how and why traders make decisions, which can mean appreciating information that doesn’t directly impact your own investing decisions. Ignoring information that doesn’t affect you but does affect people whose decisions affect you is most of why politics is so nasty. 4. Irrelevant but a window in how other people think, which is relevant in itself. Paleontology is not relevant to investing. But paleontology has insights about how things naturally grow too big for their own good, which is relevant to investing. Same for fighter pilots, which teaches us about personality traits, and George Carlin skits, which had Nobel Prize-worthy insight into human behavior. A lot of information goes in a broad bucket called “a tiny piece of the puzzle that might help me better understand why things happen.” You rarely use the individual parts, which makes it feel irrelevant. But as a whole it can make the specific information of your field easier to make sense of. 5. Useless but usefully entertaining. Follow Chris Rock’s career advice: “You can’t be anything you want. You can be anything you’re good at, as long as they’re hiring.” Implicit in this is that a good career may not be in the topic you find most entertaining. Which is unfortunate, because people do good work when they enjoy it. But there’s a solution: Every field has interesting/entertaining information that a rational practitioner would say “this is useless” but a reasonable one will say “Yes, but it keeps me engaged and that’s useful.” Examples in investing go by the names of chart porn, FinTwit, CNBC, and many white papers and blogs. I don’t watch CNBC now, but I never would have become interested in investing without teenage exposure to the flashing lights and fist-pounding of its hosts. In that sense it’s some of the most important information I’ve come across. The trick – a hard one – is knowing when information is merely entertainment and shouldn’t influence your actions. 6. Useful only when combined with other information. Interest rates rise. What next? Depends on what investors expected before the rise, what they expect to happen next, why they rose, who raised them, the level and kind of debt outstanding, the rise relative to interest rates in other countries, and so on endlessly. Few pieces of information are useful by themselves. They’re part of a puzzle where one piece only makes sense if all the other pieces are put together to show a bigger picture. And that picture often has so many pieces that it’s practical to rely on simple rules that give you a general idea of the scene. 7. Irrelevant in all circumstances. You know it when you see it. 8. Requires immediate action. The rarest information that exists.

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