Minimize

 “The best we can do is compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when stakes are high.” - Daniel Kahneman. 

The best way to solve a problem is to avoid it in the first place. You have to recognize the situations when you need to actively put a buffer between reacting and responding. People make intuitive judgments all day; you’re constantly taking in information from the world and trying to make sense of it. When something or somebody affects you directly in a negative way, you respond because you want to manipulate whatever you can to control and change the situation. But most of the time, you don't control much.

Unhappiness is when there is a difference between what reality is and what you want it to be. When someone slights you, you react because you don't see yourself that way, and you want to make sure that person doesn't see you that way. Or you want to be seen as someone who doesn't take any shit. So, in the moment, you try to quip back or go to other people privately to gauge what they think about you and tell your side. But what happens when that person quips back to your quip? Do you escalate? What does that lead to? Going to people privately could work well, but usually, they'll ask, “Wait, what are you talking about?” then you'll explain what happened and how so and so said this and that. Then that person tells another person and another person. Then suddenly, as the message goes on and on, distorted by other people, you were heard talking shit about someone else behind their back. Is that the reputation you want?

There is something to be said about standing up for yourself and defending yourself. But most of the time, it's really not that serious, especially in this day and age. Personally, I think a better strategy is to kill with kindness. But that's another topic.

Whatever is outside of yourself, you have extremely loose control over at best. And other people? Forget about it. If you want to control other people and what they think about you, get help. Warren Buffett once said, “I've never been very good at changing people's minds.” Try your best, put in the work, and find the people who agree with you and want to work with you. Loss aversion is a really tricky bias because sometimes you'll fool yourself with a certain narrative and then get upset when that narrative doesn't match up with reality.

“I have this great idea, and I'm going to get the best engineers and managers to work for me because my idea and I are so incredibly great.” What happens when no one wants to work for you?

“I am going to sell so much product because it’s the best there is, it’s affordable, we have great customer service, we’re constantly adding new features, we have a cool website, we’re search engine optimized, and I spent 10k on Facebook ads.” What happens when nobody buys anything?

If you believe something that isn't true to begin with you're going to be disappointed. What if you started with, “I don't really know anything; I'm going to keep an open mind and move on from there; let's see how this goes.” What do you think scientists do when they falsify their hypothesis? They constantly prove themselves wrong, and that’s how they get closer to the truth.

You can feel passionate about things. Don't let them kill you.                          

My goal is to have very high self-esteem and very low ego.