It's normal to rage against the top 1% nowadays. 2) Insecure Cook. Whether religious or not, most people who read this site are big on data, evidence, and accuracy. Just like how you may say “every gray cloud has a silver lining,” we believe it is “better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” As Asian Americans, we have been put on the bench for too long and all we ask for is a chance to shoot our shot. After a minute, she thought about it, and said, “Well actually, no, what I mean by that is if she wanted to go do something like spend her life on a farm in Montana, I’d be fine with that and my parents never would have been—but if she said she wanted to go work at a hedge fund, I’d kill her.” She realized mid-sentence that she wasn’t free of the rigid dogmatic thinking of her parents, she had just changed dogma brands. ost of us have the same relationship with our own software that my grandmother has with her computer: Eventually, you must hit a tipping point and trusting your own software becomes your way of life—and as Jobs says, you’ll never be the same again. To speed up the ripening process, place your avocados in a brown paper bag with an apple or banana and let them sit for a few days. But his software told him that formal education was just another way to download information into your brain and “a painfully slow download” at that—so he started reading, meeting people, and asking questions. The internet was still young and the concept of storing your money in an online bank was totally inconceivable to most people, and Musk was advised by many that it was a crazy plan. Humans also long for the comfort and safety of certainty, and nowhere is conviction more present than in the groupthink of blind tribalism. And if we can’t even see the hardware/software distinction, we certainly can’t see the more nuanced chef software vs. cook software distinction. Your head might end up running your whole life on “because mom says so” software. Given (because the tribe says so): B = C + D Americans are a tribe, of which Texans are a sub-tribe, of which Evangelical Christians in Amarillo, Texas is a sub-sub-tribe. > To sum up: if you are single and opt for "live cool and don't care about expenses" style, then an average developer salary will be enough (it might be harder if you have a family to feed). If we want to improve ourselves and move our way closer to the chef side of the spectrum, we have to remember to remember. So given all of the above, an ideal endeavor for Musk would be something involving engineering, something in an area that will be important for the future, and something to do with cutting-edge technology. It’s not software to be coded—it’s a printed rulebook. Musk is an impressive chef for sure, but what makes him such an extreme standout isn’t that he’s impressive—it’s that most of us aren’t chefs at all. The recipe they followed was scripture, a recipe that turned out to be wrong. It won’t just seem wrong, it’ll seem like heresy. 3) Extra big thanks to our Patreon supporters for making WBW sustainable and for being immensely patient during the long wait. On top of the “whatever you do, definitely don’t risk losing that money you have” conventional wisdom, there was also the common logic that said, “You’re awesome at building internet companies, but that’s all you know since you’ve never done anything else. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” Being fired “freed” Jobs from the shackles of his own history. Lithium-ion suffers from stress when exposed to heat, so does keeping a cell at a high charge voltage. Of course, there’s no way for anyone of any age to have a clear cut answer to these questions, but Elon did the best thing he could by ignoring others and independently pondering. If you were alone in a room with a car and wanted to figure out how it worked, you’d probably start by taking it apart as much as you could and examining the parts and how they all fit together. But there’s something to that. By the time eBay bought it in 2002, the company was called PayPal and it was a money transfer service. Especially from those they trust and those they love. I feel bad because I love her. Nothing unites Us like a collectively hated anti-Us, and the blind tribe is usually defined almost as much by hating the dogma of Them as it is by abiding by the dogma of Us. Whatever the time, place, or industry, anytime something really big happens, there’s almost always an experimenting chef at the center of it—not being anything magical, just trusting their brain and working from scratch. A common example of this in today’s world is that many people I know were raised by people who were raised by people who went through the Great Depression. Being a gamechanger is just having little enough respect for the game that you realize there’s no good reason not to change the rules. I talked to Musk about the United States and the way the forefathers reasoned by first principles when they started the country. And as a result, they proceeded on their path with a fatal flaw in their thinking—a software bug that told them that one of the undeniable first principles when thinking about the Earth was that it began 6,000 years ago and that there had been a flood of the most epic proportions. First, the cook tries a few friends. And yet—after thinking about this for a while, I’ve come to an unpleasant conclusion: When it comes to most of the way we think, the way we make decisions, and the way we live our lives, we’re much more like the flood geologists than the science geologists. Second, it’s about our own well-being. Without certainty, dogma has no power. I know what it’s like to be heard but not listened to. There’s no more reliable corollary than super-successful people thinking failure is fucking awesome. That’s the life irrational fears block us from. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. Better not to call too much attention to himself. So he did what many young people do—he focused his early goals not around achieving his Wants, but expanding the Reality box and its list of “things that are possible.” He wanted to be able to legally stay in the US after college, and he also wanted to gain more knowledge about engineering, so he killed two birds with one stone and applied to a PhD program at Stanford to study high energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up with a more efficient way than traditional batteries to store energy. Therefore (it seems, based on what I know): A = C + D. Hypotheses are built to be tested. Because of this optical illusion, we’re unable to see the flaws in our own thinking or recognize an unusually great thinker when we see one. He sees the tenets of conventional wisdom for what they really are—faith-based dogma. But the goal-achievement strategy you came up with was just your first crack. Wheat, tomatoes, salt, and milk go back a long time, but at some point, someone said, “What if I take those ingredients and do this…and this…..and this……” and ended up with the world’s first pizza. A brain software pro in a world where people don’t realize brain software is a thing. Especially since dogma has a powerful ally—the group. And others don’t make things any easier. It’s not good for the family. —Henry Ford, Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. In Buddhism, it is believed that life is a form of suffering. For me, that question is the springboard into all of this remembering to remember—it’s a hammer that shatters a brittle, protective feeling of certainty and forces me to do the hard work of building a more authentic, more useful set of thoughts about something. Marie Curie using unconventional methods to pioneer the theory of radioactivity and topple the “atoms are indivisible” assumption on its head (she won a Nobel Prize in both physics and chemistry—two prizes reserved exclusively for chefs). Unlike GTA, in real life, the law is a thing and jail is a thing. When there’s proof-level certainty, it means either there’s some serious concrete and verified data underneath it—or it’s faith-based dogma. And you end up being the cancer researcher we mentioned who only tries likely-to-succeed experimentation within the comfort zone he knows best. But no one knows shit. Which works like this: Given (it seems, based on what I know): A = B The Engine model is quite simplistic. Mulling this all over has legitimately affected the way I think about my life, my future, and the choices I make—and I’m going to try my best in this post to explain why. Conventional wisdom said that he couldn’t afford to build rockets because they were too expensive and pointed to the fact that no one had ever made a rocket that cheaply before—but like the scientists who ignored those who said the Earth was 6,000 years old and those who insisted the Earth was flat, Musk started crunching numbers to do the math himself. Step 1 for Elon was filling in the contents of the Want box. What this all amounts to is that during our brain’s most malleable years, parents, teachers, and society end up putting our clay in a mold and squeezing it tightly into a preset shape. You test a strategy hypothesis one way: action. The best friend of a blind Us is a nemesis Us—Them. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder but never mention how that yearning may be expressed through melancholy and sorrow. Most people would have stuck with the Stanford program—because they had already told everyone about it and it would be weird to quit, because it was Stanford, because it was a more normal path, because it was safer, because the internet might be a fad, because what if he were 35 one day and was a failure with no money because he couldn’t get a good job without the right degree. The purpose of all of that fear is to make us protect ourselves from danger. This number dropped to 12 percent by age 15 and just 2 percent by age 25. Run over a prostitute with your car. One thing goal attainment often requires is laser focus. But when you and the experiment are one and the same, not only is taking on a new goal a change of identity, it’s putting your identity on the line. Why love if I am constantly objectified, fetishized and dehumanized? And that was my introduction into this world: Society teaching me my value was less than because of the way I looked and putting me in my place for thinking otherwise. A person’s power can come in various forms: your time, your energy (mental and physical), your resources, your persuasive ability, your connection to others, etc. While young people generally don’t mind, the older generation might feel uncomfortable. The challenge with this last epiphany is to somehow figure out a way to lose respect for your own fear. Check out the sections on work experience and education to find out how to give your resume an edge, and then read about the hiring process to find out exactly what you can expect on your way to landing your first job. You may not like living by someone else’s dogma, but you’re left without much choice. He now knows exactly why he didn’t feel certain about everything—because it was all bullshit. And that’s what set me behind. Those are her puzzle pieces, her building blocks, and she works her way upwards from there, using her experience, her instincts, and her taste buds. A tribe with a strong leader at the top and the rest of the members simply following the leader would fare better. To them, any conclusions from the science community were moot because they were breaking the rules of the game to begin with. It gets confusing way down there because the first principles foundation at the bottom is a mishmash of the values and beliefs of a bunch of people from different generations and countries—a bunch of people who aren’t you. (Courtesy/ Michelle Kim). Removing the fear and the concern with identity or the opinions of others would thrust the person into the not-actually-risky Chef Lab and have them bouncing around all the exhilarating places outside their comfort zone—and their lives would take off. He sees Tesla and SpaceX like the late 18th century USA—fresh new labs ready for experiments—but when he looks at other companies in their industries, he sees an inability to drive their strategies from a clean slate mentality. When Oprah publicly recommends a book, that’s combining her abundant power of connection (she has a huge reach) and her abundant power of persuasion (people trust her) and directing them towards the goal of getting the book into the hands of thousands of people who would have otherwise never known about it. And, as Einstein says, no less of a cook than all those whom you’ve impressed. He types the command into the interface, waits a few minutes, and then the system pumps out its answer: The cook, thoroughly discouraged, thanks the machine and updates his Reality box accordingly. And probably not that different from how you think. So I’m trying to make sure there is a garden, such that in the future, many Feynmans may bloom. You direct your power towards it. But the more I learn about Musk and other people who seem to have superhuman powers—whether it be Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Genghis Khan, Marie Curie, John Lennon, Ayn Rand,2 or Louis C.K.—the more I’m convinced that it’s their software, not their natural-born intelligence or talents, that makes them so rare and so effective. The dude is a steel-bending industrial giant in America in a time when there aren’t supposed to be steel-bending industrial giants in America, igniting revolutions in huge, old industries that aren’t supposed to be revolutionable. All good in GTA. But Musk went back to first principles. The reason these outrageously smart people are so humble about what they know is that as scientists, they’re aware that unjustified certainty is the bane of understanding and the death of effective reasoning. With each of these questions, the challenge is to keep asking why until you hit the floor—and the floor is what will tell you whether you’re in a church or a lab for that particular part of your life. They’re half you at the hardware level, and depending on how much time you have with them, they’re that percentage of you at the software level.”. But then, when the surface dried up a little later, cracks formed in its surface, releasing much of the water from within. Conventional wisdom screamed at the top of its lungs for him to stop. And they weren’t anti-science. It’s not in our DNA to be chefs because human self-preservation never depended upon independent thinking—it rode on fitting in with the tribe, on staying in favor with the chief, on following in the footsteps of the elders who knew more about staying alive than we did, and on teaching our children to do the same—which is why we now live in a cook society where cook parents raise their kids by telling them to follow the recipe and stop asking questions about it. What feels like Roark might actually be Keating. I’m very, very into it. My kid has focused on music as her extracurricular, has some great awards and recognition under her belt but doesn’t want to major in music. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.5, In science, this means starting with what evidence shows us to be true. But Musk’s goal formation center had other ideas. I’m tired of feeling like I’m a burden. I think maybe even another five to 10 — how much time does a woman want a week? What feels like original opinions may have actually been spoon-fed to us by the media or our parents or friends or our religion or a celebrity. But chefs don’t pay attention to that, reasoning instead using their eyes and ears and experience. choosing a goal is choosing which direction to point your powers.↩, Musk recently started a new school that his kids go to—one without rigid grade levels and where students learn through application, not memorization.↩, There’s something I need to tell you. It’s not that he was sure he’d succeed—in fact, he thought SpaceX in particular had a reasonable probability of failure—it’s just that nowhere in his assessments did he foresee danger. Two years later, while running a growing SpaceX, a friend brought Elon to a company called AC Propulsion, which had created a prototype for a super-fast, long-range electric car. And bingo. That’s when the cliché “Why?” game comes in (what MuskSpeak calls “the chained why”). Being trapped in your history means you don’t know how to change, you’ve forgotten how to innovate, and you’re stuck in the identity box the world has put you in. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. A child’s instinct isn’t just to know what to do and not to do, she wants to understand the rules of her environment. What matters is that someone you love, someone whose life is sacred and valuable was ripped away in an unjust manner, and society is spitting at your face and showing you that people who look like you don’t matter because pity is given to the murderer for having a bad day. When you or I look at kids, we see small, dumb, cute people. This leaves most of us with a skewed danger scale: Chefs hate real risk just as much as cooks—a chef that ends up in the Actually Dangerous territory and ends up in jail or in a gutter or in dire financial straits isn’t a chef—he’s a cook living under “I’m invincible” dogma. Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. No, it’s something else—what TED curator Chris Anderson called Musk’s “secret sauce”—and for me, this series became a mission to figure it out. You have permission to edit this article. The chef reasons from first principles, and for the chef, the first principles are raw edible ingredients. The input (current engine speed) is filtered and saturated to a minimum and maximum values.The role of the filter is to simulated the mechanical inertia of the engine. One example from my life is how I slowly came to understand that most Americans—the broader public, my tribe, and people I know well—knew very little about what it’s actually like to visit most countries. You always hear facts about human development and how so much of who you become is determined by your experiences during your formative years. I encourage him to find a new job, where they will appreciate him for who he is, but in the back of my mind I wonder if he will even be given a chance to prove his worth. The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. The chef goes through the same inner thought process as Self-Loathing Cook, but when it’s time to walk the walk, the chef stands up and yells out the truth. But actually that’s not true. He knows it’s probably wrong-ish, and as new data emerges, he’ll “taste-test” the hypothesis and adjust it. It’s fitting that this blog is called Wait But Why because the whole thing is a little like the grown-up version of the Why? Therefore (for now): A = C + D. In our lives, the only true axiom is “I exist.” Beyond that, nothing is for sure. In both cases, the thinker needs to invent his own thought pathways. Why vote if I am told that I am statistically insignificant? What happened was, around 6,000 years ago, the Earth was formed as a perfect sphere with a surface of idyllic land and a watery interior. When we look at Musk, we see someone with genius, with vision, with superhuman balls. And when we grow up, without having learned how to build our own style of reasoning and having gone through the early soul-searching that independent thinking requires, we end up needing to rely on whatever software was installed in us for everything—software that, coming from parents and teachers, was probably itself designed 30 years ago. There are plenty of companies that don't do gotcha-style interviews, and those are the ones you should gravitate toward. Instead, when a superbly science-minded, independent-thinking chef like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein comes around, what do we attribute their success to? I was not welcomed because I spoke a different language and some people would throw rocks at me. A tribe is just a group of people linked together by something they have in common—a religion, an ethnicity, a nationality, family, a philosophy, a cause. Thinking like cooks is what we’re born to do because what we’re born to do is survive. You want to be hired as an engineer, but you don't want to do the coursework of an engineer. But I’m not sure. And a loose Us is nice—like the Us among conscious, independent tribe members. Answers to these questions to be you have a negative connotation, but what gave the science community surprising... Of total certainty, you need to zoom way out until you ask! 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And its conclusions are airtight learn about a need at it new song, how do we work to.
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