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Idea Almanac

Daily update on new ideas and books so that you can grow each day

June 9, 2023

Idea Almanac

Get rid of addiction

Lessons of the Balance. How to get rid of addiction ?

  • The relentless pursuit of pleasure (and avoidance of pain) leads to pain.
  • Recovery begins with abstinence.
  • Abstinence resets the brain’s reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy in simpler pleasures.
  • Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine-overloaded world.
  • Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain.
  • Pressing on the pain side resets our balance to the side of pleasure…

Excerpt From: Anna Lembke. “Dopamine Nation.”

May 31, 2023

Idea Almanac

Opportunity cost

“If you understand opportunity costs and you have a ticket to a game that you could sell for $1,000, it does not matter how much you paid for the ticket. The cost of going to the game is what you could do with that $1,000. You should only go to the game if that is the best possible way you could use that money. Is it better than one hundred movies at $10 each? Better than an upgrade to your shabby wardrobe? Better than saving the money for a rainy day or a sunny weekend? This analysis is not limited to decisions that involve money. If you spend an afternoon reading a novel, then the opportunity cost is whatever else you might have done with that time.”

“How can I possibly know which of the nearly infinite ways to use $1,000 will make me happiest? The problem is too complex for anyone to solve, and it is unrealistic to think that the typical consumer engages in this type of thinking.”

Excerpt From: Richard H. Thaler. “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.”

August 29, 2022

Idea Almanac

On Determinism and Free Will

“The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).”

Excerpt From: Erwin Schroedinger. “What is Life?.”

August 28, 2022

Idea Almanac

The Bank’s dominance

“The Bank’s dominance, moreover, was not just about money. Whatever the institution’s shortcomings—its weak communication skills under Preston, its sluggish response to the environmental movement—there was no question about its intellectual caliber. The environmental issue was a case in point. After a slow start, the Bank had by the mid-1990s assembled a strong environmental staff; it had helped virtually all its borrowers to prepare National Environmental Action Plans; it was producing, in the view of one frequently hostile observer, “an outpouring of high-quality research reports on environment-development interactions, making the Bank arguably the largest center for such research in the world.”

Excerpt From: Sebastian Mallaby. “The World’s Banker.”

August 24, 2022

Idea Almanac

Smasher of small currencies

“By the late 1990s, Soros had no doubt as to which side of his persona should dominate. He wanted to be a thinker, a statesman, a great public figure; he did not want to be a neoimperialist and smasher of small currencies. Inevitably, there was a risk that this preference might color his investment views: In a discussion with David Kowitz and Rodney Jones during the Hong Kong meetings, Soros declared confidently that the time for shorting Asian currencies had passed, even though Mahathir’s outburst against markets had triggered a new sell-off in the region. The lieutenants had doubts about the boss’s rosy prognosis, but Soros was not in the mood to listen. Although he would not micromanage the funds’ decisions—he would leave these to Druckenmiller and the team—his optimistic bias was evident.”

Excerpt From: Sebastian Mallaby. “More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite.”

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August 23, 2022

Idea Almanac

What venture capitalists do best

Which brings us back to Vinod Khosla. In the two decades he spent at Kleiner Perkins before starting his own venture firm, he learned not to worry about the bets that went to zero. All he could lose was one times his money.” What Khosla cared about were the bets that did pay off, and in the mid-1990s he fastened on an especially audacious and contrarian notion: that, with the coming of the internet, consumers would not be satisfied with a mere doubling or tripling in the capacity of traditional phone lines. Rather, they would clamor for a step change in bandwidth, involving routers that handled data flows a thousand times larger. While the telecom establishment snickered at this sci-fi babble, Khosla set out to kick-start the companies that would make the step change possible. The startups that Khosla backed are largely forgotten names: Juniper, Siara, Cerent. But they illustrate what venture capitalists do best and how they generate both wealth and progress.

–The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future

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August 22, 2022

Idea Almanac

Want to be wealthy? Happy? Peaceful? Say thank you

“When we say thank you, we release powerful energy into the world. We are instantly present. We realize everything we have is enough. We are enough. We have all that we need. Knowing this and feeling this is the most powerful force in the universe. You can literally achieve anything when you ground yourself in appreciation and gratitude.
Want to be wealthy? Happy? Peaceful? Say thank you. It’s that simple.”

Excerpt From: Ken Honda. “Happy Money.”

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August 21, 2022

Idea Almanac

Fear is like a flu virus

Fear is like a flu virus. It is everywhere and is always seeking opportunities to invade us. When one is vulnerable, fear enters and plants itself deeply into our hearts. It feeds on other emotions, such as loneliness and neediness, and multiplies at a fast pace. Unless the flu gets treated properly, the person acts as a carrier of the virus and spreads it to others. Unlike a flu virus, however, there is a formula to treat fear: the words “Thank you.”  Fear, anxiety, and appreciation cannot coexist at the same time, so if one is always content with life and well connected emotionally with others, then he or she will never be invaded by fear.

Bray Attwood, Janet; Honda, Ken. Maro Up: The Secret to Success Begins with Arigato: Wisdom from the “Warren Buffet of Japan” (p. 29).

August 19, 2022

Idea Almanac

Cold-water therapy

“Over the next couple of weeks, I started to notice that my mood after a cold shower was better. I researched cold-water therapy online and found a community of people taking ice baths. It seemed kind of crazy, but I was desperate. Following their lead, I progressed from cold showers to filling my bathtub with cold water and immersing myself in it. That worked even better, so I upped the ante and added ice to the tub water to get the temperature even lower. By doing that, I could get the temp to the mid-fifties.“I got into a routine where I immersed myself in ice water for five to ten minutes every morning and again just before bed. I did that every day for the next three years. It was key to my recovery.”

Excerpt From: Anna Lembke. “Dopamine Nation.”

August 18, 2022

Idea Almanac

Energy stored as coal

“The poorest lignites (lighter colored and crumbly) have an energy density lower than wood, because most of their mass is moisture and ash. In elemental composition, the poorest lignites are less than fifty per cent carbon, anthracites more than ninety per cent, and bituminous coals mostly between seventy to seventy-five per cent. This means that the most commonly used bituminous coals have energy densities about fifty per cent higher than air-dried wood.
Consequently, energy stored as coal will occupy less space, require less frequent stoking of stoves and furnaces, and untended fires will last longer. On the other hand, underground mining, costly and dangerous, is the most obvious disadvantage of coal extraction, while the presence of relatively large volumes of ash (bituminous coals typically contain about ten per cent of incombustibles, mostly oxides of iron, silica, and alkaline elements) and sulfur are its great­est environmental drawbacks.”

Excerpt From: Vaclav Smil. “Energy.”

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