YouSaid · the spoken record

Shane Parrish

lines on the record: 95
first: 2023-09-27
most recent: 2023-09-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'd love to, if you want to email me at shannon at fs.blog, I read everything, but I don't respond to everything. I would love to know about sort of the ideas from this episode that connect to ideas that you have in terms of decision making and positioning and what your best ideas are for how you position yourself to sort of survive in different environments and adapt to what”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're really doing is like you have all these thoughts, right? And you're making the invisible visible, and by making the invisible visible, now I can see it, now I can play with it, now I can see where it's weak and where it's strong and how it interacts with other ideas I have. But when it's just in your head, then you can't see it. So you can't reason with it. You can't play with it. You just end up playing these mental games with yourself where you trick yourself into thinking something that you don't actually think.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Humility, you learn to give up on an idea that you have. You keep trying to fit this idea in, and you've probably experienced this too, and you really want this idea to work. Maybe you have a great opening sentence to a paragraph, but it just doesn't make sense. And you can't make it make sense. So you have to give up on it. You have to delete it. You literally have to delete something from your mind and be like, no, that doesn't make sense. No, that's not good enough. And I feel like there's a certain humility to that that we're almost lacking in today.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writing is the process by which we realize we don't understand what we're talking about. And it's only when you sit down and put pen to paper or even type out an idea that you have, a decision you're making, an idea you're wrestling with, that you sort of see where you don't understand it. And the process of writing is not only refining that idea and helping you reflect on it, but you actually generate new ideas in the process of writing. And I think it's so easy my kids do this, right? They're just like, oh, insert these little variables into chat GPT, outcomes and essay. And I'm like, you can't use that. You can feed it your essay and ask it where the weak points are. That's a different way of using it than sort of getting it to write these essays for you. But the question they have is like, why would I write? Like this doesn't make sense. This thing will do it for me and I'll get a good grade. And the other aspect I would say that's important to writing is you learn.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you get this when you run a business. It tends to be a little easier in some ways because you're so tied and wed to this outcome that you're looking for ideas no matter where they come from. You're looking for the best idea to get you to the outcome you want. And the third aspect is sort of thinking independently. Are you thinking independent of the circumstances or the circumstances thinking for you? Are you thinking independently of what the crowd is doing or is the crowd thinking for you? Because if those are happening, if circumstances or the crowd are thinking for you, you're not really thinking at all. But what do you have to do to think independently? You have to be well positioned so that you can think independently.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making is the position you're in at the time you're making a decision. It comes back to a lot of what we talked about today. There's three sort of aspects to decision making that I think about that are very counterintuitive, which is the position you're in at the time you make the decision, can you manage your emotions, not eliminate them, manage them, your temperament, right? You don't want to be making a decision when you're hungry, angry, lonely, tired. You don't want to be making a decision when you're focused on proving yourself right rather than getting the best outcome. I have this phraser remind myself with, which is outcome over ego. Am I focused on getting the best outcome or am I focused on satisfying myself and improving myself right? Because the minute I'm proving myself right, what tends to happen is I ignore all this information that says that I'm not right. And then all of a sudden I'm not focused on the outcome. So by reminding yourself to focus on the outcome, you sort of like open your idea.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you don't invest in that relationship, it all multiplies by zero. And investing in that relationship becomes not a decision because you're not thinking about it as a decision. You start living with somebody and then all of a sudden, you know, you're arguing over how you loaded the dishwasher and it turns into not talking to each other. Well, if I tap you on the shoulder in that moment and I say, hey, Tim, you're about to put gas or water onto this situation. What would you like to choose? And this is what I do with my kids. And they're always like, oh, water. But what I'm really doing is like, hey, you're making a decision to escalate here. Is that the decision you want to be making? No judgment on my part, but like I'm just going to alert you to the fact you're making a decision. And that tends to help a lot in terms of making better decisions. So how are the moments that happen in everyday life? How do we recognize that they're decisions? And I would say the biggest aid to judgment in decision.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think we hit on a couple things during this episode, and I'll tie this in in a second. So most of the time when we know we're making a decision, we tend to do fairly well in that moment given the information we have, because we're rational about the sense that we're mostly rational. We don't get a perfect, but we're directionally correct. If you're thinking about marrying your partner, you know you're making a decision. If you're thinking about buying a house, you know you're making a decision. In those moments, we tend to be more rational. You know, we might be wrong in the end, but we're not.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can sort of like play these little mind games on yourself where it's like all of a sudden I'm worth less. I got to make more, right? And if that's your goal is to do that. But I'm totally with you and like money should improve the quality of life that you're living. And a lot of things that that looks like, it's counterintuitive to most people because it looks like time. It looks like you're buying time.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that's an interesting way to think about it. I mean, you could also, if you feel the need to keep going, you've accomplished so much and you've done really well. You could also just put money aside, enough money aside that if everything else went to zero, you'd be okay. Hide that bank account from yourself, basically invest it in sort of like safe, reliable stuff, and then pretend it doesn't exist and then go nuts, right? And then like with all the other stuff”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had this amazing pension, and they're like, well, starting at 55, we're going to pay you this much money every year. And it's a pretty big sum of money. Like I worked a lot of years there and got a really decent salary. And I was like, no, cash it in. And my accountant was like, what do you mean cash it in? Like that is the worst financial decision you can make. And I'm like, it's the worst financial decision, but it's the best psychological decision. Because if I know somebody's coming to save me, I'm going to behave differently. I need all the chips on the table in front of me and I need to know what's on me. And I know that doesn't make sense to you. But for me, that's the only way that I'm going to have a shot at being successful at this.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't make sense to take those risks. When you're young, it makes sense to take a lot of risk in order to sort of get ahead. But as you get older and you have more to lose, sure, you can keep pushing that button as long as you want. But at some point, it doesn't always have to be a pure financial decision. An example of that is when I left sort of working for the intelligence agency.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So interesting because you hit on a couple things there that really resonate with me and how I approach things. The first was you were like the opportunity cost is huge. Well, no, because you're only considering the measurable opportunity cost. You can't measure your sleep at night as easily. Yeah. Right. And so that decision makes perfect sense. Like why risk what you have and don't need for like what you don't have and don't want to begin with.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of that information with cash, otherwise, you're forced selling something to do it. How do you think about index fund investment? What do you do with your money?”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spell where they didn't outperform and they're really smart. I'm kind of thinking like, oh, now might be the time to allocate more money into that pocket because I think that there might be an opportunity when index funds are no longer what we're thinking of as index funds and they always go up and all of a sudden stock picking comes back in vogue. And you can buy some of them. Like you can buy Perishing Square. I don't know what today's price is, but like a 30% discount to its net asset value. And I remember doing this during COVID. So March 2020, Bill Ackman got on TV and he's like, I have these like asymmetric bets. And I was like, oh, Bill's a really smart guy. I know him. So I started looking at the net asset value of Perishing Square. And it's like, the market's tanking at the same time. The net asset value is like going parabolic. So I was just buying all the shares I could. And that's all publicly available information. But you have to be in a position to take advantage.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The weighting of the top companies has definitely caused me a little bit of hesitation. What I do with indexing is while I invest in an index fund every month, I don't always invest the same amount of money in the index fund. So if you want to think of this sort of very simplistically, when there's panic and nobody wants to invest, I tend to put more money in and when everybody's investing and we're reaching all-time highs, I tend to put less in. I don't know if that's an effective strategy for everybody else. It's just sort of what I do to regulate money going into index funds. But we haven't seen with index funds that worries me is with the rise of index funds, we haven't seen massive forced selling of index funds and how that impacts the funds. And so I'm actually sort of counterintuitively thinking the rise of activist investors, they just went through this 10 years.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It that way. I like to do the index fund thing. It's sort of outside all of that, which is I like fail safes. I don't know about you, but I hide money from myself at times. So like the real estate company, when I log into my bank, it doesn't even show up on the list of companies we have. It's just like this separate entity that I log into once a year to get the financial statements for the accountants. But mentally, I've convinced myself it doesn't exist, which I think is like a really powerful way for me because I don't want to convince myself that I'm smarter than I am at any of this stuff. And I also always want to think that I'm in a worse position than I am because I really want to increase and improve my position.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's multifilming at scale. And so, like, I just want to do things where there's a long runway. I'm working with people I trust, the financial returns are sort of like justifying the investment, but also the advantage to being you or I or this one person sort of team is you can put yourself in a position where, like you said, you stop VC investing for years. You don't have to make an investment. Nobody's emailing you going, Tim, why haven't you made an investment? Nobody's emailing you going, what are you doing with my money? All of a sudden, you can just let cash pile up on the balance sheet. You can just let it accumulate in the bank account. And then when you see an opportunity where the risks and rewards sort of indicate that this is favorable and you have an edge in this particular investment, then you can write a large check in like 12 hours. There's no investment committee to go through. There's nothing to do. It's just you making a decision. And so I like that aspect of it. And I think”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a donation to them. And I'd rather be wrong supporting a friend than right not supporting them. That doesn't do anything for our friendship. And so I think about the things that I understand and then diversifying, I don't use outside money. There's no outside investors. There's Shane. And so I think about like, how do I survive? The short term, how do I maximize my returns in the long term at rule number one for Moore Buffet to lose money? Rule number two is like see rule number one. So I want to diversify when it makes sense, but I also want to be in a position where I can flow to whatever makes sense. Like we have a real estate company where we invest in real estate, but we'll wait until there's a lot of distress until we put more money into that. And then I can be patient. I can go years without making an investment.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understand the path of I occasionally invest with friends when I invest with friends, my rule is go back to rules, I write that investment off to zero the minute I write the check because I never want my investment with friends to affect our friendship. So in my head, it's just as zero the check comes out.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I use the cash flows from Farnham Street to invest. And one of the advantages to being you or me that a lot of people don't have is deal flow. So you get deal flow that the best VCs in the world would be envious of. And to some extent, so do I. And so you've created this vehicle that wasn't primarily for investing, but has this big benefit to it where you're able to get deal flow because of all the other things you do, not because you're focused on deal flow every day. And so I wanted to use that to my advantage in terms of how do we get into good deals? How do I create something sustainable? How do I create something long term? And how do I apply this knowledge that I'm having fun applying? I like investing. I don't do a ton of VC investing. I try to invest mostly in terms of check size. It's almost allocated to companies that are making money or something that I really understand.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You grow slower, but you increase the timeline you have for growth, right? Like the runway becomes longer, even if you're growing slower in the short term.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't spread yourself too thin and try to do everything. And then you can sort of create these systems in your life that allow you to do that, which is let's say you want to do that and you want to work full time at the same time, but you want to slowly build up this body of content that works for you while you're working. Well, one way to do that is right every morning from five until six. And so you just block off the best hour of your day for right. Most people do it the other way. They block off the worst hour of their day, which might be at night. And so they come home after all this baggage and all this work and then they spend all their time and effort sort of like trying to focus instead of like actually just letting it flow and writing.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thinking it's going to be easy. And so they get into this trap of like, oh, I said something that's really popular. I wrote an article that's really popular. And now I'm going to write another one on the same thing and another one on the same thing by the end of the year. you're just posting the same stuff. And whether that's aggressive sort of like tweets or something, like you just become something you wouldn't read. And so I don't look at stats on the website. I look at the email stats sort of like once a week, but I never look at like what's the most popular article because I never want that to guide the next article. I just really want to follow what I'm interested in, what I'm curious about and where my energy is. And I feel like that a cohort of people will find that and be like, oh, I found my tribe. Like this is my person. I'm so glad that there's somebody else interested in this other than me. And that's sort of like how I think about building it. But you have to find that thing for you. And I think it's really, really critical that you.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Surface area, like just creating better, how do I write the next article? How do I make it useful? And then spending a lot of time thinking about how do I share that? Where do people who are like me who will find this interesting? Where do they hang out? How can I let them know about it? What people tend to do is the two mistakes I see in, I guess if people are trying to do sort of like what we've done or what we're doing is they spread themselves too thin. So they're like, oh, I'm going to start a blog. I'm going to create a podcast. I'm going to do an email newsletter. And it's like, man, you have no idea how much work all that stuff is. Like, good luck. And the other thing that I see a lot of people doing is just sort of like.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For context, I was operating under the guise of starting from scratch. Okay, got it. So I would pick a vector. And that vector would be sort of creating content that people find useful and timeless. And it's super important the word timeless is really important there because you want the compounding effect. You want the cumulative effect to work to your advantage. So if you're creating content that is easily consumed but no longer relevant in a week, a month, even a year, then that content can't work for you when you're not working. But a lot of the stuff that you do on your blog and definitely the stuff that we do on FS.blog is it's always relevant. It's evergreen. We just re-aired that interview with Naval Ravicont. We recorded it six years ago. People thought it was recorded yesterday. We don't talk politics. We avoid these certain subjects. So I think what I would do is like I would focus on creating the best content I could. I would get people who come to the website to give me their email address. And I would think about not expanding that.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Separate diary You also realize But going back to the question, I would focus on email and I would ditch podcasts at this point and just double down on email and long form content counterintuitively on the web.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a machine, right? Like Instagram points back to his website, Facebook points back to his website, Twitter. You know, he's just really, really smart at this. So if you're going to model yourself off somebody and you want to build an email list, like he's the person to sort of like think about. You also have a huge audience for email.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely the email list. I think that that is the key, right? If you can pick one primary focus for this, you need to be able to reach your audience. You need to be able to communicate with them. And however you do that, whether you do it building it through Twitter or Instagram, you want sort of all paths to lead back to your email list. And the person who does this the best is James Clear.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the speaking thing, again, that comes back to where do I want to get to in life? I do the exact same thing, except I sort of limit it. I'm like, here's the number of speaking engagements I can do this year. It's like six or ten, depending on the year, depending on sort of like what I want to do that year. And then we use price as a function to modulate that in the sense of I love your high watermark idea. I think that's really important. And that's a great way that I had never thought about doing it. And I just use, hey, I only do six a year. Here's the cost and it just eliminates most people. And to your point, the people that say yes are the easiest freaking people to deal with in the world. And they want you there and there's no like 16 hours of pre-calls and like all of this other stuff. They've decided.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, what is going on here? This is crazy. Interestingly enough, a few of them have come back and tried to advertise with us. They're like, we'll pay our old invoice. And I'm like, you should pay that. And then we'll talk. But there's no way I'm going to sign up to work with you. No thanks.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often you don't even think that you don't trust them, but you'll think of the contract and then you'll need a contract. And that's the first indication that something's amiss in this relationship. And so we've never used advertising contracts, but during COVID, this came back to bite us because we would invoice a lot of our advertisers once a year and we invoice them on March 31st after we have delivered all of their advertising for the past year. And we've worked with people for years. And then all of a sudden, we're delivering these invoices, March 31st, 2020. And people are like, we're not paying that. I'm like, what do you mean we're not paying this? Like, that doesn't make any sense. We've worked together for four years. How is this even possible? Am I missing something? And they're like basically soon. And I'm like.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do the same thing with this prepaid stuff, and this came back to Bitis because I'm a high trust person. I operate on trust. I don't want to be in business with you. If we need a contract, that's generally my motto. It doesn't mean we don't have contracts, but it means if I feel the need of a contract, it's an easy no for me”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, so often we do things that just take us off this compounding train. And I think it was Naval who said, you know, one of the big lessons from compounding is that all the gains come at the end. They don't come at the start. And so you have to stay on this timeline. So every relationship has to be win-win. And for the podcast, we do no paid speaking, which is so interesting. I'm sure you get these pitches too. It's like, here, I'll give you 100 grand to come on your show. I'll pay in advance, yada, yada. And then I always look up these people and I'm like, oh, now I know the podcast that like accept money for guest speakers.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. So that's an easy no, but like often when we're investing in a lot of private businesses that aren't necessarily startups that are profitable businesses, I can tell by the valuation, the pitch, like what people are looking for, what their optimal scenario is, if I want to be a partner with that. Because if you're presenting a deal that isn't fair to me right now, you're never going to be fair to me in the future. So it has to be win-win. And people don't understand like there's literally four permutations of a relationship. There's win-win, win-lose, lose-win, and lose-lose. And only one of those permutations can survive time. And what do we want with time? We want to compound relationships. You want to invest in companies where you don't have to review the legal documents because you trust the people involved. You've worked with them before. They're consistent. They show up. They do what they say they're going to do. And maybe the investment doesn't work out, but that's not what you're thinking. But you're not worried about them stabbing you in the back.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dude, as you were saying that, there's a couple things that came to mind. One is I can often determine from an initial outreach of an investment whether I want to do the deal before I even know the specifics because it's like, how fair is this to me? And if the deal is like one-sided towards you, an example of which is like, hey, I need this. You can't get it legally reviewed or you have to get your lawyers working overtime. I need it by Monday. Well, I don't want to be a partner with that person. And so that's an easy”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fit in today? How can I fit this in? It's not should I work out. It's like, oh, I don't have a lot of time. Maybe I'll just do 20 minutes. Maybe I'll just go to the gym and do squats. And all of a sudden, you get in this habit, you're consistently working out. So your health starts to get a lot better. It's mind-blowing how this simple principle can have profound impact. Do you have any rules for yourself?”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I normally work out on Wednesdays, but that little voice in my head is like, you didn't sleep well last night. You have a lot of work on your plate. And then all of a sudden, I'm like, I'll do extra tomorrow. I'll catch myself doing this sort of talk. And I'm, why am I negotiating with myself? Like who's in charge here? I'm in charge of this situation. And so I changed it. I'm like, I am going to work out every day. And it doesn't mean I go to the gym every day. And it doesn't mean I go for 60 minutes. I can reduce the scope or sort of like duration of my workout, but I'm going to work out every single day. And that workout might be a five mile walk. It might be something else. It doesn't matter. But there's going to be some form of exercise involved. And that single rule has changed so many people's lives that I've shared it with because you start exercising every day because the negotiation in your head now is like, what do I feel?”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Possible for success. And so, like, I have a couple of these rules, right? When I'm out after a talk with the people who organize the talk, my rule is I stop drinking at nine. Nothing could happen after nine. And so you just choose in advance. And a great way to think about this again is going back to what we talked about earlier, direction destination. What does a person who achieves this destination, what do they behave like? Can I create automatic rules in my life? And they're so context specific. They're so specific to you because they're also things you don't do naturally. Like I hate working out, but I want to be healthy. It's really important to me to be healthy. And I was struggling, and this is where the workout everyday rule came in, I was struggling to go three times a week because I would get into this negotiation with myself. And that negotiation was like.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No alcohol. Meaning no alcohol. And he didn't order dessert. That was his sort of like third rule. And if you think about dessert, desserts an interesting one because I think we can all relate to it. You go out, you celebrate with your friends, the wine comes out, the champagne comes out, the dessert comes out, and all of a sudden you're doing things that maybe the best version of you doesn't want to do. But you're in a social situation. You feel pressure. You can tell people, I'm not eating dessert, you know, I don't want dessert tonight. But that relies on willpower. So every time you say, I don't want dessert tonight, you're using willpower to get out of that situation. And eventually everybody loses the battle with willpower. So how can you create a system to get out of this willpower thing where it's like, I'm not using willpower, I create an automatic rule. I don't eat dessert. That's my rule. And when you say that to your friends, you might have to say it twice, but they definitely push back a lot less. As long as you're consistent with that rule. But that rule puts you in the best position.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A great example I had a friend who basically lost a whole bunch of weight using this rule. And he basically said, every time I go out for dinner and he ate out for dinner a lot in his life for work, my rule is I order the healthiest thing on the menu and I don't drink.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your surface area is large, so all these email addresses increase your surface area of attack if that's you're sort of the way that you're thinking about it. And if your goal is to reduce it one way of reducing it might be to consolidate it, one way of reducing it might be to eliminate them, one way of reducing it might be something completely different.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So it's like, who's the check and balance on what are we solving for? And it goes back to something we talked about earlier, like what direction am I getting closer to the destination? And is the destination the one that I want to get to? So in this case, is the problem that you're solving? I want access to all of these materials through one inbox, or is the problem something different, which is I don't feel these inboxes are really that secure and I don't know how to manage them. And the way that you frame that problem will determine in a large part what solutions you see as available. And maybe it's something different. I mean, we're just sort of like spitballing this on the spot here.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My belief is that the person who makes the decision has to come up with a problem statement for the decision. And that does a couple of things. That forces the person who's making the decision to really understand the problem. They can take input from everybody else, but ultimately they're accountable for taking the problem statement and determining what that problem is and then communicating what that problem is and also identifying which solutions sort of work and fit for that. When we don't do that and we just sort of throw a problem on the table, it really backfires.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To being in person. It was learning from the people at your table. It was non transferable in a way to online. So we took a more prescriptive approach, which are like, what are the things that practical tools that people use in the real world to make decisions? And we share it with people. And an example of that is separating problem definition from problem solution, having two separate meetings for that. And a lot of people go into these meetings and they have one meeting and they're like, what's the problem? And then of course we work with incredibly intelligent people and most of them are type A. And so you come in and the first statement that sounds reasonable, everybody jumps into, okay, here's how we solve for that. Nobody like takes a step back and is like, wait, is this problem we're solving? Is this problem the real problem? Because we jump into these solutions.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time I wasn't having fun doing it. Now I'm having a lot of fun doing it. Then we created these series of books called The Great Mental Models. And the idea behind the great mental models was basically, what are the big ideas you would have learned in university and can you apply those outside of the context of the domain that they were learned in? So I think that that's, we've talked about one in terms of like the frame of reference that you're using to look at a problem matters a lot in terms of what you see. So we wanted to make that accessible for people. And then we branched into a course called Decision by Design. We used to have an in-person workshop on decision making and we learned a lot about how people make decisions in the real world, but COVID shut down all of these online events. And so we created decision by design as a means to not take the same material we were doing in person because what we were doing in person was very specific.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so my idea with Frontham Street was sort of how do I create more surface area for people to discover timeless content or that they master the best of what other people have figured out. So it's literally not about me. It's about other people's ideas. I don't really have any original ideas. I sort of, if anything, maybe compress other people's ideas in an interesting way. And so we started with a website and then we went to a podcast. And then the podcast interesting side note here, Naval Ravicant saved the podcast because I was like doing this podcast and I was like, nobody's listening to this podcast. And I had just recorded with Naval. And I was like, that's the last episode I'm going to do. And then of course that episode goes like parabolic. And I'm all rose.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we do a few things. You remember that diagram from Disney in the 60s, and they have like theme parks and merchandise and how it all interconnects. You can look this up on the internet. I don't.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So I lost like. Three quarters of my audience overnight because Google decided to shut down this thing. And then at that moment it dawned on me, how can somebody else take away my audience from me? No, that's not cool. How do I solve for this problem? And so I started an email list. And now we have like 600 or 700,000 people on this email list and I sent out an email every Sunday. Basically what I'm learning. But that was the moment. I never thought about how do I create an email list or I need this. It was like somebody took away my Facebook has done the same thing like Twitter to varying extents has done the same thing. They basically take your audience away from you and then you become platform dependent. And I don't want to be platform dependent. I don't want anybody to be between me and the people who've chosen to read me and get my ideas.”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think building a business on content is really hard. I think I never set out to build a media company. What I set out to do was learn timeless ideas from other people and master the best of what other people have figured out and share that with the world as a means of giving back and part of what I want to do in life is leave the world a better place than I found it. I believe in equal opportunity and not equal outcome, but how can we have equal opportunity if we don't share information with people and make it accessible? So that's how I stumbled into Farnham Street. And there's been these pivotal moments along the way and some are intentional and some are just completely random, an example of which is I never had email. I never got people to sign up for email until feedburner. Remember when feedburner went away?”
2023-09-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT