WARNINGS by Richard A. Clarke, R.P. Eddy

• The Cassandra problem is not only one of hearing the likely accurate predictions through the noise, but of processing them properly once they are identified.
• First we must hear the forecast, then believe it, and finally act upon it.1 In practice, these steps are each individually challenging.
• Cassandras are seldom appreciated for their efforts even after the disaster comes to pass.
• “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
• The hedgehog style of thinking is marked by a belief in the truth of “one big thing”—such as a fundamental, unifying theory—and then “aggressively extend[ing] the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains.”
• Conversely, a fox’s cognitive style is marked by “flexible ‘ad hocery’ that require[s] stitching together diverse sources of information.”
• The foxes consistently beat the hedgehogs in the accuracy of their predictions by a significant margin.
• Predicting natural phenomena is stymied by the chaotic nature of the universe: natural processes are nonlinear systems driven by feedback loops that are often inherently unpredictable themselves.
• Alternative history is a parlor game.
• Instead, it was left implicit that if a phenomenon had never happened before, it never would. As illogical as that belief usually is, it has proven a powerful determinant in the way people react to Cassandras.
• Cognitive biases worked well when rapid pattern recognition and decision making was critical for survival, but in the modern world these processes can have unintended consequences.
• The availability bias tends to prejudice our interpretation and understanding of the world in favor of information that is most accessible in our memory, things that we have experienced in the recent past.
• Personal experiences are often part of what drives Cassandras to make the choices they make.
• The late Harvard historian Samuel Huntington proposed that, in analyzing leaders, it is always good to know what world events and personal experiences shaped them while they were young and their world view was being formed.
• Across all fields we have studied, expert Cassandras often make appeals to the compelling nature of data they themselves collected or which they endorse as important. The data speaks for itself, the Cassandras believe. For non-experts, however, obscure data or variables that they have never heard of before do not speak to them in the same way, and they understand them no more than they would a sentence in a language they don’t know.
• First, because they are calling out disasters beyond our collective horizon, Cassandras are often seen as pessimistic, naysaying nuisances.
• Initial Occurrence Syndrome is a potent obstacle to accurate evaluation of a warning.
• The lesson of 9/11 had been never to let a terrorist group establish a refuge from which it could launch attacks.
• Earthquakes are a very real and significant risk to nuclear power plants, warranting special measures.
• A Ponzi scheme involves no trades and no investments. It is a pure
• Psychology can trump rational decision making,
• “Math is truth, finance is bullshit,”
• Mining has long been recognized as one of the most dangerous occupations, and it remains so even today.
• As we have seen, opposition to federal regulation by the coal companies has existed since the dawn of the industry. Mining companies maintained that they could regulate themselves and, as technical experts, were best suited to determine how to make their mines safer. Decades of horrific accidents and the unnecessary loss of thousands of miners’ lives proved this assertion untrue and resulted in slow but significant steps toward improved safety standards, stricter regulation, and genuine enforcement power by the USBM and later MSHA.
• A Cassandra is only as good as her last correct prediction.
• A common error is that we believe that “people who talk in a way you don’t understand know exactly what they are talking about, when actually, people who talk in a way you do understand know exactly what they are talking about.”
• “Hubris is the cause of management mistakes 90 percent of the time.”
• One man with the truth constitutes a majority.
• We call this, our technique of identifying predicted future disasters that are being given insufficient attention today, the Cassandra Coefficient. It is a simple series of questions derived from our observation of past Cassandra Events. It involves four components: (1) the warning, the threat, or risk in question, (2) the decision makers or audience who must react, (3) the predictor or possible Cassandra, and (4) the critics who disparage or reject the warning.
• For each of the four components, we have several characteristics, which we have seen appear frequently in connection with past Cassandra Events.
• Our experience with senior decision makers in governments and corporations, however, suggests to us that such leaders prefer something they can unpack, understand, and apply themselves.
• Our proposition is straightforward. We have seen experts ignored in the past, when paying attention to them might have prevented or reduced the scope of calamities. In many of those cases, the same factors were at work over and over again. We can list them. If you see those things happening in that combination again, now or in the future, you may face a problem that deserves more attention and the application of a more diligent, rational, and unbiased analysis.
• INITIAL OCCURRENCE SYNDROME: In many cases, the event foretold has “never happened before,” at least not in the cultural memory of the audience, who will therefore resist taking the threat seriously. In our estimation, no obstacle to action is bigger than Initial Occurrence Syndrome, yet it is the easiest objection to logically assail.
• History is full of examples of things happening for the first time.
• Social psychologists use the term “cognitive bias” to describe the filters, blinders, or limits we place between our points of view and reality.
• If the warning is about something that has never happened in the historical record or personal experience of most people, it is likelier to be ignored.
• The majority of relevant experts may not initially agree with the predictor who sees something new, but in times of uncertainty, the authority of expert groups can be deceiving.
• Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. . . . The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with consensus.
• Decision makers throughout history have found comfort in the consensus of experts and rejected or persecuted the outlier who was often later proven correct.
• If the issue or risk defies a long-standing consensus because of new evidence, it should be further examined despite being a minority view.
• MAGNITUDE OVERLOAD: Overly large-scale events or phenomena can have two negative effects on decision makers.
• First, the sheer size of the problem sometimes overwhelms and causes the manager to “shut down.”
• Second, the decision maker may not be able to properly magnify their feelings of dread or empathy for disasters predicted to have massive death and loss. They simply may not be able to grasp how enormous a threat they face.
• Human emotions take place within an analog brain.
• Richard Farson notes, “The most important discoveries, the greatest art, and the best management decisions come from taking a fresh look at what people take for granted or cannot see precisely because it is too obvious.”5 Farson calls this the “Invisible Obvious.”
• Not only can we be blinded to things because of their ubiquity or obviousness, we can also be blind to critical information because of how powerfully our attention can focus in other directions.
• Cassandra Events often occur when the data is obvious if you look at it but most people are concentrating their attention elsewhere.
• DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY: Often it is not clear whose job it is to detect the warning, evaluate it, and decide to act.
• Frequently, no one wants to own an issue that’s about to become a disaster. This reluctance creates a “bystander effect,” wherein observers of the problem feel no responsibility to act.
• Increasingly, complex issues are multidisciplinary, making it unclear where the responsibility lies. New complex problems or “issues on the seams” are more likely to produce ambiguity about who is in charge of dealing with them. This phenomenon is especially true when Initial Occurrence Syndrome is involved.
• AGENDA INERTIA: Most organizations and their leadership have an agenda to which they are devotedly attached. Such groups are subject to Agenda Inertia, a force that concentrates focus on issues already in the plan.8 Unanticipated threats, ones that the leadership didn’t see coming and doesn’t really want to deal with, tend to have a difficult time crowding out preconceived agenda items.
• Often a warning of catastrophe requires explanation or interpretation by experts and involves some technical understanding which may not be common in the audience of decision makers.
• Systems can be so complex that even experts can’t see the disaster looming within. Complexity mismatch is a looming threat for government.
• If an issue is so complex that no one person fully understands it, there may be an increased likelihood of a Cassandra Event.
• Some decision makers reject the only available responses to a risk because those paths don’t conform to their ideology, for example about the proper role of government or science.
• If believing in the risk leads inevitably to an ideologically repugnant response, some decision makers will reject the warning altogether.
• It takes personal courage for leaders to detect and evaluate a warning, determine that a disaster is coming, and order resources expended and lives disrupted to deal with the risk.
• Decision makers faced with a warning of disaster often do respond in some way, an insufficient way. Faced with the risk that Cassandra is correct, but not really understanding the technical aspects of the issue sufficiently to make a personal judgement, decision makers will often make a token response.
• Ordering additional studies is a typical satisficing strategy, but may be appropriate if there is time and if the analyses truly are incomplete or insufficiently tested.
• Information that is not routine and should be rapidly escalated to higher-level decision makers is often instead placed in the queue for consideration in due course by systems not designed for determining whether an alarm is urgently required.
• successfully finding Cassandras is unlikely to happen unless relevant organizations, both in government and the private sector, foster a culture poised to listen to warnings, and empower and train small cadres to recognize and test sentinel intelligence.
• The Cassandras we have seen are recognized in their fields as competent experts.
• “Contrary to popular belief, most successful innovators are not dropout geniuses, but well-trained experts in their field.
• Usually Cassandras have not given a dire warning before, or if they have, they were clearly proven to be right.
• Because of the frustration of seeing a threat and wondering why others can’t, because of their personal sense of responsibility for promoting understanding and action on their discovery, and perhaps because of their high level of anxiety in general, Cassandras may at times appear obsessive and even socially abrasive.
• most people are unable to differentiate a message from the messenger.
• Cassandras’ warnings are not generated on the basis of intuition or “analyst’s judgment.” They are driven to their conclusions by empirical evidence. Often they are the first ones to generate or discover the data, but the evidence is usually not in question. It is their interpretation of the data that makes them step away from the previous consensus. They tend to see the problem leaping out of their data with a clarity that makes them unique.
• Most Cassandras tend to disbelieve anything that has not been empirically derived and repeatedly tested.
• Cassandra is the person in the crowd who smells the smoke first and is sufficiently confident in her judgment and so filled with a sense of personal responsibility that she is the first to call 911 or pull the fire alarm.
• For some issues, a high scientific standard of proof cannot be met in time to act. Some events cannot be accurately created, simulated, and repeated in the laboratory. To avoid the disaster, it may be necessary to abandon the normal protocol of waiting for all the evidence to be in and act instead on incomplete data and early indications.
• People with something to lose from the revelation of a risk, or from the solutions, may criticize Cassandras for illegitimate reasons based on this self-interest.
• Some experts react negatively out of simple jealousy that another expert, or worse, an outsider, got there first or is getting a lot of publicity.
• Some ideas, once exposed to peer review, gain general expert acceptance but are still heavily assailed by non-experts, many of whom may have a vested interest either in keeping things as they are or otherwise not acting to prevent or mitigate the disaster.
• Some opponents to acting on the basis of the evidence of an impending disaster know better than to deride the experts or question their technical data and analyses. Instead, they seek to minimize the urgency or defer consideration to some vaguely defined future.
• History teaches us that decision makers make exactly the wrong decision about Cassandras because of mental strategies we all employ subconsciously.
• The problem with heuristics is that they tend to become cognitive biases, inaccurate prejudices against one decision or one person versus the alternative.
• Rapidly judging other people is the primary skill for which our prehistoric brains are optimized, but this skill may be a dangerous barrier injecting subjective bias where we’d be better served by objective rationality.
• In addition to unconscious biases, a frequent reason decision makers ignore Cassandras is fear of being embarrassed by embracing someone who turns out to be wrong.
• If you decide to act in a big way to solve the alleged problem, it is, of course, less risky if the costs of your being wrong are limited and are clearly outweighed by the potential impact of not acting or doing so insufficiently.
• While technology exists for AI-driven weapons, we humans are not quite up to speed on how safe they are or will be, or how to use them.
• Artificial intelligence is a broad term, maybe overly broad. It simply means a computer program that can perform a task that normally must be done by a human.
• Machine-learning programs “have the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed,” optimizing themselves to most efficiently meet a set of pre-established goals.
• Superintelligence is an artificial intelligence that will be “smarter” than its human creators in all the metrics we define as intelligence.
• The astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Dr. Stephen Hawking warns that AI is “likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right.”
• His thesis is simple, though his solution is not: if we are to have any hope against superintelligence, we need to code it properly from the beginning. The answer, Eliezer believes, is one of morality. AI must be programmed with a set of ethical codes that align with humanity’s.
• Humans will relentlessly pursue the creation of superintelligence because it holds unimaginable promise to transform the world.
• A superintelligent computer will recursively self-improve to levels of intelligence that we may not even be able to comprehend, and no one knows whether this self-improvement will happen over a long period of time or within the first second of being turned on.
• Artificial intelligence has the potential to be dramatically more powerful than any previous scientific advance.
• Nearly all AI theorists predict superintelligence is coming and that it will so vastly eclipse the cognitive capacity of even the smartest humans that we simply cannot comprehend its intellectual horsepower.
• Once humans are no longer the most intelligent species on the planet, humankind will survive only at the whim of whatever is.
• Superintelligence gone wrong is a species-level threat, a human extinction event.
• Humans are neither the fastest nor the strongest creatures on the planet but dominate for one reason: humans are the smartest.
• Yudkowsky takes a highly pragmatic approach to the world and communicates with others according to what are called Crocker’s rules, one of which holds that the most efficient path of communication is always the best, even at the expense of social niceties.
• Unemployment is corrosive to government stability and calls for remarkably deft leadership, lest the nation collapse.
• Described as the third revolution in warfare, autonomous weapons can select targets and fire without any human intervention.
• The Grim Reaper’s favorite disguise is disease. Disease makes other disasters look trivial. More human lives have ended by bacteria and viruses than every other kind of catastrophe combined, its constant presence masking its destruction. Even war flags behind.
• Disease is now and has forever been humankind’s greatest killer, and it certainly is not being ignored; health care is one of the world’s biggest industries.
• Influenza is amazingly adaptable. It changes lethality and transmissibility quickly and jumps from animal to human more readily than any other disease. New flu mutations emerge daily, some proving more contagious than others.
• Warning of disaster is a complicated and tricky business, particularly when the solutions are expensive.
• Fossil fuels are cheap only because they do not pay their costs to society and receive large direct and indirect subsidies.
• The reality is that no one really knows what will happen when one side starts using nuclear weapons against another side that is also nuclear armed.
• The problem is that the health care industry, which is rushing headlong into the IoT, has a bad track record when it comes to cyber security.
• Often medical devices are running on software that is so old that its creators no longer try to fix it, akin to an old version of Microsoft Windows from the 1990s.
• Conventional malware is rampant in hospitals because of medical devices using unpatched operating systems.”
• Complexity is growing in the very machines that control the underpinnings of modern societies, nearly all of which are being developed and deployed with substantial cyber vulnerabilities.
• Using those lessons and the cases studies presented in this book, we suggest addressing the four necessary functions as follows:
• 1. SCANNING FOR PROBLEMS
• 2. SEPARATING THE SIGNAL FROM THE NOISE
• 3. RESPONSES: SURVEILLANCE, HEDGING, MITIGATING, AND PREVENTING
• 4. PERSUADE
• Professional experts giving warnings do not hide under rocks.
• Because many of the problems we examined have costly mitigation or prevention strategies, maybe even requiring substantial changes in the way we live, doing just enough to quiet demands for action, while failing to actually solve the problem, tends to be the easiest of solutions.
• Prevention of a disaster is the best course of action when feasible in time and cost.
• Our combined six decades of experience in the government and private sector tells us that only leaders who are convinced of the urgency of an issue get things done.
• Complexity hides vulnerabilities, creating new problems or complicating existing ones. Nowhere do we believe this tendency is clearer than in the inevitable convergence of two fields: artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.
• We believe that the recent decades of scientific and engineering breakthroughs place us on the cusp of a brave new world, one that promises great improvement for humanity. To achieve that elevated status, however, we must be on the lookout for the potential concomitant catastrophes that would slow or reverse that progress, as continued progress and improvement are not inevitable. Thus, we must systematically identify the people who see the risks first, test what these potential Cassandras are saying, then make transparent and explicit decisions about how to deal with the risk.

SUPERFORECASTING by Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner

• We are all forecasters.
• It turns out that forecasting is not a “you have it or you don’t” talent. It is a skill that can be cultivated.
• Our desire to reach into the future will always exceed our grasp.
• It is generally true that the further we try to look into the future, the harder it is to see.
• Laws of physics aside, there are no universal constants, so separating the predictable from the unpredictable is difficult work. There’s no way around it.
• “I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition,” Bill Gates wrote. “You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal….This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right.”
• Superforecasting does require minimum levels of intelligence, numeracy, and knowledge of the world, but anyone who reads serious books about psychological research probably has those prerequisites.
• superforecasting demands thinking that is open-minded, careful, curious, and—above all—self-critical. It also demands focus.
• The point is now indisputable: when you have a well-validated statistical algorithm, use it.
• Until quite recently in historical terms, it was not unusual for a sick person to be better off if there was no physician available because letting an illness take its natural course was less dangerous than what a physician would inflict.
• Randomized controlled trials are now routine. Yet it was revolutionary because medicine had never before been scientific.
• It is natural to identify our thinking with the ideas, images, plans, and feelings that flow through consciousness.
• In describing how we think and decide, modern psychologists often deploy a dual-system model that partitions our mental universe into two domains. System 2 is the familiar realm of conscious thought. It consists of everything we choose to focus on. By contrast, System 1 is largely a stranger to us. It is the realm of automatic perceptual and cognitive operations—like those you are running right now to transform the print on this page into a meaningful sentence or to hold the book while reaching for a glass and taking a sip. We have no awareness of these rapid-fire processes but we could not function without them. We would shut down.
• Conscious thought is demanding.
• Gathering all evidence and mulling it over may be the best way to produce accurate answers, but a hunter-gatherer who consults statistics on lions before deciding whether to worry about the shadow moving in the grass isn’t likely to live long enough to bequeath his accuracy-maximizing genes to the next generation. Snap judgments are sometimes essential.
• A defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based.
• Of course, System 1 can’t conclude whatever it wants. The human brain demands order. The world must make sense, which means we must be able to explain what we see and think. And we usually can—because we are creative confabulators hardwired to invent stories that impose coherence on the world.
• Sane people are expected to have sensible-sounding reasons for their actions.
• in science, the best evidence that a hypothesis is true is often an experiment designed to prove the hypothesis is false, but which fails to do so.
• As the post-Oslo speculation reveals, our natural inclination is to grab on to the first plausible explanation and happily gather supportive evidence without checking its reliability. That is what psychologists call confirmation bias. We rarely seek out evidence that undercuts our first explanation, and when that evidence is shoved under our noses we become motivated skeptics—finding reasons, however tenuous, to belittle it or throw it out entirely.
• Formally, it’s called attribute substitution, but I call it bait and switch: when faced with a hard question, we often surreptitiously replace it with an easy one.
• There is nothing mystical about an accurate intuition like the fire commander’s. It’s pattern recognition. With training or experience, people can encode patterns deep in their memories in vast number and intricate detail—such as the estimated fifty thousand to one hundred thousand chess positions that top players have in their repertoire.
• If something doesn’t fit a pattern—like a kitchen fire giving off more heat than a kitchen fire should—a competent expert senses it immediately.
• Our pattern-recognition ability comes at the cost of susceptibility to false positives.
• Whether intuition generates delusion or insight depends on whether you work in a world full of valid cues you can unconsciously register for future use.
• The tip-of-your-nose perspective can work wonders but it can also go terribly awry, so if you have the time to think before making a big decision, do so—and be prepared to accept that what seems obviously true now may turn out to be false later.
• The first step in learning what works in forecasting, and what doesn’t, is to judge forecasts, and to do that we can’t make assumptions about what the forecast means. We have to know.
• The first step in learning what works in forecasting, and what doesn’t, is to judge forecasts, and to do that we can’t make assumptions about what the forecast means.
• The truth is, the truth is elusive.
• Judging forecasts is much harder than often supposed, a lesson I learned the hard way—from extensive and exasperating experience.
• Obviously, a forecast without a time frame is absurd. And yet, forecasters routinely make them,
• But it was never adopted. People liked clarity and precision in principle but when it came time to make clear and precise forecasts they weren’t so keen on numbers. Some said it felt unnatural or awkward, which it does when you’ve spent a lifetime using vague language, but that’s a weak argument against change.
• But hopelessly vague language is still so common, particularly in the media, that we rarely notice how vacuous it is. It just slips by.
• Almost anything “may” happen.
• If we are serious about measuring and improving, this won’t do. Forecasts must have clearly defined terms and timelines. They must use numbers. And one more thing is essential: we must have lots of forecasts.
• We cannot rerun history so we cannot judge one probabilistic forecast—but everything changes when we have many probabilistic forecasts.
• Two ways to be miscalibrated: underconfident (over the line) and overconfident (under the line)
• The many forecasts required for calibration calculations make it impractical to judge forecasts about rare events, and even with common events it means we must be patient data collectors—and cautious data interpreters.
• Beating the average consistently requires rare skill.
• How well aggregation works depends on what you are aggregating.
• All too often we agree. We don’t consider alternative views—even when it’s clear that we should.
• People can and do think differently in different circumstances—cool and calculating at work, perhaps, but intuitive and impulsive when shopping. And our thinking habits are not immutable. Sometimes they evolve without our awareness of the change. But we can also, with effort, choose to shift gears from one mode to another.
• Models are supposed to simplify things, which is why even the best are flawed. But they’re necessary. Our minds are full of models. We couldn’t function without them.
• The job of intelligence is to speak truth to power, not to tell the politicians temporarily in charge what they want to hear,
• The IC is a huge bureaucracy that responds slowly even to the shock of major failures.
• When you combine the judgments of a large group of people to calculate the “wisdom of the crowd” you collect all the relevant information that is dispersed among all those people.
• it’s easy to misinterpret randomness. We don’t have an intuitive feel for it.
• Most things in life involve skill and luck, in varying proportions.
• Knowledge is something we can all increase, but only slowly. People who haven’t stayed mentally active have little hope of catching up to lifelong learners.
• High-powered pattern recognition skills won’t get you far, though, if you don’t know where to look for patterns in the real world.
• When we make estimates, we tend to start with some number and adjust. The number we start with is called the anchor. It’s important because we typically underadjust, which means a bad anchor can easily produce a bad estimate. And it’s astonishingly easy to settle on a bad anchor.
• Researchers have found that merely asking people to assume their initial judgment is wrong, to seriously consider why that might be, and then make another judgment, produces a second estimate which, when combined with the first, improves accuracy almost as much as getting a second estimate from another person. The same effect was produced simply by letting several weeks pass before asking people to make a second estimate.
• There is an even simpler way of getting another perspective on a question: tweak its wording.
• For superforecasters, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.
• The great majority of their forecasts are simply the product of careful thought and nuanced judgment.
• A smart executive will not expect universal agreement, and will treat its appearance as a warning flag that groupthink has taken hold. An array of judgments is welcome proof that the people around the table are actually thinking for themselves and offering their unique perspectives.
• Human beings have coped with uncertainty for as long as we have been recognizably human. And for almost all that time we didn’t have access to statistical models of uncertainty because they didn’t exist.
• A confident yes or no is satisfying in a way that maybe never is, a fact that helps to explain why the media so often turn to hedgehogs who are sure they know what is coming no matter how bad their forecasting records may be.
• Confidence and accuracy are positively correlated. But research shows we exaggerate the size of the correlation.
• Scientific facts that look as solid as rock to one generation of scientists can be crushed to dust beneath the advances of the next. All scientific knowledge is tentative. Nothing is chiseled in granite.
• An awareness of irreducible uncertainty is the core of probabilistic thinking, but it’s a tricky thing to measure.
• Epistemic uncertainty is something you don’t know but is, at least in theory, knowable.
• Aleatory uncertainty is something you not only don’t know; it is unknowable.
• Aleatory uncertainty ensures life will always have surprises, regardless of how carefully we plan. Superforecasters grasp this deep truth better than most.
• Meaning is a basic human need.
• Science doesn’t tackle “why” questions about the purpose of life. It sticks to “how” questions that focus on causation and probabilities.
• So finding meaning in events is positively correlated with wellbeing but negatively correlated with foresight. That sets up a depressing possibility: Is misery the price of accuracy?
• A forecast that is updated to reflect the latest available information is likely to be closer to the truth than a forecast that isn’t so informed.
• Superforecasters update much more frequently, on average, than regular forecasters.
• To be a top-flight forecaster, a growth mindset is essential.
• We learn new skills by doing. We improve those skills by doing more. These fundamental facts are true of even the most demanding skills.
• To learn from failure, we must know when we fail.
• Vague language is elastic language.
• Once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome: that’s hindsight bias.
• To get better at a certain type of forecasting, that is the type of forecasting you must do—over and over again, with good feedback telling you how your training is going, and a cheerful willingness to say, “Wow, I got that one wrong. I’d better think about why.”
• Superforecasters are perpetual beta.
• They [superforecasters] have a philosophic outlook, they tend to be:
• CAUTIOUS: Nothing is certain
• HUMBLE: Reality is infinitely complex
• NONDETERMINISTIC: What happens is not meant to be and does not have to happen
• In their abilities and thinking styles, they tend to be:
• ACTIVELY OPEN-MINDED: Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be protected
• INTELLIGENT AND KNOWLEDGEABLE, WITH A “NEED FOR COGNITION”: Intellectually curious, enjoy puzzles and mental challenges
• REFLECTIVE: Introspective and self-critical
• NUMERATE: Comfortable with numbers
• In their methods of forecasting they tend to be:
• PRAGMATIC: Not wedded to any idea or agenda
• ANALYTICAL: Capable of stepping back from the tip-of-your-nose perspective and considering other views
• DRAGONFLY-EYED: Value diverse views and synthesize them into their own
• PROBABILISTIC: Judge using many grades of maybe
• THOUGHTFUL UPDATERS: When facts change, they change their minds
• GOOD INTUITIVE PSYCHOLOGISTS: Aware of the value of checking thinking for cognitive and emotional biases
• In their work ethic, they tend to have:
• A GROWTH MINDSET: Believe it’s possible to get better
• GRIT: Determined to keep at it however long it takes
• The strongest predictor of rising into the ranks of superforecasters is perpetual beta, the degree to which one is committed to belief updating and self-improvement.
• A leader “needs to figure out what’s the right move and then execute it boldly.”
• The humility required for good judgment is not self-doubt—the sense that you are untalented, unintelligent, or unworthy. It is intellectual humility. It is a recognition that reality is profoundly complex, that seeing things clearly is a constant struggle, when it can be done at all, and that human judgment must therefore be riddled with mistakes.
• The “black swan” is therefore a brilliant metaphor for an event so far outside experience we can’t even imagine it until it happens.
• Fuzzy thinking can never be proven wrong.
• Far too many people treat numbers like sacred totems offering divine insight. The truly numerate know that numbers are tools, nothing more, and their quality can range from wretched to superb.
• Numbers must be constantly scrutinized and improved, which can be an unnerving process because it is unending. Progressive improvement is attainable. Perfection is not.
• Foresight is one element of good judgment, but there are others, including some that cannot be counted and run through a scientist’s algorithms—moral judgment, for one.
• Another critical dimension of good judgment is asking good questions.
• Triage.
• Focus on questions where your hard work is likely to pay off.
• Concentrate on questions in the Goldilocks zone of difficulty, where effort pays off the most.
• Certain classes of outcomes have well-deserved reputations for being radically unpredictable (e.g., oil prices, currency markets). But we usually don’t discover how unpredictable outcomes are until we have spun our wheels for a while trying to gain analytical traction.
• Break seemingly intractable problems into tractable sub-problems.
• Decompose the problem into its knowable and unknowable parts. Flush ignorance into the open. Expose and examine your assumptions. Dare to be wrong by making your best guesses.
• Strike the right balance between inside and outside views.
• Superforecasters are in the habit of posing the outside-view question: How often do things of this sort happen in situations of this sort?
• Strike the right balance between under- and overreacting to evidence.
• Belief updating is to good forecasting as brushing and flossing are to good dental hygiene. It can be boring, occasionally uncomfortable, but it pays off in the long term.
• Look for the clashing causal forces at work in each problem.
• For every good policy argument, there is typically a counterargument that is at least worth acknowledging.
• Strive to distinguish as many degrees of doubt as the problem permits but no more.
• Few things are either certain or impossible. And “maybe” isn’t all that informative. So your uncertainty dial needs more than three settings. Nuance matters. The more degrees of uncertainty you can distinguish, the better a forecaster you are likely to be.
• Strike the right balance between under- and overconfidence, between prudence and decisiveness.
• Look for the errors behind your mistakes but beware of rearview-mirror hindsight biases.
• Don’t try to justify or excuse your failures. Own them! Conduct unflinching postmortems: Where exactly did I go wrong?
• Not all successes imply that your reasoning was right. You may have just lucked out by making offsetting errors.
• Bring out the best in others and let others bring out the best in you.
• Master the fine arts of team management, especially perspective taking (understanding the arguments of the other side so well that you can reproduce them to the other’s satisfaction), precision questioning (helping others to clarify their arguments so they are not misunderstood), and constructive confrontation (learning to disagree without being disagreeable).
• Master the error-balancing bicycle.
• Learning requires doing, with good feedback that leaves no ambiguity about whether you are succeeding—“I’m rolling along smoothly!”—or whether you are failing—“crash!”
• Like all other known forms of expertise, superforecasting is the product of deep, deliberative practice.
• Don’t treat commandments as commandments
• Guidelines are the best we can do in a world where nothing is certain or exactly repeatable.

MINDWARE by Richard E. Nisbett

• Sometimes commonsense approaches to problems produce errors in judgment and unfortunate actions.
• The mind is like a muscle in some ways but not in others. Lifting pretty much anything will make you stronger. But thinking about just anything in any old way is not likely to make you smarter.
• The key is learning how to frame events in such a way that the relevance of the principles to the solutions of particular problems is made clear, and learning how to code events in such a way that the principles can actually be applied to the events.
• Understanding what we can and can’t observe about our mental life tells us when to rely on intuition when solving a problem and when to turn to explicit rules about categorization, choice, or assessment of causal explanations.
• When we look at a bird or a chair or a sunset, it feels as if we’re simply registering what is in the world. But in fact our perceptions of the physical world rely heavily on tacit knowledge, and mental processes we’re unaware of, that help us perceive something or accurately categorize it.
• It’s more unsettling to learn that our understanding of the nonmaterial world, including our beliefs about the characteristics of other people, is also utterly dependent on stored knowledge and hidden reasoning processes.
• Since the 1920s, psychologists have made much use of the schema concept. The term refers to cognitive frameworks, templates, or rule systems that we apply to the world to make sense of it.
• We have schemas for virtually every kind of thing we encounter.
• Schemas affect our behavior as well as our judgments.
• A serious problem with our reliance on schemas and stereotypes is that they can get triggered by incidental facts that are irrelevant or misleading.
• Any stimulus we encounter will trigger spreading activation to related mental concepts.
• our construal of the nature and meaning of events is massively dependent on stored schemas and the inferential processes they initiate and guide.
• All “reality” is merely an arbitrary construal of the world. This view has a long history. Right now its advocates tend to call themselves “postmodernists” or “deconstructionists.” Many people answering to these labels endorse the idea that the world is a “text” and no reading of it can be held to be any more accurate than any other.
• Spreading activation makes us susceptible to all kinds of unwanted influences on our judgments and behavior.
• The most obvious implication of all the evidence about the importance of incidental stimuli is that you want to rig environments so that they include stimuli that will make you or your product or your policy goals attractive.
• Less obvious are two facts: (1) The effect of incidental stimuli can be huge, and (2) you want to know as much as you possibly can about what kinds of stimuli produce what kinds of effects.
• Our construal of objects and events is influenced not just by the schemas that are activated in particular contexts, but by the framing of judgments we have to make.
• We often arrive at judgments or solve problems by use of heuristics—rules of thumb that suggest a solution to a problem.
• The conjunction of two events can’t be more likely than just one event by itself.
• Simply put, we see patterns in the world where there are none because we don’t understand just how un-random-looking random sequences can be.
• The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. You’re rarely going to do better than that.
• Remember that all perceptions, judgments, and beliefs are inferences and not direct readouts of reality.
• Be aware that our schemas affect our construals.
• Remember that incidental, irrelevant perceptions and cognitions can affect our judgment and behavior.
• Be alert to the possible role of heuristics in producing judgments.
• The fundamental attribution error gets us in trouble constantly.
• We should choose our acquaintances carefully because we’re going to be highly influenced by them. This is especially true for young people: the younger you are, the more influenced you are by peers’ attitudes and behaviors.
• One of a parent’s most important and challenging roles is to make sure their children’s acquaintances are likely to be good influences.
• self-serving motives behind such attributions. But it’s important to know that people generally think that their own behavior is largely a matter of responding sensibly to the situation they happen to be in—whether that behavior is admirable or abominable.
• there is vastly more going on in our heads than we realize.
• Pay more attention to context. This will improve the odds that you’ll correctly identify situational factors that are influencing your behavior and that of others.
• Realize that situational factors usually influence your behavior and that of others more than they seem to, whereas dispositional factors are usually less influential than they seem.
• Realize that other people think their behavior is more responsive to situational factors than you’re inclined to think—and they’re more likely to be right than you are.
• Recognize that people can change.
• Change the environment and you change the person.
• We generally feel that we’re fairly knowledgeable about what’s going on in our heads—what it is we’re thinking about and what thinking processes are going on. But an absolute gulf separates this belief from reality.
• Don’t assume that you know why you think what you think or do what you do.
• Don’t assume that other people’s accounts of their reasons or motives are any more likely to be right than are your accounts of your own reasons or motives.
• Consciousness is necessary for checking and elaborating on conclusions reached by the unconscious mind.
• The most important thing I have to tell you—in this whole book—is that you should never fail to take advantage of the free labor of the unconscious mind.
• If you’re not making progress on a problem, drop it and turn to something else.
• Microeconomists are not agreed on just how it is that people make decisions or how they should make them. They do agree, however, that cost-benefit analysis of some kind is what people normally do, and should do.
• The more important and complicated the decision, the more important it is to do such an analysis.
• Even an obviously flawed cost-benefit analysis can sometimes show in high relief what the decision must be.
• There is no fully adequate metric for costs and benefits, but it’s usually necessary to compare them anyway.
• Calculations of the value of a human life are repellent and sometimes grossly misused, but they are often necessary nonetheless in order to make sensible policy decisions.
• Tragedies of the commons, where my gain creates negative externalities for you, typically require binding and enforceable intervention.
• Expended resources that can’t be retrieved should not be allowed to influence a decision about whether to consume something that those resources were used to obtain.
• You should avoid engaging in an activity that has lower net benefit than some other action you could take now or in the future.
• Falling into the sunk cost trap always entails paying unnecessary opportunity costs.
• Attention to costs and benefits, including sunk cost and opportunity cost traps, pays.
• Loss considerations tend to loom too large relative to gain considerations. Loss aversion causes us to miss out on a lot of good deals.
• We’re overly susceptible to the endowment effect—valuing a thing more than we should simply because it’s ours.
• We’re a lazy species: we hang on to the status quo for no other reason than that it’s the way things are.
• Choice is way overrated. Too many choices can confuse and make decisions worse—or prevent needed decisions from being made.
• When we try to influence the behavior of others, we’re too ready to think in terms of conventional incentives—carrots and sticks.
• Rather than pushing people or pulling people, try removing barriers and creating channels that make the most sensible behavior the easiest option.
• you simply can’t live an optimal life in today’s world without basic knowledge of statistics.
• Observations of objects or events should often be thought of as samples of a population.
• The fundamental attribution error is primarily due to our tendency to ignore situational factors, but this is compounded by our failure to recognize that a brief exposure to a person constitutes a small sample of a person’s behavior.
• Increasing sample size reduces error only if the sample is unbiased.
• The standard deviation is a handy measure of the dispersion of a continuous variable around the mean.
• If we know that an observation of a particular kind of variable comes from the extreme end of the distribution of that variable, then it’s likely that additional observations are going to be less extreme.
• Accurate assessment of relationships can be remarkably difficult.
• When we try to assess correlations for which we have no anticipations, as when we try to estimate the correlation between meaningless or arbitrarily paired events, the correlation must be very high for us to be sure of detecting it.
• We’re susceptible to illusory correlations.
• The representativeness heuristic underlies many of our prior assumptions about correlation.
• Correlation doesn’t establish causation, but if there’s a plausible reason why A might cause B, we readily assume that correlation does indeed establish causation.
• Reliability refers to the degree to which a case gets the same score on two occasions or when measured by different means. Validity refers to the degree to which a measure predicts what it’s supposed to predict.
• The more codable events are, the more likely it is that our assessments of correlation will be correct.
• Caution and humility are called for when we try to predict future trait-related behavior from past trait-related behavior unless our sample of behavior is large and obtained in a variety of situations.
• Reminding ourselves of the concept of the fundamental attribution error may help us to realize that we may be overgeneralizing.
• Institutions increasingly rely on experiments to provide them with information. That’s a good thing, because if you can do an experiment to answer a question, it’s nearly always going to be better than correlational techniques.
• Assumptions tend to be wrong. And even if they didn’t, it’s silly to rely on them whenever it’s easy to test them.
• Correlational designs are weak because the researcher hasn’t assigned the cases to their condition.
• The greater the number of cases—people, agricultural plots, and so on—the greater the likelihood that you’ll find a real effect and the lower the likelihood that you will “find” an effect that isn’t there.
• When you assign each case to all of the possible treatments, your design is more sensitive.
• It’s crucial to consider whether the cases you’re examining (people in the case of research on humans) could influence one another.
• Sometimes we can observe relationships that come close to being as convincing as a genuine experiment.
• The randomized control experiment is frequently called the gold standard in scientific and medical research—with good reason. Results from such studies trump results from any and all other kinds of studies.
• Society pays a high cost for experiments not carried out.
• Multiple regression analysis (MRA) examines the association between an independent variable and a dependent variable,
• The fundamental problem with MRA, as with all correlational methods, is self-selection.
• When a competently conducted experiment tells you one thing about a given relationship and MRA tells you another, you normally must believe the experiment.
• A basic problem with MRA is that it typically assumes that the independent variables can be regarded as building blocks, with each variable taken by itself being logically independent of all the others.
• Just as correlation doesn’t prove causation, absence of correlation fails to prove absence of causation.
• Verbal reports are susceptible to a huge range of distortions and errors.
• Answers to questions about attitudes are frequently based on tacit comparison with some reference group.
• Reports about the causes of our behavior, as you learned in Chapter 3 and were reminded of in this chapter, are susceptible to a host of errors and incidental influences.
• Actions speak louder than words. Behavior is a better guide to understanding people’s attitudes and personalities than are verbal responses.
• Conduct experiments on yourself. The same methodologies that psychologists use to study people can be used to study yourself.
• If the structure of your argument can be mapped directly onto one of the valid forms of argument that logic specifies, you’re guaranteed a deductively valid conclusion.
• Logic divests arguments of any references to the real world so that the formal structure of an argument can be laid bare without any interference from prior beliefs.
• The truth of a conclusion and the validity of a conclusion are entirely separate things.
• Venn diagrams embody syllogistic reasoning and can be helpful or even necessary for solving some categorization problems.
• Errors in deductive reasoning are sometimes made because they map onto argument forms that are inductively valid.
• Pragmatic reasoning schemas are abstract rules of reasoning that underlie much of thought.
• Some of the fundamental principles underlying Western and Eastern thought are different. Western thought is analytic and emphasizes logical concepts of identity and insistence on noncontradiction; Eastern thought is holistic and encourages recognition of change and acceptance of contradiction.
• Western thought encourages separation of form from content in order to assess validity of arguments.
• Eastern thought produces more accurate beliefs about some aspects of the world and the causes of human behavior than Western thought.
• Westerners and Easterners respond in quite different ways to contradictions between two propositions.
• Eastern and Western approaches to history are very different.
• Western thought has been influenced substantially by Eastern thought in recent decades.
• Reasoning about social conflict by younger Japanese is wiser than that of younger Americans. But Americans gain in wisdom over their life span and Japanese do not.
• Epistemology is the study of what counts as knowledge, how we can best obtain knowledge, and what can be known with certainty.
• Explanations should be kept simple. They should call on as few concepts as possible, defined as simply as possible.
• Reductionism in the service of simplicity is a virtue; reductionism for its own sake can be a vice. Events should be explained at the most basic level possible.
• We don’t realize how easy it is for us to generate plausible theories.
• Our approach to hypothesis testing is flawed in that we’re inclined to search only for evidence that would tend to confirm a theory while failing to search for evidence that would tend to disconfirm it.
• A theorist who can’t specify what kind of evidence would be disconfirmatory should be distrusted.
• Falsifiability of a theory is only one virtue; confirmability is even more important.
• We should be suspicious of theoretical contrivances that are proposed merely to handle apparently disconfirmatory evidence but are not intrinsic to the theory.
• Science is based not only on evidence and well-justified theories—faith and hunches may cause scientists to ignore established scientific hypotheses and agreed-upon facts.
• The paradigms that underlie a given body of scientific work, as well as those that form the basis for technologies, industries, and commercial enterprises, are subject to change without notice.
• Different cultural practices and beliefs can produce different scientific theories, paradigms, and even forms of reasoning.
• Quasi-rational practices by scientists, and cultural influences on belief systems and reasoning patterns, may have encouraged postmodernists and deconstructionists to press the view that there are no facts, only socially agreed-upon interpretations of reality.
• Our conviction that we know the world directly, by unmediated perception of facts, is what philosophers call “naive realism.”

HOW TO BECOME CEO by Jeffrey J. Fox

• CEO is the acronym for chief executive officer. The CEO is the person who has strategic responsibility for the fortune and the future of the organization.
• The surest way to become president or CEO of a corporation is to buy a business or to start a business.
• Perhaps the biggest problem in business is that while environments and markets change, managements do not.
• WACADAD, pronounced wack-a-dad, is an acronym for “Words are cheap and deeds are dear.”
• If you say you are going to do something, always do it, or do your utmost. If you give your word, keep it.
• The world is full of people who say they will do something, and don’t do it.
• People who create positive outcomes are rare.
• Prove your worth with deliverables, and do so again and again.
• Ideas are nothing without execution.
• So few people in a corporation actually execute ideas that the person who does becomes visible, and is often sought to do more.
• Here is the simple gist of it: If you say you will do something, do it. If you say you won’t do something, don’t do it. If you see something that has to get done, make it happen.
• Always Take the Job That Offers the Most Money
• After you have decided what you want to do—whether it is banking, advertising, manufacturing, or something else—go to work for the company that offers you the most money.
• If you are in a corporation, always take the transfer, promotion, or assignment that pays the most money.
• There are several important reasons why you go for the money. First, all of your benefits, perquisites, bonuses, and subsequent raises will be based on your salary.
• Corporations give all extra compensation in percentages.
• Second, the higher paid you are, the more visible to top management you will be.
• Third, the more money you are paid, the more contribution will be expected of you. This means you will be given more responsibility, tasks, and problems to solve.
• Fourth, if two people are candidates for a promotion to a job that pays $60,000, and one person makes $40,000 and the other $50,000, the higher-paid person always gets the job.
• Finally, in business, money is the scoreboard. The more you make, the better you’re doing. Simple.
• Avoid Staff Jobs, Seek Line Jobs
• Line jobs make money for your corporation. Line jobs bring in money or have a direct relationship with profits and losses.
• Line jobs include salespeople, sales managers, product managers, plant managers, marketing directors, foremen, supervisors, and general managers. Staff jobs include lawyers, planners, data-processing people, research and development scientists, and administrators of all types.
• Line jobs directly help the company get and keep customers.
• Jobs that don’t get and keep customers are redundant.
• Take a staff job only if it is clearly temporary, a stepping-stone, and if it pays more money.
• Don’t Expect Human Resources to Plan Your Career
• Your destiny and your career growth are your responsibility, no one else’s.
• Get and Keep Customers
• When the phone rings, twelve people ought to dive to answer it.
• Keep Physically Fit
• Your brain will make you money, but your body carries your brain. The better your physical condition, the greater your capacity for productive, unrelenting work.
• Do Something Hard and Lonely
• Regularly practice something Spartan and individualistic.
• Never Write a Nasty E-Mail
• Think for One Hour Every Day
• Spend one hard hour every day planning, dreaming, scheming, thinking, calculating.
• Keep written notes in your special “idea notebook.”
• Keep and Use a Special “Idea Notebook”
• Buy a notebook you like. Keep it in one place—in a desk drawer or in a briefcase pocket—and leave it there. Write down all your ideas, plans, goals, and dreams.
• Good ideas always have their time. When they do, commit them to action via your “To Do” list.
• Don’t Have a Drink with the Gang
• Never get tipsy with anyone connected with your company. It is a sign of weakness. It shows you are out of control.
• Don’t Smoke
• You probably haven’t yet earned the right to smoke a victory cigar.
• Skip All Office Parties
• Friday Is “How Ya Doin’?” Day
• Every Friday, take one of the people you need out to lunch and ask, “How ya doin’?” These are usually not people in your department. They are important gears in the machine: people who help you get your job done.
• Find out who you need, no matter how low in the organization, and let them know you know you need and appreciate them.
• Make one good ally in your company every month.
• Make Allies of Your Peers’ Subordinates
• Your peers are rivals for your next spot. The support of your peers’ teammates is important. Their support of you will help you get your job done even if your peer deliberately or unintentionally acts to scuttle you.
• Know Everybody by Their First Name
• To most people, there is no sound sweeter than their name remembered and pronounced correctly.
• Learn everybody’s full name, and know something about them. Find out what they do and why their job is important.
• A very good technique is to take visitors (customers, job candidates, friends) on an office or a plant tour. Introduce them to people, telling the visitor what it is these other folks do that is important to the corporation.
• Organize “One-Line, Good-Job” Tours
• Every once in a while get the highest-ranking person you can to tour and visit your department. Before the tour, write out a single 3-by-5 index card for every person. On the card write a one-or two-line report of some achievement or contribution—business or personal—that the person made. Use the cards as “cue cards” for the top guy, so that he can personally and specifically thank and compliment each person.
• Don’t let anybody in the company know you do this.
• Make One More Call
• The difference between the successful person and the average is inches.
• Arrive Forty-Five Minutes Early and Leave Fifteen Minutes Late
• If you are going to be first in your corporation, start practicing by being first on the job.
• Don’t stay at the office until ten o’clock every night. You are sending a signal that you can’t keep up or that your personal life is poor.
• Leave fifteen minutes late instead. In those fifteen minutes organize your next day and clean your desk.
• Don’t Take Work Home from the Office
• Your home hours are for listening to your family, studying, planning, expanding your interests, and pitching to your kids during batting practice.
• Earn Your “Invitation Credentials”
• In every corporation there is, at the top, a cosa nostra, an inner, special family. This is the group that ultimately decides on who becomes CEO and for how long he or she will be in office.
• Avoid Superiors When You Travel
• You should spend your travel time working. Airplane time is work time, so fly by yourself.
• Hotel time is also work time.
• Eat in Your Hotel Room
• Dinner in your room saves time and money.
• Have breakfast in your room. Arrange for an exact service time. Get up early, do your exercises, get dressed, and start working. Don’t waste time in a breakfast line with a hundred businesspeople.
• Work, Don’t Read Paperbacks, on the Airplane
• Have a specific work objective for each trip.
• Keep a “People File”
• Get a good contact list development program. From the first day on the job, start keeping a file of all the people you meet, work with, and get to know.
• Always ask people for their business card; inevitably they will ask for yours.
• Send Handwritten Notes
• Handwritten notes stand out.
• There are endless occasions that warrant a handwritten note:
• Go to a good stationery store. Order a box of exceptional-quality cards and envelopes with your name on the cards and your address on the envelopes.
• Send one handwritten note a week… for starters.
• Don’t Get Buddy-Buddy with Your Superiors
• You and your superiors are business associates. You are not friends. There is a necessary line between you. Don’t cross it and get buddy-buddy. Don’t let your superiors cross it either.
• Don’t Hide an Elephant
• Big problems always surface. If they have been hidden, even unintentionally, the negative fallout is always worse.
• When you know there is a problem, a goof, a snafu, and it is important, let your supervisors and colleagues know right away.
• Always Take Vacations
• Always plan your vacation far in advance.
• Always Say “Yes” to a Senior Executive Request
• People who get the job done are the ones who get the top jobs.
• Never Surprise Your Boss
• Your boss wants to appear in control, on top of things. It is a discourtesy to him, and to the organization, for you to keep your boss in the dark.
• Make Your Boss Look Good, and Your Boss’s Boss Look Better
• Getting real promotions usually requires a vacancy up the ladder. Your best chance is to succeed your boss.
• Your boss’s boss is always the key. He is often more interested and influential in your career than your immediate superior.
• Never Let a Good Boss Make a Mistake
• A good boss trains you to take her place, and when she ultimately gets promoted, you have a chance to progress.
• Go to the Library One Day a Month
• One good, uninterrupted workday in a quiet library will enable you to accomplish ten times more than you could with the same number of hours in your office.
• Add One Big New Thing to Your Life Each Year
• To be qualified to be a chief executive officer of a corporation, you must be broad-gauged, widely read, and have many diverse interests.
• Practice being presidential all the time, and that includes the business uniform.
• Buy a book on how to dress for success, or note how successful people, leaders, and winners dress.
• Overinvest in People
• Hire the best people. Attract, motivate, train, and reward the best people.
• Leaders of organizations know that people make things happen. They never forget this elemental truth.
• When hiring, look to three I’s: Integrity “I can do it” attitude Intelligence
• Overpay Your People
• Get rid of the mediocre, the slackers, for they take money from the real workers. One nonearner’s salary can be spread among many.
• You can’t cut people costs and save money. People are an asset, a contributing return on investment. You make money on people.
• You are much better off having fewer exceptional people all making more money than they should, rather than having the same or lower payroll costs with more people.
• To become a president, you must master the art of and the ability to stop, look, and listen. Listening is very difficult, especially for aggressive, energetic, bright people. You must train yourself to always be on “high receive.”
• Be a Flag-Waving Company Patriot
• If you want to be president of your company, you must commit yourself totally to your company and to its products or services.
• Do not go to work for a company if you cannot, unabashedly, shout the virtues of their products.
• Find and Fill the “Data Gaps”
• Identify what you don’t know and what your organization doesn’t know. These are “data gaps.”
• Most people in business never really work hard. They manufacture a busy look by bustle and busywork.
• Dig deep, do the prep work, and success will follow.
• Never Panic… or Lose Your Temper
• If you have ten seconds to make a decision, think for nine.
• Learn to Speak and Write in Plain English
• You must learn to communicate. You must be articulate.
• Business communications must be precise, complete, and totally comprehensible.
• Treat All People as Special
• Be a Credit Maker, Not a Credit Taker
• Give everybody 100 percent credit for the work they do.
• Give proper credit and you will become known as a credit maker, as somebody who gets things done, as a person to work for. Your people will work very hard, as they know they will be fairly recognized.
• Give Informal Surprise Bonuses
• If someone does an extraordinarily good job on something, particularly something that is not part of his regular responsibility, give him a bonus.
• Please, Be Polite with Everyone
• Use good manners, all the time, with everyone. Be gracious. Never pull rank. Never wear your boss’s stripes. Don’t swear or use coarse language. Don’t put your feet on office furniture.
• Always be on time for appointments.
• Always introduce yourself, your spouse, and anyone else clearly and slowly.
• People who feel good about themselves and their jobs will contribute at high levels.
• Saying nice things to people makes them feel good.
• It is the gruntwork that counts and begets the glory.
• If you begrudge the gruntwork, you will not get the glory.
• In business, failure costs so much money that almost every satisfied company with more than a thousand employees avoids the risk of innovation.
• Not many things work perfectly the first time.
• There are two kinds of decisions: revocable and irrevocable. Knowing the difference is a hallmark of the good manager. Revocable decisions are changeable decisions and can be made relatively fast, because their impact is less, and if they’re wrong, there is time to redo. The organization has to live with irrevocable decisions.
• You must always think fast and study fast to be able to decide fast.
• Don’t change the formula for success. Rather, pour the coals to it.
• Always be on the lookout for ideas. Be completely indiscriminate as to the source.
• Stay Out of Office Politics
• Rampant office politics is symptomatic of a weak leader. The reward system is probably not fair or clear.
• Spend your time creating and accomplishing. Let your actions be your politics. In good companies, contribution counts.
• Never Be Late
• Being late is not a winning career strategy.
• Look Sharp and Be Sharp
• A little vanity is good. Look after yourself, and keep an attractive appearance.
• Don’t Go Over Budget
• Get your job done on time and within budget. Senior managers promote people who deliver what is expected.
• Tight budgets promote creativity, ingenuity, and inventiveness. Look upon a tight budget as a challenge.
• Never Underestimate an Opponent
• One of the most dangerous impediments to one’s career is the character assassin.
• The “should’ve club” is full of non-doers, the risk averse. They never go for it.

HOW TO BECOME A STRAIGHT-A STUDENT by Cal Newport

• The simple truth is that the brute force techniques used by most students are incredibly inefficient.
• Replace techniques you don’t like with ones that seem better.
• The problem here is not the amount of available hours, but rather how each hour is spent.
• As humans, our minds have evolved to prefer short-term tasks such as “run away from that lion” or “eat food.” Therefore, when you walk into the library on a Sunday morning with the goal of finishing all of your homework and writing a paper, your brain isn’t happy.
• The pseudo-worker looks and feels like someone who is working hard—he or she spends a long time in the library and is not afraid to push on late into the night—but, because of a lack of focus and concentration, doesn’t actually accomplish much.
• There is just no way to be well-balanced, happy, and academically successful if you’re regularly burning through your free hours in long, painful stretches of inefficient studying.
• work accomplished = time spent x intensity of focus
• Pseudo-work features a very low intensity of focus. Therefore, to accomplish something by pseudo-working, you need to spend a lot of time.
• Manage Your Time in Five Minutes a Day
• once you figure out what work needs to be done and when, it’s like a weight being lifted from your shoulders.
• Try to label each of your to-dos for the day with a specific time period during which you are going to complete it.
• A little organization goes a hell of a long way.
• Anyone can spend five minutes to figure out what they should be doing. The real challenge is marshaling the motivation to actually do the work once it’s scheduled.
• To put it simply, some work just plain sucks, and you, like the straight-A students interviewed for this book, will want to procrastinate on this sucky work. It’s unavoidable.
• Having to record, in ink, on paper, that you procrastinated over a task for no good reason is a powerful blow to your ego.
• Low energy breeds procrastination.
• As always, the hardest part is beginning. But once you start slogging through your assignment, the pain will slip away, you will hit your stride, and before you know it, your ride will have arrived and that once terrifying task will be safely completed.
• Once you have accomplished one big task, it becomes much easier to tackle more.
• Don’t wait until the deadlines are so close that you have no choice but to buckle down. Instead, scout out one or two days to preemptively designate as “hard.”
• Take ownership of your schedule and you are more likely to respect it.
• You need to separate your work mind-set from your relaxation mind-set.
• Part One Cheat Sheet
• Step #1. Manage Your Time in Five Minutes a Day
• Jot down to-dos and deadlines on a list whenever they arise.
• Transfer these to-dos and deadlines to your calendar every morning.
• Plan your day each morning by labeling your to-dos with realistic time frames and moving what you don’t have time for to different dates.
• Step #2. Declare War on Procrastination
• Keep a work progress journal, and every day record what you wanted to accomplish and whether or not you succeeded.
• When working, eat healthy snacks to maximize your energy.
• Transform horrible tasks into a big event to help you gather the energy to start.
• Build work routines to make steady progress on your obligations without expending too much of your limited motivational resources.
• Choose your hard days in advance to minimize their impact.
• Step #3. Choose When, Where, and How Long
• Try to fit as much work as possible into the morning and afternoon, between classes and obligations.
• Study in isolated locations.
• Take a break every hour.
• Here’s a simple truth: Most college students are terrible at studying.
• Here’s the problem with rote review: It’s a horrible way to study.
• Most students incorrectly believe rote review is the only way to study.
• There are many, many different ways to study (and rote review is not one of the better ones).
• Better technique trumps more effort.
• First things first: Always go to class! The importance of this rule cannot be overemphasized.
• As Lydia, a straight-A student from Dartmouth, explains, if you skip class, “it’ll take twice as long studying to make up for what you missed.” This is why class attendance is so important. Not because learning is power, or it’s what your parents would want you do, but because it saves you time. If you attend class regularly, you will significantly cut down on the amount of studying required to score high grades.
• To reduce your study time, you have to also take good notes once you’re there.
• The key to doing well in these courses is straightforward: Identify the big ideas. That’s what it all comes down to. Exams in nontechnical courses focus entirely on big ideas—they require you to explain them, contrast them, and reevaluate them in the light of new evidence. If you are aware of, and understand, all of the big ideas presented in the course, these tasks are not so difficult, and strong grades will follow.
• The central challenge to note-taking in nontechnical courses is deciding what to write down.
• The key to taking notes in a technical course is to record as many sample problems as possible.
• Most technical courses have assigned reading. These readings are usually textbook chapters, and they typically focus on a specific technique or formula. Don’t do this reading. It may sound blasphemous, but it’s the reality of college-level technical courses: Very few students actually do the technical reading ahead of time. Why? Because the exact same material will be covered in class. If you don’t understand a topic after it’s presented by the professor, then you can go back and use the reading to help fill in the blanks. This ordering of events is much more efficient.
• Readings that make an argument are more important than readings that describe an event or person, which are more important than readings that only provide context (i.e., speech transcripts, press clippings).
• Your problem set assignments are the key to your review process.
• Whether it’s philosophy or calculus, the most effective way to imprint a concept is to first review it and then try to explain it, unaided, in your own words.
• Ask questions during class.
• Develop the habit of talking to your professor briefly after class.
• Years of informal experimentation by successful students have demonstrated that the most effective way to tackle an exam is to answer the easiest questions first, and this is exactly what you should do.
• Double checking your work up to the last minute can make the difference between an above-average student and an academic star.
• A study system is only as useful as your ability to adapt it to your unique situation.
• For technical exams, you can never guess how well you performed until you get your grade back.
• Part Two Cheat Sheet
• Step #1. Take Smart Notes
• Always go to class and try to take the best notes possible.
• For nontechnical courses, capture the big ideas by taking notes in the question/evidence/conclusion format.
• For technical courses, record as many sample problems and answers as possible.
• Step #2. Demote Your Assignments
• Work a little bit each day on your assignments; avoid suffering from day-before syndrome.
• Read only the favored sources on the syllabus in detail. To decide how much time to spend on supplemental sources, remember the importance hierarchy: – readings that make an argument are more important than – readings that describe an event or person, which are more important than – readings that only provide context (i.e., speech transcripts, press clippings).
• Take reading notes in the question/evidence/conclusion format.
• Work in groups on problem sets, solve problems on the go, and write up your answers formally the first time.
• Step #3. Marshal Your Resources
• Figure out exactly what the test will cover.
• Cluster your notes for nontechnical courses.
• Build mega-problem sets for technical courses.
• Step #4. Conquer the Material
• Embrace the quiz-and-recall method. It’s the single most efficient way to study.
• Spread out memorization over several days. Your mind can do only so much at a time.
• Step #5. Invest in “Academic Disaster Insurance”
• Eliminate the question marks for topics covered in class or from the reading that you don’t understand.
• Step #6. Provide “A+” Answers
• Look over the whole test first.
• Figure out how much time you have to spend on each question (leaving a ten-minute cushion at the end).
• Answer the questions in order of increasing difficulty.
• Write out a mini-outline before tackling an essay question.
• Use any and all leftover time to check and recheck your work.
• Paper writing is hard, but the good news is that it doesn’t have to be as hard as most students make it. Let’s begin by taking a closer look at the paper-writing process itself, which can be broken down into three separate components:
• 1. Sifting through existing arguments.
• 2. Forming your own argument.
• 3. Communicating your argument clearly.
• Most students approach paper writing by combining all three of these components into one drawn-out and bloated process.
• Each of the three components described above is mentally taxing, but to do all three at the same time is downright exhausting!
• “The key to effective paper writing is breaking down the task into manageable units.”
• The required precision of your thinking works in direct proportion to the constraint of the material. That is, the more specific the assignment, the more subtle and detailed your thinking must be.
• Remember: A topic does not equal a thesis. A topic describes an interesting subject or area of observation. A thesis presents an interesting, specific argument about that subject or observation.
• Your thesis will change and evolve as you continue the paper-writing process. This is inevitable, because you haven’t done your exhaustive research yet.
• A good argument requires a solid grasp of all relevant information.
• If you can reduce your specific query to a group of related, yet succinct, general searches, you will have a much better chance of finding a relevant source.
• A good rule of thumb is: Don’t cite Web sites.
• In general, a good college-level argument should accomplish the following:
• 1. Draw from previous work on the same topic to define the context for the discussion.
• 2. Introduce a thesis and carefully spell out how it relates to existing work on similar issues.
• 3. Support the thesis with careful reasoning and references to existing arguments, evidence, and primary sources.
• 4. Introduce some final prognostications about extending the argument and its potential impact on the field as a whole.
• Part Three Cheat Sheet
• Step #1. Target a Titillating Topic
• Start looking for an interesting topic early.
• Step #2. Conduct a Thesis-Hunting Expedition
• Start with general sources and then follow references to find the more targeted sources where good thesis ideas often hide.
• Step #3. Seek a Second Opinion
• A thesis is not a thesis until a professor has approved it
• Step #4. Research like a Machine
• Find sources.
• Make personal copies of all sources.
• Annotate the material.
• Decide if you’re done. (If the answer is “no,” loop back to #1.)
• Step #5. Craft a Powerful Story
• There is no shortcut to developing a well-balanced and easy-to-follow argument.
• Dedicate a good deal of thought over time to getting it right.
• Describe your argument in a topic-level outline.
• Type supporting quotes from sources directly into your outline.
• Step #6. Consult Your Expert Panel
• Before starting to write, get some opinions on the organization of your argument and your support from classmates and friends who are familiar with the general area of study.
• The more important the paper, the more people who should review it.
• Step #7. Write Without the Agony
• Follow your outline and articulate your points clearly.
• Write no more than three to five pages per weekday and five to eight pages per weekend day.
• Step #8. Fix, Don’t Fixate
• Solid editing requires only three careful passes:
• The Argument Adjustment Pass: Read the paper carefully on your computer to make sure your argument is clear, fix obvious errors, and rewrite where the flow needs improvement.
• The Out Loud Pass: Carefully read out loud a printed copy of your paper, marking any awkward passages or unclear explanations.
• The Sanity Pass: A final pass over a printed version of the paper to check the overall flow and to root out any remaining errors.

CONVICT CONDITIONING by Paul Wade

• There IS a freedom that cannot be taken from you—whatever little box you may be stuck in. And that’s the freedom to cultivate the magnificence of your own body and mind, regardless of external environment.
• The average gym junkie today is all about appearance, not ability.
• The goal of being strong and in peak shape is survival.
• Calisthenics is basically the art of using the body’s own weight and qualities of inertia as a means of physical development.
• Calisthenics was never seen as an endurance training method by the ancients—it was primarily understood as a strength training system.
• Remember, plate-loading barbells and dumbbells weren’t even invented until the twentieth century. Before this innovation, the vast majority of the world’s most muscular upper bodies were developed by hand-balancing and work on the horizontal bar.
• To this day, prisoners all over the world still train using old school calisthenics.
• What most trainees need in order to really psychologically invest some energy in old school calisthenics is a good dose of reality. They need to know the differences between the unproductive, costly and damaging new methods of working out and the productive, free and safe arts of progressive bodyweight training—“traditional” arts that will become tomorrow’s cutting edge.
• Even a short way into their career, virtually all of those involved in intense, competitive sports find themselves held together by painkillers, cortisone, tranquilizers and other analgesic and relaxant chemicals which allow their joints to (again, temporarily) cope with the unnatural stresses of training and competing.
• It’s difficult to think of anything more futile, depressing and tedious than the cardio machine section of a modern gym.
• I applaud anyone who gets off the couch to go out and train, but just take a look at the results of the average person who goes to the gym.
• Ninety percent of those who join a gym quit within two months due to lack of results.
• Like so many things in our modern, money-driven world, the vision most people have been peddled regarding what they “need” to get in shape, is a big lie. It’s a scam. You don’t need all these products and extras to reach the pinnacle of strength and fitness.
• Bodyweight Training Requires Very Little Equipment
• Bodyweight Training Develops Useful, Functional Athletic Abilities
• In nature, the human body doesn’t need to move barbells or dumbbells around. Before it can move anything external
• Bodyweight Training Maximizes Strength
• Bodyweight Training Protects the Joints and Makes Them Stronger—for Life
• One of the major problems with modern forms of strength and resistance training is the damage they do to the joints.
• Bodybuilding movements primarily target the muscles, which adapt much faster than the joints; this means that the more muscular and advanced a bodybuilder becomes, the worse the problem gets.
• Bodyweight Training Quickly Develops the Physique to Perfection
• The practice of modern calisthenics mainly builds endurance and a little aerobic toning, but it does virtually nothing for the physique. Old school calisthenics on the other hand, will pack slabs of muscle onto any frame, and take the physique to its optimal development via the shortest route possible.
• Bodyweight Training Normalizes and Regulates Your Body Fat Levels
• Conventional bodybuilding is conducive to overeating.
• Because the majority of amateur lifters are not on large doses of steroids, their metabolisms just aren’t powerful enough to turn all those extra calories into muscle. The end result is that most guys become over-nourished and chubby when they begin lifting weights seriously.
• Weight-training and the psychology of overeating go hand in hand.
• Nobody ever became better at calisthenics by bulking up into a big fat pig.
• Convict Conditioning is based around six types of movements—the “Big Six.”
• As any competent weight-training coach will tell you, there are thousands of exercises you can do to train your muscles; but actually, a really good routine only requires a handful of big, basic exercises.
• Learning to do high reps is fine. But as explained in chapter 2, just adding reps to your pushups or pullups will add stamina but very little strength and muscle.
• There are ten steps for each of the movements of the Big Six; pushups, pullups, squats, leg raises, bridges and handstand pushups.
• Knowledge is power.
• knowledge is power, and is jealously guarded inside prison, like all useful possessions.
• In prison, you either learn to train yourself or you fail.
• From the moment you begin Convict Conditioning—today!—your ultimate goal must be to finally perfect the Master Steps. Not just one or two of them, either—all of them! It’s so important, I’m gonna say it again: Your ultimate goal must be to perfect all six of the Master Step exercises.
• The pushup is the ultimate upper body exercise. It generates strength, builds muscle, develops powerful tendons and trains the upper body pressing muscles to work in coordination with the midsection and the lower body. No other exercise in the world can achieve all these things.
• Pushups dynamically develop the network of pressing muscles around the torso, strongly working the pec major, anterior deltoid and pec minor.
• In reality, everybody’s “perfect” technique will be slightly different. This is purely due to different body types—variations in limb length, relative strength, body fat ratio and injury history all play subtle roles.
• When you move explosively, you inevitably rely on momentum during some portion of the movement. If momentum is doing the work, it means your muscles aren’t.
• I advise that you do the majority of your pushups with your palm or palms flat on the floor.
• Fingertip pushups strengthen the hands and forearms and are a useful addition to your routine, particularly if you are also doing a lot of grip work.
• In all strength training, progression is the name of the game. In terms of muscle heft and power, if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got—no matter how many reps you mindlessly add.
• Wall pushups are the first step of the ten step series required for complete mastery of the pushup family of movements.
• Incline pushups should be done at 45 degree angle.
• Kneeling pushups are Step 3 in the pushup series.
• Close pushups are as old as the hills. They’re a vitally important exercise in the pushup series, but are often overlooked in favor of flashier techniques like plyometric (clapping) pushups and decline pushups.
• The one-arm pushup when performed with pure form, is the gold standard of chest and elbow power, and it’s an impressive sight to see.
• Without doubt, the true master of the one-arm pushup is a rare beast. Make sure you become one of this endangered species.
• Only one thing’s for sure—grit your teeth and put the work in, and you’ll achieve where others fail.
• Although the development of endurance is an interesting and satisfying sideline, I’m a big believer that bodyweight training should be first and foremost a strength discipline. Increasing your reps will improve endurance, but after you hit double figures it won’t do very much for strength.
• Dips and bench dips are not true pushup movements, but they strongly work many of the same pressing muscles.
• Raising the feet makes the exercise harder by transferring a greater proportion of the bodyweight through the hands. Because of the increased angle, this movement effects the shoulders and upper portions of the chest more intensely than the prone pushup.
• Clapping pushups add speed and are an excellent addition to your routine, once in a while. They can lead to injury however, so work into them slowly and don’t even attempt them until you have at least mastered uneven pushups.
• In an average gym, you’ll see only a few individuals doing hard leg training.
• The real strength of an athlete lies in his hips and legs, not his upper body and arms.
• Upper body strength is important in many athletic motions, but if that strength isn’t founded on a powerful lower body, it’s totally useless.
• Most athletic movements are lower body based, and it goes without saying that these movements rely largely on leg strength. Upper body involvement is relatively minimal.
• The best way to develop truly powerful, athletic legs is to use the fewest exercises—provided they work as many leg muscles as possible. The ideal would be to use only a single exercise—as long as you could find an exercise that dynamically works all the muscles of the lower body.
• By squatting I basically mean lowering the torso by bending the three major pairs of joints in the lower body; the hips, knees and ankles.
• Without doubt, single-leg squatting beats barbell squatting—hands down.
• I’m a big believer that you need to squat throughout your entire athletic career—it’s one of the few really invaluable exercises.
• Thinking in terms of sitting rather than squatting can sometimes help athletes descend more naturally, because it facilitates correct hip positioning—which is a fancy way of saying the butt should stick out.
• Needing to elevate the heels has nothing to do with balance or body structure, and everything to do with lack of ankle mobility and inflexibility of the Achilles’ tendon.
• Stretch your calves out until you can squat without assistance.
• Full squats are the classic bodyweight leg exercise, used productively the world over for many thousands of years.
• Close squats have all the benefits of full squats, but with an amplified effect on the quadriceps.
• Uneven squats are the first big step towards mastering unilateral squats.
• The one-leg squat is the king of all squatting movements—in fact, it is the ultimate lower body exercise, period.
• Once you master the one-leg squat, take a little time to build up your reps. This is good advice that should be followed for all the Master Steps. The ability to perform multiple strict reps guarantees muscular fitness and control.
• Big figures look impressive, but in reality they are often associated with injury. All serious powerlifters are constantly plagued by knee and back problems.
• Don’t be misled by the idea that strength is everything. For a prison athlete, function is everything.
• Lunges are a classic squat substitute.
• Squatting develops muscular size and strength. But to be able to unleash this strength quickly, it’s helpful to incorporate some plyometric work into your leg training once in a while.
• Perhaps the most focused form of plyometric training is jumping. Jumping is natural, safe, and can be done virtually anywhere.
• Whether on stairs or a hill, carrying your bodyweight quickly upwards is incredibly demanding on your energy systems.
• The best—and safest—exercise to build a powerful upper back is the humble pullup.
• Master the pullup, and your lats will expand like crazy; the muscles around your shoulder blades will take on the appearance of coiled snakes, and your traps will get thicker and harder than iron girders.
• If you really want to unleash your full biceps strength and size potential, forget the curls. Get doing pullups.
• Doing pullups until your chin passes the bar is best.
• Despite what some bodybuilding pundits tell you about the motion, you should never relax into a full stretch in the bottom position of the pullup. Doing so will take the stress off your muscles and place them on the ligaments which hold your joints together. This is not what you want.
• The shoulders are ball-and-socket joints. This kind of joint is incredibly versatile in terms of motion, but that versatility comes at a price—increased vulnerability.
• Pullup movements should be performed using muscle strength rather than momentum.
• The human body is remarkably adaptive, and if you pay attention you’ll find you can do pullups almost anywhere—from a rafter, a tree branch, a rugged heating pipe, even the edge of a roof or balcony
• The human body evolved to pull itself up well—a man who cannot do pullups cannot be considered to be truly strong.
• I’m a big believer that every student of bodyweight training should have at least one explosive movement in their arsenal for each bodypart.
• A dynamite midsection that actually makes the whole body stronger.
• The crunch is totally impotent to add any real athletic function, muscle or strength.
• The idea that you need to perform multiple exercises to properly train your abdomen is another modern myth.
• The abdominal muscles are attached to the sternum at one end, and the pelvis at the other end. These muscles contract along their entire length evenly—you can’t contract one end more than the other, no matter how you move.
• In the old days of training—before the nineteen-seventies—two exercises used to vie for the title of “ultimate” midsection exercise. These exercises were sit-ups and leg raises.
• Sit-ups and leg raises work the midsection in similar ways, but from opposite directions; in sit-ups, the abdomen contracts to lift the torso; in leg raises, the abdomen contracts to lift the lower limbs.
• just because an exercise is simple, it doesn’t follow that it’s easy.
• Sometimes, bad backs associated with leg raises are actually caused by strength imbalances—the abdomen is stronger than the lower back. To eliminate this imbalance, include exercises in your program that work the spinal muscles. Squats will do this, as will bridging.
• Muscle definition is the result of leanness—absence of fat. Fat loss occurs proportionately over the entire body. You can’t lose fat from one area just by working it excessively, so don’t waste your time.
• All high-rep twists will do is irritate your spine.
• Leg raises are much easier to do if you swing—use a little explosive momentum at the bottom of the movement. This is not what you want. If you can’t do your techniques “clean” go back to earlier steps until you become powerful enough to use the correct form.
• the next day, from sternum down to pelvis. The real drawback to sit-ups is that you adapt to them quite quickly, so to increase strength people are usually forced to add weight.
• If I had to name the most important strength-building exercise in the world, it would be the bridge. Nothing else even comes close.
• The most important organ of the human body isn’t a muscle. It isn’t even the heart or lungs. It’s the brain. The brain controls these secondary organs, just as it controls virtually every other structure and process in the human body.
• The second most important organ of the human body is the spinal cord, because the spinal cord is the main means by which the brain communicates with the rest of the body.
• The spinal cord is a slim but incredibly complex tube of nerves, passing from the lower brainstem down the back of the body. No matter how powerful or healthy the brain is, if the spinal cord is damaged, it cannot communicate with the body and is effectively useless.
• The safety of the spinal cord is dependent upon the integrity of the spinal column. This in turn largely depends upon the health of the network of ligaments and muscles which support it. Once the spinal column is formed, the best way you can protect your spinal cord and keep it healthy is to maintain strong spinal erectors.
• The more athletic movements you make, the more risk to your spine. The stronger your spinal muscles are, the more punishment your spine can take and bounce back smiling.
• The stronger your spinal muscles, the better you will be at practically any athletic motion you can name.
• Bridging is a simple technique—you just arch your back off the floor by pushing up with your limbs—but if you bridge regularly you can eliminate the host of back problems associated with abuse of the human body.
• Human beings are at a spinal disadvantage to begin with; standing on two feet was the worst move our species ever made.
• The discs in your back are made of cartilage, and like all cartilage, they have very little blood flow. Instead, they receive their nutrition from liquid in the joints, called synovial fluid.
• Bridging is the ultimate exercise for the spinal muscles.
• Bridging bulletproofs the spinal column in preparation for heavy, explosive, or unexpected movements, allowing you to train harder, heavier, and faster.
• Wrestlers—as with many things—have been way ahead of the pack with their understanding of the importance of a strong back. As a result, bridging is a part of the basic training curriculum for all wrestlers, at all levels.
• Tragically, shoulder pain and strength training methods seem destined to go together like ham and eggs.
• Unfortunately, although the word is well-used, many trainees aren’t really aware of what the rotator cuff is, or what it does. For a start, the rotator cuff is not a muscle. It is a group of muscles which stabilize the humerus, the arm bone, in the shoulder socket.
• By the time weight-lifters have reached an advanced level, virtually all of them live with shoulder pain.
• Pain is not something we have to learn to live with as a result of our training.
• Perhaps the best way to understand how the human body is naturally meant to move is to look at how humans instinctively move.
• The most efficient way to warm up is with two to four progressively harder higher rep sets of the movement you are going to be performing for your work sets.
• Hard training is important, but patience is important too.
• There is a damn good reason why you should proceed slowly and methodically through any training program. The reason has to do with generating training momentum.
• Putting it as simply as possible, the harder you train, the better your results. Because of this, a lot of trainees assume that the quickest way to get big and strong is to work as hard as they possibly can. Unfortunately—particularly for the average natural athlete—training super-hard has its drawbacks.
• Once your joints and muscles are ready for it, you should always train hard.
• Working hard is the key to achieving your goals.
• Training to total “failure” is a bad idea in calisthenics—you should always leave a little energy in your limbs so you can control your body. Training to failure, especially on inverse exercises (like handstand pushups), or when you are hanging above the ground (as in leg raises and pullups) is totally unsafe.
• If you have an injury or the beginnings of an injury, you can often still train—in fact in most cases you should still train. But you need to do so in a way that brings more blood to the injured area and heals it.
• The more advanced the exercises become, the more they depend upon a good level of proportionate strength. Muscular bodyweight is no barrier to success. Body fat is. If you are having trouble moving up in your exercises, focus on losing flab over a few months.
• When you finish your training—or a soon as possible afterwards—write down what you did. Before the next session, briefly review your notes, so you’ll know what you need to match or beat this time.
• Writing your workouts down allows you to analyze the efficacy of your conditioning methods, in both the short and long term.
• Writing about your exercise sessions is an act of education in self-coaching. It forces you to think about the structure of your own workouts, teaching you a great deal about exercise theory in general.
• Training must be progressive, and keeping track of workouts in black-and-white definitely helps the athlete maintain a progressive edge.
• Muscles adapt quicker than joints.
• Be aggressive, yes. But master it—learn to channel it. You need to cultivate a focused, controlled aggression.
• The Big Six Movements:
• Push-ups
• Squats
• Leg Lifts
• Bridging
• Hand-stand Push-ups
• Pull-ups