How Warren Buffett Makes Good Decisions, Why Rich People Are Heartless, The One App to Replace Them All

Estimated Reading Time: 3 mins

Note: Readers have requested a new section to include recommended tools and resources to build better habits, improve productivity, and make better decisions. See below. Enjoy.

Quote Worth Thinking About On...

Living

“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today… The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

— Seneca, Stoic Philosopher

Source: ​On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It​

Ideas Worth Exploring

1

Warren Buffett and Ted Williams on How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work

Ted Williams, “the greatest hitter in baseball history...credits his success to his practice of “waiting for a good pitch to hit.”

Prominent investor Warren Buffett “often makes reference to Williams’ ‘sweet spot’ and draws close parallels to decision-making in investing.” “This ‘sweet spot’ of decision-making which both Williams and Buffett refer to, is called the ‘Circle of Competence.’”

In his biography, ​The Snowball​ (​audiobook​), Buffet explains how he used the Circle of Competence to make smart investment decisions. "The trick in investing is just to sit there and watch pitch after pitch go by and wait for the one right in your sweet spot. And if people are yelling, ‘Swing, you bum!,’ ignore them.”

Big idea: What separates great decision-makers from the rest of the pack is "their ability to identify what they don’t know and their willingness to wait patiently for the right opportunities to act on what they do know.”

Source: Mayo, MayoOshin.Com (​4 min read​)

2

The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization

“The Internet was supposed to be a totally open set of protocols that anyone could interact with, and for a long time it was...The promise of a decentralized system is that anyone can build anything they want, because no one owns it.”

But there are downsides. First, "the people to whom decentralized systems are the most attractive are the ones who are banned from other systems, often for good reasons...The second downside is that a lack of ownership means that no one is responsible when things go wrong."

Big idea: Whilst decentralization is important, a better version of the internet would be a “[s]ort of a digital version of the Amish, not rejecting technology wholesale but carefully considering every new technology before adopting it.”

Source: Byrne Hobart, The Diff (​14 min read​) 3

Are Rich People Heartless? (Video)

Does being rich have anything to do with a person’s level of empathy? A recent study discovered that “wealth differentials have profound effects on the subconscious psychological processes...the ability to read emotion on another person's face is actually diminished by greater wealth.”

Big idea: Greater wealth may increase our tendency to distance ourselves from others.

Source: Sophia Ahmadi, BBC (​5m 27s watch​)

Tools and Resources Worth Using

4

Measure Your Verbal Creativity In 4 Minutes Or Less

The ​Divergent Association Task​ is a brief test designed by a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard that uses 10 words to measure your creative abilities.

​According to a recent study​ of 9,000 participants across the globe, people who scored higher on this test tend to think of novel ideas and solve more analytical problems.

5

The One App to Replace Them All

We waste valuable time and lose focus switching back and forth between many work apps: calendars, docs, alerts, inbox, and so on. What if we could effortlessly manage people and projects under one app?

​ClickUp​ has emerged as a promising solution that has helped over 800,000 high performing individuals and teams (including Google and IBM) boost productivity and manage time effectively.

The ClickUP team is on a mission to make the world more productive by removing friction caused by using so many different applications.

For an affordable price, your team can plan, track, and manage any type of work with a few clicks of a button.

The future of work is here. ClickUP is free for personal use or you can ​get up to 30% off for your team​ to simplify tasks and get things done.

6

A Featherweight Running Pack For Your Essential Items

Going for a run is hard enough. Trying to figure out where to safely carry your small personal items (like your phone, wallets, and keys) creates extra hardship.

​FITLY​ is a featherweight, waterproof, minimalist running accessory that carries your phone, keys, cards, and much more without discomfort and 'jiggling.'

It's small enough to barely feel, but large enough to fit everything you need for your run.

Brain Food

Wisdom: Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Today I Learned: The earth's core is about as hot as the surface of the sun. (​Source​)

Thank you for reading,

The Smarter Brain Team

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