FourthEye

Tag: deconstructing decisions

  • You’re Avoiding The Most Important Thing

    Why can’t you achieve your 10 year goals in 6 months? This is one of my favorite thought experiments from the renowned contrarian and renegade investor Peter Thiel. Every time I ask myself this question, particularly when layered upon itself, I helplessly zero-in on the most important thing that I can do in any moment.…

  • What Will Ruin This Project?

    Only a few decisions really matter. Even Warren Buffett has often credited the majority of his success to a handful of really good judgment calls. It can be easy to get the impression that working all the time is the key to getting the project where it “needs” to be, but this is a trap…

  • Plain Sight

    Apparently over 90% of Americans are estimated to be deficient in potassium. Why hasn’t anyone done anything about it? The cultural narrative is that salt is bad and that most modern people should eat way less. The counter-cultural idea is that salt is great and you should eat a lot. Which is actually true? A…

  • The Self-Improvement Trap

    Sometimes the voice in our head telling us we need to get better is actually our greatest enemy. When I was a younger man, perfectionism and imposter syndrome in full stride, I spent inordinate amounts of time trying to better myself. I consumed all the quality self-improvement content I could get my hands on. Whether…

  • Automating Success & Rethinking Luck

    Everything important should be decision-less. At first this concept might seem psycho or confused, but it’s the most important key to success. A lot of us assume that our decision making energy should be spent in full on things we deem important, or vital to a life well lived, but very few of us ever…

  • The Lens of “Optimal”

    Although I spend a lot of time doing it, I’ve spent little time talking explicitly about my focus on optimization. The pursuit of optimization is more or less, the lens through which I see most issues and facets of my life. Whether it’s health, wealth, love and relationships or internal peace and enlightenment, optimization is…

  • Retirement Revisited

    Despite my young age, retirement has long been a fascination of mine. Perhaps this makes sense given my interest in many topics generally associated with older demographics, but even since my elementary school days I’ve been thinking about the myth of retirement. Of course by “myth” in this context I don’t mean that retirement isn’t…

  • The Practical Search For Passion

    Reflecting on the many articles I’ve published to FourthEye, I realized that though I’ve spent a decent amount of time talking about the importance of passion and managing it to achieve success and fulfillment, I’ve spent relatively little time addressing how we identify our passion. While everybody and their grandmother at some point or another…

  • Bite-Sized #1 – Performance/Productivity Pyramid Model

    Trying something a little bit different for FourthEye, as an idea I had around how to achieve higher engagement and avoid burning out. My idea was to do little, bite-sized posts where I discuss something like a model or concept that I’m working with, that may not be super polished but just something that people…

  • Distractions From The Main Plot

    It always feels like such an odd exercise to diminish the importance or usefulness of certain conversations or topics, and yet to the end of effective resource management such a task seems necessary. In this short piece, my hope is to illuminate some of how I think about choosing topics and also cover issues that…