(Photo by pedrosimoes7)

This is a continuation of the Credibility in Coaching post, based on the same lecture and influences.

1. Don’t make stupid mistakes on purpose!
   - If it’s about you and not the team, you are making a giant mistake!
   - Don’t undermine the team’s trust! If you tell the team, “If you work hard, we’ll be out by five,” and the team is still working hard at 5:30, why should they trust you again?
2. Don’t make criticism personal.
   Never say, “Are you an idiot?” Talk about criticism in a positive way, explain that it’s there for the team’s improvement. Make sure your players know you’re trying to help them. At least once a week, remind the team that it’s about the we effort.
3. Avoid sarcasm, belittling, and embarrassment.
   Making fun of players, yelling at players in front of the team, the other team, or spectators is extremely belittling and embarrassing.
4. Don’t use profanity – not even for attention.
5. Evaluate yourself.
   - After every session, practice, or class evaluate how you did. What worked and what didn’t? Did you accomplish your goals?
   - At the end of every week, take time to review the whole week as well. Are you on plan? What have you discovered? What do you need to work on?
   - Ask people you trust. Your other coaches can provide valuable, honest feedback. If you ask your athletes, give them with anonymity (ie. suggestion box, survey). You can’t expect them to criticize you openly when you’re in charge.
6. Focus on the solution.
   How are we going to get there? We all know complainers and we know how we feel about them. Don’t be one! We want to know how to fix the problem. Choose a practical, realistic approach and do it!
7. How effective am I in getting coaches to lead?
   Your effectiveness is your credibility. If you back your team 100% they should back you 100%. If they don’t, you have a problem. If you have a credibility problem, you have a lost team. Don’t put your players in that position.
8. Be a transformer.
   You set the environment. The greatest thing about being a coach is you have the power to shape the lives and characters of your personnel and players.
9. Do you create fear or develop confidence?
   - Have you ever had a coach you feared? Did he do a good job? (Prob. not)
   - Do you inspire loyalty and allegiance or create antagonistic behavior?
   - Never say, “We have to man up.” Only idiots who lose focus say things like this. Be honest, say, “We need to work ___.” Noone on your team “has no heart” and everyone “wants to give their best try.”
10. Credibility
    - Don’t lie. Don’t turn away. Address the issue. You don’t have to seek out a confrontation, but be honest and stand up for what’s right.
    - Stay human. Stay consistent. Understand integrity. People have to believe in you. Back up who you are. If you don’t have integrity, you are not a leader, you are not a coach, and you cannot teach effectively. Sell who you are. Prove what you say. Build trust. Earn trust.
11. Cohesive Leadership
    We may not like our players every day, but we will show our players that we love them every day.
    “Even if I ride a player and she has a tough day, I make sure at the end of the day, she knows that I care about her. Coaching may be a business, but it’s not all business.” You never want a player to think, “He hates me,” or, “I hate him.” If it got to this, there’s been a big mistake and it needs to be fixed. It’s not your team. It’s not my team. It’s our team.

This is based on a lecture from Mike Perez’s Intro to Physical Education class. The material is a combination of Mike’s extensive experience as well as notes from a talk by Dr. Gregory Dell, Professor of Sport Psychology and Sport Ethics at Duke University (excellenceinperformance.com). If you’re in the South Bay Area, I highly recommend taking Mike’s course (PE.30) at West Valley College.

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(Photo by apesara)

Credibility in Coaching

1. Coaches need to understand players first as people and second as athletes.
2. Quality of Effort: The process is more important than the product. Aim to develop your players and help them do their best. The focus should be on effort and improvement rather than on the scorecard. Even from the competitive standpoint, building hardworking, self-improving attitudes is the best way to achieve results.
3. Good coaches improve all their players: Make it a we project. A good coach makes the least talented player feel as important as the most. Players who didn’t make the winning shot or didn’t even play in the game still helped the team during practice. That contribution should be recognized, thanked, and appreciated. This way each team members understands his or her responsibility and the entire team develops and grows stronger.
4. Communication: Take the time to be a good listener. Keep reiterating to players, “Let me know if you need to talk. We can sit down and have a word together.”
5. Be a consistent coach: The same rules apply to all people. People are different and have different needs and learning styles, so you can’t treat everyone exactly the same way. But when it comes to goals and punishments, you must be consistent. Ask your team to help you with this: have them hold you accountable and call you out when you aren’t consistent.
6. Be yourself… unless you’re a jerk… If you’re a jerk, change!
7. While 75-80 percent of success is in recruiting, once you get your athletes, don’t let the nuts and bolts make you lose track of the cultural chemistry. A group of top players can lose half their games if the right chemistry isn’t there. “My most talented team stunk: four Draft Picks, four 90+mph pitchers, seven Division 1 Players, and we lost half our games. Too many I’s and not enough we’s. You need the right chemistry.” Make sure each team member understands his or her responsibility and that it’s a team effort.
8. Once (or more) per month, have a topic for motivation: It could be a talk from you, a guest speaker, or fun off the wall activities. A cooler with some treats or a bowling night. (Note to coaches: If you give the talk, keep it under a few minutes, especially after a game! You’ve been there yourself. Don’t torture your athletes.)
9. Demonstrate passion about your job. Show you are committed. Show your enthusiasm. “I have the greatest job in the world. I’ve gotten to put on a uniform for 27 years.”
10. Caring: Talk, be consistent, and praise. Take the time to say “thank you” to individuals and to the team as a whole.
11. Confidence building: Be enthusiastic. Have a sense of humor. Be creative. Be passionate. Try hard to bring a joke. Show that you’re human. Laugh with the team and laugh at yourself. If you’re one of those serious types, make an extra effort here. Players will appreciate it.

This is based on a lecture from Mike Perez’s Intro to Physical Education Class. The material is a combination of Mike’s extensive experience as well as notes from a talk by Dr. Gregory Dell, Professor of Sport Psychology and Sport Ethics at Duke University (excellenceinperformance.com). If you’re in the South Bay Area and are serious about physical education and development, I highly recommend taking Mike’s course (PE.30) at West Valley College.

Also, feel free to subscribe to receive email or feed updates or follow @livetruly on twitter.

This summer, I took a class all about physical education. The course is taught by Mike Perez, an athlete, a coach, and a teacher with decades of experience, and the current head of West Valley College’s Athletics Program. So far it’s one of the most interesting and inspiring classes I’ve ever taken. Even if you’re not planning on entering the field–and especially if you are–you have take this class. Every day is a bit like The Last Lecture. I sure wish I took this course earlier in life and sure am glad I’ve had the chance to take it now.

Fixing Common Problems in PE

There’s quite a lot that goes into a good physical education program that we, and perhaps our PE teachers, have taken for granted. Some of it is glaringly obvious: for example, how important is it to let kids choose teams? Were you ever the last kid chosen? Do you remember how that felt? If you weren’t, what did you think the kids that were felt like? It takes a few minutes, no seconds, for the teacher to split the class up into teams and this saves a lot of the kids from a lot of anxiety.

Another major problem were teachers who just rolled the ball. “Here’s the ball, go play.” In a way it gives some freedom, but on the other hand, how many of the kids participate? Do the kids that need PE most get involved? This was the number one problem I heard when interviewing about the subject. Physical education should help develop cognitive, affective, and psychomotor skills. While gameplay is important, a good educator should take the time to help his students improve, try new things, and build healthy habits for life. There are actually some well developed frameworks and motivational climate considerations that go into making a truly effective class. Take a look at this instructional environments article from The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance.

The article highlights the importance of creating an environment where the aim is mastery (personal improvement, building a solid foundation, working together to figure out tasks) versus one of competitive performance (where students compete for class standing). It also provides guidance in creating this motivational climate and evaluating the results of the lesson. The idea is that by setting up the lesson in a way that lets students measure themselves by their own improvements and mastering of tasks, far more students take part, enjoy, and benefit from the activity. In fact the focus on mastery over performance isn’t just for beginners, but applies to the most elite levels of competition, where mastery enables top athletes to keep competing and improving. This very much parallels Josh Waitzkin’s ideas in The Art of Learning. If a focus on personal improvement is more beneficial to the awkward kid in the corner and the top athlete in the class, shouldn’t that be the focus instead of endless competitions? Our teacher sums this up as “quality of effort” and “process versus product.” The process is what real physical education is all about.

It’s great to see that perhaps the two top problems in physical education are so quickly highlighted and addressed in courses aimed at future PE teachers and that a focus on personal improvement for each student is underscored as a goal so early in the teacher development framework.

Making PE More Relevant

I must give credit to my schools, because many of my friends still bowl and play soccer, badminton, and basketball. Many were happy that at least for a fraction of the school day, they got a chance to play the sports they watch on TV. Although, I think most of these sports were more developed in after-school sports and junior leagues than in physical education classes themselves. For me, high jump, shotput, discus, wrestling, football, and badminton were new and I would never have tried them were it not for my school’s PE and sports programs. I’m sure it was that way for many other students as well.

Personally, I always liked PE. I was never a top athlete, but I liked my PE classes and did all sorts of afterschool sports. Looking back now, I’m grateful for the experiences and especially some of the teaching I received from my coaches. However, after taking this class, I see how much more is possible in a PE class. Did any of you have classes with obstacle courses? How about activity stations that let you choose skills? Think of playing baseball in PE, how many students are actually physically active and for what portion of the time? Did any of you have classes where you could try dancing salsa or hip hop instead of square dancing? Did anyone have yoga, pilates, martial arts, or the activities you participate in now? Today, my three top physical activities are house dance, yoga, and running. The first two were never even mentioned in my PE classes and I think running could have been presented in a far more fun and inspiring way (although, perhaps I wasn’t ready for Murakami back then). These, and many similar activities are far more inclusive, active and beneficial for students, and may help start these healthy activities earlier on in life and from what I see, physical education training programs realize this, and are helping today’s gym classes become more relevant.

Today’s Physcial Educators

Today’s physical education teacher training, covers a wide range of fields, including philosophy and history, to psychology and biomechanics and motor learning and development, to sports management, motivation, coaching, and educational theory and practice. It takes just as much care and ability to prepare a good PE lesson as it does to prepare a math or language arts one, and often the PE teacher must prepare this lesson for a far larger size class. Physical education teachers also get trained to help students build lifelong healthy habits. Perhaps it’s a bit easier at a college level, where most of the students are eager to learn and an instructor can just focus on her discipline, but I’ve been truly blown away by the level of teaching skills I’ve seen from both my yoga teacher and from Mike. It’s unfortunate some folks don’t give physical education the credit it’s due, especially with today’s problems of obesity.

Demand More

Next time your kid comes home, ask them what they did in PE? When you have back to school night, ask the PE teacher about his philosophy on the topic. (Really!) You will be pleasantly surprised. If you know someone who coaches or runs a class, ask them about their objectives, methods, and goals. You’ll see there’s a great depth and value in what they’re doing. If you don’t see it, you should demand more, their teachers sure do.

How About You?

Have you had an awesome PE or fitness experience? Have most of yours just faded away? Was there a coach or teacher that had a major impact on your life? Was there one you wish you never had? Please comment. I’d love to hear about it.

Background:
Prior to this I had been using several websites as study tools. In Thailand I was using Number2.com for vocabulary building. During the months there I managed to go through their entire collection of ~2500 words. It’s a wonderful (and free) resource that I’d recommend without hesitation. However, I wasn’t too sure of whether I really learned these words, because when I started repeating them, I would miss quite a few.

My next favorite was Quizlet. I was using Quizlet for both vocabulary learning and building up chemistry knowledge. Quizlet is great because there are thousands of lists already made, but you can also build your own. Also Quizlet lets you play a space-invader-like game and has performance based quizzes. I found it really effective. My only issue with it was it was a bit time consuming typing out the full definition or equation during the review games.

My friend and I were both planning to take our GMAT/GRE’s in the near future and wanted a study tool that would help us with the vocabulary. I was in the process of writing a system when I read the SuperMemory article via Tim’s Twitter Page. I was super excited that there was no need to reinvent the wheel! I couldn’t go to bed before giving it a shot.

Initial SRS (Spaced Repetition System) Testing:
After reading reviews and checking the wikis on spaced repetition and SuperMemo, I tried a few systems: SuperMemo, Mnemosyne, Anki, and a few other web-based tools like Crammage.com.

The big advantage of the programs over the web-based tools was that I could practice offline and I could create cards and lists more easily. I quickly chose Mnemosyne over SuperMemo (even though SuperMemo is the original) because I liked the cleaner, easier to understand UI. I used it for a few days and liked it.

The next task was creating subsets and switching between them. I like clean look and feel of Mnemosyne, but I couldn’t figure out how to import one of my study lists. I know the program has that capability and I’m sure it would be quite easy after taking fifteen minutes to find out how to do it, but I figured it’d be even easier and faster to give the Anki program a shot.

I was right. With Anki, the interface was just as clean and intuitive, but I managed to import a list of terms and definitions without reading any of the instructions or FAQ. So, by quick (and brutal) default, Anki was my program of choice.

How Anki Works:
Anki is a simple flash card program. You choose how many cards and minutes a day you want to study. Then you start your study session:
1. Anki shows you a term
2. You try to remember the definition
3. You click space bar (or the “Show Answer” button)
4. You click 1 (Again), 2 (Hard), 3 (Good), 4 (Easy)
Based on your response and your past history with the card, Anki chooses when to show the card again. For example, an “Again” card may appear in a few minutes, while an “Easy” card may appear after a week. Each time you successfully review and remember the card that length of time increases. So if you learn a word, you’d review it a day later, than a few days later, than a week, a few weeks, and into the months.

More Anki Features:
In addition to Anki’s simplicity, the program actually offers many useful features. It was originally created for studying Japanese (hence the name) and has flashcard layouts conductive to multiple written systems. One can also post pictures and sounds into their sets (great for various curves/relationships in econ). As with Mnemosyne, there are plenty of pre-made decks available in a wide variety of languages and subjects, and their website is run as a MediaWiki, so one can easily contribute. I put up my Mnemosyne Spanish deck within a few days. They also have easy to follow videos, easy enough for friends and parents to follow without asking for your help.

Since I started using the program there have been several updates, none of them gave me problems. Like the automatic updates, you can create an account on their site and have your computer sync your decks before/after your study sessions. This lets you update your study decks on multiple computers, and lets you study from remote computers via their online interface.

The coolest thing about Anki, however, is their stats. I can see charts on my progress. When I started using the program I decided I’d give it a few months and see how it goes before posting anything up. Below are some of the results.

A Few Months On Anki’s Spaced Repetition System:
I used a large set to measure performance. My setup settings vary between 30 and 50 cards and an hour limit per day. The overall results were 905 out of 968 (93.5%) words correct over a month and a total review time of 1.8 days (~41 hours).

The screenshot above shows quite a few parts of the program.
On the left, you see the definition term on top and the definition answer on the bottom.
Below are the four recall performance options with the length of time the program will wait before repeat.
To the right are my performance stats.
Below them are session stats: 19 wrong, 328 old cards to review, and 33 new cards. An ETA of how long is left in the session. The top yellow bar shows progress with short term words, the bottom bar shows progress in the long term. To it’s right is a timer for the current card.

Above are stats on the daily eases. These are neat because they show how the learning is going on. 1 means Repeat (Don’t Know), 2 is Hard, 3 is Good, and 4 is Easy. Notice the shift to Good/Easy in the longer term words.

Above are stats on the amount of time and cards reviewed over the past three months. Unfortunately, the past few days have been more hectic, with less practice, but I’ll catch up this week.

Conclusion:
Anki is a great program that helps you learn better and faster. Check it out for yourself at: http://ichi2.net/anki/.

Check it out for yourself. hundredpushups.com.

I booked with China Airlines, expecting… not expecting much. Boy was I surprised. The service was fantastic. They even gave me slippers!

As usual, I got the kosher meal and the food was great. Katleta, omelet, noodles. It’s always fun having the staff check beforehand that I was the guy ordering the meal and having it arrive in a sealed box that only I can open. Almost like a spy movie.

On first, longest flight (to Taiwan), I sat next to a guy who ran an export company. He sent ships of goods from one country to another. He said that world grain supplies were down to two months from their usual three–possibly due to the impact of bio/alc energy. He talked a bit about his job and globalization, about how imports help drive down prices, and how our salary growth remains the same but electricity and gas keep rising. He said it was a relationship that helped both countries, providing jobs for people overseas and providing us with lower prices. While everyone is complaining about the imports, we do enjoy the cheaper goods. He also talked about genetic engineering, how while people fiercely oppose it, our breeders, albeit at a slower pace, have been doing it for years, and that while it has caused trouble, it has helped a lot of people as well. Interesting jobs people have. Imagine that, sending ships all over the world and negotiating with people in all sorts of countries. Beef from South America, feed from somewhere else. It was an interesting conversation because I was reading Education of a Speculator, the part where Niederhoffer was talking about relationships between wheat prices, volcanoes, and dust storms in China. Interesting how the world is so inner-connected.

The guy said I should visit Taipei. The food is delicious and the museums are filled with ancient treasures and there’s a lot of culture saved from the Cultural Revolution.

On the crossover, as we waited to board the next plane, some idiot started going off on the ticket lady. “Why the f- do you always make us wait in line? How can you treat people like this?” He felt proud to be standing up for the rights of us American travelers against the evil machine we were flying through. Except he didn’t do anything to any machine. Or for us. Or anything except have a power trip, scare a young lady trying to do her job, and embarrass us as an unwanted self-appointed representative of the passengers. Seeing what was going on, I (I hate to admit), stepped away from the confrontation. I wonder what the course of action would have been. Luckily, some of the older guys in line had more guts and did something.
“Shut up. Leave her alone.” Once one man said it, everyone else followed.
“You guys are like sheep. I’m standing up for you.”
“Speak for yourself. We’re just fine. If you don’t like the service at this airport, then don’t fly through here.”

Guess who my neighbor on the plane was? Our fearless defender against the translator/directions lady. He actually turned out to be a interesting guy. Both a complete opposite of the previous neighbor and in many ways just like him. He was in his forties, maybe older, although he looked my age. He owned a custom bike company in SF. He had a cool story and was quite a cool cat (had to be quite a story to make up for his earlier behavior huh?). I forget why he was going to Chiang Mai, I think for a vacation. He had a way of raising his voice when he got passionate about something, kind of like a man riding life, a buzz in his eyes, although I don’t think he was drunk at all. Maybe drunk on life. His opinions on trade, outsourcing, globalization were a bit different from the previous guy. He believed much of the outsourcing and international jobs were forms of exploitation. He told about how some plants would create so much pollution that they’d ruin the water supplies of the entire areas. It wasn’t just about pay. He said that before letting our corporations open a factory abroad, we had to make sure that it actually benefited the community there, improving their lives and at the very least not hurting their environments. Funny, how someone who was so rude to the lady at the airport cared so much about people abroad.

It’s interesting. I agree with both of them, although I’m no expert on econ or trade, but it doesn’t seem right that our companies can have oppressive measures and destroy our planet just because they operate in another country. At the same time I don’t see a problem with letting people in another place have a chance to work on products and services we use. Especially when the internet makes connections so easy. Why shouldn’t someone in the FRU be able to make more money for his programming skills, why shouldn’t someone in Bangalore provide excellent service at a call center? However, I do think our government should give some sort of protection to our own workers too. But at the same time, I don’t believe in protecting professions that are going away either (the destroying the machine style stuff). And at the same time, that job, as automatable or exportable as it may be, has a person behind it, a living breathing person, who has a family, most likely kids to support, and human dignity often connected to being a provider and supporter of himself and his family and in getting stuff done (hopefully). Although it’s easy to think, “Well go do something more useful,” it may not be that easy for someone who has worked hard for decades. I don’t know the perfect solution and I’m not into “ologies” but I feel that neither a “stop all trade/overseas plants” nor a “let the market take care of everything and keep the government away” offers a full solution.

On a side note, while waiting for the bathroom stall. I talked with a guy from Laos. He said I should go teach in his country. The people are super friendly, it’s beautiful, and the language is almost the same as Thai. That would be a fun trip.

We landed in an airport amid a light gray fog. Hot day but a gray fog. People said it burning rice fields.

You believe all swans are white. Each time you see a white swan, it’s just confirmation of your belief. People can see millions of white swans, but it only takes one black swan to prove everything wrong.

I first heard of this book on Talk of the Nation’s Interview with Taleb, it stayed in my mind throughout my adventures in Thailand, and upon my return I finally got my hands on a copy and fell in love with it.

Here are some of the topics covered (not a complete nor ordered list, nor exact quotes, just general highlights of parts I loved):

1. Mundanistan vs Extremistan: Take a 10,000 people to a stadium. No matter how fat one guy is, he’s not going to change the average weight by any noticeable amount. Same with height. Same with age. Now imagine you’re measuring net worth. A guy like Bill Gates will blow the average out of the stadium. Measures like height, weight, etc are from Mundanistan. Measures like net worth, people killed in a war or by a disease, the impact of a new invention etc, are from Extremistan. Averages and standard deviations and predictions can fail in Extremistan. For the most part…. we live in Extremistan… and we shouldn’t depend on Mundanistan prediction methods on things that can have huge impacts on our lives.

2. Silent Evidence: “These souls prayed to the gods and were saved.” “What about those who weren’t?” Most interesting professions, like writing or trading etc have huge cemeteries. When we look at the winning record of associates at a firm, or books sales, or even the stock picks of the latest hot fund, there’s a lot we don’t see. What about all the guys who are fired each year? What about all the authors who fail? What about all the companies that went bust and were replaced? Or the funds that were hot that no longer are? We often read books by successful CEOs listing the qualities they think made them get there (I’m particularly guilty), but we don’t see the thousands who have those same qualities who failed.

3. The Ludic Fallacy: Mistaking the map for the terrain. Best illustrated with the help of Fat Tony.

Thought experiment at a bar (this isn’t an exact quote, sounded much better in the book):
Taleb: I tossed a fair coin 99 times and got heads each time. What are my odds of heads on the next toss?
Dr. John (the actuary): 50/50.
Fat Tony: At least 99 to 1.
Dr. John: But why? The previous tosses have nothing to do with the next one.
Fat Tony: You’re either full of crap or a pure sucker to buy that fifty percent business. The coin’s gotta be loaded.

In other words: it’s more likely there’s something wrong with the assumption of fair play than a fair coin landing 99 times in a row on heads.

Further examples of this are in how we deal with probability. Most people think of probability as chances in dice and card games, but as one example points out: what were some of the biggest losses a casino had to deal with? A tiger attack on one of the Casino’s top performers, a pissed off contractor trying to dynamite the foundation columns, an employee filing papers that needed to be filed with IRS only in files in his own desk, and a kidnapping of the owner’s daughter. Think outside the box. There are many more things we don’t know than we know.

4. Induction: Don’t be the turkey!
Turkey wakes up every morning and gets fed and cared for by humans. It’s been true for 999 days. But on the 1000th day, there’s a very unpleasant surprise. Induction can be deadly.

5. Ties and Mice and Experts
Just because someone speaks with authority, has a suit on, and has a fancy position doesn’t mean you should trust him (or her). Next time you deal with a self-assured expert (political analyst, fancy academic, economist, etc) imagine dropping a mouse down his shirt and seeing his reaction. I was crying from laughter during the first detailed elaboration.

6. Survival Bias: Why didn’t the Plague kill more people? Because we’re still here. If it did, we wouldn’t be here asking. Casanova had his lucky star that he believed helped him back up. How could he bounce back so many times? Well, he might have, but thousands of other Casanova’s didn’t. You’re not hearing from them. Sitting next to a guy at a Casino, who just won some 1 to 100,000 prize. “It has to be destiny. I mean look at the chances.” Yeah, look at them, there were 999,999 others who failed. Don’t ask how could it be that you got here, but think of all the minor things that could have made you not be here. (Similar to 2. Silent evidence.. they’re all inter-related)

7. Butterflies and Chaos and Discoveries: They cleaned all the bird poop off the satellite, but the noise was still there. Turns out those noises were from the birth of the universe. They were just getting rid of bird crap. The guys that deduced those signals should exist had to read about the noise from the paper. Ditto for penicillin, another accident. Heck, ditto for Columbus and America. Big discoveries often happen when people are looking for something else. The weather simulator gave completely different results for the same input. A bug? No, it was from rounding some really small, super-tiny, unimportant number. The so-called butterfly causing a hurricane… two years later. But here’s the thing, this is not an invitation to analyze butterflies! The point is, in highly complex systems, minor measurements can completely change the results. The whole point is it’s extremely difficult to predict.

8. Diaries and Noise:
Instead of rebuilding memory and answers to suit events, keep a diary, with your predictions and analysis. Much more humbling. Interestingly, regarding news and info (and going well with Ferris’ low information diet): more information can hurt your performance. Take a fire hydrant and blur it. Now unblur it in a number of steps, say 20 for Group 1, and 10 (corresponding to each second unblur) of the previous group. If we stop at each common unblur and ask both groups if they recognize it, the group with just 10 steps would see it at an earlier step than the group with 20. More data, slower recognition. Ditto for investing, perhaps computers can run on nanosecond algorithms however, for people, this can create a lot of confusion, stress, and wasted effort. In addition to being blinded, we’re wired to make connections and see stories. They make memory doable, but the “because” isn’t a fact. Niederhoffer also stressed this in his books (Education of a Speculator, Practical Speculation) in regards to financial news headlines. Interestingly enough, he also avoids the news… except for the National Inquirer.

9. Anti-Platonicity: I whine about categories enough. The book does too.

10. More more and more:
These are just a few of the things covered in the book, others include fractals, a simple overview of black swan investing strategy (only minor but very interesting), surprising praise of army analysts, wonderful treatment of self-confident academics and professionals and high brow opera culture, anecdotes, scientific and philosophical references, different modes of reasoning, exposing oneself to opportunities, linguistic mistakes that cost us bigtime! All told in a down to earth, understandable, funny, very funny voice.

This should be required reading before entering college. It could help raise many interesting questions. The induction part, actually highlights a really interesting point in writing persuasive essays on standardized tests (my favorite subject to teach)… using single examples, the narrative, isn’t the logical/scientific way to prove stuff… although it’s very effective for its given purposes (getting into college, getting a higher score… or to get viewers for news-stories news headlines).

I actually didn’t read the book, I listened to it… twice. It’s the perfect journey book, on drives from SF to SJ, I sometimes ended up sitting in the car minutes after arriving to get the last morsel from the chapter. Some neat books that gave background to this read: Niederhoffer’s Education of a Speculator and Practical Speculation, Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, and Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. I think the direct link between the interview and getting the books was probably from Daily Speculations. In any case, The Black Swan is a must read, a book that can change the way you see the world.

Two articles worth reading:
Blowing Up: How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy (2002)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom (2008)

John Stone Fitness: johnstonefitness.com

I’ve changed the blog theme to the Zinmag Futura. However, I don’t need most of the flashy gizmos, and so I disabled them. But I love the thumbs and the rotating front page featured and slide/glide menu. The only issue I’ve had was with the thumbnails links not working correctly (discussion thread), but hopefully that gets cleaned up soon. Also, I just found out that Zinmag Redox had exactly the things I wanted without the extra features (for anyone that wants to save an hour or two in setting things up).

I added Sociable and Akismet, I love these two plugins. My amazon link plugin (which really speeds up getting the book pictures) doesn’t work with the latest version of wordpress. I also used the built-in tag cloud feature of wordpress. In the future I plan to add a photofeed and a connection to 43things.

I’ve also been cleaning up the categories. I don’t have it fully planned out, but the plan is to simplify and make them more natural. Most of the book posts will go into the book categories, financial stuff will go in its own category, job stuff in its own category rather than being split among three or four. I don’t know how relevant this categorization stuff really is since I don’t believe in categories (tags are a far better metaphor for describing the world) but nevertheless we all categorize things to help us make quick decisions (for better or worse) so for now I’ll play along. It’ll also help with the thumbnails (for posts which don’t have a specific thumb, adding category-based generics makes sense).

OK, time to go study. Have a great day.

Update:I’ve switched to the simpler and cleaner “Statement” theme by Blog Oh Blog. (BK – 08 May 2009)

I especially appreciate the sheets you can download from his website (fourhourworkweek.com) and high speed push toward efficiency and figuring out what you really want… ie. not a sum of money… but what you’d actually do with it. It was really surprising when I asked quite a few people what they would do if they had all the money and time they wanted that they really had no clue. They never thought beyond the money/time part. What Timothy Ferriss does is make you ask the right questions and take the necessary steps before it’s too late. Lifestyle design should be a required subject.