How I Avoid Acting Irrationally

The practices I follow to keep my emotions in check.

"Those who have accomplished the greatest results are those who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite." - Booker T. Washington.

All the regrets, mistakes, and embarrassing moments - I've made and experienced have one thing in common. I lost control of my emotions.

A meta example is the headline-dominating $30 billion FTX meltdown happening as we speak.

SBF, the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange, was passionate about decentralised finance and effective altruism. He wanted to parlay his success from FTX into more worldly causes, like solving malaria.

But this led him to make bigger and bigger bets with FTX, which logically made no sense and sent him down a path that may result in him and other team members going to prison.

When we can't control our impulses, they control us, which is why I regularly practice these exercises to help me stay in control.

Writing - I write down all my wild thoughts, frustrations and emotions when I experience them and store them in a box. I then review them a couple of days later.

Meditation - I do a guided meditation daily for 10 - 12 minutes.

Reading - I read biographies and philosophies that discuss the maladies of passion.

Writing gives me real-time feedback on how bad things could have been had I acted on my emotions.

Meditation stops me from being as reactive, so I'm not jerked around by my emotions.

Reading shows real-world examples of how badly it went for others when they let their emotions get the better of them.

Notes: We are told to live passionately, and most people do whatever they feel like. But we are better served by domesticating our feelings to serve our purposes.

The Batteries Included Framework

A framework to keep in mind when hiring.

​Jack Altman, founder and CEO of Lattice, a $3 billion workforce management platform with 1,000+ employees, recently shared a framework he uses to guide hiring decisions.

It's a tip of the hat to that pain in the a** moment when you get home after buying an electronic device and realise batteries aren't included.

Jack proposes we are the same.

Batteries included people bring energy to work.

Where-as batteries not included, people take energy from others at work.

We've all worked, lived and socialised with both of these types. We look forward to being around people who give energy, and we often dread being around the ones who take it.

Obviously, there's a spectrum here - we're not always on or always off. Still, as Jack suggests, it makes a lot of sense to try and build a team full of people who come with batteries included.

​Sahil Bloom recently wrote about this topic, too, and shared how he thinks you can spot these people.

1) They are internally motivated and driven by their standards rather than continually needing to be incentivised to do their work.

2) They inspire others with their bias towards action and show their enthusiasm for work through their body language, i.e. they don't drag their feet.

3) They're consistent - they show up for themselves and their team day in, and day out.

4) They're accountable - they take personal responsibility for their actions, no matter the outcomes.

Disclaimer: I've never thought about this before nor hired with this framework in mind. But I can see the benefits of doing so and will keep this in mind moving forward.

Notes: Lean towards hiring people who bring energy to work and avoid those who take it.

ENTREPRENEURS CORNER

The Building Blocks Of Business

How a business becomes valuable

The foundation of scientific knowledge is good explanations. And it progresses by us finding more and better explanations of our world.

Building a business is similar.

At their core, all businesses are a latticework of explanations we employ to drive specific outcomes.

Such as a type of ad you know how to run that generates $X or an accounts process your team uses to make sure the bills get paid.

So the value of your business is, in some way, the value of your network of explanations.

And while we can theorise on what explanations are valuable and which aren't by synthesising case studies, biographies or advice from, say, a mentor. Until we test those explanations, they are unproven.

So then, we build value into a business by conjecturing explanations and putting them into practice to measure their true value.

This means that any activity in a business that doesn't implement an already proven explanation doesn't add value—like, imagining possibilities, planning for action, debating outcomes, and even networking.

^ This stuff is not necessarily wasted action, but it is only valuable once proven.

This is a long-winded but hopefully, logical way to show that building a business is nothing other than taking action, finding what works and repeating those actions.

That is how our civilisation has progressed and how a business progresses.

Notes: We must take action in order to create value.