Principle读书笔记（一）

Part 1 && Part2

1. It isn't easy for me to be confident that my opinions are right.
2. Bad opinions can be very costly.
3. The consensus is often wrong, so I have to be an independent thinker.
4. I worked for what I wanted, not for what others wanted me to do.
5. I came up with the best independent opinions I could master to get what I wanted.
6. I stress-tested my opinions by having the smartest people I could find challenge them so I could find out where I was wrong.
7. I remained wary about being overconfident, and I figured out how to effectively deal with my not working.
8. I wrestled with my realities, reflected on the consequences of my decisions, and learned and improved from this process.

In a nutshell ... I want you to work for yourself, to come up with idependent opinions, to stress-test them, to be wary about being overconfident, and to reflect on the consequences of your decisions and constantly improve.

... Most importantly:

1. I learned that failure is by and large due to not accepting and successfully dealing with the realities of life, and that achieving success is simply a matter of accepting and successfully dealing with all my realities.
2. I learned that finding out what is true, regardless of what that is, including all the stuff most people think is bad -- like mistakes and personal weaknesses -- is good because I can then deal with these things so that they don't stand in my way.
3. I learned that there is nothing to fear from truth. While some truths can be scary -- for example, finding out that you have a deadly disease -- knowing them allows us to deal with them better. Being truthful, and letting others be completely truthful, allows me and others to fully explore out thoughts and exposes us to the feedback that is essential for our learning.
4. I learned that being truthful was an extension of my freedom to be me. I believe that people who are one way on the inside and believe that they need to be another way outside to please others become conflicted and often lose touch with what they really think and feel. It's difficult them to be happy and almost impossible for them to be at their best. I know that's true for me
5. I learned that I want the people I deal with to say what they really believe and to listen to what others say in reply, in order to find out what is true. I learned that one of the greatest sources of problems in our society arises from people having loads of wrong theories in their heads -- often theories that are critical of others -- that they won't test by speaking to the relevant people about them. Instead, they talk behind people's back, which leads to pervasive misinformation. I learned to hate this because I could see that making judgmemts about people so that they tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive. So I learned to love real integrity(saying the same things as one believes) and to despise the lack of it.
6. I learned that everyone make mistakes and has weaknesses and that one of the most important thing that differentiaties people is their approach to handling them. I learned that there is an incredible beauty to mistakes, because embdded in each mistake is a puzzle, and a gem that I could get if I solved it, i.e., a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future. I learned that each mistake was probably a reflectiong of something that I was (or others were) doing wrong, so if I could figure out what that was, I could learn how to be more effective. I learned that wrestling with my problems, mistakes, and weaknesses was the training that strengthened me. Also, I learned that is was the pain of this wrestling that make me and those around me appreciate our successes.
7. I learned that the popular picture of success -- which is like a glossy photo of an ideal man or woman out of a Ralph Lauren catalog, with a bio attached listing all of their accomplishments likes going to the best pre schools and an Ivy League college, and getting all the answers right on test -- is an inaccurate picture of the typical successful person. I met a number of great people and learned that none of them were born great -- they all made lots of mistakes and had lots weakness -- and that great people become great by looking at their mistakes and weakness and figuring out how to get around them. So I learned that the people who make the most of the process of encountering reality, especially the painful obstacles, learn the most and get what they want faster than people who do not. I learned that they are the great ones -- the ones I wanted to have around me.

In short, I learned that being total truthful, especially about mistakes and weaknesses, led to a rapid rate of imporvement and movement toward what I wanted.

While this approach worded great for me, I found it more opposite thant similar for most others' approachees, which has produced communications challenges.

1. While most others seem to believe that learning what we are taught is the path to success, I believe that figuring out for yourself what your want and how to get is is better path.
2. While most others to believe that having ansers is better that having questions, I believe that having questions is better than having answers because it leads to more learing.
3. while most others seem to believe that mistakes are bad things, I believe mistakes are good things because I believe that most learning comes via making mistakes and reflecting on them.
4. While most others seem to believe that finding out about one's weakness is a bad thing, I believe that it is a good thing because it is the first step toward finding out what to do about them and not letting them stand in your way.
5. while most others seem to believe that pain is bad, I believe that pain is required to become stronger.

Truth -- more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality -- is the essential foundation for producting good outcomes.

• I believe that evolution, which is the natural movement toward better adaptation, is the greatest single force in the universe, and that it is good.
• I believe that the desire to evolve, i.e., to get better, is probably humanity's most pervasive driving force.
• ... the sequence of 1) seeking new things (goals); 2) working and learning in the process of pursuing these goals; 3) obtaining these goals; and 4) then doing this over and over again is the personal evolutionary process that fulfills most of us and moves society forward.
• I believe that pursuing self-interest in harmony with the laws of the universe and contributing to evolution is universally rewarded and what I call "good". ... Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted and largely unrelated to their desire to make money. There are many people who have made a lot of money who never made making a lot of money their primary goal. Instead, they simply engaged in the work that they doing produced what society wanted, and got rich doing it. And there are many people who really wanted to make a lot of money but never produced what the society wanted and they didn't make a lot of money.
• ... It is extremely important to one's happiness and success to know oneself -- most importantly to understand one's own values and abilities -- and then to find the right fits. We all have things that we value that we want and we all have strengths and weaknesses that affect out paths for getting them. The most important quality that differentiates successful people from unsuccessful people is our capacity to learn and adapt to these things.

Reality + Dreams + Determination = A successful Life

• The qulity of our lives depends on the quality of the decisions we make.
• Pain + Reflection = Progress
• Ask yourself, "Is it true?"
• People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don't know and hide their weakness, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weakness remain impediments in the future.
• People who overweight the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects that the second- and subsequent-order consequences will have on their goals rarely reach their goals.
• Successful people understand that bad things come at everyone and that it is their responsibility to make their lives that their want them to be by successfully dealing with whatever challenges they face.

My 5-Step Process to Getting What Your Want Out of Life

1. Have clear goals.

2. Goals are the things that you really want to achieve, while desires are things you want that can prevent you from reaching your goals -- as I previously explained, desires are typically first-order consequences.

3. Avoid setting goals based on what you think you can achieve. Once you commit to a goal, it might take lots of thinking and many revisions to your plan over a considerable time period in order to finalize the design and do tasks to achieve it. So you need to set goals without ye assessing whether or not you can achieve them.

4. Achieving your goals isn't just about moving forward. Inevitably, you must deal with setbacks. So goals aren't just those things that you want and don't have. They might also be keeping what you do have, minimizing your rate of loss, or dealing with irrevocable loss. Life will throw you chanllenges, some of which will seem devastating at the time. Your goal is always to make the best possible choices, knowing that you will be rewarded if you do.

5. Identify and don't tolerate the problems that stand in the way of achieving your goals.

6. Most problems are potential improvements screaming at you. Whenever a problem surfaces, you have in front of you an opportunity to imporve. The more painful the problem, the louder it is screaming. In order to be successful, your have to 1) perceive problems and 2) not tolerate them.

7. If you don't identify your problem, you won't solve them, so you won't move forward toward achieving your goals. As a result, it is essential to bring problems to the surface.

8. The most common reasons people don't successfully identify their problems are generally rooted either in a lack of will or in a lack of talent or skill:
   1. They can be "harsh realities" that are unpleasant to look at, so people often subconsicously put them "out of sight" so they will be "out of mind"
   2. Thinink about problems that are difficult to solve can produce anxiety that stands in the way of progress.
   3. People often worry about appearing to not have problems than about achieving their desired results, and therefore avoid recognizing that their own mistakes and/or weaknesses are causing the problems. This aversion to seeing one's own mistakes and weaknesses typically occurs because they're viewed as deficiencies you're stuck with rather than as essential parts of the personal evolution process.
   4. Sometimes people are simply not perceptive enough to see the problems.
   5. Some people are unable to distinguish big problems from small ones.
   6. When identifying problems, it is important to remain centered and logical.
   7. Be very precise in specifying your problems.
   8. Don't confuse problems with causes.
   9. Once you identify your problems, you must not tolerate them.
9. Accurately diagnose these problems.
   • You will be much more effective if you foucs on diagnosis and design rather than jumping to solutions.
   • You must be clam and logical.
   • You must get at the root causes.
   • Recognizing and learning from one's mistakes and the mistakes of others who affect outcomes is critical to eliminating problems.
10. Design plans that explicitly lay out tasks that will get you around your problems and on to your goals.
    • In some cases, you might go from setting goals to designing the plans that will get you to these goals; while in other cases, you will encounter problems on the way to your goals and have to design your way around them.
    • Visualize the goal or problem standing in your way, and then visualize practical solutions. When designing solutions, the objective is to change how you do things so that problems don't recur -- or recur so often. Think about each problem individually, and as the product of root causes -- like the outcomes produced by a machine. Then think about how the machine should be changed to produce good outcomes rather than bad ones. There are typically many paths toward achieving your goals, and you need to find only one of them that works, so it's almost always doable.
    • When designing your plan, think about the timelines of various interconnected tasks. Sketch them out loosely and then refine them with the specific tasks. This is an iterative process, altering between sketching out your broad steps (e.g., hire great people) and filling these in with more specific tasks with estimated timelines (e.g., in the next two weeks choose the headhunters to find great people) that will have implications (e.g., cost, time, etc.). These will lead you to modify your design sketch until the design and tasks work well together. Being as specific as possible (e.g., specifying who will do what and when) allows you to visualize how the design will work at both a big-picture level and in detail. It will also give you and others the to-do lists and target dates that will help direct you.
    • Of course, not all plans will acomplish everything you want in the desired time frame. In such cases, it is essential that you look at what you won't be accomplished and ask yourself if the consequences are acceptable or unacceptable. This is where perspective is required, and discussing it with others can be critical. If the plan will not achieve what's necessary in the required time, so that the consequences have an unacceptablly high probability of preventing you from achieving your goal, you have to either think harder (probably with the advice of other believable people) to make the plan do what is required or reduce your goals.
11. Implement these plans -- i.e., do these tasks.
    • It is critical to know each day what you need to do and have the discipline to do it.
    • People with good work habits have to-do lists that are reasonably prioritized, and they make themselfves do what needs to be done. By contrast, people with poor work habits almost randomly react to the stuff that comes at them, or they can't bring themselves to do the things they need to do but don't to do (or are unable to do).
    • You need to know whether you (and others) are following the plan, so you should establish clear benchmarks. Ideally you should have someone other yourself objectively measure if you (and others) are doing what you planned. If not, you need to diagnose why and resolve the problem.
    • People who are good at this stage can reliably execute a plan. They tend to be self-disciplined and proactive rather than reactive to the blizzard of daily tasks that can divert them from execution. They are results-oriented: they love to push themselves over the finish line to achive the goal. If they see that daily tasks are taking them away from executing the plan (i.e., they identify this problem), they diagnose it and design how they can deal with both the daily tasks and moving forward with the plan.

By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn't give a damn what you "like". So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then to do those things -- which often are difficult but produce good resluts -- so that you'll then deserve to get what you want.

Weaknesses Don't Matter if You Find Solutions

• Most importantly, ask yourself what is your biggest weakness that stands in the way of what you want.
• It is difficult to see one's own blind spots for two reasons:
• Most people don't looking for their weakness because of "ego barriers" -- they find having weaknesses painful because society has taught them that having weaknesses is bad. As I said early on, I believe that we would have a radically more effective and much happier society if we taught the truth, which is that everyone has weaknesses, and knowing about them and how to deal with them is how people learn and succeed.
• Having a weakness is like missing a sense -- if you can't visualize what it is, it's hard to perceive not having it.