26 (Hopefully) Useful Thoughts For 2026
A Listicle About Self-Control, Understanding, and Sampling Bias
I think it’s important to try out something different every once in a while. This week, I’m trying out making a listicle! Weird. This is a bit more “off-the-cuff” and prescriptive than my usual articles. Maybe it’s all obvious, or maybe there will be something in here that’s helpful for you. Who knows. Here we go:
Sharpening, Leveling, and Sampling Bias
Every story we hear, whether an anecdote from a friend, a new report, or a historical story, has some “point” to it. It’s worth telling because something about it is notable. In telling stories, certain details become emphasized (sharpened) and, because most details are irrelevant, others get de-emphasized or removed (leveling). The result is most stories we hear are more extreme and less ambiguous than real life.
The above applies to our own memories of events as well. Memories aren’t a perfect recording of what happens, we remember what about the event seemed important. The result is leaving out details and sharpening the “point” of the memory.
Repeated re-tellings make stories more extreme, through repeated applications of sharpening and leveling.
People usually aren’t complete morons or complete monsters, so you should take stories that involve people acting cartoonishly stupid with a grain of salt. People do stupid things, but sharpening and leveling turning people into caricatures is much more common than indefensible stupidity.
Sharpening and leveling are just examples of sampling bias. The stories we hear and experiences we have are those that made it through some filter, or that came to us due to our particular place in the world. You’ll have a systematically distorted view of the world if you assume your experiences are representative of the wider world.
It’s true that the top people usually got lucky. But it’s also true that they’re probably quite good. Research suggests that you need to be high quality to be anywhere at the top, but luck is involved in what from the top becomes a breakaway hit.
A corollary: Don’t feel bad about lucky breaks. The people ahead of you likely got some too, it doesn’t diminish the contribution of quality to where you are.
Self-Control and Decision Making
If you set up your life so you are constantly facing temptations and consciously deciding whether to give in to a short-term reward or work towards your long-term goals, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Reduce the number of decisions you consciously make. Think in terms of policies: If I always skipped the gym to play video games when I wasn’t “feeling up to” working out, what would it look like? Once you have your policy, the decision is made for you.
Habits are automated decisions triggered by context. If you don’t like what you habitually do, focus on changing habits instead of trying to fight the same struggle everyday. Change the cues, add friction to the things you don’t want to do, and consciously build new habits.
Friction shapes a lot of our behavior. It’s easy to shape the friction in your life. Reduce the friction of things you want more, and introduce friction to the things you want less of. Keep an e-reader with you if you want to read more. Leave the phone out of reach if you want to use it less.
You aren’t “addicted” to your phone. You’ve just set up your life so you always have frictionless access to low-effort entertainment. Of course when there’s a choice between doing something hard and the frictionless entertainment, you often go the easy route.
Just get started. Tell yourself you’ll do the thing (write, read, work out) for 5 minutes. Often once the 5 minutes are up you’ll be on a roll and not want to stop.
Moderation in all things, including moderation. Adopt policies that get you towards your goals but also allow for “special occasions” like celebrations or vacations.
Fredkin’s Paradox: when we’re choosing between two options, if both are very similarly attractive, it can be harder to choose between them. It’s easy to torture yourself about the choice, but it’s these exact kind of choices where the decision we make matters least, since there isn’t much difference in the goodness (or badness) of the options. If there was a clear difference, the decision would be easy.
What’s best “right now” might not be what’s best globally. But sometimes figuring out what’s best globally is too difficult and you just need to take action, at which point a greedy approach (doing whatever gets you the closest right now, without thinking about further steps) is a good heuristic approach.
Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Deciding you’re going to read 50 books in a year is great, until you realize you only read quick, fluffy novellas to pump up your “books” number.
Understanding and Expertise
To understand something is to have a compact mental model of it. A good explanation replaces many separate facts with a smaller set of principles that generate them.
Learning isn’t about accumulating more facts. Real learning leads to understanding. It gives us new lenses and mental models to understand our environment. It can fundamentally shift how we see the world.
Expertise is often invisible. Especially when we work in an environment where most people share our expertise, it’s easy to forget how much we know. Academics take for granted their basic statistical knowledge because they’re always around people who know at least as much. Sometimes it takes interacting with a beginner in your field to realize how much you really know.
The last sentence of the previous point is part of why having kids is so cool. It opens our eyes to how much of our own understanding we just take for granted. Of course, their incessant questions about everything often also reveal how much we don’t understand.
Curiosity is easier when you already know something. We’re attracted to “gaps” in our knowledge. If you don’t have enough structured knowledge to have a gap, and instead just have a giant ignorance void, you won’t be curious.
Because expertise is often invisible, the quick judgments we make based on it can feel “obvious”. But it’s only obvious because of some mental models taken for granted giving rise to seeming “intuitions”.
It’s much easier to criticize and tear something down than to build something positive. Builders deserve more respect, even if their vision isn’t perfect. Those that only tear down want to feel superior without needing to put anything at stake.
Unarticulated thoughts often feel much stronger than they are once you say them. It’s common once you put your thought into words, to realize it sounds like just as weak an argument as the ones you criticized.
The world is “noisy”. There are real patterns, but there are also fluctuations that make those patterns hard to notice. We often think we see patterns where there aren’t any. It often takes many high-powered studies to determine an effect—we should be careful assuming our biased, anecdotal observations have uncovered one.
Notice the good. When we’re looking at society at large, or at our personal life, or at the company’s IT department, it’s easy to ignore all the things working well. If something’s going smoothly, we don’t need to think about it. If there’s a setback, we’re drawn to it. This makes everything feel more dysfunctional than it really is, because our attention is more often on the breakdowns. Try to appreciate that each breakdown is surrounded by an invisible ocean of stuff working well, that we notice setbacks but not the steady gradual improvements.
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27. If someone gives you more than 25 useful thoughts, stick to the one that resonated with you most and file the rest for later.
Jokes aside, thanks for these thoughts! Now I know how Goliath grew from 6'9" to 9 feet tall.
Usually lists like this go on too long. That's where I thought it was going to happen when I saw that it was 26. But these are all awesome. If I had to pick one, I would say number 23. Thanks Tommy