Sahil Bloom · March 24, 2023

Deconstructing Fears, Avoiding the Big Surprise, & More

Glance

A Friday Five issue covering how fear distorts decisions, why changing your mind is growth, and the Thanksgiving Turkey parable about false certainty.

Meaning

Bloom opens by asking what fear is stopping you from doing, arguing that fear makes us overstate downsides and ignore upsides and the costs of inaction, so the fix is to deconstruct the fear by mapping both the downside and upside of acting. He frames changing your mind on new information as growth, like a software update to the brain. He then retells the Parable of the Thanksgiving Turkey from Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, where the turkey feels safest right before it is killed, to show that the truths we are most certain of can fail us at the point of maximum comfort. He closes with a Beckham contract story and a recommended essay from The Marginalian.

The author, in their own words

Question you need to ask:

What am I not doing right now because of fear?

“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” — Seneca

Fear plays dangerous games with our minds. It distorts our ability to think clearly and rationally about a decision.

When we feel fear, we:

Overstate the negative consequences of our decisions or actions.
Completely ignore the potential positive consequences and the costs of inaction.

The human tendency is to (1) feel fear and (2) run away from it.

Deconstruct the fear that is holding you back:

What is the potential downside of action (or inaction)?
What is the potential upside of action?

As Tim Ferriss so aptly covers with his fear-setting framework, by getting closer to our fears, we are able to fight back against them and unlock new growth in our lives.

Quote I posted on my wall:

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." - George Bernard Shaw

Changing your mind on the basis of new information is growth.

Embrace it as a "software update" to your brain.

Framework to avoid the bad surprise:

The Parable of the Thanksgiving Turkey

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Mark Twain (maybe)

The Parable of the Thanksgiving Turkey comes from The Black Swan, the 2007 best selling non-fiction book by Nassim Taleb about unforseen events.

The story is simple:

A turkey is born on a farm.

Each and every day, the turkey wakes up to a friendly farmer, who feeds the turkey, cleans the coop, and scares off any potential predators.

For 1,000 straight days, the turkey becomes more and more entrenched in its belief that the farmer is good and will always take care of him.

Then on the 1,001st day, which happens to be Thanksgiving, the farmer comes in and kills the turkey to eat it for dinner.

Quoting from the book (emphasis mine):

"Consider that [the turkey's] feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest...But the problem is even more general than that...Something has worked in the past, until — well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading."

The lesson I glean from this story: The "truths" we have grown certain of may not always be true. When we have reached the point of maximum comfort with our reality, we may find ourselves surprised, just like the Thanksgiving Turkey.

A question we should all constantly ask ourselves:

What do I know for sure that just ain't so?

Tweet I found satisfying:

This is how you bend it like Beckham...

Behold the power of a creatively negotiated contract. The headline contract value went down, but by taking a % of all team revenues, the total dollar figure went way, way up.

Article I read five times:

Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past

I was recently referred to The Marginalian by a subscriber and have been going down the rabbit hole on the archives.

Exceptional, thoughtful stuff!

Key Passages

David Beckham shocked the world when he left Real Madrid in 2007 to sign with the LA Galaxy of MLS. He was just 31 years old and accepted a 70% pay cut. But his contract included two unique clauses that eventually helped him earn more than $500 million. Here's the story 👇 — Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano) January 4, 2023

Fear plays dangerous games with our minds. It distorts our ability to think clearly and rationally about a decision.

The human tendency is to (1) feel fear and (2) run away from it.

Changing your mind on the basis of new information is growth.

The "truths" we have grown certain of may not always be true. When we have reached the point of maximum comfort with our reality, we may find ourselves surprised, just like the Thanksgiving Turkey.