Imagine you're at a birthday party, and there's a game where each kid gets to throw a ball into a bucket. Now, think of the bell curve like a way to show how well everyone did.

• The Middle of the Bell: This is where most of the kids will land. They get the ball in the bucket sometimes, but not always. It's like the average score. In a bell curve, this part is the highest because most people are here.

• The Sides of the Bell: Now, on one side, there are a few kids who are really good at this game. They get the ball in nearly every time! On the other side, there are also a few kids who find it a bit tricky and don't get the ball in as much.

• Shape of the Bell: The reason it's called a bell curve is because of its shape. Picture a bell. It's high in the middle (where most kids' scores are) and then slopes down on both sides (where the few really good or not-so-good scores are).

• The Tails of the Bell Curve: Think about the ends of the bell, or the 'tails.' These are really important too. In our game, there are a few kids who do exceptionally well or not well at all. These kids are in the tails of the bell curve.

• The Right Tail: This is where you find the few kids who are amazing at the game. They hardly ever miss. This part of the bell curve is low and stretches out because there aren't many kids here, but their scores are really high.

• The Left Tail: Over here, you have the few kids who find the game really tough. Maybe they hardly ever get the ball in the bucket. Just like the right tail, there aren't many kids here, and their scores are on the lower side.

So, when you look at a bell curve, the middle is high with most of the scores, and the tails on each side are low but important because they show the few kids who are either really good or finding it challenging. It's like a map showing where everyone stands in the game!

Black Swans 

(Concept from Nassim Taleb, who massively inspired this piece)

A major aspect of the bell curve that’s misunderstood are the tails above. We understand them in theory but we treat them wrong in real life. If we go far enough down the tail, we get incredibly rare outcomes. They’re rare and they’re potentially able to cause a lot of damage. 

Imagine at the birthday party, we have a catch in the game that if you get a perfect score ten times in a row, you get the whole birthday cake to yourself. Most kids can’t even get a single perfect score so you don’t really plan for what would happen if a kid hit the challenge - the probability is so low it’s not worth it. And you’re right not to prepare each time. The odds are (fictional and) one in ten thousand. But what if your job is to run birthday parties and you do this every single day…

What if you run three parties a day and always do the same game? After ten years, the game is played ten thousand times, by twenty kids each time. The odds that you ruin a random kid’s birthday party are suddenly much higher. You don’t know which kid it will be. But with a tiny probability and a huge number of trials, the overall likelihood of a tail event occurring aren’t that small. We live long lives. If we do something once a day for 80 years, we have 29,200 trials. Let’s look at low-probability events in our own lives.

Misunderstood Risks Around Us

There are three areas I want to discuss where I used to misunderstand risk. 

1. Daily Physical Risks–driving a car, smoking, 

2. Personal Care Risks 

3. Major Conflict - Israel/Palestine Risk 

Daily Physical Risks 

There are nearly 300 million cars in the United States of America for 330 million people. Once we include people under the legal driving age, we have more cars than people to drive them. Safe to say, most people would not consider driving risky or dangerous.

Between 2012-2022, 423,809 people died in car crashes in America, or about 42k each year. Worldwide, there are about 70 shark attacks per year. But most people are more scared of swimming in the ocean than getting in a car. Why does that make sense?

People get in a car thousands, if not millions, times more often than people get in the ocean. If there are only 600 times more car accident deaths than shark attacks, then the odds you get attacked by a shark any given time you get in the ocean are higher than the odds of you dying in a car crash. 

You’re more likely to die in a car crash in your life but more likely to get attacked by a shark each time you get in the ocean. 

Globally - odds of dying in a car crash at some point in life are higher 

Locally - odds of getting attacked by a shark when you swim in the ocean are higher 

Personal Care Risks

If you smoke cigarettes, the odds of you dying of lung cancer any one day is low, but your odds of dying of lung cancer at some point are high.

If you eat mostly fast food, the odds of you getting obese one day are impossible, but the odds of you getting obese at some point are high.

If you exercise one time, you won’t be jacked but if you exercise everyday, your odds of being jacked at some point are high. 

How you take care of yourself daily has a tiny effect once. Over a lifetime, the effect is dramatic. 

Major Conflicts 

A tiny risk of catastrophe over a span of years leads to unacceptable risk. 

A bank constantly prioritizes earnings in the quarter. If a manager shows losses, he might lose his job. Then, every manager takes on deals that push their risk out farther and farther into the future. A hundred managers pushing small risks out into the future leads to a large risk of massive proportions at a future date.

A country facing a small but persistent military risk is facing a major risk overtime. Look at Israel and Hamas. Hamas has a very small chance of being able to kill every Jew, part of their goal as stated in their charter. But the probability is not zero. Every day that Hamas exists, the odds that they will realize their goal at some point increases. The odds of Israel’s defense weakening one day and Hamas taking advantage of that increase overall each day because of an increased number of trials and natural variability. 

That is why Israel treats Hamas as a serious risk to the entire state of Israel, even though they probably don’t pose a country-wide threat on any one specific day. 

Using Low-Probability Events To Our Advantage: Risks & Habits

Risks

Risk determines return in a perfect world. The more risky an investment, the more you stand to make. Think about sports betting. 

• Betting one dollar on Lebron James to score more twenty points in a game might win you two dollars

• Betting on Lebron to score more than twenty points and get more than ten rebounds might win you ten dollars

• Betting on Lebron to score thirty points, get ten rebounds, ten assists, zero turnovers and to win the game on a buzzer beater could win you a hundred thousand dollars

The more variability you introduce, the more risky, the greater your return. We can use this to our advantage

To get a big outcome, take a big risk with little on the line. As long as you don’t risk total ruin (death and jail), you can keep playing. The more times you take these risks, the greater your odds of a big cashout. And you only need one cashout. Once you get a big cashout, you can stay rich by taking small risks with large amounts of money. 

*Think - putting a thousand dollars into Bitcoin at 10 dollars (high risk), cashing out and then putting it all in government bonds, Coca Cola, and oil (low risk).

This applies to more than just money though…

You can use the same principles for relationships. 

If you want a great relationship, you need to show commitment. You need to put yourself out there and be emotionally vulnerable. That’s an emotional risk. Once you do that, and it works, (cashout) your risks get much smaller. The same conversation or action becomes less risky once you’ve survived vulnerability the first time with the other person. 

Habits

James Clear has a line I love that I paraphrased into a motto for myself “good habits make time my friend”.  We spoke about tail risks and how low-probability events being potentially detrimental. This is the flipside to it. 

If you exercise regularly, time is your friend. If you keep up the habit and simply wait, you will have amazing results. You’ll be stronger and mentally sharper than your friends without that habit.

If you eat well, time is your friend. You’ll get sick less, you may live longer and your body will stay younger longer. 

The reason I love this so much is because time is inevitable. Time goes on and has no feelings  towards you, good or bad. That makes it the most dependable thing on earth. Your job is to make it your friend.  

TLDR:

• Something low-risk repeated thousands of times isn’t really low risk 

• Most terrible things were low-probability locally, high-probability globally 

• Win by taking lots of risks with small losses until it happens 

• Make time your friends with good habits and patience

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This wasn’t when I was a child, this was recently. A friend posted about the Israel-Hamas conflict on her instagram story. I asked a question. She responded “...just say you’re a lil racist and go lol”

I tried to put out the fire and reach out an olive branch only to receive more screaming. 

I don’t blame her. I’m not mad at her at all. I understand social media has conditioned this generation to think and act in extreme ways. Correction - to think never and act in extreme ways. 

Social Media Kills Our Thinking

Social Media has made it harder than ever to think independently. Yes, because we’re constantly distracted by it and never bored enough to think. But also for more discreet reasons. Because of social media…

• Consistency Bias is Multiplied Exponentially

• Ideological extremism is a Win-Win

• Availability Cascades are on Crack 

Before going deeper into each, here’s a quick explanation. 

Consistency Bias is a psychology term and it’s often used in marketing. It’s the theory that once a person commits to something in some way, they are more likely to continue to agree to actions that are consistent with the original task. 

Ideological Extremism is a win-win for people consuming media and people running media. Consumers get false comfort and media owners get to print money.

Availability Cascades happen when a lot of people start to believe in something more because it's being talked about a lot. This belief gets stronger and more people believe it because they hear it everywhere.

Consistency Bias 

Once we share an opinion, we are stuck to it. 

Understanding Consistency Bias 

According to Dr. Robert Cialdini, the world leader in the science of influence and persuasion, the larger and more public a commitment, the more likely people are to adhere to it. 

For example, if I agree to put up a small lawn sign with the name of my preferred political party, I’m then more likely to agree when asked to show support at their rally. 

This is a tactic long used by professional marketers, salesmen and political campaigners to influence people, but we used to be limited in the size and audience of our statements. If I tell a salesman that I like Mercedes, HE knows I said that and can use it against me. But nobody else can. 

Today, I can commit my support for a cause (even one I know nothing about) to nearly every single person I know and have ever met by simply clicking “share” on an infographic a friend posted. 

The issue here isn’t that a thousand crafty salesmen are gonna pop up and come sell me stuff I don’t want. The issue with being so public is that we know our reputation will be hurt if we now change our minds on the issue. We know the damage we’ll take because we see it happen to our politicians constantly.

Consistency Bias in Politics  

It used to be that the only people with large audiences to make their opinions known to strangers were politicians, radio hosts and authors. For now, I’ll focus on politicians because they regularly needed to share their opinions on many topics (similar to University students today, but more on that later). 

Flip flopper is a term that  dates back to 1890 when John W. Goff, a New York district attorney, used it to slander his opponent when he changed his mind on an issue. Since then, it’s been used in political campaigns constantly. In theory, we want our leaders to change their opinions when they learn new information, but in practice it’s unnerving - because then we don’t know who our allies are. 

Another way this applies to politics is in political campaigning. People feel compelled to bombard comment sections of videos they disagree with, share content promoting their preferred candidate and “pick sides”. Word to the wise - once someone has posted their stance, you are wasting your time trying to convince them they’re wrong. They have too much on the line now that they’ve posted online. 

To make the average person change their public opinion, you don’t need to convince them that they’re wrong. You need to convince them that they are so unbelievably wrong. And that still probably won’t do it. Your only hope is that they’re not average people, they have high self-esteem and most importantly, they have very few “views” on whatever they posted.  

Extremism is a Short Term Win-Win  

Win for “The People”:  Who do we know for sure will always be our ally? The person who believes in “the cause” even more than we do.

If I’m anti-abortion, and my local representative is a level-headed, analytical thinker, I’m worried he might change his mind over time. If my local rep is more “extreme” than me, I believe it’s unlikely he’ll get new information and become pro-abortion for two reasons:

• Massive consistency bias - they would look so stupid and lose all credibility if they flip flopped 

• They “believe” in it even more than me and I’m not changing my mind, so neither will they 

The more “far X” you are, the more reliable you are to not change. Nobody would bet on AOC suddenly changing her stance on immigration or “Medicare For All”. Nobody would bet on Trump saying “well actually maybe we don’t need a wall” (although if you do want to bet, I’ll take you up on that 1,000,000:1) 

Reliability is so important because generally, most people pick 2-3 issues that they really care about. No everyday person has time to care about affordable housing, medicare accessibility, immigration, foreign affairs, woke-in-school, abortion and the entire spectrum 

More typical today is a person who cares about abortion and wokeness (whether that is pushed/decided by “the media” is for another day) and thinks very little about foreign affairs (except when things go wrong i.e Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine) 

Win for Media Outlets: Extreme news is more captivating. It does three key things that allow media companies to charge advertisers more:

1. keeps people on their media site 

2. Increases “shareability” of content

3. Increases engagement

Not that complicated - very clear why Twitter is incentivized to tell me every time someone commits a hate crime against Jewish people. It makes me click, comment and maybe even share with an angry caption.

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Availability Cascade and Opinions on Everything 

Availability cascades were coined by Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein in this paper. It’s a mix of the Availability Bias and Information Cascades:

Availability Bias: the more available an idea or piece of evidence in our brain, the more importance we assign to it

Information Cascades: when a person makes a decision based solely on the decisions of other people, not based on their own prior knowledge 

Availability Cascade Example:  A rumor at school gets told so much that everyone starts to believe it's true. They hear it, making it very available. Then, they see everyone else acting as if it's true, making the decisions of others apparent. Then it's a perpetuating loop and the rumor is now considered true. 

Availability cascades make it painfully easy to avoid thinking and believe what you see. In fact, you probably won’t even notice it. You’ll simply take what you’re constantly seeing as fact. If you see the same story reposted a hundred times, unless you’re committed to disbelieving it, you’ll fall for it. By seeing controversy as “facts” and not considering the complexities of a situation, you’re prone to say things like “your silence is deafening”. You cannot understand why a bystander would not want to remain a bystander. The situation is so clear to you.

“Your silence is deafening”

Yes, it is important to stand up for others who are being wrongfully targeted/treated etc 

No, giving heavily biased and one-sided explanations to a friend and telling them to take a stance is not important 

Yes, it’s important to exercise your right to free speech BUT it’s also important to NOT exercise that right sometimes 

No, your non-X friends have no responsibility to “educate themselves”. Nobody actually wants other people to educate themselves. Telling people to “educate themselves” on a topic is just a way to say “if you were smart you would agree with me”. It’s not about education. You can tell because if those same people returned after educating themselves and disagreed with you, you would still imagine they’re not properly educated, or else plain hateful.  

Remember the same availability cascades don’t happen to everyone. Without considering another person’s media exposure, it’s impossible to break bread. You will forever by arguing with different facts. Sad but true. 

There is a BRIGHT Side

No way, Noah! A benefit to social media?! Yes!

Independent Media Production

The democratization of media has created a million options for people choosing where to get their news and information from. For example, you’re reading Noah Sochaczevski’s BigNerd substack. You only have the ability to read this because it was so easy for me to make a SubStack account, broadcast that it exists and share my ideas here. 

Before social media, this experience you’re having now would have been infinitely harder. Your options for learning were: school, books at the library, the newspaper and news stations. These are all much harder spaces to publish in. That means the only people teaching classes, writing books, editing newspapers, and broadcasting on television were relying on somebody else who has a lot of money to support them. Printing books, delivering newspapers and getting camera equipment isn’t cheap. 

Now that the bar is lowered to publish our thoughts, smart people doing other things can also write. There is less control of what is and isn’t said or written. That comes with the challenge of figuring out who is a credible source and who is not. That sucks. But it’s a better problem to have.

There’s Still Hope

I’m keeping a positive note as I finish up. We spoke about three major ways that social media affects our thinking - well here’s three ways to fight it: 

Confirmation Bias: be hyper-aware of what you post in your name. Your reputation is important to you. Saying less is safer than saying more. Don’t post until you’re completely sure of your opinion. Or, even safer, don’t post about controversial topics.

Extremism: find independent media sources. Use substack, instagram, blogs and anything else to find specific people who you trust. These people are less likely to be dependent on advertising revenue for their livelihood. Therefore, they’re also less likely to share inauthentically extreme views to “get a rise out of you”.

Availability Cascades: have a new slogan “guilty until proven innocent”. Assume everything you see is false until you can prove it’s true. Don’t be outwardly obnoxious about it but be internally vigilant. Assuming the overly-emotional simplifications of a complex topic that fit in an instagram post are false is usually closer to the truth anyways. If you feel compelled, do your own research after. But remember, you don’t need an opinion on everything. Sometimes you can “sit this one out”

I hope you enjoyed! Please share with a friend who you think might enjoy this piece.

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Noah

As children we have no say in what our weeks or days look like (even though new parenting styles seem to be changing that). Life happens to us. Then, as we get older, we want control. We develop preferences and we fight to get them. We try to control life. 

The way I see it, there’s two big buckets that define all the ways we try to control our lives.

1. Avoid a life you DON'T WANT 

2. Chase a life you WANT 

Throughout life we go through periods where chasing a life we want is easier and then other times, avoiding a life we don’t want is easier. But overall, I think avoidance more consistently leads to enjoyable lives and I’ll explain why below. 

Avoiding a Life You Don’t Want 

I don’t want to be geographically tied down. 

I don’t want to be hurting for days whenever I play sports. 

I don’t want to be stuck in a big city where I can’t quickly immerse myself in nature. 

…

Make a big list of these - what I know I do not want in life.  

Charlie Munger, the legendary investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway said, “it is in the nature of things that many hard problems are best solved when they are addressed backward”. Put simply - it’s easier to avoid being dumb than to be smart. 

Our brains are hardwired to look for problems. We needed to avoid danger constantly when we spent hundreds of thousands of years as hunter gatherers. We can use that to our advantage by using inversion. 

It’s much easier to think of things we don’t want than things we do want. Try it. Think right now of a life you would hate to live. That probably took you less than 5 seconds to start putting together an image in your head. 

Now if you are serious about wanting to avoid that, write it down. Be very clear with yourself - what type of life do I need to avoid. This can help immensely in choosing the direction of your life. It doesn’t tell you the coordinates of your destination but it points you the right way.

If you say, “I don’t want to work weekends” and “I don’t want to have to drive hours to get into nature”. Then, first you should look at the career path you’re on and make sure you’re not going into a field where you’re expected to work weekends. Next, you look at the city you live in or plan to live in. How dense is the city? How far are the mountains? 

It’s much easier to find problems than solutions. Find your problems. Then find ways to avoid them. To me, this seems the simplest way to move in the right direction with limited information/experience. This is the frame I used to convince myself to start writing.

*Charlie Munger (pictured above) is a multibillionaire with immense knowledge. A lot to learn from his speeches and his work.

Chasing a Life You Want

With experience, you learn what you want but narrowly. I think of this like when I started playing basketball. I knew which spots on the court I did not want to get the ball and I avoided those. Now, after a decade of playing on different teams, I know which spots I want to get the ball. I naturally learned specific desire in specific circumstances. 

Life experience is more helpful for narrowing down desires in specific areas of life. You can learn naturally what kind of house you want, what fitness regimen you want, what vacations you want… but asking what life you want is a different question. 

When you try to solve for the life you want you get to questions that past experiences alone can’t help. What TYPE of life do I want? I see four types of life people can chase:

1. A life chasing acceptance 

2. A life chasing pleasure 

3. A life chasing freedom

4. A life chasing nothing - accepting (the hardest, rarest one) 

   ---

1 - Chasing Acceptance

We all want to be accepted, that’s human nature. We have different people who we want to accept us. We want our friends to like us, our family, our boss, our coworkers, or even strangers on the internet. There is nothing innately wrong with the desire to be accepted. The problems come when we compromise our values to chase acceptance.

The most common example I see is people who value loyalty and integrity, then go around gossiping about their friend's lives. They have conflicting desires: to be accepted by the group and to be a person of integrity. Everybody has this internal struggle and often, the desire for acceptance wins. 

If you find yourself craving another person’s acceptance, it’s important that you identify whose acceptance you’re chasing. Once you know whose acceptance you want, think of what you would need to do to get it. Create a list of the values, skills, activities, accomplishments you would need to be accepted by X person. The person you described fits into one of these three avatars: 

1. A person you would enjoy being and be proud to be

2. A person you would enjoy being but not be proud to be

3. A person who cannot exist - the bar is too high or has contradicting values

*Note - A person you do not enjoy being is a person you cannot be proud of. 

If the answer is 1, then I see no problem chasing acceptance from that particular person. That’s not a popular opinion but the way I see it, life isn’t easy. Controlling your thoughts and desires is grueling work. If your desire for acceptance leads you to be a person you enjoy being and can be proud of, then don’t waste your time overcoming that desire. 

But that situation is rare. If you want to make your mother proud and the way to do that is by raising a family, holding a steady job and going to charity events with her, that’s a life you can be proud of. But if what’s really calling to you is a life in a van traveling, then you would not enjoy the life you need to live to make your mother proud. Falling into category 1 becomes rare when you look at both aspects. 

If the answer is 2 or 3, then ask yourself why you want that person or group of people to accept you. If their values aren’t aligned with yours, why do you want their acceptance? You probably will need to ask your “why” at least three times before you get to the root cause. Once you find that root cause, there’s more work. Ask if allowing that to direct your life serves you well.

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2 - Chasing Pleasure

A life just doing the things that make you happy. 

I don’t know as much about this one so I won’t speak at length. 

If I enjoy something but I can’t assign meaning to it beyond that, I get bored.

I aim for nights my bed hits the pillow and I feel proud of myself. 

I imagine the key to a life of pleasure is to find the intersection of what you enjoy and what makes you proud of yourself. 

I think that is the intersection where you find “meaningful work”. 

Much easier said than done. 

This is the goal. 

This is untouchable.

3 - Chasing Nothing - A Life of Acceptance

This is the life of the philosopher. I try to live this in some degree but it’s no easy task. This is the life of a monk, who accepts the world for the way it is. 

Marcus Aurelius and other stoics have spoken about this same idea - you are in complete control of how you see the world. And if you want a real life example of a man controlling his reaction to a terrible event, watch this video of a man forgiving and hugging the man who killed his son. 

As Naval Ravikant puts it, we are born, we have a set of sensory experiences and then we die. We assign meaning to those sensory experiences - they have no intrinsic meaning. And to rip from another Ravikant - Kamal Ravikant - in his book, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It, he has a line that goes: 

“I once asked a monk how he found peace. 

I say “yes,” he’d said. “To all that happens I say yes” 

Then to knock home one last example, Jocko Willinck, a former Navy SEAL, had a line he said whenever his team gave him bad news. “Good”. No matter how bad the news was, all he said was “good.” it didn’t serve him to wish it were another way. He accepted the situation right away. “Good”. 

This is the adult version of letting life happen to you. We can never be quite as carefree as young children because we don’t have full time caretakers - and even then that’s probably not the constraint. 

A life of acceptance is not just for monks because acceptance is a spectrum, not a binary. The question isn’t whether you accept life or don’t accept life, it’s how much do you accept life. It’s a worthy ambition to learn to accept the day-to-day life around you. If you become distraught by a one-off tragedy, that does not make your ambition less admirable. This is the hardest practice because you must override brain patterns you’ve developed since you were a child. If you decide to take this journey, remember to be kind to yourself. 

4 - Chasing Freedom 

The idea of freedom is too vague. In the Red-White-and-Blue sense, freedom means nobody tells me what I can and can’t do or say. In the internal-sense, freedom means you are not a slave to your mind’s biases, reactions and impulses.  

Internal freedom sounds more abstract, so to ground it, think of addiction. A person addicted to drugs may live in Seattle and appear to be allowed to do as he pleases, but he can’t. While he has external freedom to do drugs as he pleases, he’s a slave to his desire for more drugs.He is not free. 

We all have that same issue, but it isn’t usually so obvious or debilitating. Having low self-esteem means you are not free. If you don’t have control of your monkey brain, then you are a slave to it in moments where people criticize you. You may lash out and get defensive without even realizing it. 

Our brains evolved to have biases, reactions and impulses so we could survive. We can’t solve every problem like it’s the first time we’re seeing it. If we’re hiking and we suddenly see a bear not far from us, we react before we can think. We’ve already frozen before we realize it’s just a statue. 

Now, we still use these cognitive biases to solve problems, but it’s not usually life or death. It's efficiency, which could be argued to be life or death over a long time horizon. We judge books by their covers. We’re walking down the street at night, and there’s skinheads covered in tattoos approaching, so we cross the street. The man we met yesterday didn’t make eye contact, so we forget him instantly, as he is unimportant. We speak with lots of industry jargon so people think that we’re smart. Our brains are such efficient problem solving machines, we don’t even realize how many problems we solve each day. 

Our brains are hardwired for fast problem solving, so instead of wasting energy trying to avoid our monkey brain biases, let’s:

• Be aware of our biases

• Replace biases 

Be Aware of Our Biases

Your new favorite word is “why”. You need to ask yourself why you think things as they happen. 

“That guy over there’s probably an asshole” - WHY?

You will gain awareness of your biases. “Why did I pick the right line and not the left? Why did that guy rub me the wrong way?” Keep track in your head of these interactions and look for patterns. 

While doing this exercise myself, I noticed I feel rage when I deal with bureaucracy. As I tried to organize events at school, navigate job recruiting at massive firms and get my driver’s license from the Canadian government, I felt the same fury inside. The awareness allows me to create systems to weaken my bias and also avoid situations in which it arises. This leads us to replacing biases.

Replacing Biases 

Once you become aware of your biases, you can alter them to become beneficial to you. If you know you get defensive as soon as people begin to give you feedback, engineer a new rule. “When somebody gives me feedback or advice and I start to get frustrated, I say “thank you for the feedback/advice, I really appreciate it.” Having a rule is a great way to reprogram your brain. Over time it will become more natural to follow your new rule you created than to follow the old rule your environment created. 

Returning to my anger with bureaucracy, here’s how I replaced my bias. Now when I deal with bureaucracy, I focus on smiling and being as friendly as possible. I made it a game to try to make each person I speak to smile. Now, my brain is biased towards looking for opportunities to make people smile. This simple change has made it much easier for me to be in soul crushing places like the DMV. I also get a lot more helpful answers since I started this. 

Pro tip - at the DMV, always smile, thank workers for dealing with all the crazy people, and offer them a stick of gum right away. Watch their attitude change completely. 

Under the bucket of chasing a life we want, we discussed:

• Chasing freedom

• Chasing acceptance 

• Chasing pleasure 

• Accepting Life 

Now, let’s move to the smaller bucket that I personally use much more often when making decisions. 

Do You Need To Pick Only One?

I don’t think so. But some are harder to match. And I think it’s easier to pick only one. 

The less desires you have the more likely you are to achieve them. 

If you want to be free, and be accepted, that will be infinitely harder to achieve than either one of those by themselves. I won’t say it’s impossible but I think they oppose each other. Once you’re free, you don’t seek acceptance. And so long as you seek acceptance from others, you won’t be free. 

Now that a 23 year old has  babbled on and on about how to live life, I’ll say the most important thing.  These are only ideas - the only thing I know for certain is that life is a hard problem. And there’s no easy solution that works for everyone. Find the solution that makes you content and do that. 

Or don’t. Live your own life. By your own rules. 

Noah Sochaczevski