SD#56: Motivation, technology and fresh starts
February 26, 2023
Welcome to the 56th edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here.
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Hi friends,
Last week’s newsletter had a slight undertone of change, whereas this week the newsletter has changed itself. Not massively as you can see, but in a way that should give you slight quality improvements plus a small new section of quotes of the week. That’s where I’ll pretend to look smart noting what all these people smarter than me have said. Let me know what you think of the changes!
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Productivity) Motivation starts to build again once we have taken the first steps and gained some momentum in our task In the words of Lao Tzu: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Motivation is all about getting started and consistently taking action, making sure we get back on track when we fall off the bandwagon. There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. When interest or enjoyment in activity comes from within us, we experience intrinsic motivation. A violinist, for example, may desire to improve as a musician because playing brings intense joy, rather than pursuing fame or awards. Extrinsic motivation, conversely, is driven by influences outside of us. You may want to progress in your career to earn more money, achieve recognition within the workplace, or avoid sanctions. Writing in the American Psychologist journal, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci highlighted the three innate psychological needs which must be satisfied to enhance self-motivation and mental health: competence, autonomy and relatedness. If we feel competent in our behaviour, either as a result of feedback, communication or rewards, our intrinsic motivation will be greater. However, this is only the case if we have a sense of autonomy over the action. Relatedness is often more relevant to extrinsic motivation. If a behaviour is valued by a manager, client, or friend, we will feel a sense of connectedness with them, which will lead to the internalisation of extrinsic motivation. By focusing on the right goals, using self-reflection, and implementing safety nets, you can boost your motivation and ensure a prompt comeback at times of demotivation. 👉 Ness Labs |
2. (Investing) What really matters in investing is the performance of your holdings over the next five or ten years (or more) and how the value at the end of the period compares to the amount you invested and to your needs Some people say the long run is a series of short runs, and if you get those right, you’ll enjoy success in the long run. They might think the route to success consists of trading often to capitalise on relative value assessments, predictions regarding swings in popularity, and forecasts of macro events. Most individual investors and anyone who understands the limitations regarding outperformance would probably be best off holding index funds over the long run. Most people would be more successful if they focused less on the short-run or macro trends and instead worked hard to gain superior insight concerning the outlook for fundamentals over multi-year periods in the future. 👉 Howard Marks from Oaktree Capital |
3. (Psychology) There are times in our life, within the year, when it’s easier to have a fresh start Change is hard. If you’ve ever tried to build a new habit or kill an unhealthy one, you already know that. But according to Katy Milkman, there are specific times of the year when it’s easier to change. In her book “How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be”, Milkman introduces a psychological phenomenon called the “Fresh-Start Effect.” The idea is simple… There are moments in life when we feel like we can wipe the slate clean from past failures and have a fresh start. The Fresh-Start Effect gives us a motivation boost which can make it easier to commit to our goals. A new year is a common time to adopt new habits. But fresh starts can happen at other times too such as birthdays, the beginning of a school year, a new business quarter, a new month, or even a week. Research shows that starting something new in landmark moments lets us leave our “old selves” in the past, help us see the bigger picture of our long-term life vision, and motivates us to finally make the change that aligns with that vision. 👉 Customer Camp |
4. (Society) Reasons to be tech-optimistic for 2023 To some people, it may sound ideologically blinkered to gush about technology after a year in which tech stocks took a nose-dive and one whole sector of the industry turned out to be mostly a self-devouring ouroboros of financial scams. But the profits of tech companies are not the same as the social benefit of technology — witness how little profit solar manufacturers make, even though solar is changing the world. Here are a couple of technological developments that are either changing the world or seem likely to do so soon. 1) The A.I. breakout. One of the biggest pieces of tech news last year was the release of a bunch of generative AI apps, including art applications like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and text generators like ChatGPT. But the key reason to be optimistic about AI is that it isn’t slowing down. In the past, AI development was marked by repeated “winters” in which both interest and technical progress seemed to slow down. But the field seems to have blown right past those predictions, both in the quantitative and qualitative senses. 2) The energy revolution rolls onward. The solar revolution is going from theoretical to actual, with a huge surge of global investment. Electricity is especially powerful because you can put it into a battery and move it around. In addition to providing daily energy storage and replacing internal combustion cars, batteries promise a whole host of other improvements in energy transport. In particular, combining batteries and AI seems likely to herald a robotics revolution — we may finally get that Jetsons robot future we’ve all been waiting for. Batteries are also going to be useful for high-powered, cheap-running appliances. 3) Biotech boom. Biotech is strange because the big advances are happening in a bunch of different directions — mRNA vaccines, synthetic bio, stem cells, Crispr, etc. These are all being enabled, to some extent, by cheap gene sequencing combined with cheap computing (and maybe soon with AI, as DeepMind shows). But there is just a whole lot of human brainpower going into a whole lot of different kinds of biotech, and it’s apparently paying off. 👉 Noahpinion |
5. (Psychology) Six forces that fuel friendship Though every bond evolves in its way, Julie Beck, who interviewed over 100 friendship couples, has come to believe that six forces help form friendships and maintain them through the years: accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, imagination, and grace. The simplest and most obvious force that forms and sustains friendships is time spent together. One study estimates that it takes spending 40 to 60 hours together within the first six weeks of meeting to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and about 80 to 100 hours to become more than that. So friendships unsurprisingly tend to form in places where people spend a lot of their time anyway: work, school, church, and extracurricular activities. One thing that seems to make keeping up with friends easier is ritual. The effort of coordinating hangs (or even phone calls) could be the biggest barrier to seeing friends. It’s much easier when something is baked into a schedule, and all we have to do is show up. 👉 The Atlantic |
6. (Investing) When deciding on where to focus your efforts over the next year, prioritise your income. Prioritise taking action. With the dreadful investment year of 2022 behind us, we can now shift our focus to the future and how we can bounce back financially. Unfortunately, for many people, this means falling into the trap of spending countless hours trying to find the right investments to maximise their returns. However, the truth is, such attempts are usually wasted time and energy. Too many people spend too many hours chasing alpha that would be better spent in some other productive activity. Assume someone with $10,000 invested spends 10 hours a week doing stock research looking for the best investments. Let’s also assume that their research is good and they are able to beat the market by 10% a year as a result. While this is impressive, unfortunately, their 520 hours of work (10 hours per week * 52 weeks per year) only netted them an additional $1,000 (10% alpha * $10,000). This means that our star analyst was doing stock research for under $2 an hour ($1,000/520 hours). If the analyst’s ultimate goal was to build wealth, you can see how they would’ve been far better off by picking up a part-time job instead of analyzing 10-Ks. Even if we were to increase the analyst’s portfolio size to $100,000, their 10% alpha (i.e. $10,000) is roughly equivalent to what they could have made driving for Uber in the same amount of time. 👉 Of Dollars and Data |
7. (Psychology) Be cringe in 2023. Your life will legit get better on every front If you constantly chase your edge of cringe you are probably getting closer to truth and authenticity because that is precisely what cringes people out. Conquering the fear of being cringe is fully a rite of passage to living life on your own terms. This comes back to self-image. by solving for a positive self-image (high intrinsic opinion of yourself), you can do anything without worrying about being cringe. we cringe when we think about ourselves in the context of external approval. 👉 Twitter thread |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle
🎁 Fun things to click on:
A content creator gets into taxis and tells the driver to choose a place to go while keeping the meter running. Bloomberg’s 2022 jealousy list, a collection of stories they wish they had written. What an great initiative. Digital art inspired by the Iranian protests.
Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.
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Speak soon,
Tom