Mahalo Mondays #12: An expert’s opinion, council of competence, and avoiding mistakes
Hi everyone,
Mahalo Mondays is a newsletter on the most interesting I’ve learned or found over that week. It’ll range from articles, tips, videos, hacks, and other fascinating things that would broaden your perspective.
Mahalo means many things in Hawaiian (expressing gratitude), but for me, it’s a way to show appreciation and love to those that I’ve learned from. So I want to showcase their work and share it with all of you.
What I learned this week:
When it comes to buying anything, rely on an expert for information but don’t have them buy it for you.
- Only you know what you want in the long term, not them. Example: You ask them to buy a good performing computer, only to find out that this computer isn’t compatible with your phone or monitors so you have to buy more equipment for it. Or if this computer isn’t useful for gaming or video editing.
- There tends to be miscommunication for what you want vs what they think is important. Their interpretation will be different from yours even with explicit details.
- You don’t get to test out the product and have to rely on someone’s decision. Fit is key, in literal terms for many things you’ll buy. I’ve learned that if you can’t test it then it might not be worth buying. Imagine if you couldn’t test drive a car.
Council of competence idea:
An idea that I’ve started to play with is developing a council of competence mentally. Where you create different versions of yourself and “debate” from all different viewpoints and consider consequences or alternatives before making a decision.
For example, you may have a version that only agrees with you and reasons why it’s a good choice and another contrarian version that only disagrees with you. You can also have a version that only asks questions or a version that only wants to do minimal and easiest solution.
The idea is to get you to start thinking and reasoning instead of just doing what “feels” right. Sometimes you just don’t have access to mentors so your council will have to provide guidance 1.
Feel free to have extreme versions of yourself, or gauge it as necessary. If you feel swayed by one version, be careful and reconsider. Take all viewpoints and continue to develop your council.
Quote on making better decisions:
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
Charlie Munger
Until next week,
Scott
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