Tag: bencasnocha

You Learn From People Who Mostly Agree With You | Ben Casnocha

~ Mark

Some of my best, most mind-expanding conversations have occurred with good friends who agree with me on almost everything––but not quite everything. Bottom Line: Want to learn and get smarter by talking to people? Seek out those who agree with you on 99.9% of things, and then push, push, push at the niche-y, hyper-specific areas of disagreement. It’s not about groupthink; it’s not about confirmation bias. It’s about learning on the margin.

Cf. William Deresiewicz.

Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person.

You Learn From People Who Mostly Agree With You | Ben Casnocha

~ Mark

Preface otherwise banal life wisdom with “My father once taught me…” (or similar) and it then becomes rich with generational credibility.

Ben Casnocha.
~ Mark

The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.

Hoffman & Casnocha. Warren Buffett agrees:

Hang around people who are better than you all the time. You do pick up the behavior of people who are around you. It will make you a better person. Marry upward. That is the person who is going to have the biggest effect on you. A relationship like that over the decades will do nothing but good.

If I can stretch this a bit, they don’t even have to be alive! See Austin Kleon:

The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.

Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Las Vegas: Authentically Unauthentic

~ Mark

When you visit New York City, you worry about whether you are being a tourist, about whether you are doing as the locals do. Same with visiting Paris, Rome, London. But in Las Vegas, everybody is a tourist. Anybody who’s not a tourist works in the tourism/hospitality industry. There is no real thing. It’s fake all the way to the bottom. The very idea of a sprawling, water guzzling city that sits in the middle of barren desert is too absurd to take seriously.

See also Richard Thompson & Communicatrix on cultural neutrality.
Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Las Vegas: Authentically Unauthentic

Ben Casnocha: The Blog: How to Get Hired

~ Mark

Ben Casnocha infers two myths from Derek Sivers’ How to Get Hired:

The first is that we all have one or two things we are destined to do. In fact, I think you can become good (and thus) really interested in a range of things. The second is that the way to find what you “really want to do” is through inspection and reflection. In fact, introspection seems never to bear the fruit you’re promised; personal discoveries and self-knowledge seem sooner found via experiments and activity.

Ben Casnocha: The Blog: How to Get Hired