Hunter and Farmer

Nerds and verbalists are cursed — How not to be a turkey — We need to read more — Employment can’t make you rich — Not giving a f**k is correct 99.9% of the time — Being disciplined is a myth — Healthy food tastes better — Farmers hate surprises but not the effortless hunters.

Things either matter a lot or not at all

There had been tens of thousands of matters in my life. Their impact is nonlinear. 99.9% of those stuff turned out to be inconsequential. The other 0.1% shaped me. Furthermore, those 0.1% are largely out of my control: They just happened, and I responded naturally — the whole process is effortless. Such 0.1% events are the Black Swans. Many shared the above insights, and those who don’t are mainly nerds or verbalists.

Black Swan can be either positive or negative. Positive Black Swan includes winning a lottery, inheriting a fortune from a very remote aunt, and meeting your soulmate at a museum. Negative Black Swans are 2008 for house flippers and the fourth Wednesday of November for farm turkeys.

Black Swans tend to happen naturally, so we usually can’t control their birth. However, knowing their natures — highly consequential and unpredictable — resulted in counter-intuitive strategies and attitudes towards life. Below are my four strategies.

Avoiding negative Black Swans if possible. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake is a Black Swan, but if you knew it could happen, you could avoid it by living in other places. (The same is true for the Bay Area today.) Another example is investment diversification. People holding index funds like VOO are still exposed to apocalyptic collapse — for example, if Putin decided to nuke us — but they are immune to specific business failures that are much more common. Estimating probability — and God forbidden expected value — will usually backfire. Nerds never understand that risk management is about the downside, not the probability.

Hedging against negative Black Swans. When it’s impossible to escape them, consider hedging. I love buying insurance and options — the word ‘option’ makes me feel safe. Alas, it is hard. I did some research on earthquake insurance in California. The offerings are already very expensive, but those companies will likely default when a 1906-scale earthquake does happen. Selling options, borrowing money, and making promises to others are essentially the same thing. They are prone to negative Black Swan triggered blow-ups.

Keep on learning about the birds. The turkey problems as a whole are very hard for the farm turkeys. Wild turkeys might know, however. Furthermore, no farmer would see that Wednesday as a Black Swan: Everything went as planned. The difference is in knowledge. We must never forget how ignorant and clueless we are and keep on reading and learning about our world. It’s domain-specific. Farm turkey can hardly know about the doomsday of Thanksgiving, but Michael Burry looked at the number hard enough before 2008 and became a reverse-turkey — he benefited from the ill-fated public.

Make it inhabitable for positive Black Swan. As we grow old, folks around us in general adopted the first two strategies. This makes sense because people who don’t tend to die young. Yet many forgot to make room for the positive Black Swans. They smashed all their swan eggs in an attempt to kill all negative Black Swans. The most common examples are people living a corporate life and wanting to be wildly rich. It’s very hard if possible at all. Because such fortunes are all Black Swans whose birth needs randomness as a core ingredient. Corp life is the opposite by design: Nothing is left to chance — salary, promotion, project management, milestones, and so on. There’s no room for positive Black Swan in the office.

The strategies aside, I hope the nonlinear and asymmetry nature of matters in our lives is clear. Now, let’s talk about two corollaries from this nature and how they will affect our attitude towards life. For example, why we should not give a f**c most of the time.

“The subtle art of not giving a f**k”

Only Black Swans truly matter, and though varying by some degree, they are mostly out of our control. It naturally follows that most things we work hard to control, successful or not, are not Black Swan, therefore not worth it.

This is true in my life. Looking back, I still remember many things that make me lose sleep, anxious all day, and Googling to find a better solution all day. Some of them succeeded, many failed — it’s expected because I won’t worry so much if they are on a good trajectory — but none of them appeared consequential afterward. In most cases my choices and efforts won’t change the course of the development or result; regardless, a different result is unlikely to affect my life significantly.

But losing sleep, being anxious, sad, and bad-tempered are harmful. Usually it’s not the thing at hand, be it disappointment or failure, that really hurt me. But my feeling towards it, or me giving it too much f**k. My overestimation of the trouble dealt much more damage than the trouble itself.

How much I care and whether it’s Black Swan are orthogonal. That’s why it’s OK not to give a f**k most of the time, or 99.9% of the time if you want to quantify.

The effortless hunter

The other corollary is not Nihilism but how to execute the four strategies in the beginning: Be a hunter.

All four strategies are building some long-term consistent structure. The execution therefore is the development of habits. From my own experience, any habits that lasted more than one year must be at least enjoyable or, better, addictive. I’m incapable of maintaining any habits that need willpower or even being effort-reward-neutral. All of them have to be effortless.

People think I’m highly disciplined because I never eat unhealthy food, practice Yoga three times a day, meditate for 30 to 60 minutes every day, work out every day, read seriously every day, etc. Yet, few understand that a healthy diet is in fact more tasteful if you have the knowledge about food; that Yoga had a profound effect on my happiness as if my mind was controlled by my physical movement; that books gave me the comfort which warms the lonely life; that effective physical training allowed me to do things unimaginable before. Not only are the results rewarding, but every minute of the process is also enjoyable.

Those habits make negative Black Swan, like type II diabetes, hard to develop. Then good things, or the positive Black Swans, just happen effortlessly, albeit at their own paces.

Such life is effortless and enjoyable. When we’ve made bad things unlikely, all the surprises are good ones. Just like the life of good hunters. Their endeavors, mostly effortless, are spent on not being eaten by predators. They then happily develop hunting skills. When, where, and size of their next prize is unknown. But they never worry about it. They patiently wait knowing randomness is on their side: Things won’t always go as planned for their prey.

Farmers are the anti-pattern. Agriculture is unnatural: Everything is man-made. Avoiding negative Black Swan is hard for farmers. Surprises from randomness are mostly bad news for them, like bad weather or diseases in the flock. They depend on things going as planned and Black Swan doesn’t happen — the hallmark of an disadvantage side of a game.