As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.”

Source: Amazon Shareholder Letter, 2015

When America first sent astronauts into space, they trained them in one skill more than any other: the art of not panicking (more on the Stoic art of not panicking here).

Here on Earth, when something goes wrong we trade in our plan for an emotional freak-out.

As Nassim Taleb put it, real strength lies in the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist.

The Stoics used contempt to lay things bare and “strip away the legend that encrusts them.”

Roasted meat is a dead animal. Vintage wine is old, fermented grapes.

We can do this for anything that stands in our way, seeing things as they truly, actually are, not as we’ve made them in our minds.

When the Stoics practiced amor fati, it was not the failure or the loss or the physical pain that they loved. That would be ridiculous. No, they were embracing who they could be in response to it. They were embracing what they would become because of it. They were embracing the new parts of themselves—and of relationships and life itself—that they were given as a result of it.

You ask increasingly detailed questions and people have trouble making things up and things just fuzz into obvious BS, and fake founders basically have the same problem. They’re able to relay a conceptual theory of what they’re doing… But as they get into the details, it just fuzzes out.