Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.

The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.

What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.

Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything,

Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.

You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.

If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.

Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking

Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.

You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.

Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.

How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.

Beware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a certain action on your part is “good for you” while it is also good for him, while the harm to you doesn’t directly affect him.

Finally, when young people who “want to help mankind” come to me asking, “What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world,” and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is: 1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.

Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.

Let us return to pathemata mathemata (learning through pain) and consider its reverse: learning through thrills and pleasure. People have two brains, one when there is skin in the game, one when there is none. Skin in the game can make boring things less boring. When you have skin in the game, dull things like checking the safety of the aircraft because you may be forced to be a passenger in it cease to be boring. If you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring.

Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.

It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.

Scars signal skin in the game.

Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion than an army of lions led by a sheep.

You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.

The only definition of rationality that I’ve found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is the following: what is rational is that which allows for survival. Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.

A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.

People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.

But never engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.

what you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you’ve learned. This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.

If you want to study classical values such as courage or learn about stoicism, don’t necessarily look for classicists. One is never a career academic without a reason. Read the texts themselves: Seneca, Caesar, or Marcus Aurelius, when possible. Or read commentators on the classics who were doers themselves, such as Montaigne—people who at some point had some skin in the game, then retired to write books. Avoid the intermediary, when possible. Or fuhgetaboud the texts, just engage in acts of courage.