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How to avoid The Mistake of Using Hindsight as foresight? Hey buddy, its Jerome- have you ever have some of these challenges: You attend expensive programs, seminars, webinars which promise meaningful outcome-which turn out not to deliver- the expected results especially when you implemented the nuts and bolts, you work hard – you took continuously take risk over and over nothing work and at worst you go bankrupt or you hear and see people who? Me too “Me too- I also went through that-when I started my new entrepreneurial and investment journey. I read books ……well narrated ………………. I went broke not because I did not know what I was doing but because did not know what I did not know.  let me give you the framework of how to think about avoiding at looking in the review mirror – with the firm conviction we are looking ahead, hence using hindsight as  foresight that will allow save you by avoid tones of psychological, mental, relational and money pitfalls, worries and anxiety and most importantly generate the good ones Counterfactual any big take away you get from the program” see taleb critic here” Look – in general we should be cautious about narrative, stories When we look at events, we tend to look at cause that are visible to us and we forget or scorn the cemetery of silent evidence “The things that are not obvious and sailing to us”, because history tend to kill a lot of information that were not deem to be relevant to us at the time. Let me give an example:       2-Simulate not to see what will happen- but what may happen I went from broke to overnight in less than one year 70.0000 downloads on libsyn.This is by the way not  even          3-Avoid the question what is going to change in a decade and focus on what is not going in a decade. In our 3 online businesses we have, we know that customers – want low price, vast selection and fast delivery. It is impossible to imagine 10 years from now any customer come to me and say Jerome. I would love optionalityprofits if the price were a little bite higher. Why? well because you can build a business strategy on things that are stable in time My whole point here is those of us who have their nose glue to the map (business or investment model) will end up mistaking the map for the territory (the real world) ,therefore Knowing what you don’t know allows you to be the captain of your own ship.

    How Do You Avoid using the wrong Maps? Those days you get disappointed, you get bog down, you get sad – you get angry, people make fun of you – you feel your sense of serenity and enthusiasm going down. How do you turn it around?   If you went from expensive courses to courses, attended webinars- seminars and most important put all the prescribe recommendations into practice by creating courses nobody buy, put videos on YouTube nobody watch them. Create blog nobody read and hosting podcasts no one is interested. Basically     nothing works. We must learn how to stop using the wrong Maps. How that is what this episode is all about.   The first thing you have to be aware of since you are pursuing big Mission and purpose is: the notion of iatrogenic” is harm done by the healer to the patience – in another word iatrogenic is medicine of a decease, injury or a bad outcome- caused by the words or action of the physician.”. Yes, we are living in a fast pace world today. Since the world has become more complex due to globalization and internet – hence very very unpredictable, this has as direct consequence the opacity of the world allows pseudo experts to hide risk and hurt others. Just as you cannot see the barrel when someone is playing Russian Roulette, more generally, some things remain opaque to us, leading to illusions of understanding   Second Big Idea Most systems show you (visible) benefits, which benefit the pseudo expert, and conflates benefits with reduced RISK or even absence of risk Whereas a real world robust system lets you notice the flaws and hides its benefits. All other systems hide the flaws and show the benefits Remember How do you live long? By avoiding death, bankruptcy, or being in an emergency surgery room 3-Wrong to say "the scientific method is based on evidence"; it is based on knowing how to deal with absence of evidence. How? Well I am glad you ask: Via disconfirmation which by the way is more robust than confirmation. Pay heed to the turkey story- thousand cannot prove you right. But one day cannot wrong and consequences are beyond dead We get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification. It is misleading to build general rules from observed facts Successful traders/entrepreneurs have their mind on losses; the poor ones focus on profits hold fast to these practical thoughts, and grip them close I write this not for the many, but for you; each of us is enough of an audience for the other.

  Why the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack?   Consider the following experiment a company X own by John release a new product/service to the public and since the product is organic-the expected success of the service turn out to be an unexpected shamble. t     Well what went wrong? Well John contact a consultant and precisely a data analyst or you want a top-notch marketer to figure out the cause of your decadence a la French accent. Well he/she makes you an offer you cannot refuse and you end up hiring him. After 48 hours of intensive work,He comes out with final conclusion that 1-You did not have a large list to be able to capitalize on 2-Your sale copy wasn’t compelling and therefore not well crafted 3-your product/service is more a commodity as consequence not different from others outhere We tend to conflate the source of risk which by the way is very hard to compute and your exposure. Example: Key in point. Case of the last truck that pass on the bridge and the bridge collapses. Well our intuition is to blame the last vehicle on the bridge rather than the bridge itself. People focus on specific cause rather the structural problem that the business is facing- meaning the fragility and general structure of system Most entrepreneurs and some VC, are more likely to mistake the extremistan with the mediocristan than the other way around. Just like mistaken a bear for a stone and you end in the stomach of the bear. Random with the even marketers. The ultimate kern of my thought is indeed we see because things happen and things do not happen because we see.so the event cause the knowledge and not the knowledge cause the event.   Here the three big take away from this blog.   1-Therefore, you cannot use any big data analytic company out there to predict socio economic event. Why? Well because the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack. . Two practical examples: Remember the financial crash of 2008 what about the turkey story? Does that ring the bell  2-But you can use big data them to predict the extreme(s) which by the way are the most consequential. And or you can big data for targeted things.   Second big Idea: Since we live in a fast pace world, hence prone to interdependence due to Internet and globalisation. As direct consequence we are more likely to make errors.By the ay . We have never been able to predict our own errors, and things will not change any time soon Intelligence is no more about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns) which obviously is relevant in a world that t is stable and that doesn’t change. Intelligence consist in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns) 

Well consider the following practical experiment you may have went through several times. For the last 5 years Donald who is an entrepreneur or an aspiring business owner/investor you name it, has being attending high promising business programs and mega summits worth at least 5000 dollars each. Now guess what? In practical terms his Business and life has not evolved for the better. Donald start to wonder what is wrong with himself? Be careful Donald is a practical person meaning a doer and make sure to follow the guidelines prescribed by the predictors.      Well while surfing the net Donald accidentally discovers the blog of a website call optionalityprofits.com.    Surprisingly he immerses himself in the in this blog and realize. The problem wasn’t him- but the way he framed his question. But before we that, let dig in these amazing eye-opener and profound findings:   Indeed in 2005 Prf John Ioannidis one of the world renown professional researcher in statistics proved in front of ASA – that 80% of epidemiological studies made in computer fail to replicate in real life. By the way even in psychology only 39% replicate. Since then the FDA, the Food Drug of Administration in the USA has banned any research made on the computer. Second most of people, regardless of their skills and profession are victim of the confirmation bias (meaning taking seriously what you see and not taking seriously what you don’t see)- which by the is okay if you a world that is stable and that doesn’t change. But extremistan Third, again regardless of your profession. We fall victim of Law of small number. For make money three, four- five days in the row; you will feel a profitable person. Fourth We human are very good at narrating things back. Which give us the illusion of understanding the world. When in reality we are unable to prospectively predict. By the way “the mind cannot predict its own advance” to quote F A Hayek. So all what I am saying is that two things are going on here: Namely first and foremost the accuracy of models or programs that predict or foresee your ultimate damaging effect. Keep in mind you live long by not dying -Second the doubt of the accuracy of these models, because of lack of reliable evidence of harm to guarantee your action (wasting your hard-earning money, your time of practice)  So where lies the problem of Donald? Well since we are not good at knowing, we are not good predicting, we are not good at planning. Most importantly these two alternatives are not fully comprehensive and profound.  So we can sidestep the skepticism of those who question the existence Success programs by framing risk in the most straightforward possible terms. That is we should ask; “What the correct modus operandi, meaning method or technic be, if we have no reliable programs or models? “keep in the meantime that they are two types of risks involve here- namely the risk of losing your hard earning money and time and the risk of missing an opportunity.   -Most pseudo don’t even know their error rate -Most consultants don’t know what they don’t know and as direct consequence they cannot harvest the unknown, the unpredictable, mistake,error,change.as jeff bezos put it “If someone tries to take all failure out of a process, innovation will cease..... Failure and invention are inseparable twins.”   Since the world has become more and more complex, we in optionalityprofits are here to help you build………………………… To prove it remember what the Founder maverick of EBay Pierre omidyar well thoughtfully put it” Build a platform- prepare for the unexpected ….you will know that you are successful when the platform you have built serves you in unexpected way” paraphrase him. Guess what take google,facebook,Instagram,youtube- you name it.

Till 2016 compete looks immune to the upheaval meaning the sudden violent change. The same team on the head of the company has run comfortably the company over a decade. Many pundits argued that compete sturdy police system which exercise tight control on its mailing list of customers, would survive the chaos and turmoil of the world due to the complexity of the era we living in undisturbed.     By the way the rise of complexity is due to globalization and internet characterize by a high increase of unpredictability and a drastic decrease of predictability    Compared with semrush.com, another web giant specialized a powerful and versatile competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research for marketers. Compete looked positively stable, but this appearance were deceiving and were an illusion; Today compete is in cemetery – yes you hear it right in a graveyard- As of December 31, 2016, Compete.com and the Compete PRO platform have been shut down because there no way even to fight its own survival.   The most insightful question that comes to mind is: How has seemingly stable compete.com turned out to be a fragile system, whereas always-in-turmoil semrush.com has so far proved robust?          The answer is compete was exhibiting only pseudo-stability, its calm façade concealing deep structural vulnerabilities. Whereas Semrush’s  chaos, paradoxically, signaled strength. More than 5 years years of continuos and never ending trial and error  what served to decentralize the system and bring about a more balanced  power-sharing structure. Along with semrush small size as an administrative unit, these factors added to its durability. In compete , the ruling team  sought to control  variability and versatility of the operating staffs , replacing the lively chaos of tinkerers with the top-down, Soviet-style structure instead of bottom up. This rigidity made compete much more vulnerable to disruption than SEMrush.    But compete’s biggest vulnerability was that it had no recent record of recovering from turmoil. Businesses that have survived past bouts of chaos tend to be vaccinated against future ones. Hence, the best indicator of your Business’s future stability is not past stability but moderate volatility in the relatively recent past.   Four big ideas to be retained from this episode On its face, centralization(Top down) seems to make the ruling class more stable. But that stability is an illusion.hence decentralization is as matter of fact for the last 500 years Switzerland is the most stable country in Europe due to its decentralization in 4 semi-autonomous cantons. In another word people are better neighbor than roommates . The divergent tales of compete and Semrush demonstrate that the best early warning signs of instability are found not in historical data but in underlying structural properties of each entity. Past experience can be extremely effective when it comes to detecting risks of cancer, crime, and earthquakes. But it is a bad bellwether of complex political and economic events, particularly so-called tail risks—events, such as coups and financial crises, that are highly unlikely but enormously consequential. For those, the evidence of risk comes too late to do anything about it, and a more sophisticated approach is required   Thus, instead of trying in vain to predict such “rare event” events, it’s much more fruitful to focus on how systems can handle disorder—in other words, to study how fragile they are. Although one cannot predict what events will befall a business, one can predict how events will affect a business. Some What’s more, things that are fragile respond to shock in a nonlinear fashion.   I write this not for the many, but for you; each of us is enough of an audience for the other." 12. Lay these words to heart

The "Evidence Based" Approach is often the Province of Statistically Pseudo-Experts incapable of grasping Absence of Evidence Absence of Evidence Consider the  following experiment- John is founder of a hilgly successful web analytic website- and have as baseline 15.000.000 active members as entrpreneurs- aspiring entrepreurs,investors,decision makers  – who are using his services. Year one john’s membership web analytic is doing very well- year two the financial heath of the company has shifted from good to better-year three,the profitaility of the company is oustanding.   John travel the world and gives seminar about how magnificent and grandiose his company is doing  until y year 5or 6 or  ,you name it: and then all of of sudden on the 7th year John’s webanalytic company  faces a surprise downturn.Only after the facts (when wipeout and out of business),john seem to understand that he was conflating  Emergency room for cosmetic surgery- when in reality he was sitting on a ticking time bomb.    Now john here is victim of three things  First and foremost as CEO  John  is using the statistical he observes – he makes his inferences and use hinsight as forsesight as direct consequence he doesn’t know he facing something unpredictable than he thinks Second: john is fooled by the law of small number- which implies,we human have a strong tendancy to draw out conlusion very quick on a small amount of data (practical example a 3 year data set canont predict a 10 years flood) Third john is victim of the confimation bias- which nothing more than taking seriously what you see and not taking seriously what you don’t see.After all the dark side of the Moon is difficult to be seen. This by the way happens to a lot of onlines businesses out which are born and die everyday   What are the three big take away of this episode.Well I am glad and grateful you ask First thing first,- with the world that has become inceasingly more complexToday therefore,we are more  more prone to errors because of complexity due to globalisation and internet.So it is not what you know that makes knowledgeable and rigorous; it is in the type of mistakes that you don't make.   Second :John just like many entrepreneurs and decision makers ,investors seem to forget this logical precedence: in order to grow you have to first and foremost to be able to survive( meaning survival, is ability to handle disorder) and talking about growth without concern of fragility is like a builder like studying construction without thinking of collapses Third:No amount of observations of steady earnings can allow the inference that the company is financilally healthy and profitable but the observation of a single upside down spike is sufficient to refute that conclusion-why?simply because volatiliy was compressed and the contribution of risk accumulated coming from jump was inceasing.Which by the way is something you can not observe in this case from the making.   Finally the risk consciuos of most experts has not improve at all.This explain why a lot of companies are born and die everyday.  

Evolution is scalable: the DNA that wins (whether by luck or survival advantage) will reproduce itself, like a bestselling book or a successful record, and become pervasive, widespread and general. Other DNA will vanish. Let me give you 3 practical examples that shows in a nutshell what I mean: First example, take google control more than 80% of traffic online Microsoft control more than 80% of PC, LAPTOPS and other device produce out there ,Facebook, twitter are the behemoth of social media with close to 90% of the lion share This by the way Is the reason why I always say – history is written by the winners, the visible, the salient Second example: Take a marketer or a consultant who launches an online course, with 100 000 people on his/her list as base line. At the end of the course the expert will take performance of the top 10 or 20   are now very successful which here is called the survivorship bias- the rest will end up in the graveyard.    Third Example: In the arts—say the cinema—things are far more vicious. What we call "talent" generally comes from success, rather than its opposite. A great deal of empiricism has been done on the subject, most notably by Art De Vany, an insightful and original thinker who single-mindedly studied wild uncertainty in the movies – wild uncertainty is also call the complex domain or the unpredictable domain. He showed that, sadly, much of what we ascribe to skills is an after-the-fact attribution. The movie makes the actor, he claims—and a large dose of nonlinear luck makes the movie. The success of movies depends severely on contagions. Such contagions do not just apply to the movies: they seem to affect a wide range of cultural products- such as books, online courses. It is hard for us to accept that people do not fall in love with works of art only for their own sake, but also in order to feel that they belong to a community. By imitating, we get closer to others—that is, Other imitators. It fights solitude in the meantime as we hate solitude and crave society, as nature draws men to each other, so in this matter also there is an attraction which makes us desirous of friendship. When you start buying a best seller in London because you heard it hits the New York bestseller list, you are no longer independent- you are subjected to interdependence.     First: The kernel point of my thoughts is – you cannot understand a group of persons, or a nation-party by from the observation of the behaviour of a single individual. Why because the market is not driven by the average- it is driven by people plus interaction- therefore you cannot really see how things aggregate by studying individual behaviour. This is the reason why I recommend those of you who haven’t listen or watch “When lightening hit, we do not change the laws of nature” and by the way Second, we are more likely to mistake skills with convex luck than convex luck with skills explain just as certain objects which are perfectly straight, when sunk in water appear to the watcher as bent or broken off.[15] It matters not only what you see, but with what eyes you see it; our minds are too dull of vision to perceive the truth.  By the way …………. not which is the title of the next episode   For more clarity : with skills in the Mediocrestan, you're going to be very successful, have a happy life, be upper middle class, probably, you know, you're going to definitely do very well with skills in Mediocrestan, because the link between action and reward is going to be very visible, and you know what to do. In Extremistan, skills are often necessary but highly insufficient, you see? So if you're a writer, you need to, you know, be able to compose sentences. You need - you can have all the ingredients, yet fail because "Harry Potter" is going to take the shelf space and you're going to be, you know, out of print and people are not even going to notice your existence, you see or someone like Tony Robbins,Rich Shefren Brendon Burchard? So because Extremistan, one person wins everything. There's a much higher dose of luck in Extremistan. Third: Clearly people may discuss a book because 1) they heard about it, 2) their friends like it, 3) they are genuinely impressed with it. The first two are extrinsic reasons and seem to partake of general social contagion effects. The latter is intrinsic

When lightening hit, we do not change the laws of nature Welcome to extremistan or the Non linear/or the complex Domain Since the world has become increasingly more unpredictable, due to globalization and internet-we are witnessing the following problems- which pervade across board.  The difference between anecdote and evidence The difference between knowledge and BS The difference between an observation that is fake check and something you can generalise   How do you know something is safe, a turkey is fed for 1000 days by a butcher and everyday confirms to the turkey statistic department, the turkey accounting department, the turkey membership site, marketing department, Federal reserve Department– that the butcher loves the turkey with increasing statistical evidence until November, two days before thanks giving, It is never a good idea to be a turkey. The turkey will get a big surprise (the unexpected, the random) by becoming dead meat. This is by the way is in nutshell – the illustration of the consequence of inferring from the observable- or generalizing from the known to the unknown.    My point here is that, we can probably solve the problem, by figuring out in which domain these errors are consequential and in which domain these errors are not consequential. So we are going to make a separation between two domains with this classical experiment: The Mediocristan and extremistan The Mediocristan is caracterise by the collection of regular,yes it is the average that dominates.In technical terms is,if you take randomnly select 1000 people and you place on the scale in term of weigh.We can figure out quickly the average weigh of the total-right.Now add to that sample -that the heaviest person you can think of in the world.Key question how much of the total the exception meaning represent to the total? Answer: well 0.3% in another words the means which here is the average weigh is closed to the to the exception.so from here we derive the properties.This is by the way call the law of large number which define as when your sample becomes large,no single observatio can impact the total-further we draw out the properties.   Without this law statistics and social science won’t exist.If you are earn money per,or dentist,or massage therapist etc... you are in mediocristan?Why because you can not store your work and scale it.You have to there to perform and it is the average of your work that dominates But?     --Now Extremistan Take the randomnly same selected  sample of 1000 people and instead of weigh,let us take wealth- and add to the sample the richest person alife today.Bill Gates- How much of the total would he represents? Answer: 99.9999999% of the total,therefore the total is completely irrelevant and what count here is the exception- namely the outlier,the rare that dominates the most. You can from here see why with globalisation and internet the world is schifting rapidliy to exteremistan where the winner take all effect. Some example,take google,youtube control more than 80% of traffic online – facebook twiter are the behemoth in term of traffic in social media. If you are author or expert who creates an online courses and it becomes a best seller like harry potter,just one day represent your entire earning and change your financial for better or worst.by the way you don’t have to be there to perform – and even dead your stuffs continue to sell. Now here is where lies the major problem: The procrustean bed of pseudo experts,entrepreneurs,aspiring entrepreurs and investors- in this era is- they are most likely of  conflating absence of evidence for evidence of absence.Just a turkey who is fed for 1000 days by the butcher and two days before thanks giving is surprised to become a dead meat.    --- In Business life,take most recent world membership successful and renown sites compete.com -which by the way was an Online Competitive Intelligence specialised in a web traffic analysis service – guess what compete.com went bust by december 2016- main reason,there became turkey by falling victim observing continuos of profits and benefits from when variation were compressed and before they realised that – they were sitting on tons of dynamite. This is by the way the consequence of infering from the observable.    What about most online busineeses outhere who are victim of self deception and hide it to themselves?   How many membership site do you have outhere?         By the way trades and industries are at their best when they are not yet generally understood to be profitable. When seen by all so, they fall off; because many from resorting to them, the competition prevents them from being any longer lucrative. In all things, it profits to be up bedtimes We should look to substance, not to appearance and surface of things. Yet it is incredible how much favour smooth words will bring you among men. The reason I believe to be that is everyone seems to deserve more than is really his due, and in consequence is vexed – if he sees you do not value him as he things he merits.    Here are the three big away of my thoughts 1 – We are wired to favour the visble,the tangible,the well narrated,storiesand anecdotes and we scorn the abstract,the opaque,the unknown and this the reason why optionalityprofits have been created to  2 – Most pseudo experts outhere are most likely to mistake absence of evidence for evidence of absence in another mistaking the extremistan for mediocristan. 3- What matter in is not how long successeful or unsuccessful you have been – but the magnitude or the cumulative of the rare. 4- Under complexity,the legal and the ethic don’t macth anymore and a lot of aspiring achievers are victmed for pseudo experts and con artsist are they to take advantage of you.Beware.This is the reason optionatlty profit is in cration to          

Life isn't about getting predictions "right"; it is about knowing how to navigate the environment and controlling it.How?    False causality       Consider the following surprising headline:” The employee motivation leads to higher corporate profits.” What about maybe people are only motivated because the company is doing well or what about highly motivated workers working in business doing poorly?      Another one. What about female advertising cosmetic and thus many female consumers believe firmly that these products make you beautiful. Well what about those who do not use cosmetic and crown beauty queens? All what I am saying is – it is not these products that make you beautiful. Quite, simple models are born attractive and only for this reason – they are candidate fo         r cosmetic advertising. Hence beauty is a factor for selection and not result. This is a second example of false causality.   By the way without this illusion, half of advertising campaigns would not work     Among many traits that multimillionaires have in common such great appetite to risk, they work hard. Well take look at the cemetery of bankruptcy – you will realise that the bankrupt people share certain extend the same attributes-namely they have great appetite to risk and they work hard. This in nutshell another example of false causality.   Finally, when I ask people about the secret of their happiness, I often hear this surprising answer. “You have to see the glass half full rather half empty”. See the glass half full I ask myself Ask my viewers to watch the cemetery episode, the confirmation bias    The kernel point of my thoughts is we have to be careful on things we can make inference and things on which we can’t. We tend to make the mistake of overestimating our ability to find cause and effect -which has the direct consequence that cognitively we like to have causes which give us the illusion of understanding the world. By way the today, we simultaneously inhabit two – systems- namely the predictable which is linear and the unpredictable which is nonlinear if you want complex. The problem lies in the fact of conflate one environment for another. If you haven’t listen the episode about, If someone tries to trick you with "Evidence-based analysis", show him this story of the turkey Are You Victim of the Bed of Procrustes as Your Bedrock, Via Negativa, f someone tries to trick you with "Evidence-based analysis", show him this story of the turkey   Here are the 3 big ideas from to retain from this episode.  --First and foremost, always do counterfactual which allows you not to fall victim of the confirmation bias and even debunk it --Second always simulate, not to see what will happen- but what may happen --Finally switch from predictive methods to non-predictive methods, stop trying to understand the world and focus on robustness by avoiding fragility    

Why we are lot good at doing than knowing? If you are professor at Harvard expert specialise in a given field. Your errors of predictions on the subject of what is going to happen -will be way higher than the one a semi ignorant. In another if you can only read and write ,your errors are inferior to someone who is specialise in the subject. Let me give another example:If you give 50 piece of information of a patient to a psychologist and later 10 piece of iformation on the same patient.His diagnosis with 10 piece of infos will be better than with 50 piece. Which proves we don’t know to work with infos. Now why Why? It is a technical problems: Let me explain why.if I show a blurr picture of a dog and increase the resolution of the lens by 10,you won’t be able to see the dog- because you will produce 9 or 8 theories. Now if I increase the resolution of the lens only by 3,you will see the dog immediately-yes right away. Conclusion: The more data you have- the more theory you will create. The more theories you will create and the less you will be able to see reality. Hence, once you have a theory in you mind, you will subconsciously and automatically seek what confirm your point of view meaning theory. This is the reason why it is better to have minimum of theory. Because the theory via the confirmation bias diminish your understanding of the world. Why because sterile information is never perceived as sterile by the brain What I am saying is the way we human think is based on confirmation. Meaning we favour the visible, the tangible, the well narrated and we scorn the abstract. And our natural tendency to believe that, we haven’t seen or don’t know doesn’t exist. “Finance, book publishing, expert, and venture capital “You must remain extremely vigilant. How many time did you spend your hard earning in many programs and took them seriously and they never yield the expected promises? I can answer: countless    -Hence don’t study to add more knowledge- but to make your knowledge better. -This the reason BRS is an anticipatory program rather than backward fitting one which give us the illusion of certainty (you see out there)– when beforehand they weren’t able to predict the occurrence. We are not here to retrofit the story.

Let me give a metaphor; If I leave a small piece of ice cube on the floor and ask you to predict how the ice cube will melt. It is very simple answer to be predicted. Now if I recommend you, condition of not having seen initially the ice cube and you ask where is the water on the floor coming from? Please stop to listen and provide the relevant answer .You see it is extremely very difficult to give the accurate answer? Why because you will come up with answers of different shapes. It is exactly like going from theory to practice is extremely difficult than from practice to theory. Therefore given something you observe, the generator of the of the observable will be a theory- you have an infinity of theory.Particulary when you are dealing non linearity with Hence theory is born from practice. Most experts retrofit the story.  Phenomelogy- optionality which are anticipatory than backward fitting. Which why the first Program Business Robust strategic will be release not at the beginning of February but by 31/1/2017 is knowledge without a cause, help you avoid  tons losses of your hard earning you invested out in many programs getting rich quick schemes – and you never get close there and never get close to the ultimate results . Yes we don’t have theories- we store facts. Hence we are a lot better at doing than knowing. Why because of evolution. Just as the magnificent ,the maverick entrepreneurs, venture capitalist out there focus on losses and rookies focus on profits- which even explain why most expert will always what to do to drive profits and completely forgetting that you live long by not dying.Buffett .   2 Bad things only come hard upon those who have lived without giving it a thought and whose attention has been exclusively directed to happiness and deriving profits. Disease, captivity, disaster, bankruptcies, are none of them unexpected. Therefore ore If you takes this into your inmost heart and looks upon all the misfortunes of other men, of which there is always a great plenty, in this spirit, remembering that there is nothing to prevent their coming upon him also, he will arm himself against them long before they attack him.   3-The problem can be best explained with this martial principle: The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable. All what I am saying is, since we are living in a world that has become more complex due to globalisation and internet. Which has as direct consequence: A huge increase of unpredictability and a high decrease of predictability .Life is no more about getting predictions "right"; it is about knowing how to navigate the environment and controlling it.and BRS         IS ANTICIPATORY RATHER THAN BACKWARDS FITTING

When we look at even, we tend to look at causes that are visible to us, we don’t look at the cemetery, meaning the things that are not obvious and salient to us. Yes history tend to kill a lot of information that was not deemed relevant at the time. Just as if you want know the causes to become multimillionaire –you will hear beautifully well-crafted and compelling words of self-appointed consultants and experts, data scientists purport that risk taking and working hard are necessary. After all, almost all rich people took risk and work hard. But it doesn’t mean that taking risk and working hard make you successful unless if you take the cemetery of bankrupt people and force them to write their biography, you will discover that that they share the same traits. Therefore Taking risk and working hard are necessary to become rich and also a source to become bankrupt. And you only see the winners, not the losers- hence Hence History is written by the winners not by the losers The answer here is simple and easy. A system with small mistakes doesn’t have a high ration of bankruptcies. Why? Most people outthere are unconditionally afraid of failure without  conditioning what type of system they are in or what type of failure it is “Remember 2 types of mistake” Fourth most experts and consultants out there selling programs of how to get rich quick scheme by conflating benefit with absence of risk. Another of saying it is mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Just like discussing growth without concern for fragility: like studying construction without thinking of collapses. Think like engineer not like an expert who gives you prediction (hence knowledge which turn out to be fragile). Warren Buffett put it this way “you cannot succeed if you cannot survive”, hence first and foremost you must build a robust system. Yes Business Robust Strategic will not be release by the beginning of February but by the end of January 2017.  Life isn't about getting predictions "right"; it is about knowing how to navigate the environment and controlling it. This by the way is title of the next podcast

Let us talk about data analytic namely let us talk today about unpredictability by following the logical steps First do you believe that you can use data to predict systematically what is going on? Please write your answer down. Second question. Are you aware of something we call world of finance or Wall Street? Third question. How many correlation metrics or data do we have in 2007 before the financial crises? How large it was or how big it was? Answer: Between half a billion and a Billion correlation we had in finance .Guess what/Nobody knew what the hell was going out there and most importantly the pundits and experts. So as direct conclusion data is not what we needed or wanted .Just as a good friend of mine who is actually a mentor went to Washington to testify against spending more money on data – since we get confuse by data. The congressman told him – Sir John when you cross the street you don’t look When I cross the street I remove data- because you have billions of information, all what I am interested in is crossing the street – I am not interested of the eye colour of drivers or what is their intention – how are they dress, I am only interested in large items that are moving. Hence I apply via negative”PS “,yes the more data you put in, the less you are going to see. Financial crisis after the event, we are very good at looking through the review mirror with the firm conviction we are looking straight ahead – in another words we have the inability to prospectively predict and the ability to retrospectively predict. This a problem of human nature, finds usually in social science and not in hard science.  Another example; Take the Skinner's box experiment.BF Skinner took a pigeon and put in a box and fed the pigeon randomnly.Over time the bird thought, by standing on one leg it was fed last time – it does it again, it will be fed again .All what I am saying is that we human have a tendency to immediately establish the cause too quickly even when we do not have reason to establish cause. Yes we favour the visible, the tangible, the well narrated and we scorn the abstract.    So we are shifting from predictive method to the assessment to the effect of something you are exposure – in another words are you fragile or are robust to some class of exposure.   -The one big idea to take away is that fragility is vastly more important in place of predictive analytic in the sense where fragility is much more measurable and much more rigorous approach by trying to confuse people by making prediction that cause people to take more risk

Let me clarify the main idea behind what scientists call hedonic treadmill.         Making $1 million in one year, but nothing in the preceding nine, does not bring the same pleasure as having the total evenly distributed over the same period, that is, $100,000 every year for ten years in a row. The same applies to the inverse order—making a bundle the first year, then nothing for the remaining period.   Your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive affect," than on their intensity when they hit. Mother Nature destined us to derive enjoyment from a steady flow of Pleasant small, but frequent, rewards. As I said, the rewards do not have to be large, just frequent—a little bit here, a little bit there.           Sadly, it may be even worse for you to make $10 million, then lose back nine, than to making nothing at all! True, you may end up with a million (as compared to nothing), but it may be better had you got zero.(This assumes, of course, that you care about financial rewards.)    In the meantime, Consider that our major satisfaction for thousands of years came in the form of food and water (and something else more private), and that while we need these steadily, we quickly reach saturation.          Let me give you another insightful example. How well can we predict our emotions? Would winning the lotto make us the happiest people alive for many years to come? Dan Gilbert world renown   Psychologist from Harvard university who studied lottery winners, surprisingly discovered that the happiness effect melt down over time few months.so as direct conclusion after having win the jackpot of  the lotto, we fall back to our  previous contentment or discontentment.          So many are far no better: Well people who progress in their careers are in term of happiness, are right back where they started three months ago. From the same line people who buy the latest Bugatti Veyron or the most luxurious mansion around the block. Science call this the Hedonic treadmill- indeed we work hard, advance and are able to afford  more, better and nicer things and this doesn’t make us any happier.      Where really lies the problem about a long lasting happiness is that we do not live in an environment where Results are delivered in a steady manner—rare events, outliers, the unexpected dominate much of human history. It is unfortunate that the right strategy for our current environment may not offer internal rewards and positive feedback. The same property in reverse applies to our unhappiness. It is better to lump all your pain into a brief period rather than have it spread out over a longer one. Unless it will look like Chinese torture     Well wouldn’t it be nice if we knew how happy a new career or relationship or would make us? Well use these scientific heuristic to make better and brighter decisions; Avoid at all costs anything that generate chronic stress such as being around dull and stressful people,commuting,noise I declare, is happy whom nothing makes less strong than he is; he keeps to the heights, leaning upon none but himself; for one who sustains himself by any prop may fall.(in the meantime I am not saying you should not trust people trust people – namely trust them – but check ,yes you have the last decision- since it is the unexpected that puts the heaviest load upon us. Hence randomness doesn’t look random but how its affect some people is not. Develop a mind that is steadfast and resolutely clings to a good judgment, how? I am glad you ask by gaining a complete view of truth, by maintaining, in all that you do, order, measure, fitness, and a will that is inoffensive and kindly. Follow your passions even if you have to  invest a portion of your income Invest in friendship and or most people most professional status achieve long lasting happiness and in the meantime mingle by reserving three to days in a row in a month during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: "Is this the condition that I feared?" just as In days of peace the soldier performs manoeuvres, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and wearies himself by gratuitous toil, in order that he may be equal to unavoidable toil.  

For Millennia, Europeans thought that all swan were white- because everywhere they looked, swans were always white. Till In year 1697 the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh saw a black swan in Australia and sure enough one single observation can destroy millennia of confirmation – likewise Take the story of the Turkey “For those of you who haven listen or watch, I hugely recommend you as soon as possible to give it a try. If you are employee and after 40 years, you are lay off the street. You have a negative black swan- you have the Tsunami of 2003 in east Asia. Another negative Black swan. The black swan can also be positive: For example: Take the invention of the computer. The internet which by the way was previously a military application is to use as a mean for communicate and business purposes. Consider the Viagra came from the hypertension drug.Aspirine made for headache, later it turns out to be fibber reducer and guess what today it is use as blood thinner. The black Swan is a way of saying,  Just because you never see something `happens, doesn’t mean it won’t; meaning sometimes – even highly improbable happens, in a more simplistic way the black swan event is something that happens as result of our incomplete knowledge of understanding the world The black swan is about robustness of certain class of events we cannot compute or predict Take the case membership sites. Steadiness which makes you very fragile-since your risk are hidden.So you can lose not only because of the competitor, but because a business may mutate into something else- moreover the The fundamentally error which is supposedly risk free approach- the back Swan event.   So what can be done? Put yourself in situations where you can catch a ride of positive black swans by not being  a wall but a windmill that turn volatility,variation,error,the unknown ,randomness ,time,stressor,option into profits.    For example: Become an artist, a writer, book publisher, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, biotechnology with a scalable product. These professions by definition belong to extremistan –where it is the exception that dominate. If you are selling or trading your time for money (for example: as employee, dentist, masseur therapist etc...).You are waiting in vain for such a break.Here these professions belong to mediocristan where it is the collection of the regular that counts. This is the reason why we here in optionality profits help entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs’ investors, and decision-makers by protecting you from sinking  and by providing a systematic approach under incomplete information and incomplete understanding by building systems where mistakes can occur – without threaten the system and most importantly recycle and use as fuel for improvement. After all to make systems robust, all risks must be visible and out in the open—fluctuat nec mergitur (it fluctuates but does not sink) goes the latin saying. Just as a robust economic system is one that encourages early failures (the concepts of “fail small” and “fail fast”),) than having a risk free approach- meaning base on prediction. “Lastly Man’s error are his portals of discovery” James Joyce The central insight here is that with world that has become more complex, due globalisation and the internet- black swan events(rare events) 1- are more frequent today ,2- When its happens it is vastly more consequential than we can imagine

  How to Spot an Impostor or a Charlatan?                       In 1948 the psychologist Bertram Forer made an unusual and surprising experiment. First and foremost, he used astrology columns from a wide range of magazines. He then gave his pupils meaning his students to read and rate themselves after their own assessment.     Well here is the experiment. It may surprise you .Dear listener or watcher .I know you personally and here is the way I would characterise you. You greatly like to be appreciated and like by people. You have a propensity to self-critical with yourself. You have an enormous reservoir of unused capacity- which you have not mine yet to your advantage. You have some personality weaknesses, which you can generally overcompensate for them. From outside, you are self-controlled and self-disciplined. From the inside you are tend to worry and feel insecure. Sometimes you doubt whether you made the right the decision. You like change and become unsatisfied when hinder by obstacles. You like the fact that, you are an independent thinker and do not swallow whatever is purported to you without evidence.            You find unwise to reveal yourself to completely expose yourself to people. There are moments where you are sociable meaning extroverted and moment where you are introvert. Your thoughts are always about, the hope of a better life- the future glory of your name or the fly of the illness of life. Some of your aspirations are sometimes unrealistic.    Key question: Do you recognise yourself within these lines. In the scale of 1 to 10, how would rate yourself? (Here 1 you score poorly and 10; you score perfection.    When the students rated themselves by 9.3 of 10.So the total accuracy was 86%.The experiment was repeated over decades and decades and the results turnout to be closely the same.    I bet you rated yourself by 9 or 10 to. Most people tend to identify themselves in such universal descriptions. Science calls this the Forer effects .By the way the Forer explain why pseudo-science such as astrology, astrotherapy, handwriting, analysis, tarot card.      What is really behind the Forer effect is that, the majority of the statements are too general and therefore apply to anyone of us. “Anyone of us is proud for being independent thinker “Who isn’t? Who likes to see him or herself as a dunce follower?  The second thing in the Forer effect is the feature positive effect plays a large rule: Yes- indeed reread or relisten and you will spot that- the text contains no negative statement. It stated only what we are and did not include – what we are not. Just as reading a heathy recipe of salad which omits to include the rate of cholesterol in the oil dressing right. Third the king of all errors- which is the confirmation bias- meaning taking seriously who we are (correspond to our self-image) and unconsciously filter out who we are not.       By the way this is what is used by most consultants, experts, decision makers across board in different industry. Yes we have the strong tendency to retain elements that seem to confirm our thesis and we forget what I call silent evidence.EG; Multimillionaire. Second example:A look at the profit and lost clearly shows that savings can be made.We advice company to focus on emerging economies to secure future market share.Sound about right No?   How would you rate the prowess of such a guru?        The kernel point of my thoughts and big take away  are the following two big ideas 1-An impostor or a charlatan Conflates or mistake benefit for absence of risk just as discussing growth without concern for fragility: like studying construction without thinking of collapses. Think like engineer not economist Buffett” “In order to succeed, you must first survive.” 2- an impostor is always giving recipe for what to do and never what not to do or avoid. Forgetting that we live long by not dying. 3- The tragedy of our time is the monoculture of ideas: all people are forced to believe the *same* errors. By the way it take a lot of self-confidence and intellect to recognise-that what make sense; really doesn’t make sense.eg Most books about how to and scientific which become bestsellers aren’t due to their validity or relevancy but to social contagion via marketing and sensationalisation. www.optionalityprofits.com  

If someone tries to trick you with "Evidence-based analysis", show him this story of the turkey  This Story of The Turkey     Consider the following story, borrows from Bertrand Russell and adapted by me    A turkey is fed for 1000 days by a butcher and everyday confirms to the turkey and turkey’s business’s paid membership site or offline- paid subscription’s site and offline, the turkey’s risk management department in a company, and the turkey’s analytic department in a business, the turkey’s statistic department of a company - that the butcher loves the turkey with increase statiscal evidence. And every day bring more confidence to the statement. But until 1001 days there something in the US call thanks giving, it is never a good idea to be a turkey that day .there is going to be a big surprise event or black swan of disastrous consequence for the turkey in another word the Turkey becomes death meat. What about the Butcher?Well I will give the answer at the end of this episode    This story proves in nutshell 3 things. We human are usually very good at managing the ordinary( in another words we human are very good at predicting the regular, the ordinary- or we human are very good at handling the small and excellent of being fool by the outlier, the rare, the exception) eg: HSBC in England last year 2015,lay off or redundant Randomness or uncertainty doesn’t look random, therefore don’t be fool by the historical trend. Employee, or even membership. The story illustrate the major problem of modernity couple with the rise of complexity: Eg: employee, indeed the turkey is mistaking absence of evidence (no harm) for evidence of absence. Here the turkey thought it is facing something predictable, when in reality it is facing something unpredictable than it thinks. “A mistake that prevail across board. Namely in consultancy circles, businesses circles, intellectuals circles, policy makers circles, individual lives circles and social science.     Well what is the big take away here? Remember I asked the question about the butcher. The answer is :It is not a black swan to the butcher and the whole idea or big take away of the turkey story is not to be a Turkey. How? By avoiding be evidence base and seeking Negative information which reduces the space of what we do by knowledge of what does not work. We need to pay for negative results. Why quiet simply because in a world that is stable and doesn’t change, intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (meaning detecting pattern)- whereas in a complex world- meaning uncertainty, the unknown, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false pattern) . Therefore you can easily discount anecdotes and stories and go to the core subject by making sound judgment. Welcome to the world of uncertainty- we in optionality profits have  after all with the rise of complexity – we are more prone to errors ,and since we are in an environment where we can make mistake;we can also benefit from them.Jeff Bezos put it this way” "If someone tries to take all failure out of a process, innovation will cease..... Failure and invention are inseparable twins.” After all, man’s errors are his portals of discovery

      Why We Humans Feel the good less Intensely Than The Bad?     Loss Aversion I will build a wall on the border between Mexico and the US ,I will take all the jobs overseas and bring them back home.Does that ring a bell the promotor of these promises? Donald Trump .These disadvantages which are vastly consequential and powerful anchors to move people to action. (Obviously here in optionality profits.com we advocate that any offer muss be based on noble, ethical and full of integrity from our part- since we have skin in the game.)    Why are we wired to be moved by pain and act immediately to avoid it? Well base on our evolutionary past, one slight error would lead to exit the gene pool – meaning you were dead right away. So negligence could have lead on the hunt or a broken leg was sufficient to be excluded of the group, or left alone. The ones who were prudent and combine with good luck made it by surviving. We are the descendants of the ones who survive and transmitted their genes to us.      As vivid example, today No wonder why we feel more pain of losing Euro 10 000 than the joy of gaining Euros 10 000 here And that asymmetry is just a fact of life. And it affects professionals much less than individuals, because professionals play a repeated game. So, you know, you win a few, you lose a few. Once you have that attitude, you’re okay, or you’re better off. But individual feel losses very keenly, and they should be aware of that. And what happens is if you’re not aware of that, when things go bad, you’ll want to change what you’re doing, and that’s the disaster in running a business or investing, I think. That’s here, it’s quite obvious that loss illusion can kill you.   how much are you willing to put at risk? How much are you willing to lose, in fact? Because this is money you should be prepared to lose. And how much do you really want to protect? Now, this is something that people find very natural, that distinction. And then they find it very natural to be quite conservative with the amount they want to protect, and to be fairly bold with the amount they are willing to lose. But psychologically, people have mental accounts, and they want to feel safe on one big sum, and they’re willing to gamble on another.             From this reason, if you want convince your audience or a person, avoid to focus on the advantages of your proposal, instead highlight how it would help mitigate or eradicate the disadvantages. Here is a practical example. Let’s take the following example borrow from the world renowned novelist Rolf Dobeli; a campaign promoting Breast Self-Examination (BSE). Two different leaflets were handed out to women.     Pamphlet A urged women” Research shows that women who do BSE have an early increase chance of finding a tumour in the early, more treatable state of the disease.”    Pamphlet B said: “Research shows women who do not do BSE have a decrease chance of finding a tumour in the early, more treatable state of the decease.”    The study revealed that pamphlet B written in (loss frame) generated significant awareness and BSE behaviour than pamphlets A (written in gain-frame)                   The direct conclusion is that, we human fear of losing something than to gain something of equal value. If for example, imagine your business is weigh loss. The most effective way to compelling customers to purchase your program or your products how much money they are losing without your program- as opposed to how much money they would save with it, even though the amount is exactly the same.   

“The Bozo Explosion In Your Organisation” Steve Jobs -The more you compare yourself to others, whether favorably or unfavorably, the worse off you will be. As one of my Podcast episode hit a large audience worldwide, a good friend of mine, hugely successful podcaster and venture capitalist asked me favour. One of his episode’s title, slightly similar to my actual most listened one, was on the way to become a blockbuster.so he was persuaded that, me  being interviewed by him was a necessary and prerequisite condition to boost his audience largely.        We all know- a fruitful and insightful interview combine with a forward in a book or even a testimonial, ultimately lead to a substantial result. Meaning people will either attend your podcast presentation-buy your book or enrol in one of your program.by the way I have given many interviews and most of them weren’t competitive to my episode’s title”……..”.    Well I ponder about the request of my dear friend. Why would I help an acquainting who actually is a competitor? Or he may indirectly switch my listeners to his favour in the long run?      All of sudden I realised with surprise: this is social comparison at work, which is the tendency to withhold help in term of assistance might outdo you, even if you look like a fool in the long run.     Counterintuitive and insightful interviews, forward of books-testimonial or I quote you, you quote me sort of practical significant of harmless and most importantly beneficial of example of social comparison.      However this phenomenon has reach the peak toxics level in online enterprises, organisations, consultancy, and academics in sense where many of the proponents above are willing to publish in major Media outlets platform, and prestigious journals.Overtime,by pure spurious randomness (whether you are skilful or not as long as you can write a sentence in a book or just be able to express yourself),because the phenomenon of I quote you, you quote me you end up in the top slop of the 3 or 5 accredited and acclaimed expert.as direct consequence you decide who get publish(by the way this is even when the content is irrelevant to the audience).Now think of a youngster who comes out with an incredible finding. Key question, will he be easily published? I doubt in the sense where he will outdo the top of the slot. So he will be kept in the dark.           Keep in mind that social comparison is prevalent across board. Take the start – up industry, Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist at apple and today a world renowned Venture capitalist put it this way:” A players hire people even better than themselves. It is clear that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them and C players hire hires D players”. If you start employing B players, expect to be on the rush and swift high way to cemetery. This is what Steve Jobs called “The Bozo explosion” of your company.          The message is to do what, between 1666 and 1667- Isaac Barrow, professor of Isaac Newton did: By giving up his position as professor to join the young prodigy who presented to him, his discoveries during his spare time. Guess what have seen any CEO relinquishing his position to someone better than him or her?   The two big idea to take away here are 1-to foster people who are more talented than you 2- Which is the most important one is to hire people who have the following attributes a) Determination, b) sophistication, c) authenticity, d) convexity meaning (all you need to know is to have the intelligence of realising is what you got is slightly better than what he had before in another word the person hired muss not necessary have high IQ , d) And above all  risk loving and from there flows Trial and error  and finally e)Resourcefulness

Impostors’ prophets   Prediction illusion   After Donald trump got the nomination of Republican Party, a democrat to win the next presidency of the US by 9/11/2016 Ebola propagation to be worldwide by end 2016 After Brexit, EU likely to collapse No more food in 25 years from now, only pills to be swallowed Daily consultants, experts and media assail us with prediction but how credible and reliable are they? Well Philipp fetlock in his blockbuster, bestseller book: Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Over a period of  decade meaning 10 years, investigated close to 28,361prediction from 284 self-appointed experts or if you want self-proclaimed professionals.    Surprise – surprise, the result of their accuracy turn out to, in year in the row to pure random coincidence. What is more striking is that – the semi illiterates were way better than the experts.     A pure most vivid example is the most recent one in the presidential election in the US. Guess what the republican nominee Donald Jr Trump won- with a large gap.     Although all the polls purported by different Media outlets out there, turnout to prove the opposite.      Consider this there is is more 1 million economists worldwide who work as full time employees- trying to predict financial crisis and interest rates”Except Dr Nassim taleb who predicted with greater accuracy- the financial crash of 2008”. They use sophisticated computers. Can you see the worldwide consequence of crisis of 2008.If these so proclaimed experts were able to forecast, they would multimillionaire self-employed. Is that the case?No     Well, why this problem of wrong prediction persist? First and foremost there is lack of skin in the game to quote Nassim Taleb.Meaning the predictor or the self-proclaimed expert doesn’t eat, his own cocking and therefore is not harm by it.To put is simply, since they make a lot of predictions if they randomly hit the jackpot, the get big financial rewards and get publish in major acclaimed Journal. If they miss forecast, there is no harm to their reputation, no deterrence, no financial penalties, no exist of the gene pool, no filter. So the game keep on going that way.     The recent presidential elections in the US proved three things. Experts ,consultants and media are clueless about what is going on out there The media are extremely misleading The establishment is disconnected from the public – and most importantly the members of establishment believe their job is to think for the rest of us. Polls reflects what people say they would do, not actually what they do. Final crisis     Ideally, experts or consultant should have a sort of prediction fund- say £5000.If the forecast is correct, the expert collect his £5000 back plus his lucrative interest. If wrong, I suggest the money goes to charity. So we live simultaneously in two different world: The mediocristan and the extremistan to quote probably the best risk expert alive today Dr Nassim Taleb    The mediocristan is characterise by it steadiness, regularity, stability, predictability. For if you gather randomly 1000 people a place them on the scale, and add to it the heaviest or biggest person on the planet, How much of the total will he represents? Answer only 0.3 .So in mediocristan the average of the total and the maximum are close each other. Example: If you are paid per hour, meaning you are employee, your pay is the collection of the regular hours you make within days, weeks and months. If you are dentist or a backer, you are pay by the number of patients to drill their teeth or the number of breads and cakes etc.. Customers buy. In conclusion you cannot scale your work like an artist or writer or venture capitalist, book publishers’ researcher        The extremist an is domain where it the exception, the rare, the outlier that counts, characterise by unpredictability, uncertainty, unpredictability, error, mistake, option,volatility,time,the unknown, incomplete information, incomplete understanding. So let me give you a practical example:      Take again randomly the same 1000 people, we got recently- and instead of weight, let us take wealth and ad to them; the riches person alive today(bill gates).Now key question; How of the total of net worth of the total would he represents? Answer 99.999% of the total.    Or if you line up 1000 authors, close to 2% will bring half of the profits. So in extremist an it is the exception that counts. Note that you can move from via social contagion and preferential attachment from mediocristan to extremist an.    The biggest problem of experts out there lies two things:        First In seeing patterns where there is none, than to miss on the pattern, or mistake the random with the non-random than the non- random with the random- just as mistaking a bear for a stone rather than a stone for a bear and as consequence you end up in it stomach. Reminder.        Second mistake, with the world that has become more complex, due to globalisation and internet; we are witnessing a huge rise of unpredictability couple with a high decrease of predictability and most consultants,advisors,policy makers, decision makers,experts,data analysts- analyst fall short of The Procrustean bed. Which in life consists precisely in simplifying the nonlinear and making it linear or clarifying by making easier the unpredictable and making it predictable-by the way a simplification that distorts. Reminder “See the bed of Pr”    So here are three big ideas to be taken away.  So when you encounter predictions, or future reward promises- forecast. Take a deep breath and ask yourself the following three question: What incentive does the expert have? If he is on salary or minimum wage, is he afraid of losing his position or have financial difficulties? If he is self-appointed guru, sure enough he make living by selling books and lectures, therefore his prediction relies on media’s attention and most importantly his prediction tend to sensational rather that than the statistical relevant.(The large deviation, the rare, the exception just as If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Indeed the normal, the regular, steadiness is often irrelevant.   Third what is the depth of his pay off over the past 5 to 10 years? Why?Because,the expert can have a perfect track record in prediction for the last 10 years and if the payoff is small, that means it is ireelevant.Hence don’t fall short of the law of small numbers (reminder).  Finally remember what the Nobel Prize winner in atom physicist Niels Bohr said about the future “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future”  from the same line F A Hayek put it this way; The mind cannot foresee its own advance  

The Dubious Efficacy of Doctor, Consultants and Psychotherapist And Experts. Regression to Mean.    His Right shoulder was sometimes better, sometimes going from bad to worse. There were days where he felt like the sky was the limit, indeed he could move mountains and earth and those when he could slightly move an inch.  When that was the case, fortunately it happened only rarely- his wife will drive him to the chiropractor. The next day he would feel dazzle like a little toddler full of vitality, running around and as consequence, he would recommend the Therapist to everyone.       Another man, younger with respectable piano handicap of 7 notes, rush in a similar fashion about his piano instructor. Whenever he played poorly, he booked two hours with Pro and as result in the next concert he performs much better.   A third man a stock trader in Wall Street invented a sort of “ritual” which he performed in the restroom at any time his stock plunge badly. As crazy and absurd as it sounds, he always felt compelled; and guess what? Things improve afterward.   What link all these men is the failure in their reasoning which renders their argument invalid; This is call the regression to mean delusion.         Imagine your city is experiencing a record period of hot weather.in all eventuality or probability, the temperature will go down in the next coming days, back toward the monthly average temperature. The same goes with extreme cold weather, hurricane, Typhon. Yes the weather fluctuate around the mean (which here means the average temperature).The same is true with chronic pain, piano handicaps, stock market, luck in love, subjective happiness and test scores. In short what I am saying is the crippling shoulder pain would most likely have improved without a chiropractor. The handicap of not playing well 7 notes in piano would return without additional lessons. The performance of the stock trader would have gone to the market average- and this without the some mystical ritual perform in the restroom. Just as a due diligent and hardworking man - with a sound mind knows that he who reposes should act and he who acts should take repose. Seneca put it very eloquently this way:” Discuss the problem with Nature; she will tell you that she has created both day and night.” After all, eternity is made of opposites.   Note that keep in the back of your mind that peak or extreme performance are distributed among the less. For example the most successful in stock picks from the past five years are hardly going to the most successful in the coming five years.Arme with this, you can understand and even appreciate the fact that why some athletes would rather not make the front page of newspapers and magazines, why? Well because they subconsciously know that next time in the competition, they are more likely not going to perform at their peak or  the top result.- which by the way has nothing to do with his/her due diligent hard training to the edge, or the media attention but is to do with natural variations in performance.     Or take the marketing division manager who realises, there is a slum in the marketing department and wants to improve the morale of the 5% least motivated top notch marketers. He send them on a course or a program. Result? The next time he looks at motivation level of the same people will not make the bottom few- there will others. Key question: was the course or Program worth it? Hard to say since the group’s motivation levels, would probably have return to their personal norms and guess what? Even without the training.  Another example: In California, the lowest performing colleges were entered into an innovative support programme. The following year the attended colleges moved up to the rankings. An improvement that authorities attributed to the programme rather than to natural regression to the mean.    Now ignoring regression to mean can have disastrous consequences, such as teachers, entrepreneurs, business owners and investors, even parents concluding that the sticks is better than the carrot. Consider the following example to illustrate my point by making more clear, simple and deep. Following a test, the best students are glorified, complimented and praised. And the lowest are castigated, reprimanded severely and criticized. In the next exam, others students will probably – pure coincidentally – achieve the highest and lowest scores.     The teachers will concludes that reproach helps and praise hinders. Which is pure ridiculous and guess what this failure in reasoning which renders an argument invalid- keeps on giving across boards and fields.     Conclusion Whenever you hear stories such as “I was sick, went to the doctor, and got better a few days after “or the company had a bad year, so we got a consultant in and now the results are back to normal, look out our old friend regression- to mean error. 2- The most important take away and keep close to your heart is the following rule of thumb: Whatsoever have been in the past or is now, will repeat itself in the future. But the names and surfaces of things will be so altered, that he who has not discerning eyes will not recognise them, or know how to guide himself accordingly or to form a sound judgement on what he sees

Consider the following thought experiment. You sit on the board of your Online Marketing Company with 3000 000 buyers on your mailing list. Half of the customers are in US, Canada, UK and the other half disseminate between Ireland, Siwsszerland, Luxembourg, and Lichtenstein, Monaco.at the behest of the Founder, a Data analyst consultant conducted a study on Sales and is now presenting his findings. Projected on the wall in front are the names of 5 countries where the rate of conversion is lowest compare to sales. The conclusion draw out of the presentation- “The countries with lowest conversion rate are in Europe. After a moment of deep breath and disbelief  the CEO/FOUNDER Is first to announce “Ladies and gentlemen the next steps are clear. From now on we will hire more top notch marketers –get them especially focus on the European market. Do we all agree guys?”        Hmmm not completely. You ask the Data analyst consultant to check 5 countries where the sales conversion is the highest. After some swift sorting, the list appears. Surprise, surprise: The countries with the highest conversion rate are in Europe.” The location is no the deciding factor. You can observe that the brain is releasing some dopamine which make him have a smiley face as his gaze around the table at his colleagues.” What counts is the size or the number of buyers in any given country. “Indeed in Europe the size or the number of buyers tend to be small, meaning a single action has a larger influence on the conversion rate. Therefore the European countries with small size of demography rates vary greatly- much more than the larger market of the US, CANADA and UK.Ladies and gentlemen I have just introduce you to the law of Small numbers. “It has just caught you out”      The law of small numbers is not something we understand intuitively. People like managers, board members, consultants- even scientists fall for it.    Now instead of conversion rate, consider the average weight of customers in a country. Instead of 300 000 buyers present in the given eight countries, we will take just two: the mega country – the US with a large number of 100 000 customers and a min country – namely Ireland with a small number of 2 clients.   The average weight of the customers in the mega country US correspond to the average weight of the population, say 185 pounds.Regarless of who purchase or not, it will not change much. But in a small country like Ireland with 2 clients, if one of them dropout, it will affect tremendously the average weight.       So let us return back to the conversion rate problem. We now understand why the smaller the number of customers, the more its conversion rate will rate –from extremely high to extremely low.no matter how the data analyst consultant arranges his spreadsheet, if you list all the conversion rates in order of size, small countries with small number of clients will at the bottom, the large countries with large number in the middle - and the top slots? Small countries with small number of purchasers again. So the CEO’s conclusion was trifle and irrelevant, but at least he doesn’t need to hire more top notch marketers t specially focus on small countries with small numbers of customers.      Another more fruitful example is  if a mutual fund manager has had three above-average years in a row, many people will conclude that the fund manager is better than average, even though this conclusion does not follow from such a small amount of data. Hence tend to generalize from small amounts of data.   So watch out when you hear remarkable about small entities businesses, households, cities, data centers.What is being peddled as an astounding finding is in fact a humdrum of consequence distribution.Daniel kahneman Nobel Prize winner reveal in his latest book that even experienced scientists fall short to the law of small numbers. How true and reassuring 

  Never Judge a Result By Its Outcome. The Notion of Alternative Histories          Consider the following story borrowed and adapted from a good friend of mind, probably the best risk expert alive today:Nassim Taleb; Imagine an eccentric (and bored) tycoon offering you $ 50 million to play Russian roulette, i.e., to put a revolver containing one bullet in the six available chambers to your head and pull the trigger. Each realization would count as one history, for a total of six possible histories of equal eventualities. Five out of these six histories would lead to enrichment; one would lead to a statistic, that is, an obituary with an embarrassing (but certainly original) cause of death. The problem is that only one of the histories is observed in reality; indeed the winner of $ 50 million would elicit the admiration and praise of some fatuous journalist – likewise if you take randomly 1 million of traders in the room and then universally it can be authors, entrepreneurs, thinkers, investors. Now assume fair odds: 50% chance. Year1: 1 Million; Year 2: 500 000 successful ones; Year 3: 250 000; (Please keep in mind that it is a pure thought experiment in a random world or assume we live in where reality happens that way), - you name it and you put them in the room) Year 4:125 000…….till Year 11: where you have 1000 successful ones, who will be crowned with the name of geniuses, just by pure luck- because they were there and we are going to find the reasons. Indeed he works late in the office, he sleep 8 hours a day, he practices Meditation and Yoga, he eats healthy (Sushi), he studied in Harvard University – yes look at him it cannot be random, how can he be 11 years in the row without having a deep insight – you find reasons to explain the success. This is what the super insightful evolutionary psychologist professor Robert Trivers calls the Post Hoc Fallacy or after the facts,we always fit back explanation to random data .We humans are very good at narrating back or if you want we have inability to prospectively predict and in the meantime we are very good at retrospectively predict with the firm conviction of looking ahead; just as going through life by looking through the review mirror. All what I am saying is that if you have a large population of people making statement about the future, you will be more likely to find prophets. Now I am assuming in the random world – now if it is in a world that not random (stable and that doesn’t change) it doesn’t change too much .Why? Because we humans favour the visible, the tangible, the well narrated and we scorn the abstract. So we make decisions based on the results and we forget what could have happen (alternative history).   For more illustration- consider this if you read Forbes Magazine or the Economist Magazine about the 100 top highly successful CEOs/entrepreneurs of the year – the first thing you realise is : they focus on over causation- I mean the perceive exaggeration of the links between perceived causes and effects, by the way this mistake is reinforce  by retrospective determinism (Hindsight bias) and the cemetery of silence evidence (Subjects of the two next episodes).When in reality most of their results are delivered in a random manner(I am no saying that skills are not necessary, skills are necessary but a lot of people have those skills and few succeed wildly- note the subtle difference here), the public observes the external signs of wealth without even having a glimpse at the source (we call such source the generator.) or without having in the presence mind what about the bankrupts CEOs/entrepreneurs who have the same skills and end up in cemetery( Obviously by taking risk taking propensity, hardworking as general traits share among successful entrepreneurs) .     In a nutshell To understand successes, the study of traits in failure need to be present. For instance some traits that seem to explain millionaires, like appetite for risk, only appear because one does not study bankruptcies. If one includes bankrupt people in the sample, then risk-taking would not appear to be a valid factor explaining success. Any form of analysis of art that does not take into account the silent initial population becomes close pure verbiage. The line of argument in the remaining segment of the paper is to further weaken the causative explanations by showing the prevalence of extrinsic attributes, as opposed to intrinsic ones, those not embedded in the piece to be analysed. The role of these extrinsic attributes (say social contagion, cumulative advantage) implies that the piece was successful for reasons that lie outside its own qualities, and that, accordingly, explanations by the critics are proportionally weaker than face value.          Let us go back to the possibility that the Russian roulette winner ld be used as a role model by his family, friends, and neighbours. While the remaining five histories are not observable, the wise and thoughtful person could asily make a guess as to their attributes. It requires some thoughtfulness and personal courage. In addition, in time, if the roulette-betting fool keeps playing the game, the bad histories will tend to catch up with him. Thus, if a twenty-five-year-old played Russian roulette, say, once a year, there would be a very slim possibility of his surviving until his fiftieth birthday— but, if there are enough players, say thousands of twenty-five-year-old players, we can expect to see a handful of (extremely rich) survivors (and a very large cemetery). The reader or the listener can see my unusual notion of alternative accounting: $ 50 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $ 50 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry. They are the same, can buy the same goods, except that one’s dependence on randomness is greater than the other. Reality is different from roulette. First in the simplistic example above, while the result is unknown you know the odds, most of life is dealing with uncertainty. Bullets are infrequent, “like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands, of chambers instead of six.” After a while you forget about the bullet. You can’t see the chamber and we generally think of risk in terms of what is visible.             No amount of evidence can allow the inference that something is true whereas one counter example can refute a conclusion. This idea is also related to the “denigration of history,” where we think things that happen to others would not happen to us. The kernel point of my thought is that we tend to mistake absence of evidence for evidence of absence- which is okay if we are in domain that stable and that doesn’t change (for example: If you are employee,baker,dentist,Therapist etc.…) namely mediocristan. But the world today has become more complex and therefore unstable and prone to large consequence Example: Author, book publishing, Venture Capital, Biotechnology etc.…   In conclusion here are three big ideas which allow you to avoid the pitfall trap of being victim of judging a Result by its Outcome. -First and foremost, since we live in world that more and more complex today, play the counterfactuals to dig out the alternative history   -Second always simulate not to see what will happen, but what may happen- after all It is often said that "is wise he who can see things coming." Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.   - Third focus on the task, not just the fruit of the task. Guess what you will feel refresh        

“Never Ask a Barber If You Need head Cut” Warren Buffett Incentive super- response tendency     .In the 19th To reduce and eradicate the infestation of rat in Hanoi Vietnam, the French colonial rulers passed a law: For every dead rat handed in to the authorities, the catcher would receive a reward. Obviously a lot of rats were destroyed but in the meantime many were bred specifically for this purpose.    Yes in the 21th century, modern incentives are not better: Company boards promises to CEOs bonuses for achieved targets. Guess what happens? Company managers invest more energy in trying to lower the targets than growing the company. Put in another way the company is sitting on ticking time bomb (unless the CEO is founder, hence has something to lose) example   These are example of incentive super- response tendency. This was coin for the first time by Charlie Munger the legendary business partner of Warren Buffett.    Incentive super- response tendency. is the fact people response to the incentives by doing what is in their best interests. What is more striking here is the behaviour of people change immediately when any promise of incentives comes into play and secondly people respond to the incentives themselves and not to the real intention behind them.        Real good incentive systems comprise both the intent and the reward. Just as cab driver both something to lose and to gain if he/she is good and a bad driver.         Bad incentive systems overlook and sometimes even make worst the ultimate aim. For example censoring book, makes its contents more famous and most importantly rewarding           Here are 4 big ideas to be taken away. If you want to influence the behaviour of people or organisations? You could always preach about values and visions, your ability to tell stories or you could appeal reason. But incentive work better.by its needs not to be necessary monetary (financially), anything is useable such as good grades to Nobel prizes or special treatment afterlife So for example if you are dealing with consultants, architects, accountants – meaning experts can be paid in their respective field per hour. I would recommend you to avoid paying the hourly rate instead negotiate a fixed price in advance. Just as you bargain with a cab driver about your next destination, he will be more likely to accomplish very well than when he switches his on sometimes they even screw you by driving long distance just to make you pay more. Beware of the semi erudite who play the erudite such as some investment advisors, consutants, experts,entrepreneurs,investment bankers who usually are not interested in your well-being but to their  own interest at heart. Warren Buffet sum up this way” “Never ask a Barber if you need hair cut   The message is clear if a person or an entity or organisation is making you a proposition, ask yourself what is the incentive behind it.

Halo Effect Cisco, the Silicon Valley firm, was the beloved of the world new economy. Business journalists sang and poured out its success just as a bestseller book that web in storm and is everywhere to seen. They discern as attributes responsible for this mega success: its wonderful customer acquisition, an exclusive and empowering corporate culture, its skilful talent acquisition and above all a charismatic CEO at the helm of the company. March 2000, Cisco is the most valuable company in the world.         When Cisco’s stock plunged 80% in 2001, journalists adjust their praise. All of sudden and most surprising the competitive advantages became competitive disadvantages in short the main factors of Cisco’s success became its shortcoming. Poor customer service, clumsy acquisition, disastrous corporate culture, awful CEO.Please keep in the back of your mind that none of the previous positive traits have change, except: The environment which was heavily marked by the waking and impacting of the dot.com crash. Hence, it wasn’t Cisco product but the environment within which the firm was operating. This in a nutshell an example of the halo effect in action   The halo effect happens when a single aspect dazzles us and affects how we see the full picture. In another words the halo effect is another form of the confirmation bias ().In this example, journalists were making their inference or conclusion base on the stock price without having make a deeper investigation of the firm.    Another example of the halo effect – we often ascribe success, the goodness and superiority of a product, a person where little is due, why? Because we are not aware – that we usually go with the first order thinking, which here is social contagion and the reputation. We subconsciously attach to the person or the given product and therefore miss the second order thinking.   The halo effect was discovered by the psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike .His conclusion was that a single factor (for e.g., social status, beauty, age, intelligence) produces a positive or negative impression that outshine everything else and the overall effect in a disproportionate way. We automatically assume that attractive people have it easier in their professional life or good looking people are bright, honest and more reliable.     Advertising industry, marketing use tremendously the halo effect. Just have look at how many time you see celebrities, public figures  even Billionaire, Multimillionaire of TV ads,Magazines,Bill boards and so on. An example what makes a Hollywood Celebrity actor George Clooney a coffee machine expert is still an open debate. The trick here is that the halo effect work subconsciously. All what you need to make it work is a strong compelling attractive face ,status, dream life style and deal is sealed.      How do protect yourself from the halo effect? First big idea: When it comes to an important decision, avoid first order thinking – meaning don’t draw out your conclusion based on your first impression, unless you will end up generalizing the wrong particular or if you are a nerd you will particularise the wrong general.     Second big idea counterfactual all the features presented on the product and then you will see if above one negative features ,you avoid going for the product because the consequence or bottom line of these feature compound themesleves.Keep in mind that to quote NassimTaleb: “The dark side of the moon is difficult to be seen”

  Why experience can damage our judgement Mark Twain Our brain is perfect computer connector. Consider the following practical example: At a dinner table, you are served a delicious meal, you never ate before. Shortly afterward – something surprising happen to you – as consequence you feel sick. According to you, you draw out the conclusion that this type of meal is unhealthy and even poisonous. This by the way is way how we come to good and false knowledge. Let us take a deeper experiment- which was ran for the first time by the famous Russian Scientist Ivan Pavlov, about our brain ability to quickly make connections.    Previously, Pavlov goal was measure salivation in dogs. But by serendipity or you like good accident he ended up using the bell to call the dog to eat. Meanwhile, he soon realised that- the ringing bell was enough to get the dog to salivate.     The animals’ brains linked two functionally unrelated things – namely the ringing of the bell and the production of saliva.     Palov’s experiment works equally well with us humans. Just take a look around and watch what makes the advertisement and marketing industry. Adverting creates a link between the product and the emotions. For this reason you will never see high design fashion cloth with an ugly face and fat body top model. Top model have slim body, look beautiful and very stylish. But the reality is that in the real world fat people wear the same cloth with the illusion of looking good.      These false connections are the work of association bias – which also influence the quality of our decision.  Let us take a last one .In the days before email and telemarketing, travelling salesman went from door to door peddling their wares. One day, a particular, George Forster, stood at a front door. The house turnout to be vacant, and unknown to him. A tiny leak had been filling it with gas for weeks .The bell was also damage, so he pressed it, it created a spark and the house exploded. Poor George end up in hospital, but fortunately he was soon back on his feet.    Unfortunately, his fear of ringing doorbells had become so hard that he couldn’t go back to his regular job.He knew how unlikely a repeat of the incident was,but for he tried ,he just could not manage to reverse the false emotional connection.     The kernel point of my thoughts here and as big take away is sum up by mark Twain “ We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it – and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sit down on a hot stove-lid.She will never sit down on a hot stove – lid again – and this is well;but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore”. What Mark Twain is saying is that regular mind generalises the particular and the nerd particularises the general, some do both – the wise with his fine mind does neither ,meanwhile goes one step at a time.

Picture in your mind a group of youngster exists a nightclub and immediately start to quarrelled, argue, shouting to each other to the point where its escalates to wildly gestures. The situation is near to escalate into fist fight. Police officers patrolling in the area – monitor from distance and in the meantime can only intervene when there is first causality. By the way among police officers- we have young officers and senior officers. Most of the time when officers without background experience intervene, the situation turnout to be worst after than it was before. Young police officers often fall trap to the action bias and dive in immediately. A study showed that later intervention and a great thanks to senior police officers usually lead to few causalities.      Let me give a second example to deeper our understanding. Let say a patient is rushed in the hospital and the patient’s illness cannot be diagnosed with accuracy, doctors are confronted with a dilemma between intervening (ie: prescribing some medication) or waiting and observing. Guess what doctors are prone to taking action. Hence action bias. Such decisions have nothing to do with profit but rather human strong tendency to take action than sit and patiently wait to face uncertainty and even gain from it.    This action bias in action. What is action bias, it is our strong tendency or propensity to act or decide without clarity analysis or sufficient significant information. And this usually happens when the situation is fuzzy, stressful, muddy or contradictory.    Action Bias prevails across board even in the world of finance. Here is what the legendary business partner of warren Buffet, Charlie Munger sums up their approach of investing: “We got …… discipline in avoiding just doing   any dam thing just because you can’t stand inactivity,”    What is the main cause of the action bias/ well as I mention in the previous episode entitle: Why you should not ask anybody wearing a tie Advice or Forecast And Prediction.  For those of you who haven’t listen, please I encourage you and recommend to listen as ground and robust foundation layer before you continue listening this one.          Now back to answer the question what accounts for this tendency of action bias? Well in our old hunter and gatherer environment – action trumped reflection. Acting swiftly just as a thunder lightening was a perquisite condition for our survival. Any second of mental deliberation could be fatal.So when our ancestors saw in shadow or the silhouette of a wild beast that looked like a sabre – tooth tiger. What they did immediately to run away in a blink of an eye to save their life. Guess what – we are the descendant of these quick responders therefore we have inherit action bias from them.    However, the world we live in today doesn’t resemble the past anymore .The world today is completely different and therefore reflection is beyond necessary required, even though our instinct may suggest otherwise. In conclusion If in a given situation you are unclear, hear in your mind alarm bell ringing and hold back until you access our options 2- Remember what Blaise Pascal said “All humanity’s problems from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”

Why You Should Not Ask Anybody Wearing a Tie Advice ,Forecast or Prediction Overconfidence Effect   How much confidence should we have in our own knowledge? Psychologists Howard Raiffa and Marc Alpert conducted interviews with hundreds of people. They asked participants to estimate the total number of egg production in the US, or the number of foreign cars imported into the US or the number of physician and surgeons listed in the yellow pages of the phone directory. The subjects could choose any range they liked, under the condition not being wrong more than 2% of the time (meaning out of 100 of your choices, no more than 2 can wrong).The result was striking and surprising, namely the participants were more confident on their given answer     In the final experimentation, instead of just no more than 2% wrong, they were 40 %.The researchers call this phenomenon Overconfidence meaning an inclination in which a person's subjective confidence in his or her judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high.      Overconfidence pervades across board out there. We human systematically overestimate our knowledge and our ability to predict on a large scale. The overconfidence effect does not deal with the fact whether single estimates are correct or not- but as Nassim taleb put it in a more vivid and practical way: measure the difference between what people actually know and what they think they know.     What is really surprising and puzzling is that – experts suffer more of overconfidence than laypeople do.    Let me illustrate it with the following example; about yourself. Please answer the following First question: What is your social security number? Please write down (You even look at it if you have forgotten it).Now Second question: What is estimate numbers of physicians in your town? Please write down the answer   Here is something amazing, without you even noticing it the answer you gave in the second question is close in the same range the response you gave at the first question- this is by the way what we call anchoring. Here the anchor point here was the answer of the first question. Conclusion if I give advice or prediction, I am going to harm   Second example to deeper our understanding; this is even an expert. If you take a physician and give him 10 piece of information about a patient ask for a diagnose ,his answer with 10 piece of info will better than if you gave him with 50 piece of info about the patient in the meantime we cannot ignore sterile infos,or noise)      Now two things are happening which the physician (expert usually doesn’t know; namely This example shows and prove we don’t know with information /knowledge Which the most crucial point is that the physician has a lot less confidence with 10 than with 50 of them, which explain why I said you should not trust a man wearing a tie. Why? Because you have too much confidence (Overconfidence) about his opinion – not necessary because is wrong, just because you put too much confidence on his opinion. Conclusion; Lack of increase in precision  couple with increase of confidence is deadly     The kernel point of my recommendation is to switch from predictive methods to non-predictive methods, to stop trying to understand the world to focus on robustness by making sure to avoid some fragility

Why Advertising and Marketing Crucial in The US Presidential Election And Most Importantly To Any Of Your Undertaking   ? Sleeper effect During the period of the second WW 2, every country involved in the battle generate propaganda movies. The ultimate purpose was to creep the mind of the population and most importantly the soldiers, with enthusiasm, euphoria for their country- with goal to recruit people to become soldier.   A number of studies were carry out in the US to figure out how or what the impact of propaganda movies have on regular US soldiers.    The result turn out to be surprisingly disappointing. So these movies did not increase to the slightest the enthusiasm of the soldiers.      Was it because they were poorly made? No, the soldiers were aware that the movies were propaganda – which discredited the message in the movies before they were playing. This is even when the content or if you want the message were well structure in the movie- it was still deem to fail before from the start.            Fast forward, nine weeks after, something surprisingly and unexpected happened. The psychologists measured the attitudes of soldiers for the second time.     The result was surprising, striking and staggering, namely the soldiers who watched the movie propaganda more than once, manifested and expressed more support attitude to the war – than those who have no viewed it.Hence propaganda did work after all.             Researchers were astonished, especially when most of them knew that persuasive message decreased over time. Just as if you read a good discovery about weight loss or wealth accumulation. You feel pump up, full of enthusiasm. After a couple of weeks, you realise the message and the joy have fade out. Amazingly, just the opposite is true for propaganda, hence the same for advertisement and marketing. If the message strikes the core nature of the person-but also in order to make him feel that he belong to a community. By imitating, we get closer to others—that is, other imitators. It fights solitude. After all we humans are social animal. For example- Clearly people may discuss a book because 1) they heard about it, 2) their friends like it, 3) they are genuinely impressed with it. The first two are extrinsic reasons and seem to partake of general social contagion effects. The third is intrinsic value (hence the message touches the core soul of the person). This influence only grow over time. Why well psychologist Carl Hovland who led the study for the war department, named this phenomenon the sleeper effect. The most vividly explanation is that, in our memories, the source of the message (messenger) fades faster than the message.in other words your brain forget the source or the origin of the information (here for example the department of marketing).meanwhile the message itself just as acquiring a tesla car is necessary-environment friendly and noble) fades only slowly and most importantly even endures.   Therefore, any knowledge or information that stems from an untrustworthy source gain credibility over time. The discrediting force melt away than the message does.    Countless time I asked myself why advertisement and marketing work at all. Any person with sound judgement can recognise the ads and ignore them. But even you as having a balance mind won’t always succeed at this. It’s quite possible, after a few weeks, you won’t realise or even remember if you picked up certain information from a well-researched article or from a mind boggle Lind advertisement.   How do you protect yourself against the sleeper effect?   First and foremost don’t accept any unsolicited advice, even if it seems well meant. From this stand point you on the guard against manipulation   Second, avoid ad-contaminated sources like the plague   Third remember the source of every message you encounter. Whose views are these? Why do they think that way? Who benefits. I admit it is a lot of work but it will slow down your decision making process. But it will also refine it.   Fourth: Observe what the experts or consultants do than what they tell you, why because if you ask them they give a story that doesn’t match the empirical reality of what they do.- just as Frederick Nietzsche put it this way “Never trust an idea that you haven’t seen working”   Optionality is switching to find your own path rather than been in a straight jacket        

  Why It Is Much Safer To Mistake a Stone For a Bear than A Bear For a Stone? Feature- positive effect. Take the following experiment by the way this is just a thought experiment – you manufacture a dubious product such as salad dressing with a high level of cholesterol .What do you do? On the label you promote twenty five nutrients and vitamins and consciously omit cholesterol level. Consumers won’t notice its absence. And the positive present features will make sure consumers feel not their health at threat – meaning safe and well informed. Let me give you a more profound one. Please take a sheet of paper and write the following series X:of numbers: 247,794,214,439,141,205,664. Question: What do these numbers have in common?  Don’t read until you have the answer. Answer the number 4 is feature in each one of them.    Now take a look at these series Y:of numbers: 493 , 158 , 724 , 905 ,727 , 302 , 584 , 311.What  links numbers or what do these numbers have in common? Stop listening until you provide the answer. You can see that series B is more difficult than series A.Answer none of these numbers content or use the number 6.    Hence the direct conclusion is that absence is much harder much harder to detect than presence. We tend to treat knowledge like an acquired good or a property- yes we have a strong propensity to focus on what we know (except our enemy or witty competitors focus on what we don’t know)   Which goes back to what I repeatedly mentioned- namely we   Well at a classical concert, an orchestra performed Beethoven’s ninth symphony. A Hurricane of enthusiasm crippled the concert hall. During the play of the fifth movement, tears of joy pour around and you could witness .How lucky we are that this symphony has been composed. I thought. But is that really true? Would we be unhappy without this allegro? Not really Well had the symphony never been composed- no one would miss it or even notice its absence. The conductor of the orchestra would not receive any dull stress calls recommending What I am saying is we are vastly more likely to see pattern where there is none than to miss on the pattern because it was ok in past (2000 years ago), if you see something that looks like lion and run away and every time you see a lion you run away – even if you have a false alert. But those who were analytical and miss on the second error of seeing the lion and not run because they weren’t sure it was a lion -became a great source of protein- meaning end up in the stomach of the wild beast. So our survival depended on seeing pattern where there is none. Because you cannot miss on the second error of not seeing a pattern. Just as it much Better to Mistake a Stone for a Bear than A Bear for a Stone Well this explain why we are prone to over causation (our ability to find cause and effect). But here is where the real problem lies: The world today doesn’t resemble the past, why because of the rise of complexity couple with a drastic decrease of predictability due to globalization and internet. All what I am trying to emphasize is that – we are prone to generalize the particular or some of us particularize the general, some do both and the wise neither- in one sentence we tend to make inference on small amount of data. Just as if you make enough money above average in 5 to 6 years in the row, they call you a successful person and even laugh at your jokes. But in the real world, reality is not that way. So there is a mismatch between the period of compensation and the time to real see the statically property of the underline Here are two big practical ideas to take away from this episode   1  all  what I am saying is we should be careful on things we can make inference and on things on which we can’t. This is the reason why I made a clear distinction between Mediocistan and extremistan. We have a strong propensity to overestimate causation (our ability to find cause and effect) and under estimate the presence of randomness. Yes causation is more difficult than most consultants, experts think.Ludwig wigenstein put it this way “Our language is not potent enough to express what we do” just as life is process, decision making under uncertainty,statistics,Science is not a body of knowledge; it is a rigorous process. Isn't defined by "what we know" (fragile) but "How we want to know" (robust). Science is avoiding being fooled by data. We use statistics to avoid being fooled by data and above all avoid stories- why because it will drown you into believing you are on track If you are in extremist an as I define in (The boat) or any of your undertaking a huge upside or an enormous downside – be cautious by being be as sceptical as possible about your knowledge of the world, & as certain as possible about wise action. This is where we here at option are specialise ourselves by providing practical rule of thumbs,heuristics,tricks to deal effortlessly and easily by avoiding losses and making huge profits.

Who was Procrustes, well in Greek mythology, he was a nasty and cruel fellow, owner of a small estate in Corydalus in Atica on the way between Athens and Eleusis, where his  puzzle secret rites were carry out.      Procrustes has a strange and unusual way of kindness and sociability. He abducted travellers and give them a generous dinner, then invite them to spend a night in a rather special bed. By the way he had a 100% fitting bed – to put it simply he wanted the bed to fit the traveller to perfection. So those who were tall had their legs chopped off with a sharp hatchet; and those who were too were stretched.” By the way his name was said to be Damastes,or polyphemon,but his nickname happened to be Procrustes, which means “The Stretcher”.      Well according to the saying Diamond cuts diamond, in the sense of justice, Procrustes was executed by his own petard. One of the traveller happened to be the brave and fearless Theseus. After the usual Dinner, Theseus made Procrustes lie in his own bed and decapitated him. Theseus followed Hercules’s way of paying back in kind. In a more frightening interpretation (according to the Appollodorus’s Bibliotheca) Procrustes owned two beds .One small, one large .He made short victims lie in large bed and tall victims in short one.  Yes every episode of the duty life is about Procrustes bed sort of – since the world today doesn’t resemble the past and has become more complex, hence more unpredictable. We human tend favour the visible, the tangible, the well narrated and we scorn the abstract. So we human are facing limits of knowledge, the unseen, the unknown. Furthermore we seem unaware of backward fitting just like a tailor who takes great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit – but do so by surgically altering the body of his customers   Well what is the big take away idea of the metaphor of the Procrustean bed? It is not putting something in the wrong box – but mostly that inverse operation of changing the wrong variable, here the person rather than the bed- just as mistaken a mistake a bear for a stone rather than a stone for a bear well you end up in his stomac. By the way every failure of what we call wisdom can be reduced to the procrustean bed of situation.   Above all the most successful people out there are the ones who accepts the presence of randomness rather always cause and effect and most importantly know how to work around inherent unpredictability and even exploit it.

Have you ever ask yourself why are so few serial entrepreneurs – business people who start successful companies one after the other? Obviously we have Mark Cuban, Sir Richard Branson, the late Steve Jobs. But they account for a tiny fraction of serial entrepreneurs. Yes serial entrepreneur account for a tiny fraction of one percent who starts a successful company.    Well the sound question that comes to mind is, do they go o retirement after their first Blockbuster success- just as Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft? Not necessarily. Real and true Business people possess too much to get up and go than lying hours on the beach. Is it because they cannot let go and want to coddle and pamper their companies until they leave at their moment of choice for retirement? Surely not .Most founders sell their shares within ten years .By the way these self-starter who are blessed with talent, skills, good personal network and a solid reputation would be equipped to found many businesses .But why do they stop?    Well they didn’t stop – they failed at succeeding. Only one and unique answer explain their survivability. Luck and Luck plays a bigger role than skills does. No businessperson likes to hear or even listen to this. I myself is one of them. When I first heard about the illusion of skill, my natural reaction “my success was a coincidence”. Yes at first glance it sounds offensive especially when you worked hard to get there.    We’ll let take a look at business success, how much of it comes down to luck and how much is the fruit of hard work and distinct skills. This probe question is usually and easily confusing and misunderstood by the general public. Of course depending of area here Mediocirstan little is archived without skills and talent and from the same token; nothing is bring to fruition without hard due diligent work. But this is not the case when dealing with extremistan. The most important problem out there with experts is The Procrustean bed (by the way the next Episode The bed of Procrustes).         Why because we human simultaneously inhabit two worlds – namely the mediocristan and the extremistan- just as the turkey is feed for thousand by the butcher and the turkey believe that the butcher love it with increasing statistical confident until two days before thanks giving, the turkey is surprised and become a dead meat.my whole idea here is not to be turkey but be the butcher. The Turkey is someone facing unpredictability than it thinks and in the meantime it mistake absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Example: A subscription company or a paid memberships company, a person on salary. A person who is mildly ill who takes continuously medication (Drug).     Unfortunately, neither skills nor struggles, toil, and hardship are the key criteria of success. They are necessary but not sufficient.Kapish there is a simple and easy test to detect and discover if his/her success is highly link to skills and hard work. It is if the person enjoy the success for long time compare to the less qualify. But this is not the case of a lot of company founders – unless many would after the first successful company, they will launch a second, a third a fourth start-up. Meanwhile this is not the case.         Now let us jump on CEO of large company .Do they play a large role in the success of their company? Well researchers determined a set of attributes that characterize a strong CEO such as management procedure, strategic brilliance in the past and many others. The researchers measure the relationship between these behavioural traits and the company increase of value during the reign of the given Leader. So here is the result- if you randomly compare two companies, 60% of stronger CEO lead the stronger company and 40 % of weaker CEO lead the stronger company. This is only 10% more than no relationship. Here is what the Nobel prize winner in economic Daniel Kahneman said to the issue “it is hard to imagine that people enthusiastically buy books by business leaders who are, on average slightly better than the norm”. Seemingly warren Buffett thinks nothing of CEO glorification and idealization. Here is what he said “(…….)  a good managerial record (…..)  is far more a function of what business boat you get into than it is of how effectively you row”, hence skills and hard are necessary but not sufficient.           In the meantime in certain areas (Extremistan) skills play no role at all.in his book thinking fast and slow Daniel Kahneman describes his visit to an asset management company. To brief him they send him the spread showing the performance of each investment adviser over the past 8 years. From this a ranking was assign to each: number 1, 2, 3 and so on in descending order. Professor Kahneman quickly calculated the relationship between the years rankings. Between year 1 year and year 2, between year 1 and year 3, year 1 and year 4, year 1 and year 5 up until year 7 and year 8.The result was staggering and pure coincidence or if you want pure luck-namely sometimes the advisor was at the top and sometimes at the bottom .So if an advisor had a good year, this was neither bolstered by previous years nor carried the subsequent

A good friend of mine Fat John decided to lose the extra pound weigh he had be dragging around. He resolved taking up various sport. However, bodybuilders look looked broad and cyclist? Oh so bottom heavy. Swimmer, though appealed to him with their well-built, streamlined bodies. Fat john decided to sign up at his local swimming pool and to train hard three times a week.    After a short while he realised that he failed short to an illusion. The world class swimmers don’t have outstanding bodies because of their extensive taining.Rather they are good swimmers, because of their physiques. How their body is designed is a matter of natural selection than result of their activities.And from the same token – female to Model advertise cosmetics and thus, many female consumers believe that, these products make you beautiful .But it is not the cosmetics that make these women model like. The answer is simple and straight, the model are born attractive and for only this reason they are candidate for cosmetics advertising. After all, She is not a beautiful woman whose ankle or arm is praised, but she whose general appearance makes you forget to admire her single attributes.     As with the swimmers bodies, beauty is a factor for natural selection not result of activities.   Whenever we confuse natural factors with results, we fall prey of what the best risk real world expert alive today Nassim Taleb  call the swimmer body illusion.    Without this, close to half of advertising campaign may not work. But this bias goes beyond that.    For example Harvard has the reputation of being a top university. Many world class successful people have studied there .But does this mean Harvard is a Top school? We don’t know for sure. May be the school is terrible and simply enrol by recruiting the best and brightest around.            So all over the world, MBA Schools entice by attracting potential candidates with statistics regarding future income. This simple calculation is supposed to show that horrendously high tuition fees pay for themselves after a short period of time. Many prospective students’ fall for this approach.Becareful I am not implying that – those statistics are fake, but still their statements must not be swallowed wholesale. Why?   Because the income of those pursue MBA are not different from those who do not. So the Gap income between these groups stems from multitude reasons that have nothing to do with the MBA degree itself.  So this another swimmer body illusion at work. So if your intend is to study, do it for other reasons than a bigger pay cheque.   Lastly when I ask happy people about the secret of their happiness. I often hear the answer: “You have to see the glass half full rather half empty”. Well these people fail to realise that they were born happy and now tend to see positive in everything.    By the way people do not realise that cheerfulness – according to many studies such as Harvard‘s Professor Dan Gilbert is largely a personal trait that remain constant throughout life. World renowned Social scientists Lykken and Telligent starkly “trying to be happier is futile as trying to be taller” yes this pure self-illusion and the swimmer’s body illusion in action.    Well Where, then, lies the mistake, since all men crave the happy life? It is that they regard the means for producing happiness as happiness itself, and, while seeking happiness, they are really fleeing from it. For although the sum and substance of the happy life is unalloyed freedom from care, and though the secret of such freedom is the spirit that will never consent to come under the jurisdiction of things external to ourselves. 2. This is the touchstone of such a spirit;     All what I am suggesting here is that our mood is not created by our consciousness, our mood is created by a shallow impulse of the environment- we don’t necessary notice. So if you are too emotional change the environment by choosing the one that relax and soother you than trying to be happy.         When these optimist write self-help books, the illusion can become treacherous. That is why for billions of books of people, these advice are unlikely to help. Why?  Well because just as the bankrupt people who have the same traits, and attributes as the successful ones don’t write books. Similarly the unhappy don’t write self-help books about their failure, these facts remains hidden. And even if you convince people that- they are more useful tricks in failure ones than in successful ones,After all the dark side of the moon is difficult to be seen.   So be wary when you are encourage to strive for certain things – like good looks, a long life, a higher income or happiness. Before you jump, be honest to yourself and have a sense of integrity of what you see in the mirror. For more insights please visit www.optionalityprofits.com/p/tres-bien

More than two thousand years ago, the Roman orator, belletrist, thinker, Stoic, politician, and (usually) virtuous gentleman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, presented the following story. One Diagoras, a nonbeliever in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent shipwreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked, "Where were the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?" This is in a nutshell decision making by subtraction, removing or what not to do- hence via negative Michelangelo was asked by the pope “Tell me the secret of your genius. How have you created the statue of David, the masterpiece of all the masterpieces” Michelangelo’s answer “my Lord its simple .I removed everything that is not David “     Let us be frank and honest – we don’t know with certainty what make us successful or happy. But we know with certainty what make us unsuccessful or unhappy. This simple realisation as it is, is potent and very fundamental.    Negative knowledge (meaning what not to do) trumps positive knowledge (meaning what to do).    Being semi sekeptical and empirical means thinking more clearly and acting shrewdly by adopting Michelangelo’s method: by not focusing on David instead, focus on everything that is not David and chisel it away. In our case filter out all the errors and take advantage of unintended side applications and better thinking will take place.   The Greeks, Romans and medieval thinkers had a term for this practical approach: Via Negativa.the negative path, the path to renunciation, of exclusion, of reduction.   Theologians put it this way we cannot say what God is but we can only say what god is not,- hence this explain why religion is mostly about prohibitions/interdicts .By the way 8 out of the 10 commandments are about what not to do.     Psychologist distinguish between acts on of commission (what we do) and acts on omission (what we do not do).These two practical approaches are economically the same (just as 10 Dollars not lost are 10 dollars earn).But they are not treated equally in our minds.     So do not do is more rigorous and robust empirically. How do you live long? By avoiding death. Yet most people do not realize that success consist mainly in avoiding losses, not trying to generate profits.    Yes via negative is counter-intuitive and beyond that countercultural, going against conventional wisdom. But just look around you see how it is only used by the outliers, the pros, the magnificent- here is what Charlie Munger the legendary Business Partner of Warren Buffett say “We have no system for estimating the correct value of all businesses. We put almost all in “too hard” pile and sift through a few easy ones”. The direct implication is that Strategy matter far less than FILTERING and in addition Warren Buffett about himself and his partner Charlie Munger:”Charlie and I have not learn to solve difficult business problems.What we have learned is to avoid them.” Welcome to via negative.         By the way in Chess, Grand Chess master focus on avoiding errors- whereas rookies try to win.    I think from here you have a hint to see why out there, bookstore are full of positive advice book and far fewer on failure. Does that the bell in your head.   Lastly here is the famous quote of the French Novelist Antoine de st exupery” Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Download the free counter-intuitive Natural productivity Process by clicking here:www.optionalityprofits.com/p/tres-bien

A Safari brochure promises: “The last chance to see a Silver Back gorilla before the species is extinct”. What do you do? Well if you have never cared about seeing one before today, why fly all the way long to Serengeti “Tanzania” to do now? It is irrational. This is fear of regret at work.        Let say you have long dreamed of owning a house, in Hampton Middlesex London. Now only a handful of properties with lake views are left.       So seven remain, then all of sudden three and now only one. It’s your last chance. Your adrenaline pomp up combine with the thought racing in your head, and you end up surrending by given in and purchase the property at an unbelievable exorbitant price. The fear of regret tricked you into thinking this was the last time offer. After all the sale of property is not going to stop at any time soon. This is the fear of regret at work again      The fear regret is the feeling of having made a wrong decision and this is one the best weapon great dealmakers and advertisers use to get people act.           How do you overcome the fear of regret? Well 1 Avoid sometimes be evidence base thinking approach and be more absence of evidence base by bringing necessary counterfactuals,- simulate not to see what will happen, but what may happen. By the way one single small observation can disprove a statement while millions can hardly confirm it.Hence disconfirmation is more rigorous and robust than confirmation. 2 Have maximum exposure of options, then you benefit from the unpredictable, randomness-uncertainty.  Thank you for tuning in and in the meantime apply these insights in your daily life and share it with your love one and friends and subscribe to my youtube channel and Download  your Free Natural Counter-intuitive Productivity Process at https://www.optionalityprofits.com/p/tres-bien  

Chauffeur knowledge               Take a look at the following story borrow from Charli munger,Business partner of Warren Buffett ,one of the world best investor alive today: In 1918 Max plank received the Nobel prize in physics – after went on a tour in Germany in order to lecture. Wherever he was invited, he gave the same lecture on new quantum mechanics. Over time his driver grew up to know it by heart just like a child recognising intuitively a cat. So he hinted by saying “It has to be very boring for giving the same speech each time, Professor Plank. How about I do it for you in Munich? You in the front row and you wear my chauffeur’s cap.That will give us both a little bite of variety.” Since the idea was surprising and funny- Plank liked, so that evening the chauffeur held a long lecture on quantum mechanics In front of a distinguish audience. At the end of the lecture a distinguish professor asked a question. The driver uttered: “Never I would have thought that a member from such an advanced city as Munich would ask such a simple question! My chauffeur will answer it.”          You can see this among CEOs running large companies. The is viewed to possess certain attributes VIPAND Star quality such as risk taking, hard work, reliability, dedication etc. Too often Shareholders, journalists seem to believe that showmanship gives better result. Which most of the time obviously is not the case.   According to Charlie Munger, they are two types of knowledge.  The first type is Real knowledge, coming from people who has committed a great amount of time over the years and effort to understand the intricacies, complexity of the given Topic.       The chauffeur knowledge are those who have learned to put on a show and are merely acting. They espouse knowledge which is not their own and lack substance.       Now a day, with the rise of complexity it has become more difficult to separate True Knowledge from chauffeur knowledge.         So how do you guard yourself against the chauffeur knowledge, warren Buffett recommend the following sentence.    Circle of competence: namely to say what lies in the circle of what you understand intuitively. One of best piece of advice of Charlie Munger is “you have to stay within what I call circle of competence .you have to know what you understand and what you don’t understand. It is not terribly how big the circle is.But it is terribly important to know where the perimeter is” .Munger continue “So you have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have aptitudes you don’t have, you are going to lose. And that is closed to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you have got the edge and you have got to play within your circle of competence.”    The message here is clear the showmanship chauffeur knowledge can be chiselled by recognising that ,true experts recognise the limits of their competence of what they know and what they don’t know.If they find themselves outside their inner competence – the remain quiet or immediately say “they don’t know”. From chauffeur you hear every attempt except this one.    If you like this episode,please share it with your freinds and love ones - in the meantime download your free Counter intuitive Natural productivity Process to increase and speed up your productivity by 50% a week at www.optionalityprofits.com/p/tres-bien  thank you for tuning in and see you in the next episode.         

Why no pain, no gain should set alarm bells ringing          A few years ago, I was on vacation in Corsica and fell sick. The symptoms were new to me, and the pain was growing by the day .Eventually I decided to seek help in the local clinic. A young doctor, began to inspect me, probing my stomach, gripping my shoulders and knees and then poking each vertebra. I started to suspect that he had no idea on what my problem was, but I was not really sure, so I endured the strange examination. To signal its end, he pulled out his notebook and said. “Antibiotics. Take one tablet three times a day. It will get worse before it gets better.” Glad that I now have a treatment I dragged myself back in my hotel room with the prescription in hand.          The pain grew from bad to worse and beyond worse to reach agony - just as the doctor had predicted. The doctor must have known what was wrong with me after all. But when the pain had not subsided for three days, I called him.” Increase the dose to five time a day. It’s going to hurt for a while more”, he said. After two more days of agony, I finally called the international air ambulance The Swiss doctor diagnosed appendicitis and operated on me immediately. “Why did you wait so long?” he asked me after the surgery.          I replied him “it all happened as the doctor said, so I trusted him”      “Ah you fell victim to the it will-get-worse-before-it-gets-better fallacy too. The Corsican Doctor had no idea. Probably just the same type of stand – in you find in all tourist places in high season” Let me give you a second illustration.          Let’s take another example a CEO is at his wits end. Sales are in the toilet, the salespeople are unmotivated, and the marketing campaign has sunk without letting any trace on his path. So in his desperation he hires a consultant. For £ 5000 a day, the expert analyses the company and comes back with his findings. “Your sale department has no vision, and your brand is not positioned clearly, it’s a tricky situation. I can fix it for you but not overnight. The measures will require sensitivity and most likely, sales will fall further before things improve.”  The CEO hire the consultant. A year later sales fall, and the same thing happen the next year. Again and again- the consultant stresses that the company’s progress corresponds closely to his prediction .as sales continues their slump in the third year, the CEO fires the expert consultant.        A mere smokescreen, “the it will get worse before it gets better Fallacy” is the variant of the so called confirmation bias. If the problem perseveres/ continues to worsen, the prediction is confirmed. If the situation improve unexpectedly, the customer is happy and the expert can attribute it to his prowess. Either way he wins.    Well how do you help yourself? Well two things to be followed here. If you hear from someone “it will get worse before it gets better “, you should hear alarm bell ringing.” But beware of second order thinking by paying attention within the short of period of time of the trial – to see if what he has proposed has a limited downside (loss or pain) and the gain are large and unlimited In the meantime realising that, they are situations where things dip and then improve. For example a career change requires times and often incorporates loss of pay. But all these we can see quickly if the measures are working. Yes the milestones are clear and verifiable. Look to these rather than to the heavens.   Please keep in mind that most people out there are merely selling prospective and therefore, prone to provide no tangible added value, hence are generally dealing with the future .   If you like this article,please subscribe to here https://www.optionalityprofits.com/p/tres-bien

Is the value in the worth, or in the number? Hindsight Bias Take recent economic crisis of 2007- economist painted a rosy clear picture of coming years ahead of us, more importantly with firm conviction; since they were the experts.    However just twelve months after, the was a financial crash. When asked about the monstrous incident – the same economists gave countless of reasons such as: Greed, malfeasance of bankers, the incompetence of regulators – corrupt rating agencies and so forth. So we are fool by more epiphenomena and in retrospect the occurrence of the imploded market seem painfully obvious. This hindsight bias at work. The focus is wrong, even if the logic is comforting.    Another example, if a CEO become very successful due to fortunate circumstance- he will be looking through the review mirror – with the firm belief that he looking straight ahead (forward) and will quickly make the inference from specific given attributes. He became very powerful. He end up writing a bestseller about his prowess. The focus is wrong, even if the logic is comforting.       The hindsight bias is the tendency to look in retrospect with firm conviction of looking straight ahead .In short mistaken the past for the future or if you like hindsight as foresight.    And as direct consequence of hindsight bias we become overconfident in the sense where- we believe have the right knowledge to be able to predict the future.so this give us the illusion of certainty ,hence more prone to take uncalculated risk that lead more likely  to disasters and blows up.    By the way hindsight is good in the sense where it may give us a good recollection of the past- in addition very helpful in a world that is stable and that doesn’t change.    But today, we live in a world that change rapidly and more complex and therefore more prone to big errors – in case we tend to smooth out the volatity,errors,mistakes,the unknown of the system by making it predictable.   Well how do you overcome Hindsight bias? Here are three big ideas 1 Avoid at all cost tunnelling 2 Learn to distinguish the sensational from the empirical- meaning to say read good books and great scientific articles not the newspaper and Magazines- by the way I don’t mean to recommend you to purchase every bestseller. Why? Because: I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a book and scientific articles, not its validity.   3 Always make sure the because as response to the why is based on empirical evidence than anecdotes and stories- by using the counterfactual approach.Note:I am not saying that using that narrative is irrelevant- as matter of fact story is good to convey the right message. The main point is: I am not saying here that there is no information in books and great scientific articles. There is plenty of information. The problem — the central issue — is that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.      As matter of fact since 2005 the world renown professional statistician John Ioannidis computed and proved that more 80% of epidemiological study on computer fail to replicate in real life. Yet these observational studies get reported in the media and in some scientific journals.. (Thankfully, they’re not accepted by the Food and Drug Administration). Now we are in 2016 and this number has being swelling close to 90%.You see  Well the question to be answered is How to detect the worthy books and scientific journals? Well we provide rule of thumbs and heuristics here in optionalityprofits .    If you like this episode,please subscribe here at optionalityprofits and get the Free Video and PDF download of the counter intuitive natural productivity process.Yes this is the one my best clients and I have used and are still using to achieve our Big goals.         Lastly please share this content with your freinds and love ones on Facebook,Twiter,Pinterest,tumblr.buzzfeed and many other social media outlets.      Thank you very much,I write this not for the many, but for you; each of us is enough of an audience for the other. You are magnificent. Jerome

 Health club for Rats How to capitalize and benefit from the silence evidence  In my early twenties and still read the newspaper, and thought that steadily reading the newspapers was something useful to me, I came across an article discussing the increasing threat of the Russ Mafia in the United States. The article explained their toughness and brutality as a result of their being hardened by their Gulag experiences. The Gulag was a network of labor camps in Eastern Russia, precisely in Siberia where Criminals and dissidents were routinely deported. Sending people to Siberia was one of the purification methods initially used by the czarist regimes and later continued and perfected by the Soviets. Many deportees did not Survive these labor camps Hardened by the Gulag? As cause of the Russian toughness and brutality Sound to me imperfect and inadequate. So let me debunk or if you want disprove this unsound argument and misconception cosmetic wrapping.       Let us consider the following thought experiment will give the intuition. Assume that you're able to find a large, assorted population of rats: fat, thin, sickly, strong, well-proportioned, et cetera. (You can easily get them from the kitchens of fancy California restaurants.) With these thousands of rats, you build a heterogeneous cohort meaning a mix , one that is well representative of the general Californian  rat population. You bring them to my laboratory. We subject the rats to increasingly higher levels of radiation (since this is supposed to be a thought experiment, I am told that there is no cruelty in the process). At every level of radiation, those that are naturally stronger (and this is the key) will survive; the dead will drop out of your sample. We will progressively have a stronger and stronger collection of rats. Note the following central and vital fact: every single rat, including the strong ones, will be weaker after the radiation than before.Just as we human start to feel the degradation of our health when the temperature goes above average- which is 70degree Celsius  (be careful this is regardless whether we are strong or not) An observer endowed with analytical abilities, who probably got excellent grades In law school, would be led to believe that treatment in my laboratory is an excellent health-club replacement, and one that could be generalized to all mammals (think of the potential commercial success).            His logic would run as follows: Hey, these rats are stronger than the rest of the rat population. What do they seem to have in common? Not many people will have the slightly temptation to go look at the dead rats. This is the silent evident at work. Yes the cemetery of dead rats who are also strong as the ones still alive -next we pull the following trick In the US Today newspaper: we let these surviving rats loose in California and inform the chief rodent correspondent of the newsworthy disruption in the pecking order in the California rat population. He will write a lengthy (and analytical) article on the social dynamics of California rats that includes the following passage: "Those rats are now bullies in the rat population. They literally run the show. This bias causes the survivor to be an unqualified witness of the Process. Unsettling? The fact that you survived is a condition that may Weaken your interpretation of the properties of the survival, including the Shallow notion of "cause. “show. Strengthened by their experience in the laboratory of the reclusive (but friendly) VC and entrepreneur Jerome Ngassa.         Let say you launch a new program and you have 70.000 people who attend the online course for the next 6 months. You are bound to have survivor winners, and guess what: if you are here talking about it and giving testimonies, you are likely to be that particular one (notice the "condition": you survived to talk about it). So we can no longer naively compute odds without considering that the condition that we are in existence imposes restrictions on the process that led us here.    What I am saying is you will retain elements that seem to confirm your thesis and you will forget what I call silent evidence. And this absence of silent evidence is what prevent us to really understand the Causality in history.   Once again, I am not dismissing the idea of risk taking, I am involved in it myself. I am only critical of the encouragement of uninformed risk taking.   1-Lessons big take away All what I am saying is that we should be careful on things on which we can make inference and on things on which we can’t. Dig in the cemetery of silent evidence.  2-This is the reason why; we human we inhabit simultaneously in two worlds-namely the mediocistan and the extremistan  3-It isn't what you know that makes knowledgeable and rigorous; it is in the type of mistakes that you don't make hence warren Buffett. How do you live long? By avoiding death.   Get your free counter intuitive natural productivity process by clicking here:Download Free Your Counter intuitive Natural Productivity Process      

Well ,please go ahead and follow the above gemstones.

    Hi and welcome dear friends Jerome here    How to become multimillionaire in seven steps   Scandal of Prediction Take a look at this finding from of Dunn and Bradstreet: “Of the small Businesses that fail 90% do so because of lack of skill and knowledge on the part of the owner". ---Well it raises the sound question; is Business building, investing all about what we know or what we don't know?     Further to really understand successes and analyse what caused them. We need to study the traits in failures     Consider the following experiment borrowed from the world renowned professional statistician Nassim Taleb:” Numerous studies of millionaires aimed at figuring out the skills required for hotshotness follow the following methodology. They take a population of hotshots, those with big titles and big jobs, and study their attributes. They look at what those big guns have in common: courage, risk taking, optimism, and so on, and infer that these traits, most notably risk taking, help you to become successful. You would also probably get the same impression if you read CEOs' ghost-written autobiographies or attended their presentations to fawning MBA students. Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and, if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call (as to returned e-mail, fuhgedit). Readers would not pay $26.95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them that it had more useful tricks than a story of success.* The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of bankrupt failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.          Why luck? Well because the large share of the successful winner is tie to matters that lie outside the winner himself- namely extrinsic attributes such as (social contagion, cumulative advantage, information cascade, collaboration), by the way I am not saying it’s all about Luck- skill are necessary and a lot people have a lot skills and few succeed wildly. So to succeed wildly, you need necessary skills and a lot of luck.           Why is luck invisible to us? Well because we humans have a propensity to analyse and explain success by focusing on the piece itself or the person himself and we forget the cemetery of silent evidence of losers or bankrupt people who have the same intrinsic attributes.   You do not need a lot of thought of experiment to figure this out. A simple thought experiment suffices to debunk the fallacy of scandal of prediction that pervade out there.      Let say we collect randomly or an assorted population (in term of less skill and highly skill ex ante ) of 1000 publishers then universal (writers, thinkers, Business owners, Investors etc.…) – and every year you fire the half of them who are losers, leaving the winners and thus end up with long-term steady winners. Since you do not observe the cemetery. Keep in the mind that it is a random thought experiment, after and year 5 you have roughly 31 spurious Multimillionaire winners – just by luck. Of course an explanation will be readily provided for the success of the lucky survivors “He works between 80 to 100 hours a week”, “He has passion for what he does” or “He takes a lot of risks” and so forth .Yes with By the mechanism of retrospective determinism we will find the “cause"—actually, we need to see the cause and the most surprising part is that we completely forget that it was random.      Well after the facts we always fit back explanation to random data. Be careful I am assuming this in a random world In the world that is not random, it doesn’t change to much the number of Multimillionaire. All this to say we are more likely to look back at the traits of those who have survive or the Rosier part. We are not looking at the cemetery of flops who have the same attributes that did lead not to success.          Yes we human have an inability to prospectively predict before the facts-and a strong propensity the ability to retrospectively predict after the facts. Which gives us the illusion of understanding success and therefore to be able to predict the next one, hence Steve Jobs quote “again you cannot connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward; so you have to trust that the dots will connect somehow in the future- stay hungry, stay foolish” What I am talking about here is hindsight bias derive from the confirmation bias and use as foresight. Yes we tend to focus on what we know and we scorn what we don’t know- namely the unknown (except our enemy focus on what we don’t know), whereas the really value of a Library lies in the books you haven’t read than the ones you have read. The former is fragile, the later robust. And vastly important: above and beyond all the ability to Know, how you want to know what you don't know and are in the hurry to find out are the most crucial ingredient. By the way we think we understand is heavenly mark with psychological narrative and the confirmation bias        Seemingly most entrepreneurs, start up starters, discoverers - venture Capitalists, decision makers and those who advise them: executives, senior management, public administrators, management consultants, organizational development professionals and business educators. still act today upon a straight jacket plan- hence devoid to optionality. Most of them miss the point that the essence of research or investment lies in the Unknown unknowns.          By the way as I suspect the most successful businesses are precisely those that know how work around inherent unpredictability and ultimately even exploit it          As Dave McClure defined a start up as a company that is confused about 1) what its product is, 2) who its customers are, and 3) how to make money. As soon as it figures out all 3 things, it ceases to be a startup and then becomes a real business. Hence we have the aspect of randomness (uncertainty) link to any business to begin with.         This is what the legendary successful screen writer William Goldman shouted "Nobody knows anything" in relation to prediction. You may scratch your head and ask yourself how come could he be so successful? Well He knew that he could not predict individual events, but he was well aware that the unpredictable, namely a movie turning into a blockbuster, would benefit him immensely.          Moreover we human inhabit simultaneously two worlds, namely the Mediocristan and the Extremistan - The Mediocristan is characterised by the collection of the regular that count, Example: Frequent daily sales; The Extremistan is characterised by the Outlier or Exception(s) that dominate Example: Infrequent Huge sales.           Now the procrustean bed of modernity is squeezing the Extremistan (nonlinear) into Mediocristan world. This where comes the tragedy of most consultants- Business owners, investors, entrepreneurs and decisions makers. Yes we are fooled by randomness- because we tend to mistake the random with the non-random than the other way round - meaning we tend to see pattern where there is none, than to miss on the pattern. Prediction not narration is the real test of understanding the world. In this time of change, one day among the learner is than longer than the longest life of an ignorant. Who still lives after his life has been completed. By the way reason is not satisfied with obvious facts, its higher and nobler functions is to deal with hidden facts – hidden facts need prove. Three big ideas to take away To switch from predictive methods to non-predictive methods To stop trying to understand the world and focus on Robustness by avoiding some fragility To Shift from trying to understand the future to focus the present which is measurable if you have proper rule to assure absence of fragility and the only thing you have to worry about is random event. Here in optionality Profits, we help decisions makers, entrepreneurs, consultants, investors- how to make decision under incomplete information, incomplete understanding and how build a system that is robust to the unexpected and even benefits from it and more important how to create organizations that use volatility, variability, stress and disorder as information for making better decisions. You are a Dent maker (The creative spirits. The underdogs. The resolute. The determined. The indefatigable. The defiant. The outsiders. The independent thinkers. The sophisticated. The Convexed.The fighters. The true believers. Above all Risk loving).    I love friends to read your posted comments so we get to know better. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE at https://www.optionalityprofits.com/p/tres-bien for this daily episode and tour dates.                 

A Magnificent man (I am told take a loan Credit from the Bank)- start a Business, and  goes Bankrupt shortly after. Result he falls into depression, alcoholism and finally commits suicide.       What do you make of the story? As Business analyst, you want to understand why the business idea did not work: was he a bad leader, was the business strategy irrelevant or obsolete, the market too small or the competition too large for him to be able to size a slice of the pie? Well according to his mental and health record- the psychiatrist recognises low serotonin levels. As a socialist, you blame the failure of Capitalism As Banker or Financier, you believe that, the loan contract was too severe and tight so he had no way out after declaring bankruptcy. As a religious conservative, you see in this God declaring his Destiny. As venture Capitalist, you believe that- the complete amount of capital allocated wasn’t enough to make it As a Bootstrapped owner of company you infer as conclusion that – the Business Model was not the right one to generate traction of leads. If you are journalist – you realise the potential of the story; so you can write in the most compelling sensational way to exploit the gullibility of your reader. If you were a marketer you realise all his marketing campaign weren’t well organise to resonate with a large audience.   Well come the central question: which one above would have allow his survival?       None of them “if you have only tool a hammer, everything looks like a Nail” said Mark twain a quote that summarise “Domain Dependence” By the way Charlie Mugger and Warren Buffett called this “The man with the hammer tendency”- obviously this is a perfect disastrous way to think in a world that is changing in a high speed on daily basis.        More examples; trend Gurus see trends in everything (They are always capable of spotting patterns, even where there is none)        Armies think of military solutions first  So if you ask anyone the solution to particular problem, they usually link it to their own expertise/specialisation.    The flip side of the coin is the “Domain Dependence” becomes treacherous and hazardous- when specialised experts apply their competences where – they do not belong.    Guess what even in his own municipality, the man with the hammer tends to overuse   How do you protect yourself from the man of Hammer? Well, first and foremost, if you take you take your problem to an expert, don’t expect the overall best solution. Expect an approach that can be solved with expert’s toolkit (There is a new video coming tomorrow about expert problem= inverse expert)    Second the brain is not central computer, rather it is a tool Box capable of absorbing any crafted new tool. Unfortunately our Tool Box is vastly incomplete. So given our life experience and professional expertise- we already have some tools – so is better to equip our self with new additional tools in our repertoire, hence mental models that are outside your field of specialisation.    For example, over the past few year I have begun to study a Biological view of world (Human body, the ant colony) and as consequence I won the understating of complex systems. By the way it takes only a year to understand the most important and relevant ideas in the given field. By doing this you become sharper and view the world in multiple dimension.

In his book Influence Robert Cialdini tells the following story of two brothers, Sid and Harry who ran a clothing store in 1930s led America. Sid was in charge of the sales – Harry led the tailoring department. Whenever Sid noticed that the customers who stood before the mirror really liked their suits, he became a little hard of hearing .He would call his brother Harry. “Harry how much is this suit”” Harry would look up from his cutting table and shout back “For that beautiful cotton suit, $42 (This was completed inflated price at the time.) Sid would pretend he had not understood:” How much? Harry would yell again: “Forty two Dollars! “Sid would then turn to his customer and report: “He says $22”.At this point, the customers would have quickly put money on the table and hastened from the store with the suit before poor Sid notice the mistake.       Or without contrast the discount Business would be incompletely untenable. A product that has been reduced from Euros100 to Euros 70 seems better value than a product that has always cost Euros 70. Both stories epitomise the contrast effect: We judge something to be beautiful, expensive or large if we have something ugly, cheap or small in front of us. We have difficulties with absolute judgements. When we encounter contrasts, we react like birds to a gunshot: We jump up and get moving. Our weak spot: we don’ notice small, gradual changes. Overwhelm by advertisements featuring supermodels, we now perceive beautiful people more only attractive than you really are. If you are seeking a partner, never go out in the company of your supermodel friends. People will find less attractive than you really are go alone or better yet, take two ugly friends.    The more important point here to keep in the fore front of your mind is to learn to notice small, gradual changes in order to benefit or being victim of contrast effect.

Here are two stories borrowed from the English novelist E.M .Forster.Which one would remember better. The king died and the queen died The king died and the queen died because of grief. Most people will remember the second story easily. The two deaths don’t just take place successively; they are emotionally linked. Story 1) is a factual report and story but story 2) has meaning in it. According to information theory we should be able to hold on story 1) better: Because it is shorter. But our brain don’t work that way.    In the media story bias spreads like wild fire in the forest-namely when the truck drives over the bridge and the bridge collapses, our intuition is made to blame on the tuck(meaning the driver)and not on the bridge. So in the news you will hear his biography- born here- went to school there, graduated from this university, married and father>no one will be more interested in the structural flaws and structural problem of the construction of the bridge.  Meaning was it build according to the standard norms, was the bridge damage? We will be more enticed and attracted to anecdotes in the meantime repelled by details. As direct consequently the entertaining side of the story will be apparently more relevant than the real relevant facts.   So advertisers and marketers capitalise on this too. Namely instead of focusing around the item’s benefits, they create a meaningful story around it and therefore exploit our gullibility to swallow stories.    In reality and objectively speaking, narrative are irrelevant and cause people to have the illusion of understanding which ultimately lead them to take bigger risks that lead to blow up. So how do you overcome the story bias? Well couple of things.  1 who is the broadcaster                                       2 What are his intentions                                       3 What did he hide under the rug visit the library and spend half a day reading old newspapers. You will see that events that look connected today weren’t so at that time.     To be more critical about yourself –take look at your life story. Guess what, you will be amazed. Dig into old journal and notes, you will realize that your life has not follow a straight  line leading to today, but a series of unplanned and unconnected events and experience.      

Have you ever heard the following: London is really safe – or I know someone who lives in the middle of the city and he never locks his door. Not even when he goes in holiday, his apartment has never being broken into. Or in the fly to New York, the pilot let the passengers know we that they have the map for California. Says this    We use phrase like these to try to prove something, but they actually prove nothing at all. This is the availability bias at work. Yes the availability bias: We create a picture of the world using the examples that most easily come to mind. we tend to be guided by our biology, and our attention flows effortlessly toward the sensational—not the relevant This has as direct consequence the fact that we travel through life with a wrong representation of risk map in our head. We see out there corporate executives in the boardroom- consultants, experts also victim of that, by using easy to obtain information than a more relevant and harder ones.    Just like the song of Frank Sinatra sang “OH, my heart is beating wildly/and it’s all because you are here/When I am not near the girl I love /I love the girl I am near”   How do you avoid the do you the availability bias? By spending time with people whose experiences and expertise are different than yours. Well we required others input to overcome the availability bias. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. Above all, learn to avoid "tunneling." Those who spend too much time with their noses glued to maps will tend to mistake the map for the territory.Click on the link below to get your FREE Counter intuitive Natural Productivity Process

Have you ever see yourself sitting and working at 3 am o’clock in the morning in front of a cup of coffee, on your kitchen table trying hard get your Business out of the ground, because all around you see how highly successful are the winners? This is the survivorship bias at work.     Or no matter where you look, you see bestsellers in Books, Movies you name it .They appear in Tv, magazines, they take web in storm. They are ultimately unavoidable – in the bill board, on the kindle, your playlist. They are everywhere. These are the visible, the sailors and we forget the abstract.      Motivated by the winners, the survivors - John decides to launch a career as entrepreneur, author, artist etc.…     Now let me pull back the curtain and let john pictures what he is more likely to face in the near future: Like many others he is more likely to end up in the graveyard of failed entrepreneur, artist etc.…    Why? Because no media or journalists, publishers, producers are interested in story dropouts or failures. This make john or you fall short of what Nassim Taleb call “the confirmation bias” and the conflation between “absence of evidence and evidence of absence” concealing “the silent evidence”.     By the way behind any entrepreneur, artist etc.., they are countless of dropouts or failure seemingly, we may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture. So to really understand successes, you need to study the traits in failures.  So how do you go about helping yourself against being victim of the survivorship bias:    Big idea 1 for any of your undertaking, dig in the cemetery of silent evidence (the graveyards of losers dropouts who generally have the same skills as the winners) and study their mistake- than being victim of the survivorship bias. Big idea 2 develop the ability to make a clear and easy difference between absence of evidence and evidence rather of absence than detecting similarities in stories, circumstances.By detecting false pattern and avoiding them By the way we human have the strong tendency to favour the concrete, the tangible, the visible the narrated and we scorn the abstracts. The ultimate survivor will you who have develop a sound mind by being able to clearly distinguish absence of evidence from evidence of absence, in the meantime Has develop these general attributes 1) determination, 2) sophistication, 3) authenticity, 4) convexity,5)Resourcefulness and on top of it, 5) risk loving brings the bacon home.   For more practical rule of thumbs - insights to build mental toughness in the meantime remain inspired in order to construct a magnificent Business,investing and life. Get more gemstone from https://www.optionalityprofits.com/blog  

Have you ever be in your way to a live event CONCERT you like. At an intersection, you encounter a group of people, all staring at the sky. Without a blink an eye and even thinking about it, you immediately peer upwards too. Why is that? Social proof at work.        Or in the middle of the live event CONCERT –THE TENOR is displaying mastery, a masterpiece, someone begins to clap his hands and all of sudden the whole stadium joins in.You do too.Why?Social proof       Or in the advertisement industry which benefits greatly from our weakness of social proof- in unclear situation where they are wide range of a given products/services with  no obvious advantage and disadvantage and where people like you and me appear.       Social proof is our strong propensity or our human tendency instinct to imitate each other, because the mass give us sometimes the illusion of behaving in a correct way. In another word the more people display a certain behaviour or follow a certain idea, the more appropriate the behaviour or the truer the idea –which of course is mostly absurd.           So how do you go about protecting yourself from social proof? I have two big ideas.     First and foremost –Have a semi- sceptical approach of making decision in the given case, by looking for negative instances which will prove the initial (proposition/conjecture) wrong. And when you don’t find certainty of wrongness then you can give yourself a go.       -Second stay on track by reminding yourself that disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation- since is our body of knowledge do not grow by series verification facts but by negative instances we get closer to the truth. Yes            By having a semi-sceptical approach and knowingly that is more rigorous that confirmation- you avoid being at the mercy of your own gullibility and sucker proneness for recipes stemming from our love for positive advice and only positive advice (which by the way doesn’t give you the full picture).Just take a look at this Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.”          Furthermore here is what the legendary Charlie Mungerbusiness partner of Warren Buffett said “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”           Yes in practice it is the negative that is used by the pros, the magnificent.      All what I am saying is we should be careful on things on which we can make inference and on things on which we can’t, we should know our limits, we should know where we can do better than other places, we should be more empirical (meaning verifiable experience) and remember what Mark twain said” Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority- it is time to pause and reflect”   So by putting into practice the two big ideas above- we start to develop a sound judgement, wisdom, magnanimity, beauty -This is one of the way to experience the duty life. By the way the magnificent acts to satisfy his duty.   Thank you very much for reading this blog post https://www.optionalityprofits.com/blog

Have you ever heard a friend or even yourself saying I have tried to quit alcohol for the past ten years. Each glass of beer is the last. This is procrastination at work. I have 4 big ideas .so let me first define what procrastination is  First and foremost procrastination is the tendency to delay unpleasant but important acts. For Example: Going to gym – writing thank you letter, writing a book. Guess what even New Year resolution won’t help.    Procrastination is pure idiotic because no project complete itself.th irony is that we are well aware that these tasks when completed, are highly profitable or beneficial.        So why do we keep pushing those projects in the Owen until we are burn out. Well the answer is pretty obvious: The environment – because our mood is not created by our consciousness, namely our mood is created by a shallow impulse of the environment that we don’t necessary notice.      Now how do we go about domesticating it and capitalize on it? Well here are 4 big ideas to be implemented --First and foremost since procrastination from our natural willpower via low motivation – the cure here is to change the environment or one’s profession by selecting one where - you do not have to fight with your impulse. To be more clear your environment has be in alignment with your natural impulse rather than against it. --Second have a deadline stipulated/set by an external authority or virtual authority that you respect and honour. --Third, self-impose works also very well under the condition if the task is broken down in step by step, with each part assign its own due date --The fourth big idea is to combine all the three previous big ideas.  When you all what is mentioned above- You experience we call the duty life, hence you are Magnificent. By the way, the magnificent acts to satisfy his duty – whereas the weak acts to satisfy his/her need Have you ever heard a friend or even yourself saying I have tried to quit alcohol for the past ten years. Each glass of beer is the last. This is procrastination at work. I have 4 big ideas .so let me first define what procrastination is  First and foremost procrastination is the tendency to delay unpleasant but important acts. For Example: Going to gym – writing thank you letter, writing a book. Guess what even New Year resolution won’t help.    Procrastination is pure idiotic because no project complete itself.th irony is that we are well aware that these tasks when completed, are highly profitable or beneficial.        So why do we keep pushing those projects in the Owen until we are burn out. Well the answer is pretty obvious: The environment – because our mood is not created by our consciousness, namely our mood is created by a shallow impulse of the environment that we don’t necessary notice.      Now how do we go about domesticating it and capitalize on it? Well here are 4 big ideas to be implemented --First and foremost since procrastination from our natural willpower via low motivation – the cure here is to change the environment or one’s profession by selecting one where - you do not have to fight with your impulse. To be more clear your environment has be in alignment with your natural impulse rather than against it. --Second have a deadline stipulated/set by an external authority or virtual authority that you respect and honour. --Third, self-impose works also very well under the condition if the task is broken down in step by step, with each part assign its own due date --The fourth big idea is to combine all the three previous big ideas.  When you all what is mentioned above- You experience we call the duty life, hence you are Magnificent. By the way, the magnificent acts to satisfy his duty – whereas the weak acts to satisfy his/her need Have you ever heard a friend or even yourself saying I have tried to quit alcohol for the past ten years. Each glass of beer is the last. This is procrastination at work. I have 4 big ideas .so let me first define what procrastination is  First and foremost procrastination is the tendency to delay unpleasant but important acts. For Example: Going to gym – writing thank you letter, writing a book. Guess what even New Year resolution won’t help.    Procrastination is pure idiotic because no project complete itself.th irony is that we are well aware that these tasks when completed, are highly profitable or beneficial.        So why do we keep pushing those projects in the Owen until we are burn out. Well the answer is pretty obvious: The environment – because our mood is not created by our consciousness, namely our mood is created by a shallow impulse of the environment that we don’t necessary notice.      Now how do we go about domesticating it and capitalize on it? Well here are 4 big ideas to be implemented --First and foremost since procrastination from our natural willpower via low motivation – the cure here is to change the environment or one’s profession by selecting one where - you do not have to fight with your impulse. To be more clear your environment has be in alignment with your natural impulse rather than against it. --Second have a deadline stipulated/set by an external authority or virtual authority that you respect and honour. --Third, self-impose works also very well under the condition if the task is broken down in step by step, with each part assign its own due date --The fourth big idea is to combine all the three previous big ideas.  When you all what is mentioned above- You experience we call the duty life, hence you are Magnificent. By the way, the magnificent acts to satisfy his duty – whereas the weak acts to satisfy his/her need Have you ever heard a friend or even yourself saying I have tried to quit alcohol for the past ten years. Each glass of beer is the last. This is procrastination at work. I have 4 big ideas .so let me first define what procrastination is  First and foremost procrastination is the tendency to delay unpleasant but important acts. For Example: Going to gym – writing thank you letter, writing a book. Guess what even New Year resolution won’t help.    Procrastination is pure idiotic because no project complete itself.th irony is that we are well aware that these tasks when completed, are highly profitable or beneficial.        So why do we keep pushing those projects in the Owen until we are burn out. Well the answer is pretty obvious: The environment – because our mood is not created by our consciousness, namely our mood is created by a shallow impulse of the environment that we don’t necessary notice.      Now how do we go about domesticating it and capitalize on it? Well here are 4 big ideas to be implemented --First and foremost since procrastination from our natural willpower via low motivation – the cure here is to change the environment or one’s profession by selecting one where - you do not have to fight with your impulse. To be more clear your environment has be in alignment with your natural impulse rather than against it. --Second have a deadline stipulated/set by an external authority or virtual authority that you respect and honour. --Third, self-impose works also very well under the condition if the task is broken down in step by step, with each part assign its own due date --The fourth big idea is to combine all the three previous big ideas.  When you all what is mentioned above- You experience we call the duty life, hence you are Magnificent. By the way, the magnificent acts to satisfy his duty – whereas the weak acts to satisfy his/her need