*Typing*

Refuse intense ideology. Avoid black and white thinking. Believing blindly in any one extreme is not faith but ignorance. It muddies up the waters of your thinking. Instead, you should constantly challenge your own beliefs. You should treat your beliefs as questions rather than answers. You should be wary of your natural tendency to drift too far in any one direction for with extremism comes a sense of certainty. It is not certain to live without answers. And so extremism is choosing to live with a false sense of certainty. Furthermore, you should be wary of extremists as the mouse is wary of the grinning fox, for extremists are quite persuasive.

To the truffle pig, every problem is a truffle problem. This is satisfactory when hunting for truffles. But, it doesn't exactly make for a well-rounded animal. This is the inherent problem with specialization. When we specialize, we believe that everything can be solved through our specialization. And so we must develop generalized knowledge to mitigate specialized bias.

Refusing to believe in incentives is refusing to believe in human nature. Mothers understand incentives better than most psychologists. Early on, they make an agreement with their child. You can have the ice cream once you've eaten the carrots. This isn't because they are tyrannical. They just know that if they let their kid have the ice cream before the carrots, the carrots won't be eaten. I know this all sounds very elementary. Yet, why do so many of us go about our days eating the ice cream before the carrots? We open up social media before we've gone for our run. We answer email before we've done any work of depth. We turn on the radio before we've formed so much as a single, original thought. We shower ourselves in incentives before we've allowed ourselves the chance to earn them and we wonder why we don't get anything done.

You should first seek to win. However, once you've determined that you will lose, your attention should divert from winning to not losing too badly. It becomes about losing well enough that you can live to fight another day. You see this in professional sports. Once a coach has determined the battle is lost, he pulls his best players from the floor as not to risk unnecessary strain, exhaustion or injury. The coach recognizes it makes no difference to lose by 10 points or to lose by 20 points; a loss is still a loss at the end of the day. And so he makes decisions to ensure his team can live to win another day. This requires shoving one's ego down at the bottom of their shoe. But, that's a write-up for some other time.

One way to get what you want is to make sure other people get what they want. I've also found this allows for a happier existence.