*Typing*

If you fight wars where others possess the advantages, you will lose. You will feel as though you're pushing a cannon up the face of a cliff. You will burn a lot of money. You will suffer a lot of heartache. You will experience a lot of failure. Instead, you should dedicate a tremendous amount of time finding the area you're most competent in. This area of competence is rarely fashionable. In fact, the less fashionable it is the better because unfashionable industries experience less competition. It's a very simple strategy that few people have the discipline to execute. You find your edge. You spend your life honing that edge. You pick battles you know you can win.

Instincts drive a lot of human behavior without us always realizing it. Most of these instinct serve us. We are instinctually scared of heights, snakes and spiders; and we have a natural urge to protect our young from danger and to seek out shelter. Some instincts, however, hinder us. Each of us has what is called a Survival Instinct. This is the desire to live. When we receive criticism, our survival instinct kicks into full-gear without us being fully conscious of it. On a primal level, we see criticism as a threat against our lives. If someone tells us something we don't want to hear, there's an automatic almost subconscious reaction of anger, fear and antipathy. If we don't actively think about overriding this particular instinct, our development will stall.

Find a simple idea that works and follow it religiously until it stops working.

Seduction is power. But, power is not happiness. Rarely will you find the seducer to be content. If he were content, he would have no desire to seduce. And so it is the lack of happiness and the constant need to fill its absence with pleasure that fuels the seducer. To be a great seducer, one must oscillate between interest and disinterest with the grace of a swan crossing a pond and back again. To be a great seducer, one must be indifferent, like a hand picking up a heavy plum to feel for the fruit's ripeness before setting it down again, deciding the mouth that governs it is not hungry. And while the seducer's tongue will surely taste many fruit, it will forever be left hungry. This raises the question humankind has wrestled with for ages. What is a better existence? Having tasted every experience life has to offer? Or, to have known a single experience truly and totally? Power is tasting. Happiness is knowing. To make matters increasingly complicated, it seems the latter desires the former; and the former, the latter. The seducer is vampire; the seduced, human. Is it not true, that the human wishes to be vampire; and the vampire, human.

We want to make good decisions.

But, when faced with a sea of shimmering opportunities and endless choices, making good decisions can be difficult.

It's fairly simple to decipher between three choices. However, ten, twenty and thirty choices can begin feeling homogenous with one another.

This inevitably leads to analysis paralysis and can cause us to make rash decisions that might alleviate ourselves of the short-term pain of "not knowing what to do" but come with longer-term negative consequences.

This is why the process of elimination can be helpful, particularly a framework we'll call: The good, the bad and the ugly.

Begin by eliminating choices that are downright ugly.

These are choices that either compromise your integrity or put you at risk of injury, financial ruin or reputational damage.

Charlie Munger once said, "All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there."

Figure out the choices that will kill you and then take them off the table.

Next, eliminate the bad choices.

Bad choices tend to have the following qualities:

1. They're unexciting
2. They're uninteresting
3. They offer little to no upside

Once these are removed, you're left with the good choices, which you've hopefully narrowed down to three in number.

I define good choices as options that are exciting or interesting, come with a high amount of upside and place you at a unique advantage.

From there, the choosing becomes easy.