Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking.

tribes are very effective at promoting views that aren’t analytical or rational, and people loyal to their tribes are very poor at realizing it.

Everything’s been done before. The scenes change but the behaviors and outcomes don’t.

History is abused when specific events are used as a guide to the future. It’s way more useful as a benchmark for how people react to risk and incentives, which is pretty stable over time.

There’s as much to learn about your field from other fields than there is within your field.

Once you see the roots shared by most fields you realize there’s a sink of information you’ve been ignoring that can help you make better sense of your own profession.

Self-interest can lead people to believe and justify nearly anything.

Room for error lets you stick around long enough to let the odds of benefiting from a low-probability outcome fall in your favor. Since the biggest gains occur the most infrequently – either because they don’t happen often or because they take time to compound – the person with enough room for error in part of their strategy to let them endure hardship in the other part of their strategy has an edge over the person who gets wiped out, game over, insert more tokens, at the first hiccup.

The only truly sustainable sources of competitive advantage I know of are:

Learn faster than your competition.

Empathize with customers more than your competition.

Communicate more effectively than your competition.

Be willing to fail more than your competition.

Wait longer than your competition.

Start with the assumption that everyone is innocently out of touch and you’ll be more likely to explore what’s going on through multiple points of view, instead of cramming what’s going on into the framework of your own experiences. It’s hard to do. It’s uncomfortable when you do. But it’s the only way to get closer to figuring out why people behave like they do