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1. Becoming overwhelmed with possibilities First, you have to make big decisions about what you want most, Dalio writes. That means focusing on some priorities while letting go of others. “While you can have virtually anything you want, you can’t have everything you want,” he explains. “Life is like a giant smorgasbord with more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. Choosing a goal often means rejecting some things you want in order to get other things that you want or need even more.”

Source: Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio: Quit these bad habits to achieve your goals

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. If you’re not changing and evolving, you’re relying too heavily on knowledge rather than imagination. You’re relying too heavily on experience rather than creativity.

You’re stuck in the past. You’re living out a predictable life. And predictability is nowhere to be found in courage and creativity. As Sir Ken Robinson said, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Seth Godin similarly said, “If you’re willing to do something that might not work, you’re closer to becoming an artist.”

Source: Life Doesn’t Reward You For What You Know, But For What You Do

There’s a problematic shift that happens to many successful and creative people. Eventually, their creative well dries up. They get out of the habit of doing and creating and shift to passively accumulating information or accolades.
They become far more calculated in every decision they make. They stop being iterative, failing, changing, learning, and being imaginative. They begin relying far too heavily on their prior knowledge and experience. At some point, they reach a cap on what they are interested in learning, because true learning involves risk.

Source: Life Doesn’t Reward You For What You Know, But For What You Do

Do you emphasize knowledge? Do you believe you must have all the answers? How imaginative are you? How grand and compelling is your vision for yourself and the future? How excited are you to get up and embrace learning and change every day? Your level of conviction for daily learning is reflective of the power of your imagination. If your imagination is weak, then you probably aren’t learning very much. Creativity

Source: Life Doesn’t Reward You For What You Know, But For What You Do

“When dominant players are so entrenched, they’re not usually in a good position to innovate,” he added. “At that point, they’re in a position of defense. That’s when it’s time to find a company that can attack a weak spot and find a new way of doing business.” Pinduoduo, Cao said, took a fresh approach to e-commerce that other industry players hadn’t employed so successfully. “Pinduoduo didn’t go after the market directly,” Cao said. “It found new rule of engagement. It showed that shopping could be more

Source: How Pinduoduo became a $23 billion company in less than 4 years, according to an early investor – INSIDER

2001: Here’s why we’ve started cutting prices Starting in 2001, the company started lowering prices on goods. The “loop” he mentions below will be covered in MBA classes for decades: “Focus on cost improvement makes it possible for us to afford to lower prices, which drives growth. Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions. Customers like this, and it’s good for shareholders. Please expect us to repeat this loop.”

Source: The smartest things Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has said in the last 20 years – Business Insider

1998: Here’s how you hire right This year’s snippet is somewhat out of context from the rest, but it still offers insight into how the company hired some of the brightest minds available in the late 1990s: “During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision:
Will you admire this person? …
Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering? …
Along what dimensions might this person be a superstar?”

Source: The smartest things Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has said in the last 20 years – Business Insider

Researchers are also discovering just how early a fixed and growth mindset forms. Research Dweck is doing in collaboration with a longitudinal study at the University of Chicago looked at how mothers praised their babies at one, two, and three years old. They checked back with them five years later. “We found that process praise predicted the child’s mindset and desire for challenge five years later,” she says.

Source: The Stanford professor who pioneered praising kids for effort says we’ve totally missed the point — Quartz

In 2011, iarpa initiated a program, Sirius, to fund the development of “serious” video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less biased than the average person), the anchoring effect, the representativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own).

Source: Cognitive Biases and the Human Brain – The Atlantic