I read and took notes on chapter 1 of _The Choice (Revised Edition)_ by Goldratt.
> “CHAPTER 1: What Choice Do We Have?”
> “Father, what is the choice you made that impacted your life the most?" I ask.
> Decisively he answers, "I wanted to live a full life. The most important decision that led directly to it was my decision to constantly devote time to understanding, really understanding, each one of my areas of interest: family, friends and work.”
I like the focus on *the most important decision* -- a decision that affects all other decisions.
> Knowing that when Father says "really understand," he means spending endless hours in the attempt to decipher the causalities that govern a situation, I sigh, "That's not easy."
I often notice this mindset where people say "that's not easy" or "that's hard". I think that the vast majority of these cases are cases where the person means that the thing is *too hard to be able to succeed*.
> Being the daughter of my father I have heard this question more than once. "I know, I know. If you want an easy life just grab a hammer, a big one, and hit yourself on the head, hard. You'll have a very easy life. They'll even bring the food to your bed."
i don’t think that’s an easy life. i think an easy life is one that you’re in control of. i think living like a slave is much much much harder than living like a free man.
> I firmly say, "Everybody feels a sense of disappointment when an initiative doesn't work. The more important the initiative, the bigger the disappointment. Even when a person makes the right choice, even when a person is optimistic and chooses to look on the bright side, even when the person is made out of iron, he or she will be disappointed. The fact that you repress these feelings doesn't mean that they don't exist."
scientists have been searching for intelligent alien life and haven’t found it yet. i don’t think they are disappointed about it. and if they are, that’s a mistake.
where do people get these theories from? I think it's basically this: they notice things in themselves and a few other people and then they decide (without reasoning, just faith) that it applies to all people.
> For my father, every situation is an opportunity to learn, every new initiative is an exploration.
All life is learning experiments.
> Father leans forward and says, "When a proto-type—a new initiative—doesn't work, we face two alternatives: **one is to bitch about reality** and the other is to harvest the gift it just gave us, the knowledge of what has to be corrected. That is the reason I titled the report Freedom of Choice. (emphasis added)
bitching about reality is a waste of energy and is counter-productive because of the opportunity cost of not doing problem-solving.
> Hesitantly I answer, "You're always the scientist. You are constantly figuring out how the world is ticking, trying to verbalize the cause-and-effect connections—on any subject, in any situation." I continue more confidently, "For you, everything is like a prototype. No wonder situations that trigger disappointment and frustration for others are, for you, a source of energy."
even the phenomenon of other people getting disappointed is a source of energy for him.
this reminds me of something. a friend told me that he didn’t call me when he was sad because he didn’t want to “bring me down”. i reminded him that people climb mountains and they do it for the struggle, the entertainment. he agreed. and i said that helping him with his sadness problem is like climbing a mountain.
> On the other hand, one must be arrogant—have the confidence that one is capable of figuring out how to make things work.
that’s not what arrogant means.
> Put these two requirements together and you have a nice oxymoron: humble arrogance.
fallible confidence
> “I'm looking for a good analogy," he says while his eyes search the ceiling. "Suppose that you have an excellent screwdriver, and you need to take out a screw from a piece of wood. You have the right tool for the task, but for some reason, you think that it's not a screw but a nail. How successful will you be? In such a case, to claim that you don't have a good enough tool is ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with people's brainpower; there is something very wrong with people's perception of reality. The biggest obstacle is that people grasp reality as complex when actually it is surprisingly simple."
life is simple not complex. i guess people make their lives complex, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
> When he sees that I get it, he continues, "When I left physics and started to deal with organizations, I was astonished to see that the attitude of most people is that the more sophisticated something is, the more respectable it is.
i recall from physics a basic thing that when we first work on a new thing, like making a model of reality, we start with the simplest model, get it working, then try to make the model more complex in order to more accurately model reality. so, simple first.
# My process for this session
I decided to read at least 30 minutes, plus spend some time writing a blog post about it. During the reading I stopped a lot to take notes on what I was reading (directly in Apple Books app). I also stopped a bunch of times to take care of something not related to the book. Like I'd get a notification about a planned meeting later in the day, realize that it's not a good time to do the meeting, send an email to reschedule, then get back to the book, then a minute later get a reply email about it, reply to it, then get back to the book.
I started at 7:30am and I'm writing this part at 8:15am. So I've already done the 30 minutes I planned to do. But I want to do more. (I just used up another 15 minutes taking a call from a friend.)
Finished writing at 9am. So 1.5 hours (minus minor interruptions).
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