Fatal human flaws to avoid in 2024
There are things I regret doing, but life lessons that I’ve learned from them which apply universally. By reading this, you learn from my blood-earned gains. I hope they save you some blood.
Misinformation is costly. Whether in your investments, relationships, or classes. The easiest way you can set yourself up for failure is to listen to what anybody says, no matter their evidence or credentials. Any fool can speak confidently, and every human being can fall prey to people who sound like they know what they’re doing. Here are some practical examples:
Hiring one person based on charisma and personality instead of credentials—misinformation about their abilities and work ethic.
Listening to what your friend says about absence rules instead of doing what you know works, leaving school without a note, earning you a detention.
Before you try new things, consider the worst outcome and whether you’d happily suffer it. Modern culture encourages trying new things on a whim instead of making calculated decisions about what’s worth spending time, energy, and risk on. People say, “you’re young.” I’ve found that being young doesn’t make suffering consequences of bad decisions any less tolerable.
Instead of taking a weighted class in junior year, take Dance on a whim because your friends are in it, while you’ve tried dance when you were younger and didn't like it.
Making a risky investment, expecting the best outcome as all wishful thinkers do, and losing it all.
Curiosity doesn’t kill the cat. Overconfidence does. We are constantly overconfident in the odds, our luck, our abilities, etc…This prevents us from considering and preparing for the worst outcomes, and even when bad things hit us, we stick our faces in the sand and ignore reality. I love optimism, but it’s only going to work when you pair it with action and realism.
In the SAT, reaching 10 points below your target score and expecting to do better on the real exam. In reality, you should get 50 points above your target score because test day stress dips performance.
Consider all perspectives, but don’t weigh them all equally. When making decisions, it’s good to ask the opinions of a few people because you may have blind spots, but you ultimately have to judge things on your own afterwards in order to make the decision that best suits yourself. Don’t go with the majority opinion, and don’t do something because you’re conflicted and another person tells you to do so or so. You have to face the problems yourself and look honestly at your own priorities and your heart.
You buy a shirt that your friend says is cute…but end up not wearing it because you don’t like it.
Your peers tell you that AP classes are hella hard so you only take 4 instead of 6…when in reality you have the bandwidth to take 6 and they have terrible studying habits.
Don’t forget your mistakes. Keep a detailed log of each one, your prior decision process, and the lesson you learned. In Calculus, I had a B for the first quarter because I didn’t document my mistakes in an organized manner—after I started documenting and analyzing each mistake as well as reviewing them before a test, my grade rose to A. Likewise on the SAT. Before, I took full practice tests for the sake of doing it without analyzing mistakes, and ended up wasting tons of time. Progress grew exponentially once I started recording my mistakes and learning from them!
The same applies to tennis, investing, AP Lit, and pretty much all else in life. If you want to start succeeding, you’ve got to attack every flawed decision in your life that makes a meaningful difference.
Take the blame on yourself. Most of the time, when you make a bad decision, it is your fault! Even if people misled you, it is your fault for not being discerning. By taking blame, you hold yourself accountable for your life and making better decisions. Yes, it’s painful—but it’s the only way you’ll become a better decision maker.
Life is not magical—what you do each day and the quality of your decisions determines your destiny. I encourage you to start taking your life seriously and scrutinize yourself under stress, pressure, social influence, etc…in order to recognize when and where you are weakest.