Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Running in particular, and cycling, I guess, and swimming — maybe the triathlon sports. First of all, they’re very numerical. There’s a sense every day of numbers that you can work on. That’s nice. A lot of these people are competitive, not necessarily globally, but just with themselves. They want to improve. There’s a digit you can work on every single day, and that’s very helpful and gives a sense of purpose. To a high-achieving person, that’s kind of crack. You could say, there are other numbers you could optimize for. You could try to optimize for the number of hours you sleep. The challenge with that is the effort involved in that. If you really wanted to sleep perfectly every night, it’s not about difficulty in pushing through, which is what high achievers always want to do. It’s a bit more about relaxing and taking it easy. With running and cycling and swimming, you end up in these dynamics where you have these high achievers at the highest level, much higher than me. The main thing coaches do to these people is slow them down, not accelerate them because they really get pleasure out of just persevering and pushing through. I like that. For me and for a lot of other folks, there’s this idea — like your idea earlier that you can learn a lot about how to find good personalities by reading plays — you can learn a lot about mental fortitude by just putting yourself through a physically demanding experience and pushing through. I think it’s a very helpful thing to do. The correct amount — a lot of athletes overtrain — but once a week, really putting yourself in a physically demanding situation seems to be physically, obviously, very healthy. But psychologically, it’s good to know that you can push through. Let me ask you a question that we both should answer, and you tell me if you want to go first or second. What do you think is our main disagreement, if only of emphasis, when it comes to identifying talent? We’ve written this book, worked together on this problem for years. We agree on a lot of things. What’s the residual disagreement? And how do we boil it down to a relatively small number of dimensions? I can go first if you want. You should.…

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