Russ Roberts: preference

Transcript context

…Maybe I finish one out of ten. I don’t know. Right, one out of ten. When I was younger, I found it deeply disturbing not to finish a book I started. It’s an interesting rule that says finish every book you start. If you have that rule, you will pick more judiciously, ideally, and be a little more careful, but that was my rule. I also had a rule not to write in my books because I found that to be sacrilegious, in some sense, to deface the book. I never opened it all the way, so when I finished a book in my youth, it looked brand new, but I had read it. I’ve changed all of those things. Now I write in my books. I don’t finish lots of books. Quitting is a good strategy if you know when to do it. Quitting school, or I would even say not attending in the first place, is underrated except that for a lot of people who don’t finish, they don’t do very well. I don’t think the average is a good predictor for necessarily what’s going to happen to you, Tyler. Tyler, you could’ve not finished, and I wonder what would have happened to Tyler. My favorite example of this outlier, of course, by definition, is Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly, who’s just a wonderful writer on technology and many, many other things and a brilliant photographer, by the way, also. I don’t think he ever went to college. Most of our learning takes place elsewhere, but for some people, it’s good. What’s the most underrated part of the Hebrew Bible?…

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