Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…To-do listing. The thing that honestly decides whether or not I have a good, effective day, where I feel like I got things, or whether I just wasted a bunch of time, was whether in the morning, I wrote down what I thought I had to get done that day, and throughout the day, was rigorous about putting the little tasks that come up onto that same list and then checking them off. I keep that list going, and I keep it updated, and I keep referring back to it, I am able to be pretty efficient. If I don’t, I get lost and overwhelmed and anxious. I don’t find the big tasks to be the hard thing there. The thing that is really hard to do is the tasks that take between 3 and 15 or 20 minutes. You keep in your head, when you probably have 30 minutes where you can knock out a couple of them. They don’t feel like a big enough deal. You don’t remember them. You didn’t write them down in a clear place. They just sit there causing you, or at least me, endless anxiety. When I actually have them in front of me, I will stay on top of them. Actually staying on top of them is more important, certainly, than I gave it credit for a year ago. We all are looking for other talented people to work with, and you’ve had a whole bunch of great ones. Matt and Melissa, Dylan Matthews, a whole bunch of others, some of whom I don’t know. What’s your best talent-finding tip? Look for people who are desperate to be doing the thing they’re doing. I have often found really great people by finding people who either seemed or were literally doing what they need to be doing for free because nobody was yet paying them for it. That’s an ethos that comes out of — I did that as a blogger, and I found Dylan Matthews doing that kind of thing. You can teach a lot of skills, but you can’t teach obsession. There’s a real difference between somebody who is obsessed with the work they’re doing and someone who is simply skilled at the work they’re doing. I will take the obsession and teach the skills over getting the skills and having to teach the obsession.…

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