Many years ago, a real estate broker said this to me, and it has stuck ever since. I often go back to it in my mind. The logic behind it is as follows.
The best answer is customarily "yes." "Would you like to invest $100 million into my development project?" "Yes, I'd love to! Where should I send the money? I'll do that right now." This is the outcome you want.
The second-best answer is "No, I don't like you and I don't like your project." This is not what you want to hear, and it will probably sting at first, but it's the next-best answer in that it offers complete certainty. You know where the person stands, and you can move on.
The absolute worst answer is a "no" disguised as a "maybe." "I don't know. Seems interesting. We'll see. Let me talk to my partners about it and get back to you." This answer creates false hope and delays things. Whenever possible, you want to suss out and avoid delaying an inevitable "no."
It's, of course, okay to need to think about things and do due diligence when it comes to important decisions, but ultimately, the goal is to get to either a "yes" or a "no" as quickly as possible.
It's okay to just say "no." In fact, it's the second-best answer you can give to someone.
Cover photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash
It's a long game
Why early success does not predict exceptional performance as an adult
Conventional wisdom suggests that the way to get really good at something is to (1) start as early as possible learning the thing and (2) focus exclusively on the thing. This is relevant information for elite schools, sport academies, and other institutions because it leads to, "let's find the best young talent and then further accelerate their skills through discipline-specific practice."
But recent research has found that this typically isn't the case. By looking at more than 34,000 adult international top performers in different domains ranging from classical music composers to Olympic champions, researchers found the following three major features associated with human development (quoted verbatim from here):
Early exceptional performers and later exceptional performers within a domain are rarely the same individuals but are largely discrete populations over time. For example, world top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time. Top secondary students and later top university students are also nearly 90% different people. Likewise, international-level youth athletes and later international-level adult athletes are nearly 90% different individuals.
Most top achievers (Nobel laureates and world-class musicians, athletes, and chess players) demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years. Across the highest adult performance levels, peak performance is negatively correlated with early performance.
The pattern of predictors that distinguishes among the highest levels of adult performance is different from the pattern of predictors of early performance. Higher early performance in a domain is associated with larger amounts of discipline-specific practice, smaller amounts of multidisciplinary practice, and faster early discipline-specific performance progress. By contrast, across high levels of adult performance, world-class performance in a domain is associated with smaller amounts of discipline-specific practice, larger amounts of early multidisciplinary practice, and more gradual early discipline-specific performance progress. These predictor effects are closely correlated with one another, suggesting a robust pattern.
In other words, it's a long game:
The most successful and highest-performing adults seem to start off as well-rounded kids.
Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Yesterday morning, I took the train from Toronto to Montréal. I'm here for one night for a few meetings. I love trains. You can show up right before departure, the seats are more spacious, and they go downtown to downtown. Plus, there's something romantic to me about whizzing through the landscape. But currently, this trip takes just over 5 hours once you factor in the above stops (see cover photo). That's too long in this day and age, so Canada is, as I understand it, working on a new high-speed rail solution called Alto.
The first phase will connect Ottawa to Montréal (construction is expected to start in 2029), and a subsequent phase will connect Ottawa to Toronto. The top speed will be around 300 km/h, which I'm guessing will result in an effective speed closer to 200 km/h when you factor in stops and any speed limits required near urban centers. With this, the goal is to bring the journey from Toronto to Montréal down to around 3 hours.
One thing to keep in mind is that Ottawa does not lie on the fastest route between Toronto and Montréal; it adds about 70 km. But it's of course necessary. In theory, an express route with no stops running TGV or Shinkansen-like trains could bring the journey time down closer to 2 hours. But that's not what is being planned from what I have read. Regardless, 3 hours is still a big deal and a meaningful improvement. It makes the trip faster than flying, and certainly faster than driving.
Could current drive times ultimately change with autonomous vehicles? Maybe, but it's unlikely to be by this much. I hate long road trips and the same would be true even if a robot were driving me. So I look forward to one day — in my 50s? — doing this journey in 3 hours. If we could get it down to 2 hours and change, that much better. That's a trip worth taking for a night out or just to stock up on bagels.