It took me a long time to stop thinking of some people as pure evil and start thinking of them as human beings, with flaws and qualities, from whom I can learn something.
This is my choice for top 5 obnoxious tools that can teach us something valuable and help us improve our lives:
1. George Soros - Avoid Attachment To Ideas & Examine Biases, Errors
I don’t want to talk about Hillary Clinton, the Black Lives Matter, the European migrant crisis, the human trafficking from Libya to Italy, or the countless color revolutions he has financed. George Soros has many sins and his reach is wide.
Here, I want to talk about his detached rationality.
This is what Nassim Taleb wrote, in Fooled By Randomness, about our pick numero uno’s insane rationality:
The public person most visibly endowed with such a trait is George Soros. One of his strengths is that he revises his opinion rather rapidly, without the slightest embarrassment… What characterizes real speculators like Soros from the rest is that their activities are devoid of path dependence. They are totally free from their past actions. Every day is a clean slate.
Taleb also speculates in his books that Soros’s purely rational behavior comes from a defect in the amygdala that blocks the emotions of attachment, meaning ol’ Georgie boy is a psychopath.
George Soros taught me the importance of stepping outside of my emotional responses and looking not only at the situation (my limited perspective of the situation) but also at what my biases and errors in thinking may be.
This approach opens you up to the world in amazing new ways.
2. Bill Gates - Passion & Dedication To A Dream Can Change The World
I’m not even sure if Bill Gates actually said those words, but he definitely proved them to be true.
In my mind, Bill Gates is not a single individual, but two very different people.
The first is the guy who worked 16-hour days for 5 years, believed he could change the world and, by bringing an amazing innovation into existence, HE DID EXACTLY THAT! He transformed people’s lives and he changed the world for the better.
The other guy is the busybody do-gooder that is spending his well-deserved monetary fruits of labor not on further innovation, breakthroughs and service to the world by creating something new and better, but by meddling in the affairs of countries and peoples all around the world.
This guy apparently knows what is best for me, better than I do. I cannot see into his heart and read his intentions, so I’ll just say that the two words I feel aptly describe what will be THIS Bill Gates’ legacy - UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.
He represents most of the things that I despise about the 1% of the 1%, but the creative Bill Gates, the one who built Microsoft and became the richest man in the world, showed me what one person, who believes in his own creativity and is willing to focus everything he has on it, can do. Also, he is a great example of how much environment counts in achievement, but that’s a story for another time.
I don't want to talk about Covid-19 and Bill Gates' role in the whole thing - that's a story for another time.
3. Warren Buffet - Read & Think & Let Compound Interest Work For You
I do not buy the sweet ol’ grandpa act for one second, and I am not a fan of the Giving Pledge or of his version of crony capitalism. But, you gotta give it to the man, he is wildly successful, the Michael Jordan of the investing world, and a master at selling himself as a benign and wise old man, who drinks five Cokes a day, wants to raise his own taxes and is incredibly frugal.
The Warren Buffet I am interested in is the man that spends his days reading (books, newspapers, whatever he can get his hands on) and thinking deeply about it, synthesizing the information into something he can use.
So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.
He takes his time, and allows himself not to be afflicted by FOMO or momentary passions. This is an amazing quality and worth replicating.
4. Elon Musk - Choose To Be Extraordinary
I mentioned Warren Buffet and crony capitalism in the same sentence, but the king of using stolen money to prop up products that might otherwise never be successful is our South African Iron Man. He also champions the Universal Basic Income, wants to detonate nuclear bombs on Mars...I’ll stop here with the insane ideas.
He has something Nikola Tesla lacked, and that is the ability to connect to people - he knows how to work them and his charisma overrides people's critical thinking faculties.
His accounting practices and government deals make it hard to get an accurate picture of how his companies could actually function in the free market, and he seems to be losing it more and more as time passes by, but he is still an impressive individual.
He chooses, each and every day, to dedicate himself to being awesome. He has built himself into a truly capable and visionary person, with a more than healthy ego and an impossibly strong desire to shape the world and be of significance.
Even if he is a scam-artist, he is truly great at it:-)
My takeaway from this guy is: YOU CAN CHOOSE TO BE EXTRAORDINARY!
5. Donald Trump - Politics Is Poison & It Leads To Nothing Good
To those on the left, Donald Trump is Hitler. To those on the right, he is Jesus Christ with the strategic 4D chess mind not seen since Sun Tzu. Emotions and ideologies aside, Donald has a couple of truly amazing qualities - thinking big, believing in oneself and never giving up.
But the most important lesson Donald Trump could ever teach us is that politics is poison.
Let me repeat that:
