The Difference Between Having Opinion and Having Conviction

Or, why temperament is more important than intellect

Jun 27, 2021

👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.

It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.

Note: If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart below my name (above)? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. 😍

Today, let’s talk about empty opinions. In other words, what most people practice in real life. But before that, let me tell you a story.

A startup that has been in business for about two years, and growing pretty well, has just been offered a billion dollars to sell. The twenty-something founder, after considering the offer long and hard, decides to pass.

The board, the execs, the media, the journos, the reporters, the advisors, the friends, and all other “opinionated” intellectuals think it’s a stupid move. He’s foolish to pass off $300M which he is supposed to gain personally from the deal. They try to put some sense into his head, but he won’t listen. Because he knows something they don’t.

In 2006, Facebook was on the cusp of launching new products that would entirely change the trajectory of the company, and the world as we know. They were limited to only colleges when Yahoo! offered to buy, but Mark Zuckerberg stood his ground. Fifteen years later, Facebook has a market cap of $969 billion (closing in on the $1 trillion mark) and Yahoo! is history. How do you like them apples!

I’m not a big fan of Facebook the company due to their lax attitude towards user privacy, but I’m a huuuge fan of Facebook the business and Zuckerberg’s fighting spirit. I want you to take a moment and try to get your head around the amount of pressure he must have felt as a 22-year-old when all the “adults” were advising him to sell. Anybody in his position would have folded and taken the deal, albeit reluctantly. And after Yahoo! would have gone down with Facebook a couple of years later, it would have been perfectly okay for him to say, “I told you so!” People would still think he did the right thing, and life would go on.

And that’s where the difference between having opinion and having conviction lies.

A decision maker isn’t right or wrong because the crowd agrees with them. A decision maker isn’t right or wrong because the crowd disagrees with them. It’s not a business where you take polls. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what you “think” or believe unless you act on it. It doesn’t matter what your “forecast” is unless you bet on it.

You see, “tawking” is easy, opinions come cheap. But the world is run by deeds, and how often your “thinking” is right is irrelevant in the real world. A decision maker is as good as their thinking and analysis translated into action. Everything else is meaningless. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say, “Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.”

Good decision making is more about temperament than intelligence. You need some intelligence — the minimum intelligence to comprehend what I’m trying to say. But, as Warren Buffett would say, “You don’t have to be able to play three-dimensional chess or be in the top leagues in terms of Bridge playing or something.”

You need a stable personality, the temperament of a person who derives pleasure neither from being with the crowd nor against the crowd.

Whether you are an investor or an entrepreneur (two fields where what you do is more important than what you say), your primary job is thinking, analysing, and acting on them — and not getting over-stimulated by empty opinions.

Interesting Finds

Iconic director Martin Scorsese is worried about cinema. He has spent the past couple of years distinguishing what he considers “real cinema” from the “theme park movies” of the MCU. But what if this whole distinction doesn’t really exist? And what if the key to proving it is… William Shakespeare? (Wisecrack / YouTube)

The sounds of nature influence where animals lived and how they forage. For each 12 decibel increase in white water noise volume, bird abundance decreased by about 7 percent and bat activity decreased by about 8 percent. Birds were especially deterred by white water noise pitches that overlapped with birdsong. (Nikk Ogasa / Science News)

You don’t need to watch hiking videos to hike. An impossible burden of our digitally intertwined lives is the omnipresent spectre of inadequacy, or of seeing someone else’s life and wondering why ours can’t be that cool. (Grayson Haver Currin / Outside)

Amazon’s towering success doesn’t accrue to their hourly workers. Employees feel managed largely by app, algorithm, and strict but poorly explained rules. If they go beyond the requirements, there’s no reward. Amazon intentionally limited upward mobility for hourly workers. It’s impossible for them to get leadership roles. (Karen Weise, Grace Ashford, Jodi Kantor / NY Times)

Don’t say, “It’s not personal.” When someone is hurt, angry, or otherwise clearly affected by something you’ve said or done, telling them it’s not personal only adds insult to injury. If you actually care, why not acknowledge and own that it is personal to them, even if not to you? If you can’t do that, don’t say anything about “personal” at all. (James R. Detert / Harvard Business Review)

Only 45 percent of the population in El Salvador has internet access. It remains to be seen how exactly the national government thinks it will improve connectivity, particularly in rural areas, and get powerful enough devices into peoples’ hands to support a bitcoin economy. (Aaron Mak / Slate)

RELATED: Hugo Conteras photographs surfers and sells the best shots for about $20. He’s taken Bitcoin occasionally, but the dips in price burned him. “Now I tell them it’s $25 if they want to pay in Bitcoin. You don’t know when it’s going to go down.” (Ezra Fieser / Bloomberg)

Naomi Osaka has given a public face to a growing, and long overdue, revolt. Like so many other women, the tennis prodigy has recognised that she has the right to put her health and sanity above the unending demands imposed by those who stand to profit from her labours. In doing so, Ms. Osaka exposes a foundational lie in how high-achieving women are taught to view their careers. (Kelli María Korducki / NY Times)

Seek to contribute, advises Marc Andreessen. Find the hottest, most vibrant part of the economy you can and figure out how you can contribute best and most. Make yourself of value to the surrounding people, to your customers and coworkers, and try to increase that value every day. (Noah Smith / Noahpinion)

My Directive

When we cannot change the situation, we have to change our response. What happens to us is not nearly as important as the attitude we adopt in response.

Because, if every misfortune can be blamed on someone/something else, we not only miss the opportunity of examining our contributory behaviour, but we also silently accept that no matter what we do, life will always be full of misfortune.

Quote to Note

Learn—because it’s not the knowledge itself that’s as important as showing that you have the generic ability to learn and complete schoolwork. Signalling also explains the sheepskin effect, where actually earning a diploma is more valuable than the individual years of learning that went into it—because employers prefer workers who stick around and finish what they start.

― Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain

Talk to Me

Do you agree with what I said, or do you think otherwise? Send me counters, comments, questions, and tips to resist $300M. 🤜🤛

Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋