The Slight Edge is an amazing book about an amazing concept. Dramatic change happens one percent at a time at a consistent cadence.

Also great chapter in The Psychology of Money about Warren Buffet. He's been investing since he was a child and is now in his 90s -- He's been compounding returns on a longer timeframe then anyone else alive.

> Warren Buffet

That is selection bias at its worst: he really is an outlier. There are plenty of investors that beaver away every day and do not get his returns. I suspect you could pick one of his decades and only find a few people that exceed his ability.

> There are plenty of investors that beaver away every day and do not get his returns.

There are very few investors who consistently manage to exceed average market returns. It doesn't negate the importance of consistently investing.

Yeah. And he also hasn't beaten the market in over a decade.

> And he also hasn't beaten the market in over a decade.

You say that like it's an accurate condemnation of Buffett's investment skill.

A 30% - or higher - average annual return like the old days means Berkshire would have to go from a $636 billion market cap to a $8.7 trillion market cap in one decade. Yeah right.

Berkshire no longer competes with the market. It is the market. The larger you get, the harder it is to keep high returns going; Berkshire got really, really large. In terms of value it's also overwhelmingly an operating holding company, not an investment portfolio. The investment side of the business is not what drives Berkshire's stock higher, and hasn't been the primary driver for decades, operating results are.

This.. is a fine answer if asked in the context of an interview.

I resent doing other people's work for them, I don't resent helping them when they can no longer help themselves.

Interrupt me after you've tried as many ways as you can to solve the issue, and present them to me so either I can determine the remaining set you haven't tried or we can brainstorm. It shows initiative and thoughtfulness and creates a starting point for our solutioning.

How do you reply when they haven't invested much time in solving the problem? You ask, "what have you tried?". They say XYZ. What are you going to tell them to go back, try some other things, and then come back? Sometimes I too need to brute force my way through problems. It sucks, it's how I got where I am. No one has to suffer like I did early in the career but an ounce of effort from some folks every now and then would be nice.

>Interrupt me after you've tried as many ways as you can to solve the issue

Depends on what you value more. If you are optimizing for personal productivity, sure this makes sense. But if you are optimizing for team wide productivity, it doesn't make sense for someone to spend 3 hours trying everything they can think of before asking if you could have given them the answer in 5 minutes.

Something like spending 30 minutes trying and then asking even though you could go on makes more sense team wide.

I honestly prefer teaching people to fish over providing them shortcuts. Giving them the answer doesn't often help in my experience. Helping them frame the question better does. There are some cases where the person is lacking fundamental knowledge about the domain or technology, of course.

Ultimately, team productivity isn't about enabling people in the codependent sense. It's better to build them up than to merely support them.

The OP is pretty much a refutation of your answer, you don't think it has a point?

Isn't this basically what the OP is saying? Interruptors should try things first, and write down the things they've tried and what happened. After that, they can interrupt without wasting too much time from the interruptee.

This assumes the time interrupted is more expensive than the time spent by the interruptor trying other things, often needlessly.

There is a balance here. Hard and fast rules don't cut it in my experience.

I prefer new hires have a culture of problem solving, but not at the expense of being afraid to ask for help. That is more important than my uninterrupted time.

This usually means some people need to be incouraged to reach out sooner, and others need to be encouraged to try a few things on their own first.

The worst thing I could to is create a culture of fear around asking for help, and I'll err towards having more interruptions to make sure that isnt the case.

I'm reading the OP as "use these considerations to determine when to stop trying and instead interrupt me", and the comment I replied to as "you should never interrupt me unless there is no other option". The former seems to want to optimize for overall productivity between all participants, the latter seems to want to minimize interruptions.

whoops

Sugar is one of the hardest addictions to kick. I've kicked cocaine and alcohol too.. sugar was by far the hardest physically. It's also hard to stay sober because it's so accessible in foods and accepted by society.

Yeah it's like if people would put nicotine in every product, it would most likely make smoking harder to quit as well.

The argument the author is making is that addiction is an outlier. Many many many people drink, snort cocaine, smoke cigarettes and in the author's case, use heroin, and never develop addiction.

I can understand why this infuriates people who've seen or known people who've died from an addiction but it's important for people to understand that alcohol, drugs, gambling, facebook, the internet, shopping, and everything that can turn into an addiction are not the problem. The problem is deep emotional pain from traumatic experiences.

You had me until your last sentence. There are people who are born with huge lung capacity, they are able to swim faster and longer than anyone else. We would never believe that it's emotional pain that is keeping everyone else from swimming as well. And people are born colorblind, they don't lose that ability because of emotional pain. Physics and our individual body chemistry at birth plays a deep role in our unique life experiences. There's every reason to suspect the same mechanism affects addiction proclivity.

I think OP is saying that trauma leads to addiction, not necessarily the act itself; ie, shopping addicts are addicted to shopping because of past trauma not necessarily because of the act of shopping itself. As a prior nicotine addict I don't necessarily agree with this, as I have felt firsthand what the addictiveness nicotine feels like and I don't believe it's psychological (and, it seems like heroin may be similar)

I think it makes sense that people who, due to trauma or other lived experiences (in addition to those who are genetically predisposed), have a brain chemistry that leaves them not feeling as well as they could, would be more vulnerable to getting addicted to substances that make them feel better (or ”normal”, even).

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park . It's not conclusively relevant to humans, but it does at the very least cast doubt on the models historically used to understand addiction.

Look up Gabor Mate

Addiction engenders unresolved trauma. Can be drugs, shopping, sex, internet, or anything that gives you a temporary sense of relief from a deep underlying pain that usually forms in childhood.

Check out the work of Gabor Mate. It's silly how simple it is. It's silly how misunderstood it is.

Snoop dogg is as pop culture as Martha Stewart and Larry King and has been for awhile

Free speech is a lot harder to defend when you disagree with what's said. It's relinquished by moralistic rationalizations and righteous condemnations... Be careful what you wish for.