[A seller with few buyers might be willing to accept installments spread over longer terms to close faster, minimize taxes, and earn more money in the end.]
[How much opportunity there is depends on your ability to notice it.]
Knowing what I want to offer is more important than knowing what another person expects.
I don’t want to reward myself with things that undermine my efforts.
My empathy extends beyond my capacity; therefore, my boundaries should not exist at the edges of my empathy.
When I feel self-righteous and sure of myself: tone it down about 25%. When I feel uncertain and hesitant: crank it up about 25%.
The Hero as Flexible Bureaucrat
[Bureaucrats that are incorruptible become like machines (until they’re replaced by machines), and this inflexibility counterintuitively makes them anti-human.]
“I’d bend the rules too, if I knew it would save millions of lives”. Yes sure of course so would I, but would you bend the rules to save someone an hour of unnecessary paperwork? Knowing that if your boss found out he might use it as a pretext to fire you? That’s the kind of subtle, small-scale heroism that, repeated millions of times, creates a more humane society.
Corporations and governments are already rushing to replace many customer-facing jobs with language models. This makes a lot of sense if you take the State-eye view and see human bureaucrats as faulty robots. But if you see the work of a flexible bureaucrat as noble, sometimes even heroic - these are precisely the jobs we should protect.