First, strategies that make sense
+ Learn to say NO. I used to think that NO was the hardest word inn the English language to say. It is. But I now think YES is the dumbest word. Invest money in a dumb venture and you’ll agonize for eons, trying to fix it, trying to counsel a CEO who doesn’t listen.
+ Learn to change what’s not working. My friends have kids who just graduated. One sent out 250 resumes and received not one single response. I asked him “Maybe we should try a different approach?” He answered me, “It’s a great resume.” (I didn’t make this up. I’m not that creative.)
+ For God’s sake, ask for advice. Ask Gemini. Ask Perplexity. Ask ChatGPT. Or better, ask your happy and successful neighbor who wants to feel useful in his dotage.
+ Learn to mull. My partner, Gerald Friesen, is a master muller. He’d think, research, think some more and then conclude Harry’s latest idea was stupid. Which it was.
+ Flattery and attention work. People prefer to hear what they did good. People like hearing “Thank you” or a kind email/text after you did something for them.
+ Don’t lend anyone any money. Don’t borrow any money.
I asked Google’s Gemini. She replied:
The most famous line Shakespeare wrote about being a borrower or a lender is from the play Hamlet. It is spoken by the character Polonius to his son Laertes:
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”
Second, how to achieve a happy, pain-free, healthy old age
+ Exercise is the only free lunch. Every book and article on aging agrees. I prefer daily tennis. But walking, running, yoga, pickleball etc. all work. Regular movement is the key.
+ Food kills. Everyone eats too much of it. Slice every plate in half. Eat half. Keep half for tomorrow.
+ Doctors make horrendous mistakes. Surgeons are the worst. If there’s an alternative to being cut up, try it. Too many of my friends are suffering from operations they probably shouldn’t have had. I would not be alive today if I had believed the dumb doctor I first saw in a hospital emergency room. two years ago. I was suffering big-time. He completely misdiagnozed me and sent me home — where I would have died the next day.
+ Sleeping is key. You don’t have to sleep 7-8 hours in one go. Learn your sleep habits. I personally find that one hour nap in the morning after tennis and after breakfast makes me feel better than hours in the night. I posted the previous blog at 4:23AM. I woke at 1:30AM inspired and wrote about AI. For today’s blog, I felt inspired after my mid-day nap and breakfast sandwich. You can accommodate a mad sleep schedule to a real job. I used to nap after lunch in my office by pulling out two pillows from my desk’s pendaflex drawer, crawling under my desk and closing my office door.
+ Curiosity will add years to your life. I ask older people “What excites you?” Answers I’ve received include “Nothing” to “I’m still looking.” They’ll be dead soon. Learning new things makes you live. The world is stuffed with great podcasts, great books, great videos. Hint: don’t watch or read about today’s politics. That will really depress you.
+ Social interaction is key. Instance: Charlie Munger lived to 99. Here’s a clip from the Wall Street Journal:
“I’ll have to learn Braille,” he (Charlie) told one friend. He had studied it after his botched cataract surgery (which left him blind in one eye) but never mastered it. He was ready to try again.
That turned out not to be necessary. His right eye (the other one) slowly improved, but Munger’s movement became constricted. Around 2016, he lost the ability to play golf, a longtime passion, and relied on a walking stick. Playing bridge with others became difficult. Munger, who had lost his wife in 2010, feared loneliness and irrelevance.
He chose to spend more time with friends, buoying his spirits. Each Tuesday, he met a half-dozen or so business associates and others for breakfast, usually at the Los Angeles Country Club. The group typically arrived at 7:30 a.m. and could go for hours. They discussed investments, traded barbs and shared jokes. Regulars included investors John Hawkins and John Conlin, Uber Chairman Ron Sugar, and later Bobby Kotick, the former Activision chief executive. Robert Bradway, Amgen’s CEO, made occasional visits. Munger, at the head of the table, told stories and shared philosophies.
You can read the full Wall Street Journal article here.
Harry’s latest hallucination (AI word for a mistake)
I wrote about the skyrocketing computer power driving AI:
We don’t have that history with AI. What we have is the enthusiasm of smart individuals, who are fascinated with the new exponential computer power — no longer progressing at a gentlemany doubling of speed every two years (Moore’s Law), but of a million-fold power increase every single year.
I was wrong. Gemini put me right:
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has made two notable statements regarding a million-fold increase in computing power, both related to the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the perceived end of traditional Moore’s Law:
1. Past Achievement: A Million-Fold Increase in the Last Decade
Huang has stated that NVIDIA achieved a 1 million-fold improvement in AI performance over the last ten years, primarily through innovations in GPU architecture.
+ Context: He made this claim while arguing that building a massive, dedicated semiconductor supply chain for AI is unnecessary.
2. Future Prediction: A Million-Fold Increase in the Next Decade
