Pain + Reflection = Progress: pain is information about the gap between reality and your model.
The equation only holds because of the middle term. Pain alone produces avoidance; reflection is the step that converts it into an updated model.
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prerequisite-of →Write recurring decisions down as principles — a decision made once and codified stops costing willpower and starts compounding.Reflection is what produces a principle worth writing down. Skip it and you're just accumulating rules you never earned.
← contradicted byJudge a decision by the distribution of outcomes it could have produced, not the one that happened to occur.
The sharpest methodological fight in the library. Dalio treats pain as information about a gap in your model. Taleb says the pain is often just variance, and reflecting on it teaches you superstition with the confidence of experience. Both cannot be the right default.