You shouldn’t assume that you are always the best person to make decisions for yourself because often you aren’t. While it is up to us to know what we want, others may know how to get it better than we do because they have strengths where we have weaknesses, or more relevant knowledge and experience. For example, it’s probably better for you to follow your doctor’s advice than your own if you have a medical condition. Later in this book, we will look at some of the different ways people’s brains are wired and how our understanding of our own wiring should influence which choices we make for ourselves and which we should delegate to others. Knowing when not to make your own decisions is one of the most important skills you can develop.

I’ll explain the concept of believability in more detail in later chapters, but to cover it quickly: Believable parties are those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished something—and have great explanations for how they did it.

There are many things people consider “good” in the sense that they are kind or considerate but fail to deliver what’s desired (like communism’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”). Nature would appear to consider them “bad,” and I’d agree with nature.

Everything other than evolution eventually disintegrates; we all are, and everything else is, vehicles for evolution. For example, while we see ourselves as individuals, we are essentially vessels for our genes that have lived millions of years and continuously use and shed bodies like ours.

I recommend Richard Dawkins’s and E. O. Wilson’s books on evolution. If I had to pick just one, it would be Dawkins’s River Out of Eden.

Of course, we are often satisfied with the same things—relationships, careers, etc.—but when that is the case, it is typically because we are getting new enjoyments from the changing dimensions of those things.
