The one concept that saved my life

This week in my Long Game column for Big Think, I share a personal reflection on a concept that helped me rebuild my life after a major health scare. It’s an idea I believe is becoming more essential than ever across business, investing, and beyond.

In the aftermath of brain surgery, I had to relearn basic movements and functions. What made recovery possible wasn’t brute force or optimization. Over time, I realized it was something more simple: slack.

My brain adapted by tapping into backup systems and alternate pathways. Slack — the idea of carrying built-in buffers — shows up everywhere in nature, business, and life. It’s the principle that underpins resilience itself.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to believe that we often worship efficiency. But when the world breaks — and it seems to be breaking more than ever — it’s slack, not optimization, that makes survival possible.

Key quote: “Nature figured this out a long time ago. In fact, slack isn’t a business concept. It’s a biological principle. Let’s start with plants. In fire-prone ecosystems, many trees store dormant buds beneath their bark. These buds don’t contribute to everyday growth. They’re not visible. They seem, frankly, unnecessary. Until they’re not. When fire scorches the canopy and destroys surface branches, those hidden buds activate. They sprout new growth. They bring the tree back to life. That’s slack. It’s backup potential. It’s not efficient in the short term — but it’s what makes long-term survival possible.”

Timeless lessons of long-term thinking from Warren Buffett

This Saturday, I’ll be in Omaha for Berkshire Hathaway’s 61st annual shareholder meeting. In the lead-up to the weekend, I found myself revisiting a favorite piece: a story by Wall Street Journal reporter Karen Langley, who combed through all of Warren Buffett’s annual letters to surface the most resonant quotes and ideas.

“He quoted Yogi Berra and Mae West, country songs and the Bible,” Langley writes. “In a February 2007 letter, he began a section about retroactive insurance transactions with, ‘Warning: It’s time to eat your broccoli,’ and concluded: ‘Aren’t you glad that I promised you there would be no quiz?'”

I know it’s a little cheesy — quoting Buffett always is — but I find that re-reading Langley’s highlights (and more importantly, going back to the source material itself) is still inspiring, both as an investor and as a writer.

Key quote: “Occasional outbreaks of those two super-contagious diseases, fear and greed, will forever occur in the investment community. The timing of these epidemics will be unpredictable. And the market aberrations produced by them will be equally unpredictable, both as to duration and degree. Therefore, we never try to anticipate the arrival or departure of either disease. Our goal is more modest: we simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.” (Feb. 27, 1987)

A few more links I enjoyed:

The Artist’s Superpower Is Speaking Languages Others Don’t – via Matt Zeigler

Key quote: “‍When you learn to play an instrument you learn a language. When you learn to paint a picture you learn a language. A second language. That’s a superpower, if you know how to repurpose the skill. When we learn to speak, we learn to do something with no translation. Your word choice is, kind of it, going forward. Thoughts and feelings get labels, but then everybody else speaks what you speak. But when you learn an art, like an instrument or a visual craft or cooking or — I’ll be very generous in the definition here — you are learning a new mode of communication. It doesn’t matter if you become a great artist or not. All that matters is that you learn the skill.”

How losing all my free time forced me to rethink productivity – via Danny Kenny / Big Think

Key quote: “This is the hollow chase that traps so many of us: We optimize our systems, track our metrics, implement the latest productivity hack to pursue recognition — all while avoiding the harder question of whether we’re moving efficiently in the entirely wrong direction.”

Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us – via Carl Hendrick

Key quote: “If reading is being reshaped by digital habits, then so too is the content itself which is of the ultra-processed form: flattened, filtered, stripped of its essential intellectual nutrition and increasingly produced not by humans at all, but by algorithms. Where once content was the expression of an inner life, now it is often designed to catch a query. Short-form, SEO-optimized, and emotionally neutered, much of what passes for writing today is tailored not for the attentive reader but for the indifferent algorithm. Its purpose is not to reveal, disturb or nourish, but to rank.”

Magic, Money and the Main Quest – via Tom Morgan / Leading Edge

Key quote: “Most people I encounter are specifically trying to find a way to reconcile the role of money in the pursuit of a more meaningful life. While each person seems to think they are struggling with it alone, this honestly seems like it might be the escape room “main quest” for humanity right now. In fact, it’s staying in a life that’s too small for you that’s like only playing the side quests. You’re grinding away in the dungeons accumulating a pile of gold and items, but never advancing the main plotline.”

From the archives:

Learning Through Play – via Shane Parrish

Key quote: “If we think back to being children, we often played with things in ways that were different from what they were intended for. Pots became drums and tape strung around the house became lasers. A byproduct of this type of play is usually learning — we learn what things are normally used for by playing with them. But that’s not the intention behind a child’s play. The fun comes first, and thus they don’t restrain themselves to convention.”