On his way to be sworn in as the most powerful man in the world, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to be lifted out of his car and carried up the stairs.
Frances Perkins, who campaigned with Roosevelt and later became Secretary of Labor, said the most remarkable thing about the president’s paralysis was how little its hindrance seemed to bother him. He once told her: “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say ‘that’s all right,’ and drink it.”
There’s a useful and overlooked skill: Accepting a certain degree of hassle and nonsense when reality demands it.
This is not an enjoyable skill, which makes it overlooked. But you realize how useful it can be once you spot someone who lacks it. They struggle to get through the day, upset by the smallest hassle. I was once on a flight with a CEO – he let everyone know that’s what he was – who lost his mind after we had to change gates twice. I wondered: How did he make it this far in life without the ability to deal with petty annoyances outside of his control? The most likely answer is: In denial over what he thinks he’s in control of, and demanding unrealistic precision from subordinates who compensate by hiding bad news.
A few other useful and overlooked skills:
Calibrating how much you wanting something to be true affects how true you think it is. This is magic in investing, where huge rewards for being right correlate with people’s unshakeable faith that they are right. The idea that rewards promote focus and skill is only true to a point; when the rewards get high enough it spins the other direction, because mental bandwidth that would otherwise
