The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking | Peter D. Kaufman [Outliers]

Go positive and go first and be constant in doing it. There may be no better formula for living the best life you could possibly live. That's a quote from Peter Kaufman, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. This podcast is all about learning from others, mastering the best of what they've figured out so you can use their lessons in your life. Peter Kaufman is someone you probably never heard of, and that's by design. He's the chairman and CEO of Glenair, an aerospace company that he's led since 1977. Over that tenure, he's compiled one of the best track records in business history. Peter's also the editor of Poor Charlie's Almanac, the definitive collection of Charlie Munger's wisdom. He was one of Charlie's closest friends for decades. Peter is also a personal friend. I've learned more from him in the past decade than nearly anyone else in my life. Despite all of his wisdom, Peter rarely gives public talks or interviews. He prefers it that way. One of his favorite sayings is that the whale that surfaces gets harpooned. In 2018, he made an exception. He gave a speech that was never supposed to be recorded, But Peter believed the message was too important to keep private. As he put it, it was critical for anyone interested in living a full, meaningful life with minimal regret. So he allowed that talk to be transcribed. And I'm so glad he did because what he shared that day might be one of the most valuable frameworks for living I've ever encountered. We're gonna talk about some of the lessons from that talk today using a lot of Peter's ideas and thinking. The complete transcript and audio are reproduced at fs.blog with the written permission of Peter. So you can find a link in the description for this episode or just Google the multidisciplinary approach to thinking. Let's dive in. Peter opens his talk by asking why multidisciplinary thinking is important. The answer comes from the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said to understand is to know what to do. What a great way of putting it. When you truly understand something, you don't make mistakes. Think about it this way. Mistakes come from blind spots. They come from a lack of understanding. So the more we understand, the fewer mistakes we will make. This is why Peter believes multidisciplinary thinking is critical because we understand more. The world doesn't organize itself into neat academic departments. Problems don't come with labels like economics or psychology or biology. They come unlabeled and interconnected. They're usually super messy. The financial crisis of two thousand eight, for example, wasn't really a financial problem. It was a psychology problem, an incentives problem wrapped in a complexity problem. The range of specialists couldn't see it because they could only see the world through one lens. Peter illustrates the danger of such specialization with a …