The hardest part is making it look easy.
Cached Thoughts
Often, a game requires you to excel at a different game just to qualify to play.
A student first needs to get into a college to learn there. A CEO first needs to rise through the ranks of a company to get there. A politician first needs to get elected to have any impact.
The two games are often very different, and few people have, or can develop, the skill to do well at both. The harder the qualifying game, and the more it differs from the real one, the more it selects for people who are good at qualifying. You can see the downsides most clearly in politicians, less in CEOs, and least in college grads.
Even if you have both skills, by the time you qualify for the real game you’ve often been so focused on getting there that you don’t know what to do now that you’re there.
Memory is much more fragile than you think. Write shit down the instant you can.
If everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera.
— John Rich
Selling out — stadium tickets, merch, albums — is really hard. Hipsters have an aversion to anything popular, and it’s mostly just sour grapes.
There is no risk analysis without first concretely identifying the risk vectors. “Take less risk” is not a viable strategy. What specifically are you trying to de-risk? What are the odds it happens? What is the downside? How much are you willing to do, or pay, to de-risk it?
Getting what you want requires a plan. A plan needs to have contingencies for things not to go as you expect.
History is written by the victors, so whoever wins will declare their cause just.
Related: If the news is fake, imagine history.
People-finding is hard — whether it’s friends, cofounders, or partners.
If I can’t have it forever, I don’t want it at all.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
Not Ben Horowitz — I checked. The line has no confirmed author; it floats around as a Zen-adjacent aphorism (Simon Sinek attributes it to Zen Buddhism) and gets pinned on whoever last quoted it.
Economics requires asking “And then what?” for every incentive or policy decision. — Sowell
When I have defeated you, I will be a man who can even cut steel.
— Zoro, One Piece
All places look alike because skyscrapers are efficient.
Doing diverse activities is fun. Doing the same thing compounds.
Intuitively, we all get that capital is a constraint on growth. For most people, it is the constraint on growth.
But once you have enough, it isn’t really a bottleneck — and it’s easy to forget about all the other constraints.
Case in point: Nauru, a tropical island in the middle of nowhere that stumbled into more cash than it could possibly spend. The geography made sure you couldn’t build a viable country on top of it anyway.
A healthy mind, a happy home, a fit body — these things cannot be bought.
DeepSeek did with a couple million what OpenAI did with a couple billion.
Helps connect disparate thoughts, brainstorm novel ideas.
But don’t get high on your own supply — you also tend to think your ideas are needlessly profound. Everything seems more meaningful, more possible.
All the work associated with forming non-consensus beliefs is hard. Most professionals — e.g. hedge funds who do this directly for a living — haven’t reliably outperformed chance.
So people naturally gravitate towards copying others’ views. There’s a natural bid for influencers.
There have always been key writers and philosophers shaping educated thought. Then came newspaper columnists as news became more frequently distributed. Now it’s celebrities, streamers and reaction artists — a parasocial relationship where we feel closer to them. When Martin Shkreli shares his portfolio live, people want to listen, ape, and play along.
In our lifetimes, will we have journalists and streamers vying for credibility by outperforming on prediction markets?
Set in place recurring activities per quarter. Naturally for sales, those goals go with end-of-quarter targets. Try setting up similar recurring cadences for the product team — sprints, product launches, and so on.
Incumbents are the status quo — they always want to protect what they have. Every successful endeavour, by definition, becomes an incumbent. It’s the rational thing to do once you have something to protect.
You either die a startup or live long enough to become an incumbent.
Solver of past problems, creator of new ones.
It’s very hard to work towards a goal you’re not motivated about. The clearer the path from terminal goal to current action, the more motivated people feel working towards it. At the extreme, there are mothers known to have lifted massive weights to save their children.
The IIT JEE is a competitive exam. The trait Ivy League grads and IIT grads have in common is that they were willing to compete.
It’s a common trope in fiction: One Piece (the biggest comic ever written) has a whole power system based on haki, or willpower. Gattaca is about the triumph of will over nature.
You only have enough room in your heart to mildly desire a lot of different things, or fiercely desire just one. This is why focus works — Peter Thiel famously asked all his executives to have only one focus area at a time.
You get what you want.
So you have to want more as a prerequisite to having more.
Define success, find out what it costs, and pay it.
Insurance reduces downside. Risk aversion is overvalued in investing.
Wings are overvalued on average, because selling them is like selling insurance: only a well-resourced counterparty can take the big downside, so it’s low supply, high premium. Berkshire keeps cash on hand not just for market opportunities but to survive. It’s risk of ruin vs. risk.
The human condition is uncertainty. The FIRE movement aims to quell it, but even once financially independent, there’s still worry.
People, markets, startups. A one- to two-year forecasting horizon works for most of them.
Shorter horizons are random; longer ones leave too much room for error, since future events end up having an outsized impact.
Anything worth doing is worth doing right. — Hunter S. Thompson
Long-term utility maximisation via interest-rate discounting.
Procrastination is a subconscious response. It’s your mind telling you the thing you want to do isn’t worth doing, for one of three reasons:
- The end goal isn’t something you really want
- Your plan to work towards this goal is bad
- You don’t really have a concrete plan for how to achieve this
So, whenever procrastinating, making a detailed, better plan is worth it. If you’ve already done this, just sit down and put in the work.
Laziness is the gap between ambitions (long-term goals) and desires (short-term goals).
Kill your heroes. A hero is a direction, not a ceiling. The moment you’re deferring to one instead of learning from them, they’ve stopped being useful. The point was always to outgrow them.
Society should want to reward those who take big risks and spot opportunities others wouldn’t have. To be successful you need to pay attention to the trends in the world — and, of course, you need to care about being successful.
Some people, maybe a lot of people, get in on these trends by sheer luck. But not all.
Constant vigilance! — Mad-Eye Moody, Goblet of Fire
“Wrap this up so I stop having to deal with it” is often the best motivation there is. Use it.
Small issues get ironed out later. The thing that never ships doesn’t get to have issues.
It’s easier to convince yourself that you’ll find meaning in something you’ll do in the future than it is to find something meaningful worth doing right now.
In college I thought about what I’d be doing later — research, consulting — and how to get there. It turned out fine. But the most memorable parts were the ones that had intrinsic meaning at the time, not the ones that were investments in a future self.
“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” — Nietzsche, via Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Every few months, re-evaluate your value function — what you’re actually optimising for, not what you say you are. It’s easy to spend years optimising for career success before noticing that personal life mattered more all along. Check early, check often.
And when you feel ungrateful, compare yourself to your own baseline from a few years ago, not to the people around you. By that measure you’ve probably already hit a goldmine.