Cached Thoughts

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.

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).

Recall and spaced repetition to remember things.

Deliberate practice for upskilling.

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.

If you focus on risks, you find more risks.

If you focus on opportunities, you find more opportunities.

Anything worth doing is worth doing right. — Hunter S. Thompson

Alignment — in marriage, in a company, in a civic context. You want to live and work with people you’re aligned with. How do you build alignment?

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.

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.

Long-term utility maximisation via interest-rate discounting.

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.