#212 Blas Moros – Episode Notes
Blas Moros Key Takeaways
Blas’s impressive background in tennis set the foundation for his incredible work ethic and self awareness. However, the transition after college athletics was challenging for Blas and he had to take time to learn who he was outside of the sport.
“Once you lose that sense of mastery, that sense of structure from sport, it’s pretty easy to let everything unravel”
After Blas took the time to self-reflect, he gained a natural curiosity for reading and learning. He began taking notes on the many books he read, sharing them with family and friends and his audience began to grow which ultimately led to his website The Rabbit Hole.
“It feels like a conversation with the author where there’s highlights, there’s notes, there’s things I want to ask them if I ever have the opportunity”
Blas’s newest project, The Latticework, is a multidisciplinary resource and community that’s looking to interconnect and explain valuable ideas.
“I’m hoping that together with the communities engagement and involvement that we can create something really beautiful, something that adds a ton of value, a learning roadmap”
4:05 Blas’s Tennis Backstory
Blas’s uncle gave him a tennis racquet when he was three, and he would take it everywhere. After participating in countless sports, Blas turned all his focus to tennis when he was 13. This decision led him to become captain of the Notre Dame tennis team his senior year.
“It’s shaped a lot of who I am and how I think about the world by pushing myself and trying to become the best version of me”
5:37 Why Blas Chose Tennis
Out of the many sports Blas was involved with, tennis was a combination of enjoying it the most and he felt better at it. He primarily enjoyed the pressure of the individual sport.
“I loved that aspect of it being all on me, putting myself out there, seeing what I had that day”
6:27 Internal Narrative
Sean asks Blas what the narrative was in his head when he was going through countless grueling practices. Blas says that practice was the difficult part for him, because it made matches easy. Blas loved every minute of practice, even in the middle of summer humidity in Florida.
“Getting to know what pushes you, what buttons you have, what makes you better what makes you worse”
7:41 Reoccurring Themes from Tennis to Current Life
Blas talks about how learning about all aspects of himself through tennis has allowed him to have a deeper understanding of himself in the areas of his life outside of tennis.
“Self knowledge is self mastery, I really believe that”
8:35 Deciding What Strengths & Weaknesses to Focus on
Blas learned what to focus on from tennis very early, because of how quick the feedback loop is.
“Overtime through practice you get to hone those strengths”
After years of a tight practice and school schedule, Blas explains how he was actually able to self reflect with all of his newfound free time after college.
10:55 Moving on from the Athlete Identity
Blas wrote an essay called The Infinite Game that he wrote as something he wished he had when he graduated.
Blas talks about how sports are finite games, there’s a winner and a loser but infinite games are bigger than that and are played just for the pure joy of it.
“I didn’t have these thoughts to reflect on at the time of graduation but looking back so much of this is applicable”
After graduation, Blas thought about what he wanted his life to look like, looking as far ahead to 80 years old.
“Once you lose that sense of mastery, that sense of structure from sport, it’s pretty easy to let everything unravel”
So Blas asked himself what he would never regret having done in his life.
“I would never regret reading, I would never regret learning, traveling, and meeting fascinating people, so 6 years ago that’s what I structured my life around”
Instead of having hours a day dedicated to tennis, Blas focused this amount of time per day on these pursuits. His reading journey began when Blas picked up the The Four Agreements after graduation.
14:36 Blas’s Process
The beginning process for Blas finding a new structure was ‘brute force’ and a series of making mistakes and working through them. He believes everyone needs to go through this to figure out the right process for them.
“You just start with what interests you and eventually that will expand as you learn more and get more curious”
Blas’s learning process began through reading books and taking notes in order to fully absorb the information to prevent having to re-read the books in the future.
“That process of synthesizing and distilling these core ideas from all these various books has been really helpful for me”
16:50 Keeping a Clear Vision
Blas says that even though the process could take years, having a clear vision is extremely important.
“If you’re wandering a little bit and you’re not really sure what you’re looking for or where you’re going, those opportunities come by pretty often, but you don’t recognize them”
He references the quote from the book Learning to Learn that is
“If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s pretty hard to know what to find”
18:36 Blas’s Journey as a Learner
Blas talks about how he always did really well in school, but he would do the minimum he could to do really well.
“It was really only after the fact when tennis was gone that I had space, a moment, and energy to devote to other things”
19:49 Find the Time to Get Space
Sean asks Blas if there’s anything he recommends for listeners to do in order to carve out space in their lives while living in a modern world of being constantly connected.
“Set aside a couple of hours for yourself, as often as you can”
Blas recommends people put their phones away and allow themselves to dive deep into a personal passion, whatever that may be.
22:06 Evolution of The Rabbit Hole
Blas had begun sharing his book notes through individual emails and it grew from friends and family to a bigger network. He decided to just put all of the books and his notes on a website which has grown over the past 6 years.
“There was no masterplan going into it, it was sharing things that I thought was worthwhile and interesting”
23:55 What Blas Hopes Readers Leave With
Blas wants his website readers to choose their own adventure among the 600+ books listed.
“There’s no rhyme or reason to a lot of the books that I’ve read but they interested me in the moment and they felt like the most important most interesting to me when I picked that book up”
25:52 Reading Process
Blas believes that figuring out how to distill key concepts from reading is a muscle that readers have to consistently work.
“It feels like a conversation with the author where there’s highlights, there’s notes, there’s things I want to ask them if I ever have the opportunity”
It was a difficult step for Blas to move the concepts from the intellectual to the real world.
“It’s not a purely intellectual exercise, it’s a pragmatic one”
29:31 Balancing Life with Key Lessons
Blas is an early riser and he takes the two hours before work as his sacred time to read, write, and take time for himself.
“It’s not sacrificing family life or sacrificing work, it’s all interconnected. The benefits of sitting down and reading and synthesizing these ideas benefits each”
31:00 Blas’s All Time Reads
Every December Blas does a recap of the books that he read during that year which is important for him to see the connections between them. He’s found that about 5% of the books that he reads throughout each year fall into his category of books worth re-reading.
“It takes a lot of bad books or books you don’t really love to be able to understand a really good book”
Blas lists the following books from his worth re-reading list:
33:17 Blas’s Essays
Blas says that writing is somewhat of a long process for him since he doesn’t have much formal writing practice.
“Becoming a good writer makes you a clearer thinker and that’s what I’m hoping to get out of that process”
He recommends his essay, The Infinite Game for student-athletes. He also mentions The Inverted Hierarchy and Challenging * Matter = Meaningful, among others.
34:55 The Inverted Hierarchy
Blas dives into his essay The Inverted Hierarchy and how hierarchies are a fundamental organizational structure of nature.
“It’s a simple logic chain, you have to have square one in order to build off of that to get to square two”
However, now that we aren’t living in a world of scarcity, Blas believes that we should re-evaluate how we interact with others and he references the book Setting the Table.
“From an evolutionary and biological perspective, this inverted hierarchy might be the correct route to go in today’s day and age”
37:01 Teacher Reference Guide
Blas’s Teacher Reference Guide is a deep dive on a particular topic, subject, or person. These topics are all over the map and Blas says it encapsulates his learning process.
“It’s things that I found incredibly interesting in the moment that I went really deep on”
Putting these things together serves as a useful guide for Blas to look back and see the key takeaways.
38:28 What Drew Blas to Complexity
Blas read a few papers on the Santa Fe Institute and read the book Complexity that blew his mind. He had never heard many of the terms and concepts that these readings introduced in his years of formal education.
“It seemed crazy to me that so many of these important topics, at least in my experience, were never covered”
39:23 Blas’s Creative Writing Process
For Blas, the topics of the essays come organically.
Usually Blas creates a word document with a variety of quotes, notes, questions, that he knows he wants to tie in together somehow. From that compilation, he gets the overarching theme and then writes from start to finish. After the piece is written he goes through 6 or 7 times to reduce and edit.
“It’s a long process but I enjoy every part of it”
Blas says that he learned from Paul Graham to simplify when it comes to writing.
42:11 Monthly Challenges
Blas fostered his mentality of taking on new monthly challenges during his senior year of college
“It was exciting to me to try to learn new things on a systematic basis”
Blas explains how this has also given him an excuse to try and fail things.
“These things that I do every month are not part of my ego, they aren’t part of my identity, they’re things I’m trying to learn”
43:33 The Latticework
Blas describes The Latticework as a multi disciplinary resource and community that’s looking to interconnect and explain valuable ideas. The title is taken from Charlie Munger and his idea that you need a latticework of mental models in your head in order to make them applicable.
“The more we learn the more we can learn, it’s not magic it’s just that we have more hooks to hang ideas off of”
Blas’s hope for this project is that it becomes a useful guide for people to understand how to spend their time.
“I’m hoping that together with the communities engagement and involvement that we can create something really beautiful, something that adds a ton of value, a learning roadmap”
47:14 Broad Concepts of The Latticework
Blas explains that a discipline is the overarching theme and there are ideas within each discipline, starting with Worldly Wisdom.
“If we can understand these core ideas I think it helps pave the way for future understanding, for a more seamless path that we can come to understand some of these disciplines and ideas”
The core to this project is making these disciplines and ideas applicable to everyday life.
49:47 Lollapalooza Effect
Originating from Charlie Munger, Blas says that the Lollapalooza Effect came from the idea of emergence. The concept that sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of the parts is what Blas is trying to achieve through the community built around The Latticework.
“I want this to be co-owned and used and engaged with by a broader community that cares about these ideas”
Blas believes the lollapalooza effect can come in if they can get the right people engaging with it to create the right culture.
51:39 Listener Involvement in The Latticework
Right now Blas is just wanting to provide a resource to people, which is currently Worldly Wisdom. Through this initial resource introduction, he’s hoping people step away with an understanding of what they’re trying to accomplish.
The next step is currently being built, which is a way for users to highlight, comment, and engage in groups to have active involvement with the content.
“With this tool that we’re building and getting the right people involved early on, making sure we set the culture and incentives properly from the early day, that might lead to lollapalooza effects”
53:37 Galilean Relativity
Blas says that Galilean Relativity is one of the top 5 topics they cover in The Latticework.
Galilean Relativity is the idea that you can never truly grasp the system that you are a part of.
The people around us in our support system and being multidisciplinary is what helps us in this concept because you get new looks and perspectives of the same situation.
“By giving yourself this multidisciplinary view you are giving yourself at least a greater chance of escaping Galilean Relativity”
56:32 Blas’s Resources
Right now Blas is giving away Worldly Wisdom for free with an early release waitlist here.
57:33 Blas’s Favorite Thinkers & Leaders
“Exposing yourself to these different thinkers and these different ideas and really getting a peek into their brain and how they think about things to me has been so exciting”
59:06 Blas’s Strengths
Blas lists two things as his strengths
- He is not afraid of hard work
- He is not smart enough to make things complicated, he sees and thinks relatively simply
“One thing The Latticework is trying to accomplish is getting down to the essence of these things”
1:01:41 Lesson from Blas’s Mother
Blas’s mother told him:
“You need to fill your cup before you can possibly fill other’s cups”
Meaning, you need to have love and compassion for yourself before you can give it to other people.
“These people with a full cup are playing the infinite game, a non zero sum mentality meaning that just because I have an idea if I share it with you it doesn’t take away from what I have, in fact it increases it”
1:04:19 Blas’s Person of Choice for a Sit Down Interview
“I think he is the greatest nation builder of the last couple centuries”
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