Watch Blas’s interview- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sQ1ZTFadX8
CEO of Frontier
Founder of The Rabbit Hole
Founder of The Latticework
The Big Ideas From The Big Disciplines
1. Create a valuable multidisciplinary learning resource
2. Leverage this resource to build an all-in community
3. Leverage this community and its feedback to build better learning tools, enhancing how people read, learn, and collaborate
Central to The Latticework is the belief that being a multidisciplinary learner and thinker is a lifelong goal worth pursuing. Everything we learn interlocks and becomes self-reinforcing, allowing our knowledge to compound over time. The more we learn, the more we can learn. This isn’t magic. We simply have more context on which to hang new ideas, learnings, and experiences – and this is the “latticework” for which this resource is named.
Life is an infinite game
Just like anything important in life, you have to think and decide for yourself, taking responsibility for your own life. The most important and difficult part falls on you – on you taking ownership and creating the life you want for yourself rather than simply reacting to life as it happens to you.
- Create systems that help you learn, grow, and meet new people. Long term/ Process > Outcome
- There is no finish line, focus on the mundane that compound overtime
- With big picture systems in place the details come into focus (rocks, pebbles, sand)
The earlier you do it, the more you stand to gain
- Determine what these dimensions are for you and what success in each one looks like in your own eyes. Then start structuring your life so that you actually spend your time on the dimensions you’ve determined are most important to you (this is much harder to live out than you might think!).
- As you get to know yourself and your value system more thoroughly, you can begin to prioritize your time more effectively. Many people wait too long (or never do it at all) but sitting down and thinking through this while your young will have priceless and unimaginable positive consequences.
- I sat down, visualized, and then physically wrote about the type of person I wanted to become, what I wanted to achieve, what I wanted to avoid. I put myself on my deathbed and asked, “What would I never regret?” These questions helped me better understand myself and how I wanted to spend my one life. The process and answers to these questions will differ for everyone but, for me, I found that I wanted to focus on the following life dimensions:Health, Family, Friends, Work, Community Service, Personal Growth, Spiritual Growth,
How clear does your vision need to be? It needs to be clear enough so that you would recognize an ideal situation when you see it.
Mentor/ Apprenticeship
- You have to take the time and the initiative to go out and find the person(s) you would love to learn from, spend time with, and emulate.
- In addition to living mentors, you should also study and model the “eminent dead” –those who have accomplished great things in the past. Get to know them through autobiographies, interviews, and other first-hand sources. This will improve your pattern recognition skills by enhancing your ability to make connections not only across disciplines, but across time, elevating your intuition from good to sublime. This is one of life’s true shortcuts, a key way to work smarter, not harder
Costanza’s Law of Contrast
- A subtle variety of “contrarian and correct” is contrast. If you have no contrast, you have no room for separation, differentiation, or efficiency. Competition is too tough this way as there is no way to stand out. It becomes a race to the bottom.
- If you can create enough contrast with your competitors, you can achieve incredible competitive efficiency.
- Choosing which industry or “game” to focus your career in could be vital.
- If everyone you’re going up against is top class, good luck! But if competition in an industry is less sophisticated, fragmented, complacent, slower, or inefficient for whatever reason (“cold sinks”), it can be a potential gold mine.
- Thinking of contrast in this way helps you find and decide which niche(s) to enter, and then outcompete the inefficient players who are already in it.Find a “cold sink”, determine what makes it inefficient, and go about exploiting it. On repeat. Velocity vs. Mass. Active vs. Inert. Proactive vs. Reactive. This framework could explain some of the success of companies which have been in industries typically considered unattractive.
- Be open, authentic, and vulnerable when others are isolated, disingenuous, and walled off. Become a great writer and public speaker. Be generous. Give credit and take the blame. Because human nature is what it is and is slow to change, these things will always be difficult for people as it requires courage, self-knowledge, and independence of thought.
- This goes against the norm because the subconscious self-preservation and hierarchical survival habits are deeply ingrained.
- Stepping back and reconsidering what we truly want and what it takes to get there, we can see what actually serves us and what is simply a habit we’ve fallen into. With this clarity and focus, we can see the lunacy for what it is and change as needed
- DISTANCE PROVIDES PERSPECTIVE
Galilean Relativity
- No-one can fully know or understand the system they are part of but by getting input of an outsider with fresh eyes we can avoid pitfalls.
- Seeking someone older or who has lived through similar circumstances can provide insight. You may not like the advice but that is the most important time to pay attention. Pay attention to what surprises you.
- Mull over ideas that defy your expectations and then figure out WHY, this will provide a better understanding of people and the world.
- Much like the fish doesn’t know she is in water, we often take the system we are in for granted. Pay more attention to what game you are playing rather than how to play it
The Best Product? A Great Team
1. Getting the air right
2. Attracting, retaining, and inspiring the best people, and then giving them the freedom and autonomy to run
3. Providing a grand vision which get people to go all-in
4. Creating a self-sustaining and self-organizing group that can prosper even when the leader steps away.
5. Invert! Always Invert
One-time success can happen by chance, but sustainable greatness cannot. It is one of the most difficult accomplishments and the hallmark of something truly special
Getting the air right
- Most important job of the leader to get the environment and culture right.
- Life becomes more playful, flexible, organic, and fun – all key attributes and mindsets when striving to accomplish something significant.
- Leader must also have high expectations and a hard side. Give people leeway as long as they’re living up to the high standards. If your team knows how committed you are and how much you care people go all in.
- History clearly shows that when leaders possess solid, authentic, human qualities, like trust, vision, and care, their groups tend to go all-in, and stay all-in.
- Great leaders are rare and we are hard wired to seek them out.
- “You always got the sense that Lick was playing. He was like a kid in a candy store. His exploratory and curious child-like mind never went away. He was not suited to be an administrator or manager but was a visionary and community builder. He encouraged people and showed them what was possible, what they were really working towards.”- On JCR Licklider
The Best People
- Most people want to work on meaningful problems, with quality people, where they can learn, grow, and impact the world in some positive way.
- Give people trust (must be earned), autonomy and reduce bureaucratic friction so people can spend time on the important problems.
- A focus on working on the most important problems in their field, surrounded by the best people, with a bias for speed, created a “black hole” of sorts at ARPA, starting a positive feedback loop. ARPA was able to attract high quality people as they knew that they would be able to work on the most important problems with less red tape. This attracted other great people, which allowed for more innovation, which further attracted the best talent, and so on.
- “hire the best people, buy them the best machines money can buy, inspire them to no end, and work them 14 hours a day.”
Setting the Vision
- Without a vision others can’t get behind and fight for, a strong culture and the best people will do less than they otherwise could.
- Never be satisfied with the ordinary and push the limits.
- A fundamental business and innovation principle: It is all about preparation, not prediction.
- An unbelievable “leaping emergent” effect occurs when a team goes all-in. This nonlinear outcome can occur when you have trust, a vision, autonomy, ownership, and a win/win mindset, and ARPA and PARC were able to tap into that.
- “Lick may have been one of the most intuitive geniuses of all time. He simply saw in his head how information flowed, and how people, things, and ideas were interconnected. It was this vision and his commitment and utter belief in this future which fueled the fire for these teams and helped them achieve what they did.”
Beyond The Leader
- If visions were to come to fruition, have to create a self-reinforcing and self-sustaining community between all the different groups who contributed to projects. This would create a more robust, sustainable team, allowing them prosper even after the leader or other key members stepped away.
- Find and train successors. You not only have to excel in a wide range of areas of construction and engineering, but you also have to identify, mentor, and prepare your own replacement, your successor.
- Why do people leave an organization? I always thought that low pay would be the first reason, but in fact it was the fifth. The top reason was not being treated with respect or dignity; the second was being prevented from making an impact on the organization; third, not being listened to; and fourth, not being rewarded with more responsibility. – Michael Abrashoff
The Inverted Hierarchy
- Hierarchies are one of nature’s oldest and most fundamental organizational structures, in part because they help make a system robust and efficient. They have become robust over the eons as the systems and subsystems of which they are composed have gone through iteration, adaptation, and evolution, having survived evolution’s perpetual culling.
- Over time, with just the right blend of stability and chaos, higher and more complex levels emerge. These higher levels are composed of and reliant on well-tested, above-average simpler blocks, naturally resulting in hierarchical structures. In this sense, quality emerges from quantity, complexity from simplicity. Since the simple organisms, the “bottom of the hierarchy,” give life to all resulting forms of more complex behavior, the argument can be made that the base is, in fact, the most important level of the hierarchy.
- This is a beautiful model which can be helpful in designing a more productive, fulfilling, and meaningful life. If you can blend enough chaos and stability into your life, relationships, routines, work, fitness, learnings, you can take advantage of what seems to be a fundamental principle of nature. Periods of stable intermediate forms are vital for life to flourish and evolve. This is where flow exists –too hard (too much chaos) and you can’t progress, but too easy (too stable) and you’ll be bored. Don’t burn yourself out but also don’t get complacent. Life flourishes at the edge of chaos, equilibrium = death. Learn from nature and use it to your advantage. These principles have survived the test of time in nature’s most brutal arena and the statistical sample is large enough to trust.
- Darwin’s, “survival of the fittest.” The fittest organisms (those most able to rapidly and effectively adapt) will survive and reproduce, spreading its genes and traits. At the beginning only simple organisms exist but through this process they give rise to the complex organisms and behaviors we see today, making the simple organisms vital since they serve as the foundation for further complexity.
- With a pyramid hierarchy the bottom is in fact the most important.
- Each step in the evolutionary chain serves as the launching off point for the next and, if the simple does not survive, neither will the complex. The simple is literally the foundation of the pyramid
- A forest would have no problem doing without its larger inhabitants. Deer, wild boar, carnivores, and even most birds wouldn’t leave any yawning gaps in the ecosystem. Even if they were all to disappear at once, the forest would simply go on growing without many adverse effects. Things are completely different when it comes to the tiny creatures under their feet. – Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees
How biological systems impacts business hierarchies
- Many companies have an “org chart” – a pyramid-shaped hierarchy in which the CEO is depicted at the top (as apex predator) and the mignons fall below: Although this hierarchy appears similar to the biological hierarchy shown above, what many human organizations forget (or ignore) is that the simple kernel out of which the hierarchy grew, the “bottom of the pyramid,” is most important.
- Many leaders in organizations work off “short time frames” that lead to risk increasing behavior. Through this short-term lens, this risky behavior makes a ton of sense, but if you have more of a perpetual time-frame, one similar to nature, these decisions are likely nonsensical.
- These types of organizations also tend to fall into the trap of what computer science calls “premature optimization.” They prematurely impose structure and complexity, ignoring nature’s typical process of iteration, adaptation, and evolution. They forget that complexity doesn’t arise out of thin air, that it evolves from the simple, and that this process makes the system antifragile. This type of tinkering is “antifragile” relative to blueprints and rigid plans because it allows for optionality and better decisions as more accurate information becomes available over time. However, many people aren’t in a system which allows for this type of process or simply don’t have the patience, the “long-term gratification gene,” for this type of growth. They do too much at once, skip steps, and put their ecosystem in jeopardy by trying to grow too fast. While slower in the short-term, copying nature leads to growth which is robust, sustainable, optimal. Copy nature and start with simple systems and iterate. Don’t instill or force a complex system on a situation when a simple one will do.
- The only way to correct is if the problem is seen holistically and restructuring the system. What makes a difference is redesigning the system to improve the flow of information, incentives, goals, stresses, constraints, stocks, and flows that impact specific actors or processes.
- Structure always affects function. The structure of social networks affects the spread of information and disease; the structure of power grids affects the stability of power transmission. The same must be true for species in an ecosystem. The layout of the web must profoundly shape its dynamics. – Stephen Strogatz, Sync
- Since structure always affects function, it doesn’t cost, it pays to spend an inordinate amount of time on the culture, the environment, the incentives. The structure is more important than the individual agents because the structure impacts the dynamics and interactions between the agents. It fundamentally drives and impacts behavior and is why a dumb rule in a well-structured system can achieve world-class results,but you hardly ever see the opposite.
- Changing structure created ripple effects- You must deeply understand the structure of the system – the interactions and dynamics – before you can hope to make any positive, significant, and lasting changes. It is also vital to remember that an important function of nearly every system is its own perpetuation – never underestimate self-preservation.
- Jacobi’s “Invert! Always Invert!” Can be helpful to gain a different perspective when changing structure. This inversion makes it more obvious who is on top, but also plainly shows that the hierarchy depends on a capable leader – one who can “balance” the system, set the vision, foster the culture, hire the right people, and decide on pricing. However, the frontline crew make up the majority, they are the “originating subsystem,” and the rest of the hierarchy, the “management,” should be a support function for them.
- You [former Home Depot CEO Frank Blake] now have a prominent job. But you don’t have a significant job. Don’t confuse the two. You have a prominent job because you’re the one who talks to investors, does interviews and so on. But you don’t have a significant job, because the only significant jobs are the ones that help customers. As we move to higher and higher levels in an organization, we tend to forget that. We tend to equate prominence with significance –and that creates all kinds of bad behavior, as well as an overall loss of bearings. – Bernie Marcus, Co-Founder of The Home Depot
- Danny Meyer- If the employee creates this valuable experience, it should be clear that management’s job is, among other things, to set the vision, communicate that vision well, and help eliminate any obstacles that stand in the way of the employees serving the customer. This flips the typical pyramid shaped hierarchy on its head. No longer is management at the top of the pyramid, instead, the salesmen, developers, designers, product managers, servers, customer service agents, etc. are at the top.
- In any hierarchy, it’s clear that the ultimate boss holds the most power. But a wonderful thing happens when you flip the traditional organization chart upside down so that it looks like a “V” with the boss on the bottom. My job is to serve and support the next layer “above” me so that the people on that layer can then serve and support the next layer “above” them, and so on. Ultimately, our cooks, servers, reservationists, coat checkers, and dish washers are then in the best possible position to serve our guests …I staunchly believe that standing conventional business priorities on their head ultimately
- Hierarchies are nature’s fundamental organizing structure – robust and efficient See the foundation of the pyramid for what it is – the most important You must change the structure to change behavior Compensate complexity with simplicity Invert the hierarchy V
Paradoxes
- Opportunities lie in paradoxes is only natural because otherwise the concepts would be obvious and therefore likely exploited. Like in any lucrative niche – whether in markets or natural ecosystems – competition moves in and, over time, results regress to the mean. Outperformance, therefore, cannot result from doing the obvious.
- The most valuable truths are the ones most people neglect –truths which are “contrarian and correct”
- Non-consensus ideas have to be lonely. By definition, non-consensus ideas that are popular, widely held or intuitively obvious are an oxymoron. Thus, such ideas are uncomfortable; non-conformists don’t enjoy the warmth that comes with being at the center of the herd. – Howard Marks, Dare to Be Great
- Most fairly good ideas are adjacent to even better ones
Give It To Get It
- The more you give, whether positive or negative, the more you will receive.
- A mindset of abundance requires trust, time, patience, persistence, a long-term gratification mindset, and not worrying about how or even if you will be “repaid.” Vitally, you have to act first–giving before you receive –in order to reap the benefits of this paradox.
- “overflowing cup model.” those who have a “full cup” – those who have sufficient self-love, self-confidence, and self-compassion – are able to fill other’s cups. Paradoxically, due to reciprocation, those with full cups tend to get even more in return than they give, further filling their cups. This can be thought of as a virtuous cycle and, like with any virtuous cycle
Common Sense/ Conventional Wisdom isn’t typically wise
- What we can learn from this is that what is conventional and “obvious” is rarely wise,and we must keep this top of mind before making important decisions, especially if there is social pressure, mania/depression, or any other combination which can trigger Lollapalooza Effects. We must also always account for the ever looming possibility of a black swan.
- In Howard Marks’ excellent memo, Dare to Be Great, he discusses this idea: Unconventionality is required for superior investment results, especially in asset allocation. As I mentioned above, you can’t do the same things others do and expect to outperform. Unconventionality shouldn’t be a goal in itself, but rather a way of thinking. In order to distinguish yourself from others, it helps to have ideas that are different and to process those ideas differently
- Only if the behavior is unconventional is your performance going to be unconventional…and only if the judgments are superior is your performance likely to be above average.
- Think for yourself, be skeptical and be aware of the good ideas that are overdone.
The Longcut is the Shortcut
- Any time I tried to skip ahead without doing the hard work necessary, I later paid for it–in spades.
- “There is never time to do the job right, but there is always time to fix it later.”- Richard Hamming
Attack from positions of weakness instead of head on
- Military strategy of attacking from an enemies flank instead of head on but can be applied to other situations in life such as goals. System over goals- Instead, seek to find systems which produce the results downstream, attacking the problem orthogonally rather than relying on direct frontal attacks.
- Similarly, rather than making a “direct frontal attack” on your goals, find systems that can get you what you want indirectly via The Path of Least Resistance.
- If you’re going to take on one of these massive problems, don’t make a direct frontal attack on it. If you’re going to replace email, don’t say so at first. Instead, say you’re building to-do-list-software. People can notice you’ve replaced email when it’s a fait accompli. Empirically the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it will take to get there and the further you project into the future, the more likely you’ll get it wrong. Start with what you know works and when you expand, expand in the right general direction. The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one. –Paul Graham, Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
Lower Yourself to Raise Yourself
- We can often move higher and faster by first stepping back and going slower.
- “servant-leader”–leaders who lower themselves by seeking to serve others, and never ask people to do what they wouldn’t be willing to do them selves
- Moses Maimonides said that the only virtue which can’t be overdone is humility.
- Wisdom flows into the humble man like water flows into a depression. – Lao Tzu
Expert Folly
- If you are or are attempting to specialize and become a domain expert, the tension you must balance lies in coming to gain deep fluency in an area, yet being humble enough to have a beginner’s mind, to be willing to change your opinion if the facts change. Likewise, if you are leading a group of people, you must know when you need experts and when you need people who have a fresh perspective, who are able to make intuitive leaps because they don’t know what they don’t know. As Hamming said, “most great innovations come from outside the field, and not from insiders,” so beware the expert folly, sometimes the best solution comes from outside a given field.
- None of our men are “experts.” We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert – because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the “expert” state of mind a great number of things become impossible. – Henry Ford
Enlightened Self-Interest
- Enlightened self-interest encourages you to find a way to create an environment and set incentives so that what is selfish individually is also beneficial to the group at large.
- When you find a way to align both personal and group interests, a torrent of potential energy is released. People no longer feel guilty or try to hide their selfish behavior, and all this energy can now go towards actually doing their job!
Structure ALWAYS Affects Function
- Since structure always affects function, it is worth spending an inordinate amount of time getting the structure – environment, culture, and incentives – right the first time around. When everyone is aligned, you can reach a “superfluid” state, removing all friction and creating “infinite mobility.”
- Superfluidity is the phenomenon wherein a substance undergoes a phase transition that completely removes viscosity and the matter flows infinitely and without friction. The lack of friction is directly related to the infinite mobility of a superfluid – friction creates heat, and even slight heat can cause a superfluid to return to a normal fluid state. The lack of friction allows the perpetual motion of the superfluid to exist and serves as a “loophole” in thermodynamics.
Small Things Become the Big Things
- the accumulation of small things and habits which individually seem inconsequential collectively make all the difference
- The difficult and insidious part about these marginal habits, thoughts, and actions is that the negative effects of ignoring them typically aren’t immediately felt – the feedback loops are slow and blurry.
- on the flipside of every vicious cycle there is a virtuous cycle, and by adding seemingly small and inconsequential habits together consistently, collectively they can make all the difference in the world.
- This idea that the details matter – that the small things are, in fact, the big things – has of course been stated in much more eloquent ways for millennia, but we still have trouble adhering to it. Harness the power of compounding by doing the little things well over a lifetime which, when combined and accumulated, can’t help but lead to exponential results. • Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. – Jerzy Gregorek • Life is a sum of all your choices. – Albert Camus • We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. – Aristotle • How you do anything is how you do everything. – T. Harv Eker • Everything we do imputes who we are and what we stand for. –Steve Jobs • Character may be manifested in great moments, but it is made in the small ones. –Phillips Brooks
Superb Conversationalists
- The best conversationalists often say very little. They instead are “active listeners”–not only listening to what people are telling them but hearing them too. They aren’t thinking of the next thing they can say to seem smart or engaged, they are simply present and aware – noticing subtle cues such as body language, tone of voice, and other emotions which help the other side truly feel heard and cared for. Don’t only listen to what people say, but also how they say it –the vast majority of the message lies in what is not being said.
Value/Quality
- We concern ourselves with our material possessions and “keeping up with the Joneses” because this is an easy scorecard to keep track of – there is always a price tag we can refer to. However, we unfortunately tend to neglect the things which truly matter because they are typically harder to “count”: relationships, our health, giving back to others, a beautiful day, and so much more. There is no price tag, and with few exceptions, this true wealth cannot be bought. Let’s aim to change our external scorecard to an internal one, one in which we focus on value over price
Teach to Learn
- The clearest understanding comes not from learning or doing something, but through teaching others. Ironically, the teacher gains more than the student!
- If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, we both still have one apple. But if you have an idea, and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, we each now have two ideas. – George Bernard Shaw
- The power and beauty of ideas is that they are infinite. I can give away ideas freely and it doesn’t diminish or take away at all from the idea. In fact, if anything, it adds to the pie, allowing some ideas to reach critical mass and truly change people or, potentially, the world.
- Richard Feynman, one of the best teachers I’ve come across, espoused a simple 4-step process: 1. Choose a concept 2. Teach it to a toddler 3. Identify your knowledge gaps and go back to the source material 4. Review and simplify
Effortless Mastery
- The paradox here is that by slowing down, by taking your time to truly master something, no matter how small, you actually speed the process up.
- An elusive state which is necessary in order to stay within yourself is one of egoless detachment –detachment to the outcome, but not to the process. This is a prerequisite of mastery because you cannot perform at your highest level unless you can let go and stop thinking in the big moments. Turning off the ego and rationalizing part of the brain takes diligence, deliberate practice, patience, and persistence, but it is vital. Once this state is reached, you will learn faster than you thought possible and perform at a higher level without even feeling like you’re trying. This is the state of flow.
- Paradoxically, it is when we try to sound brilliant we stumble, whereas when we stay within ourselves we sound better. There is always a schism between what the ego wants to play and what wants to come out. Although the master player may have great technical ability, you will not sense his attempt to show it; the technique manifests unconsciously. In sports, it often happens that the team with less “stars” wins it all. The players or coach will always talk about “staying within themselves,” or “just doing what they can do.” In improvised music, the one who stays within himself may be perceived as a master. – Kenny Werner Effortless Mastery
Discipline = Freedom
- Unless you are disciplined, you can’t live your ideal life. You are at the whims of your emotions, impulses, and base desires, never letting you get to the things which truly matter to you in the long-term.
- constraints give your life shape. If we remove them, we become a puddle rather than a vase, splashing and spilling all over the place.
- Thinking that we can simply and unequivocally give people freedom without knowing what to do with it has proven a flawed idea.
Life Lessons
1. Everything in this world is better in moderation, except one: humility. – Moses Maimonides
2. Engagement, passion, caring, enthusiasm, and curiosity serve as magnets for good luck and good people
3. Anything achieved through brute force never lasts –you must change the structure of the system if you want to have any sort of long-term impact (Robert Fritz)
4. Seek long-term games with long-term people (Naval Ravikant)
5. Win/Win is the only infinitely sustainable mindset
6. Amor Fati Amor – Love of fate, fate of love
7. Living deliberately –“the unexamined life is not worth living” –Socrates
8. Trust is the most powerful yet fragile tool in your repertoire
9. The true wealth in life lies in relationships. The quality of any network lies in its links
10.Simple but not simplistic –“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” – Buckminster Fuller
11. Abundance > Scarcity –in every aspect and facet of life, give more to get more. Timing, magnitude, place, and certainty are all unknown, but this mindset is worth it even if you never get anything in return (which you inevitably will)
12. There is no bigger waste of time than doing something efficiently that shouldn’t be done at all. But, if you do choose to do something, do your best and go all out
13. Trust that everything you learn and do will someday be helpful –this fuels infinite and effortless curiosity and motivation
14.Positioning > Prediction –understand what the feasible fluctuations are and make sure that you can first survive them and then thrive in them
15. There’s a reason George Marshall named his horse “Preparation” –“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” – Raymond Joseph Teller
16. Assume ignorance, not malice –give people the benefit of the doubt. Envy, hatred, jealousy, anger are simply acids that eat away at the container they’re kept in
17. Karin’s Cup– my mom always told me to first fill my own cup (to have enough self love, self-acceptance, self-compassion, and self-confidence) before I could “fill” others’. Those whose cups are empty are black holes who can never be satisfied –be sure not to be this person yourself and beware of those in your life who are. “Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.” – Kevin Kelly
18. Impatience with actions…
19.…but patience with results (Naval Ravikant)
20.Fight for what you believe in and stand up for what you think is right
21.Finding contrast in anything you do is the master key –“Don’t be the best. Be the only.” – Kevin Kelly 22. Unobstructed authenticity in everything you do – this helps attract those who love you for exactly who you are and helps you focus on the things that really matter to you (Josh Waitzkin)
23.Systems > Goals – Habits, routines, defaults, and incentives are superpowers (or supervillains). Systems help structure your life for long-term benefit whereas goals can be gamed and tend towards shorter-term mindsets
24.Process > Outcomes –you can’t judge a decision based on the outcome alone. Was it luck? Was your process repeatable?
25.Seek leverage in all that you do –code, media, software, technology, distribution, wisdom, judgment, capital, health, teaching others
26. To be interesting, be interested. (John Gardner)
27. Giving your all with no fear of failing is a valuable skill that few have. Decouple who you are from what you do
28. Love the problem, not the solution –if you’re only focused on and care about the solution, when tough times come, your motivation and dedication will falter
29. You’ll be surprised how often you find something when you know exactly what you’re looking for (The Infinite Game)
30. I’ve found that the 7 life dimensions – health, family, friends, work, community service, spiritual development, personal development –is a great framework in which to think about the important pillars in my life, finding balance that is appropriate given your priorities
31. Be very aware of who/what brings or detracts energy
32. Quality > Quantity – whether in things, thoughts, relationships, etc.
33. Long, uninterrupted periods of time are key to make progress in challenging pursuits
34. Good things take time
35. The Master/Apprentice model is impossible to beat. Aim to find someone you can build this type of relationship with, both up and down
36. Richard Hamming’s Trifecta – what are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on them? If not, why not?
37. El Flojo Trabaja el Doble –a key lesson I learned from my dad and an interesting life paradox. Oftentimes, simply doing the hard work upfront is actually less work than trying to find ways around it 38. Effortless mastery in all that you seek–another paradox where trying to force a skill or habit tends to backfire. Find ways to enjoy every step, making it effortless and sustainable (Kenny Werner)
39. What would the ideal version of yourself do? You’d be surprised how often the answer immediately surfaces if you simply ask
40.Sharing knowledge compounds it and teaching helps you learn it even better
41. Writing clearly = thinking clearly (Paul Graham)
42. You never know what someone is battling –let this thought lead you by the hand towards patience and empathy
43.Scott Adams’ Talent Stack –blending and combining unusual talents, traits, passions, hobbies, and elements leads to leaping-emergent effects that are powerful and hard to predict
44. The language behind complexity science is some of the deepest and most powerful I’ve found to describe and think about the world around us (On Complexity)
45.Systems thinking bears fruit regardless of field, industry, or context (Donella Meadows)
46. The power of synthesis to help distill, crystallize, and inform ideas (Charlie Munger, Will Durant)
47. If you bring forth a problem, also propose a solution
48. Intelligence is about seeing more options and wisdom lies in understanding the effects of those options
49. Nobody knows anything