Jacob Robinson's Blog, page 17

On Success

Here are a few thoughts I have on achieving (and keeping) success.

When it comes to success, the time in which you hit it is variable. But whether you do reach success — that’s determinable. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years trying to define success, much to the chagrin of people who believe success is undefinable. But my method of understanding success had nothing to do with fancy cars or Bali trips — it had more to do with understanding whether there was a certain chance that a person could achieve their Maslow’s hierarchy given they did a specific action. My conclusion was yes — there is always a move. 

There are few things as valuable as pure confidence. For with confidence you can get most if not all social requests. And we live in a social world.

The harder thing usually gives the better reward. It has greater demand, lesser supply, and increased return.

Luck isn’t a structure, it’s an obfuscation. Behind luck, there are hidden processes. Uncover those hidden processes, and you become lucky. Luck is a set of probabilities. Probabilities are a set of events. Events are a set of actions. Of course, this is a simplification — you can’t be expected to derive all these things. But understanding the concept can help.

When you are good to other people, see individual success. When everyone is good to one another, see societal success. People like it when others treat them well. They like it so much, in fact, they tend to treat the person well back. Imagine — what could that look like if it scaled out to everyone? 

Invest in public companies. Look for careers in private ones. Most of us don’t have the luxury of investing in private companies, due to the accredited investor requirement. However, you can still get the headwind indirectly by being part of the company itself. Growth in a firm usually means growth opportunities for those who decided to get a career there. Think outside the box. 

A key piece to success is scouting out opportunities and acting upon the ones with the best value. In life, a good phrase to follow is “say yes until you have to say no”. In other words, take on whatever opportunities that come your way when you’re young — then when you start building up some measure of clout, be much more selective and understand which will give you the most with the least amount of work. 

Productivity is all about matching inputs to outputs. When your inputs (reading, learning) equal your outputs (writing, building), you will experience maximum success. Of course, the input part of this is much easier and faster than the output part, so in practice this looks a little bit different than what the quote seems to imply. Principle still stands. 

The first part of your career has to be you saying yes to a lot of things, then performing those things well. When you get to the point where there are so many things to say yes to that you know for a fact you can’t perform all of them well, then you know to start saying no. This is the foundation of the “say yes until you have to say no” principle, and it is a pretty good rough guide to follow. 

Remember that “making it” doesn’t save you. You can always fall back in the hole. The only difference that finding success brings is that the game of life turns from being offensive to being defensive. It’s true — playing defensively in life is easier than playing the offensive. But plenty of times you get people who spend all their time playing offensively that they get to the top and don’t have any way to protect their wealth or fame or status, and they fall right back down again. Be careful out there. 

Achievement-Based Thinking

Some people think in terms of metrics, others in goals, or in routines. But what if you thought in terms of achievements?

I’ll be honest with you, I’ve tried all the above. Goals are great, but too long-term to be motivated by. Routines are boring by definition, and so are hard to use as a thought structure as well. Metrics do help… until they start going down, then they don’t. And so, while I incorporate all three into my day-to-day life, they failed to motivate me to continue on my journey. This is when I found joy in looking at achievements.

After you’ve spent some time building something up – whether it be a blog, or a series of books, or a podcast, or all three – you can look at how far you’ve come. 

It’s easy, when you’re so focused on progressing, to forget how much progress you’ve made. I was honestly shocked when I went back and found out I’ve already published three books, with two more on the way. It feels like I’ve barely done one! Another great way to do this is to use historical metrics – for example, look at how many page views you’ve gotten this year, and compare it to when you first started. It’s bound to be a lot more, given enough time difference between the two. 

If you’re just starting out, using large gauges like “number of books written” probably isn’t a good idea. Instead, you can start a tally of your “number of words written”, and look at your “achievements” in that light. If you keep even a small consistent habit, you’ll be shocked by how much it ends up increasing!

So, that’s a small introduction to achievement-based thinking. In summary: use goals and metrics as a way to carve the path, and use achievements as a way to stay on it. 

Is Relative Morality Helpful?

I’m no stranger to arguing in favor of a relative moral viewpoint. But I’ve recently come under the realization of a new argument against it: relative morality is possible, it just isn’t helpful. So… is it true?

Before I answer the question, I feel we should elaborate a bit on the background of the morality argument and the claim that’s being made here. For starters, the debate between objective morality and relative morality – whether morals are part of nature or not – has gone on for centuries. I’ve already elaborated on why I like relative morality better, so I won’t discuss that here. Instead, I’ll cut straight to the point.

One of the newer arguments against relative morality goes something like this: Okay, fine, sure. Morality is relative. But does seeing morality as relative really serve to help any of us? If we’re trying to stop a group of terrorists, or put a person behind bars, does it really help to shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, technically it’s okay because morality is relative and blah blah blah”. What does thinking about morality in a relative stance give us that thinking about it in an objective stance doesn’t?

Understandable. I think my first point would be to say that if someone is using relative morality as an excuse to shrug their shoulders, they have a fundamental misunderstanding of morality in general. Even in a relative moral landscape, you still have to think about morality – you have to determine what morality means to you, and make choices that lead to a good moral outcome. The only difference is that you acknowledge that there is no universal moral system – you have to determine morality on your own.

So with that out of the way, is thinking in terms of relative morality helpful? Certainly.

Think about the way you have arguments. Everyone knows that the secret to winning an argument is understanding the other person, then converting their position into yours. If you can have a good layout of what the other person thinks, you have a better chance to map a route to your side. 

Now, think about negotiating with a terrorist. You aren’t going to be able to negotiate with them with the assumption that your moral viewpoint is superior and theirs is inferior, because obviously they think it’s the other way around. Instead, if you can understand their moral viewpoint, you’re more likely to convince them to come to your side. 

Morality is inherently argumentative. They don’t want you to know it, but it’s true. While moral objectivists focus on building a theoretical canon of the “true morality”, moral relativists understand the argumentative side of morality and use it to their advantage. 

I’m always learning more about moral arguments (it’s really the only interesting topic in contemporary philosophy), so as always my opinions are set to change. I make fun of moral objectivists a lot, but the arguments do thread pretty close for both sides. Still, I’ll keep writing blog posts on the topic as long as interesting claims continue to be made. 

On Humility

Here are a few thoughts I have on humility, or more generally how to communicate and deal with other people.

Life is too short to argue with people over the internet. Seriously. I can’t comprehend how you people have the energy to do this. Work on making stuff instead. Or at least just have fun and live your life. But please — please — it isn’t worth it.

It’s better to be smart and think you’re stupid than to be stupid and think you’re smart. Expectation is dangerous. As the wise men have said, underpromise and overdeliver.

Be nice to people. You can’t get all of them to like you, but you’ll get most of them. You don’t need them all to like you, anyway.

Remember that you can always choose to not respond. You may feel the need to respond, but in reality that need is the excuse created by your pent up frustrations. You can exude that frustration elsewhere, in a safer place. 

Being irritated with someone isn’t going to get you any closer to what you want. In fact, showing your irritation will probably get you farther from where you were. People don’t like it when others are irritated at them. They don’t like it when others are angry at them. Anger causes anger. Try to hide that, from both others and yourself. 

Never speak for other people. Earlier I mentioned making the mistake of getting angry with someone else. The second biggest mistake outside of that is assuming you know what other people want. You never know what other people want. You might have a good enough idea, but never enough to speak for them. Don’t try. 

You can fake being nice to be popular. But it’s a lot easier if you just are. Being a kind person causes you to be kind to yourself. You don’t get that when you fake it. It’s a lot harder to keep up the guise that way — most people can see through you. 

In conflict, whoever gets angry first loses. Anger is the breaking down of all defenses. If a man gets angry in a fight, he stops trying to protect himself and goes all offensive. A smart enough opponent can find a hole much quicker that way. The same thing goes for anger in other places.

Don’t ever punish someone doing something good to you, even if you are agitated with them at the time. It will grow to bite you later on. People hate punishment, and they will do anything to avoid it. If your wife cooks for you, and you come home agitated and deny her, she’ll never do it again. Children are even more sensitive to this. This is why emotional control is so important. 

Attacking messages sound real sweet if they’re on your side. But wait until they aren’t. I get it, it’s hard. It took me years to recalibrate myself to not fall into the drama, to attack people I thought were being rude or unfair. It feels like it needs to happen, but it doesn’t. And when you stop doing it, you realize how much brighter the world can be. 

Childhood is shouting out your opinion. Adulthood is acting upon it. Speak in actions, not in words — it’s the easiest way to get someone to truly listen to what you have to say. 

Focusing on what we agree on versus what we disagree on makes life easier for the whole. It is very easy to disagree, mostly because it’s very easy to get mad. It’s an innate feeling we all get. Agreeing is relatively boring by comparison, but it focuses on our strengths as a whole as opposed to our weaknesses. You’ll notice that if you focus on agreement in the long term, you’ll get much better results than you ever did with disagreement. 

You don’t like people because of their ego. But then you remember you have an ego for yourself. In other words, you see someone on the street that acts like they’re holier-than-thou, and it drives you nuts. But think — how often do you do that yourself? 

Just talk to people. Don’t have an ask. Don’t have a pitch. Just talk. This helps in two regards. Firstly, people like to talk to humans more than networkers. Secondly, if you can’t think of anything to say to a person — don’t speak to them. You’ll save yourself some much needed time.

If you bite people, don’t be surprised when they bite back. Being mean, or rude, or even ignorant, always comes with some sort of consequence. Hedge your bets — be kind to others.

Radiate positive energy, and people will come to you. Even if they don’t want to. This is a key idea many people don’t quite understand. Most people are inclined to think that the main reason to be friendly or happy or kind is just “because it’s the right thing to do”. And sure, perhaps it is. But the better, more resilient reason to be all those things is that people like feeling good, and if you’re the one who makes them feel that way, then they’ll flock to you like moths to a light. 

Treat people like people. Don’t treat them like anything special. Celebrities, authorities, etc. — they’re people just like you. Don’t let them get the better of you by believing in their fictional status. 

Not everything is your fight. Opinions on things, people, ideas, etc. — people will try to pressure you into having some sort of hot take, when most of the time it’s better that you just say “I don’t know” or “I don’t care”. Similar to the “Try not having an opinion” statement. 

If someone says something you don’t like, don’t push back. Ask them a question. One of the best lessons I’ve ever been told in my life is that communication is a lot easier if you only talk by listening. You can defuse complex arguments, get to the bottom of a person’s beliefs, or get them to follow your ideas, if you can just learn to smile, listen, and ask good questions. 

We are trained to have an opinion on everything. Try not having an opinion, just this once. People often fall into the trap of thinking that they need to be an expert on every topic, or take a side on every political issue, or be up to date on every current event. But those are just status games, and believing you know everything about everything is more damaging to you than helpful. If you’re ignorant on a subject, just try admitting your ignorance. It will help you in the long run.

Stop Caring About Your Reputation

If I had to choose one bit of contradictory advice I can give, it would be on reputation. Society is obsessed with reputation and responsibility, and often for very bad reasons. In this post I want to break down why.

Alright, before we get too deep into the weeds I want to give the clickbait disclaimer: by “stop caring about your reputation”, I do not mean “just go out, kill people, have sex with hookers, do drugs and get in a car crash, we’re all gonna die eventually, damn it!”. Thinking for the long-term and living in polite society are common sense ideas that go beyond reputation, and in some ways this is why I’m against reputation in the first place. Reputation for reputation’s sake is the issue: always being afraid to step on people’s toes, to say things that are too controversial, to not show up 30 minutes early to every meeting you have – these are the places where responsibility falls apart. In this post, I’ll break down why reputation exists in the first place, why it often doesn’t matter, and what you should focus on instead.

The History (and Psychology) of Reputation

Reputation, like most bad ideas in our lives, has to do with evolutionary survival. Back when we were hunters and gatherers, disappointing someone didn’t mean “getting passive-aggressively subtweeted for a week”, but rather “getting pushed off a cliff and breaking your skull against the jagged rocks of the Fertile Crescent”. People used to kill each other over this, mostly because when every decision meant life or death you didn’t have for a slacker who didn’t pull their weight. And enough generations of that gave us this perpetual genetic PTSD which, fortunately, does not apply today.

While there are very good reasons not to be an asshole in 20XX, the more nuanced social queries are now open. In this new society, it’s now favorable to separate yourself from the status quo, as the more profitable avenues are all in culture creation. Most people have already spoken on this – being an entrepreneur or an artist is much more rewarding (but also risky!) than getting a normal career in the social hierarchy. However, I think the issue of reputation and responsibility is often underlooked, mostly because they are borderline moral arguments and people tend to stray away from anything related to morality. Fair enough. And as I’ve explained, I think there are good reasons to keep up your reputation. But reputation is not a be-all-end-all – you do not spend your entire life living in the realm of responsibility and building a good reputation for yourself, responsibility and reputation are byproducts of living a healthy life true to yourself. To elaborate on this, we need to talk about how we make decisions. 

Reputational Risk and the Problem of Decisions

Let’s say you’re back in college (or, for some of you, fast forward to college). You’re trying your best to build up your resume, create a good name for yourself, yadda yadda yadda. You’ve joined a club – a very important club, maybe some honors fraternity for your major or some shit, idk – and you’ve been very diligent about attending meetings, getting work done, etc. At the same time, you’ve been dabbling in your passion: making music. In a dream world, you make your living off your music, and so you’ve spent time producing 5 beats a day for 3 summers. On the eve of a very important fraternity event, a dinner or whatever, you learn that one of your many beats impressed a local DJ, who’d like you to play a set at his relatively popular club. Problem is, the set would take place during your fraternity’s dinner. What do you do?

If you pick the DJ set, your fraternity would be upset with you. You will be seen as damaging your reputation and being irresponsible, barring a very understanding fraternity official. And yet, most of us would agree that picking the DJ set is the correct decision in this case. What gives?

This is the sort of paradox that lies at the crux of the reputational argument. Do these conflicts happen all the time? No, they don’t, and that’s not the lesson out of this. The lesson is that every important decision in your life confers some sort of reputational risk. At some point it becomes less of an issue of “building a good reputation” and more of choosing which reputation you’d like to uphold. Are you building a reputation with the DJ, or your fraternity? Which is more valuable? How do we define that value?

When considering questions like this, we begin to put reputation to the wayside. What’s the point of reputation when it’s all relative? What’s the point of responsibility when inevitably someone I meet will find me irresponsible, to a degree? Well, the answer is easy: you stop caring about your reputation. Instead, you focus on a different question entirely: what should you prioritize? 

So, What Should You Prioritize?

I think anyone who regularly reads this website probably knows the answer to this, but I’m going to say my piece anyway. With questions of “societal survival” now moot, the most important thing you should be focused on is building your ideal self. In other words, focus on what makes you feel happy and fulfilled, and spec into that type of reputation. The greatest thing about living in the modern era is that so many of our needs are now taken care of for us that we can focus more on the important things. So stop caring about your reputation, and start caring about improving yourself. That’s what matters. 

My Approach to Investing

My investment thesis is no secret. In fact, I’ve written about it before. Over the years it has remained a stable and simple heuristic in my toolbox that has led to a 35% year-over-year return (and that’s not including the crypto investments ). But that being said, I think it’s high time I’ve returned to the subject and elaborated a little bit more on my approach to investing.

Before I dive into individual topics, I’ll give a refresher. My thesis, in one sentence, is the world moves towards convenience. That is, every major invention since the dawn of time has made things easier for people. The biggest companies in the world created things that made the world much more convenient, at scale. For the rest of this article, I’ll be elaborating on what I mean by convenience, as well as comparing the thesis to a few other more notable forms of investing. Let’s get into it.

Growth versus value investing

The convenience thesis is, of course, a growth investing strategy. I know that there is an endless war between growth investors and value investors, so let me write a few points on this topic:

I do believe in the power of value investing. I would say that value has a much more proven track record than growth, albeit with slower and smaller returns. I use NNT’s barbell strategy, where 75% of my portfolio goes into value and 25% goes solely to the convenience thesis.The convenience thesis does not involve forecasting. In order to be considered for investment, a company must already have a product that builds convenience for its users that is already launched (i.e. no Theranos). Obviously, the return comes from the idea that the convenience will cause large profitable growth, but I make no projections for this. I sit and hold on to the company unless there is a good reason not to. I do take value logic into account. Marcus Andressen and Charlie Munger famously only agree on two things for investing: a good price and a good team. I agree with both of these as well. A good leadership team to me is vital, so much so that I will often sell a company if one of its key leaders has left or retired. And, of course, there are few things worth buying at a high enough price. I would never invest in Amazon, for example, because even though it does provide convenience it is already much too overvalued for its size. Of course, that does not mean I will ignore every stock that the market claims is overvalued – I suppose I lean closer towards Andressen. 

In summary, I believe that value investing is a much safer bet (at least, as safe as you can be trusting your money to the stock market) and that forecasting/prediction/most of quantitative finance is still baloney. At the same time I acknowledge some level of uncertainty has to be taken to maximize returns, and I choose to entrust that uncertainty towards the convenience thesis.

Defining sustainable convenience

The next issue here is in defining what exactly “convenience” means. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to do with examples. The first thing we need to note is that there is a “breaking point” where a product goes from a mild convenience picked up by a handful of people to a world-changing innovation. Take hotels, for instance. Hotels, of course, were a massive convenience upgrade in comparison to housing – people who wanted to go somewhere else had a place to stay in that new location. Hotels first began with the ye olde inn, and then for many years didn’t see much of an upgrade beyond the standardization of the living spaces at a massive scale (think something like Marriott) or different engines for finding particularly good hotels (think Kayak). These were convenience upgrades, certainly – but they did not fundamentally “change the game”, so to speak. The Hotel game only changed when Airbnb came into the scene during the early 2010s. Airbnb made it so that, now, everywhere is a hotel. This does not only disrupt the traditional hotel system by fractionalizing hotel living spaces, but also real estate by allowing homeowners an additional pathway of “creating their own hotel” rather than just renting out a place long term. Now that Airbnb exists, everyone will always expect Airbnb to stay. This is a good heuristic for what defines a scalable, breakpoint convenience. 

Of course, there is a difference between convenience and sustainable convenience. During the early Internet boom of the 2000s, the idea of widespread grocery delivery – an incredibly disruptive convenience – was born and executed. The problem was that the global “technological trend” in software and logistics was not such that this industry was sustainable. Since it was not sustainable, it was not profitable. Since it was not profitable, the companies went bankrupt.

Flash forward twenty years, and Instacart is doing just fine. What happened? Well, the technological trends improved to the point where the product became economically sustainable. In Instacart’s case, the widespread adoption of mobile phones alongside the development of real-time marketplace infrastructure a la Uber was probably what nudged it along.

Monopoly rules

Competition is tricky stuff. It is good for the economy, but bad for business. In fact, I would argue that all of life’s problems boil down to the fact that competition is good for some and bad for others – but that’s a topic for a different post. 

As an investor (and therefore capitalist), we fall under the “competition is bad” umbrella. Therefore, we’re looking for industries where there is a single dominant firm at any given time. While Uber certainly follows a sustainable convenience, for example, it wouldn’t be worthwhile investing in it because of its stiff competition with Lyft. It’s hard to tell which one will “come out on top” in the long term, if either, and so we avoid making the decision. On the other hand, we can argue that Cloudflare will stay on top of the DNS market for a long while before any startup disruptor comes in. Another, slightly different example of a sustainable convenience monopoly would be AMD. While AMD competes directly with Intel in CPU and Nvidia in GPU, there is no (current) competitor who competes in both. So, say that Nvidia beats AMD out of the GPU market – they are still safe in their CPU market and thus are hedged against competitive risk.

Conclusion

As I wrap up here, I wanted to talk a bit about exiting. Of course, once something is a sustainable convenience, it doesn’t just stop being one (that is, until something that is more of a sustainable convenience comes out). Because of this, there are some considerations when it comes to selling.

A big change in leadership is the first one. Some companies have key individuals that pretty much keep the whole process in check. Often these are founders, but they can also be particularly good CEOs – for example, Lisa Su at AMD. If these people begin to leave the company, it’s a pretty safe bet to start exiting yourself.

Another is when the company has a massive issue or otherwise fall in quality. Note that a “massive issue” doesn’t mean “Cloudflare was down for an hour, everyone sell!”. An example of a massive issue would be Solana having continuous outages, or Polygon’s continuous hacking scandals.

One thing that I think is NOT a valid reason to sell something is hearsay or negative discussion on the internet. Yes, it is important to take in the opinions of others, especially those that disagree with you. But it is another thing to FOMO out and buy and sell whenever there’s a little bit of news or a SeekingAlpha article that tells you “X is awful!” or “X is amazing!”. That will end you up with a net-zero return, if you’re lucky. For example, Ethereum – as one of the more popular cryptoassets – has gone under a lot of fire. Some of it is for good reason (its Layer 1 is congested to hell), but some of it is not. For example, there was a big news storm when one of the founders left the Ethereum project to go work for a competitor. Good reason to sell, right? Counts as change of leadership? Well, not when we look a little bit deeper and find out that Ethereum has somewhere in the ballpark of 15 different co-founders. The main leader of ETH has always been Vitalik, and he will tell you that he is still very much on the project, thank you very much.

So, this has been the post on my thesis. Yes, I do actively use it. No, past performance is not indicative of future returns. And more importantly, you don’t have to copy me! Take the bits of this that you like and add them to your own strategy. Ignore the parts you don’t. This strategy in itself was developed this way. Investing is, at the end of the day, a game you play with money. Play it and win your own way. 

On Culture

Here are a few thoughts I have on culture creators and breaking the status quo. 

All ambitious people are failures, until they are not. Think about culture creators. People who are confident either come across as weirdos or as geniuses. It’s a 50/50 as to how the public perceives them. Of course, either way, they win. 

Our life is not defined by the choices we make that society agrees with, but the choices we make that society is against. Any choice made by society has already been made. Those who are willing to go beyond the status quo, to be made up as fools — these are the people who change things.

When someone copies you, it means you have them under your thumb. The opposite is true as well. A person who copies is at the mercy of the copied. A person who steals, who combines, who tweaks — that’s just an artist.

Don’t live the culture. Make the culture. It’s easy to live in other people’s footsteps. 95% of the population already do. The last 5% choose to make their own path. Out of that group, 50% make a minor fool of themselves and 50% become legends. Those are pretty good odds. 

The moment you break the status quo, people listen. Set the precedent. Culture creators are those with extreme confidence who define how the social setting is played. Those who do not lead the creation of the social setting are doomed to follow it. 

Do not live the life of someone begging for social approval. Live the life of the person who gives social approval. There are two types of people in this world — those who live the status quo, and those who build the status quo. These builders — otherwise known as culture creators — may fail from time to time, but the best are impervious to the “laws” of social demand and instead make things work for them. You’d be surprised how successful you can be in this regard. 

If you don’t, who will?

Life as a War

I’ve used a lot of analogies in the past when it comes to dealing with life, and this post is no different. This time, however, I’ll talk about how life is a constant push-and-pull which requires some serious strategy.

Previously I wrote Life as a Game and What the Book of Job Really Means, which were both meant to describe my general philosophy on life. In Job I wrote how life often tests us with occasional heavy struggles in order to test our mental and physical fortitude (hence the importance of constant training), whereas in Game I wrote a bit more on the side of getting things done and dealing with external factors. In a way, this article combines the two of these together into one cohesive story. 

Life is a lot like a war. Maybe not a literal war, with all its blood and death (hopefully not), but more so in its strategy format. You have your team (yourself) and an enemy team (life). You have your objective (have a nice, happy, long life) and the enemy team’s goal is to try to stop you whenever it can. There is a strategy to this (how do you plan your life to make sure its nice, happy, and long?) but at the same time there are incremental, tactical battles (setting up habits, dealing with obstacles, etc.). There is a fog of war to the enemy’s actions – you never know what is going to strike next, you merely have to predict the best you can and prepare yourself for anything. You need to have a good defense, but you also need to move up the assault. Part of that defense/offense has to do with the training which I mentioned earlier. 

Understanding life this way makes the works of classical military strategists a lot more meaningful. For example, Sun Tzu’s famous “never siege a castle” motto makes a lot more sense when you define “waiting for the castle to starve” as “waiting for the right moment to pounce on an opportunity”. Alexander the Great and Napoleon’s campaigns can be great motivation, not for conquering the world but for conquering your life. 

A lot of what I’ve said on momentum also applies here. As I mentioned, there are tactical battles (the day-to-day), and then there is the war. If you lose a battle here or there it won’t matter, but if you let the losses get to you, then you might not win that war.

And here’s the thing: you can lose against life. It’s not entirely hard to win, given you get the right resources (knowledge) and have at least a bit of a knack for campaigning. But it is possible to let life defeat you. In fact, it defeated many others in the past.

Fight the war, and don’t let it get to you. 

What’s “Hivemind”?

Some people have probably already caught on to the fact that I’ve used the term “Hivemind” in a few blog entries and twitter posts to refer to a certain group of people. But what exactly is the Hivemind, and what did they do to earn such a name?

Hivemind is a term generated from the idea that “techbro” is just too specific. Technically you could extend the term to “Silicon Valley Hivemind”, but this isn’t necessarily correct because most people who I consider Hivemind aren’t even based in Silicon Valley anymore.

There’s a very loose series of qualifications for being part of Hivemind, which is why Hivemind is such a useful term to begin with. I don’t have to say “that weird guy is obsessed with bulletproof coffee and the startup hustle and the ‘future of web3′”, I can just say he’s Hivemind. And yes, most people would guess that set of traits if I had just said “techbro”, but its not the same, damn it!

I could describe hivemind with objects and ideas like the ones I just laid out, or with people (Joe Rogan, Peter Attia, Tim Ferriss) and you’ll get the gist of who exactly are the Hivemind. As to why they get the name, it comes from the fact that this group feels all tied into one another — everybody thinks the same, talks on the same podcasts, get the same section of the bookstore to themselves, etc. I don’t think Hivemind is an inherently malignant or conspiratorial group — but it is clear they have a lot of influence in modern culture, particularly when it comes to tech and business. 

 While Hivemind is very easy to make fun of, I think they are an improvement over previous generations of self helpers and gurus. While some things they say are outlandish or outside the budget of us normal folk (like getting a blood test once a month to make sure you are properly min-maxing your chemical levels), the wide majority of their advice on exercise, meditation, reducing anxiety/fear, and not reading business books is all pretty good. 

Anyways, that’s all I really wanted to talk about on this topic. Mostly needed a blog post to link back to if I mentioned Hivemind again in the future. But something tells me I’ll be coming back to this topic sooner than I think.

On Business

Here are a few thoughts I have on entrepreneurship, income generators, and business more generally.

A lot of business success revolves around putting familiar ideas in unfamiliar environments. Take two ideas and combine them. Taxis as regular cars. Hotels as regular homes. PCs and phones with a focus on art and design. A search directory for the internet. You can get a lot of examples here if you think hard enough.

The best ideas make things cheaper AND easier to do, not one or the other. The world always moves toward convenience. Convenience, by definition, is cheaper and easier.

All you have to do each day is learn, think, make, and market. Learn to understand how the world was before you. Think to develop new ways of the world. Make to execute on those ways. Market to distribute it to others.

First, find something you’re good at. Second, turn it into something you’re passionate in. Third, sell it. Finding good work involves the combination of something that you’re good at, something you’re passionate in, and something that’s in demand. The easiest way to do this is to start with the first and work towards the last, slightly altering your skillset and audience with each iteration.

You don’t have to make something completely new. You just have to do it in a way no one’s ever done it before. See “putting familiar ideas in unfamiliar places”. 

Never do anything for free. You’re always worth some kind of price. 

The income generator path: Get a good-paying job. Dedicate a portion of that paycheck to funding the business. Keep doing such until the income of your business outpaces your salary. Switch to full-time. This is the safest way to get yourself on the income generator path — though some people will prefer the riskier way of going all-in at the start. 

Most people think they want to build businesses and prestige, when they really want income generators and freedom. A startup people build because it’s “in”. They want the feeling of getting accepted into YC and being part of a high-growth enterprise. That is, they think they want that feeling. But the reality is they’ll be much happier picking their own personal niche and building a smaller, single-person business that gives them a reasonable income. 

Never forget: the easier it is to do something, the harder it is to get into the top 1%. The mental model of market saturation cons many an entrepreneur. Don’t let it dissuade you — just understand why it’s better to be a generalist than a specialist. 

Don’t promote people if they’re really good at their job. That means they’re at peak performance in their position. Rather, promote after they start to tire of it. It’s the decision that benefits both the employer and employee equally. 

Learning -> Thinking -> Creating. This, in general, is a pretty good framework for getting anything done. If you want to develop a pretty good niche in life: learn what you want to learn, think about what you want to think, create what you want to create. There’s a good chance no one else in the world has done that specific combination. 

Learn everything until you find what you like. Build everything until you find what people need. This is very similar to the Learning -> Thinking -> Creating paradigm, in that it’s all about figuring out what your specific niche is. Yes, it takes time — lots of time — but it will give you an advantage you’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere else. 

Make value, then get people to know you made it. This is entrepreneurship in a nutshell. All you really need is product and sales — the rest is superfluous. 

Nobody thinks quite like yourself. Use that to your advantage. There is no niche more powerful than the personal niche. You are a combination of a million different identity choices, packaged into one human being. There’s no better competitive moat than that. 

Optimally, you want to work on something that you love, that you’re good at, and that people need. But if you have to choose one, work on something you love — the other two will come with enough time. The first sentence here describes the “ikigai” system of work. It has often been criticized for being “too optimal to exist”. Fair enough. But if you work on just something you love, you may be at worst poor and destitute — but still be happy. If you’re poor and destitute and upset about it, then it wasn’t something you love. That’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s true. Try again. 

Start by bootstrapping. Build up with leverage. There’s no point in spending too much resources on an idea that you aren’t even sure will get off the ground in the first place. Start by experimenting with stuff, going fast and breaking things, seeing what fits — once you find something that launches off by itself, you know it’s worth investing the serious capital into.