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December 9 - December 9, 2022
Morning pages don’t need to solve your problems. They simply need to get them out of your head, where they’ll otherwise bounce around all day like a bullet ricocheting inside your skull. Could bitching and moaning on paper for 5 minutes each morning change your life? As crazy as it seems, I believe the answer is yes.
“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”—Thomas Edison
But if I had to do something over, I would think about it much harder. I would ask questions. Why am I doing this? Am I doing this just because I have good grades and test scores and because I think it’s prestigious? Or am I doing this because I’m extremely passionate about practicing law?
So the goal isn’t to get good ideas; the goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up.”
Startup investments can be illiquid and locked up for 7 to 10 years. This is why the “fund life” of most venture capital funds is 10 years. That is how long it takes most big successes to reach IPO or get acquired. In other words, you might not know if you’re good or bad at angel investing, right or wrong in your bets, for a LONG time.
I’m thinking of these ideas and they’re flowing through my head, I’m monitoring my body; I’m not monitoring my mind. And when my body changes, I have something that other people are going to care about, too.”
This bodily reaction—an involuntary half-chuckle, a rush of adrenaline, a surge of endorphins, a sharp change of emotions, etc.—can act as a metal detector for good material. It takes practice, but it works.
“How is this new product better than the competition?” but “First what?” In other words, what category is this new product first in?
“If I had always done what I was ‘qualified’ to do, I’d be pushing a broom somewhere.” As I’ve also heard said, “Amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic.”
If you spend your time focusing on the things that are wrong, and that’s what you express and project to people you know, you don’t become a source of growth for people, you become a source of destruction for people.
“I distinctly remember him saying not to worry about what I was going to do because the job I was going to do hadn’t even been invented yet. . . . The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up. That’s something I certainly hope to instill in my son: Don’t worry about what your job is going to be. . . . Do things that you’re interested in, and if you do them really well, you’re going to find a way to temper them with some good business opportunity.”
“Imagine you have a large glass jar. Next to it, you have a few large rocks, a small pile of marble-sized pebbles, and a pile of sand. If you put in the sand or pebbles first, what happens? You can’t fit the big rocks in. But if you add the big rocks, then the medium-sized pebbles, and only then the sand, it all fits.” In other words, the minutiae fit around the big things, but the big things don’t fit around the minutiae.
my co-founder Severin [Hacker] said, ‘You know, I don’t know much about design, and I don’t particularly care. But I’ll tell you this: I hate the color green. I hate it.’ “We all thought it would be hilarious if our mascot was a green thing, and so that’s why it’s green. It is literally that we are playing a joke on our co-founder. Ever since then, every day of his life, he has to see this. He shouldn’t have said that.”
Emotional reaction: Building a following base feels like a game or competition. Users will encourage their friends and fans to follow, bringing in additional users. This “game” of bringing in your friends and fans is free marketing for Twitter.
use “TK” as a placeholder for things we need to research later (e.g., “He was TK years old at the time.”). This is common practice, as almost no English words have TK in them (except that pesky Atkins), making it easy to use Control-F when it’s time to batch-research or fact-check.
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”—Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955–1967
“It is essential to get lost and jam up your plans every now and then. It’s a source of creativity and perspective. The danger of maps, capable assistants, and planning is that you may end up living your life as planned. If you do, your potential cannot possibly exceed your expectations.”
Sometimes you need to stop doing things you love in order to nurture the one thing that matters most.”
There’s a story that comes from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, an order of Christian monks who lived in the wastelands of Egypt about 1,700 years ago. In the tale, a couple of monks named Theodore and Lucius shared the acute desire to go out and see the world. Since they’d made vows of contemplation, however, this was not something they were allowed to do. So, to satiate their wanderlust, Theodore and Lucius learned to “mock their temptations” by relegating their travels to the future. When the summertime came, they said to each other, “We will leave in the winter.” When the winter came,
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one of those guys who, every time you meet them, leave you shaking your head and (productively) asking, “What the fuck am I doing with my life?!” He recently asked me, “What’s your moonshot?” leading me to re-explore many of the questions and concepts in this profile.
“I think of problems as gold mines. The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.”
That is the number-one thing you need to do: Find out what you need to be doing on this planet, why you were put here, and what wakes you up in the mornings.”
when you’re going 10% bigger, you’re competing against everybody. Everybody’s trying to go 10% bigger. When you’re trying to go 10 times bigger, you’re there by yourself.
“Any time I’m telling myself, ‘But I’m making so much money,’ that’s a warning sign that I’m doing the wrong thing.”
All of my biggest wins have come from leveraging strengths instead of fixing weaknesses.
If we define “risk” as I like to—the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome—
Dig into your fears, and you’ll often find that the mental monsters are harmless scarecrows. Sometimes, it just takes a piece of paper and a few questions to create a breakthrough. What do you have to lose? Chances are, next to nothing.
“There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
“Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect.”
‘Discipline equals freedom.’”
“Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.”
“You guys are programmed to succeed. The hardest thing you’re ever going to do in your life is fail at something, and if you don’t start failing at things, you will not live a full life. You’ll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work. That’s not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in.
You take people who aren’t wedded to the plan and [ask them,] ‘How would you disrupt this plan or how would you defeat this plan?’
‘Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.’
what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s most often said by people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they are addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since you can always make more money. And I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth is to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder, write more, and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more round of Delanceys with Nick, another long late-night talk with Lauren, one last good hard laugh with Harold. Life is too short to be busy.
The best art divides the audience. If you put out a record, and half the people who hear it absolutely love it, and half the people who hear it absolutely hate it, you’ve done well, because it’s pushing that boundary.”
It was Julian Schwinger, the great Harvard physicist, I think, who was asked if he would teach the 9:00 a.m. quantum mechanics course, and he stopped for a second. The person asking said, ‘Well, what’s the problem, Professor Schwinger?’ and he answered, ‘I don’t know if I can stay up that late.’”
“Oh, I have 1,000 readers now. That means that 100 are going to respond like assholes. Not because I’m bad, not because they’re bad, but because that’s how the math works.”
Anytime something really cool happens in a day, something that made me excited or joyful, doctor’s orders are to write it down on a slip of paper and put it in this mason jar.
you can’t really earn trust over time with people without being somewhat vulnerable [first].”
Be clear that your ladder is leaning against the right building.”
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”—Mark Twain
1) To get huge, good things done, you need to be okay with letting the small, bad things happen. 2) People’s IQs seem to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.
The systems far outlive the vacation, and when you come home, you’ll realize that you’ve taken your business (and life) to the next level. This is only possible if you work on your business instead of in your business,
“What can you do that will be remembered in 200 to 400 years?”
What past limitations—real or perceived—are you carrying as baggage? Where in your life are you pacing in a 10-by-10-foot patch of grass? Where are you afraid of getting sprayed with water, even though it’s never happened? Oftentimes, everything you want is a mere inch outside of your comfort zone. Test it.
“Is that a dream or a goal?” If it isn’t on the calendar, it isn’t real.
“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” — Mexican proverb
A friend once told me that killing yourself is like taking your pain, multiplying it by 10, and giving it to the ones who love you.
