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March 5 - July 14, 2018
“You know something I can say, you asked about what we look for in candidates: clarity of writing. I think clarity of writing indicates clarity of thinking.”
He recommended I read the book Words That Work, written by Republican political strategist Frank Luntz. It’s brilliant. Matt added, “If someone likes that book, then I might point them to George Lakoff. He has a great seminal work from the 1980s called Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.”
I first read Tony Robbins’s Unlimited Power in high school, when it was recommended by a straight-A student.
“It’s a belief: Life is always happening for us, not to us. It’s our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent.”
“Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll ever make in your life. . . . There’s no financial investment that’ll ever match it, because if you develop more skill, more ability, more insight, more capacity, that’s what’s going to really provide economic freedom. . . . It’s those skill sets that really make that happen.”
“If you let your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learning lead to action, you become wealthy.”
“The quality of your life is the quality of your questions.”
Tony believes that, in a lowered emotional state, we only see the problems, not solutions.
Mindset by Carol Dweck (for parenting)
Aside from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Casey’s favorite book is The Second World War by John Keegan.
When in doubt about your next creative project, follow your anger (see Whitney Cummings, page 477, and James Altucher, page 246
This is, in effect, how I’ve crafted my entire career since 2004. It’s modeled after Ben Franklin’s excellent advice: “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”
But what you can always compete on, the true egalitarian aspect to success, is hard work. You can always work harder than the next guy.”
“What is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate.
“You can sacrifice quality for a great story. . . . I’ll watch shaky camera footage now . . . so long as it’s a great story and I’m engaged.”
The shirts have just three lines on them in huge font: hope is not a strategy. luck is not a factor. fear is not an option.
‘You can’t be afraid to show your scars.’
“Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.”
I’ve also noted that my big wins in life have come from being aggressive, much like iconic coach Dan Gable, whose epic rants in the hard-to-find doc Competitor Supreme are worth finding.
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.
Reid was nicknamed “firefighter in chief” at PayPal by then-CEO Peter Thiel.
Wow. Such mental capacity.
Reid also read Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu as a boy, which informed his strategic thinking.
Reid recommends studying Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom he’s taught a course at Oxford.
I should check his lecturrs later.
One of my all-time favorite quotes from dear Ludwig is: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.)
have come to learn that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem.
part of doing strategy is to solve the easiest problem,
Which of these highest-value activities is the easiest for me to do? You can build an entire career on 80/20 analysis and asking this question.
Leverage! Just like Edmond Lau's The Effective Engineer!
Reid and Josh’s descriptions led me to put the following quote at the top of my notebook: “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”—Thomas Edison
Clever! What should I do with this information?
‘In order to move fast, I expect you’ll make some foot faults. I’m okay with an error rate of 10 to 20%—times when I would have made a different decision in a given situation—if it means you can move fast.’
“How do you know if you have A-players on your project team? You know it if they don’t just accept the strategy you hand them. They should suggest modifications to the plan based on their closeness to the details.”
Based on their closeness to the details! Great catch!
‘There needs to be one decisive reason, and then the worthiness of the trip needs to be measured against that one reason.
if I go for a blended reason, I’ll almost surely come back and feel like it was a waste of time.’
(TW: @peterthiel, with 1 tweet and 130K+ followers;
This is crazy.
Notice how often he reframes the question (examines whether the question is the right question) before answering.
“If I believed this, how would it affect my decisions in the next week? Over the next 6 to 12 months?”
So if you’re planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?
So I think trends are often things to avoid. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere.
“I think some people will always find objections of one sort or another. Had I not gone to Stanford or law school, people would object and say I had no idea what I was missing. So I think they’re likely to complain in any event.
But what I have said is that not everybody should do the same thing.
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?
don’t like the word ‘education’ because it is such an extraordinary abstraction. I’m very much in favor of learning.
when you’re very competitive, you get good at the thing you’re competing with people on. But it comes at the expense of losing out on many other things.
‘What do people agree merely by convention, and what is the truth?’
We always need to ask: Is this true? And this is always what I get at with this indirect question: ‘Tell me something that’s true that very few people agree with you on.’
“It’s always the hard part that creates value.”
“Trust and attention—these are the scarce items in a post-scarcity world.”
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.”
What You Track Determines Your Lens—Choose Carefully
Well said.
‘Why don’t you just start a different business, a business you can push downhill?’
“The blog post I point people to the most is called ‘First, Ten,’ and it is a simple theory of marketing that says: tell ten people, show ten people, share it with ten people; ten people who already trust you and already like you. If they don’t tell anybody else, it’s not that good and you should start over. If they do tell other people, you’re on your way.”
Good catch.
