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June 29 - July 23, 2020
“Everyone is interesting. If you’re ever bored in a conversation, the problem’s with you, not the other person.”
“getting upset won’t help things.”
“It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.” Might be time for you (and me) to rethink our personal priorities.
Qwerty Is for Junior Varsity The normal QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow down human operators to avoid jams. That time has passed, so try the Dvorak layout instead, which is easier on your tendons and helps prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. Read The Dvorak Zine (dvzine.org). Colemak is even more efficient, if you dare. Within Automattic, Matt has held speed-typing challenges, where the loser has to switch to the winner’s layout. So far, Dvorak has always beaten QWERTY.
P2 (WordPress theme) for replacing email—p2theme.com Slack for replacing IM—slack.com Momentum: Chrome extension to help you focus. Wunderlist: To-do management app/tool to help you get stuff done. Telegram: a messaging app with really good encryption
“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.”
TF: I highly recommend reading “The CEO of Automattic on Holding ‘Auditions’ to Build a Strong Team” from the April 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review (find it on hbr.org).
“Best of Liszt” (Halidon Music):
“The concert(s) of the Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich.
To have your mind explode, search “Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1 FULL Argerich Charles Dutoit” and check out minute 31.
“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.”
“‘Stressed’ is the achiever word for ‘fear.’”
“Losers react, leaders anticipate.”
“Mastery doesn’t come from an infographic. What you know doesn’t mean shit. What ...
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“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.”
This echoes what Jim Rohn famously said, “If you let
your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learning lead to ac...
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“The quality of your life is the quality of your questions.” Questions determine your focus. Most people—and I’m certainly guilty of this at times—spend their lives focusing on negativity (e.g., “How could he say that to me?!”) and therefore the wrong priorities.
“This brain inside our heads is a 2 million-year-old brain. . . . It’s ancient, old survival software that is running you a good deal of time. Whenever you’re suffering, that survival software is there. The reason you’re suffering is you’re focused on yourself. People tell me, ‘I’m not suffering that way. I’m worrying about my kids. My kids are not what they need to be.’ No, the reason [these people are] upset is they feel they failed their kids. It’s still about them. . . . Suffering comes from three thought patterns: loss, less, never.”
“STATE → STORY → STRATEGY”
To fix this, he encourages you to “prime” your state first. The biochemistry will help you proactively tell yourself an enabling story. Only then do you think on strategy, as you’ll see the options instead of dead ends.
Sometimes, you think you have to figure out your life’s purpose, but you really just need some macadamia nuts and a cold fucking shower.
his physiology: “To
prime daily.”
But I don’t just think gratitude. I let gratitude fill my soul, because when you’re grateful, we all know there’s no anger. It’s impossible to be angry and grateful simultaneously. When you’re grateful, there is no fear. You can’t be fearful and grateful simultaneously.”
“If you don’t have 20 minutes to delve into yourself through meditation, then that means you really need 2 hours.”
On Richard Branson: “His first question to every business is, ‘What’s the downside? And how do I protect against it?’
Say, ‘How do I get no risk and get huge rewards?’ and because you ask a question continuously and you believe [there’s an] answer, you get it.”
Kyle Bass at one point bought $1 million worth of nickels (roughly 20 million coins). Why? Because their face value was 5 cents and their scrap
metal value was 6.8 cents at the time. That’s an immediate gain of $360,000. Nicely done.
“They absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, know they’re going to be wrong . . . so they set up an asset allocation system that will make them successful.
“When people think they’ve got a balanced portfolio, stocks are three times more volatile than bonds. So when you’re 50/50, you’re really 90/10. You really are massively at risk, and that’s why when the markets go down, you get eaten alive. . . . Whatever asset class you invest in, I promise you, in your lifetime, it will drop no less than 50% and more likely 70% at some point. That is why you absolutely must diversify.”
“And the last one that I found: almost all of them were real givers, not just givers on the surface . . . but really passionate about giving. . . . It was really real.”
“I always say I got all my understanding of how business and life works from studying the Second World War.”
When in doubt about your next creative project, follow your anger
“At the ninth hour, I called my editor up and said, ‘Hey, let’s not make this advertisement. Instead, let’s do something I’ve always wanted to do, which is: Let’s just take the entire production budget and travel the world until we run out of money, and we’ll record that. We’ll make some sort of movie about that.’ And he said, ‘You’re crazy, but sure.’”
How can you make your bucket-list dreams pay for themselves by sharing them? 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.”
egalitarian
“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.
“Once you get fancy, fancy gets broken.”
Touré asked, ‘Kanye, why do you have a giant picture of you on the wall?’ and Kanye goes, ‘Well, I got to cheer for me before anyone else can cheer for me.’ I thought, ‘There is some fantastic logic. That’s a good response.’”
“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.”
hope is not a strategy. luck is not a factor. fear is not an option.
Morning pages are, as author Julia Cameron puts it, “spiritual windshield wipers.”
“Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.”
the process matters more than the product.
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.
Reid recommends studying Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom he’s taught a course at Oxford. “One of the bedrocks of modern analytic philosophy is to think of [language] . . . if you’re trying to talk to someone else about some problem, and you’re trying to make progress, how do you make language as positive an instrument as possible? What are the ways that language can work, and what are the ways that language doesn’t work?”
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.)
“I have come to learn that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem. And actually, in fact, part of doing strategy is to solve the easiest problem, so part of the reason why you work on software and bits is that atoms [physical products] are actually very difficult.”
