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June 29 - July 23, 2020
“No matter what the situation may be, the right course of action is always compassion and love.” (paraphrased from one of his teachers, Barbara McNally)
“I only do email responses to print interviews Because these people love to put a twist to your words To infer that you said something fucking absurd” —lyrics from Fort Minor’s “Get Me Gone”
cover your ass and combat any malicious intent—by saying, “Great to connect! What I usually do for phoners is record it on my side as a backup [via Skype using Ecamm Call Recorder; Zencastr also works well] and then email you a Dropbox link afterward. I assume that’s cool?” If they agree, then you’re not breaking the law by recording, and everything is hunky-dory. If they don’t agree, that’s a red flag and you should abort. Missing any one media opportunity won’t kill you, but a terrible misquote can persist like an incurable disease.
“What are their incentives and the timelines of their incentives? How do they measure ‘success’? Are we aligned?” Don’t make short-term all-or-nothing bets on gimmicks, if you’re playing the long game. There will often be pressure from people who are thinking about a promotion next quarter, not your career in 1 to 10 years.
I’ve “missed” many great financial opportunities predicated on gimmicks. As Thomas Huxley famously said, “It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.” If you’re good, you’ll have more than one chance.
We’re both huge fans of Hayao Miyazaki animated films. In fact, Princess Mononoke was one of the main inspirations behind Linkin Park’s video for “In the End.” And since you asked, my favorite museum in the world is the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, created in the “Mitaka Forest” by Miyazaki.
“Be the silence that listens.”—Tara Brach
“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
One of Justin’s favorite artists—Boards of Canada
‘Don’t force it.’
* Music for sleep Justin listens to Max Richter’s From Sleep, a composed album with a shortened version on Spotify. “I put it on very quietly as I am starting my bedtime routine, so it usually ends 15 to 20 minutes after I’m asleep. Or I will use the Sonos sleep timer, if I’m at home. It started to have this Pavlovian knockout effect after a while, if I use it every day, like a lullaby. If that’s too much melody, there’s an artist called Mute Button that has high-quality, long-field recordings. The gentle rain sounds plus sleep timer are fantastic. I find it great to drown out hotel sounds
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What do you believe that others think is insane? “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.”
The worst advice you hear being given out often? “‘Look for patterns.’ As an entrepreneur and investor, I am surrounded by people who try to categorize and generalize the factors that make a company successful. . . . Most people forget that innovation (and investing in innovation) is a business of exceptions.
“I try to learn from the past without being inspired by it. My big question is always, ‘What did they try, and why did it work?’ When I hear stories of success and failure, I look for the little things that made a big difference. What conventional wisdom was shunned? . . . I avoid using a past success as a proxy for the future. After all, the dirty little secret is that every success was almost a failure. Timing and uncontrollable circumstances play more of a role than any of us care to admit.
* Advice to your 30-year-old self? “In the wrong environment, your creativity is compromised. At 30, I assumed my strengths would always be with me regardless of where I applied them. I was wrong. Truth is, your environment matters.”
What would you put on a billboard? “‘It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.’ I’d put it on every college campus in the world. In our youth, we are wonderfully creative and idealistic. . . . Truth is, young creative minds don’t need more ideas, they need to take more responsibility with the ideas they’ve already got.”
Travel isn’t just for changing what’s outside, it’s for reinventing what’s inside.
Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.
For all the amazing experiences that await you in distant lands, the “meaningful” part of travel always starts at home, with a personal investment in the wonders to come.
“I don’t like work,” says Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself.”
As Pico Iyer pointed out, the act of quitting “means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting—whether a job or a habit—means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.”
In this way, quitting should never be seen as the end of something grudging and unpleasant. Rather, it’s a vital step in beginning something new and wonderful.
“I talk to CEOs all the time, and I say, ‘Listen, the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. If it wasn’t a crazy idea, it’s not a breakthrough; it’s an incremental improvement. So where inside of your companies are you trying crazy ideas?’ ”
“I think of problems as gold mines. The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.”
“When 99% of people doubt you, you’re either gravely wrong or about to make history.” “I saw this the other day, and this comes from Scott Belsky [page 359], who was a founder of Behance.”
“I now have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999% of people is ‘no.’ I think we need to be training people on how to change the world.”
His affirmational mantra, which he repeats a number of times, is “I am joy. I am love. I am gratitude. I see, hear, feel, and know that the purpose of my life is to inspire and guide the transformation of humanity on and off the Earth.”
“The self-talk, in all honesty, was probably more like 2 weeks than 2 days. It’s going back to ‘Why do I believe this is important?’ It’s, ‘Look how far I’ve taken it so far.’ It’s a matter of reminding yourself what your purpose in life is, right? What you’re here for. If you haven’t connected with what your purpose and mission in life is, then forget anything I’ve said. 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.”
“What did you want to do when you were a child, before anybody told you what you were supposed to do? What was it you wanted to become? What did you want to do more than anything else?
If I asked you to spend $1 billion improving the world, solving a problem, what would you pursue?
“Where can you put yourself into an environment that gives maximum exposure to new ideas, problems, and people? Exposure to things that capture your ‘shower time’ [those things you can’t stop thinking about in the shower]?” [Peter recommends environments like Singularity University.]
“First of all, 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.
“The second thing is, when you are trying to go 10 times bigger, you have to start with a clean sheet of paper, and you approach the problem completely differently. I’ll give you my favorite example: Tesla. How did Elon start Tesla and build
from scratch the safest, most extraordinary car, not even in America, but I think in the world? It’s by not having a legacy from the past to drag into the present. That’s important. “The third thing is when you try to go 10 times bigger versus 10% bigger, it’s typically not 100 times harder, but the reward is 100 times more.”
“Three to five billion new consumers are coming online in the next 6 years. Holy cow, that’s extraordinary. What do they need? What could you provide for them, because they represent tens of trillions of dollars coming into the global economy, and they also represent an amazing resource of innovation. So I think about that a lot, and I ask that.
Law 2: When given a choice . . . take both. Law 3: Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. Law 6: When forced to compromise, ask for more. Law 7: If you can’t win, change the rules. Law 8: If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. Law 11: “No” simply means begin again at one level higher. Law 13: When in doubt: THINK. Law 16: The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. Law 17: The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. (adopted from Alan Kay) Law 19: You get what you incentivize. Law 22: The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a
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“I like to make promises that I’m not sure I can keep and then figure out how to keep them. I think you can will things into happening by just committing to them sometimes. . .
Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”? “I just really want people to remember that they’re capable of doing everything that the people they admire are doing. Maybe not everything, but—don’t be so impressed. I guess that’s where my head goes. . . . There’s no reason that you can’t have the things that the people you admire have. ‘Success’ sells this kind of ultimate destination when—even though I’ve accomplished something, and you [Tim] have accomplished something—I told you I was crying last night. It’s not like, ‘I’m done, I’ve arrived’ or anything like that.”
Advice to your 30-year-old self? “It doesn’t get any easier . . . the challenges are bigger with bigger things.”
“A good comedy operates the exact same way a good mystery operates. [Which is] the punchline is something that is right in front of your face the whole time and you never would have put your finger on it.”
“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.”
Money can always be regenerated. Time and reputation cannot.
When possible, always give the money to charity, as it allows you to interact with people well above your pay grade.
Get the Long-Term goal on the Calendar Before the Short-Term Pain Hits
Make commitments in a high-energy state so that you can’t back out when you’re in a low-energy state.
For Steve, comedy was a by-product of authenticity. This is the difference between a kid who knows he’s cute and one who doesn’t (the one who knows he’s cute isn’t cute).
“To me, everything is idea and execution and, if you separate idea and execution, you don’t put too much pressure on either of them.”
“I consider being in a good mood the most important part of my creative process.”
