Fractal Interests

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There’s a blank slate. What are you going to do with it?

Does my life get better if I tell other people about it?

finding new ways to confuse myself What shovels are you making today? What are you reading today? What will you teach us today?

How are you helping people move forward right now?

What are you working towards today? What future opportunities are you creating today?

How can you contribute?

What if today, just for today, we didn’t settle? What if we saw precisely the change we sought to make and sacrificed to make that change? What if we set aside urgencies and focused simply on what’s important instead? What if we did the work that matters?

The work of marketing your work is where your work begins.

When he was asked where he graduated from college, he would simply answer, “Books.”

Take Accountability to Earn Equity

Create software and media that work for you while you sleep, Product and media leverage are permission-less.

Find the others. Pull them up.

React, respond or initiate?

Make things better by making better things.

Make me a man that I’ll miss

Put out content for free, if you need to monetize create a virtual group that pays. Brand vs. Sales A clear story vs. Conversion rate optimization Are you trying to convert or are you trying to create an experience? The latter always wins. Use Branding To Pull, Instead Of Sales To Push

People don’t buy the best product. They buy the best story.

The win without pitching manifesto

This is something that virtually every consultant can do: productize one of your most common engagements, sell it to the exact same type of people who buy your consulting services. You can offer it to existing clients or leads who aren’t ready for the full engagement dance.

If the fundamental unit of value in a consulting business is professional expertise applied to a business problem, then the fundamental unit of value in a product business is capturing one thing learned into an artifact and then reproducing that artifact at scale. ** ** Whatever scares you, go do it.

Commit to five specific things they would do each day to move their goal toward completion.

Slogans

‘‘Master,’’ says Luke, ‘‘moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different.’’ ‘‘No! No different! Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.’’ ‘‘All right, I’ll give it a try,’’ Luke says begrudgingly. ‘‘No! Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try,’’ insists Yoda.

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” - Epicurus

Emulation, and action. Embed the perceptual cues within plausible scenarios.

People are siloed by algorithms. People are lonely. People are bored to death.

You are a startup of one. Employers hire you to solve a problem for them.

Work backwards from demand. Find business pains so acute that people are willing to pay differentiated sums to make the pains go away.

You can’t communicate insight by explaining.

What happened to our ability to watch other people burn and learn? For learning to happen people need to have their old mental models destroyed through visceral failure, to make way for new models.

  1. Find the domain experts
  2. Extract their expertise
  3. Build a case library of difficult cases
  4. Turn your case library into a set of training simulations

“Find a partner who is ready to build with you. It is not about finding perfection in another person, it is about realizing when you come across an undeniable connection that nourishes your being and matches the type of support you are looking for. Getting lost in the idea of perfection is a hindrance. Being with someone who is committed to going through the ups and downs of life together is truly priceless. When two people embrace their imperfections and commit to growing into better versions of themselves, it will naturally enhance the happiness they share in the relationship.”

Humans are grateful to those who fulfill their needs.

focusing on problems to be solved gets in the way of working on the systems that generated those problems in the first place.

positioning, messaging, story

coding and design techniques come second to solving problems and providing value.

Ideas that spread, win. And so the goal of it all is to find your better and make it spread.

All behavior makes sense with enough information.

When you own a laptop you own the means to production.

An enabler of great creators.

As Steve Jobs said, a leader must stop playing an instrument, and start playing the symphony.

Execution takes process: effort, sacrifice, discipline, and persistence. Ideas are just events.

The main engine for profit is attention.

To reap the rewards, plow the seeds.

“because I was so young I absolutely knew it was totally possible to do, I was fully determined and without consulting any professionals I had no barrier stopping me.”

Double down on work that’s truly hard to measure, to sign up for emotional labor and experimentation and group leadership and working on the frontier

Each moment is special. The clock may be ticking but your life is lived by the second, don’t waste any of them. 

Teams need to believe that their work is important. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful. Teams need clear goals and defined roles. Team members need to know they can depend on one another. But, most important, teams need psychological safety.

“One terrifying side effect of learning the world isn’t the way you think is that it leaves you all alone. And when you try to describe your new worldview to people, it either comes out sounding unsurprising (“yeah, sure, everyone knows the media’s got problems”) or like pure lunacy and people slowly back away.”

Help people help people.

Pioneer:

Start small. Master the art of showing up. Scale up when you have the time, energy, and interest.

Being really clear about what we’re buying (and selling) opens the door to getting serious about whether or not you’re here to solve an interesting problem.

You have a moral responsibility to do what you do best, because that is your service to the world.

  1. Hustle: You do all the hard work yourself.
  2. Management: Hire people to do the things you used to do.
  3. Operationalizing: Build systems and codify your decision-making principles so the company can run without your involvement.

Learn: Turn time into experience
Build: Turn experience into judgement
Teach: Turn judgement into capital
Fund: Turn capital into time

Write online and create projects you find interesting.

write blog posts and unofficial guides, make video tutorials, give talks, provide support. These are things the authors often don’t have energy left for, and—unlike code contributions—don’t require their time or approval.

Telling is easy. Being is hard.

“What makes something the best choice?
You.
You make it the best through your commitment to it.
Your dedication and actions make any choice great.”

If you were ready for it, it wouldn’t be growth.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

Even in the face of a seemingly endless struggle with the likes of Sisyphus, or the struggle to the death at Thermopylae, we seek to grow stronger.

Identify the real goal, decompose vague concepts, frame the right questions, seek more data or experience, listen to multiple perspectives, assess upsides and downsides, examine your biases, act like an owner.

If you possibly can, work where there are no words for what you do.

the Murakami quote about how “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking” also applies to lived experience: there are certain forms of knowledge that will be denied to you if you stay within the bounds.

Today’s problem is yesterday’s solution.

Any anger or confusions about others stems from us not knowing and understanding their reality.

Life is an open book test.

keep sending out ripples into time that can spread beyond the little space I take up. In due time, all the traces will be covered up and forgotten beyond being noticed. But I think that’s ok. To me, having made matters more than being noticed. And so I’ll keep making.

At its core, an entertainment business does only three things:

  1. Create/tell stories
  2. Build love for those stories
  3. Monetize that love

You guys sell what you do, I sell what the world can do. Who, not how.

took an engagement that I’ve delivered five times now and said “How could I refactor this engagement such that I can deliver much of the value for near-zero marginal time investment?” The answer was collecting my expertise and experience in a package that customers could use to self-direct themselves through implementing the advice

Build the things that will allow you to engage an audience and improve it over time. Included in this: Friendcatchers. Friendcatchers are small, contained lists, essays or apps that solve resonant (emotional, relevant), tractable, underserved problems.

Optimize what compounds:

Work on something that nobody has a name for.

Action Verb (e.g. Increased, decreased, drove) + Marketing Metric (e.g. targeted traffic, Facebook page followers, targeted leads) + Time Frame (e.g. over 60 days) + Specific Tactic (e.g. by testing ad copy, by testing video ads, by distributing a survey).

“If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

Invest in:

“Kaizen” is a Japanese term that captures the concept of continuously making many small improvements.

We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.

You don’t persuade people by telling them. You persuade them by asking them.

Invest in:

  1. Your brand identity and point of view.
  2. Building a media machine around that.
  3. Knowing more than others about what your audience wants, how they think about the problems you help them solve.
  4. Knowing how what you’re saying is landing on them.

In your first 30 days, try to understand the landscape: Where is my team going? What’s our vision?
Where is my team now?
What are our challenges?
Who are the people I’ll work with?

Understand the market and what motivates customers. Choose the market segments to target. Determine what attributes the product needs for people to choose it. Design an effective go-to-market plan along with the required positioning and messaging.

College tuition is merely paying for the opportunity to enroll in their classes. And once you pay they don’t care about making sure you can get into the classes needed to fulfill their graduation requirements.

Synchronous communication breaks down when you have to communicate ideas built beyond the shared context (Story Break). Asynchronous enables a more consistent manner of communicating ideas without having the same depth of shared context.

We iterate on how to properly communicate ideas. Writing instead of speaking enables preloading many more iterations before starting to communicate.

Special means you:

it’s more important to have a marketing plan for people than for clients. In that pursuit, your positioning is your culture.

“The most important thing I learned is that the low end eats the high end: that it’s good to be the “entry level” option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you’re not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling. Which in turn means that prestige is a danger sign.” – Paul Graham

What is scarce is trust and awareness.

set the desired outcome, but let the team figure out how to achieve that.

  1. Reference stories and analogies whenever possible, to connect theory to real life.
  2. Repeat your one key lesson/ask several times. People need to hear it more than once before they’ll remember it.
  3. Find your nervous equilibrium. If you’re not nervous enough, you won’t perform well. If you’re too nervous, it will impact your performance. Preparation and perspective are what allows you to strike that balance.
  4. The beginning and the end are the most important parts of your talk. People anchor their feelings and emotions there.

Pre-existing demand? Search
No existing demand? Social
More time than money? Content
More money than time? Ads

Notice things other people wouldn’t; the magic lies outside the ordinary purview.

“A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.”

leadership “can never be legislated or coerced. It is based on a courageous vulnerability that invites others by our example to a frontier conversation whose outcome is yet in doubt.

Amor Fati

content can be great but content is transactional and it wants something from you. Enjoy content from time to time, but keep it in its place, in the background behind actual art and actual attentive experience in the world itself.

If you’re in SaaS, Zapier and G2 and Capterra are coming for ya.
If you’re an agency, Clutch is gonna be there.
If you’re a restaurant, Yelp and 6 delivery services want your traffic.

Greatness is consistency.
Meditating once is common. Meditating daily is rare.
Exercising today is simple. Training every week is simply remarkable.
Writing one essay rarely matters. Write every day and you’re practically a hero.
Unheroic days can make for heroic decades

Marketing gets easier when you think of it as a search function for people who already agree with you, they just haven’t met you yet.

School requires you to learn about things after the answer has already been decided.
Life requires you to learn about things while the answer is in the process of being decided.

The Chinese bamboo tree will spend 5 years developing, spreading its root system underground with no visible progress. Then in its six year, it will grow 80-feet in six weeks.

tackle the Great Books, to wrestle the big ideas, to make notes, to ask questions, and ultimately to enter into discourse with their fellow man about the ideas that matter.

Cunningham’s Law — elicitation

Business is easy if there’s a line of people to hand you cash. The work is in finding those people.

Lou Holtz [0] has a very pithy mental model for how to evaluate leadership: Everyone asks three questions of people leading them:

  1. Can I trust you?
  2. Do you care about me?
  3. Are you committed to excellence? (aka do you have high standards).

make our clients unique and different and distinctive because that’s what it takes to make them the best

A two-pronged assault on growth. First, increase the number of buyers coming into the top of the funnel, second turn occasional buyers into regular buyers.

When you don’t know how it works, you’re afraid of it.

Understand why you’re losing. Organizing is the soul of this work. It’s talking to people about important issues and moving them to take collective action.

Go about seeing needs and learning a unique set of skills.

Accumulate assets, not responsibilities. Direction over speed. Outcome over ego. Position over predict. Long over short term.

The inverse relationship between specialization and hacking.

Your personal dislike (or mine) has nothing to do with how well something works

At every decision point, take the harder choice.

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

Start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.

If you want to create wealth (in the narrow technical sense of not starving) then you should be especially skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like doing. That is where your idea of what’s valuable is least likely to coincide with other people’s.

“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.” — William James

Just do it. Just ask. Just go. Just start. Just hit send. Just say it.

Hubspot playbook:

  1. Persona research.

  2. Greenspace analysis.

  3. Exploratory keyword research.

  4. Search Insights Report development.

  5. Editorial calendar creation.

  6. Content production and editing.

  7. Reporting and analysis.

  8. Information content

  9. Continued learning action (ebook)

  10. Email campaign

  11. Automation triggers

  12. Retargeting via Paid

We overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.

“Holy fucking shit that blew my mind.”

Write, speak, and curate. Eloquently and prestigious.

There is generally a right way to build wealth. And that is through the ownership of income-producing assets, such as businesses. You don’t have to own the businesses directly, but you do have to own them. So if the entrepreneurial life isn’t for you, just keep buying index funds and don’t stop

The biggest step you can take is the first.

Start. The difference between 0% and 1% is infinity. Start. The difference between 1% and 2% is 100%.

I absolutely think about the higher-level consequences of what I’m writing. If someone believed what I said, as they would interpret it, what would they likely do? What does this statement signal about group affiliation, and who does it give attention to, or lower or raise in status? How does this strategically impact the overall playing field? How does this interplay with being good writing or being useful or with the norms I’ve created for myself, especially around politics? Does this make me seem too angry or crazy, or just make no sense or seem unjustified until I figure out how to communicate things I don’t yet know how to communicate? Would this create cancellation risk, or risk of blameworthiness in other ways, for myself or others? 

Assume you will be successful at whatever game you play. Are you playing a game you want to win?

Artists are emotional drug dealers.

A job is a system which turns time into money. A business is a system which turns other systems into money. Build systems.

you have to have experience, opinions, and something worth sharing.

Amazon is a unique company, because every other company in the world thinks of problems in terms of build-vs-buy—is it better to pay someone else to solve the problem, or solve it internally? Whereas Amazon thinks of build-a-new-business-versus-buy: if the problem is hard to solve internally, at Amazon scale, then any solution that’s good enough for Amazon is good enough for every other business on earth, and can probably be sold to them.

“Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding; lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”

Evangelizing your category. Not your brand.

How to grow your social media audience when you don’t have decades of experience to share (yet):

You can have a rule of thumb, but you should expect it to frequently be violated in ways you can’t predict.

you’ll be more influential by channeling your energy into long-lived and semi-private communities (learning circles, meetups, etc) instead of publicly.

Practically the only thing that matters in the freelance web design space is acquiring and closing new quality leads on a regular basis.

Going the “basic website” route for a boring business is definitely the most lucrative.

Work hard to shorten your feedback loops. Less internal discussion, more shipping.

SEO is actually simple. Your job is to understand what people want, and use content to answer their questions.

As Feynman put it, “what I cannot create I cannot understand”

sometimes you have to be a crazy bastard so people won’t walk all over you.

E-Books, webinars, and virtual events… what do they all have in common? They’re all online assets that answer questions and educate people.

help buyers familiarize themselves with the core business problem, the alternative options, and how you can help them.

that most of what works is pretty simple and the hard part is executing consistently in the face of all the challenges life throws at you.

In general, there are three things that cause people to change their actions:

Help the people a few chapters behind you. (Catch me if you can)

Become an expert in something that everyone wishes they were an expert at.

The economy doesn’t care about intelligence, at all, it doesn’t care what you know, merely what you can produce for it.

Build tools that amplify human ability.

What are you doing today that’s going to pay off in 10 years?

Reputation is a simple construct, built on two ideas:

  1. Ability: What you can do.
  2. Reliability: What you actually do.

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” | Seneca

Pick your audience, pick your future. If you decide to serve people who know they need what you do and have money and are eager to pay for it, then that’s the life that you signed up for. Pick your customers, pick your future. Who will give you the fuel you need to serve them?

Perhaps the business case for purpose isn’t about making profits at all, but the protection against destructive profit-taking. Perhaps the true value of having a clear corporate purpose should actually be measured in terms of it’s contribution to resilience, long term sustainability and its contribution to a culture that isn’t willing to sacrifice the future on the alter of this quarters numbers.

take up a small part  of your client’s business and think about how to automate that- ask your client about this. You will be surprised as to how many ideas you receive.

Who is going to remember you if you don’t keep showing up?

A slogan is not just a way to talk to the outside world; it’s a way to establish an internal narrative.

It’s hard to coordinate the behavior of over a billion people without some kind of catchy guidance. So a tagline, attached to a useful concept, is a good way to run every decision or observation through a quick filter: if it matches, it’s important; if it doesn’t, discard.

Every morning, you get to ask yourself:

The more specialized your work, the greater the risk that you will communicate in ways that are incomprehensible to the uninitiated.

Entrepreneurs use money (preferably someone else’s money) to build a business bigger than themselves. Entrepreneurs make money when they sleep. Entrepreneurs focus on growth and on scaling the systems that they build. The more, the better.

take the initiative to develop creative solutions to the different problems around them.

Showing something functional goes further than any resume.

Never sell. Create value. Amateurs give advice. Experts diagnose.

Burn your implementation business to the ground. There’s no price premium in doing the work.

The more distance you create between yourself and the doing the more you will be able to influence how many is spent and with whom.

We need to plant our trees before we want the shade, and fix our systems before they break.

What you want in life is to be in control of your time. You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your time and you’re tracked on outputs.

Most social scenes suffer from lack of initiative, not excess.

What are the levers and who controls them?

Get together with a dedicated friend once a week to talk through your struggles and challenges that week

Practice Imbue with meaning.

Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any.

Do not seek to know your destination. If you know your destination, you are already there.

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change.

Discipline = identity + environment. You can influence your identity and environment.

There’s always a flow to everything wherever you go. And there will always be a single figure in the center of that flow.

Strive to inflate the success of others you are visibly connected to.

proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech

The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future.

Always reaching higher, without shame

Heads down, hands down.

Seek to give more than you receive. Create more than you consume.

When presented with a problem people would much rather choose from a set of options.

Education is useful because it signals three things to your future employers: conscientiousness, intelligence, and conformity.

Follow the inklings. Pay particular attention to ones that produce commodities which other people are willing to pay for.

With the right interface, a computer is competitive with our very mind.

Computers have been best known for replacing work. Number crunching, manufacturing, etc. But as overhead & ‘friction’ shrink, computers can increasingly replace mental processes.

Create more value than you capture.

All of the best ingredients for forming lasting, powerful communities are present in university campuses:

The correspondence between reality and my beliefs come from reality controlling my beliefs, not the other way around.

Strive to make yourself the source of every thought worth thinking. If the thought originally came from outside, make sure it comes from inside as well. Continually ask yourself: How would you regenerate this knowledge if it were deleted from your mind? When you have an answer, imagine *that *knowledge being deleted as well. And when you find a fountain, see what else it can pour.

Don’t imagine how you could have predicted the change, for that is amnesia. Remember that, in fact, you did not guess. Remember how, century after century, the world changed in ways you did not guess. Maybe then you will be less shocked about what happens next.

How to kill the university | thesephist.com

Make something or it doesn’t count.

Does it help build business? Provide utility to business outcomes? Invest.

Compliments and interest “Love your work and interested to learn more about it”

Don’t get stuck in a rut, stuck in the past. Change yourself and the world.

Don’t want people gettin’ stuck in a rut, stuck in the past. Want them to change. Them and the world.

Ignorance exists in the map, not the territory.

Words don’t count, only anticipation-controllers.

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than reality; if you are equally good at explaining any outcome you have zero knowledge.

Above all, don’t ask what to believe—ask what to anticipate. Every question of belief should flow from a question of anticipation, and that question of anticipation should be the center of the inquiry.

If true, what must not happen to you?

Entrepreneur

  1. Get new business
  2. Hire great people to do something and don’t get in their way

Being noticed is way overrated. Be trusted by the smallest viable audience and give them something to talk about.

People want to be part of a story.

“There are no marketing problems, there are no finance problems, there are no accounting problems, there are only business problems.” — Peter Drucker

Attention, trust, and tension

http://paulgraham.com/ace.html

“The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first, and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.” – Theodore Roosevelt

intelligence amplification

Create reinforcing loops to increase the things we value and create balance loops to maintain the things we value.

Don’t just move the ball, move the hills.

The world is a better place when we allow others to learn from our work.

AI and Software brings systemic accountability for outcomes. (We tel machines if this happens do this) But we don’t have systemic accountability for human caused outcomes.

Work on things you can show, where people can see you, on things you can own.

Don’t end the week with nothing.

  1. Prefer to work on things you can show.
  2. Prefer to work where people can see you.
  3. Prefer to work on things you can own.

Monetary capital: yeah $$ bills y’all Human capital: the skills you’ve built up over time and the value you’re able to create as a result of them. Social capital: the ability to call on someone who trusts you and have them do something in your interest, like e.g. recommend you to a job. Reputational capital: the way your name rings out in rooms you aren’t even in, simply when your topic of expertise comes up. (Hopefully in a good way!)

Being a minorly successful little bitty fish is worth somewhere in the $80+ range an hour.

SEO is very simple: Content + Links = You Win

Disparagement to Curiosity

Research is really what allows you to distinguish yourself from your competition so that when someone comes to your site they start nodding their head uncontrollably, and they say yes, and price becomes a mere triviality.

There’s about five or six ways to earn money:

  1. Negotiate your salary
  2. Get passive income, which for most people, never works
  3. Get freelance income
  4. Buy real estate and rent it out
  5. Invest in the public capital markets
  6. Start an honest-to-goodness business

we got into this business to be respected for our advice and to be valued and to actually do stuff that matters. Charging 10 bucks an hour is not on the easy, straightforward path to doing stuff that matters. People that do stuff that matters have a ground floor which is higher and then they go up from there.

If getting stuff done is your job description, then convincing people to get stuff done is a core job skill for you.  Spend appropriate effort on getting good at it.  This means being able to communicate effectively in memos, emails, conversations, meetings, and PowerPoint (when appropriate).  It means understanding how to make a business case for a technological initiative.  It means knowing that sometimes you will make technological sacrifices in pursuit of business objectives and that this is the right call.

The dominant quality which gets you jobs is the ability to give people the perception that you will create value. This is not necessarily coextensive with ability to create value.

Go to events in your industry, such as conferences. Find user groups. Keep in mind that user groups draw a very different crowd than industry conferences and optimize accordingly.

describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs. If you have not had the opportunity to do this yet, describe things which suggest you have the ability to increase revenue or reduce costs, or ideas to do so.

Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.

think Less Wrong and act Long Now.

“Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference. I hope my other readers, whomever they may be, might find the topic as interesting as I found it, and the essay useful or at least entertaining–but the intended audience is my future self.” — Gwen

“I believe that someone who has been well-educated will think of something worth writing at least once a week; to a surprising extent, this has been true.” — Gwern

Show up and do the work.

Reassurance is futile. “Everything is going to work” isn’t true, it can’t be.

If it’s in your head it doesn’t count.

You can’t become happy. You can only be happy.

I am Lukas Murdock

What would a dead Lukas do?

Don’t maximize participation, filter and curate a high volume of interactions.

Balance reactive tasks and proactive tasks.

Addiction, debt and pregnancy are the big ones. But avoid waiting for life to begin. It already has. Go in some positive direction even if you’re not sure it’s the exact right one.

we’re not special, we all have deep limitations in our capabilities. Whatever you’re the best at: there are people better than you. There are people who are probably better than you at every single thing you do. So what?

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.

People don’t need truth, they need ways to move forward.

Unlike other storytelling mediums, TV almost never asks you to think, it asks only for your attention.

Blue Ocean Strategy

  1. Do you take industry conditions as given? Or do you reshape them in your favor?
  2. Do you try to beat the competition? Or do you make the competition irrelevant?
  3. Do you focus on creating and capturing new demand? Or do you focus on fighting over existing customers?
  4. Do you simultaneously pursue differentiation and low cost? Or do you make a value-cost trade-off?

They only live once. TOLO.

Cheaper doesn’t always lead to trial. What Leads to trial is a combination of trust and tension. And why Leads to an idea spreading is something that says, “this works better if I tell other people about it.”

Figure out what does spread, what do they talk about, what creates enough tension that people want to dive in?

  1. Transact: Make enough money to support your life
  2. Invest: Work, money, time that compounds over time
  3. Assist: Help others
  4. **Learn: **Acquire skills and knowledge you need to move forward in any area
  5. **Health: **Care for your body including exercise, sleep, meditation and food
  6. **Family: **Spend time with and care for the people you live with
  7. **Relationships: **Connect with people in your life outside your family
  8. **Self-Kindness: **Small things that make you happy every day

The most reliable way to make sure the thing you do is successful, is to build an audience.

When an expert in a field says that something is strange or puzzling, it’s worth paying a lot of attention to. Talk to experts in different fields and ask them what they’d noticed that seemed strange.

One of the healthiest and most important things we can do is continuously challenge ourselves to question why a “best practice” is labeled as such. When we understand why and how it works, we put ourselves in a much better position to know how to properly apply it in our own situations, and when it makes sense to do so.

Learning is like a maze; don’t expect to make it through without having to turn around.

life is about forming relationships and finding ways to be helpful to the people around you. If you find ways for people to be a part of your journey, you end up in the middle of a constant exchange of information, energy, resources, and connectivity.

spend the vast majority of my time creating, reinforcing, and sustaining connections among people. The better and more extensive your connections are, the better your access to great investment opportunities, vital information, and – most important – high-quality people with great ideas and fantastic potential.

How do you know if an idea is good?

Community and connection

You don’t need more good ideas, you need more bad ideas

Enrollment is acknowledgment that we’re on a journey together.

If you don’t know who the must-reads in your field are, find out before your customers and competitors do.

“I’m afraid,” is a fine way to start. “I’m afraid and I’m going to create now,” “I’m afraid and I’m going to ship this now.”

Your personal library and you are the librarian. You have a location where you know ideas exist and you can make connections to them.

The time you spend despondent is vital to molding yourself into a profound human being.

Writer George Bernard Shaw on living a life that burns bright:

“This is the true joy in life:

being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one;

being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live.

I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.“

Learn to solve business problems

Don’t create. Connect.

Oops is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies; so to look back at a time and not see anything you did wrong means that you haven’t learned anything or changed your mind since then.

  1. Decide what you want to be good at.
  2. Set a schedule for your actions.
  3. Stick to your schedule for one week.
  4. Next week, start again.

“Safety does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing at all.“ - Helen Keller

Give people a clear and concise answer to the question “What are we fighting for?” Then recruit those who want to join the fight.

created some persistent space for the community to aggregate

community is the most powerful retention mechanism

First six months at a job: -Learn leaders’ “operating philosophies” -Conway’s Law -Well-intentioned damage -The benefits of “secondary” talent markets -There is so much software -Accelerate transfer learning by 10x whenever you can

“If anyone can refute me‚show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective‚I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone.“ — Marcus Aurelius

Fill your life with adventures, not things. Have stories to tell, not stuff to show.

Get into the practice of communicating and articulating your thoughts. Try to distill your learning through your lens to the world.

The problem of lies spreading faster than truth is the result of readers valuing the ability to share over the responsibility to assure integrity.

https://youtu.be/5Uhahu0Pos4

America no longer produces prophets, only profits, and we are all poorer for it.

Be visible, be consistent. Have strong, authentic opinions. Ship regular content in whatever form. The more, the better—as long as you maintain a level of quality. You can 100% do social daily. Repeat for many years. You’ll need it 5–10 years from now, too.”

Know what people want and offer it to them. (Steve jobs / Seth Godin)

Ask: What product do you wish existed, that you need the most?

Platforms give power to individuals, but it comes with an imperative: you cannot treat your collaborators as peers. You have to treat them as fans, and give them what they want, while protecting your ability to keep creating.

Just lower your expectations and embrace what life presents.

High expectations and high ambition

“Could we do that faster?” Is the Charge More of management strategy; the upside is so dramatic, the cost so low, and the hit rate so high that you should just invoke it ritualistically.

Pick a peer group where ambition in the service of humanity is seen as positive and where actual progress is seen as achievable.

Attitudes are skills

The point of experience is to unlearn your assumptions.

A good pun is its own reword

I believe everything is a board of tradeoffs. And by attributing value differently at each tradeoff you get the spectrum of beliefs.

Too often, we feel rejected when in fact, all that’s happened is a mismatch of needs, narratives and what’s on offer.

set out to create the single best resource for your niche.

Books act as cultural guide posts (bible)

Give them tools to make, create, and do things that have never been done before.

perception trumps truth.

Charity is the ability to override that response. To assume that if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs.

Here’s some of my learnings about getting promoted for those that really want to play that game:

The benefits of specialization is often a better understanding of expectations and perceptions.

Ubuntu, Akimbo

Go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.

What can you remove from your day, from your task list, from your life … to give yourself some breathing space?

learning should be coincided with sufficient motivation for action.

Where you spend your attention is where you spend your life

When people ask you questions, always engage and add value.

Life happens in your pursuit of things not given to you.

If it’s not the right time for you, we hope you’ll join us one day in the future. But today might be the ideal day to make a leap.

Engagement > Manipulation

Small talk builds relationships because it says “I care more about you than being productive.”

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

Separate sales from marketing. Sales is a conversation, marketing is a broadcast. Marketing gets the phone to ring, sales takes the call and closes the deal.

Put all of it into better, not more. Get clear about who’s it for and what’s it for.

The most important thing is find the smallest viable group of people who care and figure out how to give them work that matters.

Institutional power.

Live life for the stories you will tell.

When someone reads it, they’ll share it with someone else.

Look for stuff that seems broken.

Make something people want. Don’t worry too much about the money.

The more possibilities at hand, the less utility we get.  The more specific we get, the more utility we have.  

Find a game and learn to beat it without direct involvement.

find the game that you love.

People are desperate to be led and if you can be the person who unites members of a fractured tribe you will build the scarcest resource of all: trust.

Price is a story.

produce income without requiring direct involvement

Regularly look at the market, audience, brands, category. Then, write down the ‘zigs’ (something everyone else is doing), and take note where the whitespace is for ‘zags’ (how can you do something differently)

Success is largely the failures you avoid. Health is the injuries you don’t sustain. Wealth is the purchases you don’t make. Happiness is the objects you don’t desire. Peace of mind is the arguments you don’t engage.

Don’t build a marketing team. Build a media company for your niche.

You make it hard for others when you don’t see a chance in yourself. See the chance in yourself.

5 key elements to make an idea stick: 1. Simple (very short and basic)2. Unexpected (curiosity gap)3. Concrete (e.g. relevant to COVID19)4. Emotional (fun/fear, music-driven)5. Story (e.g. woman looking for a mask)

If everyone gave up at the start, people would just continue to suffer in the “now.”

You sell what you sell, but you also sell the story we tell ourselves about your relationship with the work (and with us).

Keep up with the changing of generations and lead people to where they should be.

This is your ship. What’s the point of someone else builds it for you? I want to sell my product. I want people to know about this product.

The act of expression often exposes gaps and sloppiness in our thinking.

The early adopters ask, “is it new?” The early majority ask, “did it work?” and perhaps, “what’s everyone else doing?”

Changes to your behavior and actions are the product

Things everyone is worried about are likely to get solved. The stuff people dismiss as impossible is what’s scary. When that stuff happens, everyone is caught out in the same way at the same time.

Farm for dissent.

The question for most of us is: What if the work you do is:

If it is, it’s pretty likely that you’ll be replaced by a combination of robots, AI and outsourcing.

Growth only happens through confrontation. You can walk forward because the earth pushes you back.

Externalize the mind.

Getting a giant whiteboard was like poking a needle into a water balloon. Find your needle.

  1. What’s good about this problem? What can I learn from this? (Source: Awaken the Giant Within)
  2. “What am I choosing not to see right now?” (Source: The Obstacle is the Way)
  3. What is the worst-case scenario if I did what I’m considering? (Source: The 4-Hour Workweek)
  4. “Is what I am doing, this minute, moving me measurably closer to my goals?” (Source: No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs)
  5. “Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution towards my goal?” (Source: Essentialism)
  6. “Is this necessary?” (Source: Meditations)
  7. What am I giving up by making this choice? (Source: Decisive)
  8. “What thoughts are going through my mind right now? What am I saying to myself? Why is this upsetting me?” (Source: Feeling Good)“What if I’m wrong?” (Source: _The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck_*)

Customer traction, the network effect and emotional connection can change this, particularly if you build them in from the start.

Professionals show up for other people.

Fiction is another word for fake. But fiction works on us.

Become a company that celebrates your craft.

I send people down rabbit holes. I’m here for the rabbit holes. Find more rabbit holes. Enter the unknown.

Having a giant whiteboard on my wall has led to a big QOL improvement.

When I know nothing: video walkthrough (show me) When I know enough lingo: write (tell me)

As the principal of a firm in this space, your buyer persona should be someone who:

Joy is the dissolving of self.

Demand intimacy. That you show up all the way.

The greater the impact on other ideas, the greater the power and influence involved, the more fervently criticism is discouraged, the more a belief dehumanizes, the more the need for criticism.

Make things interesting.

You only know where the line is once you’ve crossed it.

Malcolm gladwell starts with a common platform and then takes it away from you. Leaving you susceptible to grabbing the next platform he provides as an answer.

Become someone capable of standing without a platform.

At higher levels, your job is to be a router. Routing opportunities to the right place. That means people come in to your life through email, and it’s your job to figure out, if they fit, where they fit. It’s all about your ability to connect people.

Your role is to continue to meet people and represent your brand in public, on Twitter, and through your writing.

There’s so many things I don’t understand. Let’s learn.

People want to be invited to participate.

If you are waiting on leads, you die. Every day your top priority is to inform and educate people.

Landing pages focus on giving information that encourage a particular user towards a specific action.

Ask stupid questions.

resistance is a symptom that you’re on the right track

Fight for the users. (ง’̀-‘́)ง for

What we make, how we make it and the way we bring it to others–that’s the essential work of marketing.

Marketing is a game of attention. If you do what everyone else is doing, it’s hard to get it. 

Strenuous Life

Real motivation is anger against yourself.

There are two rubber-meets-the-road tests here: one, do the experts affect the real world? And, two, do any of them get really, really rich?

cultivate an antsiness for progress

Start by having arbitrary strong opinions. Expect them to be wrong. But they’ll keep things interesting. Strong opinions, weakly held, are a cheap call option on information.

The computer of the future is not a product, but a place.

What makes work matter? The heart we bring to it.

I get more excited about the work than the money.

Dedicate yourself to fighting on principle. Fight by organizing or fight by inventing.

If you want money, focus on the problems of the people who have it.

The highest ideal of humanist education is teaching students to think for themselves. Because that is the source of authority.

focus on what you can give

copy-led sites convert better.

The goal is relationships.

simplify + over communicate by a factor of 10

Decision filters:

  1. Will I enjoy this decision?
  2. Will my future self enjoy this decision?
  3. Will others I care about enjoy this decision?

speak about what you’re in the process of doing now.

Motion and intention

do more things, and tell more people about it

email is one of a few truly permissionless mass mediums.

The best way to work is to be in flow as much as possible. And the best way to be in flow is to minimize distractions, and create large blocks of time to do similar tasks all at once — so that you minimize context switching. Seek confrontation

Any great brand strategy clears three hurdles:

Unless you are exploiting people and resources for personal gain at scale, you are not a capitalist.

It’s better to fall when you’re just beginning. Because if you fall when you’re bigger, you worry more about embarrassment.

The foolish confine themselves within limits they set.

join a group where the desired behavior is the normal behavior.

Emotions are not controllable, but behavior is.

think in headlines * *

  1. Journalists are busy. So make their life easy.
  2. The email subject is my headline. I outline my article in the body. And embed my best image.
  3. Journos open laptops at 8:30. So send outreach at 8.

The true mark of a powerful person was the ability to recognize the power in everyone else.

People want content. People seek content. People create content.

Content is the foundation of culture—within a company, within an industry or within a whole country. Content shapes our perspective, our knowledge, our insight and our ability to proceed through life. That’s why it’s key for brands to invest in content, and to ensure that it is developed based on content-market fit and utilized fully through content distribution.

Epistemic over Diversive curiosity — Pursuit of understanding over Pursuit of Gossip

The best our explorer can do is shout down “this is how I climbed up the mountain”, but others need to climb up themselves.

Focus on where you can show up for the world.

not everything that happens to us is our fault. but everything that happens to us is our responsibility.

People don’t hire you, buy from you or recommend you because you’re indifferently average and well rounded. They do it because you’re exceptional at something.

Real friends, Connections lay behind making assertions.

Serving over selling. Doctors (experts) serve.

There is a formula for success in business, and it goes like this: You set out to find the very best talent in the marketplace, and then give them a compelling and inspirational vision of what you want them to achieve for you and the company. Then you empower them to achieve those goals using their own skills and talents in any way they choose. If, at the same time, you demonstrate how enormously you value them, not just through compensation, but also verbally, every single day, and if you enable that talent to share in the profit that they help create for you, you’ll be successful. It’s so simple, and virtually nobody does it, because it requires a high-trust working environment, and most business environments are low-trust. In order to own the future of your business, you have to design it around trust.

If you’d like to do the same, here’s what you should write:

When feedback is immediate, clear, and concrete, people learn quickly. When feedback is delayed, abstract, and opaque, people rarely learn.

Any leaders ambition should be greater than the ambitions of their people combined.

Show folks how to do something — and show them with great transparency and detail and humility — and the power of the thing you’ve made is multiplied many times over. This is a superpower: the doing and explaining. Just explaining can veer into pontification. But showing an object — a thing, an “output” — and explaining … that’s a substantial combination.

Why you want And why you have that want

Messaging that resonates and causes movement.

Refer to your website when someone talks about wanting to work together. “This is what I do”

Positioning isn’t about the work you do. It’s about the work you’ll pursue.

How to find interesting problems to solve?

We need you to connect We need you to lead.

Accountability over Deniability Abundance over Scarcity

CMO => Chief Movement Officer Create a movement.

You win by being more connected.

Do work without a map.

Work without a map.

The industrial world modeled interchangeable parts and interchangeable people.

Realize the difference between what is and what you were expecting.

It’s the whales that make it happen. Carve a path for the whales. Create something a few people desperately care about. Make it appealing for the whales.

Channels come and go, principles remain. Knowing everything about a channel is for incoming junior levels. Not to be undermined; it’s important to execute well. Understanding strategy, communication, behavior, and psychology is what unlocks meaningful growth.

the standard pace is for chumps — the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects.

experience erases prejudice

The things you dislike distract you, never lose sight of what you want to see and accomplish.

There are no winners by default. Those who bring the most harm are those who do not possess a good sense of reasoning.

There isn’t a magic bullet.

Most bosses really don’t understand marketing.

KPIs other than revenue don’t really matter.

Attribution is near impossible.

Community is literally all that matters.

Don’t fuck with your customers.

Spend time talking to customer support.

Take phone calls with customers.

If you don’t know, outsource, then learn as you go.

Write a list every week with a question that starts with “why”, work towards solving/understanding it.

Relationships matter, partnerships are the cheapest and best form of marketing.

People don’t by products they buy experiences involving products from people like them or people they aspire to be.

If it’s not helping you take action to make things better, what’s it for?

It’s important to keep consistency and quality in mind over virality.

Thought Leader

  1. Publish original research with strong opinions
  2. Write a book
  3. Contribute to other sites, request to contribute
  4. Give presentations

Expert

  1. Polish your LinkedIn profile to perfection
  2. Google yourself. What do you see?
  3. Publish comprehensive articles and publish more
  4. Share more
  5. Offer to speak to classes
  6. Start a mastermind group
  7. Write for many sites
  8. Write everyday
  9. Learn something useful,
  10. then teach it

Thought leadership always creates tension. It’s about making assertions. You have to be willing to be wrong. You can be certain that some people will disagree.

What do you believe that most people would disagree with? What do you think will happen in the future that most people think is unlikely?

Clearly communicate challenging new ideas, back them up with data and have a strong point of view.

Clarify your goals and raise your ambitions.

It’s your job to inspire clients to take action. To reassure them that you are indeed the expert and the prize. To ride enthusiasm’s ebbs and flows.

To think and reveal facts about their business and current situation they could never find themselves.

Traditional networking: Find the others• Go to conferences• Attend fancy parties• Go to an expensive collegeInternet networking: Let the others find you• Write online• Start a company• Make YouTube videos

Ship something new every week, even if it’s just a new feature on your website. If you don’t know exactly what to build, that’s okay. Just start making things. Taking action will teach you more about yourself in a month than years of contemplation ever will.

There’s no top and no bottom. Simply the ranks of people who care enough to make things better.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.

“you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.”

Technological revolutions get built through long efforts with large teams. But the building starts on nights and weekends.

Either your product grows via word of mouth, or you need to pay a lot to acquire customers.

the cost of finding and engaging in your craft of choice has gone to zero, thanks to the internet.

Without trust and connection, access to data is worthless.

**Let curiosity and interest take the lead. **

As long as your course helps people achieve a specific outcome, you’re good to go.

Smooth seas never made skillful sailors.

The path may be narrower than you think. But the destinations are more numerous than you can imagine.

“If I were a marketer looking for a new gig, here’s what I’d do.

First, realize that a marketer is someone who markets—time to show them what you can do.

  1. Clean up your LinkedIn profile. Pimp it. Make it sell, show off your copywriting chops. Start posting daily. Sum up your key lessons learned. Tell your best stories. Pin those posts on your profile.
  2. Build a landing page about yourself. Show ’em how it’s done. If you wanna get a job in DTC, design it like an ecommerce product page. If it’s SaaS, make it a SaaS features page.
  3. Add a portfolio of your accomplishments. Share how you overcame the obstacles, what you fucked up, and how you eventually triumphed.
  4. Get video testimonials from all your past managers, direct reports, and peers. If you can source videos from those people, it shows that people like you, you can build relationships, and you make shit happen.
  5. Start producing teardowns / strategy deconstruction type of content. Demonstrate your expertise in whatever your field is.
  6. Start sourcing intros to get interviews. Show that you can use your network to open doors. This is proof you can build relationships, and people trust you.

Never ever have I seen someone do this, but whoever is willing to put in that much work to achieve their goal—that’s someone you wanna hire.”

The two skills of modern business: Storytelling and spreadsheets. Know the numbers. Craft the narrative.

An insight is just a start. It shows that you’re curious, you’re observing, you’re noticing what’s going on around you, you’re picking up on shifts in the wind. But the next step is what actually moves the needle. The rare, courageous thing to do is to develop an assertion.

Once you see the grid, you can see the empty boxes. And then go fill them.

You might get bigger faster and make millions if you outsource everything to the experts. But what’s the point of getting bigger and making millions? To be happy, right? In the end, it’s about what you want to be, not what you want to have. When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.

If you are an agency: start building software… and if your SaaS isn’t growing: start providing the manual service.

Good rules reward exchange and specialization; bad rules reward confiscation and politicking.

Figure it out yourself, and do it.

Earn with your mind, not with your time.

Turn meetings into workshops: Collect, choose, create, commit.

  1. Change it
  2. Accept it
  3. Leave it

No wishes.

When people say they don’t want to change what they really mean is they don’t have an incentive to change. Change the incentives and the behavior follows suit

Three component theory of stratification:

  1. Wealth
  2. Power
  3. Status

If you’re ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, “How can I best help you now?”

None of your customers will ask you to turn your attention to expanding. They want you to keep your attention focused on them. It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.

A business is started to solve a problem. But if the problem were truly solved, that business would no longer be needed! So the business accidentally or unconsciously keeps the problem around so that they can keep solving it for a fee.

“Steve Blank: “No business plan survives first contact with customers.”

One of the greatest perspectives of innovators. “I didn’t know it was hard.” See: Steve Jobs, Ivan Sutherland

  1. Find what solutions a business is looking for.

  2. Have the confidence to deliver something you don’t have yet, but the world needs.

  3. ???

  4. Profit.

  5. Share your outcomes/results/work

Showing up with more than the minimum might turn the job into more than a job. When we show up because we can, when we’re extending ourselves as a matter of choice, we create space. The space to own the work, to personalize it, and to turn it into more than getting by.

Instead of looking for money, he asks: “can I do something interesting and new? Can I create something brand new that the world needs that is congruent with my morals?”

The highest level of mastery is simplicity. Most information out there is irrelevant. And most effort is wasted, but only the expert knows what to ignore.

The goal is to be known to the smallest viable audience.

Humans don’t have emotional object permanence. If you’re not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer.

Three paths for a soloist:

  1. Honor the noise in your head. Make the work you believe you were born to make. Create things you can visualize but haven’t seen yet. Do it without regard for critics, the market or the math of it all. It’s your handiwork.
  2. Embrace your market. Make what it needs. Earn a seat at the table by developing an asset, and leverage it to create real value for those you serve. Price it accordingly.
  3. Stay busy. Make slightly better than average work, for less than average pricing.

Seeking humility, audacity, discomfort, competence, desire, volition, duty, graduation.

Empathy, discernment, mindfulness, humility, and sustainability.

Like fish in water, we’re blind to how the technological environment shapes our behavior. The invisible environment we inhabit falls beneath the threshold of perception. Everything we do and think is shaped by the technologies we build and implement.

action instead of compliance

Surround yourself with people who make you feel uncomfortable on some level. If you do, it’s a great indication that you’re growing in ways you may not even be aware of.

One of the best reasons for blogging: showing other people your solution to a problem using your words

You could argue that jobs like project manager, UX researcher, designer, digital marketeer exist because of the narrow mindedness of engineers. It’s a simple division of labor. While the Engineers stay focused on the how, the PM stays focused on the what. And the UX translates the what into an interactive map easily understood by target audience.

Instead of digging for gold, sell shovels. Instead of taking a class, offer a class. Instead of borrowing money, lend it. Instead of taking a job, hire for jobs. Instead of taking a mortgage, hold a mortgage. Break free from consumption, switch sides, and reorient to the world as producer.

Life is short, hit send.

writing falls into three buckets:

  1. Trivial things that everybody knows
  2. Things that everybody knows, [but nobody around you knows], and you have a unique perspective on
  3. Stuff that nobody knows so you have to do tons of research. Direct your energy towards the second bucket.

Writing well is the cost of entry, but distribution takes you to the top.

You can often understand a lot about how something works by seeing what happens when it breaks

  1. Services
  2. Products
  3. Attention

People are busy. Don’t redirect them. Wow them.

All the time we’re spending waiting (for a normal that is unlikely to be just like it was) is time we’re not spending learning, leading and connecting.

Design is the rendering of intent.

Essentially it is almost impossible to be a large internet company if you don’t have a loyal customer base that raises your ad quality score and thereby lowers your customer acquisition costs.

We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.

College is an act of training for doing what you’re told despite your opinion.

De-shame, normalize uncertainty, show how it’s done. From supervisor to consultant. Create a system of necessity. Create flat-tire moments (creative adjustment).

Genius is obvious, only after it was crazy.

No one becomes a baseball fan because they read the baseball textbook and did well on the baseball test.

music and gardens.

Wealth is the power to choose.

Put out what you believe.

I don’t want to waste your time, there’s a good chance that what we need to charge you to do this work is going to be more than what you would want to pay. Do you have a minimum of $30,000 to spend on this?

  1. Engage with other groups, communities, leaders and products.
  2. Curate, review/recommendations, cutdown, mention, link.
  3. Platform, podcast, guest post, speak, YouTube, email shout out.
  4. Create, drop and give me 20, tell your story.

If you can pay somebody else less money than what it would cost for you to do it, DO IT.

  1. Consume
  2. Reflect
  3. Implement
  4. Share

2 on 1 — Reflection/Implementation on Consumption 5 on 1 — Five books on one subject (Synoptical reading)

When we get to the other side of the slog and look back, what will we have contributed, learned and created?

Find and make canvases for other people to paint on.

If you stand still and think quality will speak for itself, you’ll be gone before you know what happened. In a world filled with noise “Quietly brilliant” isn’t enough.

Tell their stories: what they do, their tribulations and triumphs. If they’re companies themselves, talk about how they were founded. Ask how they use your product, but don’t make that the centerpiece of their story. 

Give information and let users decide how to feel

Everything is interesting. Every industry has a history, every set of data has an insight, and every person has a story. Write about your data—it tells a story, find it. Write about your information—teach and you’ll bring in people eager to learn.

Help journalists do their job of creating interesting content easier by supplying them with easy-to-understand, new information.

authentic information that your company has access to is the currency of truly valuable content marketing.

Companies don’t need content; they need *things to happen *when they publish content. Good content is just the catalyst for performance.

Domain knowledge is required, but domain knowledge is no longer a sufficient competitive advantage, because it’s widespread. After you do the reading, then what are you going to do? Good judgment and a thoughtful point of view are now scarce assets worth seeking out. What have you done with what you’ve learned?

Individual performance does not matter. Elevate your partners.

Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don’t know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is “master something, anything”. Through mastery of one thing, you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy, and eventually discover where your bliss is.

Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time.

If you are not falling down occasionally, you are just coasting.

If you can use it for war, you can certainly use it for peace.

Outsource Your -$100 An Hour Activites

I feel a nagging sense of guilt when playing video games, or reading books that don’t imply intellectual clout, or anything else that’s internally rewarding but “non-bloggable”. If I had to characterize my generation with a pathology, it would be exhibitionism.

Friend: Why are we friends?

48 hours to bring 15 things we could do.

Commit and put yourself on the hook.

Find leverage to turn ideas into output. Flywheel.

What brings out the best in you? What brings out the worst? One more question: Is it possible to adjust your life so that you show up more often in situations that bring out the best? If you can’t, there’s one other option: Can you change your posture so that the situations you’re in a lot bring out your best instead of your worst?

Expensive placebos work better than cheap ones.

Dwelling.

The easiest way to get a contribution, advice or feedback is to present something that’s 90% done.

Read when you’re bored.

What are you uniquely qualified for? If you have trouble defining that in a way that most any decent firm could not also embrace, you have a positioning challenge that would be fun to fix. Become more relevant to fewer people

The concern for “profundity” reveals an important defining characteristic of bullshit (in general): that it attempts to impress rather than to inform; to be engaging rather than instructive.

You only get value from projects when they finish: to make progress, above all else, you must ensure that some of your projects finish.

Products should know what their users want and get out of their way and let them do that.

Write, teach, and share while you’re learning

Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.

Thought-leader: accessible with unapplied ideas, inaccessible when helping specific people.

CRITICAL: separation of strategy then execution. Strategy is premium and required before accessing execution. Strategy: nearest $XXXX Execution: nearest $XX

Gain clarity through articulation.

PRICING: If you give someone a price and you’re fairly confident you’re going to get it, it’s not high enough.

Drop and give me 20: Tell me 20 things I don’t know.

People crave just the right combination of novelty and familiarly.

The goal isn’t to get hired. The goal is to gain a knowledgeable reputation.

Start doing more things that hurt.

Owner confirmation: keep your job. Market confirmation: payment.

Fighting stasis

People seek the satisfaction of being mad at something that makes sense.

deep content, original research and video

Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building? If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building.

The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things. We need to demand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, our investors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we need to demand more from one another. We’re all necessary, and we can all contribute, to building.

Your success in life will largely be determined by your ability to speak, write, and the quality of your ideas, in that order.

How do we hear the struggles of others?

The story you tell—that makes all the difference. Change the story, change the experience.

Concentration produces wealth. Diversification protects wealth.

All models are wrong, some models are useful That’s what makes it a model. The map is not the territory, and a model is nothing but a stripped-down approximation of what might be happening. By definition, the model for your problem, your organization, your opportunity–it’s not actually the thing being studied, it’s a simplified version of it.

Remember, the real value comes from the questions you ask, the connections you make, and how well you help your client feel understood. The framework is just a tool that can help guide the conversation.

Four discomfort training exercises:

  1. Take an uncomfortable action: List five things you avoid doing which you know would be valuable. Choose the three with outcomes which seem at the moment most important to you. Break each down into discrete tasks that must be done in sequence to achieve the desired outcome. *Commit to doing the smallest task which is not currently within your ability. *
  2. Learn an uncomfortable skill: List five skills that seem personally valuable but are too difficult to acquire (i.e., where failure seems likely). Choose the three that seem most likely to benefit your current life goals. Break each down into discrete actions that must be taken in sequence to acquire the skill. *Commit to taking the smallest of these actions. *
  3. Engage seriously with an uncomfortable idea: List five people whose work you most disagree with and dislike. Choose the three who are most influential. For each, identify piece of work you hate most (writings, videos, podcasts, art, whatever). Commit to consuming the shortest of these pieces of work and writing at least a paragraph explaining why it makes sense.
  4. Engaging in an uncomfortable social interaction: List three people whose ideas you admire but who you are intimidated by, and write 2-3 lines explaining why you appreciate what you think is their biggest idea. Commit to making contact (via email, Twitter DM, snail mail, etc) with at least one of these people.

Like the gym-goer who pushes herself every day to go just a little bit further, to lift a little more weight, these teams design their work to force themselves to always confront a bit of emotional discomfort from doing work they don’t know how to do yet. Each project is intentionally slightly uncomfortable and requires learning new things and discarding existing ways of working—but not so uncomfortable it breaks the team. Through this progressive overload, their individual and collective thresholds of emotional discomfort are gradually pushed up. We could learn from this approach.

We are always in a state of becoming who we will be in the future.

“You can learn for free, but we’ve packaged everything together in a way that’s easy to follow, step-by-step, and up to date”

Maximize interactions?

Don’t put your poorly thought out expectations on me.

interesting thing about (and perhaps the only deep problem concerning) software is complexity. Never before in the history of the constructed world, of human artifact realisation, has it been possible to create complexity on such scale.

Making people smile and giving them hope is like a magic greater than magic itself.

  1. Breadth of experiences are both key and undervalued. So, take the time to choose where you’d like to focus.
  2. Lean into what your experiences have given you. And, also remember to lean into the experiences you are presented with. The dots only connect backward.
  3. There is no such thing as “falling behind.” Comparisons are useless too. You are on your own unique path – one that will be defined by the range of skills you develop.

We hear what we focus on, and what we hear changes how we experience the world. Megaphones don’t automatically create wisdom or even utility. They simply make some people louder.

How do you value contributions?

Stop filling up the gas tank and get driving.

“It’s not the existence of beliefs that is the problem, but what happens to us when we hold them rigidly, without examining them, when we presume the absolutely centrality of our views and become disdainful of others.”

Light on two sides of every room

What does work — and what produces phenomenal results — is getting to know the demand and the needs and wants and dreams and desires of people and crafting products and content that satisfy those needs.

You can learn just about anything now. Thirty years ago, that statement was ridiculous. In just one generation, we put everything you need to know about anything you want to know just a click away. The hard part isn’t access to it, the hard part is finding a cohort and a system that helps you do it. Because learning comes from doing.

  1. Establish qualifications/credentials/competence
  2. Establish relatability/authenticity/vulns

People don’t buy products. People hire products to make emotional and social progress. Figure out what’s preventing people from making progress.

When uncertainty isn’t readily apparent, it’s easy to be lulled into a false sense that things won’t change.

We are wired to notice change; when everything is static what is there to see?

We can no longer rely on our brains to continue pushing the bounds of what’s possible.

There’s never a dead end for anyone in this world. As long as you want to keep walking forward there will always be a path in front of you.

Competence, Desire, Volition, Duty, Graduation.

Competence and volition. The ability to get from where you are to where you seek to be and that place being a place you seek by your own determination.

Begin by acknowledging how things are. Then point towards where you want to go.

You don’t need more time—just a little focused action.

The ugly thing in a world of beauty stands out. Want your marketing to stand out? Make it ugly.

Volition

Since god had control over each and every human, there was no point in mere mortals trying to make scientific advances or acquire new knowledge. It was better to sit back and await your pre-determined fate. In the 16th and 17th centuries, however, this pessimistic, simpering attitude began to change. A scientific revolution swept through Europe; rather than let progress depend on God alone, people started thinking how they themselves could improve society via science.

The difficult part is becoming the type of person that better clients seek out.

“We had fifty years of experience, stress testing what normal looks like and what high looks like.

Then 2020 happened. And we were all wrong.”

we are going through three crises all at once

  1. a pandemic,
  2. a financial crisis, and
  3. a looming mental health crisis from the isolation/disruptive shift.

You don’t do better by working more hours. You can’t work more hours. You do better by finding better clients.

A leader is not about having one person and following that one person, but having someone who can create the conditions that make us all better—make us all bigger, smarter, more creative, more moral, just better.

The ones who raise themselves will be lowered and those who lower themselves will be raised.

Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copywriter’s task: not to create this mass desire — but to channel and direct it.

Study as if you know nothing. Work as if you can solve anything.

“Maybe thanks to – and not due to – the Coronavirus, we will all be a bit closer to our loved ones.”

Thanks to – and not due to – is a powerful way of reframing any challenging situation

It’s pointless to question who someone really is. All you can do is believe and accept. Because however they are in your mind is who they really are.

Build stuff. Don’t just study stuff, build stuff.

There are two classical theories that attempt to explain why planes stay up in the air. But, they each have their drawbacks and don’t provide complete explanations. Just because it makes sense doesn’t mean it should work. And, just because it works doesn’t mean it makes sense.

Money Social relations Fitness Dreams —— Mirroring Backtracking Pacing

Make people feel grateful for their time spent.

In a fragile system, that stressor creates uncertainty. You had a plan, and you were good to follow that plan so long as you stayed within a certain state. But now you’re thrown into a new state, so your plan no longer works. You’re in trouble. That’s fragility. In a robust system, that stressor is information-neutral. You had a plan, and there’s enough buffer or slack in your system to absorb the stressor. Your state is resilient to the new challenge; the plan continues.

Unless we know why someone made a decision, we can’t safely change it or conclude that they were wrong.

A pre-test quiz – taken before you have studied the material – primes the brain to absorb the information afterwards, even if you failed to answer a single question correctly.

You want the minimum amount of labor that allows you to use the other forms of leverage

It’s like Bruce Lee said, “I don’t fear the man who knows a thousand kicks and a thousand punches, I fear the man who’s practiced one punch ten thousand times or one kick ten thousand times.” It’s that understanding that comes through repetition and through usage and through logic and foundations that really makes you a smart thinker.

make sure that you’re building on a steel frame of understanding because you’re putting together a foundation for skyscraper

The foundation of learning is reading.

You need your schooling, you need your training to be able to capitalize on the best specific knowledge, but the part of it that you’re going to get paid for is the specific knowledge.

Have a very strong action bias.

Just do things. The easiest way to figure out if something is viable or not is by doing it. At least do the first step, and the second step, and the third, and then decide.

Play iterated games. All returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge come from compound interest.

Gain some initial traction, and never fall back, just keep ratcheting up, and up.

Needless commitments are more wasteful than needless possessions. Possessions can be ignored, but commitments are a recurring debt that must be paid for with your time and attention.

Your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results.

This means that any effective actions taken against coronavirus in the few days before the epidemic curve shoots upward in any country will always look unreasonable and disproportionate.

By the time those actions look reasonable and appropriate, they will be too late.

You want a career where your inputs don’t match your outputs. Tools and leverage are what create this disconnection between inputs and outputs.

Play stupid games win stupid prizes.

Be too busy to meet. Because then you’re not working.

Spend time with people of high intelligence, energy and integrity.

Specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

  1. Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you. Do more of whatever you can’t stop thinking about. It feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else.
  2. Be answerable, take risks under your own name. Singular, public, and risky brands are the most accountable.
  3. Leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no cost of replication (code, media). Money and people working for you are permission leverage. Code and media are permission less leverage, they work for you while you sleep. If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.

To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft; to get a good draft written, you only have to turn a series of notes into a continuous text. And as a series of notes is just the rearrangement of notes you already have in your slip-box, all you really have to do is have a pen in your hand when you read.

Solitude, focus, pushing through whatever I can’t stop thinking about, knowing when to quit, not holding on to idols.

The only way to get better is to walk away from what you used to believe. And the person you become can’t possibly be the same as the person you were.

Often people think they know everything they need to know. And this turns us into closed pople and with prejudices expressing opinions as absolute truths. Generally, the people who know the most about something talk in terms that involve uncertainty (e.g., generally, if, but, yet, possible, unlikely). People that know the least, tend to talk in absolutes (e.g., always, will, never).

You chose well.

Your reputation is a magnet. Once you become known for something, relevant opportunities come to you with no extra work

Your success depends on the risks you take. Your survival depends on the risks you avoid.

We’re sold on focusing on coding, data analysis, financial modeling… and we lose focus on the intangible stuff — the skills that drive customers to truly love **a brand **— empathy, clarity, attentiveness — that ultimately sets you apart from the rest.

love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning

Design Criteria:

  1. Clear/confusing
  2. Interesting
  3. Communicate
  4. Details

How do we judge this?

True efficiency, solace, and tranquility only exists amongst challenge.

**A problem solver: **You can’t stop thinking about how people interact with technology and why they use it the way they do A thinker: You have the ability to take on big tasks and break them down to their simplest components Aesthetically inclined: You value the design of everything around you, from software to hardware, from architecture to art Empathetically inclined: You need to understand people’s needs and motivations in the use of products and see its value in the design process **Passionate: **You are passionate about games, community driven content generation, and social networking Excited about one or more of these areas: Designing features, creating prototypes, competitive analysis, user research

Begin with the end in mind. Years from now, after this event is long over, what should we remember about it?

“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” — Mary Oliver

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” — Carl Sagan

Aim to be great in 10 years.

One of the things that worries me about the shoulder-shrugging manner in which our current culture is diminishing uninterrupted thinking is that I can’t help but wonder how many potential modern Whiteheads, growing up in a world of fragmentation and connectivity-primacy, will never make it to writing their own masterpieces.

Ask for advice, not feedback

Mastering the fundamentals will make you ‘good’ to a level that very few people ever reach. It’s not until you reach a level where everyone around you has a mastery of the fundamentals, that the meta comes into play.

TRY THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK: If you want a real sense of the competition and how they present themselves, try posting a fake job offer where you pretend to be a film producer that is looking for an editor.

“Marcus would have read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the tragedies of Euripides side by side with the Aeneid, and studied the speeches of the great Athenian orator Demosthenes”

One year from now, if you could do one thing to help you on your journey, what would that be? What has to have happened to make you happy with your progress?

crucial to making close friends:

  1. proximity;
  2. repeated, unplanned interactions;
  3. and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.

absorb information about who is doing and interested in what

the scale of teaching has defined what teaching is. Since there is usually a very small ratio of students to teachers, “teaching” has evolved into lecturing and homework, in hopes that it can become more scalable.

The scale of”learning” in classrooms has now defined what learning is. People think learning is done in a classroom instead of doing the actual work.

We need to redefine student and teacher. Students as learners and teachers as mentors.

When we’re told it is okay to dream, we tend to be more flexible with our dreams. When we’re told we’re not responsible for something, we often find that we’re more open to accepting responsibility for it. When we’re told that it’s okay to be afraid, we often feel less afraid. When we’re told that we’re probably justified in being suspicious, we tend to become less so. And when we’re allowed to throw rocks at our enemies, we often tire of it very, very quickly.

College feeds your anxiety to make you fear the next day. Instead of feeding your hope of a better future.

Unless our current thoughts or activities are sufficiently engaging, the next best thing that comes along will pull us away. And since it’s through engagement that we experience and through experience that we are changed, those who engage us hold the keys to our hearts and minds, and from there, our actions. We do not see these people as manipulators. We see them as saviors.

No matter how unskilled or unpolished you may be, if you can capture and hold another person’s attention long enough, they will eventually fold to your command. Why? Because when our attention is captured, our conscious judgment and self-awareness recedes and suggestibility takes their place.

People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.

Validate and fascinate. Not Correct and convince.

For any system that matters, you have to prevent a single (or multiple) failures from sinking it. Any new failure that happens should be evaluated in a blameless manner and solved by improving the system so mistakes of that class cannot happen again

commodify the back end, transform and retransform the front end.

“everything became memes, and then memes became everything“

“You are the only one who creates your reality. For no one else can think for you. No one else can do it. It is only you. Every bit of it. You.”

“People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.”

Not, “is this a good idea?” but “when?”

Valery Legasov had a powerful reflection at the end – “To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants. It doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: “What is the cost of lies?”

Got milk? The absence of the product sold the product.

“each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice”

Where are you going? What do you need to get there? Why? // Find where you’re going next. Get what you need to get there. Find the others.

Opportunities instead of tasks. Chances instead of risks.

“There’s something cool about that. Fucking up big, you know? It’s not like you should make mistakes in life… but when you really make a mess? When you really screw up? It makes what you say carry more weight. I don’t care about some guy who got a great deal on a watch at a cheap shop. I wanna hear from someone who got fleeced on an expensive ass piece of shit. If you’re gonna do it, then DO IT.”

Find the others.

If it’s obvious, it’s worth stating explicitly.

Expectation awareness and communication

moderation by degradation of user experience

slower pace fostering better discussions

Haruki Murakami on love: “If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.”

You have what every king and queen, every pharaoh and ruler, every CEO and celebrity of the past would give all their wealth for: Today.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay

Leave nothing unexamined.

People cling to ideas, because they’re supposed to be vouchers for a million dollars. no, write an obscure book. build something outside all that pressure. i guess treehouses for kids qualify

It is not difficult to avoid death… it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death.

it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day… for the unexamined life is not worth living for man

Macro patience, micro speed

Find the others. Give and get feedback. Learn by doing. See the work, do the work, repeat.

Price for the value you create.

Put in an unreasonable amount of effort to make sure it’s magical.

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami on kindness and disagreement:“Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”

Miami tries to make it seem like students have perfect lives and while you know that’s not the case for a lot of students in difficult situations, they do have plans and make plans. There is never a limit to the excitement you can see on their faces as they imagine their future. It is only afterward, after all their travels have taken them from door to door all over the country, where it all begins to collapse. It is not just that the textbooks are poorly written and the teachers are frequently lazy and uninterested, but also that they are oversimplified and abstract.

Every successful community, every organization, every family has citizens. It’s the citizens who define the future, because their commitment to the long-term matters.

It’s not up to us to judge what someone else’s enough is. It’s up to us to be mindful about where we are personally, and either work towards or optimize for what our own enough actually is.

  1. Don’t let life happen to you
  2. Search for integrative principles that cut across work and life.. and then hold to them 100% of the time.
  3. The truest reflection of your priorities in work and life is how you allocate your time and available resources.

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

Focusing is about saying “No.”

So, if you only give once per month, please think of us next time.

Design is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what problem is worth solving and then aligning all the key decision makers.

If a client says “no” based on price, then one of two things has occurred:

  1. They are asking you to solve a problem they view as unimportant, or
  2. They do not see you as unique or different and therefore easily replaced by someone else.

“If we were having this discussion three years from today, and you were looking back over those three years, what has to have happened in your life for you to feel happy with your progress?”

Perspective. Strength. Action.

Process gets you up to speed when you’re not familiar with it. It allows you to do good work even when you’re not particularly inspired.

Amateurs have a goal. Professionals have a process.

Amateurs complain about mankind’s flaws, biases, and contradictions; professionals exploit them for fun and profit

An amateur doesn’t care about the audience; the amateur is doing it for themselves. To be a professional, you have to engage with somebody — you have to engage with an audience.

Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

the highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.

Educate with examples and discussions: no pressure—just lovely, interesting discussions.

There is a large difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Nobody notices most of it, but everyone feels everything

Teach what you know. Teach while you learn. * * We’re all just big, complicated bags of emotion walking around.

manage your focus, not your time

Seek discomfort

Autodidactism

I don’t care how successful someone is, they have issues and problems they want to solve. And they want the magic bullet.

Most dangerous phrase: “I know that”

memento mori

You will spend almost all of your time building your solution and convincing people to use it.

I dislike pandering attempts to steer my thoughts and opinions.

It’s the habit that matters.

The best way to advance your career is to work. We place value on things that are real. The more you create, the more your contribution will be valued. If the work is there, the recognition will follow.

When you consider your own judgments and those within your communities, think about the criteria for intolerance. Ask yourself: How exactly is “asshole” being defined?

Idea Labs see people and their ideas as separate entities—people are meant to be respected, ideas are not. In Echo Chambers, a person’s ideas are part of their identity, so respecting a person and respecting their ideas are one and the same. While people in an Idea lab argue with each other for fun, disagreeing with someone in a culture of agreement is seen as rudeness, and a heated argument about ideas in an Echo Chamber is indistinguishable from a fight. To put a visual to it, Idea Lab culture views agreement and decency as separate, unrelated axes, while Echo Chamber culture views agreement and decency as a single axis

Looking busy vs doing what matters

Early adopters are thrilled by the new. They seek innovation.

Everyone else is wary of failure. They seek trust.

In a high school classroom? You’ll be lucky if two teens risk volunteering. That’s by design. Traditional schooling irons out our creative impulses in order to prepare us for the factory and the cubicle. Our educational system was made this way with the best of intentions, but that way of operating is wildly obsolete.

opposition between consequentialism (=what is important is the result of your actions) versus deontologism (=what is important is what you are doing, not the result). I think that as machines become smarter and smarter, it is good that we dive a bit more in our philosophical world and reach for what makes us human. When machines take over the productive work, defining our values is going to be our full time activity. Machines may participate, but why would they add anything we consider valuable to the core?

very Brave New World-esque in that it both “keeps the app fun” and acts as a means to suppress dissent

rigorously eliminate everything from your life which doesn’t fit inside your top X critical priorities. Where X is as small as possible, and seek to cull it further by combining equivalents and trying to identify why some ‘important’ things might actually be utter wastes of time in the first place. The world generally uses a ratchet approach to conquer your attention. Use a ratchet to take it back.

What is the most neglected important area in my life right now?

Distractions will always exist; managing them is our responsibility.

More conversations and fewer announcements.

Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time – to fulfill ideals of decentralization.

But we should not strive for a single universal interface that’s accessible to all, because that’s sacrificing both the best and the average case for the worst case. Consider books and vision loss. The tried-and-true solution to make books accessible is printing them in Braille. But nobody in their right mind would be suggesting we should only ever print books in Braille, because then it’s equally accessible.

Graduate your habits. Increase your output by just a tiny fraction on a consistent basis.

The very design of Netflix itself is constructed to reduce your ability to:

It’s designed to be a boundless slurry of content poured directly into your eyeballs. In a way, it’s training us to never step back or even consider, say, reading a book or going for a walk.

Most failures are one-time costs. Most regrets are recurring costs.

I don’t know what problems you have but if you’re not satisfied, then you need to get in a position of authority and change it.

Stop worrying about work or what you want to work as, and spend time playing.

Bernays did not ask, “How do I sell more cigarettes to women?” Instead, he wondered, if women bought and smoked cigarettes, what else would have to be true? What would have to change in the world to make smoking desirable to women and socially acceptable?

Approach situations from the opposite end of the natural starting point.

Life is a series of short terms; that’s what makes the long term. But if all you’re doing is maximizing in the short term, you’re going to break the system, because the system is not the short term. The system is the life you’ve chosen to live.

People are smart enough to tell what’s solid and what isn’t. Product teams who go out of their way to give us real, tangible objects we feel that we can own will find a great deal of success. 

Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made out of dependencies.

If you haven’t started, then taking action is more important than finding a better strategy.If you’re already taking action, then ensuring you’re working on the right thing is more important than working harder.Your effort sets your floor. Your strategy sets your ceiling.

*Engaging *with the world rather than constantly *thinking *about it.

Fixed time, variable scope

Allow people to think for themselves and build for themselves.

Think for yourself. Build for yourself.

https://archive.org/details/FreeTheFutureOfARadicalPrice/page/n7

The truth is, you change effortlessly and all the time. The primary job of the brain is to adjust your behavior based on the environment.Design a better environment. Change will happen naturally.

The head of marketing is the person in charge of what’s extra. Because if you want to grow, nothing is actually extra. It’s simply an investment

AWS purportedly puts design documents forward in the form of six-pagers. They start meetings with a 20 minute silent reading session. It’s like the book club from hell.

“The ability to distract or delude yourself has never been greater, and as a result we are facing crises of both privacy and politics. Though those dangers are real, there is also opportunity created in their wake. For those who know how to use technology wisely, it is the easiest time in history to teach yourself something new. An amount of information vaster than was held by the Library of Alexandria is freely accessible to anyone with a device and an internet connection. Top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale are publishing their best courses for free online. Forums and discussion platforms mean that you can learn in groups without ever leaving your home.”

Employ rapid feedback strategies

Dive straight into immersion from day one

Always have a challenge

“The problem is that once something becomes abundant, we tend to ignore it, just like we ignore the air that we breathe. There is a reason why economics is defined as the science of “choice under scarcity”: In abundance you don’t have to make choices, which means that you don’t have to think about it at all.”

If you run everything through a spreadsheet, you might end up with a rational plan, but the rational plan isn’t what creates energy or magic or memories.

I help [who you serve] [achieve a result]

I thought this… But then I realized… and as a result now I can…

I thought I had to live with my condition but then I realized that smart people found this cream that would make it go away and now I can live without my condition.

because you know that your brain was designed for survival, not truth, and it’s wise to be wary of your own intuition.

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried” or, the more simplified version from Adventure Time “Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something”

“Most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality.”

Once you free your mind of ‘correct’ you can do whatever you want with no preconception of what to do.

“Offer me a chance to contribute, and I’ll work hard on it, with focus, and once I begin to make progress, I’ll become passionate about it.” Work before passion measures our craft in terms of contribution, not in an idealized model of perfection. Passion comes from feeling needed, from approaching mastery, from doing work that matters.

And in the meantime, your brand, your campaign, your project, will benefit from what’s happening now, which is marketing, not advertising, which is connection, not interruption. 

Preferences are for people that don’t know their customer.

Find the people worth serving, and then find a change worth making.

Intensity makes a good story. Consistency makes progress.

If you want to be in the top 1% of a particular domain, then you can’t take your cues from and follow the social norms of 99% of people.This is harder than it sounds. We are wired to imitate. The further you want to climb, the more carefully you need to construct your tribe.

Comparison is the thief of joy when applied broadly, but the teacher of skills when applied narrowly.

the real long-term leader of a democracy is the giant communal brain of the citizen body.

Saying what everyone is thinking but not saying is a form of leadership.

In 1959, almost every reasonable person in the U.S. thought interracial marriage was an immoral thing. Today, we see this as a failure of wisdom. The 4% who disagreed with them were the wisest people of all when it came to this topic. Their ideas were the diamonds in the dogshit.

We’re built to believe convenient delusions, not to be accurate.

life is just Today, over and over and over again

We tell stories. We make connections. We create experiences.

There’s only one style you need. And that’s appealing to baby boomers.

We sell feelings, status, and connection, not tasks or stuff.

Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack, on the true definition of innovation: “The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of ‘innovation’ is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.”

“treating the pain seems like the most obvious approach to making the patient better. But our current approach might be blinding us to what’s possible.”

People construct anticipatory cognitive scenarios and visualized futures and use them to guide their actions. Those of high efficacy visualize success scenarios that provide positive guides for performance, whereas those beset by doubts about their efficacy visualize failure scenarios that undermine performance by dwelling on how things might go wrong.

The fastest and most innovative team wins in business. Take part in “creative destruction”

In order to be “one of the above” you have to begin by being willing to be “none of the above.” To zig with intent, when the market is insisting that you zag.

Confidence won’t automatically get you results, but self-doubt sets your ceiling.

Practice is the price you pay today to be better tomorrow.

If there are no constraints there are no problems.

I can think, I can wait, I can fast.

One can pass on knowledge but not wisdom. One can find wisdom, one can live it, one can be supported by it, one can work wonders with it, but one cannot speak it or teach it.

Embrace and pivot.

If you care enough about your work to be willing to be criticized for it then you have done a good days work.

Whatever you repeat, you reinforce.

Assume you’re wrong and try to prove yourself less wrong.

You know yourself mostly by your thoughts. Everyone else knows you only by your actions.

“Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.”

The wealthy are people who earn by taking advantage of societal booms. There is not a single gold digger who gets rich.

Show up, work hard, and listen. That’s it. It requires no talent, no special genetics, or any skill whatsoever to show up, work hard, and listen.“

Your willpower will never beat out your environment.

  1. The curiosity to experiment and explore.
  2. The honesty to observe the world as it is, not as you wish it to be.
  3. The humility to kill your favorite ideas when you learn something new.
  4. The consistency to repeat this cycle for life.

Designing a logo is never the hard job. It’s persuading people to use it.

If you want to make a long-term impact, build the roads.

I want people who believe they can achieve anything if they put the work into it.

Expectation violations are a challenge to how we live.

Reframer

Success comes from doing what others are not willing to do.

It’s not what you get, it’s what you become.

You can’t make people change. But you can create an environment where they choose to.

When making plans, think big.When making progress, think small.

Drops making waves in the ocean

You can wish away forever but you’ll never find a thing like today.

Sometimes it takes times like these to know you’re in the right place

No one cares if you have it, just as long they think you do.

Find the right clients Earn their attention and trust Identify the problem Find their fear, embrace their objectives Prototype possible solutions Create an architecture that supports your solution to the problem Build a minimum viable solution Test it Program a well-documented, resilient piece of code Test it Debug it Ship it

Now you can waste time and dignity instead of money. Who can you tear down? How much time can you waste? What’s it worth to you to have more followers than the others? It’s a lousy game, because if you lose, you lose, and if you win, you also lose. The only way to do well is to refuse to play.

Take more swings.

“It needs something more…”

You can’t solve novel problems with old principles.

Learn everything. Try everything.

Make observations that inform thinking.

Being in sync is a choice.

The single best way to figure out how people feel isn’t to ask them with some focus-group survey. It’s to watch what they do when given the choice. “This or that?” is a great way to get to the truth of our preferences.

Enable productivity.

To have human beings who care (and to give them the authority and resources to demonstrate that.)

If Something is Important to You, Schedule It

CONCEPTUAL DIP—You got this far operating under one set of assumptions. Abandoning those assumptions and embracing a new, bigger set may be exactly what you need to do to get to the next level. The heroes who have reinvented institutions and industries (everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Richard Branson, from Zelma Watson George to Jacqueline Novogratz) all did it in exactly the same way—by working through a conceptual Dip all the way to the other side.

Quitting creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.

Economics of modern business would fall apart if it weren’t for the uncommitted users who just dabble.

Being better than 98 percent of the competition used to be fine. In the world of Google it’s useless because all of your competition is just a click away, whatever it is you do. The only position you can count on now is best in the world.

If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start.

Real success goes to those who obsess.

The reason we’re here is to solve the hard problems.

Marketing would be easy if every prospect and customer thought the way you do.

In a competitive world, adversity is your ally.

It’s not until you face certain death that you have the opportunity to pull ahead.

The mature thing is not even to bother starting because you’re probably not going to make it through the Dip. And the stupid thing to do is to start, give it your best shot, waste a lot of time and money, and quit right in the middle of the Dip.

The hard part isn’t consuming content, it’s thinking deeply about your work and then engaging with it.

If a competitor came along who could achieve your stated mission faster and more effectively than you could, would you cheer them on? If you’re not proud of what you actually do, perhaps you can explore doing something else instead.

If you make content you need people to feel something when it’s done.

What does your brand stand for?

Change makers (

In a world where everybody screams, silence is noticeable.

To be successful in the marketplace it takes vision, courage, and determination, not market research and focus groups.

As designers, we have three levels of responsibility: One—to ourselves, the integrity of the project and all its components. Two—to the client, to solve the problem in a way that is economically sound and efficient. Three—to the public at large, the consumer, the user of the final design.

We are definitively against any fashion of design and any design fashion. We despise the culture of obsolescence, the culture of waste, the cult of the ephemeral. We detest the demand temporary solutions, the waste of energies and capital for the sake of novelty

We are for a design that lasts, that responds to people’s needs not to people’s wants. We are for a design that is committed to a society that demands long-lasting values, a society that earns the benefit of commodities and deserves respect and integrity. We like the use of primary shapes and primary colors because their formal values are timeless. We like a typography that transcends subjectivity and searches for objective values, a typography that is beyond time-that doesn’t follow trends, that reflects its content in an appropriate manner. We like economy of design because it avoids wasteful exercises, it respects investment and lasts longer. We strive for a design that is centered on the message rather than visual titillation. We like design that is clear, simple and enduring. And that is what timelessness means in design.

There are no hierarchies when it comes to quality. Quality is there or it is not there, and if it is not there, we have wasted our time.

Bad design is criminal since it it producing visual pollution that is degrading our environment just like all other types of pollution. ** ** To design something that has a meaning, that is not arbitrary, that has a reason for being, something in which every detail carries the meaning or has a precise purpose aimed at a precise target.** ** ** ** Creativity needs the support of knowledge to be able to perform at its best.** ** ** ** Why don’t people choose you and what you have to offer them? Until we can be honest about why, we’re going to waste time and money (our time and their time, our money and their money). Here are the basic reasons. Which ones affect you? What’s missing from this list?

A simple example: Often, a company struggles because people don’t trust the organization or the promises it makes. But instead of working on building trust, they do the opposite, coming up with scammy ways to get noticed by more people. They don’t have an awareness problem, they have a trust problem, and all the effort they’re putting into getting more noticed is actually hurting their wish to be trusted. Before you spend your time and your money on “marketing,” dig a little deeper and figure out what marketing problem you’re seeking to solve.** ** ** ** “For people who need X, we have X!”** ** ** ** Marketers define “us” because only by focusing our story and concentrating our effort can we change a few people. And if we change the right people in the right way, the culture begins to change. ** ** 1. map and understand the worldview of a culture we seek to change. 2. focus all our energy on merely this group. Ignore everyone. Instead, focus on building and living a story that will resonate with the culture you are seeking to change. That’s how we make change. By caring enough to want to change a culture, and being brave enough to pick just one. ** ** ** ** Every organization, every project, every interaction exists to do one thing: to make change happen. ** ** ** ** “We establish the culture; we communicate the culture.” ** ** ** We only want a good price when it’s a tie. ** ** ** To stand out, avoid the clusters where everyone else is clamoring to be heard. To stand out, purposefully address the needs and desires that everyone else has ignored. To stand out, set yourself boldly apart by redrawing the axes in a new way. ** ** ** Identify a specific customer that you seek to change. Then answer this: What does this person believe that you don’t believe? What do they see that you don’t see? What do they want that you don’t want? What do they care about that you don’t care about? ** ** It’s about helping someone see how you can fill a hole in their lives, and relating this to things they already understand. It’s about connecting the dots for someone, using the dots they know. ** ** ** When they hear what you do, some of them will say “that’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for, tell me more about it”** ** ** ** Don’t talk about better, get clear on the story you tell.

Begin with what the user already wants, knows, and believes.

We’re not built to do it all, we’re built to do it together.

We’re not perfect. But we have one thing that we can really bring to the table.

Being generic is a choice. If you are generic, you will always be struggling to make a difference.

You can and will be ignored, you have to earn peoples attention.

The impact you seek to have is just around the corner.

Your goal as a marketer is to keep moving closer to the foundational need. When the promise you make and the story you tell resonate with one of our core beliefs, they have more impact.

Safety Health Belonging Adventure Respect Power Sex Security Good looks Learning new things Avoiding new things Peace of mind Revenge Control Friendship Romance Community Sympathy Delight Luxury Tension Freedom of movement Freedom of expression Nostalgia Affection Participation Reassurance Creativity Obedience Reliability Strength Physical activity

Air travel: people want to get to where they are going.

Y-axis: is it going where I want to go? X-axis: are they nice to me, do I get free snacks, do they have a sense of humor?

JetBlue: some people want to feel human

The Mac