“Lose an hour in the morning chase it all day.” - Yiddish saying For most of my life I didn’t have a morning routine. It wasn’t really until my early-20s that I even made my bed every day. It wasn’t until my 30s that I shaved every day. I would just wake up and do stuff - I don’t really remember what was so urgent every morning but I did not have a set ritual - the day would just start…
TA #110: 🤘 How to Sell an Idea; Best Description of a Boring Product
Hey, you. You're doing great. Click here to read this on the web. Queen's Freddie Mercury (R) is peeved at Def Leppard's Joe Elliott (L) Welcome to…
We’ve been naming generations for a long time. Demographers use it to begin a conversation about the changes around us. While a birth range doesn’t guarantee an outlook, the demographic…
You spend years trying to learn new stuff but then look back and realize that maybe like 10 big ideas truly changed how you think and drive most of what you believe. Brent Beshore recently listed the biggest ideas that changed his life. A few of mine: Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking. There is little correlation between climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation. That’s an extreme example, but everyone has views persuaded by identity over pure analysis. There’s four parts to this: Tribes are everywhere: Countries, states, parties, companies, industries, departments, investment styles, economic philosophies, religions, families, schools, majors, credentials, Twitter communities. People are drawn to tribes because there’s comfort in knowing others understand your background and goals. Tribes reduce the ability to challenge ideas or diversify your views because no one wants to lose support of the tribe. Tribes are as self-interested as people, encouraging ideas and narratives that promote their survival. But they’re exponentially more influential than any single person. So tribes are very effective at promoting views that aren’t analytical or rational, and people loyal to their tribes are very poor at realizing it. Psychologist Geoffrey Cohen once showed Democratic voters supported Republican proposals when they were attributed to fellow Democrats more than they supported Democratic proposals attributed to Republicans (and the opposite for Republican voters). This kind of stuff happens everywhere, in every field, if you look for it. Everything’s been done before. The scenes change but the behaviors and outcomes don’t. Historian Niall Ferguson’s plug for his profession is that “The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” The biggest lesson from the 100 billion people who are no longer alive is that they tried everything we’re trying today. The details were different, but they tried to outwit entrenched competition. They swung from optimism to pessimism at the worst times. They battled unsuccessfully against reversion to the mean. They learned that popular things seem safe because so many people are involved, but they’re most dangerous because they’re most competitive. Same stuff that guides today, and will guide tomorrow. History is abused when specific events are used as a guide to the future. It’s way more useful as a benchmark for how people react to risk and incentives, which is pretty stable over time. Multi-discipline learning: There’s as much to learn about your field from other fields than there is within your field. Most professions, even ones that look wildly different, live under the umbrella of “Understanding how people respond to incentives, how to convincingly solve their problems, and how to work with others who are difficult to communicate with and/or disagree with you.” Once you see the roots shared by most fields you realize there’s a sink of information you’ve been ignoring that can help you make better sense of your own profession. I didn’t appreciate how important communication is to providing investment advice before reading about how many doctors struggle to communicate effectively with patients, leading to patients who don’t stick with treatment plans and are resistant to lifestyle change. There are millions of these dots to connect. Probing beyond the confines of your day job is more fun anyways. Self-interest can lead people to believe and justify nearly anything. Think about businesses trying to survive competition being run by people trying to prove their career worth, and the incentive to run with the option that provides the cleanest path to the next win is huge, even when that option is something you wouldn’t accept in less-stressful circumstances. I have seen investors justify strategies and sales techniques they fiercely argued against at previous employers, coming around the moment their career depended on it. These are good, honest people. But self-interest is a freight train of persuasion. When you accept how powerful it is you become more skeptical of promotion, and more empathetic to those doing the promoting. Room for error is underappreciated and misunderstood. It’s usually viewed as a conservative hedge, used by those who don’t want to take much risk. But when used appropriately it’s the opposite. Room for error lets you stick around long enough to let the odds of benefiting from a low-probability outcome fall in your favor. Since the biggest gains occur the most infrequently – either because they don’t happen often or because they take time to compound – the person with enough room for error in part of their strategy to let them endure hardship in the other part of their strategy has an edge over the person who gets wiped out, game over, insert more tokens, at the first hiccup. Sustainable sources of competitive advantage. This might be the most important topic in business and investing because other than luck it is the only path to long-term success. The only truly sustainable sources of competitive advantage I know of are: Learn faster than your competition. Empathize with customers more than your competition. Communicate more effectively than your competition. Be willing to fail more than your competition. Wait longer than your competition. Everything else – intelligence, design, insight – gets smashed to pieces by competitors who are almost certainly as smart as you. Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people. Start with the assumption that everyone is innocently out of touch and you’ll be more likely to explore what’s going on through multiple points of view, instead of cramming what’s going on into the framework of your own experiences. It’s hard to do. It’s uncomfortable when you do. But it’s the only way to get closer to figuring out why people behave like they do
Practically Paperless with Obsidian, Episode 25: Five Use Cases for Managing My Writing in Obsidian
Photo by mali maeder on Pexels.com Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. Years before I began usin…
I originally wrote this as a doc, and did a talk w/ slides in Fall 2020 at Convoy. This is very focused on how to work in a software engineering team (surprise! that’s most of what I know about!) but I’ve had friends say they’ve shown this to their partners,...
If you're interested in a morning routine that many of the most creatively and financially successful leaders on the planet are now using, then you really want to watch this episode now.
For subscribers in the UK: the paperback edition of my book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals will be published by Vintage next Thursday! It's currently ava...
Smartphones vs. Science: On Distraction and the Suppression of Genius - Study Hacks - Cal Newport
Last month, Adam Weiss, a fourth-year chemistry PhD student at the University of Chicago, published a column in the journal Nature. In the piece, Weiss talked about how he had recently hit "a rut" in his polymer chemistry research. "Although I had been productive early in my graduate career," he wrote, "my long hours and
What would a focus group have said about the title of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird? Is it easy to understand, did you know what it’s about before you pick up the book? What about …
How I Find Twitter Content Ideas - The Bootstrapped Founder
Reading Time: 8 minutes On Twitter’s own blog, their “content idea” section suggests that you “tweet a GIF.” Yeah. Let’s come up with something better. I’ve been building an audience of over 50.000 on Twitter over the last two years. I will share the strategies and tactics I use to come up with relevant and helpful daily content to … Continue reading How I Find Twitter Content Ideas
29 Lessons From Owning A Bookstore - RyanHoliday.net
I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but as I’ve said, the absolute craziest was deciding to open a bookstore. Running a small business is always difficult, running a small business during a pandemic is damn near impossible but a small town book store in rural Texas? But here we are, a year later, not just still standing but doing great! We’ve learned a lot…about business, about books, and about ourselves. I made a YouTube video about the experience, but I wanted to expand it here into a fuller explanation of all the lessons that The Painted Porch has taught me. I share them here so you can get something too—and perhaps learn a little from my experiences and hopefully go create something cool of your own out of it. Here are 29 lessons from the first 12 months of owning The Painted Porch. – It always takes longer than you think it’s going to take. That’s Hofstadter’s law. From the moment my wife suggested we open a small-town bookstore, everything has taken longer and been harder than we expected. If you can’t pass the marshmallow test of delaying gratification and deferring things into the future, you’re just going to get crushed. – For most of my life as an author and entrepreneur, my work has been digital. Close to half of the sales of my books are audiobooks and ebooks. Every morning, I send out the Daily Stoic and Daily Dad emails to over 500,000 people. I put out a podcast that’s had 80 million downloads. As satisfying as it is to reach large numbers of people through the enormous scale of the internet, there is even more satisfaction in doing something in real life, for real people, even at a much much smaller level. Every time I walk by or to the bookstore, I think, Wow, I made that. – I think one of the best decisions we made was making our book tower. It’s 20 feet tall and made of some 2000 books, 4000 nails, and 40 gallons of glue. It was not cheap to do. It was not easy to do. It took forever. We had to solve all sorts of logistical problems to make it work. But it’s also probably one of the single best marketing and business decisions we made in the whole store. Because it’s the number one thing that people come into the store to take pictures of. – You want to have a unique proposition. You want to have something that only you could do. Most bookstores have thousands and thousands of books. But what we decided here was that we’d have only a couple hundred books, only my absolute favorite books, only the books I put in my Reading List Email. It would only be those books. So not only did this make it cheaper and easier to run the bookstore, it makes us stand out. – There’s this great story of when Jeff Bezos had the idea for Amazon. He was working on Wall Street at the time. He and his boss go for a walk in Central Park and after he tells him his idea, his boss says, “that sounds like a great idea for someone who doesn’t have a job.” Meaning that somebody else should do it, not Bezos. If there’s something crazy that you’re thinking about doing, maybe you should get serious about actually doing it. On the other side of the risk and the crazy leap can be something that changes your life, that changes your community, that changes the world. – Doing something cool means risk…but just because you take a big risk doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of little ways to take risk off the table. My office is above the bookstore. I rent part of the building out to another business, etc. – There are lots of easier ways to make money than a physical bookstore in 2022…so everyday I try to remind myself this project was not about making lots of money. Remembering why you did something and how you measure success helps you calibrate your decisions properly. I’m happy enough to be putting books out in the world, making this community better, having a physical space, challenging myself, etc…as long as I don’t lose lots of money, that’s a win. – Start small. The problem is when you have really high standards, when you expect a lot of yourself, it’s hard to be comfortable with something that’s kind of crappy or mediocre or not all the way there. But there’s a reason most tech start ups think in terms of a minimum viable product. – Related to that there’s a great Hemingway line—we actually have a shirt with it, and I have a print of it on my wall—it’s one of my all-time favorite quotes: the first draft of everything is shit. I love how The Painted Porch is now, but it took weeks and months to get it to where it is. It’s been a continual process of improvement and growth and making changes. – Lengthen your timeline. I mentioned Hofsteader’s Law above—it was important to remind ourselves many times that the building we were in was nearly 150 years old. It can be very easy on a project to get caught up in the immediacy of what’s in front of you…but you miss the big picture and you miss the reality that most things that work are set up to work for a long time. We sell books in our store that were written 2,500 years ago! Who cares if the project took 13 months longer to open than we thought? – As Zeno said, books are a way to have conversations with the dead. You can learn from people who came before you. They can also inspire and reassure you. Some books I leaned on often throughout this were The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and A Calendar of Wisdom [...]
It's counterintuitive but I think it's true.
We struggle to find time to stretch our creative muscles.
But modern creativity doesn't come with more freedom.
It comes with more restriction.
Think of Morning Pages.
It became *wildly* successful among creative professionals because it forces you to write 3 pages.
No more, no less.
It forces you to write first thing in the morning or as soon as you wake up.
It doesn't ask you to sit and write whenever your mood strikes. No. It should be done as soon as you wake up.
It doesn't ask you to write as long as you want. No. It asks you to stick to 3 pages.
That's how you unlock your creativity.
With restrictions. Not with freedom.
Think of tweets, insta stories, tik-tok's viral 1-min videos, YouTube shorts, and now, this nicheless blog post with 300 words.
Modern creativity isn't about finding freedom to stretch your creative muscles.
It's about restrictions.
But, how far should you go with these restrictions?
Where should you stop so that it doesn't become suffocating?
So that you don't accidentally create a platform where creatives cannot thrive anymore?
Can you think of any platforms with restrictions that didn't become successful among creatives?
Can you think of platforms where there are NO restrictions whatsoever and became unsuccessful?
According to me, they are Facebook and LinkedIn.
Sure, they are successful when you look at their revenue numbers.
But they are often ridiculed for their cringey content.
Tik-Tok was initially ridiculed because it was popular among teenagers and not the *intellectual* batch.
But, now? They embrace it.
What changed? Absolutely nothing. Creativity among Tik-Tok users just took time to produce meaningful creative content.
So, what creative restrictions are you following next time you sit down to write? Or, paint? Or, build?
Elon Musk said he had lunch with Charlie Munger in 2009. Munger allegedly told the whole table all the ways Tesla would fail. It “made me quite sad,” Musk tweeted last week. “But I told him I agreed with all those reasons & that we would probably die, but it was worth trying anyway.” It’s both sad and inspiring. It’s also, I think, more complicated than it looks. Munger was recently asked an unrelated question that adds a layer to Musk’s point. Asked, “You seem extremely happy and content. What’s your secret to living a happy life?” 98-year-old Munger replied: The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results good and bad as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism. I think these guys are making the same point. And it’s an important point. Musk is right that some things that will probably fail are worth trying anyway. That’s true for everyone in almost all areas of life, because we live in a tail-driven world where a few events drive the majority of outcomes. It’s a world that demands you become comfortable with a lot of things not working, lots of things failing, and constant disappointment, because “success” means you tried ten things and eight of them fail miserably but two change your life. Munger is right that unrealistic expectations assure misery, for two reasons. One is that the world is a fragile and volatile and complicated place, and the only way to avoid disappointment is to expect it. Second is that progress tends to move the goal post. So the only way to enjoy the modern world is if your expectations rise slower than its progress. The common denominator between both guys is the superpower of having low expectations. That’s not intuitive, because low expectations make you think of a mopey pessimist who’s accomplished nothing. But I want to convince you: it’s the opposite. 1. Tails, you win Late last year Musk was asked about one of the hardest problems on SpaceX’s plate. Its massive Starship has to cut weight everywhere it can so that the cost of each launch becomes low enough to launch the things all day. Step one was cutting the landing gear. Rather than the rocket returning to Earth and landing on its own, the new design means it’ll come down with its bottom exposed, aiming itself at a giant tower on the ground. Just before hitting the ground, two enormous rods shoot out of the tower and grab the rocket like a parent catching a falling child. It’s wild. Musk explained: We’re talking about catching the largest flying object ever made on a giant tower with chopstick arms. It’s like Karate Kid with the fly, but much bigger. He then laughed, and added the most important line: “This probably won’t work the first time.” He says that often about his endeavors. When a rocket failed to land five years ago, he said, “Didn’t expect this one to work, but next flight has a good chance.” Talking about Starship’s challenges last month, he said “success is one of the possible outcomes.” He tweeted two years ago: To be frank, in the early days, I thought there was 90% chance that both SpaceX & Tesla would be worth $0. The press & aerospace / automotive industry at the time (correctly) agreed with me. I don’t think any of that is casual irreverence or cocky risk-taking. Purposely low expectations is the only way to survive in a world that’s not kind enough to reward every ambitious person with success. When people say, “higher risk equals higher return” they should actually be saying, “higher risk means I’ll probably earn lower returns most of the time but there’s a small chance I’ll earn very good returns that make up for it.” That’s the distinguishing feature of higher risk: The greater prevalence of failure, not the smaller chance of success that has the potential to offset it. The key part is that low expectations and accepting frequent losses increase the odds of sticking around long enough to eventually be right enough to make up for it, and then some. And that applies to ordinary people, not just maniacs like Musk. In a boring index fund of 500 stocks, fewer than 20 companies make up most of the returns in any given year. Sometimes it’s fewer than five companies. The rest – literally 80%+ of companies – range from OK to disastrous returns. So if you track every individual company, bring your pitifully low expectations. That’s how the world works. 2. Getting the goalpost to stop moving President James Garfield died in 1881 because the best doctor in the country did not believe in germs, and probed a bullet wound with an ungloved finger, likely contributing to his fatal infection. There are so many examples of the primitive lives the most privileged people lived in different eras it’s astounding. Charlie Munger was born in 1924. The richest man in the world that year was John D. Rockefeller, whose net worth equaled about 3% of GDP, which would be something like $700 billion in today’s world. Seven hundred billion dollars. OK. But make a short list of things that did not exist in Rockefeller’s day: Sunscreen. Advil. Tylenol. Antibiotics. Chemotherapy. Flu, tetanus, measles, smallpox, and countless other vaccines. Insulin for diabetes. Blood pressure medication. Fresh produce in the winter. TVs. Microwaves. Overseas phone calls. Jets. To say nothing of computers, iPhones, or Google Maps. If you’re honest with yourself I don’t think you would trade Rockefeller’s $700 billion in the early 1900s for an average life in 2022. But that’s hard to admit, because all the insane luxuries Rockefeller didn’t have are now considered basic necessities. Everything works like that. All luxuries become necessities in due time. It’s why “everything’s amazing and no one’s happy,” as Louis C.K. says. The only way to counter that truth is going through life with purposely low expectations. Don’t expect a lot of economic growth. Don’t expect great investment returns. Don’t expect a ton of innovation. Don’t expect politics to improve. Expect occasional catastrophes. Be OK with things staying roughly the way they are right now, or worse. Because for most people the way things are right now is indistinguishable from magic relative to how things used to be. Then any little improvements that happen to come along feel incredible. You appreciate them more. Low expectations don’t make you depressed – they do the opposite, making little gains feel amazing while bad news feels normal. It’s not easy, because the knee-jerk way to set expectations is to anchor to what everyone else has right now. But imagine the tragedy of unbelievable progress throughout your life and enjoying none of it because you expected all of it. My friend Brent has a theory about marriage: It only works when both people want to help their spouse while expecting nothing in return. If you both do that, you’re both pleasantly surprised. It’s a good model for a lot of things.
So I saw this tweet by Semil Shah yesterday: So I clicked on the link to my Competing To Win Deals post, which I wrote in 2010, and read it. I often read things I wrote a decade or more ago and cringe at how out of date they have become. Not this one. It […]
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid. When one need is fulfilled a person seeks to fulifil the next one, and so on. Every person is capable and has the desire to move up the hierarchy toward a level of self-actualization. Unfortunately, progress is often disrupted by failure to meet lower level needs.
Photo by Stas Knop on Pexels.com A troll on Reddit[1. Can you believe such a thing?] had a post in r/books that berated anyone who considered listening to an audiobook “reading.” Their …
productive
writing
creative
mindsets
parenting
bitcoin
tool
entrepreneurship
