There should always be a delay between the time you do something, and when you get paid for the work you did. That means you’ve created an asset or product or invested capital that’s making money for you. What you want to avoid is exchanging your time directly for an hourly wage. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, “If someone pays you for anything other than a specific transaction, you are a slave.”
Read MoreIf you’ve played around with OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Dall-E programs, you know that the “robot army” has arrived to carry out your orders. But now, you don’t even have to speak their “language” to control them. Text-based interfaces allow you to give instructions in your language, and the artificial intelligence will carry it out in theirs. The days of having to learn how to code are quickly disappearing - just give good prompts, get good results. And when everyone has infinite leverage, your judgment and taste are what matter.
Read MoreHow many times have you been 100% certain about something, only to find out you were wrong? For me, it’s probably five times a day. It wasn’t until I heard Joseph Goldstein articulate this idea in a lecture on the Waking Up app that it struck me how important an insight this is: “Certainty is not an indication of truth.” Many of the things you are certain about eventually prove to be wrong. And the faster you can rework your belief system in the face of contradicting evidence, the better off you’ll be.
Read MoreWhen you see someone standing at the top of the mountain - at the pinnacle of success - you automatically ignore the treacherous path they took to get there. Why? Because you can’t see it! All you see is the victory. And what’s hidden are the thousands of failures they suffered along the way. You can’t envy someone’s success without recognizing the suffering (past and present) it took the person to get it.
Read MoreThere’s a familiar refrain among pro athletes: “No one puts more pressure on me than I do.” That’s because excellence is a standard you set for yourself. No one can make you “work hard.” No one can make you care. Unless you find something you’re intrinsically interested in and want to become the best in the world at, you will never be great at it.
Read MoreWe are all drowning in information. When you have the entirety of human knowledge in your pocket, it’s not your brain that needs exercising, it’s your gut. Your instinct. That inexplicable feeling that tells you what you should do and when to do it. It’s not always right, but it’s always true for you. And it pushes you where you really want to go. And if you don’t spend time intentionally learning to listen to your gut, you’ll never escape the world’s noise.
Read MoreCreativity isn’t an exact science. When you start building something, you want it to be perfect from the very first spark. And nothing kills your momentum faster than realizing what you just made sucks. But it’s supposed to suck! It’s not fully formed yet - it’s just this delicate mass of ideas and features trying to find its form. It’s those who stick with their project through this early, ugly phase that come out the other side with something valuable. Stick with it.
Read MoreComparing yourself to others is a dangerous game. You have no idea what the other person has gone through to achieve the success you see from the outside. Very likely it’s more suffering and uncertainty than you could imagine. Still, there is a benefit to mapping progress against your industry peers. And if you do compare yourself to other people, compare yourself against the best.
Read MoreThe world is flush with quick dopamine. You can make a TikTok video in minutes and get thousands of views in seconds. A Twitter thread that took you ten minutes to write can go viral with millions of impressions overnight. And it feels really good. It becomes brutally hard to stick with things that take much longer. But that’s where the real competitive advantage lives. When you do things that take years, not days, you compound your efforts with small, incremental gains, and immediately escape competition from anyone with a shorter time horizon. The longer it takes to do, the larger the competitive advantage in doing it.
Read MoreI’ve spent much of my life running from problem to problem. Putting out “urgent” fires. Answering an endless stream of emails. Because most of our “priorities” are set by other people. But if you have that whisper in your mind that the lifestyle you’re living isn’t the one you envisioned before “life” took over, then that’s a signal to start paying attention to whose priorities you’re really living for. They’re probably not yours.
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