3 Success Principles I Wish I Had Known At 20

CONTEXT
Some people can’t find a job to earn enough. Some people asked me: “Will I become a billionaire if I am determined to be one and put in the necessary work require?”. Some people were desperate and despondent. They felt life had been unfair to them. They kept saying over and over things like, “I am not a bad person” and “Why is this happening to me?”.
No.
One of the many qualities that separates very successful people from the rest of us is their ability to ask the right questions.
This is not the right question.
(Which is not to say it’s a bad question. It just won’t get that deep part of your mind working to help you — mulling things over when you think you’re thinking about something else — sending up flares of insight.)
Success in life can often depend on the opinion of people around you and your business. But here’s the biggest secret about that ever-important and holy audience of yours: They don’t care about you.
Other people are far less interested in you than you think they are. You will soon realize that no one was really thinking about you at all.
Lions don’t care if a gazelle has a broken leg. Or if it’s male or female or believes in a gazelle god or not. Nature don’t either.
The harshest truth I’ve learned is that the world will not treat you better just because you are a good person.
You’re determined. So what? You haven’t been racing naked through shark-infested waters yet. Will you be just as determined when you wash up on some deserted island, disoriented and bloody and ragged and beaten and staring into the horizon with no sign of rescue?
We live in a culture that celebrates determination and hard work, but understand: these are the qualities that keep you in the game after most everybody else has left, or until somebody bigger and stronger picks you up and hurls you back out to sea. Determination and hard work are necessary, yes, but they are the minimum requirements. As in: the bare minimum.
A lot of people work extremely hard and through no fault of their own — bad luck, the wrong environment, unfortunate circumstances — struggle to survive.
We have to discard the approach of “absence of negatives” for asserting one’s value. This is useless. Saying, “I am not a bad person” is akin to a restaurant saying, “We don’t poison people with our food”. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement!
In a perfect world, your effort is all that would matter. But we don’t live in a perfect world.
One of the biggest disconnects between school and reality: schools give you credit for effort, but society doesn’t. Most people often get whiplash from this transition. After many years of getting credit for effort, it suddenly stops. That would do as well as anything as a definition of adulthood: when you stop getting credit for effort.
In school, essays start at an A and lose points with each mistake. In life, essays start at an F, and gain points with each insight. It makes sense, since mistakes are less subjective than insights, but it’s something most people never unlearn.
In physical domains (diet, workouts), consistency is king. In intellectual and social domains, wins are rare, sudden, and nonlinear — 99% of effort is “wasted.” For knowledge work, time spent has little to do with value created and the forty hour workweek is anachronistic nonsense. Once we find our ideal spouse, career, friends, we realize how much time we squandered by not moving on sooner.
Successful people have an incentive to overstate the importance of hard work. Acknowledging your talent is unpopular. Hard work is a linear and fair game that everyone can play. But the truth is, unfair advantage is the mother of success.
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You only need one thing if you want to set goals — CLARITY.
What do you want?
The pain of staying where you are, or the pain of growth?
Neither is right or wrong. The point is, whichever path you choose, you need to figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power. People chase outcomes but overlook the price they have to pay for them. Everything comes at a cost. Many people tend to fail to identify the true costs of a situation, with too much emphasis on financial costs while ignoring the emotional price that must be paid to win a reward.
If you’re choosing the simple life, lean all the way in. Don’t be conflicted about it.
And if you’re choosing the path of greatness, half-stepping just won’t do.
If you come to a decision point, and you try to rationalize doing a little of both, you are not going anywhere.
Whatever you do, do it all the way. Go hard or go home.
Pick your battles. Then win them overwhelmingly. But do make sure you pick. Or you’ll win none.
It’s just a matter of choice. If you want something, work for it, and you will if you want it.
We all get to choose our life path. It’s our choices that define us, not our gifts. You can only be proud of your choices. You either choose a life of “ease and comfort”, or of “service and adventure”, but when you’re 80, you’ll be more proud of the latter.
“If you haven’t gotten what you want yet, it’s a sign you didn’t really want it, or you tried to negotiate over the price” –Rudyard Kipling
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So if you’re choosing the path of greatness, you need to follow the right direction.
When building wealth, choose direction over speed.
What you want to do when you grow up is the most important decision of your life. Since we never grow up, every day is a chance to change your answer. It’s never too late to change direction.
“What took you ten years on your own could have been done in five with proper direction.” — Robert Greene
It’s important to know whether you’re putting energy into something that has the potential to pay off. Being at the bottom of the right ladder is much better than being midway through the wrong one. If you throw gasoline on a log, all you get is a wet log. But if you throw gasoline on a small flame, you get an inferno. If you run without direction, you’ll end up wasting three of your most valuable assets: time, money and energy. If you’re pointed in the wrong direction, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re traveling. Inversely, if you’re locked on to your desired destination, all progress is positive, no matter how slow you’re going. If you do everything perfectly, eventually you’re going to win. You’ll reach your goal eventually.
People spend too much time doing and not enough time thinking about what they should be doing. When it comes to the goals that are most important to us in life, we tend to jump tracks the second we stop perceiving forward momentum. We’re choosing the illusion of progress over what really matters.
The ability to blindly work hard is a double-edged sword. It enables you to achieve almost anything in life, but you might end up climbing the wrong ladder. Blind hard work comes with a huge opportunity cost.
You don’t need more Discipline in life, you need more Clarity in life. Discipline is a side-effect, it should not be your first-order goal. Clarity — about where you are going. Plan — about how you are going. Discipline — about actually getting there.
Passion and vision alone are not enough. I think you do have to be unrealistically optimistic to succeed, and passionate, but you also have to REALLY know your stuff. Rather than focus on the score, focus on the direction and process in everything you do, day in and day out.
If getting wealthy is your goal, you are going to have to work as hard as you can. But for general people, going through life, just trying to be successful, hard work doesn’t matter that much. What you do, who you do it with, when you do it, and how you do it, is so much more important than how hard you do it. Hard work is absolutely no substitute for who you work with and what you work on.
Founder-Product-Market Fit is how well you are personally suited to that business.
You can save yourself a lot of time if you pick the right area to work in. Picking the right people to work with is the next most important piece. Third comes how hard you work. They’re like three legs of a stool; if you shortchange on any one of them, the whole stool’s gonna fall down. It’s not like you can pick one over the other that easily.
The order of operations when you’re building a business, or even building your career, is first figure out, “What should I be doing? What is something where there is a market that is emerging? There’s something that I can build that I’m excited to work on and something where I have specific knowledge and I’m really into it?”
Second, surround yourself with the best people possible, and no matter how high your bar is, raise your bar. You can be working with other people who are great enough. There’s someone greater out there to work with, you should go work with them.
Finally, once you’ve picked the right thing to work on and the right people to work with, then you work as hard as you can.
So your goal in life — find the people/business/project that needs you the most. There’s something out there just for you.
What you work on is probably the most important thing. If you want to be successful, working on the right thing is what matters most. Deciding what to work on is the most important part of your job, whether you’re an entrepreneur, a manager, or an engineer.
If you don’t know yet what you should be working on, THAT is the most important thing to figure out. The hard work has to be directed in the right way.
Listen to your gut and look at your alternatives. Essentially, you have to negotiate honestly with yourself. Do you have the fortitude to push through the problems in front of you to reach a successful outcome, or are you better off taking another path?
Don’t sit around waiting for a YES that will never come. It’s better to get to NO sooner rather than later, so you can put your energy into opportunities with a higher likelihood of success.
Take a little time now to study the map. And once you’ve charted a route that will get you where you want to be, stay the course. You won’t move forward all the time, but if you trust the process, you’ll look back and be astonished at how far you’ve come.
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Human psychology makes us predictable creatures. When analyzing behavior, we should start with the most basic layer. People are human beings, so their most basic layer of behavior is evolutionary. What are human’s evolutionary needs (desires) that are served by behavior? What are humans trying to achieve? What they’ve always tried to achieve are significance, status, love, protection, re-production.
The painful reality is, the market is all about supply and demand. Do you have skills and talents that the market wants? What do you bring to the party? It’s all about market value. Think about yourself as a commodity. What price will you and your skills bring in an open market?
People care about how you make them feel and what you can bring to their lives. People care about what benefits you can provide them, how you can fulfill their desires and goals, and how their problems, fears and difficulties can be reduced. People are inherently self-involved. (Ain’t no shame in that game; it’s just human nature.) So remember that at its core, getting success is actually an act of service.
People don’t pay for the absence of negatives. They want to know what you can bring to their community. They want the skills and capabilities they need and they will pay for it. People want to buy stuff that works well and that makes them look good. People will pay more for higher-level needs — not just mere survival like food and drink, but elevated needs like “the need to be loved, the need to be desired, the need to be educated and self-actualized.”
The world doesn’t throw a billion dollars at a person because the person wants it or works so hard they feel they deserve it. (The world does not care what you want or deserve.) The world gives you money in exchange for something it perceives to be of equal or greater value: something that transforms an aspect of the culture, reworks a familiar story or introduces a new one, alters the way people think about the category and make use of it in daily life. There is no roadmap, no blueprint for this; a lot of people will give you a lot of advice, and most of it will be bad, and a lot of it will be good and sound but you’ll have to figure out how it doesn’t apply to you because you’re coming from an unexpected angle. And you’ll be doing it alone, until you develop the charisma and credibility to attract the talent you need to come with you.
It’s not enough to be nice people, or even knowledgeable and helpful. Those fall into the “nice-to-have” category. The real driver of a success is your ability to make other people successful. You aren’t just a bystander; you are a contributor to other people’s success.
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Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.
We are the same people as 100,000s of years ago. Everything changes rapidly, but people stay the same. While the tools we use to communicate ideas have changed in the past two thousand years, the human brain has not. Who we are as people isn’t going to change, and that means that the methods we use to reach people — and how we market to them — are enduring and translatable. And that’s the opportunity. The same formula that worked then will work now.
You never change something by taking the existing thing and reworking it. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. You’re better off changing it just by creating something brand new. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
It’s much less about “how” to make money but more about “being” the kind of person who people want to give money to.
Success is not something you pursue. What you pursue will elude you; it can be like trying to chase butterflies. Success is something you attract by the person you become.
Don’t worry about not being able to control things around you. You can control the most important thing, the things that happen inside you. All of the real score cards are internal.
Although you can’t control people’s behavior, you can influence their behavior. Instead of focusing on things that you can’t control, focus on the influence that you can have. In a world where emotions override any level of intelligence, the only way to change people’s behavior is to influence them and let them be fully convinced.
The number one thing to understand about influence is that people make decisions for their reasons, not yours. People always believe what they tell themselves.
You want to make it the people’s decision that they want to change or do something. You want them to be internally motivated to change. Don’t tell people what to do; they do it on their own. And when people make these kinds of decisions on their own, they are very influential. Change has to come from within. If you have to persistently tell them to do it, you’ll never win them for the long run. It’s real for them, and the onus is on you, not them, to work to change the dynamic.
The great way to influence people’s behavior is to be great.
Do not use the words “good” or “bad”, or “right” or “wrong”. I’m not saying these terms don’t exist or have substance, I’m just saying that those terms rarely get us what we want — long-term behavior change. When asking for help or behavior change, appeal to people’s self-interests, never to their mercy or gratitude. Instead of judging them based on their behavior, ask them their intention — if it’s in the right place, work with them to get their behavior to match. If it’s not aligned, a change in behavior is unsustainable. (Read about Sales skill at (2) below for more information)
You need to be able to see someone else’s point of view even when they feel strongly the other way. You need to take responsibility for what you contribute to the problem, to own your part and to apologize and work to fix it.
Or even better, don’t waste your time and energy trying to change people’s behavior — leverage it! People can change, no question, but it is far better to leverage behavior that already exists. So whether you’re talking about customers, clients, or teammates, pay attention to how people act and help them find a way to shine that leverages what they already do.
The best people don’t tell the world how amazing they are. The best people show others how amazing others can be — perhaps with a little help from them.
You’ve got to be able to put into words for people the feelings or the desires or the fears that they struggle with but have never acknowledged.
If you want money — Give the world something it wants that it does not yet know how to get.
A lot of people want to make a lot of money so that someday they can help other people. Remember this: To make a lot of money you will have to help other people. The way to get what you want is to help others get what they want. It’s wonderful if you understand that the key to everybody’s heart and mind — and also wallet — is determined by making it really clear that you can deliver something they really crave.
Contrary to popular opinion, being successful is less about being respected and “known” and more about providing value and inspiration. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard. You cannot shortcut your story, and you certainly cannot shortcut your audience, which, if you hadn’t noticed, is your single most valuable commodity.
Being successful has always been about finding a way to connect with the human spirit and providing value and inspiration to people’s lives. You have to be able to create value and add a meaningful difference to the lives and experiences of other people. Being impactful and providing real value to your audience is how you will truly make a difference. This is both an art and a science.
At the end of the day, success isn’t just a matter of spending more to make more; it involves connecting with people, getting to know them, offering them a unique experience and helping them solve their challenges. What’s going to make you preeminent is falling in love with the people you serve and living in a world where you see the impact of what you’re doing. When they win, you win. We rise by lifting others. This may sound easy, but accomplishing it is rare.
If we allow the world to be run by logical people, we will only discover logical things. But in real life, most things aren’t logical-they are psycho-logical.
Objectively, the world is improving. The Internet shifts the balance of credibility from institutions to individuals. Individuals replace institutions. Institutions are revealed as insatiable and corrupt, even as a billion potential leaders step onto the stage. To the elites, it’s falling apart as their long-lived institutions are flattened by the Internet. The time of elites is over to make room for those who strive to achieve more satisfying experiential connections — seeking to engage in a continuous dialogue with people, anticipate their needs and help them get the most out of every moment of their day. Proven community builders are even rarer and higher-leveraged than proven developers and designers. There’s no school or playbook.
Donald Trump only won because he’s essentially a populist/nationalist who is so good at picking out the vulnerability of someone’s personality, smelling it, sensing it and touching it. Even though he’s an elite by birth, profession, career, and status — he is not one by representation.
The paradox, of the most important things in life — happiness, love, success — is that you can’t look for it. Love, success and happiness is never achieved by pursuing them directly.
If you’re looking for happiness, you’re not doing what you need to do to be happy.
If you’re looking for love, you’re not being lovable.
If you’re looking for success, you’re not doing whatever it is you need to do to be successful.
When you focus on finding love, you arguably do not focus on being the loving, passionate person that a person can love.
Success is something you attract by the person you become. Love, success and happiness often catch you by surprise when you are not expecting it. Don’t focus on being successful. Don’t focus on getting love. Don’t focus on being happy.
Value creation generates profit, not the other way around. If you manage the top line, then the bottom line will follow. But if you manage the bottom line and forget about the rest, you’ll eventually hit the wall because you’ll take your eyes off the prize. If you start to optimize for numbers and profit, you are starting to focus on the business of value extraction, not value creation. This approach might generate revenue in the short to medium run, but if you prioritize this at the expense of actually delivering on the product benefit, then that’s a bad optimization in the long term. Any businesses that focus solely on PROFIT end up having none. Profit is what happens when you do everything else right.
If you want to be a successful person with the sole intention of getting rich, then you will more than likely fail before you even begin. A high percentage of businesses flop, and people that do find success learn that the financial reward is a byproduct of creating something that solves a problem or satisfies a need.
Most people tend to focus inwards, on self-interested gain, rather than outwards on the value they’re creating for other people. Most people never learn how to maximize their selling approach because they spend their whole business life focused on the selling approach, which they never look at critically.
Try not to become a person of money, but rather try to become a person of value. Measure the lives you save, not the life preserves you sell. Measuring value created rather than optimizing for yourself.
Concentrate on what will produce results rather than on the results, the process rather than the prize.
Stop thinking in terms of “careers” or “money”. Instead, focus on developing skills, and doing what you want to do at a particular time.
Shift your focus away from what you want (a billion dollars) and get deeply, intensely curious about what the world wants and needs.
Throw out all the numbers and just focus on one thing: “What are other people measuring?”
By looking at how they define value, then you get yourself aligned to them as closely as possible. Answering this question sets you and your business up for value creation, which then unlocks the ability to gain something from that value, then you have to start here.
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“You don’t get paid what you deserve — you get paid what other people think you’re worth.” — Seth Godin
You don’t get paid for what you think you’re worth; you get paid for what other people think you’re worth. It’s how markets work. It’s hard to command a price premium for your work when your skills are easy to learn or overlap with millions of other people.
If you have limited levels of education; have worked in varying jobs doing menial tasks and not acquiring any marketable skills, well sorry to say it is going to be tough. Who is going to offer a six-figure salary per year or more to someone who brings little to the party, when they can hire someone of similar aptitude and skills for less money? You may want this kind of pay. You may truly need it. But who is going to pay you that?
This discrepancy is called the “market value gap”. When the market doesn’t value an individual’s skill sets and offerings at the level they need or desire. It’s a tough place to be in. One can argue, in fact, that the underlying driver of “Brexit” and the recent Trump election is primarily a group of voters suffering from MVG, or Market Value Gap.
It’s not bad luck. It’s not life being unfair. It’s not a rigged system. It’s not a question of whether party A or party B is in power. Sometimes it’s racism. Sometimes it’s sexism. It’s usually because you’re just incompetent. It’s a lack of resourcefulness that stops you from making money. Most times it’s because you’re a mean person. It’s the way it is. It’s about market value. It’s about what each person brings to the party.
The game is the game.
And if you refuse any of this? You expect someone to fix it all? Or some politician? Well best of luck with that. You may not be very happy with how this all ends up. But there is an old saying that I have found proven to be true. “You are exactly where you are supposed to be.”
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So what drives market value?
It’s all about choices and decisions people make in life.
“Your decisions reveal your priorities.” –Jeff Van Gundy
If you do not like your results in a particular area, it is rarely your intellect that deserves the blame, but rather where you have directed your intellect.
Results are purchased by how you spend your attention.
“Where attention goes, energy flows and results show.” — T. Harv Eker
Understand that you are accountable for how you spend your time, energy and money.
When an important task doesn’t get done, it is vital to acknowledge that you have chosen to use your resources doing something less important. Instead of saying “I ran out of time/energy/money,” try saying “I chose to do X today instead of Y” or “I’m focusing on the wrong things.”
What you really have to do is say is it a priority or not. If something is your number one priority then you will get it. That’s just the way life works.
If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of 10 or 15 different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.
There’s always a trade-off. If you can’t name your sacrifices, you’re still hoping you can have it all. The sooner you abandon this illusion, the better. Name the price. You’ll know you’re honest if it stings.
A major roadblock to success is being unwilling to make sacrifices. When you set an important goal, ask what you’re ready to give up to achieve it. Future excellence often depends on letting go of past priorities.
So, it’s all about what you choose to do with your resources. We all have the resources; it’s just that we don’t want to have to spend them on important things.
Once you acknowledge that you control your life and resources, you can hold yourself accountable for misusing it and decide to improve. If you hold yourself fully accountable for how you spend your resources, you can make conscious choices to focus on top priorities.
Managing your resources is not easy — many people go through their entire lives without figuring out how to do it. But simply saying “I’m not lucky” is a crutch that keeps you from evaluating and improving your life management.
If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. Anything is possible if you prioritize it. Excuses are a lack of prioritization.
Ask yourself, “How can you *leverage* your time and your work?”
Prioritize what is important, make time for things that matter, and understand that only you control your life. Then, when people ask why you are not successful, you’ll have a better answer than “bad luck.”
Ignore the unfairness — there is no fair. Fair doesn’t exist in the world. What you call unfair, is merely nature There will always be people smarter, better looking, bigger, stronger, with superior genetics to others. Stop whining about unfairness and start being proactive, you’ll see these things never mattered as much as you think. Play the hand that you’re dealt to the best of your ability. If you’re going to obsess over fair, you’ll never get anywhere in life. You basically just have to do the best you can, with the cards you’re dealt.
Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself or others. No-one cares if you are offended, so stop it. Stop making excuses.
You are responsible for valuing yourself and stating that value to the world. If you are not getting what you deserve, you are not to blame your situation on someone else.
Whatever the issue, either accept it or make the necessary adjustment. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery.
Using shame as a trigger to take action is a great way to make personal changes.
Get creative. Change something. You’re in control.
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The good news is…you don’t need to read 1,000 books or have an extremely high IQ to be able to connect with other people and providing value and inspiration to their lives.
You don’t need extremely high IQ. Your background, highest level of education, or IQ is irrelevant when it comes to getting success.
Success requires more than being book smart and having the technical capacity to get work done. It is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.
Or, as the saying goes:
If you’re so (book) smart, why aren’t you rich?
Academics sometimes think people in business are less intelligent than them.
There’s an appeal to academia in a world that is governed not by clean rules but loose and unpredictable trends. There’s a preference for skills in a world where skills don’t matter if they aren’t matched with the right behavior.
People are attracted to the titles and degrees of academics because business is not a credential-sanctioned field like, say, medicine is. So the appearance of a Ph.D stands out. And that creates an intense appeal to academia when making arguments and justifying beliefs — “According to this Harvard study …” or “As Nobel Prize winner so and so showed …” It carries so much weight when other people cite, “Some guy on CNBC from an eponymous firm with a tie and a smile.”
A hard reality is that what often matters most in business will never win a Nobel Prize: Humility and room for error.
In reality, the greatest sin for the highly credentialed is thinking that’s enough to guarantee success. The greatest sin for the lowly credentialed is thinking that’s enough to guarantee failure.
The past 20 years have created a much higher ceiling for the uneducated and the rule breakers, and a much lower floor for the educated and the rule followers. The returns on playing by the rules collapsed over the last 20 years.
The overeducated are worse off than the undereducated, having traded common sense for the illusion of knowledge.
Every tech billionaire has left the world a better place than they found it. The same cannot be said of many academics and activists.
There’s nothing wrong with having high IQ, but that isn’t going to be the quality that sets apart a big winner from the rest of the pack.
There are many things in academic fields that are technically right but fail to describe how people actually act in the real world. Plenty of academic work is useful and has pushed the industries in the right direction. But its main purpose is often intellectual stimulation and to impress other academics. I don’t blame them for this or look down upon them for it. We should just recognize it for what it is.
The disconnect here is that academics typically desire very precise rules and formulas. But real-world people use it as a crutch to try to make sense of a messy and confusing world that, by its nature, eschews precision. Those are opposite things. You cannot explain randomness and emotion with precision and reason.
Most ‘how to’ books, they’re not really ‘how to’ books, they’re ‘what to’ books. They show you what to do, but they don’t actually show you how to do it.
Street smart is the new sexy.
Successful people become successful by doing and making mistakes, not only by reading books on entrepreneurship.
Usually the most successful people are not the smartest. Most of them are no brighter than the average person struggling to make ends meet. However they master one skill very well. They know how to get the most talented people working on the most important problems for them.
If there’s one thing about success that I’ve learned, it’s that you need to change yourself first; you must grow into a street smart person with a growth mindset in order for success to visit you. We as human beings have the power of attitude and that attitude determines choice, and choice determines results. If you can change yourself, you can change your life. If you want to make a permanent change, stop focusing on the size of your problems and start focusing on the size of you. You can’t change the direction of the wind, but you can adjust your sails to always reach your destination. You cannot change the circumstances or the seasons, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of. Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” –Mahatma Gandhi
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. Try to be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud. Do not complain. Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.” — Maya Angelou
If you want to do anything in the world, it’s all about creating a vision for others to join.
Apply this liberally — whether you’re starting a business or a relationship.
There’s no actual skill called “business”. It’s too broad; it’s like a skill called “relating to humans.”
If you want power, control the narrative in other people’s head. If you seek happiness, control the narrative in your own head.
What makes you most valuable is your human ability to be creative and connect with others. The key to wealth is not being the smartest but being the person who the smartest people will work for.
Becoming successful over the long haul is just as much about listening to your gut than your ability to reason. It’s about thinking lightly of yourself and deeply of the world. It’s more about building relationships than understanding yourself. It’s more about experience and execution than ideas. It’s more about doing than dreaming.
Meeting goals are important, but being successful also demands the use of soft skills, the ability to communicate clearly, problem solve and get along with others.
Intelligence is useless without the wisdom to know which games can and can’t be won with intelligence.
Schools obsess over intellectual training, but emotional mastery is the most crucial of all.
In short term games, skills are more important than character. In long term games, character dominates.
You can read as many books as you want, but until you experience the challenges and master the art of connecting with people, you will never be prepared to take charge.
To be clear, a person needs to be both book smart and street smart.
People who only manage things earn the least. The people who manage people earn more. And the people who manage both people and things earn the most.
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I can’t give you a formulaic approach because there is no one road to success. If you want a formula, you should go back to graduate school. They’ll give you lots of formulas that won’t work.
Everyone’s measure of and path to success is different. Each person’s path is different based on his or her individual context and circumstances. Success in so many ways is often looked upon as sort of being a one-size-fits-all approach. However, trying to reduce success to a singular formula is something we do to entertain and lull ourselves into believing the myth that following a prescribed set of rules is all it takes. It’s actually just the opposite.
Losers have goals, winners have systems.
Scott Adams said, famously, “Set up systems, not goals.”
True understanding is about algorithms. It’s about understanding how things connect to each other.
“System thinking” — a powerful principle that teaches you to see how people, policies, organizations, decisions, relationships, and ideas are interconnected. It can be applied to work, life, or just about anywhere you want to level up. When you’re facing a challenge or an opportunity, consider a system. Learn principles and mental models to make better decisions. If you ever wondered what separates those we are able to make good decisions at very high levels, learning principles and mental models is one of them (if not, the main one). One common characteristic of successful people — they’re strong systems thinkers. They’re easily able to integrate a whole set of business problems into one equation.
Everything is a system: a product, team, market, process, habit, personal routine — even an elephant. Most problems — from product flaws to poverty to transit inefficiencies — are system problems. A lot of what creating your own success boils down to is seeing the big picture for what it is. After all, if you want to achieve success in this life, you need to know what you’re facing and where you should go. To understand (and improve) the system, you have to understand each part, and how the parts connect. One of the biggest lessons you will learn is everything in life is cyclical, and connecting the dots across longer-time horizons is competitive advantage in anything you do in life. Once you find the leverage points, you can adjust the system. Once you find the causes and effects in your system, you can use them to your advantage. If you can’t see or experience the full system, you need to create models to put it all together. Test, learn, adapt, and keep refining your models. It’s the only way to know the thing you’re trying to get to know.
If you don’t build the system of your life, someone will build it for you.
It’s not neutral. People and companies are building reward systems, penalty systems, attention systems, technology systems for their benefit. They want it to be easy to do what they want to do regardless of whether that is in your best interests.
Perhaps it’s time to take control of the systems that shape so much of your life. Make it easy to do what is essential and hard to do what is nonessential.
Approach life with “system thinking”. Think in systems.
Use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in and then build a system to create that environment around you so that you’re statistically likely to succeed.
Try and set up good systems and then the individual decisions don’t matter that matter much. I think our ability to make individual decisions is actually not great.
This was a game changer for me. My whole life has been built around connecting dots across sectors — imagine if I had more clarity on those dots a decade ago?
Here I will give you a strategic roadmap that can help you find success through defining yourself and crafting an empowering self-narrative (purpose, core values, values, mission, vision and long-term goal) that you live up to. This is true for everyone and anyone can adopt. Specific approaches will vary from person to person, however these several principles below that direct everything we do at our foundation will be critical.
Having the wrong mindset will hold you back from getting what you want.
Mindset is the way in which we think about things, perceive our surroundings, approach problem solving, and generate ideas. Mindset includes our closely held beliefs and influences our choices and behaviors. Mindset is shaped by how we grew up, who we are, and what we’ve experienced. All of us have a unique mindset. Even when we share many things in common, there are still many things that are different about how we approach the world, our lives, and our daily choices.
True understanding > Forced discipline.
When a photographer can’t change a scene, he changes his angle and lens to capture the best of that scene. Similarly, when you can’t change a situation in your life, change your perspective and mindset to get the best out of that situation.
A lousy camera produces poor pictures, no matter how many fixes you make to the scene. The same is in life. Before trying to fix the externals, make sure your internals are working right.
Understand this: You live your entire life through your mind. If you leave your mind untrained, it will be trained by the society. As a result, you won’t live your life; the society will live it through you.
True mastery of any skill start with mastery of one’s mind.
It’s not about achieving the goal. It’s about who you have to become in order to achieve the goal. The juice is in the growth.
It’s about becoming the kind of person who makes money. If you lost all your money, you should be able to recreate that wealth. If all the wealth in the world was divided equally, pretty soon the same people would end up at the top. Producers will produce. Consumers will consume. Many will spend all their money on useless things and end up broke once again. Mindset > Resources.
Most founders and small business owners are in business without any real idea of what it takes to be a winner. That’s why they follow the Bill Gates and Warren Buffett of the world — so they can understand how a successful person thinks. Simply copying the traits of a successful person won’t make you a successful person. The visible traits are a manifestation of the internal causes invisible to others. By imitating the external traits, you end up chasing the leaves while ignoring the roots.
I could have come up with a lot of these, but the main point is this: Mindset only matters when it leads to action. Winning is an action, not a mindset. All that begins with a mindset that defines how you behave. A mindset that leads to action is the mindset of a winner.
These are things that shape mindset of a winner:
A. Start by not asking the 99% and surround yourself with the 1%. (Environment)
If you feel uncomfortable around people smarter than you, you’re status-seeking. If you feel lucky, you’re wealth-seeking. A friend more successful than you is a great asset. But it’s one that most people resent.
Who you are with and where you are will create the environment that you are in, which will shape what you are like much more than anything else.
You are the average of the five people you spend most time with. –Jim Rohn
How much does it matter how environment affects you? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You are a product of your environment (both offline and online). Your actions are a consequence of your thoughts. Your thoughts are a consequence of what you consume. You become what you consume. And in the modern age, what you consume is largely a consequence of how you select and refine your circle. You’re the books you read, the movies you watch, the music you listen to, the people you spend time with, the things you hear, the conversations you engage in. In most cases, your net worth and mindset mirror the level of your closest friends. You pick up the traits of people you spend the most time with.
You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.
When you talk about environments in the sense we are, what you’re really talking about is collections of people. For a long time cities were the only large collections of people, so you could use the two ideas interchangeably.
Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day the most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won’t matter where you live physically. But I wouldn’t bet on it. The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways environment sends you messages are quite subtle.
An environment speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It’s not something you have to seek out, but something you can’t turn off. The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you’re among.
No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. The ideas you soak in the most are as important as the people you spend time with. It’s shocking how much what you think most about will shape both the form and function of your mind.
If you think you can avoid being influenced by the people around you, think it again. It’s not so much that you do whatever an environment expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do. There’s an imbalance between encouragement and discouragement like that between gaining and losing money. Most people overvalue negative amounts of money: they’ll work much harder to avoid losing a dollar than to gain one. Similarly, although there are plenty of people strong enough to resist doing something just because that’s what one is supposed to do where they happen to be, there are few strong enough to keep working on something no one around them cares about. It’s in the more chaotic fields that it helps most to be in a great environment: you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you care about the kind of work you do, and since you have to find peers for yourself, you need the much larger intake mechanism of a great environment.
Don’t underestimate the power of having a healthy info-diet. Choose wisely what you feed your mind. Be intentional with what you consume. Consumption in the absence of intention is waste. If information isn’t moving you forward to where you want to be, it’s bogging you down. Successful people know this, and you should, too.
It’s easier to change your environment than your insides.
Great environments attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the environment sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
Choose better inputs. Get better outputs.
Align your environment with your desired habits. The biggest decision of your life may be who you choose to marry/spend your life with. Be with people who have great character and great capabilities and to be in places that suit your nature. If you want to be healthier, spend time with people who are healthier than you. If you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are, but if you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you are. If you want a fast-paced, cutting-edge life, be in a fast-paced, cutting edge-place; if you want a slower-paced, savoring-life type life, pick a place that’s like that.
If you want to be more like a successful person, you should copy the traits of successful people. If you have access to the 1%, you will have more access to higher quality opportunities to find your way to become one. The reality is, the 1% think differently from the middle class about money, and there’s much to be gained by being in their presence. The sheer exposure to their heightened level of awareness around everything related to wealth will dramatically expand your thinking. You need to get out of the 99% bubble.
Find the people who make you better and run to where they are as fast as your legs can possibly carry you. Find somebody that you can just attach yourself to, that’s incredibly impressive, and just learn through osmosis. That’s how you “be at the right place at the right time”. Curate your social feeds, your library, and your Youtube playlists well.
Look at those better than you and emulate them. Study the best to be the best. See exactly what they’re doing, and steal that. Steal from them. When you stare at someone you want to become and you have a really clear idea of where you want to be, it unlocks a tremendous amount of energy. We’re social creatures, and when we get the idea that we want to join some enchanted circle up above us, that is what really lights up motivation. Watching the best people work is one of the most powerful things you can do.
I am not saying you should cut all your connection with the 99%. They are great people, and you need them in your life. Don’t burn bridges, you never know when you’ll need to use them to reach safety. Your contacts might get you a job, but true friends will go to the end of the earth for you. You’ll need both to go far in this world.
HOWEVER, don’t settle into a pack that’s going too slow. In order to move forward, you need to figure out how to surround yourself with the 1%. It will increase your chances for you to become one of them.
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulder of Giants.” — Isaac Newton
B. Be different. (Self-awareness)
If you really want to get paid in this world, you want to be number one at whatever it is that you’re doing.
To be number one, you need to be unconventional to stand out.
Life is too short to blend in. Being outstanding comes down to being in some way different from everyone else and daring to break rules that most people would prefer to follow.
If you want to fit in with the 99%, you will never become the 1%.
99% of information is noise. 99% of interactions are fake. 99% of opportunities are traps. Life is a search for the 1%.
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.
While copying what others already do helps achieve average results quickly, common approaches never outperform. What ends as being better starts as being different. What ends as better, starts as different. You have to be willing to look like an idiot in the short run to outperform in the long run.
No two successful entrepreneurs are the same. In fact, it’s their individuality and different ways of thinking that make them successful. Successful people approach business and problem solving in numerous ways — never afraid to go against the grain.
The smartest and the most successful people I know started out as losers. If you view yourself as a loser, as someone who was cast out by society and has no role in normal society, then you will do your own thing and you’re much more likely to find that winning path. It helps to start out by saying, “I’m never going to be popular. I’m never going to be accepted. I’m already a loser. I’m not going to get what all the other kids have. I’ve just got to be happy being me.”
I think almost everything that people do these days is designed for social approval. All of the best sellers are about social approval and social conditioning. If you really wanted to be successful, happy, blah, blah, blah, all those external metrics, you’re looking for a non-average outcome. You can’t be doing the average things, to your point.
At some level, you’re doing it for social approval. You’re doing it to fit in with the other monkeys. You’re fitting in to get along with the herd. Social approval is inside the herd. That’s not where the returns are in life. The returns in life are being out of the herd.
Doing what everybody else is doing feels like the safest thing to do. But it’s also the most competitive, which makes it the riskiest.
As information is increasingly commoditized, personality becomes more important as a differentiating factor.
If you compete at being someone else, you won’t be the best in the world at it, and in turn you won’t get rewarded properly for it.
By following others, you give up your chance to lead. You can call it a tribe, a herd, a pack, a crowd, an organization, or a company — there is only one leader at the forefront. You can be that person or not. It’s no crime to be a follower, but if you’re a follower and think you’re a leader, you’re delusional.
Competition can make you play the wrong game. Sometimes you get trapped in the wrong game because you’re competing. Competition automatically leads towards copy-catting and often towards just playing completely the wrong game.
Loving what you do is important, but if you’re one of a thousand doing the same thing the same way, you’re not going to love the result. If you do what everyone else does you’ll get average results. If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.
Most kids spend their youth trying to fit in only to spend the remainder of their adult lives trying to stand out. If you can get a head start on the latter you’ll be ahead of the game.
“If you enter a market and don’t know what to do, watch what everyone else is doing, and then do the opposite, if you want to be successful. The majority is almost always wrong.” — Earl Nightingale
Be the best at what you do and the only person who does what you do. For the most part, the best opportunities now lie where your competitors have yet to establish themselves, not where they’re already entrenched. Being different is actually far more achievable than being the very best. Be the only one to change. Be the only one to take challenges. Be the only one to solve problems.
Most of your limits are *perceived* limits. They are programmed inside your mind by society and incomplete science.
Tap into your weirdness instead of trying to hide it. Especially if you have something to share with others.
Strive to be original enough that you’re often wrong, but when you’re right it’s impactful.
Certainly listen, absorb, but don’t try and emulate. It’s a fool’s errand. Instead, each person is uniquely qualified at something. You have some specific knowledge, capability, and desire that nobody else in the world does. That’s just purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development.
Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. What you don’t want to do is be building checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing. You’re never going to be that. You’ll never be good at being somebody else.
Understanding of your true self and your sincerity are what make you unique.
See (0) below for more information.
C. Seek wealth, not money or status. (Personal & Professional Development)
When most people say they want to be rich, what they really want is to be wealthy.
Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. The key difference is that it increases, without much conscious effort. This is what you should be trying to achieve. Examples: robots and computer programs that are doing the work, dividends, rent income, etc.
There's the social utility of money coming at the direct expense of growing money; wealth is what you don’t see. We tend to judge wealth by what we see. We can’t see people’s bank accounts or brokerage statements. So we rely on outward appearances to gauge financial success. Cars. Homes. Vacations. Instagram photos. One of our cherished industries is helping people fake it until they make it. Wealth, in fact, is what you don’t see. It’s the cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The renovations postponed, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. It’s assets in the bank that haven’t yet been converted into the stuff you see.
A key use of wealth is using it to control your time and providing you with options. Financial assets on a balance sheet offer that. But they come at the direct expense of showing people how much wealth you have with material stuff. The purpose of wealth is freedom. It’s nothing more than that. True wealth is not being rich. It is having the freedom and the options available to you to do whatever you want, whenever you want. My old definition was freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. Now I would say that the freedom that I’m looking for is internal freedom. It’s freedom from reaction. It’s freedom from feeling angry. It’s freedom from being sad. It’s freedom from being forced to do things. I’m looking for freedom from internally and externally, whereas before I was looking for freedom to. The most satisfying form of freedom is not a life without responsibilities, but a life where you are free to choose your responsibilities. An asset’s ability to let you do what you want, when you want, with who you want, is ROI that can’t be found on a spreadsheet. If you achieve wealth you will achieve financial and personal freedom and work on things you deeply care about. It is living in your own terms. People want freedom but within the cage of emotions and pleasure.
You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn’t need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn’t matter how much money you had.
Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, money is how we transfer time and wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money. Money aims to be an IOU from the society for something you, or someone who gave you the money, did for the society. Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time. A key point here is that few things in money are as valuable as options. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, and why you want, has infinite ROI.
Everything in life is a game — education, careers, starting a business, politics.
We play many games in life. The game of job, or career, or starting a business, or the politics game, or the education game. Everything is a game. Games suggest something that’s not serious, but of course, games are intensely serious. If you want to find someone who is ferociously intense and focused, watch someone playing a game, especially something competitive.
Zero-sum games tend towards conflict. Positive-sum games tend towards cooperation.
The problem is, everyone is trying to win the competition, no one is trying to win the game. Defeating an opponent is a limiting goal, mastering the sport is the ultimate goal.
There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game. The other one is the status game.
Status is your rank in the social hierarchy. Status is an old zero-sum game. We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes. Politics is an example of a status game. Even sports and social media are examples of a status game.
As gatekeepers decline, status signals shift from the approval of one to the approval of many.
The culture demonizes people who want money but people who crave status are far more concerning. Money can be used to feed your family, help others and create jobs. Status is zero sum. It’s telling that those who slam people who want money are those that want status instead.
“Seek wealth, not status” belies the irony that wealth creation is perhaps the biggest status game there is.
Wealth creation is actually a status game that creates more opportunities for positive-sum status games (within which zero-sum games can be played over the surplus…).
Like wealth competitions, status competitions (/negotiations) are zero-sum, but inventing new games/communities is positive-sum (creates new opportunities for status).
Humans aren’t going to get over their need to play status games, in the same way that people aren’t going to get over their desire to win business negotiations in zero-sum ways. Just make more games (businesses) so all can win. So the great game of life is a win-win game. Wealth is not a zero sum game — it’s a positive sum game. Wealth isn’t about taking something from somebody else — it’s about creating abundance for the world. Everybody can be wealthy.
So how to get wealth?
Moat is the key.
Learning about moats won’t teach you the first thing about how to build a good life/business, but it will teach you a lot about how to not build a terrible life/business.
Moats are those barriers that protect your business’ margins from the erosive forces of competition. It doesn’t matter how revolutionary your product is: even if it literally changed the face of human civilization, you’re going to get nothing for it if anybody can sell it too, arbitraging profits away. The whole surplus of the revolution will go to the consumer, and none to you.
People in tech tend to reduce moats to network effects. But a simple look at Fortune 500 companies will tell you that there exist some other very powerful moats out there.
I find that the principle also applies on the level of one’s individual career.
I’d urge anyone to get familiar with the 7 powers and adopt them as one of your key mental models. You can use it like you would go down a “moats checklist,” and see if a business/industry/individual has the potential to sustain high margins.
Let’s see what those “powers” are.
✿ Cornered Resource
A company corners a resource that can independently increase value when it somehow gains preferential access to it. Resources can be material as well as human.
At a high level, I think one wants to build his professional life around obtaining a unique accumulating advantage (aka competitive advantage or unfair advantage or personal moat or leverage).
Be hard to compete. Most people understand that companies are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with. This is important, and obviously true. But this holds true for you as an individual as well. If what you do can be done by someone else, it eventually will be, and for less money. The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. For example, you can do it with personal relationships, by building a strong personal brand, or by getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields. There are many other strategies, but you have to figure out some way to do it. Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake — if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.
They should be:
- Hard to learn and hard to do (but perhaps easier for you)
- Skills that are rare and valuable
- Legible
- Not only durable — it should also be compounding over time (“Compounding over time” is the key one here. Compound over time means that the more you put in, the better you get, increasing your defensibility. It also means that it looks impressive now + will look impressive later)
- Unique to your own talents & interests
You want to build career capital while you sleep.
When thinking of unfair advantage building, it’s helpful to think of the context of “loops” — what can you work on that is durable and compounds over time?
First off, in the literature of growth & marketing, there is this concept called “loops”. I’m curious to explore “loops” in the context of how people make career decisions and think about how to build wealth over time.
”Loops”: The basic idea is that the best companies not only understand their “funnels”: where their users are coming from and convert down the stack — but also their loops: the process by which one cohort of users not only retains but leads to an additional cohort of users.
Loops, in other words, are what leads to sustainable, compounding, growth. Funnels without loops means you have to keep pushing in order to get output, and, at some point, that becomes unsustainable, especially if your funnel is disrupted.
Applying loops in the context of career: The question to ask when evaluating career decisions: “What are the things that if you do, today, make it easier for you to have the career opportunities and resources you desire, tomorrow, in a way that compounds and is defensible?”
You need to make the case for thinking long-term and designing sustainable solutions: how to create proprietary growth, how to make sure it’s durable and scales.
I posit there are four different types of career loops (or assets):
Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from financial capital (and time, energy), people, and product (knowledge, aptitude and skills).
Wealth requires leverage (loops). All the great fortunes are created through leverage. These loops are reinforcing. Having one of each affords you more of the other. But not all loops are equal.
Things that look like “unfair advantages” but likely aren’t or may fade: Proprietary networks, being something other than one of the best at any tournament style-game, many “awards”, social media followers or general reach without “respect”, anything that depends on information asymmetry.
Nothing beats the combination of right network, information absorption & plain talent. In careers, what used to be (more) scarce were things like ideas, money, and exclusive relationships. In the Internet economy, what has become scarce are things like specific knowledge, rare & valuable skills, and great reputations. In the absence of branded proxies, being the most knowledgeable (couple with hustle) becomes a talent that builds the network & attracts underpriced opps.
You don’t want to build a competitive advantage (or loop) that is fleeting or that will get commoditized. Things that might get commoditized over time (some longer than others).
How do you find out what could be your unfair advantage?
Ask others: What’s something that’s easy for you to do but hard for others? AND very difficult for people to reverse engineer?
Second, one element of your success is based on your understanding of what things are limited, and what things are not. It is easy to treat things that are limited as if they are unlimited, and things that are unlimited as if they are limited. If you want to produce better results in life, it is important to understand what the real constraints are, and what constraints are really illusions, and are really abundant.
* Financial capital means money.
Capital is permissioned leverage.
Labor and capital are older forms of leverage that everyone is fighting over.
Our brains aren’t evolved to comprehend new forms of leverage and just how much leverage is possible in modern society.
Capital is the one that people have used to get fabulously wealthy in the last century. It’s probably been the dominant form of leverage in the last century. You can see this by who are the richest people. It’s bankers, politicians in corrupt countries who print money, essentially people who move large amounts of money around. If you look at the top of very large companies, outside of technology companies, in many, many large old companies, the CEO job is really a financial job. They’re really financial asset managers. Sometimes, an asset manager can put a pleasant face on it, so you get a Warren Buffet type.
Deep down, I think we all dislike capital as a form of leverage because it feels unfair. That said, capital is a powerful form of leverage. It can be converted to labor. It can be converted to other things. It’s very surgical, very analytical.
First, you can be rich, but not respected. People will use you for your money, but your influence will be limited to your access to capital.
Understand your relationship with money. See money as a tool, not as a status symbol. Never let money define you or you will only be worth as much as you have. I’m not sure if money can buy happiness, but it definitely can buy productivity. Money won’t make you happy, but it will give you the freedom to figure out what does. Money doesn’t solve problems, people do, but it will solve your money problems — it removes a set of things that are in the way of making you happy. Comfort and Success and Happiness are three different things. Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can certainly buy you comfort. Once money removes the problems that money can solve, you are left with all the problems that it can’t solve. A combination of talent, ideas, resources, and execution is the only way to create solutions that last.
Second, money is not a scarce commodity. There is more than enough, even if it is not equally distributed. It’s everywhere, and even if you spend all of your money, you can get more by simply figuring out what value to trade for what you need. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you.
Capital is a trickier form of leverage to use. It’s more modern.
They probably require more intelligence to use correctly, and the ways in which we use them keep changing.
Management skills from a hundred years ago might still apply today, but investing in the stock market skills from a hundred years ago probably don’t apply to the same level today.
It scales very, very well. If you get good at managing capital, you can manage more and more capital much more easily than you can manage more and more people.
It is a good form of leverage, but the hard part with capital is how do you obtain it?
If you have specific knowledge in a domain and if you’re accountable, then people are going to give you capital as a form of leverage that you can use to then go get more capital.
The first principle is, you make money, you don’t earn it.
To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with measurement. 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.
You want a career where your inputs don’t match your outputs. If you’re looking at professions where your inputs and your outputs are highly connected, it’s gonna very, very, hard to create wealth, and make wealth for yourself in that process.
You must have high creativity and leverage to decouple your inputs and outputs. Tools and leverage are what create this disconnection between inputs and outputs. The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs.
By this, I mean it’s best to focus on having a way to generate income that is tied to success. You want to be in a position where the better you are at something the more money you make.
Making money puts the ability to have as much as you need (and want) in your hands. It’s teaching responsibility. Earning money restricts your income to someone else’s decision(s).
That’s how it is for entrepreneurs, sales people, and people with a side hustle to name just a few of the ways. This is reinforced with pushes towards occupations with high performance-based reward (e.g. markets trading, sales, C-suite, entrepreneurship).
The point is that you don’t have to be an entrepreneur. Your pay just needs to be tied to your outputs rather than a capped salary.
The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions — entertainers for example — almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary.
The second principle is exposure. Exposure can be experiences, material possessions, networks, or access (physical or visual).
The point of exposure is to bring the possibility of that type of wealth from the abstract into the concrete. Wealthy people surround themselves around their dreams, because they’re big and the only way to make sense of it is to see it.
Exchange time for money. Then exchange money for time.
Make thy gold multiply: You will never be wealthy off of your labor. You need to have every single dollar working for you.
You won’t get rich renting out your time, because your inputs are too closely tied to your outputs. You’re not earning while you’re sleeping. If you’re getting paid for renting out your time, you can make good money, but you won’t make the kind of money that can really give you freedom — the passive income that can make you money while you’re on vacation. If you want to trade time for money, you will never have enough time. Renting out your time means someone else will get the wealth from your time. They’re going to pay you the bare minimum to do your job. Renting out your time also mean you’re replaceable and not as creative as you could be.
You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money. Earn with your mind, not your time. Don’t work for money, make money work for you. If you work for money, you give the power to your employer. If money works for you, you keep the power and control it. Rich people are not rich because they spend money all the time. They are rich because they spend money wisely and that money ends up working for them.
That means, invest.
You get rich by owning things. You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.
The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.
You get equity for work where your inputs don’t match your outputs. You need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly. You could do an hour of work and it could have a huge effect — or you could do 1,000 hours of work and it could have no effect. Own equity when you can. You want to own equity — If you don’t own equity in a business, your odds of making money are slim — Ownership is important. You must own equity — a piece of a business — to gain your financial freedom.
This can be a piece of a business, real estate, natural resource, intellectual property, or other similar things. But somehow or other, whether it be in your side business, an ETF or some crypto, learn to invest.
The best money to invest is other people’s money. Make other people’s money work for you. Sell an idea and make a lot of money out of it. Bigger pool, more support. If someone gives you A amount of money to invest, they would do XYZ to make sure you will make money.
Time, not money, is the most valuable asset of all. The value of time is indeterminate while the value of money is fixed. The most expensive way to pay for anything is with time. How we spend our time says so much more about who we are than does how we spend our money. You can always replenish other resources (like money), but time is finite. Your money will return. Your time won’t. Money exists in nearly unlimited supply. Time is a limited resource. Never trade significant amounts of time for small sums of money. Trade money for time, not time for money. You’re going to run out of time first. It’s much worse to waste your time than your money.
Ultimately, time is a more scarce resource — once it’s gone, it’s gone — and therefore more meaningful to us. Think about it. Life is short — we are a firefly blinking in the night. Your time is very precious — on your dying days, you will trade EVERYTHING for another day. If you don’t believe in an afterlife, this is especially true. What is his view after we die? Our consciousness just disappears. Remember how it was like before you are born? Just like that. Zero recollection and experience after we are gone. Time is the lowest common denominator. Every second counts. No amount of entrepreneurial brilliance can recoup the precious hours and minutes that’ve been lost. You can never lose time and get it back again. Time can never be replaced. Time is a constraint, even though you can do more than you believe over a longer time and less than you believe in a shorter period. You can’t spend time and go earn more of it. You can’t buy it, rent it, or borrow it. Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.
Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. One of the greatest predictors of success, is how a person allocates their time. It’s really a combination of high output management, and the allocation of time. The most important lesson is to be consciously aware of what time you’re consuming, and how to get the most possible leverage/benefit/output out of that time. Use it wisely and enjoy the benefits. Squander it, and it’s gone forever. You must treat time with the greatest respect, because time spent in one place means it is unavailable for investment in something more important. Be more conscious of what’s a waste of your time. Guard your time, it’s all you have. If you manage your time like it’s worth a lot of money, it eventually will.
People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one’s time is so detached from the event of spending one’s time. People undervalue their time because it can’t be traded. As if pricelessness were the same as valuelessness.
Wealthy people tend to receive a much more direct payoff for their time which is why they tend to be better about valuing it.
The greatest inequality is NOT money but TIME. Money buys TIME. Wealthy people are often ignorant how much time advantage they have:
- Ubers vs trains
- Nannies or stay at home parent vs two working ones racing to dropoff + pickup without being late or leaving early and getting fired
- Further commutes
Your energy is limited. You require periods of rest and recovery, and the more you build the right cadence of energy expenditure and recovery, the more you improve your effectiveness. This means that how you deploy your energy and against what outcomes is a critical decision.
Our time and energy is limited, essentially. Your trick is to be able to ration that resource for all the things you need to do, and that’s the hardest part.
As long as these principles aren’t observed in non-wealthy communities, it’ll be difficult to create any type of significant wealth for families.
I understand not everyone wants to be rich or wealthy. But these principles still work for whatever type of financial success is desired.
* People / Social capital means your unique network access/strength.
Labor means people working for you. Labor is permissioned leverage.
You really want to stay out of labor-based leverage. You want the minimum amount of people working with you that are going to allow to use the other forms of leverage, which I would argue are much more interesting.
It’s the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. It is the worst form of leverage that you could possibly use. It is incredibly messy and competitive.
Society overvalues labor leverage, which is people working for you. They’ll use that as a way to establish credibility. They’re trying to measure how much leverage and impact you actually have.
Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.
First, you can have good network access — you can be well-liked by a lot of people — but not respected. People will use you for your network, but your influence will only be limited to who else you’ll rout them to.
Once you’ve served your purpose as a router, you’re time is done. And, worse over, unlike with financial capital (e.g investing), you don’t capture any value. If you look at your network as a marketplace, your marketplace has 100% “leakage”.
Let me explain. It’s one thing to be widely networked. Another thing to be strategically networked. And yet another to have created networks that compound over time (e.g Thiel Fellowship, Paul Graham and YC).
It is yet (yet!) another thing to be well *respected* among these strategic networks — as in, they not only like you, they deeply respect you and would let you invest in their company at better terms, pay you for your expertise, or some metaphorical equivalent.
This is some really wonky stuff. don’t take any of this too seriously. Make friends and have fun.
Second, everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.
There is no reason to believe that there are not people who are ready and willing to help you. There are always people who are willing to assist you, and there are also people who need your help. Cooperation and collaboration are limitless.
See (2) below for more information.
* Product also includes knowledge, aptitude and skills.
Product and media are the new leverage.
The most interesting and the most important form of leverage is this idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication. This is the newest form of leverage.
Product leverage is where all the new fortunes are made, all the new billionaires.
The last generation, fortunes were made by capital. That was the Warren Buffets of the world.
But the new generation’s fortunes are all made through code or media. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. That is all code-based leverage.
Product and media leverage are permissionless.
Probably the most interesting thing to keep in mind about the new forms of leverage is they are permissionless. They don’t require somebody else’s permission for you to use them or succeed.
For labor leverage, somebody has to decide to follow you. For capital leverage, somebody has to give you money to invest or to turn into a product.
Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing, these kinds of things, these are permissionless. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do them, and that’s why they are very egalitarian. They’re great equalizers of leverage.
Decision-making is everything. In fact, someone who makes decisions right 80% of the time instead of 70% of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more.
The quality of your life is determined by the decisions you make. The quality of your decisions is determined by your judgment. Optimize for judgment, and everything else will fall into place. To get good at investing, you need broad-based judgement and thinking.
The people with the best judgment are actually among the least emotional. The thing that prevents you from seeing what’s actually happening are your emotions; our emotions are constantly clouding our judgment. Emotions often blinds you to the Truth of the situation. Remember this during anger, envy, and joy. It will save you from making many stupid decisions in life. The more outraged somebody gets, the worse their judgment probably is.
The best way to obtain this is to study everything (including a lot of philosophy).
Philosophy makes you more stoic/less emotional and more likely to make better decisions (so you have better judgement).
Science to me is the study of truth and mathematics is the language of science and nature. It is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions. It actually changes the world. Applied science becomes technology and technology is what separates us from the animals and allows us to have things like cell phones and houses and cars and heat and electricity.
Not everyone is Turing, just like not everyone is Tolstoy. But universal computer literacy is like universal literacy.
The robot army is already here — code lets you tell them what to do.
I think of all the forms of leverage, the best one in modern society … This is glib. This is a little overused. This is why I tell people learn to code. It’s that we have this idea that in the future there’s going to be these robots and they’re going to be doing everything.
Also, judgement is the exercise of wisdom. Judgement is the decisive skill in an age of infinite leverage. It is wisdom on a personal domain (wisdom applied to external problems). Wisdom come from experience. That experience can be accelerated through short iterations.
True judgement ability comes from experience. Intellect without any experience is often worse than useless. You get the confidence that intellect gives you along with some credibility, but because you had no skin in the game and no real experience….you’re just throwing darts.
More specifically, the true source of Wisdom is Objective Observation. It’s not reading; it’s not traveling; It does not come with age; it does not come with a degree. It comes with your ability to view things as it is. Age doesn’t lead to wisdom. Awareness does.
First, Respect — this is a loop that most enables other loops. I didn’t put it as one of the four because you can’t go after it directly — it is a byproduct of something else. Indeed: I’d posit that respect is best earned from creating product and gaining (& deploying) specific knowledge & skills.
I usually refer to it as “having a thing” — starting a company, writing a book, hosting a speaker series, etc. These are all products that can grow independently of your initial effort and also automatically upgrade your knowledge and network over time.
People talk about “passive income” a lot but not about “passive social capital” or “passive networking” or “passive knowledge gaining” but that’s what you can architect if you “have a thing” and it grows over time without intensive constant effort to sustain it.
Knowledge & skills is also the best loop to attract the other loops. New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become. Creating wealth with product leads to more ethical wealth. If you care about ethics in wealth creation, it is better to create your wealth using code and media as leverage because then those products are equally available to everybody as opposed to trying to create your wealth through labor or capital.
Knowledge is not power. It is leverage. The leverage of knowledge can be nearly infinite, which is why it can be confused for power.
The value of new knowledge is greater to the person who already knows a lot. The more effort you put in, the more you get back per unit of effort. Knowledge violates the law of diminishing returns.
As the rate of change in the world increases, your ability to learn becomes more important than what you already know.
Financial capital? Knowledge & skills gives you opportunities to build companies that no one is building, or invest in companies that others aren’t.
Unique network access & strength? Knowledge & skills allows you to build a unique network access & strength. Networks are heat-seeking missiles searching for specific skills / knowledge.
Others can spend their whole lives building relationship with someone only to, when it matters, not have as much influence as you after meeting with that same person for 5 minutes, if you’ve gotten “so good they can’t ignore you.” Some people have big networks without spending much time networking.
Brand? Knowledge & skills makes legibility much easier. Just give a talk, write a post, or go on a podcast and boom — your expertise is widely known, cemented on the internet.
It’s not that the other assets aren’t really important. They are. They’re just easier to get once you have specific knowledge & skills.
To be sure, however, you don’t want a lack of these other career assets to be constraints: You’ll need the “minimum viable money” to keep going and not have to take a job that doesn’t remotely increase your specific knowledge & skills. You’ll want the “minimum viable network”, to know the right people to help. And the “minimum viable legibility” to get them to care.
However, most people make a directionally different mistake. When it comes to network, most people make the mistake of focusing on brand awareness, instead of expertise. They focus too much on the “legible” side of things, rather than knowledge & skills. They make the mistake that relationships alone make a career successful, which isn’t true — you have to do the work to actually make something people love — but once you’ve done that, relationships are what will grow and amplify your empire. Optimizing on building your network before having a rare & valuable skill/knowledge base is like focusing on growth before product-market fit.
People often focus on building up their network, but they should also focus on reputation and expertise.
Strong reputation and expertise with small network? Can build network fast.
Widely networked with poor reputation/expertise? Funnel with leaky bucket. Your network won’t work with you.
Network is distribution. Reputation/Expertise is product.
In 99% of cases, you don’t need to grow your network as much as you need to elevate how highly your existing network thinks about you — by developing rare and valuable knowledge & skills.
Networking is overrated. Become first and foremost a person of value and the network will be available whenever you need it. The best networking advice is to not spend much time networking, and instead be so good at something that everyone wants you in their network, on your terms.
Your bottleneck usually isn’t that this person won’t get coffee with you. It’s that when you do, it’s not worth their time (otherwise they would likely have done it!). You want to refine the knowledge & skills loop so that when you do get coffee with them, they’ll get value out of it, and they’ll want to do it again — and refer you to others — or they’ll even reach out to you for coffee.
People like to get on a moving train. So that’s really what it is. Whether it’s because you’re donating or working really hard. People want to see that you, on your own, are progressing forward because people are busy. There are people who are waiting for you to level up before they invest in you because they don’t want to waste their time, their energy, their money, their influence, their advice. If you’re already moving forward, they know that if they connect with you or help you then it’s not going to be a waste. There’s nothing worse than investing in a depreciating asset. You are a stock on the rise. If you can clearly illustrate that you’re a stock on a rise, you’re going to have folks that are going to jump in.
You NEED proof of work to get a meeting with a busy person. When you’ve done something important or valuable, busy people will meet with you.
Someone asked Peter Thiel about networking after college: “At 22, I didn’t think it was important to meet people”.
In other words, focusing on knowledge & skills enables you to most quickly gain the other loops — capital, network, and legibility, but it doesn’t work the other way around. That’s because with knowledge & skills, there are no shortcuts. You have to put the time in.
Not necessarily with the others. Indeed: Found yourself with some money, valuable contacts, or fame? Parlay that into acquiring knowledge & skills. Knowledge & skills will advance all the other loops and it will bring you more optionality, autonomy, and durability.
Especially in the new world of abundant capital, easy access to information and people with knowledge, the what-you-know skills are more important than those of the who-you-now.
You have to do the work. If you’re waiting for someone to come save you, then you’re least likely to be saved. When you do the work, you’ll be surprised by the people that you attract.
Stop thinking in terms of building a network. Just get good at something. People like hanging around people who aren’t losers. It’s really their privilege to be/work with you, not the other way round. It’s really that simple.
Corollary networking strategy: If you aren’t the most impressive person in the room in one important thing, leave the room until you are. Unless that room helps you be the best at one specific, important, durable, and concrete thing. (Not to be confused with friendship strategy)
Second, for thousands of years, we have figured out how to live, thrive, and survive. Our ability to create is limitless, as is our imagination. Your knowledge, aptitude and skills are unlimited and should be treated as such. These resources should be put work and exercised in the solving of problems, and solving the problems that new solutions create.
Abraham Lincoln was quoted as saying “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”
You can work hard, hustle, put in the hours, do the work, etc., but the magic happens when you aim to perfect your skills and knowledge beforehand.
Don’t lower your ambition to the level of your skills. Build your skills to the level of your ambition.
See (1) below for more information.
>> Let’s sum up: To get leverage:
Get it permissionlessly — learn to code, create podcasts, become a good writer, etc.
Through permission — get people to work for you, or raise capital, etc.
>> Combining all four forms of leverage is a magic combination. Now, for example, the beauty is when you combine all of these four. That’s where startups really excel, where you take just the minimum, but highest output labor that you can get, which are engineers, and designers, product developers. Then you add in capital. You use that for marketing, advertising, scaling. You add in lots of code and media and podcasts and content to get it all out there.
That is a magic combination, and that’s why you see startups explode out of nowhere, use massive leverage and just make huge outsize returns.
Besides, there’s some really good microeconomic concepts that are important to understand.
Ideally, you should pick something with network effects, brand effects, low marginal costs and scale economies.
✿ Economies of Scale
Scale economies (Cost advantages): Per unit costs decrease as volume increases (typically because of high fixed costs/low marginal costs/learning curves). The more you produce, the cheaper it gets.
Scale economies is the more you produce of something the cheaper it gets to make it. That’s something that a lot of businesses have, Basic Economics 101.
This one is pretty straightforward, but has become so well-known it’s almost overlooked. If you have very low marginal costs, you should benefit enormously from scaling — an advantage you should juice for all it’s got. That leads to companies trying to “get big fast,” not because of scale for its own sake, but because it can serve as a weapon and bring enormous profits.
✿ Network Effects
* Network effects: value grows as the square of the customers. The value of a product to a user increases as the number of users increases.
The most subtle but the most important is this idea of network effects. It comes from computer networking.
If a network of size 10 would have a value of a 100, a network of a size 100 would have a value of 10,000. It’s not just 10 times more, it’s 100 times more, because of the square; the difference is the square.
If you’re number one in network effect business, you win everything.
* In a network effect, each new user adds value to the existing users.
What is a network effect? Let’s just define it precisely. A network effect is when each additional user adds value to the existing user base. Your users themselves are creating some value for the existing users.
Network effects are very à la mode these days, because people don’t understand network effects, they’ll tend to twist the word in all sorts of ways until it seems like their business has a network effect (if you squint really hard).
The most common misconception is that network effects = virality = positive feedback loops. But none of those 3 things are the same. The simple definition is that your business has a network effect if the experience for your customers gets better as more customers join in. Virality means that each user you sign up will tend to attract more users in turn.
For example, those terrible online games that used to spam your friends’ walls on Facebook didn’t have network effects — they had virality. At the end of the day, your own experience as a player was the same regardless of how many other people played.
Zero marginal cost businesses can pivot into network effect businesses.
Zero marginal cost of reproduction means producing more is free. Another one is, and this is along the same lines, but technology products especially, and media products, have this great quality where they have zero marginal cost of reproduction. Creating another copy of what you just created is free.
Anything that has zero marginal costs of production obviously has scale economies, and things that have zero marginal costs of reproduction very often tend to have network effects, because it doesn’t cost you anything more to stamp out the thing. So then you can just create little hooks for users to add value to each other.
You should always be thinking about how your users, your customers, can add value to each other because that is the ultimate form of leverage. You’re at the beach in the Bahamas or you’re sleeping at night and your customers are adding value to each other.
✿ Brand Effects
Branding/Legibility means the ability for your skills/assets to be widely recognizable and distributed, or when customers attribute higher value to an objectively identical offering by a seller based on historical information (typically due to affective valence or uncertainty reduction).
You don’t have a brand until someone else tells you what it means. A reflection, not introspection, is what gives a brand shape and meaning.
Brand is one of the most powerful and durable kinds of resource, as well as one of the most complicated and lengthy to build.
It’s interesting to look at career strategy applied through the lens of risk.
It’s worth noting that the biggest risk was neither financial nor had to do with time — it was the reputational risk.
Most people think about financial risk, but reputational risk is far more insidious inhibitor of people pursuing ideas that at first seem weird but then become widely held.
People are status-seeking monkeys.
People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of little fortune, must be in want of more social capital.
Some people find status games distasteful. Despite this, everyone I know is engaged in multiple status games. Some people sneer at people hashtag spamming on Instagram, but then retweet praise on Twitter. Others roll their eyes at photo albums of expensive meals on Facebook but then submit research papers to prestigious journals in the hopes of being published. Parents show off photos of their children performances at recitals, people preen in the mirror while assessing their outfits, employees flex on their peers in meetings, entrepreneurs complain about 30 under 30 lists while wishing to be on them, reporters check the Techmeme leaderboards; life is nothing if not a nested series of status contests.
Of course, like the Force, status is equally potent as fuel for the darkest, cruelest parts of human nature. If you look at the respective mission statements of Twitter and Facebook — “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers” and “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” — what is striking is the assumption that these are fundamentally positive outcomes. There’s no questioning of what the downsides of connecting everyone and enabling instant sharing of information among anyone might be. If we think of these networks as marketplaces trading only in information, and not in status, then we’re only seeing part of the machine.
Have I met a few people in my life who are seemingly above all status games? Yes, but they are so few as to be something akin to miracles, and damn them for making the rest of us feel lousy over our vanity.
The number of people who claim to be above status games exceeds those who actually are. I believe their professed distaste to be genuine, but even if it isn’t, the danger of their indignation is that they actually become blind to how their product functions in some ways as Status as a Service business.
Understanding how to build a moat is hard (and takes a long time), so people affiliate with brands as short hand: Harvard, Goldman Sachs, Venture-backed blitzscaling, etc.
I think the biggest career mistake people make is they’re afraid to look dumb. In order to ensure their brand’s reputation stays right, they follow safe paths that cap their downside, not realizing that they also cap their upside. And said paths are often tournament-style competitions, + perhaps not as safe as they think.
Another mistake is premature self-labeling/optimization, which closes off other, hidden, opportunities. (Don’t worry about finding your passion early. My passion hadn’t even been invented yet when I was 12.)
As information symmetry increases, the value of brand decreases. Brand might be less powerful than they once were. In a world with perfect information symmetry, your Harvard degree is only worth the intrinsic value of the skills/networks/etc. developed there.
Similarities between an Ivy League degree and a Louis Vuitton bag: 1/ Most of the seller’s pricing power comes from brand value. 2/ Most of the value for the buyer comes from what the product signals to others.
You can have a big brand (have distribution), but not respected. People will use you for your distribution, but your role will be limited to the eyeballs you can summon. Once you’ve served your purpose, you are no longer needed.
If you pursue skills, you’ll sacrifice network, brand, and short-term money. You may even look dumb. You’ll toil in ascetic obscurity until, suddenly, you won’t. And all these opportunities will come your way, and then more as your skill/asset compounds.
If you can, take smart bets that have asymmetric pay-offs: If you win, you win big. If not, onwards, who cares — you’re young, people forget. Especially if you’re young, you can always blame it on youth, or find some way to rationalize post-facto. (“Google Glass could have been huge. It was ahead of its time…”)
Indeed. Years spent on failed ideas are often forgotten when success comes along.
E.g. Ever heard of Reid Hoffman’s “SocialNet”? Nope, because LinkedIn, Greylock.
Ever heard of Marc Andreessen’s “Ning”? Nope, because Netscape, a16z.
If you’re not afraid to look dumb for a certain period of time, you can benefit from sort of a social-cultural arbitrage. If you’re not afraid to look dumb for a certain period of time, you’ll take high upside bets that others won’t take, and keep trying when last try fails.
It’s worth emphasizing the “certain period of time”. To the extent that one wants to be seen as “smart”, the goal is not to look “smart” at every step of the way-it’s to look “smart at the *end*, + often you have to look dumb for a certain period of time to get there.
This is where the stay foolish part comes from in Steve Job’s speech. Sometimes, however, you look dumb forever, so you want to pursue something that, even if bombs, the pursuit was its own reward.
But this does not mean brands will die. One of the reasons why brands might always be a thing is that the Internet isn’t touching one of their other fundamental functions: signaling.
One of the fundamental functions of a brand is to signal quality by getting you to play an iterated game instead of a single move game. Single move interactions can lead to market failures.
✿ Switching Costs
Switching costs (Lock in) means a customer would lose value by switching to an alternative supplier for a purchase due to incurring financial, procedural or relational costs.
The person who buys your product is not the same as the one who pays for it, and is not the same as the one who uses it.
If someone spends his own money or someone else’s money on himself, you can seek highest value. But if he spends it on someone else, you can’t.
Stickiness of your product can protect you from the forces of competition only if it locks your customers in. You can milk that moat and even deepen it by many ways.
✿ Counter-positioning
Counter-positioning means adopting a new business model that incumbents won’t copy because it would hurt their existing business.
✿ Process Power
Process is embedded company organization and activity sets which enable lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment.
A process is not just boxes and arrows on a PDF file, or a fancy list of principles in bullet points. It is deeply embedded inside the organization, permeating its culture. The bullet points are only very high level descriptions of the principles at play. These principles are developed and applied in a myriad of ways which form their own ecosystem within each company, and are not documented in any form.
The funny thing is that, from an insider’s perspective, you just do thing as usual, not noticing anything special happening. Meanwhile, on the outside, the process looks like some voodoo producing inexplicable results, with outsiders engaging in a cargo-cult replication of your ways and clumsily translating your values in their own lingo.
D. Live in the present. Let go of the past. (Optimism)
There’s the seduction of pessimism in a world where optimism is the most reasonable stance.
For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell.
People tend to overestimate the extent to which whatever you anticipate will happen in the near future will impact your future. Believing that what just happened will keep happening shows up constantly in psychology. We like patterns and have short memories. The added feeling that a repeat of what just happened will keep affecting you the same way is an offshoot. And when you’re dealing with life it can be a torment. Every big win or loss is followed by mass expectations of more wins and losses. With it comes a level of obsession over the effects of those events repeating that can be wildly disconnected from your long-term goals.
I don’t believe in clinging too much to memories. A lot of our unhappiness also comes from comparing things from the past to the present.
We don’t rise to the level of our hopes because we fall to the level of our thinking.
Many people spend a lifetime recouping pennies in sunk costs only to lose a fortune in opportunity costs.
Most failures are one-time costs. Most regrets are recurring costs. The pain of inaction stings longer than the pain of incorrect action.
Most of the time, something big happening doesn’t increase the odds of it happening again. It’s the opposite, as mean reversion is a merciless law of universe. But even when something does happen again, most of the time it doesn’t — or shouldn’t — impact your actions in the way you’re tempted to think, because most extrapolations are short term while most goals are long term. A stable strategy designed to endure change is almost always superior to one that attempts to guard against whatever just happened happening again.
Optimism is a belief that the odds of a good outcome are in your favor over time, even when there will be setbacks along the way. The simple idea that most people wake up in the morning trying to make things a little better and more productive than wake up looking to cause trouble is the foundation of optimism. It’s not complicated. It’s not guaranteed, either. It’s just the most reasonable bet for most people.
Become anti-fragile: Embrace what John Keats called Negative capability. You’re bending the world toward your will but not bothered when it doesn’t bend. You’re striving for more but happy with what you have. You’re telling a story while also acknowledging the futility & inaccuracy of narratives.
Bounce back from set-backs and just keep going. Long-game. Stay in it.
Be willful.
A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time — most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.
To be willful, you have to be optimistic — hopefully this is a personality trait that can be improved with practice. I have never met a very successful pessimistic person.
Don’t be trapped in the past. Whatever happened in the past is over. Do not dwell on past mistakes. There’s no point crying over spilt milk. Everybody makes mistakes. It’s what you learn from the mistakes, and promising yourself not to repeat those mistakes that matters. When you miss opportunities, don’t dwell on it, as there are always new opportunities on the horizon. Focus on the reality of where you stand now.
Be optimistic. Your optimism infects everyone around you. Like attracts like. You will become magnets for other success-minded people.
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>> In a nutshell, life is this goldmine that you drill in the hopes of finding gold.
The only ingredients that can help you to find gold are:
(0) Finding the right spot to drill. (your purpose)
(1) Having a good enough drill. (your resources/tools)
(2) Having a team to speed up your drill. (your networks)
>> In other words, here are 3 core principles to keep in mind:
I. Key to success in life
(0) Understand your true self and be sincere.
(1) Increase — Market — Capture your value.
(2) Understand people and treat them with respect.
II. Key to successful relationships
(0) Understand your true self and be sincere.
(1) Be competent. Become someone worth knowing.
(2) Be warm. Understand people and treat them with respect.
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This picture sums it up, by the amazing Oliver Emberton.


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If you want to become more than what you are right now, spend some serious, fearless time in understanding yourself, people, and the world, increasing awareness of yourself, of your environment, of the world as a whole, and finding Founder-Product-Market fit.
I. KEY TO SUCCESS IN LIFE
(0) Understand your true self. And be sincere.
✿ Understand your true self.
“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.” — Abraham Maslow
Own the position that you’re in. It will be harder to move forward, if you can’t accept who you are and where you’re at. Realization first, then action. Because your actions are more effective when you realize what needs to be acted upon. We can’t change what we aren’t aware of, otherwise we’re simply victims of circumstance. We can’t learn without reflection.
No one is you, and that is your power. — Dave Grohl
The best way to escape competition, to get away from the specter of competition, which is not just stressful and nerve-wracking but will also drive you to just the wrong answer, the way to escape competition is to just be authentic to yourself.
No one can compete with you on being you. If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is just an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that. Authenticity naturally gets you away from competition.
The more authentic you are to who you are, and what you love to do, the less competition you’re gonna have. So you can escape competition through authenticity — when you’re competing with people it’s because you’re copying them. Before the Internet, this was useless advice — now you can turn that into a career. The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers, by allowing you to scale any niche obsession. Before the Internet there was no way to find all the people in the world who were interested in your obsession. Now you can.
No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness. Life is too short to be normal. If you’re always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be. It’s better to be ridiculous than boring.
A lot of people who are successful were “losers” as kids. Since these people didn’t fit within established groups, they started doing and reading what they wanted. This allowed the “losers” to differentiate themselves and thus learn and create something new.
It can literally be, you’re getting paid for just being you.
At this point some of the more successful people in the world are that way. Oprah gets paid for being Oprah. Joe Rogan gets paid for being Joe Rogan. They’re being authentic to themselves.
We all have quirks. It is part of our being. Unleash your inner weirdness.
“If you live according to nature, you will never be poor. If you live according to opinions, you will never be rich”. — Epicurus
All truth passes through 3 stages:
It’s ridiculed –> it’s violently opposed –> it’s accepted as self-evident
The minute you start caring about what other people think is the minute you stop being yourself. The biggest mistake any performer can make is to look at the audience. Don’t undermine your worth by comparing yourself with others.
It is because we are different that each of us is special. Everyone on the planet operates to their own time zone. People around you might seem to be ahead of you, some might seem to be behind you. Everyone is running their own race, in their own time. They are in their time zone and their own world, and you are in yours. Don’t compare your life to others. There’s no comparison between the sun and the moon. They shine when it’s their time. Life is about waiting for the right moment for YOU to act. Don’t let people rush you with their timelines. Let go of playing the comparison game. There is no such thing as competition. I repeat: There is no such thing as competition.
None of us have a perfect understanding of the world we live in. No one shares your unique experience or can offer the exact same perspective on life, business, love and everything in between. Just because other people are right, does not mean, you are wrong. They just haven’t seen life from your side. Everyone has different views on everything and chooses their own life. Just because other people are right, does not mean, you are wrong. They just haven't seen life from your side. When you’ve climbed up thousands of kilometers, what you see from your vantage point is very different from what you could see at the base. People dislike people who are different from them. The people at the base may not believe what you say you can see from up high and they may ignore you. Not to mention, people around you, constantly under the pull of their emotions, change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending on their mood. You must never assume that what people say or do in a particular moment is a statement of their permanent desires. Derogating people with different world views can help people maintain the validity of their own world view. Our human nature is to disregard information that could cause us any cognitive dissonance. If people see the world one way, they may rely on that perspective, so they might reinforce the idea that they’re right by believing other world views are wrong. Even if they believe you, they may not support you. At some point you will have to realize that there will be people who hate you for no reason and there is nothing you can do about it. There are simply some people in the world that get pleasure from making others feel bad. People hate things that contradict their deeply-held beliefs. But since ideas that contradict deeply-held beliefs are the most interesting (see the history of physics for example), anyone on the hunt for interesting ideas will tend to offend a lot of people. If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.
There’s also a tendency to be influenced by the actions of other people who are playing a different game than you are. This applies to everything. How you save, how you spend, what your business strategy is, how you think about money, when you retire, and how you think about risk may all be influenced by the actions and behaviors of people who are playing different games than you are. If you start taking cues from people playing a different game than you are, you are bound to be fooled and eventually become lost, since different games have different rules and different goals. Few things matter more than understanding your own time horizon and not being persuaded by the actions and behaviors of people playing different games. One of the hardest parts is learning from others while realizing that their goals and actions might be miles removed from what’s relevant to your own life.
Don’t waste your time and energy trying to change people’s behavior and opinion — leverage it! You get paid for being right first, and to be first you can’t wait for consensus. Waiting for consensus is expensive. The more you value your time, the less you’re interested you are in: proving you’re right, proving someone else wrong, defending your position, ripping someone else’s down. All of these things are a tremendous waste of not only time, but mental and emotional energy as well. They have generally made up their mind about you and what you’re doing so there is very little chance of convincing them otherwise. Do your thing, and don’t care if they like it. Once you truly know your worth deep down in your heart, you’ll stop feeling like you have something to prove to someone. If you find yourself constantly trying to prove your worth to someone, you have already forgotten your value. Actions speak louder than words. There will be times when your resolve to serve humanity will be tested. Be prepared.
People will try to convince you that you should keep your empathy out of your career. Don’t accept this false premise. Don’t listen to trolls and for God’s sake don’t become one. Do not envy them & do not mock them. Sticking your nose into other people’s work isn’t helpful and wastes time and resources.
People will criticize you no matter what you do. Be kind, be fair, but don’t do things just to please other people. When your attempts to please others fail — you’ll realize you paid a price for nothing, so just live your life the way you think is best. The only way to not upset anyone is to be mediocre, boring, and spineless. Criticism is the entry price for any attempt at something worthwhile. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, so you have to think long term. If you’re going to focus your life on the really long-term, somewhat implausible-sounding schemes, you have to be willing to be mocked and misunderstood for long periods of time. Right up until the day when it works. The more good things you do, the more enemies you will have. The more you promote change and progress, the more you try to change things for what you believe is better … the more people who want the status quo will have a bad opinion of you and will try to bring you down. In fact, if no one has a bad opinion about you, you are doing something utterly wrong. Love your haters. It is up to you whether you agree with them or not. But they make you important. Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. You’re not right if other people agree with you — you’re right if your facts and analysis are right. Their compliments should not define you, nor should their criticism break you. You MUST think independently and this means that at times you must be willing to be different and stand apart from the crowd. It’s better to create something that others criticize than to create nothing and criticize others.
You just have a very short period of time here on this earth. You’re not really here that long, and you don’t really matter that much. Nothing you do is going to matter that much in the long run. Nothing that you do lasts. It’s really important that you don’t spend this short and precious life being unhappy. There’s no excuse for spending most of your life in misery. You’ve only got 70 years out of the 50 billion or so that the universe is going to be around.
Don’t set your goals by what other people deem important. Don’t just blindly follow the crowd. You don’t have to accept what people around you settle for. So listen and absorb, but don’t try to emulate. Each person is uniquely qualified at something — they have some specific knowledge, capability, and desire that no one else in the world does. Stay positive, nobody will want the best for you, more than you do. So you have to take it yourself. Only you know what is best for you. Know who you are. Be confident enough to be comfortable in your own skin. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drown out your own inner voice. Don’t let anyone’s ignorance, hate, drama or negativity stop you from being the best person you can be. Don’t derive your sense of pleasure and satisfaction from the opinions of others.
Let people do what they need to do to make them happy. Mind your own business and do what you need to do to make you happy.
If you goals set you apart from the crowd. Stay alone!
✿ Be sincere.
Many people tend to attach to social proof in a field that demands contrarian thinking to achieve above-average results.
The problem with viewing crowds as evidence of accuracy when dealing with money is that opportunity is almost always inversely correlated with popularity. What really drives outsized returns over time is an increase in valuation multiples, and increasing valuation multiples relies on an investment getting more popular in the future — something that is always anchored by current popularity.
Here’s the thing: Most attempts at contrarianism is just irrational cynicism in disguise — and cynicism can be popular and draw crowds. Real contrarianism is when your views are so uncomfortable and belittled that they cause you to second guess whether they’re right. Very few people can do that. But of course that’s the case. Most people can’t be contrarian, by definition. Embrace with both hands that, statistically, you are one of those people.
Amateurs believe that the world should work the way they want it to. Professionals realize that they have to work with the world as they find it.
The world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities. If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson.
In a sense when you see a lot of competition, sometimes that indicates to you that the masses are already here, so it’s already competed over too much and there’s nothing here, or it’s the wrong trend to begin with.
On the other hand if it’s completely empty, if the whole market is empty and there’s no one there, that can also be a warning indicator that you’ve gone too authentic and not enough on the product-market fit part of founder-product-market fit.
So there’s a balance. You have to find it. But generally most people will make the mistake of paying too much attention to the competition and being too much like the competition and not being authentic enough, and the great founders tend to be authentic iconoclasts. This balance also helps you avoid coming across as entitled and out of touch.
Shift from authenticity to sincerity.
Sincerity ≠ Authenticity
Authenticity is searching for your inner self and making a concerted effort to express them. If you’re a low self-monitor, you’re guided more by your inner states, regardless of your circumstances. If authenticity is the value you prize most in life, there’s a danger that you’ll stunt your own development. To be authentic, you need to be crystal clear about your identity and values. You need to know exactly who you are and bring it forward. And that can tether you to a fixed anchor, closing the door to growth. Although there’s a right time and place for authenticity (like with a romantic partner), we often pay the price for being too authentic. (i.e dreams / inside out)
Sincerity is living up to what you’re passionate about. It’s striving to be the person you claimed to be. It means you need to stick with your vision and spend most of your time turning it into reality. It means you need to do what is good for you instead of what you want to do. If you’re a high self-monitor, you’re embracing reality and dealing with it. You’re constantly scanning your environment for social cues and adjusting accordingly. Those with 100% commitment are unstoppable. What does commitment look like? Deeply understanding, accepting and working with reality as it is and not as you wish it would be. Taking risks. Persisting. Putting your heart into it. Not letting circumstances get in the way. (i.e dreams+reality+discipline / outside in)
From college admissions to office politics, most things in life are games. If you decide to play games, take the time to learn the rules first, even if you end up not following them.
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” –Pablo Picasso
For example,
If you’re trying to signal that you’re a member of someone’s tribe, you have to present evidence that you’re a member of their tribe. No one will ever think of you as a member of their tribe until they can actually see you as a member of their tribe. If you’re interviewing for finance, wear a suit. If you’re interviewing for tech, don’t wear a suit. Apply this to any context whatsoever ad infinitum and you get the idea.
If you’re trying to connect with someone, you have to learn how to speak their language. If you’re in VC, terms like due diligence, ROI, P2P, B2B, bootstrapping, will be basic terminology. If you’re in music, terms like tempo, measure, pianissimo, DC al coda, will be basic terminology. Apply this to any context whatsoever ad infinitum and you get the idea.
Don’t settle for just “be yourself”. Aim for “be the version of yourself that makes you most proud”. Be true to yourself, but not so much that your true self never evolves. I wouldn’t encourage you to be false to yourself. Of course you should be genuine. I’m not encouraging you to hide your true self. “Be yourself” is not bad advice. But too often it’s used as an excuse to never work on ourselves. It’s beautiful when we can let loose and be our true selves. But don’t ever let that stop you from constantly evolving into a better version of yourself.
Understand yourself. Decide who you want to be, then relentlessly gain the skills required to actually be that person. Self-adjust to turn your crazy passions into reality. Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize. Because remember: “What we think, we become.” I believe best practice is to slowly reveal yourself — making sure to do so at the right time and place. This helps people get to know the real you — without them rushing to judgment. Meanwhile, figure out who you want to be. Then, work hard to become that person.
Find the balance between being your true self and being a high self-monitor, between changing from the inside out and the outside in, between being true to yourself and sensitive to the real life and society, between being self-aware and self-conscious. Less is more. Too much of something is bad. On one hand, we shouldn’t restrict ourselves with rules and regulations that would limit our creativity and spontaneousness of ourselves. On the other hand, we ought to be aware of our weakness to protect ourselves and at the same time respect the fact that each one of us forms part of the social experience of everyone else. Find that right balance and you’ll not only better that experience yourself, but also help others enjoy it as well!
I believe that every virtue lies between vices of deficiency and excess. If you want happiness and success, you need to find the sweet spot between the extremes of too little and too much. You need to look for just right.
You live in a box. You drive in a box. You work in a box. One day you will be buried in a box. Don’t live your life in a box. Think and live your life like there is no box!
In the end of the day, if you cannot turn your dream into reality, you did not want it badly enough in the first place.
In other words,
Understand the desires that drive your hunger. And say NO more often.
✿ Understand your desire.
The purpose has to answer the question, “Why do you exist?” It’s the underlying personal motivation for why you do what you do. It is also a powerful way to connect with others.
Be internally driven. If you aren’t internally driven, forget about becoming successful.
Everybody can be wealthy. Everybody can be retired. Everybody can be successful. It is merely a question of education, and desire. You have to want it. If you don’t want it, that’s fine. Then you opt out of the game.
Most people are primarily externally driven; they do what they do because they want to impress other people. This is bad for many reasons, but here are two important ones.
First, you will work on consensus ideas and on consensus career tracks. You will care a lot — much more than you realize — if other people think you’re doing the right thing. This will probably prevent you from doing truly interesting work, and even if you do, someone else would have done it anyway.
Second, you will usually get risk calculations wrong. You’ll be very focused on keeping up with other people and not falling behind in competitive games, even in the short term.
Smart people seem to be especially at risk of such externally-driven behavior. Being aware of it helps, but only a little — you will likely have to work super-hard to not fall in the mimetic trap.
Who you are is more important to success and happiness than what you have. The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world. After you’ve made enough money to buy whatever you want and gotten enough social status that it stops being fun to get more, this is the only force I know of that will continue to drive you to higher levels of performance.
Eventually, you will define your success by performing excellent work in areas that are important to you. The sooner you can start off in that direction, the further you will be able to go. It is hard to be wildly successful at anything you aren’t obsessed with.
This is why the question of a person’s motivation is so important. It’s the first thing I try to understand about someone. The right motivations are hard to define a set of rules for, but you know it when you see it.
The starting point of all achievement is desire. Knowing what you desire plays a key role in which role you choose to lead in your own narrative.
Your desire is the energy at the core of your being, the energy you were given before birth, and the energy that makes you unique. The energy that you’re either working with in life or against. The energy that you either obey — because you know that your purpose in life is going with its flow — or the energy you don’t recognize, leading to a life of enduring pain.
As mentioned above, we need to be different and break rules to be outstanding. But breaking rules involves risk. In fact, breaking rules can have a multitude of downside consequences. Which is why there is one trait shared by all successful people: hunger/passion. The starting point of all achievement is desire. Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal — a commitment to excellence — that will enable you to attain the success you seek.
On the other hand, when you truly hunger for something, when your stomach or your soul feels empty without it, you will do just about anything to get it. In that ravenous state you set aside any concerns about appearing foolish, you discard the overwhelming odds against you, you get amazingly innovative, and you’ll bet everything you have to get whatever it is that will feed that hunger.
You have to find your meaning. Any piece of wisdom that anybody else gives you, whether it’s you or me, is going to sound like nonsense. I think fundamentally you just have to find it for yourself, so the important part is not the answer, it’s the question. You just have to sit there and dig with the question. It might take you years or decades. When you find an answer you’re happy with, that will be fundamental to your life.
The reason success is so unique to each of us is that we don’t all hunger for the same things, in the same order of priorities. As a result we make a critical mistake; we assume that what drives us also drives others. By projecting our own hunger onto others, or by trying to adopt someone else’s hunger, we buy into the fallacy that everyone is motivated by the same combination of desires. Nothing could be further from the truth and more destructive to finding your own path to success or helping to motivate others on your team to find theirs.
In fact, hunger/passion is actually the outcome of 16 separate desire, the combination of which is unique to every person. And I do mean unique because those 16 drivers result in more than two trillion unique profiles for what can motivate success.
Know your desires inside out. Attack it from different angles. You must know the “what” before seeking “how” and “why”. People directly jump on “How” without clearly knowing the “What”.
Now ask yourself if what you are doing on a day-to-day basis is feeding those desires. The degree to which you do that is what gives your life meaning.
Offer unvarnished honesty. Remember that it starts with you, but in service of your tribe. Define yourself first. You need to get clear about who you are and what you’re hungry for.
You often don’t want what you think you want. Observe the mental videos that play in your head when you are thinking about a goal/desire. Observe objectively, and you will get a deeper understanding of your desires.
What’s most important in understanding your unique desires is accepting the obligation you have to yourself to do everything you can to align your life with them. The more you do that the more fulfilled and meaningful your life will feel. People who are truly successful pay close attention to these core desires and do whatever they can to satisfy them. Simply put, they don’t ignore their hunger.
We all have many desires in life. The problem is when we have a basket of fuzzy desires and never finding a north star of what it is that you want MOST out of life, when we want to do ten different things and we’re not clear about which is the one we care about. When your desires are split up, you create anxiety, and this forces you to lose focus. You can have anything you want in life, but you can’t have everything. It’s very, very hard to be successful in business while trying to live a well rounded life.
Know your priority (just one) a.ka. your north star. Pick the one thing you care about more than anything, and ignore everything else. Pick one fervent desire above all else and find a way to not make it feel like work so you can outcompete everybody else. Optimize for one thing in life — it helps determines the order of the rest of the things that are nice-to-have and to avoid entirely. If you’re going to make money, it has to be your number one desire.
If you want to be rich, you can spend your entire life trying to be rich and you are likely to get it. If you want to be happy, you can spend your entire life trying to be happy and you are likely to get it.
This is your unique path to success, it’s what drives you and what fulfills you, it’s what most feeds your hunger. If you still don’t know what you love or hunger for, try it. Do all of it while you continue to search for love.
We’re all self conscious but we’re not all self aware. People don’t know what they really want. The real desires that drove humans were unconscious ones, and very few people were self-aware enough to understand them, let alone express them. Not everyone will understand it, in fact, chances are two trillion to one that that they won’t. Yes we recognize the hypocrisy as no one is 100% self aware, but this is a guideline to improve in general.
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. — Mark Twain
✿ Say NO more often.
Say NO.
Success requires you to say NO.
Say NO a lot.
Say NO often.
You get what you focus on so focus on what you want. To turn your goal into reality, you will have to say NO to yourself and everything else to stay focus. You have to say NO to protect the deep, rich, powerful YES that makes for a meaningful life. Saying NO means that you’re going to be better at the things that are most important to you.
The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say NO to almost everything. — Warren Buffett
* Say NO to the Non-Essential.
Adopt a minimalist lifestyle.
Read more here.
* Say NO to yourself.
Take risk. Because a moat often involves doing things others aren’t doing, pursuing a moat can be risky.
All fears are children of the fear of death.
It’s a good question to ask — “Why do we fear death?” — You’re essentially dead every night during sleep, same thing if you’re under anesthesia, so why do we fear death so much?
We’re afraid of death, because we fear we haven’t utilized our time here on earth wisely. If you were living your ideal life, and it was fulfilling moment to moment, then you wouldn’t fear death. Life is actually really long, it’s just that we waste it. If you’re truly living life on your terms, and you are happy, you’ll find that you are less afraid of death. It’s not that we fear death, it’s that we fear not living the life we want.
“Most people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they’re 75.” — Benjamin Franklin
Yet, death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. The worst thing that can happen to you is allowing yourself to die inside while you’re still alive.
Fear is the #1 source of regret. When it comes to regrets, it’s the dreams we didn’t go after that haunt us — the business we didn’t start, the book we didn’t write, the love we let slip away. When pursuing your dreams you won’t remember the bruises and failures, only the person you become. The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized — never knowing. When it’s all said and done, you will lament the chances you didn’t take far more than you will your failures. Failure hurts but passes quickly. Regret hurts forever. When you give it your all and it doesn’t work out, you are broken for a while but it passes because you have no regrets. You gave it everything you had.
Most people never make a decision to give up on their dreams. They just wait for the “right” time, day after day, until it’s too late.
Time waits for no one. If you want to achieve something, work hard and fight for it. If you want to meet someone, ask for a catch-up. If you hesitate, prepare to spend the rest of your life in regret. Because being 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and having regrets that you didn’t swing the bat is the worst regret of them all. When you know you’re not going to be here for long, it allows you to take bigger risks despite the inevitable fear you’ll feel. The waiting can seem painful, but the regret of not going for it will be even more painful. Do not wait; the time will never be “just right”. Time flies, we do not even know until we’re old.
If we take the necessary steps to craft each day deliberately, when our final day arrives we’ll be able to look back at a life brimming with joy, fulfillment and satisfaction. When it pays off, you will be filled like never before.
It may be difficult to fail or wait, but it is worse to live with regret. Sometimes it’s more efficient to make the mistake than to spend the time wondering whether it would have been a mistake. Better fail and know you’ve tried, than to regret knowing you’ve never tried at all! Failure is better than regret. Life is short, and death is the great equalizer. Remember that you have to die. All of this will go to nothing. Remember before you were born? Just like that. Do everything you want to do while you can. There’s no time for anything else.
The brave may not live forever — But the cautious do not live at all. Nothing sadder than seeing a person settle for so much lower than their potential. You can’t play it safe your whole life and expect to reach your highest potential. If you’re not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary. The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you did not do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” –Mark Twain
All progress depends on the risk takers. Remember that anything really worth doing in life is probably hard work, risky, and will absolutely require you to do things you don’t currently do, which will feel uncomfortable for a while. This is a “hard truth” we must all face. If it was easy, everyone would already be doing it. The safe option isn’t always safe. Sometimes the risk it entails is just harder to recognize.
If you want something you never had, you have to do something you’ve never done.
If you don’t ask, the answer is always NO.
If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it.
If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.
It’s important to have a future that’s inspiring and appealing. There have to be reasons you get up in the morning and want to live. If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.
A bumpy journey is worthwhile if you’re headed to a desirable destination. In life, if you don’t put yourself in danger, you will never have a chance to experience all the wonderful opportunities out there. It takes bravery to reach for your dreams, as doing so involves a certain degree of risk. Not being an expert makes you a better person. You need to put yourself in dangerous situations where you must move forward. Take the risks your challenge deserves. Our greatest challenges require doing some things differently.
All of the preparation and organization is wasted if we don’t move forward and take risks.
Opportunities are like sunrises. If you wait too long, you miss them. Nothing costs more than a missed opportunity. The best opportunities are always the ones you are not ready for. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity or you will get all the leftovers.
Don’t be afraid of dying. Be afraid of dying without truly living.
Start living the life you want now…. don’t put it off. Make two people proud: your 8-year old self and your 80-year old self.
Be wildly ambitious: Envision the highest version of your own success. Do not rationalize? Dream big and you will gravitate towards those dreams. Embrace the goldilocks amount of entitlement — you deserve the chance to prove yourself. That’s it. But that’s a lot.
Anything you have to do, just get it done. Why wait? You’re not getting any younger. Your life is slipping away. You don’t want to spend it waiting in line. You don’t want to spend it traveling back and forth. You don’t want to spend it doing thing that you know ultimately aren’t part of your mission.
When you do them, you want to do them as quickly as you can while you do them well, with your full attention.
Perhaps it means hiring some needed help, even if it means forgoing the comfort of saving money. Maybe it means moving to somewhere else, creating that new product, even without knowing if people will buy it, because you know it is the right move.
If everyone’s doing it, run the other way. Why would anyone who wants to be a winner get involved in social media, content, or any kind of digital marketing? Everyone’s doing it. You can’t win; you can only slug it out in the trenches. If you’re using the same tools and doing the same things the same way, you are the same as everyone else. Period.
Money is your best friend, but it is also your worst enemy. If you keep holding on to the fortune, you will miss the future.
Think big. Play the big game. $100,000, $500,000, or why not $1 million? Think about how you can get 10x or 100x. Most of the rich saved 20% or more of their income for many years prior to becoming rich. They then put their savings to use by taking calculated risks.
Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along. Theodore Roosevelt famously said,
“Do what you can, where you are with what you’ve got.”
Young or old, this is good advice for all of us. After all, you will never be younger than you are today.
Reevaluate your approach to risk. Make it easy to take risks.
Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward. Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time — you have to try many things and adapt quickly as you learn more.
It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks. Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.
Don’t save up for too long, though. When people get used to a comfortable life, a predictable job, and a reputation of succeeding at whatever they do, it gets very hard to leave that behind (and people have an incredible ability to always match their lifestyle to next year’s salary). Even if they do leave, the temptation to return is great. It’s easy — and human nature — to prioritize short-term gain and convenience over long-term fulfillment.
But when you aren’t on the treadmill, you can follow your hunches and spend time on things that might turn out to be really interesting. Keeping your life cheap and flexible for as long as you can is a powerful way to do this, but obviously comes with tradeoffs.
If you’re struggling to muster up the courage to take risk, consider framing the approach differently in your head. You are just one step away from receiving the outcome that you deserve.
Take risks you understand, don’t try to understand risks you are taking. Risk education should not aim at impressing a regulator but developing real-life competence.
Learn to manage risk. Calculated risk is a unique type of risk that requires you to do your homework. As important as it is to take risks to accumulate wealth, it’s equally important to be smart about risk-taking. Blind risk won’t get you anywhere, but intelligent risk — in which education and experience play a key role — is the mother of reward.
Always do the math. What’s the opportunity? What are the risks? What’s it going to cost you? What’s the revenue potential? Basically, is it financially sound? These are basic questions you need to answer. It’s okay to take risks. You’ll need to. But fundamentally any business model you engage with must be sound and the only way to determine that is through your own analysis and evaluation.
To win the game you have to stay in the game. Take calculated risks, mitigate your downside, avoid risk of ruin like the plague. There’s plenty of time left to play.
Take asymmetric bets, where, if you lose, you only lose 1x and if you win you can win 1000x. Avoid the reverse. Example of bad asymmetric bets (gossip, risking injury) Bad asymmetric bets seem attractive but long-term threaten your integrity.
Only play tournament games if you can win. If you can’t — make a new game. In order to do so, you need to be ok looking dumb.
The further out the returns, the more they compound. The further out the risk, the more dangerous it becomes.
Take short-term risks for long term gains. Never the opposite. Don’t be on the wrong side of exponential growth.
People tend to have an optimism bias in risk-taking, or “Russian Roulette should statistically work” syndrome: An over attachment to favorable odds when the downside is unacceptable in any circumstance. You can be risk loving and yet completely averse to ruin. The idea is that you have to take risk to get ahead, but no risk that could wipe you out is ever worth taking. The odds are in your favor when playing Russian Roulette. But the downside is never worth the potential upside. Leverage is the devil here. It pushes routine risks into something capable of producing ruin. The danger is that rational optimism most of the time masks the odds of ruin some of the time in a way that lets us systematically underestimate risk. You want to ensure you can remain standing long enough for your risks to pay off. Again, you have to survive to succeed.
Remember, the world is yours. Go forth and conquer.
You have an ability to take a step towards your dreams and do what you love.
Until you spread your wings, you will have no idea how far you can fly. Spread your wings and dare to dream! Make sure you live an extraordinary life!
Steve Jobs put it best when he said,
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
“You’ve got to find what you love. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the hear, you’ll know when you find it.”
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste living someone else’s life. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
_ _
(1) Increase — Market — Capture your value.
for the mathematically inclined,
S = L + [RV x (MV + CV)]
<=> Success = Luck + Perceived Value/Market Value
<=> Success = Luck + [Real Value x (The Marketing + Capturing Value you do)]
<=> Success = Take more shots + [(Create + Maintain Value) x (Deliver + Capture Value)]
<=> Success = Take more shots + [(Do what you love and are good at) x (Do what the world needs and you can be paid for)]
<=> Success = Luck + [(Passion ⋂ Profession) x (Mission ⋂ Vocation)]
Your success is one part luck and another part your perceived value.
The more experience you have of life and business, the more you realize that what looks to the outside like a brilliant multi-dimensional plan is actually luck, guesswork, accident, politics, deadlines and survivor bias. Mostly luck.
Perceived value is a function of how much actual value you generate and how well you market and capture that value. Learn to build. Learn to sell. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
Do a job that bring joys, uses your strengths, has an impact, and makes a living.
You need to find that intersection of what you stand for, what you’re good at, what you love, what people need, and what people will pay for. When you can check all five boxes, that’s when you know you’ve struck gold.
Your success will come to life at the intersection that stands behind your core values, fulfills your passion and strength, meets the people needs, and yet still builds a successful business.
What you really want to do is just figure out what you are uniquely the best in the world at because you just love it. And then just find out who or what needs that the most.
That’s pretty much it. Punch in the numbers and that’s how your success experiences will go.
✿ Want more luck?
* Hope luck finds you — Blind/Dumb luck (Random)
* Hustle until you stumble into it— Persistence/Hustle based luck — Fortune favors the bold (Action)
* Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss. Become good at spotting opportunity/luck — Pattern recognition related luck — Chance favors the prepared mind (Preparation)
* Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Opportunity/luck comes to you because of your previous success or reputation. Luck becomes your destiny — Thought leadership related luck — Extreme people get extreme results (Unique action)
The world is a very efficient place, so it helps to be eccentric enough to operate on a frontier and dig deeper than other people do.
By pursuing these kinds of luck especially the last one, basically everything but dumb luck, by pursuing them you essentially run out of unluck. So, if you just keep stirring the pot and stirring the pot, that alone you will run out of unluck.
It could just be reversion to the mean. So, then you at least neutralized luck so that it’s your own talents that come into play.
Take more shots. If something has a 1 in a hundred chance of occurring, then you are really just 100 shots away from getting it. Try this. Try that. Get rejected. Get failed. Don’t hide your intentions. If you like something/someone, own it and show it.
Become so good that luck finds you. Build your character in a way so luck stops being luck, and starts becoming your destiny and opportunity finds you. People will seek you, because you are uniquely skilled. Build a unique mindset/persona/skill so that eventually, you’ll be able to take advantage of opportunities that other people may characterize as lucky. Build your character so opportunity finds you because you’re a trusted, reliable, high-integrity, long-term dealmaker. This is the best luck because it allows you to transfer their luck into your luck: You put yourself in a position to capitalize and attract that luck when no one else has created that opportunity for themselves. This creates your own luck. We want to be deterministic and not leave success to chance.
✿ Want more real value? Then find ways to become more valuable as a person. Figure out how to create and maintain value. Despite what many say, the value you create doesn’t have to be unique (even if it is, imitators will spring up soon enough), but it has to be real.
* To create value: Explore as many things as possible — don’t prematurely optimize.
Be curious. Read a lot. Invest in education and experience. Acquire and develop new knowledge and skills. Knowledge and skills — they leave you speechless, then turn you into a storyteller. Knowledge first, aptitude second, skills third. Study psychology, microeconomics, mathematics, and computers/coding. Learn where the coolest restaurants are in town. Learn a musical instrument. Learn languages. Learn how to cook. Be active. Be mobile. Physically fit. Groom well. Take care of your body so that it will still be in good shape. Develop your own style. Try everything. Broad funnel. Research widely, explore unrelated areas for ideas, create a huge dataset of options. These things and hundreds of others as well are avenues to build your value. Test it for yourself, but be skeptical. Keep what’s useful, and discard what’s not. Explore, then exploit. Tight filter. Eliminate nearly everything. Focus only on the best options. Prioritize asymmetric opportunities: limited downside, unlimited upside. Repeat.
In your 20s, you may not really know what your best skills and opportunities are. It’s much better to pursue learning, personal discipline and growth. In so doing, you will be building valuable knowledge. I think education should be about learning the basics in all the fields, and learning them really well over and over, because life is mostly just about applying the basics and only doing the advanced stuff in the things you truly love, where you know the basics inside and out. At some point, your passion will come and whisper in your ear, “I’m ready.” You won’t find what you love until you’ve experimented a bit of everything.
In particular, increasing value requires a strategy for progress on at least one of four different fronts: deepening advantages, broadening the extent of advantages, creating higher demand for advantaged products or services, or strengthening the isolating mechanisms that block easy replication and imitation by competitors.
So we have next step: get clear about your values. Be a master of your own narrative. Any difficulty you experience making an important decision is the result of being unclear about your values. When knowing your own values and what role you play in your own story, you will be able to make any twists or plots as you please.
* Discover your personal core values.
Know what you stand for. (Determine core values)
The values you choose should answer, “What do you stand for?” Your values should guide you and shape your standards, beliefs, behaviors, expectations, and motivations.
Core Values are a set of things you will not compromise on.
We have, if we’re lucky, about thirty thousand days to play the game of life. How we play it will be determined by what we value.
Foundational values to me are things that I’ve looked at very, very carefully about myself and I’ve deliberately chosen.
Values, almost by definition, don’t change that much over time. It takes some time for you to figure out your own foundational values. I think everybody has them, it’s just that maybe we’re not that aware of them until later.
Generally if people are fighting or quarreling about something, it’s because their values don’t line up. If their values lined up, the little things wouldn’t matter.
The values form the backbone of you and your organization. They may come from your background, how you grew up, rules you identify with or how you see your priorities in life.
Your beliefs come from your experience, helping explain why and how you choose to do business, how you treat your people, and how you conduct yourself as a leader and as a person in the community. These beliefs should be personal, ethical, or rooted in frustration for how you see things happening in the world.
Your inspirations should excite the team members who work behind the scenes of the brand. Inspirations should stimulate your people to go beyond the norms of effort or passion.
The closer your values reflect the realities of what your people believe in, the more successful you will be in using those values to inspire greatness.
Core Values are important, prompting you advocate to express similar values. If you want to inspire others, start with what inspires you. This is not only the core foundation that great careers are built upon, but it is the cherry on top that will result in pride, fulfillment, and true happiness and success. It propels you to become more than just a thing someone buys; it makes you a cornerstone that stands in alliance with a set of beliefs. And that’s the person that reaches new heights, wins die-hard fans and makes money. You will be fighting in the trenches with the rest of the team in hand-to-hand combat to achieve difficult and complicated objectives. It’s great to have a strong flow of challenges with people you care about beside you, but you also need to believe in where you are going and what you are fighting to achieve. This is the special ingredient. This will make the needed sacrifices easier because you’ll be excited about staying up the extra hour or traveling the extra mile to help make sure your team succeeds.
It does require risk and it demands that you stand for something that is polarizing and makes people around you decide if they stand with you and the cause you stand for. When you make yourself stand for something, it will pull certain people in closer and also push away some of your fans.
If it scares you to lose potential fans, let me ask you: Would you rather have die-hard fans who will shout your name far and wide or a few lukewarm people who don’t feel emotionally attached to you and your business?
The myth is to believe you stand for everything with the hope other people hear anything. Hope is never a strategy. To be loved by people, you must stand for something with a backbone and conviction. Trying to be everything to anyone ends up becoming nothing to everyone.
In a world where attention is limited, it’s best to go straight for the jugular.
The harder the challenge, the EASIER it is to build a billion dollar company. But tackling ambitious problems doesn’t just make the potential prize bigger. Ambitious efforts are often more feasible than smaller ones, because the strongest people want to work on the most ambitious efforts. This positive talent effect is stronger than the negative effect of problem difficulty. Being mission-oriented ends up being a pre-requisite given the level of competition for employees. It’s easier to do a hard business than an easy business. People want to be in places where they’re the hero. People want to be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters. If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. When you have a bigger mission than just making money, is willing to take a stand and is willing to shake things up and is willing to lose fans, you have the potential to appeal to a strong fan base who will follow you and invest heavily in you and your business.
So, paradoxically, tackling a bigger problem could be both more rewarding for the company and in a sense more tractable.
Ask yourself, what do you stand for?
Be bold and take a risk. Attach yourself to a cause. Take a stance and tell the world.
Develop your Values — Memorialize them. No one has less serenity than the person who does not know right from wrong. No one is more exhausted than the people who must belabor every decision and consider every temptation. Try sitting down and writing your own Ten Commandments — what you do and don’t do. Put it up somewhere in your house. Use it as a guide. Let it help you settle yourself down.
* Get clear about the values you bring to the table (personal core values ≠ the values you bring to the table).
Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people. Figure out & build your skills.
Think long-term. When you switch industries, you’re starting over from scratch.
You can either step into the stream of someone else’s momentum or create your own momentum. Either choice is fine. Just remember that there needs to be momentum.
If you’re going to play the game, be the best. Or just create a new game.
You could launch something new in an existing market where there’s high demand, but more competition, if your idea is challenging current conceptions, you have to fight to convince people they want what you’re selling; or you could launch an entirely new category where there’s no competition, but where you need to build the demand.
It doesn’t matter which way you look at the issue, the grass is brown on both sides of the fence.
In any field, if you can develop a voice that’s unique and consistently observe things that people miss, you have a shot of getting people’s attention.
For the most part, the best opportunities now lie where your competitors have yet to establish themselves, not where they’re already entrenched. It’s much easier to build something new where there’s no competition. The best opportunities are at the frontier. They’re found in emerging industries and technologies. Build something before the other settlers arrive. Then, share it. If you can create a body of work before the wave of popularity arrives, you’ll be well positioned to capitalize on it when other people are looking for an authority.
However, it’s lower risk to take a new product to your existing market than take your product to a new market. Building a new customer-base is often harder than building a new product for existing customers.
Foundation skills people should have:
• Interpersonal/Sales skill — anything from one-on-one sales to marketing, recruiting, fundraising, PR, journalism, life coaching, and more. Writing is a sales skill that can be learned much more easily than, say, in-person selling, and so you may just cultivate writing skills until you become a good online communicator and then use that for your sales. On the other hand, it could just be that you’re a good builder and you’re bad at writing and you don’t like communicating to mass audiences but you’re good one-on-one, so then you might use your sales skills for recruiting or for fundraising, which are more one-on-one kinds of endeavors.
• Basic Mathematics — probability and statistics are important for personal finance. Basic accounting. Calculus — understand rates of change, be able to measure the change in small discrete/continuous events. The ultimate foundations are math and logic. If you understand math and logic, you have the basis for understanding the scientific method. Once you understand the scientific method, you can separate truth from falsehood in other fields. It’s better to study math and not go into a math-based career, than study history and not go into some sort of history career — the foundation (math) is helpful in so many other areas of life. Stick to science and the basics. Read lots of microeconomics (NOT macroeconomics). Microeconomics and game theory are fundamental. I don’t think you can be successful in business or even navigating through most of our modern capital society without an extremely good understanding of supply and demand and labor versus capital and game theory and tit for tat and those kinds of things. For example — Change yourself, then change your family or neighbors, before you get into abstract concepts about how you’re going to change the world. To learn microeconomics — read Adam Smith.
• Specific skill — a combination of unique traits from your DNA, combined with your unique upbringing and your response to it. It may be soft skills learned in childhood. It may be something so new that nobody but you knows how to do it. It may be true on-the-job training where you’re pattern matching in highly complex environments. Specific skill/knowledge tends to be creative or technical. It’s on the bleeding edge of technology, art and communication. Specific skill is highly specific to the individual, obsession, situation, and problem. The classic example of specific skill is investing. But it could be anything from judgment in running a fleet of trucks to weather forecasting, from engineering to design, manufacturing, logistics, procurement, operations, and more. Very often it is at the edge of knowledge. Figure out what it was you were doing as a kid, almost effortlessly, that you didn’t even really consider a skill, but people around you would notice. Building specific skill will feel like play to you but will look like work to others. You want to be uniquely qualified. You want to figure out what skills does society want, but doesn’t know how to get. It’s the highest paying skill because it involves things that society has not yet figured out how to broadly teach or automate or outsource. When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships or self-taught, not schools. Specific knowledge can’t be trained. Otherwise it will be mass-produced and you will be paid the minimum possible wage to do it. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you. Once your skill can be trained, you are replaceable. You want to be uniquely qualified.
* To figure out and build your specific skill:
You can’t be too deliberate about assembling specific skill. The best way is to follow your obsession, so you go deep enough into it to be the best. Specific skill can be learned by pursuing your genuine curiosity, talents and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
There’re two biggest beliefs that the greatest minds have to succeed. It comes down to following their curiosity (passion) and focusing on their core circle competency (talent), then combining the two of them.
First off, identify things that spark your interest. One of the main things you should try to achieve by age 20 is some sense for which kinds of things you enjoy doing. This probably won’t change a lot throughout your life and so you should try to discover the shape of that space as quickly as you can. Build specific skill where you are a natural. If at all feasible you want to drift into doing something in which you really have a natural interest. You’ll be most successful where you’re most intensely interested. Everyone is a natural at something. Find a work that gets you in the flow state. Make your work your art, and let that art flow through you without the intervention of the mind. Do things out of your love for the process, not out of your lust for the outcome. Instead of asking what you want to achieve, ask what you want to do on regular basis. Achievements come at a cost, and people often don’t compare the cost with the results. But if you like the process, then the cost is NEGATIVE, and achievements come as natural side effects. You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Go find the thing you can commit to for 10 years because that’s how long it’s going to take, minimum, to get a good outcome. You need to find something that interests you because it interests you, devote yourself to it, serve it, become skilled at it, make it better, and reach a stage of confidence with it. Do what you love and do a lot of it. Work on something that you are passionate about with an intense amount of concentration and dedication. Engage deeply with those things. As you engage, if it goes from interest to true fascination, go down the path of gaining mastery. Fascination + Mastery = Passion. Passion is developed, not discovered. Be passionate about one thing at a time, and have indifference towards everything else. You have to be really, really good at it, which means that you probably love it so much that you’re willing to put in the time before there’s even any return on it. I think the best founders, they have a deep understanding of the space they’re going into, enough to be contrarian. They have a deep passion for it, so that they’ll just keep working on it. They have execution skills. They just get things done. They solve problems. They’re capable. If a new business opportunity or project doesn’t excite you, and if it’s not something with which you can have a lot of seriously creative fun, then you should pass on it and move right along. If you don’t have passion for what you’re doing, consider directing your attention and energy elsewhere. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too. Don’t decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it’s wrong.
Most of the time we feel tired not because we’ve done too much, but because we’ve done too little of what makes us come alive. Life’s too short to waste your time doing things that don’t light your fire. You have to like what you’re doing though — if you don’t like it, someone who does will out compete you. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. Passion is what drives you to work through obstacles and challenges in your way. If you don’t have incredible passion for what you do, I don’t think you could do it. If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you. If you love it, you’ll teach yourself. If you don’t love it, others teach you. It’s easy to be productive for 12 hours a day when you’ve discovered a massive opportunity with a huge passion. Impossible to be productive for 2 hours a day when you haven’t. When building value, choose consistency over money. The best book is the one you can’t put down. The best exercise is the one you enjoy doing everyday. The best health food is the one you find tasty. The best work is the work you’d do for free. It’s better to be curious about many things beyond your field — the more topics you’ve explored, the broader your inspiration in your field. While you are still young and have stamina, investing time in work that excites you will allow you to acquire skills that will distinguish you from others. One more reason why it’s so important to find your passion and do what you love, it’s because work takes up so much of your life. The vast majority of your most productive waking hours will be spent at work, so in order to love your life, you have to love what you do for a living. Many people often stress the need to achieve a positive work-life balance. However, work and play don’t have to be at odds with each other. Not to mention, if you want to inspire others, start with what inspires you.
Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money, or tend to stop searching what they love to do too early for unproductive pleasures. They often end up doing something chosen for them by their parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige — or sheer inertia.
With such powerful forces leading us astray, it’s not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.
It’s hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don’t underestimate this task. And don’t feel bad if you haven’t succeeded yet. (Read more here)
Then there are probably multiple things you’re natural at because personalities and humans are very complex. So, we want to be able to take the things that you are natural at and combine them so that you automatically, just through sheer interest and enjoyment, end up top 25% or top 10% or top 5% at a number of things. Genuine curiosity is very important. Leverage and compound interest mean someone who is just slightly better than you will get paid 10x-1000x more than you. So you must be the best. It’s good to stand out by showing independent initiative. Passion is in high supply. What’s in short supply is passion AND capability. You HAVE to be able to demonstrate your capability. You need to be able to show what amazing work you’ve done — specifically on your own, without being paid for it. In a complex world, your ability to succeed is going to depend on you filling a niche that’s valuable, which as in Barabasi’s book, it could be connecting things, it could be pulling resources and ideas from different places, but it’s going to be filling a niche and that niche could take all sorts of different forms. Dig deep into one of your passions that you’re extremely good at. The most important thing is to identify — and it may take years to figure out what you can be exceptional at. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. Defining your circle of competence is the most important thing. It’s not important how large your circle is; you don’t have to be an expert on everything. You’ve got to play within your own circle of competence. The world needs role players. Find a role you can crush and crush it. Find something where you’re in the top 10% without breaking a sweat. Find your advantages — and double down on them through sweat/attention to detail. Find what you’re best at and exceptional at. Or — Try to find a rare skill you have that is in demand and become the best you can at it. And leverage that as much as possible if you want outrageous outcomes. Ask yourself what you have the potential to offer that is so unique and compelling and helpful that no computer could replace you, no one could outsource you, no one could steal your product and make it better and then club you into oblivion (not literally). All else being equal, the more you can build specific, high-value skills that are hard to replicate, the better your career prospects will be. People with average skills get average results. Work up a sweat. Persist for a decade. Make a career out of it. Focus is what gets you places. Being deeply good at a single thing, or good enough at two things. Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life.
Make sure you find your edge and invest in it, and say NO to everything else. Do less, then obsess. Knowing where the perimeter of that circle of what you know and what you don’t know and staying inside of it is all important. Ask yourself what the 20% of activities that are responsible for 80% of the positive outcomes are. The things you end up being really good at are the things you find yourself putting effort into. Because when you look at where you put in your time, where you put in your effort, that tends to be the things that you are good at. And if you put in enough time, you tend to get really good at it. I will give you a little secret: Nobody quits anything they are good at because it is fun to be good. It is fun to be one of the best. The one thing in life that you can control is your effort. Double and triple down on your most valuable activities, and keep investing in them and ignore what you’re not good at. Focus your energy on where you have the greatest competitive advantage and then leave the rest for someone else and pay them to get things done. Exploit your edge. Make sure you get to the point where you can achieve the greatest economies of scale. It is more efficient to capitalize on strengths. Do not waste time trying to “fix” weaknesses. Don’t bother wasting time trying to master the tasks you are only mediocre at. Instead acknowledge those weaknesses, outsource to appropriate sources and do what you love. Anything below your pay grade — that can be done cheaper, better, or faster — should be outsourced. Find experts and outsource when you can. There are people much better than you at a particular function in your business. Trust them to do their job. Don’t try to do everything on your own. This means knowing what works and what doesn’t and whether it will be profitable. Once you’ve delegated at least one task, devote the time you’ve gained exclusively to working on your business. With the right systems, you can maximize efficiency and profits. Generally the highest ROI comes from getting even better in areas where you're already strong, not improving in areas where you're weak. There are important exceptions, but most people focus on their weaknesses too much. You want to be world class at some narrow and important intersection, not decently good at a lot of things.
You will not succeed by trying to play other people’s game. If you play games where other people have the strengths and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. Further, capabilities built up over time can often offer opportunities to create new value.
Know what your strengths are. Know what interests you. Know the intersection of your strengths and interest. Combine those two into a role where they are best utilized. Then focus relentlessly in that direction. Double down on that intersection and make sure that whatever position you hold is aligned with those strengths and interests. Then what that means is you should demonstrate that you completely own a particular skill or subject matter and are the best at that. Degrees and experience from brand name colleges and companies generally fail to predict performance if you’re being asked to do something you suck at or don’t enjoy doing, or you suck at AND don’t enjoy.
The people who change the world are often quite exceptional on at least 1 or 2 dimensions and you can often see a spark of irrational potential. It takes an irrational person to transform society. If a punter/field goal kicker showed up to practice with a new football team and thought “Crap, all of these guys are bigger and more athletic than me!” and tried to outperform the wide receivers and running backs, they would fail miserably. But they don’t. They focus on the intersection of their skills and experience and they focus on being the best punter/field goal kicker in the game. Within that more tightly defined role they aim to perform.
For me this has made a major difference. For the most part I stopped listening to what everyone else expected of me, particularly when I knew that they weren’t familiar with what I was best at or passionate about.
| To maintain value |: Be UNCOMFORTABLE/COMPETENT. You have to keep yourself uncomfortable if you want to maintain market value in line with your dreams and aspirations.
If you want creativity, stay at the EDGE. At any gathering of people… the really interesting conversations and actions almost always happen around the edges. Change almost always starts at the EDGES and moves toward the CENTER.
Give yourself permission to be bad. You know what you’re really good at? Things you’ve done many times before. Mastery is boredom. Unfortunately, we like feeling like masters; we hate feeling like idiots. So we keep ourselves bored in order to protect ourselves from feeling stupid. This is a bad trade.
Get into your discomfort zone and reach past that. We learn when we’re in our discomfort zone. When you’re struggling, that’s when you’re getting smarter. The more time you spend there, the faster you learn. It’s better to spend a very, very high quality ten minutes, or even ten seconds, than it is to spend a mediocre hour. You want to practice where you are on the edge of your ability, reaching over and over again, making mistakes, failing, realizing those mistakes and reaching again.
Say NO to your failure and accomplishments. All of these points go in the same direction. Lean into (not away from) what’s making you uncomfortable. Saying NO means that you’re going to be better at the things that are most important to you.
Some people can call it rapid experimentation, but more importantly, I call it “hypothesis testing.” Experiment like it’s always a work in progress. Instead of saying “I have an idea” what if you said “I have a new hypothesis, let’s go test it, see if it’s valid, ask how quickly can we validate it.” Test the hypothesis. If it works, figure out how to make it better. If it doesn’t, tell everyone and move on to the next idea. Your outcomes, both good and bad, are opportunities for others to learn and do better. We all win when we learn together.
Take a more detached/experimental approach to what you’re doing. Think about a stand up comedian — they are CONSTANTLY tweaking their set to make it perfect. We should be constantly tweaking our processes to make them perfect as well. Try different things — always be experimenting. Whether in your work or in life.
There are no bad or good ideas or new ideas. There are only early ideas… They’ll all happen. It’ll all happen. I’ve become convinced now it’ll all happen. Every smart person has a crazy idea, it’s all going to happen at some point. They will all happen. It’s just a question of when. And it’s all about execution. Some are just executed better than others. Every idea can be good if it is at the right time, right place and be executed by the right people. No matter how good your idea is, it can be bad if one of those three is missing. For example, being a great content marketer is not about creating the best content, but building a great community that will generate high-quality content for you. 20% of content marketing is creating great content, while 80% is pushing it to the right people, at the right time, in the right place. Don’t love your idea so much that you cannot see life clearly. A lot of time the opportunity cost of chasing the wrong idea is the opportunity to turn another idea into reality. Always ask questions. Even if you agree with something, try to look from the other side. If you disagree with something, do the same. Don’t just listen, think critically. If it looks easy, look closer. The only way to solve the surface-level challenge is to address what’s happening underneath. Use your passion and skills to dig deep and find the roots of the problem. Learn to say NO to everything. Say NO to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. Innovation is saying NO to 1,000 things.
You have not failed. You’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. If it’s not valid, move on to the next one. Never a dead end. There’s no harm in claiming failure, if the hypothesis doesn’t work. Failure is an important part of life’s learning process. Just as evolution is a series of trial-and-error experiments, life is full of false starts and inevitable stumbling. To me, being able to come up with the new ways of doing things, new ways of framing what is a failure and what is a success, how does one achieve success — it’s through a series of failures, a series of hypothesis testing. If you aren’t failing sometimes, then you probably aren’t taking enough risks. Although family, friends, and neighbors will happily give us pointed advice about what to do, it is essentially our responsibility to pick our own direction. But it is helpful to know that we don’t have to be right the first time. What you’re going for probably is a few really big world-changing hits and a lot of failures along the way. I view that just as the overhead of doing business. Be willing to fail. If you didn’t have failure, you’d never improve. Failure causes us to change, and through that, we get growth. Learn from your failures, and you’ll gain the aptitude to succeed. You learn by doing and by falling over, and it’s because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over. If you’re not falling, you’re not trying hard enough. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, so you have to think long term. If you’re going to focus your life on the really long-term, somewhat implausible-sounding schemes, you have to be willing to be mocked and misunderstood for long periods of time. Right up until the day when it works. Everyone talks about how great failure is, but that’s only because it causes pain. If it’s painful enough, you’ll face what really went wrong, learn from it, and never make that same mistake again. You’ll be stronger and wiser. But none of that will happen if failure doesn’t hurt. You should not be afraid to fail, but make no mistake. The goal is to win. That’s in some sense the real pursuit.
On the other hand, when we’ve finally developed an idea that we’re proud of, it’s easy to feel self-satisfied in the afterglow of creative breakthrough. This is one of the greatest risks in the creative process because we can easily become attached to an idea and miss further opportunities for improvement. The most apparent downside of perfectionism is that it stops production and creation. It paralyzes people into never completing what they need to put out into the world to progress. Never satisfy with your own accomplishments. Of the very few business books that are worth reading, the very best, hands down, is Mark McCormack’s What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School. McCormack says that a key characteristic of all champions is their “profound dissatisfaction with their own accomplishments.” Indeed, success is its own worst enemy. Strive to be better even when goals are achieved. Don’t rest on your laurels. This is the biggest obstacle that keeps most people from getting richer. The average person sets goals, achieves them and then sits back and relaxes. Never quit. Once you achieve your goals, set more goals. Look for goals that will better yourselves. Challenge yourselves to be better, to reach the next level. There is always more to learn, more to accomplish and more money to be made. Don’t be a know-it-all; be a learn-it-all. The ‘learn-it-all’ always will do better than the other one even if the ‘know-it-all’ person starts with much more innate capability. There’s no shortage of self-proclaimed experts, authorities, and gurus out there. But self-proclaimed titles aren’t only useless, they’re dangerous. Experts consider themselves “know-it-alls.” Referring to yourself as an ‘expert’ in any field assumes the position that you have reached your fullest potential. It implies you have attained a thrilling pinnacle in your career and that your thirst for knowledge in a particular subject has been quenched. Now, you’ve switched your focus. Instead of limiting yourself or becoming overly concerned with how you are viewed by others, your primary concern is one of growth.
Look for ways to redesign your jobs to add more value, and keep on learning new things. That means that you need to experiment and pivot from time to time. Try out a new way of working (say leading a meeting), then get some measurements and feedback (say, feedback on meeting effectiveness), then modify their behaviors, and then repeat. It was also striking to discover how few people do this while working. Many people become competent at a professional skill, then they stop improving — good enough is good enough, it seems. This paucity means that the companies pursuing the lean method in innovation have a huge advantage over others who are not learning at the same rate. Moreover, the learning loop method really works not just for idea development but also for most “soft” professional skills, like running a meeting, prioritizing, doing a sales pitch, and so on. Everyone can apply this to managerial and professional skill development. For example, if you’re a sales person in a startup: do you apply such a learning loop to your sales pitch? Do you A/B test it and modify it constantly to become better? Those who did in our dataset improved faster and outperformed the rest. Continuous learning and growth are important in any work environment.
The key to success is the ability to extract the lessons out of each of these experiences and to move on with that new knowledge. Anyone that doesn’t continue to experiment and doesn’t embrace failure, will eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their existence.
Life is like riding a bicycle: If it’s too easy, you’re going downhill.
We all want comfort and fulfillment. But fulfillment demands progress, and progress is uncomfortable. Decide which one is higher on your values list, and be willing to pay the price.
Growth and Comfort never coexist. It’s true for people, companies and countries. Comfort is the enemy of success and abundance. When we stay in one place, stay comfortable, well we lose market value. We fail to grow. To acquire new skills. To take the right risks at the right time. A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
The answer to your growth can be found beneath suffering. Some people don’t grow because they’ve never suffered.
See The Business Portfolio Map for more information.
✿ Want to market/deliver your value? Add values to others’ lives. Don’t hide your light under the proverbial bushel. To be what people perceive as outstanding and successful you have to share. My advice is to open up to people. If you have a funny joke, tell it! If you know a great restaurant, invite your friends. If you play guitar, play it outside the school cafeteria on a Tuesday afternoon just because you feel like it. If you are good at presentations, volunteer to make the big sales pitch at work. If you are good at business, find ways to become an entrepreneur, start a company. Whatever it is. Don’t be afraid to show off the value that you’ve worked hard to build. Learn how to share your passion with others. Learn how to tell a good story.
That also means you have to have things to share. It’s a rare person who literally does absolutely nothing and has absolutely no opinion on any given topic.
* Identify your problem and the world’s problems.
“To change the world, which is the result of our thinking, we have to change the thinking behind the world.” –Albert Einstein
To change someone’s thinking, you can either change the questions they ask, or offer more inspired answers to those questions.
All human creations, are just answers to questions.
Example — Democracy answers the question, “How can everyone have a say in the political, economic, and social affairs?”
Example — Slavery answers the question, “How can I extract economic value from others, without compensating them?”
Wikipedia also does this.
What’s needed in the world right now, is more imagination, to come up with more inspired answers to the questions that people are already asking.
Opportunities are abundant. At any place and time you can look around and identify problems that need solving.
Ramp up your observation skills, tap into your talents, and unlock your creativity to challenge traditional assumptions — exposing a wealth of possibilities — in order to create as much value as possible, identify problems in your midst — problems you experienced or noticed others experiencing — problems you might have seen before but had never thought to solve. These problems were nagging but not necessarily at the forefront of anyone’s mind.
Some are mundane, such as scoring a table at a popular restaurant or pumping up bike tires. Many, as we well know, are much larger, relating to major world issues.
When I was younger I thought it would be easier to bite off small problems than big ones, but I’ve discovered in many ways it’s the opposite — tackling big challenges makes it easier to attract great people and keep them motivated. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. Nobody will pay you to solve a non-problem. Pick something that isn’t big now, but it will be in the future.
* Describe what makes your values valuable. Identify your unique selling points, differentiating factors that distinguish you from others. Build your perceived value (your unique value proposition) — what sets you apart from others. Your value proposition is the core of your competitive advantage.
Ask yourself, what makes you different and better than others? How do you differentiate yourself from others? What can you do to attract the people you want, and to be attractive to them? How do you want your peers to remember you? What do you wish for people to associate with you when they think of your name? Will you be able to stay true to this identity throughout your existence?
* Discover a professional mission in life that is best adapted to your individual talents and that will have the greatest positive impact on society.
Connect your unique value to those problems. Differentiate yourself as the preferred provider of this value. (Determine mission)
Match your value with specific mission. Discover what you can be great at. Align it with what could be important in the future. Try to formulate how you can take your unique value and find ways to contribute to the world. Match your unique value with a problem people will pay you to solve and go to work until you succeed. Ask yourself: “What am I needed for?”, “What unique contribution can I bring to those in need?”.
What’s your personal mission statement? A very strong mission orientation has three components: What unique value do you create for others — customers, co-workers, company? Is that value meaningful to you personally? And does that value provide societal benefits beyond sales and profits?
Then apply this to the business itself: What unique value does the company create — and for whom — and is this formidable value creation? (How can you make something better? How can you make the industry better? Is this venture where your true entrepreneur spirit is set free?) How many of the employees find that value proposition personally meaningful? What societal benefits does the company bring, beyond generating its sales and profits and selling stuff to customers (selling advertising or selling an app to a corporate customer does not necessarily provide societal benefits).
Passion is do what you love; mission is do what contributes. Passion asks, what can the world give me (a hedonistic view). Mission asks, what can you give to the world (an other-orientation). People who infused their work with both passion and mission performed much better than people who had just passion, or just mission, or neither. You look at things you enjoy in your life, but much more important is what you can do to be helpful and make an impact and make the world a better place. You succeed when your self-interest is aligned with the self-interest of the world. If your curiosity or your unique value ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well. This formula offers you the fulfillment of doing work you love while profiting from solving other people’s problems. Get so good they can’t ignore you.
Regardless of the size of the problem, there are usually creative ways to use the resources already at your disposal to solve them. All problems can be viewed as high-potential opportunities for creative solutions. Most important problems aren’t that hard to solve, it’s just that no one has really tried. You will get a lot of benefits from unearthing these problems and working to solve them.
No matter what your role, having an entrepreneurial mindset is key to solving problems, from small challenges that face each of us every day to looming world crises that require the attention and efforts of the entire planet.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
Because we’re surrounded by a world that has more failure than success, it’s easy to get caught up in the “avoid the failure” mentality. I don’t think you can easily get to success by just avoiding bad ideas. You kind of have to do the positive stuff too, and that requires emulating people, companies, and ideas that have been successful. I think more people should copy/replicate, and aim to reproduce what the successful companies do.
A brand new idea isn’t the only way to find success. You don’t have to have a new idea to succeed, because there are none. There’s no such thing as a new idea. (Even that statement isn’t original — it’s often attributed to Mark Twain.) All the ideas have been thought of. It’s about the combination of the idea plus the execution plus the passion. If you think you’ve found a new idea, you probably don’t know the history. Ideas are made of other ideas. All ideas have parents. We recombine, recompose and restructure ideas to get more ideas. The best way to come up with creative ideas is to synthesize them from the ideas of others.
In every cycle of innovation and growth, you go through certain phases. The initial phase is just try to copy the model that’s worked elsewhere. Over time, as you gain more experience and confidence, you will start to realize that some of the problems that others are solving are common to what’s happening in different parts of your problem. But at the same time, there are going to be differences. And so when they are different, how do you apply the differences to your advantage and leverage what you know to create something that’s more customized and fits the current situation? That becomes key.
The world’s most creative entrepreneurs look outside of their fields for ideas. You might be inspired by something other people did and convert it into something that aligns with what you are doing. Many entrepreneurs find success by putting a new spin on an old concept.
That’s what eBay did: Critics shook their heads at the idea (selling Pez dispensers online, really?), but eBay’s founders saw an opportunity to take a concept that’s been around since the beginning of civilization and transform it in the new world of peer-to-peer, global e-commerce.
Ferruccio Lamborghini confessed he never invented anything — he’d simply combined the Ferrari and Alfa Romeo engines and made one of the most beautiful automobiles in the world.
Like Steve Jobs was a visionary and a great designer, not because he came up with the idea to build the smartphone. Many people had tried to build a smartphone. It’s because he had a very high bar for the design. He understood the manufacturing tolerances and what the technology was capable of and what it wasn’t. He could rally the people and the resources to get it done. He actually didn’t care about the financial outcome. He took a dollar instead of a salary from Apple. He just wanted to see it done. He was willing to do it for as long as it takes until it worked. It’s kind of this magic … of factors. Then the timing in the world happened to be right and the technology was around and Jony Ive was there and who knows how many other factors intersected to make it happen.
As Walter Isaacson once said, “People who are interested in the widest variety of things tend to see the patterns of nature in ways that make them creative.”
When you find someone successful, ask — “How and why are they successful?” Decompose it and try to emulate that.
Steal from other people. Take what others give you and put it in your own voice and you will find your voice. Unleash your creativity by trying exposing yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you’re doing.
Seek similar problems. Aka Copy & Paste. If you have a problem, and you are looking for a solution — look for a similar problem that you (or someone else) has solved in the past and think of how you can copy & paste the principles behind that solution.
E.g. If you are rubbish with your health but great with money, copy and paste what you do with money to your health.
Track finances = Track calories
Financial advisor = Personal trainer
Wealthy friends = Healthy friends
If somebody comes along with a clever way of doing something, one should ask yourself, “Can I apply the same principle in more general ways? Can I use this same clever idea to solve a larger class of problems?”
E.g. “Can I take the Uber model to the hotel industry?”
There are two places to find ideas: places no one has looked before, and places where people have looked, but not hard enough.
Kids are taught that big ideas come from the former, but the latter may actually be more promising.
Where does no one look? — Where things don’t make sense.
When people say things don’t make sense, all that tells me is they’re not thinking about the world correctly. The world is conflicting with what you think should happen.
Read more here and here about how to find ideas.
You can borrow other people’s ideas, but not their conviction. Unfortunately, ideas without conviction are worthless.
Once you understand how you wish you to be perceived, you can start to be much more strategic about your life. Product-market fit is inevitable if you’re doing something you love to do and the market wants it.
✿ Want to capture your value? Create long-term value that pay dividends. Find ways to capture a good chunk of that value for yourself.
Brainstorm a variety of ways to monetize your unique value. (Determine vision/long-term goal)
Your vision should answer the question, “Where could you be?” Put a stake in the ground that describes an ideal state for your future. It should be able to last for 5 to 10 years. Articulate a clear vision of the future and bring the right people together. Visualize a perfect future and write down the most critical milestone you need to achieve. You need to build businesses that will pay you long-term dividends into the future. Hold, powerfully, [to] a vision and be so stubborn of it. Don’t let anybody move you off of your vision.
If you do not know where you are going, how will you know if you get there? To be a visionary, you must be able to visualize the future. Imagine it is 5 or 10 years from now and you wake up in the most fantastic mood.
One benefit of having specific goals is that it gives you the clarity to say No to the side-opportunities. If you don’t know your goals, you don’t know your distractions.
The vision gives you clear direction. A vision sets aspirational stretch goals for the future, linked to a clear result or purpose. A great vision is a balance between aspiration (stretch) and reality (achievement). It should motivate you, written in a way that scares you a little and excites you a lot. While vision could include your mission, it goes further. Mission generally describes what you are currently doing; vision goes into the future and describes what you hope to accomplish. Your vision should be the overarching goal, the established purpose and objective of an organization (or an individual).
“The main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and the others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen…No vision, not much of a future.” — Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
Your long-term goals should answer, “What will you achieve?”
People who set the more audacious goals were actually more likely to complete them than the people that set reasonable goals. I get the logic of baby steps and starting small, but when it comes to goals you’re better off being bold. You need the excitement of what your life will be like on the other side of success to keep you motivated.
* Find a career/job/education where you will end up in a business where the inputs and outputs are disconnected.
Navigate towards a career where you’re tracked on the outputs, rather than the inputs — this will allow you to control your time much better.
Another way of thinking of this is you don’t want a “linear job” where 10 hours of work always equals the same result vs. one killer feature in an app makes it go viral — “asymmetric”.
2000 years ago, the inputs and outputs were connected — effort=result
Nowadays — we have knowledge worker jobs.
A good developer can write a good piece of code that will generate millions of dollars over the next few years.
Sales is a good example, or product building etc.
NOT a customer service role.
* Productize yourself. Know how to package yourself in a product. Create a product out of whatever it is that you naturally and uniquely do really well. If you compete at being someone else, you won’t be the best in the world at it, and in turn you won’t get rewarded properly for it.
We’re living in the tool era. Tools are leverage. We’re tool making monkeys, and we’re living in an age of incredible tools. The Internet is a tool. The smartphone is the greatest tool ever invented.
Code and media are the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep. The top coders in the world can make billions of dollars of value, while a not so good coder can well, create no value. If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts to build an independent brand.
In some businesses, this is clear and straightforward, but in others the waters are considerably more murky.
In some types of business, such as trading, you need to trade over and over to keep revenue coming in. Each day you are starting fresh. You need to find add-on businesses that will generate residual revenue for you and don’t require starting from scratch each month.
See more here.
Execution Plan: Don’t get lost in the fantasy. You need to map out your execution plan. Don’t just visualize, execute.
Figure out what new product or technology you can provide that’s natural to you.
Give society what it wants, but doesn’t know how to get — at scale.
Then figure out how to scale it so everyone on the planet can have your product.
Getting success is essentially an act of creating something new from scratch. Predicting that society will want it, and then figuring out how to scale it, and get it to everybody in a profitable way, in a self-sustaining way.
The most important thing to do is to understand your own temperament and skills, to develop a plan and to stick with it. But human nature is to go with what feels good, to look for social proof and to act out of fear and greed in times of stress.
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Why?
✿ Make luck
People tend to underestimate the role of luck and risk, and fail to recognize that luck and risk are different sides of the same coin.
Like it or not, your success in life is influenced by luck and timing. The same way external forces dictate what becomes popular or not. Luck determines so many things in life. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome.
Everything I wrote here is easier to do once you’ve already reached a baseline degree of success (through privilege or effort) and want to put in the work to turn that into outlier success. But much of it applies to anyone.
People’s lives are a reflection of the experiences they’ve had and the people they’ve met, a lot of which are driven by luck, accident, and chance. The line between bold and reckless is thinner than people think, and you cannot believe in risk without believing in luck, because they are two sides of the same coin. They are both the simple idea that sometimes things happen that influence outcomes more than effort alone can achieve.
I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.
Musicians would often say that it was their “throwaway songs” — the ones that they record on a whim on the road without much thought — that end up becoming smash hits.
Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky.
Were we lucky? In some ways, yes. Because even after all that planning and hard work, it doesn’t always work out. Not by a long shot.
Been there, done that.
I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren’t born incredibly lucky.
Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. There are geniuses who lost the Rawlsian ovarian lottery and ought compete with rich silverspooned kids. Wealth is NOT the goal BUT you can’t discount privilege, access, peer networks, structural advantages, positive presumptions of those NOT born in poverty. If you can you’ve not spent a day let alone a childhood. There’re many families of four making $25k total. It’s very hard to find success and mindfulness with that.
The biggest reason I’m excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks.
Until then, if you aren’t born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult. It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net.
It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. Entry to the wealthy club from humble beginnings is much harder than most people think.
With all this randomness and externalities, how is one supposed to have faith in their efforts?
A society that believes that wealth is only created through luck or privilege will eat itself alive.
I’ve witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it’s possible.
Most entrepreneurial efforts fail, but great entrepreneurs don’t.
Luck does play a part in the grand equation here, but it’s not random luck.
It’s the luck that comes from planning, preparation, and a whole lot of sweat. It’s the luck that happens when your hard work and smart work and preparation meet an opportunity. Those who didn’t make the cut looked at successful people as just being “lucky.” Meanwhile, most of the time it’s just the opposite.
It’s not about being lucky; it’s about making yourself lucky.
Being lucky does not mean you do not have to work for it or it’s handed to you.
Being lucky means you did really work for it…you put yourself in the right place at the right time…and it could have been anyone else if they had worked as hard to get it. I believe it’s entirely possible to create your own luck. You can become luckier, absolutely. Because fact is, luck is really about chance: The chance of something good happening. If you make yourself available to new people and new opportunities — you’ll be rewarded for it. It’s really pretty straightforward, actually.
It takes a lot of hard work to be lucky.
“I will fail many times, and I will be really right once” is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky. You make your own luck if you stay at it long enough.
One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution. The more times you do this, the more you will believe it. Grit comes from learning you can get back up after you get knocked down.
While I’ve had more than my fair share of mishaps, I am lucky to say that things have mostly worked out.
I try my best to make myself lucky.
Read more here.
So just as with anything, the biggest ingredient is PATIENCE / COMPOUND INTEREST.
You’re gonna win some. You’re gonna lose some. But keep playing the game. The game stops for no one. Life doesn’t hand rewards to people who quit. Only those who keep playing.
I think the biggest competitive advantage in business — either for a company or for an individual’s career — is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.
Guard thy treasures from loss: The key to money is to not die. Compounding creates success in almost anything. Compounding is magic. Compounding interest will work wonders… with TIME. It keeps adding on itself, so that you end up with thousands of times your original investment. The longer you last, the more likely it is that you will win.
There are books on economic cycles, trading strategies, and sector bets. But the most powerful and important book should be called “Shut Up And Wait.” It’s just one page with a long-term chart of economic growth. Physicist Albert Bartlett put it: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
The counterintuitiveness of compounding is responsible for the majority of disappointing trades, bad strategies, and successful investing attempts. Good strategy isn’t necessarily about earning the highest returns, because the highest returns tend to be one-off hits that kill your confidence when they end. It’s about earning pretty good returns that you can stick with for a long period of time. That’s when compounding runs wild.
Look for it everywhere. In most aspects of life, try to find the thing you can go all in on with compound interest. Go find the thing you can commit to for 10 years, because that’s how long it’s going to take, minimum, to get a good outcome. You also have to enjoy the journey because there is no guarantee of the outcome. When you find that 1%, go all in, and forget about the rest. When you find the right thing to do, and people to work with, invest deeply into that, and stick with it for decades — that’s how you make the big bucks. Play iterated games. You just have to play the game long enough and randomness would have a higher chance to be in your favor. Make sure you are investing properly so you are protected from getting wiped out. I don’t believe in any short-term thinking or dealing. All returns in life come from compound interest in iterated games over many turns of long-term games — and they usually come at the end; whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities or habits. I only want to be around people who I know I’m going to be around with for the rest of my life, and I only want to work on things that have good long term payout. Long-term players make each other rich. Short-term players make themselves rich. People are fair with each other when they know there will be more turns of the game. Friction goes down with each turn, so you can do bigger and bigger things together.
In the intellectual domain, compound interest rules. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation. You also want to be an exponential curve yourself — you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory. It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect — most careers progress fairly linearly. It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric — money, status, impact on the world, or whatever.
Compound business relationships — people trust you when you have shown yourself in a visible, and accountable way, to be a high integrity person. This can apply to your reputation, as it’s compounded over time. If you’ve worked with the same person for a long enough time, the good relationship is compounded to a place where trust tends to dominate. In dating — the minute you think the relationship won’t lead to marriage, you should probably end it.
Try to work your way up the stack to try and get to higher and higher leverage, accountability, and specific knowledge. The combination of those, over a long enough period of time, with the magic of compound interest, will make you wealthy.
And how do you work your way up? Do really good work for a long time. It’s the nature of these things that nobody recognizes you for a very long time, and then everybody recognizes you at once, and then all the opportunities then hit.
You can get to about the 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both — you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot.
Extreme people get extreme results. Working a lot comes with huge life trade-offs, and it’s perfectly rational to decide not to do it. But it has a lot of advantages. As in most cases, momentum compounds, and success begets success.
Do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off. It’s also easier to work hard when you have fewer other responsibilities, which is frequently but not always the case when you’re young.
You have to figure out how to work hard without burning out. People find their own strategies for this, but one that almost always works is to find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with.
Stop excusing yourself for being bad at things. You can be good at anything you are willing to set your mind to and practice (a lot). “I’m just not good at X” means “I don’t care enough to become good at X”.
Making your identity “I am bad at X” is a loser’s mindset. There’s no cost to changing your thinking to “I’m not yet good at X because I haven’t put in work”.
I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.
Too many people expect the world when they haven’t found their goldmine.
Too many millennials expect high paying jobs when they don’t have a taste of the bottom.
They expect success to come served up with a touch of lemon.
They don’t want to dig for gold. They just want to stumble on it.
There are no shortcuts or silver bullets. Don’t pursue any get-rich quick schemes. If someone is selling you get-rich-quick scheme, they are trying to get-rich-quick-off-of-you. There are no shortcuts. NONE.
Success is a marathon, not a sprint. If you can’t stick with it over the long haul, you will not end up a winner. Success is a lifelong game. No one ever said that creating lasting change was easy. The work ahead is incredibly challenging. Stay the course. Everything changes slowly. Time is often the most important investment you can make. It’s going to take more than one try to make an impact, and it’s going to take more than one success to make a difference. When you see the real-world impact your work has made, you’ll know the effort was worth it.
The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.
It’s a long road, but well worth it — especially given that if this is exactly where you want to be. It feels like people get excited about the idea of running a business and getting success, but don’t actually take the time to really evaluate whether it’s a life they want.
✿ Create Value
* It’s all about vision. To prepare for the future you need to shape it. You need to shape your future before someone else does. Those that lack the courage to predict and shape their future may become victims of an unwelcome destiny.
“Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.” — David Bowie
Opportunities present themselves as problems. There is always a gap in the market, and instead of complaining about the gap, try to figure out how to fill it.
Apply the rule of 5. Think about what the decision looks like 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 months, 5 years, 5 decades.
Whatever business you’re in, you have to solve somebody’s problem, shape the future and be willing to invest in them for years.
The truth is that business rarely succeeds by adapting to market events. Once you find yourself in a position where you need to adapt, it’s usually too late. Great business prepares the ground long before. When you are building capacity in your business decades ahead of time, you really don’t need to move that fast. Nobody needs a quarter inch drill, they need a quarter inch hole. Nobody needs a quarter inch drill, they need a quarter inch hole.
Business with mission and ”unreasonable standards” that focus on solving problems, shaping the future, and are willing to invest in them for years –or even decades — can become very successful.
Take a look at any great business and it becomes clear that what made it great wasn’t the ability to pivot, but a dedication to creating, delivering and capturing new value in the marketplace. Figuring out how to create value is the core of success.
* Nothing can beat the returns from investing in yourself. Nobody can take away what you’ve got in yourself.
A good investor does not invest their money in things they do not understand. You should only invest in things you know. Nothing you know better than yourself. Invest in self is the best investment you can make. If you do it right, you can have anything you want.
You’re the only one who can save yourself. The right person will open doors for you, but he can’t drag you through them. Nothing in the world can help people who don’t help themselves. Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit.
Taking care of yourself could save you from career burnout. When I’m asked: “What’s the key to success in business?” my answer can differ depending on the subject at hand — delegation, people, learning from failure, etc. — but when it comes down to it, the key is you. The simple fact is, if you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t be able to take care of business. A healthy body equals a healthy mind, and a healthy mind takes care of business. Increasing your investment in yourself also helps you strengthen your self-confidence. It costs nothing to take care of yourself, but it costs everything if you don’t.
* You need to be selfish in order to become an effectively “selfless” person.
There’s so such thing as selfishness. The desire to be good, is in itself selfish.
I think working with your values is long-term selfish, although short-term it absolutely involves sacrifices. If being ethical were profitable, everybody would do it. We wouldn’t have to have a separate consent. We wouldn’t need to talk about it. There would be no books on it. No one would ever talk about values because they’d be profitable. It’s not. It’s obviously unprofitable. It involves sacrifices. Like everything in life, if you are willing to make the short-term sacrifice, you’ll have the long-term benefit.
A friend of mine always says, “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.” Basically if you are making the hard choices right now in what to eat, you’re not eating all the junk food you want and making the hard choice to workout, then your life long-term will be easy. You won’t be sick. You won’t be unhealthy. The same is true of values. The same is true of saving up for a rainy day. The same is true of how your approach your relationships. If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder.
Big vision and goals require people to be selfish to do things most people wouldn’t agree. Taking the time to plant some roots for yourself is critical. It’s like that part of the speech they give you on an airplane when they talk about the oxygen masks: “Put yours on first before you help the person next to you.” If you don’t make sure you’re safe and capable, how can you possibly expect to take care of others, to better the world, or to create epic things? If you don’t take care of yourself, you’ll never really be much good to other people. If you don’t look after yourself, you will have nothing to give when you’re trying to build relationships or create a value exchange. We need to be fulfilled so we can give to others. You need to fill up your own cup first. You can’t pour from an empty cup. You cannot really help anyone if you are starving. You can’t give what you don’t have. The irony is that if you always pretend to be “self-less” to get others to like you, you’ll probably start to give only to get your own needs met. You’ll always be acting from that place of lack in your life.
You must take personal responsibility. You have to take charge of your development. Do whatever it takes to make yourself a better person. You need to know how to invest in yourself and increase your wisdom and stature. You need to know what is important in life and what is worth investing in. Everything you do should be good for your growth. You will thank yourself one day. Focus on yourself and the rest will come later. Things often work out as soon as you start loving yourself and do what is good for you. Many people will gladly blow $300 on a bottle this weekend but are scared to buy a $35 fitness program. Get your priorities straight. All knowledge is out there, most of it for free. There are no excuses.
| Maintain Value |
“If you don’t keep innovating — your product will go stale. And somebody will come out with a better product and displace you.” — Marc Andreessen
This advice holds true in all walks of life. If you don’t keep working on yourself and becoming better. Better people will replace you.
Success is meant to be unstable.
Definitive stability equals death. Entrepreneurship is the relentless pursuit of finite periods of unstable success.
Success has a target on its back and a bounty on its head. Capitalism can’t stand outliers. It’s constantly looking for standout successes to dismantle and shove back to the boring world of mediocrity. High profit margins attract competitors. High salaries attract more workers. Bubbles and bull markets attract self-destructive behavior. Popular products attract imitators. Capitalism’s job is to ensure no one is ever comfortable. If you’re below the top, you’re clawing up at competitors. If you’re at the top, you’re pushing down on them.
The key to long-term success is, then, to keep moving forward realizing that everything will always be in motion.
You can’t be a confident, skilled person by deciding to be one. You have to put in the hours and the passion. Be a hustler.
Few things in life come free. Whether you want to start your own company or take your business to the next level, it’s important not to rely on handouts. Instead of sitting idly by waiting for your big breaks, you must be proactive and seize opportunities.
To be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running.
With so much information now online, a strong work ethic and growth mindset, even more than knowledge, predicts your future success.
Success comes when you’re so busy living your life and minding your business, working on you and your goals that you don’t have time for anything that doesn’t add value into your life.
You’re just focused!
“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” –Henry David Thoreau.
Your value won’t last. It used to be that a CEO could maintain the same basic formula for creating, delivering and capturing value for his entire career. Now, it’s unlikely to last a decade. What’s more, the cycles are shrinking and returns to scale are diminishing.
A big idea, flawless execution and even a strong track record of success aren’t enough to prevail anymore. Unless you can continually create, deliver and capture value in a changing context, you’re toast.
✿ Market/Deliver Value
“Our greatest fear in life should not be of failure; our greatest fear should be of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.” —Francis Chan
Money and influence flow from ideas and problem solving. Solve a big problem, and the world will gladly turn their money and attention over to you.
Most of what’s now awesome came from something that was once miserable. Capitalism solves problems, and nothing motivates people to solve problems like hardship. We don’t discover new oil-drilling techniques when oil prices are low; we do it when prices are high bleeding consumers dry, incentivizing anyone who can solve the problem with a sense of urgency. Same with medicine. The only reason we’re vaccinated today is because we had urgency to solve problems that were once killing tens of thousands of people. Uber and Lyft weren’t created to be part of the taxi system, but to fix an endlessly frustrating one. No one cheers for hardship and suffering, but we should recognize that it’s the most potent fuel of problem-solving, serving as both the root of what we enjoy today and the seed of opportunity for what we’ll enjoy tomorrow.
Invest your time creating solutions to people’s problems, and you’ll never lose a minute sleep worrying about how to pay the mortgage.
You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
Having passion and purpose in one’s job is important because when you inspire yourself first, it’s easier to inspire others. In today’s workplaces, whether in large companies or startups, you need to get others excited about your initiatives and projects — you can’t just rely on the old style “command and control.” Top performers were really good at inspiring others, surprisingly not through charisma but through other easily adopted techniques to evoke emotions in others (both positive and negative). For example, by “showing and not telling.”
I initially thought that people who do very well just because they “followed their passion.” That idea has become cliched, it’s repeated so often. The problem is this: What it really implies is that passion should dictate what you choose to do, regardless of other considerations (the assumption being that it will all work out in the end). Ignoring your passion, doesn’t sound like such good advice, either, as it may just lead to a life of drudgery.
✿ Capture Value
You need a vision, then, that’s a touchstone: It’s something you can always come back to if you ever get confused.
While creating and delivering value are essential, it will all come to naught if you are unable to profit from it.
Knowing how you want to create value isn’t enough, you also have to be able to deliver and capture it.
“If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” — Joker
It is very difficult to raise your prices from free. If you don’t value your work or your time, neither will your clients.
Value comes from scarcity. No one values free things.
Execution plan
Just because you’ve got some eggs, flour and sugar doesn’t mean you have a cake. You’ve got to bake it.
Ideas you don’t execute don’t exist. The point is that ideas mean little without the capabilities needed to deliver them. Ideas are just thoughts. Everyone has them.
You don’t get paid for having ideas. You get paid for making them happen.
Content is just ideas on paper or a site. Everyone generates it. The only distinction is what you do. What you execute. What you deliver. Everything else is just vaporware. Customers don’t value concepts or content; they value real, innovative solutions to their problems.
It’s never about the idea you have. It’s about how good the execution is. It’s about your team, joint venture partners, and money partners who will help you with the transaction. It’s about your deep knowledge and understanding of the marketplace that will transition you to liberation.
There are no bad business ideas. There are only bad implementations of business ideas.
If you understand your market, there is potential in every market. See that potential and exploit it. Learn the fundamentals of business first, like traction, marketing, branding, sales, management, etc., and then focus on the idea.
That’s how businesses thrive.
Businesses fail when people give enormous value on the idea and ignore the impact of the rest.
Business is based entirely on one fundamental concept: selling products or services that customers need. The products and services that win big are the ones that best fulfill customers’ needs by solving their biggest and hairiest problems. Tough Problem + Great Solution = Big Win. Remember that equation.
Writing a business plan = easy
Getting people excited about it = easier
Adapting plan to real world and getting results = hard
It’s more powerful to think in terms of execution plans rather than dreams. Dreams are rad, but plans are straight hot. In fact, I think the only reason people use the word dreams is they don’t yet believe in themselves enough to start making execution plans. But that’s got to be the goal — planning and then executing.
It can take years of experience, and many mistakes, to refine your vision and develop effective plans. But once established, these will provide the focus and clarity you need to do your best work for years to come.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
Long term, people who understand the underlying product and how to build it and can sell it, these are catnip to investors, these people can break down walls if they have enough energy, and they can get almost anything done.
When one person can both sell and build, they can create entire industries. Examples include Marc Andreessen, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk.
It’s easier to be a builder who learns sales, than a seller who learns building. Usually the building is a thing that a sales person can’t pick up later in life. It requires too much focused time. But a builder can pick up selling a little bit later, especially if they were already innately wired to be a good communicator.
Bill Gates famously paraphrases this as, “I’d rather teach an engineer marketing, than a marketer engineering.”
Being a builder helps you stand out when you’re starting out, but it can be exhausting to stay current. Sales skills scale better over time and can be self-fulfilling.
I think if you only had to pick up one, you can start with building and then transition to selling. This is a cop-out answer, but I think that is actually the right answer.
The Silicon Valley model is a builder and seller.
So, generally, the Silicon Valley startup model tends to work best. It’s not the only way, but it is probably the most common way, when you have two founders, one of whom is world class at selling, and one of whom is world class at building.
Examples are, of course, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with Apple, Gates and Allen probably had similar responsibilities early on with Microsoft, Larry and Sergey probably broke down along those lines, although it’s a little different there because that was a very technical product delivered to end users through a simple interface.
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(2) Understand people and treat them with respect.
Check out the answer by amazing Evan Asano to know what the most effective yet efficient way to get rich is.
There are a million paths to getting rich, but “There’s unlikely anyone out there successful who wouldn’t emphasize the value of people skills in succeeding”. If you have checked out the link above, you must be impressed with Evan Asano’s story about how interpersonal people skills drove his success, “You’ll be blown away by how effective it is and how after meeting and talking with a few people and asking them about themselves, how they’ll want to help you, without you asking them”.
From my personal experience, I’ve been lucky enough to meet some successful and wealthy people (founders and investors, executives from startups & the Fortune 500, financiers, media influencers, etc) — a huge lesson I’ve learned is that the more successful the person, the more humble and down to earth they are. The moment you start a conversation they are humble, down-to-earth people that have never lost that child-like spark of curiosity. Those are the virtues I see in the most successful people that surround me.
The nature of the business is relationship driven. Having good social skills confers life-long benefits. So, don’t write them off. You can have all the talent and motivation in the world, but if you don’t put the same energy into people skills, you’ll always be at 50% of your potential.
Master the art of communication and certain rules of etiquette principles and you’ll experience great success in all aspects of life. If someone likes you, they’re more likely to be persuaded by you, so be nice to people.
My tips:
Getting good at communication — particularly written communication — is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.
One of the most potent mindsets for success is having humanity. The magnetic currency of transparently and genuinely loving people is unsurpassable because they can feel it and they know it. Having humanity quantum-leaps you to the front lines in business because people respond irresistibly, craving the connection.
The best way to be highly influential is to be human (real and genuine) to everyone you meet. Be as human as possible. Strive to be a person who people want to help. This will put a massive tailwind at your back as you explore opportunities. It sounds obvious but since most of our reach outs will be via email, you’ll have a far greater chance of success when you attach a personality to your emails. Understand people and treat them with respect.
If there is one thing I have seen cause people to lose opportunities and money every time, it would be their PRIDE. Ego is your biggest enemy when building relationships. Your ego is your enemy during good times. It’s your friend during bad times. That fear of shame is your ego holding you back. Where there is ego, there can be no “family”.
Ego is false confidence, self-respect is true confidence.
I think the hard thing here is seeing the truth. The number one thing that clouds us from being able to see reality is that we have preconceived notions of the way it should be. Creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth. The more of a desire that you have that it work out a certain way, the less likely you are to see the truth. Ego clouds and disrupts everything.
To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it to see the reality.
The only way to build wealth and relationship is to have a gap between your ego and your income. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to see the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less desire you’ll have for the outcome you want, and the easier it is to see reality.
You have to be willing to look a fool to get anywhere. Being unphased by shame is the only way ahead, short hand phrase “Killing your ego”.
Two truths we all know: 1/ You are not the center of the universe. 2/ You won’t live forever. But we live as if these are not true.
To kill your ego, be more grateful. No matter how awful your life seems at the moment, you have something to be grateful for. Focus on it with the laser-like, single-minded devotion of a dog eyeing a porterhouse. You have been granted 2 billion seconds on this planet, give or take. You won’t get a refund from the universe for the time you spent brooding about the unfairness. You lose them just as surely as a second spent experiencing joy, only they don’t even give you something nice to remember them by.
The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair. Gratitude dissolves the hard shell of your ego — your need to control — transforming you into a generous being. This gratitude makes us magnanimous — large souled.
Cultivate humility. Not the public kind, which is meant to appease other people and protect your insecurities. Cultivate the private kind, which lets you admit to yourself when you’re wrong, and accept life’s lessons when they present themselves.
✿ How to be trustworthy?
As the saying goes, a man is only as good as his word. Trust is fundamental in relationships, and our relationships are often a reflection of our own character.
It doesn’t matter how well-reasoned or logical an argument is if the audience doesn’t trust the person who’s delivering the message. This means that true persuasion starts before you even open your mouth. If you haven’t established yourself as an authority, you’ve lost before you’ve even begun.
Trust is not a word, it’s an attitude. Only trust can inspire trust. Your behavior should constantly reinforce trust in other people.
I recently learned a way of framing trust.
Trust = Credibility x Reliability x Vulnerability
Let’s talk about components of equation. First, the variables are multiplied. Not a mistake. Implies a few things including that if any are absent, trust is impossible. For example, if you have Credibility and Vulnerability in a relationship, but not Reliability, trust won’t occur. Let’s go through each variable.
* Credibility — Is Person X able to do what they say? Does X have the experience, skills, qualities necessary to follow through on what she says she can do? It is all about logic and reason. Credibility is your ability to predict the future and your track record of doing so, combined with your influence, reach and persuasion. Someone gains Credibility with me when they are ABLE to deliver on a project/task. I start with baseline assumption about Credibility — based on a combo of experience, intelligence, work ethic. More effectively they can deliver on what they say, the more Credibility with me.
* Reliability — Will Person X follow through on what they say? Is the person dependable? They may have the ability to follow through (Credibility) but will they actually follow through (Reliability)? Ways I gain confidence in someone’s Reliability: Email/Slack responsiveness, managing expectations appropriately, showing up to meetings/calls on time, operating within the agreed upon roadmap or framework (i.e. OKRs).
* Vulnerability (also called Sincerity or Intimacy) — Do I feel comfortable entrusting a project with you? You could say “I can trust Person X with something sensitive because she understands me.” Do I feel comfortable being Vulnerable with Person X and will that person be Vulnerable with me? Will the person expose weaknesses? Can I feel confident that if I turn to Person X with a hard question, they feel comfortable saying “I don’t know” rather than trying to make up an answer? This is an ability to show weakness and build Vulnerability. Vulnerability for me is also being able to share fears, hopes, passion with someone. Familiarity, sincerity, unguarded. I’ve found the best relationships are those where the people can talk appropriately about their fears and weaknesses openly- with the hope to grow together.
In my career I’ve seen cases where I have developed 2 of the 3 variables with someone, but can’t build the full trust. I’ll lay out some examples.
Ex: Teammate that is brilliant and experienced- can deliver on what she says (Credible). Able to talk about her fears, take/give feedback well, etc (Vulnerable). However, she often misses deadlines, goes MIA during critical times. She isn’t Reliable thus can’t build trust.
Ex: VC that has great experience and is able to deliver on what he says (Credibility). He manages expectations and follows through — he is Reliable. But he is seemingly blind to his weaknesses- or certainly wont talk about them with others (Vulnerable). Can’t build real trust.
In other words,
* Be confident & Build your personal brand/reputation.
It’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.
This advice holds true in all walks of life.
People are totally unattracted by a person that is timid and unsure of himself. When you speak in a friendly, confident, and concise manner, people are much more attentive to and interested in what you have to say than if you try to show that you’re important. People catch on to your attitude quickly and are more attracted to the right attitude than what or how many people you know.
Be inviting and approachable. When a person first encounters another person, the initial impression greatly influences subsequent perceptions and attitudes, which then affects the quality of subsequent interactions. Mind your body language, capitalize on aspects of attractiveness and smile. People do judge a book by its cover.
See How to boost your self-confidence for more information.
Build a reputation that makes other people do deals through you. What we should all be striving for is a powerful, attractive and visible personal brand. I define that as an online and in-person authentic display of the engaging aspects of your professional and personal activities and interests.
If one thing is clear, it’s that personal branding has become less of a competitive advantage and more of a requirement.
You’re only as good as the people you know. That’s why it’s so worth it to make your reputation a priority.
Your personal brand lasts a lifetime. 90% of businesses fail within the first five years. That means that 95% of the work that entrepreneurs do will vanish when the startup goes under. On the contrary, your personal brand lasts forever and does not have to fail alongside your business. Jobs will come and go, but your personal brand is forever. Success is fleeting, but dignity and respect last forever.
Ironically, your brand actually comes from you doing great, consistent work on time. First impressions matter, but reputations are built over a lifetime. Relationships take years to build, start now. This is a long-term business. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.
If you think about that, you’ll do things differently. The greatest factor determining your success is how well you are able to maintain consistency in your efforts. You’ve got to have consistency. It’s an ongoing effort. Do it consistently and constantly. It could help you unearth hidden opportunities or create custom opportunities for yourself. So, make sure that every action you take is aligned with you’d like to be seen in the world; in other words, what you want your brand to be must be consistent with the perceptions of others, and a lot of people simply aren’t willing to make that kind of effort. No matter how nice you are to the people you have lunch with, it’s all for naught if those people witness you behaving badly/differently toward others. Your reputation is more heavily scrutinized, whether that is within your community or set of friends. In an even larger contexts, the way you act will be more frequently talked about. That makes it critical to treat people well. A failure to do so can result in negative perceptions. That could close the door for future opportunities and give people preconceived notions before ever meeting you. Avoid things the best version of yourself will regret. Never do anything you wouldn’t want to see reported by people you respect on the front page of the New York Times. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. When other people see or hear your name, think about what you want their first reaction to be.
Read more here.
Branding requires accountability. Accountability means sticking your neck out. It is reputational skin in the game; it’s putting your personal reputation on the line, as skin in the game. To build a great personal brand (an eponymous one), you must take on the risk of being publicly wrong.
Taking accountability for your actions is the same as taking an equity position in all of your work. You’re taking greater downside risk for greater upside.
When you put your name out there, you take a risk with certain things. You also get to reap the rewards. You get the benefits.
We’re currently socially brainwashed to not take on accountability in a visible way.
Be willing to risk social disapproval. Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
We’re socially hard wired not to fail in public. People who have the ability to fail in public under their own names gain a lot of power.
Taking on accountability is how you get credibility and a piece of the business. If you have high accountability, that makes you less replaceable so they have to give you a piece of the upside.
Accountability lets you to take credit when things go well, but you will also bear the brunt of failure when things go badly.
In modern business, the downside of accountability is not that large. Even personal bankruptcy can wipe your debts in good ecosystems. People will forgive failures, as long as you were honest and made a high integrity effort.
The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon. They have such high accountability that they could get rich just by stamping their name on products because their name is such powerful branding.
A well-functioning team has clear accountability for each position. If you have a small team with clearly delineated responsibilities, you can keep a very high level of accountability.
* Maintain integrity.
Any time we say we will do something and then don’t, we’re out of integrity. The painful truth is that those who do not live with integrity are not trustworthy. Those without integrity will not reach their ultimate vision of success.
To that end, build a reputation of integrity & frictionlessness. Honesty is confirming our words to reality. Integrity is confirming reality to our words — keeping promises, fulfilling expectations, doing the right thing, etc.
Integrity usually comes out in two ways. One is long-term, which is you’ve known somebody for a while and you kind of know how they think about things.
The more interesting one, there’s a short-term one, which is you just kind of see how they treat other people. There are lots and lots of people who will not screw over, screw over is a strong word, but they will do something that is self-dealing or slightly unethical relative to another business partner.
The people who really do things out of integrity, they have an internal moral compass. They don’t do unfair, unethical, or bad deals with other people because it would soil their own view of themselves and they wouldn’t be able to sleep themselves at night. Some of the highest integrity people I know, the worst thing you can do is you can say to them is, “I think you’re self-dealing on that one.” They will get so unhappy because they’ll be like, “No, no, no. That’s not who I am. I can’t be that person.” They’ll bend over backwards.
Usually, I find that people that I negotiate with who are high integrity, they’re very easy to negotiate with. They’ll give you things that they don’t need to give you because they think it’s fair and vice versa.
We all fall out of integrity at some point or another; it’s inevitable. Inconveniences happen sometimes, even despite best efforts and great planning. The key is to acknowledge the break of integrity, and then recommit. Consider where you must acknowledge and recommit, and be prepared to hold people accountable and absorb the potential consequences of breaking integrity. Only then can you move forward to fully receive the success you seek.
✿ Be honest.
It’s really important for me to be honest. I don’t go out of my way volunteering negative or nasty things. I would combine radical honesty with an old rule that Warren Buffet has, which is praise specifically, criticize generally. I try to follow this. I don’t always follow it, but I think I follow it enough that it made a difference in my life.
If you have a criticism of someone, then don’t criticize the person, criticize the general approach or criticize that class of activities. If you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who is the best example of what you’re praising and then that praise that person, specifically. That way people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you, they work for you.
I want to be able to just be me. I never want to be in an environment or around people where I have to watch what I say. Anyone around whom I can’t be fully honest, I don’t want to be around.
If someone is going around and talking about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest. That’s just a little telltale indicator I’ve learned. When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they’re talking themselves up, they’re covering for something.
Some of the telltale signs are they will push the deal a little bit too hard. They’ll sell just a little bit too hard. They’ll talk about how honest they are.
The first time around, I will warn them. By the way, nobody changes. Then I just kind of distance myself from them. I sort of cut them out of my life. I just have this saying inside my head, the closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.
I believe that deep down we all know who we are. You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche and they are obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will? I think you just have to be very careful about doing things that you are fundamentally not going to be proud of because they will damage you.
Bring brutally honest will help you build a strong following.
Be vulnerable around them. Don’t ever underestimate the power of vulnerability. Your greatest relationships will be built on it. There are big risks to both showing and not showing vulnerability. In the former case, you risk getting a knife in your back; in the latter case, you risk being lonely and failing to make connections that might lead to beneficial outcomes for yourself. I suggest you treat being vulnerable like any risky but potentially-beneficial thing.
Be personal. To aid your ability to persuade in the first 60 seconds of a conversation or presentation, share something personal, and show the audience that you are talking to them, not simply giving a canned speech or sales pitch. If you think about it, this is exactly what the classic comedy act opening does. Talk about your real problems, and ask people about theirs. Invite someone into your home instead of going to a bar or coffee shop. Give thoughtful gifts. A big part of friendship is understanding someone for who they are and having them understand you for who you are, and that’s not possible without some degree of vulnerability.
Be open about your feelings. Straightforwardness is rare and therefore interesting. Too many people hide their feelings behind routine sentences like, “I’m fine, thanks. How are you?” People who say what they feel are refreshingly different. So, surmount yourself to saying what you feel and experience an instant boost in interest from others. Learn to communicate with clarity. Simple and concise is always better than complicated and confusing.
However, get too personal too fast and you risk crossing a boundary that could make your date uncomfortable. But if you come off as too cautious or formal, you might miss an opportunity to make a connection.
You don’t have to be overly emotional. The key is to get just the right amount of personal. Simply mention times in your life where you can relate to what the other person is saying. Simply sharing details about your hobbies and your favorite childhood memories can make you seem warmer and more likeable. By sharing personal stories, you build trust and get to know each other more quickly. This openness helps others see you as another human, not just a business person.
Remember to find the balance between being honest and being polite.
To be honest, speak without identity.
Besides, you want to be able to just be you. Don’t ever be in an environment where you have to watch what I say. Anyone who you can’t be honest around, don’t want to be around.
✿ How to be lovable?
Make people feel good when they are around you. That’s the whole secret.
At the very core of our being, we are emotional creatures. No matter what will shape our world in the future, emotion will always drive behavior. Nothing can replace the empathy and spontaneity of human emotion. Ignoring that fact can undermine your entire effort, no matter how reasonable it may be.
People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. — Maya Angelou
This advice holds true in all walks of life.
To persuade someone, you can’t simply rely on reason and logic. You have to find a way to make your audience feel. Whether it’s hope, anger or even humor, you must connect your words and actions to an emotion.
The right way to make people feel good is creating fun and delight for others, leaning into each moment, and in every encounter, expecting magic or miracle.
Almost like a dog — it goes up to every person expecting a good interaction.
How can you create fun and delight for someone right now?
Engage others in play.
Much of life would be improved, if the seriousness we applied to work, we applied to games.
Always be asking yourself, “How can I create more play in this situation, for others?”
Be more playful about things in life.
Example — On a job interview, instead of thinking to yourself, “How can I impress this person, or make this person want to hire me?” ask “How can I create fun and delight for this person?”
This turns the interview, into a game.
If you truly create fun and delight for the other person — then they’ll want to be around you, and you really improve the odds of you getting a job.
Instead of asking yourself, “What do I need to do in this situation?” ask “Who do I need to be in this situation?”
There’s a lot of doing, and not enough being.
Instead of “What do I need to do in this job?”, ask “Who do I need to be in this job?”
* Disarm people with seduction.
Adults are starved for a kind word. When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.
Whether they’re working for you, or you’re working for them, people continually seek approval for their actions — so they respond very well to affection. And if you keep giving it to them, they’ll eventually crave it from you. People allow themselves to believe that because you were charming them, it meant that you liked and respected them. It is an impression that you sometimes fostered by dishing out insincere flattery to those hungry for it.
One key to communication: When someone does something you love, praise them for it. Recognition will get you everywhere. But don’t go overboard. Use humility markers. Boost your conversation partner’s self-esteem in order to capture and hold their interest. Try to make everyone you talk with feel a little better about themselves after having met and talked to you. Make those in power feel good about themselves. If you must point out a mistake by someone in power, blame the situation or others; and shower them with flattery. People who make the best impressions aren’t the ones who try the hardest to impress. Good communicators make themselves look smart. Great communicators make their audiences feel smart. Amateurs focus on tearing other people down. Professionals focus on making everyone better. The best person doesn’t tell the world how amazing he/she is. The best person shows other people how amazing they can be — perhaps with a little help from him/her.
If someone is fishing for compliments — take the bait. When someone is fishing for compliments they don’t want to hear the truth. They just want validation. Compliment others more. You’ll barely remember you did it, but the other person may never forget that you did. Kindness has unlimited upside. It’s not about the words. It’s about making a friend feel good. Make the other person an expert. This grabs people directly by their ego.
This is how you do it:
Friend: “I got 400 Likes on my new profile picture.”
You: “That’s sick! I’ve seen it, you look amazing in it.”
Another example:
Friend: “I am so tired from all that working out.”
You: “But it pays off. I wish I had abs like you have.”
I know, you feel the urge to respond “I am sick and tired of you talking about your damn workout. Now shut the f*ck up!” But remember, it’s not about being right. It is only about lifting a friend up. The favor will surely be returned one day. It’s a virtuous circle.
* Learn how to tell a story.
The best way to transfer emotion from one person to another is through the rhetorical device of storytelling.
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. The ability to persuade people and craft a narrative and tell your story will get you further than any skill you could possibly develop in your life.
Stories are incredibly important and they’re a great way to communicate. People may stop listening to information or small talk, but everyone leans in for a good story. Telling our stories is not an end in itself but an attempt to release ourselves; to evolve and grow. People are moved by emotion, and the process of changing one mind or the entire world should begin with “Once upon a time …”
You really only learn it through practice, but the over-arching key is that storytelling is a deliberate act. You don’t just dump whatever is on your mind into the conversation; you purposefully shape it to make it interesting.
Make sure you’re banking your interesting stuff as story fodder. Don’t just read (or do) and forget! Get into the habit of saying, “I could make a good story out of this.”
Sharing is a bi-directional form of communication. It doesn’t mean pontificating while everyone else listens.
You need to learn what’s too long and what’s too short, which depends on your audience and their moods (you need to learn how to read people); you need to learn to make your experiences visceral, which means describing the cheesecake you ate in a way that makes your listeners taste it; you need to learn how to to tease by withholding information until people are itching for a payoff; you need to learn about story structure: beginnings, middles, and ends.
The stories that can generate the best connection are stories about you personally or about people close to you. Tales of failure, awkwardness, misfortune, danger or disaster, told authentically, hastens deep engagement. The most personal content is the most relatable.
* Be a passionately curious individual that looks to connect and learn about interesting and innovative people around you on a consistent basis. Focus on the leave-behinds not the take-aways.
It’s not just that people have difficult conversations in their relationships, in important ways, those conversations are the relationship. If we handle them well, the relationship will strengthen and thrive, and if we don’t handle them well, the relationship starts to deteriorate.
If you shift your purpose in the conversation from getting them to change or getting them to apologize to just understanding better what’s going on — that conversation is much more likely to be fruitful.
Interests are feelings. What people care about, what people worry about. If you’re going to get things done, you’ve got to respond to what people worry about, care about, can get excited about, can get on board with, how much risk they’re willing to tolerate — those are all related to emotion and relationships.
You need to be able to see someone else’s point of view even when they feel strongly the other way. You need to take responsibility for what you contribute to the problem, to own your part and to apologize and work to fix it.
The way to introduce feelings, you can do two things. One is listen for the feeling that they’re expressing, maybe through being emotional or translating it into blame and accusations, and just name that and acknowledge it and ask them about it. The second thing that you can do is share a little bit about how you’re feeling by describing it.
We assume that persuasion is about talking, when actually the most persuasive strategy that you can take is a listening strategy for a couple of reasons. It helps you to learn, stay curious and be likable. Listening provides you the opportunity to understand and learn the person’s interests, priorities and challenges. Really good listening means you’re learning a ton about not just what is under people’s positions. You can use this information to later address what the other person said and better demonstrate your value. You can’t be a good problem solver without being a good listener. To launch a business means successfully solving problems. Solving problems means listening. Listening also keeps the other person curious. All the while they are talking about themselves, they remain interested in learning about you. Further, listening makes you likeable. People want to be heard and understood.
People want to be understood and accepted. Don’t forget, a person’s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated. 2 primal urges: Need to feel safe and secure. Need to feel in control.
If people believe you are looking after their best interests, they will do almost anything that you ask.
First and foremost a deep interest in people obviously leads to greater digital and physical connections with awesome people in this world that you go onto to spend time with, hang out and learn from. People ultimately choose to do business with people they like, and everyone likes someone who appreciates them.
It’s been observed people like you when they feel liked by you. If you expect people to accept you, act warmer toward them — thereby increasing the chances that they really will like you. So even if you’re not sure how a person you’re interacting with feels about you, act like you like them and they’ll probably like you back. If, on the other hand, you don’t express fondness for the person you’re meeting, you could potentially turn them off. You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. So, do you greet them and in a way that sounds like you’re genuinely happy to see them?
Don’t be chill when it comes to making friends. Tell people you like or respect or value that they’re great and you want to hang out with them. If they signal that they’re not interested, that’s fine — but don’t miss the opportunity to get to know someone wonderful just because you don’t want to appear overly eager.
Actively project warmth and high energy. Convey genuine appreciation. The irony is that opportunities tend to come faster when people focus on fostering a genuine connection. Demonstrate interest in your conversation partner. Building relationship isn’t about you. It’s about the person you’re talking to. Focus on being interested instead of being interesting. It’s much easier, and you’ll find that the other person is much more receptive to your ideas.
We as human being don’t care until we connect.
The magnetic currency of transparently and genuinely loving people is unsurpassable because they can feel it and they know it. Having humanity quantum-leaps you to the front lines in business because people respond irresistibly, craving the connection. This human connection is what we crave — what we have ALWAYS desired.
Listening well means being active in the conversation. Actively listen with intent and show compassion to understand their motives and actions (which includes 4 steps: hearing, interpreting, evaluating, and responding). Learn how to be witty. Learn how to make great conversation. It’s best when the conversation builds on itself.
First step is hearing. Listen intensely. Demonstrate empathy. Show a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing. Do more listening than talking.If you want to be important to somebody else, start by making them the star of the show and relate topics to them and their experience. Standing out in conversation doesn’t just mean being interesting. It means you’re also able to notice and appreciate the interesting parts of other people. Stay modest and be discreet. Listen to them. Look at them, and never look at your phone. Conversations are not promotional opportunities. No healthy relationship is one sided. Don’t dominate the conversation. Be present in the conversation, not the selling points. There is no harm in talking about yourself, but don’t get carried away and monopolize the conversation. True listening requires a setting aside of oneself. Suspending your ego is nothing more complex than putting other individuals’ wants, needs, and perceptions of reality ahead of your own. Most times, when two individuals engage in a conversation, each patiently waits for the other person to be done with whatever story he or she is telling. Then, the other person tells his or her own story, usually on a related topic and often times in an attempt to have a better and more interesting story. Individuals practicing good ego suspension would continue to encourage the other individual to talk about his or her story, neglecting their own need to share what they think is a great story. People LOVE talking about themselves. That also means letting your conversation partner share information about himself or herself.
Next, interpret, evaluate and respond.
There are two ways to be interesting: 1) Known/experienced a lot of interesting stories 2) Know how to ask the right questions. If you’re still young, you are probably going to have a relative lack of life experiences that make for great stories, but there’s still probably something in their family or their travel or their side activities or their personal secrets where, if you get them to open up in the right way, will be a very interesting use of your time to hear (and great practice). You can learn a lot about someone from how they react to a new idea. Smart people ask questions. Dumb people form opinions. The only reason you would hesitate to ask a “dumb” question is if you want people to assume you know more than you actually do. That’s a vice, and a strategic error. It’s better to let people assume you know less. Keep your ego in check, and give you a surprise card. The quality of your life is relative to the quality of the questions you ask. It also has the side effect of making them like you. Most people, if you dig and ask interesting enough questions, have something fascinating about them that you can uncover and make them proud to be able to tell someone. It can be a bit of a game, if you like it to be, to figure out what that thing is. Take an interest in the other person by asking about their interests, goals, challenges and where they’d like to go in their career. If you don’t fundamentally care about the person you are speaking with, that will show, and that may be the primary reason why you are running out of things to discuss. To make it clear you’re interested in the other person, think about what they know that you don’t. Everyone you will ever meet know something that you don’t. Allow your conversation partner to teach you. Ask Wh- questions. If there’s a subject you’re not familiar with, just be honest with that person and nine out of ten times they’ll teach you about it. What do you actually want to learn in the interaction? Everyone becomes nearly infinite in their experience of life, if we listen to them with enough imagination. Focus on that so that they can walk away knowing they added value too.
The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said. Read between the lines: Try to understand what is not said, witnessed, or heard. Listen carefully to discover what lies underneath so you can understand that, too. Behind many simple questions or sayings is often a larger question or saying that goes unasked or unsaid. Where relationships are concerned, face value is usually without value. Often people will say a different thing or ask a different question than the one they really want understood or answered. In this age of instant communication, everyone seems to be in such a rush to communicate what’s on their mind that they fail to realize everything to be gained from the minds of others. Keep your eyes & ears open and you’ll be amazed at how your level or awareness is raised. The best listeners are those who ask follow-up questions that offer insight or promote discovery. Be curious and open-minded, and you might just find your next adventure.
Remember to share anecdotes. Don’t ask someone questions without talking about yourself at all. When they start to open up, listen to what they are saying, then take a step beyond and offer something positive in return. Don’t hesitate to let your conversation partner know that you can relate to what he or she is telling you. After they tell you something personal, say something like, “Well, that’s not so bad. I’ve done worse.” Or, “I really admire this about what happened” and pick something in the story you really do admire. Let them know you’re on their team, that they are not alone with their experience. Self-disclosure predicts closeness: It has to be mutual. People generally like you less if you don’t reciprocate when they disclose something intimate. There must be mutual disclosure between partners. Everyone loves talking to people who understand what they say. Everybody has problems, fears and skeletons in the closet. Many people think, “If I share this, they’ll leave me.” You have to show that this is not the case by revealing something about yourself that shows you have as much trust in them as they have in you.
Be careful. Don’t give advice to people who don’t ask for it. It’s understandable to want to help when we see people struggling or in pain. It feels good to give direction. In fact, giving advice increases one’s sense of personal power.
The fundamental problem with advice: you cannot act on someone else’s conviction, and conviction requires personal experience. Advice is a gift, albeit one bundled with inherent power dynamics. That “I know your situation best and here’s what you should do” attitude is what can make advice-giving so fraught. To take advice from someone is to agree to be influenced by them. Sometimes when people don’t take advice, they’re rejecting the idea of being controlled by the advice-giver more than anything. There is no point in trying to prove someone wrong by giving advice. They are always “right” and if you do convince them they are wrong they will only remember how you made them feel “I.e. Stupid”. This is why nerds don’t have friends.
Make sure as you give them feedback, that you take their side. Many people listen to the stories that other people tell only to respond by telling them how they’ve been looking at it wrong. They take the side of someone else. In a story about work, for example, it’s the coworker he’s been having a hard time with. It is important, however, that you look at the situation from his point of view. This is not a time to teach or train him, it’s a time to “make friends.” When two people are making friends, they share their common experiences mutually and, because of that, experience closeness and comfort. Here, you’re creating rapport, the feeling that the two of you occupy the same planet and live in a similar world. It’s amazing how many people feel tremendously alone, especially men. Not only have they been trained for silence, taught that it is unmanly to express what they are going through, they usually don’t get feedback from the guys in their world. Your honest and positive feedback is vital. If you bond in this way, other people will feel there is someone there who understands them and open up even more.
Be the standard and others will raise their standards. The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion. Modeling a behavior is 100x stronger than telling someone to act differently. Kids imitate the habits of their parents. Teammates match the competitive energy of one another. Employees learn to manage like their supervisor.
Here are other things to keep in mind to make sure the advice you give to others will land so you, and the person you’re advising, can feel good about the exchange:
Make sure you’re actually being asked to give advice. Avoid giving opinions unless you know the room will at least respect your idea (something to back it up). Look for clues on who in the group dislikes you/has respect for you. And. Always ask yourself, what is gained before doing any activity (both verbal or physically attending new events). Unless you can get a neutral or positive reaction… It is best to avoid entirely.
Make sure you’re actually being asked to give counsel: It’s easy to confuse being audience to a venting session with being asked to weigh in. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. It’s almost like people will say to you, “I want a strategy,” and what they really mean is, ‘I want someone to understand.’”
Consider your qualifications. Avoid giving a lot of opinions: Be careful about broadcasting opinions. Be honest about where you sit in the group/room. People often go to those close to them for advice, even if family members and friends aren’t always in the best position to effectively assist. Advice is also more likely to be taken if the person offering counsel is more experienced and expresses extreme confidence in the quality of the advice (doctors recommending a treatment, for example). Before giving any advice on a performance based topic ask if you have any relevant experience. Ask yourself: “Do I have the expertise, experience or knowledge needed to provide helpful advice in this situation?” If you do, fantastic! Advise away. If you don’t, rather than give potentially unhelpful advice, identify someone who is in a better position to help. Unless you’re certain you’ll be proven to be right over time or you’re certain that you’re the expert within the context of the group, there is no reason to stand out. The key is to put your loved one’s needs and interests front and center. Many people are worse than every single person in the room on all metrics… yet continue to vocalize strong opinions, this is a quick way to be put back into their place instantly. The best example of this is sports. Why? Well un-athletic people routinely give advice on how professional sports players should “adjust” their game. They couldn’t even earn a spot on the bench but somehow they believe their ideas are better. This same concept applies to any sort of performance-based advice.
Look for clues: You have to look at every person including yourself and build a mosaic to figure out where you stand with someone else and what they think of you. If you figure out that there is a theme (they dislike XYZ about you) then that’s probably your fault. If you figure out they have a character flaw (they go out of their way to damage people’s lives) it’s your job to avoid them.
What is Gained? Before doing anything ask yourself quickly in your head “what is gained?”. If the answer is nothing, simply stop it. There is no point in getting into arguments when it’s only going to create downside for you. The only time you want to speak up/become the center is when it will benefit you.
If you have a criticism of someone, then don’t criticize the person, criticize the general approach or criticize that class of activities. If you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who is the best example of what you’re praising and then that praise that person, specifically. That way people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you, they work for you.
The best way to give advice and influence someone through communicating is to get good at sales. Try to find part time sales jobs. The most successful people in life are salespeople and actors. Successful business owners — successful people in general — spend the majority of their time “selling.” Nearly all of them — especially incredibly wealthy people — do this incredibly well. They have the ability to sell their dream and visions. Doing sales is challenging, but it is the fastest way for you to acquire the art of selling and this is a very deep skill that you will be able to carry it for the rest of your life. Sales skills are, in essence, communication skills. And since communication skills are critical in any business or career, the best way to learn how to communicate well is to work in sales — because great salespeople are great communicators. Success is based — in almost any field — on solid sales skills.
Whatever line of business you’re in, almost everyone nowadays is in the business of selling. All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc. This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, some degree of charisma, and evidence of execution ability. Whether you’re trying to get customers to buy your product, pitch your company to investors, motivate your employees or get your teenager to do the dishes, your success will be dictated by your ability to influence, persuade and “close the sale”. You have to be able to convince other people of what you believe. Everyone needs to have the ability to convince other people that an idea makes sense, to show bosses or investors how a project or business will generate a return, or to help employees understand the benefits of a new process. Gain sales skills and you’ll be better at everything: bringing investors on board, lining up distribution deals, landing customers, motivating employees. Especially in the early stages of starting a company, seemingly everything you do involves some form of sales.
Once you’re in sales, you will also learn what sells and what not. Use the sensitivity of detecting market sentiments as a platform for running your business and in the identification of product winners in the future. You’ll also meet many people that will be of value to you in the later part of your career. And that would generate enough seed money to let you start your own business and let you use your sales skills to make money for yourself, not for an employer. You’ll gain confidence and self-assurance, and the skills you gain will serve you well for the rest of your business — and personal — life. That’s why spending time in a direct sales role is an investment that pays off for the rest of your life.
The more intimidating or scary a position in sales sounds, the more you need to take one. So if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, set aside your business plan and work in sales for a year or two. If you’re a struggling entrepreneur, take a part-time sales job. One reason you’re struggling might be that you need to improve your sales skills.
Learn how to sell. It’s the best investment you will ever make. Getting good at sales is like improving at any other skill — anyone can get better at it with deliberate practice. But for some reason, perhaps because it feels distasteful, many people treat it as something unlearnable.
Primary tactics to influence others:
Uncover the value drivers. Negotiation/Persuasion is about gathering information, deciphering how that information affects a person’s emotional makeup is where EQ meets the road. People internally have the most trouble agreeing when they don’t trust or feel understood. You need information from your counterpart to their influence behavior. Some of the information is predictable, like negative human nature emotions. Other information can be something the other side is actively hiding from you, or they may be ignorant to the importance of how it affects you directly. These pieces are what you are looking to bring into the light.
Create trust through understanding. The most popular way to create trust is by finding common ground. Common ground is, in fact, a good way to build trust. The answer to building trust in any situation is the use of empathy, articulating the justifications of the other side. No matter who you talk to they have their own line of reasoning for their position, whether or not it makes sense to you is irrelevant. What applies to you is whether or not you can verbalize that line of thinking, as opposed to whether you can relate to a life experience. Share experience. People tend to resist when advice is preachy. Saying, “I’ve been there and here’s what I did,” makes people more receptive. Don’t tell them what to do, offer them a real resource beyond you. Share things that you’ve learned along the way in the spirit of, ‘This worked for me, maybe it’ll work for you, too.’” There is one glaring hole with this approach, what do you do if there is no common ground? What do you do if they have preconceived notions, already don’t like you for various reasons, or are being forced to work with you? There are plenty of conversations that take place with people whether internally or externally where you have nothing in common. Often you unknowingly resort to bargaining, “I need this from you” and “I can’t give you that.” When that type of conversation starts, you are in fact engaged in a haggle.
Apply these framework of communication for speaking and listening that enables you to get what you want in ways you are proud of and meet everyone’s needs:
• Ask question — Reason — Use silent allies — Invoke authority — Force
• Inspire — Cozy up — Make deal — Ask for favor
• Observations — Feelings — Needs — Requests (OFNR)
State clear observation: specific facts/data, no evaluation/judgment.
Express feeling: Emotional responses to those observations.
Take ownership of feeling by expressing a need: Needs and personal wishes that cause those feelings.
End with a request: Specific requests (not demands) to other people to address need.
For example:
When I see people speaking this way.
I feel extremely happy and excited.
Because I want to have deeper connections with people.
So please learn this framework and, if resonates with you, please use it.
Asks five questions:
• How are you feeling?
• How does that feel on the inside?
• What do you want?
• What would that give you?
• What would need to be true for you to…X?
Do not use the words “good” or “bad”, or “right” or “wrong”. I’m not saying these terms don’t exist or have substance, I’m just saying that those terms rarely get us what we want — long-term behavior change. When asking for help or behavior change, appeal to people’s self-interests, never to their mercy or gratitude. Instead of judging them based on their behavior, ask them their intention — if it’s in the right place, work with them to get their behavior to match. If it’s not aligned, a change in behavior is unsustainable.
Like I mentioned above, if you shift your purpose in the conversation from getting them to change or getting them to apologize to just understanding better what’s going on — that conversation is much more likely to be fruitful.
You need to be able to see someone else’s point of view even when they feel strongly the other way. You need to take responsibility for what you contribute to the problem, to own your part and to apologize and work to fix it.
When you least want to listen and when you’re most frustrated, you need to actually lean into the conflict to understand it better, and understand their perspective better first, even though they still don’t get your perspective. If you can train yourself to do that, which is counter-instinctual, then you’re going to be effective in the moments where it matters most.
If they’re not willing to open up to you, don’t blame them or try to get them to talk. Be open with them first. When they feel safe to be vulnerable around you, they will open up to you more.
Don’t tell people you want something. You cannot “invest” in marketing, relationships or advertising. They are more like educated bets than an investment. When you give and expect a return, that’s an investment. When you give and don’t expect anything back, that’s love. The cash is out the door already, and may not come back for a long time (or ever). Expenses are expenses — don’t kid yourself. Personal cashflow is different from business cashflow. Long-term success is based on relationships, and that is what networking is all about. It is not transactional, which is what asking for something is when you meet someone for the first time. Everyone should be open minded and leave their egos at the door. Come to help others with no other agenda. No ego and no expectations. Don’t lead with asking for something. Don’t end with asking for something. Don’t ask, period. As the old saying goes,
No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
Or, at least, it’s hard to build trust if you treat people like they’re nothing more than targets. We all know people who only reach out when they need something. This asking at every contact is asking too much. It’s okay to ask your network for help (that’s a big benefit of networking) but if you only reach out when you need help, then you are not relating or building a genuine network. Building your network is about interacting with other humans. It is relationship based, not a sales product. You are not trying to sell these people anything (especially not the first time you meet them). Don’t be too “salesy”. Remember that you want these people to like you, not buy a car from you. Check in just to say hello — send a holiday greeting, send an interesting article, email about anything but asking for a favor. This way, if you ever need to ask for something, that request is not the only time your contact hears from you.
When you meet with people, don’t ask for money or opportunity — share your future goals and ask for advice. Don’t ask for anything else. Rather, share what you envision the next step in your career to be. Be honest and authentic. When you are very clear about your career aims and ambition, people are happy to do what they can for you. It shows that you’re open to input and that you’re not desperate. No sane investor will invest in a desperate entrepreneur. Sharing your future goals and asking for advice do two things. It tells the person you are looking for something without saying it. It also lets them know the type of opportunities they might share with you if they come across something. As discussions continue and that person feels you’re listening and taking their advice to heart, they will develop a natural interest in giving you opportunity or their money. In summary: If you ask for money or opportunity, you will get advice. If you ask for advice, you will get money or opportunity.
Relationship building is about giving before receiving. An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Go out of your way to be helpful. (And remember that you have to pay this forward at some point later!) Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments. I’m continually surprised how often something good happens to me because of something I did to help a founder ten years ago. A lot of people want to make a lot of money so that someday they can help other people. Remember this: To make a lot of money you will have to help other people. The way to get what you want is to help others get what they want. You can get everything in life you want if you will just help other people get what they want. It’s called karma — if you want people to share with you, share with them. Be overly generous with sharing the upside; it will come back to you 10x. What you give away will come back to you tenfold. I always try my best to create win-win situations with everyone, but I also try to give more than I take for all of my relationships — be it in my personal or professional life. It isn’t necessarily altruistic, but rather simply a long-term approach to relationships. I’ve always felt the best life strategy is to “Care” … effort is so underrated and when you care about other people, you think about them and give them what they want instead of what you want and that allows you to “win”. I’m a firm believer that generosity has a multiplying effect. Happiness, freedom, peace, and financial security are only sustained by sharing them with others. Gratitude is a natural magnet. Greed is a natural repellent. The average man seeks what he can receive from the world. The extraordinary man seeks what he can give to the world. I firmly believe in this saying, and I try my best to live it. History is always watching — make kindness a foundation of your efforts — the payoff in business and in life is enormous. One of my favorite spiritual principles to live by is to always try to leave everything in better condition than I found it. Offices, apartments, hotel rooms, cities and YES, people’s hearts. With that said, try to leave people better than you found them. Leaving them worse off will have repercussions far beyond just you, touching everyone they interact with in the future. After every interaction, ask yourself: “Did I leave this person in better condition than I found him or her? Did I uplift, inspire, empower him or her? Did I cheer him up? Did I make her laugh? Did I give some love and support?” If you approach social interactions with this simple intention, you will always know what to do. All other social hacks are just tools. Your life depends on other people’s lives. Helping others become successful is helping yourself. Take note: people gun for you if you’re a selfish taker, but root for you if you’re a generous giver. If you find yourself keeping score in your relationships, you’re on the wrong track. Investing your time to help someone else could pay dividends in the long term.
Help people, but do not do their work for them. The worst things you can do for the ones you like are the things they could and should do for themselves. It’s key that you’re working with them, not for them, so they can have skin in the game.
Always invest in yourself before helping other people. People need experienced people who have done stuff and who can actually help them. Otherwise it’s the blind leading the blind. Busy people don’t want to become busier. They need help from people that can add value to them. Find out what help the super connectors need. Offer your help. There is nothing that these people want more than free resources! So start providing others with value, for free. It does not have to be anything massive, and might be simply a strategic recommendation or tidbit of advice. Make a list of everything you feel comfortable offering others (even if you get nothing back). Don’t think too much about yourself now, just help them. Operate on the idea of a value exchange. One of the many side benefits of writing and blogging, for example, is you build up a library of content to send to your network. Create a group in your contacts and share books, podcasts, or blog posts you find interesting (be sure to bcc). Sending quality information to people who are helping you is a great way to nurture your network. Perhaps you provide connections or advice or office space or a next step in a process. That way, if you have to say NO to one thing, there’s still energy you can contribute. You will realize the more you give the more you gain. People will remember your generosity. If you treat people beyond their expectations, you might just build up a loyalty. And in turn they will bring opportunities your way. After one year, your circle of friends should have generated tremendous value for you. Your reputation, influence, added value will be clearly recognized. You’ll also enhance your image of being good and generous. Always pay for results and hold people accountable. If you can create value for them, they will be happy to reward you. Remember to reciprocate. If you are successful, it’s almost always because some people went out of their way to help you. You have a moral obligation to pay it forward. Pull up the people who helped make you successful. Make your success their success. Be a person who others want to see successful. If your friend is always the initiator, invite them to do something with you. If you do have to cancel on someone — sometimes circumstances happen — you should be the one to make a plan for the future. And then make sure that it happens. Friendships aren’t static. They require work from both people.
Don’t forget to thank your partner at the end of the dialogue and tell them how happy you are and how they listening and sharing means to you, regardless of the outcome, and express a desire to continue the conversation at a later date.
Don’t defect. What goes around comes around, not because of karma, but because game theory. Life is infinite game: If you co-operate, people will co-operate with you. If you defect, people will defect. To get long-term cooperators, you must suffer some defectors (“get taken advantage of”). Don’t defect.
Master nonviolent communication and you’ll avoid drama, needless conflicts, and struggles bouncing back (we’re all beginners here :-)
When you are poor, spend less time at home and more time outside. When you are rich, stay at home more and less outside. This is the art of living. When you are poor, spend money on others. When you’re rich, spend money on yourself. Many people are doing the opposite.
When you are poor, be good to others. Don’t be calculative. When you are rich, you must learn to let others be good to you. You have to learn to be good to yourself better. When you are poor, you have to throw yourself out in the open and let people make good use of you. When you are rich, you have to conserve yourself well and don’t let people easily make use of you. These are the intricate ways of life that many people don’t understand.
When you are poor, spend money so that people can see it. When you are rich, do not show off. Just silently spend the money on yourself. When you are poor, you must be generous. When you are rich, you must not be seen as a spendthrift. Your life would have come full circle and reach its basics. There will be tranquility at this stage.
See The Four Types of Relationships and the Reputational Cue Ball for more information.
* Tease. It’s a way to give someone some playful bait to react to. The best form of teasing is combining interest and a sprinkle of playful challenge. Have a VERY GOOD argument….Basically you make it sounds like you insult or disagree with them at first. But you make them look good with your argument and they cannot disagree with you anymore. It is a win win. Then boost their ego and you have a new friend.
* Resist gossip. One of the easiest ways to lose trust is to gossip about people behind their back. If someone meets you and soon after that you start talking bad about other people, it is a HUGE RED ALERT that you may talk behind their back too. They will stay away from you. Learning not to gossip was hard to do because it meant missing out on possibly important conversations, distancing yourself from influential people, and awkwardly having to tell people, “Hey, sorry to interrupt but I really don’t need to know that, could we talk about something else?” But press on and you will get your priceless reward. Trust.
* Don’t trust anyone.
Be nice to everyone. Be friends with a few. Trust one person: yourself. Listen to others but only think for yourself and trust your gut. Question everything. Bend reality. Never outsource your decision-making. Never discredit your gut instincts. Listen to that “gut feeling” and trust it. You’re not paranoid. It is the light from within informing you. Your higher self is guiding you. Trust yourself and your instincts, and make judgements on what your heart tells you. You know more than you think you do. The heart will not betray you. Your heart can pick up bad vibrations. If something deep inside of you says something is not right about a person or situation, trust it. When considering options, watch your heart rate. Believe what you see.
If you’re outside your circle of competence and still have to make a decision, ask experts HOW they would make the same decision not WHAT they would decide.
If you don’t trust yourself to reach the truth when you’re emotional, why would you trust strangers who aren’t even trying to keep their emotions in check?
Success is entirely about making good decisions. Information may be power, but these days, everyone has access to the same information, so the playing field is level. It helps to surround yourself with the best people, but when you’re the boss, it’s your butt on the line.
No one have your best interests at heart. No one cares more about you than you do, but there are plenty of people who care about your money. Many of them want to turn it into their money and they are quite good at it. The less money you have, the more likely someone will come at you with some scheme. … Please ignore them. Always remember this: If a deal is a great deal, they aren’t going to share it with you. Be skeptical of anyone who does. If the person selling the deal was so smart, they would be rich beyond rich rather than trolling the streets looking to turn you into a sucker. Nothing in life is free. If you’re not paying for it; you’re the product. Others have good intentions but simply don’t understand how money works. One more thing I learned about people is that if they do it once, they will do it again.
Remember, one thing that NONE of the ultra wealthy does is DELEGATE investment decisions. They only invest in things they understand, after asking multiple questions and doing due diligence on their own pace. If you don’t take care of your money, no one will take care for you.
Even successful people give bad advice all the time. Never outsource your judgment, no matter who the person is.
The only way to avoid being taken (one way or the other) is to equip yourself with knowledge and experiences. Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Try to study as much as you can, put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
Read more about decision-making here.
I broke down relationship development into the following:
• Social networks
• Email outreach
• In-person meetings
• Events
See How To Transition From Finance To Tech for more information.
More reading:
• Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”
• Gardner’s “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences”
• Sherrie Campbell‘s “Loving Yourself: The Mastery of Being Your Own Person”
• Stephen Joseph‘s “Authentic: How to Be Yourself and Why It Matters”
• Christopher Voss’s “Never Split The Difference”
• Robert Cialdini’s “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”
II. KEY TO SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIPS
If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people.
The old adage is:
“It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.”
or as American sociologist Ronald Burt put it, “Instead of better glasses, your network gives you better eyes.”
“It doesn’t matter who is buying and who is selling. It’s the personal connection that matters.” — Tim Draper
That’s still true today.
The #1 investment, as we know, is in yourself. The next best investment is in people.
If you can master one skill, learn to network and build relationship. The most profitable business is investing in people. Success in life can often depend on the opinion of people around you. Whether you’re looking for a promotion or trying to get a date, you’ll struggle if no one likes you. If you can convince people to love you, no matter how lazy you are, someone will take care of you. If you take care of other people, they’ll take care of your business. It doesn’t matter what you do, if people adore you, your life will be easy.
There is no secret success formula for entrepreneurs. But one common thread is that no matter where you’re living or your circumstances, it takes time, resources, and dedication to turn an idea into a fully functioning business. The true geniuses will attract the resources necessary to turn their ideas into reality wherever they are. They understand that the most important component isn’t product or capital — it’s the people. That starts with you.
Building a company is only 10% about the product. The rest is about the people and the market.
We live in a world where 70% of success is determined by relationships. As long as humans are still deciding who gets the investments or the top jobs at companies etc, there is no such things as 100% meritocracy. What this means is that being smart, meeting expectations, and working hard with your head down aren’t going to supercharge your career. Building relationships and cultivating network are major keys. Word of mouth is always the leanest way to acquire your first customers, create your network, and begin your entrepreneurial journey. People typically say startups succeed 1–10% of the time — I actually think if you put together the right founding team, it’s more like a 35–40% chance of success. Just like a movie’s talent (actors, writers etc.) determines its odds of being a blockbuster, the strength of a company’s talent determines its chances of success. Great work requires teams. A company becomes the people it hires, not the plan it makes. A company often exists only because of the heroic efforts of a handful of individuals. The team you build is the company you build. The companies that really succeed become this magnet for talent, and they’re able to sustain it for a significant period of time. Developing a network of talented people to work with — sometimes closely, sometimes loosely — is an essential part of a great career. The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish. In the business world, achieving success often means finding individuals who are just as passionate as you about achieving your goals.
Because of physical limits on one’s ability and energy, no one can do everything by himself. You’ve never been the best person at doing every job. Finding the spotlight isn’t about standing in it. No single individual could create the leverage and momentum necessary to create billions of dollars in value. It’s the successful people who ask for and offer protection and support, because they know that entrepreneurs accomplish almost nothing alone, and we all move forward faster together. If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. Research in creativity and innovation points to the importance of interaction among people, whether formally or not, to bring together the unusual combination of ideas that spark something new. Whether in schooling offered, the way you were raised, pre-existing national and global infrastructure, work of those who went before, or teams that help make a final vision possible and known to the world, there is always help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the internet. Business success depends on the employees doing all the things they need to do. Inspirational movies and theatrical productions don’t happen because of one actor or director or writer or designer or crew member. If you build your own deck or even replace a washer in a faucet, you learned to do it somehow and the tools and methods you needed were all invented long ago. No one can do everything by themselves.
Doing everything yourself in the beginning is fine if you don’t have the budget to invest in people but you must break through the mental block and invest in people as soon as you can. A great relationship will earn you more profit than any other investment. There’s so much to be gained from working with people who support each other to achieve great things. Don’t be afraid to share your vision with others or ask for help when you need it. The right people can help you achieve more than you would have alone. All great feats and accomplishments in life were the efforts of a group of people. This is difficult for people, because when you ask for help, you’re making yourself vulnerable and that’s scary to most. But don’t let the ego stop you from becoming the best version of yourself because you’re too scared or stubborn to ask for help. You need to seek and partner with the highest quality and smartest people in the industry. Your network is your source of opportunities. (Of course you can’t come up with opportunities on your own). The easiest way to get opportunities is to leverage your connections. Your strategic network will keep your focus laser sharp. It can help guide you towards the decisions you need to make to move forwards.
Life without relationships, focused solely on accomplishment and success, is empty and meaningless. Love, Freud said, is the great educator. I’ve never understood the idea that monks and priests should turn away from relationships. No, it’s through loving and being loved that we reach a higher plane of stillness and understanding. “There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable,” Seneca said, “unless one has someone to share it with.”
Cultivate relationships. Expand your social circle so that you will constantly meet new people where you can learn new knowledge from. When you expand your network of contacts, your income also grows proportionately. Expanding your network will have an important impact in how much you earn eventually. Make friends. This will make you well off. Build the relationships, opportunities will follow. Find ways to meet and become their friends first. Get to know them well and opportunities (love, work, friendship, personal connections, etc) will come when the time is right.
_ _
The High Level
Quality over Quantity. Don’t spread yourself too thin. The main reason people struggle to generate fruitful connections is they simply have too many. They haven’t focused on those who are most important. Networking and building relationship are not about being in touch with as many people as possible or attending every event at the opening of an envelope; it’s about finding the right people and the right relationships; it’s about nurturing them so that at every moment there is the mutual exchange of value, insight, connection and information to drive the professional and personal success of another. It’s best to build close bonds with others you can count on when you need advice. If you wish to attract and commit energy to new things, you need to free up capacity by ridding yourself of “energy vampires,” or people who suck up all of your time and resources. Move away from how many people you know to discovering who are the people you need to know. Choose to make an impact by developing your own network to connect with the right people in the right way and to cultivate those relationships over the long term. You have to take ownership of your network. You have to take back control of your time and network with the right people — those that matter. Get back in control and you will change your game, make the impossible possible and achieve your goals. Get back in control and build connections that really matter. Optimize for quality, not quantity. Get comfortable saying NO to people you don’t want to prioritize. That sounds harsh, but in the end, it will save your time and effort and theirs. It’s not a kindness to “perform” friendship without genuine support and commitment, and both of you have limited time to spend. Instead of saying you’ll grab lunch and then canceling yet again, you can just part ways and make friends who are better suited to each of you. With the right software and strategy, it is fairly easy to throw your name out there and establish hundreds of surface-level connections. What is far more challenging, and more valuable in the long term, is establishing a few dozen close friends who you can rely on for big favors and help. You’ll find these deeper contacts to be more helpful when you need them — the types of relationships that actually change lives.
If you can’t see yourself working with somebody for life, don’t work with them for a day. If any relationship is short-term or temporary, it’s really not going to pay out the dividends that you want later in life. Find and befriend the influential people in your community. Look for the most talented people you can find and then find a way to align yourself economically with them (e.g co-founding, working for them, investing in them). A special case of developing a network is finding someone eminent to take a bet on you, ideally early in your career. Spend your time with positive people who support your ambitions. Instead of working from the bottom up, you should work from the top down. This is easier said than done. Start from the top. This group of superpowers will build your success, boost your positive mojo and keep you in a place of constant growth. It’s about meeting a few well-connected people who can vouch for your ability and who are willing to refer you to a few other well-connected people. Collaboration among unlikely partners amplifies impact. Find people who challenge your thinking and invest in them. Align yourself with thinkers and doers who have already achieved what you dream of achieving or who simply ride shotgun alongside you and you’ll be pushed to take the right actions and be inspired to move in the right direction towards your goals. Find and befriend the super connector in your community. Spend time with ‘cup half empty’ thinkers and you’ll feel low and de-energised. Spend time with individuals who dream big and see the cup not just as half full but as overflowing, and you’ll believe anything is possible. They put fuel to the fire in your belly, put a spring in your step, and water the seeds of ideas that grow in your mind.
The spectacular successes come from finding people before they’re well known. A particularly valuable part of building a network is to get good at discovering undiscovered talent. Recognizing another individual’s potential before they do is an underrated human skill. Identifying super talented people before everyone else does (or even before THEY realize they’re smart) is one of the most valuable skills to develop and is the core skill of recruiting, investing etc.
Building a more valuable network means taking back ownership and control of your network and approaching your actions and connections with strategic deliberation. It is both an art and a science. It is an art as it requires basic human skills in communication, connection, authenticity and the ability to be ‘in the present’ and engaged. It is a science because building your network and being in control requires an ongoing analysis, audit and sustained curiosity around leveraging your networking in the best way possible. It’s about seeing the lines that connect people and ideas and opportunity. This means reworking the way we network and connecting with others on a personal level with authenticity, meaning and value.
It's not what you know or who you know — It's how well you know each other that counts
Think “relationship” over “networking”. There’s quite a difference between having a “contact” and having a “relationship.” Don’t be misled by some networking experts — it’s not the number of contacts you make that’s important — it’s the ones you turn into lasting relationships that make a difference. You may be part of a network group or two, have a list of contacts and a stack of connections across various social media platforms but how many of your contacts do you really know? How many truly know you? How many of your contacts honestly care about you and your success? Are you doing things to help each other achieve your goals? Building relationship is not just about having another high-caliber LinkedIn connection or the email address of a VIP. Those are nice to have, sure, but the real win is not who you know, it’s who knows you and responds quickly to you when you reach out. Try making 10 phone calls to people you’ve just met. Tell them you’re putting together a marketing plan for the coming year and you would appreciate any help they could provide in the form of advice or a referral. So… how well did that go? Not very well I suspect.
Work hard at getting to know as many people as you can on a collegial or even more personal level. Work to build a network of close relationships. Your goal over time will be to build a deep (and varied) network of trusted people who will provide you with ongoing mentoring, advice, and feedback as you progress in your career and personal life. Your success, more times than not, relies initially on the support from friends and family. Sometimes that means their time, their emotional support, or in some cases their capital. Because, in the end, who wants to see those near and dear to them struggling? who wants to quit their “family”? Not to mention, so much of working with somebody is communicating what you care about and why. Knowing somebody well means you [don’t] have to get to the bottom of what someone’s motivations are every time you interact. If you don’t develop meaningful relationships with people you’ll never know what’s really on their mind until it’s too late to do anything about it. Many people often don’t have close, meaningful friendships. They want them, but they aren’t willing to go out of their way to dedicate time and effort to developing these relationships. They could be a person who has that hobby or goes to that event or has that friend; they have that option, and they expect it’ll always be there. The choices we have made, not the choices that we could make, are what, in the aggregate, decide who we are. When it comes to friends, it’s the relationships we’re invested in that count — not the relationships we could invest in if we ever made the time for them. The explosion of digital and social media has fundamentally changed the way we function, communicate and do business both online and offline. Yet the technology that was supposed to connect us and bring us closer together actually seems to be having the reverse effect. Building a more valuable network means taking back control and approaching your actions and connections with strategic deliberation. Of course we know this and yet something about how we are networking right now just isn’t working. We are often overwhelmed with myriad on and offline networking options to choose from. Every day we are pulled and stretched in hundreds of directions while maximizing productivity, and to throw networking in to the mix of our already jam-packed diaries — well, it’s no wonder it ends up in the too-hard basket. Add to this the pressure we unconsciously place on ourselves to be interesting and engaging, and the reality is we’ve put the work back in to networking, making it exhausting. Most of our connections are superficial and transactional. Conversations have become brief and fleeting. If you are making a habit to nurture your network along the way, then you won’t be seen as searching for an opportunity. You’ll just be in the right place when opportunity opens its door. It’s true that the idea of networking can make some people feel drained or even fake. But if that’s the case, you might be doing it wrong. Building genuine relationships with influential people is the quickest way to accelerate your growth, and it is relational, not informational. Valuable and sincere relationship is the result of earning ones trust and allowing that individual to help you. The irony is that opportunities tend to come faster when people focus on fostering a genuine connection. No matter what you do, to stay in the good heart’s of people nowadays, you must be able to connect on a personal level. Again, you want people to want to help you. The more that you can establish a genuine connection with someone, the more likely you both will be to help each other. Most people in business have taken the hire-your-smartest-friends approach.
Life is complicated. I don’t separate work and life into two contrasting initiatives — it’s all living. I don’t believe in work-life balance. Balance is dead. Balance implies there’s a strict trade-off. Work life integration is where it’s at! When you love what you do, your work is your life. Do you want to stop? I like the phrase ‘work-life harmony’. The real reason why people talk about work life balance is that most people don’t do what they love. The problem is their choice. I think the controversy around “hard work” mostly comes from a failure to understand that “work” isn’t a sacrifice for some people — it’s a calling. There are exceptions, but a “workaholic” is often just what people call someone whose hobby also happens to be work. Whatever you do, don’t tell someone that “it’s nothing personal, just business”. Symbolic work-life boundaries are almost impossible to maintain. Why? They are their business. Their business is their life, just like their life is their business — which is also true for family, friends, and interests — so there is no separation because all those things make them who they are. I find ways to include family instead of ways to exclude work. I find ways to include interests, hobbies, passions, and personal values in my daily business life. Because if I couldn’t, I was not living — I was just working. I consider living passionately a job requirement. My interests allow me to better connect the dots and come up with creative and insightful solutions that I would not otherwise be able to create. I do my best work when I’m most connected with my interests, family and friends — and I am most connected and enjoy my life to the fullest when I am deepest in my quest to build things that can make life a little better for everyone. If I’m happy at home, it makes me a better employee, a better boss. If I feel like I’m adding value and am a productive member of a team at work, it makes me better at home. Don’t be someone who drains energy out of your co-workers or family. It’s not just about how you allocate hours in the day, but whether you have enough energy to participate with enthusiasm. If you have a good work ethic, you’ll know this to be true. Business IS personal. It’s the most personal thing in the world, because it’s all about you. It’s your vision, your passion, your team — it’s your business, and it’s impossible to separate the business stuff from the personal emotions. People eat, sleep and live every second of a good part of their lives with their business, and every bit of the business affects them as much as their family. Not to mention, in an ecosystem where socializing and happy hours are a big way to meet or get to know helpful people, there are no real clear lines about what is personal and what is professional. People ultimately choose to do business with people they like, trust and respect.
For example: If I want to get a job in banking or consulting, as I start thinking about making a move, instead of cold calling, I would make a list of 5 companies I’d like to work for and for each company I will try to find and reach out 5 people who currently work there. I want to be as certain as possible that the company I might jump to will make me happier than the one I’m leaving, and it’s hard to know that until I hear from people who currently work there, and chances are they would be able to help me get a job interview. Next I would invite some of them to coffee — my treat if possible — to connect on a personal level. People in general will want to help if it doesn’t cost them much.
It would be great if they’re in my circle of friends. If I am in the fortunate position of knowing those people, then great, I can start there directly.
If I don’t know those people directly, here are a few more thoughts on what to do next.
If I am not connected to any of them but have a friend who is well connected, I would go through him/her. They will trust a recommendation from this source extremely highly.
If I don’t know any connections, then it’s time to start connecting and building relationships. If I am struggling to connect via my network, my next best bet is to meet someone at the team in person. I would do an extensive research on these 25 people and find way to meet and become their friends.
Instead of giving my product pitch or trying to explain why I am highly qualified in your field, I would ask people questions. Try to create a real connection. Don’t be transactional. Build genuine relationships. Play the long game. Don’t keep score. Give first. After all, “authentic” relationships involve mutuality and back-and-forth and personal rapport. You don’t want to come off as having a transactional agenda. Right?
Try to avoid getting impatient and feeling the urge to move on if someone isn’t directly tied to the career path you see for yourself. Usually the person who can help you is two to three degrees of separation away — for example, that person might not be in your chosen field, but their relative, sister or best friend could be. Something else to keep in mind when you’re relationship-building? It’s an ongoing effort. Do it consistently and constantly. It could help you unearth hidden opportunities or create custom opportunities for yourself.
Treat everyone like they can get you on the front cover of The New York Times. Since building relationship always takes longer than you think, the first secret is to start your building long before you need it. It’s hard to prioritize conversations that aren’t urgent or essential…until they are. But if you want your future announcements to be successful, you need to lay the groundwork. The big potential win is that by laying all this groundwork, you’ll find your way into a “hidden opportunity” — one that isn’t found anywhere else. That’s huge. (Remember to keep an eye open for hidden opportunities that do not yet exist at a certain time.) You never know when an interesting partnership opportunity could arise. Opportunities emerge from the unlikeliest of places. Even if someone doesn’t seem like a good fit for your needs at the moment, they could still present a great opportunity later on. What you need now might not be what you need later. You never know when your paths might cross again. You are likely to bump into the same people again and again in life, often in unexpected ways. This alone is reason enough to make sure that when you do something, you do so with careful thought about the consequences for those around you. Well, when you’re young, you’re evaluating potential networking contacts based on what you want to do for a living — and less how knowing that person might enable you to do what you want to do later on. And that’s a huge mistake. Some of my most fruitful connections are those who didn’t deliver a lot at first, but over time created a meaningful exchange that slowly grew. Treat every connection you make as if it’s the most important thing you’ve ever done — because, frankly, you never know when it actually will be. Keep in touch with people you think are interesting, even if they’re a million miles away. Build relationship before you need it. When figuring out which connections deserve your attention, take a long-term view. Be open to meeting almost anybody and try to make a great impression every time. Collect contact information whenever you can get it, and listen to people when they talk about them. You need to use the backdoor to gain access to the (hidden) opportunities which are open and grabbed either internally or through a referral from a trusted source. Let people surprise you. The earlier and more widely you plant seeds about what you are working on, the greater your potential for harvesting people when you need them.
Learn how to pass the gatekeepers to connect with the high profile person. Don’t accept a NO from someone who can’t make the final decision. Go around the gatekeeper and try every other possible avenue. What if no one replies to your request? You should wait at least a week before following up, especially if they’re busy. Don’t take being ignored as a NO, and simply follow up politely. When it comes to building relationship, take whatever you can get. Just get yourself in the door.
Listen to the experts in your network, ask questions, find more experts and keep digging until you can unearth the best opportunities. Don’t feel satisfied with the first answer you get or the first opportunity you come across. The best ideas and opportunities need to be discovered.
When you find these types of people, make it a priority to stay connected and hold onto them. Invest in these relationships and you have a chance to be rewarded not just with business success, but also lifelong friends. These people will play a defining role in the success and enjoyment you experience along the way.
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The Nitty Gritty
Human psychology makes us predictable creatures. When analyzing behavior/emotion, we should start with the most basic layer. People are human beings, so their most basic layer of behavior/emotion is evolutionary. What are human’s evolutionary needs (desires) that are served by behavior/emotion? What are humans trying to achieve? What they’ve always tried to achieve are significance, status, love, protection, re-production.
Here’s the biggest secret about that ever-important and holy people around you: They don’t care about you.
They care about:
(2) How you make them feel.
(1) What you can bring to their lives.
People care about what benefits you can provide them, how you can fulfill their desires and goals, and how their problems, fears and difficulties can be reduced.
People are inherently self-involved. (Ain’t no shame in that game; it’s just human nature.) So remember that at its core, successful interpersonal interacting is actually an act of service.
We all depend on others. There is no innocent relationship. A relationship is all about mutual benefits. Sometime it is love. Sometime it is companionship. Sometime it is money.
It doesn’t matter how nice somebody is. We’re all selfish enough people that we’re naturally going to have some kind of favoritism towards those who benefit us, we naturally create a bias towards liking those who make us feel special and bring values to us. If you can’t go for more than a day without money and happiness, consider the person who you’re subconsciously beholden to.
What people say is love, is not love. It’s a transaction. People like to say love is unconditional, but it’s not, and even if it was unconditional, it’s still never free. There’s always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever and that makes you automatically responsible for their happiness because they won’t be happy unless you are …
True, unconditional, love is the province of parents and saints. Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.
The only way to prevent people wanting you for something is not building any relationships at all.
When you realize how unimportant you are to 99.9999999% of people and howimportant their desires are to them, their behavior and emotion losses weight.
Behavior is what someone is doing, intention is why they’re doing it.
Too often you judge yourself based on your intention, and everyone else based on their behavior. We judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions, and this has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose.
In politics most notably, someone may judge their own party based on its intention while judging the opposing party based on their behavior.
Intention is often inferred from behavior. Almost all disagreements come from a misunderstanding about intention.
Their behavior says something about them, not you. It isn’t about you at all. It is a reflection of them and their state of being.
Don’t take it personally. This is nothing personal.
Don’t always rush to think that there’s something wrong with you because someone didn’t get what they expected from you. People often determine what they want from you based on their prior experiences with others. So if their experiences were shitty, their expectations will be as well.
To minimize misunderstanding: rather than judging people and actions as good/bad, right/wrong, frame behavior as people’s strategies to get their needs (like love, respect, self-worth) met. When listening, treat all behavior as the other person expressing their needs.
Avoid labeling others and yourself. Never think of yourself as a “worthwhile person”.
You should always specific *why* you’re doing something instead of just what.
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So how to be an attractive person?
Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.
We are the same people as 100,000s of years ago. Everything changes rapidly, but people stay the same. While the tools we use to communicate ideas have changed in the past two thousand years, the human brain has not. Who we are as people isn’t going to change, and that means that the methods we use to reach people — and how we market to them — are enduring and translatable. And that’s the opportunity. The same formula that worked then will work now.
You never change something by taking the existing thing and reworking it. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. You’re better off changing it just by creating something brand new. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
It’s much less about “how” to attract other people to you but more about “being” the kind of person who people want to build relationship with.
Success is not something you pursue. What you pursue will elude you; it can be like trying to chase butterflies. Success is something you attract by the person you become.
Don’t worry about not being able to control things around you. You can control the most important thing, the things that happen inside you. All of the real score cards are internal.
Although you can’t control people’s behavior, you can influence their behavior. Instead of focusing on things that you can’t control, focus on the influence that you can have. If you want to change people’s behavior, the only way is to influence them and let them be fully convinced.
The number one thing to understand about influence is that people make decisions for their reasons, not yours. People always believe what they tell themselves.
You want to make it the people decision to do something. Don’t tell people what to do; they do it on their own. And when people make these kinds of decisions on their own, they are very influential. If you have to persistently tell them to do it, you’ll never win them for the long run.
Change has to come from within. Their feeling is their feeling, and it’s up to you to help “correct” it. It’s real for them, and the onus is on you, not them, to work to change the dynamic.
The great way to influence people’s behavior is to be great.
Do not use the words “good” or “bad”, or “right” or “wrong”. I’m not saying these terms don’t exist or have substance, I’m just saying that those terms rarely get us what we want — long-term behavior change. When asking for help or behavior change, appeal to people’s self-interests, never to their mercy or gratitude.
Let’s say you don’t think your friend is doing something right. You’re judging them based on their behavior. When asking for help or behavior change, appeal to people’s self-interests, never to their mercy or gratitude. Ask them their intention — if it’s in the right place, work with them to get their behavior to match. If it’s not aligned, a change in behavior is unsustainable. (Read about Sales skill at (2) above for more information)
This goes for all relationships. Investors, employees, friends, family, significant others… Behavior versus intention!
You need to be able to see someone else’s point of view even when they feel strongly the other way. You need to take responsibility for what you contribute to the problem, to own your part and to apologize and work to fix it.
Or even better, don’t waste your time and energy trying to change people’s behavior — leverage it! People can change, no question, but it is far better to leverage behavior that already exists. So whether you’re talking about customers, clients, or teammates, pay attention to how people act and help them find a way to shine that leverages what they already do.
Building a relationship is about providing value and inspiration. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.
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People quickly answer two questions when they first meet you:
(2) Can I like this person?
(1) Can I trust/respect this person?
All of these points go in the same direction:
(1) Having something to say.
(2) Knowing how to say it.
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If you want to attract other people, the only way is to focus on you, upgrade yourself and your life, make yourself a more interesting person. Let other people see that side of you so that you can influence them.
The only way to increase attraction is to become a better and more valuable person.
Work to become an attractive person. Be yourself, do your own thing and work hard. Invest in yourself and the rest will come later. Things often work out as soon as you start loving yourself and do what is good for you.
It’s like, as Charlie Munger says, “To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate.”
You gotta be worthy of the ones you want to attract. If you want to be connected, make yourself worth connecting. You have to change your life first and prove yourself so that others will see that you’re the type of person to invest in.
It’s always better to raise your own bar rather than expecting someone else to lower theirs. When you start taking care of yourself, you start feeling better, you start looking better; and you even start to attract better. We become and then we attract. Become better, and you attract better. We grow personally and then we advance materially. If you want to attract extraordinary, and you’re not extraordinary, you have to work on being extraordinary.
The greatest attraction is when we meet someone who has this full and complete life that doesn’t depend on us, and they’re their own person in their own right. The greatest attraction is when someone can bring their best energy to us when they do engage with us.
Taking the time to plant some roots for yourself is critical. It’s like that part of the speech they give you on an airplane when they talk about the oxygen masks: “Put yours on first before you help the person next to you.” If you don’t make sure you’re safe and capable, how can you possibly expect to take care of others, to better the world, or to create epic things? If you don’t take care of yourself, you’ll never really be much good to other people. If you don’t look after yourself, you will have nothing to give when you’re trying to build relationships or create a value exchange. We need to be fulfilled so we can give to others. You need to fill up your own cup first. You can’t pour from an empty cup. You cannot really help anyone if you are starving. You can’t give what you don’t have. This part of networking isn’t often discussed, but it’s critical for establishing relationships. The irony is that if you always pretend to be “self-less” to get others to like you, you’ll probably start to give only to get your own needs met. You’ll always be acting from that place of lack in your life.
Be a good person with an edge
Be a rare bird that has unique pairings that other people think they couldn’t necessarily find again, or they couldn’t find with ease again. That is someone people could get addicted to. That is someone who is irreplaceable.
A unique pairing is the key to being someone of incredible perceived value. Two or more pairings create addiction.
The best people always embody contrasts.
Be assertive. Say NO when others are saying YES (if you want to). Be the “Strong Grounded Person” who can be both kind and aggressive. Dominant and loving. Powerful but soft, vulnerable. You can have a gentle heart, but still be rock solid at your core. You can be as gentle as a breeze, but as fierce as a dragon. It sounds oxymoronic (which is why so many people struggle with this) but balancing the Hard/Soft side of yourself is what will really turn other people on. The best people always embody both sides.
These dimensions are referred as warmth and competence, respectively, and ideally you want to be perceived as having both. What’s the point of networking if not to get other people to like and trust and respect you? Sure, you need people to see you as interesting, competent, professional, and potentially valuable to them — but if they don’t also find you likable, nobody will feel motivated to reach out later and build relationship with you. The reason why all comes down to emotional intelligence, the set of skills and qualities that allow people to form deeper, closer relationships with others.
This requires a lot of proactive showing off some EQ. It is an art and requires a lot of strategies. If it is too much for you, maybe success doesn’t mean a lot. Move on.
The same principles (0)(1)(2) as above also apply to interpersonal interactions.
(0) Understand your true self. And be sincere.
If you want to fit in with the 99%, you will never become the 1%.
Your relationship with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship you have. Core confidence is the ultimate key to getting the relationship you deserve. You are more able to give love when you live a life you love. If you love yourself, you love others. If you hate yourself, you hate others. In relationships with others, it is only you, mirrored. It all starts with you.
Once you understand yourself and your destination, it’s infinitely easier to go out and make friends or seek a partner and filter out the ones who aren’t a good fit, and it’s better to filter them out and go through a solid filtering process by understanding what you really want before you build an emotional connection. This is the foundation because you’re not going to be a priority in a relationship that is not aligned.
Most people try to become a better person in order to attract other people. You are changing yourself to please others. It’s just not the right way to do it. Figure out the way to be a better person for yourself.
Everyone is trying to find the right person, but nobody is trying to be the right person. Many of us go overboard in trying to impress others because we think that is the best way to be remembered. While that technique sometimes works, far more often it is easier to be memorable than impressive.
Understand what you really want and need. Offer unvarnished honesty. Remember that it starts with you, but in service of your tribe. Find yourself first people will come. Everyone loves an independent person who knows what he/she wants.
Being different is actually far more achievable than being the very best. Try to think of ways that you and your brand separate yourself from the crowd — like interesting stories or unique experiences.
(2) Be warm. Understand people and treat them with respect.
If you can portray yourself as warm — i.e., non-competent and friendly — people will feel like they can like you.
If people believe you are looking after their best interests, they will do almost anything that you ask.
Understand others’ wants and needs in the same way that you understand yourself. It’s our responsibility not just to seek a partner/friend that we want, but to find a partner/friend that we’re a good fit for.
(1) Be competent. Become someone worth knowing.
If you seem competent — for example, if you are resourceful, have a high social or economic or educational status, look good, and can maintain integrity and self-respect — they’re more inclined to trust and respect you.
The real secret to getting to know people is, “become someone worth knowing”, and you’ll be in a better position to meet people. Nothing is sexier than confidence born of competence. People are not equally desirable. And the great irony of life is that nothing makes you more appealing than not needing someone else.
For me, this doesn’t necessarily need to be linked to work. My interest in culture and travel, for example, has enabled me to make remarkable business connections that I would never have made without planting my own new trees.
This is why so many people give the wise advice to lonely folks that they need to focus on themselves instead of “Why don’t people like me?” They need to dive into hobbies, interests, careers, and become something more than “nice.” And that’s not something you can do overnight. You can’t be a “nice person,” go to two meetings of a book club, and be magically morphed into a literary expert. That’s not attractive. You can’t be a confident, skilled person by deciding to be one. You have to put in the hours and the passion.
Develop self-worth by earning credibility with yourself. Get rock solid in your own skin. Impress yourself on the daily. Earn confidence and let it ooze quietly out of your pours. Level up your life and find a very respected career where you have a natural access to high caliber, successful people. Then watch how much easier it gets to find a friend/partner you actually want to be with.
Gain some interesting things about you for others to discover, and some interesting subjects of conversation. Make yourself a worth knowing and more interesting person who has ambitions, hobbies, the energy to go do fun things; the one who is always trying something new, going somewhere exotic, learning something useful, someone who wants hustle and is busy. Knowledge and experience — they leave you speechless, then turn you into a storyteller. Not to mention, you know, having more fun and feeling more satisfied with your life.
There are many ways to have something to say in a conversation, but the worst it to just expect interesting stuff to pop into your head. It probably won’t. You collect interesting tidbits by experiencing the world. That can mean traveling to exotic places, reading interesting books, building complex contraptions, or talking to interesting people.
The common thread is doing stuff that changes you. It doesn’t have to be a huge change, and usually it won’t be. It could just be that you went to a new restaurant or learned a new fact. (Did you know that orange things used to be called “red”? We had no word for orange, except as a name for a kind of fruit. The color was named after the fruit, not the other way around! There are still vestiges of pre-orange in our language. It’s why we say “redhead,” even though most gingers have orange hair.)
This is, by far, the easiest step of the two, but I’m belaboring it, because people misunderstand. They think there are simply interesting people and boring people, as if it’s a trait you’re born with. If you want to be interesting, you have to make yourself interesting by doing interesting things. Luckily, there are interesting things almost anyone can do. They can be physical or intellectual.
Simply put,
If you can make them think, you’ll have their respect.
If you can make them feel, you’ll have the keys to the kingdom.
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Most people, especially in a professional context, believe that competence is the more important factor. After all, they want to prove that they are smart and talented enough to handle your business.
In fact, warmth is the most important factor in how people evaluate you. It’s important to demonstrate warmth first and then competence, especially in business settings. From an evolutionary perspective, it is more crucial to our survival to know whether a person deserves our care. It makes sense when you consider that in cavemen days it was more important to figure out if your fellow man was going to kill you and steal all your possessions than if he was competent enough to build a good fire. While competence is highly valued, it is evaluated only after care is established. And focusing too much on displaying your strength can backfire.
There is great truth in the following axiom, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” Or, at least, it’s hard to build trust if you treat people like they’re nothing more than targets.
If someone you’re trying to influence doesn’t like you, you’re not going to get very far; in fact, you might even elicit suspicion because you come across as manipulative. A warm person who is also strong elicits admiration, but only after you’ve established care does your strength become a gift rather than a threat.
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Be aggressive/competent in actions; be kind/warm/sweet in your tone.
Under any circumstances, be polite, be professional, be warm, but always have a plan for yourself.
If you’re competent in your actions, you can be sweet as pie in your tone. Words are powerful, as long as you use them the right way with the right tone. What’s far more powerful are your actions. Word lose its power when the actions fail to compliment them.
The dumbest mistake people make in interacting with other people is wearing all of the competence in their tone and none of them in their actions. In other words, people are often ruthless and aggressive and competent in their tone and completely malleable in their actions. The reverse is much more powerful.
Tone isn’t that big of a influence. What tone has the potential to do is show someone they have total power over your emotions. When you become aggressive, all you’re showing is that they have actually had an effect on you and your emotions. You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that happens to you.
Tone just has the ability to make you sound really unattractive and hurt by something. This often ends up making us look immature and someone with a lot of negative energy. Nagging people looks more to them like begging, which makes them disrespect you. Sounding aggressive almost never covers our sole purpose of being aggressive, which is to convey our feelings to another person. I have often noticed that people barely pay attention when you’re aggressive although the purpose was to grab their attention in the first place.
It’s so important to communicate your messages through actions whilst maintaining the calm in your tone. Not only you will find communicating is much easier for you and you get far more attraction, but you’ll actually be the one in control.
The person everyone desires never shows others her/his next move. True power is sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. Breathe and allow things to pass. You have a standard. That standard is, you’re a great, kind, positive person. Instead of complaining, remind them with your actions that you’re a strong person who isn’t to be messed with. So if someone does something that doesn’t meet your standards, you don’t become a mean, aggressive, obnoxious, difficult, nasty, snippy person. You stay sweet, kind, positive and warm, like their actions had no impact on you whatsoever! But amidst your kindness, your actions tell the story of the competence. That’s the most powerful part of interacting.
For example, you don’t need to build yourself up any more or explain why you’re important or going to be helpful. Never directly tell people how awesome you are and how bad they are. This will make you come off as cocky and arrogant. Be more discreet. Let them figure it out through your “rock bottom to rock star” story. Or even better, give your tribe a platform to say it for you. Stop trying to impress people, start focusing on actually “connecting” with people. Your focus should be on building bridges between your experience and theirs so there are points of recognition, especially if you can organically work in shared struggles or challenges. Maybe you can’t provide what someone is looking for. But, if you can change the angle or way they’re thinking about something by openly working with them, you make them feel like they got something special and unexpected. It’s key that you’re working with them, not for them, so they can have skin in the game. Help people, but do not do their work for them. The worst things you can do for the ones you like are the things they could and should do on their own.
Now think of both situations and think deep. Which of the two people do you find yourself being more attracted to? An arrogant person whom you know you can yet get away with anything, or a kind, happy-go-lucky person who would not put up with your bullshit? The majority of your answers are going to be the 2nd person.
People maybe different to one another but human psychology is more or less the same when it comes to attraction. So as a person, strive more to be what attracts you. Attract what you expect and reflect what you desire. You cannot expect one thing whilst being the complete opposite of it.
So if it’s the person in the second scenario who’s more likely to win your respect and attractions, then that’s the person you need to often strive to be.
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Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise people.
At the end of the day, it’s entirely up to us to follow these etiquette rules. I guess it’s about finding the balance between the being fun and sensitive to everyone. Less is more. Too much of something is bad. On one hand, as mentioned above, we shouldn’t restrict ourselves with rules and regulations that would limit our creativity and spontaneousness of our social interactions. On the other hand, we ought to be aware of the publicness of our behavior to protect ourselves and at the same time respect the fact that each one of us forms part of the social experience of everyone else. Find that right balance and you’ll not only better that experience yourself, but also help others enjoy it as well!
I believe that every virtue lies between vices of deficiency and excess. Too little humor is dry; too much is silly. Too little pride makes us meek; too much breeds narcissism. Too much self-restraint leaves you doing homework while your friends are tailgating. Too little self-restraint means you’ll really regret eating that fourth Scotsman Dog.
The food industry has a term called “The bliss point” — the optimal level of salty and sweet in a food that keeps you wanting more of that food. Try to achieve the bliss point in your communication with other people and they will become addicted to you.
Sophisticated foods are bittersweet (wine, beer, coffee, chocolate). Addictive relationships are cooperative and competitive. Work becomes flow at the limit of ability. The flavor of life is on the edge.
If you want happiness and success, you need to find the sweet spot between the extremes of too little and too much. You need to look for just right.
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And don’t forget that compatibility is important. Compatibility is a two-way street. A high-quality person is going to invest in someone if it aligns with their bigger vision and purpose. When you begin to understand more about yourself and others, you start to realize that there’re certain types of people that you might not be a good fit for.
Making mutual decisions together and collaborating together on life goals moving from the “I” to the “We” is important. There should be a feeling of excitement. There should be this energy where you both feel a desire to build an incredible life together to face the world as a team. If you’re not feeling that, it’s like roller-skating up a hill.
The only pathway to a healthy relationship is compromise and sacrifice. There’s no such thing as a relationship that’s perfectly self-serving. There’s no such thing as getting into a relationship where you get everything you want whenever you want.
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I broke down relationship development into the following:
• Social networks
• Email outreach
• In-person meetings
• Events
See How To Transition From Finance To Tech for more information.
These principles are intuitive, not revolutionary, but they’re driving success.
Here’s the thing:
While visible results get the attention, the invisible work deserves the credit. The seeds of exceptional results are planted when no one is watching. It’s what you do in the dark, when nobody’s watching that defines you when they eventually do and sets you up for success.
Stop “waiting” for gold.
Start digging when nobody’s looking.
Seek clearer thinking, not faster thinking. You acquire faster thinking on the way.
Seek value-creating skills, not money-earning skills. You acquire money on the way.
Seek your own love, not the love of others. You acquire the love of others on the way.
Don’t return it, give it away. Don’t keep fixing it, create something new. Don’t force the relationship, find someone else.
Have courage. (You will need it.)
And good luck. (You’ll need that too.)
