(1:57) There’s only so much you can do or worry about, so focus on the important things, and leave out office politics, power games etc. Otherwise a decade will pass and you’ll realize you’ve worked on unimportant things in retrospect. But also don’t do what 21 year old dropouts do, like trying something for 3 months and then change project if you’re not successful in that short time span. He stops once a year to reflect on what went well and what hasn’t, and he doesn’t stress too much about that the rest of the year.
(4:23) Take the time to explore many different things, in the quickest and most cheapest way, and be honest with yourself about what’s working and what’s not. When something works, pull more resources into it.
(6:34) If you’re in the position between jobs, and you can take a year off, do it to have the time to experiment things and study. He learned about AI, synthetic biology and investing. He met with plenty of people that were doing all sort of things. This was one of the best 2–3 career choices he did, after selling his startup.
(10:45) The things that taught him a lot about business are poker and angel investing, and he recommends both. He recommends poker to learn about psychology and risk. He funded his living expenses while in college with poker.
(12:19) He sleeps 8 hours a night or close to that. If you want to have creative ideas, cut off something else, not sleep. For him the best time to work on projects is the first 3 hours after waking up. He can be very productive for even 8 hours, but doesn’t believe that people can work for 16 hours straight and be more productive that he’d be in 8.
(16:05) There are very few people that he’s interested about because he things they’re doing very amazing things and that he just wants to help. He challenges people saying they think too small, or that they need a “perspective shift”. Looking at things with a fresh perspective, from a new angle, is incredibly valuable, but it gets more difficult as you get older.
(18:18) Surround yourself with people that make you more ambitious. But most of the people just push you to be average and pull you back. # He says playing poker and reading pocket books was great for him to understand this, as well as bios of people doing amazing things and books about the big engineering projects in history (like books about the Apollo program).
(25:58) The deferred like plan (eg: I want to do this, earn a ton of money, and than use it to do that other thing that really want to do), doesn’t work, you’ll be unsuccessful on both plans. If you want to do something, just work on that from the beginning, and if you need money to do it, just try to raise it. In Silicon Valley you can raise money to do a rocket company even if you’re 22 as long as you’re competent and ambitious.
(29:35) People can sense authenticity and motivation, and they won’t join you if they don’t believe you’re really motivated.
(30:22) Doing anything worthwhile takes a long time and emotional trauma, like people telling you you’re an idiot or you’re wrong. If you can’t stand that, you can’t succeed.
(32:05) People find purpose in many different ways, and raising a family or building an eSports team is as valid as trying to work on strong artificial intelligence (aka GI, General Intelligence, machines capable of experiencing consciousness).
