Takes #2
Here’s the second installment of my newsletter. It’s just a curation of interesting pieces that have really made me think or answered a question I have been thinking about.
Where Are You Going?
I love almost everything that Tobias van Schneider writes. This piece is on making plans is especially interesting.
I’m not trying to control the things I can’t control in the first place. For example: I like to visit new countries without a big plan on what things I NEED to see. I love flying somewhere and then figuring it out the moment I arrived. There are people who get so hyped up to visit a new country because they found this particular restaurant they want to visit. And then once they arrived, they find out the restaurant is closed that day and their whole vacation is ruined just because of that. Stress & disappointment follows quickly.
I agree so much with this. The sooner we accept the uncontrollable constraints and stop trying to control them, the better. This piece ties in what I call my growth equation. It’s a summation of strategy, hustle, luck and timing. You can control the first two. You mostly do not control the last two. But first two components can help us be in situations where last two components can be optimized for.
On Luck & Serendipity
I was in a conversation with Scott Belsky on Twitter about role of luck in professional success. He shared this blog post he wrote on role and perception of luck. It’s very thoughtful as usual.
I’ve always believed that luck is not a thing, it is a perspective. It is a lens through which you see an occurrence — often a common one — as an opportunity (or at least a signal that emboldens you).
I really like his way of thinking about luck. Irs very easy to dismiss someone’s success and attribute to luck. Being able to capitalize on something at the right time is an art. That leads people to think that the said art is merely getting lucky. Luck surely plays a role in almsot everything. But, like almost everything else, it’s a spectrum.
From Michael Lewis, a Portrait of the Men Who Shaped ‘Moneyball’
“You should have the risk and you should enjoy the reward,” he said. “It’s not healthy for an author not to have the risk.”
I am very excited to read this book once I am done with most of Tools of Titans.
Jeff Bezos: Regret Minimization Framework
This is fantastic. So simple. So powerful.
So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that’s very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, “What will I think at that time?” it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That’s the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.
While I cannot claim to be wise enough to use this exact framework, I do have a similar model to think through big things. And, I am wise enough to use this model now that I know about it.
American Dream collapsing for young adults, study says, as odds plunge that children will earn more than their parents
The research from a group led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty, and also including economists and sociologists from Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, estimates that only half the children born in the 1980s grew up to earn more than their parents did, after adjusting for inflation. That’s a drop from 92 percent of children born in 1940.
Scary.
The Art and Science of Investing
This is a fantastic piece on Art vs Science. I have always struggled to articulate the strengths of Arts effectively. I now know how to do it better.
Building a valuation model is a science. Calibrating it to reflect the psychology of uncertainty is an art.
Gathering information is a science. Filtering out noise is an art.
Net present value is a science. Identifying the trust and passion of a CEO is an art.
Measuring what worked in the past is a science. Understanding why things are different now is an art.
It’s art because you can’t measure it or rely on a repeatable set of rules. Science has formulas. Art has fads. Science has calculations. Art has feelings. Science has laws. Art has eras. Science can be taught. Art has to be experienced. You can spend a lifetime proving the science of why something should or shouldn’t be, only to have the art part of the equation humble you into the ground.
Strong insight —
The difference between science and art is basically this: Science often provides multiple ways of getting something done. But if any of those ways contradict each other, then art is playing a role.
THE NUANCES OF NEGOTIATING
I have mad respect for Vaynerchuk’s energy, optimism and philosophies. It’s interesting how he look at the process of negotiations. I agree with a lot of it.
Speed is one pillar of negotiating that most people miss. I’m stunned by how many people want to nickel and dime until they get to their ideal arrangement, when it’s much easier and more efficient to let some of that money go upfront. Speeding up the process also allows you to close off the chance that the deal will break down because of variables that might get introduced at the time of the negotiation. It’s way better than continuing the discussion over minutiae and risk losing the deal altogether.
20 learnings from 20 books in 2016
This post has a great collection of good books. It has one quote from each recommendation.
“Young people will always manage to achieve the impossible–whether that is on the football field or inside a company or other big organisation. If I were running a company, I would always want to listen to the thoughts of its most talented youngsters, because they are the people most in touch with the realities of today and the prospects for tomorrow.”
After The Process: Meet Sam Hinkie 2.0
I don’t know how to describe this piece. I just know I enjoyed reading it. It covers a lot of things that are seemingly unrelated.
Besides the obvious reasons — weather, culture, networking, anonymity — Hinkie came here to be among what he calls “my people,” the quants, dreamers, AI geeks and visionaries. As opposed to the sports world, which can range from socialist to dictatorial but is often slow to embrace change, in Silicon Valley disruption is expected. Here no one tries to replicate the status quo or embrace average. Here companies operate for years without showing a profit, for better or worse. “When I meet someone out here, I’ll say, ‘I’m kind of between gigs,’ ” Hinkie says. “Or, if I’m being cute, sometimes I’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m like a founder that got pushed out for professional management,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, first time? That happened to me in ’85 and ’93 and ’02.’ ” He pauses. “There’s not the sense of shame for failure here that there is some other places.”
23 Things I Learned About Writing, Strategy And Life From Tim Ferriss
I wholeheartedly agree with this approach to relationship-building. Treating everyone well and looking out for them is always the right thing to do.
Tim’s network is pretty astounding. His media opportunities are the secret envy of almost every entrepreneur or author. How does he do it? Tim’s strategy is simple: He treats people well. Especially the people that other people ignore. I remember watching Tim going around SXSW and getting to know people who would go on to become some of the most influential investors and founders in the world. You never know who might help you one day with your work. His rule was to treat everyone like they could put you on the front page of the New York Times…because someday, you might meet that person. Networking is not about finding someone who can help you right this second. It’s about establishing a relationship that can one day benefit both of you. And often the best people to do that with aren’t the busy, important people. You want to meet the people who aren’t well known but should be and will be. It’s not about who has the biggest megaphone. A great example for me was meeting Tim. He hadn’t sold millions of books then and didn’t have a huge platform. Now he does.
What We Can Learn from Airlines About Product-Market Fit
I have always been impressed by Southwest’s service and price. This post gives a very clear explanation of what Southwest gets right.
All bags fly free on Southwest. Unlike Delta or United, Southwest prefers point-to-point flights, so you don’t have to connect in Charlotte, or Atlanta, to get where you want to go. Southwest does not have WiFi, and they have first-come first-served seating, like a bus or train. Their goal seems to be less about maximizing profits, like Spirit. They don’t want to coddle their customers, like Virgin. They seem to care most about what the customers want — cheapest possible travel. And in an industry that has been losing money for a half century, Southwest has been profitable for 39 consecutive years.
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