Essays and Projects
“He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.” Rabindranath Tagore He built the biggest jewellery chain in the world. Then he stood up at the Royal Albert Hall and called his products crap. Gerald Ratner was speaking to 6,000 business leaders at the Institute of Directors on 23 April 1991. Continue reading His Joke Was So Bad It Cost £500 Million The post His Joke Was So Bad It Cost…
Watch Listen “The fastest way to still the mind is to move the body.” Gabrielle Roth A man who broke rock all day in a prison quarry went back to his cell and ran in place. Swinging a hammer at limestone all day was how the state planned to wear Prisoner 46664 down. He added Continue reading You re Not Overthinking. You re Under-Moving. The post You re Not Overthinking. You re Under-Moving.…
Watch Listen “No one tests the depth of a river with both feet.” Ashanti Proverb I wrote code for 3 hours before work each day. It was 2012 and I was building Shommi, a tool that tracked Twitter to find potential customers for businesses. I told myself a working solution would sell itself. After 3 Continue reading How I Got My First Customer With 8 Notion Docs The post How I Got My First Customer…
Watch Listen “Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.” Margaret J. Wheatley I write one number for each day, somewhere between -4 and +4, to score how the day went. I call it my tempo. Two questions follow each night: If the day was Continue reading 1 Metric for Life Progress: The Daily Tempo Score The post 1…
Watch Listen “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” Margaret Atwood I chose the model that writes for Multi off a public ranking and it still gets things wrong. Arena ranks frontier models on text, code, image, video and search. New entries keep landing near the top. A research group called Continue reading AI s 7-Month Doubling Rule The post AI s 7-Month Doubling Rule appeared…
“The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” Niels Bohr “You don’t want to make money by screwing your investors,” Charlie Munger said. That, he said, is what a lot of venture capitalists do. Two podcast hosts had him in front of a microphone and asked whether venture capital does its Continue reading Y Combinator s 1,000-to-1 Bet The post Y Combinator s 1,000-to-1 Bet…
“Frugality is enjoying the virtue of getting good value for every minute of your life energy.” Vicki Robin One drop of solder came off each kerosene can and kept paying Rockefeller for as long as the plant ran. Each can took 40 drops to seal At 38 the kerosene ran out onto the floor At Continue reading Why Rich People and Dying Spacecraft Follow the Same Rule The post Why Rich People and Dying…
Watch Listen “Survival is the only road to riches.” Peter L. Bernstein Two men who won the Nobel Prize for pricing options helped found a fund that bet 25 dollars for each dollar it held. Long-Term Capital Management lost 4.6 billion dollars in four months, almost everything it owned. Ed Thorp ran a fund on Continue reading You re Not Undisciplined. Your Habit Is Too Big. The post You re Not…
Watch Listen “If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children.” Guan Zhong I put off a book for 15 years and finished it before lunch. Publishing the book was a morning of formatting. The book Continue reading The 150-Year Art of Delayed Gratification The post The 150-Year Art of Delayed Gratification…
Watch Listen “Learning comes through suffering.” Aeschylus A man built the same vacuum cleaner 5,127 times while his wife taught school to cover the mortgage. James Dyson worked from 1979 to 1983 in an unheated coach house behind his home in Bath. Each build was one cycle: make it, test it, change one thing. He Continue reading The 10,000 Hour Rule Counts the Wrong Thing The post The 10,000 Hour…
Watch Listen “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” Henry David Thoreau Two men lay wounded on the same field and the one with rank was carried first. A man who could have been saved bled out behind a man whose wound could Continue reading Everything Feels Important? It s a Ranking Problem The post Everything Feels Important? It s a Ranking Problem…