Farnam Street

"People ask me how I got my career, how I did anything, and I will flat-out tell you I outread the motherf***ers." "If you want to think better, you have to start by reading more." "I realized very early on I wasn't the brightest guy; I wasn't the best at all that stuff, but I was willing to read three or four or five times the amount as anybody else was willing to read."

ADHD is a superpower. "The problem isn't that I can't focus; it's that I can't focus on stuff I don't care about." "On stuff I care about, I can lock in and you’re not going to find me for months." So if you have ADHD ... "The first thing you have to do is reframe the task to find the autonomy."

My conversation with @steven_kotler on flow, cognitive performance, and doing your best work. Kotler is the executive director of the Flow Research Collective, where he studies flow and the science of peak performance. In this episode, you’ll learn: • How to get so absorbed in what you’re doing that distractions fade. • How to find a challenge that holds your attention without overwhelming you. • Why a hobby you gave up might be worth picking up again. • What frustration tells you when you’re learning and how to respond. • How to focus on work you don’t feel like doing. • How to think clearly when there’s too much information, and you’re unsure what to trust. Listen and Learn (Includes paid partnerships.)

My guest today is @RyanSerhant, founder of SERHANT and star of Netflix’s Owning Manhattan. We talk about the psychology of getting noticed, earning trust, and becoming the person people choose. 00:00 Intro 02:19 Get Chosen Before You’re Established 10:03 Why Sellers Should Take Acting Classes 11:11 What Is Embarrassment Costing You? 12:28 The 1,000 Minutes a Day Framework 16:26 Why Buyers Resist Your Pitch 20:57 Are You Giving Up Too Soon? 21:39 How to Use Google Alerts to Land Leads 23:21 The Craziest Deal in Serhant History 31:21 How to Handle Ego in Negotiations 33:02 Your Next Move at Rock Bottom 38:56 Why Attention Isn’t Making You Money 43:11 Find Clients Where Nobody Knows You 44:55 Why Strangers Ignore Your Offer 46:51 What Is Success Costing You? 52:03 The Excuse That Costs You Respect

Your past explains you, but it doesn't excuse you. "I was last to be picked on every sports team. I was chubby, covered in rashes and acne growing up. I think I was counted out, an outcast. "I think your past explains you, but it does not excuse you, and so I do make an active effort every day not to let how I was brought up and everything in my past be an excuse for behavior, because I meet a lot of people who do." "How many people have you met who are just complete assholes and who are dicks and who are rude, and they don't value your time? And then they'll tell you, "Oh, w- what I've gone through." "Work incredibly hard, be incredibly nice, and endurance for the win. Everybody else will tap out."

Why don't people follow up? "They give up, man." "Giving up is so easy. So easy to give up. Giving up is so easy. Quitting is so easy." "Trying is so much harder, but it's also free."

Here is the story of what happened to Bill's daughter, Lucy. "They found her lying on the floor of her apartment, barely breathing, face down on the right side."

My second conversation with @BillAckman is unlike anything I expected. 0:00 Intro 0:53 The Night His Daughter Nearly Died 17:07 How He Holds it Together 23:17 How Bubbles Pull You In 23:49 Is Venture in a Bubble? 25:23 When Easy Money Runs Out 28:05 He Hated the Idea but Invested 30:05 Who Actually Profits from AI? 35:53 The Rules He Carved in Stone 39:15 The Trade He Won't Make Again 42:02 AI 46:14 Waiting for a Cheaper Market? 48:20 Netflix: Why He Changed His Mind 51:36 The Assets Nobody Wanted 53:22 What If You Owned a City? 01:00:02 Berkshire’s Most Overlooked Advantage 01:04:36 From Watch Buyer to Company Owner 01:09:42 How He Judges CEOs in an Hour 01:14:19 What’s Left to Achieve at 60? Enjoy!

"Beauty is how our intuition communicates with us." Intuition is a form of knowledge. In many ways, intuition is more powerful than intellect. @tobi continues ... "This is why people are so fast sometimes because they use the part, like they use the massively parallel part of the brain where things are at least slightly more sequential in— than when you're trying to reason it out from first principles." "And sometimes you can never reason towards aesthetics from first principles to begin with."

How a conversation with Andy Grove led to Jobs returning as CEO.⁣ ⁣ teapaw.org/shaneparrish/status/20…

Steve Jobs almost disappeared from history. After being ousted from Apple, he spent 12 years struggling. He: • Alienated the people closest to him • Blew up deals that could have saved his company • Refused to compromise • Drove away his co-founders and investors • Burned through hundreds of millions of dollars Fortune wondered if he was a “snake oil salesman.” But those 12 years of failure taught him the lessons that would eventually save Apple and turn him into the Steve Jobs we remember. I sat down with biographer @geoffrey_cain to unpack the lost decade and the lessons Jobs learned the hard way. Enjoy! (Includes paid partnerships.)

The craziest part of this episode is how he saved his son's life.

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us" — John Culkin, writing about Marshall McLuhan One problem with AI watermarking on writing is that humans are learning to write like AI as quickly as AI is learning to write like humans. My kids write their school essays by hand in class, without access to any devices. Yet when I read them, they look as though they were written by AI. In fact, one of the reasons they write them by hand is that teachers can no longer tell the difference. How is that possible? It's nearly impossible to prove or disprove to a third party that something was written with AI. Try it for yourself. I once submitted a few pages from an early book to an AI detection engine. With near certainty, it told me that what I wrote was AI. The only problem was that the book was from before AI even existed. Watermarking can make some words and patterns statistically more likely to appear in AI-generated text, possibly allowing a very weak signal on a long enough sample. But as people absorb these patterns, their own patterns shift. If my kids are any indication, it won't be long before they update their own mental prediction algorithm and start watermarking their own words. This was Culkin and McLuhan’s point: the tools we create shape us. Even if we could reliably prove that AI was used (and we can't), that would tell us little about the quality of the output. A carpenter who refuses a hammer doesn't make the house any better. He has only made his work slower and harder. Judge the work, not the tool.

Just say the thing. "When I got to Opendoor, I would sit in meetings where everyone would act like everything was going well, but things were not going well. You could tell things were not going well by the shape of the chart." How do you change this? You have to say the thing and say it now. "Say it about the thing, not the person. Always say, 'This sucks,' not, 'You suck.'" It's ok to call out stupidity.

Steve Cohen and PGA Golfers share the same performance coach. For the next hour, he’s yours too. @GioValiante is the world’s top performance psychologist. We discuss why most people never reach their potential, how both confidence and fear shape performance, and what separates those who consistently excel from those who stay stuck. Enjoy! (Includes paid partnerships)