thought smuggler
New York, USA
Joined June 2022
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how to find earned secrets // @FoundersPodcast
Every time I talk with @FoundersPodcast (and listening to the podcast of course), I hear new powerful maxims.
I’ve been collecting what he learned from decades of studying founders.
1. Money comes naturally as a result of service.
2. Ordinary things, done with extraordinary focus, over an extraordinary period of time.
3. Find an earned secret and exploit it for two or three decades.
4. Be a professional opportunist.
5. Opportunity arrives after a loss.
6. The best financial decisions are not financial decisions.
7. You don't need to be a genius; you just need to collect more information.
8. Reading is not hard—pick up a book and stare at it. If you're not doing that, you're not serious.
9. Wise people don't solve problems; they avoid them.
10. Genius has the fewest moving parts.
11. Those at the margins often come to control the center.
12. Mute the world, build your own.
13. Don't do anything that someone else can do.
14. A natural monopoly is ideal, but if not, take an oligopoly.
15. Invest heavily in the technologies of the day.
16. Ideas that are easy to understand are easy to spread.
17. Make yourself easy to interface with.
18. Relationships run the world.
19. History doesn’t repeat; human nature does.
20. Quality of your life is the direct result of the quality of your decisions.
21. Don't learn to deal with stress; learn to enjoy it.
22. Belief comes before ability.
23. Problems are opportunities in work clothes.
24. Books are made out of books.
25. Bad boys move in silence.
26. Learning from history is a form of leverage.
27. Designing in constraints is powerful.
28. The world is your classroom.
29. "Always more audacity." — Winston Churchill
30. Excellence is the capacity to take pain.
31. Actions express priorities.
32. The public praises people for what they practice in private.
33. There are ideas worth billions in a $30 history book.
34. Successful people listen. Those that don’t, don’t last long.
35. If you know your business from A to Z, no problem is unsolvable.
36. Business is problems; the best companies are problem-solving machines.
37. Gentlemen, watch your costs.
38. You aren't advertising to a standing army; you're advertising to a moving parade.
39. Self-pity has no utility.
40. Always more audacious.
41. Wisdom is prevention.
42. Go for great (Munger).
43. Go for freedom (Zell).
44. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active.
45. Time carries most of the weight.
46. Incentives rule everything around you.
47. Find a simple idea and take it seriously.
48. Good ideas are rare; when you find one, bet heavily.
49. Genius lies in ignoring the unimportant.
50. Intensity is the price of excellence.
51. You can’t save souls in an empty church.
52. Scale and fanaticism combined are powerful.
53. If you’re not working on your best idea, you're doing it wrong.
54. Ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.
55. Become friends with the eminent dead.
56. People are power law; the best ones change everything.
57. By endurance, we conquer.
58. Keep things simple and remember what you set out to do.
59. The founder is the guardian of the company’s soul.
60. In business, the winning system maximizes or minimizes one or a few variables.
61. Imitation precedes creation.
62. Focus is saying no.
63. Optimism is a moral duty.
64. Intense concentration can bring out hidden resources in people.
65. If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.
66. Obsess over customers.
67. Being extreme in your craft is essential in the age of leverage.
68. Learning is not memorizing; it’s changing behavior.
69. Repeat, repeat, repeat; volume and consistency win.
70. If you love what you do, the only exit strategy is death.
71. The story of the father is embedded in the son.
72. The hard way is the right way.
73. Be intolerant of slowness.
74. Hire a professional critic.
75. Experts don’t know sh*t.
76. I love the climb; I don’t care where the summit is.
77. "If you do everything, you will win."
78. "Reading is forced meditation."
79. "Action solves everything."
80. A great product has to be better than it has to be.
81. It’s not what you do; it’s how you do it.
82. "I'm not a businessman; I'm a business, man."
83. "Forever on the attack."
84. Life isn't about finding yourself; it's about creating yourself.
85. Plan B should be to make Plan A work.
86. The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.
87. The good ones know more.
88. Avoid boring people.
89. The best thing I did was choose the right heroes.
90. All good things in life come from compounding.
91. A players hire A players; B players hire C players.
92. "Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees."
93. Have pride in creation, not consumption.
94. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
95. Once you find something that works, shut up about it.
96. If you know the basics, you have an advantage over others (Kobe).
97. Apply specific knowledge with leverage, and you’ll get what you deserve (Naval).
98. There’s no substitute for hard work.
99. Collect a handful of ideas, then hammer them home repeatedly.
100. It’s slothful not to compress your thoughts.
101. A novice is easily spotted because they do too much.
102. "Repetition is persuasive."
103. Keep the main thing the main thing.
I've done several podcast episodes with David, usually with our buddy @baldridgecpa, and we have another one coming soon!
Vince McMahon on WWE's main product: "We make movies, pal."
Notes on story + product:
1) without story, there is no product. without story, WWE is a min wage sideshow in a Walmart parking lot. with story, it's a business worth ~$20 billion. Vince sold the thing beneath the thing: story
2) without character, there is no story. a wrestling match is a point in time, but The Rock is forever. Vince didn't sell matches; he sold characters.
3) without conflict, there is no character. WWE is a masterclass on hero + villain archetypes. the face vs the heel. It was irresistible during the era of Homer, and it's irresistible today.
4) without stakes, there is no conflict. the physical consequences incited drama every single week. Vince himself tore both quads sliding into the ring.
5) without desire, there are no stakes. two conflicting wants (the championship belt, the girl, etc) creates an undeniable narrative propulsion.
You don't sell product.
You sell feeling:
1) Dana White, UFC: I sell holy shit moments for a living
2) Charles Revson, Revlon: In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the store, we sell hope
3) Guy Laliberté, Cirque du Soleil: We're happiness merchants
4) Jon Taffer, Bar Rescue: The burger is not the product, the reaction is
5) Ferrari: We don't sell cars, we sell dreams
6) Harley-Davidson: We sell the chance for a 43-year-old accountant to put on black leather, ride through small towns, and have people be afraid of him
The great risk of Business is the problem-choice tradeoff. When you choose to work on something, you reject everything else. And if you don't reject everything else, you'll lose. The only way to win is to work on the one thing for a long time.
So the best choice has to minimize the risk of this tradeoff. Some questions to help:
1) If it fails, will you have learned the things you wanted to?
2) Does it allow you to work with the people + customers you'd be happy to be around?
3) Does the domain align with your natural curiosities and obsessions?
If you answer yes to all of those things, then you can't lose.
Great way to sell: transform a cortisol response (something out of their control) into a dopamine response (something completely within their grasp)
To maximize memetic potential, you have to engineer the right conceptual packaging.
Examples:
1) 1000 True Fans
2) Skin in the Game
3) Eat the Frog
Always think in high-imagery frames
the 2 feelings to watch for as you consume great content:
1) surprise
2) satisfaction
whenever something feels both surprising + satisfying, you're witnessing an artist's mastery.
Think of a fresh instance of Claude as the morning version of you after a great night of sleep + freshly caffeinated.
Think of a 200k+ token-stuffed instance of Claude as the version of you after a 12 hour shift.
Now imagine you can infinitely replicate the morning version of you for any task throughout the entire day and design your workflows under these assumptions.
the creative block:
1) free yourself from the burden of expectation
2) create the thing that gives you relief
3) don’t chase applause - chase relief
Anthropic has masterfully executed the most important principle of Positioning:
First to market is nothing.
First to mind is everything.
They own mindshare for devs, power users, newbies, and even OS tools with naming riffs like Clawd, despite being a late entrant to market.
Opportunity cost has exploded in the past 3 years. Everything that has suddenly become attainable, simultaneously feels not worth doing.
The most important problem remains problem selection.
The last idea appears over and over again:
1) tell the truth but make it fascinating (Ogilvy)
2) archetypal stories are universal human experiences wrapped in unique culture-specific expressions (McKee)
3) say something true in an interesting way (@naval)
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Decision Velocity - the single variable that determines how well any organization runs.
The CIA's sabotage manual perfectly illustrates this, if you simply invert their model:
1) Empower direct action
2) Get to the point
3) Kill meetings
4) Stay on target
5) Be directionally accurate, not perfect
6) Don't second guess
7) Action over caution
8) Act first, ask forgiveness later
