Deliberately choose and invest in your peer group, recognizing that you tend to become the average of your five closest friends, making this choice massively formative for your personal development.
Actively pursue your deep interests and self-education, even if it means diverging from conventional educational paths, as this can lead to accelerated learning and unique opportunities.
Be open to unexpected opportunities and ideas that arise, especially if you are not bound by strong cultural expectations for traditional paths, as this can lead to significant shifts in your trajectory.
Actively test your career hypotheses, even returning to previous paths to re-evaluate, and be willing to pivot if the reality of a field or your personal enjoyment doesn’t align with your expectations.
Prioritize decision speed, making more decisions with less confidence and earlier in the decision-making curve, treating fast decisions as an asset, as you can often course-correct later.
Categorize decisions by their degree of reversibility and magnitude of impact; deliberate carefully over low-reversibility, high-impact decisions, but prioritize speed and flexibility for all other types.
As a leader, deliberately make fewer decisions by pushing others to decide, recognizing that your need to make a decision often signals an underlying organizational or institutional issue that needs fixing.
When disagreeing on a decision, don’t just discuss the decision itself; instead, dig into the underlying differences in mental models or what each party is optimizing for, to achieve deeper alignment.
Have different parts of the organization explicitly write down what they are optimizing for, their mission, long-term key metrics, and customers, to ensure foundational agreement and reduce persistent friction from latent disagreements.
Optimize for designing robust feedback mechanisms, incentive structures, mindsets, and clear goal definitions within the organization, treating it more like a continuous, biological apparatus rather than a series of binary decisions.
Cultivate a culture of thoughtful disagreement where people enjoy finding the limitations and exceptions of arguments and beliefs, rather than seeing such challenges as personal attacks, to foster deeper understanding.
Embrace the mindset that ’there are no knockdown arguments’ and actively seek out where heuristics, intuitions, and rules might be wrong, viewing such discoveries as enjoyable rather than stressful.
Cultivate rigor and clarity of thought, prioritizing correctness over smoothness of interactions, and be willing to contemplate improbable or surprising ideas, even if it means being wrong.
Cultivate determination and competitiveness, finding enjoyment in pushing against difficult odds and expected failures, as this mindset is crucial for achieving significant goals, especially in challenging environments like startups.
Prioritize interpersonal warmth and a genuine desire to make others around you better, as this creates a more enjoyable and supportive environment, especially given the large fraction of life spent at work.
Uphold strong ethics and integrity in all actions and interactions, as this is a foundational expectation for any individual and organization.
When considering a new venture, actively search for problems where an obvious solution for a large market should exist but doesn’t, as this non-existence can signal a significant, overlooked opportunity.
Before committing to a new venture, thoroughly investigate if any unobserved constraints or ’latent forces’ (like regulatory blocks) exist that might prevent a solution from being viable, ensuring you’re not pursuing an impossible problem.
Build a prototype quickly to get a sense of what a solution could look like and to test initial assumptions, even if it’s more of a concept rendering than a full solution, to gauge viability.
Validate that the problems you perceive for a niche segment are also shared by larger entities or represent a much broader market, indicating a significant ‘ocean’ of opportunity rather than just a small ’lake’.
Recognize that in scaling a business, problems will materialize at an uncontrolled rate across all levels and magnitudes of the organization, requiring constant adaptation and problem-solving efforts.
Practice emotional self-management to deal with the psychological difficulty of facing a constant, often unreasonable, swathe of problems that materialize daily in a scaling organization.
Learn to make consequential decisions under uncertainty, balancing the desire to obtain more information with time constraints, recognizing that you often won’t have time to fully mitigate uncertainty.
Continuously balance exploration (figuring out new things) and exploitation (optimizing existing systems), allocating resources (e.g., 70-80% to optimization, 20% to speculative bets) to ensure both stability and future growth.
Be self-aware of your managerial and leadership inadequacies relative to the demands of a rapidly growing company, and actively figure out strategies to acquire necessary skills as rapidly as possible.
Allocate resources using heuristics, such as devoting 70-80% to optimizing existing operations and 20% to speculative projects, but remain flexible to revisit or make exceptions for particularly promising opportunities.
As an organization grows, permit heterogeneity in the balance of exploration and exploitation across different teams, allowing some to focus more on new ventures and others on optimization to avoid diseconomies of scale.
When considering speculative projects, prioritize those where the downside cost is not excessively large or fatal to the organization, even if the potential upside is significant, to manage risk.
Actively reconcile the mindsets of those optimizing existing systems with those exploring fundamentally new ideas, ensuring they can collaborate and feel like they are on the same team despite their structural disagreements.
Seek to build or join organizations with strong, well-defined cultures that members can articulate at length, including what they dislike, as this indicates a clear identity rather than a ‘milk toast averaging’.
Cultivate a culture of perfection with extraordinarily high standards and a primacy of work, where the work speaks for itself, sometimes with anonymity of the creator, demonstrating a deep belief in quality.
Study organizations with longevity and sustained success over decades, looking beyond single drivers of success to understand the underlying institutional characteristics that enable continuous compounding and adaptation.
Prioritize epistemology, structuring doubt, and accounting for biases to achieve clarity of thinking, drawing inspiration from successful multi-decadal institutions like Berkshire Hathaway and Koch Industries.
If raising children, consider how limitations (like poor internet access) can foster a love for reading and self-directed exploration, allowing children to burrow through books and follow their own interests.
When guiding others, push from behind by supporting their interests rather than pulling in front by choosing them, fostering intrinsic motivation and self-directed exploration.
Treat reading as something you ‘ought to do’ because there’s so much important knowledge to acquire, even if it’s not always a blissful experience, to alleviate the stress of not knowing.
Filter reading material ruthlessly: prioritize books that are both ‘really worth reading’ and ‘really enjoyable to read,’ discarding those that don’t meet both criteria, as there are more such books than you can read in a lifetime.
Be an active consumer of books: skim, skip, backtrack, discard, and annotate wildly, recognizing that you are not subject to the book but rather the book is there for your utility.
Don’t just follow the people you admire; instead, follow what they admired, trying to disentangle the obscure influences and upstream sources that shaped their ideas and work.
Optimize ‘dead’ time by reading while walking, as your peripheral vision allows for functional reading, making use of time you already spend in motion.
When starting a new book, jump midway through and read a few pages to see if you ‘would like to have ended up here,’ and if so, backtrack to the start to read more seriously.
At every moment, strive to be reading the ‘best book for you’ in the world; as soon as you discover something more interesting or important, immediately discard your current book in its favor to avoid reading suboptimal material.
Leave physical books strewn everywhere (kitchen, bedroom, bed) to create an ‘idea space’ that makes productive intellectual collisions more likely, as their presence can trigger relevance or recommendations.
Annotate books by underlining or marking in the margin, rather than the text itself, so you can quickly flip through and see all the parts you’ve marked.
On the last pages or inside cover of a book, quickly note page numbers for particularly interesting points or things that jumped out, creating a list for easy future reference.
For really good books, write a review for friends (e.g., email, Google Doc) or share snippets, as the act of summarization aids synthesis and recollection, and it can also trigger further suggestions from friends.
Reach out to people whose work you admire and tell them so; even if only half respond, the asymmetric upside of potential dialogue and connection is incredibly rewarding and costs little when they don’t.
Work to reduce fundamental friction in global commerce, such as making it easy for any two parties in arbitrarily chosen countries to transact, as this will have enormous consequences for worldwide economic development.
Think about how to perturb overall economic systems to move macro outcome measures, such as increasing the number of technology firms started, their survival rate, and their expansion, rather than just focusing on micro-level improvements.
Advocate for and implement better management practices, as empirical evidence shows they can lead to double-digit percentage increases in revenue and value provided, representing an incredible low-hanging fruit for economic improvement.
Challenge societal inconsistencies where we decry a lack of innovation or poor outcomes, yet collectively implement structures (e.g., regulatory) that actively prevent improvement, recognizing the dissonance in our stated desires and collective actions.
Actively address issues like housing and cost of living in productive regions, recognizing that inefficient land use and high costs are a negative-sum game that stifles future innovation and displaces people, rather than being an unavoidable economic force.