Paul Levesque
September 9, 2017
“During his peak travel period, Paul traveled 260+ days per year, performing in a different city each night. Here is one of his rules:
“When I landed, I would check into the hotel. The second we checked in, I’d ask them: ‘Is the gym open? Can I go train?’ Even if it was to get on a bike and ride for 15 minutes to reset things. I learned early that it seemed any time I did that, I didn’t get jet lag.”
TF: This absolutely seems to work, even if done at 1 a.m. and for 3 to 5 minutes. I don’t know the physiological mechanism, but I use it.”
September 9, 2017
“There are a lot of things that he said to me then that I find myself telling the young guys now…. For example, if you don’t do something well, don’t do it unless you want to spend the time to improve it. Still, to this day, I see a lot of guys do stuff in the ring and think, ‘He doesn’t do that well, but he does it all the time.’ You shouldn’t do that.”
Chris Sacca
September 12, 2017
“Chris elaborates: “Generally, what all of this comes down to is whether you are on offense or defense. I think that as you survey the challenges in your lives, it’s just: Which of those did you assign yourself, and which of those are you doing to please someone else? Your inbox is a to-do list to which anyone in the world can add an action item. I needed to get out of my inbox and back to my own to-do list.”
September 14, 2017
“GOOD STORIES ALWAYS BEAT GOOD SPREADSHEETS”
“Whether you are raising money, pitching your product to customers, selling the company, or recruiting employees, never forget that underneath all the math and the MBA bullshit talk, we are all still emotionally driven human beings. We want to attach ourselves to narratives. We don’t act because of equations. We follow our beliefs. We get behind leaders who stir our feelings. In the early days of your venture, if you find someone diving too deep into the numbers, that means they are struggling to find a reason to deeply care about you.”
September 14, 2017
“BE YOUR UNAPOLOGETICALLY WEIRD SELF”
“I gave a commencement speech in Minnesota few years ago [at the Carlson School of Management]. The core of it was to be your unapologetically weird self. I think authenticity is one of the most lacking things out there these days.”
Marc Andreessen
September 10, 2017
“The number-one theme that companies have when they really struggle is they are not charging enough for their product. It has become conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is to price your product as low as possible, under the theory that if it’s low-priced, everybody can buy it, and that’s how you get to volume,” he said. “And we just see over and over and over again people failing with that, because they get into a problem called ‘too hungry to eat.’ They don’t charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it. Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?”
September 10, 2017
“To avoid the potential problem of newer hires getting battered more than senior folks, Marc and his founding partner, Ben Horowitz, make a point of smashing each other. “Whenever [Ben] brings in a deal, I just beat the shit out of it. I might think it’s the best idea I’ve ever heard of, but I’ll just trash the crap out of it and try to get everybody else to pile on. And then, at the end of it, if he’s still pounding the table saying, ‘No, no, this is the thing …’ then we say we’re all in. We’re all behind you…. It’s a ‘disagree and commit’ kind of culture. By the way, he does the same thing to me. It’s the torture test.”
September 10, 2017
“Most people go through life and never develop strong views on things, or specifically go along and buy into the consensus. One of the things I think you want to look for as both a founder and as an investor is things that are out of consensus, something very much opposed to the conventional wisdom…. Then, if you’re going to start a company around that, if you’re going to invest in that, you better have strong conviction because you’re making a very big bet of time or money or both. [But] what happens when the world changes? What happens when something else happens?”
September 10, 2017
“Marc and I are both huge fans of Steve Martin’s autobiography, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life. Marc highlighted one takeaway:
“He says the key to success is, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’”
TF: Marc has another guiding tenet: “Smart people should make things.” He says: “If you just have those two principles—that’s a pretty good way to orient.”
September 10, 2017
“To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.”
Seth Godin
September 9, 2017
“BE A MEANINGFUL SPECIFIC INSTEAD OF A WANDERING GENERALITY”
September 9, 2017
“Keeping track of all the times someone has broken our heart or double-crossed us or let us down. Of course, we can keep track of those things, but why? Why keep track of them? Are they making us better?
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep track of the other stuff? To keep track of all the times it worked? All the times we took a risk? All the times we were able to brighten someone else’s day? When we start doing that, we can redefine ourselves as people who are able to make an impact on the world. It took me a bunch of cycles to figure out that the narrative was up to me.”
September 9, 2017
“Seth has published roughly 6,500 posts on his blog since 2002. Which blog post would he point people to first, if he had to pick one?
“The blog post I point people to the most is called ‘First, Ten,’ and it is a simple theory of marketing that says: tell ten people, show ten people, share it with ten people; ten people who already trust you and already like you. If they don’t tell anybody else, it’s not that good and you should start over. If they do tell other people, you’re on your way.”
Scott Adams
September 10, 2017
“► Naval Ravikant (here) regularly credits Scott’s short blog post “The Day You Became a Better Writer” for improving his writing.
”
September 10, 2017
“Scott believes there are six elements of humor: naughty, clever, cute, bizarre, mean, and recognizable. You have to have at least two dimensions to succeed.
”
September 10, 2017
“Fundamentally, “systems” could be thought of as asking yourself, “What persistent skills or relationships can I develop?” versus “What short-term goal can I achieve?” The former has a potent snowball effect, while the latter is a binary pass/fail with no consolation prize. Scott writes about this extensively in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. Here’s one real-world example:
”
September 10, 2017
“TF: At this point, I asked Scott about a clever line Trump often uses to shut down journalists, which is a quick interjection of “Check your facts, [insert journalist name].”
”
September 10, 2017
“SCOTT: “‘Check your facts’ is what I call the ‘high ground maneuver.’ It’s the same thing Jobs did when he explained away Antennagate just by saying, ‘All smart phones have problems. We’re trying to make our customers happy.’ He made a national story go away in less than 30 seconds with those two sentences.”
”
September 10, 2017
“To minimize decisions, Scott wakes up, pushes a button for coffee, and has the same breakfast every morning: a chocolate–peanut butter flavor Clif Builder’s 20-gram protein bar. The next step is exposing himself to new information to generate ideas for his comic strip:”
September 10, 2017
“There’s a process where once you clear your mind, you have to flood it. You may use different words for this, but I know you do it. So you empty it, and then you flood it with new input that’s not the old input. So I’m looking at the news, I’m looking at stuff I haven’t seen. I’m not looking at yesterday’s problem for the fifth time. I’m looking at a new problem, I’m thinking of a new idea. But then you’ve got to find out where in that flood is the little piece that’s worth working with.”
September 10, 2017
“if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.”
September 10, 2017
“Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. … ”
September 10, 2017
“At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal. And it could be as simple as learning how to sell more effectively than 75% of the world.”
Alex Blumburg
September 9, 2017
“Prompts to Elicit Stories (Most Interviewers Are Weak at This)
“Tell me about a time when …”
“Tell me about the day [or moment or time] when …”
“Tell me the story of … [how you came to major in X, how you met so-and-so, etc.]”
“Tell me about the day you realized ___ …”
“What were the steps that got you to ___ ?”
Ed Catmull
September 14, 2017
“We had to [start over internally] with Toy Story 2. We had to do it with Ratatouille … [since] all our films, to begin with, suck.”
September 14, 2017
“This is the big misconception that people have, that [in the beginning] a new film is the baby version of the final film, when in fact the final film bears no relationship to what you started off with. What we’ve found is that the first version always sucks. ”
September 14, 2017
“Right now, we have a three-picture deal with Disney.’ The financial [profit-sharing] terms of the deal, while they were as good as we could have gotten under the circumstances, once we [became] a successful company, then our share of the profits was actually pretty small.”
Maria Popova
September 9, 2017
“ There is just so much—and I mean so much—universal timeless truth in his private reflections, on everything from the best definition of success to the perils of sitting, which he wrote about 150 years before we started saying, ‘Sitting is the new smoking.’”
September 9, 2017
“Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect”
September 9, 2017
“If you don’t have the patience to read something, don’t have the hubris to comment on it”
September 9, 2017
“Evernote has, as you know, optical character recognition. So, when I search within it, it’s also going to search the text in that image.”
September 9, 2017
“When Kurt Vonnegut wrote ‘Write to please just one person,’ what he was really saying was write for yourself. ”
September 9, 2017
“What is the worst advice you see or hear given in your trade or area of expertise?
“‘Follow your dreams.’ It’s impossible to do without self-knowledge, which takes years. You discover your ‘dream’ (or sense of purpose) in the very act of walking the path, which is guided by equal parts choice and chance.”
