philosophy 101

No one is going to beat you at being you. Find what that feels like—play to you but looks like work to others. So that you’re going to outcompete them because you’re doing it effortlessly; you’re doing it for fun.
The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have. Escape competition through authenticity, by being your own self.
To be successful in two words — productize yourself.
Much better to treat this like a search function: find the work you want to do, or the place you want to be at, and the best time to figure this out is right now.
Try to focus on the overarching problem and try to solve that problem. If you want to be successful, define success very concretely and focus on that. In everything else, when you tend to see your mind, it becomes a problem.
You have one life, don’t settle for mediocrity.
The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of your life, and there are two parts to that —
- One is getting what you want, so you know how to get it.
- Second, wanting the right thing—knowing what to want in the first place.
Use secretary theorem (read about it) to pick stuff in life. Optimal time is about ⅓ or 37%.
- The interesting thing about the secretary problem is that it’s not time-based. It’s not based on ⅓ of the time; it’s iteration-based (analogy: the number of candidates or number of shots you took on goal).
Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea of 10,000 hours to mastery — but I think it’s 10,000 (not actually, but some unknown number) iterations to mastery. It’s about the number of iterations that drives a learning curve.
Iterations are not repetitions. Repetition is about repeating a thing over and over.
Iteration is modifying it with a learning and doing another version of it. So that’s error correction. So if you’ll get 10,000 error corrections in anything, you’ll be an expert at it.