Every time I'm not reading, I'm thinking about reading.
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It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect—most careers progress fairly linearly.
Your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results.
I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.
It's like what Atomic Habits describes - growing 1% every day is better than nothing at all. This compounding effect will provide even higher level-ups in life. I didn't really equate it to my career as directly so seeing his take on career was fascinating.
Most highly successful people have been really right about the future at least once at a time when people thought they were wrong.
Be almost knowingly delusional about yourself and your skills. Remember to not overdo this and become an egoist.
One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution. The more times you do this, the more you will believe it. Grit comes from learning you can get back up after you get knocked down.
Nothing in standard day-to-day life prepares you for this.
Be able to convince other people of what you believe.
My other big sales tip is to show up in person whenever it’s important. When I was first starting out, I was always willing to get on a plane. It was frequently unnecessary, but three times it led to career-making turning points for me that otherwise would have gone the other way.
Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward.
Keeping your life cheap and flexible for as long as you can is a powerful way to do this, but obviously comes with tradeoffs.
Focus is a force multiplier on work.
You can get to about the 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both—you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot.
One more thought about working hard: do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off.
I believe that it’s easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup. People want to be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters.
Ask for what you want. You usually won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well.
To be willful, you have to be optimistic. I have never met a very successful pessimistic person.
If you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.
Be overly generous with sharing the upside; it will come back to you 10x. Also, learn how to evaluate what people are great at, and put them in those roles.
A particularly valuable part of building a network is to get good at discovering undiscovered talent. Quickly spotting intelligence, drive, and creativity gets much easier with practice. The easiest way to learn is just to meet a lot of people, and keep track of who goes on to impress you and who doesn’t. Remember that you are mostly looking for rate of improvement, and don’t overvalue experience or current accomplishment.
I try to always ask myself when I meet someone new “is this person a force of nature?” It’s a pretty good heuristic for finding people who are likely to accomplish great things.
Time only scales linearly. The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.
they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world.
This is why the question of a person’s motivation is so important. It’s the first thing I try to understand about someone. The right motivations are hard to define a set of rules for, but you know it when you see it.