In today’s newsletter, I bring you some interesting nuggets taken from Daniel Kahneman’s speech at Google (and expanded with examples from Nassim Taleb and Naval Ravikant) on the 4 core biases that distorts our perception of reality and lead us to bad decisions.

Hope you find it valuable :)

Bias #1 — Context-Dependence

The Experiment…

Many people will read that as “ABC”.

Many people will read that as “12 13 14”.

Reality…

The “B” and the “13” are exactly the same!!

Conclusion…

What happened is that we have a tendency to produce coherence from the context, and this leads to errors in our judgment.

Another important conclusion is that we automatically and subconsciously suppressed the ambiguity, so we are not even aware of the possible confusion!

[Nassim Taleb on the Context-Dependence]

Nassim illustrates this tendency with an observation from people who take the elevator to go to the Gym to then exercise on the “Stair-master” (a machine to do steps). They don’t realize that the natural stairs (such as the one in the building) is essentially the same thing as the “Stair-master”.

In his book Antifragile, he wrote:

“This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it.”

Another story from his book Antifragile:

“

In business, people pay for the option when it is identified and mapped in a contract, so explicit options tend to be expensive to purchase, much like insurance contracts. They are often overhyped. But because of the domain dependence of our minds, we don’t recognize it in other places, where these options tend to remain underpriced or not priced at all.

I learned about the asymmetry of the option in class at the Wharton School, in the lecture on financial options that determined my career, and immediately realized that the professor did not himself see the implications. Simply, he did not understand nonlinearities and the fact that the optionality came from some asymmetry! Domain dependence: he missed it in places where the textbook did not point to the asymmetry —he understood optionality mathematically, but not really outside the equation. He did not think of trial and error as options. He did not think of model error as negative options. And, thirty years later, little has changed in the understanding of the asymmetries by many who, ironically, teach the subject of options.

”

Bias #2 — Judgment based on Preconceived Knowledge

The Experiment…

A person hears an upper class male British voice saying, “I have large tattoos all down my back”.

Reaction from the person…

He gets surprised by this statement. Kahneman argues that if you think about it, this is astonishing… Because the person had to classify that voice as coming from an upper-class British male, and then based on that assumption the person deduces that this individual don’t have tattoos (as it would contradict the construct of a typical upper-class British male). Thus, when he hears the statement from this individual “I have large tattoos all down my back”, he gets surprised because it opposes his preconceived knowledge on that individual, he didn’t expect it at all.

Conclusion…

“System 1 (our brains’ automatic and effortless response) holds a world-knowledge and uses it to classify situations as normal/abnormal. And it does this at top speed.”

Bias #3 — Fast Creation of New Norms

Daniel Kahneman explains this phenomenon with a personal story (on his speech at Google and on his book “Thinking Fast and Slow”). He was with his wife in a 40-villa Resort in Australia, when suddenly he met Jon (a peer psychologist from Stanford). 2 weeks later, Daniel and his wife found Jon again in a theater in London!

They draw 2 conclusions from it:

1. From System 2 (the effortful/rational part of the brain): “It was a more remarkable coincidence than the first meeting”

2. From System 1 (the effortless/automatic part of the brain): “We were distinctly less surprised to meet Jon on the second occasion than we had been on the first”

So even though they were aware that the second time was a more remarkable coincidence, they were less surprised because they (subconsciously) created a new norm: “He was now the psychologist who shows up when we travel abroad”.

“It takes very little time to create a norm” (Speech at Google)

“A single incident may make a recurrence less surprising.” (Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow)

“By any measure of probability, meeting Jon in the theater was no more likely than meeting any one of our hundreds of acquaintances—yet meeting Jon seemed more normal.” (Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow)

Story from Naval Ravikant

A common and important consequence of this bias is the so called “Hedonic Adaptation” — Getting used to positive/negative life changes.

In the Tim Ferriss Podcast, Naval said the following:

“

When I achieved those material and social successes, or at least beyond the point where they didn't matter as much to me anymore, I realized that my peer group and a lot of the people who were around me and the people who had achieved the similar successes were on their way to achieving more and more successes just didn't seem all that happy!

And in my case there was definitely hedonic adaptation — I'd very quickly get used to anything.

So [this] led me to the conclusion that happiness is internal. And so then that set me on a path of starting to work more on my internal self and realizing that all real success is internal and has very little to do with external circumstances.

”

"If you can’t be happy with a coffee, you won’t be happy with a yacht."

- Naval Ravikant

Bias #4 — Causal Reasoning

The Experiment…

Which is more probable?

A. “That a mother has blue eyes if her daughter has blue eyes”

B. “That a daughter has blue eyes if her mother has blue eyes”

Common Reaction…

The latter (option B) is perceived more probable.

Reality…

“If you stop to do the math, on the assumption that the incidence of blue eyes is the same two generations, the probabilities are strictly equal.”

Conclusion…

“Your reasoning flows along causal lines. This happens intuitively.”

Why? → “It feels more coherent”

Outcome → The event is perceived to be more likely.

Story from Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan

“

One day in December 2003, when Saddam Hussein was captured, Bloomberg News flashed the following headline at 13:01: U.S. TREASURIES RISE; HUSSEIN CAPTURE MAY NOT CURB TERRORISM. Whenever there is a market move, the news media feel obligated to give the “reason.” Half an hour later, they had to issue a new headline. As these U.S. Treasury bonds fell in price, Bloomberg News had a new reason for the fall: Saddam’s capture (the same Saddam).

At 13:31 they issued the next bulletin: U.S. TREASURIES FALL; HUSSEIN CAPTURE BOOSTS ALLURE OF RISKY ASSETS. So it was the same capture (the cause) explaining one event and its exact opposite. Clearly, this can’t be; these two facts cannot be linked.

It happens all the time: a cause is proposed to make you swallow the news and make matters more concrete. Any conceivable cause can do.

”

Daniel Kahneman also talked about this in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. He wrote…

“

Hussein’s capture was the major event of the day and because of the way the automatic search for causes shapes our thinking, that event was destined to be the explanation of whatever happened in the market on that day….

All headlines do is satisfy our need for coherence!

”

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This Blogpost is brought to you by Shortform - The platform that I love using to get nuggets from Books!

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. This is how I mainly learn from books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms). But of course, for books that I’m deeply interested in reading I still read the entire book! And then use Shortform to quickly re-visit the main ideas.

I also made a short video exploring the platform and showing you how I’m personally using it. Here’s the Link!

The cost is equivalent to the price of one book a month and you can use my affiliate link to get a 5-Day FREE trial and a 20% Discount on the annual subscription (besides, you will be supporting my work 😉) - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

The mark of a great (non-fiction) author:

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Until next time :)

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!

In today’s article, I bring you some insightful nuggets from Naval Ravikant and Mohnish Pabrai on common middle class habits that keeps people working on a 9-5 job until they are sufficiently old to retire.

Even if you are not in the rat race, these nuggets are still very insightful as they provide a solid bedrock for personal growth, agency and freedom.

Hope you find it valuable :)

👨 People

Naval Ravikant — Co-founder of AngelList and co-author of Venture Hacks. He has invested (early-stage) in companies like Uber, Twitter and FourSquare.

Mohnish Pabrai — Entrepreneur and investor. He sold his first business for 20M$. He founded the NGO "Dakshana" in India, and has a close friendship with Charlie Munger.

📝 Notes

Habit #1 — Thinking Wealth is Zero-sum

There is the general notion that making money is evil.

“Money is the root of all evil”

And this is partly true, as it incentivizes theft and corruption. And indeed, this is negative-sum (for someone to get richer they make others poorer). But this is different from true wealth creation — the kind of wealth that is positive-sum! Meaning that you don’t have to make someone poor to make yourself rich, and in fact you are not only making yourself richer but also the entire Society!

“With the rise of the middle class, wealth stopped being a zero sum game. Jobs and Wozniak didn’t have to make us poor to make themselves rich. Quite the opposite: they created things that made our lives materially richer. They had to, or we wouldn’t have paid for them. But since for most of the world’s history the main route to wealth was to steal it, we tend to be suspicious of rich people. Idealistic undergraduates find their unconsciously preserved child’s model of wealth confirmed by eminent writers of the past. It is a case of the mistaken meeting the outdated.” - Paul Graham (Hackers and Painters)

“Understand ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.” - Naval Ravikant

And although all of today’s wealth has been created by playing positive-sum games, most people focus on the negatives of wealth. Why is that?

• Positive-sum wealth creation games are pretty recent. Before the Industrial Revolution most people got rich by stealing or bribing.

  “For most of human history the usual way to accumulate

  a fortune was to steal it: in pastoral societies by cattle

  raiding; in agricultural societies by appropriating others’ estates

  in times of war, and taxing them in times of peace.” - Paul Graham (Hackers and Painters)

• There is a natural tendency in humans to be pessimistic.

• It feels better in the short-term to blame anyone (who is not you) about your circumstances and your future. And is not hard to fall in this trap as it is the entire business of politics — their goal is always to victimize you from the rival political parties. Even when there are no real issues, they will come up with anything and make it matter to you!

Habit #2 — Playing Status Games

You want to avoid Status Games because these are Zero-sum games — To be a winner, there must be a loser. The more you focus on these games, the more competitive and angry you become and the less wealth you will be capable of creating.

Some examples of Zero-sum games:

• Politics

• Sports

• Moral Signaling

  “Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.” - Naval Ravikant

• Materialistic Signaling (next habit)

Habit #3 — Materialistic Signaling

Upgrading your lifestyle every time you make more money leads to imprisonment — it makes you increasingly more dependent on your income source, and if that source is a 9-5 job then it will trap you there!

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates and a monthly salary” - Nassim Taleb

We often upgrade our lifestyle because of:

• the so called “hedonic treadmill”.

• and the phenomenon of “keeping up with the Joneses”.

  “Envy makes the world go around” - Naval Ravikant

  “It is not greed that drives the world, but envy” - Warren Buffet

How can we overcome it?

Get use to ignoring your peers.

“People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can't fathom.” - Naval Ravikant

"Survival and replication drive put us on the work treadmill. Hedonic adaptation keeps us there. The trick is knowing when to jump off and play instead.” - Naval Ravikant (The Almanack of Naval Ravikant)

Habit #4 — Being Tracked on Your Work

Escaping the 9-5 grind is actually VERY DIFFICULT. Your time and energy is chewed up by that job, so how are you supposed to work on anything else (in order to escape it)?

Well, one thing that definitely helps is to gravitate towards a career in which your input and your outputs are disconnected — that means that your time / effort is detached from your results.

Most Jobs: Inputs and Outputs are closely connected

In most jobs, inputs and outputs are closely connected. A good example (just to illustrate it) might be someone cutting wood or on a support role such as Customer Service.

In this case, the amount of hours put in matters! In this situation, the job will truly chew up all of your time and energy.

Solution

The key is trying to find a Career / Job / Education where you’ll end up in a business where the inputs and the outputs are disconnected.” - Naval Ravikant

The reality is… customers don’t care about how much time and effort you put in. They only care about the outcome! So if you can find a job in which you are directly involved in the building and selling of a product and you use some kind of leverage, you will be able to detach your time / effort from the results! It will free up your time!

Let’s look at some examples:

• Programmers. They can build products, and they use coding leverage. A good developer can write a piece of software that adds disproportionate economic value to a business. On the other hand, a bad developer can write code all day long and not add any value to the business.

  

• Real Estate Agent. This is not necessarily a good job, given the ton of competition out there, but it is a good example to illustrate this concept of input-output detachment. If you are selling high-end Real Estate, you can spend the same time and effort as someone selling low-end Real Estate, but you will make much more money! This is because you are getting a commission from the sale and you have capital leverage! (the more capital, the bigger the gains regardless of your time and effort input).

Habit #5 — Believing in Shortcuts

People selling get-rich-quick advice for 20$… that’s all complete non-sense! There are NO get-rich-quick schemes. That’s just somebody else trying to get rich off of you. 

It is surprising to see how many people fall for these things.

Why do people fall for it?

• Most people are desperate for making money.

• Most people don’t know how to truly create wealth.

“But the truth is that making money is a by-product of learning!”

Habit #6 — Stop Learning after School

[Mohnish Pabrai]

“Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five.” - Benjamin Franklin

What does it mean? “It means that from age 26 - 75 -> Is just a living corpse.”

“What happens with a lot of humans is that they stop learning when they finish school. It means that at 25, they stop growing and stop learning.”

Even people who went to elite universities don’t go very far in life, because they are not learning machines. They just learned what they were taught in school.

[Naval Ravikant]

“If you are a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options on how to make money” - Naval Ravikant

“I would say that the most important skill to getting rich… is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to be able to learn anything that you want to learn.”

No book in the library should scare you!

Some books will be challenging… but that’s OK. Go back and re-read them. The pain of confusion when you are not understanding something leads to mental growth, just like the pain in the gym leads to muscle growth!

Picking Nuggets Reflection:

“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest,  sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.” - Charlie Munger

“If you're a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options for how to make money. You can always see what's coming up in society, what the value is,  where the demand is, and you can learn to come up to speed.” - Naval Ravikant

Ultimately, the most common way to escape the rat race is to be an entrepreneur and build businesses. And there’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur! In words of Shopify’s President:

“Remember that the cost of failure, right now, is the lowest it’s ever been in the history of the world” - Harley Finkelstein (President of Shopify and Entrepreneur)

And the reason for this is that in today’s world you have free leverage at your disposal. Your website, app or media content are essentially assets that can earn while you sleep.

"An army of robots is already here. The bottleneck is just figuring out intelligent and interesting things to do to them" - Naval Ravikant

And the way out of this bottleneck is to become a perpetual learner!

"Ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders: Just Learn” - Paul Graham (Speech at Stanford)

This Blogpost is brought to you by Shortform - The platform that I love using to get nuggets from Books!

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. This is how I mainly learn from books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms). But of course, for books that I’m deeply interested in reading I still read the entire book! And then use Shortform to quickly re-visit the main ideas.

I also made a short video exploring the platform and showing you how I’m personally using it. Here’s the Link!

The cost is equivalent to the price of one book a month and you can use my affiliate link to get a 5-Day FREE trial and a 20% Discount on the annual subscription (besides, you will be supporting my work 😉) - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

The mark of a great (non-fiction) author:

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Wishing you a lovely week!!

Julio ❣️

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!

In today’s newsletter, I have compiled Naval Ravikant’s life principles. Naval has laid out many principles, but here I only selected the principles that I think are the most core principles, timeless and that have had the greatest impact on *my* personal life since I first discovered his wisdom almost 3 years ago!

Hope you find it valuable :)

👨 People

Naval Ravikant is the co-founder of AngelList and co-author of Venture Hacks. He has invested (early-stage) in companies like Uber, Twitter and FourSquare.

📝 Notes

Rule #1 — Be ready to start over

"The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself." - Naval Ravikant

Once we choose a life / career path and we invest significant time in it, it is very hard to look for a new path and start over — Starting something feels confusing, you are more likely to make mistakes and be seen as a fool. But under some circumstances, that is the best thing to do!

“The Fool is the precursor to The Saviour”

- Jordan Peterson

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

- Steve Jobs

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life…”

- Steve Jobs

Rule #2 — When Inspired, Act Immediately

“Inspiration is perishable – act on it immediately”

- Naval Ravikant

Naval says that inspiration is a beautiful and powerful thing — So when you have it, use it immediately! Because as time goes by, your inspiration slowly fades away!

This is why Naval says one should be “impatient with actions”. You want to leverage on your inspiration energy as much as possible. But at the same time, one should be patient with the results, because you are dealing with non-linear complex systems (that is, all nature / social / economic activities — since these run under a Power Law) so it takes time to see results!

“Impatience with actions, patience with results.”

- Naval Ravikant

Also, learn to prioritize and apply your inspiration wisely…

“Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.”

- Naval Ravikant

Rule #3 — Choose to Be Yourself

“If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them then you get to listen to that little voice inside of your head that wants to do things a certain way and then you get to be you and no one in the world is gonna beat you at being you.

You're never gonna be as good at being me as I am. And I'm never gonna be as good at being you as you are. So certainly listen, absorb… but don’t try to emulate — it’s a fool’s errand.

Instead, each person is uniquely qualified of something. They have some specific knowledge, capability and desire that nobody else has! That's just purely from the combinatorial of human DNA and development

So your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most. To find out the business that needs you the most. To find out the project and the art that gives you the most — Because there's something out there just for you!”

(transcript from his interview with Shane Parrish)

“Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

- Steve Jobs

The combinatorics of human DNA and experience are staggering. You will never meet any two humans who are substitutable for each other.

- Naval Ravikant

Rule #4 — “Do What Feels Like Play to You, But Looks Like Work to Others”

Naval explains that there are 4 components to his famous quote that are equally important:

• “Feels” → You feel it. You have your heart on it.

• “Play” → It is fun to you!

  “That’s how I know no one can compete with me on it.

  Because I’m just playing 16 hours/day.”

  - Naval Ravikant

• “Looks” → Because the outside person doesn’t have the feel.

• “Work” → If it looks like work, it means that is useful (for a segment in Society) and you can monetize it!

“Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career.” A career is a concept for how one is supposed to progress through stages during the training for and practicing of your working life.

There are some big problems here. First and foremost is the notion that your work is different and separate from the rest of your life. If you are passionate about your life and your work, this can’t be so. They will become more or less one. This is a much better way to live one’s life.

Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work.”

- Steve Jobs

Rule #5 — Choose your Desires Carefully

“A happy person wants 10.000 things. A sick person just wants 1 thing. So… it’s your unlimited desires that are clouding your peace, your happiness.”

“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want”

- Naval Ravikant

“Have desires. You are a biological creature! But just be very careful of your desires. Don’t focus on more than 1 desire at a time — The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that… you will get it! But everything else… you gotta let go.”

(transcript from his interview with Joe Rogan)

"While you can have virtually anything you want, you can't have everything you want."

- Ray Dalio

Rule #6 — Fall in Love with Reading

“I probably read 1-2 hours / day. And that puts me in the top 0.0001%. It accounts for any material success that I’ve had in my life and any intelligence that I might have.”

Naval argues that he is on the top because real people don’t read an hour a day!

He also lays out the key to make yourself an avid reader — just make reading an habit! And how you do it an habit? By reading whatever you like! Naval says that is almost doesn’t matter what you read, because you are in the phase of making it an habit! Once you gain the habit, you can go and pick up more intellectually challenging material!

"Read what you love until you love to read."

- Naval Ravikant 

Naval also says that it doesn’t have to be books specifically — It’s everything that contains ideas and information: Blogposts, Twitter…

Picking Nuggets Note:

Personally, my 3 main sources of learning are:
* Videos and Podcasts.
* Books
* Shortform (Platform that creates the best study guides from hundreds of non-fiction books)

Charlie Munger reads around 500 non-fiction books every year. He said the following:

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads--and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.” 

It’s not about “educated” vs. “uneducated.” It’s about “likes to read” and “doesn’t like to read.”

- Naval Ravikant

Rule #7 — Master the Basics

“Now I realize that the biggest mistake is memorization… To live in congruence with reality… You want to have a deep understanding of what you do and why you do it. So, it is much more important to know the basics really well than it is to know the advance.” (transcript)

"To think clearly, understand the basics.”

- Naval Ravikant

“A clear mind leads to better judgment, leads to better outcome.”

- Naval Ravikant

Having a deep understanding of the basics is much more useful in Life / Business compared to knowing the advanced stuff!

• e.g./ You don’t need Calculus but a real grasp of Arithmetics for counting change at the grocery store, figuring out the valuation of businesses and probabilities of events!

"Boil things down to the most fundamental truths and then reason up from there."

- Elon Musk

“Richard Feynman has a piece that takes you from counting numbers on hand all the way to calculus in 4 pages of text. It is a complete unbroken logical chain that takes you through geometry, trigonometry, pre-calculus, analytic geometry, graphs… all the way to calculus. He didn’t have to memorize anything!” (transcript)

“When you are memorizing is an indication that you don’t understand” 

- Naval Ravikant

Rule #8 — Be an Owner

When you are working for someone else (wage work), it’s extremely hard to build the kind of wealth that can give you financial freedom. This is, at its root, because of 2 big issues:

1. Your inputs (expertise & time) are very closely tied to your outputs. There are 2 derived problems from this fact:

   • You are getting paid by the hour — You are essentially selling your time for money. The implications here is that you can’t earn when you are on vacations, when you are sleeping or retired! Because *you* are the asset, you are the piece of labour (Labour leverage) of someone’s business.

     Whereas if you own a business, the *business* is the asset — and if it’s a profitable business and it has some kind of leverage (Code, Internet Media, Labour or Capital), you can do whatever you want and the business will earn money for you!

     “You are not going to get rich renting out your time.”

     - Naval Ravikant

   • You are earning linearly and you get paid the bare minimum for you to do the job and stay in the Company!

     If you owned a business, you can earn non-linearly and your income is only attached to the level of value that you provide to customers! And as you scale the business with increasingly more leverage (improve the software, create more content, hire more employees, raise capital from investors/banks…) there is no limit to how much you can earn!

“If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.”

- Naval Ravikant

2. You are not being creative (in most cases). You are doing a set role which any other person can learn in school / university. If it can be taught, is not going to make you rich! Because it implies that you are replaceable. You are not creating anything new!

“You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.”

- Naval Ravikant

Rule #9 — Use the New Leverage

Last generation’s fortunes were all made from Labour and Capital. But most of this generation’s fortunes were all made from Code and (Internet) Media! Code and Media are the leverage of the new millionaires/billionaires!

Code Leverage

This is the software that is always running and serving customers without you having to be directly involved in each transaction.

Some notorious billionaires from Code Leverage — Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.

Media Leverage

This can be writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing…

Once you create and publish a piece of digital content, it can (hypothetically) be reproduced an infinite amount of times, without you having to be involved in each reproduction!

If you are interested in learning more about YouTube... I recently created a YouTube Guide with my own journey, lessons I learned and mistakes I made, and much more! - Here's the link :)

Permission

“Probably the most interesting thing to keep in mind about
new forms of leverage is they are permissionless. They don’t
require somebody else’s permission for you to use them or
succeed. For labor leverage, somebody has to decide to follow
you. For capital leverage, somebody has to give you money to
invest or to turn into a product.

Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, You-
Tubing—these kinds of things are permissionless. You don’t
need anyone’s permission to do them, and that’s why they
are very egalitarian. They’re great equalizers of leverage. [78]
Every great software developer, for example, now has an
army of robots working for him at nighttime while he or
she sleeps, after they’ve written the code, and it’s cranking
away.”

Bottom Line

“Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media). Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.”

Rule #10 — Create Empty Space

Naval argues that is critical to have at least 1-2 days in which you are not busy doing things. He calls it “empty space”, and this is super useful to have a clear mind! (if you are always busy, your mind is clouded with little to-do’s and you are unable to see the big picture of what you do). And when you think with a clear mind, your judgment and the quality of your ideas radically improves!

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking”

- Nietzsche

“In an age of infinite leverage, judgment is the most important skill.”

- Naval Ravikant

Rule #11 — Overcome the Need for External Validation

"To me the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely -- Who don't even play the game. Who rise above it. And those are the people who have such an internal mental and self-control and self-awareness that they need nothing from anybody else."

- Naval Ravikant

Some instances that Naval mentions —> Jerzy Gregorek (author of the book “The Happy Body”), Buddha and J. Krishnamurti.

"If you could sit for 30 minutes and be happy... You are successful"

- Naval Ravikant

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

- Blaise Pascal

“Contra the prevailing belief, "success" isn't being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.”

- Nassim Taleb

✅ References

► Naval Ravikant Podcast -

► Naval on The Joe Rogan Experience -

► Naval Ravikant on The Knowledge Project -

► Naval Ravikant on The Tim Ferriss Show -

► Naval Ravikant on Clubhouse -

📁 All the ideas in this article are saved and classified in a searchable Database, which (as of July 2024) contains nearly 2,000 timeless ideas (sourced directly from the most influential doers and entrepreneurs — captured on books, interviews/podcasts and articles).

I call this Database the Doers Notebook, and I’ve recently opened it for anyone who wants it.

🤔 Why did I build this?

Well, as the Latin motto goes, “A chief part of learning is simply knowing where you can find a thing.” And since it’s all 🔎 searchable, we only need to type a keyword to immediately get a list of insights related to it!

For instance, if I’m unsure about how to get more sales in my business, I can simply type the word “sales” and immediately get 88 search results! In this case from Jim Edwards, Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Balaji Srinivasan, Nassim Taleb, and many other remarkable individuals.

It’s like having a 🧠 second brain from which we can pull wisdom on demand.

And this is super valuable because it can significantly decrease the error rate in our judgment.

“In an age of infinite leverage [code and media], judgment is the most important skill.”

- Naval Ravikant

I actually made a video where I went through the list of insights I got for the keywords “sales” and “creative”.

So, if you wanna get better at sales and learn to be more creative (and also see all the features of the database and how you can get access) then definitely check out the video 👇

Until next time :)

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!

I have collected some insightful nuggets [from Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi] on the topic of Building Wealth without relying on dumb lucky breaks. Naval argues that you can get rich in a deterministic way, by developing a specific skillset. So you can create your *own luck*, which depends complete on you (and not on some random external forces) — which is also very empowering!

Hope you find it valuable :)

🧠 Top Quotes

“In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the 50 of them where you got lucky. We want to factor luck out of it.”

- Naval Ravikant

“You build your character in a certain way, and then your character becomes your destiny.”

- Naval Ravikant

"Extreme people get extreme results"

- Sam Altman

👨 People

Naval Ravikant is the co-founder of AngelList and co-author of Venture Hacks. He has invested (early-stage) in companies like Uber, Twitter and FourSquare.

Babak Nivi is also the co-founder of AngelList and co-author of Venture Hacks. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering at MIT.

📝 Notes

Naval argues that you can get rich without having to rely on sheer luck. As an introduction to this topic, he says that you wanna become the kind of person that makes money by developing a specific skill-set.

“I like to think that if I lost all my money and if you drop me on a random street in any English-speaking country, within 5, 10 years I’d be wealthy again. Because it’s a skill set that I’ve developed and I think anyone can develop.

In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the 50 of them where you got lucky. We want to factor luck out of it."

- Naval Ravikant

Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape) wrote a blogpost on the 4 kinds of Luck, which Naval and Nivi later discussed…

1) Blind Luck (No Control)

When a positive event (that is completely out of your control) happens. That is just fortune.

2) Luck from Hustling (Some Human Influence)

When you are doing many things (Motion, Hard work…), you have more chances to stumble upon an opportunity.

Naval comments how Nenad (YouTuber/Animator) made his luck by creating videos that people enjoy — that’s how Naval found him, and now he works also in the production of Naval’s Podcast!

“Keep on going and chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.”

- Charles Kettering

3) Luck from Preparation (Some Human Influence)

When you become highly skilled and knowledgeable in a specific field, you will be able to spot opportunities! You become sensible to Luck!

“I will prepare and someday my chance will come”

- Abraham Lincoln

“Chance favors the prepared mind.”

- Louis Pasteur

4) Luck from your Unique Character (Complete Control)

Sources

When you build a unique Character, Brand, Mindset — so that Luck finds you! (this is the kind of “luck” that is completely on our control)

E.g./ Let’s imagine a person that gets blind luck (the first kind of luck) and finds a sunken treasure off the coast. He knows where the treasure is located, but he does not possess the skills to access it. So he goes to the individual who is the absolute best at deep sea underwater diving and he gets the treasure, and of course the deep diver gets paid really well. We can see here that the person who found the treasure just got lucky (blessed with blind luck), but the other individual developed a unique skill-set so that he was able to capitalize on other people’s opportunities! This is an extreme example, but it serves well to illustrate the point — If you want to get rich in a deterministic way, you gotta develop a unique and valuable skillset.

“You build your character in a certain way, and then your character becomes your destiny.”

- Naval Ravikant

“We make our fortunes and we call them fate.”

- Benjamin Disraeli (former Prime Minister of the UK)

Another aspect that is super important is to develop a Reputation of High Integrity — So that people can trust you. The more trustworthy you are, the more people will want to make deals thru you!

Picking Nuggets Note:

Tip to Build Trust...

Nassim Taleb on his Commencement Speech at the American University of Beirut:

"If something is nonsense... You say it. And you say it out loud. You will be harmed a little bit but it will be Antifragile -- In the long run, people who need to trust you will trust you."

Naval and Nivi argue that one thing that helps in developing a unique skillset is to do things in an eccentric way. That is, following your intrinsic interests and quirks rather than doing what everyone else is doing. Because…

"Extreme people get extreme results"

- Sam Altman

"You can't be normal and expect abnormal returns"

- Jeffrey Pfeffer

Also, if you just do what everyone else does, you are highly likely playing Status Game — Which you should avoid, as these are zero-sum games. Also, you will encounter more competition.

“Play stupid games. Win stupid prizes.”

- Naval Ravikant

More on this Luck…

This is the only kind of Luck that does not have Cliches. Almost everyone has heard that if you work hard and prepare you become luckier, but not too many people is aware of the kind of luck that comes from one’s own unique character — which means that there is an even greater opportunity if you focus on pursuing this kind of luck.

Picking Nuggets Reflection:

Personally, I follow a particular framework to develop this unique skill-set. I first learned about this framework from Tim Ferris, and it consists in the following:

When you are thinking about starting any project, think about what skills could you develop or improve by doing the project. If you can identify one or more important skills, then you should be more willing to take the project. Because even if you end up not succeeding, you still will have developed skills that can be useful to you in future projects.

"Is there a way that I can win doing this even if I fail. 
And the way that I win something even if I fail is if I develop skills and relationships or deepen relationships that transcend that project"
- Tim Ferris

Tim applied this framework when deciding to whether he should start his Podcast or not. He was able to see that the Podcast would make him better at interviewing and asking questions, which is an important skill in general and even the philosopher Voltaire went to say "Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers". Besides, Tim was a prolific book author at the time, so this skill would serve him well when interviewing people for new books.

So as you go executing different projects over time and stacking up new skills with each new project, you become increasingly more unique because less people will be able to match your skill-set. And as Naval Ravikant said, is even better if you are genuinely interested in those projects, because you will go deeper than other people and it will feel like play to you rather than work.

Scott Adams argue that he was never the best at any particular skill, but he was the best at something in which he was able to apply many acquired skills. He was able to combine his average knowledge in design, writing, comedy and business skills to produce his most successful project: Dilbert.

So the most deterministic and less competitive way to get rich is to keep learning skills and finding ways to combine them so that you can be the best at what you do.

"The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways"
- Robert Greene

Also, when I'm doing things and learning new skills, I try not to fixate too much on the particular relevance of those skills to my future self. Because as Steve Jobs said, is impossible to connect the dots looking forward, we can only connect them looking backwards. So I just have faith that somehow those new skills will eventually connect and become useful to my future self.

Check out the YouTube Video!

✅ References

• Make Luck Your Destiny [Naval Ravikant]

• Making Money Isn't About Luck [Naval Ravikant]

• Marc Andreessen Blogpost on the 4 kinds of Luck

• Carrie Rose at the DeepDive Podcast

• Steve Jobs (Connecting the Dots)

This Blogpost is brought to you by Shortform - The platform that I love using to get nuggets from Books!

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. This is how I mainly learn from books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms). But of course, for books that I’m deeply interested in reading I still read the entire book! And then use Shortform to quickly re-visit the main ideas.

I also made a short video exploring the platform and showing you how I’m personally using it. Here’s the Link!

The cost is equivalent to the price of one book a month and you can use my affiliate link to get a 5-Day FREE trial and a 20% Discount on the annual subscription (besides, you will be supporting my work 😉) - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

The mark of a great (non-fiction) author and mission of Shortform…

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

💎 The Best of This Week…

Until next time :)

Julio xx

I have collected some insightful nuggets on the topic of Entrepreneurship, and more specifically on the domain of Internet Entrepreneurship. So these nuggets are relevant for both (1) building software (using CODE leverage) and (2) creating content (using MEDIA leverage) — These are the 2 new types of Leverage (from the old ones: Capital and Labor) where all the “new fortunes” are being created, according to Naval Ravikant.

Hope you find it valuable :)

🧠 Top Quotes

“What a customer tells you… is just pure gold”

- Mohnish Pabrai

“Any business where you are judged by your peers and not by some contact with reality is gonna rot, eventually.”

- Nassim Taleb

"It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product"

- Peter Thiel

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something... This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

- Steve Jobs

👨 People

Peter Thiel is the co-founder of Paypal and first outside investor in Facebook. In 2022, his estimated net worth was 7 Billion $.

Mohnish Pabrai is an entrepreneur and investor. He sold his first business for 20M$. He founded the NGO "Dakshana" in India, and has a close friendship with Charlie Munger.

Nassim Taleb's work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. Author of many successful books, including The Black Swan, which The Sunday Times considers one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

Guy Kawasaki is the former chief evangelist of Apple and co-founder of Garage Technology Ventures.

Naval Ravikant is the co-founder of AngelList and co-author of Venture Hacks. He has invested (early-stage) in companies like Uber, Twitter and FourSquare.

📝 Notes

Rule #1 — Start with a Small Market. Then, gradually Expand. [Peter Thiel]

Peter Thiel argues that the mistake that many entrepreneurs make is to go after a Big Market (the typical multi-billion dollar market where people say “if we can just take 1% of this market, we can create a billion-dollar business…”). It’s a mistake because:

• If you are creating something for a Big Market, it means that you are making something that is too generic. Thus, you are making something that is far from being unique / differentiated. And as Thiel explains, there are 2 necessary things to build a *profitable* business — Make something UNIQUE and VALUABLE for a group of people. The *valuable* part makes the business, and the *unique* part makes the profits. If you build something too generic, you might be making something valuable for a group of people, but it is not unique and thus the business is likely to fail (because you will compete on prices with other businesses that offer the same product/service).

• A Big Market also means fierce competition. Because the most intuitive (though incorrect) thing for most entrepreneurs out there is to go and take a percentage of a billion-dollar market. And this is also what Business Schools would tell people to do! No Business School teacher will tell you “go for a super small market where potentially won’t be any value”. But as we will see later, this is exactly what one should do! Because the best way to (eventually) conquer a valuable market is to go for an almost insignificant market, dominate it and then repeat it with similar markets.

Now, let’s see some examples of Internet-based companies that have started with small markets and then expanded to similar and bigger markets…

1. Amazon

   It started as an online book store. Then, once they conquered most of that market, they started to offer any product on their website — so it went from an online book store to become a generic E-commerce Platform. After that, they started with other markets: The Grocery’s Stores Market (with Amazon Fresh), Music Streaming (with Amazon Music), Electronic Reading (with Kindle) and even Cloud Services (with AWS).

2. Ebay

   It Started with offering only Pez Dispensers. Then it went for the Beanie Babies auctioning Market. And today Ebay is the biggest platform for auctioning any product.

3. Paypal

   Started with Ebay’s “Power Sellers” (a group of around 20,000 people that made many transactions per day on Ebay). Peter Thiel argues that this was actually a horrible market — it was a group of people selling junk on the internet. But Paypal could deliver a product that was ideal for them (imagine the pain of having to make multiple bank transactions per day for each trade! Of course they would take the chance with Paypal to avoid that). Paypal gained 25-30% of that market in 2-3 months. And this built brand recognition and a starting base for Paypal’s operations. They kept expanding markets and today Paypal is a well-recognized brand in the Payments Market for consumers and merchants.

4. Facebook

   Started as a Social Network only for Harvard students — A market of 10,000 people. Facebook gained 60% of that market in just 10 days! And today, we all know how far Facebook (or Meta) got.

As it can be observed, many of these big dominant companies started with small and low-value markets. The Business School verdict for a starting Facebook or Paypal would have been that their markets are so small that these companies can’t have any value! And that’s indeed true, but only if they would have stayed in those markets forever. So most entrepreneurs and Business School scholars are missing “the forest for the trees” — they can’t see past the initial small market, and so in their minds they see a business that forever will stay with Ebay’s Power Sellers or Facebook’s Harvard Markets.

But the truth is that the best way to differentiate is to start with a super small market, and the best way to eventually build a sustainable business is to grow concentrically from small markets to similar and slightly bigger markets!

You can differentiate in Small Markets not only because the market is more specific, but also because most people won’t see the value of going there (less competition)!

Let’s end this chapter with a passage from Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One…

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

I asked Chat-GPT to re-write this with the tone of Mark Zuckerberg and having into consideration the context of Mark’s history. This was the reply 👇

“Hey there, it's Mark. When I started Facebook back in my Harvard dorm room, I wasn't thinking about conquering a billion-dollar market. I was just trying to connect with my fellow students and make campus life more social. But as we grew and expanded, I realized that starting with a small market was actually the key to our success.

I've always believed that the best way to build a profitable business is to create something unique and valuable for a specific group of people. That's why we started with a market of just 10,000 Harvard students, and then gradually expanded to other schools and eventually the world. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

Picking Nuggets Reflection:

Peter Thiel argues that to build a profitable business you have to deliver something unique and valuable to a group of people. Now let's adapt this idea to a Passage from the Book "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant", which I think adds some insightful nuances to this idea:

"You can go on the internet, and you can find your audience.
And you can build a business, and create a product, and build
wealth, and make people happy just uniquely expressing yourself
through the internet.

The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the
best person at it to scale out. And the great news is because
every human is different, everyone is the best at something—
being themselves."

So you can deliver something unique just by being yourself. And then if a sufficiently sized group of people on the internet resonates with your content or find your products useful -- you can build a profitable business, and even better, a profitable business that is aligned with your ideas and character. And as you keep exploring your curiosity, that group of people will naturally expand to a bigger group.

Rule #2 — Customer Feedback beats your Intuition [Mohnish Pabrai]

Mohnish argues that whatever idea you come up with… is not going to work. Unless you build it taking into account what your prospects (people who might be interested in your products / content) — So you have to iterate (or sometimes build again) your product based on what people actually want, rather than your guesses about what they want. Because wealth is simply a byproduct of doing *what people want*.

“What a customer tells you… is just pure gold”

“Get a version 1.0 out there as soon as you can. Until you have some users to measure, you’re optimizing based on guesses. The ball you need to keep your eye on here is the underlying principle that wealth is what people want – If you plan to get rich… you have to know what people want.”

- Paul Graham (Book: Hackers and Painters)

Mohnish gave an example:

Viresh Bhatia, a good friend of Mohnish and a maverick computer geek, had a passion to build many software tools. One day he went to a Trade Show with 7 different products (and one idea of a product that he hadn’t yet built). After the 2 days that the Trade Show lasted, only one person grew an interest into one of this things — the fictional product that was yet only in idea-phase. So Viresh built this product to only this one customer, but then he went all-in into this product and he gained more customers! That product was Install-Shield, which is the default tool to install any program on Windows OS.

Bottom Line…

Drop your ego. Listen carefully to prospect’s feedback!

I fed Chat-GPT with my raw notes on this chapter, and told it to make it with the tone of J. K. Rowling. I was pretty amazed by it's reply and I enjoyed the reading, so I attach it down here 👇

J. K. Rowling writing from my notes…

“Once upon a time, there was an idea that nobody believed in. It was met with skepticism and doubt, and many said that it would never work. But the creator knew deep down that his idea had potential.

And so, the creator set out to listen to their prospects and customers. He paid attention to their feedback and iterated the idea based on what they wanted. Like a skilled potion maker, he carefully crafted his idea, adding and subtracting ingredients until it was just right.

As if by magic, the creator's idea began to take shape. It was like a spell being cast, one that nobody could resist. And as the creator continued to listen to their customers and improve upon their idea, it grew stronger and more powerful.

Eventually, the creator's idea became a reality, one that nobody could deny. It was a triumph of perseverance and determination, a testament to the power of listening and iteration.

And like a character in a storybook, the creator and his idea lived happily ever after, enchanting and delighting all who came across it. For in the world of business, as in the world of magic, anything is possible if you have the courage to pursue your dreams and the wisdom to listen to those around you.”

Picking Nuggets Reflection:

One cool thing about being a Content Creator is that once you get some traction (reach an audience of +1K Subscribers), you immediately get the feedback from the viewers and subscribers. So you can optimize your content and products much more based on what people actually want rather than your intuition about what they want. As Paul Graham wrote on his book "Hackers and Painters", you want to keep the time-to-market as short as possible in order to eventually come up with something that people will actually want!

Rule #3 — Customer Feedback beats Peer Feedback [Nassim Taleb]

“Any business where you are judged by your peers and not by some contact with reality is gonna rot, eventually.”

- Nassim Taleb

Nassim argues that the more you focus on the advice and feedback from peers and the less you focus on customer’s feedback, the higher your chance of failure! This happens for a phenomenon that Nassim calls “The Expert Problem” — in which pseudo-experts (experts with no skin in the game) advice to the business owner what to do and what he is best at. The problem is that because this “expertise” lacks substance, his advice is almost certainly bad — you can’t develop a unique product-market fit by listening to “industry experts”.

Rule #4 — Do Things in Parallel [Guy Kawasaki]

Kawasaki remarked that one important mistake that most entrepreneurs make is that they do things serially — they do one thing at a time.

First they put all their energy into getting the financing, then to build the team, then to create the product, then to distribute (marketing & sales) the product and finally collect the revenue.

But… “The serial world in Entrepreneurship does not exist". In the real world, you have to do all at once! So you do it in a parallel way, instead of a serial way.

Picking Nuggets Reflection:

Another interesting thing about being a Content Creator, is that the Product and the Distribution are essentially the same thing. So if you are a Content Creator, by default you build the business in a parallel way, you build the Product and the Distribution at the same time. And this is something that Peter Thiel also recommends on his book Zero to One:

"It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product"
- Peter Thiel

Alex Hormozi also said in a conversation with the famous YouTuber Unspeakable...

"It is one of the unique things about the Media Business -- How you market the product is also how you fulfill it" 
- Alex Hormozi

Besides, there is no need for external financing given the super tiny upfront investments and costs involved in the Content Creation business model. And in most cases, is not even necessary to have a team of people.

Rule #5 — Be a Tinkerer [Naval Ravikant, Sahil Lavingia, Ben Thompson]

"I think most successful creators are ultimately tinkerers"

- Naval Ravikant

Tinkering is powerful because it means that you are opportunistic and you are open to different ways of doing things. This does not mean that you don’t have goals — you need to have goals, but the path to reach your goals is flexible! And the goals themselves can also be flexible! (in case you realize that you were executing in the wrong direction).

"Your only moment of Power and Knowledge is the Present. You just act from the Present."

- Naval Ravikant

Picking Nuggets Note:

Richard Wiseman, a renowned researcher on "Luck", has observed that one common trait among lucky people (individuals who consider themselves to be Lucky) is that they are highly flexible and opportunistic on the process to reach their ultimate goals.

But most people are completely in-flexible / fixed-minded with their goals and execution paths — this is bad not only because you miss reality and the opportunities that exist in your present moment, but also because even if you “succeed” and reached the goal — it might have been the wrong goal all along! So you end up in a bad place.

Ben Thompson argues that this happens a lot when it comes to People’s Careers — they are so fixated in their 5-10 year plan, and many times when they get there they realize it wasn’t worth the pursuit and they also find a lot of competition (which is not a surprise — because when someone is fixed-minded with a long-term plan that’s usually the result of an extreme obedience to the subtle but highly dogmatic culture of the Society that surrounds him).

Naval Ravikant defines tinkerers as individuals who are “playing at the edges of their fields”. And they are playing because they are driven by a genuine curiosity, rather than any other incentive that is not for the sake of the activity itself.

Doing things for the sake of doing them it's one thing that I'm definitely trying to follow. Because that's the state of retirement -- when you are no longer sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow. 

"When today is complete in and of itself you are retired"
- Naval Ravikant

"Reminder to make “doing the thing” the goal, not “what you get” from doing the thing."
- Alex Hormozi

Related to this, I'm lately trying to think deeply on the implications of the famous quote from Sigmund Freud:
"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."

So I'm trying to maximize my time in 2 fronts:

* Do work that is meaningful to me and that it can be financially sustainable.

* Cultivate loving and meaningful relationships with the people around me, and new people that I admire and connect with. 

Naval argues that most of what Tinkerers do is “wasted ” (meaning that it does not end up becoming a financially sustainable activity), but that once in a while they will come up with something that is sustainable and can add value to Society in some way.

“What fools call 'wasting time' is most often the best investment.”

- Nassim Taleb

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something... This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

- Steve Jobs

This Blogpost is brought to you by Shortform - The platform that I love using to get nuggets from Books!

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. This is how I mainly learn from books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms). But of course, for books that I’m deeply interested in reading I still read the entire book! And then use Shortform to quickly re-visit the main ideas.

I also made a short video exploring the platform and showing you how I’m personally using it. Here’s the Link!

The cost is equivalent to the price of one book a month and you can use my affiliate link to get a 5-Day FREE trial and a 20% Discount on the annual subscription (besides, you will be supporting my work 😉) - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

The mark of a great (non-fiction) author and mission of Shortform…

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

📚 Passage I loved

In this Passage from his Collection of books "Incerto", Nassim Taleb exposes the problem with the Narrative Fallacy...

When I was about seven, my school teacher showed us a painting of an assembly of impecunious Frenchmen in the Middle Ages at a banquet held by one of their benefactors, some benevolent king, as I recall. They were holding the soup bowls to their lips. The school teacher asked me why they had their noses in the bowls and I answered, “Because they were not taught manners.” She replied, “Wrong. The reason is that they are hungry.” I felt stupid at not having thought of this, but I could not understand what made one explanation more likely than the other, or why we weren’t both wrong (there was no, or little, silverware at the time, which seems the most likely explanation).

Beyond our perceptional distortions, there is a problem with logic itself. How can someone have no clue yet be able to hold a set of perfectly sound and coherent viewpoints that match the observations and abide by every single possible rule of logic? Consider that two people can hold incompatible beliefs based on the exact same data. Does this mean that there are possible families of explanations and that each of these can be equally perfect and sound? Certainly not. One may have a million ways to explain things, but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach.

In a famous argument, the logician W. V. Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a given series of facts. Such insight should warn us that mere absence of nonsense may not be sufficient to make something true.

This does not mean that we cannot talk about causes; there are ways to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running experiments, or as we will see in Part Two (alas), by making testable predictions.* The psychology experiments I am discussing here do so: they select a population and run a test. The results should hold in Tennessee, in China, even in France.

Picking Nuggets Note:

Tim Ferriss just released a podcast with Naval Ravikant and David Deutsch. It was a mentally challenging podcast for me, and I definitely will listen to it again. One thing they discussed was the issue of how to come up with good explanations -- and the way that Naval and David suggested to do it is exactly the same as what Nassim describes in the last paragraph of the passage -- you make conjectures (a theory of how something works) and then you test it empirically! If it holds, you have a good explanation that is very likely to have escaped the Narrative Fallacy.

(If you enjoyed these passages, you might wanna connect with me on Twitter/Linkedin — I consistently post there the best passages from books I’m reading!)

My Twitter

My Linkedin

👨‍💻Other content I have found super valuable lately…

Until next time :)

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!

Here I bring you 11 insightful rules for life from Nassim Taleb. I think that reflecting on these rules can make us more resilient in life, more successful and help us live a happier life!

Hope you find it valuable :)

🧠 Top Quotes

"Nietzsche's Master-Slave morality in modern terms: Reputation is for slaves. Honor, Courage, & Integrity is for the Self-Owned." 

- Nassim Taleb

“Every person must decide at some point, whether they will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” 

- Martin Luther King Jr.

"The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his action."

- Confucius

👨 Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb's work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. Author of many successful books, including The Black Swan, which The Sunday Times considers one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

📝 Notes

Rule #1 — Do not Disappoint your 18-year-old Self

Look at yourself in the mirror and wonder if you would disappoint the person you were at 18 (right before people usually get corrupted by life). Let your 18-year-old self be the only judge. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful.

Never let your reputation, wealth, academic awards, prizes, and standing in a community to be the judge of your success! As these are modern fragile judgers of success [we will see in Rule #3 why these are fragile measures].

"Nietzsche's Master-Slave morality in modern terms: Reputation is for slaves. Honor, Courage, & Integrity is for the Self-Owned." 

- Nassim Taleb

"I have found freedom in dropping being respectable. Respectability is a social strategy to keep you imprisoned."

- Osho

Rule #2 — Sacrifice for Others

In ancient times, success for the Greeks was to have had an heroic death. Nassim argues we can adapt this to our (less martial) modern times:

"Take a heroic route for the benefit of the collective. As narrowly or broadly defined as you want. So long as it's someone else."

"You are as good as what you do to other members."

In this sense, virtue is inseparable from courage. So you have to take some risks for the sake of others. That’s success. That’s honor.

“You must live for another if you wish to live for yourself.”

- Seneca

“Every person must decide at some point, whether they will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” 

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Rule #3 — Seek Self-Respect. Do not attach to external success

Attachment to external success (Wealth, Prizes...) will make you:

• More fragile.

• More insecure.

When you attach to something that you can lose, you become fragile and insecure. The higher you go up, the worse the fall.

Besides, a willingness to show-off your external success is a sign of weakness and lack of confidence.

On the other hand, Self-respect is robust. That’s the approach of the Stoics — Regardless of the external circumstances (making wealth, losing wealth...) your character remains untouched.

So you can be wealthy or poor, highly awarded or not — and be robust! Because your validation comes from yourself, and no one can take that away from you.

“Receive [wealth or prosperity] without arrogance and be ready to let it go.”

- Marcus Aurelius

"When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost."

- Billy Graham

Rule #4 — Do Not Read Newspapers

Do not follow the news in any way or form. To be convinced, go to the library and try to read last year’s newspapers.

Passages from Nassim Taleb’s Incerto:

"Consider the iatrogenics [negative second order consequences] of newspapers. They need to fill their pages every day with a set of news items—particularly those news items also dealt with by other newspapers. But to do things right, they ought to learn to keep silent in the absence of news of significance. Newspapers should be of two-line length on some days, two hundred pages on others—in proportion with the intensity of the signal. But of course they want to make money and need to sell us junk food. And junk food is iatrogenic."

"In the complex world, the notion of “cause” itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things."

Rule #5 — If something is nonsense... You say it! And you say it out loud!

You will be harmed a little bit, but it will be Antifragile — In the long-term, people who need to trust you, will trust you!

Picking Nuggets Note:
Another rule from Nassim similar to this one:
"If you see fraud and don’t say fraud, you are a fraud."

Rule #6 — Be respectful to hard manual labor workers

“Treat the doorman with lot of respect. More than bosses. Because the boss can go down, not the doorman.”

Rule #7 — Avoid things that bore you

“If something is boring, avoid it. Except taxes and visits to your mother-in-law.”

"That’s the whole secret: to do things that excite you."

- Ray Bradbury

Picking Nuggets Note:
When I get really bored with something, I typically avoid it. But I do not avoid the higher categories to which that boring thing belongs. For instance, if I read a book on Economics and find it super boring, I will stop reading it but I will still try to find other books on Economics! (I won't avoid the whole category of Economics just because I read a boring instance of that category). And if we go a higher level, I'm even more stubborn on keep trying -- I won't stop trying to read books just because the first books I read in my life were boring. 

So I easily avoid particular instances if they are boring, but I do not usually avoid overarching categories. In the case of books, I keep looking until I find the interesting ones!

Rule #8 — Do Not Do to Others What You Don’t Want Them to Do to You

This simplistic-looking rule has deep implications. It implies moral symmetry (risk ownership) among people, which is a robust ethical rule to ensure a well-functioning civilization.

The idea of moral symmetry was started in Ancient Egypt, under Hammurabi’s Code. The essence of this Code was not the “eye-for-eye” kind of rule, instead the central idea is that “You cannot walk away from risks you have created for others”. So they were looking for symmetry in risks, to mitigate and punish the actions of reckless people who do not care about generating risks for others. And this is a more difficult problem in today’s complex world, because the more complex the system the easier it is to hide risks and get away with no punishment (violating the moral symmetry).

We have seen it in banks and credit-rating agencies operations (leading to the 2008 Crisis), and recently in the illegal construction of many buildings in Turkey (sadly leading to its collapse after the strong earthquake).

Rule #9 — Start a Business

If you are an ambitious person, the best way to improve the world is to start a business [this view is also shared by Naval Ravikant and Charlie Munger]. Much better than go to work for an NGO. But of course, starting a business requires that you take some risks. But as Nassim Taleb argues, virtue is inseparable from courage. And with the internet and the existence of so many cheap software services, you do not even have to take that much risk anymore!

More about the differences btw a Business and an NGO on this blogpost.

Rule #10 — Tell People What You Do. Not What They Should Do.

You should never tell people what they should be doing. You should tell them what you do. If you are going to give advice, your words should be supported by your actions (skin in the game) — Because you should always bear the risk of your advice.

"The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his action."

- Confucius.

Rule #11 — Be a Communist to your Family

Picking Nuggets Note:
This was taken indirectly thru Naval Ravikant (on the episode with Joe Rogan), when commenting on Nassim Taleb's positioning in Politic matters. 

• "With my family, I'm a Communist."
• "With my close friends, I'm a Socialist."
• "At State level politics, I'm a democrat."
• "At higher levels, I'm a Republican."
• "At the Federal level, I'm a Libertarian."

The smaller the group, the more trust there is. Thus, you can be a Communist / Socialist to the members of those groups (family and friends). And that’s actually the way to live a happy meaningful life!

The larger the group, the less trust there is. Thus, the more aligned the incentives need to be so that the system works well. In this case, the more you should lean towards Capitalism.

Nassim Taleb explained on his speech at Google (discussing his book — Skin in the Game) that different political stands are perfectly compatible when you attach the scale. As the scale of the group changes, your political stand can (and should) change!

Quick Heuristics on What to Avoid…

• Muscles without Strength

• Friendship without Trust

• Opinion without Risk

• Change without Aesthetics

• Age without Values

• Food without Nourishment

• Power without Fairness

• Facts without Rigor

• Degrees without Erudition

• Militarism without Fortitude

• Progress without Civilization

• Complication without Depth

• Fluency without Content

• Religion without Tolerance

Check out the YouTube Video!

📁 All the ideas in this article are saved and classified in a searchable Database, which (as of July 2024) contains nearly 2,000 timeless ideas (sourced directly from the most influential doers and entrepreneurs — captured on books, interviews/podcasts and articles).

I call this Database the Doers Notebook, and I’ve recently opened it for anyone who wants it.

🤔 Why did I build this?

Well, as the Latin motto goes, “A chief part of learning is simply knowing where you can find a thing.” And since it’s all 🔎 searchable, we only need to type a keyword to immediately get a list of insights related to it!

For instance, if I’m unsure about how to get more sales in my business, I can simply type the word “sales” and immediately get 88 search results! In this case from Jim Edwards, Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Balaji Srinivasan, Nassim Taleb, and many other remarkable individuals.

It’s like having a 🧠 second brain from which we can pull wisdom on demand.

And this is super valuable because it can significantly decrease the error rate in our judgment.

“In an age of infinite leverage [code and media], judgment is the most important skill.”

- Naval Ravikant

I actually made a video where I went through the list of insights I got for the keywords “sales” and “creative”.

So, if you wanna get better at sales and learn to be more creative (and also see all the features of the database and how you can get access) then definitely check out the video 👇

📚 Passages I loved

Passage 1

8 Beliefs about Money that You Need to Remove ASAP (to get in the right mindset to become Financially Independent):

1) Only lucky people get rich

2) Your innate capabilities determine your level of wealth

3) Frugality creates wealth

4) It's OK to spend more than you earn

5) You can make money without creating value

6) The rich prevent you from acquiring wealth

7) There's a shortcut to wealth

8) Relying solely on compound interest (in a savings / passive investing setup) makes you rich

This is an excerpt from Shortform's summary of the book "Unscripted", written by MJ Demarco.

Passage 2

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own . . .”

— Epictetus

Passage from the Book “The Daily Stoic”, written by Ryan Holiday.

Picking Nuggets Note:

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” - The Serenity Prayer

If we can know the difference btw what is not under our control and what is under our control, it will also give us a big advantage over people who doesnt know -- because we can allocate our (limited) energy into what we can actually change and improve, instead of wasting it in things we can't change. For instance, it is a waste of time to think about the past and things we wish were different, but we have power on the present moment and we can change our future as result.
(Inspired from the book The Daily Stoic)

(If you enjoyed these passages, you might wanna connect with me on Twitter/Linkedin — I consistently post there the best passages from books I’m reading!)

My Twitter

My Linkedin

👨‍💻Other content I have found super valuable lately…

- 1 Video

- 1 Podcast

https://foundersjournal.morningbrew.com/more-thinking-less-doing/

- 3 Tweets

Until next time :)

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!

I compiled 5 important truths about life (from very insightful people) that Society never promotes and has even counter-narratives to them — which are created for the simple reason (as Naval Ravikant argues) that Society (as any other group) optimizes for consensus, rather than truth. Because what’s most necessary for the survival of any group is consensus — which implicitly makes truth seeking, at best, secondary in the list of priorities. Therefore, ideas that ensure consensus will be spread by Society, regardless of its truth/false nature.

Hope you find it valuable :)

🧠 Top Quotes

"What Society wants for you is not what's always good for you."

- Naval Ravikant

"There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

- George Orwell

"The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects."

- Leonardo Da Vinci

👨 People

Naval Ravikant is the co-founder of AngelList and co-author of Venture Hacks. He has invested (early-stage) in companies like Uber, Twitter and FourSquare.

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. Co-founder of Paypal and first outside investor in Facebook. In 2022, his estimated net worth was 7 Billion $.

Chamath Palihapitiya is the CEO of Social Capital (Venture Capital Fund). In 2007, he joined Facebook and led the User Growth Team. His net worth is estimated to be over 1 Billion $.

Mohnish Pabrai is a renowned investor and entrepreneur. He also founded the NGO "Dakshana" in India, and has a close friendship with Charlie Munger.

📝 Notes

What Society wants [Naval Ravikant]

"What Society wants for you is not what's always good for you."

- Naval Ravikant

As Naval argues, the biggest problem with truth-seeking is that we have been conditioned by Society, and Society’s objective is Consensus, rather than Truth (this happens with any group of people, and Society is the largest group). Thus, we are conditioned to believe in the consensus-seeking ideas of Society, and this makes it very hard for the individual to seek truth, because it’s hard to un-condition oneself. But the pursuit is worth it because it will give us the right judgement to improve our lives, and see things the way they actually are.

Naval also discusses that Society not only shares wrong ideas, but it also programs you so well that you are your own warden in following (and encouraging that others follow too) these ideas. One instance of this programming is Guilt.

"Guilt is Society's voice speaking in your head."

- Naval Ravikant

Picking Nuggets Note -- Quotes on Society/Truth-Seeking...

"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” 
- Gustav Le Bon (polymath and psychologist who first discussed behavioral contagion in 1895

"There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” 
- George Orwell

"The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects." 
- Leonardo Da Vinci

Social “Truth” #1 — Money isn’t gonna make you happy [Naval Ravikant]

This is what Society always promote. But the real truth is that money will get rid of many sources of unhappiness, and will make happiness more controllable and at least a choice.

Social “Truth” #2 — Kids go to school for education [Naval Ravikant]

The School System has many goals, and education is just one of those goals and is not even the most important (in comparison). Goals of the School System:

• Education — Just a tiny bit. And subjects are mostly irrelevant/obsolete and are taught at the speed of the slowest student.

• Indoctrination.

"An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life.”

- Richard Feynman

• Socialization.

• Compliance Training.

"Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all."

- Nietzsche

• Baby-sitting — It is useful to have a place that takes care of children while parents are working.

• Reduce teenager crime.

Social “Truth” #3 — Competition is Good [Peter Thiel]

"We have been taught that the losers are the people who are bad at competing…

[But] I would suggest that something very different is the case…"

- Peter Thiel

Peter argues that when we compete, we focus too much on the people with whom we are competing and lose sight of what actually matters — which is to make something that is valuable and meaningful.

"We would achieve more if we chase the dream instead of the competition."

- Simon Sinek

Peter admits that is true that competition makes you better at that which you are competing on. But he also argues that this comes at an expensive cost (higher than the benefits), because of 2 aspects:

• As commented previously, you over-focus on the other competitors and focus less on what’s actually meaningful to do (your attention shifts from the intrinsic mission towards just beating the people around you).

• (Psychologically) Imprisons you -- Your sense of self-worth / identity is wrapped up in winning these competitions.

  Peter talks about the time when he was working at a big Law Firm in New York. He commented that from the outside everybody was trying to get in, and from the inside everybody was trying to get out. And when Peter finally left his job (after 7 months) a co-worker told him that it was very re-assuring to see him leaving, as he thought no one could leave “Alcatraz”.

  This personal story from Peter illustrates this big downside that comes with fierce competition — your identity gets so wrapped up into winning the game and staying ahead of the other competitors, that it’s really hard to just leave the game and opt out of the competition (even when you realize the game isn’t important for you or is meaningless and empty). This is why Naval Ravikant calls this the “Competition Trap”. And this downside (getting trap in a worthless game) is much more important than the upside (improving thru Competition), because why does it even matter to improve on something if the prize is meaningless to you?

"You’re playing a stupid game — You’re going to win a stupid prize. It’s not obvious right now because you’re blinded by competition. But three years from now, it’ll be obvious."

- Naval Ravikant

Personality Matters…

Most of the successful companies in Silicon Valley were founded by people with mild Asperger. And Peter argues that this is the case because the less social you are, the more you will believe in *your* own ideas. Whereas the more social you are, the more likely it is that you will just do what everyone else is doing (falling into the Competition Trap), because you are more influenced by what other people say — You will over-focus on the people and focus less on your own original ideas/goals.

So the highly social type of people might just open a restaurant after all his original ideas has been talked out by other people. Whereas the person with mild Asperger will just do what he truly wants to do, regardless of how other people feel about his ideas.

Picking Nuggets Note:

I don’t think Peter has mild Asperger, but he is deeply interested in philosophy (he also did his Bachelor’s Degree in this field), so that probably helped him to be aware of these issues about Competition and resist being influenced by other people (at least after quitting his job at the Law Firm to start Paypal with Elon Musk). Besides, he was very influenced by Stanford teacher Rene Girard, who created a whole theory around the theme of Imitative Behavior.

Peter concludes saying that highly social people are at a disadvantage when it comes to doing something that is truly valuable.

Social “Truth” #4 — Mistakes are bad [Chamath Palihapitiya]

Society tells you (mostly in a subtle way) that you shouldn’t make mistakes. And if you do them, the consequence is a loss of status (people looks down at you when you fail).

Chamath argues that mistakes are obviously necessary for success, and more specifically…

“The really successful people realize that… is the cycle time of mistakes that get you to success.”

Because the more mistakes that you make, the more you can observe and learn from them. And this consequently decreases your error rate (paradoxically), which ultimately leads to success. Thus, mistakes are necessary for success. And the faster you make mistakes, the faster you will be successful.

Internal Motto at Facebook — “Move Fast and Break Things”

"Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments."
- Leonardo Da Vinci

Picking Nuggets Note -- Good ways to frame mistakes...
Chamath says that he only uses the word "mistake" because that's how Society understands it, but to him it means just learning. 

Other people like Leonardo Da Vinci frames mistakes as experimentation, and he argues that this is critical to do because it's only the experiments that give you the real objective feedback! Kapil Gupta also frames it as experimentation, and he only uses the term failure when it is ultimate failure (e.g./ a startup that shuts down).

Nassim Taleb also frames it as experimentation, as long as when the experiment fails the downside is small and when it succeeds the upside potential is hugely big (or at least it puts you in a better direction to keep experimenting and be more likely to find that big upside pay-off eventually // Nassim calls this an "up-regulating" process).

Chamath also mentions that just following a established path to (almost surely) have no failures and the approval of other people comes at a great cost — when you don’t put yourself in a position where failure can happen (and the odds of failing are significant), you don’t know what you are really capable of achieving. You will not realize your full potential.

"If you don't fail at least 90% of the time, you are not aiming high enough."

- Alan Kay

“The degree of success in your life is not correlated to the hard work you put, but the degree of failure and uncertainty you are willing to tolerate”.

- Guy Spier (interview with Boston College)

Are your parents Baby-Boomers?

In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel also presents an interesting idea to why most parents today (at least in the US) cheer their sons to follow the established path (make a career in a big Corporation). He links it with the kind of life that the Baby Boomers (1946-1964) had…

“Recent graduates’ parents often cheer them on the established path. The strange history of the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it. Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you. Technological advance seemed to accelerate automatically, so the Boomers grew up with great expectations but few specific plans for how to fulfill them. Then, when technological progress stalled in the 1970s, increasing income inequality came to the rescue of the most elite Boomers. Every year of adulthood continued to get automatically better and better for the rich and successful. The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naïve optimism. Since tracked careers worked for them, they can’t imagine that they won’t work for their kids, too.”

Little Reflection

I think that a big part of that avoidance of mistakes and risk-aversion comes from the School System.

Nassim Taleb argues (on his book Antifragile) that being right or wrong is fundamentally different when we are talking about papers / schools compared to the real world. What happens in Academia or the School System is that you normally need to be right at least slightly more than wrong, whereas in the real world (which runs under a Power Law Distribution of events) we have asymmetries going on.

Let's take the example of Entrepreneurship. In Entrepreneurship, you can be wrong most of the time as long as each individual mistake is inconsequential and when you are right the win is massively consequential.

So, in the real world, is not about the relative proportion of mistakes and wins, is about the consequential magnitude of those mistakes and wins.

Social “Truth” #5 — You should be original and not copy others [Mohnish Pabrai]

(this might seem contradictory to Peter Thiel’s arguments against mimetic behavior, so at the end of this chapter I tried to clarify how these differ and why they don’t contradict)

Opposed to this Social “Truth”, Mohnish Pabrai argues that Cloning (that is, copying from other people) is incredibly powerful because…

• You can implement into your work things that are already working well (from other people) or you think that are objectively good ideas.

  This reminds me of a quote from Nassim Taleb...
  "Suckers try to win arguments. Non-suckers try to win."
  
  The idea being that it doesn't matter (eventually) if *your* own opinions/ideas are the right ones, what matters is only the final outcome. Shane Parrish also calls it "Outcome over Ego" (on his podcast with Scott Adams). So drop your Ego and focus on the outcome!

• So few people are willing to do it. Most people “look down at cloning”. They think is beneath them. This is why Mohnish says that if you are willing to embrace cloning, you will have a huge edge over most people.

How to be a Cloner…

Whenever you see something that (positively) impresses you… Clone it!

For instance, when Mohnish was running his IT business, he saw a businessman with very nice presentation cards. So, Mohnish just shamelessly cloned that and started to use the same cards in his business — with the same design and colors!

Picking Nuggets Note:

Over time, the accumulation of things (that you clone from others) will result in something, ironically, original!

"If you have one person you are influenced by, everyone will say you are the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you are so original"
- Gary Panter

“I steal from every single movie ever made.”

- Quentin Tarantino

“No man who cares about originality will ever be original. It's the man who's only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original -- and doesn't notice it.”

- C.S. Lewis (author of The Chronicles of Narnia)

So you don’t have to be original all the time. There are so many good ideas / practices that other smart people have already figured out!

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

- Isaac Newton

Picking Nuggets Note:

The truth from Peter Thiel on Competition might seem like it conflicts with the truth from Mohnish Pabrai on Copying good practices from other people. But I think they don't conflict because what Peter Thiel opposes is pursuing a competitive goal. Whereas Mohnish Pabrai is only in favor of copying other people's best practices, when it makes sense for you to do it. So Peter is talking about copying and competing over goals (which is the end) whereas Mohnish is talking about copying practices and methodologies (which are just means of an end).

Also, the kind of copying that Peter talks about is driven by the sheep-like behavior that is common in humans, as explained by Social Epistemology. Whereas the kind of copying that Mohnish talks about is driven by independent thinking from the individual on what makes sense to him to incorporate into his work (depending on his personal goals).

Check out the YouTube Video!

This Blogpost is brought to you by Shortform - The platform that I love using to get nuggets from Books!

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. This is how I mainly learn from books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms).

(Many times book authors will make hundreds of pages based on just a few new ideas just for the sake of producing a book, but in reality they could have given you these new-interesting ideas in just few pages. This is the cool thing about Shortform: you cut to the chase and get the book insights without having to go thru unnecessary extensions of them. Besides, in any book guide on Shortform you can find links to blogposts or other book guides related to the same ideas! -- as Naval Ravikant argues: reading books to completion is more of a vanity metric. What actually matters is to look for ideas, and once you find good interesting ideas, you reflect and research on them. [Naval on the podcast with Joe Rogan]. And it is the foundational understanding of all these truthful and interdisciplinary ideas that will make you better in any life dimension [references: Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Naval Ravikant, Mohnish Pabrai]).

I also made a short video exploring the platform and showing how I’m personally using it. Here’s the Link!

If you wanna check out Shortform, you can use my special link to support the channel and you will have a 5-day FREE trial and a 20% off the annual subscription - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

The mark of a great (non-fiction) author...

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

📚 Passages I loved

Passage 1

Peter Thiel on the Formula for Success👇

"This book [Zero to One] offers no formula for success. The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas."

Elon Musk on First Principles👇

"I do think there is a good framework for thinking. It is physics – you know the sort of first principles reasoning … What I mean by that is boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there as opposed to reasoning by analogy."

Passage 2

Peter Thiel on the condition for every successful business👇

“In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition [they compete because they try to solve the same problem -- leading to tiny or non-existent profit margins].

....

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business."

(If you enjoyed these passages, you might wanna connect with me on Twitter/Linkedin — I consistently post there the best passages from books I’m reading!)

My Twitter

My Linkedin

👨‍💻Other content I have found super valuable lately…

- 2 great episodes from the podcast The Diary Of A CEO (I recently discovered it):

- Shane Parrish interview with Scott Adams

- New Episode released by Naval Ravikant:

Until next time :)

Julio xx

I collected some nuggets (from Nassim Taleb and Naval Ravikant) on why is always wiser to not follow groups in general (because of at least 3 social dynamics that occur and overrides all rational-critical thinking), and what kind of groups are the only “sane” (little clue: it has to do with real interactions, such as Businesses in Market Economies).

Hope you find it valuable :)

🧠 Top Quotes

"A group that tries to change its mind falls apart."

- Naval Ravikant

"Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."

- Nietzsche

"Science is the Belief in the Ignorance of the Experts".

- Richard Feynman

👨 People

Nassim Taleb's work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. Author of many successful books, including The Black Swan, which The Sunday Times considers one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

Naval Ravikant is the co-founder of AngelList and co-author of Venture Hacks. He has invested (early-stage) in companies like Uber, Twitter and FourSquare.

📝 Notes

Chapter 1 — The Madness of Groups [Nassim Taleb]

In a speech with the GBH Forum Network, Nassim states:

"How come something can be deemed as wrong by individuals, and considered as true by the collective?"

He then mentions a saying from Fat Tony (fictional character in Nassim's books):

"Is easier to scam people with billions than scam them with thousands.
And is a lot easier to fool a multitude than to fool a single person."

As I was hearing and processing this, I couldn’t help but think of 2 particular subjects:

On the left, Sam Bankman-Fried. On the right, Bernie Madoff. They both fooled a multitude and scam them with billions of dollars. It is estimated that Madoff stole around 65 billion dollars.

Nassim argues that this statement, from Fat Tony, is fully confirmed by the following:

• Social Epistemology

  The study of the relevance of communities to knowledge.

• Social Contagion

  Involves behaviour, emotions, or conditions spreading spontaneously through a group or network.

• Informational Cascades

  Situation in which an individual makes a decision based on observation of others without regard to his own private information.

Nassim exposes an instance from the field of Economics…

Most economists make forecasts and compute risks. But the truth is that all these forecasts and risks estimations are flat wrong, because they are based on the assumption that the Economy follows a Bell (Normal) Distribution, when in reality it follows a Power Law (what Nassim calls “Fat tail”) Distribution. And under a Power Law, computing risks and making forecasts is just not feasible — which is why Nassim claims that the key is to prepare for unforeseen risks rather than naively forecast them.

"We don’t live in a normal world; we live under a power law."

- Peter Thiel (founder of Paypal)

Passage from Peter Thiel's book "Zero to One":

"In 1906, economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered what became the “Pareto principle,” or the 80- 20 rule, when he noticed that 20% of the people owned 80% of the land in Italy—a phenomenon that he found just as natural as the fact that 20% of the peapods in his garden produced 80% of the peas. This extraordinarily stark pattern, in which asmall few radically outstrip all rivals, surrounds us everywhere in the natural andsocial world. The most destructive earthquakes are many times more powerful thanall smaller earthquakes combined. The biggest cities dwarf all mere towns puttogether. And monopoly businesses capture more value than millions of undifferentiated competitors. The power law— so named because exponential equations describe severely unequal distributions—is the law of the universe. It defines our surroundings so completely that we usually don’t even see it."

After Nassim explains this truth about the world and their field to Economists, the result is no change in their way of doing things! They stick to the status quo of wrong (and harmful — since decisions are taking on wrong models) forecasting and risk computing. This is what’s called “Institutional Stickiness”. In the next chapter, Naval Ravikant offers additional good arguments for why we have this phenomenon of Institutional Stickiness.

"Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."

- Nietzsche

"It is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”

- Carl Jung

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

- Mark Twain

"Be a free thinker and don't accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in."

- Aristotle

Chapter 2 — Groups Never Admit Failure [Naval Ravikant]

Naval argues that Groups never admit failure, because if they do they would fall apart!

"A group that tries to change its mind falls apart."

- Naval Ravikant

So the ultimate usual outcome of a Group is that it remains the same, but what happens is that a portion of the group diverges! — and sometimes that portion create a new group. Naval puts the instance of the Catholics and the subgroup that emerged from it: the Protestants.

Outcomes don’t matter

A group will declare victory regardless of the real basis of the outcome. When real outcomes don’t dictate the survivorship of the group (like with Banks, the International Monetary Fund, Non-profits, “experts” without skin in the game…), failures are dismissed by the groups. And institutional stickiness takes place — and it sticks corrosively because as Nassim argues: A system that doesn’t learn from its mistakes, is a doomed system!

Solution: Groups that have to implement feedback from reality in order to survive are the best kind of groups (the only kind that doesn’t live in delusion — because if it does, it dies). Of course, a clear example are for-profit organizations in Market Economies (except Banks — as they have what Nassim calls “a transferability of antifragility” — they take ownership of the upside thru inflated bonuses, and when bad times come is the citizens who pay for their bail-outs). Because for-profit organizations are exposed to losses. They have Skin in the Game! And so they need to admit and learn from failures if the group wants to survive.

“I believe Costco does more for civilization than the Rockefeller Foundation.
I think it's a better place. You get a bunch of very intelligent people sitting around trying to do good, I immediately get kind of suspicious and squirm in my seat.”

- Charlie Munger

Picking Nuggets Note:
Among for-profit organizations, the smaller the group the better! As Paul Graham (founder of Y Combinator) argues, in a Big Corporation you can fake productivity to your boss by staying long hours in the office (though not necessarily doing anything) or making it look like you are working. But in a startup there is no BS, as the market will tell if you worked (and did a good work). What happens here is that the bigger the group, the more "averaged out" is your work input (with the work of the other employees) and so the more detached is your work with the final product and its market response. So startups are better groups because the link btw the input of its members and the market/reality response is much more direct and easy to evaluate.

"Science is the Belief in the Ignorance of the Experts".

- Richard Feynman

Check out the YouTube Video!

📁 All the ideas in this article are saved and classified in a searchable Database, which (as of July 2024) contains nearly 2,000 timeless ideas (sourced directly from the most influential doers and entrepreneurs — captured on books, interviews/podcasts and articles).

I call this Database the Doers Notebook, and I’ve recently opened it for anyone who wants it.

🤔 Why did I build this?

Well, as the Latin motto goes, “A chief part of learning is simply knowing where you can find a thing.” And since it’s all 🔎 searchable, we only need to type a keyword to immediately get a list of insights related to it!

For instance, if I’m unsure about how to get more sales in my business, I can simply type the word “sales” and immediately get 88 search results! In this case from Jim Edwards, Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Balaji Srinivasan, Nassim Taleb, and many other remarkable individuals.

It’s like having a 🧠 second brain from which we can pull wisdom on demand.

And this is super valuable because it can significantly decrease the error rate in our judgment.

“In an age of infinite leverage [code and media], judgment is the most important skill.”

- Naval Ravikant

I actually made a video where I went through the list of insights I got for the keywords “sales” and “creative”.

So, if you wanna get better at sales and learn to be more creative (and also see all the features of the database and how you can get access) then definitely check out the video 👇

📓 Latest Thoughts

Reflecting on a quote from Alan Watts…

"To the degree that you condemn others, and find evil in others, you are to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself."
- Alan Watts

Reflecting on this quote, it makes me think that we underestimate the influence that a group has over its members. We are wired to do what everyone else is doing (Mimetic Theory), and even if the group engages in illogical or unethical behavior we will put a lot of effort into rationalize it somehow to never go against the group dynamic. And once we start executing on those bad/immoral behaviors, it's much more difficult to escape from the group because of 3 dynamics that stem from executing the actions:

• Cognitive Dissonance

  We all think of ourselves as good people. So if you do something that goes against your values or the values of the general Society, you need to convince yourself that it has to be done and justify it with whatever reasons you can find (because the dissonance of ideas is just too uncomfortable to bear). So the more bad actions you take, the more you believe in that is actually the right thing to do (humans can rationalize anything). So your marginal action will likely be increasingly more deliberate and intense on its purpose.

• Consistency Bias

  Tendency to make any future action consistent with actions already executed on.

• The fact that everyone outside the group will condemn you and isolate you (precisely because most people is unconscious about their own potential for evil). So your only "friends" are in the group.

As you keep executing on these immoral actions, the more intense these dynamics get and the more you identify with the group and believe in the group no matter the morality of the actions that are being promoted by the group.

This is why I think that all humans are capable of the worst kind of atrocities (this is something Jordan Peterson talks a lot about. In an interview with Lex Fridman they discuss it, especially from the timestamp 3:00:00).

Is just the human condition. And we are not far from the evilness of the Nazis or the Bolsheviks or the Catholic Inquisition. This is why I believe is critical that we learn (without judging) from history and the human condition, and decrease or eliminate the consumption of sensationalistic news where mono-culturist journalists condemn people or groups (who did something wrong) with a sense of superiority and distance as if they were of a different specie.

📚 Passages I loved

Passage 1

"It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You’d think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn’t sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they’re expressionists. It’s all evasion. Underneath the long words or the “expressive” brush strokes, there’s not much going on, and that’s frightening. When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance."

(other quotes)

"That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains" - Steve Jobs

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Leonardo Da Vinci

Passage 2

Peter Thiel on How Paypal almost died, and the Insanity of the Dotcom Bubble 👇

“We knew that the boom was going to end. Since we didn’t expect investors’ faith in our mission to survive the coming crash, we moved fast to raise funds while we could. On February 16, 2000, the Wall Street Journal ran a story lauding our viral growth and suggesting that PayPal was worth $500 million. When we raised $100 million the next month, our lead investor took the Journal’s back-of-the-envelope valuation as authoritative. (Other investors were in even more of a hurry. A South Korean firm wired us $5 million without first negotiating a deal or signing any documents. When I tried to return the money, they wouldn’t tell me where to send it.) That March 2000 financing round bought us the time we needed to make PayPal a success. Just as we closed the deal, the bubble popped.”

“Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” - Nietzsche

👨‍💻Other content I have found super valuable lately…

- Lex Fridman Podcast with Sean Kelly. 3 insights I took:

• There might not be a "global meaning", but you can find "local meanings" everywhere — anything that brings you a moment of deep joy. When “there is no place I rather be, there is no thing I rather be doing, there is nobody I rather be with, and this I will remember well”.

• You can't appreciate the joy of life without also experiencing the grief and darkness.

• Relationships and taking responsibility for other people is very meaningful for humans.

- Quick explanation of “Fat Tails” (the Power Law Distribution) by Nassim Taleb

- The Laws of Marketing by Mohnish Pabrai

- A Marketing tip from Alex Hormozi

Until next time :)

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!

I have collected some nuggets around the topic of Success! It is focused on 2 aspects:

1. How to Be Successful. — Here I picked 2 main insights!

2. What does Success even mean? Here I picked one big insight!

These insights debunk common beliefs about Success — Some are intrinsically flawed. While others outdated in this digital age.

I picked the nuggets mainly from Naval Ravikant. But also from Kapil Gupta, Jimmy (MrBeast) Donaldson and Mohnish Pabrai.

I hope you will find this article valuable :)

🧠 Top Quotes

“Discipline is really overrated. Discipline is just you fighting with yourself to do something that you don’t wanna do.”

- Naval Ravikant

“The only style worth having is the one you can’t help.”

- Paul Graham

"For general people going thru general life just trying to be successful... Hard work really doesn't matter that much."

- Naval Ravikant

"To me the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely -- Who don't even play the game. Who rise above it. And those are the people who have such an internal mental and self-control and self-awareness that they need nothing from anybody else."

- Naval Ravikant (interview with Tim Ferriss)

👨 People

Naval Ravikant is the co-founder of AngelList and co-author of Venture Hacks. He has invested (early-stage) in companies like Uber, Twitter and FourSquare.

Kapil Gupta is an author and Personal Advisor to many renowned Pro Athletes and CEOs -- such as Hayley Wickenheiser and Naval Ravikant.

Jimmy (Mr Beast) Donaldson runs several YouTube Channels, a delivery fast food restaurant (Mr Beast Burger) and two philanthropic projects: Beast Philanthropy and Team Trees. His brand is valued in the Billions of dollars.

Mohnish Pabrai is a renowned investor and entrepreneur. He currently manages around 600-800m$ in his Investment Fund. He also started the NGO "Dakshana" in India (2008), which coaches students to pass the university entrance exams for IT and Medicine. He has a close friendship with Charlie Munger.

📝 Notes

Lie #1 — You need Self-Discipline to Succeed

(Truth: You Need a genuine Obsession to Succeed)

“Discipline is really overrated. Discipline is just you fighting with yourself to do something that you don’t wanna do. So, I would say is more important to find something that you wanna do and that can be productive, as opposed to trying to discipline yourself. Self-discipline is tough. You won’t sustain it. Tiger Woods didn’t become a great golfer thru self-discipline.”

- Naval Ravikant (on a Periscope recording)

Naval argues that self-discipline is not a source of success. In a conversation (recorded on Clubhouse) with his personal advisor Kapil Gupta, they agreed on that true success can only come from a sincere and deep obsession (on something that also has a long-term pay-off), because it’s only when you are sincerely engaged that you will forge your own path. And to be successful, by definition you can’t do what everyone else is doing (competition trap) or merely follow a set of prescriptions or “how-to’s”. You have to add a unique component to the equation! But this can’t be forced. It should come naturally as you try to do something really good (which only happens when you are passionate and genuinely interested — which is why Naval says that “no one can compete on being you”). Paul Graham (founder of Y Combinator) makes reference to this idea on his book — Hackers and Painters:

“At an art school where I once studied, the students wanted most of all to develop a personal style. But if you just try to make good things, you’ll inevitably do it in a distinctive way, just as each person walks in a distinctive way. Michelangelo was not trying to paint like Michelangelo. He was just trying to paint well; he couldn’t help painting like Michelangelo.

The only style worth having is the one you can’t help.”

The more love for the process you have… The better job you will do! Thus, the less discipline (that is, pushing yourself to do something you don’t want to do) that a particular activity demands from you, the more suited is that activity for you and the more chances you have to be the best at it!

"Find what you love and let it kill you." - Charles Bukowski

The Process for Success

Once you start executing on something that genuinely moves you, Kapil Gupta argues that this process is (1) non-linear and (2) unpredictable.

(1) The non-linearity of this process has also been discussed by Nassim Taleb:

"Progress is almost never linear. Ups and downs and bursts."

- Nassim Taleb

(2) The uncertainty factor also fits perfectly with Nassim Taleb’s work (and anyone who cares about real progress and innovation). Nassim argues that is impossible to intellectualize reality, and so instead of having a rigid plan is better to just experiment and based on the outcomes of the experiments, take the rational choice (Up-regulation thru the Convexity Bias).

"What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Stay hungry. Stay foolish"

- Steve Jobs

The Essence of Success

Kapil Gupta argues that when a person “makes it” and becomes a top performer in his field, what happens is that he has accumulated an almost infinite amount of small details that allows him to perform at that level. The aggregate of these details is what makes the person unique and successful. He also argues that these details have 2 properties:

• They are not transmissible, because of the sheer amount. So when a great performer shares "his secrets” he is only sharing the highlights — So anyone that religiously follows “the secrets” of the great performer is doomed to ultimate failure, because in following the highlights he still misses all the small details (not to mention also the fluid evolution of reality which changes the set of opportunities at any given time) Thus, the utility should be more to inspire you, rather than instruct you.

• They are not even knowable by the great performers themselves! Kapil argues that “no great artist knows”. Naval Ravikant agreed and mentioned that during the performance these people are in a state of complete selflessness (one of the states of the famous “flow-state”), they are not self-conscious about what they do but are fully immersed in the activity.

The Obsession of Jimmy (MrBeast) Donaldson

The following is an excerpt from a conversation between Jimmy and Lex Fridman. For context, Jimmy was telling Lex about his singular obsession for building businesses.

"Is not even discipline for me.

Is just in my blood.

Is what I wake up (for).

I don't think about it.

I don't push myself.

I don't need to watch a f***ing motivational video to go work.

I just do it.

It's programmed in me at this point.

And I couldn't imagine a world where I don't wake up and do it every day."

- Jimmy (MrBeast) Donaldson (on the latest interview with Lex Fridman)

This connects well with a passage I read on the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (by Mark Manson):

“I wanted the reward and not the struggle.

I wanted the result and not the process.

I was in love with not the fight but only the victory.

And life doesn’t work that way.

Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.

People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have chiseled abs and can bench-press a small house.

People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it.

People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainties of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.”

- Mark Manson

Lie #2 — Hard work is critical to Achieve (Financial) Success

(Truth: Good Judgement is critical to Achieve Financial Success)

"Hard work is really overrated. How hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy."

- Naval Ravikant (The Almanack of Naval Ravikant)

Naval Ravikant was asked by Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) whether hard work was required for success in life — in a scale of 1 (don’t even mind) to 10 (very needed).

Naval responded that, unless you want to build the next big platform winner-takes-all billion dollar company, hard work would be at a 3-4 in the scale.

"For general people going thru general life just trying to be successful... Hard work really doesn't matter that much."

- Naval Ravikant

Why this is the case? Naval argues that we live in an age of infinite leverage, and so…

What you do + How well you do it + Who you do it with >> How hard you work

"Outputs are non-linear based on the quality of the work that you put in."

- Naval Ravikant (on the Joe Rogan Podcast)

Picking Nuggets Note:

Let's analyze this quote in 2 parts: the leverage, and the judgement.

The infinite leverage means that your product or service can be replicated infinitely with the internet at no marginal cost, and you can get paid (potentially) by each of these replications (or create goodwill and track-record that lets you capitalize in future opportunities). This is why pure hard work is much less relevant in our current environment - because you don't have to hustle anymore to make the replications, as now you can delegate this to the robots behind the internet.

"An army of robots is already here. It’s very cheaply available. The bottleneck is just figuring out intelligent and interesting things to do to them." - Naval Ravikant

This takes us to the second part - How can we build good judgement? There are 2 proven ways:

  * One is to Iterate Fast. The more you iterate, the more experience you gain, which leads to better judgement.

  * The other one is to acquire foundational skills and mental models

"Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills." - Naval Ravikant

"You have got to have models in your head and you have got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models" - Charlie Munger

Instance of using YouTube (Internet Media) as Leverage...

In the H3 Podcast, Jimmy (MrBeast) Donaldson said that…

"You have to work smarter not harder."

He argues that YouTube is exponential based on the quality of the work that you put in (perfect instance of the previous explanation by Naval Ravikant). And so for him it makes much more sense to put a lot of time and effort into one video rather than make a lot of not-the-best videos — He argues that is way easier (and faster) to get 100K views on a single video, than 100K views from making 100 videos of 1K views each. Because if a video is just slightly better than most videos out there, the YouTube algorithm will take that video and serve it to as many people as possible (who are interested in the content theme) and hide the not-so-good videos from viewers.

Picking Nuggets Note:

An analogy that comes to my mind is the top athletes in races — The number one is just slightly faster than the number 2 or 3. But he will get much much more compensated than the number 2 or 3. So outcomes are non-linear based on the increase in performance.

A common (and negative) motive to do hard work...

Kapil Gupta, in a conversation with Naval Ravikant on Clubhouse, argued that many times people work hard only to have an answer (to prepare ourselves for the case that we ultimately don’t succeed)…

• To have an answer for the mind — When it comes attacking and asks you: How come you didn’t make it? If one is armed with the ammunition of hard work, then he can reply to the mind that he did the best he could (and not feel so bad). Whereas if he would have just sit in the coach doing nothing, he wouldn’t have that ammunition to reply to the mind.

• To have an answer to the people who bet in you. If you don’t succeed at the end but other people observed you working hard… That somehow feels more forgivable. Because there is romanticism in having tried hard and failed. And effort (for its own sake, without necessarily arriving anywhere) seems to be highly regarded in our Society.

Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.”

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Hard work seems to be sort of the preparing of the bed of failure."

- Kapil Gupta

Lie #3 — Success depends on your noticeable accomplishments

(Truth: Success is a completely internal metric)

The Common View…

"Most people think of someone as successful when they win the game."

- Naval Ravikant

This can be any competitive game. Naval comments a few examples:

• If you are an athlete, you will think the top athletes are successful.

• If you are in Business, you will think as successful people like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Satoshi Nakamoto or Marc Andreessen (co-founder of the first widely used web browser).

Naval’s unique view

"To me the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely -- Who don't even play the game. Who rise above it. And those are the people who have such an internal mental and self-control and self-awareness that they need nothing from anybody else."

- Naval Ravikant (interview with Tim Ferriss)

Some instances that Naval mentions —> Buddha and J. Krishnamurti

"If you could sit for 30 minutes and be happy... You are successful"

- Naval Ravikant

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

- Blaise Pascal

“Contra the prevailing belief, "success" isn't being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.”

- Nassim Taleb

The Fisherman Story

You can listen to the story in the YouTube video (starts at timestamp 10:20).

(spoil alert!) Story: There is a banker from New York who makes a lot of money but is extremely stressed out. So he decides to take a break from NY and books a remote village in Mexico for one-week. In the village, there is only one more human: a local fisherman.

The banker becomes interested in the life-style of the fisherman and sees him always doing the same thing every day — Wakes up. Go fishing and gets exactly 2 fish. Comes back to his hut. Eats one for lunch. Takes a nap. Eats the other one for dinner. Hangs around his hut and goes to sleep.

In the 3rd day the banker couldn’t take it anymore and went to ask him if he could catch more than 2 fish. The fisherman tells him that of course he could. The banker then advises him to catch more than 2 fish and sell the rest in the market.

The fisherman asks “and then what?”. The banker tells him that with the extra money he can hire a person to catch more fish and have more to sell to in the market.

The fisherman asks “and then what?”. The banker tells him that with the extra money he can build a fleet with many employees and also build his own “canning factory” with a good branding so he could improve profit margins and export worldwide.

The fisherman asks “and then what?”. The banker tells him that he can “take him public” — He can make an IPO (Initial Public Offering) of his new company and help him make a lot more money.

The fisherman asks “and then what?”. The banker tells him that after he has made so much money… He can come to the village to hang out and rest if he wants. At that moment, the fisherman just stares at the banker. And tells him that he is already there!

Mohnish Pabrai shared this insightful story with the students of The Carroll School of Management (Boston College). I have to say this is my favorite story that combines humor with so much wisdom underneath.

The lesson of the story is to think of life in terms of the essence of life. And from the true essence of life, we can derive 2 key lessons:

• Life is finite.

  “The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.” - Seneca

• We come naked, we leave naked. Any amount of wealth that you generate (and that you won’t need in your life) will be:

  - Recycled back to Society.

  - Misused by some of the heirs. Also, as Warren Buffet and many other influential people argue, large inheritances are a dis-service for the next family generations.

Check out the YouTube video!

This Blogpost is brought to you by Shortform - The platform that I love using to get nuggets from Books!

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. This is how I mainly learn from books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms).

(Many times book authors will make hundreds of pages based on just a few new ideas just for the sake of producing a book, but in reality they could have given you these new-interesting ideas in just few pages. This is the cool thing about Shortform: you cut to the chase and get the book insights without having to go thru unnecessary extensions of them. Besides, in any book guide on Shortform you can find links to blogposts or other book guides related to the same ideas! -- as Naval Ravikant argues: reading books to completion is more of a vanity metric. What actually matters is to look for ideas, and once you find good interesting ideas, you reflect and research on them. [Naval on the podcast with Joe Rogan]. And it is the foundational understanding of all these truthful and interdisciplinary ideas that will make you better in any life dimension [references: Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Naval Ravikant, Mohnish Pabrai]).

So you will likely find many interesting book guides on Shortform! My plan is to read my personally filtered book guides (I have around 50-60 saved on my personal list on Shortform -- which I filtered based on whether I already knew about the author or the book was recommended by someone I trust). And if in a particular book guide I find super interesting-new ideas, I will also buy the book and read it entirely!

If you wanna check out Shortform, you can use my special link to support the channel and you will have a 5-day FREE trial and a 20% off the annual subscription - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

The mark of a great (non-fiction) author...

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

📓 Latest Thoughts

If I had to pick only ONE idea from Nassim Taleb's wisdom…

that has helped me the most (to live better in any dimension of my life), that would be (without any doubt) the concept of embracing CONVEXITY BIAS...

Of course this concept is intertwined with many other ideas from Nassim, but the specifics of this idea are extremely powerful. That's why he calls it "the philosopher's stone" in the real life. This concept implies the typical trial and error (that gives you the optionality factor), and the bias comes from always choosing the "good options" and never taking the "bad options" (once you try and examine the outcomes). As you keep doing this, you increasingly improve your judgement and gather more and more information thru the experimentations! ---> You essentially gain intelligence from the unintelligible.

"What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent." - Friedrich Nietzsche

The key is to be comfortable with that feeling of uncertainty! This is, at least to me, the biggest impediment I have to apply this idea.

"The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces." - Robert Greene

But I try my best to be comfortable with it and be aware that starting a project (of my own) without the slightest clue of what I'm doing or what next to do is the best thing I can do if I ever wanna have a chance of getting outstanding outcomes in the long-term. Of course I do start projects with a little plan, but I make the plan just to "start going" and take action, but once I'm "in the action" I have no issue changing or taking a completely different path to my initial plan! In fact, I now willingly seek to do this!

"To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often." - Winston Churchill

Lessons from Leonardo Da Vinci (that we can apply)…

• Nurture an insatiable, child-like curiosity.

  "Wisdom begins in wonder." - Socrates

• Learn because it gives you pleasure, not because you need to.

• Pay attention to details.

• Let your imagination run free.

• Don't be afraid of distractions or procrastination if they feed your creativity.

  "What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Use critical thinking and experimentation.

• Take complex ideas and make illustrations (to understand them better).

• Find the intersections of different disciplines / fields.

  (this is Charlie Munger's latticework of mental models that comes from learning all the big ideas from all the big disciplines).

• Seek perfection.

• Seek collaboration.

• Don't let money dictate your passions.

• Write things down. Always carry a notepad with you.

  (recommend checking Tiago Forte's Second Brain concept -- our mind is made to have thoughts, but not to permanently carry those thoughts. That's why is important to write down your thoughts.)

(Taken from a Shortform (affiliate link) summary of Leonardo Da Vinci biography by Walter Isaacson, plus my commentary).

📚 Passages I loved

Passage 1

"In practice I think it’s easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who’ve made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks, I could do better than that.

Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing. You have to do your homework. But as you become expert in a field, you’ll start to hear little voices saying, What a hack! There must be a better way. Don’t ignore those voices. Cultivate them. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it."

- Paul Graham (Hackers and Painters)

Picking Nuggets Note: This recipe for designing is aligned with Nassim Taleb's concept of "Via Negativa", which is the process of elimination / substraction. So instead of thinking about what something "is", you think about what something "is not" and then remove all the things that can't be part of that something.)

Passage 2

"Good design solves the right problem. The typical stove has four burners arranged in a square, and a dial to control each. How do you arrange the dials? The simplest answer is to put them in a row. But this is a simple answer to the wrong question. The dials are for humans to use, and if you put them in a row, the unlucky human will have to stop and think each time about which dial matches which burner. Better to arrange the dials in a square like the burners."

- Paul Graham (Hackers and Painters)

Picking Nuggets addition:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions" - Albert Einstein      

👨‍💻Other content I have found super valuable lately…

Until next time :)

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!

I have collected some insights on Why you should become a Content Creator this year! I picked the nuggets from Naval Ravikant, Chamath Palihapitiya, Mark Rober (23M Subs on YouTube) and Jimmy (aka MrBeast) Donaldson.

But before, a summary of the Content Creator Playbook:

1. Grow an audience on any platform which has a discovery algorithm such as YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, Instagram…

2. (Optional, though recommended) — Redirect (amap) that Audience to your own Website / Blog / Community… (e.g./ you own website, Substack, Discord or any other platform where you actually have direct reach with the audience).

3. Monetize thru: Ads Revenue (e.g./ YouTube’s Adsense Program), Affiliate Marketing, Brand Deals or your own business (which solves a common problem in your Audience).

I hope you will find this article valuable :)

🧠 Quotes (my favorite)

“The new oil is ideas. It’s all digital. All the new fortunes are being created in ideas space. In fact, if you’re starting out today as a young, ambitious person, you don’t learn real estate; you don’t learn coal and oil mining; you don’t go into the extraction of physical resources to create wealth. You go into ideas space. You go into programming, books, movies, blogs and podcasts and building robots, which are mostly intellectual property underneath.”

"The most powerful money-makers are actually individual brands"

"Today in Society... You get rewarded for creative work"

- Naval Ravikant

"I would focus on the Content Creator side of things because I believe that's 'where the puck is going'. That's a much more important shift... In how we all consume information."

- Chamath Palihapitiya

"I think four or five years from now there's gonna be a lot of articles about Creators who will be billionaire Creators."

- Mark Rober

👨 People

Chamath Palihapitiya is the CEO of Social Capital (Venture Capital Fund). In 2007, he joined Facebook and led the User Growth Team. His net worth is estimated to be over 1 Billion $.

Naval Ravikant is the co-founder of AngelList and co-author of Venture Hacks. He has invested (early-stage) in companies like Uber, Twitter and FourSquare.

Mark Rober is a former Apple engineer who makes videos on YouTube and has grown an Audience to 23.3M Subscribers (as of January 2023).

Jimmy (Mr Beast) Donaldson runs several YouTube Channels, a delivery fast food restaurant (Mr Beast Burger) and two philanthropic projects: Beast Philanthropy and Team Trees. His brand is valued in the Billions of dollars.

📝 Notes

Chapter 1 — Chamath Palihapitiya: The Evolution of Social Apps and the Next Big Opportunity

(Interview took place on December 2022)

Where are we probabilistically going? (in Apps & Social Experiences).

Before Chamath answered this question, he went back to how all started and analyzed the evolution until today and the ongoing most clear opportunity (though not clear to the knowledge of most people). He tells the story in 3 waves:

The First Wave — The Platforms

The mission here was to build the platforms and scale them.

The winners? Apple and Google. They captured trillions of dollars (in Enterprise Value) and reached billions of Monthly Active Users (MAU).

The Second Wave — The (Social) Apps

Once the platforms scaled to mass use, the second wave took place. In this case, the mission was to create the social network (on top of the platforms) — a social ecosystem. Chamath argues this was the "Atomized version of the platforms".

The winners? Facebook, Tencent QQ, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. These too captured trillions of dollars (in Enterprise Value) and reached billions of Monthly Active Users.

Where is now the “puck” (opportunity) going? —> That’s the third wave!

The Third Wave — The Content Creators

"The next most obvious atomic unit are Content Creators.” The Content Creators are the ones that “sit on top” of the Social Apps, and represent the new atomization. And it is hiding in plain sight.

The mission here is to provide (to the audience) a unique New’s Feed, Community….

2 big instances: Lex Fridman and Jimmy (MrBeast) Donaldson.

Future projections (next 5 years):

• Trillions of dollars in Economic Value.

• Reach to billions of People.

“I would focus on the Content Creator side of things because I believe that's 'where the puck is going'. That's a much more important shift... In how we all consume information.”

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” - Wayne Gretzky

The new filter of information are Individual Brands!

Chapter 2 — Naval Ravikant: The New Oil is Ideas

(June 2019)

The Default Model for people is to work for other people. That’s the Employment Model… "I must work for other people - work my way up the ladder". Which is also how you end up in the Competition Trap — trying to imitate what other people is doing to make money.

But in the modern digital economy, there is a new model available…

"Today in Society... You get rewarded for creative work."

"The most powerful money-makers are actually individual brands."

You need 3 things…

1. Leverage — e.g./ Internet Media

2. Unique skill-set (Specific Knowledge)

3. Accountability — Put your name on it! (you have to take the risks to gain the rewards).

The key, Naval argues, is to be Authentic and Find what you love doing (that's how you escape the Competition Trap), and then map it with Society’s needs!

(November 2021)

Ideas are the New Oil…

“The new oil is ideas. It’s all digital. All the new fortunes are being created in ideas space.

In fact, if you’re starting out today as a young, ambitious person, you don’t learn real estate; you don’t learn coal and oil mining; you don’t go into the extraction of physical resources to create wealth. You go into ideas space. You go into programming, books, movies, blogs and podcasts and building robots, which are mostly intellectual property underneath.”

Chapter 3 — Mark Rober: Why Content Creators are much more valuable now than ever before.

(Interview took place on December 2022 // Source Interview: Colin and Samir)

"I think four or five years from now there's gonna be a lot of articles about Creators who will be billionaire Creators."

2 reasons why…

1) The Creator's influence enables a Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Business Model. — which is very valuable because it skips paying to intermediaries.

2) "The Data Darkness" Phenomenon

"It used to be really easy (for businesses) to find audiences. (Now) it's not as easy to find an audience if you don't have it."

This phenomenon essentially means that your data can’t be tracked (Cookies Policy) and so companies have a harder time finding a relevant audience. Thus, people with an audience become more valuable (in the market) as companies can use that audience (the audience profile is molded by the theme of the content) to pitch their stuff (e.g./ Mark Rober’s content is about building/engineering and the subscribers are mostly kids, so his channel can be an optimal publishing space for companies like Lego).

The New Paradigm of Entrepreneurship

The traditional paradigm is the classic "Product-Market” fit. Which is based on first building the product, and then find an audience to pitch that product. Now, Colin and Samir (interviewers) argue that we are moving towards a paradigm shift —> first you grow an audience, and then you go build the product (which fits the common interests of the audience). They call it “Market-Product” fit.

Picking Nuggets Note:

I’m currently reading the book “Hackers and Painters”, by Paul Graham (founder of VC firm Y Combinator). It was published on 2004, so it doesn’t say anything about YouTube or being a Creator, but I’m surely getting many nuggets given its timeless nature. One thing I read that made me realized how important this new entrepreneurship paradigm might be (market-product fit), is that one of the most important things in a Startup is keeping the time-to-market short — You want to launch the product asap so that you can start having your first users / customers and then iterate the product based on their feedback. You want to make minimum guesses, and take maximum feedback — that’s how you make something that people actually wants (another definition I learnt from the book —> Wealth is not money. Wealth is what people want. Whereas money is just how people credit you for giving them what they want). On the opposite, the longer you take to build the product, the more likely it is that you are “prematurely optimizing” — meaning that you are optimizing on your guesses rather than the user’s feedback.

If we reflect on this idea, we can see how important it becomes to first have an audience and then build the product. You can build that product almost entirely based on potential user’s feedback — seeing what they say in the comments section, what content get’s most views, you can directly ask them if they would be interested in a specific product.

Peter Thiel (on his book Zero to One) also remarks the importance of having a successful distribution channel (that is, anything related to advertising, marketing and sales). He argues that you can have an amazing product, but if you don't find an effective distribution channel... your company is gonna fail. On the other hand, if you build an average undifferentiated product but you have a successful distribution channel... your business can be successful! Therefore, building *first* the distribution channel / audience and *then* making a product that can flow in that distribution channel and solve the needs of that audience... I think it's the less risky way to go about building a profitable business!

Passages from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One

“We underestimate the importance of distribution… Customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks…

It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product. If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.”

Chapter 4 — MrBeast: Making Content in YouTube

(June 2021)

MrBeast did an event on his Discord Community where he shared tips about YouTube. One of the questions was — “What's the best thing to start doing on YouTube?” To what MrBeast answered: “Whatever you love. Whatever gets you out of bed in the morning. Whatever you are curious and passionate about.”

He also argues that even if your interests are very niche and weird, there is the possibility that you find an audience thanks to the enormous reach of YouTube.

Picking Nuggets Note:

This is exactly what Naval Ravikant also says, but he also mentions that your passion should be valuable to Society (in order to find an audience/market). He summarizes it in his quote: 
"Do what feels like play to you, but looks like work to others".

So the holy grail is to find Founder-Product-Market Fit. 

  * Founder-Product Fit —> "What feels like play to you". Your passion. But the market doesn't care (in most cases).

  * Product-Market Fit —> It probably "looks like work to others", because anything that is useful to Society tend to be this way. People love what you make, but you hate the process of making it. (so what’s the point if you are unhappy? Unless you can sell quickly and become Financially Independent I guess…). Besides, you will unlikely become the best at what you do because you are not passionate about it (so there is the risk that you start competing with people who is genuinely passionate about that, and make better products as result).

  * Founder-Product-Market Fit —> "What feels like play to you, but looks like work to others". People love what you make, and you also love making it! Maybe you don’t love it as much as something that has only Founder-Product Fit, but that’s OK. Also Jeff Bezos argues that when your passion starts becoming a business, there will always be things you won’t enjoy doing (heard it on an interview a long time ago but can’t trace back its source), but the secret is that you enjoy *most* of what you do. Besides, you have a shot at becoming the best at what you do because you love doing it! (that will set you apart from competition).

But how do you know in advance if what you are doing is (or could become) valuable to Society? This is really hard to know. But I guide myself on this with 3 ideas:

   * "Looks like work to others" -- Indication that what you do has an intrinsic value to Society.

   * Asking myself: Does what I'm doing has the potential to positively impact the life of any one person? If the answer is yes, then I think I’m on the right path. 

   * Asking myself: Is the project interesting?...
“The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but it's probably the most accurate one you're going to get. You're the one working on the stuff. Who's in a better position than you to judge whether it's important, and what's a better predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting?”
- Paul Graham (Essay on How to Work Hard)

Chapter 5 — Last Reflections

As Naval Ravikant and Alex Hormozi argue, Ideas and Attention are the New Oil. In the following diagram, you can see the full chain of value from the ideas to the monetization of them (specific for Content Creators):

1) Follow your passion and your genuine curiosity. Which naturally will give you ideas.

2) Package those ideas in a digital format using Social Platforms such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter… (whatever fits best what you are doing). Is important to first use the Social Platforms because these have an algorithm of discovery, and that’s how you build the audience.

3) Once you have an audience, you can direct them to your personal blog / newsletter / community… (which do not have an algorithm of discovery, but you establish more direct contact with the existing audience). Some instances: Any personal blog / website (wordpress, wix, ghost...), Substack (Blog + Newsletter), Discord (Community)...

4) Monetization type 1 -- thru native ads in the Social Media Platform. (If it lets you share the revenue. For instance, on YouTube you get 55% of the Internal Ads Revenue).

5) Monetization type 2 -- Promote other people's products (ideally that you like and use). Once you start having an audience (1-10K followers / subscribers), you can start monetizing thru:

• Affiliate Marketing. You recommend a product / service and if people click and buy with your link (tracked with cookies) you get a percentage-based commission of that sale.

• Brand Deals (when you have +20K Subs).

6) Monetization type 3 -- Make and promote your own products. Another way to monetize is to make your own products which solve common needs of your Audience. You can build a portfolio of products (which is essentially a business). And because of the Direct-to-Consumer model and that nowadays there are so many websites/apps that can help you to build those products and facilitate the online commerce, it becomes really simple to ship the products!

Check out the YouTube video here!

📁 All the ideas in this article are saved and classified in a searchable Database, which (as of July 2024) contains nearly 2,000 timeless ideas (sourced directly from the most influential doers and entrepreneurs — captured on books, interviews/podcasts and articles).

I call this Database the Doers Notebook, and I’ve recently opened it for anyone who wants it.

🤔 Why did I build this?

Well, as the Latin motto goes, “A chief part of learning is simply knowing where you can find a thing.” And since it’s all 🔎 searchable, we only need to type a keyword to immediately get a list of insights related to it!

For instance, if I’m unsure about how to get more sales in my business, I can simply type the word “sales” and immediately get 88 search results! In this case from Jim Edwards, Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Balaji Srinivasan, Nassim Taleb, and many other remarkable individuals.

It’s like having a 🧠 second brain from which we can pull wisdom on demand.

And this is super valuable because it can significantly decrease the error rate in our judgment.

“In an age of infinite leverage [code and media], judgment is the most important skill.”

- Naval Ravikant

I actually made a video where I went through the list of insights I got for the keywords “sales” and “creative”.

So, if you wanna get better at sales and learn to be more creative (and also see all the features of the database and how you can get access) then definitely check out the video 👇

📚 Snippets of Stuff I’m reading…

"Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group. For most people the best plan probably is to go to work for some existing company. But it is a good idea to understand what’s happening when you do this. A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.

If you want to go faster, it’s a problem to have your work tangled together with a large number of other people’s. In a large group, your performance is not separately measurable—and the rest of the group slows you down."

- Paul Graham (Hackers and Painters)

"Much progress comes from the young because of their relative freedom from the system and courage to take action that older people lose as they become trapped in life."

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"I discovered that I had been intuitively using the less-is-more idea as an aid in decision making (contrary to the method of putting a series of pros and cons side by side on a computer screen). For instance, if you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason. Likewise the French army had a heuristic to reject excuses for absenteeism for more than one reason, like death of grandmother, cold virus, and being bitten by a boar. If someone attacks a book or idea using more than one argument, you know it is not real: nobody says “he is a criminal, he killed many people, and he also has bad table manners and bad breath and is a very poor driver."

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

👨‍💻Other content I have found super valuable lately...

• Paul Graham - A Project of One’s own

• Paul Graham - How to Work Hard

• Chris Williamson - 16 Lessons from 2022

• How to Not Become A Man-Child

• 3 Tweets:

Until next time,

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!

I have collected some nuggets on a very special Investment Strategy (which we will see that is based on a mathematical property which extends from Investing into any life domain) that it is far from being the common strategy in the world of Investing and the Finance Industry. This strategy is coined as “The Barbell Approach”, and consists in being extremely conservative for the most part (80-90%), and for the other 10-20% be extremely aggressive (extreme high risk-reward opportunities) — that’s why is called the Barbell, because everything is on the extremes, nothing in the middle. This approach is how Nassim Taleb thinks about asset allocation in Investing, and investor Tim Ferriss is a big follower of it.

Along the notes, we will see why exactly this performs better than the traditional investment portfolios (e.g./ 60% stocks & 40% bonds…).

I hope you will find this blogpost valuable :)

🧠 Quotes

"I subscribe to the Nassim Taleb school of investment, with 90% in conservative asset classes like AAA bonds and the remaining 10% in speculative investments that can capitalize on positive 'black swans' "

- Tim Ferriss

"It's much better to put 80% of your money risk-free, and 20% speculative. Rather than the whole thing medium risk. Much more robust that way."

- Nassim Taleb

"Just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of
emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of
uncertainty."

- Nassim Taleb

"Make sure that the probability of the unacceptable (i.e., the risk of ruin) is nil.”

- Ray Dalio

👨 Giants

Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb's work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. Author of many successful books, including The Black Swan, which The Sunday Times considers one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

Tim Ferriss

Tim is an entrepreneur. He runs the Tim Ferris Podcast, which has over 1 million subscribers. Author of many popular books, including Amazon's best seller book "The 4-hour Work Week". And investor in companies (early stage) like Uber, Shopify, Alibaba, Facebook and Twitter.

🐨 Main Idea:

Apply Jensen's Inequality (mathematical property) to Make the Portfolio more Robust and Better — For the same amount of risk, it gives you better outcomes than any other traditional portfolio. It gives you limited-small downside and unlimited/unknown upside (definition of antifragility).

📝 Notes

Chapter 1 — Explanation of the Bipolar Strategy

How to make something ROBUST?
Focus on Jensen's inequality (mathematical property). The Bipolar Strategy is a strategy that has variations within it. It is vastly better than Mono Strategies (with no variations).

Instances:

— Health: Walk and Sprint is better than just jog.

— Investment Portfolio…

"It's much better to put 80% of your money risk-free (if you can find it), and 20% speculative. Rather than the whole thing medium risk. Much more robust that way."

- Nassim Taleb

Your portfolio is much more *robust* with a Bipolar Strategy (bipolarity on the risk level).

More examples…
Monogamous Birds follow a Bipolar Strategy! The female will take the boring-stable partner 90% of the time. And the hotshot partner 10% of the time — for a linear combination that is better than picking just a “good match”.

Chapter 2 — Tim Ferriss’s Barbell Portfolio

"I subscribe to the Nassim Taleb school of investment, with 90% in conservative asset classes like AAA bonds and the remaining 10% in speculative investments that can capitalize on positive 'black swans' "

- Tim Ferriss

Tim started his Barbell portfolio on the year 2007-2008. He invested a tiny portion (120K$) of his assets in early-stage start-ups and cryptocurrencies, diversified (initially) into 6-12 companies. His assumption for these super risky investments was that he would lose it, and it would be the sunk tuition cost for the network built, the skills developed and the knowledge acquired. He viewed it as his own MBA! The alternative was to spend that same money (120K$) in a 2-year Stanford MBA graduate program. You can find more about Tim and his Barbell portfolio on his Blogpost.

By 2018, some of his risky investments capitalized into “positive black swans”, with companies like Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, Uber and Shopify. So his tiny risky portion grew onto becoming bit more than 50% of his total net-worth. But of course, this happened naturally! As these companies grew massively (power of compounding and being exposed to assets with big-unknown upside).

Chapter 3 — Reflections on How I think about investing

When I reflect on how to invest my money, I can think of 3 different Buckets where I can allocate the money.

BUCKET #1 -- Invest in Yourself

"The best investment you can make, is an investment in yourself. The more you learn, the more you'll earn.”

- Warren Buffet

This Bucket is all about growing your knowledge base and skills by learning from other people's experiences and discoveries.

It can be very concrete knowledge that you already know is gonna be instantly useful to you, like for instance a workshop on how to run TikTok Ads.

But also a more broad kind of knowledge, like for example learning from the life of Charlie Munger or about mental models. And this can be very cheap because you can mostly find it on the internet for free or in books. A platform that I personally love using for this is Shortform, which is why I contacted them to create a long-term business partnership with Picking Nuggets.

I think most people just go straight to the concrete knowledge that they need, but I think it's also important to be exposed to broad big ideas because, in words of Steve Jobs, "You can't connect the dots looking forwards. You can only connect them looking backwards.". So, as you expose yourself to new ideas, you become more prepared, and as you become more prepared you will be able to see more opportunities around you.

"I will prepare and some day my chance will come".

- Abraham Lincoln

I see this Bucket as kind of like a Meta-Bucket. Because improving one’s judgement by learning from other people is a critical component for attaining success in the following 2 buckets.

Bucket #2 -- Build your own Asset
This is the entrepreneurial Bucket. Where you take your interests, creativity and knowledge to build something from scratch, which will be successful if it's useful for a group of people.

So in this Bucket you use the money to get the things that you need to start your entrepreneurial venture or make it grow. And the good thing is that nowadays is not necessary to have a lot of money or good connections to bootstrap your business, because you can freely access to infinite leverage thanks to the internet. Also, I think that tinkering in the internet is much more aligned with the barbell model that we have seen, because in the internet mistakes won't cost you any money or will be super cheap, and when you get something right you can turn it into a highly profitable business (known-small downside + unknown upside). Whereas in the case that you are purely using capital leverage, your mistakes can be very expensive. As Jimmy Donaldson (Mr. Beast) commented in the Joe Rogan Podcast... You only want to add the Capital and Labor slowly as you are proven right with your judgement.

The absolute best resource that has helped me to learn the general principles of today's Entrepreneurship is the 3-hour long Podcast Episode of Naval Ravikant on How to Get Rich.

Bucket #3 -- Buy other people's Assets
This is about buying assets from other people that can potentially maintain or increase in value, and the investment is a means for passive income.

As you probably guessed, my currently favorite Asset allocation strategy for an investment portfolio would be the Barbell model. There are 2 things I love about the Barbell:

1) The obvious one, the fact that I avoid the risk of ruin. Because 80 to 90% of the money would be in low risk asset classes such as cash (also gives you optionality to take advantage in economic crisis), high-grade treasury bonds, and Real-Estate.

"Make sure that the probability of the unacceptable (i.e., the risk of ruin) is nil.”

- Ray Dalio

2) The other thing that I love, is that for the 10-20% risky portion, it's OK if I don't calculate the risks with precision because the most I can lose it's that 10-20%. My downside is limited to that tiny allocation into the risky portion. Whereas if I were to put everything into medium-risk, I would have to accurately estimate the risks. And the thing is that it is almost impossible to do this, because we all have blind-spots and we can't predict the future.

Personally, for my current circumstances and objectives… (I’m 26 yo)

I'm mostly focused on bucket 1 and 2. But I do have a barbell extreme of around 15% of my (very) little net-worth composed of highly volatile stocks, and now I'm also open to consider equity ownership through crowdfunding of private companies, or investing in the million-dollar fine-art market which has now been democratized thanks to companies like Masterworks, which btw is kindly sponsoring this newsletter.

Also, I try following Ray Dalio's advice on that the holy grail of investing is to have good diversification, as it can remove the idiosyncratic risk (the risk of a particular asset class or an instance of a particular asset class) from your investment portfolio.

But please do not take any of this as investment advise. As it is made for entertainment purposes only.

Check out the YouTube video!

Today’s Newsletter is brought to you by Masterworks! 

Right now, the ultra rich are doubling their median investment into one particular market. Business Insider says demand has been “insane” for the past decade, but with 2022’s volatility, CNBC says the ultra rich may see this investment: “as a hedge against inflation, and perhaps a safer store of value than increasingly volatile stocks and crypto currencies.”What market? The art market. But more specifically, the multimillion-dollar fine art.

As an investment, its appreciation outpaced even the S&P 500 for the last 26 years, by a whopping 131%! And that’s even during the bull market of the past decade.

But if you’re not a billionaire, don’t worry; you can still diversify with art in an SEC-qualified way, thanks to Masterworks. Even as the stock market has fallen over 20% this year, Masterworks sold a painting for a 13.9% net return just a few weeks ago. That brings their last 3 sales, out of 9 total, to 13%, 17%, and 21% net returns to investors. And although past performance is not a guarantee of future results. It is pretty impressive.

Masterworks has over 600,000 users, and paintings have sold out in minutes. But you can use my special link to skip the waitlist: https://masterworks.art/pickingnuggets

See important Masterworks disclosures: http://masterworks.com/cd

👨‍💻Other content I have found pretty cool and valuable lately...

• Stop Hustling, Start Focusing.

• Buying Time

• How to Be TRULY Original

• Peter Thiel’s Tips for Changing the World

• Alex Hormozi’s tweet thread: How to stay poor

• Building an Idea Factory with Ali Abdaal.

Until next time,

Julio xx

I have collected some nuggets regarding common and important traps that people fall into. I sourced this wisdom from an Episode of the Joe Rogan Experience with Naval Ravikant, the Podcast of Naval Ravikant and the Shareholder's Annual Meeting of the Daily Journal Corporation where Charlie Munger answer some questions from the audience (it's very funny that almost all the questions are about life / philosophy instead of questions related to Daily Journal's operations).

I hope you will find this article valuable :)

🧠 Quotes (my favorite)

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” - Nassim Taleb

“It is not greed that drives the world, but envy.” — Warren Buffett

"People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom." - Naval Ravikant

"Competition is for Losers" - Peter Thiel

👨 People

Naval Ravikant

Naval is the co-founder of AngelList and co-author of Venture Hacks. He has invested (early-stage) in companies like Uber, Twitter and FourSquare.

Charlie Munger

Billionaire investor. He is the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett. Munger also served as chairman of Wesco Financial Corporation from 1984 through 2011. He is also chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation, and a director of Costco Wholesale Corporation.

🐨 The Traps:

1) Working for (Material) Things as Rewards

2) "That's easy for you to say" Mindset

3) The Victim Mentality

4) The Competition Trap

📝 Notes

TRAP 1: Working for Material Things as Rewards.

- Outcome: Imprisonment.

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” - Nassim Taleb

Picking Nuggets Reflection: 
“The things you own, end up owning you.”- Chuck Palahniuk

The main problem is that... People tend to upgrade their lifestyle when they make more money (Hedonic Treadmill)

- Overcome this Trap...

Ignore your peers...

Picking Nuggets Note: 
Reading about the "Mimetic Desire" is extremely interesting. This was life changing for Peter Thiel. Here is a pretty insightful interview btw Shane Parrish and Luke Burgis on this topic - Link

Beware...

“It is not greed that drives the world, but envy.” — Warren Buffett

“What you really want is Freedom” - Naval Ravikant

The objective should be to Get to Retirement.

Retirement --> "When you stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete in and of itself."

How can you get there? There are 3 ways:

• Passive Income +Frugal Life-style

• Drop your costs to zero (you become a monk)

• You work on something you love (is not about the money).

TRAP 2: The "That's easy for you (someone already wealthy) to say" Mindset

Picking Nuggets Note: 
Naval explains his childhood and adversities. He even had to borrow 400$ to go to college.

It is hard to become wealthy, but that's also (the fact that is hard and you struggle) the rewarding thing.

"Your real resume is just a catalogue of all your suffering"

"You have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life"

- Naval Ravikant

"One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful." - Sigmund Freud

TRAP 3: The Victim Mentality

The "It's someone else's fault" mindset

"You can get out of it (change your circumstances). You just have to stop thinking it's everybody else's fault" - Naval Ravikant

- Antidote:

(Realize that) Life is a Single-player Game. It's all going on in your head.

• What you think or believe -- shapes your reality

"It is your mind that creates the world" - Buddha

• Reality is neutral. It has no judgements. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong.

Charlie Munger argues that Real Victimism exposed is important (positive) for improving Society -- But he also argues that this truth is also mixed with another truth --> "It’s very counterproductive for an individual to feel like a victim, even if he is." The best you can do, as an individual, is to adopt a survivor mindset, be cheerful and keep "plugging along".

Picking Nuggets Note:
Charlie has quite a story...
- His 8-year-old son Teddy died from leukemia.
- Was Financially Broke.
- Failed first marriage.
- He is blind in one eye.
- Her 2nd wife died tragically falling off the stairs at home.

But still.. he has an amazing attitude towards life. Far from resentfulness, envy and self-pity (which are all necessary ingredients to have a bad life).

Also.. Charlie argues that you should be careful with politicians... because big part of their job is essentially to make you feel victimized!

Picking Nuggets Reflection:

My formula for greatness is amor fati: That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it….but love it.” - Nietzsche

"A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others." - Confucius

TRAP 4: The Competition Trap

"Competition is for Losers" - Peter Thiel

- The Issue (why we fall so easily into the Compeition Trap)...

"We are highly mimetic creatures" - Naval Ravikant

Picking Nuggets Note: 
Our desires are influenced by the desires of other people whom we interact or follow. This phenomenon explains the First Trap!

"If everyone around me is an artist... I want to be an artist" - Naval Ravikant

So...

"Be careful when you get caught up into these status games that you end up competing over things that aren't worth competing over." - Naval Ravikant

e.g./ Peter Thiel wanted to be a Law Clerk. Coz everyone in Law School wanted to be that for a Supreme Court Justice. He got rejected, and he went to business.

Picking Nuggets Note: 

The Games...

Lesser Games --> Zero-sum Games (e.g./ All Status Games -- Other/s have to lose so that you can win)

Greater Games --> Positive-sum Games (e.g./ Business -- Everyone can win -- the Economy is a positive sum game).

"Sometimes you just get trapped in the wrong game because you are competing."

- Naval Ravikant

- Best way to Escape Competition...

"The way to escape competition is to just be authentic to yourself. If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is just an extension of who you are... No one can compete with you on that" - Naval Ravikant

Picking Nuggets Reflection:

"If you have a guaranteed market of one, i.e. yourself, you are ahead of 99% of all entrepreneurs out there" - Tim Ferriss

“Ideas don't come out fully formed , they only become clearer as you work on them . You just have to get started.” - Mark Zuckerberg

Something that has been useful to me is this idea of building something that I myself would love to consume. Even if I see other entrepreneurs already executing on that same concept.

I just do something similar or shamelessly copycat them if they have better ideas. This might look like I'm getting into competition instead of escaping from it, but the thing is that as I execute the project I naturally give it my own spin over time. So when I just start the project, my idea it's also just starting. It is far from being a complete business idea. But as I work on the project... the idea gets more and more formed. And as it gets formed, you are slowly getting away from competition. Until the ideal scenario in which there is demand for your product/s and the market can't find it anywhere else other than thru you! That's the point where you become a Personal Monopoly, as one of my favorite writers David Perell would put it.

Check out the YouTube video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bL5JHKf16k&ab_channel=PickingNuggets

Get your Printable-ready Slides for FREE today! — with the 100% Discount Code “FREE”.

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Beware that there isn't new information here! You can watch all the slides (in motion) for free on the YouTube video.

So... how can it add value?

• The PDF in Digital Format

  Once you have watched the YouTube video or read this blogpost… Use this PDF to quickly revisit the concepts and let the knowledge soak in! You can also use it with this blogpost as a guide, in case that you need/want to refresh something specifically.

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  Is there any particular timestamp in the YouTube video that you would like to make it memorable? If so… What better than to print it out (with a super-cool printing format)? So that you can always have it present. There is a stand-alone PDF for each printable-ready slide and these are scaled to paper size DinA4, DinA3... The Printable Slides also come with an empty notes section (below each slide) so that you can make your own notes on the paper!

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Get your FREE Slides HERE!

This Blogpost is brought to you by Shortform - The App that I personally use to get nuggets from Books!

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. This is how I mainly learn from books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms).

(Many times book authors will make hundreds of pages based on just a few new ideas just for the sake of producing a book, but in reality they could have given you these new-interesting ideas in just few pages. This is the cool thing about Shortform: you cut to the chase and get the book insights without having to go thru unnecessary extensions of them. Besides, in any book guide on Shortform you can find links to blogposts or other book guides related to the same ideas! -- as Naval Ravikant argues: reading books to completion is more of a vanity metric. What actually matters is to look for ideas, and once you find good interesting ideas, you reflect and research on them. [Naval on the podcast with Joe Rogan]. And it is the foundational understanding of all these truthful and interdisciplinary ideas that will make you better in any life dimension [references: Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Naval Ravikant, Mohnish Pabrai]).

So you will likely find many interesting book guides on Shortform! My plan is to read my personally filtered book guides (I have around 50-60 saved on my personal list on Shortform -- which I filtered based on whether I already knew about the author or the book was recommended by someone I trust). And if in a particular book guide I find super interesting-new ideas, I will also buy the book and read it entirely!

If you wanna check out Shortform, you can use my special link to support the channel and you will have a 5-day FREE trial and a 20% off the annual subscription - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

The mark of a great (non-fiction) author...

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

👨‍💻Other content I have found pretty cool and valuable lately...

Naval recently shared this video (That - Kapil Gupta) on Twitter. It is really insightful. Reminds me of Osho's "Life has no Purpose. And that's why is so beautiful. Life is the Purpose"

That - Kapil Gupta — www.youtube.com Written by Kapil Gupta, I am not Kapil Gupta@KapilGuptaMDhttps://www.kapilguptamd.com/Original Article: https://www.kapilguptamd.com/2018/03/21/that/Copyrigh...

A Micro Lesson on reframing stress and anxiety — www.youtube.com I show you several ways to reframe your thoughts to reduces stress and anxiety.

Joe Rogan on modern life and living a satisfying life |Joe Rogan | Steven Pressfield #1901 — www.youtube.com Joe Rogan and Steven Pressfield discuss the modern society and living a satifying life. Subscribe for daily content.Steven Pressfield is the author of numero...

I just heard the video below from timestamp (around) 1:00:00 to 1:30:00. I find it pretty useful to the functioning health of a society that Elon is increasing transparency on what they are doing at Twitter (and what previous Management did before he took control).

Twitter Files - Elon Musk Interview on #twittergate & Twitter's Government Manipulation... — www.youtube.com Chapters: 0:00 Pre - Elon Musk1:02:50 Elon Musk Joins In this video, Elon Musk & The Roundtable discussed how Twitter was manipulated the Government (both Re...

Until next time,

Julio xx

PS: If you opened this article from the YouTube video, consider subscribing to not miss out on similar blogposts in future!

In this article, we will go through 3 important Cognitive Biases that are creating a tendency to..

1) Seek small frequent gains while ignoring big unfrequent risks (opposite of antifragility)

2) Be consistent with our habits and beliefs

3) Avoid discomfort all together -- we can't fine-tune that a certain amount of variability or randomness is beneficial to us.

I took notes on this from a conversation between Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman, and from Mohnish Pabrai who appeared on a recent talk.

Here is the full version of my notes and reflections...

🧠 Quotes

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“If you’re willing to bleed a little bit every day but in exchange you’ll win big later, you will do better. That is, by the way, entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs bleed every day. They’re not making money, they’re losing money, they’re constantly stressed out, all the responsibility is upon them, but when they win they win big. On average they’ll make more.” - Naval Ravikant

👨 People

Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb's work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. Author of many successful books, including The Black Swan, which The Sunday Times considers one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

Daniel Kahneman (source: wikipedia)

Daniel Kahneman is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith). His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory.

Mohnish Pabrai

Mohnish Pabrai is a renowned investor and entrepreneur. He currently manages around 600-800m$ in his Investment Fund. He also started the NGO "Dakshana" in India (2008), which coaches students to pass the university entrance exams for IT and Medicine. He has a close friendship with Charlie Munger. 

🐨 Summary

1) Prospect Theory

As the magnitude of the loss/gain increases… Our capacity to feel the pain/pleasure decreases.

It will make you Less *Objective* and *Antifragile*.

2) Consistency Bias

Anything we think or do… We will tend to make it consistent with our habits and beliefs.

3) Bias to Avoid Discomfort

We are programmed to avoid discomfort (variability), but we *need* it to get better.

📝 Notes

Chapter 1: Nassim Taleb & Daniel Kahneman

1) The Prospect Theory (2002 Nobel Prize in Economics)

We are more sensitive to small losses/gains than to big losses/gains.

• As the magnitude of the loss/gain increases --> our capacity (or sensitivity) to feel the pain/pleasure decreases.

1.1) Maximizing Pleasure and Minimizing Pain(Basis for Fragility)

1.1.1) Gains

"You would rather make a million over a year in small amounts." - Nassim Taleb

You feel more pleasure from making a small gain many times than to make all the gain at once (even though the total accumulated amount gained is exactly the same!).

1.1.2) Losses

"If you are gonna lose money or have a bad event, have it all at once. You would rather lose a million dollar (all) in one day, than lose a little bit of money (many times)" - Nassim Taleb

You feel less pain from losing it all at once than to lose a bit many times (even though the total accumulated amount lost is exactly the same!)

(Picking Nuggets note:

Some issues with falling prey to this Bias...

• It will cause to make poorer decisions. Because it increases the mismatch btw your perception of reality and the actual reality. And if you can't see reality the way it is, you can't have good judgement (critical for success).

"A clear mind leads to better judgement, (which) leads to better outcome. So a calmed / peaceful person will make better decisions and have better outcomes. So if you wanna operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind." - Naval Ravikant (Joe Rogan's Podcast)

• You will become more "fragile". Because you will tend to prefer to win as many times as possible, and avoid any kind of pain/stressor. This is the opposite of what Nassim calls "Antifragile", which he argues is the best way to approach life.

)

To successfully follow Taleb's Antifragile prescriptions, you can't fall prey of the Prospect Theory!

Antifragility --> To embrace many small losses so you can have a one-off big gain. Or to forgo small gains so you are not exposed to a one-off big loss.

2) The Consistency Bias

When we think or do anything, we try to make it consistent with our past habits and beliefs. Thus, we never really expect the big event to ever happen, because we (likely) haven't experienced any previous big event yet.

So we are biased to (unintendedly) create a big potential risk (e.g./ getting a big debt) for small gains in the present.

It's like the turkey that falls in love with the butcher until Thanksgiving day comes (core idea behind Nassim's book The Black Swan --> Do not be the Turkey!).

Instance: The Banking System (represents very well these Biases)

Small frequent gains

Big unfrequent loss (when a Crisis hits)

The Issue...

• The loss wipes out all previous gains and leaves a net negative.

• In a quarter of 1982, bankers lost more money than they made in all the history of Banking. This would happen again in 1991 and 2007.

How they survive?? -- In the case of Banks it's a special case (which the rest of businesses and individuals do not have)

• When they lose... Citizens subsidize the losses.

• When they make money... they make money for them.

This is what Nassim calls "Transfer of Antifragility".

3) Bias to avoid immediate discomfort / seek immediate pleasure

"A system that does not convert stressors/problems/variabilities into fuel is doomed" - Nassim Taleb

"A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." - Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)

The Inner Struggle...

We *need* variability (within a healthy range), but we are programmed (by evolution) to avoid it and seek comfort.

We are not fine-tuned to understand that variability/randomness/stressors in small amounts is beneficial to us.

(Picking Nuggets note: Also, we tend to see it black and white: Extreme comfort won't kill us. But extreme stressors will! So this causes us to go all in with comfort and avoid randomness AMAP! But when we do this, we miss on the gains that can come from overcoming healthy amounts of randomness/stress.)

Chapter 2: Mohnish Pabrai

“Anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.” - Nassim Taleb (Book: “Antifragile”)

To reduce the negative effects from the Prospect Theory Bias... Consciously try to engage in antifragile behaviors and activities…

Charlie Munger and Mohnish Pabrai consciously try to follow this idea of Antifragility. They call it “Asymmetry”.

Do things which have an ASYMMETRY (in the risk/reward ):

• Downside is small or non-existent

• Upside is unknown and unlimited.

Get use to making "small bets" --> embrace small frequent losses so you can have a huge unfrequent gain.

Check out the YouTube video I created on this (same content, but with more visuals/animations):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q-CubomEJg&ab_channel=PickingNuggets

💬 Reflections

Loss Aversion

Besides the distortion in sensitivity caused by the magnitude level of the gain or loss, we can also notice another important Bias in the graph: And that is that for the (same) unit of loss/gain We feel more the pain than the happiness. This Bias is called Loss Aversion. This is one of the most important biases in human nature and it explains a great deal of our reactions.

This is why it is said that 70% of all consumer purchases are done to avoid a loss and 30% to get a positive/benefit (according to ex FBI negotiator and business leader Chris Voss). Or, to some extent, why people are afraid of variability in general -- So afraid that in the financial markets people often even use volatility (that is, the fluctuation of prices) as a measure of risk, which in an objective sense doesn't make any sense because real risk is only a permanent loss of capital.

Embracing Randomness...

Having some variability in the sense of adventure in your life is also way more fun than having a monotonous life in which you already know what you are gonna be doing at each hour or minute of your day. This is what Nassim calls "touristification of your own life" --> Just like in a tour everything has a specific time in the schedule. Your life becomes a tour in itself if you already know in advance what you will be doing at each moment of your day. Also, having everything timely planned makes you more "fragile", because an unexpected event can only be negative (that is, there is only downside). Whereas if you are adventurous, unexpected events will definitely have more upside than downside.

Some aphorisms from Nassim Taleb on this...

"If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead – the more precision, the more dead you are."

“You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.”

The Prospect Theory and Consistency Bias

The Consistency Bias makes the Prospect Theory even more powerful! -- We think that the big unfrequent event (positive or negative) will never happen, so we don't seek the big potential pay-off or prepare ourselves for a big potential loss. And we get complacent with the small frequent gains to feel like we are doing well (maximizes pleasure) and we are "in the right path" and everyone in our social circle respects/accepts us (not only because you are often winning, but also because most people will choose this path).

Falling prey of the Prospect Theory and Consistency Bias will make you way more likely to find and stay in a "stable" job, rather than starting an entrepreneurial venture.

If you are an employee, you have small frequent gains (your monthly salary). You feel good because you are feeling the pleasure of the gain in many doses, but you also set up the potential big event of losing your job and even defaulting on your mortgage if you got any. Maybe this structure of having "certain" and frequent gains is one motive for Nassim's aphorism:

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

If you are an entrepreneur, you are "bleeding" a bit every day, but you also set yourself up to profit from a big unfrequent gain at some point in the future. And also because the upside potential in entrepreneurship is unlimited, you could make way more money than the accumulated small gains of a corporate job. In terms of biased feelings, you feel bad everyday and the day you win big you don't feel it that much because our - sensitivity to feel - decreases. So it sucks from a feelings perspective, but in absolute terms (in terms of financial freedom or freedom in general) I think you are way better off.

“If you’re willing to bleed a little bit every day but in exchange you’ll win big later, you will do better. That is, by the way, entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs bleed every day. They’re not making money, they’re losing money, they’re constantly stressed out, all the responsibility is upon them, but when they win they win big. On average they’ll make more.” - Naval Ravikant

The Fresh Nuggets (Newsletter) is brought to you by Shortform

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms).

(Many times book authors will make hundreds of pages based on just a few new ideas just for the sake of producing a book, but in reality they could have given you these new-interesting ideas in just few pages. This is the cool thing about Shortform: you cut to the chase and get the book insights without having to go thru unnecessary extensions of them. Besides, in any book guide on Shortform you can find links to blogposts related to the same ideas! -- as Naval Ravikant argues: reading books to completion is more of a vanity metric. What actually matters is to look for ideas, and once you find good interesting ideas, you reflect and research on them. [Naval on the podcast with Joe Rogan]. And it is the foundational understanding of all these truthful and interdisciplinary ideas that will make you better in any life dimension [Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Naval Ravikant]).

Besides, I have found at least 50-60 books (on Shortform) that were on my personal reading list. These include 4 popular books of Nassim Taleb:

So you will likely find many interesting book guides on Shortform! My plan is to read these book guides and if in a particular one I find a super interesting-new idea to me, I will also buy the book and read it entirely!

If you wanna check out Shortform, you can use my special link to support the channel and you will have a 5-day FREE trial and a 20% off the annual subscription - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

The mark of a great (non-fiction) author...

👨‍💻Other content I have found pretty cool and valuable this week

The Modern Struggle - Naval Ravikant — www.youtube.com Naval Ravikant is a technology ​entrepreneur well known for his role as a founder and the Chairman ​ of AngelList​. This audio is from his podcast with Joe R...

The Art of Making Decisions - Alan Watts — www.youtube.com Speech extract from "Do You Do It or Does It Do You?: How to Let the Universe Meditate You" by Alan Watts, courtesy of https://alanwatts.org Alan Wilson Watt...

Joe Rogan Explains Why He Doesn’t Set Goals in Life. W/ Steven Pressfield — www.youtube.com

🌈 Join our Community on Discord - link

Until next time,

Julio xx

PS: If you opened this article from the YouTube video, consider subscribing to receive them in future!

Well, Naval Ravikant argues that the decisive and most important skill is Judgement: the ability to make the right decisions by having knowledge of the long-term consequences of your decisions. As he argues, judgement is just wisdom applied to external problems. Of course, Naval has also talked about other skills and foundations that are critical to build wealth: having Accountability, applying your Specific Knowledge and obtaining Leverage. Early in your career, the main focus should be to build the leverage machine (the audience in Media / the trust from people to give you Capital...), and as you go building Leverage your Judgement starts becoming increasingly important (because your decisions have a larger impact).

But the thing is that if you have the good judgement in the first place, it is just much easier to build the leverage (for instance, you have a huge knowledge about how YouTube works -- MrBeast argues he could go from 0 to 1 million subscribers in 3 months easily just because his knowledge about YouTube is so large), and also you understand clearly why you need to have accountability and specific knowledge in your work. So really all stems from having good judgement.

In this article, I picked some nuggets from Naval Ravikant, Jimmy MrBeast Donaldson and Chamath Palihapitiya around this skill and specially, on how to build this skill.

Below you will find all my notes, reflections and a careful selection of the best quotes that I took while studying all this content...

🧠 Top Quotes

"Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment." - Naval Ravikant

"Judgment requires experience but can be built faster by learning foundational skills" - Naval Ravikant

"You do not want to win an argument. You want to win" - Nassim Taleb

"You have got to have models in your head and you have got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models" - Charlie Munger

👨 People

Naval Ravikant

Naval is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList. I have learnt so much from his deep wisdom about many wide-ranging topics, from meditation and inner freedom to web 3.0 and crypto. I'm grateful for his willingness to share his insights, and inspire me to become a wiser / happier person.

Jimmy (Mr Beast) Donaldson

Jimmy (Mr Beast) Donaldson runs several YouTube Channels, a delivery fast food restaurant (Mr Beast Burger) and two philantropic projects: Beast Philantropy and Team Trees. His brand is valued in the Billions of dollars. 

Chamath Palihapitiya

Chamath Palihapitiya is the CEO of Social Capital (Venture Capital Fund). In 2007, he joined Facebook and led the User Growth Team. His net worth is estimated to be over 1 Billion dollar.

📝 Notes

Chapter 1: Naval Ravikant

Picking Nuggets note: In the last article we explained the forms of Leverage behind this current Generation's fortunes: Media (internet-based) and Code. If you want to check it out you can click on the link:

Fresh Nuggets - This is How all the New Fortunes are Made [Naval Ravikant, Mr Beast] | Revue — www.getrevue.co Fresh Nuggets -

Your first job is to obtain Leverage. You can obtain it through permission: Labor or Capital. Or you can build your own leverage by using Code or Media.

Once you obtain the Leverage...

"You wanna slow down a bit. Because your Judgement really matters."

"You have a lot more at risk, but you also have a lot more to gain"

If your Judgement is 10-20% better than the next person, the difference in the output is Massive (is not 10-20% more, but it can be orders of magnitude more depending on how much Leverage you have).

(Picking Nuggets note:

Without leverage, if you have a 10% better judgement, you might just get around a 10% better output.

The more Leverage you have, the more non-linear is the relationship between the quality of your judgement and the output/result you get. A subtle increase in the quality of your judgment results in a gigantic increase on the output.)

Critical Factors...

• Demonstrated Judgement

• Credibility around the Judgement.

• High Accountability

(Picking Nuggets note: You reap the rewards but you also expose to the risks! Recommend to check out the book Skin in the Game, by Nassim Taleb. Naval Ravikant stated that it was the best book he read in 2018.)

• Reputation of High Integrity

(Picking Nuggets note: High integrity builds Trust. Trust attracts other high-integrity people and will increase your deal flow / opportunities.)

"Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly" - George MacDonald

Once you have proven Judgement, You Won't have to hustle to get Leverage anymore! You become a magnet of Leverage -- everyone will give you Capital because you have built a track record of good judgement.

Definition of Judgement

To know the long-term consequences of your decisions.

Judgement is just Wisdom applied to external problems.

How to build up Judgement

2 Potential Sources:

1) Intellect (theoretical basis)

It is better to get your knowledge from experience, as there is no "skin in the game" (accountability) when learning from pure theory.

2) (Real) Experience

Why it Matters?

It is the best source of learning for building judgement.

Reality is too complex to intellectualize it.

"To outperform Trial & Error intellectually, you need at least 1000 IQ points" - Nassim Taleb (conversation with Daniel Kahneman, year 2013.)

How to Build it Fast?

Solution: Iterate FAST.

In Chapter 3, we will see a Hack that MrBeast used to iterate super Fast.

The Mindset

Be Unemotional (you need to be objective to see reality as it is).

"A clear mind leads to better judgement, (which) leads to better outcome. So a calmed / peaceful person will make better decisions and have better outcomes. So if you wanna operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind." - Naval Ravikant (on Joe Rogan's Podcast)

Tip: Read and Practice Stoicism!

Traits of the best investors:

• Unemotional

(Picking Nuggets note: Renown author William Green describes in his book "Richer, Wiser, Happier" and many podcasts how almost all the top investors have an emotional stability that is very far from common.)

• They also have a Broad-based knowledge

"To the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" - Charlie Munger

"You have got to have models in your head and you have got to array you experience - both vicarious (indirect) and direct - onto this latticework of mental models" - Charlie Munger

Traits of the best entrepreneurs:

• Unemotional (just like the best investors).

• Passionate

They need the emotions of deep desire and obsession to actually do it (energy fuel).

This is why being an entrepreneur is so tough: You need to control your emotions in both directions. You need the drive and passion to make things happen. But you also need to see reality clearly without emotions getting in the way.

In the following chapters, we will see instances of the application of judgement and the building of the judgement.

Chapter 2: Jimmy (Mr Beast) Donaldson - Judgement on YouTube

How Good Judgement is critical on YouTube...

In YouTube you can (permissionlessly) build your Media Leverage. Thus, good judgement becomes a critical skill here (because you can potentially reach millions of people if they find value in your content).

MrBeast actually coached (just for fun) another YouTuber to grow his channel. After 8 months of having a few sessions, this YouTuber went from making 24k$/month to make 400k$/month from YouTube's ads revenue. See the tweet below...

What was the biggest factor for this huge change?

“It is much easier to get 5M views on 1 video, than 100K views on 50 videos. You could upload 1 great video a year and get more views than if you upload 100 mediocre videos. Because it is very exponential.” - MrBeast

If your video is 10% better (people click 10% more often and watch it 10% longer) your video is not promoted just 10% more by the algorithm but orders of magnitude more! 

"So triple the amount of time that you are putting into that video. Because you are not gonna get triple views, you will get 10X views. Because YT is trying to serve people the best content possible, right? They don't wanna serve you 100 lane ones, they wanna serve you one good one. The Home Page is a curation of the best videos possible. So it is really just about making these videos really really good." - MrBeast

Chapter 3: Jimmy (Mr Beast) Donaldson - Hack to Build Judgement Fast

Do not just learn from your direct iterations / mistakes. You can significantly increase your knowledge base by studying from other people. If you are learning about YouTube with 5 other people, and everyone is sharing his mistakes, you are learning 5X faster compared to doing it alone.

Chapter 4: Chamath Palihapitiya - Building Judgement

"My firm belief is that life success really boils down to how do you control your mistakes. (And) the way you control your mistakes is by making a lot of mistakes." - Chamath Palihapitiya

Many iterations / mistakes --> Experience Knowledge --> Better Judgement (minimization of mistakes) --> Success

The issue:

Society diminishes your worth if you make mistakes. So we are biased to avoid mistakes (risk-aversion).

But...

"The really successful people realize that... it's the cycle time of mistakes that get you to success."

The more mistakes you make + Reflecting on them --> The more your error rate diminishes.

Similar to Ray Dalio's Formula for Success: Pain + Reflection = Progress

Facebook placard: "Move Fast and Break Things". Translated to Societal language --> "Make mistakes as quickly as you can".

"A mistake in the eyes of Society is equivalent to *learning* in the eyes of the highly successful."

Chapter 5: Chamath Palihapitiya - Applying Judgement

Parallels from Poker to Running a Business or Investing...

Chamath argues that whether you are playing poker, running a company or investing, there is a core idea in common:

The other person's mistakes (other poker players, industry competitors or other investors) minus your mistakes, is equal to the edge. And you win this edge when you make less mistakes than your competitors/rivals. And this edge translates into the captured economic value.

Link to my YouTube video:

💬 Reflections

👉 Caveats on Experience Knowledge and Judgement

One caveat that I would add is that this iterative process — of trying, making mistakes and learning from them — is not the way to go when the stakes are high and mistakes are consequential. When mistakes are consequential, is not time to do trial and error, is time to demonstrate good judgement (by minimizing mistakes).

"Trial and Error isn't really Trial and Error. Trial and Error is Trial with small Error." - Nassim Taleb

As Nassim argues, if you try something in which the downside potential is small, you put yourself in an Antifragile position: big upside with small downside potential.

Renowned investor Vinod Khosla mentions that the willingness to fail is what enables success, and failures don't matter IF they are manageable. So, in a high stakes scenario, he is not suggesting this attitude of being willing to fail. Also, Chamath Palihapitiya mentions that under high stakes circumstances, you must focus on avoiding mistakes.

To sum up and see this clearly, let's see the 2 extremes:

• Mistakes are not consequential in the output? Absolutely focus on trial and error. Is time to gain experience and build judgement.

• Stakes are high / mistakes are very consequential? Absolutely focus on not making mistakes. Is time to demonstrate your good judgement.

(Sidenote: I learned this framework of analyzing things in their extreme limits from Elon Musk in an interview with Lex Fridman)

👉 Expanding on the Mindset of being Unemotional

1) Stoicism

Following, I listed my top 3 quotes from Stoic philosophers...

“Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.” - Seneca

"A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it." - Marcus Aurelius

"Objective judgment, now, at this very moment.

Unselfish action, now, at this very moment.

Willing acceptance—now, at this very moment—of all external events.

That’s all you need.”

- Marcus Aurelius

2) Dropping the Ego

As we can see, dropping one’s ego is really important because even if we iterate many times, we still need to objectively reflect on each iteration if we wanna truly build that Experience Knowledge.

Also, I think that your ego will cause you to increase the cycle time of any iteration (the opposite of what we want) because it will refuse as much as possible that there is anything wrong about what you are doing, until of course you can't avoid it any longer and you are faced to admit that it was not the correct path.

Being right feels great in the immediate moment, but in the long-term you will be far from being exceptional at anything, because you would compound Experience Knowledge at just an average rate.

To compound Experience Knowledge at the highest rate, you can't give a damn about being right, the only thing that should matter to you is truth seeking (as fast as possible). You wouldn't care for instance if the good idea is yours or from someone else. Or even better, you should actually celebrate it because once you adopt the new better idea, now your perception of reality is closer to the actual reality.

Nassim Taleb brilliantly summarizes this in just one line:

"You do not want to win an argument. You want to win"

The Fresh Nuggets (Newsletter) is brought to you by Shortform

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms).

(Many times book authors will make hundreds of pages based on just a few new ideas just for the sake of producing a book, but in reality they could have given you these new-interesting ideas in just few pages. This is the cool thing about Shortform: you cut to the chase and get the book insights without having to go thru unnecessary extensions of them. Besides, in any book guide on Shortform you can find links to blogposts related to the same ideas! -- as Naval Ravikant argues: reading books to completion is more of a vanity metric. What actually matters is to look for ideas, and once you find good interesting ideas, you reflect and research on them. [Naval on the podcast with Joe Rogan]. And it is the foundational understanding of all these truthful and interdisciplinary ideas that will make you better in any life dimension [Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Naval Ravikant]).

So you will likely find many interesting book guides on Shortform! My plan is to read these book guides and if in a particular one I find a super interesting-new idea to me, I will also buy the book and read it entirely!

If you wanna check out Shortform, you can use my special link to support the channel and you will have a 5-day FREE trial and a 20% off the annual subscription - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

The mark of a great (non-fiction) author...

🌈 Join the Community! (on Discord)

I recently created a Discord Server for Picking Nuggets. So that we can have a place to meet and where everyone who wants can share ideas, we can debate on many topics, share content and build a nice and fun community!

Click here to join the Community! — discord.com Check out the Picking Nuggets community on Discord - hang out with 55 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

👨‍💻Other content I have found pretty cool and valuable lately...

👇 I absolutely loved every minute of this Podcast. Daniel is a brilliant mind in the world of entrepreneurship and his personal stories are just perfect instances of Naval Ravikant's concepts.

How Anyone Can Develop The Mindset Of A Multi-Million Dollar Entrepreneur - Daniel Priestley — www.youtube.com Sponsored by Heights - go to https://www.yourheights.com and use the code Ali15 at checkout to get an extra 15% off your first quarterly subscription.Sponsor...

👇Another one from Ali. Chris Sparks is extremely insightful and he goes deep into implementing poker strategies in other life dimensions such as entrepreneurship, investing, self-improvement...

World Poker Champion On The Science Of Decision Making - Chris Sparks — www.youtube.com Go to https://shortform.com/deepdive to get 20% off the annual premium subscription.To give Shopify a try, go to https://shopify.com/aliabdaal.Chris Sparks i...

👇Other content I have found super valuable...

The Curiosity Chronicle | The Most Powerful Decision Making Razors — www.sahilbloom.com The Curiosity Chronicle has quickly become one of the most popular newsletters for growth-minded individuals in the world. Each week, subscribers receive a deep dive that covers topics ranging from growth and decision-making to business, finance, startups, and technology. In addition, subscribers receive The Friday Five, a weekly newsletter with five ideas curated to spark curiosity headed into the weekend.

Ryan Holiday on Twitter: "What can only I do? There has never been anyone like you…and there never will be again. You have been given a complete and total monopoly over the business of being you. Your main thing is to not give that up. To BE YOU. To do what only YOU can do." / Twitter Your description for this link...

Until next time,

Julio xx

PS: If you opened this article from the YouTube video, consider subscribing to receive them in future!

Have you ever wonder how is it that nowadays there are so many super young people that are so wealthy? (on their own merit). Well, I picked some insights from Naval Ravikant's Podcast and a few interviews of Jimmy (Mr Beast) Donaldson (biggest YouTuber in the world) to fundamentally understand this relatively recent phenomenon.

Below you will find all my notes, reflections and quotes that I took while studying all this content...

🧠 Quotes

"Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media). Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually, you will get what you deserve." - Naval Ravikant

"The most valuable thing you can build is an audience" - Alex Hormozi (founder Acquisition.com)

👨 Speakers

Naval Ravikant

Naval is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList. I have learnt so much from his deep wisdom about many wide-ranging topics, from meditation and inner freedom to web 3.0 and crypto. I'm grateful for his willingness to share his insights, and inspire me to become a wiser / happier person.

Jimmy (Mr Beast) Donaldson

Jimmy (Mr Beast) Donaldson runs several YouTube Channels, a delivery fast food restaurant (Mr Beast Burger) and two philantropic projects: Beast Philantropy and Team Trees. His brand is valued in the Billions of dollars. 

📝 Notes

Chapter 1: Naval Ravikant

"Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media). "

Leverage --> Is a force multiplier for your input work. It creates a non-linear relationship between the -time effort and quality of your work- AND - the outcomes of your work-.

Let's first look at the old forms of Leverage (where all the fortunes were made in the past):

1) Labor Leverage.

2) Capital Leverage

Core Idea: "Products that has no marginal cost of replication"

- The new form of Leverage.

Invented in the last few hundred years.

* History timeline:

1) The Printing Press

2) Broadcast Media (the Legacy Media)

Problems with this kind of Media:

• It has Gatekeepers (with likely very different incentives from you -- if you wanna go into TV)

• It is PermissionED Leverage ---> Means that someone has to give you the permission to use their Leverage!

3) Internet / Code

Internet / Code Leverage

You can use it to multiply your efforts without the need of:

• Involving other humans (Labor Leverage) -- Permissioned Leverage

• Money from other humans (Capital Leverage) -- Permissioned Leverage

Also, there are no Gatekeepers! You do not need permission of anyone to buy a cheap mic and start running a podcast (new media based on the internet) or you can learn how to code and build anything! This source of leverage is permissionless.

This Generation's Fortunes are built on this form of leverage.

2 kinds of Leverage that you can use from here:

1) New Media (enabled by Internet / Code)

Good examples: Joe Rogan Podcast, Pewdiepie...

2) Code (programming software)

Good examples: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Jobs...

The magic combination happens when you combine all 4 types of leverage: Capital, Labor, Code and New Media (content creation).

Picking Nuggets Note:

In the next Chapter of my Notes, We will see how MrBeast brand illustrates very well this "magic combination" which Naval talks about.

Naval on Wealth...

Chapter 2: Jimmy (Mr Beast) Donaldson

The first leverage that Mr Beast started to compound was Media (internet-based) Leverage. As he became better by trial and error (acquiring bottom-up knowledge and thus improving his judgement) his videos reached more and more people thru the Media Leverage, until he built a pretty solid Audience which also started to give him a different form of Leverage ---> Capital.

He didn't saved anything and essentially reinvested ALL back into the business. So he used 100% of the Capital Leverage to make higher quality and more interesting videos, which coupled with Media Leverage allowed him to grow his audience way faster.

This made him more money (exponentially more), and he repeated this cycle continuously. He also used the capital to hire people (Labor Leverage). Currently he has over 100 people working in his empire, and they also contribute to making better videos (grow the audience more) and also start new business lines: Mr Beast Burger and Feastables (chocolate bars).

Also, his software developer employees set up the business websites and many apps with a really friendly User Interface (Code Media).

So, Mr Beast definitely got all the ingredients for the "magic combination" of leverage. But this took him some time, and he started with free permisionless leverage: Media, and from there he kept using it but also added other forms of Leverage. Mr Beast's empire is now valued in the billions of dollars.

If you liked the notes, you might also enjoy the YouTube Video version I created:

💬 Reflections

"The most valuable thing you can build is an audience" - Alex Hormozi (founder Acquisition.com)

The cool thing about Leverage is that it fundamentally distorts the relationship between your input and the output that you get. The relationship becomes non-linear in nature. And your input, once is done, is detached from the output, because it is detached from the marginal delivery of your product/service every time that a customer or viewer consumes it.

Using Leverage, you might work on some project for 1 day or 1 year, and that can potentially bring an output that people without leverage couldn't get in 10 years or a lifetime. This is why you can't get rich renting out your time. You must *own* something, run it on a form or forms of *leverage* and apply your *specific knowledge*.

Now I wanna share some quotes that always help me when doing any big personal project:

"The pessimist may sound intelligent, but is the optimist who makes money." - Peter Lynch.

“After a lifetime of making money and observing better men and women than I fall by the wayside, I am convinced that fear of failing in the eyes of the world is the single biggest impediment to amassing wealth. Trust me on this.” - Felix Dennis

The Fresh Nuggets (Newsletter) is brought to you by Shortform

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms).

(Many times book authors will make hundreds of pages based on just a few new ideas just for the sake of producing a book, but in reality they could have given you these new-interesting ideas in just few pages. This is the cool thing about Shortform: you cut to the chase and get the book insights without having to go thru unnecessary extensions of them. Besides, in any book guide on Shortform you can find links to blogposts related to the same ideas! -- as Naval Ravikant argues: reading books to completion is more of a vanity metric. What actually matters is to look for ideas, and once you find good interesting ideas, you reflect and research on them. [Naval on the podcast with Joe Rogan]. And it is the foundational understanding of all these truthful and interdisciplinary ideas that will make you better in any life dimension [Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Naval Ravikant]).

So you will likely find many interesting book guides on Shortform! My plan is to read these book guides and if in a particular one I find a super interesting-new idea to me, I will also buy the book and read it entirely!

If you wanna check out Shortform, you can use my special link to support the channel and you will have a 5-day FREE trial and a 20% off the annual subscription - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

The mark of a great (non-fiction) author...

🌈 Join the Community! (on Discord)

I recently created a Discord Server for Picking Nuggets. So that we can have a place to meet and where everyone who wants can share ideas, we can debate on many topics, share content and build a nice and fun community!

Click here to join the Community! — discord.com Check out the Picking Nuggets community on Discord - hang out with 55 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

👨‍💻Other content I have found pretty cool and valuable lately...

Yen Liow - Discovering and exploring career paths 01-07-21 — www.youtube.com 10 min video prepared for teenagers and college students who are starting the exploration phase of career discovery. This talk was prepared for a discussion ...

Val Katayev on Twitter: "I've generated over $1 billion in sales using ONE strategy. Used it in every recession - 2000, 2009, and 2020. I've never shared it publicly before. This thread might make you a millionaire." / Twitter Your description for this link...

👆Reminds me of the famous Buffet's quote:

"Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” - Warren Buffett

Vinod Khosla on Twitter: "Taking no risk may be the largest risk most enterprises take" / Twitter Your description for this link...

Until next time,

Julio xx

PS: If you opened this article from the YouTube video, consider subscribing to receive them in future!

I just made a video about the best methodology / approach that exists to go about any activity -- that is the approach of trial and error. Along the video, Nassim Taleb argues why this approach absolutely beats the approach of acting exclusively from theoretical knowledge, and he shows a model (generated from a simulation) of how better is this approach in comparison to theoretical knowledge.

Finally, Naval Ravikant together with Sahil Lavingia and Ben Thompson talk about how all their success came from executing in a trial and error fashion, and how each error led to a clearer decision.

Here are all the notes and reflections I took...

🧠 Quotes

- "A lot of things that we believe come from theoretical knowledge, effectively come from tinkering" - Nassim Taleb

"Most Successful Creators are ultimately Tinkerers" - Naval Ravikant

"What fools call 'wasting time' is most often the best investment." - Nassim Taleb. (The Bed of Procrustes)

"You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards" - Steve Jobs

“Ideas don't come out fully formed, they only become clear as you work on them . You just have to get started.” - Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard Speech)

👨 Speakers

Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb's work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. Author of many successful books, including The Black Swan, which The Sunday Times considers one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

Daniel Kahneman (source: wikipedia)

Daniel Kahneman is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith). His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory.

Naval Ravikant

Naval is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList. I have learnt so much from his deep wisdom about many wide-ranging topics, from meditation and inner freedom to web 3.0 and crypto. I'm grateful for his willingness to share his insights, and inspire me to become a wiser / happier person.

📝 Notes

Nassim Taleb & Daniel Kahneman

- Trial & Error (approach):

(Approach to knowledge --> BOTTOM-UP)

* Conditions:

** The Error is small.

** Be aware that the unintelligible (what we don't understand) does not necessarily imply unintelligence.

* Benefits:

** Big upside (large pay-off potential) --> Convex Pay-off (see picture with the simulation)

** This approach is fully "Antifragile"!

*** Small (frequent) losses

*** Big (unfrequent) gains

**** (why this works? -- the magnitude of a one-off gain can be vastly superior to the sum of all small losses over time)

** This approach significantly outperforms the approach of acting exclusively from theoretical knowledge.

** Gives you Optionality at any point in time (which gives you the chance of being opportunistic!) ---> the more options, the more you can adapt to the changing environment and thrive!

- Theoretical Knowledge

(Approach to knowledge --> TOP-DOWN)

(the "convexity bias" reflects how much better is the Trial & Error approach compared to Theoretical Knowledge approach)

(Picking Nugget's Note:

I guess it's very difficult to know in advance what's going to work. So, in lack of omnipotence, is better to stick to trial and error! You develop knowledge from each error / iteration, until you get it right -- the key is to learn and improve from each iteration!)

Besides, acting exclusively from theoretical knowledge raises 2 big issues:

1) Although we might be convinced that we know something, most times this is an illusion. In reality, we might just know 1% of something, or even be flat wrong about it.

"The overeducated are worse off than the undereducated, having traded common sense for the illusion of knowledge" - Naval Ravikant

"What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean" - Isaac Newton

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman

2) Even if we get the knowledge base right, knowing how to execute it well is another issue. The process of taking that knowledge and convert it into something tangible and useful is also pretty hard to come up from an exclusively theoretical base.

- Took some ideas from Shortform's book guide "Antifragile"

- "A lot of things that we believe come from theoretical knowledge, effectively come from tinkering (trial and error approach)" - Nassim Taleb

Naval Ravikant, Ben Thompson, Sahil Lavingia

(Episode first released on the 10th of June 2022)

"Most Successful Creators are ultimately Tinkerers" - Naval Ravikant

- Trial & Error (approach):

* Traits of tinkerers:

** Plays at the edge of his field.

** Genuine interest.

"Learn how to be in your particular moment" - Ben Thompson

"Your only moment of Power and Knowledge is the Present" - Naval Ravikant

- Theoretical Knowledge (approach):

"People get so fixated 5-10 years in the future" - Ben Thompson

* The more you stick to a (long-term) plan, the more you will miss Reality.

Picking Nuggets Note: As Nassim argues, someone needs 1000 IQ points to correctly predict something so complex as reality and its fluidly changing evolution.

- (Meeting in the middle) --> Have plans, but loosely held!

_____________________

(Picking Nuggets Note: Besides the Education Institutions taking credit for the achievements of many great inventors, another reason for why we might overvalue theoretical knowledge is the existence of the "hindsight bias" -- which "eliminates" all factors of randomness, luck and optionality in a process).

Link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXnSbF6fteY&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=PickingNuggets

💬 Reflections

In my perspective, the theoretical knowledge is important to have a minimum of good judgement to know more less what path to take and also detect the BS and nonsense that exists in most industries (specially important in new emerging and still-to-fully-regulate industries, i.e. crypto / blockchain / web 3.0 ..., because these will have lots of scams around).

As you acquire these foundational axioms (what Elon Musk would call first principles thinking), you will be ready to follow the path/s you want. In that path, you execute thru trial and error and learn from the errors and implement that new knowledge into your previous knowledge base.

So, I think the theoretical knowledge is useful for having a first principles thinking base and a minimum understanding necessary for a given activity, but then all real and innovative learning will come from the bottom-up knowledge (from the outcomes of an iteration, you learn and rationally decide to move one way or the other --> optionality / opportunistic ).

Just like Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger spend most of their days thinking and reading (and inevitably learning from theoretical knowledge), all their investment decisions to action (the execution part) are absolutely opportunistic, and they keep learning from each mistaken decision!

The key I think is to never stop learning from either theoretical knowledge or tinkering. Because just like compounding in investments, knowledge does also compounds and we are never too wise at anything (in absolute terms).

"Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day." - Charlie Munger

The Fresh Nuggets (Newsletter) is brought to you by Shortform

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms).

(Many times book authors will make hundreds of pages based on just a few new ideas just for the sake of producing a book, but in reality they could have given you these new-interesting ideas in just few pages. This is the cool thing about Shortform: you cut to the chase and get the book insights without having to go thru unnecessary extensions of them. Besides, in any book guide on Shortform you can find links to blogposts related to the same ideas! -- as Naval Ravikant argues: reading books to completion is more of a vanity metric. What actually matters is to look for ideas, and once you find good interesting ideas, you reflect and research on them. [Naval on the podcast with Joe Rogan]. And it is the foundational understanding of all these truthful and interdisciplinary ideas that will make you better in any life dimension [Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Naval Ravikant]).

Besides, I have found at least 50-60 books (on Shortform) that were on my personal reading list. These include 4 popular books of Nassim Taleb:

So you will likely find many interesting book guides on Shortform! My plan is to read these book guides and if in a particular one I find a super interesting-new idea to me, I will also buy the book and read it entirely!

If you wanna check out Shortform, you can use my special link to support the channel and you will have a 5-day FREE trial and a 20% off the annual subscription - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

The mark of a great (non-fiction) author...

🌈 Join the Community! (on Discord)

I recently created a Discord Server for Picking Nuggets. So that we can have a place to meet and where everyone who wants can share ideas, we can debate on many topics, share content and build a nice and fun community!

Click here to join the Community! — discord.com Check out the Picking Nuggets community on Discord - hang out with 55 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

👨‍💻Some content I have found pretty cool and valuable

Get Rich in the New Economy [2022] — www.youtube.com I'm looking for one $10M+ business per month to scale to $100M+. Is it yours? (Yes, you reading this) If so, apply here: https://acquisition.comAnd for every...

Gary Vee video (first video of the list) — m.facebook.com

Until next time,

Julio xx

PS: If you opened this article from the YouTube video, consider subscribing to receive them in future!

I just uploaded a new video that I created from a fascinating conversation between Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman (nobel prize in Economics). I was curious about this talk since Nassim is so critical (and, as Daniel argued in the talk, unnecessary rude sometimes) of economists. The parts I took are focused on what is "antifragility", how we can become more "antifragile" (we will see there are certain activities and behaviors which can put us more in this category) and why it is much better than being just resilient.

Here are all the notes and reflections I took...

🧠 Quotes

" A system that does not convert stressors / problems / variability to fuel is doomed" - Nassim Taleb

"A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it. // The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way" - Marcus Aurelius

"Never let a mistake go to waste. Learn from every mistake to become better." - Nassim Taleb

"Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition." - Charlie Munger

👨 Speakers

Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb's work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. Author of many successful books, including The Black Swan, which The Sunday Times considers one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

Daniel Kahneman (source: wikipedia)

Daniel Kahneman is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith). His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory.

📝 Notes

Nassim Taleb & Daniel Kahneman

- Just like there are things that are fragile, there are also things that are antifragile.

* Antifragility is the opposite of fragility. Thus, is not robustness (which would be the neutral --> neither fragile or antifragile properties)

- 3 categories in which we can separate everything:

* Fragile

** Things that lose from Chaos / Volatility

*** E.g./

tourists with strict travel agenda,

employees following a career path,

insurance providers.

** Downside > Upside

* Antifragile

** Things that gain from Chaos / Volatility

*** E.g./

adventurous people,

entrepreneurs,

insurance clients.

* Robust

** Things that neither gain nor lose. Neutral state.

---------------

- Organic vs. Engineered products....

* Organic entities *need* some amount of Volatility (Variability or Disorder) to get better

* Engineered products (e.g./ washing machine) do not benefit from any amount of Volatility.

** Some Organic-Complex Entities...

(Picking Nugget's Note:

Where is likely to find antifragility [things that gain from variability] -- in living-complex systems. "Living" in this context refers literally (e.g./ the biology of a human being) or figuratively ( anything in which the outcomes are influenced by the aggregation of human behavior // e.g./ The progression of popularity of an artist's work, The Economy, Entrepreneurship.... In all these kind of systems, it is a mistake to consciously micromanage the system's behavior to avoid randomness and struggle. Because these systems thrive from disorder, but gets worse in the lack of it (there is no neutral state)

- Reflections from Shortform's synthesis of the book "Antifragile".)

*** The human Being

**** The Source of Variability for human biology are Stressors.

***** If we do not get stressors --> we get weaker

***** If we do get stressors (to an amount that is not lethal) ---> we get stronger / better

(Heart rate variability --> improves health condition,

Muscle hypertrophy --> gets you physically stronger)

(Picking Nuggets Note:

We are biased to think binary about things or events, so if we see something that might kill us potentially, we tend to avoid it all together. So we miss on the gains of small amounts of harm AND become weaker, given this tendency to remove all discomfort / harm completely.

In our primitive past this tendency wasn't an issue even if existed, since we didn't have much control over the environment, so we couldn't remove discomfort even if we wished to.)

On this picture...

Living organisms are both antifragile and fragile (if the amount of stress is lethal). Thus, the key is to get stressors, but not too much that it kills us :(

(in other realms such as entrepreneurship or trading financial options, is all ANTIFRAGILITY!! there are no lethal amounts to worry about!).

*** The Economy

**** If we try to over-manage / stabilize it (get rid of stressors)...

***** We are making the system weaker --> which makes it more fragile / vulnerable.

**** Booms and busts are natural (in an Economy).

"The best predictor of a hedge fund that is going to collapse is steady earnings. It means they are taking a lot of hidden risks"

- Nassim Taleb

- The Denial of Antifragility (in living-complex systems)

* Eliminating small risks makes us more vulnerable to risks overall.

(lack of stressors --> weaker system --> more vulnerable to risks)

- Bottom line on how to become more antifragile...

" A system that does not convert stressors / problems / variability to fuel is doomed" - Nassim Taleb

"A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it. // The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way" - Marcus Aurelius

* Never let a mistake go to waste. Learn from every mistake to become better.

"Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition." - Charlie Munger

- The Table from the book "Antifragility" on events / systems fitting into these 3 categories commented:

Link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq1rcdEds5Q&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=PickingNuggets

The Fresh Nuggets (Newsletter) is brought to you by Shortform

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms).

(Many times book authors will make hundreds of pages based on just a few new ideas just for the sake of producing a book, but in reality they could have given you these new-interesting ideas in just few pages. This is the cool thing about Shortform: you cut to the chase and get the book insights without unnecessary extensions of them. Besides, in any book guide on Shortform you can find links to blogposts that talk about the same ideas! -- as Naval Ravikant argues: reading books to completion is more of a vanity metric. What actually matters is to look for ideas, and once you find good interesting ideas, you reflect and research on them. [Naval on the podcast with Joe Rogan]. And it is the foundational understanding of all these truthful and interdisciplinary ideas that will make you better in any life dimension [Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, Naval Ravikant]).

Besides, I have found at least 50-60 books (on Shortform) that were on my personal reading list. These include 4 popular books of Nassim Taleb:

(there is a synthesis of all the ideas for each chapter of each of these 4 books!!)

So you will likely find many interesting book guides on Shortform! My plan is to read these book guides and if in a particular one I find a super interesting-new idea to me, I will also buy the book and read it entirely!

If you wanna check out Shortform, you can use my special link to have a 5-day FREE trial and a 20% off the annual subscription - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

👨‍💻Other themes I've been bingeing on...

Robert Greene on Reading, The Laws of Power, and Detecting Lies | Knowledge Project Podcast Archive — www.youtube.com Robert Greene is a five-time NYT bestselling author and world-renowned strategist. We discuss how he reads and retains, how to spot a bullshitter, and how to...

Until next time,

Julio xx

PS: If you opened this article from the YouTube video, consider subscribing to receive them in future!

I just uploaded a new video about 2 powerful principles that we can apply to be significantly more productive. The foundational secret is to think deeply about what tasks has the highest pay-off in the outcomes, and essentially knowing what to do and what to ignore --> Effectiveness beats Efficientness! But it is so easy to just try to be efficient (rather than effective) because it has a romanticisim (as we will see later) in modern society, gives us the illusion of moving forward, makes us think less about stuff and it serves as a justification in the case that we fail.

Here is all the written content I produced…

🧠 Quotes

"What you do is more important than how you do it" - Tim Ferriss

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” - Bill Gates

"Progress is almost never linear. Ups and downs and bursts." - Nassim Taleb

"Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action." - Tim Ferriss

👨 People

Tim Ferriss

Entrepreneur, investor, podcaster and author. He wrote the famous book "The 4-hour Work Week", and invested in very successful companies at early stage (e.g./ Uber). He is one of the most sought-after individuals within the entrepreneurship ecosystem. Personally, I have gotten so much value from his podcast, in which he interviews successful people in different domains (from Business to Judo).

Naval Ravikant

Naval is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList. I have learnt so much from his deep wisdom about many wide-ranging topics, from meditation and inner freedom to web 3.0 and crypto. I'm grateful for his willingness to share his insights, and inspire me to become a wiser / happier person.

📝 Notes

Tim Ferriss & Cal Newport

- How to (truly) Increase your Productivity...

* Be Smarter on what you do, rather than more Efficient. (Book: The 4Hour Workweek)

"What you do is more important than how you do it"

( this reminds me of Naval's argument about Good Judgement (which is essentially knowing what to do) beats hard work)

** Being effective is more important than being efficient.

** Pareto Principle: 80/20 Rule

*** Definition (wikipedia):

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.

*** Focus on the tasks with highest leverage.

(the 20% of the tasks that produce 80% of the outcomes)

* "Slow Productivity"

** Productivity is dependent on the time scale you have.

*** Shorter time scale -- The busier you will be.

*** Longer time scale -- The more selective and patient you can be.

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” - Bill Gates

(Picking Nuggets Note: We tend to underestimate the long-term view because success is non-linear! And humans can't intuitively understand non-linear evolutions) --

"Progress is almost never linear. Ups and downs and bursts." - Nassim Taleb

*** Play *your* Game

**** It is important that you play your own game (suited to your motivations / time-scale).

**** And also that you are aware of the games other people play (and their motives).

**** Your time scale will dictate what games make sense for you to play and which games doesn't.

- What won't increase your Productivity...

* High-tech tools are not a source for Productivity.

** It only makes you more efficient at doing all the tasks (wether relevant or not)

"Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action."

- Tim Ferriss

Naval Ravikant & Kapil Gupta

(Revisiting part of the Episode released on October 2021)

- More important than Hard Work (which comes from "how you work") is:

* What you work on

* Whom you work with

• Intensity of the desire

- We overvalue Effort

• Why? In the eyes of Society...

• Effort is very well seen.

• People who do not work as hard but are much more successful are seen as lucky people.

- Focus on what's really necessary, instead of overworking for its own sake.

- Hard Work (on its own) is the preparing of the "bed of failure"...

Link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHBbhyqiDUc&ab_channel=PickingNuggets

The Fresh Nuggets (Newsletter) is brought to you by Shortform

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms).

Also, I have found at least 50-60 books that I previously had on my personal reading list. So you will likely find many interesting book guides on Shortform! My plan is to read them (on Shortform), and in the books that I find ideas that are truly new and impactful to me, I will also buy the entire books!

If you wanna check out Shortform, you can use my special link to have a 5-day FREE trial and a 20% off the annual subscription -

shortform.com/pickingnuggets

Until next time,

Julio xx

I just uploaded a new video on Naval Ravikant explaining the truths behind this notion of Life being a single-player game, and why it is also beneficial to your life to adopt this mind frame.

Here is all the written content I produced…

✍️ My top Quotes

"Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all" - Nietzsche

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl

“They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.” - Seneca

👨 People

Naval Ravikant

Naval is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList.

📝 Notes

Naval Ravikant

"The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single-player." - Naval

Life is a Single & Multi Player Game.

(Society)

* But.. Society trains us for Society's ends

** This implies seeing life as only a multi-player game.

(Individual)

* Only at the individual level we can see life as single-player.

** How can life be single-player?

*** Your mindset shapes how you see the world (so, your mindset is your world).

"It is your mind that creates the world" - Buddha

*** The only moment that exists is the present moment.

**** The Past and Future are just thoughts being produced in the present moment.

"Nothing exists outside of right now"

“They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.” - Seneca

*** Our time alive is extremely short.

*** Anything you do will be forgotten.

** Benefits of adopting this mind frame...

*** You create your own meaning

**** Our Freedom lies in the fact that there is no objective purpose.

"Life has no Purpose. And that's why is so beautiful. Life is the Purpose"

- Osho

You design your life. You get to figure out what you want, and then work to get it.

"The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life."

*** Drops the Victim Mentality

**** You have full agency / power in your life.

***** Even if your are a real victim, the victim mentality is still a net negative.

***** When looking back in your life, the memorable moments are always the ones you rose from adversities and got what you wanted.

“No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.” - Seneca

(Personal take: If we think of any hero in human history, what defines his status of hero are all the adversities he had to go through, and their proactive character shown in those circumstances)

"A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others." — Confucius

"See your life as a videogame. Now, isn't the toughest parts of a videogame, where there is huge adversity, also the most interesting and fun?"

- Paraphrasing from Brian Armstrong (interview with Tim Ferris)

** Tips:

*** On how to interpret things...

**** Make your subjective interpretations as close as possible to reality.

"What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality"

- Naval Ravikant (from the book the Almanack of Naval Ravikant)

***** So that you make less mistakes

**** If you can choose, interpret it positively

***** Always better to live positive experiences!

*** On potentially worthy meanings...

**** Self-actualization against your natural talents.

***** Something you intrinsically enjoy / puts you in flow

***** It has a benefit to you (without negative repercussions) OR to Society

****** Good things with negative repercussions --> They are good in the short term, but it comes at a cost (negative repercussions) in the long-term.

Thus, is important (to have good life) to understand the long-term consequences of your actions.

📝 Reflections

Takeaway: Framing your life/mind as a single-player game, to the extent that is relevant, has not only properties of Truth on itself, but it is also supportive to one's life as it is liberating and empowering!

Link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtvZrJYputI&ab_channel=PickingNuggets

Today's newsletter is brought to you by Shortform

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book. Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms).

Also, I have found at least 50-60 books that I previously had on my personal reading list. So you will likely find many interesting book guides on Shortform! My plan is to read them, and in the books that I find ideas that are truly new and impactful to me, I will also buy the entire books!

If you wanna check out Shortform, you can use my special link to have a 5-day FREE trial and a 20% off the annual subscription -

shortform.com/pickingnuggets

👇Content I've been bingeing lately...

Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman discusses Antifragility at NYPL.mp4 — www.youtube.com Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman discusses Antifragility at NYPL on Feb 5, 2013http://www.pleasemishandle.com/video/Fat Tony's Antilibrary: An online directo...

Until next time,

Julio xx

PS: If you opened this article from the YouTube video, consider subscribing to receive them in future!

I just uploaded a new video on Mohnish Pabrai and Naval Ravikant Hack / Mental Model to have a better life and make better decisions overall.

Here is all the written content I produced…

✍️ Quotes

"If you cannot decide, the answer is No." - Naval Ravikant

👨 People

Mohnish Pabrai

Mohnish Pabrai is a very well-known investor and follower of the investment style of Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger. He has been a successful investor since he started in 1995 and currently manages around 600-700m$ in his fund "Pabrai Fund" with a focus on global public equity. He also started the non-profit foundation "Dakshana" in 2008 to coach smart kids (in a distressed economic situation) to pass the university entrance exams for IT and Medicine in India.

Naval Ravikant

Naval is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList.

📝 Notes

Mohnish Pabrai

- Principle: Hang out with people better than you, and you will get better.

* There is a "gravitational pull"

- How can you know if someone is better than you?

* Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger have a powerful Hack to apply this principle...

** Only pick the obvious instances (people that are undoubtedly better than you).

"If you cannot decide, the answer is No." - Naval Ravikant

*** Benefits:

**** You don't need to be a good human judger, you just pick from the few people that seems obvious to you that they are great.

**** If you only pick the obvious instances, the risk of picking someone worse than you is very low.

*** The process discriminates massively, but is rational to do it...

**** There are so many people (and good people) in the world. And we only need to choose well on a an infinite small percentage of that population.

(In the next part, Naval exposes a more generalized Hack to Buffet's Hack, and how we are wired to instinctively not follow this model)

Naval Ravikant

(Picking Nuggets note: Naval follows this same model, but in a more general way towards any important decision...)

When making an important decision...

- If you cannot decide, the answer is No.

(Picking Nuggets note: A more generalized Hack to Buffet's Hack)

* Reason: Modern Society is full of options.

** Instances:

*** The internet connects us to almost everyone in the world.

*** There is a huge number of careers available.

* Beware we are biased...

**We are not biologically prepare to act properly from current reality.

**** In our evolution, we couldn't afford to just effortlessly disregard a given choice.

- Only say yes if you are pretty certain (although, you never will never be 100% sure...)

(Picking Nuggets note: As Mohnish argued, pick the obvious cases! We can't afford the risk of choosing wrong).

📝 Reflections

Lesson --> When considering an important decision and there are many options, mistakes of commission matter. Whereas mistakes of omission are irrelevant.

It was also inspiring to me when I watched Mohnish's display of humility and humor, when he argued that one day Charlie and his friends will find out that they made an error of judgement when they included Mohnish in their peer group. I think this is definitely a core trait of any high quality person (not taking yourself so seriously and being humble).

Link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsSZHVlSgDw&ab_channel=PickingNuggets

👇Content I've been consuming lately (and recommend it)

Peter Thiel: You Are Not a Lottery Ticket | Interactive 2013 | SXSW — www.youtube.com Discourse and action in our society are increasingly dominated by the idea that the world cannot be known. But to what degree issuccess in this world dominat...

Your Dark Side and Control Over Your Life | Robert Greene | #237 — www.youtube.com This episode was recorded on November 11, 2021.This episode focuses on human nature and the principles surrounding strategy, power, and seduction with Robert...

🔶 If you would like to support this newsletter service and the YouTube Channel, click on the link below :)

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Until next time,

Julio xx