Here’s the best content I found over the past 2 weeks 😛

📚 Best Book Passage

(no context needed)

This passage is from the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, written by Eric Jorgenson

“

There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters. Literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at the exact time you happen to be here.

Like all great profound truths, it’s all paradoxes. Any two points are infinitely different. Any moment is perfectly unique. Each moment itself slips by so quickly you can’t grab it. You’re dying and being reborn at every moment. It’s up to you whether to forget or remember that.

“Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now, and we will never be here again.” — Homer, The Iliad

…

Our lives are a blink of a firefly in the night. You’re just barely here. You have to make the most of every minute, which doesn’t mean you chase some stupid desire for your entire life. What it means is every second you have on this planet is very precious, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re happy and interpreting everything in the best possible way.

We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it’s really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed.

”

𝕏 Best Tweets

✦ Peter Thiel on taking Risks

✦ Nassim Taleb on Success

✦ Vishal Khandelwal (@safalniveshak) on Nassim Taleb’s summary quote of Antifragility

✦ Alex Hormozi on Wealth VS. Rich

✨ Get Rewards

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(and much more!)

Wishing you a lovely weekend!!

Julio ❣️

🔵 my key links

Here’s the best content I found last week 😛

📚 Best Book Passage

(no context needed)

This passage is from the Book series "Incerto", written by Nassim Taleb.

Thales was a philosopher, a Greek-speaking Ionian of Phoenician stock from the coastal town of Miletus in Asia Minor, and like some philosophers, he enjoyed what he was doing. Miletus was a trading post and had the mercantile spirit usually attributed to Phoenician settlements. But Thales, as a philosopher, was characteristically impecunious. He got tired of his buddies with more transactional lives hinting at him that “those who can, do, and others philosophize.” He performed the following prowess: he put a down payment on the seasonal use of every olive press in the vicinity of Miletus and Chios, which he got at low rent. The harvest turned out to be extremely bountiful and there was demand for olive presses, so he released the owners of olive presses on his own terms, building a substantial fortune in the process. Then he went back to philosophizing.

…

Thales put himself in a position to take advantage of his lack of knowledge— and the secret property of the asymmetry. The key to our message about this upside-downside asymmetry is that he did not need to understand too much the messages from the stars.

Simply, he had a contract that is the archetype of what an asymmetry is, perhaps the only explicit asymmetry you can find in its purest form. It is an option, “the right but not the obligation” for the buyer and, of course, “the obligation but not the right” for the other party, called the seller. Thales had the right—but not the obligation—to use the olive presses in case there would be a surge in demand; the other party had the obligation, not the right. Thales paid a small price for that privilege, with a limited loss and large possible outcome.

That was the very first option on record. The option is an agent of antifragility.

- Nassim Taleb (Incerto, pages 188-189)

Picking Nuggets Notes:

“The voice of the Socratic dream vision is the only sign of any misgivings about the limits of logic: Perhaps – thus he might have asked himself – what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

How I’m trying to become more Antifragile…
I try to just put myself in a position where I have more upside than downside (we can call this a “positive asymmetry”), where the upside is unknown and uncapped and the downside is known, bearable and capped. So that uncertainty is my dear friend, rather than my merciless enemy. And I won’t even try to intellectualize or know anything beyond the properties of the bet — the knowledge about its downside, and the potential upside. That’s it. As Nietzsche pointed out: “what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent”.

🪺 Best of Twitter (in 📸 pictures)

✦ Daniel Vassallo

✦ Jason Leow

✦ David Senra

📺 YouTube 1-minute Clips

✦ Charlie Munger - The Fundamental Algorithm of Life

📺 YouTube Videos I Loved

✨ Get Rewards

If you enjoyed this newsletter, help me keep creating new content by becoming a Patron and get awesome rewards! 👉 The Patreon Community

Wishing you a lovely weekend!!

Julio ❣️

🔵 my key links

Here’s the best content I found over the last 2 weeks 😛

📚 Best Book Passage

(no context needed)

This passage is from the book Hackers and Painters, written by Paul Graham

"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

📱 Best Blogpost Passage

(no context needed)

This passage is from the blogpost "How to be Successful", written by Sam Altman. (Thanks @coder_rc for the recommendation!)

You get rich by owning things

The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions—entertainers for example —almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary.

You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.

This can be a piece of a business, real estate, natural resource, intellectual property, or other similar things. But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly.

The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.

- Sam Altman (link to his blogpost)

🪺 Best of Twitter (in 📸 pictures)

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.

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

📺 YouTube 1-minute Clips

✦ Tim Ferriss - Be Your Own Category

Wishing you a lovely weekend!!

Julio ❣️

Here’s the best content I found this week 😛 (plus my notes on a super interesting YouTube video)

📚 Best Book Passage (no context needed)

This passage is from "The Black Swan", by Nassim Taleb
(This passage can be understood on its own! No additional context is required for comprehension)

The Melting Ice Cube

Consider the following thought experiment borrowed from my friends Aaron Brown and Paul Wilmott:

Operation 1 (the melting ice cube): Imagine an ice cube and consider how it may melt over the next two hours while you play a few rounds of poker with your friends. Try to envision the shape of the resulting puddle.

Operation 2 (where did the water come from?): Consider a puddle of water on the floor. Now try to reconstruct in your mind’s eye the shape of the ice cube it may once have been. Note that the puddle may not have necessarily originated from an ice cube.

The second operation is harder…

The difference between these two processes resides in the following. If you have the right models (and some time on your hands, and nothing better to do) you can predict with great precision how the ice cube will melt—this is a specific engineering problem devoid of complexity, easier than the one involving billiard balls. However, from the pool of water you can build infinite possible ice cubes, if there was in fact an ice cube there at all. The first direction, from the ice cube to the puddle, is called the forward process. The second direction, the backward process, is much, much more complicated. The forward process is generally used in physics and engineering; the backward process in nonrepeatable, nonexperimental historical approaches.

In a way, the limitations that prevent us from unfrying an egg also prevent us from reverse engineering history.

Now, let me increase the complexity of the forward-backward problem just a bit by assuming nonlinearity. Take what is generally called the “butterfly in India” paradigm from the discussion of Lorenz’s discovery in the previous chapter. As we have seen, a small input in a complex system can lead to nonrandom large results, depending on very special conditions. A single butterfly flapping its wings in New Delhi may be the certain cause of a hurricane in North Carolina, though the hurricane may take place a couple of years later. However, given the observation of a hurricane in North Carolina, it is dubious that you could figure out the causes with any precision: there are billions of billions of such small things as wing-flapping butterflies in Timbuktu or sneezing wild dogs in Australia that could have caused it. The process from the butterfly to the hurricane is greatly simpler than the reverse process from the hurricane to the potential butterfly.

Confusion between the two is disastrously widespread in common culture. This “butterfly in India” metaphor has fooled at least one filmmaker. For instance, Happenstance (a.k.a. The Beating of a Butterfly’s Wings), a Frenchlanguage film by one Laurent Firode, meant to encourage people to focus on small things that can change the course of their lives. Hey, since a small event (a petal falling on the ground and getting your attention) can lead to your choosing one person over another as a mate for life, you should focus on these very small details. Neither the filmmaker nor the critics realized that they were dealing with the backward process; there are trillions of such small things in the course of a simple day, and examining all of them lies outside of our reach.

Picking Nuggets Note:

I think this is a really good way to also understand intuitively the narrative fallacy. There might be a million reasons for something to happen the way it happens, and many times we are (erroneously) confident about one specific instance of the causal reason. Just because it "makes sense". What we fail to see is that a million stories can make sense and be super logic, but that doesn’t mean that it's the true!

🎉 Airchat

This is a new Social Media app founded by Naval Ravikant. I was lucky enough to get access to the app (thanks ) and it’s amazing! It’s like being on a perpetual party with super smart and interesting people. Here are some nuggets that I hunted and compiled together:

🎬 YouTube, Spotify (+ Notes)

✦ Learning from Pieter Levels.

A bit of context → I first heard of Pieter from Ali Abdaal’s podcast (hosting Ben Francis) and I started watching all of his stuff! He built many website projects and scaled them to tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars per month! But what I find even more interesting, is that in many ways he embodies many of the teachings from Naval Ravikant and Nassim Taleb.

(Below are my raw notes on these 2 videos // When you see a “@” symbol, it means that the text following it is a thought of mine, rather than a note from the video)

- The Startup cycle for Pieter:

1) Identify the problem you want to solve (the idea)

• Characteristics of a Good Idea --> It focuses on a problem. 

** I try to look at my own life... What does really annoy me on my daily life? What information is missing? 

*** Cool thing --> You are an expert at your own problem!

** Do different things, so that you can see different problems to what most people see! If you do the same as the herd, you will have just the same problems -> which are very likely already solved by some company out there. 

- You can make it ALL bootstrapped!

- Do it yourself. You don’t need to work with other people. 

* You don’t need a technical co-founder if you are a business person. Just learn to code. Do it yourself. Learn to design...

* Benefits:

** Avoid Group Thinking --> That can be dangerous!

- Be happy with sharing your idea! Most important thing is the execution, so dont worry about people copying you!

2) Build it

- Lot of people will have to learn how to code.

* I do not recommend any bootcamp or academy! Takes too long, and is mostly a scam. 

* I think that you should just go to Google and that’s it!

** Open Google and type “How to make a website”. That’s how I and many successful people learned!

* the most important skills -> To learn how to learn! (@ this is something that Charlie Munger and Naval Ravikant argue is the most important skill for getting rich)

- Do not spend too much time building it because you need to “validate” it thru launching. I would say you should not spend more than 1 month working on the startup before launching it!! (the more time you spend building without launching, the riskier it is!!). 

- Also have already in mind which features you may wanna limit for premium members!!! Coz if you make everything for free and later you wanna charge for features (which were previously free) people will get super angry. 

3) Launch it

- @ Market it

(if it "sticks", continue to next step...)

- Most important step! Because it tells if the actual product is useful or not! (and if can be monetized or not)

- Slogan startup is super important!

- Launch it in…

* ProductHunt

** Ship the product in SanFrancisco time!! So that you have a higher chance of going viral.

* Reddit

* HackerNews

* go to niche platforms!! (related to your target market)

- Have the server ready to handle it if many people visit your site at same time! (you don’t want the server to die just when you are going viral). Tip: make the web static. 

4) Grow it

* @ Adding more features, polishing away...

* Start small. Start super Niche. Then go expanding concentrically!! 

** e.g./ Start with Nomad travelers, and then target the whole Travelers market. 

** @ as you already know... by starting super small you can differentiate WAY more!! Because people will think that there isn't any value in that super small market! So it frees it up from competition! (they don't see the big picture, that you start small but after some time you will grow it more valuable!). 

- Forget about non-organic growth! → that is bots (non-ethical), ads (at least this is ethical, but people hate it!!)

* Organic growth is the best! It means that people really like your website. -> harder to get. But when you get it, it means you have validated your product! (people is using and loving it). And if you don’t get that traffic… Means your product is not good enough (tweak it, change it…).

- Build with your users.
* always ask for feedback -> to solve issues, to add new features, 

** When you listen to feedback and make people feel involved, they become sort of ambassadors of your product (this is also mentioned in the book of Sahil Lavingia: The Minimalist Entrepreneur). It’s called “CO-CREATING”.

** Most beautiful feedback box (paid though) →

https://www.intercom.com/

- Make sure that you have a way to capture people’s emails!! So that you can always contact the people who showed interest!! This is super important to have all set up before launching!

* but don’t spam people!!

- Build your startup in PUBLIC

* you could stream your screen (on twitch)! So that everyone sees the development of the startup real time. 

- Launch many times!!

* Don’t just launch the first time! Every time you build a new feature, get the word out there!! I do this every 2-3 months. → This helps you getting more press!

5) Monetize

- Very important to make money, because you need to pay your bills.

* Within 2-3 months, get your first dollar in. 

* Ignore people who say you are evil for charging money!!

- Put a paywall on many features, and see what happens. Analyze which features make people pay the most!

- You can make your main site a FREEMIUM, and then have specific features or side things where you can charge money!

- Always better to get recurrent revenue instead of a one-off payment!! So best thing is to set up a subscription model! Sure there will be churn (and it might be annoying for users), but it is still worth it!  (@ Peter doesn’t do this on his main biz Nomadlist. He charges a one-off fee! He does this because he says that Nomads don’t last very long in the nomadic lifestyle, so the churn is HUGE. So better to capture LTV ASAP)

- Ads are dead. Affiliate Marketing is dead. Just charge for premium features on your web! People will pay if they find value. 

6) Automate it AMAP

* In case you get bored of the product, put as many robots to automate the startup!

 - Get the robots to work for you! Don’t hire any people, just get the robots to do all the work. 

* Only have 1 employee who can manage these robots. So that when the server crashes at 4am in the morning, there is someone who can get the server up and running again. 

🪺 Twitter (no need to click links)

✦ @paulg (Paul Graham):

“When young founders build something that they don't want themselves but that they believe some group of other people want, 90% of the time they're building something no one wants.”

✦ @naval (Naval Ravikant):

Networking is overrated. Become first and foremost a person of value and the network will be available whenever you need it.

Wishing you a lovely weekend!!

Julio ❣️

Here’s the best content I found this week 😛

📚 Book Passages

From “The Daily Stoic”, by Ryan Holiday

“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

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
(I'm not religious, but there is a lot of wisdom in those words)

If we can know the difference between *what is not under our control* and *what is under our control*, it will also give us a big advantage over people who doesn't know -- because we can allocate our (limited) energy into what we can actually change and improve, instead of wasting it on 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 in the present moment and we can change our future as result.

🪺 Top Tweets (no need to open Twitter)

▻ @dickiebush → 7 Realizations About The Smartest People I Look Up To (After 500+ Hours Studying Them):

Picking Nuggets Note:

Nowadays, I think that point 2 (on being content with appearing clueless) is way easier than ever thanks to Chat-GPT (specially with GPT-4). I’m currently building a website from scratch, and had to revisit many concepts about HTML / CSS / JS. I also had so many doubts that might sound stupid and were also very “long-tail queries” specific to the requirements of my website project. So thanks to GPT-4, I could just ask it all these questions without any personal feeling of appearing foolish! What a time to learn new intellectual things.

▻ @FoundersPodcast → David Senra’s biggest lesson from Sam Zell:

“Go for freedom.

Freedom allows you to control what you work on.

If you control what you work on then you can work on what you love.

If you love it you will do it for a long time.

If you do it for a long time you will get really good at it.

Money will come as a result.”

▻ image twitted by @bkaellner // The work is the win:

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.

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

Wishing you a lovely weekend from Newcastle, England (came to visit a good friend for a few days. Going to eat some tortillas now 🥞 )

Julio ❣️

Here’s the best content I found this week 😛

📚 Book Passages

[Context]

▻ Source
This passage was extracted from the book “How To Get Rich”.

▻ Author
Felix Dennis. He was one of the 50 richest people in the UK, with an estimated net worth of 400-900 million USD. He wrote the renowned book “How To Get Rich”. He passed away in 2014.

Back in the late 1970s, I had a conversation with a much older man, a senior manager at the high-street retailer, W.H. Smith. W.H. Smith are a power in the magazine and newspaper industry. This old buffer was friendly and helpful towards my little publishing company. I was interested in launching a personal computer magazine. He dissuaded me, warning me over and over that ‘nobody would ever pay money to read monthly magazines about dinky little computers’. Several colleagues in my company agreed with him. After weeks of discussions, I abandoned my plans.

Shortly thereafter, another entrepreneur, Angelo Zgorelec, launched just such a title, called Personal Computer World. It soon exhibited all the signs of becoming a big success. Fortunately, Angelo did not have sufficient capital to promote it. In the nick of time I was able to purchase a majority stake in the magazine, which I proceeded to sell for a small fortune four years later to a large conglomerate.

So what is the lesson here? Because I had been dissuaded from launching my own title, and did not own the magazine outright, I was forced to pay Angelo a million pounds or so for his remaining share. Well done, Angelo!

Had I launched a similar magazine myself earlier, I would have been £1 million richer in the autumn of 1982. (Around £2.4 million in today’s money.) If I had invested that £2.4 million at a low rate of compound interest, I would be £4 million richer than I am today. That is what that well-meaning old gentleman at W.H. Smith and his long-winded advice cost me. He cost me nearly $8 million in my pocket right now. And whose fault was it? It was mine, for prevaricating and listening to a Jeremiah.

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

🎬 Top YouTube Videos (+ Notes)

▻ President of Shopify

Highlights:

• The most successful merchants on Shopify were accidental!

• When we started Shopify, there were many competitors -- Yahoo Stores, Magenta…
  But the idea wasn't necessarily to do something that no one else was doing, but TO DO IT BETTER. This was not this massive novel thing, we just did it better!

  "If you never have a single great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas of others, you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. They do not have to be your ideas. Execution is all."

  - Felix Dennis

• If I were to invest 3M$ into 3 Businesses, which ones would be?

  1. "I would definitely put one of those millions of dollars into the hands of a creator who is on the precipice of figuring out: "what exactly does my audience like?". And then creating a better version of that"

  2. The second one would be someone who is obsessed about something that is SUPER niche. For instance, someone completely obsessed about black t-shirts. He can go and do the BEST black t-shirts in the market and only focus on that!

  3. And the 3rd one would be someone who can make something expensive significantly more affordable to the masses.

▻ Cliff Weitzman — Founder of Speechify

Highlights:

How to increase your network and become luckier:

• Bond over Ambition or Vulnerability…

  • Small talk has its place, but its only thru a shared AMBITION / VULNERABILITY / EXPERIENCES that we bond!

  • it helps to structure it as a story :
    1) What you want? --> Goals, Desire, mission.
    2) Why can't you get what you want? --> Challenges in the way. People connect with that!

• Cold email strangers and people you admire. Create a tracking system and reach out to learn, seek mentorship, or explore job/internship opportunities. Research their content, consume it, and then make contact.

• Get comfortable asking people to hang out. Building relationships often starts with casual social interactions.

• Write thank-you notes to express gratitude. They have a significant impact on the receiver, and little cost to you!

• Put positive energy into the world without expecting anything in return. Giving without expectations can lead to good things happening.

• Work in your zone of genius (work that feels like play to you) and create opportunities for yourself.

🪺 Top Tweets

▻ Everything that man ignores does not exist for him. That is why the universe of each one, is summed up to the size of his knowledge. — Albert Einstein

▻ The work is the win

Wishing you a lovely weekend,

Julio ❣️

Here’s the best content I found this week 😛

📚 Books

[Context]

▻ Author
Felix Dennis. He was one of the 50 richest people in the UK, with an estimated net worth of 400-900 million USD. He wrote the renowned book “How To Get Rich”. He passed away in 2014.

▻ Source
This Passage was extracted from the book “How To Get Rich”.

I employ a great many people smarter than I am. That’s not false modesty, that’s a stone-cold fact. The only two reasons such geniuses continue to work for me and put money into my pocket are that, on the positive side, they enjoy their work, and on the negative side, they fear losing what they have already gained – challenging work, congenial colleagues, a certain status and the promise of promotion and pay rises. They know this as well as I do. (They are far from fools, otherwise I would hardly employ them.) But fear holds them back, with the exception of those rare individuals who are content with their lot. And what is fear? ‘Fear is the little death, death by a thousand cuts,’ goes the ancient Japanese saying. Nifty, but ultimately unhelpful. Similar to Shakespeare’s ‘Cowards die many time before their deaths: / The valiant never taste of death but once.

"Old boss once warned: You'll never be rich since you're obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that's just good enough." - Naval Ravikant

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” - Goethe

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.

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

🪺 Twitter

▻ David Senra’s highlights from the book “Make Something Wonderful” (Steve Jobs in his own words)

▻ Val Katayev on Compounding

▻ Break down of the Story-telling technique

▻ Steve Jobs on why you should not “be a career”

▻ A consistent set of values that Steve Jobs held dear

▻ Alex Hormozi’s business lesson to a newbie entrepreneur

📺 YouTube

▻ I love this conversation between Sam Parr and David Senra. In this Podcast episode, David breaks down the Podcasting business, which he argues is a “miracle” and the equivalent of the printing press but for the spoken world!

▻ Super interesting conversation. Check out my highlight. This conversation made me realize (and reassure) the importance of eating whole food and doing strength exercise. I recently created a Strength Exercise routine with this free Notion template that I found on Twitter.

Wishing you a lovely weekend,

Julio ❣️

Here’s the best content I’ve found lately 😛

📚 Book Passage

Context...

▻ Book Author
Marc Andreessen is the co-author of Mosaic (first graphical Web Browser) and co-founder of Netscape (commercializer of the first Web Browser). His net-worth is estimated in 1.8B$.

Naval Ravikant considers him to be one of the world's most successful individuals (together with Steve Jobs and Elon Musk).

▻ Source
This Passage is from The Pmarca Blogs Archive, by Marc Andreessen.

▻ Content
From the 3 core elements of any startup (Team, Product and Market)... What element matters significantly more?

“

The only thing that matters for a new startup
...
I’ll assert that *market* is the most important factor in a startup’s success or failure.

Why?

In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup.

The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn’t care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product.

In short, customers are knocking down your door to get the product; the main goal is to actually answer the phone and respond to all the emails from people who want to buy.

”

🪺 Tweets

- The Salary Trap (by George Mack)

- George Mack listed 29 super insightful lessons he would give to his younger-self

- The Career Cheat Code (by George Mack)

- The Time Value of Time (by Tom Harari)

- How to Create a good Cold Email (by Nik Sharma)

🎙️ Podcasts

✅ The life of a young Bill Gates. David Senra shares his lessons from the reading the book “Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire”

Don’t be misguided by the modern conservative look of Bill Gates. Before becoming a billionaire, he was obsessed with destroying the competition and was said to be the Genghis Kahn of this century.

✅ David Senra shares his lessons from the reading the book “I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words (In Their Own Words)”

I love how Steve is always talking about Passion and putting your spirit in the process of doing anything.

Wishing you a lovely weekend,

Julio ❣️

Here’s the best content I’ve found lately! 😛

📚 Book Passage

▻ Source
This Passage is from the book "The Black Swan", by Nassim Taleb.

▻ Topic
There is an important issue with becoming more knowledgeable on something -- Our confidence grows faster than that knowledge, which worsens our judgement.

“

Our knowledge does grow, but it is threatened by greater increases in confidence, which make our increase in knowledge at the same time an increase in confusion, ignorance, and conceit.

Epistemic arrogance bears a double effect: we overestimate what we know, and underestimate uncertainty, by compressing the range of possible uncertain states (i.e., by reducing the space of the unknown). The applications of this distortion extend beyond the mere pursuit of knowledge: just look into the lives of the people around you. Literally any decision pertaining to the future is likely to be infected by it. Our human race is affected by a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned (in addition to other biases that sometimes exert a compounding effect). To take an obvious example, think about how many people divorce. Almost all of them are acquainted with the statistic that between one-third and one-half of all marriages fail, something the parties involved did not forecast while tying the knot. Of course, “not us,” because “we get along so well” (as if others tying the knot got along poorly).

”

Picking Nuggets Note:

Epistemic arrogance matches perfectly with the initial phase of the Dunning-Kruger effect...

* As the individual starts to learn about a particular Field, his perceived competence increases at a much faster rate compared to his acquisition of real competence. Besides, I think that if in that Field/Activity there is also ton of misinformation (for instance, in emerging fields where there can exist many strong self-interests from other people -- best example: The typical ad about investing on a new Crypto Platform with some "unique" feature that is gonna give you instant riches), the mismatch between perceived competence and real competence is even greater!

* (Reduction of Epistemic Arrogance) // As the individual makes mistakes and gets more knowledgeable on the Field, his confidence decreases (as he realizes that he is prone to many mistakes and he starts seeing a bigger picture of the Field) while his real competence slowly increases! 

"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid one are full of confidence." - Charles Bukowski

💎 Best Content

✅ Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of FaceBook…

"A lot of people are focused on taking over the world. They are like doing the biggest thing and getting the most users. And I think part of making a difference is focusing intensely... There is a level of service that we can provide when we were just at Harvard... I really just want to see everyone focus on college and create like a really cool college directory product that is very relevant for students."

This reminded me of Peter Thiel's advice of going after a small Niche and make something superior and unique for a small group of people. Once a big part of that Niche is taken over, repeat the process with related Niches and gradually expand! Never go after a Big Market on day one.

✅ This is probably the best podcast episode I have heard this year. An absolute gem. David Senra is truly a learning machine.

Super insightful moment when he finds the same theme across Paul Graham, Naval Ravikant and Michael Jordan on doing what feels like play to you, and that is also valuable for a Niche / Group of people.

✅ Jeff Bezos

Click here to see the clip!

This clip, from an interview of Jeff Bezos, reminded me of Naval's quote:

"An old boss once warned: “You’ll never be rich since you’re
obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job
that’s just good enough.”

- Naval Ravikant

The smarter you are, the braver you gotta be!

✅ F.U. Identity

Click here to see the tweet!

✅ Male Depression

Click here to see the tweet!

To feel like a victim feels good instantly, but it will destroy you in the long-term. The hero archetype is not someone who demands on others, is someone who strives from the difficulties he experiences.

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

- Confucius

✅ The Cynicism Safety Blanket

Click here to see the tweet!

Wishing you a lovely weekend,

Julio ❣️

I hope you had a great week!

I have collected my favorite book passage and the best content I have consumed last week! Hope you find it valuable too!

But before… some updates about the content and the Newsletter…

✅ Updates

From now on, my plan is to send this kind of newsletter (the curation of an insightful book passage and the best content I’ve consumed on the week) *every* Friday, and then *some* Mondays I will send the typical newsletter that includes my Notes and Reflections used for my latest YouTube Video!

This way, I can keep the content a bit more organized, and also deliver the content to you in a more consistent basis! So you can digest everything more easily :)

TLDR…

• Every Friday → This Newsletter (Curation of a Book Passage and Content)

• Some Mondays → My typical Newsletter with my Notes & Reflections used for my latest YouTube Video.

📚 Favorite Book Passage

This Passage is from the book "The Black Swan", by Nassim Taleb
(About our tendency to learn the precise/ factual instead of the meta/abstract)

“

The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don’t learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don’t seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion…

What are our minds made for? It looks as if we have the wrong user’s manual. Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect; if they were, things would be easier for us today, but then we would not be here today and I would not have been here to talk about it—my counterfactual, introspective, and hard-thinking ancestor would have been eaten by a lion while his nonthinking but faster-reacting cousin would have run for cover. Consider that thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy, that our predecessors spent more than a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals and that in the blip in our history during which we have used our brain we have used it on subjects too peripheral to matter. Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do— except, of course, when we think about it.

”

Picking Nuggets Note:

I think this idea that Nassim exposes matches very well with the idea of Kapil Gupta -- Everyone is seeking the tangible step-by-step process and practical tips to achieve their goals (they seek the "hacks" and the fast way). And while this is useful (specially when you are just starting out in a particular journey -- i.e. You want to become a great writer but you have no idea where to start or what to do), it is not going to make us different from the rest of people that also pursue that list of steps and most importantly, it is superficial in nature -- it lacks the depth / substance / foundational aspect. And since we humans need a purpose and existential reason, I think this is the most important part! 

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how" - Friedrich Nietzsche 

Maybe that's why I'm enjoying the content of a new Creator I discovered recently: Dan Koe. Who embraces the abstract and the "meta aspect" of of being a Creator in today's world.

More quotes on this...

“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

"Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!" - Bertrand Russell

💎 Best Content

If you want to keep receiving this kind of newsletters, please reply with a “Yes” to this email :) — it also hacks the email system, making emails way less likely to end up in your Spam folder!

Until next time,

Julio xx

I have been a little busy these days with Freelancing work and setting up my own little website (I’m super open for feedback 🤓). So there is no video / blogpost today, but I still wanna share with you my favorite book passage of the week and some of the best content that I have been bingeing on lately!

Hope you find it valuable :)

📚 Best Passage

This Passage is from the Series of Books "Incerto" by Nassim Taleb. It touches in the issue of "Hope".

Giovanni Drogo is a man of promise. He has just graduated from the military academy with the rank of junior officer, and active life is just starting. But things do not turn out as planned: his initial four-year assignment is a remote outpost, the Bastiani fortress, protecting the nation from the Tartars likely to invade from the border desert—not too desirable a position. The fortress is located a few days by horseback from the town; there is nothing but bareness around it—none of the social buzz that a man of his age could look forward to. Drogo thinks that his assignment in the outpost is temporary, a way for him to pay his dues before more appealing positions present themselves. Later, back in town, in his impeccably ironed uniform and with his athletic figure, few ladies will be able to resist him.

What is Drogo to do in this hole? He discovers a loophole, a way to be transferred after only four months. He decides to use the loophole.

At the very last minute, however, Drogo takes a glance at the desert from the window of the medical office and decides to extend his stay. Something in the walls of the fort and the silent landscape ensnares him. The appeal of the fort and waiting for the attackers, the big battle with the ferocious Tartars, gradually become his only reason to exist. The entire atmosphere of the fort is one of anticipation. The other men spend their time looking at the horizon and awaiting the big event of the enemy attack. They are so focused that, on rare occasions, they can detect the most insignificant stray animal that appears at the edge of the desert and mistake it for an enemy attack.

Sure enough, Drogo spends the rest of his life extending his stay, delaying the beginning of his life in the city—thirty-five years of pure hope, spent in the grip of the idea that one day, from the remote hills that no human has ever crossed, the attackers will eventually emerge and help him rise to the occasion.

At the end of the novel we see Drogo dying in a roadside inn as the event for which he has waited all his life takes place. He has missed it.

The more you focus on hope, the more you waste your life. Hope is in the distant future, whereas your life only exists in the present. For all practical purposes, I like to think that the past is a fiction and the future an illusion.

"I think in general it's bad to live a life full of hope... Because it's throwing today away -- It's too much living in the future." 
- Naval Ravikant

(Video of Naval on this issue)

👨‍💻Content I have found super valuable lately…

- Entrepreneurship

• Finding the One Decision That Removes 100 Decisions (By Tim Ferriss)

- Life

Until next time :)

Julio xx