Play long term games, partner with intelligent people and arm yourself with specific knowledge

When you’re competing with people it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don’t copy.

No one can compete with you on being you. It’s that simple. And so the more authentic you are to who you are, and what you love to do, the less competition you’re gonna have. 

And normally that would have been useless advice pre-internet. Post-internet you can turn that into a career.

All returns in life come from compound interest in long-term games. Whether it’s goodwill, or love, or relationships, or money.

If you want to be successful, you have to work with other people. And you have to figure out who can you trust, and who can you trust over a long, long period of time, that you can just keep playing the game with them, so that compound interest, and high trust will make it easier to play the game, and will let you collect the major rewards, which are usually at the end of the cycle.

When you switch industries, you’re starting over from scratch.

Every time you reset, every time you wander out of where you built your network, you’re going to be starting from scratch. You’re not going to know who to trust. They’re not going to know to trust you.

When you have been doing business with somebody, you’ve been friends with somebody for ten years, twenty years, thirty years, it just gets better and better because you trust them so easily.

Get some traction. Get purchase, and don’t lose it. Gain some initial traction, and never fall back, just keep ratcheting up, and up.

The three-part checklist that you cannot compromise on. You need someone high-energy because the world is full of smart, lazy people.

It’s not meant to say someone is smart, someone else is stupid. But it’s more that everyone is smart at different things.

And then energy, a lot of times people are unmotivated for a specific thing, but they’re motivated for other things.

Then high integrity is the most important because otherwise if you’ve got the other two, what you have is you have a smart and hard working crook, who’s eventually going to cheat you.

Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists; their beliefs are self-fulfilling.

To create things, you have to be a rational optimist. Rational in the sense that you have to see the world for what it really is. And yet you have to be optimistic about your own capabilities, and your capability to get things done.

We’re genetically hardwired to be pessimists. Adapting for modern society means overriding your pessimism, and taking slightly irrationally optimistic bets because the upside is unlimited. If you start the next SpaceX, or Tesla, or Uber, you can make billions of dollars of value for society

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job, it’s not for going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.

Specific knowledge is found by observation. You almost have to look back on your own life and see what you’re actually good at.

Your specific knowledge is observed and often observed by other people who know you well and revealed in situations rather than something that you come up with.

It’s on the bleeding edge of technology, on the bleeding edge of art, on the bleeding edge of communication.

Specific knowledge is highly specific to the situation, it’s specific to the individual, it’s specific to the problem, and it can only be built as part of a larger obsession, interest, and time spent in that domain.

The best way to arm with specific knowledge is just to follow your own obsession.

It’s important that one not start assembling things too deliberately because you do want to pick things where you are a natural. Everyone is a natural at something.

And then there are probably multiple things you’re natural at because personalities and humans are very complex. So, we want to be able to take the things that you are natural at and combine them so that you automatically, just through sheer interest and enjoyment, end up top 25% or top 10% or top 5% at a number of things.