Partner With Rational Optimists

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 t...

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 d...

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 t...

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, interes...

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 d...

The internet connects everybody. That is its superpower. So, you want to use that. You can find your audience for your product, or your talent, and skill no matter how far away they are.

It allows you to scale any niche obsession. 

It could be like people who collect snakes, to like p...

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 tim...

Almost everything that’s in your house, in your workplace, and on the street used to be technology at one point in time. There was a time when oil was a technology, that made J.D. Rockefeller rich. There was a time when cars were technology, that made Henry Ford rich.

You want to figure out...