The Paradox of Effort

When faced with chaos, ask yourself whether you're a local or a tourist.

Tourists flee bad weather. Locals are aware of the season's change.

Play games where you're a local. Never be a "Stubborn Local”—ignoring evidence that something has fundamentally change...

Imagine a rock is thrown into a lake. The splash is the first-order effect—the ripples are the second-order effect.

The world is filled with first-order thinkers. Dig deeper—ask "and then what?” Second-order thinkers will always be in short supply.

To learn anything:

• Step 1: Identify a topic
• Step 2: Try to explain it to a 5-year-old
• Step 3: Study to fill in knowledge gaps
• Step 4:

Most of us need fewer friends and more intellectual sparring partners.

• Friends are easy to come by.
• Intellectual sparring partners are harder to find. They will call you on your BS, question your assumptions, and push you to think deeply.

Your Zone of Genius is where your interests, passions, and skills align.

• Operating in your Zone of Genius means playing games you are uniquely well-suited to win.
• Once you identify it, you can stop playing "their" games and start playing "yours".

• The British offered bounties for cobra heads—so locals bred cobras to turn in their heads.
• A policy designed to reduce the cobra population had the opposite effect.

Lesson: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Tiny deviations are amplified by distance and time.

A 1-degree error in heading will cause a plane to miss its target by 1 mile for every 60 miles flown.

Small miss now = large miss later. Always make real-time course corrections and adjustments.

Much of what we call "luck" is the macro result of 1,000s of micro-actions.

• Your habits put you in a position where luck is more likely to strike.
• If you want to create more luck, increase your luck surface area.
• Open up the aperture to let more luck in...

The goal is to minimize the number of regrets in life.

When faced with a difficult decision:

1. Project into the future.
2. Look back on the decision.
3. Ask "Will I regret not doing this?"
4. Act accordingly.

The energy required to refute bullshit is much larger than the energy required to produce it.

This is why BS spreads so easily—especially on social media. It's also why we need to make a deliberate effort to fight back against it....

Extraordinary achievements are often just the result of a large volume of tiny actions.

Small things become big things.

When faced with two options, choose the one that’s more difficult in the short term. Naval calls this making "uphill decisions”.

It requires a forced override of your pain avoidance instinct. It's worth it—short-term pain creates compounding long-term gain.

These are:

• Financial (money)
• Social (relationships)
• Physical (health)
• Mental (health, knowledge, faith)

Asking great questions uncovers the truth—bias for action builds upon it.

The four quadrants:

• Q1: World-changers (rare!)
• Q2: Grinders/hustlers
• Q3: Philosophers/thinkers
• Q4: Dead zone

Invest behind Q1s, hire m...

Observe the weekend projects of the smartest people in your circles. Odds are those will become a key part of our future.

Invest accordingly.

Jerry Seinfeld hangs a calendar on the wall and uses a red marker to put an X over every day that he completes his daily writing.

It's not about quality, it's about consistency. If you want to improve at anything:

• 30 days
• 30 min per day

• Black Lines = Paths Closed
• Green Lines = Paths Open

Stop focusing on the black lines behind you. Start focusing on all of the green lines before you. It is a future with immense opportunity.

Learn the difference between urgent and important.

Place tasks on a 2x2 matrix:

• Important & Urgent
• Important & Not Urgent
• Not Important & Urgent
• Not Important & Not Urgent.

Prioritize, delega...

• Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is often the best one.
• Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
• Hitchens' Razor: Anything asserted without evidence can be dismisse...

• Old Way: Learn to Play.
• New Way: Play to Learn.

We are living in an unprecedented era—historical boundaries are being broken, enabling anyone to participate.

If you're trying to learn anything new, insert yourself i...

Skin in the Game means that the key principals participate in both the upside and downside associated with any decisions.

• Always look for its presence in any new situation.
• Avoid games where those making the rules don't have any skin in the game.