A Few Things: Quotes I am Thinking About, Transformative Ideas, How To Live An Asymmetric Life, Position Yourself for Success, Die With Zero, Founders...

August 2, 2023

I am sharing this weekly email with you because I count you in the group of people I learn from and enjoy being around.

You can check out last week’s edition here: Economist on Heatwaves and Geopolitical Shifts, Marko Papic on Markets, Energy Transition & Commodity Cycle, Working Without Working, Your Employer Isn't Ready for AI, Thrive Capital....

Believe it or not, that “♡ Like” button is a big deal – it serves as a proxy to new visitors of this publication’s value. If you enjoyed this, don’t be shy.

It’s summer, I’ll keep this short so you have time for more important things.

---

Quotes I Am Thinking About:

“You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.”

- Timothy Leary

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

- Warren Buffett

“Man is the creature of the era he lives in; very few can raise themselves above the ideas of the time.”

- Voltaire 

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

- Epicurus

"One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now."

- Novelist Paulo Coelho on taking action

“Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.”

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Accepting that we cannot predict the future--i.e., that there will always be unexpected and highly consequential events--is the first step in becoming less fragile and more adaptable. People should be highly skeptical of anyone’s, including their own, ability to predict the future, and instead pursue strategies that can survive whatever may occur.”

- Seth Klarman

---

A. A Few Things Worth Checking Out:

1. How do you come up with transformative ideas? This is a question we should all ask, but rarely do. Most days are like the days and week before. But change is not only possible, it is critical.

This article had some great big questions to help you come with paradigm shifting thinking at work.

My favourite 5 questions were:

• If you were forced to increase your prices by 10x, what would you have to do to justify it?

• If all our customers vanished, and we had to earn our growth and brand from scratch, what would we do?

• What if you made your most introverted teammates’ dreams come true: No more synchronous meetings, ever again?

• What if you could change anything, regardless of what anyone thinks or feels?

• What externality has the potential to kill the entire company?

Are you going to ask the big questions or go back to living a life of quiet desperation, as Robin Williams said here quoting Thoreau:

B. How to Live an Asymmetric Life by Graham Weaver, part of the Last Lecture Series at Stanford GSB.

C. How To Position Yourself For Success, Adam Robinson with Shane Parrish at the Knowledge Project. Adam is one of my favourite thinkers. His mind is soooo BIG. This is a good intro to Adam and his thinking.

More markets oriented recent discussion is here.

---

B. Die With Zero

If I measure the impact of a book based on how it changed my behaviour than Bill Perkins “Die With Zero” will be a Top 5.

Bill’s thesis can be summarised as follows:

Life is just the sum of your experiences.

Our goal in life should be to maximise our fulfilment, which is a function of maximising experiences, memories and our life energy (things that energise you).

Many people are just optimising or maximising their life along one variable: Wealth.

Bill thinks we should optimise over three variables: health, wealth and time.

Let me use a statistic to go deeper. According to the US Internal Revenue Service, the median age at which someone receives an inheritance in the US is 51. What is wrong with that? That probably means that 51 yr old had a 80 year old parent who at their death left their estate to their 51 year old child.

What good is money to the 51 yr old? Would it have been better a) if the dying parent had given the money to their child when the child was 30 and needed the money more? b) could it have been more useful if the 80 year old had worked a few years less, retired earlier and spent more time with their young kids?

What was the point of piling up money, only to give it to their 50 year old children, who probably didn’t need it as much.

You could do the same analysis with a charity the 80 year old endows on their death. Could the cash have been better used if it was given 20 or 30 years earlier?

Bill would argue that if you die before getting to zero, it’s like working for years without being paid.

If you want to give money to someone why not now? If you say it’s for the kids. Then how much money do you want to give and when is a better question than saying it all goes to them at death. Give it while you are living. Give it sooner.

On the time front, it’s important to think about windows of opportunity. You could be a billionaire at 80, but you are never going to climb The Great Wall of China at 80. You are never going to go on Safari to Africa with your kids then. Timing Matters. You only have specific windows to do certain things. When those windows close, they close forever.

On their death bed, every billionaire would give away all their wealth to just have another day. There are stages of your life. You can’t do all things at all times. Have to use the windows when they exist. We think of our death as one final date, but really there is a part of us dying everyday. Certain doors are closing on us every day.

What are activities that I can do now that I won’t be able to later. What opportunities are open to me that won’t be open in the future.

What are you planning on doing later? Why not do them now.

Maintaining health is critical to long term fulfilment. Time and wealth become irrelevant if you haven’t taken care of your health. Someone who is sick doesn’t care how rich they are, they just want to be healthy again. What investments can you make today in your long term health?

You can get a good overview of the book in this interview Bill Perkins did with Peter Attia.

---

C. Founders

I’ve been listening to the Founders podcast by David Senra for the past few months. Every week David reads a biography of an entrepreneur and shares the key ideas and lessons about entrepreneurship from that founder. So far, he has spent +6 years reading hundreds of biographies and has invested over 10,000 hours in this project.

I have never been a fan of biographies, but David has this ability to bring people to life that is uncanny and addictive. For me it’s been a way to learn both historical context and lessons from the entrepreneurs.

Considering that these are huge books that would take weeks to finish, David has done a great service distilling things down.

He’s published 314 episodes, my favourite six episodes:

#25 Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson

#54 The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

#73 Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America

#84 Aristotle Onassis

#139 The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance

#282 Jeff Bezos Shareholder Letters

Curating further, a couple of lessons I’ve picked up so far:

1. The one idea that drives you for decades: The core of creating something great is having persistence, stubbornness, courage to keep going. It’s critical to find that idea that will drive you for decades. They were in love with an idea, a vision for what the company was going to do. They could see the final result in their minds and that drove them.

2. Keep learning: All of the great founders knew their domain better than anyone. The numbers, the people, the processes, the systems. They knew it from the ground up. And they kept learning, looking for improvements, looking for an edge to keep honing their craft, their system, their business. A big part of this was to seek the best in the business. Learn from them, be around them, hire them. The right people make all the difference.

3. Maniacal Focus: They focused relentlessly on one thing, making their business a success. As you get successful it’s easy to get distracted, but the best stayed focused on their vision over decades.

4. Be different: Think from 1st principles, don’t keep repeating what others are doing, figure out for yourself the best way to do something. Build new ways of doing things that haven’t been done before. Customers like new solutions and technology too, this will help sales.

5. Keep costs low and have financial flexibility: Having lower cost structure and financial flexibility helps to survive the business cycle and buy other less prudent investors assets cheaply. Run a tight ship and know your numbers better than others. Avoid ruin.

---

Believe it or not, that “♡ Like” button is a big deal – it serves as a proxy to new visitors of this publication’s value. If you enjoyed this, don’t be shy.