This is me trying to summarize my 25 years of learnings, most of which I learnt the hard way.
Things I wish I knew sooner
- Set goals that scare you.
- Seek progress, not perfction.
- Consistency is the key.
- Know what you don’t know.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel.
- Learn by doing.
- Ideas are dime a dozen. Execution is everything.
- You are who you choose to be.
- Do what is right, not what is easy.
- Become an A+ generalist.
- Live in Permanent Beta.
- Create More, Consume Less
- Make mistakes
- Show empathy
- Be ethical
- Give more than you get
- Learn from pros
- Never give up! You might be too close to success.
- You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
- Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
- Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework
- Use The 5 x 5 x 5 rule - Will it matter in 5 minutes? Will it matter in 5 days? Will it matter in 5 years?
- Timebox everything. You’ll be surprised at what you’re capable of!
- I’m not good at this thing YET.
- Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.
Bonus Quotes
- Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it away from you. - Mark Cuban
- Torture the data, and it will confess to anything. - Ronald Coase
- Once you know it, AI is just Maths. - Zuck
- The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. - Jeffrey Hammerbacher
- People should focus much more on figuring out what feels like play to them and looks like work to others because that’s your superpower and that’s where you’ll outperform everybody. - Naval
- The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be out-worked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple, right? - Will Smith
- The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel. - Steven Furtick
- Wherever you are, make sure you’re there. - Dan Sullivan
- One of life’s cheat codes is realizing that you can learn absolutely anything. The whole system is structured to make you think you need special institutions to learn something new. Not true. You can do it all yourself. You can master anything. You aren’t supposed to know that. - Erik Fin
- Some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default. - J.K Rowling