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One of my major realizations last year has been that life is too short to have regrets and lowering expectations is the key to a happy life.

My theme for 2022 is to live in the moment. Lower expectations. Detach myself. It also nicely ties with my only goal of this year, which is getting into meditation.

Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap

This is the third time I’m making my annual review public!

What went well?

• I continued journaling (wrote 224 entries this year compared to 302 entries in 2020).
• Continued focusing on health. Lost the weight gained in the pandemic, mostly by a combination of calorie deficit and walking 5k steps.
• Read 39 books (compared to 50+ in 2020) sustainably.
• Set up my blog on Wordpress.
• Started a reading community.
• Ran a friendship experiment.
• Started a podcast.
• Finally crossed the 10kg mark on my adjustable weights.
• Hired two people to help with scaling up.
• Started learning Procreate by following tutorials - it’s mad funnn!!
• Explored many cool hostels and checked off a lot of items on my bucket list, some unintentionally.

What didn’t go well?

I recently read Tribe of Mentors. One thing that stood out to me was the emphasis on meditation throughout, every other interviewee had mentioned it! And so, I decided my next year’s only goal: dive deep into meditation.

I’m attached to some outcomes. I want to work on detaching myself more. Life is too short to have regrets and lowering expectations is the key to a happy life.

This is a follow-up to 🏫 Reading Academy for Everyone.

While starting out, monthly goals can be more effective than annual ones. With this in mind, we’re starting monthly reading challenges at Reademy.

We have 4 themes with different channels for each. You need to read one book in ANY theme to complete the challenge:

1. Curiosity - this is for avid readers, picking up an out of comfort zone book, different opinion, long/academic books like architecture books, game design, etc.
2. Adulting - anything that you know will help you somehow, like atomic habits, the defining decade, becoming, lean in, educated, etc.
3. Fun - children’s literature, graphic novels, humor books
4. Escape - classic fiction/scifi go here

I completed my annual reading goal today. My plan was to read one book for satisfying my curiosity, one that directly helps me in business, and one that provides an escape every month. Here are the books I picked along with a short review:

1. The Power of Habit (5/5): I now have a solid understanding of the science behind modifying habits. I’d recommend this more than Atomic Habits.
2. The Airbnb Story (5/5): By all accounts, Airbnb should not have become this big! The very idea of letting strangers into your home raises eyebrows, but the way they executed it with belongingness at the core is amazing.

3. And Then There Were None (5/5): The thought process that went into writing this is simply incredible! I might not pick up the Mystery genre again for a while as this has set the bar quite high.

4. The Psychology of Money (5/5): This book combined my favorite topic psychology with finance, which I’ve been subconsciously avoiding for a long time. I got a good definition of freedom - being able to wake up one morning and change what I’m doing on my own terms. In other words, do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want.

5. Steve Jobs (5/5): I see a lot of parallels in Jobs and Musk, combining great technology and aesthetic design with a team of A-players.

6. The Little Prince (5/5): It’s the most beautiful book I’ve ever read! This will now be my choice of gift for all ages. The Little Prince is one of the top translated books of all time, and I now understand why. If you’re reading this and have some recommendations for me, please let me know.

7. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (4/5): The content is really good and crisp - it’s just that I had read most of it in bits and pieces already.

8. The Everything Store (4/5): Jeff is an embodiment of long-term thinking. He emphasizes doing what’s best for the customer, even if it translates to huge losses in the short term. However, I feel that this is not the definitive story of Amazon. It has cherry-picked bits and pieces, unlike Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

9. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2/5): I hated the font! There wasn’t any coherent story either. It felt more like random motivational posts stitched together.

10. The Courage to be Disliked (5/5): It’s the most powerful book I’ve ever read. The book provides a nice introduction to Adlerian psychology with a unique conversational format between the philosopher and youth, which grew on me. I had a lot of aha moments and will be picking this again soon.

11. Good Strategy Bad Strategy (2/5): It helps you understand what a good strategy looks like, in an unnecessary long text.

12. Recursion (3/5): I liked the concept of traveling through memories; the story wasn’t a page-turner though.

13. The Courage to be Happy (5/5): One of those rare sequels that make you want to read more. I found a lot of parallels with religious texts. Everyone should read this.

14. Playing to Win (2/5): My key takeaway was that all successful strategies fall into two buckets: you can provide a commodity at the lowest price or you can differentiate your offering to charge a premium. Not worth reading the whole book.

15. The Midnight Library (3/5): The ending was predictable. Pick this up if you want to read self-help books but get bored quickly.

16. The Selfish Gene (5/5): When we die, there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. I enjoyed the rich examples. You should definitely pick this up if you liked Sapiens.

17. Blue Ocean Strategy (4/5): This book provides good frameworks to pursue differentiation at low-cost with lots of case studies.

18. Project Hail Mary (5/5): Andy tickles my nerdy bones. If you liked “Dark Matter” or “The Martian”, you’ll love this as well.

19. Meditations (1/5): This is the first book I have left halfway. Life’s too short to spend time on things I know I’m not enjoying.

20. The E-Myth Revisited (5/5): Loved this business novel. It hit me that the sole aim of a small business owner should be to create playbooks that anyone can execute.

21. The Phantom Tollbooth (5/5): I enjoyed the wordplay. I’d love to write a witty book like this down the line.

22. Siddhartha (5/5): You need to experience a lot to achieve inner peace. Knowledge can be transferred via words, but wisdom must be earned on your own.

23. The Making of a Manager (4/5): Your report should never be left wondering: What does my manager think of me? If you think she is the epitome of awesome, tell her. If you don’t think she is operating at the level you’d like to see, she should know that too, and precisely why you feel that way. This hit me hard because I felt restless wondering about the same question frequently a few years back. I’m now consciously bringing this up in my weekly 1:1s. Other learnings were around delegation and caring for your team. Your job as a manager isn’t to dole out advice or “save the day”—it’s to empower your report to find the answer herself.

24. Jonathan Livingston Seagull (4/5): This is for people who think there’s more to life and are in the pursuit of perfection.

25. Freakonomics (2/5): It felt like individual blog posts, which can be compressed to a tenth of their size.

26. High Output Management (4/5): Training is the manager’s job. Along with motivation. Your management style should change with the task-relevant maturity, going from hands-on to high-level supervision.

27. Animal Farm (5/5): I’m falling in love with the fable genre. Kudos to Orwell’s effort for putting this down in such a simple language.

28. The Science of Storytelling (5/5): If you want to write a story, read this book. It is one of the densest books I’ve read so far, with a lot of great examples. This is going into my rereading list. I picked this up at the right time as I have recently started penning down another story. I got solid frameworks to develop the main character and the overall plot. This book has single-handedly improved my mental models around storytelling by an order of magnitude. There was so much I didn’t know.

29. The $100 Startup (5/5): Some key takeaways for me were to give people the fish (not many people want to learn how to fish), that you usually don’t get paid for your hobby itself but to help other people pursue the hobby or for something indirectly related to it, and have a deadline on your offerings. It reinforced my belief to improve the quality of life I lead, not the amount of money I earn. And to not sweat about the small things. The case studies also conveyed that there’s no rehab program for being addicted to freedom. Once you’ve seen what it’s like on the other side, good luck trying to follow someone else’s rules ever again.

30. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (3/5): I liked the variety of explanations but I have forgotten a lot of them already.

31. Bird by Bird (4/5): Anne talks candidly about the insecurities you feel while writing, especially when your early drafts are bound to be shitty.

32. Founders at Work (5/5): It’s okay to make mistakes while starting out; you can figure things out on the way. Props to Jessica for probing at all the right places.

33. Big Mushy Happy Lump (2/5): I LOL’d at some of the comic strips in the first half; the second half was a drag for me.

34. On Writing (4/5): You need to read a lot and write a lot. There’s no other way to become a great writer.

35. Tribe of Mentors (5/5): I picked this up to get book recommendations for next year. One thing that stood out to me was the emphasis on meditation throughout, every other interviewee had mentioned it!
36. Solutions and Other Problems (3/5): I liked the second half more, especially the ending which talks about being friends with yourself.

Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap

I picked this up to get book recommendations for next year. One thing that stood out to me was the emphasis on meditation throughout, every other interviewee had mentioned it!

Here are my notes from Tribe of Mentors:

1. Then finally we hit on this idea of, "Why don't we just store money in the handheld devices?" The next iteration was this thing that would do cryptographically secure IOU notes. I would say, "I owe you $10," and put in my passphrase. It wasn't really packaged at the user interface level as an IOU, but that's what it effectively was. Then I could beam it to you, using the infrared on a Palm Pilot, which at this point is very quaint and silly since, clearly, what would you rather do, take out $5 and give someone their lunch share, or pull out two Palm Pilots and geek out at the table? But that actually is what moved the needle, because it was so weird and so innovative. The geek crowd was like, "Wow. This is the future. We want to go to the future. Take us there." So we got all this attention and were able to raise funding on that story. Then we had the famous Buck's beaming at Buck's restaurant in Woodside, which is sort of the home away from home for many VCs. Our first round of financing was actually transferred to us via Palm Pilot. Our VCs showed up with a $4.5 million preloaded Palm Pilot, and they beamed it to us.

The product wasn't really finished, and about a week before the beaming at Buck's I realized that we weren't going to be able to do it, because the code wasn't done. Obviously it was really simple to mock it up to sort of go, "Beep! Money is received.' But I was so disgusted with the idea. We have this security company; how could possibly use a mock-up for something worth $4.5 million? What if it crashes? What if it shows something? I'll have to go and commit ritual suicide to avoid any sort of embarrassment. So instead of just getting the mock-up done and getting reasonable rest, my two coders and I coded nonstop for 5 days. I think some people slept; I know I didn't sleep at all. It was just this insane marathon where we were like, "We have to get this thing working." It actually wound up working perfectly. The beaming was at 10:00 a.m.; we were done at 9:00 a.m.

What can sit between MOOCs and CBCs?

Something like Dumbledore’s Army - a group learning on their own with a community manager. Accountability comes from paying a small fee + having like-minded people set deadlines together. Feedback comes from peers + experts curated by the CM.

This came up while discussing the different ways people can learn things with a friend, who is professionally a backend engineer and now wants to learn web development.

We have MOOCs, which are abundant but filled with noise. Rarely do people complete them.

You need to read a lot and write a lot. There's no other way to become a great writer.

Here are my notes from On Writing:

1. Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

On the day this particular idea-the first really good one came sailing at me, my mother remarked that she needed six more books of stamps to get a lamp she wanted to give her sister Molly for Christmas, and she didn't think she would make it in time. "I guess it will have to be for her birthday, instead," she said. "These cussed things always look like a lot until you stick them in a book." Then she crossed her eyes and ran her tongue out at me. When she did, saw her tongue was S&H green. I thought how nice it would be if you could make those damned stamps in your basement, and in that instant a story called "Happy Stamps" was born. The concept of counterfeiting Green Stamps and the sight of my mother's green tongue created it in an instant.

One of my friends pinged me recently for a casual podcast.

To get out of our comfort zones.

Talk about our love of freedom and curiosity.

And to have fun.

It's okay to make mistakes while starting out; you can figure things out on the way. Props to Jessica for probing at all the right places.

Here are my notes from Founders at Work:

1. Then finally we hit on this idea of, "Why don't we just store money in the handheld devices?" The next iteration was this thing that would do cryptographically secure IOU notes. I would say, "I owe you $10," and put in my passphrase. It wasn't really packaged at the user interface level as an IOU, but that's what it effectively was. Then I could beam it to you, using the infrared on a Palm Pilot, which at this point is very quaint and silly since, clearly, what would you rather do, take out $5 and give someone their lunch share, or pull out two Palm Pilots and geek out at the table? But that actually is what moved the needle, because it was so weird and so innovative. The geek crowd was like, "Wow. This is the future. We want to go to the future. Take us there." So we got all this attention and were able to raise funding on that story. Then we had the famous Buck's beaming at Buck's restaurant in Woodside, which is sort of the home away from home for many VCs. Our first round of financing was actually transferred to us via Palm Pilot. Our VCs showed up with a $4.5 million preloaded Palm Pilot, and they beamed it to us.

The product wasn't really finished, and about a week before the beaming at Buck's I realized that we weren't going to be able to do it, because the code wasn't done. Obviously it was really simple to mock it up to sort of go, "Beep! Money is received.' But I was so disgusted with the idea. We have this security company; how could possibly use a mock-up for something worth $4.5 million? What if it crashes? What if it shows something? I'll have to go and commit ritual suicide to avoid any sort of embarrassment. So instead of just getting the mock-up done and getting reasonable rest, my two coders and I coded nonstop for 5 days. I think some people slept; I know I didn't sleep at all. It was just this insane marathon where we were like, "We have to get this thing working." It actually wound up working perfectly. The beaming was at 10:00 a.m.; we were done at 9:00 a.m.

If nobody calls your vision arrogant, you’re probably not thinking big enough.

Your favorite problems can be anything — related to your work life, scientific questions, your love life, your health, wealth, or humanity as a whole. The only important thing is to settle on problems you can contribute to. To find twelve worthwhile problems for your life, consider the following questions:

• What are you curious about?
• What have you always pursued?
• What puzzles you about life and society?
• Which problems you can’t stop thinking about?

“Every time you hear a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’”— Richard Feynman

Anne talks candidly about the insecurities you feel while writing, especially when your early drafts are bound to be shitty.

Here are my notes from Bird by Bird:

1. One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

2. And then the miracle happens. The sun comes up again. So you get up and do your morning things, and one thing leads to another, and eventually, at nine, you find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of dialogue that makes you say to yourself, very, very softly, "Hmmm." You look up and stare out the window again, but this time you are drumming your fingers on the desk, and you don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you got to it. And the story begins to materialize, and another thing is happening, which is that you are learning what you aren’t writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing. Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what his painting isn’t, until finally he finds out what it is.

This is a follow-up to 🏋️ Losing Weight as a Vegetarian.

So I’ve been working on fitness lately. Thought I’d give a progress update!

Over the last year, I’ve lost more than 10kg (yayy!) but now things have started plateauing (NOO!!). Till now, I’ve been mostly following a slow-carb diet along with walking regularly but now I feel I need to start lifting weights. It requires a lot of patience as now the progress has become slow. It’s a long-term game but those are the ones I like playing anyway so let’s see how it goes.

Some key takeaways for me were to give people the fish (not many people want to learn how to fish), that you usually don't get paid for your hobby itself but to help other people pursue the hobby or for something indirectly related to it, and have a deadline on your offerings. It reinforced my belief to improve the quality of life I lead, not the amount of money I earn. And to not sweat about the small things. The case studies also conveyed that there's no rehab program for being addicted to freedom. Once you’ve seen what it’s like on the other side, good luck trying to follow someone else’s rules ever again.

Here are my notes from The $100 Startup:

1. There’s no rehab program for being addicted to freedom. Once you’ve seen what it’s like on the other side, good luck trying to follow someone else’s rules ever again.

2. Many of these unusual businesses thrive by giving things away, recruiting a legion of fans and followers who support their paid work whenever it is finally offered. “My marketing plan is strategic giving,” said Megan Hunt, who makes hand-crafted dresses and wedding accessories in Omaha, Nebraska, shipping them all over the world. “Empowering others is our greatest marketing effort,” said Scott Meyer from South Dakota. “We host training sessions, give away free materials, and answer any question someone emails to us at no charge whatsoever.”

I watched Mahabharata with family in the last 3 months. The new Star Plus version.

My mom picked out two takeaways on friends:

1. Have a friend like Karna, who stands by you no matter what.
2. Have a friend like Krishna, who stays calm no matter what.

Noting down this here to reflect upon it from time to time. ❤️

If you want to write a story, read this book. It is one of the densest books I've read so far, with a lot of great examples. This is going into my rereading list. I picked this up at the right time as I have recently started penning down another story. I got solid frameworks to develop the main character and the overall plot. This book has single-handedly improved my mental models around storytelling by an order of magnitude. There was so much I didn't know.

Here are my notes from The Science of Storytelling:

1. It’s story that makes us human. Recent research suggests language evolved principally to swap ‘social information’ back when we were living in Stone Age tribes. In other words, we’d gossip. We’d tell tales about the moral rights and wrongs of other people, punish the bad behaviour, reward the good, and thereby keep everyone cooperating and the tribe in check. Stories about people being heroic or villainous, and the emotions of joy and outrage they triggered, were crucial to human survival. We’re wired to enjoy them.

Some researchers believe grandparents came to perform a vital role in such tribes: elders told different kinds of stories – about ancestor heroes, exciting quests and spirits and magic – that helped children to navigate their physical, spiritual and moral worlds. It’s from these stories that complex human culture emerged. When we started farming and rearing livestock, and our tribes settled down and slowly merged into states, these grandparental campfire tales morphed into great religions that had the power to hold large numbers of humans together. Still, today, modern nations are principally defined by the stories we tell about our collective selves: our victories and defeats; our heroes and foes; our distinctive values and ways of being, all of which are encoded in the tales we tell and enjoy.

There have been a handful of step functions in my life. One of them was building a reading habit. Today marks day 1000 from when I consciously made a decision to read more. It went pretty well; I’ve read 100+ books since then. It’s my second-best habit after journaling as of today.

My main learning was that reading is like a muscle. It can be trained to progressively higher weights, i.e. going from 10 pages/day to 20, 50, 100, etc. or starting with 10 minutes/day to 20, 30, 60, etc.

I did an AMA on Twitter. Here’s a compilation:

1. What’s your daily routine? When do you set aside time for books?

Training is the manager's job. Along with motivation. Your management style should change with the task-relevant maturity, going from hands-on to high-level supervision.

Here are my notes from High Output Management:

1. A manager’s skills and knowledge are only valuable if she uses them to get more leverage from her people. So, Ms. Manager, you know more about our product’s viral loop than anyone in the company? That’s worth exactly nothing unless you can effectively transfer that knowledge to the rest of the organization. That’s what being a manager is about. It’s not about how smart you are or how well you know your business; it’s about how that translates to the team’s performance and output.

As a means to obtain this leverage, a manager must understand, as Andy writes: “When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.” This insight enables a manager to dramatically focus her efforts. All you can do to improve the output of an employee is motivate and train. There is nothing else.

This is a follow-up to 🔥 Meetups are dead. Enter Mastermind Groups!

I had mentioned 4 key ingredients of a successful mastermind group in the above post. CBCs fall into the sweet spot of what I was looking for:

1) Curation

Since there’s a decent price point for enrolling into a CBC, it acts as a self-selection for high-agency and curiosity. Most people who join are very committed.

It felt like individual blog posts, which can be compressed to a tenth of their size.

Here are my notes from Freakonomics:

1. How did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?

As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get—were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren’t being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.

Tony Khan is my role model. After being a lifelong avid fan of professional wrestling, he started All Elite Wrestling.

I love Tony. His passion and love for wrestling shows up in AEW storytelling. I hope someday I become a manager who’s one quarter as good to my folks as Tony Khan is to his (Brodie, Mox, Hangman/MJF, Sting, and everyone else really). Their talent is treated well and has creative freedom. I aspire to have the same passion in whatever I choose to do in life.

He brought CM Punk back into the industry after 7 long years!!! I got goosebumps hearing him talk about why he left: “I was never going to get healthy physically, mentally, spiritually, or emotionally staying in the same place that got me sick in the first place.” Thank you Tony for making me cry like a baby.

My moonshot plan for 2024 is to create a show like AEW that focuses on long-term storytelling in our industry and provides emotion as a service.

Your report should never be left wondering: What does my manager think of me? If you think she is the epitome of awesome, tell her. If you don’t think she is operating at the level you’d like to see, she should know that too, and precisely why you feel that way. This hit me hard because I felt restless wondering about the same question frequently a few years back. I'm now consciously bringing this up in my weekly 1:1s. Other learnings were around delegation and caring for your team. Your job as a manager isn’t to dole out advice or “save the day”—it’s to empower your report to find the answer herself.

Here are my notes from The Making of a Manager:

1. This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself.

Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.

This is a follow-up to ⚔️ A Personal Assistant to Maximize your Productivity.

I recently switched my task management workflow from Todoist to Things 3. It was probably my nerdiest purchase of 2021 (I’ve never paid $50 for an app before!).

1. The main reason for switching is its clean interface. I’m a sucker for nice UI. Also, switching forced me to review all of my pending tasks and do a Marie Kondo after almost 3 years. I had a lot of projects going on before - now I have started optimizing for outcomes instead.

2. The latest 3.14 update brought Markdown support and you know I love Markdown.

3. It also changes how I see my calendar events now. Todoist made events as tasks in my day which I need to check off. Things 3 shows them at the top together for a quick review of the day so I know what my non-negotiables are (calendar is sacred territory for me) and then I can look at my daily list.

4. It gives me a logbook! Seeing what I spent my day on is oddly satisfying.

5. Another nifty little feature is that it shows a ring next to the project indicating its progress, calculated by the completion rate of tasks.

6. You can schedule a task for the evening which is shown in a separate section, which is pretty handy to plan out your evenings / take a quick glance.

7. It gives better control for repeating tasks.

8. You can set both a reminder and a deadline for a task. Todoist allows for only one time set to a task, whereas Things 3 allows for setting a reminder for today while noting that the deadline is 2 days away. I can’t go back now. The design choices are quite thoughtful.

Overall, it’s pretty neat and new things are exciting. See what I did there?

You need to experience a lot to achieve inner peace. Knowledge can be transferred via words, but wisdom must be earned on your own.

Here are my notes from Siddhartha:

1. Siddhartha laughed in such a way that his voice expressed a shade of sorrow and a shade of mockery and he said: ‘You have spoken well, Govinda, you have remembered well, but you must also remember what else I told you — that I have become distrustful of teachings and learning and that I have little faith in words that come to us from teachers. But, very well, my friend, I am ready to hear that new teaching, although I believe in my heart that we have already tasted the best fruit of it.’

Govinda replied: ‘I am delighted that you are agreed. But tell me, how can the teachings of the Gotama disclose to us its most precious fruit before we have even heard him?’

I have been using Notion for more than 2 years now. With time, I’ve realized that it doesn’t allow cross-pollination of ideas. That’s where Roam Research comes into play.

One thing that was a deal-maker for me is that it also acts as a personal CRM. You can tag notes with any person’s name and clicking on that name gives the entire history of all previous interactions.

I have started using it now to put down my raw thoughts whenever they come up. To be honest, I still haven't got the hang of it. But I have a good feeling that this is the future, especially as my notes will only keep increasing.

P.S. I might switch to Obsidian once it moves to version 1. Right now, it's 0.12.15 which doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in its stability. I’ll continue using Day One for journaling as it provides password protection and prompts.

Loved this business novel. It hit me that the sole aim of a small business owner should be to create playbooks that anyone can execute.

Here are my notes from The E-Myth Revisited:

1. The people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.
   The problem with most failing businesses I’ve encountered is not that their owners don’t know enough about finance, marketing, management, and operations—they don’t, but those things are easy enough to learn—but that they spend their time and energy defending what they think they know. The greatest businesspeople I’ve met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost.
2. Your business is nothing more than a distinct reflection of who you are.
   If your thinking is sloppy, your business will be sloppy.
   If you are disorganized, your business will be disorganized.
   If you are greedy, your employees will be greedy, giving you less and less of themselves and always asking for more.
   If your information about what needs to be done in your business is limited, your business will reflect that limitation.
   So if your business is to change—as it must continuously to thrive—you must change first. If you are unwilling to change, your business will never be capable of giving you what you want.
3. The problem is that everybody who goes into business is actually three-people-in-one: The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician.
   And the problem is compounded by the fact that while each of these personalities wants to be the boss, none of them wants to have a boss.
   So they start a business together in order to get rid of the boss. And the conflict begins.
   To show you how the problem manifests itself in all of us, let’s examine the way our various internal personalities interact. Let’s take a look at two personalities we’re all familiar with: The Fat Guy and The Skinny Guy.
   Have you ever decided to go on a diet?
   You’re sitting in front of the television set one Saturday afternoon, watching an athletic competition, awed by the athletes’ stamina and dexterity.
   You’re eating a sandwich, your second since you sat down to watch the event two hours before.
   You’re feeling sluggish in the face of all the action on the screen when, suddenly, somebody wakes up in you and says, “What are you doing? Look at yourself, You’re Fat! You’re out of shape! Do something about it!”
   It has happened to us all. Somebody wakes up inside us with a totally different picture of who we should be and what we should be doing. In this case, let’s call him The Skinny Guy.
   Who’s The Skinny Guy? He’s the one who uses words like discipline, exercise, organization. The Skinny Guy is intolerant, self-righteous, a stickler for detail, a compulsive tyrant.
   The Skinny Guy abhors fat people. Can’t stand sitting around. Needs to be on the move. Lives for action.
   The Skinny Guy has just taken over. Watch out—things are about to change.
   Before you know it, you’re cleaning all the fattening foods out of the refrigerator. You’re buying a new pair of running shoes, barbells, and sweats. Things are going to be different around here. You have a new lease on life. You plan your new physical regimen: up at five, run three miles, cold shower at six, a breakfast of wheat toast, black coffee, and half a grapefruit; then, ride your bicycle to work, home by seven, run another two miles, to bed at ten—the world’s already a different place!
   And you actually pull it off! By Monday night, you’ve lost two pounds. You go to sleep dreaming of winning the Boston Marathon. Why not? The way things are going, it’s only a matter of time.
   Tuesday night you get on the scale. Another pound gone! You’re incredible. Gorgeous. A lean machine.
   On Wednesday, you really pour it on. You work out an extra hour in the morning, an extra half-hour at night.
   You can’t wait to get on the scale. You strip down to your bare skin, shivering in the bathroom, filled with expectation of what your scale is going to tell you. You step lightly onto it and look down. What you see is…nothing. You haven’t lost an ounce. You’re exactly the same as you were on Tuesday.
   Dejection creeps in. You begin to feel a slight twinge of resentment. “After all that work? After all that sweat and effort? And then—nothing? It isn’t fair.” But you shrug it off. After all, tomorrow’s another day. You go to bed, vowing to work harder on Thursday. But somehow something has changed.
   You don’t know what’s changed until Thursday morning.
   It’s raining.
   The room is cold.
   Something feels different.
   What is it?
   For a minute or two you can’t quite put your finger on it.
   And then you get it: somebody else is in your body.
   It’s The Fat Guy!
   He’s back!
   And he doesn’t want to run.
   As a matter of fact, he doesn’t even want to get out of bed. It’s cold outside. “Run? Are you kidding me?” The Fat Guy doesn’t want anything to do with it. The only exercise he might be interested in is eating!
   And all of a sudden you find yourself in front of the refrigerator—inside the refrigerator—all over the kitchen!
   Food is now your major interest.
   The Marathon is gone; the lean machine is gone; the sweats and barbells and running shoes are gone.
   The Fat Guy is back. He’s running the show again.
   It happens to all of us, time and time again. Because we’ve been deluded into thinking we’re really one person.
   And so when The Skinny Guy decides to change things we actually believe that it’s I who’s making that decision.
   And when The Fat Guy wakes up and changes it all back again, we think it’s I who’s making that decision too.
   But it isn’t I. It’s we.
   The Skinny Guy and The Fat Guy are two totally different personalities, with different needs, different interests, and different lifestyles.
   That’s why they don’t like each other. They each want totally different things.
   The problem is that when you’re The Skinny Guy, you’re totally consumed by his needs, his interests, his lifestyle.
   And then something happens—the scale disappoints you, the weather turns cold, somebody offers you a ham sandwich. At that moment, The Fat Guy, who’s been waiting in the wings all this time, grabs your attention. Grabs control.
   You’re him again.
   In other words, when you’re The Skinny Guy you’re always making promises for The Fat Guy to keep.
   And when you’re The Fat Guy, you’re always making promises for The Skinny Guy to keep.
   Is it any wonder we have such a tough time keeping our commitments to ourselves?
   It’s not that we’re indecisive or unreliable; it’s that each and every one of us is a whole set of different personalities, each with his own interests and way of doing things. Asking any one of them to defer to any of the others is inviting a battle or even a full-scale war.
   Anyone who has ever experienced the conflict between The Fat Guy and The Skinny Guy (and haven’t we all?) knows what I mean. You can’t be both; one of them has to lose. And they both know it.
   Well, that’s the kind of war going on inside the owner of every small business.
   But it’s a three-way battle between The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician.
   Unfortunately, it’s a battle no one can win.
4. The entrepreneurial personality turns the most trivial condition into an exceptional opportunity. The Entrepreneur is the visionary in us. The dreamer. The energy behind every human activity. The imagination that sparks the fire of the future. The catalyst for change.
   The Entrepreneur lives in the future, never in the past, rarely in the present. He’s happiest when left free to construct images of “what-if” and “if-when.”
   In science, the entrepreneurial personality works in the most abstract and least pragmatic areas of particle physics, pure mathematics, and theoretical astronomy. In art, it thrives in the rarefied arena of the avant-garde. In business, The Entrepreneur is the innovator, the grand strategist, the creator of new methods for penetrating or creating new markets, the world-bending giant—like Sears Roebuck, Henry Ford, Tom Watson of IBM, and Ray Kroc of McDonald’s.
   The Entrepreneur is our creative personality—always at its best dealing with the unknown, prodding the future, creating probabilities out of possibilities, engineering chaos into harmony.
   Every strong entrepreneurial personality has an extraordinary need for control. Living as he does in the visionary world of the future, he needs control of people and events in the present so that he can concentrate on his dreams.
   Given his need for change, The Entrepreneur creates a great deal of havoc around him, which is predictably unsettling for those he enlists in his projects.
   As a result, he often finds himself rapidly outdistancing the others.
   The farther ahead he is, the greater the effort required to pull his cohorts along.
   This then becomes the entrepreneurial worldview: a world made up of both an overabundance of opportunities and dragging feet.
   The problem is, how can he pursue the opportunities without getting mired down by the feet?
   The way he usually chooses is to bully, harass, excoriate, flatter, cajole, scream, and finally, when all else fails, promise whatever he must to keep the project moving.
   To The Entrepreneur, most people are problems that get in the way of the dream.
5. The managerial personality is pragmatic. Without The Manager there would be no planning, no order, no predictability.
   The Manager is the part of us that goes to Sears and buys stacking plastic boxes, takes them back to the garage, and systematically stores all the various sized nuts, bolts, and screws in their own carefully identified drawer. He then hangs all of the tools in impeccable order on the walls—lawn tools on one wall, carpentry tools on another—and, to be absolutely certain that order is not disturbed, paints a picture of each tool on the wall where it hangs!
   If The Entrepreneur lives in the future, The Manager lives in the past.
   Where The Entrepreneur craves control, The Manager craves order.
   Where The Entrepreneur thrives on change, The Manager compulsively clings to the status quo.
   Where The Entrepreneur invariably sees the opportunity in events, The Manager invariably sees the problems.
   The Manager builds a house and then lives in it, forever.
   The Entrepreneur builds a house and the instant it’s done begins planning the next one.
   The Manager creates neat, orderly rows of things. The Entrepreneur creates the things The Manager puts in rows.
   The Manager is the one who runs after The Entrepreneur to clean up the mess. Without The Entrepreneur there would be no mess to clean up.
   Without The Manager, there could be no business, no society. Without The Entrepreneur, there would be no innovation.
   It is the tension between The Entrepreneur’s vision and The Manager’s pragmatism that creates the synthesis from which all great works are born.
6. The Technician is the doer.
   “If you want it done right, do it yourself” is The Technician’s credo.
   The Technician loves to tinker. Things are to be taken apart and put back together again. Things aren’t supposed to be dreamed about, they’re supposed to be done.
   If The Entrepreneur lives in the future and The Manager lives in the past, The Technician lives in the present. He loves the feel of things and the fact that things can get done.
   As long as The Technician is working, he is happy, but only on one thing at a time. He knows that two things can’t get done simultaneously; only a fool would try. So he works steadily and is happiest when he is in control of the work flow.
   As a result, The Technician mistrusts those he works for, because they are always trying to get more work done than is either possible or necessary.
   To The Technician, thinking is unproductive unless it’s thinking about the work that needs to be done.
   As a result, he is suspicious of lofty ideas or abstractions.
   Thinking isn’t work; it gets in the way of work.
   The Technician isn’t interested in ideas; he’s interested in “how to do it.”
   To The Technician, all ideas need to be reduced to methodology if they are to be of any value. And with good reason.
   The Technician knows that if it weren’t for him, the world would be in more trouble than it already is. Nothing would get done, but lots of people would be thinking about it.
   Put another way, while The Entrepreneur dreams, The Manager frets, and The Technician ruminates.
   The Technician is a resolute individualist, standing his ground, producing today’s bread to eat at tonight’s dinner. He is the backbone of every cultural tradition, but most importantly, of ours. If The Technician didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done. Everyone gets in The Technician’s way.
   The Entrepreneur is always throwing a monkey wrench into his day with the creation of yet another “great new idea.” On the other hand, The Entrepreneur is always creating new and interesting work for The Technician to do, thus establishing a potentially symbiotic relationship.
   Unfortunately, it rarely works out that way.
   Since most entrepreneurial ideas don’t work in the real world, The Technician’s usual experience is one of frustration and annoyance at being interrupted in the course of doing what needs to be done to try something new that probably doesn’t need to be done at all.
   The Manager is also a problem to The Technician because he is determined to impose order on The Technician’s work, to reduce him to a part of “the system.”
   But being a rugged individualist, The Technician can’t stand being treated that way.
   To The Technician, “the system” is dehumanizing, cold, antiseptic, and impersonal. It violates his individuality.
   Work is what a person does. And to the degree that it’s not, work becomes something foreign.
   To The Manager, however, work is a system of results in which The Technician is but a component part.
   To The Manager, then, The Technician becomes a problem to be managed. To The Technician, The Manager becomes a meddler to be avoided.
   To both of them, The Entrepreneur is the one who got them into trouble in the first place!
7. “But I can’t even imagine what my business would be like without me doing the work,” she said. “It has always depended on me. If it weren’t for me, my customers would go someplace else. I’m not sure I understand what’s really wrong with that.”
   “Well, think about it,” I said. “In a business that depends on you, on your style, on your personality, on your presence, on your talent and willingness to do the work, if you’re not there why of course your customers would go someplace else. Wouldn’t you?
   “Because in a business like that what your customers are buying is not your business’s ability to give them what they want but your ability to give them what they want. And that’s what’s wrong with it!
   “What if you don’t want to be there? What if you’d like to be someplace else? On a vacation? Or at home? Reading a book? Working in the garden? Or on a sabbatical, for God’s sake? Isn’t there any place you would rather be at times than in your business, filling the needs of your customers who need you so badly because you’re the only one who can do it? “What if you’re sick, or feel like being sick? Or what if you just feel lazy?
   “Don’t you see? If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!
   “And, besides, that’s not the purpose of going into business.
   “The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.
   “The purpose of going into business is to expand beyond your existing horizons. So you can invent something that satisfies a need in the marketplace that has never been satisfied before. So you can live an expanded, stimulating new life.”
   Sarah said, “I hate to beat a dead horse, but what if I want to do the technical work in my business? What if I don’t want to do anything else but that?”
   “Then for God’s sake,” I said as emphatically as I dared, “get rid of your business! And get rid of it as quickly as you can. Because you can’t have it both ways. You can’t ‘have your pie and eat it too.’ You can’t ignore the financial accountabilities, the marketing accountabilities, the sales and administrative accountabilities. You can’t ignore your future employees’ need for leadership, for purpose, for responsible management, for effective communication, for something more than just a job in which their sole purpose is to support you doing your job. Let alone what your business needs from you if it’s to thrive: that you understand the way a business works, that you understand the dynamics of a business—cash flow, growth, customer sensitivity, competitive sensitivity, and so forth.
   “The point is,” I said to her, watching her face sink and then begin to lift with an unexpressed question, “if all you want from a business of your own is the opportunity to do what you did before you started your business, get paid more for it, and have more freedom to come and go, your greed—I know that sounds harsh, but that’s what it is—your self-indulgence will eventually consume both you and your business.”
8. You could have anticipated that people would love your pies and that the business would therefore have to grow.
9. It all started in 1952 when a fifty-two-year-old salesman walked into a hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California, to sell the two brothers who owned it a milkshake machine.
   What he saw there was a miracle.
   At least that’s how Ray Kroc, the milkshake machine salesman, might have described it. For he had never seen anything like that very first MacDonald’s (later to become McDonald’s) hamburger stand.
   It worked like a Swiss watch!
   Hamburgers were produced in a way he’d never seen before—quickly, efficiently, inexpensively, and identically.
   Best of all, anyone could do it.
   He watched high school kids working with precision under the supervision of the owners, happily responding to the long lines of customers queued up in front of the stand.
   It became apparent to Ray Kroc that what the MacDonald brothers had created was not just another hamburger stand but a money machine!
   Soon after that first visit, and possessed by a passion he had never felt quite like that before, Ray Kroc convinced Mac and Jim MacDonald to let him franchise their method.
   Twelve years and several million hamburgers later, he bought them out and went on to create the largest retail prepared food distribution system in the world.
   “The Most Successful Small Business in the World”
   That’s what McDonald’s calls itself today.
   And for good reason.
   Because the success of McDonald’s is truly staggering.
   Think about it. In less than forty years, Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s has become a $40-billion-a-year business, with 28,707 restaurants worldwide—and growing in number every minute—serving food to more than 43 million people every day in 120 countries, representing more than 10 percent of the gross restaurant receipts in America!
   The average McDonald’s restaurant produces more than $2 million in annual sales, and is more profitable than almost any other retail business in the world, with an average 17 percent pretax net profit.
   But Ray Kroc created much more than just a fantastically successful business. He created the model upon which an entire generation of entrepreneurs have since built their fortunes—a model that was the genesis of the franchise phenomenon.
   It started as a trickle when a few entrepreneurs began to experiment with Kroc’s formula for success. But it wasn’t long before the trickle turned into Niagara Falls!
   In 2000, there were 320,000 franchised businesses in 75 industries. Franchises produce $1-trillion in sales each year—almost 50 percent of every retail dollar spent in the nation—and had more than 8 million full- and part-time people, the largest employer of high school youth in the country’s economy.
   But the genius of McDonald’s isn’t franchising itself. The franchise has been around for more than a hundred years. Many companies—Coca-Cola and General Motors among them—have utilized franchising as an effective method of distribution to reach broadly expanding markets inexpensively. The true genius of Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s is the Business Format Franchise.
   It is the Business Format Franchise that has revolutionized American business.
   It is the Business Format Franchise, with one new franchise opening its doors every eight minutes of every single business day, that has spawned so much of the success of the franchise phenomenon over the past forty years. And, according to studies conducted by the U.S. Commerce Department from 1971 to 1987, less than 5 percent of franchises have been terminated on an annual basis, or 25 percent in five years.
   Compare that statistic to the more than 80-percent failure rate of independently owned businesses, and you can immediately understand the power of the Turn-Key Revolution in our economy, and the contribution that the Business Format Franchise has made to it and the future success of your business.
10. Instead of asking, “Hi, may I help you?” try “Hi, have you been in here before?” The customer will respond with either a “yes” or a “no.” In either case, you are then free to pursue the conversation.
    If the answer is yes, you can say, “Great. We’ve created a special new program for people who have shopped here before. Let me take just a minute to tell you about it.”
    If the answer is no, you can say, “Great, we’ve created a special new program for people who haven’t shopped here before. Let me take just a minute to tell you about it.”
    Of course, you’ll have to have created a special new program to talk about in either case. But that’s the easy part.
    Just think. A few simple words. Nothing fancy. But the result is guaranteed to put money in your pocket. How much? That depends on how enthusiastically you do it. The experience of our retail clients tells us that by doing this one thing alone, sales will increase between 10 and 16 percent almost immediately!
    Can you believe it? A few simple words and sales instantly go up. Not by just a little bit, mind you, but by a considerable amount! What would you do for a 10-to 16-percent increase in sales?
11. Again, for salespeople, a six-week test. For the first three weeks, wear a brown suit to work, a starched tan shirt, a brown tie (for men), and well-polished brown shoes. Make certain that all the elements of your suit are clean and well-pressed. For the following three weeks wear a navy blue suit, a good, starched white shirt, a tie with red in it (a pin or a scarf with red in it for women), and highly polished black shoes.
    The result will be dramatic: sales will go up during the second three-week period! Why? Because, as our clients have consistently discovered, blue suits outsell brown suits! And it doesn’t matter who’s in them.
    Is it any wonder that McDonald’s, Federal Express, Disney, Mrs. Field’s Cookies, and many more extraordinary companies spend so much time and money on determining how they look? It pays! And it pays consistently, over and over and over again.
12. A franchise is simply your unique way of doing business.
13. Think of your business as though it were the prototype for 5,000 more just like it.
    To imagine that someone will walk through your door with the intention of buying your business—but only if it works. And only if it works without a lot of work and without you to work it.
14. Ask anyone what kind of business they’re in and they’ll instinctively respond with the name of the commodity they sell. “We’re in the computer business.” Or, “We’re in the hot tub business.” Always the commodity, never the product. What’s the difference?
    The commodity is the thing your customer actually walks out with in his hand.
    The product is what your customer feels as he walks out of your business.
    What he feels about your business, not what he feels about the commodity.
    Understanding the difference between the two is what creating a great business is all about.
    Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon and an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur, once said about his company: “In the factory Revlon manufactures cosmetics, but in the store Revlon sells hope.”
    The commodity is cosmetics; the product, hope.
    In a Chanel television commercial in the 1980s, an incredibly handsome man and a strikingly beautiful woman are alone while music plays hypnotically in the background.
    The scene shifts quickly and frequently to other shots, such as a tall, erect building.
    So far there hasn’t been a sound except for the music that supports this suggestive visual ballet.
    The black shadow of an airplane moves vertically up the building.
    She approaches him.
    The music continues.
    He says, “Can I ask you a question?” in a voice filled with intimacy and invitation.
    We don’t hear her answer.
    We just see her tilt her head back, close her eyes, and open her mouth slightly.
    Suddenly, the message: “Share the Fantasy. Chanel.”
    Not a word about perfume. That’s the commodity. The commercial is selling the product—fantasy.
    The commercial is saying, “Buy Chanel and this fantasy can be yours.”
    What’s your product? What feeling will your customer walk away with? Peace of mind? Order? Power? Love? What is he really buying when he buys from you?
    The truth is, nobody’s interested in the commodity.
    People buy feelings.
    And as the world becomes more and more complex, and the commodities more varied, the feelings we want become more urgent, less rational, more unconscious.
    How your business anticipates those feelings and satisfies them is your product.
    And the demographics and psychographics associated with your customer will predetermine how you do that.
15. All organizations are hierarchical. At each level people serve under those above them. An organization is therefore a structured institution. If it is not structured, it is a mob. Mobs do not get things done, they destroy things.
16. The work we do is a reflection of who we are. If we’re sloppy at it, it’s because we’re sloppy inside. If we’re late at it, it’s because we’re late inside. If we’re bored by it, it’s because we’re bored inside, with ourselves, not with the work. The most menial work can be a piece of art when done by an artist. So the job here is not outside of ourselves, but inside of ourselves. How we do our work becomes a mirror of how we are inside.

If you liked the above content, I'd definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

We forget most of what we consume in a few days or weeks. The forgetting curve of newly-learned knowledge depends on various factors like how meaningful it is to you, the difficulty level of the information, your stress levels, the kind of sleep you get after it, etc. A couple of ways to combat this are using mnemonic techniques for better memory representation and spaced repetition based on active recall.

Here is my current retention system:

1. While reading, I highlight anything that made me reread it or taught me something new. After completing the book, I put all my highlights in one place and go through them once.
2. After a few weeks, I revisit them to send them out in my newsletter (the one you're reading).
3. After a few months, I revisit them again to send them out over a Telegram channel. Going back to my old book notes to curate excerpts has a very good RoI for me.

Recently, I've added another layer on top of this: Readwise. It has 1-click integrations with everything I use and it took me just a few minutes to set it up. It makes it so easy to revisit my highlights that I wish I could've started using this sooner. It resurfaces the highlights based on spaced repetition to get the most of what I read. It also sends out a weekly digest of what I mark as favorite (feel free to subscribe).

This is the first book I have left halfway. Life’s too short to spend time on things I know I’m not enjoying.

Here are my notes from Meditations:

Read to collect the dots, write to connect them. - David Perell

I have a bunch of dots collected already from reading a lot of books and writing a decent number of short-form articles. I’m now moving to the connection phase where I’m finding related ideas and building on them. Otter helps me connect those seamlessly.

Talking is a great way to overcome writer’s block. In just a few minutes, magic happens - I get a lot of clarity about a topic by talking into the Otter app.

This book provides good frameworks to pursue differentiation at low-cost with lots of case studies.

Here are my notes from Blue Ocean Strategy:

Imagine a game where there are no rules and you can do anything. That would be such a boring game, isn’t it? Life is no different from MMORPGs. You can choose your missions. Or simply enjoy side-quests.

The core is your skill tree. You can unlock new skills and upgrade/master existing ones using your experiences. But experiences are limited as they cost time and energy. This is your real constraint which makes the skill tree unique to you.

When we die, there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. I enjoyed the rich examples. You should definitely pick this up if you liked Sapiens.

Here are my notes from The Selfish Gene:

1. The fundamental principle involved is called negative feedback, of which there are various different forms. In general what happens is this. The ‘purpose machine’, the machine or thing that behaves as if it had a conscious purpose, is equipped with some kind of measuring device which measures the discrepancy between the current state of things, and the ‘desired’ state. It is built in such a way that the larger this discrepancy is, the harder the machine works. In this way the machine will automatically tend to reduce the discrepancy—this is why it is called negative feedback—and it may actually come to rest if the ‘desired’ state is reached. The Watt governor consists of a pair of balls which are whirled round by a steam engine. Each ball is on the end of a hinged arm. The faster the balls fly round, the more does centrifugal force push the arms towards a horizontal position, this tendency being resisted by gravity. The arms are connected to the steam valve feeding the engine, in such a way that the steam tends to be shut off when the arms approach the horizontal position. So, if the engine goes too fast, some of its steam will be shut off, and it will tend to slow down. If it slows down too much, more steam will automatically be fed to it by the valve, and it will speed up again. Such purpose machines often oscillate due to over-shooting and time-lags, and it is part of the engineer’s art to build in supplementary devices to reduce the oscillations.
   The ‘desired’ state of the Watt governor is a particular speed of rotation. Obviously it does not consciously desire it. The ‘goal’ of a machine is simply defined as that state to which it tends to return. Modern purpose machines use extensions of basic principles like negative feedback to achieve much more complex ‘lifelike’ behaviour. Guided missiles, for example, appear to search actively for their target, and when they have it in range they seem to pursue it, taking account of its evasive twists and turns, and sometimes even ‘predicting’ or ‘anticipating’ them. The details of how this is done are not worth going into. They involve negative feedback of various kinds, ‘feed-forward’, and other principles well understood by engineers and now known to be extensively involved in the working of living bodies. Nothing remotely approaching consciousness needs to be postulated, even though a layman, watching its apparently deliberate and purposeful behaviour, finds it hard to believe that the missile is not under the direct control of a human pilot.
   It is a common misconception that because a machine such as a guided missile was originally designed and built by conscious man, then it must be truly under the immediate control of conscious man. Another variant of this fallacy is ‘computers do not really play chess, because they can only do what a human operator tells them’. It is important that we understood why this is fallacious, because it affects our understanding of the sense in which genes can be said to ‘control’ behaviour. Computer chess is quite a good example for making the point, so I will discuss it briefly.
   Computers do not yet play chess as well as human grand masters, but they have reached the standard of a good amateur. More strictly, one should say programs have reached the standard of a good amateur, for a chess-playing program is not fussy which physical computer it uses to act out its skills. Now, what is the role of the human programmer? First, he is definitely not manipulating the computer from moment to moment, like a puppeteer pulling strings. That would be just cheating. He writes the program, puts it in the computer, and then the computer is on its own: there is no further human intervention, except for the opponent typing in his moves. Does the programmer perhaps anticipate all possible chess positions, and provide the computer with a long list of good moves, one for each possible contingency? Most certainly not, because the number of possible positions in chess is so great that the world would come to an end before the list had been completed. For the same reason, the computer cannot possibly be programmed to try out ‘in its head’ all possible moves, and all possible follow-ups, until it finds a winning strategy. There are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the galaxy. So much for the trivial non-solutions to the problem of programming a computer to play chess. It is in fact an exceedingly difficult problem, and it is hardly surprising that the best programs have still not achieved grand master status.
   The programmer’s actual role is rather more like that of a father teaching his son to play chess. He tells the computer the basic moves of the game, not separately for every possible starting position, but in terms of more economically expressed rules. He does not literally say in plain English ‘bishops move in a diagonal’, but he does say something mathematically equivalent, such as, though more briefly: ‘New coordinates of bishop are obtained from old coordinates, by adding the same constant, though not necessarily with the same sign, to both old x coordinate and old y coordinate.’ Then he might program in some ‘advice’, written in the same sort of mathematical or logical language, but amounting in human terms to hints such as ‘don’t leave your king unguarded’, or useful tricks such as ‘forking’ with the knight. The details are intriguing, but they would take us too far afield. The important point is this. When it is actually playing, the computer is on its own, and can expect no help from its master. All the programmer can do is to set the computer up beforehand in the best way possible, with a proper balance between lists of specific knowledge and hints about strategies and techniques.
   The genes too control the behaviour of their survival machines, not directly with their fingers on puppet strings, but indirectly like the computer programmer. All they can do is to set it up beforehand; then the survival machine is on its own, and the genes can only sit passively inside. Why are they so passive? Why don’t they grab the reins and take charge from moment to moment? The answer is that they cannot because of time-lag problems. This is best shown by another analogy, taken from science fiction. A for Andromeda by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot is an exciting story, and, like all good science fiction, it has some interesting scientific points lying behind it. Strangely, the book seems to lack explicit mention of the most important of these underlying points. It is left to the reader’s imagination. I hope the authors will not mind if I spell it out here.
   There is a civilization 200 light-years away, in the constellation of Andromeda. They want to spread their culture to distant worlds. How best to do it? Direct travel is out of the question. The speed of light imposes a theoretical upper limit to the rate at which you can get from one place to another in the universe, and mechanical considerations impose a much lower limit in practice. Besides, there may not be all that many worlds worth going to, and how do you know which direction to go in? Radio is a better way of communicating with the rest of the universe, since, if you have enough power to broadcast your signals in all directions rather than beam them in one direction, you can reach a very large number of worlds (the number increasing as the square of the distance the signal travels). Radio waves travel at the speed of light, which means the signal takes 200 years to reach earth from Andromeda. The trouble with this sort of distance is that you can never hold a conversation. Even if you discount the fact that each successive message from earth would be transmitted by people separated from each other by twelve generations, it would be just plain wasteful to attempt to converse over such distances.
   This problem will soon arise in earnest for us: it takes about four minutes for radio waves to travel between earth and Mars. There can be no doubt that spacemen will have to get out of the habit of conversing in short alternating sentences, and will have to use long soliloquies or monologues, more like letters than conversations. As another example, Roger Payne has pointed out that the acoustics of the sea have certain peculiar properties, which mean that the exceedingly loud ‘song’ of some whales could theoretically be heard all the way round the world, provided the whales swim at a certain depth. It is not known whether they actually do communicate with each other over very great distances, but if they do they must be in much the same predicament as an astronaut on Mars. The speed of sound in water is such that it would take nearly two hours for the song to travel across the Atlantic Ocean and for a reply to return. I suggest this as an explanation for the fact that some whales deliver a continuous soliloquy, without repeating themselves, for a full eight minutes. They then go back to the beginning of the song and repeat it all over again, many times over, each complete cycle lasting about eight minutes.
   The Andromedans of the story did the same thing. Since there was no point in waiting for a reply, they assembled everything they wanted to say into one huge unbroken message, and then they broadcast it out into space, over and over again, with a cycle time of several months. Their message was very different from that of the whales, however. It consisted of coded instructions for the building and programming of a giant computer. Of course the instructions were in no human language, but almost any code can be broken by a skilled cryptographer, especially if the designers of the code intended it to be easily broken. Picked up by the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, the message was eventually decoded, the computer built, and the program run. The results were nearly disastrous for mankind, for the intentions of the Andromedans were not universally altruistic, and the computer was well on the way to dictatorship over the world before the hero eventually finished it off with an axe.
   From our point of view, the interesting question is in what sense the Andromedans could be said to be manipulating events on Earth. They had no direct control over what the computer did from moment to moment; indeed they had no possible way of even knowing the computer had been built, since the information would have taken 200 years to get back to them. The decisions and actions of the computer were entirely its own. It could not even refer back to its masters for general policy instructions. All its instructions had to be built-in in advance, because of the inviolable 200 year barrier. In principle, it must have been programmed very much like a chess-playing computer, but with greater flexibility and capacity for absorbing local information. This was because the program had to be designed to work not just on earth, but on any world possessing an advanced technology, any of a set of worlds whose detailed conditions the Andromedans had no way of knowing.
   Just as the Andromedans had to have a computer on earth to take day-to-day decisions for them, our genes have to build a brain. But the genes are not only the Andromedans who sent the coded instructions; they are also the instructions themselves. The reason why they cannot manipulate our puppet strings directly is the same: time-lags. Genes work by controlling protein synthesis. This is a powerful way of manipulating the world, but it is slow. It takes months of patiently pulling protein strings to build an embryo. The whole point about behaviour, on the other hand, is that it is fast. It works on a time-scale not of months but of seconds and fractions of seconds. Something happens in the world, an owl flashes overhead, a rustle in the long grass betrays prey, and in milliseconds nervous systems crackle into action, muscles leap, and someone’s life is saved—or lost. Genes don’t have reaction-times like that. Like the Andromedans, the genes can only do their best in advance by building a fast executive computer for themselves, and programming it in advance with rules and ‘advice’ to cope with as many eventualities as they can ‘anticipate’. But life, like the game of chess, offers too many different possible eventualities for all of them to be anticipated. Like the chess programmer, the genes have to ‘instruct’ their survival machines not in specifics, but in the general strategies and tricks of the living trade.
2. If simulation is such a good idea, we might expect that survival machines would have discovered it first. After all, they invented many of the other techniques of human engineering long before we came on the scene: the focusing lens and the parabolic reflector, frequency analysis of sound waves, servo-control, sonar, buffer storage of incoming information, and countless others with long names, whose details don’t matter. What about simulation? Well, when you yourself have a difficult decision to make involving unknown quantities in the future, you do go in for a form of simulation. You imagine what would happen if you did each of the alternatives open to you. You set up a model in your head, not of everything in the world, but of the restricted set of entities which you think may be relevant. You may see them vividly in your mind’s eye, or you may see and manipulate stylized abstractions of them. In either case it is unlikely that somewhere laid out in your brain is an actual spatial model of the events you are imagining. But, just as in the computer, the details of how your brain represents its model of the world are less important than the fact that it is able to use it to predict possible events. Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster.
3. Many animals devote a great deal of time and energy to apparently defending an area of ground which naturalists call a territory. The phenomenon is very widespread in the animal kingdom, not only in birds, mammals, and fish, but in insects and even sea anemones. The territory may be a large area of woodland which is the principal foraging ground of a breeding pair, as in the case of robins. Or, in herring gulls for instance, it may be a small area containing no food, but with a nest at its centre. Wynne-Edwards believes that animals who fight over territory are fighting over a token prize, rather than an actual prize like a bit of food. In many cases females refuse to mate with males who do not possess a territory. Indeed it often happens that a female whose mate is defeated and his territory conquered promptly attaches herself to the victor. Even in apparently faithful monogamous species, the female may be wedded to a male’s territory rather than to him personally.
   If the population gets too big, some individuals will not get territories, and therefore will not breed. Winning a territory is therefore, to Wynne-Edwards, like winning a ticket or licence to breed. Since there is a finite number of territories available, it is as if a finite number of breeding licences is issued. Individuals may fight over who gets these licences, but the total number of babies that the population can have as a whole is limited by the number of territories available. In some cases, for instance in red grouse, individuals do, at first sight, seem to show restraint, because those who cannot win territories not only do not breed; they also appear to give up the struggle to win a territory. It is as though they all accepted the rules of the game: that if, by the end of the competition season, you have not secured one of the official tickets to breed, you voluntarily refrain from breeding and leave the lucky ones unmolested during the breeding season, so that they can get on with propagating the species.
4. Parental investment (P.I.) is defined as ‘any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that increases the offspring’s chance of surviving (and hence reproductive success) at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in other offspring’. The beauty of Trivers’s parental investment is that it is measured in units very close to the units that really matter. When a child uses up some of its mother’s milk, the amount of milk consumed is measured not in pints, not in calories, but in units of detriment to other children of the same mother. For instance, if a mother has two babies, X and Y, and X drinks one pint of milk, a major part of the P.I. that this pint represents is measured in units of increased probability that Y will die because he did not drink that pint. P.I. is measured in units of decrease in life expectancy of other children, born or yet to be born.
5. Runts constitute a particular example. We can make some more general predictions about how a mother’s tendency to invest in a child might be affected by his age. If she has a straight choice between saving the life of one child or saving the life of another, and if the one she does not save is bound to die, she should prefer the older one. This is because she stands to lose a higher proportion of her life’s parental investment if he dies than if his little brother dies. Perhaps a better way to put this is that if she saves the little brother she will still have to invest some costly resources in him just to get him up to the age of the big brother.
   On the other hand, if the choice is not such a stark life or death choice, her best bet might be to prefer the younger one. For instance, suppose her dilemma is whether to give a particular morsel of food to a little child or a big one. The big one is likely to be more capable of finding his own food unaided. Therefore if she stopped feeding him he would not necessarily die. On the other hand, the little one who is too young to find food for himself would be more likely to die if his mother gave the food to his big brother. Now, even though the mother would prefer the little brother to die rather than the big brother, she may still give the food to the little one, because the big one is unlikely to die anyway. This is why mammal mothers wean their children, rather than going on feeding them indefinitely throughout their lives. There comes a time in the life of a child when it pays the mother to divert investment from him into future children. When this moment comes, she will want to wean him. A mother who had some way of knowing that she had had her last child might be expected to continue to invest all her resources in him for the rest of her life, and perhaps suckle him well into adulthood. Nevertheless, she should ‘weigh up’ whether it would not pay her more to invest in grandchildren or nephews and nieces, since although these are half as closely related to her as her own children, their capacity to benefit from her investment may be more than double that of one of her own children.
   This seems a good moment to mention the puzzling phenomenon known as the menopause, the rather abrupt termination of a human female’s reproductive fertility in middle age. This may not have occurred too commonly in our wild ancestors, since not many women would have lived that long anyway. But still, the difference between the abrupt change of life in women and the gradual fading out of fertility in men suggests that there is something genetically ‘deliberate’ about the menopause—that it is an ‘adaptation’. It is rather difficult to explain. At first sight we might expect that a woman should go on having children until she dropped, even if advancing years made it progressively less likely that any individual child would survive. Surely it would seem always worth trying? But we must remember that she is also related to her grandchildren, though half as closely.
   For various reasons, perhaps connected with the Medawar theory of ageing, women in the natural state became gradually less efficient at bringing up children as they got older. Therefore the life expectancy of a child of an old mother was less than that of a child of a young mother. This means that, if a woman had a child and a grandchild born on the same day, the grandchild could expect to live longer than the child. When a woman reached the age where the average chance of each child reaching adulthood was just less than half the chance of each grandchild of the same age reaching adulthood, any gene for investing in grandchildren in preference to children would tend to prosper. Such a gene is carried by only one in four grandchildren, whereas the rival gene is carried by one in two children, but the greater expectation of life of the grandchildren outweighs this, and the ‘grandchild altruism’ gene prevails in the gene pool. A woman could not invest fully in her grandchildren if she went on having children of her own. Therefore genes for becoming reproductively infertile in middle age became more numerous, since they were carried in the bodies of grandchildren whose survival was assisted by grandmotherly altruism.
   This is a possible explanation of the evolution of the menopause in females. The reason why the fertility of males tails off gradually rather than abruptly is probably that males do not invest so much as females in each individual child anyway. Provided he can sire children by young women, it will always pay even a very old man to invest in children rather than in grandchildren.
6. Many baby birds are fed in the nest by their parents. They all gape and scream, and the parent drops a worm or other morsel in the open mouth of one of them. The loudness with which each baby screams is, ideally, proportional to how hungry he is. Therefore, if the parent always gives the food to the loudest screamer, they should all tend to get their fair share, since when one has had enough he will not scream so loudly. At least that is what would happen in the best of all possible worlds, if individuals did not cheat. But in the light of our selfish gene concept we must expect that individuals will cheat, will tell lies about how hungry they are. This will escalate, apparently rather pointlessly because it might seem that if they are all lying by screaming too loudly, this level of loudness will become the norm, and will cease, in effect, to be a lie. However, it cannot de-escalate, because any individual who takes the first step in decreasing the loudness of his scream will be penalized by being fed less, and is more likely to starve. Baby bird screams do not become infinitely loud, because of other considerations. For example, loud screams tend to attract predators, and they use up energy.
   Sometimes, as we have seen, one member of a litter is a runt, much smaller than the rest. He is unable to fight for food as strongly as the rest, and runts often die. We have considered the conditions under which it would actually pay a mother to let a runt die. We might suppose intuitively that the runt himself should go on struggling to the last, but the theory does not necessarily predict this. As soon as a runt becomes so small and weak that his expectation of life is reduced to the point where benefit to him due to parental investment is less than half the benefit that the same investment could potentially confer on the other babies, the runt should die gracefully and willingly. He can benefit his genes most by doing so. That is to say, a gene that gives the instruction ‘Body, if you are very much smaller than your litter-mates, give up the struggle and die’ could be successful in the gene pool, because it has a 50 per cent chance of being in the body of each brother and sister saved, and its chances of surviving in the body of the runt are very small anyway. There should be a point of no return in the career of a runt. Before he reaches this point he should go on struggling. As soon as he reaches it he should give up and preferably let himself be eaten by his litter-mates or his parents.
   I did not mention it when we were discussing Lack’s theory of clutch size, but the following is a reasonable strategy for a parent who is undecided as to what is her optimum clutch size for the current year. She might lay one more egg than she actually ‘thinks’ is likely to be the true optimum. Then, if the year’s food crop should turn out to be a better one than expected, she will rear the extra child. If not, she can cut her losses. By being careful always to feed the young in the same order, say in order of size, she sees to it that one, perhaps a runt, quickly dies, and not too much food is wasted on him, beyond the initial investment of egg yolk or equivalent. From the mother’s point of view, this may be the explanation of the runt phenomenon. He represents the hedging of the mother’s bets. This has been observed in many birds.
7. A. Zahavi has suggested a particularly diabolical form of child blackmail: the child screams in such a way as to attract predators deliberately to the nest. The child is ‘saying’ ‘Fox, fox, come and get me.’ The only way the parent can stop it screaming is to feed it. So the child gains more than its fair share of food, but at a cost of some risk to itself. The principle of this ruthless tactic is the same as that of the hijacker threatening to blow up an aeroplane, with himself on board, unless he is given a ransom. I am sceptical about whether it could ever be favoured in evolution, not because it is too ruthless, but because I doubt if it could ever pay the blackmailing baby. He has too much to lose if a predator really came. This is clear for an only child, which is the case Zahavi himself considers. No matter how much his mother may already have invested in him, he should still value his own life more than his mother values it, since she has only half of his genes. Moreover, the tactic would not pay even if the blackmailer was one of a clutch of vulnerable babies, all in the nest together, since the blackmailer has a 50 per cent genetic ‘stake’ in each of his endangered brothers and sisters, as well as a 100 per cent stake in himself. I suppose the theory might conceivably work if the predominant predator had the habit of only taking the largest nestling from a nest. Then it might pay a smaller one to use the threat of summoning a predator, since it would not be greatly endangering itself. This is analogous to holding a pistol to your brother’s head rather than threatening to blow yourself up.
   More plausibly, the blackmail tactic might pay a baby cuckoo. As is well known, cuckoo females lay one egg in each of several ‘foster’ nests, and then leave the unwitting foster parents, of a quite different species, to rear the cuckoo young. Therefore a baby cuckoo has no genetic stake in his foster brothers and sisters. (Some species of baby cuckoo will not have any foster brothers and sisters, for a sinister reason which we shall come to. For the moment I assume we are dealing with one of those species in which foster brothers and sisters co-exist alongside the baby cuckoo.) If a baby cuckoo screamed loudly enough to attract predators, it would have a lot to lose—its life—but the foster mother would have even more to lose, perhaps four of her young. It could therefore pay her to feed it more than its share, and the advantage of this to the cuckoo might outweigh the risk.
8. Many fish do not copulate, but instead simply spew out their sex cells into the water. Fertilization takes place in the open water, not inside the body of one of the partners. This is probably how sexual reproduction first began. Land animals like birds, mammals and reptiles, on the other hand, cannot afford this kind of external fertilization, because their sex cells are too vulnerable to drying-up. The gametes of one sex—the male, since sperms are mobile—are introduced into the wet interior of a member of the other sex—the female. So much is just fact. Now comes the idea. After copulation, the land-dwelling female is left in physical possession of the embryo. It is inside her body. Even if she lays the fertilized egg almost immediately, the male still has time to vanish, thereby forcing the female into Trivers’s ‘cruel bind’. The male is inevitably provided with an opportunity to take the prior decision to desert, closing the female’s options, and forcing her to decide whether to leave the young to certain death, or whether to stay with it and rear it. Therefore, maternal care is more common among land animals than paternal care.
   But for fish and other water-dwelling animals things are very different. If the male does not physically introduce his sperms into the female’s body there is no necessary sense in which the female is left ‘holding the baby’. Either partner might make a quick getaway and leave the other one in possession of the newly fertilized eggs. But there is even a possible reason why it might often be the male who is most vulnerable to being deserted. It seems probable that an evolutionary battle will develop over who sheds their sex cells first. The partner who does so has the advantage that he or she can then leave the other one in possession of the new embryos. On the other hand, the partner who spawns first runs the risk that his prospective partner may subsequently fail to follow suit. Now the male is more vulnerable here, if only because sperms are lighter and more likely to diffuse than eggs. If a female spawns too early, i.e. before the male is ready, it will not greatly matter because the eggs, being relatively large and heavy, are likely to stay together as a coherent clutch for some time. Therefore a female fish can afford to take the ‘risk’ of spawning early. The male dare not take this risk, since if he spawns too early his sperms will have diffused away before the female is ready, and she will then not spawn herself, because it will not be worth her while to do so. Because of the diffusion problem, the male must wait until the female spawns, and then he must shed his sperms over the eggs. But she has had a precious few seconds in which to disappear, leaving the male in possession, and forcing him on to the horns of Trivers’s dilemma. So this theory neatly explains why paternal care is common in water but rare on dry land.
9. Insects of the group known as the Hymenoptera, including ants, bees, and wasps, have a very odd system of sex determination. Termites do not belong to this group and they do not share the same peculiarity. A hymenopteran nest typically has only one mature queen. She made one mating flight when young and stored up the sperms for the rest of her long life—ten years or even longer. She rations the sperms out to her eggs over the years, allowing the eggs to be fertilized as they pass out through her tubes. But not all the eggs are fertilized. The unfertilized ones develop into males. A male therefore has no father, and all the cells of his body contain just a single set of chromosomes (all obtained from his mother) instead of a double set (one from the father and one from the mother) as in ourselves. In terms of the analogy of Chapter 3, a male hymenopteran has only one copy of each ‘volume’ in each of his cells, instead of the usual two.
   A female hymenopteran, on the other hand, is normal in that she does have a father, and she has the usual double set of chromosomes in each of her body cells. Whether a female develops into a worker or a queen depends not on her genes but on how she is brought up. That is to say, each female has a complete set of queen-making genes, and a complete set of worker-making genes (or, rather, sets of genes for making each specialized caste of worker, soldier, etc.). Which set of genes is ‘turned on’ depends on how the female is reared, in particular on the food she receives.
10. Social insects discovered, as man did long after, that settled cultivation of food can be more efficient than hunting and gathering.
    For example, several species of ants in the New World, and, quite independently, termites in Africa, cultivate ‘fungus gardens’. The best known are the so-called parasol ants of South America. These are immensely successful. Single colonies with more than two million individuals have been found. Their nests consist of huge spreading underground complexes of passages and galleries going down to a depth of ten feet or more, made by the excavation of as much as 40 tons of soil. The underground chambers contain the fungus gardens. The ants deliberately sow fungus of a particular species in special compost beds which they prepare by chewing leaves into fragments. Instead of foraging directly for their own food, the workers forage for leaves to make compost. The ‘appetite’ of a colony of parasol ants for leaves is gargantuan. This makes them a major economic pest, but the leaves are not food for themselves but food for their fungi. The ants eventually harvest and eat the fungi and feed them to their brood. The fungi are more efficient at breaking down leaf material than the ants’ own stomachs would be, which is how the ants benefit by the arrangement. It is possible that the fungi benefit too, even though they are cropped: the ants propagate them more efficiently than their own spore dispersal mechanism might achieve. Furthermore, the ants ‘weed’ the fungus gardens, keeping them clear of alien species of fungi. By removing competition, this may benefit the ants’ own domestic fungi. A kind of relationship of mutual altruism could be said to exist between ants and fungi. It is remarkable that a very similar system of fungus-farming has evolved independently, among the quite unrelated termites.
    Ants have their own domestic animals as well as their crop plants. Aphids—greenfly and similar bugs—are highly specialized for sucking the juice out of plants. They pump the sap up out of the plants’ veins more efficiently than they subsequently digest it. The result is that they excrete a liquid that has had only some of its nutritious value extracted. Droplets of sugar-rich ‘honeydew’ pass out of the back end at a great rate, in some cases more than the insect’s own body-weight every hour. The honeydew normally rains down on to the ground—it may well have been the providential food known as ‘manna’ in the Old Testament. But ants of several species intercept it as soon as it leaves the bug. The ants ‘milk’ the aphids by stroking their hind-quarters with their feelers and legs. Aphids respond to this, in some cases apparently holding back their droplets until an ant strokes them, and even withdrawing a droplet if an ant is not ready to accept it. It has been suggested that some aphids have evolved a backside that looks and feels like an ant’s face, the better to attract ants. What the aphids have to gain from the relationship is apparently protection from their natural enemies. Like our own dairy cattle they lead a sheltered life, and aphid species that are much cultivated by ants have lost their normal defensive mechanisms. In some cases ants care for the aphid eggs inside their own underground nests, feed the young aphids, and finally, when they are grown, gently carry them up to the protected grazing grounds.
11. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catchs on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: ‘… memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking—the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.’
    Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent ‘mutation’. In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that ‘survival value’ here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
12. Has the god meme, say, become associated with any other particular memes, and does this association assist the survival of each of the participating memes? Perhaps we could regard an organized church, with its architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, and written tradition, as a co-adapted stable set of mutually-assisting memes.
    To take a particular example, an aspect of doctrine that has been very effective in enforcing religious observance is the threat of hell fire. Many children and even some adults believe that they will suffer ghastly torments after death if they do not obey the priestly rules. This is a peculiarly nasty technique of persuasion, causing great psychological anguish throughout the Middle Ages and even today. But it is highly effective. It might almost have been planned deliberately by a Machiavellian priesthood trained in deep psychological indoctrination techniques. However, I doubt if the priests were that clever. Much more probably, unconscious memes have ensured their own survival by virtue of those same qualities of pseudo-ruthlessness that successful genes display. The idea of hell fire is, quite simply, self perpetuating, because of its own deep psychological impact. It has become linked with the god meme because the two reinforce each other, and assist each other’s survival in the meme pool.
    Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
    Blind faith can justify anything. If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die—on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader’s sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.
    Memes and genes may often reinforce each other, but they sometimes come into opposition. For example, the habit of celibacy is presumably not inherited genetically. A gene for celibacy is doomed to failure in the gene pool, except under very special circumstances such as we find in the social insects. But still, a meme for celibacy can be successful in the meme pool. For example, suppose the success of a meme depends critically on how much time people spend in actively transmitting it to other people. Any time spent in doing other things than attempting to transmit the meme may be regarded as time wasted from the meme’s point of view. The meme for celibacy is transmitted by priests to young boys who have not yet decided what they want to do with their lives. The medium of transmission is human influence of various kinds, the spoken and written word, personal example, and so on. Suppose, for the sake of argument, it happened to be the case that marriage weakened the power of a priest to influence his flock, say because it occupied a large proportion of his time and attention. This has, indeed, been advanced as an official reason for the enforcement of celibacy among priests. If this were the case, it would follow that the meme for celibacy could have greater survival value than the meme for marriage. Of course, exactly the opposite would be true for a gene for celibacy. If a priest is a survival machine for memes, celibacy is a useful attribute to build into him. Celibacy is just a minor partner in a large complex of mutually-assisting religious memes.
13. When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king’s genes. We should not seek immortality in reproduction.
    But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G. C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus, and Marconi are still going strong.
14. Nobody would ever claim that a bacterium was a conscious strategist, yet bacterial parasites are probably engaged in ceaseless games of Prisoner’s Dilemma with their hosts and there is no reason why we should not attribute Axelrodian adjectives—forgiving, non-envious, and so on—to their strategies. Axelrod and Hamilton point out that normally harmless or beneficial bacteria can turn nasty, even causing lethal sepsis, in a person who is injured. A doctor might say that the person’s ‘natural resistance’ is lowered by the injury. But perhaps the real reason is to do with games of Prisoner’s Dilemma. Do the bacteria, perhaps, have something to gain, but usually keep themselves in check? In the game between human and bacteria, the ‘shadow of the future’ is normally long since a typical human can be expected to live for years from any given starting-point. A seriously wounded human, on the other hand, may present a potentially much shorter shadow of the future to his bacterial guests. The ‘temptation to defect’ correspondingly starts to look like a more attractive option than the ‘reward for mutual cooperation’. Needless to say, there is no suggestion that the bacteria work all this out in their nasty little heads! Selection on generations of bacteria has presumably built into them an unconscious rule of thumb which works by purely biochemical means.
15. In the evolutionary ‘arms race’ between cuckoos and any host species, there is sort of built-in unfairness, resulting from unequal costs of failure. Each individual cuckoo nestling is descended from a long line of ancestral cuckoo nestlings, every single one of whom must have succeeded in manipulating its foster parent. Any cuckoo nestling that lost its hold, even momentarily, over its host would have died as a result. But each individual foster parent is descended from a long line of ancestors many of whom never encountered a cuckoo in their lives. And those that did have a cuckoo in their nest could have succumbed to it and still lived to rear another brood next season. The point is that there is an asymmetry in the cost of failure. Genes for failure to resist enslavement by cuckoos can easily be passed down the generations of robins or dunnocks. Genes for failure to enslave foster parents cannot be passed down the generations of cuckoos. This is what I meant by ‘built-in unfairness’, and by ‘asymmetry in the cost of failure’. The point is summed up in one of Aesop’s fables: ‘The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.’ My colleague John Krebs and I have dubbed this the ‘life/dinner principle’.
16. The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. It must have an impartial exit channel into the future, for all the genes inside it. This is true of an individual wolf. The channel is the thin stream of sperms, or eggs, which it manufactures by meiosis. It is not true of the pack of wolves. Genes have something to gain from selfishly promoting the welfare of their own individual bodies, at the expense of other genes in the wolf pack. A beehive, when it swarms, appears to reproduce by broad-fronted budding, like a wolf pack. But if we look more carefully we find that, as far as the genes are concerned, their destiny is largely shared. The future of the genes in the swarm is, at least to a large extent, lodged in the ovaries of one queen. This is why—it is just another way of expressing the message of earlier chapters—the bee colony looks and behaves like a truly integrated single vehicle.

If you liked the above content, I'd definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

Alfred Adler’s thoughts have had a big impact on my thinking. They reinforced my belief that you are who you choose to be and are not bound by your past.

Let’s talk about Sam. He wants to become a novelist, but he never seems to progress. His job keeps him too busy. Freudian etiology will reason that he doesn’t have the proper environment or the talent for it.

But is that the real reason? No! It’s actually that he wants to leave the possibility of “I can do it if I try” open, by not committing to anything. Let it sink in. His actual goal is to live inside that realm of possibilities, where he can say that he could do it if only he had the time. When you see this from the lens of Adler’s teleology, Sam’s actions become coherent. In another five or ten years, he will probably start using other excuses like “I’m not young anymore” or “I’ve got a family to think about now.” Sam had a subconscious goal of not writing beforehand and he’s been manufacturing reasons to achieve that goal.

When one adopts the point of view of Freudian etiology, one sees life as a kind of great big story based on cause and effect. So then it’s all about where and when I was born, what my childhood was like, the school I attended and the company where I got a job. And that decides who I am now and who I will become. To be sure, likening one’s life to a story is probably an entertaining job. The problem is, one can see the dimness that lies ahead at the end of the story. Moreover, one will try to lead a life that is in line with that story. And then one says, “My life is such-and-such, so I have no choice but to live this way, and it’s not because of me—it’s my past, it’s the environment,” and so on. If we focus only on past causes and try to explain things solely through cause and effect, we end up with “determinism.” Because what this says is that our present and our future have already been decided by past occurrences, and are unalterable. In Adlerian psychology, we do not think about past “causes” but rather about present “goals”.

My key takeaway was that all successful strategies fall into two buckets: you can provide a commodity at the lowest price or you can differentiate your offering to charge a premium. Not worth reading the whole book.

Here are my notes from Playing to Win:

1. The key to making the right choices for your business is that they must be doable and decisive for you. If you are a small entrepreneurial firm facing much larger competitors, making a how-to-win choice on the basis of scale would not make much sense. But simply because you are small doesn’t mean winning through scale is impossible. Don’t dismiss the possibility that you can change the context to fit your choices. Bob Young, cofounder of Red Hat, Inc., knew precisely where he wanted his company to play: he wanted to serve corporate customers with open-source enterprise software. In his view, the how-to-win in that context required scale—Young saw that corporate customers were much more likely to buy from a market leader, especially a dominant market leader. At the time, the Linux market was highly fragmented, with no such clear leader. Young had to change the game—by literally giving his software away via free download—to achieve dominant market share and become credible to corporate information technology (IT) departments. In that case, Young decided where to play and how to win, and then built the rest of his strategy (earning revenue from service rather than software sales) around these two choices. The result was a billion-dollar company with a thriving enterprise business.

2. Many individual considerations need to go into the comprehensive where-to-play choice. And the considerations are the same, no matter the size of the company or type of industry. Think of a small farmer. He must answer a number of questions to get a clear sense of his playing field. Will he sell only locally or to his friends and neighbors, or will he attempt to join a co-op that has a larger geographic footprint? Which fruits and vegetables will he grow? Will he sell organic products or standard ones? Will he sell bushels of fruit unprocessed or process apples into juice before selling them? Will he sell direct to consumers, or through a warehouse middleman? If he does process the fruit into juice, will he do that himself or outsource that phase of production? If he is thoughtful, the farmer will consider where to play in a manner that enables him to choose geographies, segments, products, channels, and production options that work well together (e.g., selling organic veggies locally at farmer’s markets or processing fruit to sell nationally while minimizing spoilage).
   Start-ups, small businesses, regional or national companies, and even huge multinationals all face an analogous set of where-to-play choices. The answers, of course, differ. Small businesses may well have narrower where-to-play choices than larger companies do, largely as a function of capacity and scale. But even the largest companies must make explicit choices to compete in some places, with some products, for some customers (and not in others). A choice to serve everyone, everywhere—or to simply serve all comers—is a losing choice.
   Choosing where to play is also about choosing where not to play. This is more straightforward when you are considering where to expand (or not), but considerably harder when considering if you should stay in the places and segments you currently serve. The status quo—continuing on in the locations and segments you’ve always been—is all too often an implicit, unexamined choice. Simply because you have made a given where-to-play choice in the past is not a reason to stay there. Consider a company like General Electric. A decade ago, it derived considerable revenue from its entertainment holdings (NBC and Universal) and materials businesses (plastic and silicon). Today, it has remade its portfolio to focus much more on infrastructure, energy, and transportation, where its distinctive capabilities can make a real difference to winning. This was an explicit choice about where not to play.

3. In cost leadership, as the name suggests, profit is driven by having a lower cost structure than competitors do. Imagine that companies A, B, and C all produce widgets for which customers will gladly pay $100. The products are comparable, so if one company charges more for its product than the others do, most customers will elect not to buy it in favor of the less expensive versions. Company B and company C have comparable cost structures and produce the widgets for $60, earning a $40 margin. Company A has a lower cost structure for producing essentially the same product and is able to do so for $45, producing a $55 margin. In this instance, company A is the low-cost leader and has a dramatic advantage over its competitors.
   The low-cost player doesn’t necessarily charge the lowest prices. Low-cost players have the option of underpricing competitors, but can also reinvest the margin differential in ways that create competitive advantage. Mars is a great example of this approach. Since the 1980s, it has held a distinct cost advantage over Hershey’s in candy bars. Mars has chosen to structure its range of candy bars such that they can be produced on a single super-high-speed production line. The company also utilizes less-expensive ingredients (by and large). Both of these choices greatly reduce product cost. Hershey’s and other competitors have multiple methods of production and more-expensive ingredients and hence higher cost structures. Rather than selling its bars at a lower price (which is nearly impossible because of the dynamics of the convenience-store trade), Mars has chosen to buy the best shelf space in the candy bar rack in every convenience store in America. Hershey’s can’t effectively counter the Mars initiative; it simply doesn’t have the extra money to spend. On the strength of this investment, Mars moved from a small player to goliath Hershey’s main rival, competing for overall market share leadership.
   Dell Computer took a similar tack early on. In its first decade, Dell enjoyed a substantial low-cost advantage over its competitors in the PC space. Superior supply chain and distribution choices created a cost differential of approximately $300 per computer in Dell’s favor; it simply cost Dell’s competitors more to make, sell, and distribute personal computers. Rather than keeping all of that margin advantage, Dell returned some to consumers, underpricing its competitors for roughly equivalent products. On the strength of these lower prices, Dell gained leading market share in record time, taking a huge bite out of Gateway, HP, Compaq, and IBM in the process. The $300 margin differential gave Dell a massive winning advantage at the time. The company grew from Michael Dell’s dorm-room start-up in 1984 to a company worth $100 billion at its height in 1999.
   While all companies make efforts to control costs, there is only one low-cost player in any industry—the competitor with the very lowest costs. Having lower costs than some but not all competitors can enable a firm to stick around and compete for a while. But it won’t win. Only the true low-cost player can win with a low-cost strategy.

4. The alternative to low cost is differentiation. In a successful differentiation strategy, the company offers products or services that are perceived to be distinctively more valuable to customers than are competitive offerings, and is able to do so with approximately the same cost structure that competitors use. In this case, companies A, B, and C produce widgets and all do so for $60 per widget. But while customers are willing to pay $100 for widgets from company A or B, they are willing to pay $115 for company C’s widgets, because of a perception of greater quality or more-interesting designs. Here, company C has a $15 higher margin than its competitors and a substantial advantage over them.
   In this type of strategy, different offerings have different consumer value equations and different prices associated with them. Each brand or product offers a specific value proposition that appeals to a specific group of customers. Loyalty emerges where there is a match between what the brand distinctively offers and the consumer personally values. In the hotel industry, for instance, one consumer would have a much higher willingness to pay for a service-oriented offering, like Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, while another would more highly value a unique, boutique experience, like the Library Hotel in New York. Differentiation between products is driven by the activities of the firm: product design, product performance, quality, branding, advertising, distribution, and so on. The more a product is differentiated along a dimension consumers care about, the higher price premium it can demand. So, Starbucks can charge $3.50 for a cappuccino, Hermès can charge $10,000 for a Birkin bag, and they can do so largely irrespective of input costs.
   Not all differentiators look the same. While Toyota is sometimes considered a lost-cost player because of its focus on manufacturing effectiveness, it is really a differentiator. Its manufacturing effectiveness is necessary to make up for its production environment (which is heavily weighted to high-cost Japan). However, the automaker is able to earn a price premium of several thousand dollars per vehicle over its competitors in the US car market, while producing vehicles at similar cost. The best-selling Camry and Corolla models have a reputation for superior quality, reliability, and durability, driving the significant price premium. This differentiation advantage means that when it wants to gain market share, Toyota can cut its prices without destroying profitability—and its competitors won’t have the resources to respond. Or Toyota can invest some of the premium to add new, desirable features to its vehicles. In doing so, it can actually reinforce its differentiation advantage.
   All successful strategies take one of these two approaches, cost leadership or differentiation. Both cost leadership and differentiation can provide to the company a greater margin between revenue and costs than competitors can match—thus producing a sustainable winning advantage. This is ultimately the goal of any strategy.

5. In a standard strategy discussion, skeptics attack ideas as vigorously as possible to knock options out of contention, and defenders parry the arguments to protect pet options. Tempers rise, statements get more extreme, and relationships are strained. Meanwhile, little new or helpful information emerges. If instead the dialogue is about what would have to be true, then the skeptic can say, “For me to be confident in this possibility, we would have to know that consumers would respond in the following way.” This is a very different sort of statement than “That option will never work! Consumers hate that approach.” Rather than a blanket denunciation of a possibility, skeptics in the reverse-engineering process must specify the exact source of their skepticism. This frame helps the possibility’s proponents understand the reservations and creates a standard of proof to address them.

If you liked the above content, I'd definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

What would you do once you hit your FIRE goals?

This question came up in one of the 100+ communities I'm a part of, and it forced me to reflect. Here's my current answer: I want to open a Read & Dine Cafe in my hometown. Travel and teaching were close contenders.

Why read? I can't imagine myself not reading. So this has to be a part of anything I do down the line.
Why dine? I like food, duh.
Why cafe? There's a lot of scope for creating good vibes here. You'd want to spend more time by design and have a good time.
Why hometown? I like metros for the exposure it brings, but I like small towns more.

Writing this down also got me thinking: Can I do this in 2024? Let's see. My fingers are crossed.

One of those rare sequels that make you want to read more. I found a lot of parallels with religious texts. Everyone should read this.

Here are my notes from The Courage to be Happy:

1. Religion explains the world by means of stories. You could say that gods are the protagonists of the grand stories that religions use to explain the world. By contrast, philosophy rejects stories. It tries to explain the world by means of abstract concepts that have no protagonists.

2. In our search for truth, we are walking on a long pole that extends into the darkness. Doubting our common sense and engaging in continual self-questioning, we just continue to walk on that pole without any idea of how far it may go. And then, from out of the darkness one hears a voice inside saying, ‘Nothing further lies ahead. Here is truth.’ So, some people stop listening to their internal voice and stop walking. They jump down from the pole. Do they find truth there? I don’t know. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But stopping in one’s steps and jumping off the pole midway is what I call religion. With philosophy, one keeps walking without end. It doesn’t matter if gods are there or not.

3. Socrates, in his dialogues with the self-described wise men known as the Sophists, arrived at the following conclusion: I (Socrates) know that ‘my knowledge is not complete’. I know my own ignorance. The Sophists, on the other hand, those would-be wise men, intend to understand everything and know nothing of their own ignorance. In this respect—my knowledge of my own ignorance—I am more of a wise man than they are. This is the context of Socrates’ famous statement, ‘I know that I know nothing.’

4. Counselling and childhood education are essentially the same.

5. Education is not intervention but assistance towards self-reliance.

6. How would it be if one were thrown into society without knowing any traffic rules; without knowing the meaning of red lights and green lights? Or, if one had no car-driving skills and found oneself behind the wheel? Naturally, there are rules to be learned here and skills to be attained. This is an issue of life and death and, moreover, of putting other people’s lives in danger as well. One could also put it the other way around and say that if there were no other people left on Earth and you were the only person alive there would not be anything you would have to know, and education would not be necessary, either. You would not have any need for knowledge.

7. PHILOSOPHER: There are many parents and educators who disapprove and try to give them things that are more ‘useful’ or ‘worthwhile’. They advise against such activities, confiscate the books and toys and allow the children only what has been determined to have value. The parent does this ‘for the child’s sake’, of course. Even so, one must regard this as an act that is completely lacking in respect and that only increases the parent’s distance from the child. Because it is negating the child’s natural concerns. YOUTH: Okay, so I should recommend vulgar pastimes? PHILOSOPHER: One does not recommend anything from where one stands. One only has concern for the children’s concerns. Try to understand just how vulgar their pastimes are from your point of view and what they really are, first of all. Try them yourself, and even play together on occasion. Rather than simply playing with them, enjoy the activity yourself. If you do, the children may at last have the real feeling that they are being recognised; that they are not being treated as children; that they are being given respect as individual human beings.

8. Suppose, for example, that you are in distress over your life right now. Let’s say that you are wishing you could change yourself. But changing yourself means giving up on yourself until now, denying yourself until now and never again showing the face of yourself until now, as if you were sending it to its grave, in effect. Because once you have done that, you will be reborn as your new self at last. Now, regardless of how dissatisfied you may be with your current situation, can you choose death? Can you throw yourself into the bottomless darkness? This is not such an easy thing to talk about. That is why people do not try to change and why they want to feel okay with things as they are, no matter how tough life gets. And they end up living in search of ‘okay as I am’ ingredients in order to affirm their current situation.

9. From the innumerable events that have happened in a person’s past, that person chooses only those events that are compatible with the present goals, gives meaning to them and turns them into memories. And conversely, events that run counter to the present goals are erased.

10. If their presence is likely to be otherwise ignored, they would much rather be rebuked. They want their presence recognised and they want to be put in a special position, even if it takes the form of rebuke. That is their wish.

11. By resorting to violence, one can push through one’s demands without expending time or effort. To put it more directly, one can make the other party submit to one. In every way, violence is a low-cost, easy means of communication. But before deeming it morally unacceptable, we must say that it is a rather immature form of conduct for people to engage in.

12. What should parents and educators do when confronted with problem behaviour in children? Adler advises that we ‘renounce the standpoint of the judge’. You have not been granted the privilege of passing down judgements. Maintaining law and order is not your job.

13. Violence, which includes reprimand, is a form of communication that reveals one’s immaturity as a human being. This is something that the children know well enough themselves. Whenever they receive reprimands, in addition to their fear of violent conduct, at an unconscious level they have the insight that ‘This is an immature person.’ This is a much bigger problem than the adults think. Could you respect an immature human being? And could you have a real feeling of being respected by someone who threatens you in a violent manner? There is no respect in communication with anger and violence. Rather, such communication invites contempt. That reprimand does not lead to substantive improvement is a self-evident truth. On this point, Adler states, ‘Anger is an emotion that pulls people apart.’

14. ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom always to tell the difference.’

15. It is easier to live according to ‘direction from another’. One does not have to think about difficult things, and one does not have to take responsibility for failure. All one has to do is swear a certain allegiance and someone will take care of all one’s troublesome tasks. From children in families and schools, to members of society working at companies and government offices, to clients who come for counselling.

16. When children fail, and especially when they disturb others, it is only natural that you, too, are held responsible. It is your responsibility as an educator and as a supervisor, and, if you are a parent, it is your responsibility as a parent. What can one do to evade that responsibility? The answer is easy: control the children. One allows the children to take only those paths that are safe and free from harm, without permitting any adventure. One keeps them under one’s control as much as possible. One does not do this out of concern for the children. It is all for one’s own self-protection.

17. Suppose a child asks, ‘Can I go and play at my friend’s place?’ There are parents who will grant permission, ‘Of course you can,’ and then set the condition, ‘Once you’ve done your homework.’ And there are others who will simply prohibit their children from going out to play. Both are forms of conduct that put the child in a position of dependence and irresponsibility. Instead, teach the child by saying, ‘That is something you can decide on your own.’ Teach that one’s own life and one’s everyday actions are things that one determines oneself. And if deciding things requires certain ingredients—knowledge and experience, for example—then provide them. That is how educators should be.

18. Praising is the passing of judgement by a person of ability on a person of no ability, and its goal is manipulation.

19. PHILOSOPHER: I am telling you this as a friend. You have been talking about education all day long, but that is not where your real troubles lie. You have not learned to be happy yet. You are not able to have the courage to be happy. And you did not choose the path of the educator because you wanted to save children. You wanted to be saved through the act of saving them. YOUTH: What did you say? PHILOSOPHER: By saving another person, one tries to be saved oneself. By passing oneself off as a kind of saviour, one attempts to realise one’s own worth. This is one form of the superiority complex that people who cannot dispel their feelings of inferiority often fall into, and it is generally referred to as a messiah complex. It is a mental perversion of wanting to be a messiah, a saviour of others. YOUTH: Don’t mess around! What are you suggesting, all of a sudden? PHILOSOPHER: Raising one’s voice in anger in such a way is also an expression of feelings of inferiority. When one’s feelings of inferiority are aroused, one tries to resolve them by using the emotion of anger.

20. Take the rules of traffic on public roads, for example. It is on the basis of our trust that all people follow the rules of traffic that we pass through a green light. We are not having confidence in people unconditionally. We do look to the left and right first. But even then, we are placing a certain trust in other people whom we have never met. In a sense, this, too, is a work relationship, in that it is fulfilling a shared interest in the smooth flow of traffic.

21. PHILOSOPHER: Rather than the self-interested seeking of ‘my happiness’ or the other-interested wishing for ‘your happiness’, it is the building of a happiness of an inseparable ‘us’. That is love. YOUTH: An inseparable us? PHILOSOPHER: That’s right. One upholds ‘us’ as being higher than ‘me’ or ‘you’. One maintains that order in all one’s choices in life. One does not give precedence to the happiness of ‘me’, and one is not satisfied with only the happiness of ‘you’. Unless it is the happiness of two of ‘us’, it has no meaning. Such is the ‘task accomplished by two people’.

22. You are standing now at the edge of the dance floor of life and just watching the dancing people. You are assuming that ‘There couldn’t be anyone who would dance with someone like me,’ while in your heart you are waiting impatiently for your destined one to reach their hand out to you. You are doing everything you can to endure and to protect yourself, so that you do not feel any more miserable than you do already and so that you do not begin to dislike yourself. There is one thing that you should do. Take the hand of the person beside you, and try to do the best dance that you can possibly do in that moment. Your destiny will start from there.

23. One devotes one’s ceaseless efforts so that when the day of parting comes, one will be able to be satisfied that ‘Meeting this person, and passing the time together with this person, was not a mistake.’ Whether it is in one’s relationship with one’s students, in one’s relationship with one’s parents or in one’s relationship with the person one loves. If, for example, your relationship with your parents came to an end all of a sudden, or a relationship with a student or a friend came to an end, would you be able to accept it as the best possible parting?

If you liked the above content, I'd definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

Reframing is changing the way you look at something. It is infinitely powerful. Here are some examples from my life:

1. Imposter syndrome is real. It's a phase; it comes and goes every now and then. Using reframing, it has become a bit easier for me to handle it. I now remind myself that if I start feeling like an imposter, that means I'm not the smartest person in the room and this is a state I like being in. This subtle mindset change is working for me now.

It helps you understand what a good strategy looks like, in an unnecessary long text.

Here are my notes from Good Strategy Bad Strategy:

Some of you asked for the prompts we used in our app. Here you go!

1. Try and remember any moment from your past and write down as many details as you can.
2. If you were to die tomorrow, what would you do?
3. What are your most prized possessions?
4. What’s your idea of a perfect vacation and why?
5. What was your favourite activity as a child?
6. If money were no object, what would you do all day and why?
7. What makes you happy?
8. Write out a word of encouragement or two for yourself today!
9. Who’s your biggest inspiration, and why?
10. What do you think about when you’re alone?
11. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever seen, and why would you say it is?
12. Where is the one place or person you would go to for safety, if everything became too much? Why is that?
13. What is one thing you've done that you thought you'd never do?
14. What is one characteristic or personality trait that you admire in others?
15. What is a book, movie, song, or television program that has influenced you, and how?
16. What could you talk about for 30 minutes without any preparation?
17. If you could UNDO or REDO something in your life, what would that be? Journal the thoughts or reasons behind it.
18. When was the last time you shed a happy tear? Tell that whole story.
19. What are some of the mottos you live by in your life? If you don’t have any, create some now to help define what’s important for you to live by.
20. Write about a piece of advice you got from a parent that still guides you to this day.
21. What do you think the perfect number of friends to have is?
22. How do you like to best relax? Write about a time you recall doing that.
23. What makes you get up in the morning?
24. What activities did you use to love but don’t do any longer?
25. Write about someone you initially judged, but had a change of heart after you heard their story.
26. What magic power would you like to have? How would you use it? What would it feel like?
27. What is one of your favorite quotes? Why does it mean so much to you?
28. What would you ask for if a genie granted you three wishes?
29. Write about something you desperately wanted when you were younger.
30. Name and describe a teacher who made a difference in your life. What did that teacher do that was so special?

Until We Meet Again...
🖖 swap

It's the most powerful book I've ever read. The book provides a nice introduction to Adlerian psychology with a unique conversational format between the philosopher and youth, which grew on me. I had a lot of aha moments and will be picking this again soon.

Here are my notes from The Courage to be Disliked:

1. None of us live in an objective world, but instead in a subjective world that we ourselves have given meaning to. The world you see is different from the one I see, and it’s impossible to share your world with anyone else.
2. Everyone wishes they could change. I know I do, and I’m sure anyone you might stop and ask on the street would agree. But why does everyone feel they want to change? There’s only one answer: because they cannot change. If it were easy for people to change, they wouldn’t spend so much time wishing they could. No matter how much they wish it, people cannot change. And that’s why there are always so many people getting taken in by new religions and dubious self-help seminars and any preaching on how everyone can change.
3. If we focus only on past causes and try to explain things solely through cause and effect, we end up with “determinism.” Because what this says is that our present and our future have already been decided by past occurrences, and are unalterable.
4. In Adlerian psychology, we do not think about past “causes” but rather about present “goals”.
5. Your friend had the goal of not going out beforehand, and he’s been manufacturing a state of anxiety and fear as a means to achieve that goal. In Adlerian psychology, this is called “teleology”.
6. PHILOSOPHER: Suppose you’ve got a cold with a high fever, and you go to see the doctor. Then, suppose the doctor says the reason for your sickness is that yesterday, when you went out, you weren’t dressed properly, and that’s why you caught a cold. Now, would you be satisfied with that?
   YOUTH: Of course I wouldn’t. It wouldn’t matter to me what the reason was—the way I was dressed or because it was raining or whatever. It’s the symptoms, the fact that I’m suffering with a high fever now that would matter to me. If he’s a doctor, I’d need him to treat me by prescribing medicine, giving shots, or taking whatever specialized measures are necessary.
   PHILOSOPHER: Yet those who take an etiological stance, including most counselors and psychiatrists, would argue that what you were suffering from stemmed from such-and-such cause in the past, and would then end up just consoling you by saying, “So you see, it’s not your fault.” The argument concerning so-called traumas is typical of etiology.
   YOUTH: Wait a minute! Are you denying the existence of trauma altogether?
   PHILOSOPHER: Yes, I am. Adamantly.
7. In Adlerian psychology, trauma is definitively denied. This was a very new and revolutionary point. Certainly, the Freudian view of trauma is fascinating. Freud’s idea is that a person’s psychic wounds (traumas) cause his or her present unhappiness. When you treat a person’s life as a vast narrative, there is an easily understandable causality and sense of dramatic development that creates strong impressions and is extremely attractive. But Adler, in denial of the trauma argument, states the following: “No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.” Focus on the point Adler is making here when he refers to the self being determined not by our experiences themselves, but by the meaning we give them. He is not saying that the experience of a horrible calamity or abuse during childhood or other such incidents have no influence on forming a personality; their influences are strong. But the important thing is that nothing is actually determined by those influences. We determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those past experiences. Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live.
8. Suppose there is someone whose parents had divorced in his past. Isn’t this something objective, the same as the well water that is always sixty degrees? But then, does that divorce feel cold or does it feel warm? So this is a “now” thing, a subjective thing. Regardless of what may have happened in the past, it is the meaning that is attributed to it that determines the way someone’s present will be.
9. Why are you rushing for answers? You should arrive at answers on your own, not rely upon what you get from someone else. Answers from others are nothing more than stopgap measures; they’re of no value. Take Socrates, who left not one book actually written by himself. He spent his days having public debates with the citizens of Athens, especially the young, and it was his disciple, Plato, who put his philosophy into writing for future generations. Adler, too, showed little interest in literary activities, preferring to engage in personal dialogue at cafés in Vienna, and hold small discussion groups. He was definitely not an armchair intellectual.
10. Without question, there is no shortage of behavior that is evil. But no one, not even the most hardened criminal, becomes involved in crime purely out of a desire to engage in evil acts. Every criminal has an internal justification for getting involved in crime. A dispute over money leads someone to engage in murder, for instance. To the perpetrator, it is something for which there is a justification and which can be restated as an accomplishment of “good.” Of course, this is not good in a moral sense, but good in the sense of being “of benefit to oneself.”
11. Although there are some small inconveniences and limitations, you probably think that the lifestyle you have now is the most practical one, and that it’s easier to leave things as they are. If you stay just like this, experience enables you to respond properly to events as they occur, while guessing the results of one’s actions. You could say it’s like driving your old, familiar car. It might rattle a bit, but one can take that into account and maneuver easily. On the other hand, if one chooses a new lifestyle, no one can predict what might happen to the new self, or have any idea how to deal with events as they arise. It will be hard to see ahead to the future, and life will be filled with anxiety. A more painful and unhappy life might lie ahead. Simply put, people have various complaints about things, but it’s easier and more secure to be just the way one is.
12. I have a young friend who dreams of becoming a novelist, but he never seems to be able to complete his work. According to him, his job keeps him too busy, and he can never find enough time to write novels, and that’s why he can’t complete work and enter it for writing awards. But is that the real reason? No! It’s actually that he wants to leave the possibility of “I can do it if I try” open, by not committing to anything. He doesn’t want to expose his work to criticism, and he certainly doesn’t want to face the reality that he might produce an inferior piece of writing and face rejection. He wants to live inside that realm of possibilities, where he can say that he could do it if he only had the time, or that he could write if he just had the proper environment, and that he really does have the talent for it. In another five or ten years, he will probably start using other excuses like “I’m not young anymore” or “I’ve got a family to think about now.”
13. It’s basically impossible to not get hurt in your relations with other people. When you enter into interpersonal relationships, it is inevitable that to a greater or lesser extent you will get hurt, and you will hurt someone, too.
14. Being alone isn’t what makes you feel lonely. Loneliness is having other people and society and community around you, and having a deep sense of being excluded from them. To feel lonely, we need other people.
15. People enter this world as helpless beings. And people have the universal desire to escape from that helpless state. Adler called this the “pursuit of superiority.”
16. Those who go so far as to boast about things out loud actually have no confidence in themselves. As Adler clearly indicates, “The one who boasts does so only out of a feeling of inferiority.”
17. When we refer to the pursuit of superiority, there’s a tendency to think of it as the desire to try to be superior to other people; to climb higher, even if it means kicking others down—you know, the image of ascending a stairway and pushing people out of the way to get to the top. Adler does not uphold such attitudes, of course. Rather, he’s saying that on the same level playing field, there are people who are moving forward, and there are people who are moving forward behind them. Keep that image in mind. Though the distance covered and the speed of walking differ, everyone is walking equally in the same flat place. The pursuit of superiority is the mind-set of taking a single step forward on one’s own feet, not the mind-set of competition of the sort that necessitates aiming to be greater than other people.
18. This is what is so terrifying about competition. Even if you’re not a loser, even if you’re someone who keeps on winning, if you are someone who has placed himself in competition, you will never have a moment’s peace. You don’t want to be a loser. And you always have to keep on winning if you don’t want to be a loser. You can’t trust other people. The reason so many people don’t really feel happy while they’re building up their success in the eyes of society is that they are living in competition. Because to them, the world is a perilous place that is overflowing with enemies.
19. But do other people actually look at you so much? Are they really watching you around the clock and lying in wait for the perfect moment to attack? It seems rather unlikely. A young friend of mine, when he was a teenager, used to spend a lot of time in front of the mirror arranging his hair. And once, when he was doing that, his grandmother said, “You’re the only one who’s worried how you look.” He says that it got a bit easier for him to deal with life after that.
20. If someone were to abuse me to my face, I would think about the person’s hidden goal. Even if you are not directly abusive, when you feel genuinely angry due to another person’s words or behavior, please consider that the person is challenging you to a power struggle.
21. The first thing that I want you to understand here is the fact that anger is a form of communication, and that communication is nevertheless possible without using anger. We can convey our thoughts and intentions and be accepted without any need for anger. If you learn to understand this experientially, the anger emotion will stop appearing all on its own.
22. It’s not that you mustn’t get angry, but that there is no need to rely on the tool of anger. Irascible people do not have short tempers—it is only that they do not know that there are effective communication tools other than anger. That is why people end up saying things like “I just snapped” or, “He flew into a rage.” We end up relying on anger to communicate.
23. People are extremely selfish creatures who are capable of finding any number of flaws and shortcomings in others whenever the mood strikes them.
24. If one takes appropriate action, one receives praise. If one takes inappropriate action, one receives punishment. Adler was very critical of education by reward and punishment. It leads to mistaken lifestyles in which people think, If no one is going to praise me, I won’t take appropriate action and If no one is going to punish me, I’ll engage in inappropriate actions, too. You already have the goal of wanting to be praised when you start picking up litter. And if you aren’t praised by anyone, you’ll either be indignant or decide that you’ll never do such a thing again. Clearly, there’s something wrong with this situation.
25. Studying is the child’s task. A parent’s handling of that by commanding the child to study is, in effect, an act of intruding on another person’s task. One is unlikely to avert a collision in this way. We need to think with the perspective of “Whose task is this?” and continually separate one’s own tasks from other people’s tasks.
26. In general, all interpersonal relationship troubles are caused by intruding on other people’s tasks, or having one’s own tasks intruded on. Carrying out the separation of tasks is enough to change one’s interpersonal relationships dramatically.
27. There is a simple way to tell whose task it is. Think, Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made? When the child has made the choice of not studying, ultimately, the result of that decision—not being able to keep up in class or to get into the preferred school, for instance—does not have to be received by the parents. Clearly, it is the child who has to receive it. In other words, studying is the child’s task.
28. When reading a book, if one brings one’s face too close to it, one cannot see anything. In the same way, forming good interpersonal relationships requires a certain degree of distance. When the distance gets too small and people become stuck together, it becomes impossible to even speak to each other. But the distance must not be too great, either. Parents who scold their children too much become mentally very distant. When this happens, the child can no longer even consult the parents, and the parents can no longer give the proper assistance. One should be ready to lend a hand when needed but not encroach on the person’s territory. It is important to maintain this kind of moderate distance.
29. A stone is powerless. Once it has begun to roll downhill, it will continue to roll until released from the natural laws of gravity and inertia. But we are not stones. We are beings who are capable of resisting inclination. We can stop our tumbling selves and climb uphill. The desire for recognition is probably a natural desire. So are you going to keep rolling downhill in order to receive recognition from others? Are you going to wear yourself down like a rolling stone, until everything is smoothed away? When all that is left is a little round ball, would that be “the real I”? It cannot be.
30. Freedom is being disliked by other people.
    It’s that you are disliked by someone. It is proof that you are exercising your freedom and living in freedom, and a sign that you are living in accordance with your own principles.
31. A community that you can break relations with by simply submitting a withdrawal notice is one that you can have only so much connection to, in any case. Once you know how big the world is, you will see that all the hardship you went through in school was a storm in a teacup. The moment you leave the teacup, that raging storm will be gone, and a gentle breeze will greet you in its place.
32. In the act of praise, there is the aspect of it being “the passing of judgment by a person of ability on a person of no ability.” A mother praises her child who has helped her prepare dinner, saying, “You’re such a good helper!” But when her husband does the same things, you can be sure she won’t be telling him, “You’re such a good helper!” In other words, the mother who praises the child by saying things like “You’re such a good helper!” or “Good job!” or “Well, aren’t you something!” is unconsciously creating a hierarchical relationship and seeing the child as beneath her. The example of animal training that you just gave is also emblematic of the hierarchical relationship—the vertical relationship—that is behind the praising. When one person praises another, the goal is “to manipulate someone who has less ability than you.” It is not done out of gratitude or respect.
33. It is when one is able to feel “I am beneficial to the community” that one can have a true sense of one’s worth.
34. Without judging whether or not other people did something, one rejoices in their being there, in their very existence, and one calls out to them with words of gratitude.
35. It is even said that to truly understand Adlerian psychology and apply it to actually changing one’s way of living, one needs “half the number of years one has lived.” In other words, if you were to start studying it at the age of forty, it would take another twenty years, until you turned sixty. If you were to start studying at the age of twenty, it would take ten years, until you turned thirty. You are still young. Starting at such an early stage in life means that you might be able to change more quickly. In the sense that you can change quickly, you are walking ahead of the adults of the world. To go about changing yourself and making a new world, in a way you are ahead of me, too. It is okay to lose your way or lose focus. Do not be dependent on vertical relationships or be afraid of being disliked, and just make your way forward freely. If all the adults could see that young people were walking ahead of them, I am sure the world would change dramatically.
36. In the teachings of Judaism, one finds the following anecdote: “If there are ten people, one will be someone who criticizes you no matter what you do. This person will come to dislike you, and you will not learn to like him either. Then, there will be two others who accept everything about you and whom you accept too, and you will become close friends with them. The remaining seven people will be neither of these types.” Now, do you focus on the one person who dislikes you? Do you pay more attention to the two who love you? Or would you focus on the crowd, the other seven? A person who is lacking in harmony of life will see only the one person he dislikes and will make a judgment of the world from that.
37. Imagine that you are standing on a theater stage. If the house lights are on, you’ll probably be able to see all the way to the back of the hall. But if you’re under a bright spotlight, you won’t be able to make out even the front row. That’s exactly how it is with our lives. It’s because we cast a dim light on our entire lives that we are able to see the past and the future. Or at least we imagine we can. But if one is shining a bright spotlight on here and now, one cannot see the past or the future anymore.
38. When one adopts the point of view of Freudian etiology, one sees life as a kind of great big story based on cause and effect. So then it’s all about where and when I was born, what my childhood was like, the school I attended and the company where I got a job. And that decides who I am now and who I will become. To be sure, likening one’s life to a story is probably an entertaining job. The problem is, one can see the dimness that lies ahead at the end of the story. Moreover, one will try to lead a life that is in line with that story. And then one says, “My life is such-and-such, so I have no choice but to live this way, and it’s not because of me—it’s my past, it’s the environment,” and so on. But bringing up the past here is nothing but a way out, a life-lie. However, life is a series of dots, a series of moments. If you can grasp that, you will not need a story any longer.
39. No matter what moments you are living, or if there are people who dislike you, as long as you do not lose sight of the guiding star of “I contribute to others,” you will not lose your way, and you can do whatever you like. Whether you’re disliked or not, you pay it no mind and live free.
40. You say you wish you had known this ten years ago. It is because Adler’s thought resonates with you now that you are thinking this. No one knows how you would have felt about it ten years ago. This discussion was something that you needed to hear now.

If you liked the above content, I'd definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

I’ve been journaling for the last 6 years and it has been life-changing.

I keep getting DMs on how to get started, so I pinged one of my iOS wizard friends to brainstorm. We outlined the problem statement as “newbies get overwhelmed while starting journaling”. Our aim was to create a frictionless experience (we are both fans of minimalism).

There were two things we spent a lot of time on:

Jeff is an embodiment of long-term thinking. He emphasizes doing what's best for the customer, even if it translates to huge losses in the short term. However, I feel that this is not the definitive story of Amazon. It has cherry-picked bits and pieces, unlike Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs.

Here are my notes from The Everything Store:

1. Bezos has proved quite indifferent to the opinions of others. He is an avid problem solver, a man who has a chess grand master’s view of the competitive landscape, and he applies the focus of an obsessive-compulsive to pleasing customers and providing services like free shipping. He has vast ambitions—not only for Amazon, but to push the boundaries of science and remake the media. In addition to funding his own rocket company, Blue Origin, Bezos acquired the ailing Washington Post newspaper company in August 2013 for $250 million in a deal that stunned the media industry. As many of his employees will attest, Bezos is extremely difficult to work for. Despite his famously hearty laugh and cheerful public persona, he is capable of the same kind of acerbic outbursts as Apple’s late founder, Steve Jobs, who could terrify any employee who stepped into an elevator with him. Bezos is a micromanager with a limitless spring of new ideas, and he reacts harshly to efforts that don’t meet his rigorous standards. Like Jobs, Bezos casts a reality-distortion field—an aura thick with persuasive but ultimately unsatisfying propaganda about his company. He often says that Amazon’s corporate mission “is to raise the bar across industries, and around the world, for what it means to be customer focused.” Bezos and his employees are indeed absorbed with catering to customers, but they can also be ruthlessly competitive with rivals and even partners. Bezos likes to say that the markets Amazon competes in are vast, with room for many winners. That’s perhaps true, but it’s also clear that Amazon has helped damage or destroy competitors small and large, many of whose brands were once world renowned: Circuit City. Borders. Best Buy. Barnes & Noble.
2. In 1991, D. E. Shaw was growing rapidly, and the company moved to the top floors of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper a block from Times Square. The firm’s striking but sparely decorated offices, designed by the architect Steven Holl, included a two-story lobby with luminescent colors that were projected into slots cut into the expansive white walls. That fall, Shaw hosted a thousand-dollar-a-ticket fund-raiser for presidential candidate Bill Clinton that was attended by the likes of Jacqueline Onassis, among others. Employees were asked to clear out of the office that evening before the event. Jeff Bezos, one of the youngest vice presidents at the firm, left to play volleyball with colleagues, but first he stopped and got his photo taken with the future president. Bezos was twenty-nine at the time, five foot eight inches tall, already balding and with the pasty, rumpled appearance of a committed workaholic. He had spent seven years on Wall Street and impressed seemingly everyone he encountered with his keen intellect and boundless determination. Upon graduating from Princeton in 1986, Bezos worked for a pair of Columbia professors at a company called Fitel that was developing a private transatlantic computer network for stock traders. Graciela Chichilnisky, one of the cofounders and Bezos’s boss, remembers him as a capable and upbeat employee who worked tirelessly and at different times managed the firm’s operations in London and Tokyo. “He was not concerned about what other people were thinking,” Chichilnisky says. “When you gave him a good solid intellectual issue, he would just chew on it and get it done.” Bezos moved to the financial firm Bankers Trust in 1988, but by then, frustrated by what he viewed as institutional reluctance at companies to challenge the status quo, he was already looking for an opportunity to start his own business. Between 1989 and 1990 he spent several months working in his spare time on a startup with a young Merrill Lynch employee named Halsey Minor, who would later go on to start the online news network CNET. Their fledgling venture, aimed at sending a customized newsletter to people over their fax machines, collapsed when Merrill Lynch withdrew the promised funding. But Bezos nevertheless made an impression. Minor remembers that Bezos had closely studied several wealthy businessmen and that he particularly admired a man named Frank Meeks, a Virginia entrepreneur who had made a fortune owning Domino’s Pizza franchises. Bezos also revered pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay and often quoted his observation that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points”—a reminder that looking at things in new ways can enhance one’s understanding. “He went to school on everybody,” Minor says. “I don’t think there was anybody Jeff knew that he didn’t walk away from with whatever lessons he could.” Bezos was ready to leave Wall Street altogether when a headhunter convinced him to meet executives at just one more financial firm, a company with an unusual pedigree. Bezos would later say he found a kind of workplace soul mate in David Shaw—“one of the few people I know who has a fully developed left brain and a fully developed right brain.” At DESCO, Bezos displayed many of the idiosyncratic qualities his employees would later observe at Amazon. He was disciplined and precise, constantly recording ideas in a notebook he carried with him, as if they might float out of his mind if he didn’t jot them down. He quickly abandoned old notions and embraced new ones when better options presented themselves. He already exhibited the same boyish excitement and conversation-stopping laugh that the world would later come to know. Bezos thought analytically about everything, including social situations. Single at the time, he started taking ballroom-dance classes, calculating that it would increase his exposure to what he called n+ women. He later famously admitted to thinking about how to increase his “women flow,” a Wall Street corollary to deal flow, the number of new opportunities a banker can access. Jeff Holden, who worked for Bezos first at D. E. Shaw & Co. and later at Amazon, says he was “the most introspective guy I ever met. He was very methodical about everything in his life.”
3. Shaw and Bezos discussed another idea as well. They called it “the everything store.” Several executives who worked at DESCO at that time say the idea of the everything store was simple: an Internet company that served as the intermediary between customers and manufacturers and sold nearly every type of product, all over the world. One important element in the early vision was that customers could leave written evaluations of any product, a more egalitarian and credible version of the old Montgomery Ward catalog reviews of its own suppliers. Shaw himself confirmed the Internet-store concept when he told the New York Times Magazine in 1999, “The idea was always that someone would be allowed to make a profit as an intermediary. The key question is: Who will get to be that middleman?”
4. Bezos concluded that a true everything store would be impractical—at least at the beginning. He made a list of twenty possible product categories, including computer software, office supplies, apparel, and music. The category that eventually jumped out at him as the best option was books. They were pure commodities; a copy of a book in one store was identical to the same book carried in another, so buyers always knew what they were getting. There were two primary distributors of books at that time, Ingram and Baker and Taylor, so a new retailer wouldn’t have to approach each of the thousands of book publishers individually. And, most important, there were three million books in print worldwide, far more than a Barnes & Noble or a Borders superstore could ever stock. If he couldn’t build a true everything store right away, he could capture its essence—unlimited selection—in at least one important product category. “With that huge diversity of products you could build a store online that simply could not exist in any other way,” Bezos said. “You could build a true superstore with exhaustive selection, and customers value selection.” In his offices on the fortieth floor of 120 West Forty-Fifth Street, Bezos could hardly contain his enthusiasm. With DESCO’s recruiting chief, Charles Ardai, he investigated some of the earliest online bookstore websites, such as Book Stacks Unlimited, located in Cleveland, Ohio, and WordsWorth, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ardai still has the record from one purchase they made while testing these early sites. He bought a copy of Isaac Asimov’s Cyberdreams from the website of the Future Fantasy bookstore in Palo Alto, California. The price was $6.04. When the book appeared, two weeks later, Ardai ripped open the cardboard package and showed it to Bezos. It had become badly tattered in transit. No one had yet figured out how to do a good job selling books over the Internet. As Bezos saw it, this was a huge, untapped opportunity.
5. Each order during those early months brought a thrill to Amazon’s employees. When someone made a purchase, a bell would ring on Amazon’s computers, and everyone in the office would gather around to see if anyone knew the customer. (It was only a few weeks before it started ringing so often that they had to turn it off.) Amazon would then order the book from one of the two major book distributors, paying the standard wholesale rate of 50 percent off the list price (the advertised price printed on the book jacket). There was little science to Amazon’s earliest distribution methods. The company held no inventory itself at first. When a customer bought a book, Amazon ordered it, the book would arrive within a few days, and Amazon would store it in the basement and then ship it off to the customer. It took Amazon a week to deliver most items to customers, and it could take several weeks or more than a month for scarcer titles. Even back then, Amazon was making only a slender profit on most sales. It offered up to 40 percent off the list price on bestsellers and books that were included in Spotlight, an early feature on the website that highlighted new titles each day. The company offered 10 percent off the list price on other books; it also charged shipping fees starting at $3.95 for single-book orders. One early challenge was that the book distributors required retailers to order ten books at a time. Amazon didn’t yet have that kind of sales volume, and Bezos later enjoyed telling the story of how he got around it. “We found a loophole,” he said. “Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn’t have to receive ten books, you only had to order ten books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, ‘Sorry, but we’re out of the lichen book.’ ” In early June, Kaphan added a reviews feature that he’d coded over a single weekend. Bezos believed that if Amazon.com had more user-generated book reviews than any other site, it would give the company a huge advantage; customers would be less inclined to go to other online bookstores. They had discussed whether such unfiltered user-generated content could get the company in trouble. Bezos decided to watch reviews closely for offensive material rather than read everything before it was published. The early employees and their friends wrote many of the initial reviews themselves. Kaphan himself took a book off the shelf that was meant for a customer, a Chinese memoir called Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag. He read it cover to cover and wrote one of the first reviews. Naturally, some of the reviews were negative. In speeches, Bezos later recalled getting an angry letter from an executive at a book publisher implying that Bezos didn’t understand that his business was to sell books, not trash them. “We saw it very differently,” Bezos said. “When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”
6. As if to prove his singular obsession with customer experience, Bezos placed an expensive bet, hitching Amazon’s Quidditch broom to the rising fantasy series Harry Potter. In July, author J. K. Rowling published the fourth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Amazon offered a 40 percent discount on the book and express delivery so customers would get it on Saturday, July 8—the day the book was released—for the cost of regular delivery. Amazon lost a few dollars on each of about 255,000 orders, just the kind of money-losing gambit that frustrated Wall Street. But Bezos refused to see it as anything other than a move to build customer loyalty. “That either- or mentality, that if you are doing something good for customers it must be bad for shareholders, is very amateurish,” he said in our interview that summer. The Harry Potter promotion unsettled even the executives working on it. “I was thinking, Holy shit, this is a lot of money,” says Lyn Blake, the Amazon executive in charge of books at the time. She was later inclined to admit that Bezos was right. “We were able to assess all the good press and heard all these stories from people who were meeting their deliverymen at their front doors. And we got these testimonials back from drivers. It was the best day of their lives.” Amazon was mentioned in some seven hundred stories about the new Harry Potter novel in June and July that year. Bezos was obsessed with the customer experience, and anyone who didn’t have the same single-minded focus or who he felt wasn’t demonstrating a capacity for thinking big bore the brunt of his considerable temper. One person who became a frequent target during this time was the vice president in charge of customer service, Bill Price. A veteran of long-distance provider MCI, Price came to Amazon in 1999. He blundered early by suggesting in a meeting that Amazon executives who traveled frequently should be permitted to fly business-class. Bezos often said he wanted his colleagues to speak their minds, but at times it seemed he did not appreciate being personally challenged. “You would have thought I was trying to stop the Earth from tilting on its axis,” Price says, recalling that moment with horror years later. “Jeff slammed his hand on the table and said, ‘That is not how an owner thinks! That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.’ “Of course everyone else was thinking [executives should be allowed to fly business-class], but I was the exposed nail in the room,” Price says.
7. One weekend in the fall of 2000, Bezos called various S Team members and executives to a daylong meeting in the basement of his lakefront mansion in Medina so they could examine why the third-party efforts were failing. Despite the problems, the group recognized that Crosslinks on the product pages were generating most of the traffic to Amazon’s third-party sellers. That was an important observation. Traffic on Amazon was oriented around Amazon’s reliable product catalog. On eBay, a customer might search for the Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises and get dozens of auctions of new and vintage copies. If a customer searched for the book on Amazon, there was one single page, with a definitive description of the novel, and that’s where customers flocked. Amazon executives reasoned that day that they had the Internet’s most authoritative product catalog and that they should exploit it. That, it turned out, was the central insight that not only turned Amazon into a thriving platform for small online merchants but powers a good deal of its success today. If Amazon wanted to host other sellers on its site, it would have to list their wares right alongside its own products on the pages that customers actually visited. “It was a great meeting,” says Jeff Blackburn. “By the end of the day we all felt one hundred percent sure that this was the future.” That fall, Amazon announced a new initiative called Marketplace. The effort started with used books. Other sellers of books were invited to advertise their wares directly within a box on Amazon’s own book pages. Customers got to choose whether to purchase the item from Amazon itself or from a third-party seller. If they chose the latter, either because the seller had a lower price or because the product was out of stock at Amazon, the company would lose the sale but collect a small commission. “Jeff was super clear from the beginning,” says Neil Roseman. “If somebody else can sell it cheaper than us, we should let them and figure out how they are able to do it.”
8. In early 2001, Amazon’s position and future prospects remained dubious. The problem wasn’t only its diminishing market capitalization or its overlarded staffing and expansion efforts. Growth, particularly in the oldest category, books—still more than half its business at the time—appeared to be slowing after years of annual double-digit increases. Inside the company, executives were fearful that the slowdown augured an overall decrease in online shopping itself. “We were scared to death,” says Erich Ringewald, a vice president in charge of Marketplace. “Books were decelerating, and everyone thought that Walmart.com would start selling books at a loss to keep us from growing.” Amazon then did something rare in its history. Warren Jenson, pushing to improve margins to meet the company’s self-imposed profitability deadline, convinced Bezos to quietly raise prices in the older media categories. Amazon reduced its discounts on bestselling books and started charging more to overseas customers who were buying from the domestic website. Bezos signed off on the increases, but another important meeting quickly made him change his mind. On a Saturday morning that spring, at the Starbucks inside the Bellevue Barnes & Noble where he had conducted Amazon’s very first meetings, Bezos met Jim Sinegal, the founder of Costco. Sinegal was a casual, plain-speaking native of Pittsburgh, a Wilford Brimley look-alike with a bushy white mustache and an amiable countenance that concealed the steely determination of an entrepreneur. Well into retirement age, he showed no interest in slowing down. The two had plenty in common. For years Sinegal, like Bezos, had battled Wall Street analysts who wanted him to raise Costco’s prices on clothing, appliances, and packaged foods. Like Bezos, Sinegal had rejected multiple acquisition offers over the years, including one from Sam Walton, and he liked to say he didn’t have an exit strategy—he was building a company for the long term. Bezos had set up the meeting to ask Sinegal about using Costco as a wholesale supplier for products that manufacturers still wouldn’t sell to Amazon. That idea never went anywhere, but over the next hour, Bezos listened carefully and once again drew key lessons from a more experienced retail veteran. Sinegal explained the Costco model to Bezos: it was all about customer loyalty. There are some four thousand products in the average Costco warehouse, including limited-quantity seasonal or trendy products called treasure-hunt items that are spread out around the building. Though the selection of products in individual categories is limited, there are copious quantities of everything there—and it is all dirt cheap. Costco buys in bulk and marks up everything at a standard, across-the-board 14 percent, even when it could charge more. It doesn’t advertise at all, and earns most of its gross profit from the annual membership fees. “The membership fee is a onetime pain, but it’s reinforced every time customers walk in and see forty-seven-inch televisions that are two hundred dollars less than anyplace else,” Sinegal said. “It reinforces the value of the concept. Customers know they will find really cheap stuff at Costco.” Costco’s low prices generated heavy sales volume, and the company then used its significant size to demand the best possible deals from suppliers and raise its per-unit gross profit dollars. Its vendors hadn’t been happy about being squeezed but they eventually came around. “You can fill Safeco Field with the people that don’t want to sell to us,” Sinegal said. “But over a period of time, we generate enough business and prove we are a good customer and pay our bills and keep our promises. Then they say, ‘Why the hell am I not doing business with these guys. I gotta be stupid. They are a great form of distribution.’ “My approach has always been that value trumps everything,” Sinegal continued. “The reason people are prepared to come to our strange places to shop is that we have value. We deliver on that value constantly. There are no annuities in this business.” A decade later and finally preparing to retire, Sinegal remembers that conversation well. “I think Jeff looked at it and thought that was something that would apply to his business as well,” he says. Sinegal doesn’t regret educating an entrepreneur who would evolve into a ferocious competitor. “I’ve always had the opinion that we have shamelessly stolen any good ideas,” he says. In 2008, Sinegal bought a Kindle e-reader that turned out to be defective and wrote Bezos a laudatory e-mail after Amazon’s customer service replaced his device for free. Bezos wrote back, “I want you to consider me your personal customer service agent on the Kindle.” Perhaps Amazon’s founder realized he owed Sinegal a debt of gratitude, because he took the lessons he learned during that coffee in 2001 and applied them with a vengeance. The Monday after the meeting with Sinegal, Bezos opened an S Team meeting by saying he was determined to make a change. The company’s pricing strategy, he said, according to several executives who were there, was incoherent. Amazon preached low prices but in some cases its prices were higher than competitors’. Like Walmart and Costco, Bezos said, Amazon should have “everyday low prices.” The company should look at other large retailers and match their lowest prices, all the time. If Amazon could stay competitive on price, it could win the day on unlimited selection and on the convenience afforded to customers who didn’t have to get in the car to go to a store and wait in line. That July, as a result of the Sinegal meeting, Amazon announced it was cutting prices of books, music, and videos by 20 to 30 percent. “There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop,” he said in that month’s quarterly conference call with analysts, coining a new Jeffism to be repeated over and over ad nauseam for years.
9. Gise, who had been a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy during World War II, was in many ways Bezos’s mentor. He instilled in Bezos the values of self-reliance and resourcefulness, as well as a visceral distaste for inefficiency. “There was very little he couldn’t do himself,” Jackie Bezos says of her father. “He thought everything was something you could tackle in a garage.” Bezos and Pop Gise repaired windmills and castrated bulls; they attempted to grade dirt roads and built contraptions like an automatic gate opener and a crane to move the heavy parts of a broken-down D6 Caterpillar bulldozer.
10. Bezos’s grandparents taught him a lesson in compassion that he related decades later, in a 2010 commencement speech at Princeton. Every few years Pop and Mattie Gise hooked an Airstream trailer to their car and caravanned around the country with other Airstream owners, and they sometimes took Jeff with them. On one of these road trips, when Bezos was ten and passing time in the back seat of the car, he took some mortality statistics he had heard on an antismoking public service announcement and calculated that his grandmother’s smoking habit would take nine years off her life. When he poked his head into the front seat to matter-of-factly inform her of this, she burst into tears, and Pop Gise pulled over and stopped the car. In fact, Mattie Gise fought cancer for years and would eventually succumb to it. Bezos described what happened next in his speech at Princeton. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
11. An interviewer once asked Bezos why he was motivated to accomplish so much, considering that he had already amassed an exceedingly large fortune. “I have realized about myself that I’m very motivated by people counting on me,” he answered. “I like to be counted on.”
12. Some Amazon employees currently advance the theory that Bezos, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison, lacks a certain degree of empathy and that as a result he treats workers like expendable resources without taking into account their contributions to the company. That in turn allows him to coldly allocate capital and manpower and make hyperrational business decisions while another executive might let emotion and personal relationships intrude. But they also acknowledge that Bezos is primarily consumed with improving the company’s performance and customer service, and that personnel issues are secondary. “This is not somebody who takes pleasure at tearing someone a new asshole. He is not that kind of person,” says Kim Rachmeler. “Jeff doesn’t tolerate stupidity, even accidental stupidity.” Right or wrong, Bezos’s behavior was often easier to accept because he was so frequently on target with his criticisms, to the amazement and often irritation of employees. Bruce Jones, the former Amazon vice president, describes leading a five-engineer team working to create algorithms to optimize pickers’ movements in the fulfillment centers while the company was trying to solve the problem of batches. The group spent nine months on the task, then presented their work to Bezos and the S Team. “We had beautiful documents and everyone was really prepared,” Jones says. Bezos read the paper, said, “You’re all wrong,” stood up, and started writing on the whiteboard. “He had no background in control theory, no background in operating systems,” Jones says. “He only had minimum experience in the distribution centers and never spent weeks and months out on the line.” But Bezos laid out his argument on the whiteboard and “every stinking thing he put down was correct and true,” Jones says. “It would be easier to stomach if we could prove he was wrong but we couldn’t. That was a typical interaction with Jeff. He had this unbelievable ability to be incredibly intelligent about things he had nothing to do with, and he was totally ruthless about communicating it.”
13. In many ways, the introduction of Amazon Prime was an act of faith. The company had little concrete idea how the program would affect orders or customers’ likelihood to shop in other categories beyond media. If each expedited shipment cost the company $8, and if a shipping-club member placed twenty orders a year, it would cost the company $160 in shipping, far above the $79 fee. The service was expensive to run, and there was no clear way to break even. “We made this decision even though every single financial analysis said we were completely crazy to give two-day shipping for free,” says Diego Piacentini. But Bezos was going on gut and experience. He knew that Super Saver Shipping had changed customers’ behavior, motivating them to place bigger orders and shop in new categories. He also knew from 1-Click ordering that when friction was removed from online shopping, customers spent more. That accelerated the company’s fabled flywheel—the virtuous cycle. When customers spent more, Amazon’s volumes increased, so it could lower shipping costs and negotiate new deals with vendors. That saved the company money, which would help pay for Prime and lead back to lower prices.
14. But on this particular visit to Bezos in 2002, O’Reilly had a cogent case to make, and Bezos listened. The publisher showed Bezos Amarank, a sophisticated tool his company had created that visited the Amazon website every few hours and copied the rankings of O’Reilly Media books and the books of its competitors. It was a clunky process that relied on a primitive technique called screen scraping, and O’Reilly suggested that Amazon should develop a series of online tools called application programming interfaces, or APIs, that allowed third parties to easily harvest data about its prices, products, and sales rankings. O’Reilly spoke ambitiously about parceling out entire sectors of the Amazon store and allowing other websites to build on top of them. “Companies need to think not just what they can get for themselves from new technologies but how they can enable others,” he said.
15. At the same time, Bezos became enamored with a book called Creation, by Steve Grand, the developer of a 1990s video game called Creatures that allowed players to guide and nurture a seemingly intelligent organism on their computer screens. Grand wrote that his approach to creating intelligent life was to focus on designing simple computational building blocks, called primitives, and then sit back and watch surprising behaviors emerge. Just as electronics are built from basic components like resistors and capacitors, and as living beings spring from genetic building blocks, Grand wrote that sophisticated AI can emerge from cybernetic primitives, and then it’s up to the “ratchet of evolution to change the design.” The book, though dense and challenging, was widely discussed in the book clubs of Amazon executives at the time and it helped to crystallize the debate over the problems with the company’s own infrastructure. If Amazon wanted to stimulate creativity among its developers, it shouldn’t try to guess what kind of services they might want; such guesses would be based on patterns of the past. Instead, it should be creating primitives—the building blocks of computing—and then getting out of the way. In other words, it needed to break its infrastructure down into the smallest, simplest atomic components and allow developers to freely access them with as much flexibility as possible. As Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: “Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.” Bezos directed groups of engineers in brainstorming possible primitives. Storage, bandwidth, messaging, payments, and processing all made the list. In an informal way—as if the company didn’t quite know the insight around primitives was an extraordinary one—Amazon then started building teams to develop the services described on that list. In late 2004, Chris Pinkham, head of the company’s IT infrastructure, told Dalzell that he had decided to return with his family to their native South Africa. At this point, A9 had taken root in Palo Alto, and Dalzell was busy establishing remote developer centers in Scotland and India, among other places. Dalzell suggested to Pinkham that instead of leaving Amazon, he open an office in Cape Town. They brainstormed possible projects and finally settled on trying to build a service that would allow a developer to run any application, regardless of its type, on Amazon’s servers. Pinkham and a few colleagues studied the problem and came up with a plan to use a new open-source tool called Xen, a layer of software that made it easier to run numerous applications on a single physical server in a data center. Pinkham took colleague Chris Brown along with him to South Africa and they set up shop in a nondescript office complex in Constantia, a winemaking region northeast of Cape Town, near a school and a small homeless encampment. Their efforts would become the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2—the service that is at the heart of AWS and that became the engine of the Web 2.0 boom.
16. By 2007 there were a hundred thousand workers on Mechanical Turk in more than one hundred countries. But it didn’t take off in the way Bezos clearly hoped it would, or at least it hasn’t yet. One obvious reason is that the exceedingly low wages on Mechanical Turk have the greatest appeal in less developed countries, yet most impoverished workers in the third world do not own Internet-connected PCs. When Amazon’s other Web services unexpectedly took off in the following years, Bezos devoted considerably more attention and resources to them. Just as in Amazon’s early days, when automated personalization replaced editorial, machines, not people hiding inside them, would drive Amazon’s long-awaited big breakthrough. In March 2006, Amazon introduced the Simple Storage Service, which allowed other websites and developers to store computer files like photos, documents, or video-game player profiles on Amazon’s servers. S3 remained alone and somewhat overlooked, like a section of a fence that had not yet been finished. A month after the launch, Alan Atlas recalled, it crashed for nine hours, and hardly anyone in the outside world noticed. Then a few months later, the Elastic Compute Cloud went to public beta, allowing developers to actually run their own programs on Amazon’s computers. According to Chris Brown, who returned from South Africa for the launch, Amazon opened the first servers to customers on the East Coast of the United States, and developers rushed in so quickly that the initial batch of computers was taken up before Amazon had a chance to let in folks on the West Coast. Part of AWS’s immediate attraction to startups was its business model. Bezos viewed Web services as similar to an electric utility that allowed customers to pay for only what they used and to increase or decrease their consumption at any time. “The best analogy that I know is the electric grid,” Bezos said. “You go back in time a hundred years, if you wanted to have electricity, you had to build your own little electric power plant, and a lot of factories did this. As soon as the electric power grid came online, they dumped their electric power generator, and they started buying power off the grid. It just makes more sense. And that’s what is starting to happen with infrastructure computing.” Bezos wanted AWS to be a utility with discount rates, even if that meant losing money in the short term. Willem van Biljon, who worked with Chris Pinkham on EC2 and stayed for a few months after Pinkham quit in 2006, proposed pricing EC2 instances at fifteen cents an hour, a rate that he believed would allow the company to break even on the service. In an S Team meeting before EC2 launched, Bezos unilaterally revised that to ten cents. “You realize you could lose money on that for a long time,” van Biljon told him. “Great,” Bezos said. Bezos believed his company had a natural advantage in its cost structure and ability to survive in the thin atmosphere of low-margin businesses. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google, he suspected, would hesitate to get into such markets because it would depress their overall profit margins. Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn’t want to repeat “Steve Jobs’s mistake” of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition. The comment reflected his distinctive business philosophy. Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals’ investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible. (He was partly right about the iPhone; its sizable profits did indeed attract a deluge of competition, starting with smartphones running Google’s Android operating system. But the pioneering smartphone is also a fantastically lucrative product for Apple and its shareholders in a way that AWS has not been, at least so far.) Bezos’s belief was borne out, and AWS’s deliberately low rates had their intended effect; Google chairman Eric Schmidt said it was at least two years before he noticed that the founders of seemingly every startup he visited told him they were building their systems atop Amazon’s servers. “All of the sudden, it was all Amazon,” Schmidt says. “It’s a significant benefit when every interesting fast-growing company starts on your platform.” Microsoft announced a similar cloud initiative called Azure in 2010. In 2012, Google announced its own Compute Engine. “Let’s give them credit,” Schmidt says. “The book guys got computer science, they figured out the analytics, and they built something significant.” Just like Creation author Steve Grand had predicted, the creatures were evolving in ways that Bezos could not have imagined. It was the combination of EC2 and S3—storage and compute, two primitives linked together—that transformed both AWS and the technology world. Startups no longer needed to spend their venture capital on buying servers and hiring specialized engineers to run them. Infrastructure costs were variable instead of fixed, and they could grow in direct proportion to revenues. It freed companies to experiment, to change their business models with a minimum of pain, and to keep up with the rapidly growing audiences of erupting social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
17. Bezos’s colleagues and friends often attribute Amazon’s tardiness in digital music to Bezos’s lack of interest in music of any kind. In high school, Bezos forced himself to memorize the call letters of local Miami radio stations in an effort to fake musical fluency in conversations with his peers.8 Colleagues remember that on the solemn road trip from Target’s offices in Minneapolis after 9/11, Bezos indiscriminately grabbed stacks of CDs from the bargain rack of a convenience store, as if they were all interchangeable. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, lived and breathed music. He was a notoriously devoted fan of Bob Dylan and the Beatles and had once dated singer Joan Baez. Jobs’s personal interests guided Apple’s strategy. Bezos’s particular passions would have the same defining impact at Amazon. Bezos didn’t just love books—he fully imbibed them, methodically processing each detail. Stewart Brand, the author of How Buildings Learn, among other works, recalls being startled when Bezos showed him his personal copy of the 1995 book. Each page was filled with Bezos’s carefully scribbled notes.
18. One day in 2004, Bezos called Kessel into his office and abruptly took away his impressive job, with all of its responsibilities and subordinates. He said he wanted Kessel to take over Amazon’s fledgling digital efforts. Kessel was skeptical. “My first reaction was that I already had the best job in the world,” he says. “Ultimately Jeff talked about building brand-new things, and I got excited by the challenge.” Bezos was adamant that Kessel could not run both the physical and digital-media businesses at the same time. “If you are running both businesses you will never go after the digital opportunity with tenacity,” he said. By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.” Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading device, Bezos told him, “You are basically already late.” With no personal knowledge of the hardware business and no internal resources at the company to draw on, Kessel went on a fact-finding mission to Silicon Valley, meeting with hardware experts from Apple and Palm and with executives from the famed industrial design firm Ideo. He learned that Amazon would need not just designers but electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, wireless engineers—the list was endless. Following Christensen’s dictates as if they were instructions in a recipe, Kessel set up another subsidiary in Palo Alto in addition to A9. To take the helm of the new division, he hired Gregg Zehr, an easygoing former vice president of engineering at Palm Computing who kept a jazz guitar in his office. Jateen Parekh, a former engineer at set-top-box maker ReplayTV (an early TiVo rival), became the first employee, and a few others were hired as well. There was no office to report to, so they set up shop in an empty room in the headquarters of A9. Zehr and his colleagues set about furnishing the new division with a name alluring enough to attract the best and brightest engineers from Silicon Valley. They eventually settled on Lab126. The 1 stands for a, the 26 for z; it’s a subtle indication of Bezos’s dream to allow customers to buy any book ever published, from a to z.
19. Lab126 was soon given extensive resources but it also had to contend with the unfettered imagination of Bezos. Amazon’s founder wanted his new e-reading device to be so easy to use that a grandmother could operate it, and he argued that configuring devices to work with WiFi networks was too complicated for non-tech-savvy users. He didn’t want to force customers to connect the device to a PC, so the only alternative was to build cellular access right into the hardware, the equivalent of embedding a wireless phone in each unit. Nothing like that had been tried before. Bezos insisted that customers should never have to know the wireless connection was there or even pay for access. “I thought it was insane, I really did,” Parekh says. In those early months, much of the early direction for the Kindle was set. Zehr and Parekh made the decision to explore the low-powered black-and-white display technology called E Ink that, years before, Martin Eberhard had found too primitive and expensive. It used millions of tiny microcapsules, each about the diameter of a human hair and containing positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a positive electric field is applied, positively charged particles move to the top of the microcapsule, making that spot appear white; when a negative electric field is applied, negative particles migrate up, and the spot appears black. Unlike LCD systems, the technology worked well under direct sunlight, used very little battery power, and was exceedingly easy on the eyes. In a sense, Amazon got lucky. A technology perfectly suited for long-form reading on a device (and terrible for everything else) just happened to be maturing after a decade of development.
20. The Pentagram designers, both British born, began by studying the actual physics of reading—the physical aspects of the pastime, such as how readers turn pages and hold books in their hands. They forced themselves to read on existing e-readers, like the Sony Libre and the old Rocketbook, and on PDAs like the iPaq from Compaq and Palm’s Treo. They brought in focus groups, conducted phone interviews, and even went up to Seattle to talk to Bezos himself, trying to deconstruct a process that for many hundreds of years people had taken for granted. “We were pushing for the subconscious qualities that made it feel like you are reading a book,” says Hobbs. One of the primary conclusions from their research was that a good book disappears in the reader’s hands. Bezos later called this the top design objective. “Kindle also had to get out of the way and disappear so that you could enter the author’s world,” he said.
21. The meetings could get tense. Hobbs, Whitehorn, and Brunner wanted to strip out complexity and make the device as streamlined and inconspicuous as possible. Bezos also wanted a simple, iconic design but insisted on adding a keyboard so users could easily search for book titles and make annotations. (He envisioned sitting in a taxi with Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg and keying in and downloading an e-book right there in the cab.) Bezos toted around a BlackBerry messaging device at the time and told the designers, “I want you to join my BlackBerry and my book.” In one trip to Seattle, the designers stubbornly brought models that left out the keyboard. Bezos gave them a withering look. “Look, we already talked about this,” he said. “I might be wrong but at the same time I’ve got a bit more to stand on than you have.” “I remember being very silent for the rest of that meeting,” Hobbs says. They complied and designed oblong buttons, based on the style of the BlackBerry, while trying to accommodate the angles that reader’s fingers might take moving across the device. There were similar disputes about wireless connectivity. The Pentagram designers couldn’t understand how the economics of the wireless connection could work and assumed Amazon would be asking the user to pay a wireless charge every time he or she bought a book. At one point, they pitched Bezos on a process similar to the iTunes model, which required making the bookstore accessible on a PC. Bezos pushed back. “Here’s my scenario, I’m going to the airport. I need a book to read. I want to enter it into the device and download it right there from my car.” “But you can’t do that,” Hobbs replied. “I’ll decide what I can do,” Bezos said. “I’ll figure this out and it is not going to be a business model you understand. You are the designers, I want you to design this and I’ll think about the business model.”
22. During these unproductive months, Amazon developers conceived of a potential shortcut to their goal, which they dubbed Topaz. Topaz was a program to take the scanned digital files from Search Inside the Book and repurpose them in a format suitable for the Kindle. Amazon offered this as an option to publishers, arguing that it would help them decrease the costs of digitizing their catalogs, although the digital file would remain exclusive to the Kindle. Large publishers like Simon and Schuster did not want to create a new dependency on Amazon, but some smaller publishers jumped at the option. By early 2007, Amazon could demonstrate the Kindle’s wireless access, and, finally, some publishers understood its potential. John Sargent, the CEO of Macmillan, and some other executives became converts when they recognized for the first time that giving customers instant gratification—the immediate download of any e-book at any time—might allow Amazon to succeed where Sony and others had failed. Of course, as Bezos had feared, it leaked. Engadget, the technology blog, had the first details about Amazon’s new e-reading device, and soon after, Victoria Barnsley, the CEO of HarperCollins UK, confirmed at an industry event that she had seen the device and was “rather impressed.”
23. The next few months were tense. Amazon’s inducements to publishers were followed by threats. Publishers that didn’t digitize enough of their catalogs, or didn’t do it fast enough, were told they faced losing their prominence in Amazon’s search results and in its recommendations to customers. Years earlier, the music labels had scampered into the arms of Apple despite their reservations, since they were facing the even more ominous threat of rampant music piracy. But books were not as easily pirated and shared online, and book publishers feared no similar bogeyman. So Bezos finally had to turn Amazon into one. What had started out as Amazon’s soliciting publishers for help had evolved into the equivalent of a parent threatening a child. After realizing they did not yet have the Oprah Winfrey book club pick, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Porco sent an e-mail to Random House’s head of sales demanding to know why there was no e-book version available. The note, which came during the middle of the night New York time, was so contemptuous and incendiary that it made the rounds within the publishing company. (Knopf, the Random House imprint that published the book, wouldn’t have the digital rights for another year.)
24. And there was one other ingredient in this piquant stew. Bezos decided that the digital versions of the most popular books and new releases would have a flat price of $9.99. There was no research behind that number—it was Bezos’s gut call, fashioned after Apple’s successful ninety-nine-cent price tag for a digital single in iTunes and based on the assumption that consumers would expect to pay less for an e-book than they did for a traditional book, as an e-book had none of the costs associated with printing and storage. Since Amazon bought e-books from publishers at the same wholesale price as it bought physical books, typically paying around fifteen dollars for a book that would retail at thirty, that meant it would lose money on many of its sales. Bezos was fine with that—he believed publishers would eventually be forced to lower their wholesale prices on e-books to reflect the lower costs of publication. In the meantime, it was just the kind of investment in Amazon’s future that he loved. “Customers are smart, and we felt like they would expect and deserve digital books to be lower priced than physical books,” says Steve Kessel. Amazon knew quite well that publishers would absolutely hate the $9.99 price. The $9.99 e-books were considerably more appealing to some customers than the more expensive hardcovers, the industry’s most profitable format, and the pricing pulled the rug out from under traditional retailers, particularly independent booksellers, who would suddenly find their shelves stocked with what some book buyers might soon view as overly expensive relics. Everyone had watched this precise dynamic play out in music, with disastrous consequences for physical retailers. So Amazon decided not to let publishers know about the planned $9.99 price, lest they object. This was easily rationalized; retailers have no obligation to tell their suppliers how they plan to price products, and doing so could theoretically raise the specter of vertical price fixing and attract the attention of antitrust authorities. Still, Amazon had approached publishers as a partner, and now it was deliberately withholding a key piece of information. “We were instructed not to talk about pricing strategy,” Jeff Steele says. “We knew that if we priced e-books too low, they would fear it would devalue their product. So we just said pricing had not yet been decided.”
25. The new low price for top-selling e-books changed everything. It tilted the playing field in the direction of digital, putting additional pressure on physical retailers, threatening independent bookstores, and giving Amazon even more market power. The publishers had seen over many years what Amazon did with this kind of additional leverage. It exacted more concessions and passed the savings on to customers in the form of lower prices and shipping discounts, which helped it amass even greater market share—and more negotiating leverage. All this would take a few years to sink in, but it became widely understood when the Kindle started gaining real momentum with the introduction of the Kindle 2 in early 2009. The gazelles were wounded, the cheetah was on the loose, and the subsequent high-profile business and legal dramas would shake the book industry to its foundation.

If you liked the above content, I'd definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

Here's my problem: People book 30min meetings with me via Calendly but they are scattered (say one at 4pm, then one at 5pm, another at 6:30pm). I want a solution that can schedule these meetings in a continuous stretch of time.

The available slots should be prioritized dynamically using multiple customizable rules. The first meeting of the day can be scheduled anytime. However, while scheduling more meetings, they should only see the slots adjacent to my current meeting slot(s). Other slots should be opened only when they explicitly mention that they aren't available in any of the adjacent slot(s). Other rules should limit the number of total meetings and the number of continuous meetings.

Let's say I have slots open from 11am-1pm and 4pm-6pm. The first person to book can pick any time, say they choose 4pm. Now the ideal solution should make the second person choose 4:30pm preferentially.

If you are interested in building this, hit reply.

The content is really good and crisp - it's just that I had read most of it in bits and pieces already.

Here are my notes from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant:

1. If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it’ll do wonders for your self-esteem.
2. I like to think that if I lost all my money and you dropped me on a random street in any English-speaking country, within five or ten years I’d be wealthy again because it’s just a skillset I’ve developed that anyone can develop.
3. The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn. The old model of making money is going to school for four years, getting your degree, and working as a professional for thirty years. But things change fast now. Now, you have to come up to speed on a new profession within nine months, and it’s obsolete four years later. But within those three productive years, you can get very wealthy. It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a brand-new field in nine to twelve months than to have studied the “right” thing a long time ago. You really care about having studied the foundations, so you’re not scared of any book. If you go to the library and there’s a book you cannot understand, you have to dig down and say, “What is the foundation required for me to learn this?” Foundations are super important. Basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing calculus. Similarly, being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important than being able to write poetry, having an extensive vocabulary, or speaking seven different foreign languages. Knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital marketer or click optimizer. Foundations are key. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things.
4. Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.
5. Luckily, in modern society, there’s no more debtors’ prison and people aren’t imprisoned or executed for losing other people’s money, but we’re still socially hardwired to not fail in public under our own names. The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power.
6. You’re more likely to have skills society does not yet know how to train other people to do. If someone can train other people how to do something, then they can replace you. If they can replace you, then they don’t have to pay you a lot. You want to know how to do something other people don’t know how to do at the time period when those skills are in demand.
7. The final form of leverage is brand new—the most democratic form. It is: “products with no marginal cost of replication.” This includes books, media, movies, and code. Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission.
8. This book is a form of leverage. Long ago, I would have had to sit in a lecture hall and lecture each of you personally. I would have maybe reached a few hundred people, and that would have been that.
9. Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream.
10. What you want in life is to be in control of your time. You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs. If you do something incredible to move the needle on the business, they have to pay you. Especially if they don’t know how you did it because it’s innate to your obsession or your skill or your innate abilities, they’re going to have to keep paying you to do it.
11. Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess.
12. Imagine someone comes along who demonstrably has slightly better judgment. They’re right 85 percent of the time instead of 75 percent. You will pay them $50 million, $100 million, $200 million, whatever it takes, because 10 percent better judgment steering a $100 billion ship is very valuable. CEOs are highly paid because of their leverage. Small differences in judgment and capability really get amplified.
13. There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game. Because money is not going to solve all of your problems, but it’s going to solve all of your money problems. People realize that, so they want to make money. But at the same time, many of them, deep down, believe they can’t make money. They don’t want any wealth creation to happen. So, they attack the whole enterprise by saying, “Well, making money is evil. You shouldn’t do it.” But they’re actually playing the other game, which is the status game. They’re trying to be high status in the eyes of other people watching by saying, “Well, I don’t need money. We don’t want money.” Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy.
14. Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do. We spend very little time deciding which relationship to get into. We spend so much time in a job, but we spend so little time deciding which job to get into. Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life, but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city to live in.
15. An old boss once warned: “You’ll never be rich since you’re obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that’s just good enough.”
16. Humans evolved as hunters and gatherers where we all worked for ourselves. It’s only at the beginning of agriculture we became more hierarchical. The Industrial Revolution and factories made us extremely hierarchical because one individual couldn’t necessarily own or build a factory, but now, thanks to the internet, we’re going back to an age where more and more people can work for themselves. I would rather be a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried. Because even a failed entrepreneur has the skill set to make it on their own. There are almost 7 billion people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7 billion companies. I learned how to make money because it was a necessity. After it stopped being a necessity, I stopped caring about it. At least for me, work was a means to an end. Making money was a means to an end. I’m much more interested in solving problems than I am in making money. Any end goal will just lead to another goal, lead to another goal. We just play games in life. When you grow up, you’re playing the school game, or you’re playing the social game. Then you’re playing the money game, and then you’re playing the status game. These games just have longer and longer and longer-lived horizons. At some point, at least I believe, these are all just games. These are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through the game. Then you just get tired of games. I would say I’m at the stage where I’m just tired of games. I don’t think there is any end goal or purpose. I’m just living life as I want to. I’m literally just doing it moment to moment. I want to be off the hedonic treadmill. What you really want is freedom. You want freedom from your money problems, right? I think that’s okay. Once you can solve your money problems, either by lowering your lifestyle or by making enough money, you want to retire. Not retirement at sixty-five years old, sitting in a nursing home collecting a check retirement—it’s a different definition.
17. Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
18. Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering. If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you’ve done, it’s all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did. However, anything you’re given doesn’t matter. You have your four limbs, your brain, your head, your skin—that’s all for granted. You have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life. Making money is a fine thing to choose. Go struggle. It is hard. I’m not going to say it’s easy. It’s really hard, but the tools are all available. It’s all out there.
19. “Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”
20. The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see the reality.
21. It’s actually really important to have empty space. If you don’t have a day or two every week in your calendar where you’re not always in meetings, and you’re not always busy, then you’re not going to be able to think. You’re not going to be able to have good ideas for your business. You’re not going to be able to make good judgments. I also encourage taking at least one day a week (preferably two, because if you budget two, you’ll end up with one) where you just have time to think. It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time.
22. Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.
23. A contrarian isn’t one who always objects—that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform. Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.
24. Our egos are constructed in our formative years—our first two decades. They get constructed by our environment, our parents, society. Then, we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy. We interpret anything new through our ego: “How do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be?”
25. Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
26. Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
27. The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.
28. The reality is, I don’t actually read much compared to what people think. I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success I’ve had in my life and any intelligence I might have. Real people don’t read an hour a day. Real people, I think, read a minute a day or less. Making it an actual habit is the most important thing. It almost doesn’t matter what you read. Eventually, you will read enough things (and your interests will lead you there) that it will dramatically improve your life. Just like the best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day, I would say for books, blogs, tweets, or whatever—anything with ideas and information and learning—the best ones to read are the ones you’re excited about reading all the time.
29. I’ll start at the beginning, but I’ll move fast. If it’s not interesting, I’ll just start flipping ahead, skimming, or speed reading. If it doesn’t grab my attention within the first chapter in a meaningful, positive way, I’ll either drop the book or skip ahead a few chapters. I don’t believe in delayed gratification when there are an infinite number of books out there to read. There are so many great books. The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power. Generally, I’ll skim. I’ll fast forward. I’ll try and find a part to catch my attention. Most books have one point to make. (Obviously, this is nonfiction. I’m not talking about fiction.) They have one point to make, they make it, and then they give you example after example after example after example, and they apply it to explain everything in the world. Once I feel like I’ve gotten the gist, I feel very comfortable putting the book down. There’s a lot of these, what I would call pseudoscience bestsellers…People are like, “Oh, did you read this book?” I always say yes, but the reality is I read maybe two chapters of it. I got the gist. If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it.
30. When you’re reading a book and you’re confused, that confusion is similar to the pain you get in the gym when you’re working out. But you’re building mental muscles instead of physical muscles. Learn how to learn and read the books.
31. If you’re a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options for how to make money. You can always see what’s coming up in society, what the value is, where the demand is, and you can learn to come up to speed.
32. When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution. If you’re trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane, you should read something written in the modern age because this problem was created in the modern age and the solution is great in the modern age. If you’re talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better. Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct. I wanted to get back into reading these sorts of books.
33. Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.
34. Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition.
35. People mistakenly believe happiness is just about positive thoughts and positive actions. The more I’ve read, the more I’ve learned, and the more I’ve experienced (because I verify this for myself), every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought. It is a contrast to something negative. The Tao Te Ching says this more articulately than I ever could, but it’s all duality and polarity. If I say I’m happy, that means I was sad at some point. If I say he’s attractive, then somebody else is unattractive. Every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive. To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. If I latch onto a feeling, if I say, “Oh, I’m happy now,” and I want to stay happy, then I’m going to drop out of that happiness. Now, suddenly, the mind is moving. It’s trying to attach to something. It’s trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation. Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is.
36. I think a lot of us have this low-level pervasive feeling of anxiety. If you pay attention to your mind, sometimes you’re just running around doing your thing and you’re not feeling great, and you notice your mind is chattering and chattering about something. Maybe you can’t sit still…There’s this “nexting” thing where you’re sitting in one spot thinking about where you should be next. It’s always the next thing, then the next thing, the next thing after that, then the next thing after that creating this pervasive anxiety. It’s most obvious if you ever just sit down and try and do nothing, nothing. I mean nothing, I mean not read a book, I mean not listen to music, I mean literally just sit down and do nothing. You can’t do it, because there’s anxiety always trying to make you get up and go, get up and go, get up and go. I think it’s important just being aware the anxiety is making you unhappy. The anxiety is just a series of running thoughts. How I combat anxiety: I don’t try and fight it, I just notice I’m anxious because of all these thoughts. I try to figure out, “Would I rather be having this thought right now, or would I rather have my peace?” Because as long as I have my thoughts, I can’t have my peace. You’ll notice when I say happiness, I mean peace. When a lot of people say happiness, they mean joy or bliss, but I’ll take peace.
37. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I don’t think most of us realize that’s what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long and then wonder why we’re unhappy. I like to stay aware of it, because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time, and I also recognize it as the axis of my suffering. I realize the area where I’ve chosen to be unhappy.
38. Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.
39. I don’t think life is that hard. I think we make it hard. One of the things I’m trying to get rid of is the word “should.” Whenever the word “should” creeps up in your mind, it’s guilt or social programming. Doing something because you “should” basically means you don’t actually want to do it. It’s just making you miserable, so I’m trying to eliminate as many “shoulds” from my life as possible.
40. Jealousy was a very hard emotion for me to overcome. When I was young, I had a lot of jealousy. By and by, I learned to get rid of it. It still crops up every now and then. It’s such a poisonous emotion because, at the end of the day, you’re no better off with jealousy. You’re unhappier, and the person you’re jealous of is still successful or good-looking or whatever they are. One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous. Once I came to that realization, jealousy faded away because I don’t want to be anybody else. I’m perfectly happy being me. By the way, even that is under my control. To be happy being me. It’s just there are no social rewards for it.
41. When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.
42. At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.
43. If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
44. Every time you catch yourself desiring something, say, “Is it so important to me I’ll be unhappy unless this goes my way?” You’re going to find with the vast majority of things it’s just not true.
45. Tell your friends you’re a happy person. Then, you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person.
46. Increase serotonin in the brain without drugs: Sunlight, exercise, positive thinking, and tryptophan.
47. One hack is stepping back and looking at previous bits of suffering I’ve had in my life. I write them down. “Last time you broke up with somebody, last time you had a business failure, last time you had a health issue, what happened?” I can trace the growth and improvement that came from it years later. I have another hack I use for minor annoyances. When they happen, a part of me will instantly react negatively. But I’ve learned to mentally ask myself, “What is the positive of this situation?” “Okay, I’ll be late for a meeting. But what is the benefit to me? I get to relax and watch the birds for a moment. I’ll also spend less time in that boring meeting.” There’s almost always something positive. Even if you can’t come up with something positive, you can say, “Well, the Universe is going to teach me something now. Now I get to listen and learn.” To give you the simplest example: I was at an event and afterward, someone flooded my inbox with a whole bunch of photos they took. There was a tiny instant judgment saying, “Come on, couldn’t you have just selected a few of the best? Who sends a hundred photos?” But then immediately I asked myself, “What is the positive?” The positive is that I get to pick my five favorite photos. I get to use my judgment. Over the last year, by practicing this hack enough, I’ve managed to go from taking a couple of seconds to think of a response, to now my brain doing it almost instantaneously. That’s a habit you can train yourself to do.
48. A lot of what goes on today is what many of you are doing right now—beating yourself up and scribbling notes and saying, “I need to do this, and I need to do that, and I need to do…” No, you don’t need to do anything. All you should do is what you want to do. If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then, you get to be you.
49. My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Second, it’s my mental health. Third, it’s my spiritual health. Then, it’s my family’s health. Then, it’s my family’s wellbeing. After that, I can go out and do whatever I need to do with the rest of the world.
50. We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance. There’s a constant struggle to say no when your genes always want to say yes. Yes to sugar. Yes to staying in this relationship. Yes to alcohol. Yes to drugs. Yes, yes, yes. Our bodies don’t know how to say no.
51. The daily morning workout. That has been a complete game-changer. It’s made me feel healthier, younger. It’s made me not go out late. It came from one simple thing, which is everybody says, “I don’t have time.” Basically, whenever you throw any so-called good habit at somebody, they’ll have an excuse for themselves. Usually the most common is “I don’t have time.” “I don’t have time” is just another way of saying “It’s not a priority.” What you really have to do is say whether it is a priority or not. If something is your number one priority, then you will do it. That’s just the way life works. If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.
52. Your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system. It’s involuntary, but you can also control it.
53. I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold. Your body saying it’s cold is different than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally suffer over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes isn’t going to kill you. Having a cold shower helps you re-learn that lesson every morning. Now hot showers are just one less thing I need out of life.
54. When your mind quiets, you stop taking everything around you for granted. You start to notice the details. You think, “Wow, I live in such a beautiful place. It’s so great that I have clothes, and I can go to Starbucks and get a coffee anytime. Look at these people—each one has a perfectly valid and complete life going on in their own heads.” It pops us out of the story we’re constantly telling ourselves. If you stop talking to yourself for even ten minutes, if you stop obsessing over your own story, you’ll realize we are really far up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and life is pretty good.
55. Life-hack: When in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way.
56. For your entire life, things have been happening to you. Some good, some bad, most of which you have processed and dissolved, but a few stuck with you. Over time, more and more stuck with you, and they almost became like these barnacles stuck to you. You lost your childhood sense of wonder and of being present and happy. You lost your inner happiness because you built up this personality of unresolved pain, errors, fears, and desires that glommed onto you like a bunch of barnacles. How do you get those barnacles off you? What happens in meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your mind. These things will start bubbling up. It’s like a giant inbox of unanswered emails, going back to your childhood. They will come out one by one, and you will be forced to deal with them. You will be forced to resolve them. Resolving them doesn’t take any work—you just observe them. Now you’re an adult with some distance, time, and space from previous events, and you can just resolve them. You can be much more objective about how you view them. Over time, you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unresolved things you have in your mind. Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental “inbox zero.” When you open your mental “email” and there are none, that is a pretty amazing feeling. It’s a state of joy and bliss and peace. Once you have it, you don’t want to give it up. If you can get a free hour of bliss every morning just by sitting and closing your eyes, that is worth its weight in gold. It will change your life.
57. Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself. It only “works” when done for its own sake. Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation.
58. The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
59. I don’t measure my effectiveness at all. I don’t believe in self-measurement. I feel like this is a form of self-discipline, self-punishment, and self-conflict. If you hurt other people because they have expectations of you, that’s their problem. If they have an agreement with you, it’s your problem. But, if they have an expectation of you, that’s completely their problem. It has nothing to do with you. They’re going to have lots of expectations out of life. The sooner you can dash their expectations, the better.
60. What is anger? Anger is a way to signal as strongly as you can to the other party you’re capable of violence. Anger is a precursor to violence. Observe when you’re angry—anger is a loss of control over the situation. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes.
61. People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.
62. Honesty is a core, core, core value. By honesty, I mean I want to be able to just be me. I never want to be in an environment or around people where I have to watch what I say. If I disconnect what I’m thinking from what I’m saying, it creates multiple threads in my mind. I’m no longer in the moment—now I have to be future-planning or past-regretting every time I talk to somebody. Anyone around whom I can’t be fully honest, I don’t want to be around.
63. I only believe in peer relationships. I don’t believe in hierarchical relationships. I don’t want to be above anybody, and I don’t want to be below anybody. If I can’t treat someone like a peer and if they can’t treat me like peer, I just don’t want to interact with them.
64. The moment you have a child, it’s this really weird thing, but it answers the meaning-of-life, purpose-of-life, question. All of a sudden, the most important thing in the Universe moves from being in your body into the child’s body. That changes you. Your values inherently become a lot less selfish.
65. The rational part means I have to reconcile with science and evolution. I have to reject all the pieces I can’t verify for myself. For example, is meditation good for you? Yes. Is clearing your mind a good thing? Yes. Is there a base layer of awareness below your monkey mind? Yes. All these things I’ve verified for myself. Some beliefs from Buddhism I believe and follow because, again, I’ve verified or reasoned with thought experiments myself. What I will not accept is things like, “There’s a past life you’re paying off the karma for.” I haven’t seen it. I don’t remember any past lives. I don’t have any memory. I just have to not believe that. When people say your third chakra is opening, etc.—I don’t know—that’s just fancy nomenclature. I have not been able to verify or confirm any of that on my own. If I can’t verify it on my own or if I cannot get there through science, then it may be true, it may be false, but it’s not falsifiable, so I cannot view it as a fundamental truth. On the other side, I do know evolution is true. I do know we are evolved as survival and replication machines. I do know we have an ego, so we get up off the ground and worms don’t eat us and we actually take action. Rational Buddhism, to me, means understanding the internal work Buddhism espouses to make yourself happier, better off, more present and in control of your emotions—being a better human being. I don’t subscribe to anything fanciful because it was written down in a book. I don’t think I can levitate. I don’t think meditation will give me superpowers and those kinds of things. Try everything, test it for yourself, be skeptical, keep what’s useful, and discard what’s not.

If you liked the above content, I'd definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

I see a lot of parallels in Jobs and Musk, combining great technology and aesthetic design with a team of A-players.

Here are my notes from Steve Jobs:

This is a follow-up post to this.

Year-3 Updates

This book combined my favorite topic psychology with finance, which I've been subconsciously avoiding for a long time. I got a good definition of freedom - being able to wake up one morning and change what I'm doing on my own terms. In other words, do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want.

Here are my notes from The Psychology of Money:

1. Every financial decision a person makes, makes sense to them in that moment and checks the boxes they need to check. They tell themselves a story about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and that story has been shaped by their own unique experiences. Take a simple example: lottery tickets. Americans spend more on them than movies, video games, music, sporting events, and books combined. And who buys them? Mostly poor people. The lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 a year on lotto tickets, four times the amount of those in the highest income groups. Forty percent of Americans cannot come up with $400 in an emergency. Which is to say: Those buying $400 in lottery tickets are by and large the same people who say they couldn’t come up with $400 in an emergency. They are blowing their safety nets on something with a one-in-millions chance of hitting it big. That seems crazy to me. It probably seems crazy to you, too. But I’m not in the lowest income group. You’re likely not, either. So it’s hard for many of us to intuitively grasp the subconscious reasoning of low-income lottery ticket buyers. But strain a little, and you can imagine it going something like this: We live paycheck-to-paycheck and saving seems out of reach. Our prospects for much higher wages seem out of reach. We can’t afford nice vacations, new cars, health insurance, or homes in safe neighborhoods. We can’t put our kids through college without crippling debt. Much of the stuff you people who read finance books either have now, or have a good chance of getting, we don’t. Buying a lottery ticket is the only time in our lives we can hold a tangible dream of getting the good stuff that you already have and take for granted. We are paying for a dream, and you may not understand that because you are already living a dream. That’s why we buy more tickets than you do. You don’t have to agree with this reasoning. Buying lotto tickets when you’re broke is still a bad idea. But I can kind of understand why lotto ticket sales persist. And that idea—“What you’re doing seems crazy but I kind of understand why you’re doing it.”—uncovers the root of many of our financial decisions. Few people make financial decisions purely with a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a company meeting. Places where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together into a narrative that works for you.
2. Bill Gates went to one of the only high schools in the world that had a computer. One in a million high-school-age students attended the high school that had the combination of cash and foresight to buy a computer. Bill Gates happened to be one of them. Gates is not shy about what this meant. “If there had been no Lakeside, there would have been no Microsoft,” he told the school’s graduating class in 2005. Gates is staggeringly smart, even more hardworking, and as a teenager had a vision for computers that even most seasoned computer executives couldn’t grasp. He also had a one in a million head start by going to school at Lakeside.
3. When judging others, attributing success to luck makes you look jealous and mean, even if we know it exists. And when judging yourself, attributing success to luck can be too demoralizing to accept.
4. Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.
5. Crime committed by those living on the edge of survival is one thing. A Nigerian scam artist once told The New York Times that he felt guilty for hurting others, but “poverty will not make you feel the pain.” What Gupta and Madoff did is something different. They already had everything: unimaginable wealth, prestige, power, freedom. And they threw it all away because they wanted more. They had no sense of enough.
6. There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.
7. The ceiling of social comparison is so high that virtually no one will ever hit it. Which means it’s a battle that can never be won, or that the only way to win is to not fight to begin with—to accept that you might have enough, even if it’s less than those around you.
8. None of the 2,000 books picking apart Buffett’s success are titled This Guy Has Been Investing Consistently for Three-Quarters of a Century. But we know that’s the key to the majority of his success. It’s just hard to wrap your head around that math because it’s not intuitive. There are books on economic cycles, trading strategies, and sector bets. But the most powerful and important book should be called Shut Up And Wait. It’s just one page with a long-term chart of economic growth.
9. Good investing isn’t necessarily about earning the highest returns, because the highest returns tend to be one-off hits that can’t be repeated. It’s about earning pretty good returns that you can stick with and which can be repeated for the longest period of time. That’s when compounding runs wild.
10. Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast. It requires frugality and an acceptance that at least some of what you’ve made is attributable to luck, so past success can’t be relied upon to repeat indefinitely.
11. You’ve likely heard of the investing duo of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. But 40 years ago there was a third member of the group, Rick Guerin. Warren, Charlie, and Rick made investments together and interviewed business managers together. Then Rick kind of disappeared, at least relative to Buffett and Munger’s success. Investor Mohnish Pabrai once asked Buffett what happened to Rick. Mohnish recalled: [Warren said] “Charlie and I always knew that we would become incredibly wealthy. We were not in a hurry to get wealthy; we knew it would happen. Rick was just as smart as us, but he was in a hurry.” What happened was that in the 1973–1974 downturn, Rick was levered with margin loans. And the stock market went down almost 70% in those two years, so he got margin calls. He sold his Berkshire stock to Warren—Warren actually said “I bought Rick’s Berkshire stock”—at under $40 a piece. Rick was forced to sell because he was levered. Charlie, Warren, and Rick were equally skilled at getting wealthy. But Warren and Charlie had the added skill of staying wealthy. Which, over time, is the skill that matters most.
12. No one wants to hold cash during a bull market. They want to own assets that go up a lot. You look and feel conservative holding cash during a bull market, because you become acutely aware of how much return you’re giving up by not owning the good stuff. Say cash earns 1% and stocks return 10% a year. That 9% gap will gnaw at you every day. But if that cash prevents you from having to sell your stocks during a bear market, the actual return you earned on that cash is not 1% a year—it could be many multiples of that, because preventing one desperate, ill-timed stock sale can do more for your lifetime returns than picking dozens of big-time winners.
13. “The great investors bought vast quantities of art,” the firm writes. “A subset of the collections turned out to be great investments, and they were held for a sufficiently long period of time to allow the portfolio return to converge upon the return of the best elements in the portfolio. That’s all that happens.” The great art dealers operated like index funds. They bought everything they could. And they bought it in portfolios, not individual pieces they happened to like. Then they sat and waited for a few winners to emerge. That’s all that happens. Perhaps 99% of the works someone like Berggruen acquired in his life turned out to be of little value. But that doesn’t particularly matter if the other 1% turn out to be the work of someone like Picasso. Berggruen could be wrong most of the time and still end up stupendously right.
14. Part of why this isn’t intuitive is because in most fields we only see the finished product, not the losses incurred that led to the tail-success product. The Chris Rock I see on TV is hilarious, flawless. The Chris Rock that performs in dozens of small clubs each year is just OK. That is by design. No comedic genius is smart enough to preemptively know what jokes will land well. Every big comedian tests their material in small clubs before using it in big venues. Rock was once asked if he missed small clubs. He responded: When I start a tour, it’s not like I start out in arenas. Before this last tour I performed in this place in New Brunswick called the Stress Factory. I did about 40 or 50 shows getting ready for the tour. One newspaper profiled these small-club sessions. It described Rock thumbing through pages of notes and fumbling with material. “I’m going to have to cut some of these jokes,” he says mid-skit. The good jokes I see on Netflix are the tails that stuck out of a universe of hundreds of attempts.
15. The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.” People want to become wealthier to make them happier. Happiness is a complicated subject because everyone’s different. But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.
16. Doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.
17. The letter I wrote after my son was born said, “You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I’m telling you, you don’t. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does—especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.”
18. We tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that’s the information we have in front of us. We can’t see people’s bank accounts or brokerage statements. So we rely on outward appearances to gauge financial success. Cars. Homes. Instagram photos. Modern capitalism makes helping people fake it until they make it a cherished industry. But the truth is that wealth is what you don’t see. Wealth is the nice cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The watches not worn, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. Wealth is financial assets that haven’t yet been converted into the stuff you see.
19. In a world where intelligence is hyper-competitive and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills—like communication, empathy, and, perhaps most of all, flexibility. If you have flexibility you can wait for good opportunities, both in your career and for your investments. You’ll have a better chance of being able to learn a new skill when it’s necessary. You’ll feel less urgency to chase competitors who can do things you can’t, and have more leeway to find your passion and your niche at your own pace. You can find a new routine, a slower pace, and think about life with a different set of assumptions. The ability to do those things when most others can’t is one of the few things that will set you apart in a world where intelligence is no longer a sustainable advantage. Having more control over your time and options is becoming one of the most valuable currencies in the world.
20. The thing that makes tail events easy to underappreciate is how easy it is to underestimate how things compound. How, for example, 9/11 prompted the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, which helped drive the housing bubble, which led to the financial crisis, which led to a poor jobs market, which led tens of millions to seek a college education, which led to $1.6 trillion in student loans with a 10.8% default rate. It’s not intuitive to link 19 hijackers to the current weight of student loans, but that’s what happens in a world driven by a few outlier tail events.
21. Although card counting is statistically proven to work, it does not guarantee you will win every hand—let alone every trip you make to the casino. We must make sure that we have enough money to withstand any swings of bad luck. Let’s assume you have roughly a 2 percent edge over the casino. That still means the casino will win 49 percent of the time. Therefore, you need to have enough money to withstand any variant swings against you. A rule of thumb is that you should have at least a hundred basic units. Assuming you start with ten thousand dollars, you could comfortably play a hundred-dollar unit.
22. Nassim Taleb says, “You can be risk loving and yet completely averse to ruin.” And indeed, you should. The idea is that you have to take risk to get ahead, but no risk that can wipe you out is ever worth taking. The odds are in your favor when playing Russian roulette. But the downside is not worth the potential upside. There is no margin of safety that can compensate for the risk. Same with money. The odds of many lucrative things are in your favor. Real estate prices go up most years, and during most years you’ll get a paycheck every other week. But if something has 95% odds of being right, the 5% odds of being wrong means you will almost certainly experience the downside at some point in your life. And if the cost of the downside is ruin, the upside the other 95% of the time likely isn’t worth the risk, no matter how appealing it looks. Leverage is the devil here. Leverage—taking on debt to make your money go further—pushes routine risks into something capable of producing ruin. The danger is that rational optimism most of the time masks the odds of ruin some of the time. The result is we systematically underestimate risk. Housing prices fell 30% last decade. A few companies defaulted on their debt. That’s capitalism. It happens. But those with high leverage had a double wipeout: Not only were they left broke, but being wiped out erased every opportunity to get back in the game at the very moment opportunity was ripe. A homeowner wiped out in 2009 had no chance of taking advantage of cheap mortgage rates in 2010. Lehman Brothers had no chance of investing in cheap debt in 2009. They were done. To get around this, I think of my own money as barbelled. I take risks with one portion and am terrified with the other. This is not inconsistent, but the psychology of money would lead you to believe that it is. I just want to ensure I can remain standing long enough for my risks to pay off. You have to survive to succeed. To repeat a point we’ve made a few times in this book: The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, has an infinite ROI.
23. Every five-year-old boy wants to drive a tractor when they grow up. Few jobs look better in the eyes of a young boy whose idea of a good job begins and ends with “Vroom vroom, beep beep, big tractor, here I come!” Then many grow up and realize that driving a tractor maybe isn’t the best career. Maybe they want something more prestigious or lucrative. So as a teenager they dream of being a lawyer. Now they think—they know—their plan is set. Law school and its costs, here we come. Then, as a lawyer, they face such long working hours that they rarely see their families. So perhaps they take a lower-paying job with flexible hours. Then they realize that childcare is so expensive that it consumes most of their paycheck, and they opt to be a stay-at-home parent. This, they conclude, is finally the right choice. Then, at age 70, they realize that a lifetime of staying home means they’re unprepared to afford retirement. Many of us wind through life on a similar trajectory. Only 27% of college grads have a job related to their major, according to the Federal Reserve. Twenty-nine percent of stay-at-home parents have a college degree. Few likely regret their education, of course. But we should acknowledge that a new parent in their 30s may think about life goals in a way their 18-year-old self making career goals would never imagine.
24. “All of us,” he said, “are walking around with an illusion—an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” We tend to never learn this lesson. Gilbert’s research shows people from age 18 to 68 underestimate how much they will change in the future.
25. We should avoid the extreme ends of financial planning. Assuming you’ll be happy with a very low income, or choosing to work endless hours in pursuit of a high one, increases the odds that you’ll one day find yourself at a point of regret. The fuel of the End of History Illusion is that people adapt to most circumstances, so the benefits of an extreme plan—the simplicity of having hardly anything, or the thrill of having almost everything—wear off. But the downsides of those extremes—not being able to afford retirement, or looking back at a life spent devoted to chasing dollars—become enduring regrets. Regrets are especially painful when you abandon a previous plan and feel like you have to run in the other direction twice as fast to make up for lost time.
26. Sunk costs—anchoring decisions to past efforts that can’t be refunded—are a devil in a world where people change over time. They make our future selves prisoners to our past, different, selves. It’s the equivalent of a stranger making major life decisions for you.
27. When I’m blind to parts of how the world works I might completely misunderstand why the stock market is behaving like it is, in a way that gives me too much confidence in my ability to know what it might do next. Part of the reason forecasting the stock market and the economy is so hard is because you are the only person in the world who thinks the world operates the way you do. When you make decisions for reasons that I can’t even comprehend, I might follow you blindly into a decision that’s right for you and disastrous to me. This is how bubbles form.
28. Manage your money in a way that helps you sleep at night. That’s different from saying you should aim to earn the highest returns or save a specific percentage of your income. Some people won’t sleep well unless they’re earning the highest returns; others will only get a good rest if they’re conservatively invested. To each their own. But the foundation of, “does this help me sleep at night?” is the best universal guidepost for all financial decisions.
29. Being able to wake up one morning and change what you’re doing, on your own terms, whenever you’re ready, seems like the grandmother of all financial goals. Independence, to me, doesn’t mean you’ll stop working. It means you only do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want.

If you liked the above content, I'd definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

I recently switched phones. Here’s how my habits changed:

1. My media consumption on phone has practically dropped to zero, as it has a smaller screen size (5.4 inches compared to the previous 6.55). I do it on my tablet now.
2. I used to play a lot of idle clicker games on my phone. Smaller phone came with a smaller battery as well, so it had an unintended consequence of breaking this habit. I miss this - eagerly waiting to get my hands on PS5.

By all accounts, Airbnb should not have become this big! The very idea of letting strangers into your home raises eyebrows, but the way they executed it with belongingness at the core is amazing.

Here are my notes from The Airbnb Story: