Aristotelis Economides

Agent Command Centers: Scaling Human Attention

2026-02-03T00:00:00-08:00

The first hour of using Claude Code feels like magic. You ask, it does. By hour six, you realize you’re glancing at the terminal every few seconds like a nervous first-time parent.

Is it done? Did it break something? Is it asking a question you missed? The agent is pulling its weight and you are mostly nudging. Of course, you could run these agents in yolo mode and they would keep going without needing you. Why monitor at all?

There’s emotional friction in letting an intelligent tool work for hours when you can’t tell what it’s doing. And when you do check back, it’s hard to tell what it did after running unsupervised for hours. Did it use any dependencies you don’t want? Change system-level settings? Did it leak API keys to hack around a dumb issue it was facing? When it’s fail-looping, will it just burn tokens for nothing?

The interface gives you little signal and control knobs, so you supply your own attention as a substitute. A better interface wouldn’t assume you already trust the agent. It would create the conditions for trust by showing you what matters: what the agent is doing, what it’s uncertain about, when it needs you.

Back in April 2025 Pete Koomen called most AI apps horseless carriages. I loved that essay, but capability had to mature for function to follow. Early engines couldn’t have powered Ford’s Model-T even if he sketched it in 1803. OpenClaw showed everyone that models are now ready to power the Model-T version of AI.

Current interfaces demand too high a cognitive tax. Chat can only ever be a linear timeline of messages. When using agents, you need to consume a lot of information quickly and text is just a poor way to do that.

What’s missing is a completely new interface: something that allows a human to manage a bunch of agents. Closer to a general’s command center than a chatbox. And the closest currently existing interfaces for managing many semi-autonomous units can be found in games.

StarCraft players command two hundred units in real-time. They’re not chatting with each marine, or approving each attack. The interface shows them what matters: resources, alerts, unit groups. They issue high-level commands and units execute. The player micromanages units only when something goes wrong or the strategy needs to shift.

David Kaye: StarCraft 2’s UI is one of the most refined solutions to human-agent coordination that exists.

We need interfaces that amplify human agency. Built for flow-state continuous interaction when a human has a lot of input to give, but also running autonomously with sparse input when the human is doing other things. And even running overnight without supervision.

Exploration vs. Exploitation

Agents seem to be mature and ready for two modes right now: exploration and exploitation. There are more ways to delegate work, like autonomous agent factories, but these still feel a year or two away.

In exploration mode, you don’t know what you want yet. You’re playing with a problem, getting a feel for it. Chat works well here because conversation is itself exploratory. It’s how we brainstorm with other humans. Greenfield projects involve a lot of that kind of work.

In exploitation mode, you already made key decisions and there’s a backlog of things that need to get done. Here, chat is friction. You don’t want to collaborate anymore, you want to loosely supervise a capable worker.

In practice you constantly jump between the two modes. Tasks are being completed in the background while you are figuring out other details in the foreground. You need both in parallel, which means that a flexible tool still needs good chat, just not as the primary interface. Most tools force both modes into chat because that’s what early models needed, but (somewhat surprisingly) capabilities improved way faster than interfaces adapted.

A command center is an interface designed for exploitation mode. It respects your attention. It lets you supervise multiple agents without monitoring multiple conversations. It surfaces what matters and handles the rest.

Useful Primitives for Command Centers

So what could a command center look like?

I’ve been noting what I need when supervising agents, whether managing Claude Code, having OpenClaw handle personal tasks, or using Antigravity for coding at work. Five primitives keep recurring:

Inbox items: decisions, deliverables, and escalations.
FYI items: activity overviews and agent assumptions.

They’re probably not exhaustive or perfectly carved, but they capture what I need.

Decisions. Things that need human judgment. Not “what should I do?” but “here’s the situation, here are the options, here’s my recommendation.” The agent gives options so you can answer in seconds. If you don’t like them, you can enter chat mode and discuss.

The key here is surfacing the right decisions. If the agent found a security issue, it should just fix it: that’s not a good use of human attention. Human-grade decisions (for now at least) are about taste and ambiguity. “Two flights match your criteria: 6am direct or 10am with layover, which fits your day better?” That requires knowing something the agent doesn’t (for now).

Deliverables. Pieces of work ready for human review. Code diffs, email drafts, excel sheets. The agent should be proactive. When sorting through email, instead of waiting for me to ask for an email draft, it should prepare one and surface it for approval or editing.

Escalations. When failing to complete a task, the agent should surface the failure and reason. Things that broke. Build failed. Payment declined. Merge conflict. “Email couldn’t be sent: authentication failed, credentials may have expired.” These shouldn’t be buried in activity digests, but visually distinct. They’re clearly problems needing resolution.

Activity. What happened while I wasn’t watching? I don’t want a log dump, but something that I can parse with a glance. “Ran 847 tests. Fixed 3 flaky ones. One still failing after repeated fix attempts, here’s the digest” or “Archived 23 uninteresting emails, moved 2 in your read-it-later list, and prepared 5 draft replies.”

Assumptions. Implicit choices the agent made for completing a task. The agent acts on beliefs about what you want, and it should surface these assumptions. “Scheduled the meeting for 2pm because you usually prefer afternoon calls.” “Chose the direct flight over the cheaper option with a layover because you’ve picked direct 4 out of 5 times.” “I used casual tone because you rejected formal twice.”

Surfacing assumptions is how trust gets calibrated. Ideally the agent learns over time from your decisions. How exactly that learning works is an open problem (more on this below), but the interface should surface agent assumptions.

Nerfed version of what a command center could look like. Busier version at aristotelis.eco/nexus

In practice, decisions, deliverables, and escalations are all inbox items that appear in a queue. The reason I break them down here is to point out different types of information that are useful. The agent’s activity and assumptions aren’t actionable most times, and should command less of the user’s attention.

One more thing: an overarching approach when building agentic interfaces.

Clay. Functionality should be moldable. The layouts, UI, components, information structures shouldn’t be hardcoded. Good agent-native applications will be malleable like clay. Two reasons: first, it allows for intelligent emergent behavior that the software author didn’t explicitly design for. Second, it’s the only way for software to stay relevant as models improve.

Open Questions

There are problems I’m still not sure about. Most are model rather than interface problems though, so interfaces might just need to deal with them in a good-enough way and trust that new models won’t have the same issues.

Agent memory, continual learning. Right now, “learning” mostly means updating text files that persist between sessions. This kind-of works, but there are issues: files drift from reality, or they make behavior too rigid, or agents forget to update them. Also, agents aren’t good at forgetting irrelevant information, which is an integral part of intelligence.

Heavy-handed engineering solutions feel like swimming upstream when you recognize that all of this file manipulation is suspiciously bitter-lesson-y. What you eventually want is for memory and learning to be trained behaviors instead of bolted-on. Dario and Sholto think models will get there soon.

Multi-agent coordination. Beyond here be dragons. Some approaches are simpler than others. All the problems of a single agent are amplified in a swarm. My gut leans towards engineering the simplest thing that works OK, while waiting for models to solve coordination through RL, like Kimi K2.5 (bitter lesson again).

Interruption budget. How much should the agent escalate? How often? If the agent interrupts you for every decision, you’re babysitting. If it never interrupts, you have no control. The right balance depends on stakes, reversibility, and confidence. Turning off a light: low stakes, reversible. Don’t interrupt. Sending an email: medium stakes, irreversible. Maybe interrupt. Booking a flight: high stakes, involves money. Definitely interrupt. How much should the user configure this? Per-tool rules get complex very fast.

Part of the reliable escalation problem feels like it should be solved with continual learning (agents will learn your preferences over time), but it’s also an alignment problem in miniature: the agent must know when it’s uncertain, when stakes are high, what a human would want to know, and it must want to do the right thing.

Failure recovery. How to effectively deal with agents looping into failure or crashing? How many retries should an agent attempt? How much token budget should a crash-looping agent spend? Here I lean towards simple again. New models will overcome current failure modes and introduce different ones. Heavy investment in failure handling for today’s models may not transfer.

Closing

Horseless carriages or not, the best agentic tool out there is a souped-up CLI. Models far outpaced the interfaces.

We’re entering a period where the bottleneck is human attention, not model capability. Scaling human attention is the next step. The people who figure out how to manage that attention well, how to supervise ten agents as easily as one, will have leverage that looks like magic.

Thank you to Masha Stroganova, Sarah Catanzaro, John Carpenter, Matthew Siu, and Rohan Virani for reading drafts of this essay.

The essay reflects my personal thoughts and exploration and is not affiliated with Google DeepMind.

Notes & Further Reading

I am using “Claude Code” as a catch-all for all similar interfaces that came after it: Gemini CLI, Open Code, etc.
I’ve been exploring the idea of a command center at aristotelis.eco/nexus. It’s an early prototype with mocked data. I like the experience more than other tools I’ve tried. It still doesn’t flow the way a good strategy game does.
Even with the ideas I share executed well, multiple agents running in parallel quickly produce visual noise with high attention tax. Humans are bad at monitoring multiple asynchronous streams. In addition to the suggestions in the essay, a good command center probably needs a combination of hierarchical aggregation + strong prioritization + “drill-down on demand” mechanics. Here, too, there is a lot to learn from game design, but this topic deserves its own essay.

Relevant work I’ve enjoyed, or discovered while writing this:

The Cities We Build

2025-11-08T00:00:00-08:00

We spend most of our lives in cities. Walking past buildings, working inside them, commuting between one another. Cities are the background of our civilization.

And yet, something fundamentally changed about how we think about them during the 20th century.

Take Penn Station in New York. The original, built in 1910, had vaulted ceilings modeled after Roman baths. Marble columns rose to meet enormous arched windows that flooded the space with light. It made you feel that arriving in New York meant something.

Main Waiting Room of the original Penn Station, completed in 1910

They demolished it in 1963 and replaced it with an underground hub. Low ceilings, fluorescent lights, narrow corridors. Some call it New York’s most hated building.

Penn Station today

Same city. Same purpose. Sixty years apart.

What’s strange isn’t just that we replaced something beautiful with something ugly. It’s that this happened everywhere, roughly between 1940 and 1970. Train stations, schools, churches, apartment buildings, entire neighborhoods.

We changed how we build things.

Why?

It Wasn’t Capitalism

The easiest explanation is capitalism. When profit-driven private individuals build without accountability in a free market, we get soulless, boring things.

Except this doesn’t hold up.

Look back to the 19th century, when capitalism was raw and unregulated. Victorian London, with its iconic row houses and grand stations, was built by profit-driven developers.

Central Hall of the Natural History Museum in London, completed in 1881

Palace of Westminster, completed in 1870

In New York, Frank Woolworth commissioned his Gothic skyscraper in 1913, during the Gilded Age. Peak capitalism. Maximum inequality. He paid for beauty because it boosted his brand and legacy.

The Woolworth Building, opened in 1913

Gothic details from the Woolworth Building

Beauty sold then, just as it does now. Apple is one of the world’s most valuable companies, and they sell the opposite of cheap and soulless.

Then there’s socialism to compare. Soviet Khrushchyovkas were mass-produced concrete boxes, as ugly as anything capitalism produced in the 1960s.

1960s residential district in Moscow, built to address housing shortage

Berlin is the perfect test case. East Berlin was managed by communists, West Berlin by capitalists. Both sides built the same bland blocks. The economic system didn’t matter.

Something else drove the transformation. Something ideological.

The Industrial Revolution

For most of history, life didn’t change much. Your grandfather’s world looked much like yours.

Until suddenly it didn’t.

Over the course of the 19th century, Europe got trains, electricity, telephones, cars, x-rays, and radios. Your son, helping you with farming in your little village, could move to a city with millions of people and work in a factory. You could see a photo of Tokyo without leaving London.

This transformation brought unprecedented wealth. Private individuals suddenly had fortunes greater than kingdoms of the past. They poured fortunes into beautiful Victorian buildings mixing architectural elements from different historical periods.

We romanticize those buildings, but it’s easy to forget how bad it was for most people living through it.

Factories brought assembly lines. Millions migrated to cities for work. Hundreds of workers packed into dark airless rooms with shared toilets in hallways. Cholera outbreaks killed thousands at a time. Tuberculosis was the leading cause of death. Children worked in factories, breathing air thick with coal smoke. In places like Manchester, the working poor could hardly expect 25 years of life. Even the mighty Thames got so polluted that the local government declared an emergency to deal with the “Great Stink” of 1858.

The beautiful Victorian buildings existed alongside grimy slums.

Street with common houses, London in 1865

By the early 1900s, thinkers across Europe started questioning this chaos. The lavish Victorian designs, with their fake historical flourishes slapped onto cheap mass-produced bricks felt dishonest. Reformers looked at ships, factories, and machines with their clean, functional lines. If this was what modern beauty looked like, why were we still copying Greek temples? Decoration, they argued, is primitive and wasteful. Advanced, enlightened civilizations should embrace scientific and rational design.

This was the start of modernism. But it was still just an idea, confined mostly to theory and small experiments.

Then came World War I.

Breaking Free From the Past

World War I was the first global conflict. Fifteen million people died with industrial efficiency. Much of Europe lay in ruins. Kings, generals, and politicians had led Europe into hell.

After 1918, people wanted more than reconstruction. They wanted a clean break, not just from war, but from everything associated with the old order that had failed so catastrophically.

The architectural styles of the pre-war era became wrapped up with the political and social systems that had produced the war. If you wanted to build a new world, you needed new architecture.

Three Men and a Movement

In 1919, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Germany. A design school that combined art, craft, and industrial production.

Germany in the 1920s was chaotic. Hyperinflation, political violence, traumatized veterans. The Bauhaus wasn’t just about aesthetics. It was trying to build a new kind of society.

Bauhaus members believed quality design should be accessible to everyone, not just the wealthy. Mass production could make good housing affordable. Function over decoration meant spending money on better materials and safety instead of ornamental details for wealthy patrons.

From their perspective, traditional architecture was part of the problem. It served the elite, required expensive craftsmen, and was slow to build when millions needed housing immediately.

Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect, proclaimed that “a house is a machine for living in.” He thought buildings should be standardized like automobiles. Cities should be organized rationally: towers in parks, separated by function.

In 1925, he proposed demolishing the historic center of Paris and replacing it with 18 identical 60-story towers housing 3 million people. It was never built, but his ideas shaped a generation of architects.

Le Corbusier’s “Plan Voisin” in 1925 to replace the historical center of Paris

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a German who worked with Gropius, redefined modernism aesthetically. His designs proved that radical simplification could be elegant, not just efficient. “Less is more” is one of his famous principles.

Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier held a revolutionary exhibition in 1927 alongside other prominent modernist architects to demonstrate modern architecture. The goal was an existence proof for modernism’s promises: inexpensive, simple, efficient, and good-quality housing.

Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart. 1927. The buildings look completely commonplace today. That’s only because Bauhaus architects were so tremendously successful at spreading their design philosophy, that it’s now everywhere.

Around 1928, modernist architects formed CIAM, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture. The scattered individual architects transformed into a coordinated movement with shared principles and manifestos.

Their framing was simple: modernism equals progress, science, health, democracy. Traditional equals nostalgia, disease, authoritarianism.

Even the early Soviet Union invited modernist architects, seeing rationalist planning as compatible with communist ideals.

Modernism Arrives in America

The Nazis hated modernism. They called it “degenerate art” and shut down the Bauhaus. Many of its architects, often left-wing or Jewish, fled to North America.

Walter Gropius went to Harvard. Mies van der Rohe went to the Illinois Institute of Technology. Other Bauhaus architects spread across American universities.

This was a crucial moment. America in the 1940s and 50s saw itself as modern, progressive, and scientific: the perfect soil for modernist ideology to take root. American universities competed to hire these famous European intellectuals who were fleeing fascism.

MoMA’s 1932 “International Style” exhibition, featuring works of Le Corbusier and Mies, had already established modernism as sophisticated and cultured in American minds. Now the masters themselves were here, ready to train the next generation.

Meanwhile, World War II had flattened even more cities than WWI. Entire city centers were gone. There was urgency to rebuild, and blank slates to build on.

Tokyo after the bombing in March 1945

Warsaw in 1948

The war had just proven with tanks, planes, and ships that mass production could work at enormous scale. Why not buildings?

The total war economy mindset carried over into postwar reconstruction. Modernist architecture fit perfectly: it was rational, planned, efficient, and standardized.

Traditional building was slow, required skilled craftsmen, was expensive. And importantly, the Nazis had rejected modernism, which tainted traditional architecture by association. Modernism became the architecture of democracy.

By 1950, Gropius and Mies had trained a generation of American architects. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you studied with them. They taught that decoration is dishonest. Form follows function. Less is more.

Architecture schools stopped accepting traditional designs. Professional journals, architectural awards, planning departments, and licensing boards were all led by people aligned with modernist principles. It became the official style of American power and education.

When Mies designed the Seagram Building in 1958, it became a template copied in every major city worldwide.

Mies’s Seagram Building, 1958

Lock-In

Here is where it gets interesting.

Modern zoning rules started as early as 1916, but most were implemented in the decades after World War II.

The people writing zoning codes in the 1950s had all been trained by modernists. That’s what everyone learned in architecture school. So the codes embedded modernist assumptions.

Separation of uses. Wide streets for cars. Minimum parking requirements. Buildings needed to be set back from streets. Height limits and floor-area ratios favored simple geometries.

Separation of uses in Florida, USA

These rules weren’t written to ban traditional architecture explicitly. They were written to solve practical problems: avoid factories next to homes, ensure enough light and air, stop overcrowding.

But the solutions made traditional urbanism nearly impossible.

You can’t build a mixed-use building with shops below and apartments above. Use separation forbids it. You can’t build to the sidewalk edge, forming a continuous street wall. Setback requirements prevent it. You can’t create traditional street grids with small blocks. Road width and parking requirements make it unworkable.

Residential setback requirements

Parking minimums were especially destructive. Traditional neighborhoods relied on walking and transit. New codes required two parking spaces per unit, making that density impossible.

Fire codes were developed with concrete and steel in mind. You could technically build in wood or masonry, but you had to shoulder the burden of proving safety yourself.

This created a self-reinforcing system. Only modern buildings could easily get permits. Architecture students learned to design what could actually be approved. Planning departments only knew how to evaluate modern designs. Traditional building skills disappeared because no one needed them anymore.

By 1970, the system was locked in.

Under most current regulations in most cities, it is literally illegal to build Paris or Amsterdam.

What We Have Now

Why the history lesson?

As Winston Churchill said, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”

Modernism solved real, terrible problems. Slums in 1900 were disease-ridden deathtraps. The housing shortage after WWII was desperate. Within a few decades, we developed efficient systems for building. Modern apartments are dramatically safer, cleaner, and warmer than 19th century houses.

The only reason we can stop and wonder why cities don’t feel right anymore is because modern codes work so well at the material level that we can’t even imagine how dangerous things used to be.

But.

Walk through a city built after the 1950s. Everything works. Nothing is broken. The buildings are safe and the systems are efficient. But nothing feels like it’s for you.

Buildings don’t acknowledge your presence. They could be anywhere, Phoenix, Frankfurt, Singapore. They belong to no place and no one.

Frankfurt, Germany

Phoenix, Arizona, USA

Singapore

Historic cities are different. They have layers of different eras visible at once. Buildings at human scale. When you pay close attention, you notice rewarding little details, like layers in your favorite music. Streets shaped for lingering, not just passing through. The city tells you: people were here before you, and people will be here after. You’re part of something continuous.

Cities like Florence have museums, cafes, shops, and churches all intertwined.

This isn’t nostalgia. When people travel, they overwhelmingly prefer historic cities. Prague, Florence, old Montreal. Not because people are “stuck in the past” but because those places feel alive in a way modern cities don’t.

Old Montreal

Modern cities often tell you: you’re a functional unit in an efficient system.

What Next?

It’s 2025, but we’re living in cities shaped by ideas from 1960.

Ideas developed under different circumstances, with different needs, different technologies, different constraints. Ideas that seemed obviously correct then, but we now know were incomplete. Ideas shaped by disease, war, and poverty. Ideas that aren’t mandated by laws of nature, economics, or history. Do these ideas still serve us?

People often assume that boring cities are the inescapable price of progress. Capitalism’s iron logic. Are they?

The constraints that created soulless cities have changed. We have materials and methods that previous generations couldn’t imagine. Digital fabrication, advanced engineering, new materials that outperform anything from the past. The technical barriers are lower than they’ve ever been. Construction technology today would seem like alien magic to Michelangelo designing Saint Peter’s Basilica back in the 16th century.

The question isn’t whether to rebuild old Paris. It had too many problems that we worked too hard to solve. And there are still problems to solve, enough to make you miserable if you think about all of them at once.

But life cannot only be about solving one problem after another. There has to be more than that. Cities can’t be just infrastructure. They’re where we spend our entire lives. Where our children will grow up. What we leave behind. They don’t just shape how efficiently we move from place to place, but how we feel, what we notice, what we remember.

History’s greatest cities understood this. They had figured out things about human psychology and social dynamics that we forgot to include in our attempt to redesign everything from scratch. Like teenagers rebelling against their parents, we threw out things that actually worked along with things that didn’t.

We can build cities that inspire again. Places we’re excited to wake up in, proud to show visitors, honored to pass on.

The future doesn’t have to look like the past. But it also doesn’t have to look like a parking lot.

Key Inspiration:

Cultural Tutor, especially his first YouTube video
Monumental Labs and their vision
Altissia from FFXV
The magnificent cities that we used to build when we were vastly poorer and technologically primitive than we are now

Why LLMs might actually lead to AGI

2025-04-20T00:00:00-07:00

Search “will llms agi” on Google and you will find completely contradicting opinions.

Sam Altman promises AGI in 2025. Dario Amodei dreams about Machines of Loving Grace. Yann LeCun straightaway declares that scaling LLMs is just complete BS. Ilya Sutskever encourages young researchers to think new ideas, and Francois Chollet struggles to come up with a benchmark that can even define what AGI is.

Still, we’re confidently investing billions of dollars into LLMs. This seems irrational until you understand what problem LLMs actually solve.

The bottleneck of AI progress

AI progress is bounded by research iteration speed and the total amount of energy available for computation.

Research speed means how quickly we can test ideas and make them work in practice. Think of it as the time between researchers conceptualizing “thinking models”, and o1 being live on ChatGPT.

Better algorithms, evals, and model architectures are all research outputs that give us more “intelligence”. New chips, scaling methods, and infrastructure optimizations give us more FLOPs per watt.

Energy for computation means how many watts we have for running AI. Building more datacenters increases our total available wattage.

Since AI is just matrix multiplications at scale, more FLOPs means faster iteration. More FLOPs come from research, and more wattage from datacenter capacity. The combination of the two gives us how many operations we can do, or, how many things we can try.

Everything is reduced to two variables: research speed and energy.

(I won’t talk much about energy in this post.)

What changed within a year

LLMs today can easily make beautiful landing pages and demo apps, contribute to existing codebases, and perform basic tasks in containerized computer environments like ordering pizza or booking tickets. As almost everyone experienced a month ago, AI can now turn any picture into a Ghibli scene and follow visual instructions surprisingly well.

These tasks sound boring, but that’s because the more hype AI gets, the higher our expectations go. A year ago, none of this worked ¹. We didn’t even have multimodal or thinking models yet, both of which were instrumental in making agents possible ².

Within less than a year, we got from AI barely completing toy tasks, to autonomous delivery of economically valuable work.

The image below succinctly summarizes the progress:

But what does this have to do with AGI? Yes, models are improving fast, but a cat is still, in some ways, more intelligent than an LLM.

I suspect that no person on earth today has any concrete idea how to get to AGI. But we still have a simple path to get there.

AI research is boring work

Walk into any frontier lab and ask a researcher how they spend their week. You will hear about failed training runs that need debugging, broken pipelines that need fixing, hardware issues that they don’t understand.

On a good week, they might get a few hours of actual creative work: designing experiments, formulating hypotheses, interpreting results.

Parsing ten-thousand-line error logs doesn’t require brilliance. Babysitting a job and restarting it when things go wrong isn’t creative. Running multiple experiments with different hyperparameters is tedious. And importantly, humans are remarkably bad at all these tasks.

We are not out of ideas. People have tons of ideas and too little time to try them out. The boring, repetitive work is the bottleneck to AI progress.

LLMs are a research catalyst

We’re left with two statements:

AI progress is bounded by research speed.
Much of research is boring work.

If these are true, we should be able to automate research.

Humans are good at having ideas, but exploring multiple similar approaches, parsing lots of information, and debugging are slow and tedious tasks. Machines are excellent at exploring variations, parsing logs, and crunching data, but they don’t know how to interpret the results. The two complement each other.

Which leads us to the main point of this whole thoughtstream:

It doesn’t matter whether LLMs ever lead to AGI. What matters is that they can become research accelerators. LLMs will do the gruntwork that humans are bad and slow at, freeing us to focus on what we’re good at: exploring ideas.

If the secret to AGI is hidden in a combinatorial explosion of experiments and ideas, we now have a few highly trained humans crawling through the possibilities. LLM agents will allow each researcher to supervise a thousand explorations in parallel.

And we are almost there. The only remaining piece is having agents that can handle the boring parts of research.

Early tools like Manus AI and Replit already do useful work. Google is training AI co-scientists and I would be surprised if the others are not exploring similar ideas. My current guess is that the big AI labs will be deploying agents that can do basic research tasks before the end of the year. After that, it will probably take another year for these agents to automate significant parts of the process.

Once LLM agents can run experiments, summarize logs, and debug pipelines, many bottlenecks are gone. We can try more ideas. Good ones get refined faster. That leads to better, more autonomous models, and the whole system accelerates.

Maybe this leads to AGI. Probably it just leads to much better models. Either way, our chances to find the next breakthrough increase.

LLMs are the most straightforward way to meaningfully speed things up.

Notice that there is no magic ingredient here and, importantly, no hand-wavy statements like “AI will recursively improve itself leading to intelligence explosion.” All you need to believe is that LLM agents can automate boring work. This would already be enough for transformative AI improvements and economic growth.

Where this leaves us

Whether or not you believe that LLMs will become AGI, there is no doubt that they will massively accelerate research towards AGI.

Going back to the two constraints for AI progress: research iteration, and energy. LLMs will take care of the speed constraint.

The world’s two superpowers are in a full-throttle arms race to build datacenters and power plants. That’s the energy constraint.

As long as speed and energy are progressing, we are getting closer to AGI. In other words, LLMs might lead to AGI.

Thanks to Masha Stroganova and John Carpenter for reading drafts.

Notes:

This essay is strictly my personal opinion.
Essays you should read about AI predictions:
- What 2026 looks like, written in 2021 by Daniel Kokotajlo. It got many things right astonishingly right, but it was thankfully too pessimistic about social predictions.
- The Scaling Hypothesis, written between 2020 and 2022 by Gwern. This was one of the core works that reinforced the idea that scaling results in new capabilities, emergent properties not found in smaller scale.
- Situational Awareness, written mid-2024 by Leopold Aschenbrenner.
- AI 2027, released a few weeks ago by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, and a few others. I read this midway through writing my post. Seeing a similar narrative made me a bit more confident in mine. I think (hope?) that their social predictions are too pessimistic, similar to Daniel’s past essay.

You can probably point out toy cases where models could kind of build end-to-end code, or some GitHub repo that attempted “agentic” behavior. In practice, the models needed a lot of handholding, they would fail a lot, and they could only tackle much simpler problems. ↩
GPT-4o was released on May 13 2024, and o1 started previewing on September 12 2024. ↩

Life Advice

2024-09-29T00:00:00-07:00

Mecca

2024-06-18T00:00:00-07:00

Every field, every era, has one.

A place where the brightest minds collide, sparking new ideas and pushing boundaries. Athens had its philosophers, Florence its artists, Paris its writers. These places become like hives, attracting talented people drawn by the energy and opportunity.

The field’s heroes band together and create communities with such fervor that it feels almost religious. As if they’re pilgrims in the holy lands.

A Mecca.

For tech, that place has been Silicon Valley for more than five decades. Since the 1980s, almost every successful tech entrepreneur and company has had ties to Silicon Valley. Sure, today’s world is more connected than ever. We have virtual networks and online communities. But there’s a different kind of energy when you’re physically present, when you can meet a legendary engineer at a coffee shop or bump into your future co-founder at McDonald’s.

It’s like Hamming said. You need to find where the people doing interesting things in your field are, and go there.

San Francisco, here I come.

Problems with advice

2024-05-23T00:00:00-07:00

Navigating advice is tricky.

First, you have to solve the problem of motives. Does the person giving the advice really have your best interests in mind? Are they trying to manipulate you for their benefit? Maybe they’re just reminiscing their own regrets?

Even when motives align, the advise-giver might not be entirely honest. Take the example of the entrepreneur YouTuber. She teaches you how to start a business, but her business is selling courses to you. In this case, the motives are aligned: the YouTuber wants to make money, and you hope to learn how to create a business. However, the YouTuber carefully omits that you are her primary source of income.

And even if someone has good intentions, you have another problem which is not solvable. Everyone is bounded and biased by their life experiences. A simple way to observe this is how generational opinions about investing in the stock market correlate strongly with how the stock market performs from the early 20s to the late 30s of each generation.

Even excellent thinkers like Charlie Munger are limited by what they’ve learned and experienced. His decisions and their outcomes shaped his world models and understanding of how the world operates. This isn’t because Charlie Munger isn’t smart enough, but simply because one cannot create causal models from information that never entered one’s brain.

Being shaped by experiences means that everyone’s context is different. The environment you grow up in, the people you interact with, the time period, and the place you live all shape your worldview. What might have worked during a booming economy of rapid industrialization might not be effective in a recession. Not to mention that people have different goals and values. One might be maximizing asset value, another might be idolizing freedom, and you might be going for a mix between freedom, wealth, and family.

This doesn’t mean all advice is useless. Having good mentors is one of the most powerful ways to level up extremely fast.

Advice comes from the giver’s world model, which is formed by their experiences. Experiences are information. To benefit from the knowledge and experience of others, reduce their advice to information. Information is much easier to work with because it can be examined, dissected, and analyzed. Then it’s easy to keep what is useful and discard the rest. From the useful information, you can build your own conclusions.

To reduce advice to useful information, ask the person about their choices and experiences rather than looking for direct advice about your situation. If you drill down enough, you will understand the criteria, circumstances, and outcomes of each decision.

Bad questions:

How should we go about our manufacturing process?
What’s the best way to hire people?
Should I start an AI company?

Good questions:

Why did you choose sourcing from China and building in-house?
What were the greatest challenges in scaling production?
Did you come up with a repeatable way of hiring good talent?
Why did you pick a16z instead of Sequoia to lead the investment round?

Most advice is bad because it doesn’t apply to your situation. Following bad advice is confusing, and disorients your internal compass. And your capacity to make decisions and take action based on your own judgment largely defines where you end up in life.

Positive thinking 101

2024-02-21T00:00:00-08:00

A few months ago, I attended a friend’s housewarming party and ended up striking a conversation with a university colleague.

Among our life updates, I shared my experience of a self-reinforcing feedback loop: delusional optimism leading to positive thinking, resulting in unexpectedly heightened performance leading to delusional optimism. Excitedly, I was trying to convey how interesting the phenomenon was, when he cut me off with the world’s flattest voice:

“That’s positive thinking 101. Everyone knows that.”

Funnily, throughout our exchange, my classmate engaged in not-that-positive thinking and self-limiting beliefs, being critical even to the effectiveness of positive thinking itself.

“That’s positive thinking 101”. I chuckle to this day when I remember his tone. But the reason the conversation keeps persisting in my head is the stark contradiction between “everyone knows about positive thinking” and his (conscious or subconscious) resistance to apply it.

There are at least two interesting observations to be made:

Lack of knowledge is not the bottleneck towards behavioral change. We know what is helpful or harmful in the majority of cases, which is why we almost never learn anything new when reading self-help books. We re-read familiar concepts phrased in a different way, hoping that a previously unexamined angle will lead to change.
What you know, say, or think are all footnotes of what you do. Action is what that takes your knowledge, words, and thoughts, and makes it tangible. Thoughts and emotions might be driving actions, but without action you are left with an open loop. Current is not flowing. Energy is not converted, it is merely consumed. Nothing happens.

Positive thinking is marginally useful. Practice positive acting 101 instead.

You are constantly voting

2023-12-26T00:00:00-08:00

Most people like the concept of voting. While I’m uncertain why, I suspect that feeling heard and acknowledged contributes to it. There is also general agreement that you should vote in presidential elections and other processes that directly affect you.

However, beyond these formal instances, a subtler form of voting takes place in daily life.

Buying groceries from Amazon is a vote supporting the company. Engaging with a social media post is a vote towards making the content viral. Even greeting people with a smile casts a vote for your public perception as a cheerful individual.

Although not always evident, every action is part of an implicit election.

A 1000 points of view

2023-08-20T00:00:00-07:00

For nearly every topic, idea, argument, belief, there are a 1000 points of view.

Addressing every single one is counterproductive for several reasons. It dilutes the core message, weakening its impact and clarity. It makes your view harder to follow and confusing to your audience. Even worse, it exhausts their attention. Covering every possible viewpoint rarely benefits anyone.

Skilled writers tend to be aware of unexplored arguments and subtleties in their work. They deliberately limit their scope to maximize their impact.

A receptive reader understands that a writer’s message is contextual, choosing to benefit from the main point rather than nitpicking “flaws”.

After all, the utility of any literary work lies in its potential to inspire ideas, invoke action, or trigger contemplation. Such potential is increased when the work is succinct, sharp and focused.

Mountain peaks don't move

2023-07-04T00:00:00-07:00

After months away from biking, I got a new bike last week.

Weekend arrived, and the weather was beautiful. The sky was blue, and I was excited to have a bike after so long, so I decided to ride to the top of Üetliberg ¹.

The incline was already tiring from the first minutes. My legs started burning even before the asphalt road gave way to the dirt path. Doubt filled my mind as I entered the forest, and the peak seemed impossible to reach. My brain was heavily protesting against the endeavor.

Several people passed by me effortlessly, ascending with ease.

Around 30 minutes into the ride and on the verge of turning back, I had a sudden realization: the peak cannot move. I just need to keep moving forward, no matter how slowly. Moving in the right direction will inevitably lead me the top.

The trivial fact felt like an epiphany, transforming the entire experience. I stopped being painfully aware of the remaining distance and the passing riders. They were exemplifying what I could achieve with repetition and practice. Though my legs burned, I knew from past experiences that they can endure for a remarkably long time. I just had to pedal consistently.

But the most intense change occurred within my mind — I was no longer desperate. Loud thoughts and mental pain evaporated. I could enjoy the beautiful scenery, the endorphin rush, and above all, the pure joy of the ride.

At the top, I got myself the biggest ice cream I could find, and sat to admire the view. The thought persisted in my head: goals are immobile, and persistence leads to their inevitable conquest.

Zurich’s own “mountain” (which is more of a hill). ↩

Scrambled eggs or omelet?

2023-06-19T00:00:00-07:00

Yesterday, my girlfriend asked me whether I’d like scrambled eggs or an omelet for breakfast.

Throughout my life, I had always preferred scrambled eggs. My mom would frequently whip up omelets, but I would only have scrambled eggs during special occasions like hotel breakfasts or when my dad took charge of the morning meal. Scrambled was the premium deal.

But I’ve been working at Google for the past 10 months. Every morning at 9 o’clock, I enjoy my breakfast at the office. On my plate, there’s a dark bread bun topped with cheese, turkey ham, tomato, and three slices of cucumber. Accompanying it is another plate with a serving of scrambled eggs and steamed vegetables.

Considering that I spend, on average, four days a week at the office, I’ve consumed scrambled eggs about 160 times since last August.

So, after pondering my girlfriend’s question for a second, I was surprised to hear myself answering her: ‘omelet’.

On refining published writing

2023-03-06T00:00:00-08:00

Writing is a tool for crystallizing one’s distilled thoughts through language. It allows the author to capture their way of thinking and writing at a specific moment in time.

However, any written text is inevitably outdated by the time it is read, since it reflects the author’s thoughts at a past moment in time. Our opinions and understanding of the world continuously evolve, based on new evidence and experiences.

Traditionally, published writing has been viewed as a static entity, but with digital technology continuous iteration is available at the click of a button. This poses the question: should writing stay untouched once published, or should it be continuously iterated on?

Keeping text unedited can be valuable both to the reader and the author. Readers can visit old texts and compare it with current works, gaining insight into the author’s evolution as a thinker and writer. For the author, keeping old work untouched can serve as a reminder of their progress.

On the other hand, many famous creators, from writers to scientists to artists, have been known to continuously edit and refine their work. It is not hard to imagine that they published frozen snapshots of their work reluctantly, and only due to the lack of technology and interfaces permitting otherwise.

Attempting to give a definite answer to the question is probably naive. As is often the case, it seems to depend on context. For example, in peer-reviewed publications in scientific work, it makes sense to have static content, since the reviewers “approved” a specific iteration of the text.

An interesting interface would be to allow viewers see multiple revisions of a work through version control. Something not too unlike git ¹, but oriented towards the general public rather than software engineers. In this way, continuous iteration is enabled without loss of context and history.

https://git-scm.com/ ↩

Surprise as a tool for thought

2023-02-23T00:00:00-08:00

Writing has been historically used as a means of understanding the world around us, and there is extensive research supporting the benefits of writing as a tool for thinking. Meanwhile, with the advent of the internet, all human knowledge has become universally accessible. Physics equations, nutrition facts, programming idioms, disease symptoms, can all be found in seconds. What is worth keeping note of then?

Many ideas are obvious, and make intuitive sense, while some are surprising. Initially they don’t make sense at all, until a euphoric moment of clarity where everything ties together. Other ideas make so much immediate, intuitive sense that they are equally surprising.

Claude Shannon quantified the amount of information contained in a message by how surprising it is. I take note of things that surprise me. This seems to be a reliable heuristic for what’s worth keeping note of.

What was I surprised by, why, and how I ultimately came to understand the concept. Apart from helping me understand the concept better, writing allows me to track how my understanding evolves over time. When I revisit my notes, I can compare my initial reaction to an idea to my brain’s current interpretation.

Notes for The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod

2022-11-06T00:00:00-07:00

Understanding the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma

The entire book is based on a classic Game Theory problem called Prisoner’s Dilemma, so I will first try to explain the idea behind it, before we get to the book notes themselves.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma describes a scenario where two players can either cooperate or defect (cheat / betray / be uncooperative). Based on what each of them does, they get a certain reward (or punishment).

In the classic scenario, there are two prisoners, Joe and Tuna, which are being interrogated. They have no way of communicating with each other, and therefore cannot agree on a strategy beforehand. The interrogator is asking each of them separately to give criminalizing information about the other, such that they can take them to court. In exchange, the interrogator promises that they will get beneficial treatment for helping.

So Joe and Tuna can cooperate with each other by staying silent, or they can defect by giving information to the interrogator. There are four possible outcomes:

Both of them cooperate, and they give no information about each other to the interrogators. They both get a 2-year sentence.
Tuna cooperates, by giving no information to the interrogator, but Joe betrays him. Tuna gets a 10-year sentence, while Joe gets set free (as a favor for helping the interrogators).
Vice-versa (Joe stays silent and Tuna defects). Tuna gets set free and Joe gets the 10-year sentence.
Both defect and give information about each other, they each get a 5-year sentence.

So the outcomes can be summarized on a table like this:

	Joe cooperates	Joe defects
Tuna cooperates	2Y each	0Y Joe, 10Y Tuna
Tuna defects	5Y each	10Y Joe, 0Y Tuna

The problem can be generalized to any situation where:

If you cooperate with someone you both get good results.
If you trick them into cooperating but you defect you get great results and they get terrible results (and vice-versa).
If neither cooperates you get mediocre to bad results.

The Iterated Prisoners Dilemma is exactly the same concept, but instead of playing the game once, you play it for many times (i.e. in iteration). This is a small but important change, since you are now choosing your action knowing that you will be faced with the other player again, and they will remember what you did.

This situation comes up all the time in real life between individuals, companies, even between states. The entire book is about comparing various strategies one can use in such a setting, and finding out what impact different strategies have.

A strategy is a set of rules that one uses to choose their action in an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game.

Example strategies:

ALL D: Always defect.
ALL C: Always cooperate.
RANDOM: Cooperate or defect randomly.
TIT FOR TAT: Start with cooperation. Then do whatever the other did in the previous round.
SPITEFUL: Start with cooperation. If the other ever defects, always defect from that point on.

Spoiler alert: You might want to keep TIT FOR TAT in mind. It will appear often.

My Notes

Computer tournaments teach us about cooperation

Axelrod presents the results of various computer tournaments he organized, where he asked people to write computer programs to play the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game against each other. So the participants would submit their code, which was playing with specific rules. At the end of each tournament, some computer programs (which we will refer to as strategies) would get more points than others, and Axelrod would try to understand which strategies did well and why.

This simple experiment, resulted in remarkable insight on how cooperation emerges among people, societies, and even biological systems (for example birds feeding in a crocodile’s mouth, and the crocodile not eating them, because they are cleaning its teeth).

Based on the results of the tournament, there are four behaviors that can best ensure that a strategy will do well:

Be nice. Avoid unnecessary conflict. Cooperate as long as the other person is cooperating. This creates a stable environment where you both get good rewards.
React when the other is defecting for no reason. Otherwise you look exploitable and players will try to exploit you.
After you respond to the defection, forgive. Don’t be spiteful, because it can create an endless loop of defecting at each other, resulting in both players getting the lowest reward possible, and therefore you both lose.
Follow a simple strategy, such that others can recognize it, and adapt to it. If your reactions are complex, they are as good as random to the other person, and they cannot learn how to cooperate with you.

Being nice was the single most important property that differentiated the high scoring strategies from the low performing ones in the tournament. By nice, we mean that you should never defect first, and cooperate as long as the other player cooperates.

“Eye for an eye” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”?

The most robust strategy was TIT FOR TAT. It did well against all other players. And it displays all of the characteristics of well performing strategies:

It always starts with cooperation, so it’s a nice strategy.
It always retaliates defection immediately, so it cannot be exploited.
It always forgives right after retaliating, so it does not end up in defection loops.
It is easy to recognize, so others can easily adapt to it.

As a bonus, it is a very, very patient strategy. It will always forgive once it retaliates, no matter how many times it is provoked.

Interestingly, TIT FOR TAT never scored better in a single game than the other player. It cannot, since it always lets the other player defect first, and never defects more times than the other player. So it will always get the same score as the other player or less.

However, TIT FOR TAT won in all the tournaments. This was because it was good at eliciting such behavior from other players that enabled them both to do well. It won by consistently being able to make other players cooperate, resulting in mutually rewarding outcomes.

TIT FOR TAT can elicit good behavior by other strategies so well because it is simple to recognize. The other person can see what you are doing very easily. Your pattern is straightforward to predict, and the other person can easily learn that the best they can do with you is cooperate.

If your behavior is too complex, it looks no better than total chaos for the other player. They cannot tell what you do, or why, and you appear unresponsive. This gives no incentive to the other player to try to cooperate, making it hard to elicit good behavior from them.

TIT FOR TAT sounds mean to most of us because it is essentially following the “Eye for an eye” rule, which is a bit harsh. The question one can ask, is, are there any better alternatives? For example, the most widely accepted moral rule is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. In the context of Prisoner’s Dilemma, this means you should always cooperate, since this is what you would want from the other person.

This provides incentive for other players to exploit you. Moreover, unconditionally cooperating spoils the other player. Thus, implicitly, it hurts innocent players the exploiters will interact with later. And the rest of the community is burdened to reform the spoiled player. Curiously, reciprocity seems to be a better moral foundation than unconditional cooperation.

As a side note, when there is trustworthy central authority, you can rely on it to enforce the community standards. But in its absence, it falls to the players to give each other the necessary incentives to be cooperative.

In the WWI trenches

During the First World War, it was often the case that a battalion would stay at a fixed location for months. Apart from the atrocities that happened during that period, a fascinating aspect of the WWI Trench Warfare was how the Allies and the Germans developed cooperative behaviors, even though they were enemies, and without prior agreement. The English knew that if they did an aggressive attack, the Germans would reply back equally viciously. If the French let Germans rest during lunch time, the Germans would do the same.

So they developed various mutually followed behaviors. An account by a British officer facing a Saxon unit of the German army is almost hard not to laugh:

I was having tea with A Company when we heard a lot of shouting and went out to investigate. We found our men and the Germans standing on their respective parapets. Suddenly a salvo arrived but did no damage. Naturally both sides got down and our men started swearing at the Germans, when all at once a brave German got on to his parapet and shouted out “We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt. It is not our fault, it is that damned Prussian artillery.” (Rutter 1934, p. 29)

In 1914 the two sides even unofficially stopped fighting during Christmas, and exchanged food and souvenirs. There are even songs about it.

Because the two sides would face the same opponents again and again, the stationed battalions of the Allies and the Germans were essentially in an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario.

Life is a non-zero sum game

We tend to judge how well they do by what is available in their surroundings, and that is usually other people. We compare with others’ success, which often leads to being envious. Therefore, we try to reach the other player by defecting, but this leads to mutual punishment in the end. Envy is self-destructive.

How well you are doing compared to how the other players are doing is a bad metric, unless your goal is not to do well, but to destroy the other players. In most situations, you can either not destroy the other player, or it will be very costly to try.

A better metric is how well you are doing compared to how well someone else could be doing in your shoes. Given the others’ behaviors, are you doing as good as possible? Could someone else in your situation do better with this other player?

We often think of many situations in life as zero-sum games. That means a situation where advantage for one player means equivalent loss to the other, like in a chess game for example. But most situations are not zero-sum.

Smart people realize that, and find ways that make everyone win, rather than how can they win at the expense of others (think alliances in Big Tech etc.). In a non zero-sum world, you don’t have to do better than others to do well for yourself. Everybody can win. Therefore, it doesn’t make any sense to be envious if someone is doing a little better than you, as long as you take care to do well for yourself. In fact, in a game with repeated interactions, the other’s success is a prerequisite for yours.

How to promote stable cooperation

Cooperation among people can be encouraged by:

enlarging the shadow of the future
changing the payoffs
teaching people to care about others
teaching the value of reciprocity

If you think you will not see the other player ever again, then it makes sense to defect, and get the maximum reward. Therefore to make people cooperate, we should enlarge the “shadow of the future”. Make interactions more durable, and more frequent.

Another way to promote stable cooperation, is to make the gains from defection smaller than the gains of cooperation. Try to make the long-term incentive for mutual cooperation greater than the short-term incentive for defection.

For instance, if you are a business, it makes sense to ask for frequent small payments throughout a project, rather than a lump sum at the end. The other player will not try to cheat by taking the product and not paying, since they will only save a small amount of money, and they will not get the entire product.

Pitfalls to avoid

When you know that the other player is not reciprocating it doesn’t make sense to cooperate since whatever you do, the other person will keep doing their thing.

If you are cautious, and try to “play it safe” by starting with defection until the other person cooperates, it will backfire. Your defection will likely trigger a retaliation from the other player. Remember that the most important characteristic of winning strategies in the tournament, was being nice: never defect first.

It is important to be able to recognize defection when it occurs, in order to retaliate. In practice, this is harder than it sounds, because often you are not sure of the other person’s motives and actions.

Hierarchies make equality hard

Status hierarchies can have impactful effects on how cooperation evolves among people in different levels. Suppose that everyone when dealing with people below their status, are sometimes cooperating and sometimes defecting. At the same time, they don’t tolerate defection from those below them. When dealing with some one above them, they always cooperate, unless the other defects twice in a row. So with people below you, you are being a bully by often defecting but not tolerating defection, and with people above you, you are tolerating being a sucker sometimes, but only allow certain amount of exploitation.

This means that people near the top will always do well because they can defect everyone else some times, and get away with it. In contrast, people near the bottom will do poorly because they are meek to everyone. They can’t defect because they will immediately receive defection from those above them. An individual operating alone at the bottom of the social structure is trapped. They are doing poorly, but if they try to react they will do worse.

Should you hide your strategy?

A way to measure the value of any piece of information is to calculate how much better you could do with the information than without it. Thus, the better you can do without the information, the less you need the information, and the less it is worth.

Depending on your strategy, it might be costly to you if others know it. For example, if you are using a meek strategy that can be exploited, and the other player knows it, you will get exploited. On the other hand, if you are using a strategy that works best with cooperation, like TIT FOR TAT, then you are happy if the others know your strategy, because they know they should cooperate with you.

With TIT FOR TAT you are asserting a fixed behavior pattern. Since it is very easy to recognize, you let the other player adapt to you. You refuse to be bullied, but do not do any bullying. If the other player adapts, then you have mutual cooperation.

The value of reciprocity

The biggest surprise was the value of reciprocity, and especially provocability. Common sense says one should be slow to anger, but the results of the computer tournaments show that it is better to respond quickly to provocation.

The reason is that if one waits to respond to an uncalled for defection, they risk sending a wrong signal. The longer defections are allowed unchallenged, the more likely that the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay. And the more strongly this pattern is established, the harder it will be to break it.

Notes for Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, by Benjamin Franklin

2022-11-14T00:00:00-08:00

Context: Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of United States. A true polymath, he made significant contributions in politics, science, engineering, and the printing press among other things. He was one of the least controversial Founding Fathers, and maintained amicable relationships with almost everyone.

My Notes

If you want to be improved from the knowledge of others, don’t present your opinions strongly and in a fixed manner. Wise people, who usually dislike disputing, will let you being wrong and undisturbed.

Don’t promise to return favors. Instead, just return the favor. When someone lends you money, pay back as soon as you can, pay back in full, and ideally with interest.

Certain actions may be bad not because they’re forbidden by the Bible, but they were forbidden by the Bible because they were bad. Likewise, some actions are good not because they are commanded, but might be commanded because they’re good.

There are always some people who foresee doom and failure everywhere. They’re usually wrong.

When undertaking a collaborative project, avoid presenting yourself as the owner of ideas. It will make people reluctant to cooperate. Put yourself as much as you can out of sight and present it as a project of friends, who asked you to go and propose it to XYZ people because of this and that reason. This will make people less disputing and more agreeable to your cause.

Franklin spent no time in amusement (taverns, games, etc.) apart from reading, which he did for two hours every single evening since he was young.

“He that would thrive, must ask his wife”, says an old English proverb. You need an agreeable and collaborative significant other. Someone who assists you in your business, is frugal and does not take up your energy, time, and money.

Trying to improve yourself over multiple things at once is hard. While your attention is at avoiding one fault, you might do another. Habit might take advantage of inattention, or desire might overpower reason. You need to focus on one small piece every time, making it a habit so that you don’t rely on motivation, willpower, and mental strength. When you have mastered one habit, go on and fix others, while still trying to preserve the one you worked on.

In addition, merely knowing what is right and virtuous is not enough to ensure one is acting virtuously. Bad habits must be broken in order to have a steady and uniformly good character.

Never directly contradict what others are saying, nor try to assert your own opinions. Avoid using language expressions that imply a fixed opinion such as “certainly”, “undoubtedly”, etc. Say instead “I imagine something to be so and so”, or “So it seems to me currently”. When someone states something you think flat out wrong, deny yourself the pleasure of abruptly contradicting them and pointing the absurdity in their proposition. In answering, begin by observing how in certain cases or circumstances their opinion would be right, but in the current case there appears to be some difference.

In this way, you will find that your conversations will be more pleasant. Your opinions will be received with more ease, and with less contradiction. When you’re wrong, it will be less scary. And finally, it’s easier for other people to give up their mistakes, and agree with you, if you don’t fight them.

The hardest passion to subdue is pride. Even if one manages to overcome it, they would probably be proud of their humility.

When trying to earn a person’s favor, don’t pay them servitude and respect. Find something they are passionate about, and ask them a favor regarding that subject (e.g. if they would be so kind as to lend you that fascinating rare book they have in their collection). They will be excited to show-off and help you, and they will want to do you more favors.

On the contrary, when you help people, they might feel indebted to you, which can make them resentful.

Removing potential adversaries by making them friends is much more useful, and pleasant, than to resent or be hostile.

Franklin always prepared an idea in the minds of people several months or even years ahead of its possible execution. In this way, he prepared people for change, making them more agreeable to it, and more likely to vote such a proposal. He also usually tried to diffuse the idea through his intellectual circle of friends, who then diffused the idea further in their own circles.

After getting the first hundred pounds, it is more easy to get the second.

Partnerships often finish in quarrels. Make sure to be proactive and cautious at the early stages of a deal. Explicitly agree everything such that there is nothing to be disputed in the unfortunate event of a cease of cooperation. No matter how much you may trust and highly esteem the other person at the start of a contract, over time little jealousies and quarrels may arise, which can lead to breach of both partnership and friendship.

When someone comes to you with a request, avoid answering in a rush, nor in the presence of the person who made the request. Their presence will cloud your judgement, and they might be able to talk you into decisions you wouldn’t have made on your own. Think about it in isolation, and deliver your reply in a hard to negotiate method like a letter, rather than a meeting.

If asked to perform a duty you believe you’re inadequate for, and want to excuse yourself, you don’t need to proclaim inadequacy as the reason. You can mention other duties that keep you from being able to do this.

Asked for advice on how to raise funds for an endeavor, Franklin epically replied:

Firstly, ask from all those who you know will give something. Then from those who you are uncertain whether they will give anything or not, and show them the list of those who have given. Lastly, do not neglect those who you are sure will give nothing, because for some of them you may be mistaken.

People often complain about things they can easily change. Londoners wake up three hours later than sunrise, but complain that candlelight is expensive.

Happiness is not produced by strokes of great fortune that rarely happen, but by little advantages that occur every day.

Disputing, contradicting and confuting people are generally unfortunate in their affairs. They might get victory sometimes, but they never get good will, which is much more useful.

When people keep themselves busy with work, they are content and cheerful. When they are idle all day, they start complaining about their food, and finding faults among each other.

A priest once complained that soldiers did not attend his prayers. They were, however, very punctual in attending to receive their daily ration of rum. So Franklin advised the priest to act as steward of the rum, dealing it out only after the prayers.

Big part of people’s misery, comes from them giving up too much for something they value, whose value they falsely estimated. They give too much for their whistles:

When I was a child of seven year old, my friends filled my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys for children, and being charmed with the sound of a whistle, that I met by the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and gave all my money for one.

I then came home, and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family. My brothers, and sisters, and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth. They put me in mind what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money, and laughed at me so much for my folly, that I cried with vexation. The reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure.

This, however, was afterwards of use to me, the impression continuing on my mind. Often, when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary thing, I said to myself, “Don’t give too much for the whistle” and I saved my money.

As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for their whistle.

Notes for Anything You Want, by Derek Sivers

2022-11-15T00:00:00-08:00

Context: Derek Sivers started a business by mistake, because he wanted to sell his music online, but he had no deal with a big record label. Back then, you couldn’t sell online if it wasn’t through a record label. So he created a website, to be able to sell his CDs. Then some friends asked him if he can sell their CDs on the website too. Then his friends of friends started asking. And so CD Baby was born.

My Notes

On creating and managing a business

You don’t need to advertise things that people really want. Make things that people want, i.e. solve their problems. Persist by improving and inventing, not by repeatedly doing something that’s not working.

A business plan doesn’t need more than a few hours of work, and ideally no more than a few minutes. Simple plans can take you a long way.

Famous quote from Steve Blank:

No business plan survives first contact with customers.

Continuously adapt. When Derek created CD Baby back in 1998, he thought it was a card processing service. A week after he launched his website, a customer emailed to ask if there are any new releases, thinking that CD Baby was a store. So Derek changed his “business plan”. When iTunes launched 5 years later, Apple asked CD Baby to be a digital distributor, and so it happened.

Investors can skew your mission/vision. You should only spending effort on pleasing your customers, no one else.

Never promise a customer you can do something that is not in your full control.

When you have no funding, you only spend money on essentials, and you build the rest yourself. Your customers don’t care if you spent $100000 for something or you built it yourself for $1000. They only care about user-facing improvement of your product.

Don’t punish everyone, past and future customers, employees, friends, for one person’s mistake. Also, don’t make decisions when you are angry. That’s the worst time to roll out a new policy. Quoting straight from the book, as I love his phrasing:

Several years ago, one guy tried to light his shoes on fire on a plane. Now, and for all future time, millions of people a day have to queue up to take their shoes off at the airport—because of that one dumb moment.

If your business crumbles the moment you leave it alone, you’re self-employed. You are a business owner when you leave for a year and your business is doing even better when you come back.

Execution is all that matters. The idea is just a multiplier of the execution:

weak idea	1
good idea	10
great idea	20

no execution	$1
weak execution	$1000
great execution	$100,000
brilliant execution	$10,000,000

A business exists to serve its customers

Make every business decision (including expansions, raises, promotions etc.) according to what is best for the customer. If you don’t know what to prioritize, ask the customer what do they want. Then satisfy that.

No customer will ask you to expand. Your customers want you to have your attention on them. Focus entirely on your existing customers, and make them love you. Your business will grow because they’ll tell everyone.

Remember your reason for doing something. Refuse opportunities, partnerships, and offers that go against your reasons, even if it means big money for you.

No customer would ask you to put ads on your website, so don’t do it. Read this funny story from Derek.

Rule No. 1 of a good service: it’s all about the customer. When ordering from CD Baby, this is the email you would get:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Such a tiny piece of genius. See Derek’s post.

Why are you doing this?

If you’re not excited about something, say no.

You can’t expect to start big. If you don’t want to start without being big, maybe you are more interested in fame than doing what you have in mind. Start now with 1% of your vision. It will not be grand, but you will be in the game. You’ll be ahead of the rest because you started, while others are waiting for the finish line to appear on the starting line. Just focus on helping people today.

Never forget why you are really doing what you’re doing. If your goal is to be happy and help people, do you want to spend your nights turning in bed thinking how to maximize profits?

Know what is important to you, and how you grade yourself. This will be your guiding compass when others loudly and confidently say what they think you should be doing. There will always be people telling you you’re wrong. Be mindful of what excites you and what drains you. Pay attention to when you’re being the real you and when you’re trying to impress.

You can always do things more efficiently, outsource them, do all kinds of growth tricks. Do you want this? Why are you doing your project/business in the first place? Isn’t the point to have fun and be happy? You are doing things because of who you want to be, not what you want to have. Being requires learning, practicing and honing your craft.

Everyone assumes a business’ goal is to be as big as possible, but that means spending most of your time on meetings, investors, bankers, media etc. This has probably nothing to do with why you started the business in the first place. Always keep in mind your reasons for doing things. Even if your reason is money, you want money to do something with it, and that something will supposedly give you happiness.

Anything you hate doing, someone else loves. If you love programming, but hate management, find someone who loves management and let them do it. Doing things you hate will make you lose interest in the whole thing.

Keep examining and realigning yourself with your actions. If you find that your project grew or changed beyond of what aligns with your identity, let it go.

See Derek’s story of how he knew he was done with CD Baby, and the astonishing way he sold it.

Create your small utopia

A business - or a website, a book, anything you create - is the reflection of it’s creator. It can be as unconventional and as quirky as you want.

Creating a business is like making a little universe where you control all the rules. Your own utopia. How would a business work in your utopia? What would be the 5 things that would be true in your perfect world? Write them down, and make them the guiding principles for your business. If you make a dream come true for yourself, it might be a dream come true for others too.

Revolution is just succeeding by doing things differently. When you are onto something great, it doesn’t feel like revolution, it just feels like uncommon sense.

Notes for Show Your Work, by Austin Kleon

2023-02-26T00:00:00-08:00

My Notes

Creativity doesn’t come as a lightning bolt

Good work doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes from interacting with ideas of other people. Many of the “lone geniuses” throughout history were part of a community who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, and giving and taking ideas.

It’s okay to be an amateur. It gives you freedom and perspective

You have no reputation to live up to, nothing to lose and people are have less expectation out of your work. You can experiment, make mistakes, and look ridiculous. Also, as an amateur, you can sometimes give better advice to other amateurs, since the expert is so far ahead in his craft that he may have trouble seeing what the amateur is struggling with.

To “find your voice” you need to use it

Share what you like reading, what thoughts you’re obsessed with, what music you can’t keep out of your head. Talk about what you love, and don’t self-censor.

You will die, and so will everyone else. It’s not that scary to put yourself out there

To quote Steve Jobs:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.

Human beings are social. They want to see what other humans are doing and how and why. Sharing your work helps you form relationships with other people.

Especially if the outcome of your work isn’t easily shared, if you’re still in the apprentice stage of your work, or if your process doesn’t lead to tangible finished products, the process is all you have to share.

No-one had overnight success. Building a body of quality work takes a lifetime. Focus on shipping a bite-size of work every day. It can be your influences, your sources, your method, what you learned, anything. Share this on your social media. Even if 90% of it is crap, if you share daily, you will have 36 good posts in a year.

You have to make time for it. Everyone has 24hrs/day. If it’s important, you will make the time. Stay up a bit later, wake up a bit earlier, do it during commute.

Sharing shouldn’t take precedence over producing actual work.

You’re sharing with people because you care, not to spam their feeds. If it’s not interesting, useful, or entertaining don’t share it. If you wouldn’t be comfortable with your mom or your boss seeing it don’t share it. If you’re unsure, share something else instead and put this back in the drawer. Sleep on it, there’s no reason to rush.

Combine your small daily shares into larger bodies of work

There are themes and patterns in the daily bite-sized chunks you share Collect and organize what you’re sharing. Keep your sources accessible and searchable. Have an archive. Go back through your notes, and piece them together to bigger bodies of work . Tweets become blog posts. Blog posts become book chapters.

Claim Your corner of the internet

Social media are useful, but they come and go like any other trend. Have a corner of the internet that’s yours. You can be anything and anyone you want online. Build your own website and publish everything you do there. Make it your own small utopia and fill it with your ideas and the things you care about.

When starting out anything, you will not be good enough. Becoming good takes time and practice. Share your inspiration if you don’t feel comfortable sharing your early attempts. What are you reading? What blogs are you subscribed to? Who are your heroes? Who do you look up to?

All these are part of who you are. People are social. They want to know you. Share away!

Be open and honest about what you like. Don’t self-censor

You love things that someone else probably thinks are garbage. That’s fine. Love your garbage. When you genuinely enjoy something, don’t feel guilty about it. Share it. It’s the best way to connect with people who like it too.

If you self-censor and only share things that you think other people will find cool, you will never connect with people over the things you actually care about. That’s a lonely life to live.

Whenever you are sharing work of others, credit it. Always. Treat work of others as if it were your own.

Say what the work is, who made it, how they made it, when and where, and why are you sharing it. You can also shout-out to the people who helped you find the work you’re sharing; you share your inspiration sources, and help them get more visibility at the same time.

Lastly, always include a link. People are lazy. If you don’t add a link, almost no-one will bother searching the source you’re attributing.

Learn to tell good stories about your work

Words are important. The stories you tell about your work vastly shape how people perceive your work. It shapes how they feel, what they understand about it, and how they value it. The way you email, text, tweet, blog, comment is all part of a narrative you are constructing about your work. Learn what is a good story and how to tell one.

There is a vast body of work studying storytelling. A simple, but effective plot for stories by John Gardner:

A character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw.

Learn to talk about yourself in an interesting but humble way

Have a pitch when people ask you “What do you do?”. It’s an opportunity to connect with somebody who might be genuinely interested in your work. Keep your audience in mind: you should be able to explain what you do to a 5-year-old, to your grandmother, to someone in your field, and everyone else.

Saying “I’m a software engineer who draws and plays music” is ok. If you don’t feel comfortable with your title, ask yourself why. Maybe you need to reflect upon your life decisions.

Stick to the facts. Quoting straight from the book:

If you take photos, you’re not an “aspiring” photographer, and you’re not an “amazing” photographer, either. You’re a photographer. Don’t get cute. Don’t brag.

Sharing your techniques doesn’t mean anyone can emulate them. It usually requires years of practice to master something, and most people are not even interested in mastering it in the first place. But they still can be fascinated in witnessing the process¹.

Share what you learn, your reading list, helpful reference materials. Create tutorials. Teach what you know. It generates interest in your field, which helps your work. Teaching helps internalizing knowledge. People reach out to you with helpful reading material and they bring you in contact with people in the field.

If you want to be noticed, you have to notice

No-one likes the “I write, but I don’t read” kind of people. If you only shout-out to your own work you are playing the game wrongly, and no-one will want to play with you. You need to be a fan before you have fans. You have to care about others’s work if you want people to care about yours.

Care about Who is following you, not how many

It’s much better to have 1000 true fans than 10000 followers who don’t care about what you are doing. Connections are important in life, but meaningful connections only arise through genuine interest and care. Make stuff you love and you will attract people who love that kind of stuff.

Keep away from people who suck your energy

Spending time with some people will make you feel energized. With others, you will feel depleted. The latter suck your energy. Remove them from your life at all cost. Same with any other activity that drains you.

Find the few people who match your weird and make them your trusted circle

There are a few people that match your weirdness. They share your obsessions, they have a similar mission to you, and you share mutual respect. Collaborate with them, praise them, and keep them as close as you can.

Meet with people in real life

Over time you will make a great online network. Meet with these people in real life too.

Learn to take criticism without making it personal

The more work you share, and the more popular you become, the more criticism you will face. Get used to criticism. Learn to differentiate your work from self-identity. Use the useful critiques to become better, and ignore the hateful ones.

Some people will hate your work with passion. Make more of it. Hate and love are two sides of the same coin.

It’s fine to make money as a creative

Quoting from the book:

Everybody says they want artists to make money, and then when they do, everybody hates them for it.

Don’t be jealous when people you like do well. Don’t be bitter.

Ask funding for your work

When your work becomes sufficiently good that you think it deserves funding, ask for it. Add a “Like this? Buy me a coffee.” to your website. Send an email to your newsletter subscribers asking them to fund your next book.

Be careful when crowdfunding. Sometimes feel that they have some say in how their money is being used (not too unlike how investors want to influence a startup).

Have a mailing list of people who like your work

Email outlasted every other online communication channel so far. Keep a mailing list of people who like your work, and send them emails with useful and interesting content.

When you need to advertize your new project, ask for funding for your new startup, or need help proofreading your upcoming book, your mailing list will be a warm audience responding to your needs.

People who sign up to your mailing list trust you. Respect them and don’t betray their trust.

Be open to opportunities for that help you do more of what you like

If something comes along your way that will allow you to do more of the work you love doing, say Yes. If something comes along that would mean more money but less of what you like doing, say No.

Be mindful to spend your time on your craft, not the busywork around it

Quoting Neil Gaiman:

There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.

Persist, and don’t quit early

People who succeed are usually the ones who persist long enough. Don’t quit early.

Keep a momentum with your work

Don’t let your momentum die between projects. Woody Allen used to start writing the script for the next film the day he finished the last one. Ernest Hemmingway used to stop a sentence midway so he knew where to start next morning.

Taking breaks, waiting for feedback and worrying about what’s next all kill your momentum. Use your current project as a link to the next one.

Don’t burn out

Sometimes it is beneficial to completely remove yourself from your work and what you’re doing. Go to the woods for a week. Spend three months doing something entirely different.

Sabbaticals - of varying length - will give your brain space to ideate.

Keep yourself an amateur

As you become better at what you do, you will plateau and things will become stale. You need to keep challenging yourself. Try new things, start a new craft, dive in a new domain of knowledge. Become a beginner again, and let the possibilities light up your brain.

Did you watch How it’s made as a kid, or anything else similar? You were probably never interested in becoming a bowling bowl manufacturer, but it was still fascinating to watch how they’re made. ↩

Notes for Zero to One, by Peter Thiel

2023-04-05T00:00:00-07:00

Aim for 0 to 1 improvements
The dot-com bubble made people cautious of innovation and big thinking
Competition is usually bad for a business
Monopolies exaggerate their competition, competitive businesses exaggerate themselves
The value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future
Characteristics of a monopoly
A business should always start with a very niche market
People from 15th to 20th century believed that luck was to be mastered and dominated
Definite and optimistic outlooks of life
Diversification doesn’t work well in investing because great success follows a power law distribution
Why do so many people today believe there are no secrets left to be discovered?
Founding decisions and initial alignment in startups should be done very carefully
Compensation in startups should align employee and company interests
Create a strong culture by choosing people who work well together and love the company mission
Why should the 20th employee join your company?
Everyone underestimates sales because no one likes to be sold and sales tries hard to stay hidden
You need a great distribution plan or your company will fail
The seven questions every company must answer in order to succeed
Great founders are usually extreme figures and odd people

Aim for 0 to 1 improvements

Horizontal/extensive progress: Globalization. Taking an idea from 1 to n. Easier to imagine.
Vertical progress: Technology. Taking an idea from 0 to 1. Hard to imagine, since it requires doing something that no one has done before.

The only field that has improved dramatically since mid-20th century is computers and communications. There are plenty opportunities in many fields waiting to be uncovered. You need a contrarian view to find them: What valuable company is nobody building?

The most contrarian thing is not to oppose the crowd, but to think for yourself.

Ali Abdaal also had a video on this. He made the point that investing in equipment, knowledge, experiences, etc. that you have never done before gives you much more than marginally improving upon existing things.

If you already have an iPhone X and it works fine, buying an iPhone 14 would take you from 1 to 1.1. if your main reason for buying the phone is a better camera. You’re better off buying a camera instead. The quality of a professional camera is unmatched compared to the quality of iPhone 14.

Of course there are contradicting arguments to be made:

if you would end up not using the camera because it would be inconvenient to carry around, then obviously the new phone might be a better choice overall.
if you keep learning new tools instead of mastering the ones you know, you will never become productive. Principles for software engineers and other makers.

It might also be applied to productivity and business I guess. Learning a new tool that does a job you could previously just couldn’t do, might be better than improving your workflow with a tool that you are already quite acquainted with?

The dot-com bubble made people cautious of innovation and big thinking

Dot-com bubble happened during a period where everything was pessimistic and in decline except computers and the internet. A lot of people were quitting well-paying jobs to found or join startups.

Effect of dot-com bubble burst on people’s outlook:

treat the future as indefinite. dismiss long-term plans as extreme. Promote globalization stay away from technology.
Silicon valley thinking after dot-com crash:
- incremental advances over grand visions
- be lean (unplanned) and flexible. planning is arrogant and rigid. iterate agnostically until it works.
- improve on competition. new markets are dangerous.
- focus on product development. sales and distribution will follow. advertising is wasteful.

This lead people away from Definite-and-optimistic-outlooks-of-life.

It is easy to see why the thinking is wrong, and the opposite principles make more sense. Some examples:

Competition is usually bad for a business

In perfect competition, no company makes economic profit. Capitalism and competition are opposites: capitalism believes in the accumulation of capital and competition balances pricing such that profits are competed away.

Taking monopoly and perfect competition as two ends of the spectrum, we tend to think that most companies are somewhere in the middle. This is because both monopolies and competitive businesses have incentive to make it look like that: Monopolies exaggerate their competition, competitive businesses exaggerate themselves.

In reality, most businesses are much closer to either perfect competition or monopoly.

Monopolies can afford to think about things other than money because their profit margins are big. Competitions struggle to survive, so long-term planning is harder.

Everyday business language uses war metaphors: headcount, sales force, captive market. Competition is like war, but a great business shouldn’t be.

In competition you can lose sight of what matters and focus on what your rivals are doing instead. Microsoft and Google were waging war on each other: Google Search - Bing, Chrome - Edge, Surface - Chromebook. Winning is better than losing, but everyone loses in a war: Apple did its own thing and overtook both of them.

Creative monopoly: give customers more choices by adding new categories of abundance, rather than competing on existing ones.

Monopoly is a condition for a successful business: it succeeds when it can do something others cannot.

All successful companies are different, since they earn a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they fail to escape competition.

The trend for “disruptive startups” is counterproductive since such startups see themselves through the eyes of the eyes of the old players in a market. They define themselves as competition. If your business can be summarized as a competition to existing markets, you’re probably not creating something new, and therefore it’s unlikely to become a monopoly. Also, disruptive companies gather attention, sometimes picking fights they can’t win. When expanding to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt. Frame your market in a way that avoids competition as long as possible.

Monopolies exaggerate their competition, competitive businesses exaggerate themselves

Monopolies lie to protect themselves. They try to conceal the monopoly, and exaggerate the power of their competition, to avoid unwanted (regulatory and media) attention. They frame their market as a union of several large markets to look smaller.

Competitive businesses exaggerate the difference of their company compared to competitors to differentiate themselves and exaggerate their (market) power. They define their market as an intersection of smaller markets to look big ¹.

The value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future

Nightclubs and restaurants are extreme examples of competition. They are all the same, exaggerate minor differences, and fade into non-relevance once their trend period is over. They accumulate decent amounts of money today but their profits often dwindle over time.

Tech companies usually lose money for the first few years. Most of their value comes 10-15 years in the future. Therefore, a tech company must grow and endure. Most companies focus on growth, which is easily measurable, and forget durability. The most important question for a business is: will this company still be around a decade from now? To answer this you must think about the qualitative characteristics of your business, which are usually hard to measure.

Future cash flows should be discounted since money today is worth more than in the future.

Characteristics of a monopoly

proprietary technology: A business needs 10x technological improvement to have real monopolistic advantage
network effects: Network effects make a product more useful as more people use it. Your product needs to be valuable when the network is still small, otherwise it will never become a big network. Therefore network effect businesses must start with very small markets. Successful network effects businesses rarely get started from business people because the initial markets are so small that they don’t appear to be business opportunities at all.
economies of scale: Economies of scale work best when the cost of production, distribution, operation etc. doesn’t scale with the customer base. Software startups are exemplary examples since producing copies of the product has near zero cost. Service businesses are hard to make monopolies since they are hard to scale.
branding: A strong branding can be a powerful ace in claiming a monopoly. Branding only works with strong underlying substance. Apple has superior materials, hardware, better software integration etc. Their branding only binds and strengthens everything else.

A business should always start with a very niche market

Startups should start with a very, very niche market. When in doubt, it’s almost always better to start smaller. It’s much easier to reach a few thousand people who desperately need your product than compete for the attention of a million scattered individuals. Small market doesn’t mean nonexistent.

Go for a small market of concentrated people served by a few or no competitors. Large markets either lack a good starting point, or they are open to competition. Competition means marginal to no profits.

First dominate your niche market, and then you can scale up. Amazon started selling only books. Then they expanded to CDs, videos and software, which were similar markets. Today they sell everything. Expanding gradually and with the right sequence is hard and requires strong discipline.

Being the first to dominate a market is irrelevant to the success of your business. You want to be the last dominating: make a great improvement and enjoy monopolistic advantage for years/decades.

Dominate your tiny niche market first, and then scale up to your grand long-term vision. Similar to start helping today rather than dreaming of big big big - Anything you want, ꆜ Derek Sivers.

People from 15th to 20th century believed that luck was to be mastered and dominated

Proving whether success is luck or skill is impossible since each person/company starts only once, and always in unique circumstances. If it is luck, “serial entrepreneurship” is not explainable. Successful people can create new things easier, but dismissing all planned success as luck or privilege (Matthew effect) seems indignant.

From 15th to 20th century (Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution), luck was something to be mastered, dominated and controlled. Everyone agreed that you should focus on what you can control, not what you can’t. People believed in making their own luck by working hard rather than focusing on possible misfortunes.

People who think they can control the future make concrete and definite plans: Definite-and-optimistic-outlooks-of-life. People who think the future is indefinite, diversify to be “prepared for everything”.

Definite and optimistic outlooks of life

Depending on one’s beliefs about the definiteness of the future, and their outlook (optimism/pessimism), we can have four different scenarios.

Indefinite pessimism: the future will be bad, and I have no idea what to do about it. A good example are Europeans: they react to things as they happen and hope things won’t get worse.

Definite pessimism: the future will be bad in a known way, and I need to prepare for it. An example is China: they have experienced intense poverty and can project how it looks like in the future. Therefore they work hard to avoid it. They copy everything that worked well in the West: capitalism, factories, skyscrapers.

Indefinite optimism: the future will be better but I don’t know how, so I make no plans. I strive to prepare for everything. An example is high-performing students today: they gain diversified general knowledge, and go on to work as consultants or banking investors, keeping their options open. This might be a byproduct of Baby Boomers born in the 50s: things got better every year of their early life, without them causing it through their actions. So they had great expectations and few plans.

Definite optimism: the future will be better, if I plan and work to make it so. People-from-15th-to-20th-century-believed-that-luck-was-to-be-mastered-and-dominated. Each generation’s inventors and visionaries until 1960s surpassed their predecessors. Today, great plans from unknown people are mocked and long-range visions from powerful people are considered hubris.

In an indefinite world, money is more valuable than what you can do with it, because it provides unlimited optionality. In a definite future, money is a means to an end.

In today’s philosophy, politics, and business, everyone glorifies processes and shies away from plans.

Indefinite optimism is the only view of the future that cannot work: how can the future get better if no one plans for it?

Side note on startups:

Lean startups that adapt and evolve in an ever-changing environment making minimum viable products and iterating to success are the hallmark of indefinite optimism: we don’t know what will work so let’s just try things and see what sticks. But why would you expect a business to succeed without a plan to make that happen?

Founders only sell when they have no concrete visions of the company. The acquirer usually under or overpays. Definite founders with robust plans don’t sell, because they know what they will do with their company.

Steve Jobs was a definite optimist. Above all, he was a grand designer. He planned everything meticulously.

Diversification doesn’t work well in investing because great success follows a power law distribution

Diversification for VC funds

Having a diversified portfolio as a VC fund doesn’t make sense since the companies you invest in don’t follow a normal distribution: a handful of companies will vastly outperform all others. The vast majority of startups fail, some have mediocre success and few take off. Power-law-is-omnipresent-in-human-society

One investment usually equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined. Funds should only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.

When you invest in 10 startups, they all will have similar trajectory initially. Only after 10 years you will be able to see the dominant investment. It’s easy to miss the power law, since it doesn’t reflect daily experience.

Diversification for everyone else

Everyone-is-an-investor

You shouldn’t necessarily start your own company. Too many people start their own companies. Joining the very best company while it’s growing fast and owning 2% can be much more profitable than owning 100% of your own unsuccessful company. Also, roles between companies are much more important than roles inside companies.

Why do so many people today believe there are no secrets left to be discovered?

To build something great, you need a secret: a hard to discover, unpopular, and correct belief. It has to be hard but not impossible, because then it’s a mystery (what happens when we approach a black hole? what happens after death?). Not easy because then many people can find it, and it’s not a secret anymore.

A lot of people today act as if there are no more secrets to be discovered. If everything worth doing has already been done, you throw in the towel, feign an allergy to achievement, and become a barista.

Fundamentalists think that there are easy truths that everyone knows, and the mysteries of God/the universe. The hard truths in between are heretic.

Why did people lose the wonder of secrets?

Most of geographical exploration is finished. There are no blank spaces on the map left anymore.
Incrementalism: Most social environments reinforce the idea that the right way to do things is one step at a time. If you overachieve, you don’t earn credit. If you do exactly what is asked of you, you get an A. If you publish a lot of papers (instead of discovering new science), you will get tenure track.
Risk aversion: Being wrong is hard and annoying. If you are looking for secrets, it’s a lonely road since, by definition, you’re looking for something that most people don’t believe in. Believing in the wrong secret can be soul crashing: you’ll be wrong and lonely.
Complacency: The welcoming message of most elite education institutions is something along the lines of “You managed to get in here, and you can now chill. You are set for life.”
The world has become flat: Globalization increased competition to a level where it is discouraging to try

As a result, very few people take unorthodox ideas seriously today. As a cost for having less cults and conspiracy theories, we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.

Finding secrets

What secrets is nature not telling you?
What secrets are people not telling you?
Look where no one else is looking
- are there any fields that matter but haven’t been standardized and institutionalized? Example: nutrition. Most research is old, and paid by companies to promote certain agendas.

You should keep secrets to yourself, and the few people who need to know. Unconventional beliefs are often crucified and shamed. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world, and everyone involved is a fellow conspirator.

Founding decisions and initial alignment in startups should be done very carefully

Making bad decisions at the founding phase of a startup is like writing a bad constitution for a country. It’s almost impossible to fix that along the way.

Choosing co-founders is like getting married, and founder conflict is as ugly as a divorce. Founders should have a solid pre-history, otherwise they’re just rolling dice.

Areas of alignment at founding of startups:

Ownership: who owns the company’s equity?
Possession: who runs the company day-to-day?
Control: who governs the company’s affairs?

Distributing these functions among different people ensures utilization of different people’s strengths, but it also increases the opportunities for misalignment. Most conflicts in startups are between ownership and control: the founders, and investors on the board.

Ideal size of a board is 3 people. It should never exceed 5 people, unless the company is public, where government regulations mandate otherwise. Large boards increase misalignment, reduce accountability, and cover-up who actually runs things. The corollary to having small boards, is that it should be chosen very carefully, since misalignment between the board and the founders can be catastrophic.

The founding of a company lasts as long as the company keeps creating new things. When creation stops, so does the founding. Try to extend the venture’s founding as long as possible.

Compensation in startups should align employee and company interests

Anyone who doesn’t own stock options or get their main salary from your company is de-facto misaligned with your company’s vision.

Paying employees

cash promotes employees claiming from the current company’s value, rather than incentivizing them to invest their time in increasing the future company’s value.
cash bonus incentivizes performance, but still no interest in the future of the company
equity incentivizes thinking of the future

It’s very hard to distribute equity fairly:

Giving equal shares is wrong, since not everyone has equal impact.
Giving different amounts upfront, is unfair, since noone has proven their impact yet.
Early employees get more equity since they take more risk, but later employees might have more crucial contributions to the company’s success.

Solution to this problem: Keep equity details secret.

Side note: One of the clearest patterns observed from investing in startups is that a company does better the less it pays the CEO. No more than $150.000 at an early stage venture backed startup (the book is from 2014).

Create a strong culture by choosing people who work well together and love the company mission

Cultures don’t exist apart from their companies. A company doesn’t have a culture, it is a culture. A company is a group of people on a mission. Therefore, the people and how well do they work together is what defines the culture, and the success of a venture.

Hiring the most talented people and pitching them together is not sufficient. People should like working with each other. They should be passionate about the work they are doing. They should believe in the company’s mission. Hiring talented people that work well together and care about what they’re doing will take you much further than hiring the “best” who might view the job purely transactionally.

From outside of the company, all company’s employees should look different than all other employees, but similar to each other. A tribe of like-minded people devoted to the company’s mission.

Inside of the company, everyone should have sharply distinguished roles. Each employee should have one thing they’re responsible for, and know that they’ll be evaluated only on that thing. This increases accountability, and eliminates competition. This way, employees build relationships that far transcend mere professionalism.

You want your team to have an almost cult-like spirit. Cults are groups of people who are usually fanatically wrong about something. A good startup is a team of people who are fanatically right about something people outside have missed. The extreme opposite of cults are consulting firms: the company lacks a discriminative mission on its own, and employees drop in and out with no long-term connection to the company.

Why should the 20th employee join your company?

The first people who will join the company will do so because they will have great equity and important roles. Why should the 20th employee join your company? Talented people don’t need to work for you, they have plenty of options. Why should one work for you when they can work for Google for more safety, money, and prestige?

The only good answers to this question are specific to your team, and have to do with your team, and your mission. Avoid the perk war at all cost. Anyone who will prefer the perks against the people and the mission is misaligned. You can’t beat Google’s offering in 2014 but you can be like Google in 1999.

Everyone underestimates sales because no one likes to be sold and sales tries hard to stay hidden

Customers will not come just because you built a product. You need to sell it. And You-need-a-great-distribution-plan-or-your-company-will-fail.

We don’t like salesmen because their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. No one likes being sold. But we only react to obvious and awkward salesmen, the bad ones. Great salesmen sell without you even noticing you’re being sold.

Sales works best when hidden. This is why job titles related with sales, have nothing to do with sales.

account executives: sell advertising
business development: sell customers
investment bankers: sell companies
politicians: sell themselves

The most fundamental reason that everyone underestimates the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world driven by it.

Everyone wants to believe that we make up our own minds, and sales doesn’t work on us. But everybody around us is selling.

Apart from the product, your company needs to sell to investors and employees. There are equivalent lies for these markets to the lies that the company tells about it’s product. To employees: “this company is so great that everyone will want to join it”. To investors: “this company will be so valuable that all investors will want to get shares”. Selling the company to the media is necessary for selling it to everyone else.

You need a great distribution plan or your company will fail

If you have invented something and you haven’t invented a good way to sell it, you have a bad business, no matter how good is the product. Everyone-underestimates-sales-because-no-one-likes-to-be-sold-and-sales-tries-hard-to-stay-hidden.

Superior sales and distribution can create a monopoly even for a non-differentiated product. A superior differentiated product with bad sales and distribution cannot, and will probably fail. Most common cause of failure for companies is poor sales because of bad distribution, not a bad product.

Customer lifetime value (CLV): total net profit earned on average over the course of your relationship with the customer.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC): amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer.

As a general principle, the higher the value of the product, the more you have to spend to make a sale.

Complex sales ~ O($10M): Every deal requires close personal attention. It takes months to develop the right relationships. You make sales every couple of years. They are hard. Customers want to talk to the CEO, not VP of sales. They succeed if they achieve 50-100% year-to-year growth over a decade. Example: SpaceX, Palantir.
Personal sales ~ O($10K - $100K): The challenge lies in establishing a process by which a sales team of modest size can move the product to a wide audience.
Dead zone ~ O($100 - $10K): Personal sales efforts are not justified, and traditional marketing is not enough. Most small businesses lie in here. They are small because distribution is the hidden bottleneck.
Marketing & Advertising ~ O($100): Nike, Apple, etc.
Viral marketing ~ O($1): A product whose core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too. Should be as quick and frictionless as possible. Whoever is the first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market for several years (PayPal, social media platforms, messaging platforms).

Like in everywhere else, the power law is true for sales too. One distribution method will be far more powerful than any other for a given business. You need to get one distribution method to work perfectly for your business to survive.

The seven questions every company must answer in order to succeed

Engineering: can you create a breakthrough technology rather than incremental improvements? A business needs 10x technological improvement to have real monopolistic advantage
Timing: is now the right time to start your particular business? Keep in mind: entering a slow moving market can be a good strategy, if and only if you have a definite and realistic plan to take it over.
Monopoly: are you starting with a big share of a small market? A business should always start with a very niche market. The trap to avoid here is exaggerating your own uniqueness: Monopolies exaggerate their competition competitive businesses exaggerate themselves. If you run a solar company that owns 10% of US solar energy market, it sounds cool. You are 1% of the global solar energy market though, and 0.02% of renewable energy market. This is not a market you can dominate.
People: do you have the right team? Create-a-strong-culture-by-choosing-people-who-work-well-together-and-love-the-company-mission. If the CEO walks around with suit and tie, it’s a red flag. There’s nothing wrong about a CEO who can sell, but a CEO who looks like a salesman is probably bad at sales and worse at tech.
Distribution: do you have a way to deliver your product? You-need-a-great-distribution-plan-or-your-company-will-fail.
Durability: will your market position be defensible 10 years into the future? You should be the last mover. Ask what will the world look like 10 years from now, and how does your company fit in.
Secret: have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?

Great founders are usually extreme figures and odd people

( #TODO: the bell curves are nice here)

Companies that create new technology often resemble feudal monarchies rather than modern organizations. Powerful founders can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades.

We should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme. We need unusual individuals who can lead companies beyond incrementalism, towards innovation.

Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because of their ability to bring out the best work from everyone in their company.

Prominence and adulation cannot be enjoyed without the possibility of it being exchanged for notoriety and demonization at any moment.

The greatest danger for a founder is to become deluded by their own myth (sell themselves what they’re selling to everyone else), and lose their mind.

When you hear that most restaurants fail within 1-2 years, you instinct is to come up with a story about how yours is different. No screenwriter wants to admit that their new movie simply rehashes what has already been done before (Everything-is-a-remix). ↩

Notes for The Lessons of History, by Will and Ariel Durant

2023-04-12T00:00:00-07:00

Author’s opening remark: It is impossible to compress the entire human history into a 100 pages of conclusions.

Equality

Equality is biologically incompatible. Variety is a fundamental biological mechanism. We are all born unequal, subject to physical, psychological, and social heredity. We have different health, strength, mental capacity, and character.

Inequality grows with invention, discovery, and economic growth. The competitive and strong become stronger and the comparatively weak become weaker.

Under total freedom (lack of control), inequalities grow.

People below average economic ability desire equality. People with superior ability desire freedom.

In the best case, humans can have approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.

Race

Racial antipathy is likely predominantly created through differences in culture rather than ethnic origin. Broadened education ¹ reduces it.

Character

Behavioral characteristics are similar among humans across time and space. Greeks in Plato’s discourses behaved like modern French, and Romans behaved like modern English. Poor and rich have similar impulses, but the poor have less opportunity or skill to implement them.

99 out of 100 new ideas are inferior to the established ones they aim to replace. New ideas should be heard because they might be useful or true. Challenge and criticism help filter out mediocre and bad ideas, leaving only the good ones ².

Morals

Morals vary over time (and place), and sometimes contradict each other. Changes often coincide with the rise or decay of great civilizations. However, morals are part of every society in every historical period, they just change depending on each context.

Socratean Athens, Augustean Rome, and post-world-war West experienced similar relaxation of morality.

Plato, through Socrates more than 2000 years ago, expressed moral concerns that might have very well been expressed today on Twitter.

Homosexuality was popular in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, and rising in popularity today.

Written history is different to lived history. Historians tend to record the exceptional, extraordinary, interesting events. Everything else that is “normal” remains unwritten.

Morality changed fundamentally when humans transitioned from hunting-gathering to agriculture ³, a transition that took hundreds of years. We do not know yet if the current relaxation of morality is because of the shift from agriculture to industrialism or because the current dominant civilization is decaying.

Religion

Religion has been incredibly useful in the history of mankind.

Most prevalent theologies were dualistic, a good spirit versus a bad spirit. Nature and History do not agree with religion’s definition of good and bad. Good is that which survives and bad is that which perils.

The moral development of Greeks weakened their belief in the flawed gods of Olympus. Similarly, Christian ethics weakened belief in the vengeful God of traditional theology.

Modern secularity is a result of the Industrial Revolution. Laws are not commandments of god-given kings, but of confused and fallible humans. Colleges are run by businessmen and scientists. Holydays are now holidays.

Religion’s popularity varies across centuries. Repression of senses and desires rises when laws are weak, and morals keep people in check. Expression and skepticism rises in powerful governments where stability of the state is not endangered by decline of morality, church, and family.

There is no significant example in history of society successfully maintaining moral life without aid of religion.

“As long as there is poverty, there will be gods.”

Economics

Economic interpretation explains a lot of history:

Delian Confederacy’s money built the Parthenon.
Cleopatra’s treasury revitalized Roman empire.
The Crusades were attempts to capture trade routes to the East. Discovery of America was a result of the failure of the Crusades.
Medicis financed Florentine Renaissance.
French Revolution was a result of middle class rising to economic leadership and needing legislative freedom for their business.

Motives are often economic, but outcomes depend on mass passions. Sometimes, power drives economics, not the other way around.

In many cases motives are economic, but the outcome is determined by the passionate mass. In other instances, political or military power drives economics rather than the other way around.

Bankers influence history: Medicis, Fuggers, Rotshschilds, Morgans sat in councils of governments, financed wars and popes, and sparked revolutions. They utilize the fact that history is inflationary and money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

All economic systems need the profit motive to stir productivity. Slavery, supervision, ideology are unproductive, expensive, or transient. Generally, people are judged by their ability to produce. (In war they are ranked by their ability to destroy)

Concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable. When disparity in wealth distribution reaches a critical mass, tension increases and we need partial redistribution. This can be either violent or peaceable.

Socialism

There have been several socialistic experiments throughout history. They were usually established as war economies. Usually they failed because economic control became increasingly expensive, taxes too high, and bureaucracy overwhelming.

“The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.”

Government

Freedom of individuals in society requires regulation of conduct, so, counter-intuitively, limitation of freedom is a condition for its existence. Absolute freedom results in chaos. The prime task of government is to establish order.

Most governments have been oligarchies. An entire population can rarely organize itself towards united, directed, and specific action.

Aristocracy is a particularly interesting form of oligarchy, where an individual is trained from birth in statesmanship, culture, morals, knowledge, manners, standards, tastes, etc.

History doesn’t justify revolutions. Economic developments often achieve similar goals without upheaval. Wealth is often thought as accumulation of goods, but it is more about production and exchange of goods, and it relies on trust (e.g. credit). Violent revolutions rather destroy wealth than redistribute. Human inequality quickly leads to a new imbalance in wealth and power, with a new elites replacing old ones.

Democracy is the hardest form of government since it requires the widest spread of intelligence. Education improved but intelligence is biologically hindered by the high fertility among the less educated.

People cannot be equal (due to biological differences), but we can make access to education and opportunity nearly equal.

The current economy of freedom will turn to dictatorship if it fails to distribute wealth as ably as it created it.

War

History shows that long peace can weaken the martial ability of a nation, often leading to its decline or perish.

Civilization growth and decay

Inequality rises in a growing economy, dividing society into a cultured minority and a less educated majority ⁴. The majority holds back cultural progress.

As education spreads and religion loses influence, secularism and skepticism rise. This in turn results in moral decay, which results in corruption, which in the end results in civilization decline.

Civilizations are like generational legacies, passed down to heirs across time and space. Today, technology is uniting nations and preserving the shared heritage of humanity.

Is progress real?

History is so vast and varied that one can find examples to support almost any argument.

Happiness is a bad metric for progress. The average child is happier than the adult or sage.

Scientific and technological progress brought both good and harm.

Comfort and convenience weakened us physically and morally.
We can do everything immensely faster but are also stressed all the time.
The same technology that improved transport, communication, etc., is used to kill.
We have lower infant mortality, longer lifespans and lower vulnerability to diseases.
Education, key to civilization, has vastly improved.
…

Education and indoctrination are different. Indoctrination is much easier to achieve, as it doesn’t require skilled reasoning or understanding, and is the method predominantly used for dealing with sociopolitical topics as much today as in the past. ↩
Inertia-in-physics-is-similar-to-habitude-in-human-behavior. Societal resistance to new ideas is as if humanity behaves like a swarm intelligence, with the goal of minimizing false positives. We are cautious of embracing ideas that seem to be good but turn out to be oopsies two generations later. Similarly to how companies like Google want to minimize false positives when hiring. While in Google it is by design, I don’t think that is the case for collective society. It’s interesting that abundance of good options drives actors to adopt risk averting strategies (minimizing false positives). #TODO: make this a separate note and link. ↩
In hunting, qualities like aggression and greed were good.Agriculture favored industriousness, peace, and family units. Early marriage, chastity, and monogamy were vital. This moral code endured for centuries in Christian Europe and its colonies. ↩
This holds true even given equal beginnings, since in a growing economy the biologically lucky minority will always get ahead faster regardless of the sociopolitical environment. Only by artificially hindering the high performers can we sustain equality. ↩

Notes for The Millionaire Fastlane, by MJ DeMarco

2023-10-08T00:00:00-07:00

Rich people often don’t do as they teach
Success is a process, not an event
True wealth, money, happiness
Choices, luck, ownership, accountability, control
“Normal” life and being an employee
Being an employee comes with a limited financial ceiling
Become an entrepreneur
Consumer vs Producer
Grow a money tree
Money is passive by itself
Law of effection
What makes a good business?
- Control of the market
- High entry barrier
- There is need
- Detaches income from time
- Scale
You will face pushback if you have unconventional ideas
Be stingy with your time, not with money
Failure is the sweat of success
You don’t need a crazy big idea, opportunities are everywhere
Ideas are free, bias towards action
Customer feedback is gold
Choose who you let into your castle carefully
Avoid competition
Marketing is the Queen of business

Rich people often don’t do as they teach

Success and financial advice often given by “experts” does not align with the actions they took themselves to attain success and wealth. Their teachings don’t necessarily work, but selling them does.

Listen to those who practice what they preach and back their advice with a proven track record.

Many financial experts promote strategies, but their wealth often comes from different sources.

Success is a process, not an event

Success is usually experienced by observers as an event: Beatles having a hit single and instantly rising to fame, an entrepreneur sells their company and suddenly becomes a millionaire etc. Behind those events there is process. Events are byproducts of process. Without process there is no event.

True wealth, money, happiness

True wealth and happiness can usually be described by the quality of your relationships, your physical health, and the amount of freedom you enjoy. The three Fs: family, fitness, freedom.

True wealth is the freedom to do what you want. You know what you want, the price you want to pay, and can go do it. If you think you can’t afford it, you probably can’t. If you think you can afford it but only if a certain condition stays the same or changes, you can’t afford it. You can afford it when you don’t need to think about it, and the impact of the purchase to your life is unconditional to future circumstances.

Freedom is the most important of the wealth trinity, because it protects the other two (family, fitness). Freedom gives you ownership of your time. You are much less likely to take actions that sacrifice your relationships and health if you are not financially “forced” to.

Everyone’s personal definition of freedom is different. Knowing your personal definition defines your goals and allows you to plan your actions.

A lot of studies come to the conclusion that money doesn’t buy happiness. An underlying problem with such studies is that they don’t study correlations that may lead to such results. Lack of happiness is caused by servitude, not by money. Most people earn more money by sacrificing more of their freedom. This results in less true wealth: worse freedom, family, and fitness.

The happiest people according to studies report to have tight sense of community, social support, and strong family bonds.

Many millionaires are miserable and it has nothing to do with their wealth, and all to do with their lack of freedom.

Wealth and health are both hard to obtain. They require long-term thinking, consistency, and embracing delayed gratification.

Choices, luck, ownership, accountability, control

Luck is a residue of process. When you consistently act and bombard the world with your efforts, creating waves and interacting with the waves of others, things happen. You improve your probabilities of events happening. You change your probabilities from impossible, to unlikely, to possible, to likely.

When you play, you allow luck to work for you. If you don’t play you can’t win.

Unsuccessful people have a victim narrative. They give control of their life to others, and when things don’t work out, they blame others. You cannot be a victim if you do not surrender power to someone capable of making you one.

Statements like “they didn’t tell me”, “they raised my rent”, “they laid me off”, etc. are all abdications of taking ownership and control. The landlord’s right to increase the rent was in the lease agreement, and no one forced you to work for the employer that you chose.

You cannot be a victim if you claim responsibility and ownership of your actions. Most bad situations are consequences of bad choices. Owning your decisions allows you to acquire wisdom rather than adopting a victim attitude.

People whose life is out of control usually blame external factors (other people, events, institutions etc.) for their situation.

Accountability means facing consequences and changing your actions to avoid them.

To control your life you need to take responsibility, and follow up with accountability.

You only deserve what your actions have or have not earned.

If you have been doing the same thing over years and you are not happy with the results you are getting, it makes little sense to keep doing it.

There are a lot of “rich” people who have more financial trouble and their lives more out of control than “poor” people. Money does not solve poor financial management and lack of financial discipline.

Poor results are the outcome of poor choices. If you are not where you want to be, the problem is your choices.

Actions, beliefs, perceptions, are all what creates your reality. All these are choices you make.

You are exactly where you decide(d) to be.

Taking ownership of your choices is taking ownership of your life. Ownership is the only way to control and direct your life.

You cannot undo your choices. Depending on their magnitude, some choices can impact or handicap you for life.

Everyday decisions you make today will ripple years in the future.

Success is a lot of good choices. Lot of good choices are a process. Consistent process is a lifestyle.

Choice is the most powerful control you have in life.

Perception and belief precedes action.

Create a system for yourself that allows you to evaluate the risks and worst-case scenarios of actions you are considering. Similar to Tim Ferris’s Assess-the-risk-of-your-fears.

Stop being self-restrained by the past. The universe doesn’t care about your past, nor do most people on Earth. If you are fully defined by your past, you cannot become who you want to be in the future.

“Normal” life and being an employee

The traditional path to wealth is to get a good job, invest your savings in the stock market, do it for 30 years, and you will be a millionaire. It’s problematic because:

it’s linearly tied to your time - and takes a lifetime to achieve
it’s dependent on too many factors you don’t control - such as the stock market, your employer, etc.

Conventional wealth advice is bad advice coming from people you trust like family, school, financial experts etc.

Normal life today is to wake up at 06:00, work 09:00-17:00 Monday-Friday, save 10%, invest 10% in the stock market, repeat for 50 years. Normal does not make sense at all to any human who hears it for the first time. Normal is indoctrinated irrationality.

The conventional wealth plan is work + save + invest for 50 years, and be rich at retirement.

A plan whose key parts you don’t control is a bad plan. Without a job, the plan fails. If the stock market crashes, your plan fails. If the housing market crashes, your plan fails. The plan depends on time and external factors, and you don’t control any of them.

By working as an employee you accept to trade 5 days of work, for 2 days of freedom. While most people recognize that 5-for-2 is a bad deal with money (60% negative return), they do it willingly with their time.

The 5-2 trade never changes no matter how long or hard you work as an employee. No matter how much time you invest, if you choose to work 4 days, you get 80% of the salary.

In most jobs - including charging insanely high rates for high-quality freelancing work - you sell time your time for money. If you don’t work for a week, that’s a week’s worth less money.

Trading time for freedom is not a good trade, unless you trade time for a process that can eventually give you better return on your time.

By working faithfully 8 hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work 12 hours a day.

~ Robert Frost

As an employee, you sell freedom to get freedom. You sell your life, to get money, to live your life.

Being an employee comes with a limited financial ceiling

Most jobs provide you with limited, specialized experience and knowledge. (See also Paul Graham’s You weren’t meant to have a boss.)

As an employee, your income is in the control of your employer. If you are working for freedom, and your financial plan is your job, then you don’t control your freedom.

Taxes and deductions take cuts off your money before you see them, leaving you with minimal control over your finances. Your ability to leverage pre-tax income is restricted.

When owning a corporation, you dissociate yourself from your business. This gives you limited liability, and space for tax creativity.

Your salary is capped by company policies. If you give 10x value to a company with your work, they will not give you 1000% raise. Your negotiation power is constrained.

The conventional “get a good job, save, and invest” path to wealth provides you with uncontrollable, limited leverage. Your theoretical ceiling for wealth is limited.

\[Wealth = Job + Investments\]

where,

\[Job = HourlyPayRate \times HoursWorked\]

and

\[Investments = InvestedSum \times (1 + Yield)^{time}\]

Your job income is limited to the amount of time available in a day. You cannot work for 400 hours. Time has no leverage.

Your investment income is limited again by time (years of compound interest), AND the market returns. You control none of the two.

Hope is not a plan.

Your hourly pay rate is usually correlated to the intrinsic value attributed to you by society. You can raise this value through education, but education is expensive both in time and money ¹.

Life can be precarious and unpredictable. When expecting to build your wealth through save-invest-compound, you are betting with your most precious asset, time.

There are people who become wealthy through the conventional path. They are usually either extremely talented, elderly, or overworked.

Fame is a way - even though unlikely - to break through.
Becoming a CEO is another. Most CEOs are old (Sundar, Tim Cook, Satya, …).

A net worth of \$1,000,000 today is barely upper middle class. You don’t get to live much more differently than a person earning \$100,000/yr.

Become an entrepreneur

Mindset:

debt is a tool
time is the most important asset
continuous education is paramount
money is abundant
wealth reflects the value you created
responsibility and ownership of one’s life, resulting in control

As an employee you trade your work for your employer’s cash. You keep training to be stronger, to lift heavier stones.

As an entrepreneur you trade your work to build systems. Those systems lift the stones for you.

Entrepreneurship results in accelerated knowledge, acquired through engagement, action, and feedback.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

TS Eliot

As an entrepreneur you can exert much higher leverage compared to an employee.

You control the units. You can sell 1,000 units in a day. Or 10,000. Or 100,000. You cannot sell more than 24hours of work.
You control the price. Increasing the unit profit by \$0.50 when selling 1000 units a day, you increase your revenue by $15,000/month.

Small numbers have a gravity towards mediocrity.

The vast majority of wealthy people experience exponential or chunked growth of their wealth. A big amount of money, after several hard working years.

When you create a profit generating asset - like a service, or a product - the asset’s value grows. This means that by increasing the profits of your business, you increase its value, which increases your profit when you sell equity. You are essentially getting double payback for your effort.

Stocks define the value multiplier for publicly traded companies, through the price-to-earnings ratio.

Value on paper is illiquid, as you cannot buy anything with it. Valuations are nothing but current perceived value, since a company valued today at \$60M can be valued next year at $1M if they do poor decisions. Illiquid wealth is always in risk of having it’s subjective value changed.

Consumer vs Producer

As a consumer, you demand, want, need, buy. As a producer, you create value and fulfill needs. You need to shift your perspective to a producer to succeed in entrepreneurship.

When encountered with advertisement, examine it as a producer.

How does this company make money?
What strategy do they use to make me buy?
What are the operational processes involved to offer this product of service?
Is the company profitable?
What is the revenue model?

Watch infomercials to learn what the experts do.

Grow a money tree

In order to stop trading time for money, you need to create a system that generates revenue even when you don’t put time into it, e.g. when you are sleeping. You need to grow a money tree. A passive income source.

rental systems (real estate, licensing, patents, …)
computer systems (software, subscriptions, apps, infrastructure, …)
content systems (books, blogs, youtube, …)
distribution systems (franchises, chains, …)
human-resource systems

Human resource systems are expensive to manage and implement. Also humans are unpredictable.

Content systems are less likely to succeed even when executed well. Entry barrier is extremely low, so competition is extremely high, and in most cases revenue comes from affiliate programs (hitchhiker instead of driver).

Lead generation systems benefit from fragmented industries where the players are small-to-medium sized businesses.

Money is passive by itself

Money is inherently passive by itself. Once you have money, it’s very easy to invest it to generate more of it.

Investing \$10M at 5% results in a monthly passive stream of $41,667.

Compound interest is a source of passive income, not a tool for wealth (fast) growth.

Law of effection

Law of effection ²: the more lives you affect, in scale and/or magnitude, the wealthier you will become.

\[Profit = UnitsSold \times UnitProfit\]

where $UnitsSold$ is scale and $UnitProfit$ is magnitude.

You need scale, magnitude, or both. With scale or magnitude, you create millions. With both, you create billions.

The closer you are to the source of big numbers, the closer you get to wealth.

What makes a good business?

Control of the market

The one who controls a system/market/technology makes the big money. Everyone who hitchhikes, makes good money at best. You need to control almost every aspect of your system ³.

Stop climbiing pyramids and start building them.

High entry barrier

The lower the entry barrier to a field, the more competition you face. If anyone can start your business within hours, choose a different business.

If you are exceptional, you don’t need to worry about low entry barrier.

Real startups are processes, not events.

When “everyone is doing it”, you have to be really thoughtful about whether it’s a good idea. It’s most likely not.

There is need

No one cares about your desires, wants, needs, or reasons you want to do things. You have to show people what’s in it for them. To succeed as a producer, you need to give up your own selfishness and address the selfishness of others.

Stop chasing money and start chasing needs.

Address other people’s needs, problems, pain points, service deficiencies, and emotions.

Money is like love and happiness. The more you focus on it, the more elusive it becomes. Instead of trying to attract money, think of what attracts money. Solve problems and needs.

People are voting all the time with their time, thoughts, or money. Get their vote by:

making them feel better
helping them solve a problem
educating them
making them look better
giving them security
raising positive emotions
satisfying appetites
making things easier
inspiring their dreams, and giving them hope
….

You need to know your WHY for doing things, otherwise you risk being misguided by money (and other people).

Detaches income from time

You need to build a system that detaches income from time. In other words, you need to grow a money tree. Content systems, computer systems, software systems, distribution systems, human resource systems can all be money trees.

If it doesn’t make money while you sleep, it’s not a money tree.

Scale

Same idea as in law of effection: impact millions and you will make millions.

You will face pushback if you have unconventional ideas

When you have unconventional ideas, you will be met with resistance. Extraordinary results require extraordinary beliefs and actions. To live unlike everyone you need to be unlike everyone.

Societal norm is not exactly sane: get up, go to work, come home, watch tv, go to bed, repeat. This is mental. The gravity of society is to be average, not exceptional.

If you hang out with dogs, you will get fleas.

Family, friends, and the environment will probably be headwind. As a producer, you will be a minority.

The worst headwind you can have is from your spouse.

You need to protect yourself and your ideas from negative energy.

Good people fuel your dreams, motivate you, and extend your opportunity reach.

Be stingy with your time, not with money

Your time is your life. When you are dedicating time to something or someone, you are dedicating a chunk of your life.

Time is scarce, money is abundant.

When you are an employee, you don’t just pay 8 hours a day. You pay 8 hours plus all the time you spend dressing up for work, preparing, commuting, etc.

You work for freedom. Freedom is freely allocated time. Paying time to get back time doesn’t make a lot of sense.

When you spend 1 hour driving, to save \$10 by buying a TV cheaper than the store next to your house, you are valuing 1 hour of your life for $10.

Lifestyle extravagances have double cost: the cost itself, and the time cost.

Failure is the sweat of success

The same way you can’t exercise hard without sweating, you can’t succeed without failing. If you avoid failure, you avoid success.

Failure is just an event. If you don’t give up, you will eventually be successful. Success is a process.

Fear of failure is caused by an overestimated worst-case consequence analysis. Usually, the worst-case scenario is not that bad.

“Someday” is dangerous and paralyzing. You never get anywhere with it. The same is true with waiting for some arbitrary favorable condition.

You don’t need a crazy big idea, opportunities are everywhere

Opportunities are everywhere. Buggy software, bad service, annoying call centers. Every little thing that annoys you when using existing products or services is an opportunity.

Opportunity is rarely a huge big big thing like the light bulb or the car, and most times it’s simply an unmet or poorly met need.

It’s okay if other people are already doing it ⁴. The question is, can you do it better? Can you do it cheaper? Most successful entrepreneurs take existing concepts and improve them. They take poorly met needs and solve them better. Instead of focusing on the big idea, they focus on the big execution.

Your thoughts constantly flood you with business opportunities:

I hate ….
I don’t like ….
It’s frustrating that ….
Why is it like this?
Do I have to?
I wish there was ….
I’m tired of ….

Opportunity is exposed in your and other people’s language and thoughts.

Ideas are free, bias towards action

Most people don’t do anything even when they know and agree with what needs to be done to succeed. Few people try, but half-ass it. Very few people try, try hard, and stick to it long enough.

Thinking of a business has no output. Ideas are nothing but electrochemical reactions in your brain. They’re events that require little effort. You have to create the business and execute well. Execution is a process. Execution requires effort, sacrifice, discipline, and persistence.

Execution is the great divider separating winners and losers from their ideas.

What affects your success in order of importance:

execution
marketing
customer service
product
idea

(ꆜ Derek Sivers - Ideas are just a multiplier of execution)

Business plans are useless unless they’re backed by tangible execution. You should still do a reasonable financial analysis though.

Investors back the person, their track record, and the execution, they don’t back a business plan.

If you have a track record of execution, people will suddenly become interested in your business plan.

Positivity, belief, visualization etc. are all necessary but not sufficient conditions for success. You need action that affects in scale.

Customer feedback is gold

Collect customer complains like a maniac. They are free feedback and expose unmet needs in your business.

When you change things, at least some people will complain because of habitude. These are hard to validate so you need to use metrics and analytics to gauge if the complaints should be heard.

Expectation complaints are vital because what you provide didn’t meet the client’s expectation for some reason. Did you offer bad service? Bad product? Do you have misleading marketing? Did customers misunderstand how they are supposed to use your offering? Are there operational issues?

When customers request something and you don’t have it, it exposes unmet needs. It’s people telling you what they want for free.

I don’t know what’s the key to success but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Bad customer service is so commonplace today that we get surprised when someone offers decent customer service. Use that to your advantage.

Determine what the customers expect out of your business. Then positively violate this expectation. Spend money on pleasing your existing clients rather than trying to find new ones. Satisfied customers become evangelists and free advertising for your business.

Look big but act small. Look like you have the power of a big company, but give personal service as if you’re a one-human op. No one likes dealing with bureaucracies and admin work. Also looking big scares away potential competitors.

Amazing product cannot overpower bad service. Human experience is the no.1 selling weapon.

Choose who you let into your castle carefully

You company is like a fortress. Don’t let just anyone in.

A company is a collection of people. Bad or mediocre people result in bad or mediocre companies.

A business partner is like marriage. Partnerships survive on character, synergy, and complimentary attributes.

Don’t start a company with someone you don’t know well. Would you marry someone after two weeks of dating?

When hiring, investigate and interview. Get referrals. Anyone with inside access to your company has the potential to ruin it. Employees are the public perception of a company.

Trust actions, not words.

Trust, but verify.

When you impact millions, you come in contact with millions. This will inevitably lead to bad contacts. This doesn’t mean the world is bad, there are just some bad people out there.

Avoid competition

Products and services that are homogeneous between providers are commoditized, like air travel. In any commoditized product, people are loyal to the price, not the product.

Mind your own business, not the competition. Otherwise, you neglect your product, and you become reactive rather than proactive.

Your job is to innovate, skew value, and win customers. Do that well, and then everyone will be following you instead of you seeing what they’re doing.

Marketing is the Queen of business

Marketing is extremely powerful. People buy mediocre products and tolerate mediocre services because of great marketing.

Build a brand that people are loyal to.

Have a unique selling point that focuses on benefits. This helps the customers choose your company. Provide specific actions and evidence.

Domino’s didn’t say “Delivered on time”. It said “Delivered within 30 minutes, or it’s free”.

There is too much noise in marketing today, making it hard for real value to show through. Some ways to get above the noise:

polarization. People other love or hate you, and it drives traffic
sex. It unfortunately always works and never goes out of style. However, it can tarnish your brand.
emotion. Most consumer decisions are driven by emotion and the need to feel something.
let people talk about themselves. When customers expose part of themselves, they build a relationship with your brand.

Grabbing the attention is half the battle. The other half is communicating enough value to create a sale.

Marketing should focus on benefits, not features. Who is your buyer? What do they want? What are they trying to solve? What do they want to feel?

You can use price tricks to reframe value. Price is tied to perceived value. Purchasing a knife for ~~$80~~ ONLY $20 for a limited time! feels much better than purchasing a knife for $20.

Education is mostly free or ridiculously cheap in Europe. If you study in your home town and thereby don’t have living costs, you are basically studying for free in money terms. But the time cost is still present. ↩
effect: create, do ↩
This reminds me a lot of how vastly influential entrepreneurs were obsessive with vertical integration (Rockefeller, Bezos, etc.). ↩
When Dropbox founder was pitching the idea to investors they retorted that there’s already dozens of cloud storage and file sharing apps. He then asked them, “yes, but which one are you using?”. He was pointing out the fact that while lots of apps exist, most of them are clunky, and very few people actually use them. There was a pain point in the market, that he thought he could address. ↩

Notes for Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson

2024-04-03T17:00:00-07:00

Note: As an experiment, I have not taken notes or highlights while reading this book. Last time I’m doing this, writing in the book while reading is a far superior experience.

Thoughts and impressions right after finishing the book
Pages of the book that I liked so much that I took a picture

Thoughts and impressions right after finishing the book

Elon Musk is an extraordinary human.
His ability to reduce extremely complicated problems to simple, precise metrics is astounding.
He is constantly faced with pushback on the boundaries of what is possible. He never respects the opinion of anyone on this matter, and only uses his own understanding of the situation to call the shots. It was crazy that they just went into Twitter’s datacenter and Elon started pulling out the plugs of live, running servers out of the blue.
His failures are huge, but so are his successes. There’s no other human on earth that is running as many successful companies as Elon.
He lacks empathy to the point that makes him a dick, very often. I don’t want to be like Elon.
He is probably the most important builder on Earth for the last several decades. If Steve Jobs didn’t make the iPhone it’s very much likely that someone else would have come up with something similar. There is no other space company today that matches SpaceX’s capability, and no other electric car company that comes close to Tesla. Elon Musk might have been the biggest driver towards electric cars.
The amount of risk he’s willing to take, and the amount of self-confidence that he has is mind-blowing. He’s making incredibly complicated decisions at insane speed, and the rate with which he takes actions and uses the information gained to inform upcoming actions is unmatched. He basically has an intuitive bias towards epistemic action (epistemic action), which allows him to gather orders of magnitude more information than the average human.
I am willing to bet that the neurological activity of his amygdala (responsible for fear, empathy, and emotional responses) and his orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex (responsible for regulating impulse control and evaluating the consequences of actions) are significantly shifted from the average.

Pages of the book that I liked so much that I took a picture

“I need to catch the internet wave”

In 1995 Elon was getting ready to pursue a PhD on solid state capacitors. Like every student who right after uni he was going through a contemplative period, and was asking himself which things will truly affect humanity. He came up with the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.

In summer of 1995 Netscape, a web browser, had just IPO’ed reaching a market value of $2.9B. He realized that the internet was. not going to wait for him to finish graduate school, and if he failed, he could always go back to it.

I need to put everything else on hold. I need to catch the internet wave.

I feel the same about AI the past months. There is a huge wave, and it’s not going to wait for anyone.

Mission first, business second

After they sold PayPal, Elon wanted to start SpaceX to make humans a multi-planetary species. He worried that if we don’t colonize Mars, there is a high chance humanity will go extinct.

Every one of his friends and advisors told him he’s stupid. “How is this a business?”, Reid Hoffman had said.

Elon starts with a mission, and later finds a way to make it work financially.

One reason he wanted to start SpaceX was that it scared him that technological progress is not inevitable. It can stop, and even backtrack. Space exploration had basically been stale for 50 years.

Technology only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.

Also, life cannot be merely about solving problems. You need to have huge, grand goals, that inspire you and give you purpose.

He preached SpaceX as a mandate from Heaven

Max Levchin said:

One of Elon’s greatest skills is the ability to pass of his vision as a mandate from heaven.

People were trying to convince Elon that SpaceX was a stupidly risky move, which only made him more resolved to do it.

The likeliest outcome is that I will lose all my money. But what’s the alternative? That there be no progress in space exploration? We’ve got to give this a shot, or we’re stuck on Earth forever.

To my point above about incredibly simple, but on-point metrics: the goal of SpaceX was to minimize cost per pound of payload into orbit. This was the obsession that drove increasing engine thrust, reducing rocket mass, and making reusable rockets.

Elon sets unrealistic deadlines that transform projects from completely insane to merely being very late.

The laws of physics

Elon never respects any requirement set by a human unless re-proven to be true. Every requirement had to come with the name of a human who made the requirement. All requirements are merely recommendations.

The only immutable requirements are the ones necessitated by the laws of physics.

The idiot index

Elon has an inherent skepticism about everything, and this includes prices of goods. If any product has a high Idiot Index, it is highly likely that the design is too complex, or the manufacturing process too inefficient.

\[Idiot \ Index = Total \ cost \ of \ component \over Cost \ of \ raw \ materials\]

A hardcore showman

Elon has an inherent tendency towards showmanship. It’s very interesting because he’s a huge introvert.

When he bought Twitter and cut 75% of it’s workforce he said:

I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated.

He had slept on the floor of his first office at Zip2 in 1995.

He had slept on Tesla’s Nevada battery factory in 2017.

He had slept under his desk at the Fremont assembly plant in 2018.

None of this was truly necessary, but he loved the drama, and the urgency. Above all, he understood the importance of leading by example, like a war general who rallies his troops.

When he acquired Twitter, it had a vastly different culture than the one he instilled in his companies. In order to show them hardcore, he slept at Twitter headquarters during the entire transition period.

The Algorithm

This is so good that I made it a separate post.

Aristotelis Economides

Agent Command Centers: Scaling Human Attention

Exploration vs. Exploitation

Useful Primitives for Command Centers

Open Questions

Closing

Notes & Further Reading

The Cities We Build

It Wasn’t Capitalism

The Industrial Revolution

Breaking Free From the Past

Three Men and a Movement

Modernism Arrives in America

Lock-In

What We Have Now

What Next?

Why LLMs might actually lead to AGI

The bottleneck of AI progress

What changed within a year

AI research is boring work

LLMs are a research catalyst

Where this leaves us

Life Advice

Mecca

Problems with advice

Positive thinking 101

You are constantly voting

A 1000 points of view

Mountain peaks don't move

Scrambled eggs or omelet?

On refining published writing

Surprise as a tool for thought

Notes for The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod

Understanding the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma

My Notes

Computer tournaments teach us about cooperation

“Eye for an eye” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”?

In the WWI trenches

Life is a non-zero sum game

How to promote stable cooperation

Pitfalls to avoid

Hierarchies make equality hard

Should you hide your strategy?

The value of reciprocity

Notes for Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, by Benjamin Franklin

My Notes

Notes for Anything You Want, by Derek Sivers

My Notes

On creating and managing a business

A business exists to serve its customers

Why are you doing this?

Create your small utopia

Notes for Show Your Work, by Austin Kleon

My Notes

Creativity doesn’t come as a lightning bolt

It’s okay to be an amateur. It gives you freedom and perspective

To “find your voice” you need to use it

You will die, and so will everyone else. It’s not that scary to put yourself out there

Document everything you do and share your process

Share something small every day

Don’t share useless things

Combine your small daily shares into larger bodies of work

Claim Your corner of the internet

Share your influences and inspiration sources

Be open and honest about what you like. Don’t self-censor

Always credit the work you’re sharing

Learn to tell good stories about your work

Learn to talk about yourself in an interesting but humble way

Teach your craft and share your knowledge

If you want to be noticed, you have to notice

Care about Who is following you, not how many

Keep away from people who suck your energy

Find the few people who match your weird and make them your trusted circle

Meet with people in real life

Learn to take criticism without making it personal

It’s fine to make money as a creative

Ask funding for your work

Have a mailing list of people who like your work

Be open to opportunities for that help you do more of what you like

Be mindful to spend your time on your craft, not the busywork around it