The mathematician and philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota spent much of his career at MIT, where students adored him for his engaging, passionate lectures. In 1996, Rota gave a talk entitled “Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught” which contains valuable advice for getting people to pay attention to your ideas. Life Lessons From Mathematician and…
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You look at Katie and you realize the differentiator is between the ears. And their hearts. Their appetite for competition, their unwillingness to lose, and their embracing the challenge. And not just the challenge on competition day, which is a huge part, but the challenge of the training grind. How Katie Ledecky became better at…
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When we promote problem solvers, we incentivize having problems and because most organizations reward problem solvers, it can seem like a better idea to let things go wrong, then fix them after. That’s how you get visibility. You run from one high-level meeting to the next, reacting to one problem after another. It’s great to…
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When we can’t trust each other, nothing works. As we participate in our communities less and less, we find it harder to feel other people are trustworthy. But if we can bring back a sense of trust in the people around us, the rewards are incredible. The High Price of Mistrust
Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially…
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Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own…
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When people reflect on what it takes to be mentally fit, the first idea that comes to mind is usually intelligence. The smarter you are, the more complex the problems you can solve— and the faster you can solve them. Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent…
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“We are learning in vaccines what most startups inevitably realize too late. Product is great. but most of the time, you live or die by distribution.” https://twitter.com/kevinakwok/status/1351805737727533056. Correct. The Mike Speiser Incubation Playbook https://kwokchain.com/2020/09/22/the-mike-speiser-incubation-playbook/. Incubation and execution on a different level. Interview with Mario Cibelli from Marathon Partners Equity Management https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/46347335/cibelli-cornerstone-investing-insights. How to create differential…
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2020 has been a record year, in a few different, often contradictory ways.PwC and CB Insights just released their latest report on VC funding. The US highlights: Funding: 2020 was the biggest-ever funding year, with VCs disbursing $130 billion. The previous record was $122 billion in 2018. Unicorns: 28 startups grew unicorn horns in Q4 2020 alone. For context,…
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Inspire yourself never to waste time on bullshit again. Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while…
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