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You’re Avoiding The Most Important Thing
Why can’t you achieve your 10 year goals in 6 months? This is one of my favorite thought experiments from the renowned contrarian and renegade investor Peter Thiel. Every time I ask myself this question, particularly when layered upon itself, I helplessly zero-in on the most important thing that I can do in any moment.…
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The Most Underappreciated Lever For Success
Your potential is determined by the quality of your health. If you’re sleep deprived, overweight and running on caffeine, how can you expect to produce your best work? Most of us focus on the wrong things when we try to eke out more productivity or be more creative. We work harder, pound the coffee, and…
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Your Inner Badass Is Unemployed
You are getting in your own way. The difference between your current self and your desired future state is complexity. The more complicated we make things, the more friction in our creative process, relationships and goals, the more herculean the required effort. Growth often comes at the point resistance, but the context is often misunderstood.…
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Don’t Expect Anything
Expectations are the death of happiness. Happy people’s expectations are within their grasp, while those of the unhappy and unfulfilled are always at a star’s distance. Your state is not a product of what you have, but how you choose to feel about it. Your family doesn’t have to support your dream to become a…
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Catching The Dragon – On Life’s Eternal Pursuit Of Purpose
Purpose is born from aligning your life with the transcendent. As a secular person it can be hard to pin down what exactly the meaning of waking up every day is all about. The real impact of the death of god was the sister disintegration of spirituality. The transcendent is not something woo-woo, mystical or…
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It’s Not A Business
Being an entrepreneur looks a lot different in 2024 than it did in 2004. Given that the world is rapidly moving toward an economy built around the personal brand, the creator, it’s harder to differentiate between an artist and a solopreneur. Before you’re managing employees, before you’re selling a product, honing your craft as a…
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Is Life Really Hard?
Often we measure the difficulty of our lives by the perceived obstacles and hardships we encounter. Probably the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from developing myself via meditation, stoicism, psychology and even marketing, is that the value we extract from things is mostly a matter of our perception. Not only does the $50 wine glass…
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What Will Ruin This Project?
Only a few decisions really matter. Even Warren Buffett has often credited the majority of his success to a handful of really good judgment calls. It can be easy to get the impression that working all the time is the key to getting the project where it “needs” to be, but this is a trap…
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Lean-In To Absurdity
The success of a unicorn is determined by the quality of its reality distortion field. Nobody stands out merely by having unique ideas. Everybody has unique ideas. People become titans by persistently figuring out how to make their absurd ideas work, while inspiring those around them with an almost feverish commitment to a useful delusion.…
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You Are Not A Fraud
When you are generously and passionately trying to solve a hard problem your relative expertise is irrelevant. New problems and neglected problems, by definition, have no experts. Whoever makes the first move is never qualified. You’re there to do the work because it matters. When you stick your neck out for the projects that others…
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