Writing
- Speeches
- Essays and blog posts
- Sam Altman, Startup advice
- Tim Urban, The cook and the chef: Musk's secret sauce
- Murat Demirbas, My time at MIT
- Murat Demirbas, Advice to the young
- Murat Demirbas, Research, writing, and career advice
- Derek Sivers, There is no speed limit
- Admiral Hyman Rickover, Nine rules for managing humans managing nuclear reactors
- Ryo Lu, How to make something great
- Tim Urban, The tail end
- Naval Ravikant, Escape competition through authenticity
- Books
- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
- Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, How Big Things Get Done
Videos
- Talks
- Howard Stevenson, Building a life
- Richard Hamming, You and your research: video, transcript
- Shorts
Podcasts
- David Senra, Founders
Thinkers
Quotes
The reason most people fail instead of succeed is that they trade what they want most for what they want in the moment. — Napoleon
A goal is a dream with a deadline.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. — Steve Jobs
You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear. — Steve Jobs
When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and you're job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it... Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again. — Steve Jobs
The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think. — Marc Andreessen
You are not a lottery ticket. — Peter Thiel
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
You're never too young, never too young to die. — Zedd, “Transmission”
We are all born children. The trick is to remain one. — Pablo Picasso
Try to learn something about everything, and everything about something. — Thomas Huxley
Be happy while you're alive because you're a long time dead.
The dangers of indiscipline increase with temptation. If you're sufficiently determined to achieve great things, this will increase the number of temptations around you. Unless you become proportionally more disciplined, willfulness will get the upper hand, and your achievement will revert to the mean. — Paul Graham
L'appétit vient en mangeant. (Appetite comes with eating.) — French proverb
Words
- gusto. enjoyment or vigor in doing something
- dynamism. the quality of being characterized by vigorous activity and progress
- raison d'être. the most important reason or purpose for someone or something's existence
Ideas and Principles
Principles
- Don't be too efficient.
- Everything is probabilistic. Plan in probabilities, use beam search.
- Dichotomies (choices between two options) are almost always fake. The world is highly underconstrained. How can you discover or create more options or blends?
- It's better to be optimistic and wrong, than pessimistic and right. (Elon Musk)
- Optimize for the right objective. You don't want to lose weight by cutting off your limbs.
- Focus on the fundamentals.
- You don't need to understand everything the first time.
- Speed matters.
- Impatience with actions, patience with results. (Naval Ravikant)
- Create more than you consume.
- Progress compounds. The beginning looks almost flat, but repeated effort with begin to show the shape of the exponential curve. Corollary: start early to maximize the benefits of compounding.
- Rules at the extrema (tail ends, frontier) are different than those at the median.
- Momentum is everything.
- Burnout doesn't come from working too hard. Burnout comes from failing and things not working (or working on things you don't care about). (Sam Altman)
- Beware the bed of Procrustes. Listen to advice, and decide for yourself what is relevant and applicable to you.
- Be an autotelic. Do things because you find meaning in the activity itself. Everything else will follow. (David Senra)
- Action creates knowledge.
- You can just do things. You don't need someone else's permission. Plus, it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
- "10x harder" problems are often only 2-3x harder. Try to solve classes of problems rather than isolated ones. (Richard Hamming)
- Make it exist first. You can make it good later. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. All complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. (Gall's law)
- Strong opinions, weakly held. Be decisive, revise quickly.
- Understand mimetic theory. Don't compete over things that you don't actually want.
- Never doubt yourself.
- We are the people we have been waiting for. When we have little dreams, we become little people.
- Only dead fish go with the flow.
- Conflict is essential.
- Excellence is the capacity to take pain.
- Truly positive people are rare; hold them close.
- The biggest cost to consider is opportunity cost.
- Time is the thing life is made of.
- Power laws rule the universe.
- Be authentic. Affectations are meaningless.
- Maintenance is just as important as building.
- You can encourage yourself to do work you don't like by reducing friction.
- The idea is often right; it's the execution that falls short.
- The world is not zero-sum.
- Focus on what you can control. (Epictetus)
- Process is not the goal.
Ideas
- Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
- Goodhart's overhang
- Murphy's law. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
- Murphyjitsu
- Gall's law. All complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked.
- Matthew effect. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
- Wright's law. The more times a task is performed, the less time is required on each subsequent iteration.
- Metcalfe's law. The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users.
- Pace layers of change (Stewart Brand)
-
Names are important. Once something has a name, you can control it, manipulate it, tinker with it.
- This is one of the powers of ChatGPT; it can turn your amorphous thoughts into established concepts for you to dive deeper.
-
Eisenhower matrix
-
The seventh bun, a Buddhist parable
- Xiao Ming was very hungry, so he and a friend went to buy buns. He ate the first bun, then the second, and kept going until he had finished the sixth. Still hungry, he ate the seventh—and at last he felt full. Perplexed, he turned to his friend. “If I'd known the seventh bun would be the one to fill me up, I could've just eaten that one!” His friend smiled. “It wasn't only the seventh bun. The first six made the seventh enough.”
- related: gradient descent; the 10 year overnight success
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The rate of learning exceeds the rate of knowledge-generation
Contrarian ideas
Leadership
- Don't be afraid to maintain control. There must be one clear direction for the team.
- Solo founders often outperform co-founders.
Hard work
- Nobody actually works 80-hour weeks (productively) over a sustained period of time. Instead, the process looks more like a marathon of sprints.
Elon Musk's “Algorithm”
- Question every requirement.
- Delete unnecessary parts and processes.
- Simplify and optimize.
- Accelerate cycle time.
- Automate.
General Purpose Technologies (GPTs)
- Engine
- Electricity
- Computers
- AI
- Robotics
- Synthetic biology
- GPTs need to be (1) Possible (foundational theory/key invention), (2) Viable (technological advancements), (3) Valuable (existing demand + complementary innovation) and (4) Available (distribution) in order to have proper impact.
Research
Synthetic biology
- Ron Weiss, MIT
- Jim Collins, MIT
- Katie Galloway, MIT
- Wendell Lim, UCSF
- Kole Roybal, UCSF
- Mo Khalil, BU