The Wisdom Wall

“Terrible. They're terrible. I mean, there's very few people because you tend to be obsessed. Like I also think like it's important to note. So the, the people that appear on founders podcasts, right? They, they were so good at their jobs that somebody wrote a book about their life. This is like the tiniest percentage…”

“I would just say that I don't think it's prerequisite for extreme success. It's just that most humans grow up in bad environments. And so I think you just, it's literally just a bigger sample size. Um, there you can, you know, grow up with, you know, loving household and still have extreme success.”

“I don't think you choose to be an entrepreneur. I think, like, there's this great line from Jeff Bezos where he says, we don't choose our passions, our passions choose us. That's how I kind of think about it. So I think even if they, that entrepreneur type didn't even have trauma, they still would do what they're…”

“usually if you want the most talented designer in the world or the most talented programmer in the world or the most talented ex Anything in the world, they're going to be unusual people with very distinct personalities, and a lot of their personality types will They usually lead to, like, bad behavior”

“and really the importance of like knowing yourself, and then you're not gonna be successful unless you can build a, a, a company that's a reflection of you. You know, essentially like a, uh, an echo or a shadow of the founder.”

“it's not people like, oh, to be a master or something, it's 10,000 hours. No, it's 10,000 iterations.”

“a lot of the content that entrepreneurs are actually consuming or actually created by investors. And so you could have incentive alignment with them, but many cases, your incentives are misaligned and we should just think about that. And what's disturbing about that is how much of it is about start scale.”

“people think entrepreneurs are obsessed with money. I would argue they're obsessed with control. And that if you're talented, and you're working on a valuable product, or a problem, and you solve the problem for other people, and you maintain control, you wind up with the money.”

“Go for freedom. He's like, if you keep your freedom, you can control what you work on. If you control what you work on, you can work on what you love. If you love it, you'll do it all the time. If you do it all the time, you'll get really good at it. And money will come as a result.”

“you see the success in most entrepreneurs lives happen multiple decades in. Because they didn't interrupt the compounding. You had to wait for time to do most of the work, and that's why the start, scale, sell doesn't work.”

“Bezos's analogy for this. Cause he's all like, all he thinks about is AI all day long now. Is he calls it these thin horizontal enabling layers. And he thinks AI is more akin to electricity than it is to anything else. The internet was a thin horizontal enabling layer. Electricity was a thin horizontal enabling layer.…”

“He had this, there's another maxim, belief comes before ability, which I hate when people are like, oh, you shouldn't have so much self belief. You tell us entrepreneurs, like generate evidence and then have belief. And I'm like, well, I've read 400 of these books and none of these people did that. They believed in…”

“learning from history is a form of leverage. Why did Munger read hundreds of biographies? Why did Buffett read hundreds of biographies? Why did Elon read hundreds of biographies? Why did Jeff Bezos, like Steve Jobs, This just over and over again, it's obviously one of the highest value things you can do.”

“you should limit the amount of details, and then make every detail perfect. That's how I would describe what Todd Graves has done, and then you don't interrupt the compounding”

“One of the, um, greatest maxims from a history of entrepreneurship is excellence is the capacity to take pain.”

“And what Daniel's realizing, and it's been very helpful cause he definitely shapes my thinking on a lot of things. Is he's like, I just think I'm a better player than coach or excuse me, better coach than player. And Steve's a player. Elon's a player. He says, but I'm not like that. So then that doesn't mean you can't…”

“And I think a lot of history's greatest entrepreneurs did. You won't find many of them that are obsessed over, I have to hit a certain net worth, or I have to hit a certain market cap. I almost never hear that.”

“And one thing that you observe when you're reading about Great History's Greatest Entrepreneurs, you get to talk to some of the greatest entrepreneurs, is how small their circles are, and how, like, they're very slow to add new people. They almost go to great lengths to vet the people they have around them”

“the trait they have is they're uncompromising. And so if you're uncompromising, it's going to be very hard To be described as nice.”

“people think about, like, founder market fit And he actually thinks the more interesting idea is founder problem fit. And knowing your archetype and then knowing other archetypes of other entrepreneurs that came before you and that match your archetype would be very useful. So you're, make sure you're attacking the…”

“And I think the big, the biggest way to be likable and to be like somebody that people want to be around is just like, you have to be intensely interested in something because the most interesting people are the most interested. They're like passionate about weird things.”

“most bit more businesses dive indigestion than starvation. It's like, they just try to do too much. They essentially sabotage themselves.”

“This is like my framework for entrepreneurship. So pick a mission. Be really concentrated on like your resources, time, money, energy, attention, all to that mission, tiny teams of just A players.”