The Wisdom Wall

“And what I realized is like erring on the side of firing too quickly is actually so rare. And so we have such like an emotional reaction to it. Oh, it's unfair, but actually 99.9% of organizations on the planet are erring on the side of firing too slowly.”

“He says, if you're not adding back 10% of what you removed, you're not removing enough.”

“Reject the trilemma because speed lowers cost, and so if you hold the quality bar and just move faster, you should be able to lower costs.”

“what Elon does, which is so He has a knack for it, but anyone can do it in the proper context is have empathy at the level of the mission, not empathy at the level of the individual.”

“You know, the rule of thumb in startups is like you, you're a different organization every time you triple in headcount. Or roughly an order of magnitude, right? And so, what he says is like, what looks like a three-year churn is actually a full tour of duty. It just, at another company, it would take 10 years to do…”

“The algorithm is five steps, and the order is very important. So the first step is to question every requirement. Um, he says, no matter how many requirements there are, question them, eliminate as many as you can. Every existing requirement must have an individual human being's name attached to it. Um, the more…”

“Hard work is, you know, respectable and admired and yes, we should work hard, but hard work can only get you a two or three X improvement in what you're doing. And if you don't learn to improve how you're working or the elegance or improve your leverage, like learn where you can have those hundred X, you know, where…”

“the degree that you specialize, even if you set out to be a generalist, you will end up becoming a specialist. A sufficiently, like, advanced generalist becomes a unique specialist”

“if you grind and beat yourself up, and have this brutal internal monologue, and, like, Right, all the way to, like, winning the game, finally achieving all these things that you hope to the whole time, you have the same epiphany that you can have right now, which is that, like, none of it matters.”

“you can probably be equally effective by just, like, Uh, by having emotional detachment, rather than having, like, being all in, all consumed, emotionally, like, wringing yourself out every day, feeling massive stress about everything that you're doing”

“Like if you can imagine quitting what you're doing, don't start. If the fear is stronger than the desire to achieve the mission, then maybe you haven't picked the right mission.”

“since he got involved in politics, I think it's very hard to be involved in politics at all without Making enemies. Like, it's just such a zero-sum thing that, um, there's people just really eager to distort and take down reputations, and there's people that take sort of anything that's in a headline as, as gospel, um,…”

“And so many CEOs that we know, so many operators are like, well, I've got, I've got a board meeting to prepare for. I've got a weekly meeting. I've got a status update. I've got to do this. I've got to do that. And they're sort of caught in the like minutia and maintenance of the company. They are not like eye of…”

“One of his things is like, uh, order of magnitude goals. You know, you're not gonna hear him ever say like, I would like you to increase that by 20%, please. You'd be like, drop that. The cost of that should be one percent of what it is. Or I want you to increase the e-com sales by 20 X. And like, that just totally…”

“when I hear, well, best practice is X, I'm like, oh, we're already lost. Like we're starting from a bad place because only incremental improvements are going to come from like, well, how do we do it today? Where he starts with is like, what is the theoretically maximum, most efficient, most effective, like perfect…”

“The modern forms of leverage are code, media, and capital. Zero marginal cost and uncapped and accesses this sort of global marketplace.”

“All the difference between a day laborer and Zillow is just like, how leveraged are you and how comfortable are you using each of those different forms of leverage?”

“Um, but if you were mired in something else, just like, plodding along on not the biggest opportunity, rather than having the space to jump on the best opportunity, When it came about, then you might miss it. And like, that's the live like a lion kind of mindset is like, you want to have the space to evaluate and…”

“There's a dynamic where people, I think, want to be in the same room as like the, the person, the CEO, the leader, the whatever, like that, that those meetings are an opportunity for FaceTime probably in some ways that are like more about the political game than the output.”

“In particular, if you're young, I feel like it's, it's hard to, um, it's hard to appreciate that what, how lucky some people are getting is actually 20 years of, like, Carefully grown seeds and reputation and relationships and effort and like you shouldn't expect to get as lucky as somebody that has created that much…”

“my perspective now in my thirties is that, you know, the first 20 years of your career is an audition for the second 20 years of your career”

“Naval's got a great line, it's, it's maybe, like, the ultimate Naval line, which is, the true test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life.”

“Buffett is track record is investing in CEOs and abdicating entirely to them. And so like, you gotta be a really good people picker when that's your strategy.”

“And I think the people that end up the most unhappy, um, have repressed so much because they never summoned the courage. And so they're like deeply aware of what it is, um, that they, they truly want to be doing or feel like they could be doing and just never took that next leap.”

“Meditation is the same way. It helps you separate sort of, um, the evaluator, like the observed from the observant, like see your own thoughts from above, but writing it is, is a shortcut to doing it.”