The Wisdom Wall

“what I found in my own experience working with some of those things is that, um, you end up moving a whole lot, but not actually making progress on things. You know, you like have this complicated productivity system, but you're not actually, uh, you know, creating progress on the things that you were supposed to work…”

“I think like business school is like the, um, it's like the uncertainty pick where like people aren't willing to, to tolerate the like uncertainty of what comes next at that first pivot point in their career. And business school is like the easy, uh, the easy answer.”

“cause to me, I, I think of cash as like a call option on future interesting opportunities. Um, I like having more cash than anyone would say makes sense. And the reason I do that, I think of it as the same as free time, by the way, it's like now when something cool comes up, I'm not like having to reshuffle out of…”

“any business where people, there's tons of people and they, they made 1.7 billion dollars last year, um, in revenue. And like any time that's the case and no one is proud to say they're affiliated with it, that seems like an opportunity just as a mental model.”

“when you are in wartime and having to make dramatic, you know, bold decisions quickly, the idea of going and asking, you know, a hundred million users to vote on something and Trusting that it's going to be the right long-term decision when they're operating with imperfect information relative to you as the general is…”

“You're much better off, and it's like, maybe it's contrarian advice, and it's a hot take, but, like, you're much better off just saying fuck it to the stuff you're bad at, and, like, I'm probably not gonna ever be amazing at those things I'm bad at. Let me just, like, not focus on it, and I'm gonna double down and go…”

“So the fundamental idea with both question two and question three, which we'll come to, is that your outcomes in life follow your energy. Idea being like when you are working on and leaning into things that create that lift, that natural pull, you create the best outcomes.”

“I focus on how do I feel after rather than how do I feel during for that exact reason, uh, working out, actually the example that you brought up there is the best one in my mind for me, because there's plenty of run workouts or different lifts or whatever, where I'm clearly drained during it physically and mentally.…”

“recurring meetings are a funny one too, because what, what I find happens is you create stuff to talk about on them. That's not actually impactful. Uh, you, you're like, oh, okay, I have this recurring meeting every month on the first Monday of the month. So I'm gonna have a bunch of touch points that we need to talk…”

“Identifying what those are and cutting the line, if you will, is the fastest way to make progress. We, as ambitious, high-performing people, Automatically assume that the fastest way to make progress is to add something new. You're like, oh, okay, I'm going to try to make progress in 2026. What's the new habit? What's…”

“if you're proud of the work that you put in and you know it's going to be impactful for the world, if you're not willing to shamelessly self-promote your thing, why should anyone else be willing to share it?”

“In a world of audience and in a world of these algorithms, we are progressively falling victim to what our audience wants. And effectively we are slaves of our audiences or of these algorithms, if that's what you believe in.”

“it's really hard to send an insight rich newsletter once a week. Um, and the people that do it, like Ben Thompson, I like bow down to the fact that that guy can every single day churn out an insight rich piece of Piece of writing is insane to me. Like Paki once a week. Um, you know, Mario, same thing. Like it's pretty…”

“prices are hopefully gonna reset to some extent in the private markets too. And you're gonna be able to invest in things at a, you know, a more reasonable price point and generate better returns for your investors, which creates a feedback loop of more money flowing into the space. Um, and allows more projects to be…”

“I've always found that the most impressive people in the world, like find a way to just reduce the amplitude. Like they never get too high. They never get too low. And they have these like So everyone has waves, right? It's going to happen. You're going to have things that spark happiness, things that spark joy, et…”

“if you've lived a certain way for 50 years, and you've lived frugally, and that's why you've built up this nest egg, it's very hard to mentally shift into, like, a consumption mode of splurging on yourself and doing the fun things and spending the little extra.”

“By the way, those people are so high churn that these, these companies are deploying so much money Into customer acquisition because a customer comes on and it's a freaking 18 year old. They change their mind every day. So they're switching versus like a high, um, loyalty, sticky, older customer like this.”

“if you're a company and you're growing and you're not thinking about storytelling, if you have any sort of consumer facing angle, you're going to struggle long-term because at the end of the day, you just cannot like, even just like mechanically, when you're starting as a company, your first customers are your lowest…”

“Basically, if the hype cycle outpaces the kind of features and capabilities of the platform, you're dead, and you can almost never come back.”

“It's like you as a human being, imagine yourself as like a pile of cash, like a million dollars of cash. You're just a pile of cash. And it's not always that you find the like perfect thing to invest that cash in, like to invest your resources in. And so sometimes you need to find the like High yield savings account to…”

“There's actually no way to get these NFT back, NFTs back in like a traditional way, right? And so that's the challenge is like, it's not FDIC insured. It's the kind of the downside of decentralization in some context is that, um, you are self-custodying all of this. There is not a bank that's actually holding this for…”

“this is an area that has opportunity because not many people are doing it. Thinking about it or want to spend time on it. It's like super sexy to invest in venture, growth, crypto, whatever. So returns get squeezed. Zig when other people zag and like do the thing that other people aren't thinking of.”

“And it used to be that capital was scarce to go start these things because it was so expensive. Now capital is abundant. The capacity is abundant. You can go and try all these things. All of the technology to try them is abundant. What's scarce then in my mind is. Execution. You know, it's action bias.”

“And the reality with a lot of it is it's sort of a natural evolutionary feature, this hype, because it draws a ton of capital, but also a ton of talent into the space that will build the next layer of innovation. So even if we go through kind of a cycle where it's a bear market and people aren't talking about it every…”

“10 99 income is effectively taxed at a much higher rate than w two, not in the sense of like an actual tax rate, but in the sense that you can't go get leverage on it. Good luck getting a mortgage with a bunch of 10 on income. If you have a million dollars of 10 on income here and a million dollars of W two income…”

“the structure of board meetings when well done, which was The CEO and the board and the team would send around like maybe a week in advance a deck that was basically the business update and all of the key information about the business. And then the meeting itself, when everyone was in the room together was entirely…”

“you see a whole lot of businesses go under because of that exact dynamic. Like you're, you know, you're paying your, your, uh, producers so far in advance of when your, your retailers are paying you. It's like, you know, a terrible dynamic to have to deal with when you, especially when you're growing, it hurts you the…”

“You're sharing in public, which is a great way to get lucky because you sort of cast these like idea magnets out into the world around all this stuff.”

“I found that to be a common thread, by the way, among extremely successful people, they like built the, you know, version one point O of their thing accidentally prior to doing the real one.”

“the internet is just Permanent, man. You can't, like, run and hide from stuff the way you might have used to be able to, where you can just say, oh yeah, I'm just gonna delete it, walk away, whatever, and so I leaned into it.”