2024-08-27 08:00:00
Aspiring founders tend to fall at one of two extremes: they overanalyze and never ship anything, or they ship tons of random crap.
The first is more common.
The second is better. At least you’re shooting on goal.
But both approaches are far from optimal.
In poker, most world class players play a style known as “tight aggressive”.
They are tight about entering pots, but play aggressive when they do.
That’s exactly what you should do as an entrepreneur.
Carefully choose what you work on, but once you do, pursure the project with intensity.
The issue with the “just ship it” approach is that you waste a ton of energy on stuff that has a near zero percent chance of turning into something meaningful.
Not every brainfart deserves to see the light of day.
You also don’t pursure your bets with intensity if you’re betting on everything all the time.
But there is a risk once you start weighing your bets instead of just focus on shipping.
You might get stuck in analysis paralysis.
It’s a fine line to walk.
But similar to poker, you can at least always do some quick napkin math to see if a bet is worth taking.
Write down the odds of success, the potential payoff, the costs.
Then calculate the expected value.
Looking at the expected value decide if this is a bet worth taking.
Let’s do a quick example.
Say I have an idea for a digital product I can sell for $100.
Building the product will take me roughly 40 hours.
Marketing costs to validate it will be $2000 plus 40 hours of my own time.
I value my own time at $100 per hour so the total costs for the project would be $10,000.
I estimate that there’s a 10% chance that the product will be moderately successful (generate ~$1k in profit per month for at least 18 months).
Further I estimate that there’s a 2% chance that the product will be a huge success (generate ~$10k in profit per month for at least 18 months).
The odds of it being a complete failure are 88%.
The expected value therefore is:
EV = -$10k0.88 + $18k0.1 + $180k*0.02 = -$8800 + $1800 + $3600 = -$3400
The expected value is negative! This is a clearly a project I shouldn’t pursue.
If I’m a bit more optimistic and estimate the odds of moderate and huge success at 20% and 5% respectively, the expected value would be:
EV = -$10k0.75 + $18k0.2 + $180k*0.05 = -$7500 + $3600 + $9000 = $5100
It’s positive but not by much, at least by entrepreneurial standards.
If I look at the project like this it becomes obvious that I shouldn’t pursue it.
I can easily compare it to alternative projects and see select the most promising one.
It might sound trivially obvious. This only takes 5 minutes. But few founders actually do it.
Founders in “just ship it mode” are afraid that even the tiniest bit of analysis might paralyze them.
Founders in “analysis paralysis mode” are afraid that always might be a better opportunity around the corner.
The catch is of course that all estimates are of course purely based on gut feeling. This is what makes entrepreneurship so much harder than poker. But that’s also why the potential payoffs are so much higher.
A few useful rules:
This is not an exact science but gives you directionally helpful numbers fast.
Now the second key to playing tight aggressive is to pursue your bets with intensity once you’ve made one.
No half-assing. No hedging. No second guessing.
Once you’ve decided that a project is worth doing, you relentlessy pursue it.
You don’t build a shitty MVP, put out a tweet to announce it and call it a day.
Instead, you put in the hours to build the best product you can, you pay what’s necessary to get the word out, you hustle to get the first customers.
You don’t stop until it’s obvious you’ve either lost or won.
Yes, losing is always a possibility. It’s always a game of probabilities. You can fold as more information becomes available.
But until then, you play to win.
Now there is of course no right or wrong way of pursuing entrepreneurship.
Just like in poker there are people that win big with an extremely tight style and people that win big with an extremely loose style.
But the vast majority of world class players play tight aggressive.
I’ve oscillated between playing too tight and too loose.
Shipped a bunch of crap without thinking about it.
Stopped shipping waiting for the perfect opportunity.
It’s always hard to see this from the inside.
But it’s obvious when you see other people play too tight or too loose.
I don’t think it’s serving them well.
So it seems dumb to assume that it’s serving me well.
I’m trying to play more tight aggressive.
And you probably should too.
2024-08-26 08:00:00
If you don’t get along well with someone, you say “we’re simply not on the same wavelength”.
Another way of saying the same thing is “the vibe is off”. Vibe is short for vibration.
This doesn’t just apply to people but also food, drinks, movies, music, activities, environments, anything really.
When the vibe is off, it’s off. You just know.
But what is fascinating is that your wavelength is never static.
It can change a lot in the matter of minutes.
For example, after going to the gym my desire for unhealthy fast food is zero. Fast food and I are no longer on the same wavelength.
Alcohol is another obvious example. After a few drinks you’re suddenly able to vibe with people you otherwise couldn’t. You’re able to spend hours in environments you otherwise would leave immediately. Fast food suddenly has an irresistible pull.
“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.” - Ernest Hemmingway
It’s hard to talk about these kind of things without sounding woo-woo.
But to me thinking like this is simply a powerful lens to look at the world.
Humans aren’t rational robots. Vibes matter.
It’s one of the most commonly overlooked factors when it comes to productivity, social interactions, and happiness.
Everyone keeps searching for hacks instead of just focusing on raising their vibe.
Sometimes people make implicit use of certain vibe-related ideas but they are rarely ever made explicit.
So let’s do that.
There are two fundamental laws.
Stuff at roughly the same wavelength attracts each other, while stuff at wildly different wavelengths repels each other.
If stuff at different wavelengths spend time in close proximity, they influence each others wavelengths.
The second law is why you become the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.
It’s why we say that certain people can “lift a room up” or that others are “vibekillers” simply through their presence.
But again, these laws go far beyond human interactions.
Music is an immensely powerful tool to change your vibe.
Simply being in a beautiful environment can noticable lift your vibe.
The arrow of cause and effect is clear in one direction.
But it always works both ways.
When you discover that a person you don’t like is a big fan of music you like, the music’s vibe goes down.
A room can become ugly in the instance a person you don’t vibe with enters.
The vibe of a room can totally change simply through the music that’s playing.
None of this is news, of course.
But it’s very helpful to look at all of this through this one common lens.
Next, let’s ask: is there any way to turn this into something actionable?
There is.
The first step is figuring out what effect stuff has on your vibe.
You want to find high vibe stuff.
The easiest way to do this is to pay close attention the next time you’re in a high vibe state.
Everything you feel attracted to in that state is stuff that’s on your wavelength at that moment.
Since your vibe is high, this is stuff with a high vibe.
What music does feel right? What food is appealing and tasting great? What activities are excited about? What ideas and projects are you excited about? What environment do you feel drawn to?
Similarly, you can figure out this way what stuff is low vibe.
When you’re in a high vibe state, pay close attention to what feels off.
What music are you unable to listen to? What food is unappetizing? What activities are you avoiding? What ideas and projects are you procrastinating on? What environment do you feel uncomfortable in?
You will discover a lot of obvious things but also tons of surprises.
For example, I noticed that pork tastes disgusting to me when I’m in a high vibe state.
I can’t listen to rap music for more than 10 seconds.
Now the crux of the matter is that you need to get into a high vibe state in the first place to figure this out.
You have to pull yourself by the bootstraps.
This is where you have to rely on other people’s recommendations.
Prioritize raising your vibe for a few days by doing only obviously high vibe things.
Spend time in nature, exercise, dance, eat ultra healthy, meditate, journal to get all those negative thoughts out of your system.
Avoid anything that could lower your vibe. Avoid negative news, social media, Netflix, alcohol, fast food, etc.
Then pay close attention to what feels right and what feels off.
A key is doing this alone.
People have a huge impact on your vibe and no outsider can tell you who’s low vibe and who’s high vibe.
So until you have a good grasp on your own vibe, it’s better to spend time alone when trying to figure this out.
Only once you’re fairly confident that you’re in a high vibe state, you can start testing who in your life is high vibe and who is low vibe.
The same is true for work. It’s extremely hard to figure out the vibe of different tasks and projects unless you have a strong grasp on your own vibe.
But once you do, you will notice a ton of nuances.
Maybe that salad you love and thought of as healthy is actually low vibe.
Maybe that friend you thought of as high vibe is actually pulling you down.
Maybe that music you thought is lifting you up is actually lowering your vibe.
Maybe that author you always admired is low vibe and pulling you down.
What’s amazing about high vibe states is that you’re largely unbothered by low vibe stuff.
There’s zero temptation.
You have a visceral negative reaction to reading, say, a clickbaity hit piece in the New York Times.
You cannot scroll more than 10 seconds on X before you’re disgusted.
Anyhting put out by people in a low vibe state is simply not vibing with you at that moment.
But this raises the obvious question: how can your vibe get lowered at all?
First of all, most things in the world are low vibe. Low vibe people create low vibe stuff that attracts other low vibe people.
So avoiding low vibe stuff is virtually impossible if you’re living a normal life.
Constant exposure to low vibe stuff eventually does pull you down.
The second reason is mimetics.
Mimetic pulls can overshadow vibe forces.
When you’re surrounded by other people it’s hard to feel your own vibe.
When everyone is drinking beer, you feel a strong pull to do the same.
When everyone else is ordering burger and fries, it feels weird to just order a salad.
Alone the beer or burger wouldn’t feel tempting at all. You might feel disgusted by it.
But if you’re surrounded by other people, the dynamic changes.
Alone you might have zero desire to talk or think badly about other people. But once the group around you starts gossiping you join in.
And once you give in and drink that beer, eat that burger, or start gossiping, your vibe lowers.
But the good news is that once you have a good grasp on the vibes around you, you can start cultivating high vibe states.
The key is realizing that when you’re in a low vibe state you feel repelled by high vibe stuff.
So it takes willpower to raise your vibe.
Take your list of high vibe stuff and do everything you can to have their vibes rub off on you.
Listen to high vibe music, eat high vibe food, do high vibe activities, work on high vibe projects, spend time in high vibe environments, talk to high vibe people, read high vibe books, work on high vibe tasks, etc.
You won’t feel like doing any of this.
But it always works.
I’ve only talked about high and low vibes and acted as if this is a binary thing.
But of course it’s not.
There is a whole spectrum of vibes.
So you regularly have to recalibrate what is high and low vibe for you.
Once you start cultivating high vibe states, you will be able to gradually raise it to higher levels.
Then you’ll discover that things you considered high vibe before are now low vibe. It’s all relative.
Now I’m of course perfectly aware that “good vibes only” has become somewhat of a cringy meme.
There is a ton of spiritual nonsense commonly associated to these ideas.
But I don’t care.
The only thing that matters is: “does this serve me or not?”.
And thinking in terms of vibes is a suprisingly powerful framework.
Do you own experiments.
Get those vibes up.
2024-08-26 08:00:00
John Vervaeke in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis:
“Suffering”: people usually hear “pain/ distress” when they hear the word suffering. That person is suffering. But that’s not actually what the word means. To ‘suffer’ means to undergo. It means to lose agency. So you can actually suffer Joy. You can have so much joy that you, sort of, have lost control of yourself! You can have so much pleasure, it is not oxymoronic to say “I’m suffering pleasure”. It means I’m having so much pleasure that I’ve sort of lost control of the situation! Now, pain is a very powerful way of losing agency! Why? First of all it’s highly disruptive and secondly pain is associated,, usually with damage and damage is a state in which we’re often losing Agency. So don’t hear just pain. The Buddha is not saying everything’s painful. That’s ridiculous. Because if everything was painful nothing would be painful. Even all of your experiences can be painful. It doesn’t mean anything in particular. Because many of your experiences can’t be painful in and of themselves.”
“Most of the Buddha’s metaphors are not pain metaphors, they’re entrapment metaphors: Being fettered, losing your freedom, losing your Agency. That’s why the Buddha doesn’t describe enlightenment in terms of relief. But he would famously say “just like wherever you dip into the ocean it has one taste: the taste of salt! No matter where you dip into my teaching, it has one taste: the taste of freedom”.”
“realize that all of your life is threatened with a loss of freedom, a loss of Agency. And there’s a word for this kind of loss, that’s often translated as suffering, which is “Dukkha”. Dukkha, again, does not mean pain.”
John Vervaeke in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis:
“If the video gaming is robbing you of those Agentic processes then of course that is what we mean by addiction. Addiction is a loss of Agency.”
adrienne maree brown in Pleasure Activism:
“The opposite of pleasure is not pain. It is dissociation, the departure of mind from body into a fantasy of its own creation. As coping mechanisms go, it is an effective one.”
““When you’re dissociating, it’s hard to know whether you’re doing something because you enjoy it, or because you’re just trying to escape reality.” Dissociation actually causes pain and pleasure to blur together into an endless search for stimulation.”
2024-08-26 08:00:00
David Deida in The Way of the Superior Man”:
“Without a conscious life-purpose a man is totally lost, drifting, adapting to events rather than creating events. Without knowing his life-purpose a man lives a weakened, impotent existence, perhaps eventually becoming even sexually impotent, or prone to mechanical and disinterested sex.”
“Your mission is your priority. Unless you know your mission and have aligned your life to it, your core will feel empty. Your presence in the world will be weakened, as will your presence with your intimate partner. The next time you notice yourself “giving in” to your woman, postponing your mission and denying your true purpose in order to spend time with her, stop. Tell your woman that you love her, but you cannot deny your heart’s purpose.”
“The core of your life is your purpose. Everything in your life, from your diet to your career, must be aligned with your purpose if you are to act with coherence and integrity in the world. If you know your purpose, your deepest desire, then the secret of success is to discipline your life so that you support your deepest purpose and minimize distractions and detours.”
“if you don’t know your deepest desire, then you can’t align your life to it. Everything in your life is dissociated from your core. You go to work, but since it’s not connected to your deepest purpose, it is just a job, a way to earn money. You go through your daily round with your family and friends, but each moment is just another in a long string of moments, going nowhere, not inherently profound.”
Having a conscious life-purpose is equivalent to Peter Thiel’s notion of Definitive Optimism.
Most poeple nowadays aren’t optimist. This is easily quantifiable by looking at the rise of dystopian movies.
David Deida in The Way of the Superior Man”:
“Neither woman nor world can be second-guessed, or fooled. They know when you are just dicking around. They want to receive you for real. […] Otherwise, if you sheepishly penetrate them to gratify your own needs, your woman and the world will feel your lack of dedication, depth, and truth. Rather than yielding in love to your loving, they will distract you, suck your energy, and draw you into endless complications, so that your life and relationship become an almost constant search for release from constraint.” - David Deida
David Deida in The Way of the Superior Man”:
“Man must be prepared to give 100 percent to his purpose, fulfill his karma or dissolve it, and then let go of that specific form of living. He must be capable of not knowing what to do with his life, entering a period of unknowingness and waiting for a vision or a new form of purpose to emerge. These cycles of strong specific action followed by periods of not knowing what the hell is going on are natural for a man who is shedding layers of karma in his relaxation into truth.”
“For instance, you may take on a business project, work at it for several years, and then suddenly find yourself totally disinterested. You know that if you stayed with it for another few years you would reap much greater financial reward than if you left the project now. But the project no longer calls you.”
“Among the signs of fulfilling or completing a layer of purpose are these: 1. You suddenly have no interest whatsoever in a project or mission that, just previously, motivated you highly. 2. You feel surprisingly free of any regrets whatsoever, for starting the project or for ending it. 3. Even though you may not have the slightest idea of what you are going to do next, you feel clear, unconfused, and, especially, unburdened. 4. You feel an increase in energy at the prospect of ceasing your involvement with the project. 5. The project seems almost silly, like collecting shoelaces or wallpapering your house with gas station receipts. Sure, you could do it, but why would you want to?”
David Deida in The Way of the Superior Man”:
“A man rediscovers and fine tunes his purpose in solitude, in challenging situations, and in the company of other men who won’t settle for his bullshit. A man must arrange for both forms of restoration: his own solitude and men’s gatherings.”
“But for men who have lost their sense of purpose, who don’t know what their life is about, or who have trouble aligning their life with their truth, singing and dancing aren’t the remedy. The cure for lack of purpose is to be challenged to live at your edge, since you have lost the capacity to live there by yourself. The two ways to bring you right to your masculine edge of power are austerity and challenge.”
“Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn’t about truth, love, or the divine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding from it.”
“Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control.”
“The other means, besides austerity, for rediscovering your masculine core is through challenge. The more superficial forms of challenge include activities like mountain climbing, ropes courses, competitive sports, and boot camp. These forms of physical challenge instantly enliven the masculine sense of purpose and direction, in men and women.”
“Deeper forms of challenge involve directly giving your gift in ways that have been blocked by your fear. If you have always been afraid of public speaking, you can take on the challenge of speaking in public once a week for three months. If you fail and miss an appointment one week, the following week you must give three talks. If you have always wanted to write a novel, but could never finish one, you tell your friends that you are going to complete one chapter a week (or a month) for the next year.”
“The most potent forms of masculine realignment involve both austerity and challenge. Go to the middle of the woods, by yourself, with only survival necessities. Nothing to read, nothing to do. Fast from food and don’t sleep for as long as possible. Challenge your attention with some practice, like chanting or ritual movement, so that your attention doesn’t drift or become balmy. Open yourself and wait. Do not cover your suffering. Do not quit before you fall through the hole of your fear and emerge with a vision of your true mission, the unique form of your living sacrifice.”
“This kind of isolation and challenge is an extreme and potent form of masculine vision-questing,”
“The next layer of your unfolding purpose may make itself clear immediately. More often, however, it does not. After completing one layer of purpose, you might not know what to do with your life. You know that the old project is over for you, but you are not sure of what is next. At this point, you must wait for a vision.””
“You stay open to a vision of your deeper purpose by not filling your time with distractions. Don’t watch TV or play computer games. Don’t go out drinking beer with your friends every night or start dating a bunch of women. Simply wait. You may wish to go on a retreat in a remote area and be by yourself. Whatever it is you decide to do, consciously keep yourself open and available to receiving a vision of what is next. It will come.”
David Deida in The Way of the Superior Man”:
“When it comes, it usually won’t be a detailed vision. You will probably have a sense of what direction to move in, but the practical steps might not make themselves clear. When the impulse begins to arise, act on it. Don’t wait for the details. Learn by trial and error what it is you are to do.”
“It feels as if the universe is supporting you in this direction. You have no idea whether you can earn a living doing this, but it feels right for now. So you apply yourself fully to it.”
“You then allow your body to be animated by that mission. It is very specific. So if you sit there for a week or two, suddenly you might feel, “Before I die, I have to form a business to sell this product that I am interested in. I just keep thinking about it.” So you get off the cushion and form the business. It might take 10 years, 5 years, one year, but you form the business. You sell the thing you feel you have to. When that no longer moves you, that mission dissolves. That sense of purpose dissolves. A man living his mission has some years of highly focused purpose followed by a resolution of their mission, the accomplishment of their mission or the evaporation of their mission, and then they are back to no mission, to no purpose, to being.”
If you have to ask “Is X my purpose?” the answer is always No.
See Betteridge’s law of headlines
David Deida in The Way of the Superior Man”:
“you continually feel for the “groove” of your purpose. You might have a few false starts.”
David Deida in The Way of the Superior Man”:
“Whatever the specifics of a man’s purpose, he must always refresh the transcendental element of his life through regular meditation and retreat.”
“To help you remember the triviality of your daily tasks, interrupt your schedule with refreshers. These refreshers should cut to your core and strip the fat off the moment. Consider your own death. Behold an image of the most enlightened being you know. Contemplate the mystery of existence. Relax into the deepest and most profound loving of which you are capable. In your own way, remember the infinite, and then return to the task at hand. This way, you will never lose perspective and begin to think that life is a matter of tasks.”
2024-08-26 08:00:00
I love searching for success secrets.
There must be something ultra successful people know that I don’t.
And if I knew, I would be a lot more successful.
Most of this search is entirely futile.
But turns out, I finally found one.
I’ve been reading Nate Silver’s book “On the Edge”.
One thing he points out is that there basically two kinds of people.
Those who understand game theory and probability, and those who don’t.
People in the first category understand that for any real world game, getting things even somewhat right is hard enough.
Probabilities are usually the best you can do.
This is not a natural way of thinking for most people. Most people are in the second category.
When someone makes the prediction that Trump will become president with 29% probability and he does, most people think that the prediction was horribly wrong.
But when everone else was predicting 17% probability, 29% was actually a pretty good prediction. And you could make a lot of money betting on it.
17% means a 5 to one chance of winning, so if you bet 100 dollars and Trump becomes president, you would win 500 dollars.
If Trump loses, you of course lose your 100 dollars.
This means the expected value is ($500 * 0.29) - ($100 * 0.71) = $74.
So if you trust the 29% model, taking this bet is a nobrainer.
But most people cannot wrap their heads around this.
People with a deep grasp of probability tend to be more successful and not necessarily because they are better at gambling.
It also doesn’t matter whether or not people understand it in the language of mathematics.
What matters is that they have a better grasp of reality.
Without an implicit or explicit understanding probabilities and the role they play in the world, you feel like a failure when you fail.
But with it you know that you know that failing is an inevitable part of any real world game. It’s simply how probabilities work.
The best founders do not put their head in the sand when a product fails.
The best marketers do not give up when a campaign fails.
The best scientists do not stop when 12 experiments in a row fail.
The best athletes do not get mad when a dribble fails or a shot goes far off target.
The best writers just keep publishing even if there is no resonance.
The people best at friendships keep proposing plans even keep getting rejected.
Most people give up after 3 or 4 tries.
They get paralyzed by their failures or mediocre past success.
They start overanalyzing to find a better way of doing things.
They become unable to try even one more time.
There is a pattern. It doesn’t work. I’m not meant to do this.
But the most successful people have internalized that everything requires far more tries than you would naively think.
It’s not 3 or 4 tries. It’s hundreds.
Everyone is failing all the time.
But successful people forget failures quickly and just keep going.
They know that no one remembers their failures.
Lionel Messi loses the ball dozens of times each game. He plays dumb passes and misses shots left and right.
But all that people remember is that one succsful dribbling that ended in a goal.
No one gives a damn about Brian Armstrong’s silly projects that failed. All they remember is Coinbase.
Successful people don’t feel like the pressure is mounting with each failure.
They have an infinite resorvoir of IDGAF energy.
