Excerpt: "The Prophecies of Baraji"

Summary After Reading#

Distillation#

Think about truths that are unpopular and unwilling to be acknowledged by the public, and then push those truths to the masses.
The real truth depends on 1) signal sources (beware of signal relays, such as media; it is recommended to read the latest technical papers and the oldest books); 2) decision trees (have a bird's-eye view of the whole, full-stack, coordinate all branches, complete hypotheses, deductions, form insights, and actively seek help for your own shortcomings).
(Personal information source) The first thing you see every day shouldn't be a random story chosen by others, but rather key metrics you want to improve, such as the truths you hold, your health, and your wealth, and continuously optimize them to make progress. Excellent entrepreneurs help society improve these metrics.
(Personal decision tree) At night, I lie in bed thinking about what I learned today, how it integrates into my collection of thoughts, and whether there are contradictions or overlaps. Integrate it with your own knowledge reserve and see if it conflicts with other ideas.
Write down your goals; clear written instructions are the best way to improve oneself. With goals, you will often think about the essence of those goals and actively filter information to apply what you learn.
In the face of most things, take "no" as the default answer.

General Summary#

Have enough logical ability to think about unpopular truths (thought crimes lead to huge wealth leverage), while also having enough influence to make these truths popular. Unpopular truths are reliable sources of profit. The real truth depends on signal sources (beware of signal relays, such as media) and decision trees.
- The logic of signal sources extends to faith in blockchain: your private documents will be kept on local disks. Documents important to others will be placed on the internet. Documents that are "especially" important to others will be placed on the blockchain.
- The latest technical papers and the oldest books are the best sources for arbitrage (the most obscure facts and the most profitable truths); understanding truths that others cannot or do not want to acknowledge will be your competitive advantage.
Personal dashboard (personal information source). The first thing you see every day shouldn't be a random story chosen by others, but rather key metrics you want to improve, such as your health or hobbies.
- What is truly good? It can help you optimize measurable variables that matter to you, such as the truths you hold, your health, and wealth. It involves your knowledge, physical health, bank account balance, or some combination of them. These are the things you should include in your personal dashboard. You should strive every day to improve yourself for you and your family, thus making real progress on these key life variables. A dashboard is better than a newspaper.
- Compared to GDP, per capita GDP, or the stock market, perhaps we should have dashboards showing life expectancy (health) and net worth (wealth). Excellent leaders can improve these metrics for individuals and society as a whole.
- It also leads to blockchain, using blockchain to carry and open important data and information for humanity.
- Check the company dashboard daily (hypothesis validation of the business model), think about open company.
Decision trees & how to come up with a good idea (bird's-eye perspective & founder's mindset & full-stack). Excellent founders not only have ideas but can also navigate the maze of creativity from a bird's-eye view. Understand how ideas change in branching decisions and deduce the final outcomes for each scenario. Anyone can point out the entrance to the maze, but few can think through all the branching paths.
- Strategy, structural design, multi-perspective. Historical perspective and market research are key. A strong new maze navigation plan usually requires in-depth research of the market and unique insights that others have not had.
- Risk is good; entrepreneurs inherently take risks, test boundaries, and create public value.
- If you can write and draw a complex decision tree with multiple choices, explaining why your unique maze navigation plan allows your company to perform better than those that perished in the maze in the past, and can outperform current competitors lost in the maze, then you have largely proven that you have a good idea that others have not had and do not have now.
- Most of the time, people only see a company's journey and results but do not see the paths that have not been taken, nor do they think about those companies that fell into various traps and perished before reaching customers.
- If you want to use software technology to enter traditional industries, one option is to adopt a "full-stack" model. Ideas are not equivalent to models. Models are not equivalent to prototypes. Prototypes are not equivalent to programs. Programs are not equivalent to products. Products are not equivalent to businesses. Businesses are not equivalent to profits.
Goals & focus. Write down your goals. Surprisingly, very few people do this. By writing down goals, you can prevent aimlessly wasting your life. Many people just wander through life.
- Don't overconsume novelty while neglecting purpose and goals. Many people just drift through life.
- Saying "no" is difficult in the face of most things. Please take "no" as the default answer.
- Learning with intent allows you to filter information so you can immediately apply what you learn. This is why I believe a goal-driven life is good. With goals, you will often think about the essence of those goals.
- I rely on handwriting for many things because it forces me to focus. This process is zero-interference. Later in the day, I will input these scraps of paper, drafts of book chapters, or other content into digital files. Before other mundane tasks flood in, you should focus on advancing your work. You know they will flood in, but you must resist them and focus as much as possible on pushing your key tasks forward before letting all the day's messages come rushing in.
Thinking & reducing entropy (personal decision tree). At night, I lie in bed thinking about what I learned today, how it integrates into my collection of thoughts, and whether there are contradictions or overlaps. Most people do not do this; they merely categorize and store. After learning something, they do not attempt to integrate it with their knowledge reserve to see if it conflicts with other ideas.
- (In-depth research. Execution. Models.) Beginners often place too much emphasis on patents or seemingly brilliant ideas while neglecting to develop usable working prototypes. The logic required for many ideas is quite the opposite; only after actually building a product can you delve into certain concepts.
TEAM. I prefer a small team of well-rounded employees who are smart, hardworking, and can collaborate well. This way, there will be no internal politics, as the selection criteria are their ability to collaborate. When you and your team have different areas of strength, there will be continuous knowledge exchange between you. This is the recruitment method I prefer.
- If someone is stronger than you in a certain skill, why would they want to work for you? My answer is that we need to view each skill as a vector. (Expanding "multidimensional space" & bird's-eye view. Global perspective.)
- I look for people who can be my teachers and hope I can be their teacher as well. This way, we both improve our skills and benefit from the mutual, positive exchange of knowledge in this relationship. (Communication, sharing information, releasing space, i.e., "viewing each skill as a vector.")
- Finding promising talent is a very important part of recruitment. Tech executive and investor Keith Rabois has a famous saying: "Hire undiscovered geniuses." I expand it to: "Hire those who are eager to learn and can teach us something."
- As an entrepreneur, one of the most challenging yet absolutely necessary things is to hire people who are better than you. (Isn't collaboration possible? Since everyone in the team understands collaboration, it can replace hiring.)
- Leaders should focus as much as possible on creating, quantifying, and communicating consistency, which complements daily management. Consistency is the reason people will do things even when not assigned tasks. (His dashboard thinking)

Other Discussions#

Disagreement: He identifies technology as the driving force of innovation and the future, and has a strong obsession with technology, believing it to be a substantive existence that overturns historical assumptions. I believe that "change" itself is the driving force; proactive change and action are the driving forces, and technology is merely a result. He does not discuss practical cognition much, aligning with the stereotype of nouveau riche and investors; his cognitive sources are recruitment, leadership, control, encouragement, and motivation, which can be seen as a form of passive learning.
A trial-and-error approach: My brother Ramji is very good at execution. He is very disciplined and wise. He approaches problems differently than I do. I learned a skill or pattern from Ramji called "listing, ranking, iterating." (Make basic assumptions, then execute thoroughly; if it doesn't work, modify or correct the assumptions.)
Linguistic & semiotic flavor: The closer value creation is to pure writing, i.e., directly outputting symbols from the mind, the harder it is to deny the value of the person outputting those symbols. (A way to resist AI invasion.)
His belief: Mathematics, computer science, and statistics are universal languages. I don't mean just learning programming and how to call library functions, but understanding the basic concepts of computer science and delving deeply into them.
Idealism (which is actually an investment strategy): I have given up many promising financial investments because I am not interested in projects that only make money. My investments are based on ideological principles; I invest in the world I hope to see built.

Appendix#

Attached is a secondary summary of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" (which is basically consistent with this book):

So simplifying the seven habits of effectiveness overall, first is to take proactive action, do not wait; second is to be goal-oriented, focus on key points, and solve practical problems under the goals (TRIZ engineering thinking); third is to actively maintain external cooperation, openness, promote good communication, effectively utilize external resources, and avoid internal friction; finally, it should be holistic thinking, coordinating the unified relationship between self and goals.

Original Excerpts#

I graduated from high school in 1997. At that time, search engines were not very useful, and Wikipedia had not yet appeared. I feel that my education truly began in 2001 when Google was good enough to use, allowing me to improve myself on the internet, self-learn, and absorb all information eagerly.
Now, we do not have such a high risk tolerance. People want a high level of security but do not realize they may be too conservative. Overly cautious behavior can actually lead to systemic risks. When people stop taking risks and get stuck in a rigid system, systemic risks become apparent.
- (Viewing "risk" from this perspective is quite good, so there should always be entrepreneurs testing boundaries; the world should share their risks.)
If you have not deeply studied something, your mental model regarding that thing will often be indirectly simplified to a few scenes from Hollywood movies.
Technology is the driving force of history. The premise of science fiction is often that new scientific inventions have changed the world. From the perspective of movies, such changes are usually negative and occur in fast-forward montage scenes. In reality, such changes are usually positive and happen gradually day by day.
- (Change is the driving force.)
In other words, what occupies the headlines of daily newspapers is not science and technology, but politics and crime—despite the fact that the former is what we should be focusing on the most.
- (It really isn't technology. His confidence is merely a thing of the past; a more important perspective is information, similar to quantum gravity theory.)
You can summon the CEO of Facebook to Congress, but you cannot summon the "CEO of email" to Congress because there is no such CEO. This is the direction of all development.
When children enter and participate in different networks rather than state-sanctioned networks in their early years, interesting things happen: they integrate into their own communities and subcultures. Today, as children grow, the state's control over them has significantly weakened.
To be a true creator, you must be a creator of cryptocurrency, not an internet celebrity. The huge gap between them stems from digital property rights.
- (But many property rights are priced in dollars... Public ownership is not within his consideration.)
From disk → to the internet → to the blockchain. The blockchain is the third layer of deployment. Your private documents will be kept on local disks. Documents important to others will be placed on the internet. Documents that are "especially" important to others will be placed on the blockchain.
When you put information on the internet, you gain rights to distribution, sharing, collaboration, etc. When you put it on the blockchain, you enjoy the attributes of immutability, verifiability, and monetization. Not everything is suitable for the blockchain, just as you wouldn't put everything on the internet. The chain is a stronger version of the web. It reduces the impact of many issues such as broken links, secret edits, downtime, outdated formats, and firewalls.
- (Bitcoin believers are trying to reclaim their land and seize control in advance.)
All wealth is digitalized. Everything becomes a set of digital instructions, executed by printers or robots, acting on the real world. Services like Amazon Prime, drop shipping, food delivery, and ride-sharing involve a digital front end and a human back end. Over time, more and more components are being automated, so the back end is also becoming digitalized.
The application scenarios of the robots I just described are not limited to food delivery; they also apply to war, agriculture, and manufacturing. Those who are truly skilled in software architecture will continue to receive compounding returns, which is crucial.
The more technical knowledge you have in a certain field, the less you will rely on reputation signals. Imagine a study published by a few scientists, summarized by dozens of people, and read by millions, leading to arguments among people about that study. Most of the nodes involved in that scenario are signal relays. To determine the truth, what truly matters is the signal source.
Data makes absolute deductions about the truth possible. Reputation only allows people to make relative deductions about the truth. The internet makes it easier for people to resort to data, but it also makes reliance on reputation more common.
Argue with the signal source, not the signal relays. Many people do not engage in forward reasoning based on logical premises but excel at reverse reasoning based on social consequences. This behavior has its own logic because social capital is essentially still capital. Shouting at external groups is much cheaper than investing in internal groups.
Financial decision-makers are always concerned with the truth. Cryptocurrency is turning the world into investors, just as the internet turned the world into publishers. If people lack economic incentives to assess and disseminate the truth, then regardless of whether you have scientific or historical evidence to prove the truth, it will become irrelevant.
Unpopular truths are reliable sources of profit. Behind every great fortune lies a significant thought crime.
If the company you run is not generationally inherited or built on nepotism, as the current leader, you are more democratic than the rulers of the New York Times Company, with more diverse conditions. You do not need to accept the teachings of your predecessors, the people your predecessors hired, or anyone constrained by their social influence. Within the legal framework, you have the moral right to hire the people you need.
Most people receive a pile of random things all at once every day. In this high-dimensional space, you are pulled in many different directions but make no real progress. Studying a math problem today and then researching a deeper math problem in the same field tomorrow is progress. Accumulating progress slowly along the same path every day produces results, but the time spent on these websites accumulates to no meaning.
I am not saying they are completely worthless. Stumbling upon new things has its own value; you do indeed touch the pulse of community thinking. But I believe we are overconsuming novelty while neglecting purpose.
What is truly good? It can help you optimize measurable variables that matter to you, such as the truths you hold, your health, and wealth. It involves your knowledge, physical health, bank account balance, or some combination of them.
These are the things you should include in your personal dashboard. You should strive every day to improve yourself for you and your family, thus making real progress on these key life variables. A dashboard is better than a newspaper. If you work in the tech industry, you should check the company dashboard with metrics like sales figures at the start of each workday. This is a good thing. The first thing you see every day shouldn't be a random story chosen by others, but rather key metrics you want to improve, such as your health or hobbies.
Creating a personal dashboard is a great way to disrupt the newspaper industry. Algorithms and incentives can reveal important and real things to us, rather than popular and profitable ones.
Open-source culture is transforming closed-source software companies into more ethical, open, and commercially viable companies, and decentralized media will also strive to achieve the same goal.
Unlike local newspapers, new media communities are gathered based on ideology rather than geographical proximity. If individual creators can take responsibility for their work, then the "newspaper" of the new era is a dynamic combination of different individual works.
As a guiding principle, "win and help others win" will always prevail over "survive and let others survive."
Compared to GDP, per capita GDP, or the stock market, perhaps we should have dashboards showing life expectancy (health) and net worth (wealth). Excellent leaders can improve these metrics for individuals and society as a whole.
The closer value creation is to pure writing, i.e., directly outputting symbols from the mind, the harder it is to deny the value of the person outputting those symbols.
With enough technology and wisdom, we can break free from these political barriers. We can not only reopen digital frontiers but also physical frontiers, including remote lands, oceans, and even space.
- (Innovation is most abundant at the frontier.)
Bad leaders create division, good leaders encourage creation.
Go build the future. The hardest way to gain status is to build, complete, and add value, while the easiest way is to blame others for being bad. The latter is a quick way to gain status. Your criticism of the existing system may be correct, but what we need are substantial products, not just critical rhetoric.
The logic required for many ideas is quite the opposite; only after actually building a product can you delve into certain concepts.
How to come up with a good idea?
- Excellent founders not only have ideas but can also navigate the maze of creativity from a bird's-eye view. Most of the time, people only see a company's journey and results but do not see the paths that have not been taken, nor do they think about those companies that fell into various traps and perished before reaching customers.
  - (Strategy, structural design, multi-perspective)
- The maze is a great analogy. Sometimes, there are traps that you cannot cross. Sometimes, you can only defeat specific monsters after obtaining treasure in a particular area of the maze and enter new markets. Sometimes, the maze changes over time, and new doors open with the arrival of new technologies. Sometimes, there are traps that you cannot cross by yourself, but others can. Sometimes, traps only become apparent when a company reaches a certain scale, and only by re-entering the maze with new weapons can you cross those traps.
- A good founder can foresee which decisions will lead to treasure and which will lead to demise.
- If a founder runs to the entrance of the maze without any understanding of the industry's history, the players in the maze, past casualties, or technologies that could move walls and change assumptions, then they are a bad founder.
- A good idea should have a bird's-eye view of the idea maze; you need to understand how ideas change in branching decisions and deduce the final outcomes for each scenario. Anyone can point out the entrance to the maze, but few can think through all the branching paths.
- If you can write and draw a complex decision tree with multiple choices, explaining why your unique maze navigation plan allows your company to perform better than those that perished in the maze in the past, and can outperform current competitors lost in the maze, then you have largely proven that you have a good idea that others have not had and do not have now.
- In this process, historical perspective and market research are key. A strong new maze navigation plan usually requires in-depth research of the market and unique insights that others have not had.
History is the closest thing we have to human physics. It provides many descriptions of how people collide and interact with each other. The correct historical research process compresses and encodes the results of countless social experiments, allowing you to learn from human experience without having to derive social laws from scratch.
People should seek their own paths to success, which is severely underestimated. Don't just look at success stories on TechCrunch or Twitter; some people succeed because they pay attention to competitors and make strategic adjustments around competition. They are merely swift followers.
Entrepreneurs should set aside everything tech people talk about and look for areas of human civilization that technology has not yet touched. That will be where the opportunities lie.
Besides technologies unknown in laboratories, technologies that people have given up are also potential opportunities. Look for things that people think are "done for" or not working, and find out why. Innovation and consensus are antonyms. New ideas are, by definition, unpopular.
Among all definitions of startups, the best one might be Paul Graham's: The essence of a startup is growth. A startup is a business that grows at an extremely fast pace. Rapid growth often requires some new technology to overturn existing assumptions, whether those assumptions come from current politicians, established companies, or mainstream ideas. Stating preferences means praising something; expressing preferences means that people actually buy something, and the gap between the two is an inexhaustible source of entrepreneurial ideas. You can condemn hypocrisy or profit from this inconsistency.
- (His obsession with technology lies in his belief that technology is a substantive existence that overturns historical assumptions. But in fact, "change" itself is.)
If we want to match operational speed with computational speed, introducing zero-latency robots into task operations can achieve true productivity liberation. We have not yet achieved complete digitalization. As long as humans are part of production, we cannot fully enjoy the benefits of digital productivity. Many industries will undergo such an evolution: (1) manual services (2) semi-automated services (3) fully automated services from human to human-machine combinations, and then to pure machines.
Every successful platform must have a "killer app." For mobile phones, the killer app is SMS and visual voicemail. These things prompted people to take the step of purchasing an iPhone because the iPhone is a new platform. You can build a billion-dollar company on this user base. Jack Dorsey created Twitter before the iPhone appeared because he predicted that mobile devices would become popular worldwide.
- (It is a special perspective of seeing the world.)
From the perspective of entrepreneurship and investment, you must consider strategic issues. What types of platforms already exist? What new platforms can solve people's pain points? What else can be deployed on this platform?
- (AR glasses are also a new platform, an information platform.)
The best entrepreneurs have enough logical ability to think about unpopular truths while having enough social skills to make those truths popular. If you want to use software technology to enter traditional industries, one option is to adopt a "full-stack" model.
If your goal is to develop a full stack, be sure to talk to executives in the field early on. A few words can save you years of time costs, which can be used to identify the core and bottlenecks of key costs. You can initially call it "just" a new clinic/restaurant/accounting firm/architecture firm/law firm. Think big, start small. First, prove its feasibility, then scale it.
Phased development is key for full-stack startups. Start with the ambition to complete the full stack, but then carefully choose the specific upgrade sequence! If possible, first adopt industry standards or existing models at specific layers until you have the capacity to improve it.
The 6P checklist is practical.
- Product — What product are you selling?
- Person — Who are you selling to?
- Purpose — Why are they buying it?
- Pricing — At what price?
- Priority — Why buy now?
- Prestige — Why buy from you?
Ideas are not equivalent to models. Models are not equivalent to prototypes. Prototypes are not equivalent to programs. Programs are not equivalent to products. Products are not equivalent to businesses. Businesses are not equivalent to profits.
When building and selling early products, sometimes changing direction is the right answer, but sometimes you just need to persist. How to find a balance between the two? One method is to make limited investments. List your options, choose the best one, and put in effort for a predetermined period (like a week or a month), then review. This is similar to the sprint methodology in agile software development and can also be likened to balancing depth-first and breadth-first search algorithms. The key to this practice is to view your time as a quantifiable resource that can be allocated, just like capital.
I prefer a small team of well-rounded employees who are smart, hardworking, and can collaborate well. This way, there will be no internal politics, as the selection criteria are their ability to collaborate.
Finding promising talent is a very important part of recruitment. Tech executive and investor Keith Rabois has a famous saying: "Hire undiscovered geniuses." I expand it to: "Hire those who are eager to learn and can teach us something."
I am not saying that people from Harvard or Stanford are fools; that is definitely not my point. But from a cost-benefit perspective, you would want those undiscovered geniuses. When you offer them opportunities they have never had, they will be filled with desire.
Another key point is "can teach us something." I look for people who can effectively communicate the knowledge they possess. Can I learn something from their writing? Writing is important in remote work because you interact with people through writing. Do their blog posts read like mysteries that readers struggle to understand, or are their articles straightforward?
Casual conversation and instructive writing are different. To improve efficiency, you should place key information at the beginning and convey it in the title. Then you should convey it again in the subtitle, restate it in slightly different ways in the opening sentences, and expand on it in the opening paragraph.
As an entrepreneur, one of the most challenging yet absolutely necessary things is to hire people who are better than you.
- (Isn't collaboration possible?)
If someone is stronger than you in a certain skill, why would they want to work for you? My answer is that we need to view each skill as a vector.
- (Expanding the perspective under "multidimensional space." Global perspective.)
You tell him: "You are an expert in robotics. I am not as confident in this field as you, but I have self-studied and am nearly at a passing level. I can tell you what degrees of freedom are, how robotic arms work, and what basic sensors and actuators exist. I know some of the challenges in your field; I have done my homework."
If someone has gone to great lengths to master the basic vocabulary of a field, an expert in that field will look at them differently. Suppose you are an engineer working with a self-taught person; you find that although their code structure is poor, they manage to scrape some data for analysis and create some charts. You would consider these people resourceful and respect them.
When you and your team have different areas of strength, there will be continuous knowledge exchange between you. This is the recruitment method I prefer. I look for people who can be my teachers and hope I can be their teacher as well. This way, we both improve our skills and benefit from the mutual, positive exchange of knowledge in this relationship.
Fairness brings unity; politics creates division.
Leaders should focus as much as possible on creating, quantifying, and communicating consistency, which complements daily management. Consistency is the reason people will do things even when not assigned tasks.
The true organizational chart is a map of who reports to whom. Twitter changed the "organizational chart" of the world. Slack changed the "organizational chart" of every company. Who really reports to whom? This is more important than any management structure written on paper.
The best and worst CEOs share a common trait: the company can operate without them.
Before candidates join your company, have them write down what they consider success, mediocrity, and failure, i.e., their bull market, benchmark, and bear market. Where do they hope to be in one year or four years?
This type of form is simple. You should create an expectation for yourself and others every time you have a one-on-one conversation, and you will be accountable under that person's supervision, just as they will be accountable under your supervision. You both know each other's expectations.
As a manager, it is very useful to track these forms in simple documents, as it helps you review what has been agreed upon. Employees can do this too. This is not a confrontational activity; everything is about maintaining consistency. Given that new things are constantly emerging, not everyone can handle everything, so personal responsibilities are not absolutely unchangeable.
- (Dashboard.)
This is useful for you and important for them. Four years later, what counts as good, what counts as excellent, and what counts as failure? By thinking about this, they take on more responsibility for their own paths. The scene four years later when they review their answers will be interesting. They will exclaim, "Wow, my predictions were terrible, but some of my other predictions were correct!"
It is advisable to use the same technique to allocate work between managers and employees. Draw a 2x2 table with four quadrants. What are the manager's expectations for themselves? What are the manager's expectations for employees? What are the employees' expectations for themselves? What are the employees' expectations for the manager?
Good entrepreneurs boast with numbers rather than adjectives.
What does good execution specifically mean? Having an executor's mindset means you are always executing the next item on your to-do list. You can rewrite this list daily or weekly based on progress.
This is easy to say but extremely difficult to do. It means saying no to others, saying no to distractions, saying no to entertainment, and spending all your waking time on the task at hand.
In terms of inspirational methods for execution, perhaps the best method is Peter Thiel's "one thing" rule. Everyone in the company is responsible for one thing; everyone should know what that one thing is at any given time, and everyone should also know what others' one things are.
Marc Andreessen's anti-to-do list is also good: write down what you just did and then cross it off. Even if you veer off course, this will help you understand what you are doing and your progress.
My brother Ramji is very good at execution. He is very disciplined and wise. He approaches problems differently than I do. I learned a skill or pattern from Ramji called "listing, ranking, iterating." It is a meta-algorithm that is simple and effective in solving unstructured problems. Suppose you encounter a question like "How do we increase sales?" or "How do we raise funds?" You need to first list a checklist of potential doctor buyers or venture capital firms as potential funding sources. Then rank them. "Which administrative region is this doctor in? Is he likely to issue a prescription for this test?" "Has this venture capital firm invested in companies like ours before?" Then violently iterate on the ranked list. The key to this step is to set a limit. You say, "Okay, I will try 150 of them. If I don't manage to close any, I will try a new strategy."
- (Make basic assumptions, then execute thoroughly; if it doesn't work, modify or correct the assumptions.)
Sometimes, doing business is about figuring out some less obvious things. More often, doing business is about doing the obvious things. "What matters is not the idea, but the execution." This is a good reminder and a mantra to keep us focused. It is particularly useful for novice entrepreneurs or dreamers. Beginners often place too much emphasis on patents or seemingly brilliant ideas while neglecting to develop usable working prototypes.
"No one cares; just take care of your team" may be the best advice for CEOs ever. It is best not to spend time lamenting what you could have done but to devote all your time to what you can do. Because, no one cares; just run your company.
Productivity manual.
Write down your goals. Surprisingly, very few people do this. By writing down goals, you can prevent aimlessly wasting your life. Many people just wander through life.
Clear written instructions are the best way to improve oneself.
I always have a broad mission or direction that everything I learn reflects upon. My brain holds a single-threaded worldview, which is interesting because you might think I dabble in multiple fields. But in reality, everything is traceable. If something is difficult to fit into my worldview, I tend to discard it. I have a mental "clothesline" to hang various ideas on. It also helps me remember these ideas, like data compression.
At night, I lie in bed thinking about what I learned today, how it integrates into my collection of thoughts, and whether there are contradictions or overlaps. Most people do not do this; they merely categorize and store. After learning something, they do not attempt to integrate it with their knowledge reserve to see if it conflicts with other ideas.
As personal productivity increases, the amount of consensus needed to build things decreases. Today, a few people (or even one person) can prove that a crazy idea is feasible. Increased productivity directly leads to enhanced personal independence. Higher productivity means smaller team sizes, smaller team sizes mean less averaging, and less averaging means greater differences in outcomes.
- (Reducing entropy.)
Saying "no" is difficult in the face of most things. Please take "no" as the default answer. If you do not say "no," you cannot say "yes" to important things.
Maintaining high output in the long term.
I rely on handwriting for many things because it forces me to focus. This process is zero-interference. Later in the day, I will input these scraps of paper, drafts of book chapters, or other content into digital files.
Before other mundane tasks flood in, you should focus on advancing your work. You know they will flood in, but you must resist them and focus as much as possible on pushing your key tasks forward before letting all the day's messages come rushing in.
The latest technical papers and the oldest books are the best sources for arbitrage; they contain the most obscure facts and the most profitable truths. The truths you understand that others cannot or do not want to acknowledge are your competitive advantage.
You typically cannot win by just doing what you have always done. I read many old books and new technical journals. I do not focus much on contemporaneous matters but rather on finding truths that most people do not know.
Brian Chesky was inspired by a series of articles about co-living written in the late 19th century to create Airbnb. In fact, co-living was much more common around 1900 than in 1950. He saw solutions in the shared economy of 100 years ago and then modernized, transplanted, and applied those ideas today. Reading books about social arrangements from different times and spaces is very beneficial.
Learning with intent allows you to filter information so you can immediately apply what you learn. This is why I believe a goal-driven life is good. With goals, you will often think about the essence of those goals.
Ideally, you are both a full-stack engineer and a full-stack creator. It is like using both your right brain and left brain simultaneously. In engineering, this means you have mastered computer science and statistics. Having knowledge of physics and continuous mathematics is also good. This is inherently very valuable; today, you may need to combine continuous mathematics with artificial intelligence.
Of course, every field has domain knowledge, but mathematics, computer science, and statistics are universal languages. I do not mean just learning programming and how to call library functions, but understanding the basic concepts of computer science and delving deeply into them.
Becoming a full-stack creator is also important. Social media will become far more profitable and easier to monetize than people imagine. People think everything is over or stagnant, but innovation is just beginning. Many who want to build billion-dollar companies will also have to build media fan bases of millions.
Accumulate your wealth, then help others accumulate wealth.
- (They really won't share wealth, nor consider redistribution.)
Venture capital has many downsides, but it also has some interesting points. One of them is that venture capitalists are very interested in whether they make mistakes.
Another interesting point is that venture capitalists are motivated to cultivate talent. As an investor, you want to make the entities you invest in richer than you.
I have given up many promising financial investments because I am not interested in projects that only make money. My investments are based on ideological principles; I invest in the world I hope to see built.

arlmy