Sarkar

Technology, Productivity, and Entrepreneurship.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

If you want to actually retain information you consume, then you need to practice retrieving it from memory, not just re-consuming it.

You have retained information if and only if you can regenerate it from memory. So naturally that is the exercise that must be practiced.

Yes, it is also helpful to make connections between isolated pieces of information.

Yes, those connections are themselves information.

Yes, if you want to retain the connections, then you have to exercise their retrieval, not just re-consume them from an external source.

Yes, this also applies to connections between connections.

Yes, this also applies to skills, concepts, procedures, applications, etc.

If you want to be able to generate it from your head, then you need to practice generating it from your head.

[blue @bluewmist]

Every time you avoid something uncomfortable, your brain reinforces the idea that avoidance works. It literally strengthens the pathways that make hesitation, procrastination, or excuses automatic. And every time you do the hard thing even imperfectly your brain is building a new pathway: this is something I can do.

[Incentivising @incentivising]

Time spent does not equal results.
Hard work does not equal results.
Effort does not equal results.

The person who tracks these variables is measuring a cost, not a result.

That's because output (what/how you produced something) is never the same as outcome (what changed because you produced it).

An email is output. A decision by the recipient that was caused by the email is an outcome.

A meeting attended is an output. A relationship changed by the meeting is an outcome.

A book read is output. A behavior changed by the book is an outcome.

Track your outcomes. Every significant expenditure of effort must be intended to produce an outcome.

Anything else is "fake work."

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

High-agency people have this weird immunity to embarrassment. And the more you look at it the more you realize it's not that they're braver or or born without the shame gene.

It's that they relocated the shame. they moved the embarrassment button.

It's still there, they're not sociopaths, it's just wired to something completely different than everyone else's.

For most people the button is wired to: being seen wanting something and not immediately having it. Being caught trying. Looking dumb. Getting told no.

For high-agency people the button got rewired to a single thing: not trying. That's the only thing that makes them cringe.

[Incentivising @incentivising]

If you want an unfair advantage:

Train yourself to stop reacting to everything.

You don't need an answer for everything.
You don't need to justify everything you do.
And you especially don't need to expend energy on every issue.

In the best case, you expend tons of effort and make the situation slightly better. But in the worst case, you make the situation actively more difficult.

In many cases, silence is the superior strategy.

Don't react, don't provoke, just notice and move on. You can always choose to reply later on.

That is a rare skill most people don't possess, and it ruins careers daily.

[Sarkar @0xSarkar]

Theory of Constraints

[David Senra @FoundersPodcast]

“Rockefeller would focus on the highest priority.

When he gets into the oil refining business it has no barriers to entry.

It costs $1000 to start a refinery and only requires a few people to run it.

And one thing he notices is that transportation is the largest expense. It costs more to ship a barrel of oil, than to refine it.

So if transportation is your highest priority that means the location of your refinery is key. 

The site that he chose was genius. He selected a location that was next to both the railroad and on the banks of a river. Why? Shipping by water was 50% cheaper than shipping by rail. 

If something is your top priority you should spend the majority of your time thinking about how to develop an edge there.”

—From episode 405 “How Rockefeller Worked”

[Mason Hughes @msnrhu]

Kasparov on greatness.
Banger.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

The easiest way to stay mediocre is to keep your goals abstract and your days unexamined. Vague ambition lets you feel serious without forcing contact with serious work. The truth shows up in what you repeatedly do, not what you admire.

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

Skills that have nothing to do with money but are worth dedicating an immense amount of practice to:

- Charisma
- Metacognition
- Critical thinking
- Sitting with discomfort
- Articulating what you believe and why
- Changing your beliefs when presented with new information

Almost nobody actually practices these and it shows.

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre.

The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time- and energy-consuming.

If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too.

Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.

Unreasonable and unrealistic goals are easier to achieve for yet another reason.

Having an unusually large goal is an adrenaline infusion that provides the endurance to overcome the inevitable trials and tribulations that go along with any goal. Realistic goals, goals restricted to the average ambition level, are uninspiring and will only fuel you through the first or second problem, at which point you throw in the towel.

If the potential payoff is mediocre or average, so is your effort.

The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits.

There is just less competition for bigger goals.

[Laura Matsue @lauramatsue]

Lord knows I've had to learn this many times over.
By Joseph Campbell

[Incentivising @incentivising]

Game theory teaches that life is not about merit or fairness. It exposes that skills and knowledge are not always rewarded. Instead, positioning decides success: aligned incentives, pragmatic alliances, and potent strategies. That's what provides you the leverage you need. People fail because they're optimizing an ideal world, not a real environment.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

Lots of people use brainrot to postpone existential dread. What they often don't realize is that they are also postponing the actions that would create meaning. If your life feels unfulfilling, no amount of distraction will fix that. You can't fix emptiness with more emptiness.

[jay plemons @jayplemons]

The great lie is that society is divided between rich and poor.
The great truth, as David Friedberg puts it, is makers vs takers.

Makers build, create, and deliver real value: houses, software, art, businesses, and everything that moves civilization forward.

Takers watch, criticize, analyze, and politic. They push the lie that the rich hoard unfairly so the poor must seize it… all while positioning themselves to rule the chaos.

As @friedberg tells his kids: “At the end of the day, if you made something and someone else valued it, you were a maker. That was an amazing achievement. That is a great day.”

Takers thrive on division. Makers drive progress.

Time to choose your side.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Major cheat code for life: Become difficult to rush. The world will pressure you to rush into everything. Rushed decisions. Rushed conversations. Rushed relationships. Rushed timelines. There's immense power in rejecting that trend. Slow down. Create space to think clearly.

[George Mack @george__mack]

One mistake I made in my 20's was neglecting the compound interest of focus. I thought that if did two things, I'd get 50% progress for both. It seemed like a smart risk prevention strategy. But when you go from doing two things for 30 hours per week, to one thing for 60 hours per week, magic happens. On that 31st or 42nd hour, you spot a solution or a clue. A door gets unlocked. You have an aha moment. And you sprint on that aha moment with your full focus, without context switching. Then come next week, you've got another sixty hours to stack on top of that aha moment. So you begin to run laps around the version of you that was splitting his time.

I thought 60 hours on one thing would give me 2x the outcome of 30 hours on two things. But I was wrong. 60 hours on one thing can be 5x, 10x, 100x or even 1000x.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

The easiest way to stay mediocre is to keep your goals abstract and your days unexamined.

[Gary Bernhardt @garybernhardt]

I'm an old programmer (by programmer standards). I use agents daily, extensively. Here's a view from the other side of "wooooow look how many lines it wrote!", taken from my work today.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Five dimensional chess doesn’t exist. Everyone is furiously improvising all the time. The future is utterly uncertain.

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Leonardo da Vinci's greatest paragraph