Conor Neill on why luck is not random and how to deliberately get more of it:
1. Luck flows through people and travels by conversation. James Clear's framing: keep talking to the same people, keep finding the same opportunities. start talking to new people, start finding new opportunities. If you want different luck, start walking into different rooms. The people you have access to determine the opportunities that reach you. This is not a metaphor. It is mechanics.
2. What separates successful people from unsuccessful ones is not the amount of luck they receive. It is return on luck. Jim Collins's idea: when a luck event presents itself, what do you do with it. Most people get roughly similar amounts of lucky moments. The difference is who is prepared and paying attention when they arrive.
3. A careers advisor in Spain gave one piece of advice that changed everything: meet one new person every week. For 25 years, the speaker kept a slot in his calendar every single week for a coffee with someone new. almost every significant opportunity in his life, his teaching role, his business, came through a single individual and a conversation. The math on one new person per week over 25 years is staggering.
4. When you meet someone new, you are starting at number 21 on their list of priorities. Dan Sullivan's framework: they have at least 20 things more important than talking to you. If you spend the conversation talking about yourself, your goals, what you want, you drop from 21 to 30 to 50 and fall off the list entirely. If you ask about them, their goals, what brought them there, you move up. Most good people, if you explore who they are, will then explore who you are. That is how a real conversation opens.
5. Luck surface area is a size you can control. The more people you meet and the more genuine conversations you have, the larger the surface through which luck can reach you. same people, same conversations, same luck. new people, new conversations, new luck. It is that simple, and most people never deliberately expand it.
Michael Phelps on how to accomplish big things:
"When I said I wanted to win eight gold medals, basically half the people in the swimming world thought I was absolutely crazy and nobody could ever do something like that. But for me, I was somebody who believed in it and somebody who believed in the process of getting there."
Michael knew it wouldn't happen overnight.
As he puts it:
"Every little small thing that we did was a small stepping stone in order to even be able to have that chance and that opportunity to do what I did in 2008. From 2002 to 2008 was basically trial and error."
On managing pressure during the Olympics:
"Winning a gold medal is absolutely incredible, but I knew that I had seven other events after the first day. So I have to throw that in the back of my head, throw that race out. I broke a world record, won my first gold medal, cool, things are starting really well. I have to put that behind me to get ready for the next race."
He continues:
"On top of that I have to make sure I'm eating the right amount, I'm sleeping the right amount, my body is as fresh as I can possibly be. That means sitting in an ice tank, getting massages, getting stretched. All of these small things end up adding up to the major end result."
His daily approach:
"We would call it putting money into the bank. At the end of the year when we had a major international competition, we could withdraw that money that we had saved throughout the year."
On motivation:
"I'll be the first one to tell you there were a lot of days where I did not want to get out of bed. But if you have those little small goals, those little small things that get you excited when you don't want to, it's going to make it even better and even easier at the end."
The difference between good and great:
"If you look at the greats in any walk of life, the greats do things when they don't always want to. And that's the separation for me."
Small daily deposits create Olympic results.
Jordan Peterson on how to easily overcome social anxiety:
1. Social anxiety is not shyness. When you walk into a social situation, your brain registers it as a dominance hierarchy that is judging you. A negative judgment means low status. Low status interferes with everything your biology cares about. You are not being irrational. You are being evaluated by something that feels like nature itself, and your nervous system knows it.
2. Telling an anxious person to stop thinking about themselves does not work. You cannot tell someone to stop thinking about something. They get caught in the loop. Stop thinking about a white elephant. white elephant. white elephant. The instruction makes it worse. The only way out is to give the brain something else to do.
3. The actual solution is to look at other people. not glance. Genuinely look. Watch their face. Track what they are thinking. The moment you focus outward, your automatic social mechanisms engage, and the awkwardness dissolves on its own. You cannot be socially calibrated and self-focused at the same time. Attention can only go in one direction.
4. When speaking to a group, never try to address the group. It does not exist as a thing you can talk to. Find one person, look at them directly, and talk to that person. They will reflect the entire room back to you because everyone is entrained to the same social signal. If you can talk to one person, you can talk to anyone.
5. The eye at the top of the pyramid, the thing the Egyptians worshipped as Horus, is attention itself. What you pay attention to determines everything. The most important thing to look at is whatever your instincts flag as slightly wrong or off. That is where the real information is. Your enemies are useful for the same reason. They will tell you things about yourself that nobody else will, and occasionally one of those things will be accurate.
Tony Robbins on how to change someone who doesn't want to change:
1. People only change when they link enough pain to staying the same or enough pleasure to changing. Ideally, both at once. This is not a mindset shift. It happens in the nervous system, not the head. Your head can know exactly what you should do, and your gut will override it every single time.
2. Yes, you can change someone who doesn't want to change. But not by forcing them. You find the leverage that makes them change themselves. Everyone has a point that will get them to follow through. For some people, it is not even the threat of their own life. For others, it is their children. For others, it is spiritual growth. The leverage is different for everyone, but it always exists.
3. The food poisoning example. You used to love a food or a drink. Then one night it came back up with enough intensity and enough aroma that to this day you cannot look at it without feeling repelled. No willpower required. Your brain simply rewired what it links pleasure to. That is the entire mechanism of change in one story.
4. Scrooge did not want to change. He was certain he did not need to change. Three ghosts showed up and did one thing: they made him link unbearable pain to his past, his present, and his future simultaneously. When there is nowhere to escape, change happens in a heartbeat. Robbins calls this the Dickens pattern. Lock pain into all three time zones at once, and there is no exit.
5. People avoid changing by escaping to a different time period. If the present is painful, escape to a good memory from the past. If the past was also painful, invent a better future and escape there. As long as one of those three zones offers relief, the pressure to change dissolves. Removing all three exits and change becomes inevitable.
6. Problem is some people have accidentally linked pain to things they actually need: exercise, intimacy, and hard conversations. The association is wrong, but it runs their life anyway. The job is not to build more willpower. It is to change what you have linked pain and pleasure to in the first place.
@jaynitx Building the right team is such an underrated skill.
No matter how great your ambition is, if you don’t have the right team, you are not going to make it.
Walter Isaacson reveals what Steve Jobs told him was the best product he ever created and it wasn't the iPhone or the Mac
"When I asked Steve Jobs what was the best product you ever created, I thought he'd say the Macintosh or the iPhone"
"He said, no, those products are hard. The best thing I ever created was the team that made those products"
"That's the hard part, creating a team. He did, from Johnny Ive to Tim Cook to Phil Schiller"
"Elon has done a good job too. Gwynne Shotwell, Mark Juncosa at SpaceX, Drew Baglino, Lars Moravy, Tom Zhu at Tesla, many others. Musk is a magnet for awesome talent"
"The best team ever created was the founders. You needed smart people like Jefferson and Madison, passionate people like John Adams, a guy of high rectitude like Washington, but you also needed a Ben Franklin to bring everybody together"
@jaynitx I agree with his method on this as when he took over Twitter, most of the people there hated him, were woke and leftists.
And only few employees were running Twitter, rest of them were wasting time with yoga and retreat.
Since the takeover, X has improved so much.
Walter Isaacson reveals exactly how Elon Musk figured out who to fire at Twitter
"Especially when it came to taking over Twitter, he thought half the people were disloyal. He was wrong. Two-thirds were disloyal"
"He made what I called the Musketeers, the young cousins and two or three other people, look at the Slack messages these people had posted"
"They went through hundreds of Slack messages. If anybody posted on internal Slack, that jerk Elon Musk is going to take over, I'm afraid he's a maniac, they would be on the list"
"They did not look at private Slack messages. People who are posting on a corporate Slack board should be aware their company can look at them"
"That was to figure out who's deeply committed and loyal"
"I think that was mainly the case at Twitter. He doesn't sit around at SpaceX saying who's loyal to me."
The definition of an "influencer" just changed from a full production team to a single AI agent.
Pika’s new MCP kit basically automates the entire creative pipeline:
• Niche & branding playbook
• Trend spotting + script writing
• Scroll-stopping visual hooks
• AI-driven aesthetic fixing (lighting, background)
You don't need a manager anymore. You just need an agent.
@jaynitx Although his algorithm seems ruthless, I agree with his approach.
There is a height of difference between Twitter and X.
but X support could still be better, rest of the stuff is far better after Elon took over
Walter Isaacson reveals how Elon Musk fired 85% of Twitter's employees in three rounds and why
"He brought in the engineers and figured the amount of people doing Tesla full self-driving and autopilot software was about one-tenth of what was doing software for Twitter. He said this can't be the case"
"He fired 85% in three different rounds. First was firing people because they had a team from Tesla's autopilot team grading the code written in the past year. Then he fired people who didn't seem totally all in or loyal. Then another round of layoffs"
"At each step, almost everybody says that's enough, it's going to destroy things. They were partly right. There was degradation of the service, but not as much as half the services I use"
"He has an algorithm. Question every requirement, then delete delete delete. And the corollary, if you don't end up adding back 20% of what you deleted, you didn't delete enough in the first round"
"You asked me if he overdid it. He probably overdid it by 20%, which is his formula"
🚨 Researchers are shaking right now
WisPaper just dropped the most powerful AI research agent of 2026.
It can now analyze entire fields, identify unexplored research gaps, and generate novel research directions in minutes instead of weeks.
Here is the breakdown🧵:
The biggest challenge in research isn't finding information.
It's turning information into new ideas.
That's what WisPaper is built for.
👉 https://t.co/QFcLTF28rf
50% off for new users: 812447
Why WisPaper Is Different
Most academic tools solve one problem.
WisPaper connects the entire research workflow.
→ Deep Search understands intent instead of keywords
→ Idea Discovery helps uncover new research directions
→ AI Survey generates structured literature reviews
→ Scholar Q&A answers directly from your research library
→ PaperClaw helps automate reproduction workflows
It's built to support research from idea to execution.