Barbell strategy for killing it in an age of superhuman AI:
Simultaneously get as close to AND stay as far away from AI as humanly possible.
1. Get close — play with AI models, use them to help you think, ask them to teach you about the world, get them to help you create, work with them to write code, understand what makes them tick, embed them into your everyday life, have fun.
2. Stay far away — learn to tell stories, make eye contact, build a team, lead with courage, connect far-flung ideas, build lifelong friendships, debate persuasively, think forbidden thoughts, handwrite ideas, confess your fears, fall in love.
Spend less time trying to master mental transformations that are purely mechanical — building spreadsheets, analyzing trades, balancing accounts, writing code by hand, following playbooks, searching for needles in haystacks. These are the emerging no-man's land, squarely the domain of AI.
Venture to the extremes. That’s where all the fun is anyway.
@michaelsikand@GavinSBaker The counter is that the multiples on the memory stock make sense as there is a shortage but that’ll only last a couple years.
🚨 FORMER TESLA PRESIDENT ADMITS ELON USED THE DOMINO’S PIZZA APP TO REINVENT HOW PEOPLE BUY CARS — AND THE STORY IS BLOWING PEOPLE’S MINDS
Former Tesla president Jon McNeill is going viral after revealing the bizarre moment Elon Musk pulled up the Domino’s pizza app during a meeting… because Tesla customers needed 64 CLICKS just to buy a car online.
Elon’s reaction?
“How many taps does it take to get a pizza?”
Answer:
• 10 taps
Buying a Tesla at the time?
• 64 clicks
• endless loan documents
• nonstop forms
• massive friction
Elon became obsessed with stripping the process down after realizing most of the paperwork wasn’t even legally required.
So Tesla started going bank-to-bank asking:
Why does buying a car need to feel harder than ordering dinner?
Most banks reportedly refused to cooperate.
Then one Midwest bank CEO finally agreed to test a radically simplified system… and Tesla allegedly eliminated around 40 clicks from the process almost overnight.
Now people online are saying this perfectly explains why Tesla disrupted the entire auto industry while traditional dealerships kept drowning customers in paperwork, waiting rooms, and sales tactics.
Did Tesla accidentally expose how outdated the entire car dealership model really was?
📹: kencoleman
It’s not true that failure is a good thing.
All failure that came from not listening, not thinking well, and not building with quality is bad and dumb.
Sorry…it’s just the truth.
Most people are underskilled, and I believe there’s a simple reason why.
Goals.
See, when many humans set a goal, or have one set for them, they know skill is needed. But the goal has an interesting effect. It suggests that there’s a specific level of skill required to meet that goal.
And that has a consequence: the mind now has a reason to debate that extra skill beyond what’s required to reach the goal is excessive. It’s wasted effort. And when a goal is reached with the minimum applied skill, it says, “See? That’s all I need. I am good enough.”
Ultimately, most people don’t realize that day to day business doesn’t require that much skill to reach goals. Crappy designs. Crappy code. Crappy pitch decks. Crappy use of resources. All of this crap can still reach a goal, and crap reaches goals every day, reinforcing that crap is good.
But it isn’t. Because crap that reaches goals today almost always creates issues tomorrow. And a team built on crap skill will be defenseless to a new entrant with actual skill.
So what do we do?
This is weird, but we stop talking about goals so much. Instead, we start talking about skills and capabilities. You know, the things that actually reach the goals. We want our capabilities to be objectively great, not great relative to goals. We want our designs, code, materials, etc to be great in global context, which is actually very easy to assess and grade.
And when we do that, goals feel like silly things. We reach them with ease. Goals begin to function as a way of prioritizing things, no longer as a way of doing things. That’s when you know it’s working and high skill is in the building.
@grok I’m seeing a lot of debate on X about whether introspection helps or hurts success. Can you steel man both sides?
Why do some successful people think introspection leads to rumination, hesitation, and weakness, while others see self-awareness as essential for good decisions, growth, relationships, and long-term success?
Where’s the nuance between reflection and overthinking?
Some of the people I think would have good but different opinions are @pmarca@shreyas@chamath@Jason@evanlapointe