@HackedOffHugh Much as I agree with Hugh that full disclosure is important. people say every new technology or invention is going to destroy jobs and wipe out humanity. But it never does. It always creates more jobs and humanity continues to get better, albeit with unfair distribution.
Warren Buffett is my hero.
He began purchasing Berkshire Hathaway in 1962 at $7.5 per share.
Today, one share of Berkshire Hathaway is worth more than $600,000.
I summarized all my key learnings in a free e-book of 60 pages:
if you want to survive AI, now is the time to fight as hard as you possibly can to be a COMPLETE human... the specialist won't survive 👇🏾
Your grandfather could probably build a house, fix an engine, grow food, play piano, speak french, and tell you which way was north without checking a phone.
He had skills across the spectrum of survival and craft.
Slowly we told everyone to pick one thing and get really good at it.
At 16 I was told to pick a career for the rest of my life...
But in a world of AI, and incoming super-intelligence, this has never, ever, been worse advice.
The specialist programmer? ChatGPT codes faster. The specialist writer? Claude writes cleaner. The specialist designer? Midjourney does it faster.
The inconvenient truth is that the specialist won't survive.
The people I am now hiring into my companies and what I want my future kids to be, are COMPLETE HUMANS.
The complete human is the one who builds AND creates AND thinks AND feels across disciplines - that's the person that becomes more interesting, more rare and more valuable, as machines become more specialised.
It's hard for machines to automate the weird intersection of human experiences that makes someone decide to explain a marketing campaign through jazz metaphors, design a product inspired by stoic philosophy.
Your ancestors weren't specialists because they couldn't afford to be.
We can't afford to be specialists because the machines are going to win that game.
Fight as hard as you can, to remain a complete human!
Fight the voice in your head that says successful people don't waste time painting, or dancing, or learning languages they'll never monetise.
That voice is lying. The most interesting founders I know are part-time sommeliers, weekend pilots, terrible poets, decent drummers.
They bring their whole weird, complete humanity to everything they touch. And that's exactly what makes them irreplaceably human 👊🏾❤️
Interested to hear about some of the weird things my community on here does to remain a complete human!
Anyone wanna share?
In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”
“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”
The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”
The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”
The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”
The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover, if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery, there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”
The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”
The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her, this world would not and could not exist.”
Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”
To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”
Maybe this was one of the best explanations of the concept of GOD.
– this lovely parable is from Your Sacred Self by Dr. Wayne Dyer 🙏
@WSJ People get rich by owning assets which appreciate in value. Rather than envy, better to emulate. Buy assets like stock or property ETFs which you can start buying for just a few bucks. Whenever you have spare cash buy more. Ignore the volatility and hold assets. Freedom awaits!
Every time I talk with @FoundersPodcast (and listening to the podcast of course), I hear new powerful maxims.
I’ve been collecting what he learned from decades of studying founders.
1. Money comes naturally as a result of service.
2. Ordinary things, done with extraordinary focus, over an extraordinary period of time.
3. Find an earned secret and exploit it for two or three decades.
4. Be a professional opportunist.
5. Opportunity arrives after a loss.
6. The best financial decisions are not financial decisions.
7. You don't need to be a genius; you just need to collect more information.
8. Reading is not hard—pick up a book and stare at it. If you're not doing that, you're not serious.
9. Wise people don't solve problems; they avoid them.
10. Genius has the fewest moving parts.
11. Those at the margins often come to control the center.
12. Mute the world, build your own.
13. Don't do anything that someone else can do.
14. A natural monopoly is ideal, but if not, take an oligopoly.
15. Invest heavily in the technologies of the day.
16. Ideas that are easy to understand are easy to spread.
17. Make yourself easy to interface with.
18. Relationships run the world.
19. History doesn’t repeat; human nature does.
20. Quality of your life is the direct result of the quality of your decisions.
21. Don't learn to deal with stress; learn to enjoy it.
22. Belief comes before ability.
23. Problems are opportunities in work clothes.
24. Books are made out of books.
25. Bad boys move in silence.
26. Learning from history is a form of leverage.
27. Designing in constraints is powerful.
28. The world is your classroom.
29. "Always more audacity." — Winston Churchill
30. Excellence is the capacity to take pain.
31. Actions express priorities.
32. The public praises people for what they practice in private.
33. There are ideas worth billions in a $30 history book.
34. Successful people listen. Those that don’t, don’t last long.
35. If you know your business from A to Z, no problem is unsolvable.
36. Business is problems; the best companies are problem-solving machines.
37. Gentlemen, watch your costs.
38. You aren't advertising to a standing army; you're advertising to a moving parade.
39. Self-pity has no utility.
40. Always more audacious.
41. Wisdom is prevention.
42. Go for great (Munger).
43. Go for freedom (Zell).
44. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active.
45. Time carries most of the weight.
46. Incentives rule everything around you.
47. Find a simple idea and take it seriously.
48. Good ideas are rare; when you find one, bet heavily.
49. Genius lies in ignoring the unimportant.
50. Intensity is the price of excellence.
51. You can’t save souls in an empty church.
52. Scale and fanaticism combined are powerful.
53. If you’re not working on your best idea, you're doing it wrong.
54. Ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.
55. Become friends with the eminent dead.
56. People are power law; the best ones change everything.
57. By endurance, we conquer.
58. Keep things simple and remember what you set out to do.
59. The founder is the guardian of the company’s soul.
60. In business, the winning system maximizes or minimizes one or a few variables.
61. Imitation precedes creation.
62. Focus is saying no.
63. Optimism is a moral duty.
64. Intense concentration can bring out hidden resources in people.
65. If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.
66. Obsess over customers.
67. Being extreme in your craft is essential in the age of leverage.
68. Learning is not memorizing; it’s changing behavior.
69. Repeat, repeat, repeat; volume and consistency win.
70. If you love what you do, the only exit strategy is death.
71. The story of the father is embedded in the son.
72. The hard way is the right way.
73. Be intolerant of slowness.
74. Hire a professional critic.
75. Experts don’t know sh*t.
76. I love the climb; I don’t care where the summit is.
77. "If you do everything, you will win."
78. "Reading is forced meditation."
79. "Action solves everything."
80. A great product has to be better than it has to be.
81. It’s not what you do; it’s how you do it.
82. "I'm not a businessman; I'm a business, man."
83. "Forever on the attack."
84. Life isn't about finding yourself; it's about creating yourself.
85. Plan B should be to make Plan A work.
86. The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.
87. The good ones know more.
88. Avoid boring people.
89. The best thing I did was choose the right heroes.
90. All good things in life come from compounding.
91. A players hire A players; B players hire C players.
92. "Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees."
93. Have pride in creation, not consumption.
94. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
95. Once you find something that works, shut up about it.
96. If you know the basics, you have an advantage over others (Kobe).
97. Apply specific knowledge with leverage, and you’ll get what you deserve (Naval).
98. There’s no substitute for hard work.
99. Collect a handful of ideas, then hammer them home repeatedly.
100. It’s slothful not to compress your thoughts.
101. A novice is easily spotted because they do too much.
102. "Repetition is persuasive."
103. Keep the main thing the main thing.
I've done several podcast episodes with David, usually with our buddy @baldridgecpa, and we have another one coming soon!