Sean M

Learning

[andrew engler @aerockrose]

Jeff Bezos explains the Wandering Rule behind real invention:

"When I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I'm going."

"To go in a straight line, to be efficient, efficiency and invention are sort of at odds."

"Real invention, not incremental improvement... real lateral thinking... requires wandering."

"You have to give yourself permission to wander."

"A lot of people feel like wandering is inefficient."

"I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we're trying to solve a problem."

The useful distinction:

Use efficiency when the path is known.
Use wandering when the problem is still being discovered.

Most teams kill invention by demanding a straight line too early.

[Ben Springwater @benspringwater]

I think about this Seinfeld interview all the time.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Richard Feynman said it right:

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent, and original manner possible.”

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

The watchers will always demand explanations because they construct narratives, they need things to make sense, they want your jump to fit into their framework of reasonable behavior.

But the jumper is already in a different reality.

[Sean M @seanpmcg]

There’s a scene in Mad Men I love where Don tells Peggy “Think about it deeply, then just forget it. The answer will jump out at you.”

100% true in my experience

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

It's like your subconscious has been grinding away all week and it just needs you to get out of the way so it can hand you the goods. The walk isn't procrastination disguised as work. The walk is the work.

[Sean M @seanpmcg]

Have been really enjoying this account’s posts lately

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

Here’s a secret that every genuinely original thinker knows: there are no original ideas. there are only original combinations. Every “breakthrough” is two existing ideas from different domains meeting for the first time inside someone’s head.

The person who reads only within their field will only ever have ideas that their field has already had.

This is why the most interesting people are almost always polymaths.

Go wider. Read the thing that has nothing to do with your work. Talk to the person who has nothing in common with you. Visit the place that makes no sense on your itinerary. The irrelevant input is the one that will combine with everything else and produce something nobody’s ever seen.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

High-agency people seem to have insane luck. They don't. They just tried 47 things while everyone else tried two and gave up. The conviction that reality is negotiable is generative, it makes you creative. Because if you believe there's always another angle, you start looking for angles other people don't see.

[Pau 🌞🏺 @chepauet]

“The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Let me explain exactly why every new subdivision in America looks like the top photo, because the math is wild.

A mature tree increases a home's value by 7 to 19 percent. On a $400,000 house, that's $28,000 to $76,000. A single shade tree produces the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 20 hours a day. One tree on the west side of a house cuts energy bills by 12 percent within 15 years. The bottom photo is worth more, costs less to live in, and sells faster. This has been documented by the University of Washington, Clemson, Michigan State, and the USDA. The data is not in dispute.

Removing those trees saves the builder roughly $5,000 per lot. Concrete trucks need twice the dripline radius of every standing tree. Utility trenches need flat ground. A bulldozer flattens 200 lots in an afternoon. Preserving trees adds weeks and thousands per home.

So the developer pockets $5,000 in savings and the buyer eats $50,000 in lost value for the next two decades. The person making the decision and the person paying for it have never been in the same room.

The Woodlands, Texas is the proof of what happens when they are. George Mitchell bought 28,000 acres of Houston timberland in 1974 and preserved 28% as permanent green space. He forced McDonald's to build behind the tree canopy. That McDonald's became one of the highest-volume locations in Texas. The first office building, designed to reflect the surrounding forest so you couldn't see it from the street, leased completely.

The Woodlands median home price today: $615,000. Katy, a comparable Houston suburb that clear-cut: $375,000. Named #1 community to live in America two years running.

Fifty years of data. The trees are worth more than removing them saves. Developers clear-cut anyway because they sell the house once and leave. You live in it for 30 years.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

In any profession, 90% of people are clueless but work by situational imitation, narrow mimicry & semi-conscious role-playing. Except social "science" and journalism where it is 99% and 100%, respectively.

[Sean M @seanpmcg]

Strongly agree

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

There is a specific kind of intelligence that is almost never celebrated but is consistently effective: the intelligence that recognizes when the game being played is not the game worth playing.

[Sean M @seanpmcg]

Hey guys @gowithquo @darynakulya is quo having issues? My calls aren’t going through

[Sean M @seanpmcg]

@rossiadam @porterstansb

[Investment Wisdom @InvestingCanons]

Charlie Munger: “[With reading], you can take in so much, and you can take it in on your own time schedule.”

“It's just God's gift. If you're into self-education, there's nothing like reading. And, of course, people who do a lot of it have an enormous advantage.”

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do—something people who take showers discover on occasion." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

[The Spectator Index @spectatorindex]

MEDICINE: Psychosis, in the form of delusional thinking, 'can emerge in the setting of immersive AI chatbot use' in part due to the 'sycophancy of AI chatbots', according to article published in Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience journal.

[Sean M @seanpmcg]

Cool post

[jameson (big deck energy) @jamesonhaslam]

this thanksgiving, I am grateful for reinvention, safety nets, and the land of opportunity 🇺🇸

I took this picture 5 years ago, Thanksgiving 2020

I had gone all in, and lost everything

I’d left a demanding but lucrative PE job to launch a short term rental biz (a la Sonder RIP 🪦) - which went great!, until it didn’t 🫠

we raised money, hired wonderful people, built a portfolio … and then got completely obliterated by COVID

I lost my life savings, my home, and ultimately, my marriage and family as then constituted
At the time this pic was taken, I was hanging on by a thread

It took me a good two years to sort through the wreckage and get to a place where I could even think about what I’d do next

I moved back in with my parents (at 35), licked my wounds, and started going for twice daily walks - piecing life back together one mile at a time

somehow, on one of those walks, in early 2022, West Coast Deck started as a glimmer in my mind’s eye - and then that glimmer turned into a spark and I scrounged up the last remaining kindling I had to my name (about $14k) and tried to start a fire …

it was not smooth sailing
trying to figure out how to build decks while also rebuilding my own confidence and somehow also convincing other people (clients, employees, vendors) to believe in us AND attempting to make a profit
LOTS of bumps in the road

.
.
.

… this November my team delivered $346k of sticks and bricks (deck projects across Southern California). We will install another ~$350k in December (on the books). And really, this is just the beginning! 🚀🚀🚀

I live in a peace-filled home
my family is thriving
my team (WCD) are absolute killers
I have wonderful friends and family
I have a meat smoking addiction!

I am so, so very back 😤

this time around, any hubris is tempered by a quality of character that I assume one can only achieve by spending a fair bit of time in the refiner’s fire (if there’s an easier way, I’m all ears 😅)

the lesson for you, dear reader, is that
yes,

You can just do things

and, some of this is because of the divine power which we each carry,

but recognize also that a big piece of it is because of the people who carry *us*, and lift us up when we stumble - who want to see us win

I will never, ever, ever forget the arms who reached out to lift me when I was falling. my spark never went out but it got really close and other people kept me going: you know who you are.

Reader: I’m rooting for you: if I can do it, so can you 🤟🏼

DECKS FOREVER

[Sean M @seanpmcg]

Interesting and true quote imo. A question of trade offs

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"For an honest man, freedom requires having no friends; and, one step above, sainthood requires having no family." - @nntaleb

[Sean M @seanpmcg]

@sean_a_mcclure Beautiful

[Sean M @seanpmcg]

Hey guys @anything, trying to work on a project in mobile app but stuck on this screen for the last 5 min.