There’s no monopoly of good ideas..
Just because someone else is doing it first should not discourage you one bit.
If you are truly truly obsessed, you’ll do it better. And that should fuel you to push through any barrier - which includes the competition.
working theory: the purpose of life is to die a surplus human. to have contributed more than you consumed. most believe the opposite. thinking it's all about buying more, eating more, watching more. but in reality, it's all about making more, creating more, building more.
The biggest money mistake i see people make is optimizing for high paying careers they have no passion for.
You need to be optimizing for something you can become top 1% in the world at. The top 1% of Halo Youtubers or WWII historians or acroyoga teachers make multiples more than the median programmer.
To become top 1% in a domain, the work must feel like play. That is the only way you will outwork everyone else.
Choose your suck
There’s an idea in behavioral science called loss aversion. Simply put, humans are more sensitive to losses than to gains of the same magnitude.
Losing $1,000 stings more than gaining $1,000 brings joy.
In fact, it often takes a gain of almost double that amount to balance the emotional scale. That’s how much we hate losing.
One of the most famous illustrations of this is the “mug experiment” by psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler.
In the study, participants were randomly given a mug. Later, they were asked how much money they’d be willing to sell it for.
Then a different group who hadn’t received a mug was asked how much they’d pay to buy one.
Both groups saw the same mug. Yet the sellers consistently demanded nearly twice as much as buyers were willing to pay.
Why? Once people owned the mug, giving it up felt like a loss and losses feel stronger than gains.
It's why majority of people will rather get $10,000 cash transfer today rather than a coin toss for $100,000. Even though the money in question never belonged to them.
Yet, they can't stand losing something that they could "possibly" own.
But this isn’t just about money or mugs. It’s about life.
We carry this fear of loss into how we spend our time, energy, and attention. We’re afraid to lose out on anything. To say no, to fall behind, to be left out.
So we try to do it all: be the perfect employee, the great friend, the consistent gym-goer, the social butterfly, the night owl and early bird rolled into one.
But let's be real, to be great at something, you have to be bad at something else.
You must choose your suck.
If you want to write a great book, you might need to suck at socializing for a while. If you’re preparing for your bar finals in NLS, you may need to suck at sleeping or watching Netflix.
Want to be a cracked developer? You’ll probably suck at attending parties and events.
In other words, you have to intentionally decide what to neglect. And this can be hard, not just practically, but emotionally.
Because even when we get the results we were aiming for, we often still feel the ache of what we missed.
But there’s hope.
It's worth noting that we process sacrifice differently depending on whether we choose it.
When we consciously decide what we’ll let go of, the emotional toll is lighter. It’s not that the pain disappears. Rather, it just feels more like a trade and less like a loss.
So, summon courage and ask yourself this;
What will I choose to suck at for now—so I can be great where it matters most?
The more I hang around the people I look up to, the more I realize that all advice is contextual.
They can't teach you how to do it. They can only teach you how they did it.
Follow their advice. Test its limits. Then write your own rules.
Tech Term of the week💡
DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
Distributed System is a group of independent computers or nodes that work together to appear as a single system to the end user, even though they are physically apart.(1/4)