Duc Thong Do

Explore creative ideas about self-development through my letters 👇

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Every time something scarce became abundant, the world changed so fast that the people living through it mistook the beginning for the end.

Food was scarce for a hundred thousand years. Agriculture made it abundant, and people who had spent every waking hour chasing their next meal suddenly had something they had never owned before.

Time.

That time became villages. The villages became cities. The cities became language carved into clay, and then law.

Nobody standing in a wheat field understood they were building Rome.

Information was scarce for millennia. The printing press made it abundant. The church lost its monopoly on knowledge, and within two centuries every throne in Europe was shaking.

Nobody pulling letters from a press understood they were ending the divine right of kings.

Energy was scarce until we learned to crack the earth open. Coal and oil made it abundant, and a single person could suddenly command the force of a thousand. Within one generation the entire structure of work turned inside out.

Nobody shoveling coal understood they were building the middle class.

The pattern never changes. A resource that was hoarded becomes available. The people who held it resist. The structures built on that scarcity fall. And whatever rises in their place is invisible from where everyone is standing.

Here is the part almost everyone misses.

Information stopped being scarce a long time ago. The library, the search engine, the endless feed. We have been drowning in information for decades, and it never set anyone free, because information just sits there. It answers only the question you already knew how to ask.

Intelligence was the thing still locked away.

A mind on the other side. Something that explains, argues back, catches your mistake, and meets you exactly where you are standing. The part that bends toward you instead of forcing you to bend toward it.

That is what broke open.

For the first time, a person with nothing but curiosity and a connection can reach an intelligence that teaches, challenges, and builds alongside them in real time. No tuition. No admissions office. No permission.

The distance between what a person can imagine and what they can actually make is collapsing in front of us.

And the people most threatened by that are not the ones without talent. They are the ones whose entire standing depends on talent staying rare.

Every credential, every hierarchy, every quiet system that decided who was allowed to build and who was told to watch, is resting on a foundation dissolving underneath it.

They will fight it. They always do.

The church fought the press. The aristocracy fought the vote. The owners fought the union. Every single time a scarce thing became abundant, the ones who controlled it warned everyone else that the sky was falling.

The sky was never falling. The ceiling was lifting.

And the people underneath it, the ones who had been told their whole lives that the ceiling was the sky, finally looked up and saw nothing there to stop them.

That is what is happening right now.

Intelligence was never rare. Access to it was.

Access just became free.

Whatever gets built in the next ten years will not come from the rooms we are all watching. It will come from someone who was never supposed to have the tools, who right now has no idea that the thing they are doing has a name, or a scale, or a future.

Same as the wheat field. Same as the press. Same as the coal.

We never recognize Rome while we are still building it.

[Li Mengbai @lvjin1993]

小孩问庄子，什么是诡辩。庄子反问：我家来了两个客人，一个很干净，一个很脏。我请他俩洗澡，你觉得谁会洗？
小孩脱口而出；肯定是脏的那个!
庄子摇摇头：不对。干净的人爱干净，脏的人不在乎脏，应该是干净的人洗。
小孩赶紧改口：那就是干净的洗。
庄子又笑了：又错了。干净的人没必要洗，脏的人才需要洗，是脏的洗。
小孩情了：那到底是谁洗？
庄子说：干净的人有习惯，脏的人有需要，两个人都洗。不等小孩反应，他又补了一句；其实俩人都不洗，干净的不用洗，脏的不爱洗。
小孩彻��迷糊。
庄子这才点明：这就是诡辩。逻辑都通顺，但答案却不一样，很多人跟你争论，逻辑听着都没问题，但结论可以随意变换。
绕来绕去，目的不是求真，只是把你绕晕。
遇到这种诡辩，不必争辩。

[Dear Son. @DearS_o_n]

Man to man: If you’re feeling lost, go back to what you loved as a kid. It usually leads you back to yourself.

[The SI Maximalist @thesimaximalist]

Don’t believe me, just watch. 🕺

Uptown Funk, but the CEOs showed up.
Elon, Jensen, Zuck, Altman, all of them in the street like they own Saturday night. This one is a banger. 💀💀🤣🤣

[orange cat @pearl0812lucky]

过度坦诚会失去吸引力，熟悉会滋生轻视，真诚会换来傲慢，退让会产生贪婪，说教会引发矛盾，得到了会祛魅，待人如初是个伪命题。人生注定是一场孤独的旅程。

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Getting rich is a skill issue.

That's Devon Canup's argument, and his article on it has 1.4 million views.
I turned it into 7 prompts.

Warning: prompt 6 might make you want to move cities.

Enjoy 👇

[𝗘𝗟 @MasterNumber]

The whole point of this circus is to ascend. Earth gave you trauma, lust, ego, money, fear, exes, taxes and algorithms, and you still think the mission is to get comfortable? Fam, how many side quests do you need before you clock the main one?

Earth is basically spiritual GTA. Temptation everywhere, random boss fights, people trying to rob your energy, and half the population still thinks the mission is get a mortgage and die politely.

The game is simple. Master yourself, stop getting baited by every impulse, learn what the fuck you are, then ascend. People turned the tutorial into a 70-year side quest.

Imagine reincarnating 12 times just to keep falling for lust, ego, money and people’s opinions. Brother, complete the fucking level.

You got dropped into a body with desires, fear, trauma, hormones, ego and free will, then surrounded by distractions 24/7. And people still can’t work out there might be a test going on. Comedy.

Life keeps sending the same lesson wearing different faces and people keep calling it bad luck. Fam, at some point you’ve gotta pass the fucking exam.

The wildest part is people think the goal is comfort. Nothing about this place looks designed for comfort. It looks like a spiritual obstacle course

You came here naked, leave with nothing, and somehow people think the whole point was collecting shit in between. Mad

[Devon Canup @devoncnp]

https://t.co/OzJZFUsBBF

[Hedy.eth 🎮 @Crypto_hedyEth]

我发现了一个高度成功的人身上的规律：

1. 他们总是独处。

[Doge Tipping @Dogetothemoon]

Elon Musk proposed to Talulah Riley just 2 weeks after they first met.

They connected at London’s Whisky Mist nightclub in July 2008.

After a whirlwind few days together, he looked at her and said: “I don’t want you to go home. I want to marry you.” No ring. Just a handshake. She said yes.

Talulah Riley: "It all happened very fast. We became engaged after knowing each other for about two weeks. I was 22, and there were all these boys, which was the best part. Everything moved quickly, and suddenly we were fully committed to the relationship.

He was very charming and definitely the most interesting and eccentric person I had ever met."

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

Never let anyone talk you into pricing based on what your competitors charge.

There's a reason most of them don't make much money. The market rate is just the average of everybody else's fear.

Go premium. Charge more. BUT make sure you’re worth it.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Elon Musk’s first wife explains what it takes to become a billionaire:

Justine Musk, first wife of billionaire Elon Musk, knows a thing or two about wealth and hard work — her ex-husband is a founder of PayPal, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and has an estimated net worth of $248.7 billion.

She posted a response to a Quora thread asking the question “Will I become a billionaire if I am determined to be one and put in all the necessary work required?”

Her answer is “no,” though she says that the Quora reader is asking the wrong question altogether.

“You’re determined. So what? You haven’t been racing naked through shark-infested waters yet,” she writes. “Will you be just as determined when you wash up on some deserted island, disoriented and bloody and ragged and beaten and staring into the horizon with no sign of rescue?”

She then offers some advice:

“Shift your focus away from what you want (a billion dollars) and get deeply, intensely curious about what the world wants and needs. Ask yourself what you have the potential to offer that is so unique and compelling and helpful that no computer could replace you, no one could outsource you, no one could steal your product and make it better and then club you into oblivion (not literally). Then develop that potential. Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life.

The world doesn’t throw a billion dollars at a person because the person wants it or works so hard they feel they deserve it. (The world does not care what you want or deserve.) The world gives you money in exchange for something it perceives to be of equal or greater value: something that transforms an aspect of the culture, reworks a familiar story or introduces a new one, alters the way people think about the category and make use of it in daily life. There is no roadmap, no blueprint for this; a lot of people will give you a lot of advice, and most of it will be bad, and a lot of it will be good and sound but you’ll have to figure out how it doesn’t apply to you because you’re coming from an unexpected angle. And you’ll be doing it alone, until you develop the charisma and credibility to attract the talent you need to come with you.

Have courage.

And good luck.

[Carl Jung Archive @QuoteJung]

"No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown allies will come and seek you."

- Carl Jung

[Jay Alto @theJayAlto]

i'm convinced burnout has nothing to do with 'working too hard' and everything to do with betraying yourself for an extended period of time

[DHH @dhh]

Burnout happens when you work too hard with not enough meaning.

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how" — Nietzsche

[Karun Pal @karunpal]

The real purpose of wealth is to become a kid again. To have the freedom to follow your curiosity and do whatever the fuck you want, whenever you want.

[Robert Greene @RobertGreene]

Understand: you are one of a kind. Your character traits are a kind of chemical mix that will never be repeated in history. There are ideas unique to you, a specific rhythm and perspective that are your strengths, not your weaknesses. You must not be afraid of your uniqueness

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

The time people spend building personal brands would be better invested in personal connections.

Products have brands. People have relationships and reputations.

Authenticity is not about marketing yourself to create an image. It’s about aligning your actions with your values.

[Lark Davis @LarkDavis]

Elon’s advice to 20-year-olds on surviving the AI era:

Get as broad-based an education as possible: arts, sciences, engineering, and wide general knowledge.

Why?

AI and robots will fulfill almost any request immediately.The edge won’t be doing the work. It will be knowing what to ask for. The broader your knowledge, the better your questions.

(source: CGTN)

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Liftoff of Starship's first orbital flight