Category: Notes

To me, the unhappiest people in the world are those in the watering places, the international watering places, the south coast of France and Newport and Palm Springs and Palm Beach. Going to parties every night, playing golf every afternoon, then bridge. Drinking too much, talking too much, thinking too little. Retired. No purpose.

I know there are those who would totally disagree and say, ‘If I could just be a millionaire, that would be the most wonderful thing. If I could just not have to work every day. If I could be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that would be the most wonderful life in the world.’ They don’t know life. Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle. The struggle. Even if you don’t win it.

– Richard Nixon

Overconfidence is a powerful source of all illusions, primarily determined by quality and coherence of story you can construct, not by its validity.

– Daniel Kahneman

A book is far more than what the author wrote; it is everything you can imagine and read into it as well.

– Dee Hock

Strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.

Link

The reason I’ve spent so long establishing this rather obvious point – that writing helps you refine your thinking – is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

– Henrik Karlsson

The pioneers of new technology must raise a lot of capital to create foundational infrastructure, which can lead to over-investment and speculative bubbles. When these bubbles burst, weak firms fail, and market power consolidates around industry leaders and their paradigms. Through this consolidation process, we can identify the common elements across applications and isolate them into standard, modular components that can be open-sourced or sold as individual services.

These abstractions make it easier to build more complex applications and enable a shift from capex-dominant to opex-driven cost structures that allow new products to launch faster and with lower startup costs.

– Link

Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.

– Derek Sivers

A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery.

Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you’ll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

– Paul Graham

Sometimes sanity-checking ideas means demonstrating that they require absurd real-world assumptions. But sometimes things compound in such a way that the world turns out quite absurd from the perspective of the recent past.

– Byrne Hobart