Success

Success comes from not giving up, doing what you love & sharing what you learned.

Notes

• Figure out what you are uniquely the best in the world at because you just love it. And then just find out who or what needs that the most.
• Doing what everybody else is doing feels like the safest thing to do. But it’s also the most competitive, which makes it the riskiest.
• If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
• The trick with being confident, is accepting the results of an action or situation before it even happens.
• A generally-preferable alternative to “worse is better” is, in my mind, “real artists ship”. (This is to say: availability is a prerequisite for adoption, while quality only ranks available options.)
• All learning is dependent on feedback. The faster the feedback, the faster you can learn. Thus, in many domains, the individual, team, or organization with the fastest feedback cycle is the one that wins.
• Explore the solution space before refining the solution. (aka 'Get the right design, then get the design right')
• Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.
• The single most important factor to success is the ability to make things happen. This requires determination, resourcefulness, focus, tenacity, confidence, a willingness to look like an idiot, and an ability to do the work when no one is watching.
• Don't be impressed by money, followers, degrees, and titles. Be impressed by kindness, integrity, humility, and generosity.
• Success is when reality catches up to your imagination.
• Do lots of experiments. Fail fast. Learn from them. Move on.
• Create an environment that tolerates and encourages failure.
• What we find enjoyable at a certain intensity, duration, and frequency, we can totally hate at a different intensity, duration, and frequency. And vice versa.
• Talk to your customers and keep building stuff! The simplest way to figure out what to build is just to ask people what would help them.
• Convinced 95% of being successful is just finding people you vibe with.
• My job is to remove myself from the critical path.
• Since location and network have become mostly unbundled (in some circles), where you live is not as big of a (professional) decision as who are the 10-20 people you chat with most in digital space.
• Most people forget that the goal isn’t money. The goal is to spend days as you wish.
• If you are tired, learn how to rest. Not how to quit.
• The older you get, the more you realize that much the world was build by people no more remarkable than you. The bar isn’t as high as you think.
• Imposter syndrome never goes away. I work to reframe the conversation. I'm the prototype of my role. The only comparison I can have is myself on my best day. If I was able to perform well before, then I can do it again.
• Success in anything is just a byproduct of learning, and learning is a byproduct of curiosity. Ultimately, if you are curious about something, you will be successful at it, and the more curious you are about it, the more successful you will be at it.
• Life goal: Work hard, retire early, buy a small house in the south of France, drink wine, study math.
• I'm not impressed if you're a good engineer. I'm impressed if you're a good teammate.
• Luck is when opportunity meets preparation. If the moment comes, and you're ready, it will happen.
• Don’t feel guilty about your privilege. Use it to lift others up.
• There's a lot of power in regularly picking at the same problems for several decades. 3 traps: to get discouraged & give up, to lose the initial passion & check out, and to wrongly believe you've figured it out -- substituting a real solution with the idea of having found one.
• If you like something, start talking about it. It will attract like-minded people: the best audience there is.
• There are two types of people: 1) I worked hard to get to where I am. No one gave me any breaks, so you're on your own. 2) I worked hard to get to where I am. Now I get to unlock doors for others. If you're the second type, you're my people. 💙
• So much of my growth as an IT person was "trying to put myself out of a job" by fixing things permanently. I just kept working on more and more advanced projects as my time freed up. So much in Enterprise has perverse incentives with managed providers where that doesn't happen.
• Want to get ahead in life? Start genuinely rooting for others to succeed. It’s as simple as that.
• Do you feel lost? Try creating. Could be code, companies, art, people. Creation brings meaning because it's what we were made to do.
• Celebrate when your friends win.
• Fear makes us fiction writers.
• Just ask. It's the kind of thing everyone says "of course" or "that's obvious" to and then never do in practice themselves. I'm in my 40s and only seeing the true power now of asking for things, for help, for what you want. In business, in friendships, in romance, in all aspects of your life, when you ask, the response is most often Yes, Sure, Of course, Happy to help.
• The ultimate hack in life is to simply be the person you're looking for.
• The greatest privilege one can have is the option of only working with people you like, trust and respect.
• Never let anyone’s opinions or comments influence how you view your own life and priorities.
• Common behaviors that get rewarded in the workplace, but often are actually trauma responses: Perfectionism. Savior complex. Never saying no. Overwork. Burnout.
• Things that don’t get encouraged by traditional workplaces/managers, but are still important for you to practice: Identity/self-worth that's independent of work. Trusting your instincts. Boundaries. Boundaries. Boundaries.
• Unhealed workplace trauma can manifest as: Irritability, paranoia. Anxiety, depression. Difficulty with feedback. Poor boundaries. People-pleasing. Intense fear of failure (or success). Being drawn to more toxic orgs/leaders. Chronic guilt/shame.
• The times I've done the best work in my career are times I've been able to fully connect who I am with what I'm doing. For anyone who needs to hear it: it is career suicide to let your soul die a slow death by suppressing anything unique you can contribute.
• Google’s greatest evil is grooming brilliant 22 year olds into becoming complacent careerists instead of ambitious founders who might one day compete with them.
• What looks like success is often just patience.
• Being patient doesn't get you what you want.
• It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.
• You only fail when you choose to give up, everything else is just the journey to success.
• If your work doesn't feel like a game you're gonna get smoked by the people actually having fun.
• At critical moments, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something more important and ambitious than what they might have in mind.
• Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself.
• When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.

Links

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• Change your environment, change your life.
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• Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life (HN)
• Optimism Shapes Reality (2022) (Tweet)