Systems are better than goals. Systems form lasting habits, and capture life’s asymmetries. Goals are linear, closed-loop objectives that, being overly future-oriented, fail to cultivate mastery of work. Systems instill rock solid fundamentals, and cast infinitely scalable nets. Goals are isolated desires, and cast singular, specific nets that generate high time preference thinking. If you blindly seek specific goals, your opportunity cost is high as you sacrifice optionality in our highly entropic world. Systems are Read More

Language and writing are the ultimate forms of leverage. Every thought or idea articulated on paper is like a snippet of code available to conjure up and deploy in the future, asymmetrically serving as raw-building blocks of ideation. Writing (and reading) hones critical thinking and helps us spin up richer, more nuanced narratives—the ones we both create and interpret. Narratives, after all, are what make us unique in the animal kingdom. As Yuval Harari shows Read More

Innovation happens through iteration. Rarely does one have a fully formed “lightbulb” moment. Rather, good ideas emerge through trial and error, on the backbone of first principles. Iteration from first principles is a more antifragile strategy for forming a business than adhering to preexisting roadmaps and business plans. When market conditions invariably change and new information arises, a business forged through iteration will have dynamic parts and systems that can more readily pivot to meet Read More

The average investor has a visceral aversion to forecasting technological change. Radically transformative technologies such as Tesla, Bitcoin, and even the internet itself are initially met with heavy skepticism and even outright dismissal by mainstream pundits. Mainstreet and Wallstreet alike miss the boat, leaving the most explosive early returns to fringe visionaries. “If you are right in consensus, you don’t make money because your returns get arbitraged away. The only way to make outsized returns Read More

Forget left versus right politics. The more interesting schism is bottom-up (emergent) versus top-down systems and thinking. The old guard worships a linear, top-down governance model. This system is broken, and the internet has amplified its brokenness. Bottom-up, emergent systems offer a degree of decentralization that allows individual parts of the system to compete and iterate in a flat, free-market-type exchange with each other, benefiting the whole. This includes everything from peer to peer businesses, Read More

Diversification is a hedge against the lack of knowledge, and a nice tool for preserving existing wealth. It will keep you moving up and to the right over time, but won’t make you rich. If you have the time and resources to think deeply about where the world is going, making a number of high-conviction, asymmetric bets while young is the easiest way to secure your financial freedom far before retirement age. Yet, personal finance Read More