Author: MIKE

My notes from Marc Andreessen’s appearance on Tim Ferriss’s podcast.

1/ Read history books. “I got a lot of my education from history. Rather than reading a lot more about the contemporaries I would go back and read about; Ford, Rockefeller, Edison, Morgan.”

Andreessen does mention some modern books he likes – like cofounder Ben Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing about Hard Things, which we’ve touched on  – but for the most part he learns mostly from history. David Chang and Ezra Klein both said the same thing. Forget management books, said Chang, “I can learn more from a history book or autobiography about someone that made a ton of mistakes.”

2/ What’s the right shade of grey? “You want to fail fast, but you also want to be determined and can’t give up. How do you possible reconcile those? That’s where you get to strong views weakly held.”

Andreessen is known for the expression “strong views weakly held,” and this mindset is a tool for deciphering spectrum locations.

We’ve seen a number of spectrums; ecologists to engineers, skill to luck, and baseball scouts to statiticisans. These are good models for thought, but we can’t use them the same way every time.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” ― Heraclitus

Andreessen provides a switching mechanism. “Strong views weakly held.” We can find our footing in some part of the spectrum, and hold that position until it’s time to flee.

3/ Alternative histories. “Do you have the judgement to make that call, knowing by the way, that either way can be a big mistake. Nobody’s going to tell you that you made the right call. If you change and then succeed, that’s great, but you might have succeeded at the old thing even better.”

We touched on alternative histories in podcast episode #02, but Andreessen points out a challenge. We’ll never be sure about the range or intensity of the different outcomes.

4/ Opportunity cost. “The investors in Friendster were more likely than not, unable and unwilling to invest in Facebook when it came along because they were conflicted.”

Andreessen said investments have three costs; money, time, and opportunity. Of these three, money is the cheapest. When a partner at a16z has to work on a project, it means they can’t work on another. When they choose a drone or cryptocurrency it precludes them from another chance to invest in that sector.

This mindset about choices means the a16z team has to proceed slowly. Daniel Kahneman said, “when things get really big and you’re really not sure, slow down.” Warren Buffett put it this way:

“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches – representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.”

Dan Ariely found that we have trouble with the mental accounting of opportunity costs. Andreessen and his team have recognized where it is highest – and presumably move slowly.

5/ Red teaming. “It’s the responsibility of everybody else in the room to stress test the thinking. If necessary we’ll create a red team. We’ll formally create the countervailing force and designate some set of people to counter argue the other side.”

Bob Seawright said much the same thing; “Institutional red teams are not the same thing as real disagreement… you need people to become empowered if they are to become a red team.”

At a16z they do exactly this, Andreessen said, “whenever he (Ben Horowitz) brings in a deal, I’ll trash the shit out of it.”

Stanley McChrystal recalled being in a red team meeting where a commander who was role playing the bad guy used all his forces to attack at once. That won’t happen, someone said. But that’s the whole point, added another. Good red teams – much like the good culture we looked at in the Shane Parrish post strive for an objective understanding of the issue.

6/ Toys are for children. “These things look like cult and fringe activities until they break mainstream.”

Things we think are toys can become much more. Bill Bryson wrote:

“When Henry Ford built his first Model T, Americans had some 2,200 makes of cars to choose from. Every one of those cars was in some sense a toy, a plaything for the well-to-do.”

7/ Competition. “We don’t foreclose the possibility that there will be another mobile killer or social killer app but it’s getting harder and harder and harder because more and more people have figured out that you can do these things and the winners have gotten very established. One of the ways to think about it; first you had Facebook and then Twitter and then Instagram and now Snapchat, and those all became big winners. What would it take to make the fifth one? You only have so many icons on the home screen of your phone. It has to knock one of the other ones off.”

Investor Burton Malkiel said, “The problem is, as the market gets more and more professional, when people are better trained, when people have better sources of information…it’s then harder and harder to actually beat the market.”

Biologist Terrt Burnham wrote, “with high population density comes competition for resources, and with competition comes conflict.”

Auren Hoffman said that investing is such a challenge it can’t be anything but a full time job. Jack Bogle said that Vanguard succeeded because there was no competition. Jim Chanos also found a niche with limited competition. Peter Thiel wrote in Zero to One, “the best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking…every great business is built around a secret that’s hiding from the outside.”

Thanks for reading, I’m @mikedariano on Twitter. If you liked this post, I’m looking to do more research work like it. Get in touch.

Ponzi’s Scheme by Mitchell Zuckoff reminded me a lot of the book The Fish That Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen. It’s not as good, but like a Polaroid photo, developed the story to a well-known picture. Though Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff ran the same scheme, they were quite different. Here are 5 things I learned:

1/ Opportunity costs in education. Most of the examples on this blog, from Sophia Amoruso to Ezra Klein lean toward favoring real world knowledge rather than book knowledge. As Elizabeth Gilbert asked, “Why learn about the thing by learning about the thing, when you can learn about the thing by doing the thing?”

This typically means less formal schooling and more of the XMBA approach. Where this fails is if we do neither. The real world education can be more valuable, but also requires more work. When Ponzi went to school in Italy, Zuckoff wrote, “His rich friends considered the university a four years vacation, and so Ponzi acted as though he could too.”

The same thing occurred to  the future newspaper editor who would bring him down – Richard Grozier. Zuckoff wrote, “There was a cachet of laxity among certain Harvard students. This was especially true of ‘club men,’ who thought a grade above a C was a waste of effort.” Grozier believed this applied to him. He only barely graduated. 

School is not the most efficient form of learning, but it is a decent one.

2/ About newspapers. Two aspects about the daily news came up in this book. First, was rosy retrospection. We tend to look back and think ‘those were the good old days.’ While the owner of the Boston Post had been inspired by the work of Joseph Pulitzer, the paper printed a wide range of stories.

“Then there was the ‘primitive man’ stunt. The Post sent a man named Joe Knowles into the Maine woods, naked and empty-handed, to live completely alone for sixty days. During the two-month adventure, the paper printed dispatches and drawings Knowles made with charcoal on birch bark and left at a prearranged drop point. When Knowles emerged from the woods, wearing deer skins and carrying the tools of a caveman, some 400,000 people crammed the length of Washington Street to greet him. The paper’s circulation doubled that year.”

The second point of note was the – at first – limited coverage of Ponzi. Papers only have so many pages, television so many minutes, and websites so many pixels above the fold. The year 1920 was busy enough that other stories pushed Ponzi out of the pages.

Nassim Taleb called daily news “toxic” for this very reason. Something is going to fill that space everyday. The chances of it being important and true are low.

3/ Path of dominos. Ponzi, like so many others we’ve profiled, had  a one-of-a-kind path to his infamy. To come upon his scheme had to had to have been born overseas, come to America, left, had his name misspelled on an arrest warrant, started a trade publication, opened a letter with an exchange coupon and so on.

We’re all some outcome of choices, and I wonder what our alternative histories look like without one or another key event. Had Napoleon Bonaparte not been admitted to military school what would have become of him? Had Teddy Roosevelt not been elected as a state legislature would he have been president? Would we have national parks?

4/ Hedonic treadmill. “The average man is never satisfied with what he had, he does not realize when he is well off. If he has a shirt, he wants two. If he is single, he wants a wife. If he is married, he wants a harem. He is always reaching for the moon and stepping off into space.” – Charles Ponzi

Ponzi was a good judge of other men. He also wrote:

“Each satisfied customers became a self-appointed salesman. It was their combined salesmanship, and not my own, that put the thing over. I admit that I started a small snowball downhill. But it developed into an avalanche by itself.”

That’s the other side we can forget, greed. There were people like Clarence Barron who questioned Ponzi’s business. People neglected the advice as they praised Ponzi.

5/ Fabian strategy. One person who thought that Ponzi’s scheme stunk, was bank commissioner Joseph Allen. Though he doubted the legitimacy he lacked authority to stop it. Ponzi could legally sell notes, take deposits, and make payments. Allen was forced to wait.

But not idly. Allen’s domain(turf) was the banking system, and it was there he set his snare. He watched Ponzi’s accounts (many of which were under aliases). If those accounts dipped too low and pushed the bank’s reserves passed a limit, Allen could act, and he did. When he froze Ponzi’s accounts at one bank it was the beginning of the end. 

Fabian strategist use timing as a tool. Allen might have stretched in an attempt to stop Ponzi, but he would have likely failed. Instead he waited to attack Ponzi where he was most powerful. When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia the Russians continually fell back and soon the French armies were strung out and freezing. Gene Tunney withstood Jack Dempsey’s onslaught only to land a few crucial punches at the right time. Charlie Munger deflects options as not worth it or too hard until he pounces. (“I think part of the popularity of Berkshire Hathaway is that we look like people who have found a trick. It’s not brilliance. It’s just avoiding stupidity.”)

The Fabian strategy is survive, survive, survive, attack!

Thanks for reading, I’m @mikedariano on Twitter. The audio version of this post is coming soon: iTunes, Overcast, Soundcloud, & Medium. 

This was a fun one to write. Shane Parrish was interviewed by Mitch Joel at Six Pixels of Separation and the two talked about a host of interesting things. I’m a fan of both their work, so let’s get to it. Here are a few things I learned.

1/ How to challenge your thinking. “I used to subscribe to magazines that had the opposite point of view that I did, just so I was exposing myself to those ideas, but it’s not really enough to expose yourself to them, you kind of need to hone these general ideas over a long period of time and get better at them if you want to apply them.”

Parrish’s comment reminded me of what Ben Horowitz wrote about culture, “yoga is not culture.” Horowitz’s book drills deep to determine what culture is. It’s true for many things we do in life. Parrish addressed this too:

“A lot of the books are prescriptive, but that doesn’t work in the real world. You can’t just add 20% innovation time to your organization and expect you’re going to be Google. No you have to understand what Google was doing. How it fit in their culture. Why it was part of their culture. Why it worked as part of their culture. And now why it’s stopped. And you further have to map it to the base rate.”

Twenty percent time is not culture. Giving kids iPads is not teaching tech. College is not (always) education. It’s not about what you wear, said Auren Hoffamn but whether that represents something deeper.

For example, we have a collection on ways to use Twitter well, one of which is to challenge your ideas by following people with opposing views. Seeing tweets only does so much, and rarely tests our ideas. In Marc Andreessen’s podcast with Tim Ferriss, he said that he and Horowitz argue like crazy so that any idea that survives that process is a good one. Similarly, we can improve our Twitter use if we engage (cordially) and debate.

2/ Opportunity cost of education. “If you have to prioritize what you’re learning there’s an opportunity cost to it. With that opportunity cost we’re trying to prioritize things that change slowly or not at all.”

Farnam Street is an education in and of itself. Parrish noted that they sometimes discuss best selling books, but don’t begin from that list. Rather, they try to find things that change little. Reading takes a lot of time where you could be doing something else, and Parrish values that time.

The best-selling-books system – as Ryan Holiday has pointed out, can be gamed. Beyond reading Farnam Street, here’s my advice:

a) Prefer number of reviews over favorable reviews:

b) Let podcasts be your guide for books to read. I found Robert Kurson and Eric Weiner after hearing them interviewed.

c) Quit a book that you don’t reach for instead of your phone.

3/ How to eat an elephant. “One of the things I was really conscious about was ‘how do I get a little bit better each year, a little bit smarter.’ I don’t need to be 100% improvement, I just want to get a little bit better every year, and over a long life, hopefully that adds up and I surpass people naturally more smart than me, that are naturally more gifted.”

An idea Steven Kotler has thought about too.

4/ Potpourri. “I was passionate about learning, and I found that the MBA program wasn’t what I thought it would be…it was more of a big money machine…it became about what was easy for the students and teachers.…but that’s how life works too, it was a great lesson for life. Doing what other people lead you down the road to do isn’t always the best answer for you as a person and you need to own and be conscious of the decisions you’re making.”

This quote has a few nooks and crannies we can peek into.

4a/ Time and again we see – thoughaccording to Ezra Klein, we may be biased that people on podcast talk about education this way – that people find education lacking. Teddy Roosevelt’s parents hired tutors and took (lavish and exoitc) family trips. Elizabeth Gilbert approached trips from a different financail place, but found the same value at the end. Our post on the XMBA explains more, and in a way, Farnam Street is an eXperiential MBA.

4b/ Parrish saw that incentives mattered at the university level; both students and professors want things to go smoothly. I sat on both sides of those desks and agree. The incentives were for no one to rock the boat and the journey to be smooth. Incentives matter. People loved  to sell Charles Ponzi’s certificates because he payed (apparently) handsome comissions. Charles Lindbergh used the power of incentives to get the Spirit of St. Louis built. Louis C.K. traded normal TV incentive structure (align content with commercials) for a different set when he released Horace and Pete on his website.

4c/ Your life is your life. Jocko Willink frames it as “extreme ownership.” This kind of ownership can help solve different kinds of problems. Chris Sacca told Bill Simmons that they rarely had leaks at Google because “everyone felt an ownership of the company.” Brogan BamBrogan told Ashlee Vance that Elon Musk would approach an engineer and say:

“‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.”

Thanks for reading, I’m @mikedariano on Twitter. If you liked this post, my podcast is basically the audio version: iTunes, Overcast, Soundcloud, or Medium.

This post was originally published on Medium. I’m moving it here for linking purposes. 

Auren Hoffman joined Erik Torenberg on the Product Hunt podcast and here are 3 things I learned.

1/ Timing is a variable in the success equation. “If you’re 6 people, a false positive is so destructive to your company that hiring somebody really bad can be a really real bad thing…when you’re 200 people it’s not nearly as destructive.” “None of your listeners should take advice from me on investing…I’ve been a very active investor in the last eight years, and if you were a very active investor, in the valley, 100% of them did really well.”

Hoffman’s humility here (and throughout the interview) demonstrates objective observations.

In the success equation it’s crucial to figure out what happened because of your “genius,” and what happened because of “rising tides.”

Daymond John said he launched FUBU (effort) on the hip hop tide (timing).

Chris Dixon noted that some startups fail because a tsunami strikes the harbor. “Some reasonable percentage of the time the entrepreneur does everything right and things happen.”

The valuable part is to figure out how much of your success (or failure) was your timing and not lucky timing.

2/ Invisible scripts and default options. “A lot of people spend more time thinking about what restaurant to go to tonight rather than if they should go to college.” “People should affirmatively choose to go to college … The default position for too many people is to go to college, and I think in society we have too many default positions.” Hoffman adds this caution applies to marriage and kids too.

How do you see these invisible scripts? Flip them upside down.

Venkatesh Rao told Dan Andrews that reversing our point of view garbles existing scripts. Look at things upside down.

Or backwards. “One easier way to figure out what your strengths are is to figure out what they aren’t,” said Hoffman. Tren Griffin said that if you want to have a good marriage, be someone who is good to be married to.

Or anthropomorphic. Benjamin Graham compared the stock market to a bipolar “Mr. Market,” that Warren Buffett says is the best part of Graham’s book The Intelligent Investor.

3/ Creating Company Culture. “Culture is something that your company does that other companies like you don’t do.” “You don’t need to recruit everyone in the world, if you can appeal to just 1% to come work for you that’s good enough.”

Yoga is not culture. Culture is a weapon, sometimes a self harming one.

One main theme of failed startups — in my survivorship bias project was hostile culture. Good culture meant focus and responsibility.

When he was on Product Hunt, Josh Kopelman noted that there’s no “virality dust,” and the same is true for culture. It has to be baked in.

Burton Malkiel joined Barry Ritholtz to talk about markets, psychology, and technology on the Masters in Business podcast. The two covered a lot of familiar ground, so let’s get to it.

1/ More people means more competition. “As more and more good people get into something the opportunity goes away.” “The problem is, as the market gets more and more professional, when people are better trained, when people have better sources of information…it’s then harder and harder to actually beat the market.”

Nate Silver said this about playing poker, “I got out in 2007 when the games got a lot tighter.” Napoleon Bonaparte biographer Paul Johnson wondered what would have happened if the little emperor had taken the fight to the America’s rather than Europe. Jim Chanos said part of the reason he’s succeeded is because he has “a little market niche.”

2/ The “Hold my beer” effect. “You ask a group of 200 students, are you a better driver or a worse driver than all the other students in the room, and 90% of them say they are better than average. It’s like Lake Wobegon, we’re all better than average.”

This effect operates on two levels, the macro and micro. At the macro level we know: 90% of people can’t be above average drivers. Charlie Munger puts it this way, “the iron rule of life is that only 20% of the people can be in the top fifth.” From a macro point of view we get statistics that suggest the odds are long.

I (We) laugh at “hold my beer” gifs, but sometimes those people nail it, and on the whole we’re better for it.

 We believe in something beyond the numbers, ourselves. In Antfragile Nassim Taleb wrote that we should thank the people who try. The odds are against them, but through their trials, successes, and failures we all benefit.

3/ POTRT. Ritholtz asked, “Why is stock picking so difficult?” Malkiel responded, “Partly the reason is that there are so many people doing it and that they are so professional in doing it.”

Part of the reason thinking (POTRT) is a helpful idea. I did a podcast episode on it and Sanjay Bakshi explained it in another. David Chang spoke about how POTRT relates to restaurants and we drilled into how it relates to CEO pay. Everything has many reasons, figuring out the different parts is valuable.

4/ Simple signs are the best signs. “The one thing I’m absolutely sure about in financial markets; the lower the fee I pay to the purveyor of the investment service, the more there is going to be for me.”

“Whoa,” I thought, when I first saw an investment prospectus. There were a lot of numbers. And charts. I picked the ones that looked like stairs, each subsequent bar graph higher than the one before. I gave a brief glance and even briefer thought to the “past performance is not indicative of future results.”

In choosing complexity I failed to choose simplicity. Simple models are often the best. Charlie Munger’s models like  the “cancer surgery model” are simple ones that can be used over and over again. Genius is simple. When Stephen King spoke with writers he says, “I always started by telling them not to be too concerned with stuff like weird verbs (swim, swum, swam) and just remember to make subject and verb agree. It’s like we say in AA—KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.”

Don’t think simple is easy though.

– “I’m talking about nothing but plain vanilla stock picking. That, believe me, is complicated enough.” Charlie Munger

– “Such (leadership) concepts are simple, but not easy.” Jocko Willink

– “But though this is very simple, it does not mean it is easy.” Timothy Gallwey.

5/ Low overhead. “When Jack Bogle first met Warren Buffett they were at a hotel together and Jack recognized Warren, went up and introduced himself, and he said to Warren, ‘you know the thing I really like about you is you have rumpled suits just the same as I do’ and Jack and Warren have become very good friends.”

This anecdote from Malkiel was great. Beyond (further) endearing Buffett and Bogle, it’s case for keeping a low overhead. Sophia Amoruso, Michael Ovitz, and the Wright brothers all kepted a low overhead in their businesses. Sarah Silverman, Jay Leno, and Jerry Seinfeld all kept a low overhead to kickstart their careers. The fewer obligations in one area, the more calculated risks you can take in another.

Thanks for reading, I’m @mikedariano on Twitter. If you want the audio version of these ideas, subscribe to my podcast; https://medium.com/mikes-mental-models .

Tony Hawk’s conversation with James Altucher was wide and deep. I didn’t know much about Hawk before I listened, but here are 7 things I learned from his conversation with Altucher.

1/ No idle days. “The drive was to keep challenging myself and keep getting better. I think some of my peers got caught up in the celebrity/party aspect, or they reached this pinnacle and they lost their motivation.”

People who are the best are always moving in important areas. When asked how he got so much done explorer Percy Fawcett said he “had no idle days.” Teddy Roosevelt was known to stay up late and work. He’d wake up in the morning and show up to work, “like he’d been shot out of a catapult” said one friend. Gary Vaynerchuk put it this way, “I’m not interested in the politically correct version of everything right now. I’m not interested in having a conversation around how to raise my kids. I’m not interested you imposing your will on me on how I meditate.” The only thing Vaynerchuk is interested in is work. 

One way to do this is follow the path of Casey Neistat, Ryan Holiday, and Nate Silver – always have something to work on. When each reaches capacity in one area, they have the ability to switch to another.

Adam Savage spoke about how this helps his process. Savage was stuck on a precision machining task that he couldn’t get right. He switched to something that needed sewn instead and it “was like the wheelhouse I needed to get myself into.” Savage continued, “I think it was firing a different part of my brain…it was totally a change of pace…and the pivot really did surprise me with how invigorating it felt to work with a brand new material.”

2/ In strengths are weaknesses and in weaknesses are strengths. “My style was all about tricks and I got criticized, but eventually I found my strengths and did really well in competition and shut everyone up.”

Hawk explained that when other skateboarders were learning one way, he was doing another. He was too small for the popular “surfer style” and had to learn to skate differently. This ended up paying off, as those skill that people criticized were eventually really valuable.

Strengths in weaknesses and weaknesses in strengths  operates on multiple levels. At the micro level it’s Hawk learning a different style. Zoom out and – Clayton Christensen explained “an organization’s capabilities become its disabilities when disruption is afoot..a process that defines a capability executing a certain task concurrently defines disabilities in executing other tasks.” Zoom out further yet and Nial Ferguson proposed that the silver mines of South America led to a less democratic foundation compared to the more resource scattered lands of North America.

From the personal to the world of business to the global landscape, there are strengths in weaknesses and weaknesses in strengths.

3/The economics of blue jeans and video games. “It was right when the cool washes were coming out. It was very boutique. The designs were cool. Little did we know, not everyone wanted to pay $200 for jeans and that it was going to keep costing us money to produce.”

Marginal cost is the cost of each additional unit. Cars have high marginal costs, software has (very) low marginal costs. Hawk missed this. What was notable was how low the software (his video game) cost to make. He told Altucher that the engine was from another game. 

Tren Griffin consistently explains this well at 25iq.

4/TIMING MATTERS. “There was a lifestyle associated with it (skateboarding). There was an attitude. There was a culture that was born out of punk-rock–70’s-pool-skating-surfing.”

Skateboarding blew up because there was a culture ready for it. “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come,” wrote Victor Hugo.

Hawk also said that he started his company during a downturn in the industry, which meant their advertising dollars went further. He said the X Games helped too.

This is a great story. You have this untapped cultural force (skateboarding) that’s been brought about by punk rock and a California drought (people couldn’t fill their pools, so they skated in them). As this wave begins to break, Hawk is skating in Six Flags parking lots for $100 a day, with no idea of the swell.

Television helped. Before YouTube it was hard to find videos for niche cultures. In 1997 I bought a used VHS of  professional sand volleyball video from a new website called Amazon. Four years later I did the same for a video of ultimate frisbee. Those things were hard to find. Now not so much. 

Timing matters in anything we do. Good timing allowed Brian Grazer to get a great office. Poor timing, said Chamath Palihapitiya meant the Facebook phone failed . As the quote from Any Given Sunday goes:

Because in either game, life or football,  the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half step too late or too early, you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow or too fast,  and you don’t quite catch it.

5/Adversity helps. “In the late 80’s and early 90’s pool skating and ramp skating came to a halt because all the skateparks closed due to liability issues and insurance and everyone went out and skated the streets. That’s how all the modern skateboarding was born, out of necessity, going out and making the urban landscape your skatepark.”

It helped the sport when the skateparks closed. This idea goes by other names; blessing in disguise, silver lining – and we see time and again how true it is. Charles Lindberg was a great pilot because he flew tempermental planes in poor conditions. Jocko Willink was a good commander because he was tested and occassionally failed.

“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.” – J.K. Rowling

Going back to #4, bad business conditions forced out Hawk’s competition. While things were hard at the time, anyone that made it through would be stronger on the other side.

6/Strive for a deep understanding. “The best advice I have is, you want to learn every aspect of what you’re getting into. I learned it by accident. I didn’t ever want to learn what point of purchase was, or net, but I embraced it because I wanted to be prepared for what was to come.”

A deep understanding helps. When John Chatterton found a U-boat on the ocean floor he booked a plane ticket to walk through a similar one in Chicago – and did so twelve times.

Chris Hadfield wrote about the space program:

“In the debrief about food for instance, we’re asked, ‘how was it?’ what did you like? why? was there enough for everyone? what did you throw away? How about the packaging – any way you can think to improve it?’ The level of detail we go into helps explain why the food on the station is, for the most part, really good.”

Louis C.K. was only able to make Horace and Pete because he had a deep understanding of all the aspects of a show’s creation.

How do you get a deep understanding? You “stay on the bus.” Hawk said, “I was considered a super nerd because I was still skating, I was doing this kid’s activity. But I loved it.” In some ways, Hawk merely outlasted his competition. If you need to get this mindset, you need to read about the Helsinki bus station.

7/Learning to fall safely. “I’m definitely used to falling, it’s more the like the unexpected falls. When you think you got something and all of a sudden something didn’t go right but you don’t have the time to prepare for the fall, that’s when you get hurt.”

There’s a good way to fall; take one step then go down on your knees, explained Hawk. Those are manageable. It’s the unexpected falls that cause the most surprise. .

My favorite author on this idea is Gilbert Gall who wrote in Systemantics, “COMPLEX SYSTEMS EXHIBIT UNEXPECTED BEHAVIOR.”

In Foolproof, Greg Ip suggested that we never get complacent with our safety. Hawk never assumes that because he knows how to fall (one step then slide on your knees) that he’s safe. Ip noticed a domain blindness. We’ll think we are always safe because we know how to fall, or think we are protected from a fall. For example, we (re)build houses in floodplains and along coastlines.

Thanks for reading, I’m @mikedariano on Twitter.

New episodes have been published to this series. I’ve started to add clips rather than just reading quotes in the episodes. It’s rough, but I like it. If you’ve been listening let me know what you think.

Show links are at https://medium.com/mikes-mental-models. Episodes are available on iTunes, Soundcloud, or Overcast. Here’s what I’ve talked about so far.

#07 – Small Barriers.

#06 – Survivor Bias.

#05 – Examples from Dan Carlin’s Common Sense podcast.

#04 – Part of the reason thinking.

#03 – The three filters.

#02 – Alternative histories.

#01 – Gordian knots and Chesterton fences.

#00 – An introduction to the season.

Thanks for reading, I’m @mikedariano on Twitter.

Colonel Percy Fawcett was explored the Amazon and whose story is told in The Lost City of Z by David Grann. It was an incredible adventure. Here are a few things I learned.

1/ Mind over matter. “Men under these conditions are often broken by their minds succumbing before their bodies,” wrote Fawcett, who forced his expeditions beyond what most bodies were able and willing to do.

Though exploration seems physically demanding, it’s the mental site Fawcett saw break. It was the choice to put one foot in front of the other rather than the act. Navy SEAL, Leif Babin wrote, the same about Hell Week, “it was not a physical test, but a mental one.”

2/ Adjacent possibles. Late in his life, as the quest for Z consumed but eluded him more, Fawcett sought out psychics. His diary became more imaginative than factual. He wasn’t alone in this.

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson wrote about the Society for Psychical Research:

“The society’s constitution stated that membership did not imply belief in “physical forces other than those recognized by Physical Science.” That the SPR had a Committee on Haunted Houses deterred no one. Its membership expanded quickly to include sixty university dons and some of the brightest lights of the era, among them John Ruskin, H. G. Wells, William E. Gladstone, Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain), and the Rev. C. L. Dodgson (with the equally prominent pen name Lewis Carroll). The roster also listed Arthur Balfour, a future prime minister of England, and William James, a pioneer in psychology, who by the summer of 1894 had been named the society’s president.”

When we explore one adjacent possible – whether it’s a tangible space like the jungle or a scientific one like radio waves – it opens a new adjacent possible where we lack tested theories.

About maps, Grann wrote:

“During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, maps depicted fowl in Asia that tore humans apart, a bird in Germany that glowed in the dark, people in India with everything from sixteen toes to dog heads, hyenas in Africa whose shadows rendered dogs mute, and a beast called a “cockatrice” that could kill with a mere puff of its breath.”

Fawcett lived in a time when inventions like the Marconi radio (1895) and Wright brothers flight (1899) shifted what people knew to be true. Fawcett wasn’t crazy for seeking spiritual solutions, he was typical. At He was one of the best explorers in the world.

3/ About wearing carpet slippers (1). Fawcett lived through a shift from explorers to academics. One scolded the explorers this way, “what you can do, is state accurately what you saw, leaving it to stay-at-home men of science to collate the data of very many travelers, in order to form a theory.” An explorer retorted that those in “carpet slippers,” should not “criticise those who labour in the field.”

Sometimes we must be the explorers. Samuel Zemurray overtook American banana imports because he was there. Sarah Tavel said technology companies need to be in Silicon Valley. John Nagl wrote about the importance of being there for warfare.

On the other hand, Chris Dixon, Michael Mauboussin and Josh Kopelman all said that being not being there helped.

4/ Economic bubbles. While Fawcett plumbed the Amazon, a rubber industry grew on the surface. And it grew well. Grann wrote about one rubber baron’s house:

“And nothing was more extravagant than the opera house, with its Italian marble, Bohemian glass, gilded balconies, crystal chandeliers, Victorian murals, and a dome bathed in the colors of the national flag. Prefabricated in Europe and costing an estimated ten million dollars in taxpayers’ money, the opera house was shipped in pieces more than a thousand miles up the Amazon River, where laborers were deployed around the clock to assemble it, working at night under Brazil’s first electric light bulbs.”

Soon the rubber bubble popped. Should they have known?

“A bubble,” said Cliff Asness “is where you say ‘this cannot last.’” College football might be a bubble. Towns with fracking saw a bubble.

Bubbles are hard to predict. Jim Chanos said the best you can do is understand history and notice familiar things.

5/ No idle days. When someone asked Fawcett how he got so much done, he replied, “I am a rapid worker and have no idle days.”

Exploration took up a lot of time, but Fawcett also presented findings, wrote articles, planned future trips (and raised money for them), spent (minimal) time with family. He wrote:

“One learns little from a smooth life, but I do not like roping others into the difficulties which have dogged me so persistently . . . It is not that I want luxuries. I care little about such things—but I hate inactivity.”

Successful people seem to be constantly busy with something. Casey Neistat called it “the religion of work.” Nate Silver, Ryan Holiday, and historical geniuses were especially productive because they had different things to work on. They had many irons in the fire.

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6/ Timing matters. Grann wrote that Fawcett could have explored even more, except for the world war. In 1914 Fawcett had just scouted his next trip, yet, “when he emerged from the jungle he was greeted with the news that…World War I had begun. Fawcett and his two British companions immediately set sail for England. … Though Fawcett was forty-seven years old and a “renegade” from European life, he felt compelled to volunteer. He informed Keltie (a fellow geographer) that he had his ‘finger on important discoveries’ in the Amazon, but was obliged by ‘the patriotic desire of all able-bodied men to squash the Teuton.’”

Lucky timing helped people like Seth Godin profitably exit the stock market, Teddy Roosevelt enter politics, and Louis C.K. create Horace and Pete.

Unlucky timing hurt F. Scott Fitzgerald whose The Great Gatsby sold poorly, Neil Strauss who released a book the same weekend as Hurrican Katrina, and Mark Cuban who created a streaming music service too soon.

Thanks for reading, I’m @mikedariano on Twitter.

(1) Nothing against slippers, Teddy Roosevelt took his mother’s to wear at Harvard.

This post was published on Medium during this experiment.  

“When the bad times are coming, I get excited.” — Corcoran

1/ It’s not the market. It’s not the competition. It’s you.

About successes Corcoran said, “the real difference between the superstar salespeople and everyone else, was…how long it took to feel sorry for themselves.” “They keep popping up. It doesn’t mean they don’t take the injury, but it’s a quicker turnaround time.”

About failures: “They took insult personally.” “They were living in the past.”

Corcoran has seen that success is about being “stupid enough,” to focus on the now. In her interview with James Altucher, she said that her successful Shark Tank entrepreneurs are dumb in the sense that they don’t know how to quit.

Jocko Willink called it “Extreme Ownership.”  Ryan Holiday‘s books center on the inner game.

2/ Silver linings. 

“My asset was terrible years for New York.” “I had the luckiest timing of any kid in the world because I happened to land in New York at its darkest hour.” “When the shit hit the fan, I realized it was game time and I was going to have a huge advantage.” “When interest rates went to 18% I had one of my best successes of my life.”

Episode 012 of this podcast was all about how constraints help.

Daymond John called it “the power of broke.” Tim O’Reilly said his business was saved when they were forced to pivot. Kevin Kelly noted that you only invent things when you’re stretched. Eric Weiner proved this thesis in his book.  Amanda Palmer said that restrictions help the creative flow. Megan McArdle wrote an entire book about it, The Up Side of Down.

Bad times can be the perfect time for future success.

3/ Have a good mixtape in your head.

“The tape kicks in and I go, ‘oh yeah, you’re not any smarter than me.’’ “Then boom, I’m in my feet and I’m over it.”

“The worst troll is the one that lives in your head” — @austinkleon

Corcoran goes on, “when you’re building a business it’s an extension of yourself as an entrepreneur.”

I saw this time and again when I looked at failed companies. The identity of a startup entangled the founder — an emotional yoke. Entrepreneurship has a heavy emotional component. Corcoran’s advice is to create your own mixtape, one you can cue up the moment your troll starts whispering. Get out of your head and back in your feet.

Thanks for reading, I’m @mikedariano on Twitter.

Theodore Roosevelt did a lot before being the 26th President of the United States. In the book Mornings on Horseback, David McCullough wrote about the early life of Roosevelt which has some timeless lessons. Here are six:

1/ “Money can’t buy me love.” The Beatles song was a toe tapper, but the Roosevelt family would have sung a different version, “money can’t buy me health.”

Despite being one of the richest families in New York City (and the country) they were plagued with health problems. Roosevelt has asthma, his brother became an alcoholic, and his sister wore a brace for her spine. Beyond that, Roosevelt’s wife and mother died on the same day in 1884.

Money helps, but it’s not the only cure. John Nagl noted when money does and doesn’t work in fighting wars. Kevin Kelly talked about when a lack of money is valuable. Louis C.K. eschewed money in favor of experimentation.

2/ Roosevelt had a real world education. His parents didn’t think much of the schools, so he had a private tutor. When he visited family in Philadelphia he visited the library “every spare moment.” His father’s advice upon leaving for Harvard was to take care of his morals, health, and learning – in that order.

School is not synonymous with learning. The Wright brothers learned more from books than at school. Elizabeth Gilbert asked, “why learn about the thing by learning about the thing, when you can learn about the thing by doing the thing.”

Of course, Roosevelt had the opportunity to learn thanks to the money, but he still did the work. He took advantage of his situation to do the best he could.

3/ Be damn sure you’re right. When Roosevelt challenged more senior state legislators he never backed down because he believed he was right. In one case, cigar makers were forming a lobby to mandate conditions for work. Roosevelt was against it at first, but then visited apartments where cigars were rolled next to “filty bedding.” When he changed his mind he was adamaent, because he had facts to go with his opinion.

4/ Roosevelt was energetic. On friend wrote, “he came in as if he had been ejected from a catapult.” Another said that he was halfway up the stairs before the door swung closed behind him.

5/ Timing matters. There was a shakeup in state political power dynamics right before Roosevelt ran. “The game had opened up just as Theodore commenced to play,” McCullough wrote. Another moment of good timing was starting his ranch in the badlands a few years before the cattle boom. His operation was relatively small, but it rose with the rising tides brought by railroads and refrigerated cars.

Daymond John, Nate Silver and B.J. Novak all benefited from this timing with the tides effect.

6/ Adversity helps. Though Roosevelt was blessed with money, education, and family connections, he had to work for a lot of things too. His health was relatively feeble. Politically he always had an adversary (or two). The wilderness challenged him. People made fun of the way he looked.

He had the right mix of opportunity and opposition. His brother, who was much better looking, funnier, and more jovial ended up an alcoholic. Whether there’s a connection there, I don’t know. I do know that some adversity helps.

Charles Lindberg earned his wings by flying in the worst conditions with the worst equipment as a mail deliverer. Judd Apatow wrote in Sick in the Head that a lot of funny people had sad childhoods. Apatow himself was a product of divorce, and he said he wants to screw up his own kids just enough so that they face adversity too.

While McCullough’s book is only a sliver of Roosevelt’s life, it was a golden one. If you liked this post, you’ll love my podcast, it’s on; iTunes,
Soundcloud, or Overcast.