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Studying & breaking down how top founders think, decide, and operate for future builders.

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Jeff Bezos on the exact moment he realized he would never be a great physicist: "I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I went to Princeton. I was a really good student, I got A-pluses on almost everything. I was in the honors physics track, which starts with 100 students and by quantum mechanics it's down to 30." Then came the homework problem: "I can't solve this partial differential equation. It's really, really hard. I've been studying with my roommate Joe, who was also really good at math. The two of us worked on this one problem for three hours and got nowhere." They decided to visit Yasantha, the smartest guy at Princeton: "He was Sri Lankan. In the Facebook, which was an actual paper book at that time, his name was three lines long. I guess in Sri Lanka when you do something good for the king, they give you an extra syllable on your name. The most humble, wonderful guy." Jeff continues: "We show him the problem. He stares at it for a while and says, 'Cosine.' I'm like, 'What do you mean?' He says, 'That's the answer.' I said, 'That's the answer?' He said, 'Yeah, let me show you.' He sits us down, writes out three pages of detailed algebra, everything crosses out, and the answer is cosine." Jeff asked if he solved it in his head: "He said, 'No, that would be impossible. Three years ago I solved a very similar problem and I was able to map this problem onto that one. Then it was immediately obvious the answer was cosine.'" Jeff reflects: "That was an important moment for me. Because that was the very moment I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist."

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1,322,025 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

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In 2002, Elon Musk tried to buy a rocket. The Russians quoted him $8 million per unit. American aerospace companies wanted over $65 million. He walked away from both. On the flight home, he opened a spreadsheet and broke down the raw materials. Aerospace-grade aluminum. Titanium. Copper. Carbon fiber. He priced each on the commodity market. The total came to roughly 2% of what the industry was charging. That gap is what first principles thinking actually looks like. Not "how do we negotiate a better deal." Not "who else sells rockets." Just: what is this thing actually made of, and why does it cost what it costs? The answer was overhead. Legacy processes. Layers of contractors and subcontractors. Margins stacked on margins. Nobody had questioned the price because nobody had questioned the structure. Musk decided to build it himself. The first Falcon 1 exploded 33 seconds after launch. The second made it further but failed to reach orbit. The third exploded too. Three rockets. Three failures. SpaceX was almost out of money. Musk put his last $35 million into the company. If the fourth launch failed, that was it. September 28, 2008. Falcon 1 Flight 4 reached orbit. First privately developed liquid fuel rocket to ever do it. Seven years later, they landed a booster back on Earth for the first time. Now they do it routinely. The cost per launch dropped from $65 million to under $3 million for a reused Falcon 9 booster. Everyone else was reasoning by analogy: rockets are expensive because rockets have always been expensive. Musk reasoned from atoms: rockets are expensive because nobody rebuilt the system from the ground up.

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160,186 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

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Conor Neill: "18 years of school trained you to ruin conversations" "You finish your pitch and the customer says, 'Your product is too expensive!' You arrive home a few minutes late, your partner says, 'You are always late.' There's a dirty plate left on the table 'You never wash the dishes.' What do you say in this moment?" Neill explains the problem: "Most of you, me included, went through 14 years of school where we were taught one way to respond to questions. Teacher asks, 'How do you spell cats?' Student: 'C-A-T.' Teacher asks, 'What is osmosis?' Student explains in detail. For 14 years, you've been taught to give answers to questions. If you went to university, you probably had another 3 or 4 years of giving answers to questions." Here's what that does to you: "In real life in persuasion, in getting to what the other person is really about, what their needs really are, the worst thing you can do is give an answer to a question." He gives examples: "If someone says, 'Your product is too expensive,' and you say, 'No it's not! It's only €1,000'; you've lost every chance to understand what else is behind their reasoning. If you get home and your partner says, 'You're always late!' and you say, 'No, no, no, Tuesday I was definitely here on time', you're gonna have a crap weekend." Neill explains why this happens: "When your partner says, 'You're always late,' emotion goes up. And what happens? The thinking part disconnects. The way to make someone stupider is to insult them, object to them, tell them they are wrong. When you're asked a question, there's an emotional reaction, and the higher emotion goes, the lower thinking goes." He continues: "If you don't practice this response, you're not going to be able to do it in the moment. If you don't practice repeatedly how you'll respond to 'You're always late,' 'You never wash the dishes,' 'Your product is too expensive,' 'Your competitor is better,' 'You failed us 3 years ago,' 'I don't trust your company', you're not going to be able to do it in the heat of the moment." Here's what to do instead: "When you are asked a question or given an objection, I want you to say: 'I understand.' And repeat in your words what they're saying. Then give an open question back." He demonstrates: "'Your product is too expensive!' → 'I understand that money is an important factor for you. What other criteria will be used in making this decision?'" Neill calls this "Conversation Aikido": "Martial arts are about using the energy and force of the opponent against them. In Judo, if someone punches you, you pull their arm and allow the energy to keep flowing. In Aikido, the concept is you go toward the punch. You go toward the energy. If someone punches you, if someone asks you a question, if someone objects, the Aikido method is to go toward them and see the world from their view." He explains how to practice: "'You're always late!' → 'I understand you feel frustrated.' 'I understand you feel let down.' You'll have to work on this quite a few times over the next 10 years to find the set of words that captures what the other person feels, what's behind it. Then ask: 'What can we do now?' 'What happened during the day?' 'What would you like to talk about?'" Neill shares what happens when you don't do this: "When a client says 'You're too expensive' and you say 'No, we're not!' you learn nothing about who else they're considering, what other criteria are important, what process they've gone through, who else is involved in the decision." He closes with a guarantee: "By giving the answer, we shut down the possibility of hearing what's really going on in the other person's mind. But if you say 'I understand,' accept the energy coming from the other person, and give back an open question, I guarantee that if you do it 4 times, the answer to your 4th open question begins to be the real underlying need, issue, or interest of the person you're listening to."

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192,820 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

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MrBeast: "I could start from 0 and still get millions of subscribers. It’s just knowledge" "I've been doing this since I was 11. Now I'm 23. Every year it's just gotten crazier and crazier. The first few years I wasn't even making money. Once I started, I was making a dollar a day. I saved up for a couple months, bought a microphone. Saved up for half a year, got a computer. I've just always reinvested it." He describes where he started: "I was as awkward as they came. No money. No nothing. I just obsessed over YouTube every day for a decade. My first couple hundred videos, I didn't even have a microphone. Imagine just crackly, terrible voice. I was using my brother's old laptop." On his first video going viral by accident: "My first video got 20,000 views instantly. That was probably the best thing that could have ever happened to me, I was hooked from day one. Most people, it takes hundreds of videos before you get one view. Somehow the very first video I uploaded at 11 got 20,000 views. I fell in love and I've been hooked ever since." On the turning point: "When I graduated high school, I was only making a couple hundred bucks a month. My mom was like, either move out or go to community college. I hated school with a passion. So what I did was I would act like I was going to community college, but I would just work on videos in my car and edit. I had straight zeros. The clock had started. Once my mom found out, I was screwed." MrBeast explains what happened next: "I was 15 hours a day, all in. I was like, I'm fucked if this doesn't work. Then I had some videos pop off. I had a month where I made 20 grand. I came home and said, 'Yeah, I haven't been going to college.' Moved out the next day. My mom almost had a heart attack." On why nobody believed in him: "Nobody saw this coming. You can't blame her. Me, in the middle of North Carolina, small town, horrible acne, really awkward. People would have bet a million dollars that I wouldn't be a YouTuber. It makes no sense. But I have hyper obsession and I love this. You give it enough time, anyone can solve it." On how he actually learned: "I found these other four lunatics. Three of us were college dropouts, one was a high school dropout, one just quit his job. We were all super small YouTubers. We talked every day for a thousand days in a row. Just hyper-studying, what makes a good video, what makes a good thumbnail, what's good pacing, how to go viral." He describes the intensity: "We called them daily masterminds. I'd get on Skype at 7am and be in the call until 10pm. Go to bed. Wake up. Do it again. We'd take a thousand thumbnails and see if there's a correlation between the brightness of the thumbnail and how many views it got. Videos that get over 10 million views, how often do they cut the camera angles? We were very religious about it. We had no life." On the results: "We all had like 10-20,000 subscribers when we met. By the time we stopped talking, we all had millions. We all hit a million subscribers within a month of each other. They say 10,000 hours, I probably put 40-50,000 hours. Every day, all day. We had no friends outside of the group. That was our life." On why the group worked: "If you're trying to be great at something and it's just you learning and messing up, in two years you might learn from 20 mistakes. But if you have four other people also messing up, and when they learn from the mistake they teach you what they learned, two years down the road you've learned five times more. It helps you grow exponentially way quicker." On money: "I don't need money. Living your life chasing a nicer car and a bigger box, it's kind of a dumb way to go about life. I lived in a little duplex, $700 a month, split with a roommate. Drive a normal car. I did have a phase where I balled out a little bit, bought designer clothes, thousand dollar shirts. Then I realized, this doesn't make me happy. Ironically, all of it got stolen when my house was broken into. So I was like, perfect. I don't care about this stuff anymore."

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79,405 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

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Ajahn Brahm demonstrates how easy it is to stop overthinking in 2 minutes: "The biggest problem in people's meditation is the mind which is always thinking. People keep telling me, 'I can't meditate. I'm always thinking, thinking, thinking about something, thinking about anything. I can't stop thinking.' That becomes one of the biggest obstacles to being a meditator." But he reveals the truth: "It's very easy to stop thinking. A lot of people do it quite naturally, very often. They stop thinking." He shares a demonstration: "When I am speaking, also be aware of the reaction to my words inside your mind. Don't just listen to what I'm saying, listen to what it does to you inside your mind. Because as I am speaking, if you're mindful inside a little bit, you will begin to notice something strange." Here's what he wants you to see: "Between my words, there are long gaps. In those spaces between my words, what was happening in your mind? You were silent. You were aware. But not a thought was going on in your mind." He pauses. "You can do it. And this is what it feels like. Being aware. Hearing the sounds of the birds. But without a thought going on in your head. Easy, isn't it?" He adds with a laugh: "Now just carry on for another two hours." Then he shares the real question: "Now you know what silence is and how beautiful it feels. Now we have to try and understand: why is it that we keep destroying this silence with all these thoughts? You're all old enough now to realize 99% of your thoughts are total rubbish. And I'm being quite generous."

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18,548 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

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