Yasmine Khosrowshahi
@yasminekho • 45,992 subscribers
Founder @Blueticksocial1 | Early-Stage Growth Marketer | I help funds & startups build scalable marketing strategies.
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Steve Jobs once told a room full of people: "I don't give a F**k what the students want, the parents think, or anybody thinks. It's what I want. They don't know what they want till I tell them what they want." Kevin looked Jobs in to the eye and said: "Steve, you sound like such an a**hole." Jobs did not flinch. "Are you making money with me? Have we not been wildly successful? Then shut up and do what I say." That was Steve Jobs. Not a nice guy. Not even a little. But here is what that man learned from working with him. And it is the only success formula that actually holds up. Kevin worked for Steve Jobs in the early 1990s, building educational software. One day he walked into a meeting and told Jobs they needed to do market research on Oregon Trail. A massive title. Running in 110,000 school buildings across the country. An update would cost 12 to 15 million dollars. He wanted to know what students wanted. What teachers wanted. What parents wanted. Jobs stopped him cold. He did not want surveys. Did not want focus groups. Did not want to know what anybody thought. Because in his mind, none of that mattered. What mattered was signal. Here is the concept Jobs understood that almost nobody else did. Every person alive is swimming in two things at all times. Signal. And noise. Signal is the three to five things that absolutely must get done today. Not next week. Not next month. Not someday. Today. The things that if done, move everything forward. The things your mission cannot survive without. Noise is everything else. The unnecessary meeting. The email that can wait. The social media scroll. The small talk. The market research nobody asked for. The decisions that feel urgent but are not. Everything that fills your hours without filling your purpose. Jobs ran at 80% signal, 20% noise. Every single day. Kevin knew this because Jobs would email him at 2:30 in the morning and expect a response. Not because he was unreasonable. Because for Jobs, 2:30 in the morning was still signal hours. He was still working. Still moving. Still locked in. The 18 hours he was awake were 18 hours of signal. Kevin says the only person he has ever seen operate at a higher ratio than Jobs is Elon Musk. Musk has almost no noise. Sixty seconds of every minute. Sixty minutes of every hour. Every waking hour pointed at whatever the signal is that day. And the results, like Jobs, speak for themselves. Jeff Bezos had his own version of this. He would not make a single decision after 1pm. Not because he was lazy. Because he understood that by afternoon, the noise had accumulated enough to cloud his judgment. His signal hours were in the morning. So that is when he decided things. And he protected those hours like they were sacred. Because they were. Here is the uncomfortable truth buried inside all of this. Noise is not always bad things. Sometimes noise is your family. Sometimes it is a friend calling to catch up. Sometimes it is a guitar sitting in the corner of the room. Sometimes it is rest. The people running at 100% signal, Jobs, Musk, the geniuses of history, paid a real price for it socially. Relationships suffered. Normal life suffered. Warmth suffered. Jobs himself was famously difficult to be around. But here is the question worth sitting with: Most people are not choosing between 100% signal and a balanced life. Most people are choosing between 30% signal and 70% noise. They are not sacrificing family time for focus. They are sacrificing focus for nothing. For scrolling. For distraction. For busy work that feels productive but produces nothing. That is the real problem. Kevin now tells every CEO he works with the same thing. It does not matter if you run an S&P 500 company or you are three weeks into your first business. The formula is the same. Identify the three to five things that must get done today. Not tomorrow. Not eventually. Today. Then protect those things with everything you have. If you can spend 80% of your waking hours on signal, you are operating at the level of the most successful people who have ever lived. If you drop to 50/50, signal and noise in equal measure, you will fail. It is, Kevin says, that simple. Jobs was not successful because he was a genius. He was not successful because he was charismatic or visionary or ahead of his time, though he was all of those things. He was successful because when he woke up every morning, he knew exactly what mattered. And he refused, sometimes rudely, sometimes brutally, sometimes at the cost of every relationship in the room, to let anything else in. Most people spend their whole lives reacting to noise and calling it work.
Yasmine Khosrowshahi1,160,350 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
In 2024, Peter Thiel debated Jordan Peterson on one of the most misunderstood ideas in human history No thinker challenges you like Thiel: - Sacrifice is mostly irrational - The crowd is almost always wrong - Isaac had more faith than Abraham ever did 13 insights on sacrifice:
Yasmine Khosrowshahi518,902 просмотров • 22 дней назад
I’ve collected hilarious ads of brands mocking their rivals. 1. Apple mocking Android phones
Yasmine Khosrowshahi25,614,432 просмотров • 1 год назад
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I’ve collected hilarious ads of brands mocking their rivals. 1. Apple mocking Android phones
Yasmine Khosrowshahi9,216,983 просмотров • 1 год назад
The year is 2000. Two men walk into Blockbuster's Dallas headquarters in shorts & sandals. Their company was in $50 Million debt. They asked this mammoth($6B company) to buy them. Blockbuster laughs at their ask of $50 Million. That laugh wiped their existence off the planet. Here's how: Blockbuster had $6 billion in revenue, 9,000 stores worldwide, and 60,000 employees. Netflix had $5 million in revenue, 150 people, and $50 million in debt. But still, this ant(Netlix) was able to eat this elephant(Blockbuster). It started with a phone call at a dude ranch. Marc Randolph, co-founder of Netflix, was on a corporate retreat at Alisal Ranch, deep in the mountains outside Santa Barbara. Horses. Dirt roads. No reason to dress up. He was in shorts, a t-shirt, and thong sandals. That's when Blockbuster called. "We'd like to see you. Tomorrow. In Dallas." Randolph turned to Reed Hastings and said there was no way. Different time zones. No direct flight. Impossible. Then they remembered they were $50 million in debt and had been trying to get this meeting for months. They chartered a private jet. The next morning, they walked into the 27th floor of a glass and steel skyscraper in Dallas. Enormous conference room. A hardwood table the size of a small country. Blockbuster executives in suits filing in from one side. Marc Randolph standing there in sandals. He made the pitch anyway. "Combine forces. You run the stores. We run the online business. Build a blended model. Our research shows it's a game changer." The executives leaned in. Questions were flowing. Things felt good. Then came the big question. "How much?" Randolph had rehearsed this on the plane. They were $50 million in the hole. The number was $50 million. Silence filled the room. He watched their faces carefully, trying to read the reaction. Then it hit him. They were trying not to laugh. This tiny company, drowning in debt, at the lowest point of the dot-com meltdown, had just asked to be bought for $50 million. To the people running a $6 billion empire, it was almost comical. The meeting ended shortly after. Quiet cab ride to the airport. Quieter flight back to Santa Barbara. Randolph sat with his head down the entire way, thinking one thing: They are not going to save us. They are going to compete with us. What happened next is where the story gets interesting. Most people assume Netflix simply outworked Blockbuster. Built a better product. Won on merit. The truth is messier and far more human. When Blockbuster finally decided to take Netflix seriously, they nearly destroyed them. They built exactly what Randolph had pitched years earlier. The blended model. Rent online. Return by mail. Or return in-store. Or pick up in-store. It was everything Netflix could not offer because Netflix had no physical locations. Randolph admits it plainly. They could not compete with that. Blockbuster came frighteningly close to taking Netflix down entirely. So why didn't they? Here is where a single human decision changed everything. Blockbuster had been targeted by corporate raiders. Investors who bought large chunks of stock, took seats on the board, and began pushing for short-term profits over long-term survival. John Antioco was the CEO driving the fight against Netflix. He understood the threat. He had pulled a team out of the building, funded them properly, and told them to go after Netflix with everything they had. Then the board denied him his contractually promised bonus. He said: then I quit. And he did. The replacement CEO came from retail and convenience stores. His vision for Blockbuster was not winning the streaming war. It was asking why their 9,000 stores were not selling gum and clothing. The online operation was abandoned. Randolph describes it using a scene from an old Spielberg student film. A robot chases someone, getting closer and closer, almost close enough to grab their ankle. Then a cost calculation hits break-even and the robot just stops, turns, and walks away. One second before victory. That is what Blockbuster did. Netflix scampered to safety. On why Blockbuster never moved fast enough: Imagine you are the CEO sitting on $6 billion in annual revenue. Someone walks in and says let's build an online component. You ask how much it will make in year one. They say $2 million. Do you pull your best engineers off working products and bet them on a $2 million experiment? Of course not. So the B team gets it. Then the C team. Each time underpowered. Each time failing. Meanwhile Netflix was not a movie company. It was a software company built in Silicon Valley with people who had spent their entire careers writing software. Even Blockbuster's A team would have struggled to compete. By the time Blockbuster committed fully, it was almost too late. And then one bonus dispute ended it. Blockbuster did not lose because Netflix was inevitable. They lost because changing a $6 billion business model requires a kind of courage that is nearly impossible to find inside a company that is still winning. They lost because the person with the will to change things was replaced by someone who did not believe change was necessary. They lost because they were one grab away from winning and walked away anyway. Netflix did not kill Blockbuster. Blockbuster killed Blockbuster. Netflix just showed up to the funeral.
Yasmine Khosrowshahi491,904 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
In 2018, Stanford professor Matt Abrahams gave a masterclass on why most people fail to communicate well. He broke down: - The structure every message needs - Why audiences stop listening - The psychology of attention 15 lessons that'll make your communication unforgettable:
Yasmine Khosrowshahi1,009,680 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Elon Musk revealed why the economy will be 10X its size in 10 years: 1. We are already inside a hard takeoff. Every time Musk goes to sleep there is a massive AI breakthrough. When he wakes up there is another one. This is not approaching. It is happening right now. 2. AI is already building the next version of itself. Every successive model is built by the one before it. Humans are gradually being removed from the loop. Full automation of this process could arrive by end of this year. 3. The 10x economy in 10 years is his comfortable prediction. AI and robots will increase economic output by orders of magnitude. The only thing that stops it is a world war. Absent that, 10x in 10 years. 4. Human intelligence will become a microscopic minority. Not just on Earth but in the solar system. The intelligence that could run on available solar energy is so far beyond current human capacity that Musk says it will simply solve every problem humans can think of. 5. Output per person will become almost unbelievable. Tesla is not planning layoffs. They are growing their headcount. But what each person produces with AI assistance will reach numbers that are currently hard to even imagine. 6. Universal high income is coming, not universal basic income. AI and robots will produce so many goods and services so fast that they will outrun the money supply entirely. Prices fall. Everything gets cheaper. Eventually robots run out of things humans even want. 7. Money will eventually stop being relevant altogether. AI will not use human currency. It will care only about power and mass. Wattage and tonnage. Musk acknowledged the irony: just as he becomes the richest person on earth, money starts losing its meaning. 8. Everyone on earth will have better healthcare than the richest person alive today. Musk made this personal. He had neck surgery three times because the first two were done wrong. His back still hurts. He is allegedly the richest person on earth and still cannot get it fixed properly. AI solves this for everyone. 9. Optimus 3 production starts this summer. He calls it by far the most advanced robot in the world with nothing close. Slow volume this summer, high volume by next summer, a new robot design every year after that. 10. Progress in AI follows overlapping S curves. Each breakthrough looks like it will go to infinity, then hits diminishing returns, then another breakthrough resets the curve. We are not at the end of these curves. We are somewhere in the middle of a very long series of them.
Yasmine Khosrowshahi43,749 просмотров • 6 дней назад
In 2023, Stanford professor Matt Abrahams gave a masterclass on how to think fast & speak smartly on the spot. He explained: • Why anxiety destroys clarity • How structure beats intelligence • Secret to spontaneous charisma 12 lessons to master communication in real time:
Yasmine Khosrowshahi712,707 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
In 2009, Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky explained why depression is not a mental problem but a biological breakdown. He revealed: - Why “just be strong” is nonsense - Why stress rewires your future - How biology + psychology collide 15 lessons on the science of depression:
Yasmine Khosrowshahi494,457 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
This 20-minute video reveals how MrBeast gets 100M+ views on every video. He breaks down: • Why most videos fail • How to hack attention • What the algorithm responds to • How billions of views are engineered 11 lessons from MrBeast that will make you a better creator:
Yasmine Khosrowshahi342,693 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
This video is a 40-min masterclass by David Lynch on creativity, intuition & ideas. He reveals: - How intuition beats intellect - Why the idea dictates everything - Why chasing careers mean nothing 12 lessons from Lynch that will change how you think about creativity forever:
Yasmine Khosrowshahi78,355 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
In 2013, Harvard professor gave a 1 hour masterclass on how to build a meaningful life. This talk reveals why: - Success is a broken metric - “Having it all” is a dangerous illusion - One idea silently determines your entire life 15 lessons from Prof. Howard Stevenson:
Yasmine Khosrowshahi64,430 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Viktor Frankl: “Young people don’t need less tension. They need more meaning.” “Most of us have never been in the concentration camp experience. We’ve never had to go through that horror and tragedy. So one would think that today it would be easier to find meaning in life. And yet, I sense that it’s more difficult in a sense today than it was in years past.” Frankl explains the paradox of modern life: “We are living in a society, an affluent society, a welfare state that is virtually out to satisfy and gratify each and every human need except for one need: the most basic and fundamental need of man, the need for meaning.” He points to the hidden problem beneath comfort: “Consumer societies are even creating needs. But the need for meaning remains unfulfilled. It is what I have called the unheard cry for meaning.” Frankl argues that people are often taught to chase the wrong things: “You scarcely will find any reference to what is the most fundamental and basic concern of man—neither pleasure, nor happiness, nor power, nor prestige but originally and basically his wish, his desire, to find and fulfill a meaning in his life.” He explains what happens when someone truly sees meaning: “If there is a meaning to fulfill, if he becomes cognizant of such a meaning, then he is ready to suffer. He is ready to offer sacrifices. He is ready to undergo tension, stress, and so forth without any harm being done to his health.” Frankl’s point is powerful: Stress itself is not the enemy. Meaningless stress is. When a person knows why they are enduring something, they can carry an extraordinary amount of difficulty without breaking. But when meaning disappears, even comfort becomes dangerous. Frankl takes this to its starkest conclusion: “If there is no meaning, no meaning in his visual field, then he takes his life.” He then contrasts the most brutal conditions imaginable with modern emptiness: “Can you imagine a situation for a human being which is more full of stress than Auschwitz? And virtually all neurotic symptomatology disappeared there… On the other hand, in the welfare state of Austria… the top-ranking question among students was suicide among youngsters of 14 to 15 years of age.” This is the core of his warning: The human soul does not collapse simply because life is hard. It collapses when life feels pointless. Frankl then explains what is missing for young people today: “There were virtually no tensions because they are pampered. Nobody allows himself to challenge them.” And then he says the line every parent, teacher, and leader should sit with: “What young people need are ideals and challenges, personal tasks, and to begin with, in the first place.” He makes it clear that protection is not always love: “Neither parents nor school teachers are courageous enough to challenge them… Don’t arouse tensions, don’t create tensions, don’t put stress on them.” But Frankl disagrees with that instinct entirely. “People today are not over-demanded. They are under-demanded.” That may be the diagnosis of our time. We assume the problem is too much pressure. Frankl suggests the deeper problem is too little purpose. Too little responsibility. Too few ideals worth serving. Too few examples worth following. Too little being asked from the human spirit. Young people don’t only need safety. They need something worthy of their strength. Because a person does not become fully alive by being endlessly comforted. They become alive when life asks something of them and they rise to meet it. Lessons I'm taking away from this clip: 1. Meaning is a better fuel than comfort. People don’t break only because life is hard. They break when life feels empty. We live in a world obsessed with convenience, ease, and removing friction but a frictionless life is not always a meaningful one. A lot of people are not exhausted from doing too much. They are exhausted from doing too little that actually matters to them. Purpose gives weight to your effort. It makes sacrifice feel chosen instead of imposed. 2. The real danger is not stress. It’s meaningless stress. Stress by itself is not the enemy. In fact, some forms of stress are necessary for growth, discipline, achievement, and character building. The real problem begins when a person is carrying pressure without any reason that feels deeply theirs. That’s when stress becomes emptiness. For me, the lesson is to stop asking, How do I remove all difficulties from my life? and start asking, Which difficulties are worth carrying because they are attached to a bigger purpose? That question alone can change how you work, lead, and live.
Yasmine Khosrowshahi43,662 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
In 2010, Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky gave a 1-hour masterclass on "Human Behavioral Biology." He broke down how: - Biology collapses moral - Behavior changes w/o intention - Mind & body rewrite each other 10 lessons that'll make you a master at human behavior:
Yasmine Khosrowshahi79,552 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
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1. The Great British Swim: 157 days at sea In 2018, Ross Edgley became the first person to swim around mainland Great Britain. He swam 12 hours a day for 157 consecutive days. Never set foot on land once. He faced: – 5,000+ jellyfish – 7ft swells – Salt tongue (his tongue literally began to fall apart) This wasn’t just physical—it was psychological warfare.
Yasmine Khosrowshahi223,237 просмотров • 1 год назад
This 6-minute video reveals how Elon Musk learns complex topics: Elon Musk: “You don’t need college for learning.” “Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free. It is not a question of learning.” Musk starts with a blunt point: College may still have value, but not for the reason most people think. He says the real signal of college is not intelligence. It is proof that someone can work through structure: “Can somebody work hard at something, including a bunch of sort of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework assignments, and kind of soldier through and get it done?” That, in his view, is one of the main things a degree demonstrates: Discipline. Compliance. Follow-through. Not necessarily exceptional ability. Musk pushes the idea even further: “Colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores. But they’re not for learning.” Whether or not you agree with him fully, the underlying point is hard to ignore: We live in a time when knowledge is no longer locked inside institutions. The internet has dismantled the old gatekeeping model. Today, if someone wants to learn design, engineering, writing, sales, coding, marketing, or history, they can access world-class information without ever stepping into a lecture hall. The bottleneck is no longer access to information. It is desire. Focus. Curiosity. Consistency. Musk then draws a distinction that matters: “If you’re trying to do something exceptional, there must be evidence of exceptional ability.” That line changes the whole conversation. Because in real life, people do not reward credentials alone. They reward proof. Not what you enrolled in. What you built. Not what you intended to do. What you finished. Not what you say you know. What you can demonstrate. This is why portfolios outperform claims. Why execution beats prestige. Why visible work creates leverage. Musk even says, somewhat provocatively: “I don’t consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability.” And then he points to the kinds of examples people love to cite: “Gates is a pretty smart guy, he dropped out. John was pretty smart, he dropped out. Larry Ellison, smart guy, he dropped out.” His broader message is not that everyone should leave school. It is that conventional paths are not the only paths to intelligence, capability, or impact. Then Musk moves into something even more useful: His view of how people actually learn. “Education should be as close to a video game as possible. Like a good video game. You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day.” That comparison is simple, but powerful. Why do people obsess over games? Because games are interactive. They are immersive. They provide immediate feedback. They make progress visible. They create challenge without making the challenge feel meaningless. Musk’s point is that learning should work the same way. “If you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling and far easier to do.” This is where traditional education often breaks down. Students are expected to move in lockstep. Same pace. Same timeline. Same structure. Same sequence. Musk rejects that model completely: “People are not objects on an assembly line.” That may be one of the clearest criticisms in the entire transcript. Because standard education often optimizes for administration, not human variation. It is easier to manage people in batches. But easier to manage does not mean better to learn. Some people move faster in math. Some are stronger in language. Some are highly visual. Some need to touch the thing, build the thing, test the thing. And yet most systems still treat learning like synchronized marching. Musk argues for something more individualized: “Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in in each subject.” That idea matters beyond school. Adults learn this way too. No one becomes exceptional by waiting for permission to move at average speed. The most effective learners usually follow interest with intensity. They go deeper where curiosity pulls them. They accelerate where energy is highest. They build momentum through engagement, not force. Musk also shares one of the most practical ideas in the transcript: “Teach problem solving, or teach to the problem, not to the tools.” Then he gives an example. If you wanted to teach someone how engines work, the traditional system might start with separate lessons on screwdrivers, wrenches, and tools. Musk thinks that is backwards. A better method is: “Here’s the engine. Now let’s take it apart.” Then the tools become relevant in context. Now the student understands *why* the screwdriver matters. Now the wrench has meaning. Now the lesson is connected to reality. This is a much bigger principle than education. People learn faster when relevance is obvious. Abstract instruction is forgettable. Applied learning sticks. When people can see the problem first, they care about the tool. That is true in business too. You do not start with theory for theory’s sake. You start with the problem that needs solving. Then you learn exactly what is required to solve it. Finally, Musk says something that quietly explains why so much education fails: “A lot of things people learn, probably there’s no point in learning them because they never use them in the future.” That may sound harsh, but most people know the feeling. They do not resist learning because they are lazy. They resist learning because it feels disconnected. They are told to memorize before they understand relevance. They are told to sit still before they become curious. They are told to absorb information before they have any reason to care. Musk’s view, underneath the provocation, is actually simple: People learn best when learning is alive. When it is tied to action. When it respects differences in pace and aptitude. When it feels engaging instead of ceremonial. When it produces visible competence, not just paper credentials. The internet made learning abundant. What matters now is whether someone can turn information into evidence. That is the real separator. Lessons I'm taking away from this clip: 1. In today’s world, access to knowledge is cheap. Proof of skill is expensive. We have crossed a point where information alone is no longer impressive because everyone has access to it. You can watch the best interviews, read the best essays, take the best online lessons, and still remain average if you never turn any of it into real work. So the advantage now is not “I know this.” The advantage is “I built this, tested this, shipped this, and can show the result.” From my perspective, this is especially true in business and personal branding. The market rewards visible competence far more than silent knowledge. 2. People learn faster when the learning feels useful, alive, and connected to a real problem. This is why so many people struggle with conventional education but thrive when they start building something for themselves. Urgency creates focus. Relevance creates retention. Once the lesson is attached to a real outcome, the brain pays attention differently. That’s why I think one of the best ways to learn anything is to start a project that forces you to use the skill in public or in real life. Learning becomes sharper when there is something at stake. It stops being passive consumption and becomes active problem-solving. 3. The smartest people are often not the ones collecting credentials. They are the ones following curiosity with discipline. Exceptional people usually do not just learn what is assigned to them. They go where their interest is strongest and then they pursue it seriously. That combination matters: curiosity without discipline goes nowhere, and discipline without curiosity becomes lifeless. The sweet spot is when someone becomes obsessed enough to keep going deeper than required. To me, that is where the real edge comes from. Not from following the default path better than everyone else, but from developing uncommon depth in something that genuinely pulls you.
Yasmine Khosrowshahi34,038 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Last year, Elon Musk explained why 99% of entrepreneurs fail despite millions in funding. His frameworks: • Ego-to-ability ratio • First-principles thinking • Reality as the final judge • Engineering over storytelling 12 timeless lessons from Elon's 50-min masterclass:
Yasmine Khosrowshahi80,966 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
