“What if I told you that in order to be in the top 10% of certain industries, all you have to do is show up and market your business every single day? That won’t work for every startup, but in some spaces, it will put you ahead of the pack.”

“My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it — all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity — , but to love it…” ― Nietzsche"

“One might propose that the entire profit motive behind the genre of creative work made up by brand, marketing, and design is to drive behavior change. We enable customers to do something new — whether by informing them that an option exists, or making it more attractive and effective to choose that option over others.”

“Several academic studies have found that the question isn’t whether luck exists. It’s whether you think it does.”

“So, while it may seem counterintuitive, the study shows that believing in luck boosts your confidence in your ability to control future outcomes. If you had a winning streak in the past and you believe in luck, you’ll likely try, try again.”

A renewed interest in human curation, a slow move away from big social, a clearer understanding of platform incentives, the economic feasibility of subscription businesses, and builders driven by a new set of values – combined, it feels like a good time for Internet businesses that are both human-scale and profitable.

Constraints are parameters within which one operates, guiding actions toward optimal outcomes, while restraints imply limitations that hinder progress. Embracing constraints should foster creativity and efficiency and should help transform potential obstacles into catalysts for innovation.

Work matters if we do fewer things and stick to what’s needed, wanted, or useful. It’s also more likely to be exceptional. The mere act of creating something valuable can create joint satisfaction and meaning – for everyone. In this environment, work can both matter and be profitable. 

Slow productivity is good business.

“MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks pointed out in a recent TechCrunch interview that AI has to deal with much tougher problems than most technology, and it won’t necessarily grow in the same rapid way as, say, chips under Moore’s law have.”

“I think income is a lot more important than wealth. It’s also because from a policy perspective, dealing with income is a lot easier than dealing with wealth. But the biggest reason is that I think that wealth is a lot harder for regular people to understand than income.

In general, regular people’s intuitive “folk” understanding of income is pretty close to the way economists think about it. Every month you get a certain number of dollars, and you can spend those dollars on stuff you want — pizza, haircuts, medical care, rent, treats for your pet rabbit, etc. The number of dollars you get represents the value of the stuff you can buy.

That’s pretty much exactly how GDP works at the level of the whole economy — GDP is the total value of the stuff that gets produced in the economy, and it’s theoretically exactly equal to the total income that everyone earns for producing that stuff. So income for a whole economy works pretty much the same as it works for an individual.

Wealth is different, for a number of reasons. For one thing, unlike income, wealth can be negative. This means that a lot of personal wealth isn’t actually the world’s wealth.”

“A small business in general is a shitty business. 65% fail in the first 10 years in the U.S.  A media company is also a shitty investment. Media stocks had their worst decline in 30 years in 2022. A creator is a small business that is also a media company (aka shit squared). “