When you read a biography, everybody wants to know the beginning. There's always a part of the biography after they're super rich and famous and they're donating a bunch of money and I'm glad they're doing all that, that's fundamentally not interesting. How many people can relate to that? But everybody can relate to, hey, I have a dream. This is what I want my life to be. Life is going to throw up all these barriers, so how do I navigate that maze to actually get to where I'm going? Everybody can relate to that.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy • Passion & Pain

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So it's both scary and exciting that the greatest things that any of us might accomplish are not something that we can imagine or something that we could accomplish through just a linear progression. So I'd love to describe what you think this means for how people should behave, especially ambitious people that want to achieve great things or affec... See more

Patrick O'Shaughnessy • Greatness Without Goals

While doing the reporting for my book, I read a postmortem from a successful startup founder. They said something along the lines of: “One of the best things that can happen to you is to achieve professional success when you’re young. That way you can learn that it does little to change your happiness.” For better or worse, achieving your goals sho

Every • On the Value of Not Reaching Your Goals

I feel like a lot of founders forget that everything big starts small.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy • Finding Undiscovered Talent

The only person out of every single person that I've studied on the podcast that I consider my blueprint for, I want that, I want their life in totality is Ed Thorp. Because, history's greatest entrepreneurs, how'd they get there, they're going to over optimize their work to the detriment of everything, their health. In many cases, they die earlier... See more

Patrick O'Shaughnessy • Passion & Pain

A Compulsive Search for the Most Interesting People with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Compound Manual

Frederik Gieschen manual.withcompound.com

You can kind of imagine the world getting split into two: jobs that have a very clear set of next steps—working in the military, or working at Starbucks, or working as a manager in a large company, clear jobs—and then you got opaque jobs. And I think starting a company is an incredibly opaque job—it's very unclear what to do next. It's very unclear... See more

Patrick O'Shaughnessy • Finding Undiscovered Talent

The best description of a business I ever heard came from Richard Branson. He's like, "All businesses, it's an idea or service that make somebody else's life better. If you make other people's life better, you'll capture that value in return." So I don't find many of these people are moderate.