Christian Baaki

Environment matters a lot; move to where you flourish maximally. Put yourself in environments where you have to perform to your utmost; if you can get by being average, you probably will. (Greek saying: “A captain only shows during a storm.”)

You have to build a great pipeline. Your best pipeline is going to come from your personal contacts. You literally have to sit everyone at your company down and tell them to name the 10 best people they've ever worked with or gone to school with … You get those 10 best people and then you just pound the pavement. You have lunch, coffee, breakfast,

A friend of mine lost the ability to form memories for a few days last week and it really hammered home that being in the present isn't all that great — it is the layering of the past onto the present that gives stuff meaning.

This makes me think: if having no memory robs the present of meaning, actively forming more memories should make life richer

On top of that, these are the only two metrics that you can “improve” in your business → either making customers worth more or reducing the cost to acquire them. You should be able to tie every project on your list directly to the improvement of one of these metrics.

The fastest-moving entrepreneurs are obsessive resource allocators. Similar to investors, they seek the best risk-adjusted returns with the resources they have. The main resources of the business are time (of the team), attention (of the team), and capital (of the business). So resource allocation is 1) aligning attention on the most important thin

Even if you can’t experience the thing directly, try going for information-dense sources with high amounts of detail and facts, and then reason up from those facts. On foreign policy, read books published by university presses -- not The Atlantic or The Economist or whatever. You can read those after you’ve developed a model of the thing yourself,

One thesis of the internet that always stuck with me comes from Evan Williams, who founded Twitter/Blogger/Medium. He said that the best way to create a giant internet company is to take something people want to do and make it 10x easier.

It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important—and worth doing.

Steinbeck on the one story:

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one... Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil... There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chip