Figuring out what you want

“The best thing you can do is to be exceptionally good at something,” Buffett said. “Whatever abilities you have can’t be taken away from you – they can’t actually be inflated away from you.”

“The best investment – by far – is anything that develops yourself,” he said.

The way to wealth is to be exceptionally good at something. If you are the best at... See more

Yes. I have a young friend who dreams of becoming a novelist, but who never seems to be able to complete his work. According to him, his job keeps him too busy, and he can never find enough time to write novels, and that’s why he can’t complete work and enter it for writing awards. But is that the real reason? No! It’s actually that he wants to

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Here’s the canonical case: you grow up with people who know from age five that they want to be doctors, truck drivers, belly dancers, whatever. But you have no idea where you fit in, and as time goes on, you start to suspect that you don’t fit in anywhere .

There’s a couple things going on here. First, you should check back in with those folks and... See more

Wolff and Beast might seem extreme, but they’re only extreme in terms of output, not in terms of time on task. This is the obvious-but-overlooked insight that you find when you unpack: people spend so much time doing their jobs. Hours! Every day! It’s 2pm on a Tuesday and you’re doing your job, and now it’s 3:47pm and you’re still doing it. There’s... See more

When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked. For example, in grad school I worked with lots of undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors. Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this, ” he would say, miming typing on a... See more

Billy: I'll skip to it. I'll go be a ski instructor and do the bare minimum—meet the quota of ski instructing days, but then just ski. For my first year of doing that, I thought, I've unlocked the secret of the universe. This is what I'm going to do forever.

Jackson: Be without obligation. Right.

Billy: It was like the sword cutting daisies. It... See more

Even if you can identify and control the highest-order bit, you might not be able to flip it right now.

Maybe there isn’t enough capital, or maybe you don’t yet have the skills needed to flip the most important bit. You’ll need to start on lower-order bits first to level up. Everything is resource-constrained and you need to be strategic about... See more

Your procrastination isn't a character flaw or lack of discipline. It's often a sophisticated guidance system trying to direct you toward greater alignment with your authentic gifts and path.

Learning to decode these resistance messages—distinguishing between fear and wisdom, identifying specific types of resistance, and responding... See more