Why do some people achieve so many of the things they want, and others not? Do people have a fixed budget of things they can achieve in a lifetime? It doesn’t seem so. Rather, it seems like our achievement budget is a function of the number of priorities we have. Interestingly, it seems to be a nonlinear function. Meaning that if you go from 4 prio... See more
A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.
People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever... See more
as Jeff always noted, you can make micro-adjustments in the long run to tweak the profit leaks. For some really large, heavy items, you can tack on shipping surcharges or just remove them from qualifying for Prime. These days, some items in Amazon are marked as "Add-on items" and you can only order them in conjunction with enough other items such t... See more
hypothesis:
1. work feels bad (unmotivating, boring, hard) when we lack of focus
2. focus is upstream of energy, flow, fulfillment, progress, feedback loops
what's upstream of focus?
attention (presence) paired w/ agency (when our abilities and beliefs match our context) Show more
One thing I do look back on fondly was how incredibly focused we were. Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren’t working on. You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing.
To pick a somewhat trivial example, at fireside chats with Mark (the predecessor to the co... See more
A lot of companies don’t make it because in the process of trying to get many things right, they don’t get anything right.
Why are they in such a hurry?
A great company is a privilege, and it’s a privilege best earned through a singular product, not a collection of products. Entrepreneurs and creatives think about batches of products —creating an e... See more
I have a suspicion that most adults (75%+) could pick any skill—excluding sports—and work their way into the top 10% in the world simply by working exclusively on it every day for two years.
But almost nobody displays that degree of focus, so we will never know.
Doing more things does not drive faster or better results. Doing better things drives better results. Even more accurately, doing one thing as best you can drives better results.