Greatness

Walter Isaacson on the link between suffering and greatness and those with happy childhoods: “We grow up with fewer demons but we grow up with less drive. We end being Boswell and not Johnson. We end up being the observer and not the doer. Respect those who are in the arena…” A few years ago, I learned that Jobs, Ellison, Musk and Bezos hav... See more

All these books, there is the decision you can make to compromise on the quality of your product or take a shortcut or do something you would never dare do it. I just read the biography of the guy that started In-N-Out. Compared to his contemporaries, the McDonald's and Carl's Junior and all this explosion of fast food that was happening at that ti... See more

“Grind it out. You can make something look like magic by going further than most reasonable people would go.”

Patrick Collison on Stripe: “My intuition is that more of Stripe success than one would think is down to the fact that people like beautiful things and for rational reasons. Because, what does a beautiful thing tell you? It tells you the person who made it really cared, and you can observe some superficial details, but probably they didn’t only ... See more

The best reason to not cut corners: If you didn't get the response you were hoping for, how can you know if it was because your idea was bad vs. you cut corners?