Quest hunting
To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal— to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.
Farnam Street • Hunter S. Thompson’s Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life
You want to build a competitive advantage that will endure over time. You don’t want to build a competitive advantage that is fleeting or that will get commoditized. Some awards, for example, may have been impressive early on, but as they have expanded significantly they’ve become more diluted and thus no longer as impressive. You want to have skil... See more
Erik Torenberg • Build Personal Moats
Ca not be commoditised: Asking the right questions for solving the right problems
What will the new commodities look like in the age of AI agents?
persistence
Execution
You can just do things
Perhaps building personal moats requires two things
- Writing down how you approach things
- Slowing down to reflect on the above
When it comes to business and careers, the more interesting people will succeed and capture more upside than ever before.
Because the uninteresting ones will get commoditized (hello 🤖).
And by interesting I mean being capable of analyzing, deciding, and executing in a way few others can.
Generating more unique ideas, understanding complex things fast
... See moreJim Simons: "I’m not an extremely fast thinker myself; I just work hard."
That was all I needed to do—work hard, not fast. A paper I published in '68 took me five years. But it has had 1,850 citations. For a math paper, that’s an awful lot.
There’s too much emphasis on a person’s being able to answer questions quickly."
Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.
More recently I’ve kept repeating to myself, don’t abandon your vision . Decisiveness is knowing myself well enough to take the plunge, then the rest is all faith.
Peak Decisiveness
I’ve started to think about the idea of the trophy job — a job that people covet for its status more than its substance.