Joe Stampone

Success makes noise. Building doesn't. That's the paradox: Exceptional looks boring until suddenly it isn't.

The people who change things aren't at the parties, they're home on Friday night, obsessed with problems everyone else finds tedious. Their Instagram looks empty because their life isn't shareable. Just the same unsexy routine, day after day. They aren't doing anything glamorous. They're just consistently making steady incremental progress over a l

The solution is what IDEO cofounder Tim Brown called a “T-shaped professional” in the 1990s: becoming a specialist with a generalist’s mindset—deep in one area (like the stem of a T), and broad enough (like the top) to adapt, connect, and multiply value across others.

Position yourself where AI can’t easily reach—where your skills are both scarce and make the technology more useful.

People think good decision-making is about being right all the time. It's not. It's about lowering the cost of being wrong and changing your mind.

When the cost of mistakes is high, we're paralyzed with fear. When the cost of mistakes is low, we can move fast and adapt.

Make mistakes cheap, not rare.

"You can attract luck simply by telling people what you are working on."

This captures something I struggle with daily; how do you tend to your children and be present in mundane moments, when you could instead get the instant dopamine hit of the world's best ideas? The competition between presence and endless intellectual stimulation feels impossible to navigate. We have 24/7 access to everything, but no framework for

I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.
(Phil Knight, Nike founder, from Shoe Dog)