Tom Schmidt

"Results tend to accumulate to the person who enjoys the lifestyle that precedes the result."

Optimize for enthusiasm. Make as many choices as you can that leave you feeling energetic and interested. Pay attention to when you have the urge to pursue or participate in something and do more of it."

And OpenAI appears to continue to decide its model names by sprinkling the blood of a virgin intern into a bag of Scrabble tiles, praying to get something good, and picking whatever jumble of letters comes out.

We're wired for novelty, but life rewards repetition.

Good ideas are rare. When you find something that works, you've found gold. But instead of mining it, we go looking for more gold.

Maybe if I interviewed them, if I talked to 50 top performers in different fields about what makes them tick, then I’d be able to derive a set of first principles, the physics of how knowledge organization worked. If I turned those interviews into a newsletter, I could also use the newsletter to build the audience for my eventual product. At the... See more

optimistic realism, intellectual generosity, and conversational authority.

• What helped you get here that you need to give away?


• Who are you when you are the best to yourself in the world around you?


• What is the beautiful question that you’ve cradled through years of doubt – which is too precious to ask – that you are afraid the answer will come back as ‘no’?


• What would you be if you failed to be yourself?


• What promise did you

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