SG

Mental Model of the Week

V2 | Chemistry | Alloying

Alloying is the art of mixing elements to create something greater than the sum of its parts. While our intuition tells us that pure substances are best, alloying shows this is not always true. One plus one can equal ten. By blending ingredients in precise proportions, metallurgists can create mate... See more

“Double the pleasure and divide the pain,” and that’s what relationships are all about.

Waiting for perfect conditions is how otherwise intelligent people keep themselves stuck.

Two entrepreneurs spot the same opportunity. One builds elaborate plans; the other tests crude prototypes. The planner is still planning when the tester sells their company.

While you wait for perfect conditions, others are creating them.

An imperfect solution that exists outperforms a perfect one that doesn't.

Facebook wasn't the first social network - it was just the one that kept iterating and showing up. The Wright brothers weren't the most educated aviation pioneers, but they were the ones who got a plane off the ground.

What you build matters more than what you could have buil... See more

Checking all the boxes

The simplest way forward is to see which boxes your target market has and then check all of them.

Unfortunately #1: The audience doesn’t publish their actual list of boxes, they conceal many of them.

Unfortunately #2: They don’t all have the same boxes.

Unfortunately #3: If it were that straightforward, your competition would ha... See more

Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with tho... See more

Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave th... See more

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it beco... See more