Happy Monday!! I hope you’re as excited as I am to wrap up a great year :))
A little inspiration from Farnam Street:
“Results are accumulated in drops but lost in buckets.”
Andrew Chen said something:
For early consumer startup efforts, it’s better to focus on the basics. Understand your users, deliver a great product to the market that grows by itself, built moats, monetize in a user-aligned way. Grow your team, work with the best advisors/investors/etc. The basics.
Yes, yes and yes. What I’ve been trying to get across for ages.
Max Read asks: Did Elon Musk change?
“[T]he big difference between the Musk of the previous decade and the Musk we’ve seen this year is less his politics or his personality (or his choice of stimulants) but the financial conditions under which he operates.”
“Worse, the number of opportunities or exits you create through the chaos you provoke dramatically narrows, and suddenly you find that the only advantage you can seize comes from throwing your lot in with anti-vaxxers and child-trafficking conspiracy theorists.”
Yes, yes and yes. I’d be curious to look into his level of organization when building and exiting from his first companies :// I’d be surprised if these same tactics worked in the beginning of his career...
I loved Howard Lindzon’s Sunday Newsletter.
Managing energy and attention has been the key thing I’ve been personally working on the past year, so this hit home.
I loved this parallel drawn to fights:
“A lot of them have this ability to calmly sit and observe and not expend very much energy for long periods of time. And then strike very aggressively at a certain point in time. It’s not that they're doing nothing during the observation periods. They're just slowly accumulating information and observations and they're gaming things out in their head, but at a really low metabolic clip.”
I also loved this:
“[I]f there is no business to be done, then the point of the pencil should be as sharp when you leave as it was when you came in.”
Although, I do think early “hustling” comes less from an intellectual belief that intensity is necessary, but rather from a human need to feel deserving and worthy of success. Not sure if that’s just me though…
Have a relaxing Christmas week, and until next time!
Angeline