solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem. (Location 4036)
Note: simple
“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”—Thomas Edison (Location 4057)
Note: put this in list to implement
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (Location 4827)
Note: get this
[TF: This will blow your mind. Go to any Kickstarter project, click on Share, and pick a social network, like Twitter. A pre-populated tweet will appear with a shortlink. Copy and paste the link alone into a new tab, add + to the end, and hit Return. Voilà.] (Location 5212)
Note: this is killer
PR outreach and launch (this alone could save you more than 100 hours), visit fourhourworkweek.com/kickstarter “Occasionally, a good idea comes to you first, if you’re lucky. (Location 5247)
Note: awesome
“His hypothesis is that everything breaks at roughly these points of 3 and 10 [multiples of 3 and powers of 10]. And by ‘everything,’ it means everything: how you handle payroll, how you schedule meetings, what kind of (Location 5458)
Note: find a place where people have a need at this transitin
“IF YOU HAD $100 MILLION, WHAT WOULD YOU BUILD THAT WOULD HAVE NO VALUE TO OTHERS IN COPYING?” (Location 5510)
Note: gold
“Valve: Handbook for New Employees” (Location 5520)
Note: find thi
“Money is a great servant but a horrible master.” (Location 5580)
Note: good quote
Invisible Selling Machine, (Location 5582)
Note: nice
FOR HIRING WELL—“WHO?” IS OFTEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN “WHAT?” “The Who book [by Geoff Smart, Randy Street] is a condensed version of Topgrading, and I learned of it at Mint, where the founder was using it.” TF: I now recommend this book to all of my startup founders, who have, in turn, (Location 5629)
Note: read
This visual metaphor was first taught to me by a college professor, and it’s a great way to think about priorities. Paraphrasing my teacher: “Imagine you have a large glass jar. Next to it, you have a few large rocks, a small pile of marble-sized pebbles, and a pile of sand. If you put in the sand or pebbles first, what happens? You can’t fit the big rocks in. But if you add the big rocks, then the medium-sized pebbles, and only then the sand, it all fits.” In other words, the minutiae fit around the big things, but the big things don’t fit around the minutiae. (Location 5669)
Note: use this as a visual representation
This week, try experimenting with saying “I don’t understand. Can you explain that to me?” more often. (See Malcolm Gladwell’s mention of his father on page 573.) (Location 5716)
Note: try this
You put in whatever it is—‘120 minutes of freedom.’ And then, you are completely locked off of your Internet, no matter what, for that amount of time. So, as soon as I sit down to write, the first thing I do is I put on Freedom, because if you’re writing and you want to research something, you research something, and then you get stuck in the clickbait rabbit hole. What you can do is save all of the things you want to research, and just research them when that time expires. You’ll find it so much more efficient.” TF: Neil and I, and many other writers, use “TK” as a placeholder for things we need to research later (e.g., “He was TK years old at the time.”). This is common practice, as almost no English words have TK in them (except that pesky Atkins), making it easy to use Control-F when it’s time to batch-research or fact-check. (Location 5941)
Note: good tip
was told my goal should be “two crappy pages a day.” That’s it. If you hit two crappy pages, even if you never use them, you can feel “successful” for the day. Sometimes you barely eke out two pages, and they are truly terrible. But at least 50% of the time, you’ll produce perhaps 5, 10, or even—on the rare miracle day—20 pages. Draft ugly and edit pretty. (Location 5971)
Note: good info
The question I ask whenever I’m straining for extended periods is, “What would this look like if it were easy?” (Location 6083)
Note: apply to software
Music for sleep Justin listens to Max Richter’s From Sleep, a composed album with a shortened version on Spotify. “I put it on very quietly as I am starting my bedtime routine, so it usually ends 15 to 20 minutes after I’m asleep. Or I will use the Sonos sleep timer, if I’m at home. It started to have this Pavlovian knockout effect after a while, if I use it every day, like a lullaby. If that’s too much melody, there’s an artist called Mute Button that has high-quality, long-field recordings. The gentle rain sounds plus sleep timer are fantastic. I find it great to drown out hotel sounds when traveling.” (Location 6105)
Note: try
“‘It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.’ I’d put it on every college campus in the world. In our youth, we are wonderfully creative and idealistic. . . . Truth is, young creative minds don’t need more ideas, they need to take more responsibility with the ideas they’ve already got.” (Location 6145)
Note: likse
think of problems as gold mines. The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.” (Location 6289)
Note: moner
“WHEN 99% OF PEOPLE DOUBT YOU, YOU’RE EITHER GRAVELY WRONG OR ABOUT TO MAKE HISTORY.” (Location 6290)
Note: m
Stone Soup. “It’s a children’s story that is the best MBA degree you can read. Between [the concept of] supercredibility and Stone Soup, [you have a great foundation]. (Location 6327)
Note: read
“First of all, when you’re going 10% bigger, you’re competing against everybody. Everybody’s trying to go 10% bigger. When you’re trying to go 10 times bigger, you’re there by yourself. For me, [take asteroid mining as an example]. I don’t have a lot of asteroid mining competition out there, or prospecting. Or take human longevity, trying to add 40 years in healthy lifespan with HLI. There are not a lot of companies out there [attempting this]. “The second thing is, when you are trying to go 10 times bigger, you have to start with a clean sheet of paper, and you approach the problem completely differently. I’ll give you my favorite example: Tesla. How did Elon start Tesla and build from scratch the safest, most extraordinary car, not even in America, but I think in the world? It’s by not having a legacy from the past to drag into the present. That’s important. “The third thing is when you try to go 10 times bigger versus 10% bigger, it’s typically not 100 times harder, but the reward is 100 times more.” (Location 6362)
Note: .
“Three to five billion new consumers are coming online in the next 6 years. Holy cow, that’s extraordinary. What do they need? What could you provide for them, because they represent tens of trillions of dollars coming into the global economy, and they also represent an amazing resource of innovation. (Location 6372)
Note: dude
Law 2: When given a choice . . . take both. Law 3: Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. Law 6: When forced to compromise, ask for more. Law 7: If you can’t win, change the rules. Law 8: If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. Law 11: “No” simply means begin again at one level higher. Law 13: When in doubt: THINK. Law 16: The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. Law 17: The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. (adopted from Alan Kay) Law 19: You get what you incentivize. Law 22: The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. Law 26: If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. (Location 6382)
Note: .
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE “BLUE SKY” PERIOD The season writing process for The Office began with the Blue Sky Period, which was B.J.’s favorite part of every year. For 2 to 4 weeks, the writers’ room banter was each person asking, “What if . . . ?” over and over again. Crazy scenarios were encouraged, not penalized. Every idea, no matter what, was valid during this period. The idea generation and filtering/editing stages were entirely separate. As B.J. explained, “To me, everything is idea and execution and, if you separate idea and execution, you don’t put too much pressure on either of them.” (Location 6473)
Note: create mhy blue sky period
One of my favorite time-management essays is “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” by Paul Graham of Y Combinator fame. Give it a read. As investor Brad Feld and many others have observed, great creative work isn’t possible if you’re trying to piece together 30 minutes here and 45 minutes there. Large, uninterrupted blocks of time—3 to 5 hours minimum—create the space needed to find and connect the dots. And one block per week isn’t enough. There has to be enough slack in the system for multi-day, CPU-intensive synthesis. For me, this means at least 3 to 4 mornings per week where I am in “maker” mode until at least 1 p.m. (Location 6597)
“Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect.” (Location 6986)
Note: love
NOTE-TAKING—DISTILLING THE GEMS Maria and I have a nearly identical note-taking process for books: “I highlight in the Kindle app in the iPad, and then Amazon has this function where you can, basically, see your Kindle notes and highlights on the desktop of your computer. I copy them from that page and paste them into an Evernote file to have all of my notes on a specific book in one place. I also take a screen grab of a specific iPad Kindle page with my highlighted passage, and then email that screen grab into my Evernote email because Evernote has, as you know, optical character recognition. So, when I search within it, it’s also going to search the text in that image. I don’t have to wait until I finish the book to explore all my notes. . . . I love Evernote. I’ve been using it for many years, and I could probably not get through my day without it.” (Location 6992)
Note: do this
get in the zone, Samy likes to code to AudioMolly.com, The Glitch Mob, and Infected Mushroom. Based on his recommendation, I found some of my current favorites—Pegboard Nerds (“Blackout”) and David Starfire (Karuna)—on AudioMolly. (Location 7296)
Note: look these up
TF: What kind of first-of-a-kind group could you gather if you had a gun to your head? Rereading “The Law of Category” (page 276) and “1,000 True Fans” (page 292) might help. (Location 7544)
Note: $$$
80% of people who appear to be haters or would-be haters. They’ll even sometimes do an about-face (Location 8958)
