Category: Bible

Your relationship with time (from Auren Hoffman)

Really thought provoking piece from Auren (his podcast is great too):

https://auren.substack.com/p/seconds-to-strategy-how-your-relationship

To quote:

There are five types of time:
1. Micro Time (sub-second)
2. Engagement Time (Seconds)
3. Business Time (Minutes to Hours)
4. Strategy Time (Days to Weeks)
5. Big-Thinking Time (Months to Years)

If forced to choose, I’m probably a 3. Leaning towards 4.

I also wonder how correlated this is with age and context. For example in university, I was definitely more 2, and during my Wall Street internship I was very 1 and 2.

And:

If you are one of those people that has a great “gut”, you likely should be in a career where quick-time decisions rule. The more you trust your gut, the more you should choose a profession where you are making decisions quickly.

And:

The longer the timescale you are optimizing for, the more you should spend reading (and gathering information). The shorter your timescale, the more you should spend doing (for muscle memory).

Definitely going in the bible.

My Personal Bible – some recent additions (Wences’s bitcoin PDF, Rafa Nadal’s memoir)

Here’s an updated version of my personal bible which is a collection of excerpts and highlights and quotes from my favorite writings.

Recently I added two sources, one is Wences Casares’s bitcoin PDF (original post), some snippets:

If Bitcoin succeeds it may be a global non-political standard of value and settlement. The world already has a global non-political standard of length in the meter, and a global non-political standard of weight in the kilo. Could you imagine a world in which we changed the length of the meter or the weight of the kilo regularly according to political considerations? Yet that is what we are doing with our standard of value.

To illustrate the power of these qualities, consider that today the only standard of value and settlement that the United States of America can be certain that The People’s Republic of China (PRC) will not discriminate access to, censor transactions from or dilute the value of is the Bitcoin Blockchain.

I’m not half done with Rafa Nadal’s 2011 memoir (Amazon link) which is AMAZING, felt compelled to begin adding it to my bible already. Some snippets:

To illustrate the power of these qualities, consider that today the only standard of value and settlement that the United States of America can be certain that The People’s Republic of China (PRC) will not discriminate access to, censor transactions from or dilute the value of is the Bitcoin Blockchain.

Nadal’s mother, Ana María Parera, does not disagree. “He’s on top in the tennis world but, deep down, he is a super-sensitive human being full of fears and insecurities that people who don’t know him would scarcely imagine,” she says. “He doesn’t like the dark, for example, and he prefers to sleep with the light, or the TV, on. He is not comfortable with thunder and lightning either. When he was a child he’d hide under a cushion when that happened and, even now, when there’s a storm and you need to go outside to fetch something, he won’t let you. And then there are his eating habits, his loathing of cheese and tomato, and of ham, the national dish of Spain. I’m not as mad about ham myself as most people seem to be, but cheese? It is a bit peculiar.”

After all he’s accomplished since then — can’t wait for an update.

Latest version of Personal Bible + newly added content

I recently updated my personal bible and wanted to share the new content that was added.

Here’s the PDF download.

—

The Tail End

It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.

In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%.

Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.

Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.

The Tail End

—

The Paradoxes of Modern Life

The Paradox of Writing: Great writing looks effortless. But because the ideas are so clear, casual readers don’t appreciate how much time it took to refine them.

The Paradox of Originality: Many of history’s greatest artists have found their voice by copying others. We discover who we are by imitating others and watching our uniqueness emerge over time.

The Paradox of Specificity: In the age of the Internet, when everybody has Google search and social media, differentiation is free marketing. The more specific your goal, the more opportunities you’ll create for yourself.

The Paradox of Strategy: The same things that help you achieve outlier success also increase your chances of outlandish failure. For example, investing with leverage increases your chances of risk and reward.

The Paradoxes of Modern Life

—

10 lessons from The Beatles

The first rule of improvisation (and brainstorming) is “yes… and”. When someone suggests an idea, plays a note, says a line, you accept it completely, then build on it. That’s how improvisational comedy or music flows. The moment someone says ‘no’, the flow is broken. As they slog through Don’t Let Me Down, George breaks the spell. Instead of building and accepting he leaps to judgement, saying “I think it’s awful.” Immediately, John and Paul lay down the rules: “Well, have you got anything?” “you’ve gotta come up with something better”.

But at other times, Paul, John and producer Glyn Johns keep at it: pouring out idea after idea. Some of them awful — see ‘Don’t be afraid’ below — but most are just technical ways to reframe the problem: play it faster, play it slower, change the order, change the instruments, add repetition, remove repetition.…They never seem to discuss or argue over these changes, they just play it to see if it works. They don’t judge the idea, they judge execution.

View at Medium.com