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.

“I probably shouldn’t care what other people think either, because their brain is probably just as fucked up as mine…”

From Bryan Johnson:

When I was depressed, I learned this lesson — to observe my thoughts — not BE my thoughts. And when I could observe my mind in action, and it’d be like “Hey Bryan, life is not worth living, everything’s worthless, everything sucks, you should probably kill yourself.”Like ohh, I’m not those things, that’s just my brain throwing trash, being a troll. That was like the most liberating experience of my entire life and then I was like, oh you know what, my brain is probably very similar to other peoples’ brains, I probably shouldn’t care what other people think either, because their brain is probably just as fucked up as mine…

Podcast:

Podcast notes – Daniel Gross (Pioneer) on identifying 10x talent (Auren Hoffman’s podcast)

Guest Daniel Gross, runs Pioneer accelerator
Host Auren Hoffman

If you invest in 16 yos – who is underpriced? How to identify talent?
Simplest thing is raw energy – it’s hard to measure, but everyone knows how it feels
PG: Formidability and almost fear

Studies on Professor charisma – can tell after 2 minutes if a professor is charismatic

Every culture has energetic versus non-energetic types

IQ matters, need working memory, reason through complex problems, but there’s a asymptote rather quickly
Warren Buffett: Emotional stability is just as important (if not more)

For founding companies, initial hypothesis is generally wrong – how many things will you try, how quickly will you try them?
Energetic founders have more shots on goal

When you meet someone, would you work for them?

Is the person funny? Humor is underrated. Charismatic leaders are pretty funny
Humor creates bonding
like Peloton coaches telling jokes, building bonds with you through a screen

Don’t hire for lateral moves
True gratitude is powerful, try to lift people up

Ambition is more nurture
Who is that person performing for? Who are they trying to impress? Who are their role models?
Bezos even with all his success, is still competing with Elon

A lot of people perform for Twitter

Can we make people more energetic?
Dark Ages, we moved from alehouses > tea and coffee houses
Real miracle for human productivity

Humans have huge dynamic range, how much will you activate?
Meeting impressive people is a real motivator / energy boost

How to create more optimism in society
Number of native Chinese Nobel Laureates – only six or seven in such a huge nation
Lack of optimism
Very domestically competitive, leads to local optimization over global optimization

Israel has no market risk companies, only execution risk companies
No Snapchat, but they’ll will get semiconductors right
Related to harsh society, existential risks

What’s biggest motivator for founders?
Silicon Valley was not driven by commercial goals initially
A Walt Disney sense of building a cool place
Changed today by 1) crypto (instant liquidity) and 2) growing popularity (Eternal September effect)

As Silicon Valley eats more of the world, tech as a sector doesn’t really exist, it’s just business

Most founders now are just on easier / known paths, eg, SaaS companies

Brain is better at imagining downside over upside
Upside requires real creativity
CNN is a menu of moral panics
Some of it is useful, but only small % you have agency over
Daniel only reads Financial Times and Bloomberg – and you have agency over more of the news items, you can trade on it / react to it

Covid – unvaccinated people – no news item or celebrity endorsement will lead them to get vaccinated now

He likes to ask simple interview questions, like your favorite movies
Tyler Cowen does this
Get honest answers, get same alpha by decoding these responses
Can have a better conversation too
He likes the movie Whiplash – can filter the insecure overachiever types
It’s like a dating problem

Likes to go meta in interviews
Start an interview by talking about how most interviews are boring, maybe we’ll go on a random walk, have a fun 30 minutes together

Auren’s own experience: best hires not really related to best interviews
10x-ers – don’t think he could have predicted it at the interview stage

Prefers raw 23yo, energetic, higher beta
Doesn’t like the extremely polished execs, feels like he’s in a punching match

How do you test for aesthetic in an engineer?
Good writing can be a decent proxy

How to quantify engineering productivity
Often must choose between dirty metric that’s easy to explain, and a better metric that’s more complicated to understand
Dirty metric is usually the right choice

Auren: Successful salesperson – extremely high correlation with working hours
Almost the only metric in sales
In engineers, some of his best ones work <40 hours a week

Daniel’s best engineer left work every day at 3:59pm, but would have seen his productivity in lines of code. Spent 30 minutes planning in the morning, and then just output rest of the day
Code that works the first time is another good predictor of skill, versus it doesn’t work and let’s brute force / debug it

10x-er – what they consider easy work is often what others think is hard work – baseline sense is very different from others
Expand job description, do a lot more than expected
They just have a sense of what’s right, what needs to be done
Conscientiousness overdose

How can companies use leaderboards
Staring at charts together as a team is helpful, especially in remote work world
If you have a fixed beginning and end for reviewing stats – eg, 2 hours every week – creates more engagement
Liveliness also helps – constant up and down ticks eg stock market
Need skin in the game – real risk tied to the metrics

Remote work has shortage of emotion, oxytocin

Lots of reputational short sellers these days – looking to bring down others
eg, Slack emoji riots, cancel culture, reputation raiders

Grew up in Jerusalem, orthodox Judaism
What he learned – outsiders are very beneficial for innovation, talent is universal

Advice to younger self
Only moving at 5% of potential speed – do everything faster – how to get to 100% or even 105%
Benefitted at Apple from coworkers, especially when young, being an apprentice
Finding mentors sooner, increases compounding growth rate