The proper response to losing, I learned as a child, was to hate it. It should make you miserable, frustrated, and sad. Feeling terrible about it was a good thing, because you would work even harder to make sure you never felt that way again.
I like to think that I got this from Michael Jordan. The impression I have of him was that he hated losing more than anyone else and because of this, he could will himself to win, no matter obstacles lay before him.
I don’t know about him, but it didn’t work for me. More than once, I quit or didn’t try my hardest to avoid the pain of losing.
Now I think the best response to losing is to take it as easily as possible. Maybe not enjoyment, but bemusement if you can manage it. Analyze it, but don’t stress it. The important thing is to continue to try.
In my mental library, this book is part of a trilogy with Range and Talent about how to do your best work.
The book probably only gets published because it’s about late bloomers, but I can’t think of any part of it that is only applicable to late bloomers.
I thought about survivorship bias basically the entire time I was listening to the book. Some of it is definitely embedded in here, but some wisdom is too.
A common theme in Oliver’s late bloomers is earnestness. Earnestness to the point of being annoying to their contemporaries. I think earnestness is a quality that ages really well.
Many of the lessons I took from this book can be reduced to the sorts of things a youth baseball coach would say to me during practice. This is related to the earnestness.
The need to move through periods of exploration and exploitation at different stages of a career is a lens that will stick with me. If you think your potential is capped in your current situation, it’s probably time to turn the dial towards exploration. This is not one I got in youth sports.
Luck from motion — when you get an opportunity because you’re out in the world doing interesting things
Luck from awareness — when you notice an opportunity is available to you (or you’re open to it)
Luck from uniqueness — opportunities that come to you because of your unique interests, passions, and projects
“The harder you work, the luckier you get!”
Networks are important because of the influence they have on your aspirations. You need to be around people that expand your idea of what’s possible through words and actions.
It’s really important to (appropriately) display your work. People can’t bump into you if they don’t know you exist.
Caring is a source of alpha. Ray Kroc was one of the late bloomers. McDonald’s dominance made more sense when I better understood how much Ray Kroc cared. His passion for french fries isn’t something I share, but it makes sense that he of all people created the dominant fast food company. He cared more than anyone else!
Being a little reckless can be a good thing as you age. He cites a study (I think this one) where people who make a life change by flipping a coin are ultimately happier when it forces them to change rather than stick with the the status quo.
People who keep trying have more successes and more failures than those that don’t. Chaos and failure are not to be avoided but part of taking many chances at success. You do your best work when you do your most work. Quantity precedes quality. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Courage / not counting yourself out is underrated. Believing that you have the ability to be excellent is not sufficient for becoming excellent but it is necessary. This is increasingly important with age. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Recommended if you, like me, hope your best work is ahead of you.
Many wonderful public servants made valiant efforts and scored some great wins, but Democratic leadership did not make it a top priority to clear out the underbrush that jams the gears of government.
Every second for the viewer is just that viral video where the person picks between two pop stars. You’re always deciding what to pay attention to. The relationship between person-who-makes and person-who-consumes is paramount to long-term success, because if you are winning that game then you will be able to survive.
Things I learned
Eyes have evolved more than 50 times - Salon via Rohit
Musings
You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas. — Paul Graham
Product market fit provides a business with gravity
- It lets you know up from down — this helps
- But it also weighs on you; it’s tough to take the business in a direction that your current product / market / customer isn’t pulling you
A key skill for the future is going to be how to work with something that is:
1. smarter than you in many / most domains
2. sometimes wrong
A surprising amount of life is figuring out the right words to say in order to get what you want
A surprising number of pregnant women—about 1 in 2,500— are in denial about their pregnancy until birth
Fascinating, but extremely hard to read, especially as my infant daughter slept on my chest.
From my friend Oriana: The more males and females of a bird species look alike (e.g. cranes), the more likely they are to mate for life. The more males and females of a bird species look dissimilar (e.g. mallards), the more likely they are to be promiscuous.
The oldest bond in the world dates from December 10, 1624; pays €13.61 of interest a year. From the FT via The Browser.
Worth your time
Ben James on Fusion. Can’t wait to read the rest of his guides.
Some thinking on how companies get penalized for trying to be more sustainable by the Green Beauty Community. I do think that one reaction to the backlash on greenwashing has been some companies pulling back from talking about what they’re doing.
My coding stack as of December 2024 looks like this:
I keep a running Google doc that functions roughly like a PRD:
What’s the product — what’s the vision, where does it stand today, what am I building towards
What’s the current project — e.g., set up a system for taking a pdf, extracting the text, and then organizing it in a way that’s useful to the rest of my app
What’s part of the current project am I working on — at the moment, squashing a bug related to super large files
Any files that I can’t upload directly to the Claude project (e.g., my prisma database schema)
I have this connected to a Claude project so it stays synced. In this Claude project, I’ve got the ~5-10 most critical files for the project at hand also uploaded.
In my Claude project, I’ve got some background information about my tech stack (e.g., NextJS app, I’m using yarn, not npm, I’m on a mac) and some guidance (I want you to challenge my thinking rather than flatter me; ask questions if you have them; I prefer simple solutions).
I sit down and start chatting with Claude on whatever I happen to be working on (at the moment, uploading PDF files and extracting key data). I chat through different considerations and then create or update a file. I’m using Cursor as my text editor, but really only rarely using the AI features at this point as I was running into too many places where it would spiral off and start making changes I didn’t need and couldn’t follow. Claude feels better at staying on the task at hand. I probably won’t re-up my subscription when it’s done.
I usually code in 2-3 hour blocks. When one of these blocks is ending, I ask Claude to summarize what we’ve been working on:
What we accomplished today
What the next steps are
What the 5 most important pieces of context would be for them to get started again
I then paste this into my Google doc and I’m done for the day, picking back up at the beginning the next day.