17: Notes To Self

Yo, it’s Luke!

I started reading Third Door and am completely enthralled. It’s a great book on reaching out to people and hustling your success into existence.

Here is your weekly dose of 5 things I’m pondering and exploring. Click on each link to dive further on that topic.

1. Hong Kong: 1964 → 2016 (Tim Urban)

This is wild to look at. Somewhere today, there's a quiet fishing village that will be a megalopolis in 2100.

2. Special Situations In Private Markets w/ Jeremy Giffon (Invest Like The Best)

Easily one of the best podcasts I’ve listened to all year. Jeremy is crystal clear thinker who walks the walk professionally and just seems to “get it” when it comes to doing life.

It still blows my mind that I can permissionlessly listen to people like him get interviewed for 2 hours by the best question-askers in the world for free!

There were tons of great insights, stories, and questions. Here’s a few of my notes:

• The best investors ask the simplest questions. They try to understand the story of the business, the background of the founder, the true value the business provides, and the reason why customers don’t use their competitors. Don’t overcomplicate it.

• Also, the best investors are the ones who can get deals done.

• You can make a lot of money buying out VCs who invested in great businesses that won’t be the 10x/100x company in that VCs portfolio. Despite being a great business, misaligned incentives make the VC not care about it & founders have less reason to build it. You can re-align incentives and buy it out at a big discount.

• When big tech companies acquire mid-level companies, they often don’t want the media properties that come with the company. So, you can scoop up those assets for cheap (especially because no stakeholders have big incentives to care about them).

• The more you understand who you are, the less you’ll envy those who you aren’t. If you don’t know whether you want to be a quarterback, a chef or an artist you’ll be envious of all of them. A great sign that you’ve found your calling is when you stop envying others.

• What could you not be paid a billion dollars to stop doing? What would you do if the only reward for doing good work is more work?

3. Thoughts On Reputation (Patrick O’Shaughnessy)

“Kevin Kelly has this great idea that you need your own distinct definition of success. For me, success would be cultivating a very specific reputation. I'd like my reputation to be ‘talk to that guy and you'll leave energized, thinking about something new. Good things will happen, and it'll generally cost you nothing.’”

I’d like this to be my reputation too. Maybe it’ll change, but for now it seems like a pretty damn good north star.

4. Horizontal History (Wait But Why)

This blog post is so fascinating.

For a quick taste, here’s one of the charts from the post. It has the lifespans of some of the most well-known people of the past 600 years. Who would’ve thought Lincoln, Darwin, Napoleon, & Beethoven all lived at the same time?!

5. The Secret Trick To Happiness (About Time)

If you’ve got 5 minutes, watch this clip. This is how I’d like to experience day-to-day life.

Savoring each moment.

Thanks for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday! If you liked this edition, send it over to a friend who would like it too 🤝 

Cheers,

Luke

PS: Have a topic you think I’d like learning about? Send it to me here.

PPS: Got questions you want me to answer? I made an anonymous form for that.

PPPS: you can find more rabbit holes here & my writing here.