Reading Time: 3 minutes

Today we’re up to the 8th question in “Tribe of Mentors” by Tim Ferriss (see all previous questions here). Today is:

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore?

We’ll start with a great answer from Annie Duke:

First, seek out dissenting opinions. Always try to find people who disagree with you, who can honestly and productively play devil’s advocate. Challenge yourself to truly listen to people who have differing ideas and opinions than you do. Stay out of political bubbles and echo chambers as much as possible. Feel good about really hearing those who disagree with you. Try to change your mind about one thing every day. The fact is that when two extreme opinions meet, the truth lies generally somewhere in the middle. Without exposure to the other side, you will naturally drift toward the extremes and away from the truth of the matter. Don’t be afraid of being wrong. Because being wrong is just an opportunity to find more of the truth.

Jason Fried gave a great answer, separating the ideas of time and attention:

Time and attention are very different things. They’re your most precious resources moving forward. Just like you walk through the air and you swim through the water, you work through your attention. It’s the medium of work. While people often say there’s not enough time, remember that you’ll always have less attention than time. Full attention is where you do your best work, and everyone’s going to be looking to rip it from you. Protect and preserve it.

Gary Vaynerchuk‘s answer was quite long and I was going to trim it down, but I think it’s worth sharing his full thoughts:

Macro patience, micro speed. They should not care about the next eight years, but they should stress the next eight days. At a macro, I think everybody’s super impatient. I think I’m unbelievably patient in years and decades, and unbelievably sporadic and hyper every minute on a day-to-day basis. I genuinely think everybody’s the reverse. Everybody’s making decisions about, like, “What am I going to do at 25? I better do that. . . .” In years, they’re impatient and making dumb decisions, and then in days, they’re watching fucking Netflix. They’re super worried about 25 when they’re 22, yet they’re drinking every Thursday night at 7 P.M. They’re playing Madden. They’re fucking watching House of Cards. They’re spending four and a half hours on their Instagram feed every single day. This is super important. Everybody’s impatient at a macro, and just so patient at a micro, wasting your days worrying about years. I’m not worried about my years, because I’m squeezing the fuck out of my seconds, let alone my days. It’s going to work out.

Last is a quote from Yuval Noah Harari:

Nobody really knows what the world and the job market will look like in 2040, hence nobody knows what to teach young people today. Consequently, it is likely that most of what you currently learn at school will be irrelevant by the time you are 40.

While I don’t disagree with any of the above, I think the last one was the most helpful. Really, it just needs to be taken further to explain other ways of learning. School is valuable, of course, but finding ways to continue to learn after school will be the key. Fortunately, the world today has so many amazing ways to continue to learn that there are no good excuses not to.

Taking it further, thanks to technology, you don’t have to wait for anyone. Write a book, record a song, create a video. The gatekeepers are gone.

What advice would you give to a student who is about to leave school?

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Digging into the first question posed by Tim Ferriss in “Tribe of Mentors” (here are all of his questions), he asks:

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

This one elicited a lot of great responses from the people that supplied answers to him. Here are some of the best that I found in the book.

From actor Terry Crews:

The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel. I have read hundreds of personal development books, but this is the one that clearly showed me how to visualize, contemplate, and focus on what it was I truly wanted. It revealed to me that we only get what we desire most, and to apply myself with a laserlike focus upon a goal, task, or project. That in order to “have” you must “do,” and in order to “do” you must “be”—and this process is immediate. Although it takes time for these desires to manifest in our material world, you must see the thing you desire as completed, finished, and real, now. The better you can do this, the more you can accomplish. I have bought several copies of this book and distributed it to family and friends. I also reread it probably once a month to keep my vision clear.

From Naval Ravikant:

Everything by Matt Ridley. Matt is a scientist, optimist, and forward thinker. Genome, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist—they’re all great.

From Dustin Moskovitz:

15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman. Though most people will typically blame other people or circumstances in their life when they are unhappy, Buddhists believe that we are the cause of our own suffering. We can’t control the fact that bad things are going to happen, but it’s how we react to them that really matters, and that we can learn to control.

Quite a few of them mentioned “Man’s Search for Meaning“, including Jimmy Fallon:

If I gave one to an adult, it would be Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I read it while spending ten days in the ICU of Bellevue hospital trying to reattach my finger from a ring avulsion accident in my kitchen. It talks about the meaning of life, and I believe you come out a better person from reading it. The lines I took from it are: “There is no exact answer to the question ‘what is the meaning of life.’ It’s like asking a chess master ‘what is the best move in the world?’ It all depends on what situation you are in.” It also reinforced the belief, that which does not kill me makes me stronger. If you read it, you’ll get more from it.

I also noticed that Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens” was in there a lot, including these notes from Ashton Kutcher:

The brainy book I seem to be sharing or talking about the most lately is Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. The more that I study people and the way systems work, the more I realize that it’s all made up. It’s easy to spout philosophies, or quote books, well-known people, or doctrines as if they are somehow of more credence than others, but the deeper you dig, the more you realize we are all just standing on piles of collective fiction. This book does a great job of illustrating that point.

My list

I thought about this question for a while, and settled on these four:

• Think Again by Adam Grant, one of my favorite books from the past few years.
• The Business of Expertise by David C. Baker, which I’ve shared on here quite a few times.
• Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller, easily the book I’ve given away the most copies of.
• Getting Things Done by David Allen. It impacted me 20 years ago, and it ultimately helped me get my life organized to the point to be able to start a business.

What book(s) would you add to this list?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Back in 2017, Tim Ferriss put together a fantastic book titled “Tribe of Mentors“. I say that he “put together” rather than “wrote” the book, because 95% of the content of the book are answers to questions that he collected from other people.

All told, Tim asked 11 questions to roughly 130 people and shared the results in the book. Here are the questions that he asked:

1. What book have you given most as a gift, and why?
2. What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in recent memory?
3. How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
4. If you could have a billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why?
5. What is the best or most worthwhile investment you’ve ever made?
6. What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
7. What new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?
8. What advice would you give to a driven college student? What advice should they ignore?
9. What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
10. What have you become better at saying no to?
11. What do you do when you feel overwhelmed or unfocused?

Not everyone answered all of the questions, but most answered at least two or three. As I was reading through the book I highlighted any answers that stood out to me, and I’ll be sharing those over the coming days and weeks.

Some of the questions provided me a ton of highlights, such as #1 and #4, and some provided me with none, like #2 and #6. Most were somewhere in-between, with three or four answers that I found to be very insightful.

In the meantime, I encourage you to pick up the book and give a go. It’s a long book (624 pages printed, or just shy of 19 hours on Audible), but it goes quickly. With 130+ separate chapters, it’s easy to pop in and out as time allows. Enjoy!

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Among other traits, I work hard to be confident in what I believe but also open to new ideas. It can be a weird balance.

There are many reasons why you should show confidence, and it can help inspire trust from others. However, it can quickly turn sour if applied incorrectly. Charlie Munger made it a point to avoid people who were overly confident, and Ryan Holiday says that it can become our most dangerous vice.

That seems to make openness the superior trait, right? After all, being free to change your mind can increase your knowledge, and it’s really the best way you could respond to learning something new.

On a recent episode of the 2Bobs podcast, David C. Baker brought this apparent contradiction to light. Their show often talks about showing expertise in the pursuit of sales, and confidence is a huge part of that. If you’re not confident in what you do, it’ll be harder to get people to pay for your skills. He shares:

“Your clients hire you because you’re confident, you’re an expert in something, but that can go against this notion of continuous learning. You have to bring this really unique mix of confidence, but openness to something different.”

It’s a fine line to balance. I want to be as strong as possible in my beliefs while also being open to new ideas. As Gary Vaynerchuk has said before, conviction doesn’t require a closed mind.

For me, I find the best solution to often be creating steel man arguments. If I believe in something, I want to dig in deep and fight for the other side. If I do, one of two things will happen:

• I learn more about why I was right.
• I discover why I was wrong.

Both are great outcomes! In the “confidence vs openness” arena I tend to lean a bit too far to the openness side, but we all should work to find ourselves somewhere in that middle area between them.

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I spend a good deal of time memorizing information. This could be cards I put in Anki, doing my “Daily Review” in Readwise, or any number of other things. Memorizing information isn’t bad, but it’s worthless if you stop there.

In a recent episode of “Founders”, host David Senra shared thoughts on some time that he spent with Charlie Munger and he dug into this very concept. From the show:

“Learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior. If I spend all this time reading about Charlie Munger, watching his Q&As at the Berkshire meeting, listening to his speeches, reading books, reading people who were influenced by him, and it doesn’t change my behavior, I’m just wasting time.”

I need to be careful with that when it comes to learning, and to be sure that I’m making actual use of what I learn. I’m confident that much of what I learn is of benefit, but I’m also confident that I have pieces in there that don’t do much good in the long run for me.

If I think “how can this information help to shape my behavior?“, it will make me better consider what I’m taking the time to learn. That doesn’t mean that everything needs to have a lesson behind it, as entertainment is an important facet of our lives, but simply that I need to keep that in mind when I start to learn something new.

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Most of us are familiar with the amazing power of compound interest when it comes to money. There’s a famous quote (attributed to Einstein, but likely wasn’t from him) that simply says: “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” Charlie Munger shared similar thoughts throughout his life.

Compounding interest with money is fascinating to study. There’s the famous example of taking a single penny and doubling it every day for 30 days, with a result of more than $5M at the end of 30 days.

Perhaps more interesting is to think about when that money was halfway to the $5M mark. You’d kind of think it must be around day 15, but it’s not — it’s day 29, the day before. All of the gains come at the end. If you say “I’ll stop after 25 days, it should be close“, you’d end up with just $167K. Not a bad sum, for sure, but it’s just 1/32 of the total value!

Knowledge

These examples are talking exclusively about money, but a recent episode of the 2Bobs podcast argues that knowledge works the same way. Knowledge can compound as time goes on, making each year of learning far more beneficial than the one before. On the show, Blair compares leaving interest on the table when it comes to knowledge, saying:

That’s the lesson. The lesson is if you have a constant rate of learning, or if you continue to learn, the value of your knowledge with time gets to be massive, but all of the gains come at the end. If you quit a year or 2 or 5 or 10 years too early, you’ve passed on all the possible gains. They all come at the end.

The entire episode was thought-provoking, and I encourage you to give it a listen.

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I’ve shared a few times on here my desire to repeat myself more often, so I guess this post is kind of a self-fulfilling success!

This really comes from a few different angles. As Robert Carnes shared in his book “The Story Cycle”, repetition is essential in marketing because your audience only hears what you have to say a fraction of the time. He says:

Remember that once you’ve heard the story internally a few dozen times, it likely means that your audience has only heard it once or twice. Keep sharing.

The other side is repetition for yourself. While I’m not great about repeating my words on here very often, I often repeat things that I want to learn through three main activities:

1. Using Anki flashcards. Any quote or concept that I want to remember goes in there, and I see it repeated quite often.
2. Using Readwise frequently. I’m not always as good about this, but I try to run Readwise “Daily Reviews” as often as I can, to see the same great quotes repeatedly.
3. By forcing myself to revisit books, via our virtual book club (come join us) and by chatting with people on my podcast. These cause me to read some new books, which is great, but more often I’m opening up books I’ve read in the past and further cementing some of the lessons that I learned from them.

This whole post initially came up from a quote I read in “Poor Charlie’s Almanack“, where the author is describing how Charlie thinks about this:

A special note: Charlie’s redundancy in expressions and examples is purposeful; for the kind of deep “fluency” he advocates, he knows that repetition is the heart of instruction.

In that book alone, which largely covers various talks that Charlie gave over the years, you can hear repetition in many of the talks. He shares some of the same anecdotes multiple times, because he’s found that they’re helpful and there’s no reason to try to come up with new examples when the old ones work perfectly well.

It’s a fine line between “always be exploring and learning” and “revisit and repeat past learnings to go deeper”, and it’s a line I’ll continue to try to balance for the rest of my life.

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Charlie Munger shared a humorous story at the USC Law School Commencement in 2007, which goes as follows:

I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics.

Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, “Would you mind, Professor Planck, because it’s so boring to stay in our routine. [What if] I gave the lecture in Munich and you just sat in front wearing my chauffeur’s hat?” Planck said, “Why not?” And the chauffeur got up and gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics. After which a physics professor stood up and asked a perfectly ghastly question. The speaker said, “Well I’m surprised that in an advanced city like Munich I get such an elementary question. I’m going to ask my chauffeur to reply.”

The story is funny, but also shares a solid point — the chauffeur doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about. Certainly spending that much time around Planck would be very beneficial, but he’s still never really studied what’s behind the main speech.

Charlie explains the difference between the two types of knowledge in his book “Poor Charlie’s Almanack“:

In this world, I think we have two kinds of knowledge. One is Max Planck knowledge, that of the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. Then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They have learned to prattle the talk. They may have a big head of hair. They often have a fine timbre in their voices. They make a big impression. But in the end, what they’ve got is chauffeur knowledge masquerading as real knowledge. I think I’ve just described practically every politician in the United States. You’re going to have the problem in your life of getting as much responsibility as you can to the people with the Planck knowledge and away from the people who have the chauffeur knowledge. And there are huge forces working against you.

That’s partially the reason for this blog. It’s one thing to hear something and repeat it back, but true understanding requires much more work. Writing a blog post about any given topic certainly doesn’t make me an expert at all, but it does get me one step closer each time I do it.

Further, I think having “chauffer knowledge” can sometimes be a good place to start, but then you need to dig deeper and build a better foundation to really understand what you’re talking about.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We live in an amazing time. Right this very moment, you can summon the knowledge from some of the smartest people who ever lived. Books (or Kindle/Audible) are very inexpensive, and you can even use your local library to make it free. In a bit of a meta twist, the examples I’ll share today are from “Poor Charlie’s Almanack“; author Charlie Munger himself is easily considered among the eminent dead, but his thoughts today are encouragement to read from others.

Charlie says:

I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, making friends among the “eminent dead,” but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education. It’s way better than just giving the basic concepts.

Later, he phrases it slightly differently:

Let me further develop the idea that a multidisciplinary attitude is required if maturity is to be effective. Here I’m following a key idea of the greatest lawyer of antiquity, Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero is famous for saying that a man who doesn’t know what happened before he’s born goes through life like a child. That is a very correct idea. Cicero is right to ridicule somebody so foolish as not to know history.

It’s a concept that I also hear quite a lot on the Founders podcast. The entire point of that show is to learn from the eminent dead, and David talks about that idea in almost every episode.

I’ve learned a lot over the course of my life, and there is a huge amount left to learn. To be able to call on anyone from history and learn from them is an exceptional gift, and one that we should all take advantage of as often as possible.