Tip
There are four principles:
- Do hard things
- Do your thing
- Do it for decades
- Write your story
1. Do hard things
is the only way one can get somewhere in life. Anything worthwhile in the long-term requires first things getting worse, before getting better, as we’re shifting from one local optima to another.
2. Do your thing
As Buddha puts it:
Life is suffering. So pick something worth suffering for.
If you’re passionate about the thing you do, you’ll go much further than others.
3. Do it for decades
Little changes and improvements, when done with passion, compound drastically with time.
4. Write your story
The speaker sought an executive coach around the nadir of the 2008 financial crisis for advice. The advice he got was to write a story, with three rules in place:
- It’s going to take place 5 years from now
- Start with nirvana—what would you do if you know you couldn’t fail?
- Forget the “how” for now—it’s the killer of all great dreams