Hey, Friends –
Welcome to The Saturday Slack, a list on what what I’m pondering and exploring with a short summary for those too busy to dive in.
Writing is your brain’s API. Check out and follow my API (Twitter feed) to get real-time calls with no request limits (for you software nerds out there). I’ve listed a few of my most recent tweets below to give you a taste of what you can expect.
Ben’s Tweets
Work on things that are persistent and scalable and where input to output correlation is low.
The future is unknowable, so bet on yourself.
Long term thinking and curiosity are the greatest competitive moats.
Writing is your brain’s API, making your skills extensible to the marketplace and offering you the best opportunities to hit your potential.
You can be right for the wrong reasons. You can be wrong for the right reasons. All else is footnotes.
Before making any decision, write down your process and hypothesis on the outcome. Act. Review. Learn.
Leverage (y) is when each unit of input (x) has exponential impact. Impact = x^y. Focus on building y through media, code, or networks.
Freedom is what you want. Not income. Not wealth. Not cars, clothes, homes. No, freedom to do what you want, when you want, with who you want is the greatest gift you can give yourself.
Articles
One of my guilty pleasures is reading annual letters to shareholders from thinkers I love (Howard Marks, Bezos, Chamath, Buffet, etc.). The best ones have such clarity of thought and insight into how to think and make better decisions. Whether you like finance or not, we all need to make directionally correct bets with asymmetric information, which these letters can help us with:
- Social Capital Letter to Shareholders – 2019: “For me, I have learned that my family, my health and what I know (knowledge) are the most important things that matter to me…What doesn’t matter? Everything else, particularly, what others think about me and my decisions.”
- 2020 Letter to Shareholders – Jeff Bezos: “If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Any business that doesn’t create value for those it touches, even if it appears successful on the surface, isn’t long for this world. It’s on the way out..”
- “The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen. You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it.”
- Favorite Section: Differentiation is Survival and the Universe Wants You to be Typical (about halfway in)
The Tail End – Please read. Changed my life. Try to read it at least once a month to jolt my system.
Book
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel: Getting money is relatively easy, keeping it is another story. The ability to know when you have “enough,” to survive, to have the patience to let time perform it’s magic are the keys to long term financial rewards. Not skill, intellect, timing, insight. Never give up the invaluable (freedom, reputation, family, etc.) chasing the ephemeral (money, power, prestige). The big takeaway from ice ages is that you don’t need tremendous force to create tremendous results, you just need to (1) survive and (2) time.
Podcasts
Invest Like The Best: Go Slow to Go Fast: Software Building and Investing: If you are building good software, LTV should be directionally infinite. – Chetan Puttagunta (GP at Benchmark Capital)
Invest Like The Best: Capital Light Compounders & Reinvestment Moats: Focus solely on trying to find a business with a moat, which can be defined as a structural advantage, inherent to a business that allows you to earn compounded returns on capital. – Connor Leonard IMC (Family office of Golden Corral Family)
Short Video
Bill Gurley (VC at Benchmark) on How to Find Your Purpose:
- Pick a career which you have an immense curiosity about
- Be obsessive about learning in your field
- Develop mentors in the field
- Embrace peer relationships
- Be gracious
Quotes
“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” – Charlie Munger
Munger”Where there’s pain, there’s margin.” – Brent Beshore
“Charlie and I always knew that we would become incredibly wealthy. We were not in a hurry to get wealthy; we knew it would happen. Rick was just as smart as us, but he was in a hurry.” – Warren Buffet
”Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer, now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said,
“Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?
”And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” Kurt Vonnegut
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