How long you’ve been in business beats how fast you’re growing. You can fake speed. You can’t fake endurance. Anyone can get off the couch and sprint 100m. Almost no one can run a marathon. Growth rate gets faked all the time. Burn ads to buy revenue you lose money on. Land one big one-time PO. Inflate, repeat. You can’t fake a decade. A decade means you found a way to stay alive, and for sure some shit went down along the way. Probably more than once. This isn’t to say growing fast isn’t cool. But still being here in ten years is cooler. Doing both is gangster.

This is just common sense. Not liberal or conservative.

We traded books for smartphones, and knowledge now competes with entertainment.

One of the best ideas I’ve come across lately is vegan plus bacon. Say someone wants to go vegan but loves bacon. The idea is just be vegan, plus bacon. But the point isn’t the diet. It’s that one exception shouldn’t kill the whole rule. Don’t have an hour to train? Train for 20 minutes. Don’t have the perfect business plan? Launch and figure it out as you go. Can’t unplug for the day? Put the phone away for dinner. Most progress dies in the gap between perfect and good enough. People who actually get somewhere keep the rule and forgive the exception.

The only truly wasted time is time spent wishing you were somewhere else.

Why choose to be on the side that vilifies success? Self selecting on a team that chooses to lose is wild lol

"... the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it." — Thomas Sowell

The OTPP turned a $300M bet on the $SPCX IPO into ~$16B CAD – roughly $33.5K per each of it's 346K teachers. Thousands more Canadians are along for the ride through their RRSPs, TFSAs, & retail investment. Like Elon or not, a rising tide lifts all boats. Canadian boats too. 🇨🇦

What a stupid fucking headline

Chase revenue. Not awards. Not investors. Not incubators. Not any other vanity metric. Until you've hit PMF and scale, forget all of it. It's never been easier to bootstrap your way to success. Anyone saying otherwise has talked themselves into a story that lets them off the hook. It's when things aren't working that you reach for pseudo signals like panel seats, pitch competitions, and accelerators. They feel like progress, but they're not. And they don't pay the bills. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman

“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” — Naval

Envy is often ambition that quit.

“Wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Judgment is wisdom applied to external problems.” — Naval Ravikant

“In a long-term game, everyone is making each other rich. In a short-term game, everyone is trying to make themselves rich.” — Babak Nivi

“It’s just a matter of perspective. If you ask the grass, the deer is the monster and the lion is the protector.” — unknown

“Congratulations, you’re moving to the next level. Your next opponent is you.”

Wealth creation is not a zero-sum game. The economy is not a pie where one person’s larger slice leaves less for everyone else. If wealth is earned ethically and through voluntary exchange, demanding that someone give it away because they’ve accumulated “too much” rests on the assumption that prosperity must be redistributed rather than created. In reality, wealth is rarely passive. It is invested into businesses, new ventures, housing, technology, and markets that generate employment and opportunity. The question shouldn’t be “when is enough enough?” It should be “how was the wealth created?” If it was created by serving others and creating value, I don’t see why becoming wealthy should be viewed as a moral failing.

The west is committing cultural suicide right now. I liken it to an auto-immune infection. The people who are pushing these things are well intentioned people. But, they are confused. The West should be proud of itself: open inquiry, self-criticism, the capacity for moral guilt, are among our highest achievements. No other tradition produced quite the same reflexive willingness to interrogate itself. But, as with autoimmune disease, when that machinery turns inward, the body begins methodically destroying the tissue that keeps it alive. This is what is happening to the west. The examples are numerous. Some recent ones: •⁠ ⁠In Britain, the Bank of England moved to strip Churchill, Turing, and Austen from its banknotes after commissioned researchers warned that such figures were "elitist and divisive" and projected "a backward-looking vision of the UK”. Even Turing, the (gay) man whose codebreaking helped defeat Nazi Germany, is recast by a focus group as a relic of imperial pride. •⁠ ⁠In Canada, the 2023 passport redesign quietly erased Terry Fox, the Vimy Ridge memorial, and the Famous Five, trading a nation's memory of its own dead and its own heroes for inoffensive nature scenes. •⁠ ⁠In Canadian Parliament right now there is a push to criminalize "residential school denialism" (most recently revived as an amendment to the Combatting Hate Act), which carries a two-year prison term. The last one is especially troubling. Criminalizing speech is the immune system attacking the very organ (free inquiry) that lets a society detect and correct its own errors. Meanwhile, we’re more confused as ever as to what “Canadian culture” even is. Toronto renamed Dundas square as “Sankofa” which is borrowed from Ghana meaning “go back and get it” in response to accusations that Henry Dundas delayed the abolition of the slave trade. Put aside that historians dispute the record and notice instead what the gesture reveals: we keep reaching to other culture’s symbols as a token of OUR virtue, because we can no longer all agree what we stand for in our own right. We just accept that the other must be better. Yet, the same year that Toronto did this, Ghana voted to imprison gay people for up to three years, and their advocates for five. Our moral outsourcing strategy is not working. We need our own morals: Conveniently our existing ones are pretty good. We just need to stop attacking ourselves. In 2015, Trudeau called Canada a “post nation state” with “no core identity, no mainstream” and he meant it as praise. But, it is in fact a diagnosis. A body that cannot tell self from non-self will attack itself. Until we fix this, nothing will change. @MarkJCarney, as our leader here in Canada, I hope you are listening. The biggest problems are the biggest opportunities. I remain hopeful that the West can be saved.

Just remembered the world sauna championship. Was one of the most interesting things I've read about It used to be hosted in Finland every year until the incident in 2010. Rules were that it started at 110°C (230F). Then 1 litre of water was poured onto the stove every 2 minutes The last person to walk out under their own power won In 2010, both finalists had to be dragged out The russian finalist died, burned all over, and the reigning Finnish champ went into a coma and woke up 6 weeks later with 70% of his skin burned, kidney failure and his airways completely roasted One peculiar thing about it was there were no prizes. Only in one particular year did the winner get 1 small prize, some special heat resistant speakers that could be used in a sauna But despite this, participants went to the edge of death every year and would do insane stuff like grow their hair out long specifically to cover their ears so it didn't get burned by the boiling water vapor It was interesting to me because it's another piece of evidence that as soon as you create a ruleset... no matter how ridiculous it is, no matter how small the group of participants, no matter the extremely chance of death, and no matter a total lack of prizes. There will always be men willing to compete to the point of actually killing themselves The male brain enters a kind of hypnotic trance where it will completely convince itself of the worthwhileness of the task, so long as it begins to venture seriously down the path of a competitive interest It's kind of like a hijacking of the programming evolutionary mind, where no incentive makes sense but it happens anyway. You can find a million examples of this for every male interest on the planet. Just the simple act starting down a path confers it meaning to the person, and the more they are surrounded by other men who care about the same thing, the more they learn and compete, the more entranced by it they are, until their identity is fully subsumed by it and stuff like these sauna deaths happen Seeing lots of things like this taught me to be very careful when I start down the path of any competitive interest or business, because getting hypnotized by what you are doing is essentially guaranteed. So it's good to assume it'll happen and be totally sure the outcome is worth your potential self-destruction