Sooner or later you realize everything comes down to mindset.

Like curiosity, the zeal to win is often killed early in life for many and is hard to revive.

"Peter Thiel didn't become Peter Thiel by winning popularity contests." Naval

"Learn math, kids. Speaking the language of nature is the ultimate superpower." Naval

Anything one does for status is self-inflicted harm.

Politics seems to break the brains of a lot of smart people.

"Envy is inversely correlated with self-examination. The less you know yourself, the more you look to others to get an idea of your worth." Lawrence Yeo

What an awesome Universe! I'm quite happy to live here. I feel lucky.

"Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status." Derek Sivers

It feels like we're entering a new era of "There's an app for that", except "app" = AI agent and "that" = <$120k salary white collar job.

Bertrand Russell, ten commandments for the freethinker

Better to have people work with us than for us. Naval

Ten Things That Matter Right Now in Seed VC…

1/ Millions of small businesses, from law firms to medical practices, still spend hours manually processing unstructured data—faxes, emails, PDFs—to enter into industry-specific systems of record. We call this the "messy inbox problem" and AI is stepping in to fix it. A 🧵:

"The oldest and largest organisation in the world has only 4 layers of management, that's the Catholic church." - Steve Jobs

Access coming from success is way better than illusion of success coming from access.

The best founders I know are absolute animals. They do not sleep. They do not eat at French Laundry. They do not ski in Tahoe. They do not hang with friends on Saturday. They do not want to be on a Forbes list. Most people don't mean it when they say "I want to be a founder".

The stock market tends to prioritize growth over cash generation, often overvaluing the former while undervaluing the latter. $EVO

Something I explained to 13 yo: There is no intrinsically fair price for any commodity, just the market price. Most people have no problem understanding that. Until the commodity is labor. Then suddenly it becomes hard to understand.

open.substack.com/pub/outsidesho…