The Weekly Roundup – October 4th 2020

In this weekly roundup learnt a broad range of topics from dealing with failure, making better decisions and personal healing

i FAILED my way to $10,000,000

Background and context

In this video, Sunny share has transformation journey of how to build her business.

She gives an example of Post-it and how it almost never became a thing. 3M the inventors we looking to create an ultra-strong adhesive for use in aircraft construction. Instead, a mistake led to the new adhesive, which was a weak, pressure-sensitive adhesive. For the first year, there was very little interest in the product. Forward today with billions of unit shipped and a successful company that has changed the way we work.

Key take-outs:

• Have a product value ladder. A series of products that can help your customers at every stage of the journey.
• Your experiences or failures are not wasted. Every experience is teaching you something and leading you to where you want to be.
• Learn to the art of selling. If you have something that you think is of value, then selling is an act of generosity.
• Turn the things you are struggling within your business into a system. This could be IP that you use to streamline your business or create products that can be sold to customers.
• Don’t do anything in our business out of boredom but pure necessity. If not, you are just succumbing to shiny toy Syndrome.
• Reducing the options and complexity in your business. Figure out a business modal that will not run you into the ground.
• Redefine failure. Failure = feedback. Celebrate failure, every failure lead you to your next win-win. Testing creates new inventions. 

“Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.” – Oprah

Naval Ravikant: Investing, Making Decisions, Happiness and the Meaning of Life

Naval Ravikant is the CEO of AngelList, a prolific investor and all-around smart and really nice dude.

Key take-outs

• Build a reading habit. You don’t have to finish reading a book. Treat books like a collection of blog posts.
• Build strong habits.
• “I don’t have time is another way of saying something is not a priority”. Set priorities for your life.
• Happiness is the state when nothing is missing 
• keep track of your internal monologue. Be present. When a challenge pops into your brain, ask yourself “do I need to be solving this problem, right now” are better of resting your mind and dedicated yourself to the challenge when it actually occurs. 
• You are more than you mind, thoughts and internal monologue. Watch your mind.
• Naval values:
  • Avoid people with short term thinking.
  • Don’t believe in hierarchies. Not one is above or below you.
  • Avoid anger and avoid angry people.
• Be radically honest without offending. Criticise the personal approach, not the person.
• Freedom from (internal freedom) e.g. freedom from reaction, anger, sadness’s vs freedom to(external freedom) e.g. freedom to do what you want.
• Don’t get caught up with a past. Everything that I have done and was done to you brought you to this moment.
• If you receive are an unhappy email, don’t reply for 24 hours.
• Observe your mind. Train yourself to be happy.
• Be happy with being you. Do you want to be like others and have their problems on top of their success that you desire.
• Change yourself, then immediate people around you before you get into abstract concepts about changing the world.
• There is nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time or predicts the feature in any way that matters.
• The brain is a memory prediction machine that assumes what happened in the past will happen in future…which is a bad way of predicting the future. Make decisions based on principles and mental models.
• Be what you want. Stop listening to what others want to you to be and listen to the little inner voice. Each person is uniquely qualified at something. Find out the people/businesses/projects that need you the most.
• Short term sacrifices = long term success. Easy choices hard life, Hard choices easy life.
• Real knowledge is intrinsic and is build from the ground up. The smartest people can explain something to a child.
• Smart thinkers understand things on a fundamental level. No need to memorise 
• There are no new ideas, it’s the combination the Idea, execution and passion that brings success e.g. Steve Job.
• Looking outside for happiness is a delusion.
• You find your own life meaning.

Further reading

1. Podcast show notes
2. The Psychology of Human Misjudgement – Charlie Munger Speech
3. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
4. Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words  by Randall Munroe

The Knowledge Project #68 — Daniel Kahneman

• The behaviours are about the situation and not the person. When someone has a behaviour check the situation before you judge the person. Sometimes we make judgements about people
• The environment has a lot to do with your ability to make good decisions e.g. We feel more productive working from a cafe, it’s hard to make good decisions while working in the red room etc.
• Defy judgement until you have explored all options
• When you make decisions, review decisions that succeeded or failed and try and work out the steps you used to make those decisions. That way, you can create a process and systems to make better decisions in future.
• Keep a decision journal where you can use to review your decisions. For every decision, note down the pros and cons and how you arrived at the decision.

You Can Heal Your Life

• We are all victims of victims. Forgive yourself and forgive others.
• Love yourself 
• If we are willing to do the mental work, almost anything can be healed.
• Life Is Really Very Simple. What We Give Out, We Get Back What we think about ourselves becomes the truth for us. 
• We are responsible for everything in our lives, the best and the worst. Every thought we think is creating our future. Each one of us creates our experiences through our thoughts and our feelings.
• Because the mind and body are connected, illnesses of the body somehow have their root causes in emotional and spiritual aspects of the mind and its beliefs and thought processes.