Paras Chopra Profile picture
Sep 21, 2020 11 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Capitalism rewards rare and valuable

(a short thread on this mental model)

🎉 It's also the first chapter from my new book invertedpassion.com/capitalism-rew…
1/ You create value when you fulfill the unmet desires of people better than the alternatives they have (from competitors).
2/ The idea that capitalism rewards things that are rare and valuable was proposed by @ScottAdamsSays in his essay on career advice where he recommended readers to master various skills until no one else has the mix that you have.

dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_bl…
3/ The same applies to startups too.

A great example of building something that's rare and valuable is Facebook. Read about it in the full chapter here: invertedpassion.com/capitalism-rew…
4/ A fatal but common mistake that entrepreneurs make is misjudging what makes something valuable.

Many entrepreneurs start companies around their own passions and desires, but not many share their passion.
5/ Entrepreneurs are an odd bunch, what excites them isn't representative of the wider public

If you don’t understand what's valuable to others, you'll end up building products and services that nobody needs

As @paulg says, build things that people want paulgraham.com/good.html
6/ However, even if you end up correctly identifying a broadly shared desire or frustration, another costly mistake is to ignore how such desires or frustrations are currently being serviced.

(Why would customers switch from the tried and tested options to you, the unknown one?)
7/ Hence, value creation requires identifying what specific desires of people others haven’t yet figured out.

Doing this difficult.

But can you identify what’s rare and valuable?
8/ Incidentally, this is why my blog is called invertedpassion.com

That is, instead of being passionate about your own problems, start being passionate about other people's problems.
9/ That's it!

Read the full chapter here: invertedpassion.com/capitalism-rew…

The beautiful Illustrations are done by @sia_steel.
10/ I'll be posting one new mental model for entrepreneurs every week.

Here's the entire list of 60+ mental models that I'll cover in a year or so invertedpassion.com/free-book-ment…

Make sure you sign up for email updates on the book page.

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More from @paraschopra

Nov 10, 2024
Kicked off the 2nd batch of Turing’s Dream, the AI residency that I run in Bangalore!

Here’s what they’re upto… Image
1/ Adithya S Kolavi @adithya_s_k is a 4th year engineering student at PES.

In 2024, he set a target to achieve 10k stars across his github repositories

His most famous one is Omniparse and has 5.5k stars, it's a library that converts unstructured data into structured data for LLMs github.com/adithya-s-k/om…
@adithya_s_k 2/ Arjun Balaji @kaizen797 - 4th year engineering.

He's working with UPI team to detect money laundering using graph NNs. (it has trillion edges, so fun problem!)

He's also working with a Harvard team to map MRI images over time to 3D space to see how brain structures change!
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Oct 26, 2024
How to achieve success without trying to shoot for it!

My notes from the #book "Why Greatness Cannot be Planned" by @kenneth0stanley and @joelbot3000

🧵 Image
1/ It’s an unconventional self-help book disguised as a computer science research exposition (that’s why the publisher is Springer).

I strongly recommend reading it.

Here is a taste of the book’s main ideas. 👇
2/ Key insight:

Objectives only work when your goal is one hop away from where you are
Read 42 tweets
Sep 14, 2024
Turing’s Dream first batch - who is in it and what they’re upto.

🧵
1/ Praveen Chavali - @praveen_chavali is exploring the math of neural networks, and is trying to build a black box optimization method for compressing large models into smaller models.

At yesterday’s tech deep dive, he showed why GANs never converge.
@praveen_chavali 2/ Mehul Goyal - @observerforever is a former hedge fund guy who is now exploring how to model time series data using deep networks.

Yesterday, he explained the problem formulation of predicting sharpe ratio via a reinforcement learning kind of a setup. Image
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May 15, 2024
How to be a messy thinker

🧵
1/ I love thinking about thinking. Give me a research paper on rationality, cognitive biases or mental models, and I’ll gobble it up.

Given the amount of knowledge I’ve ingested on these topics, I had always assumed that I’m a clear thinker.
2/ Recently, though, it hit me like a lightning strike that this belief is counter-productive.

That’s because is you “know” that you’re a clear thinker, you’re less likely to suspect that you might be missing something big in your thought process.
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Why time seems to pass faster as we age.

🧵
1/ I’ve been mega-obsessed with this feeling.

A year as a 36 year old seems so much shorter as compared to when I was a kid or even as a teen.

It seems cosmically unfair - have less years to live, and each year is flying by faster.
2/ But, why is that happening?

My tentative conclusion is that it’s an unfortunate outcome of how evolution shaped our brain to be an efficient storage device.
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Feb 19, 2024
A (massive) thread on dopamine

🧵
1/ If you prefer the blog format, this thread is available on my website too:

invertedpassion.com/a-primer-on-do…
2/ I recently made notes on the book “Hooked” but wasn’t satisfied by the depth of explanation in it.

So, I went about doing my own research on how to make habit-forming products.

invertedpassion.com/notes-from-the…
Read 74 tweets

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