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

Feb 26
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.
Read 17 tweets
Feb 19
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
Dec 30, 2023
List of books I read in 2023.

🧵
1/ My favorite one was perhaps this one. It traces parallels between religion and trans-humanism.

Highly, highly recommend it.

2/ Highly recommend "Four Thousand Weeks" also. It's an anti-productivity manifesto.

My notes ->

invertedpassion.com/the-anti-produ…
Read 45 tweets
Aug 21, 2023
Effective technique for not getting involved with thoughts and emotions. Image
Correction: it’s acceptance commitment therapy.

By the way, not fusing with thoughts and emotions is the core of mindfulness and is pretty powerful.
Thoughts and emotions that bubble up to your consciousness is mostly clickbait - they got selected precisely because they’re exaggeration’s fabricated to make you pay attention.
Read 7 tweets
May 20, 2023
The best guidelines for any forum/network I've seen is that from Hacker News.

And the wonderful thing is that these guidelines actually work - Hacker News is the most inspiring and thoughtful forum out there.

Other networks like Twitter can learn a thing or two from it. Image
Sidenote: the massive work of moderating this long list of guidelines is done by ONE person.

Though increasingly we can have LLMs (like ChatGPT) interpret such guidelines and try to provide feedback to people before they make low-effort, clickbaity, rage-inducing comments. Image
The guidelines are worth reading in full and internalizing if you want to be a more thoughtful communicator.

news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines…
Read 6 tweets
May 14, 2023
The danger of pleasing the algorithm to go viral is that gradually you end up selling yourself to big tech companies.
This is how it works.

• Algorithms optimize for time spent on platform, because more time spent = more time for showing ads

• Algorithms promote content that sucks in more people (i.e. content that can go viral)

• Certain types of content is inherently more viral (rage… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
This loop has two sinister effects:

• For the non-creator, it appears that the world is falling apart as they see extreme, hot takes all around them as nuanced, well-balanced content is seldom promoted by the algorithm

• Creators with promise end up losing their soul in the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Read 5 tweets

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