Five valuable mental models

1. Gates' Law
2. Parkinson’s Law
3. The Paradox of Choice
4. Hanlon's Razor
5. Leverage

On startups, business, finance, investing, career, life and whatnot.

Here's a quick guide/refresher:
@BillGates' Law.

We overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in ten years.

It's the classic instant gratification versus long term mindset.

A ten year timeline will set you free.
Parkinson’s Law.

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

"How can you achieve your 10 year plan in the next 6 months?" — Peter Thiel

Forgive me for putting it right after Gates' Law. But why not?
The Paradox of Choice.

More choices make decisions hard.

Your friends can't decide what to eat? Don't pass the parcel. Ask them to pick between two options. Same for Netflix. And so on. Saves time!

Eliminate indecision by reduction.
Hanlon's Razor.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Not everyone's out there to get you.

There can be honest mistakes.
Leverage.

Leverage is a force multiplier.

You can make things where the effort it takes to scale, or to build a hundred, is identical to the effort it takes to build one, like a book, or a YouTube video.

"Build once, sell twice." — @jackbutcher
Add to the discourse.

What's your favorite mental model?

Bonus points for application.

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More from @sumitgrrg

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Out of 242 investors, 217 refused to back Howard Schultz on Starbucks.

Startups are f*cking hard.

Today, Starbucks has a $130 billion-plus market cap and literally stands for world-class coffee.

Thread: lessons on business and life:
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After reaching a peak in 1961, coffee consumption in America had begun to decline, which lasted till late 1980s.

But the founders of Starbucks were not studying market trends.

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THREAD: Elon Musk wants to make life multiplanetary.

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Here are the five biggest lessons I've learned from him, be it startups or life:
Do or die.

"My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”

Seppuku, or hara-kiri, is when a samurai passes a sword through their belly as an honourable alternative to disgrace.
Do not make the best product in a niche.

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"The Model S by Tesla was not just the best electric car; it was best car, period, and the car people desired."
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27 Apr
You can go to business school, spend two more years of your life, spending $100K or so in bills, or you can just listen to Steve Jobs.

I’ve read his biography every year for the last 10 years.

Here's what I learned about startup, marketing, creativity, career, life, and more:
Customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

When Jobs unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter asked him what type of market research he had done. Jobs replied: “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”

Think different.
Turkish Coffee? So Fucking What?

1/2

When someone in Turkey tried to explain to Jobs how Turkish coffee was made very different from anywhere else, Jobs thought, “So fucking what?”

"Who in Turkey even gave a shit about Turkish coffee?"
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I've read all of Jeff Bezos's 23 years of Amazon shareholder letters twice now.

It's an MBA of its own.

Here's what I learned about startups, entrepreneurship, investing and more:
Your customers are loyal to you right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service.
Listen to customers, but don't just listen
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I’ve read more than 100 threads in the last 3 months.

The amount of ever-growing great content on Twitter continues to blow my mind.

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Here are the first 10 days to get you started:
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What are the similarities between Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg that make them both generational leaders.

From someone who has worked closely under both.
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