In an age of leverage, B gets paid 10,000x more than A
The classic formulation:

“Being at the extreme in your art is very important in the age of leverage.” -@naval

My interpretation is there's confusion these days.

People conflate being at the extreme with being on the frontier.

Naval never does that. Here's how we puts it.
Being marginally better means getting outsized rewards (by orders of magnitude).

That means combining your skills and pushing as far to the extreme as possible.

That also implies loving what you do so much you can persevere.
Yes, small differences in judgment and capability get amplified.

But there's more, and Naval and many others know it.

Being at the frontier is different from being at the extreme in your art, but there are similarities.
The first is better vision.

"Out on the edge," as Kurt Vonnegut has said, "You see all kinds of things you can't from the center.”
You can also find your people in ways you wouldn't otherwise.

As the wonderful writer George Kennan said, “People who are a little unusual -- the bohème -- they understand me better than do the regular ones.”
You can also discover things you never thought possible.

In the words of the biologist E.O. Wilson:

Outside our sensory bubble are countless prospects... The challenge is to translate the previously unperceived into the limited audio-visual world of human consciousness."
The big advances don't come from the frontier itself, they come from standing at the frontier and looking out.

It's a process of continuous close observation.
This is why the point isn't to simply visit the frontier, it's the live there.

As @naval has said, the move there.
Every day, people compete on a winner-take-all playing field

As (again) Naval has said:

#1 wins everything
#2 gets something
#3 loses it all

We don't have to play accordingly, but we can be aware of the field
The key to progress, in this situation, is to tap into the deepest root of science. One that's shared between the humanities and the natural sciences.

"The capacity to see beyond the visible" as physicist Carlo Rovelli has noted.
One the most elegant things:

Integration.

The French have a beautiful word for it.

Coup d'œil: an integration of experience, observation, and imagination that constructs the whole out of the fragments the eye can see.
It's hard to succeed on the frontier.

History tells us, the only way to do it is to love it so much you can persevere.

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More from @jmikolay

Jan 17
NEW THREAD SERIES

"The Rules They Live By"

1️⃣ READ the philosophy of a thoughtful person in 2 min

2️⃣ LEARN a contrarian belief

3️⃣ TAKE a simple idea seriously

Thoughtful Person #1: @jackbutcher 👇
One person's take (mine) on the distilled philosophy of Jack Butcher, in two min:
Memes exert force in the world and drive human progress.

But many people *still* underestimate their power and significance.
Read 16 tweets
Jan 15
I’m thinking about writing a thread on the personal philosophies of thoughtful people.

I’d state a simple idea each person takes seriously. A belief important to them but underappreciated by others.

I’d also invite them to comment. Would anyone be interested in this?
I'd love to jump-start something like this, and it would be even better if people shared their philosophies themselves.

70 years ago, Edward R. Murrow invited people to share their beliefs in three minutes or less.

The invitation became the radio series, “This I Believe.”
The program stressed “individual belief over dogma" and it became a cultural phenomenon.

People shared their beliefs simply and sincerely, which stimulated more people to do so, and so on.
Read 7 tweets
Jan 14
Ten years ago this week, Bret Victor spoke at a software engineering conference in Canada.

"I don't have any prizes to give out," he said. "I'm just going to tell you how to live your life."

Here’s a distillation of the talk that’ll change the way you think about your career:
There's a way of living most people don't talk about.

When you approach your career, you’ll hear a lot about following your passion or doing something you love.

I’m going to talk about something different: finding a guiding principle for your work.
The principle that guides my work is creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating. Without an immediate connection, many great inventions and theories will not emerge.
Read 34 tweets
Jan 13
People crushing it in business, writing, and creative work fill themselves with ideas.

But 98 percent of people aren’t doing it systematically every day.

Why you should create and build a Book of Wisdom throughout your life:
We tend to think we remember more than we do, but to a first approximation, we’ve forgotten everything we’ve learned.

By the time you've read a book or listened to a podcast, you retain a fraction of its fidelity, and the rest decays at an alarming rate.
Think about your favorite podcast episode and try to remember three things you learned from it.

Then read this distillation, which is only ten percent of what Balaji said.

This one exercise will change the way you think about your memory forever.

Read 15 tweets
Jan 11
I distilled the internet's best lecture about writing into a set of big ideas.

It's insane I wrote professionally before internalizing these truths.

The Craft of Writing Effectively – on Twitter and everywhere:
If you've been writing in school, you haven't been writing at all.

You’ve been writing for people who are paid to care about you.
Learning to write in a system where people are paid to care about you doesn’t just leave you with neutral habits, it leaves you with terrible habits.

You get used to the idea that people are going to read whatever you write.
Read 25 tweets
Jan 10
I read and synthesized 4 of the most influential books of the past decade:
-The Beginning of Infinity
-The Origins of Creativity
-The Rational Optimist
-Sapiens

Here's what they say about human progress, potential, evolution & creativity:
Progress starts with rebellion
-Rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge
-Refusal to accept the present order of things
-@DavidDeutschOxf @carlorovelli
The potential for human progress is unlimited.

The more human beings have exchanged, the better off they have been, are and will be. And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process.
-@mattwridley
Read 23 tweets

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