1/ I’ve worked with many smart people over the past couple years. I’ve learned so much from others and via trial-and-error. Here are some of the important lessons I'd tell my younger self—an extension of my post on counterintuitive business tips: jonathanbales.com/40-counterintu…
2/ Invest in yourself by reading, exercising, and sleeping well. Don’t eat healthy though; that shit sucks.
3/ If others don’t agree with you, there’s even more value in being right. Many times you’ll be wrong, but finding those situations in which you’re very confident but others disagree is where there’s the most opportunity.
4/ The “right” answer for most problems changes when you extend your time horizon. The things that will optimize your day – however you define that – are very often not ideal for long-term exponential growth.
6/ Emphasizing the long game – which I’ve seen Jeff Bezos and Sam Hinkie do best – typically translates to engagement over traffic and loyalty over profit. Metrics like email open rate and time on site mean a lot for online businesses.
7/ Try lots of different things, even if (and sometimes specifically because) it isn’t part of a plan. Rigid focus isn’t really useful if the plan stinks. See what works, quickly drop the things that don’t, and spend the majority of your energy on the winners.
8/ Be okay with getting it wrong and learning by trial-and-error. It’s better – much better – to move fast than to be right. Getting 20% of 100 things correct is better than 100% of five (math checks out).
9/ The big data movement is out of control. The biggest strides I made in business/gambling were when I changed the ways in which I used data to make decisions. I’m more data-driven that most, but still make almost every decision based on instincts.
10/ But those instincts should evolve and be informed by data.
11/ In real-world scenarios, there’s almost always incomplete data. The best decision-makers I know, whether gamblers or in business, are data-driven but not data scientists.
12/ On top of that, the most lucrative opportunities are when the sample size of data is “too small.” Guess what? When it’s too small, like in crypto, there’s an edge. When it’s robust, there’s lots of competition. You can’t afford to wait for more data. actionnetwork.com/crypto/article…
13/ Don’t worry as much about accuracy in predictions. It’s overrated and you’re competing with everyone. Worry more about payoffs. In the real world, rewards don’t come just from what you can accurately predict, but what you can predict that others can’t.
14/ Focus energy figuring out how to win when the thing that should happen doesn’t happen.
15/ It’s really easy to criticize others’ work and really hard to create value for others. Just forget about trolls; they’re unhappy people.
16/ Don’t work long hours. Maximize how well you work when in “flow” – the semi-rare times you’re really producing things at an elite rate and quality.
17/ Give people things that help them make money, have sex, or lose weight. I heard that from someone and can’t remember who it was now.
18/ Write more. Putting things into writing forces you to think more logically. Clear writing is a sign of a clear mind. Feel free to email me anything you’d like as a way to improve your writing. I mean I won’t respond, but still.
19/ Strategically work for free. jonathanbales.com/should-you-wor…
20/ Stop taking meetings and calls. Just stop and see what happens.
21/ Make public goals. The downside of not living up to your word will motivate you. I was once going to skip writing a book and tweeted that it would be out in two weeks and wrote an entire f**king book in 10 days because I didn’t want to disappoint people.
22/ Don’t just be the best at what you do; be the only person who does it.
23/ Process > results, sure, but process + results is even better. You can’t continually fail and just chalk it up to variance. Except me in DFS golf; I’ve been so unlucky for years. Just wait.
24/ Let things go. I mean, really, it ultimately just isn’t that important. Drop expectations to become free.
24/ You should live a healthy life, but not necessarily a balanced one. Or, perhaps, your time horizon for balance can and sometimes should be very long. jonathanbales.com/good-balance-l…
25/ Do it the way you want to do it, and have fun.
