A distillation of what @balajis said in conversation with @tferriss on The Tim Ferriss Show:

Covering:
🔷Financial & Ideological Independence
🔷Product, Distribution, & Media
🔷Crypto & Decentralization
🔷The Pseudonymous Economy
🔷Digital Native Education
🔷Attacks on Bitcoin
🔷Leadership & Crypto
🔷Anarcho-Primitivism & Transhumanism
🔷Capital
🔷India
🔷War

Financial independence is upstream of individual and ideological independence. It means you can’t be canceled. You can ride it out and not back down.

You know consequences may come, but you accept them because you’ve planned for the future and banked up.

A distillation of what @naval, @shl, and @benthompson said about the creator economy on Clubhouse this weekend:

Naval: To be a good creator, you have to be creative, and being creative means constantly creating things.

You’re not just creating something; creativity is who you are and what you do. You're always creating things in your domain. Nonstop. Constantly.

Naval: There's a tinkering mentality that can keep you ahead of the curve.

Most successful creators are tinkerers. They just play at the edges of their field on something that’s interesting to them, but they don’t do it with a strong motive. They’re genuinely interested.

To make writing easier, ask what would make it impossible:

Writing’s hard because every time you write, you’re working on two problems at once.

The first is a language and syntax problem made up of words and sentences, and the second is a meaning and structure problem made up of concepts and themes.

These two problems are interconnected, and they can’t be solved independent of each other. 

They have to be solved together.

If communities are the new scarcity, then knowing how to build them is valuable.

A distillation of what @rosiesherry said on Clubhouse this week:

Yesterday Rosie announced she's stepping down after two years @IndieHackers as Head of Community.

She's one of the most thoughtful and effective community builders on the internet, and this thread demonstrates why.

People like to overcomplicate things, but building a community isn’t rocket science.

It comes down to simple things.

A distillation of what @ljin18 and @shl said about the Creator Economy on Clubhouse yesterday:

There's nothing you unlock at some point that says you can now do this.

Everyone has access to the same tools.

The root of passion, in Latin, is suffering.

The Passion Economy means the suffering is worthwhile.
You might not be happy 100 percent of the time.

Anyone who wants to become a great creator is up against The 10x Creator, a creator ten times, 50 times, or 100 times more productive than the average creator: (thread)

The concept of a 10x Engineer has been around for 50 years, and today a similar dynamic range of productivity applies to creators.

Like 10x Engineers, 10x Creators are valuable and rare.

They’re not just one standard deviation away from the mean, they’re extreme outliers — one in 2,000,000 — five standard deviations away from the mean.

A distillation of what @naval said on Clubhouse last night:

What you call chaos I call spontaneity.

A regimented life is like a heartbeat that's non-chaotic; it's a system that’s too ordered. It doesn't have any life to it. And real life has lots of ups and downs, some of them very extreme.

I over-plan, but planning is pretty useless. What tends to dominant life are a small number of Black Swan events in both directions, positive and negative.

Expose yourself to asymmetric upside and lots of good options: things that can become massively important for you.

News✨

I channel creators betting on themselves, and I want to build a 3-week, intensive course:
🔷Helping you structure info products, books, and courses
🔷Helping you turn ideas into a portfolio of assets

See details in 🧵and reserve a spot here:
justinmikolay.typeform.com/to/mFWclvCJ

Who is this course is for?
🔷Your skills are in demand
🔷People come to you for results
🔷You create compelling content
🔷You want to build valuable products
🔷You need to put more of your process in writing (and you don’t need or can’t afford a $10k/month consultant)

Who am I?
🔷I summarize creators on Twitter
🔷I help creators get paid @gumroad
🔷I helped @jackbutcher structure “Build Once, Sell Twice”
🔷I’m helping @EricJorgenson structure a course
🔷I'm helping @mkobach write a short book
🔷I’m helping @dvassallo structure a product

THREAD: I want to tell you a story about reaching higher in your life, and looking at the world with fresh eyes.

The story is about my former coach, Al Cantello, and one of his runners, Willie McCool.

👇👇👇

Al led the men's varsity cross country and track teams at the Naval Academy for 55 years. He coached and mentored thousands of future military officers.

He said endurance sports help sensitize people to prehistoric pursuits, and to the unforgiving nature of life.

I once asked Al what he hoped to teach his runners.

"Distance running," he said, "teaches you about savagery." And "Distance runners, at their essence...are the product of, and learn the power of...one concept: look ahead, for life is hard."

In 2008, my friends and I decided to come up with a list of life rules

Our goal was to define the fewest possible rules that applied to any situation in our lives

We refined our list until we had nine rules, each philosophically consistent with the others

I remember sharing the rules with a friend of mine who was a new dad, and he said, “Those are the rules of a child.”

When I shared the list with my parents, they replied with a list of their own:

11 instructions on how to live, and 11 observations about the nature of life

My Dad wrote, “Notice we dated our rules as we think they should change as you grow older and wiser.”

Since then, I’ve kept a file called “The Basics” and use it to capture thoughts on life and how I should relate to it

Take a triple shot of @MorningBrew

I organized and distilled 12,000 tweets from @businessbarista @austin_rief @tobydoyhowell and @KinseyGrant into a summary of their big ideas, in three parts...

1⃣: Business Building
2⃣: Building Yourself and Career
3⃣: Social Media Principles

(first, an observation)

There are three kinds of companies:
🔷Audience companies
🔷Companies that will become audience companies
🔷Companies that will become irrelevant and decay

If you don't think you lead one or work for one, you do or you will

Part 1⃣: Business Building

Never forget, no one has it easy…
🔷Building a business is hard
🔷Building a business is hard
🔷Building a business is hard

@thisiskp_ 💯 KP

That may be the best-ever quote about creative flow.

The creative process succeeds in one direction (consuming ideas and then creating) and stalls in the other (trying to create and then looking for ideas).

@thisiskp_ In practice, consuming and creating aren’t separate activities; they’re connected and fold together like an accordion.

@thisiskp_ Start pulling apart the accordion and more activities emerge:

To create, curate. To curate, consume.

Keep pulling and the full creative stack appears: to consume, collect; to collect, explore, and so on for seven more levels!

I summarized everything I've ever written about writing and creativity.

Behold: a big idea summary for readers and thinkers, artists and creators. (thread)

It’s not about you…
🔷It’s about ideas
🔷It’s about the message
🔷It’s about how you send it

Creating is like…
🔷Having your ego surgically removed one day
🔷Replaced the next
🔷And then removed the day after, in a continuous cycle

I channel successful creators in my personal life and @gumroad

Here’s what I’ve learned from them in the past six months, in their own words.

Stages of the Builder’s Journey – a Blueprint for Aspiring Creators:

Don’t wait until you have a big following (i.e. start now)...
🔷“I had fewer than 300 followers when I started”
🔷“I had fewer than 400 followers when I started”
🔷“I had fewer than 500 followers when I started”

Create without a plan (i.e. just be creative)...
🔷“This started as an experiment”
🔷“I wasn’t trying to build a business”
🔷“I didn’t set out to become a creator”
🔷“This wasn’t something I thought I’d be doing”

Nearly thirty years ago, at the end of my eighth-grade school year, I received an award named in honor of Ray Kroc. The prize was one share of McDonalds Corporation common stock.

Here's the story of that one share:

https://twitter.com/TidefallCapital/status/1332501397728874502

My dad, a Certified Public Accountant, thought I might learn from the act of investing, so I bought a few more McDonalds shares along the way.

I didn't parlay the gift into millions. Instead, I learned patience and a practical lesson about Uncle Sam.

In 1993, I received the share for $53.81. Thereafter I reinvested all cash dividends.

In 1994, the stock split two shares for one. Since the stock price had by then risen to about $60, I now had two shares worth about $30 each.

Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style" is the best-known instruction book on writing in English.

I organized and distilled chapter five, "An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders)," from 6,500 words to 1,300.

The summary includes ten observations and 21 reminders:

There’s no key that unlocks the door...
🔷No infallible guide to good writing
🔷No satisfactory explanation of style
🔷No inflexible rule by which writers may shape their course

These reminders state what most of us know and at times forget...
🔷Style is an expression of self
🔷To approach it, turn away from mannerisms, tricks, and adornments
🔷Move toward plainness, simplicity, orderliness, and sincerity

I channel the worldviews of interesting people on Twitter.

I do that by organizing and distilling their tweets into a summary of their big ideas. For my own education I summarized the timeline of @JoeBiden, and it’s helped me to look beyond the headlines.

I believe it’s valuable to channel people of all stripes and persuasions, and in that spirit, I’ll continue to share summaries of writers and thinkers, artists and creators.

In one place, read the philosophy of @JoeBiden, win or lose:

America is full of possibilities…
🔷We have respect for hard work
🔷We have determination, resilience, and grit
🔷We have opportunity to go as far as our dreams take us

An hour into a conversation with @karaswisher two years ago, @elonmusk told a story I still think about whenever I hear CEOs talk.

Two years earlier, Elon said he was "going to take apart a tunnel-boring machine" and "improve its efficiency between 500 and 1,000 percent."

In response, an unnamed tunneling consultant was quoted as saying, "Give me a break. You think someone can take apart a Boeing plane and put it back together, improving it by 500 percent? Elon’s got a very steep learning curve."

Which is exactly what Elon thought too. At the time, he said, "We have no idea what we’re doing. We’re going to get this machine, take it apart, figure out how to make it go much faster and still be safe. We’ll see how much progress we can make."

@david_perell is halfway to writing 100 articles in 100 days.

Here's my latest summary of his last 15 articles, distilled from 8,000 words to 800.

Installment 2⃣: David's Big Ideas on the Creative Process, Knowledge Management, and Effective Writing

If you want to start creating, but you don’t know where to begin…
🔷Start with curation
🔷Give yourself license to experiment
🔷Gather links and write recommendations
🔷Differentiate yourself by adding commentary
🔷Add an interpretive layer to the links you gather

Curate your intellectual environment…
🔷Collect information
🔷Notice small details
🔷Start to recognize patterns
🔷Classify the world in unusual ways
🔷Stand out with your vivid personal monopoly

Feeling cooped up?

1/ Here's what it’s like to live on a U.S. Navy submarine:

2/ Take away sunshine, plants and animals, news and sports, proximity to loved ones, fresh food, and the occasional drink of alcohol.

Replace those things with enclosed spaces, vertical ladders, 130 people, three showers, and a disconnected cell phone.

3/ The sub leaves port with 3,000 rolls of toilet paper. Hours later the hatches shut and the boat submerges hundreds of feet underwater.

Every day for the next six months, the crew will consume ten pounds of coffee, sixty liters of Crystal Light, and 70 pounds of flour.

Channeling @eriktorenberg

A summary of his big ideas, in three threads...

Thread 2⃣: Management and Leadership

Good management matters more than ever…
🔷Today’s employees need to be both productive and creative
🔷To do that, they need to be inspired and internally motivated

Management gives you leverage…
🔷Optimizing management creates ripple effects
🔷Managers dictate the experience of most people at a company
🔷Leverage is the art of making small changes that have big impacts
🔷Employees optimize for managers as much as the specific company