40 life lessons I know at 40 (that I wish I knew at 20):

1. Stop asking for permission

Don’t think: "If only I could get into this great school/company/job, then I could do great work."

You can do great work right now! Build something people want and bypass the gatekeepers. 2. Find the torture that you’re comfortable with

Success in any career requires sacrifice.

So try different paths to find what Seinfeld calls: “a painful thing that you can do for hours that would make others tap out in minutes.”

For example, I love waking up at 6 AM to write.

A newsletter is one of the best long-term investments that you can make for your career.

@chenellco has spent 100+ hours studying top newsletter writers.

Here are 5 proven tactics to grow your newsletter from 0 to 50,000+ subscribers 👇 1/ The tactics are:

1. Pick the right niche
2. Build a content system
3. Drive sign ups
4. Get organic traffic
5. Optimize paid traffic

Check out the full post below or continue on in this thread: creatoreconomy.so/p/how-the-best…

Shopify deleted 12,000 meetings this year.

Today, they went a step further with a tool that shows the $$$ cost of holding meetings.

I spoke to @CanadaKaz (Shopify's COO) about meeting bloat and protecting craft time.

Here are 6 spicy takes from our interview 👇 1/ My chat with Kaz is one of my favorite interviews so far.

Check out the full post below or continue on in this thread for the quotes:
creatoreconomy.so/p/kaz-coo-shop…

Amazon has an incredible writing culture.

Here are 7 writing tips that anyone can use:

1. Use less words
2. Replace adjectives with data
3. Eliminate weasel words
4. "So what"
5. 4 answers

More in thread 👇 6. Be objective - avoid adjectives and adverbs

The secret to a successful product isn't just:

❌ High quality
❌ Low prices
❌ Amazing service

What matters more is:

✅ A starving crowd

Here are 4 ways to find the starving crowd for your product: 1/ How strong is the pain?

Find customers who desperately want to solve their pain & frustrations.

If you can bring this pain to life, they'll almost always want to buy your product.

Like a hot dog stand in front of a hungry crowd that just left the bar at 2 am.

Cocomelon is the undisputed king of kids TV:

- #1 kids show on Netflix (16B minutes)
- #2 channel on YouTube (158B views)

But why is it so addictive and should you let your kids watch it?

I did the research and here's what I found: 1/ Cocomelon appeals to kids because it:

- Changes scenes every few seconds
- Has a low angle to match a toddler's view
- Features bright colors and catchy music

Here's a TikToker showing Cocomelon's short scene changes vs. another popular kids show:

Twitter just shared plans to revamp its business at a private investor's presentation.

Both Elon and new CEO Linda Yaccarino attended.

Here are 3 ways that Twitter will change: 1/ Invest in video + creators

Vertical video now makes up more than 10% of time spent on Twitter.

Twitter wants to grow video further and sell video in partnership with content creators.

Tucker Carlson's new show is an example:

https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1656037032538390530?s=20

I've interviewed 100s of people in tech.

I see candidates make these 5 interview mistakes over and over again.

Here's what they are and how you can avoid them to stand out: 1/ Not doing your research

Start a doc and write down the company's:

- Mission
- Strategy
- Core values
- Products and gaps

Do your research by:

- Using the product
- Visiting the website
- Watching exec presentations
- Talking to people who work there
- Talking to customers

Researchers recently ran largest AI social experiment ever.

1.5M people had to guess if they were talking to a human or an AI.

The results were not encouraging: 1/ Only 60% correctly guessed that they were talking to an AI.

Researchers prompted LLMs like GPT4 to behave like humans through details like:

- Name
- Age
- Occupation
- Location
- Personality: e.g., Wit, humor
- Style: e.g., Use slang, typos

Here's an example prompt:

Everyone's pivoting to generative AI.

But my alarm bells go off when I see:

🚩 A crowded landscape
🚩 FOMO driven decision making
🚩 Sky high valuations for an early space

Here are 5 questions to ask to understand if a gen AI product will be successful: 1/ If you took the word "AI" out, is the product still solving a customer problem?

AI is a solution, not a problem.

Ask yourself:

1. What is the pain point?
2. How many users share this pain?
3. Is the pain big enough to take action?
4. Is the pain underserved by non-AI tools?

How Notion built a community of 20M+ users:

1. Have a service mindset
2. Be authentic
3. Balance user needs
4. Build a trust balance
5. Empower users to create

Let's break down each step with @akothari (Notion's co-founder and COO): 1/ I've always been fascinated by how @NotionHQ scaled through their community and built AI into their product.

Check out my interview with Akshay below or continue on in this thread:
creatoreconomy.so/p/how-notion-b…

Andrej Karpathy is a legendary AI researcher who helped start OpenAI.

He recently gave a talk on how to craft great GPT prompts that almost everyone missed.

I watched the 40 min talk - here's @karpathy's top 5 tips to make AI work better for you: 1/ Let's start by comparing humans to LLMs.

To arrive at the output "California's population is 53x that of Alaska", a human would:

1. Look up the populations on Wikipedia
2. Use a calculator to divide the numbers
3. Do a sanity check and craft a sentence

My life changed for the better when I learned about the 3 forms of leverage from @naval.

It made me set new goals and redesign my life with intention.

Maybe it'll change your life too: 1/ The 3 forms of leverage are:

1. Labor: More people.
2. Capital: More money.
3. Product: More content or code.

Let's break down each one...

Nvidia almost died 3 times in its 30 year history.

CEO Jensen Huang shared these near-death stories at a commencement speech last night.

Here's what he said: 1/ LESSON #1: Have the humility to confront failure and ask for help

Nvidia's first big 3D chip contract was for Sega's new game console.

From Jensen:

"After one year of development, we realized our architecture was the wrong strategy..."

Nvidia ($960B) is now worth more than:

- Facebook ($665B)
- Tesla ($618B)
- Netflix ($168B)

This is a company that started 30 years ago at Denny's and was for decades only a video game chip maker.

Here's why Nvidia is surging: 1/ Nvidia invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) back in 1999.

Its GeForce series was a perfect fit for PC and console games that demanded high fidelity graphics.

Google Workspace has 3 billion users.

Gen AI will be the biggest change to Workspace in years.

Here are the best gen AI features that Google announced today to improve productivity: 1/ Generate images from text in Google Slides

Trung Phan's viral threads consistently reach 20K+ likes and 5M+ views.

I asked him to explain his end to end process.

Here's how he does it in 4 steps: 1/ @TrungTPhan uses the barbell strategy of smart threads and dumb memes:

- Dumb memes are low effort and help him stay top of mind.

- Smart threads are high effort and bring in great opportunities and relationships.

So how does Trung craft smart threads?

7 habits that I swear by in my late 30s to feel better than ever: 1/ Have a bedtime routline

As a parent, I know it's hard to do anything well without good sleep.

Here's a routine that works for me:

- No food or water after 8 pm
- No phone in the bedroom
- Bed by 10 pm

If I have trouble falling asleep, I read my Kindle until I get tired.

Temu is the #1 shopping app in the App Store (yes, more popular than Amazon).

They're also owned by Pinduoduo which is a $87B market cap company from China.

If you thought US tech was wild, this article I read about Temu's work culture is quite eye opening: 1/ Only hierarchy matters

3 execs - Colin, Chen, and Abu - make all the decisions while the other 1,500 employees are responsible for implementation only.

Abu is proud of arriving at work at 8 am and working till midnight everyday.

12 tips for parenting young children without going crazy: 1/ Put that phone away

Give your child your full attention when you play with them.

They'll connect with you so much more if you're not distracted.

During his 11 year tenure as LinkedIn's CEO, Jeff Weiner grew the platform from:

- 33M to 690M members
- $78M to $7.9B revenue
- 338 to 16K employees

Here's how you can use his Vision to Values framework to define everything important about your product and company in one page: 1/ The Vision to Values framework has 9 core components.

Let's break down what each component means along with Jeff's examples from LinkedIn ↓