Postcard 17: Stamina
Hello from New York.
Recently I've put an order of importance on what's needed to accomplish what I want to accomplish over the next few years. The first thing is I have to start. I have to just get started and build the habit. Doing one great thing, one great habit, seems to unexpectedly lead to doing many other great things until it all snowballs into an avalanche.
Then generally, doing harder things will be far more lucrative and rewarding.
Then finally, I have to keep going. This is where most people fail. This is why stamina is such an underrated attribute in people's success. To be able to take a beating and keep going, to not give up.
I wrote about all three of these topics in my favorite three essays from this week, and the postcard includes many other great ideas from others too.
Top Three Articles from me this week:
A few ideas I ran into this week:
A great thread from Sahil on a powerful mental model to solve tough problems. Start from the end and work your way backwards. My friend Ping-Teng wrote an Atomic Essay on how he used this technique to ace all of his tests.
The returns on companies led by their founding teams still far outpace those that bring in professional managers. This is obvious now, but just a few years, this practice was frowned upon. Now, I wonder if this can be used as an investment strategy to beat the markets.
This tweet from Visualize Value reinforces the idea that it takes stamina, failure after failure to increase your success rate in things in life.
A few Articles I've read from others this week:
Ever heard the saying: "too smart for their own good?" This article by Morgan Housel goes into the double edged sword that is intelligence.
"the smarter you become the more complex your communication and the smaller the audience you may be able to persuade."
A great article if you've got to monitor applications in production. Staring at dashboards is considered bad monitoring because it's passive and active alerts, even if they are not super accurate to the problem but that alert you that there is a general problem are great.
A study on Airbnb and crime rates in those neighborhoods with increased Airbnb rentals:
"We find evidence that increases in Airbnb listings–but not reviews–led to more violence in neighborhoods in later years. This result supports the notion that the prevalence of Airbnb listings erodes the natural ability of a neighborhood to prevent crime, but does not support the interpretation that elevated numbers of tourists bring crime with them."
Thanks for reading.
A reminder that my inbox is open; feel free to reply to this email. I love hearing from my friends and acquaintances who subscribed to this weekly postcard, and I am happy to help in any way that I can.
Have a great week,
Louie