When you break down the lives of extremely successful people, you find that their success didn't come from an earth shattering break-through.

Rather, it came from obsessing about a simple idea, fanatically.

Time for a thread about one such idea. 👇👇👇

1/ During world war II, a eleven year old kid checks out a book from the nearest library. The book's title was "1000 ways to make 1000 dollars".

After he reads that book, he makes a statement that by the time he was 35 years old, he'd be a millionaire.

2/ By the age of 35, his net worth was roughly 7-8 million dollars. The library was Omaha public library. That kid was Warren Buffett.

How he got there is an interesting story.

As soon as he reads that book, he decides he should have 1000 dollars before he finishes school.

3/ While looking for business ideas, he goes to his friend Dan's house one day.

He watches Dan fix an old pinball machine (that he bought for $15) in two hours.

Warren asks him if he can fix more.

Dan says yes.

4/ Warren and Dan set up a company (of course no incorporation and all that legal jazz).

They call the firm "Wilson Coin Operated Company".

They go to local barbers and pitch the barbers an ingenious business plan.

It looks like every symptom on Google search leads to cancer.

So, when you have a symptom that Google screams CANCER, should you be afraid?

Before I answer that for you, let's talk about Occam's Razor and how you can use it to simplify your life.

Let's dive in. 👇👇👇

1/ In the early 1900s, two physicists studied space and time and arrived at a similar conclusion: things tend to go a little bonkers within the space-time continuum.

Ex: The closer we get to moving at the speed of light, the more we slow down.

2/ Both the scientists arrived at the same results through their equations & derivations. But both had different explanations.

One suggested that the phenomenon was due to the changes that took place within "the ether". Another didn't refer to the ether at all.

3/ The latter won the Nobel prize and the world reveres him as a genius.

The former was the physicist named Lorentz.

The latter was Einstein.

This was the Einstein-Lorentz Relativity priority dispute that we are talking about.

4/ Lorentz's explanation wasn't given preference because according to science, the ether doesn't exist. When that's introduced into the equation, it makes things complicated.

Einstein used no references to the ether, and his simpler explanation rooted in scientific method won.