Building a Personal Monopoly: (thread)

How to combine competence, curiosity, and character to create a category of one.

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Why promoting yourself/your business/your ideas feels uncomfortable:

You must repeat things that are obvious to you until they become obvious to others.

This is why most people hire marketers or outsource the amplification of their message.

The problem with that is no one is an invested as you are, and no one knows your message like you do.

And why those who break through their discomfort reach an escape velocity that eludes most.

This is a difficult and unnatural process, hence the upside on the other side.

Another way to think about it is the famous shelf analogy:

No one wants a drill they want a hole, no one wants a hole they want a shelf, no one wants a shelf they want to a place to put books to look smart, etc.

People care about the 2nd, 3rd, 4th order effects of your work.

Building Principles:

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1/

Value = doing things that other people don't do, won't do or can't do.

"You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve" — Elon Musk

2/

Service is high-touch result generation (building experience), product is low-touch result generation (scaling experience).

3/

In a world of infinite distraction, focus is the only path to freedom.

4/

Sell time to buy experience, sell experience to buy time.

“If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.” — Warren Buffett

10 ideas that changed my life: (thread)

Illustrations by @visualizevalue

1/ Get more done by doing less.

2/ You can't get better unless you get started.

3/ Zoom out. It's getting better. (IP via @behaviorgap)

4/ 'Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.' — Charles Addams

10 ideas that changed my life: (thread)

Illustrations by @visualizevalue.

1/ Get more done by doing less.

2/ You can't get better unless you get started.

3/ Zoom out. It's getting better. (IP via @behaviorgap)

4/ 'Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.' — Charles Addams

Circle of Competence 101:

@SahilBloom x @jackbutcher

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1/

A Circle of Competence is the set of topic areas that align with a person's expertise.

If the entire world of information were to be expressed in a circle, an individual's Circle of Competence is the small sub-circle that represents their expertise.

2/

The idea surfaced in the 1996 BH annual letter.

"You don’t have to be an expert on every company...you only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital."

3/

A Circle of Competence is built over time.

It is built through experience, reading, dedicated study, and effort.

It is dynamic, not static.

It can expand as you deepen your knowledge in new areas. It can contract if you fail to nurture your existing areas of expertise.

4/

To engage this mental model in your life, there are two key processes to go through:

(1) Identify what falls within your circle
(2) Identify the boundaries of your circle

(1) is all about figuring out what you know, while (2) is about humbly admitting what you don’t.

New thread on values! What does pixel art have to do with value grouping in painting? It’s all down to a concept I call *dithering*. We are naturally very good at seeing small differences, and this is not helpful for painting, because we need to see differences *between* things.

Have you ever done a study of a painting and found yourself zooming in, only to zoom out and find that it was only getting worse? This is because of focusing on small differences too early. How do we even get started with all of these patterns and materials here?

The essence is in everything & all is within the essence.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, A Whistle Is A Wish, 75.56 x 70 cm, oil on canvas , 2018

Build your ManUtd Ultimate 11 from players of the last two decades.
2000 - 2020

GK

LB

RB

LCB

1) Why do I use VHS in my Art?

It's not to just look "retro."

Combining obsolete and cutting edge technology is an aesthetic intervention that lets me transport the viewer outside of their present reality. It's not Here, and it's not Then, so it makes you ask... When?

2) I evoke these mediums of the past in my unique way to serve as a method of conveyance, so you receive my transmissions differently from the multitude of images beaming into your brain at any given moment.

I want to transport you to a dimension of my own definition.

3) From this techno-mystical space, new perspectives emerge.

The Weirdness and the Humor of our Now can be enjoyed from outside looking in – we can gather around the shadow puppets and laugh at our folly in believing any of it to be real.

4) Analog Video Art has a long tradition, and I see my digital-analog hybridization as a means of carrying its torch forward with us into the metaverse.

I use VHS, the last of the physical image mediums, as a reminder to bring our souls with us into the landscape of the spirit.

5) As @erik_davis says in "Techgnosis,"

"The analog world sticks to the grooves of the soul – warm, undulating, worn with the pops and scratches of material history. The digital world boots up the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more code than corporeality..."