Difference between wealth and money.

(a short 🧵 thread)

Recruit exceptional people by showing them a promised land.

a 🧵

1/ A recruitment strategy should be indistinguishable from a marketing strategy.

2/ Entrepreneurs spend a lot of time understanding the market, talking to customers & customizing marketing messages to customer segments.

However, they often fail to realize that recruiting people to work for you is no different from recruiting customers to use your product.

3/ It’s true that the key difference is that you’re asking for money from customers while you’re offering to pay money to prospective employees.

However, for exceptional people, money offered is a commodity because many other companies are offering them the same or higher money.

4/ Exceptional people never look for jobs; jobs look for them.

You can find a lot about a company's undisclosed strategy by simply looking at what positions it is hiring for.

It’s a mistake to assume that open-minded people have weak opinions.

On the contrary, they are actually strongly opinionated because they actively seek evidence contrary to their beliefs which makes them converge on beliefs that are only updated if there’s compelling evidence.

Here’s me trying to make sense of the unprecedented 2020 bull rally of stock markets.

(A thread)

1/ The simple answer to why stock markets are up is always that there’s more demand for stocks than supply.

So the real question is: why is there more demand for stocks?

2/ Actually, what’s happening is what should happen.

Central banks across the world, especially the fed in the US, are providing cheap liquidity across the board to institutions.

With interest rates falling to 0% and below, bonds are no longer attractive.

3/ The central banks are injecting this extra liquidity to stimulate economic activity.

They’ve made risk-free investments such as bonds so unattractive that the only place for money to go is towards relatively risky investments which are stocks.

4/ More than anything else, what central banks want is inflation.

They want things to become pricey so wages grow, profits grow and people’s perception of recession goes away because you’re getting more money than last year.

1/ Here are my notes from @robertwrighter's book - Nonzero: the logic of human destiny. I enjoyed the book very much.

The basic premise of the book is that history has a direction which favors co-operation and non-zero sum games, and that causes an increase in complexity.

2/ Starting from the first replicating molecule which co-operated with an outer layer to form first proto-cell, evolutionary and cultural history is full of examples where two entities come together to survive and progress a lot more than they would have done individually.

3/ This co-operative entity fares much better than two individual entities because of specialization. If two entities are in the same boat - that they win together or lose together - then trust is implicit.

4/ In a non-zero sum game, trust causes entities to focus on what they do best.

For example, eukaryotic cells - the ones animals and plants have - emerged when two proto-cells merged, and one took the role of energy generator (mitochondria), the other specialized in protection.

5/ Some scientists believe that even nucleus in a cell is a result of an early cell merging with another cell.

So M&A is not a recent phenomena, entities have been merging because of common interests ever since life started.

People that expect the worst of others, bring out the worst in themselves.

Whether negotiating, leading a team, or just having a coffee...expect good things.

How you approach every interaction matters. Your expectations always influence outcomes.

"He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once." - @nntaleb

While he considers you weak and inferior,

and takes no precautions against you,

you are using the time to catch up and surpass him.

This soft, permeable form of invasion is often the best,

for the enemy has nothing to react against, prepare for, or resist.

Finally, since power is a human creation, it is inevitably increased by contact with other people.

The problem is that you often do not know your friends as well as you imagine.

Friends often agree on things in order to avoid an argument.

Since honesty rarely strengthens friendship, you may never know how a friend truly feels.