10 fascinating traits of highly-successful people:

1) Enjoy Being Wrong: The most successful people legitimately enjoy being wrong. They’ve learned to embrace new information that forces you to change your viewpoint—these "software updates" improve upon the old.

(read on)

2) Work in Sprints: Parkinson's Law says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Winners typically work like lions instead—sprint, rest, repeat.

3) Antifragile: Life is chaotic. The best aren't broken by the chaos—they build structure to benefit from it.
4) Paranoia: Highly-successful people share a surprising fear that all of the success is suddenly going to disappear. It creates a drive for continued growth.

5) Self-Awareness: The most successful people are hyper self-aware. They know their unique edge (and their weaknesses).
6) Compartmentalization: An uncanny ability to compartmentalize. They turn off outside stressors and focus exclusively on the task at hand.

7) Focus on Questions, Not Answers: They ask great questions. It allows them to aggregate insights more effectively.
8) Expert Advice Filters: Winners have learned how to filter and selectively implement advice—take the signal, skip the noise.

9) Impatient Long-Term Thinkers: Long-term thinking plus short-term impatience for action is the recipe for success.
10) Smile Through Chaos: I had a teammate who would grin wildly when we were in the depths of a painful workout. It was simultaneously inspiring and terrifying. If you can do this, it means everyone wants to stand with you, and no one wants to stand against you.
Those are 10 interesting traits I’ve observed in highly-successful people.

What others would you add to the list?

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More from Sahil Bloom

Short Squeeze 101

If you follow financial markets (or if you watch Billions), you've heard the phrase "short squeeze" used quite frequently.

But what is a "short squeeze" and how does it work?

Here's Short Squeeze 101!

👇👇👇

1/ First, the basics.

The "short" in "short squeeze" refers to the concept of short selling.

The basics are covered in my thread below.

https://t.co/xecJYNCxMs

TL;DR - short selling is a way of betting against a stock - i.e. betting that its price will decline.


2/ "Short interest" is a measure of how heavily an asset is shorted by the market.

It is the total number of shares that have been sold short (borrowed and sold), but have not yet been covered (bought and returned).

It is usually measured as a % of the # of shares outstanding.

3/ A "short squeeze" occurs when a heavily-shorted asset experiences a rapid upward price movement.

When this happens, short sellers may be forced to close their short positions (i.e. buy the stock and return it to the broker), further accelerating the upward price movement.

4/ Let's look at a simple example to show this in action.

We will use Tesla, one of the most heavily-shorted stocks in the world.

Imagine the stock price is $1,000 per share. This seems crazy. Ricky Rational decides to short the stock at this level.

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"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".