Hi friend,
Spent most of the week working and writing. Yesterday Apple approved our app, so the next week is gonna be exciting!
Last Sunday went to Oxford, walked 26 km, and explored medieval Oxford Castle.
What stuck out: tower stairs were designed to make it easier to kill climbing invaders.
Most folks were right-handed and had a hard time climbing almost vertical, narrow stairs, and attacking with a sword in their right hand at the same time.
Some pics (you can see the stairs on the first one):
Writing
How to Choose What to Read
Reading Thinking as a Science last week inspired me to write an article on how to choose reading matter.
I covered why it’s better not to read at all than to shovel bestsellers and how to select good stuff (some good books attached).
Competition Is For Losers, by Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel gave this talk at Stanford in 2014. It’s the most important business idea I’ve ever heard, and it took me some time to understand the thinking behind it. It also has changed the way I think about creating value in the world.
I mentioned it to a few friends in the past few months, and none of them had heard of it before. So I decided to publish it.
What stuck out:
There are exactly two kinds of businesses in this world, there are businesses that are perfectly competitive and there are businesses that are monopolies. There is shockingly little that is in between.
People are constantly lying about the nature of the businesses they are in. The basic lie you tell as a non-monopoly is that we're in a very small market. The basic lie you tell as a monopoly is the market you’re in is much bigger than it looks.
“Well we're the only British food restaurant in Palo Alto.”
Is the intersection real? Does it make sense? Does it have value?
The something of somewhere is really mostly just the nothing of nowhere. It's like the Stanford of North Dakota, one of a kind, but it's not Stanford.
You want to go after small markets. You start with a really small market and you take over the whole market and then over time you find ways to expand that market in concentric circles.
The thing that's always a big mistake is going after a giant market on day one because that's typically evidence that you somehow haven't defined categories correctly, that normally means there is going to be too much competition in one way or another.
(On Facebook, Paypal, Ebay, and Amazon) The markets were perhaps so small as to have almost no value and that they would've had little value had they they stayed small, but it turned out there were ways to grow them concentrically and that's what made them so valuable.
You want to be a one of a kind company. You want to be the only player in a small ecosystem. You don’t want to be the fourth online pet food company. You don’t want to be the tenth solar panel company. You don’t want to be the hundredth restaurant in Palo Alto. Your restaurant industry is a trillion dollar industry. So if you do a market size analysis, you conclude restaurants are fantastic business to go into. And often large existing markets typically means that you have tons of competitions so it's very very hard to differentiate.
The first very counterintuitive idea is to go after small markets, markets that are so small people often don't even think that they make sense. That's where you get a foothold and then if those markets are able expand, you can scale into a big monopoly business.
In the history of technology, every moment happens only once.
There are always very unique businesses that are doing something that has not been done before and end up having the potential to be a monopoly. The opening line in Anna Karenina, that all happy families are alike and all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way, is not true in business, where I think all happy companies are different because they're doing something very unique. All unhappy companies are alike because they failed to escape the essential sameness in competition.
The question of whether a company will be around a decade from now, that’s actually what dominates the value equation and that’s a much more qualitative sort of a thing.
We find ourselves very attracted to competition and in one form or another we find it reassuring if other people do things. We go for things that lots of other people are going for.
(On college education) When it's been really hard to differentiate yourself from other people, when the differences are, when the objectives differences really are small, you have to compete ferociously to maintain a difference of one sort or another. That's often more imaginary than real.
(On competition) There often comes this tremendous price that you stop asking some bigger questions about what's truly important and truly valuable. Don't always go through the tiny little door that everyone's trying to rush through, maybe go around the corner and go through the vast gate that nobody is taking.
Books
How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Very short read on productivity, written by Arnold Bennett in 1908. Same as Henry Hazlitt in Thinking as a Science, Arnold focuses on learning how to control the mind and make the most out of your day.
The book has some interesting practical advice as well, like context switching, starting small, and thinking for oneself.
Ponder on this idea for a second:
“You cannot by any chance fail if you persevere.”
What stuck out:
(On having a job that does not fulfill you) If a man makes two-thirds of his existence subservient to one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how can he hope to live fully and completely? He cannot.
If my typical man wishes to live fully and completely he must, in his mind, arrange a day within a day.
The mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.
On hundreds of suburban stations every morning you see men calmly strolling up and down platforms while railway companies unblushingly rob them of time, which is more than money.
Can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy—the thought of that something gives a glow and a more intense vitality to the whole day?
You practise physical exercises for a mere ten minutes morning and evening, and yet you are not astonished when your physical health and strength are beneficially affected every hour of the day, and your whole physical outlook changed. Why should you be astonished that an average of over an hour a day given to the mind should permanently and completely enliven the whole activity of the mind?
Hence, it seems to me, the first business of the day should be to put the mind through its paces. You look after your body, inside and out; you run grave danger in hacking hairs off your skin; you employ a whole army of individuals, from the milkman to the pig-killer, to enable you to bribe your stomach into decent behaviour. Why not devote a little attention to the far more delicate machinery of the mind, especially as you will require no extraneous aid?
By the regular practice of concentration (as to which there is no secret—save the secret of perseverance) you can tyrannise over your mind (which is not the highest part of you) every hour of the day, and in no matter what place.
What leads to the permanent sorrowfulness of burglars is that their principles are contrary to burglary. If they genuinely believed in the moral excellence of burglary, penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years for them; all martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles agree.
Suppose you were to study, in this spirit, the property question in London for an hour and a half every other evening. Would it not give zest to your business, and transform your whole life?
The first is to define the direction and scope of your efforts. Choose a limited period, or a limited subject, or a single author. Say to yourself: "I will know something about the French Revolution, or the rise of railways, or the works of John Keats." And during a given period, to be settled beforehand, confine yourself to your choice. There is much pleasure to be derived from being a specialist.
The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year.
Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.
The appetite for knowledge grows by what it feeds on.
Ideas
What makes the most progress?
I was pondering on this idea on a train when coming back from Oxford.
Every day we have sixteen waking hours to make progress on whatever it is we’re working on. Weirdly enough, a year later, we can only remember a few of those numerous activities we performed in entire weeks, not even days.
My idea was that I can make more progress if I somehow figure out how to sort the wheat from the chaff.
So I decided to reverse-engineer this year. I wrote down everything I achieved and mapped my results to activities that caused them.
After an hour of struggling with my memory, I came up with three buckets for activities that delivered most of my results:
Activities that made me anxious or uncomfortable;
Activities that created fear of failure;
Activities that were not urgent but important.
If you have any ideas on the subject, drop me a line at vasilishynkarenka@gmail.com or just reply to this email.
I’ll write my own take on the topic next week.
Quotes
“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.” — Plato (427-347 BCE)
“Eating alone is not enough for health, there must also be exercise.” — Hippocrates (460-270 BCE)
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right.” — Henry Ford
See you next week,
Vasili