flâneur

Hayden Kress

4 followers · 20 following · 308 views

on the atlas — 22

highlights — 23

  • This applies to all areas of life. People are very good at convincing themselves that what they truly want to do is impossible. They assume that there is some insurmountable step they must achieve before finally working on what they know is right. This thinking is dangerous. Of the set of things we think are impossible, there’s a large subset of things that we’ve merely convinced ourselves are impossible.
    Why I intern at startups while school is on
  • Eventually, you will define your success by performing excellent work in areas that are important to you. The sooner you can start off in that direction, the further you will be able to go. It is hard to be wildly successful at anything you aren’t obsessed with.
    How To Be Successful
  • First, you will work on consensus ideas and on consensus career tracks. You will care a lot—much more than you realize—if other people think you’re doing the right thing. This will probably prevent you from doing truly interesting work, and even if you do, someone else would have done it anyway.
    How To Be Successful
  • One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you.
    How To Be Successful
  • The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. For example, you can do it with personal relationships, by building a strong personal brand, or by getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields. There are many other strategies, but you have to figure out some way to do it.
    How To Be Successful
  • People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential.
    How To Be Successful
  • If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on.
    How To Be Successful
  • Extreme people get extreme results. Working a lot comes with huge life trade-offs, and it’s perfectly rational to decide not to do it. But it has a lot of advantages. As in most cases, momentum compounds, and success begets success.
    How To Be Successful
  • Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.
    How To Be Successful
  • Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.
    How To Be Successful
  • It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain.
    How To Be Successful
  • “I will fail many times, and I will be really right once” is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.
    How To Be Successful
  • I remember when Elon Musk took me on a tour of the SpaceX factory many years ago. He talked in detail about manufacturing every part of the rocket, but the thing that sticks in memory was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking “huh, so that’s the benchmark for what conviction looks like.”
    How To Be Successful
  • If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.
    How To Be Successful
  • I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.
    How To Be Successful
  • You don't want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people.
    How To Be Successful
  • You also want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory.
    How To Be Successful
  • “The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”
    Don't Major in Computer Science - by Varun Shenoy
  • Most successful ventures today will not only require the ability to build, but also to find interdisciplinary problems that you are uniquely qualified to solve.
    Don't Major in Computer Science - by Varun Shenoy
  • Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.
    Don't Major in Computer Science - by Varun Shenoy
  • I would also dare to say that an adventure is a solo quest. It is because while on an adventure, most lessons learned eventually are applied to one's own life. Or otherwise, one mostly learns about himself. Solo traveling embraces these benefits.
    The magic of traveling alone - Yuval Aizenman
  • Traveling alone is lean. You don't have to mind other people’s desires or needs and hear no other voice than your inner one. That leads to a looser travel style that allows you to take different decisions on the fly.
    The magic of traveling alone - Yuval Aizenman
  • A copilot for the mind might be able to find the perfect quote from a book you highlighted 10 years ago to help you make the point you’re trying to make. Or it might suggest relevant counterarguments to help you sharpen your prose—or maybe even change your mind on a topic you’re thinking about.
    GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind - Chain of Thought - Every