Seek Work That Compounds

“Are there general rules for finding situations with superlinear returns? The most obvious one is to seek work that compounds.

“There are two ways work can compound. It can compound directly, in the sense that doing well in one cycle causes you to do better in the next. That happens for example when you're building infrastructure, or growing an audience or brand. Or work can compound by teaching you, since learning compounds. This second case is an interesting one because you may feel you're doing badly as it's happening. You may be failing to achieve your immediate goal. But if you're learning a lot, then you're getting exponential growth nonetheless.

“This is one reason Silicon Valley is so tolerant of failure. People in Silicon Valley aren't blindly tolerant of failure. They'll only continue to bet on you if you're learning from your failures. But if you are, you are in fact a good bet: maybe your company didn't grow the way you wanted, but you yourself have, and that should yield results eventually.

“Indeed, the forms of exponential growth that don't consist of learning are so often intermixed with it that we should probably treat this as the rule rather than the exception. Which yields another heuristic: always be learning. If you're not learning, you're probably not on a path that leads to superlinear returns.

“But don't overoptimize what you're learning. Don't limit yourself to learning things that are already known to be valuable. You're learning; you don't know for sure yet what's going to be valuable, and if you're too strict you'll lop off the outliers.”

“There are many variables that affect how good your work is, and if you want to be an outlier you need to get nearly all of them right. For example, to do something exceptionally well, you have to be interested in it. Mere diligence is not enough. So in a world with superlinear returns, it's even more valuable to know what you're interested in, and to find ways to work on it.”

“It will also be important to choose work that suits your circumstances. For example, if there's a kind of work that inherently requires a huge expenditure of time and energy, it will be increasingly valuable to do it when you're young and don't yet have children.”

- Paul Graham, Superlinear Returns

The Recipe for Doing Great Work

“There's a surprising amount of technique to doing great work. It's not just a matter of trying hard. I'm going to take a shot giving a recipe...

1. Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in.
2. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn't matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious.
3. Work as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth from a distance, but up close they're full of gaps. Notice and explore such gaps, and if you're lucky one will expand into a whole new field.
4. Take as much risk as you can afford; if you're not failing occasionally you're probably being too conservative.
5. Seek out the best colleagues. Develop good taste and learn from the best examples.
6. Be honest, especially with yourself.
7. Exercise and eat and sleep well and avoid the more dangerous drugs.
8. When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.

“And there is of course one other thing you need: to be lucky. Luck is always a factor, but it's even more of a factor when you're working on your own rather than as part of an organization. And though there are some valid aphorisms about luck being where preparedness meets opportunity and so on, there's also a component of true chance that you can't do anything about. The solution is to take multiple shots. Which is another reason to start taking risks early.”

- Paul Graham, Superlinear Returns

See also: How To Do Great Work

The Wisdom of Small Bets

“When nothing is working, explore and make a lot of small bets.

“After something starts working, double down on what works best.

“When that stops working, explore and make a lot of small bets again.”

- James Clear

You Need to Read to Think Well

“You can't replace reading with other sources of information like videos, because you need to read in order to write well, and you need to write in order to think well.”

- Paul Graham

“Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about,” adds Farnam Street's Shane Parrish.

Brandolini's Law (Bullshit Asymmetry Principle)

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.”

- Alberto Brandolini, Italian programmer

Twitter commentator "Gurwinder" (@G_S_Bhogal) reformulates the law this way: “It takes a lot more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it. Hence, the world is full of unrefuted bullshit.”

We should all keep that in mind the next time we read something online. As I often say (sarcastically): “I read it on the Internet. It must be true!”

Maximum Aerobic Function (MAF)

Maximum Aerobic Function (MAF) is the ideal heart rate for all aerobic training. Below are excerpts from the Website of Dr. Phil Maffetone, creator of the MAF fitness metric.

The MAF 180 Formula

Subtract your age from 180, then modify from one of the categories below:

• If you have or are recovering from a major illness (heart disease, any operation or hospital stay, etc.), are in rehabilitation, are on any regular medication, or are in Stage 3 (chronic) overtraining (burnout), subtract an additional 10.
  
  
• If you are injured, have regressed or not improved in training (such as poor MAF Tests) or competition, get more than two colds, flu or other infections per year, have seasonal allergies or asthma, are overfat, are in Stage 1 or 2 of overtraining, or if you have been inconsistent, just starting, or just getting back into training, subtract an additional 5.
  
  
• If you have been training consistently (at least four times weekly) for up to two years without any of the problems mentioned in a) or b), no modification is necessary (use 180 minus age as your MAF HR).
  
  
• If you have been training for more than two years without any of the problems listed above, have made progress in your MAF Tests, improved competitively and are without injury, add 5.

Exemptions:

• The MAF 180 Formula may need to be further individualized for athletes over the age of 65. For some, up to 10 beats may have to be added for those only in category (d) of the Formula. This does not mean 10 should automatically be added, but that an honest self-assessment be made.
• For athletes 16 years of age and under, the formula is not applicable; rather, an MAF HR of 165 has been used.

(Source: "MAF 180 Formula: Heart-rate monitoring for real aerobic training")

The MAF Test

The MAF Test can be done with any exercise except weight-lifting. The test can also be performed on stationary equipment such as a treadmill or other apparatus that measures power output.

To perform the test, you must first obtain your maximum aerobic heart rate with the help of the MAF 180 Formula. While working out at that heart rate, determine your walking, jogging or running pace—the time that it takes you to cover a certain distance—in minutes per mile, cycling speed in miles per hour, or repetitions (such as laps in a pool over time), and make a note of it. This is the parameter you will test for improvement later on.

During any MAF Test, your times should always get slower with successive repetitions: the first mile should always be the fastest, and the last should be the slowest. If that’s not the case, it usually means you haven’t warmed up enough.

The MAF Test should indicate faster times as the months go by. This means the aerobic system is developing and you’re burning more fat, enabling you to do more work with the same effort. Even if you walk or run longer distances, your MAF Test should show the same progression of results, providing you heed your maximum aerobic heart rate.

(Source: "What is the MAF Test?")

The Feynman Learning Technique

"If you want to master something, teach it." - Richard Feynman

More specifically:

1. Pretend to teach a concept you want to learn about to a student in the sixth grade.
2. Identify gaps in your explanation. Go back to the source material to better understand it.
3. Organize and simplify.
4. Transmit (optional).

(Source: Farnham Street)

This could be simplified in this way: If you want to make sure you understand something, give a Powerpoint presentation about it to a group of 12-year-olds.

The Case Against Living Together

“[S]ex isn't the only or even the main problem with ‘shacking up’ ... although it's a factor — not because it's immoral, per se, but because men have less incentive to commit... 

“Women want what they've always wanted: security. And men want what they've always wanted: sex. Ergo, women are exchanging frequent access to sex for, well, nothing.”

- Suzanne Venker, "The secular case against living together before marriage" 

My wife used to laugh when I made this argument to her unmarried friends. That’s probably because I opened with the classic old wives’ line: “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” 

Humor aside, this is important wisdom all young women need to hear. At the appropriate time, I plan to share it with my daughters, nieces and goddaughters. Living with someone you hope to marry one day is a terrible idea. That said, I get why men do it. 

I don't get why any smart woman would do it.

Shakespeare Tells More Than Surveys

"If you want your profession to recognized as a science you can't very well admit that some of Shakespeare's tragedies tell more about politics than a barge-load of surveys."

- Professor John Frary

How to Spot the Dishonest

“If someone is going around and talking about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest ... When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or talking themselves up, they’re covering for something.”

- Naval Ravikant, Farnam Street podcast

The Power of Incentives

“Never think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives."

- Charlie Munger

Relationships Die from Lack of Intimacy

"If you do what you did in the beginning of the relationship there won’t be an end ... Extraordinary, loving, intimate relationships don’t die for lack of love; they die from lack of intimacy

- Tony Robbins, "Don't Get Stale"

On Booking Travel

"People have different heuristics, in behavioural economics language. Some people will want to get there as fast as possible, some people will want it as comfortable as possible. Because people have these different heuristics, I always think allowing someone else to book your travel is a terrible mistake because they may have totally different heuristics to you."

 - Rory Sutherland, vice chairman, Ogilvy & Mather Group

Elite Founders Driven by Accomplishment

“Determination is the most important factor in deciding between success and failure, which in startups tend to be sharply differentiated. But it takes more than determination to create one of the hugely successful startups. Though most founders start out excited about the idea of getting rich, purely mercenary founders will usually take one of the big acquisition offers most successful startups get on the way up.

“The founders who go on to the next stage tend to be driven by a sense of mission. They have the same attachment to their companies that an artist or writer has to their work. But it is very hard to predict at the outset which founders will do that. It's not simply a function of their initial attitude. Starting a company changes people.”

- Paul Graham

(Source: "Economic Inequality")