Cognitive Bandwidth is Extremely Valuable​

Poverty and busyness are not simply due to a lack of money and time, but rather a deficiency in mindset and capability.

Cognitive bandwidth is extremely valuable, and poverty and busyness consume it. A lack of cognitive bandwidth leads to a narrow mindset and neglectful behavior, creating a chain reaction that results in greater troubles.

People Often Underestimate the High Returns of Conserving Bandwidth​

Even the smartest individuals often underestimate the importance of leisure.

Due to resource scarcity, we must focus. However, the tunnel vision that comes from focus can cause us to overlook many things. Science has shown that the burden of cognitive bandwidth can lower a person's IQ.

Our inability to cultivate leisure stems from being focused on the tasks that must be completed in the present, making it difficult to anticipate all possible future events.

To Break Free from This Dilemma​

• 1. Make important tasks that should be done easier to accomplish. For example, those important tasks that lie outside our immediate view need to be repeatedly reminded.
• 2. Conserve cognitive bandwidth, such as making "neglect" the "default." For instance, the Jewish Sabbath is a uniquely wise intervention to cope with scarcity. The Sabbath is an ancient tradition where people do not work, send emails, write, cook, or even drive.
• 3. Start acting when resources and bandwidth are abundant, applying cognitive bandwidth to what truly matters.
• 4. Transform fragmented but necessary reminders into one-time actions. For example, enroll your child in a weekly activity to ensure you have dedicated time to spend with them each week.
• 5. Maintain slack to handle unpredictable events.
• 6. Properly divide tasks into manageable sizes, breaking long deadlines into incremental milestones.

1. Depth: The things that can be produced in a unit of time
2. Breadth
   • The expansion of the market's geographical scope across regions and countries
   • Innovation that creates new industries, such as consumer goods, industrial varieties, and spatial expansion
3. Length: Time dimension - financial securities

When customers evaluate a product or service, they weigh its ==perceived value== against the ==asking price==.

Here are 30 “elements of value”.

1. Functional

   • saves time
   • simplifies
   • makes money
   • reduce risk
   • organizes
   • integrates
   • connects
   • reduce efforts
   • avoid hassles
   • reduce costs
   • quality
   • variety
   • sensory appeal (e.g. food & beverage)
   • informs

2. Emotional

   • reduce anxiety
   • rewards
   • nostalgia
   • design / aesthetics
   • badge value
   • wellness
   • therapeutic value
   • fun / entertainment
   • attractiveness
   • provides access

3. Life Changing

   • provides hope
   • self-actualization
   • motivation
   • heirloom
   • affiliation / belonging

4. Social Impact

   • self-transcendence

• Cost Leadership Strategy. Having lower costs than competitors.
• Differentiation Strategy. Highlighting the differences between your products and those of competitors.
• Focus Strategy. Providing specific services to a particular group of customers.

1. Is This Market Efficient?​

What is an "efficient market"? In an efficient market, it is difficult to find assets with mispricing. Prices are completely determined by the balance of supply and demand. Anyone who wants to buy something can easily do so, and anyone who wants to sell something can easily sell it; this is an efficient market.

If you want to achieve excess returns, do not choose an efficient market, because demand can quickly find supply. When you discover an opportunity, others may have already found it. Even if others have not discovered this opportunity now, they will likely find it quickly in the future.

Should we choose an "inefficient" market then? Not necessarily, because there may be prices but no market. For example, in the real estate market, you know that housing prices will decline in the long term, but you cannot short it. Unless you have complete control over the supply and can negotiate freely.

2. Is This an Insufficient Equilibrium in an Efficient Market?​

The better low-hanging fruits are the insufficient equilibria in efficient markets.

Insufficient = there are still low-hanging fruits to pick. Equilibrium = the interests of all parties involved have reached a balanced state, and no one is picking the fruits. If this is the case, experts are not to be feared, because what they want and what you want are not on the same dimension; they do not care about low-hanging fruits.

Capitalism: Capital is the most important​

• Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
• Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
• Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
• You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity - a piece of a business - to gain your financial freedom.

What to do? large scale, long term, compounding, positive energy, sell.​

• You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
• Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.
• The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven't figured this out yet.
• Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
• Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.
• Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.
• Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

What to equip with? specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage​

• Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

  • Specific knowledge

    • Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.
    • Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
    • Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
    • When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.
    • Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.

  • accountability

    • Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
    • The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.

  • leverage

    • “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” - Archimedes
    • ==Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).==
    • Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment.
    • Labor means people working for you. It's the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.
    • Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.
    • Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.
    • An army of robots is freely available - it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.
    • If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
    • Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.

How to judge what to do and what not to do? There is no silver bullet.​

• Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.
• There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.
• Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
• Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.
• You should be too busy to “do coffee," while still keeping an uncluttered calendar. (Keeping an uncluttered calendar is more important than a coffee meet.)
• Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.

Attitude? work hard, work smart, and work long.​

• Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.
• Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
• There are no get rich quick schemes. That's just someone else getting rich off you.

Final Words​

• Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.
• When you're finally wealthy, you'll realize that it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place. But that's for another day.

Enterprise Software Success Formula​

• building amazing consumer-grade product
• leverage virality across individual users to grow personal + professional adoption at low costs
• harvest individual users for enterprise go-to-market with dedicated product + inside / outbound sales
• build enterprise-grade platform + ecosystem
• net = low cost product-driven customer acquisition + strong / sticky business model

IoT products mentioned in slides​

Alibaba Tmall Genie, Amazon Alexa, Amazon Ring

Why Should We Value Soft Skills?​

Because your job can be taken by someone with strong soft skills.

Americans have excellent speaking abilities, as their elementary education emphasizes expression, leading to articulate communication. In equal circumstances, even if Chinese individuals have better technical skills, job opportunities can still be snatched away by Americans. This is not about racial discrimination; it’s a matter of self-expression ability.

For instance, Indians have a strong presence in the U.S., especially in the management of high-tech companies, where the influence of Chinese individuals is far less. This is also due to the Indians' exceptional storytelling abilities. Although their English pronunciation may not be standard, they are willing to speak up and often get to the point. Consequently, we often see an Indian manager overshadowing several Chinese employees who may be technically superior. We often mock Indians for their “PPT governance,” but their storytelling ability is something to take note of.

This illustrates that the soft skills of “free artistry” are a shortcoming for contemporary Chinese individuals.

The Essence of an Interview is to Answer the Following Three Questions​

1. Can you do it or not?
2. Do you want to do it or not?
3. Are you a good fit or not?

How to Answer These Three Questions?​

The five discussion points in an interview.

1. Adversity. It’s not about how big the difficulties are, but how you overcame them. You need to prove that you were not only not defeated by adversity but became stronger. Ideally, downplay significant challenges with an optimistic tone. Also, take a moment to express gratitude to those who helped you during tough times, making it clear that you are a grateful person.

2. Influence. All communication issues are essentially leadership issues, and all leadership issues are fundamentally communication issues. If you are good at persuading others, it indicates you possess inherent leadership qualities.

3. Technical Proficiency. What stories can showcase your technical skills?

4. Fit. When the FBI used to interview candidates, they liked to ask what books applicants had read. Candidates would list numerous titles, but what the FBI really wanted to hear was that they had read Tom Clancy's spy novels. For a while, anyone who mentioned reading Clancy's novels had a higher chance of being hired. Eventually, this insider information leaked, and then everyone started saying the same thing, making that tactic ineffective.

5. Achievements. Compared to others, do you have any standout qualities? This is your opportunity to boast about past accomplishments. Achievements don’t necessarily have to be actual work experience.

On a larger scale, even U.S. presidential campaigns follow this pattern. Obama would say, “My father was an immigrant, and he abandoned my mother. I grew up in a single-parent household as a Black man, and it was tough for me… but none of that matters now; I am optimistic and strong.” Trump would say, “I have worked on this project, that project, and this project, and now I want to undertake a major project that benefits America.”

How to Prepare for These Five Discussion Points?​

• Try more, experience failures, and enrich your life experiences;
• Engage with more people to practice your communication and organizational skills;
• Learn some technical skills and master practical tools;
• Be good at research to understand what is happening in your field; seek opportunities to achieve results that make you stand out.

What is bikeshedding?​

Members of an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.

How to overcome the bikeshedding?​

Having a clear agenda of the meeting. Or even do not mix complex topics with easy ones.