“Above all, live with change and adapt to it.” - Charlie Munger Change isn't the exception in life, it’s the rule. And those who can learn fast, pivot quickly and position themselves to gain from rapidly changing circumstances eventually win. Life is change. It’s a constant flow of beginnings and endings. Meditation makes this very clear. Everything that has ever happened to you - every experience in your life - has begun and ended. And now you are here reading these words. Despite this, humans don’t like change. Most of us desperately resist it and will fight to maintain the status quo of our lives. You are battling against mental biases (shortcuts in your brain) that make change difficult. Things like confirmation bias, commitment & consistency bias, loss aversion, and social proof all work to keep you moving in the direction you’re already going. Physics is also working against you. Newton’s first law of inertia states that “if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by a force.” The irony is that change is going to happen anyway, whether you want it to or not. As Charlie Munger says: “Those who will not face improvements because they are changes, will face changes that are not improvements.” Change is uncomfortable but necessary. You must do something different in the present to get a different result in the future.

Yes! This, but also: fish where the fish are. There’s no point in dragging yourself up at 5 a.m. in the cold darkness, diligently prepping your fishing gear, heading out on the water only to sit around for 3-hours in an area without a single fish! That’s a waste of hard work. Charlie Munger says: “There’s a rule of fishing that’s a very good rule. The first rule of fishing is “fish where the fish are,” and the second rule of fishing is “don’t forget rule number one.” And in investing it’s the same thing. Some places have lots of fish, and you don’t have to be that good a fisherman to do pretty well. Other places are so heavily fished that no matter how good a fisherman you are, you aren’t going to do very well.” The goal is to choose the right thing to work on. If you’re in the right space, it won’t matter if there are more talented people in your field - you can still do really well. Here’s Warren Buffett saying the same thing differently: “When a manager with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, the reputation of the business remains intact.” It’s a good reminder that no amount of hard work will save you from a dying industry (or an empty pond). Fish where the fish are!

On a small enough timeline, it’s all failure. Get used to it, and zoom out. Because on a long enough timeline, you can’t help but succeed. Success is measured in decades, not days.

This dude. Your life should be optimized to limit future regrets. Jeff Bezos uses what I call the "80-year-old" test. Will the future you, at 80, regret not trying something? If the answer is yes, then try it. The worst regrets come from omission, not commissions. Try more stuff.

To find your calling, first you must know yourself. Most people never get close to knowing who they are, what they like, or what their calling is. Because the world is so noisy. It's loud. And distracting. And you get pulled into someone else's calling. Into someone's else's life purpose. To find yours, you must quiet the world. Spend time alone. And listen to what you really want. It's not too late. But you must start listening now.

Don’t beg for opportunities. Create luck instead. Here’s how: wealest.com/articles/four-ki…

What’s the creative equivalent to this? Taste. There’s an old saying in Hollywood: “Write the movie you want to see.” That’s taste. Taste is what you like and what you think is quality. Your creative partners must have the same taste as you. Go find them.

The difference between success and failure is consistency. Because consistency is what leads to compounding: slow, incremental, constant progress. And with compounding, small gains compound on each other to create massive change over time. The reason consistency is so hard to maintain is that the greatest gains come at the end of the compounding period. You can’t see the small gains you’re making on a daily basis, and so it’s very easy to assume that they aren’t happening! That’s why most people quit before the reward. They aren’t consistent enough to reach the threshold where they will see positive changes. You have to be patient enough to wait and trust the consistency is working. And the one day - BOOM, you see big progress. That’s the secret to success: consistency in the same direction for a really long time.

Dude so many people forget this. Smart people talk themselves out of huge opportunities all the time because they try to eliminate risk. I’m all about watching the downside. But smart people attempt to eliminate risk entirely by thinking it up, down, and sideways until their head spins. No matter how much analysis you do, there is no reward without risk. Nothing comes for free. Limit the downside as much as you can, and then ACT!

This is super powerful. “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” — Charlie Munger What’s one way to get more of the thing you want? Avoid the thing that will destroy the thing you want. To get more life, just avoid death. To get more good, avoid the bad. This is inversion Inversion is the practice of thinking through problems in reverse. It’s the practice of “inverting” a problem - turning it upside down - to see it from a different perspective. In its most powerful form, inversion is asking how an endeavor could fail, and then being careful to avoid those pitfalls. Charlie Munger said that much of his success has come from him and Warren Buffett avoiding stupid mistakes: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

This is why incremental, constant progress is so powerful. It’s enough challenge to grow, but small enough to get through it. Everyone wants to finish what they start in a day. And they usually quit. But if you decide, okay, I’ll give myself 6 months to really build this out, you’ve strung out the challenge into manageable chunks. And each day, what you’re building gets a little bit better.

You can either optimize your life for comfort or freedom. But never both. “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” — Tim Ferriss To build the life you want, you have to do things you've never done before. The habits that got you here are not going to get you where you want to go. You have to push further. And there's a simple heuristic you can use to know if you are on the right track: you'll feel uncomfortable. Get uncomfortable.

Build for one, scale to others. Be your first customer. I’m my first reader and I always ask: would this info have helped me a few weeks ago, or years? If so, it’s valuable and worth sharing. Solve your own problems first, then scale.

It’s not about irrelevance, it’s about meaning. Humans are meant to create - to play. When we lose that, our lives become much smaller. In the beginning, don’t create for status, don’t create for money. Create because it’s in you to create something. And then, once that creative fire is burning, use it to get what you want out of life.

Well said. Your success depends on how long you can stay focused on one thing. The price of freedom is control of your attention. Almost everyone suffers from multi-tasking. There are so many things vying for your attention - emails, messages, group chats, social media notifications, work meetings - that you stop trying to carve out time for deep work and just skim the surface to save time. And you’re paying a terrible price for it. Here’s Charlie Munger talking about this at the 2015 Daily Journal Annual Meeting: “When I want to read something I can tune everything else out… I think people who multi-task pay a huge price. They think they are extra productive, and I think when you multi-task so much you don’t have time to think deeply about anything. You are giving the world an advantage you shouldn’t. Practically everybody is drifting into that mistake. Concentrate hard on something that’s important. I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I did because I have a long attention span.”

The people you look up to aren’t much smarter than you. They are just better at handling uncertainty in areas with far more upside than downside. Courage is the most important factor. Everything begins where certainty ends.

What doesn’t change? - storytelling - human creativity - Building leverage - compounding skills, assets. - human psychology (sales) - asymmetric opportunities (more upside than downside)

Well said. Creativity isn’t an exact science. The best work doesn’t happen on command and when you try and push to make it happen, the work often falls flat. Totally agree that you need to work when energy is the highest. And then once you start, you realize there’s nothing like owning the upside of your own creativity. Just start.