I’m back from my hiatus *cough cough*

There were several newsletters I had to scrap for various reasons:

But I’m back now! The theme this year for me is “building in public,” so I’m trying to be much more transparent about what I’m working on and how I’m working on it. So in terms of the ENTPrenuer brand here are some projects I’m taking on this year:

I currently have 14 subscribers and I love every one of you. I’d love to get to 100 by the end of the year( a goal I don’t think is ambitious at all.) If you get anything of value from what you read, please feel free to share.

I thought this would be a great piece of content to start 2025 with. It’s a dense video full of actionable advice for strategizing the future. There’s Stoic philosophy, Cal Newport inspired advice, Atomic Habits, Tim Ferris’s wisdom and more. It lacks those attributions but I can recognize the source of these ideas anywhere. I recommend you watch the full video but, if you just want some highlights, here are some takeaways:

A great strategy starts with the end in mind. Of course, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." So the first step to planning your ideal life is to imagine what it looks like. Where do you live? What do you do for money? Who is there with you? What does your average Tuesday afternoon look like? If you know where you want to go, you know what obstacles you must overcome to get there. For more on this topic read Deep Work, by Cal Newport.

This is an idea covered in length by James Clear in Atomic Habits. We are products of our environment. The lowest hanging fruit of habit change is our environment. Playing too many video games? Remove the console. Eating too much junk food? Get it out of your house. Make your bad habits more difficult.

Practice the meta-skills around skill acquisition. Every time you learn a new skill, you get better at learning. This is a recipe for exponential growth. Pattern recognition, mental modeling, and problem solving are all transferable meta-skills and will make learning easier and easier.

Every time you meet a new person, you have a chance to be introduced to a new network of people. One friend becomes five which becomes 25 and so on and so on(ignoring the limits of Dunbar’s number of course.) Drum up opportunity for yourself by meeting new people and add value to their lives. Many fortunes have been made this way.

We all have the same 24 hours in the day, but some get more done than others. Some of that can be attributed to leverage, but it’s also because some of use just have more gas in the tank. You’re probably tired of hearing it by now but exercise, eating healthy, sleep, and meditation makes it easier to do more difficult things for a longer time. So build habits into your life that increase your stamina.

Peter Thiel is one of the cofounders of PayPal. His net worth is somewhere around 15 billion dollars. As an investor he is responsible for many of the world’s leading tech giants including Facebook, LinkedIn, Tesla, Stripe, Openai(the list goes on and on.)

In 2012 Theil taught a class centered around startups at Stanford University, one of his students, Blake Masters, took detailed notes which which quickly circulated around campus. This inspired Thiel to work with Masters to turn his lecture into a book on the topic.

In 2014 Zero to One was published. A blueprint to creating billion dollar startups, creating category of one businesses, and changing the world through enterprise.

This was my second read-through and now that I’m working for a tech startup, a lot of the wisdom in this book clicked for the first time. These were my 5 greatest takeaways:

“You are not a lottery ticket,” says Theil.

Theil has four categories of sentiment towards the future, and we each fall into one of them. They are:

America is full of indefinite optimists, and Thiel argues that this is the worst mindset to have. Indefinite pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, characterized by people without goals who are content with getting nothing out of life. On the other hand, definite pessimists, while expecting challenges, at least prepare for the future and plan for difficulties ahead. Definite optimists, meanwhile, are the ones who actively move the ball forward, working to improve life for themselves and those around them.

Indefinite optimists, however, are individuals who have grown accustomed to life improving without any effort on their part and believe this trend will continue indefinitely. These people are often in for a rude awakening when they realize they have nothing to show for their time.

“A great company is a conspiracy to change the world.”

Entrepreneurs have a deep seated restlessness; they’re uncomfortable with the way things are. That’s why they build machines, products, and software so that they can disrupt and change the world around them.

But these ideas of change rely on “secrets.” things about our reality or about our personal lives that entrepreneurs can see where no one else can.

What do you do with these secrets? Tell everyone? Tell No one?

There’s a middle ground between these two. A golden mean. That golden mean is the company(a group of co-conspirators who act on that secret to change the world)

Most Entrepreneurs are obsessed with first mover’s advantage. Being the first one with a new solution to a pain point; but any market worth being in is going to attract competition and you’re vulnerable to another business coming in and eating your market share, or rendering your product obsolete. That’s why its better to have “last mover’s advantage.”

You want to enter a market with the final iteration of a technology, a development that makes what you have the best there ever is and ever could be. No one is able to reinvent the wheel. You’re product should be the apex of it’s class.

Everyone wants to make their company to sound like it’ll enter a space and have no competition. While it’s true that the most innovative businesses are so valuable that they have no alternatives and are therefore monopolies, it’s also true that monopolies play up their competition, while wannabees play their competition down.

Google wants you to think that there are many competitors in their space. Of course they do; the government breaks up monopolies. They describe many of their products as being at the intersection of large markets; wearable tech has many large players(Apple, Samsung, etc.) but when we search for something we don’t “Bing it,” we “Google it.”

Meanwhile wannabee monopolies will play down their competition by describing themselves as being at the intersection of two smaller markets (i.e. “We’re the only delivery app for restaurants that serve Thai-Panamanian fusion cuisine.)

“Why should your 20th employee join"

Thiel looks to invest in companies, not just with an innovative product, but with a strong mission. Recruiting great talent is difficult. Talented employees can work anywhere, so you need to know what makes your company non-fungible; that’s who works their and why they work their.

Peter Theil boils down that philosophy into the simple yet potent question “Why should your 20th employee join your company?”

January 1st is an arbitrary date to make resolutions. You always have the opportunity to change your life. We enjoy the symbolism of having a new year accompany our fresh start. Symbols are powerful; so this is no trivial thing, and of course there’s a sense of comradery in joining a cohort of millions of strangers all taking steps to change their life for the better.

Most fail at their resolutions though. A few weeks in(maybe you make it to February), and the challenge you picked for yourself is too challenging to continue, so you regress to the mean of your life. The difficulty you experience shouldn’t surprise you though, as it’s the very same difficulty that led you to delay this resolution to New Years in the first place.

You knew it would be hard, and yet you still weren’t ready. So you have to ask yourself, “did you ever actually intend on changing?”

It’s easy to confuse cynicism with honesty. People can change; they just often don’t. Most people give up on their goals because they feel their limitations before they know what they are. They’re not honest about what they need to do to better their lives. Because then they’d have to admit that they have greater faults than the(often superficial) ones they choose to change.

Come New Years, everyone wants to lose weight, spend less money, quit smoking, spend more time with friends and family, etc. etc. but no one chooses to acknowledge the underlying issue: That we are all liars.

There is no obstacle to your growth greater than the inability to look at yourself and articulate honest criticisms. We are all adept at either denial, rationalization or both.

Denial is the inability to look at yourself, to do deep introspection unclouded by ego’s guardrails. We choose not to evaluate ourselves because it is too painful. It hurts to acknowledge your areas of weakness, ignorance, and impotence(and we all have them.)

By avoiding the mirror, we can maintain the ephemeral fantasy of a better life, the source of our indefinite optimism. True introspection would impede our ability to daydream, our ability to retreat into our protagonist fantasy where things work out for us despite our lack of effort.

Even when we confront ourselves—when we endure the discomfort of naked knowing—we then rationalize.

“Rationalization” is the most polite synonym for “lying.” Rationalization, is the discursive logic that lets us continue our bad behavior. It’s the smokescreen we use to justify inaction, complicity, or transgression. It’s a convenient truth, that for any behavior, there are always compelling, seemingly logical reasons to continue with them.

Why are your doing this thing you shouldn’t be doing? It’s because it’s in your nature, it’s how you were raised, it’s the culture, it’s your coping mechanism, you don’t know how to change, you’re sick in some way, you can’t afford to change or:

Insert trivial defense, prepared by the lawyer that is your ego, here.

If you’re worried that this type of self-interrogation is cruel; don’t. I’d argue that this type of radical honesty with yourself is what true love looks like. If you raised a child by denying all of their faults, and rationalizing all of their bad behaviors how do you think they’d turn out; is that what love looks like to you?

Despite all of this; I consider myself an optimist albeit a cynical one. People can change, they just don’t know how. Whatever your New Year’s resolution, I believe in you, but without radically honest introspection I expect you to fail.

There is a reason you make similar pledges every year and continue to fail; you just refuse to see it, and then you refuse to own it.

So resolve to speak to yourself truthfully. If you’re not sure what the truth sounds like, you’ll know it when it hurts.

Happy New Year,

The ENTPreneur

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