Hervin Alvarez

I was listening to a podcast yesterday about Hitler (Really well done, from the channel @HTTOTW). I don’t know much about the life of Hitler, but I’ve heard him being portrayed as a charismatic speaker able to move the crowd. Where did he get that ability from? Because of the podcast, I learned that, in his youth, Hitler spent a lot of times inside hostels. From the outside it looked like he was wasting time not being very productive. It seems like he was a bohemian, going nowhere. He spent his time reading. Arguing politics. Debating his views with anyone who would listen. While it might seem like that was a lazy period, I think that’s part of where he sharpened his axe. I can imagine he got a lot of reps when it came to learning to speak about his political beliefs in a persuasive manner. Getting real-time feedback on what resonated and what didn't. It’s weird to learn this lesson from such an evil person, but if you want to become a great speaker, you have to speak, a lot.

I don't know how you intended this, but here's what it made me think of. My dance instructor taught in NY, and I lived in FL. While I got to travel once a year to see him, I mostly didn’t learn from him directly. He doesn’t love filming tutorials, so the main way I learned from him was through dissecting short videos people took of him at the end of one of his workshops, or of him dancing freestyle at a party. I would reply to his videos for hours, and try to imitate what he was doing. He has a unique style that was unlike anything else in the “salsa scene”. A mixture of foundational techniques, plus his idiosyncrasies layered on top (sort of hiding the mechanics). Through imitation and reflection, I started to separate his technique from his personality that showed up in the dance. Eventually, by understanding the foundations, I was able to create my own moves. I don’t know how I would have done this without imitation. So, now, in my mind, I think imitation + reflection leads to you learning the patterns and principles that allow you to create your own success. So in this case, I feel like imitation really helped me. In what context did you mean this? Or, did you just mean purely imitating without any understanding?

Imitating success is the exact habit that prevents it. Another person didn’t figure out how a thing works generally, they figured out their own life. Figure out yours.

Taking the identity of the teacher is heavy. You’re an expert. That’s the end. It also feels like playing the game from the role of a teacher is a 0 sum game. You TEACH. What you’re teaching is “the truth”. There is no more room for other ideas. That feels bad. Instead, a contributor is better. What you share does not invalidate anyone else. You’re simply adding to the pie. You’re contributing your point if view without eliminating other possibilities.

What resonates with me about your posts is that you articulate (often elegantly) things that I’ve intuitively thought about, but not well articulated. An example would be the post that you shared about getting distracted and wasting a bunch of time on the thing that distracted you. I wanted to hear why you had posted that, because for me, I’ve had a lot of breakthroughs in business from learning principles from pickleball and applying them to our business, or breakthroughs in dance that came from boxing. But… I’ve often wrestled with myself, thinking that I’m wasting time playing pickleball because it doesn’t feel productive. Even though productivity has very rarely felt like a linear experience for me. Another example is that Disneyland came from Walt Disney getting obsessed with miniature train models… Which I would imagine must have seemed like a major waste of time to others, but it led to a massive breakthrough. I am sharing this to say that I often read your posts and find them validating and revealing.

@hervin_ Tough out there

I disagree with the popular view that “some people are smarter than others.” The immediate reaction by most is that I am making some shallow egalitarian claim. No. I am making a systems-level critique of how intelligence is defined and localized. Intelligence is not fundamentally an individual property; it is an emergent property of interacting systems. Problems are solved by networks of differentiated roles rather than isolated minds. That’s how nature *actually* functions. Separating someone’s specific “role” in problem solving is a localization fallacy. This is the case for any historical discovery or present day innovation. The property of intelligence loses all meaning once (artificially) isolated from the group. There is no such thing as “individual intellect” because you cannot disconnect the information and insight an individual holds from the countless unseen contributions of the group. This is a fundamental property of systems in nature.

@sean_a_mcclure My phone changed “how” to “hi” I meant to say “how are your insights not more widely spread?”

@hervin_ Sorry, I don’t understand the question.

@sean_a_mcclure Makes sense, thank you!

@hervin_ Making connections, going deep, revealing patterns, new sticking points, etc.

Get distracted, waste a bunch of time on the thing that distracted you, and get back to what you normally do. Do this on a regular basis. You can’t be intelligent without being distracted on a regular basis.

STOP doing "the boring work" So many people out there advise you to “do the boring work.” “That’s how you get ahead!” I’ve been using AI to analyze the life and work of really successful people, and based on what I found, it doesn’t look like they were bored to death doing work that drained them all the way to success. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, and Warren Buffett didn’t grind sales calls. They didn’t grind boring admin work. They didn’t grind support tickets… They weren’t bored to death with their work. From the outside, people might look at their work and think “that looks boring!”, but internally they were engaged and enjoying the work. Examples Elon Musk Obsessed with: - Physics - First principles - Scaling systems He sleeps on factory floors not out of discipline, but obsession. He says he works because he can’t stop thinking about the problems. Factory logistics might look boring to outsiders, but for Musk it’s a physics puzzle, not boredom. Steve Jobs Obsessed with: - Product taste - Simplicity - User experience - Storytelling Delegated execution details aggressively. Known for pacing, arguing, refining, not administrating. Jobs didn’t “push through boredom.” He protected his attention for the work that lit him up. Warren Buffett Spends most days: - Reading - Thinking - Talking through businesses He has explicitly said he does this because he loves it. He avoids operational grind entirely. What looks “boring” (reading annual reports) is play to him. He structured his life to eliminate work he doesn’t enjoy. Mark Zuckerberg Obsessed with: - Systems - Code - Network effects - Long-term architectures Zuckerberg enjoys abstract system design. What drains others stabilizes him. Walt Disney Obsessed with: - Story - Experience -World-building He hated administration and finances. He nearly destroyed himself when forced into roles that didn’t fit. Disney thrived when creating worlds — and suffered when stuck in misaligned work. Surely, all those entrepreneurs I just listed pushed through a lot of work in their careers that they didn’t love. But that wasn’t 80% of the time. It was the minority. I think that’s how they lasted so long. If they did some boring work, it was because they had to, not because of this mentality of: “You have to grind!” Based on every book I’ve read, success is a long-term game. How are you going to last a long time if you are bored to death? If you are bored, you will quit — unless you have a high pain threshold. But that’s not the type of success I want. My takeaways from this research: The people who win long-term aren’t better at tolerating boredom. They’re better at structuring their lives so their hardest work is also the work that engages them, aka “aligned work”. Pushing through work that you find boring should be the minority, not the strategy. I think you can use the feeling of being bored as an important signal that you are doing work that is misaligned with you, and that you should ultimately find a way to reduce, redesign, or remove. Here are some things I wrote for myself that you can do to stop feeling bored: - Re-engineer the task or job so it does not feel boring. - If you can’t, try seeing if you can get away with not doing the task at all. If you can’t, delegate it. Find someone who loves what you find boring. - If that’s not possible, sometimes you have to push through, but it should be 20% of the time, not 80%. If pushing through most of the time is what is required to be successful in the game you are playing, you are going to have a rough time. The way I think about it is that if you are playing a game that bores you, and someone else finds it exciting or calming, and they love it while you hate it, it’s going to be tough to beat them long term. When it comes to boring work in relation to success, I think a better way to say this is: Do high-value work that seems boring on the outside, but you find deeply rewarding inside.

@sean_a_mcclure That makes sense! Thank you!

@hervin_ Beginning with a structure (fingering) that does not sound good, and using its faulty instantiation of your musical instincts to reveal better fingering. Eventually, the song emerges.

1) Look upon that which you wish to understand, but currently do not; 2) create a naive structure of its core themes and narrative flow; 3) produce a list of questions to define the parts of that flow you do not know or fully grasp; 4) find answers to those questions, and use those answers to modify your naive structure. Repeats steps 3 and 4 until your structure converges on something you look upon with intuitive satisfaction. --- That's it. That's learning. There are things you want to be good. A topic in mathematics, a piano song to play, an artistic style to master. Always begin with a wrong naive structure. Make it tangible. Your hands have to create a thing to know a thing. Look upon what you have built with uncertainty and unease. Reduce that unease through repeated questioning and answering. Stop when you like what you see. There is no mystery to learning. All adaptive processes run off the same process. Go learn.

Thank you! the invitation means a lot. To be honest, what I found most valuable wasn’t the subject itself but watching a great teacher at work. How you teach.. the clarity and structure were great! Right now I don’t have a practical application that would justify going deeper, but I genuinely learned a lot just from that session. Thanks again for making something complex feel accessible. Ps I’ve also been slowly going through your book!

@hervin_ Thanks for the great comment. If you want to join, I have no doubt you can learn the material.

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My takeaway: I need to get better at asking questions.

Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer, but: He understood systems He understood what “good” felt like He understood constraints (simplicity, elegance, end-to-end control) Jobs didn’t know how to implement things. He knew what tradeoffs were unacceptable. I would imagine that his delegation was more like: “How can we make the screen made out of glass?” “How can we make this machine be a complete square?” “How can we eliminate these buttons?” His delegation wasn’t: “Here’s the step-by-step process for how we need to build this machine.” “Here’s how to solve this problem.” It might sound obvious, but that’s how I typically delegate. I usually give people well-written SOPs once I’ve built the system.

How did Steve Jobs get his team to build revolutionary technology without being a technical person? As someone who is tech-inclined, this has always puzzled me. How did he envision these machines that his team built without having the technical knowledge?

@RyanHoliday Great!

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