The Long Compound

The reason most habits don't stick: you're trying to add a behavior to a person who wouldn't do it. Decide who you are first. A runner doesn't negotiate the morning run — it's just what runners do. The habit follows the identity, not the other way around. Then make the first version so small it's almost embarrassing. Two minutes. One page. The point isn't the size — it's that you never break the chain. Everything that compounds starts boring. Most people quit before it does anything. Stay past that point and you're already rare.

@russellbrunson "No one drifts into greatness" is a clean line, but plenty of people stumbled into their thing chasing curiosity, not a written destination. Think scientists of the golden age as well.

"No one drifts into greatness. Write the destination. Then steer hard."

@DearS_o_n This movie should be AI edited. Put Denzel instead Will Smith.

Whenever life gets tough, I watch this scene 1000 times.

@ItsKieranDrew Thet "best self" usually isn't blocked by one big thing. It's a hundred small days you keep postponing. It almost goes unnoticed. That's what's scary I think.

My biggest fear is dying without letting my best self live.

@DearS_o_n Nobody picks the regret on purpose. The pain of work is loud and right now, the pain of wasted potential is quiet and far off, so doing nothing quietly chooses it for you. It's not one wise choice, it's re-choosing the work every day.

Every man has to choose a pain: • The pain of hard work • The pain of unfulfilled potential Make sure that you choose wisely.

@russellbrunson The discomfort that grows you is usually boring, not dramatic. No need to chase the dramatic kind because it feels more impressive.

Avoiding discomfort guarantees mediocrity. Leaning into it guarantees evolution.

@hvgoenka You don't leave values in them by deciding to. Kids copy what you do, not what you say, including the parts you're not proud of. The real question is what you model daily, not what you hope to instill.

Many people spend their lives worrying about what they will leave for their children. The deeper question is: what will you leave in them? -Values. Character. Kindness. Courage.

@lawrencekingyo Also like a striker, the misses are public but the work to get into position isn't. Everyone sees the goals, nobody sees the reps that put you there.

Doing sales is like being a striker in football (soccer) Some days everything you touch is a goal, you score 4 goals, and everything goes your way On other days, you hit the bar, the ball goes wide and nothing works The trick is to keep putting yourself in a position to score

@DearS_o_n Good message. Small thing in the framing though: respecting someone only because their dream died is closer to pity. The work is real and necessary on its own. You don't need to cast them as failed dreamers to respect them.

Nobody grew up with the intention of being a cleaner, cashier, or security guard. We all had big dreams, but life happened. Dear son, Respect other people’s jobs.

@MasculineTheory Confident, low-shame men also have hips.

You think you’re ugly and can’t make eye contact with women because you have tightness and tension in your hips and pelvic floor. Most likely because you’re a man who feels shame and guilt quite often.

@thejustinwelsh That's an amazing thing. But careful making it as a metric. The deepest help usually ends up credited to the person themselves, which is exactly how it should work.

A great measure of personal success is how many people thank you for theirs.

@readswithravi Let's not confuse the people who think they reached "blame no one" with the ones that actually just gave up and called it acceptance.

There’s an old Chinese proverb that I love: “He who blames others has a long way to go on his journey. He who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames no one has arrived.”

@dickiebush The genius thing is the admin now can't be skipped, because it's bolted to a workout you're already doing. Forcing function beats willpower.

Current Sunday life hack: Hammering out all of my admin / planning / scheduling while doing a Zone 2 workout on the incline treadmill. 60 minutes of zone 2 & all the trivial things I have to do each week accomplished. I step off that thing with insane momentum & dopamine afterward. Highly recommend.

@Nicolascole77 The honest problem with "trust the process" is you can't tell a slow-compounding process from a broken one until a lot of time has passed.

The hardest growth is the kind you can't see on a daily basis. If you can measure it in 24 hours or less, it's incremental. Whereas anything exponential must be measured over longer time horizons. Trust the process.

The line isn't really per-domain, it splits inside a single task. Building an audience: what converts is verifiable, you can measure and test it. But the voice that earns the click is taste, and AI can't fake it. Same task, AI takes the measurable half, the human keeps the taste. I don't think AI have taste, or maybe it has one but it can't be unique by user/AI.

it’s said that to be a true science, then it must be testable and falsifiable. The scientific method (hypothesis->experimentation->theory) can then be used to discover truth within these testable domains There must be a deep connection to AI’s mastery of verifiable truths. That is, there’s an AI-native version of the Scientific Method where if a system is highly verifiable (AlphaGo, Erdos problems, etc) then AI will eventually know everything. And there are domains that might be in-between (it may turn out lots of science is like this). We’re use embodied AI/robotics to move the bar over time. Then there be some areas which are inherently non-verifiable and/or irreducibly complex, which is the domain of taste and human essence Just as falsifiability determines the line between science and “not science” it feels like verifiability becomes the line between “AI can do it” and “needs a human”

@readswithravi Start by knowing which hand you're holding. What are you good at? And what environment are you in?

Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator on strategy: “Always play the hand you have, not the one you wish you had.”

@readswithravi It's not about setting a bunch of goals on January 1st.

A reminder from Atomic Habits by James Clear: “New goals don't deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results.”

@ML_Philosophy There's a version of this that's just insecurity. Smart people don't speak less, they stop speaking to prove they're smart. Big difference between having nothing to add and being scared to be wrong.

The smarter you get, the less you speak

@readswithravi It also works in reverse. People stay uncommitted on purpose because every option still feels open. Distraction is comfortable that way.

I’m in love with this sentence: “Those who commit to nothing are distracted by everything.”

@tdinh_me The fact that this reads as a "crazy idea" is a problem.

I have a crazy idea! So after you give out a task to your agent, while waiting for it to work, instead of starting a new task in parallel, you can just… chill?

@RobertGreene The leverage is in the combination, not the skills. Being top 1% at one thing is brutal and replaceable. Being top 25% at three things that rarely go together makes you nearly one of a kind.

Acquiring a set of skills is the key to navigating a turbulent work world. The ability to later combine these skills is the best path to mastery.