Curiosity Chronicle

Question: How would you accomplish your 5-year goals in the next year? Framework: Inversion

Last weekend, I attended my 10-year Stanford University reunion. It was an opportunity to look back on those formative years, reconnect with old friends, and reflect on the lessons learned. 10 lessons from 10-year college reunion: (1) The Medici Effect is real; (2) Your daily habits show up on your face after 10 years; (3) Insecurity tells, confidence shows; (4) Plans are great, but life will gene...

Question: How is your definition of success harming your life? Framework: The 90% Rule.

I have spent time with a lot of very successful people. I have observed two common trends: (1) A struggle to appreciate the present and (2) A struggle to identify the key actions to create the desired future. The tool we can all use to fight back: Mental Time Travel. This involves the vivid imagination of both the past and the future. You use your mind to figuratively "travel" to the experienced p...

The first in a series of impromptu, off-the-cuff episodes based on my daily learnings and notes. This episode covers 10 key lessons learned from spending time with 50 multimillionaire entrepreneurs at a retreat in Texas.

Question: How would you want your loved ones to describe you? Framework: The Life Force Pyramid.

Pixar Animation Studios has a 30+ year history of creating award-winning animated films. One of their secrets for consistently excellent output: The Braintrust. The Braintrust is a group of individuals who meet regularly to pressure test in process films. It is a diverse group not directly involved in the film's production, but with a vested interest in its success via their roles at the company....

Question: Who are your Winter Friends? Framework: The 3x5 Notecard Strategy.

The world lost a beautiful soul over the weekend. My grandmother, Vimala Reddy ("Avva" to me), passed away peacefully in the early morning hours on October 1. She was 94-years-old. Life is cyclical. When I was born, she was there to welcome me to this world. In the end, I had to bid her farewell from it. 10 short lessons from her that changed my life (and may change yours): (1) Don’t fear sadness,...

Question: What am I certain of today that I'll laugh at in 10 years? Framework: The Bike Shed Effect.

I recently re-read an old Paul Graham essay that got me thinking about the composition of professional time—what "types" of time exist in our workdays and how we can find a more optimal balance across those types. I identified four types of professional time: Management, Creation, Consumption, and Ideation. Most of us have a lot of Management, a little bit of Creation, and almost no Consumption an...

Question: What would you invest in today assuming you had to hold the investment forever? Framework: Survivorship Bias.

I just completed my first marathon in 2:57:31 just 6 months after I started running. By achieving the sub 3-hour marathon time, I had hit my Big Goal. It felt great, at first. But then came the rut, one which led to a fundamental change in how I'm going to think about goal setting and achievement in the future. Big Goals create a perfect storm for unhappiness. If we miss them, we feel like a failu...

Question: The 1-Second Decision. Framework: Maximizers vs. Satisficers.

Dr. Peter Attia uses a framework with his patients called the Centenarian Decathlon to organize physical aspirations for life’s later years. The idea is to choose 10 physical tasks the person wants to be able to do at 100 and then reverse engineer the necessary actions in the present to achieve that future. Using a similar exercise to look at the broader scope of your life can be very helpful. Wha...

Question: What does your perfect workday look like? Framework: The 3-3-3 Method.

A Stanford business professor split her class into groups and gave each group $5 and 2 hours to generate as high of a return as possible. The losing groups bartered with the $5 or used the time to generate income. The winning group sold the ad space of the presentation time at the end of the challenge and generated a 12,000% return. When faced with a challenge with the potential for outsized rewar...

Question: If everything stays the same, what is the one change that would have the greatest impact? Framework: The Locksmith Paradox.

Last week, I spent three days with a group of successful entrepreneurs on a retreat in Big Sky, Montana. I left the event with a new energy to grow and a lot of interesting, non-obvious learnings. This piece shares my 10 key learnings from the event. The learnings: (1) Freedom is the real goal, (2) Environment is everything, (3) Insecurity is natural, (4) Always know the game you're playing, (5) C...

Question: What am I avoiding because it's too painful to address? Framework: Fundamental Attribution Error.

While we all want to live in a state of low stress, during certain moments, we need to learn to optimize our stress response—we need to learn to harness stress to our benefit rather than allowing it to derail us. The Yerkes-Dodson Law says that stress and performance are positively correlated, but only up to a certain point, after which more stress reduces performance. 3 strategies for mastering s...

Question: If you woke up three years from now and were living your ideal life, what were the three things you did to get you there? Framework: The Pyrrhic Victory.

Theory: Our belief in our ability to create our own luck exposes us to more good fortune (or at least allows us to see the good fortune amidst a sea of bad). In an early 2000s study, Dr. Richard Wiseman found that lucky people came across "chance" opportunities, while the unlucky people seemed to miss them. Both groups had equal access to these opportunities, but the lucky group saw what the unluc...

Question: Do I actually need more information, or do I simply need to act on the information I already have? Framework: The Identity-Action Grid

I recently got a message from a 22-year-old reader asking for career advice. Career advice is a topic area that I have always found interesting, probably because I feel it so often misses the mark. I take this as a challenge. I sat down and synthesized the advice I would have wanted to receive early in my career (or what I would tell my own son if he were just starting out). The 7 pieces of career...