Permission to be obsessed

obsession: “If Anything Is Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing To Excess” – Edwin Land, Inventor

"Don't be the best be the only" Jerry Garcia
creativity in one mind "Originality are attributes of a single mind, not a group…there's no such thing as group originality or group creativity.” — Edwin Land

Obsession + repetition = long term durability

Costco “profits in pockets” idea. Surplus for the long term game. Surplus is slack against Moloch

Moloch discards all values in the name of the legible ones. Counter by having “slack”. Living below means, underemployment etc.

Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. — Samuel Johnson

Buffet: some part of your business philosophy is not going to be financial and that's the way it should be

A determination to have and to hold involves a mixture of personal and financial considerations. To some, our stand might seem highly eccentric. Charlie and I have long followed David Ogilvy's advice, develop your eccentricities while you're young. That way, when you get old, people won't think that you're gaga.

Certainly, our posture must seem odd to many in that arena, both companies and stocks are seen only as raw material for trades. Our attitude, however, fits our personalities and the way we want to live our lives. Winston Churchill once said, "You shape your houses and then they shape you”.

We know the manner in which we wish to be shaped.

With respect to arbitrage and paying attention to like the active market…Buffet is not interested in that., "This is not how Charlie nor I wish to spend our lives. What is the sense in getting rich just to stare at a ticker tape all day? (If you don't like staring at a ticker tape all day. Some people probably like doing that of course)

David Senra: Figure out how you want to spend your life; and two, find out how to get rich doing that. It's usually not what you do, it's how you do it. Look at almost any profession — you have realtors that make no money, and you have realtors that make millions. You have podcasters that make no money, you have podcasters that make millions. You have investors that don't make any money and investors that make a ton. It's not what you do, it's how you do it. So to me, it's like, no, let's figure how to do both. Let's figure out, how do I want to spend my life? (that's actually the hard question) and then from there, once you're focused on that, how can I get rich at doing that?

Inverting the problem: what happens when you choose something you don’t love?

Mike Bloomberg:

A task becomes easier if you structure things so that you enjoy doing them. Since doing more almost always leads to greater accomplishments, in turn, you'll have more fun. And then you'll want to do even more because of the rewards and so on. This creates a virtuous cycle. I've always loved my work and put in a lot of time, which has helped make me successful. I truly pity people who don't like their jobs. They struggle at work so unhappily for ultimately so much less success and thus, develop even more reason to hate their occupations. Now, this is about the negative cycle if you don't love what you do. That's actually really smart. There's too much delightful stuff to do in this short lifetime, not to love getting up on a weekday morning.

Part of having a great life is being proficient at our work. Our work constitutes one third of our lives. If you don't enjoy it, if you're not good at it, you're leaving a lot on the table. Your enjoyment of life will be diminished. You have to learn how to be a capable craftsman, professional, or whatever it is that you choose to do during the day. (Reminscent of Pink’s autonomy, mastery, purpose framework)

Graham Weaver: Do your thing!

So you’re going to do an expected value calculation, right? But there’s one thing you’re not factoring into that equation, which is you when you’re turned on. I went to this dinner in New York, and it was a bunch of private equity people there. It was ridiculous, this dinner. We went to this restaurant in New York, one of those restaurants that has ice with fish heads in it. You can go up and point to the fish that you want. For the privilege of doing that, you pay four times more for the same fish, but they’re in the ice. Anyway, there was this one guy there, Dave.

Dave is in the same business, in the same role as me, at a competing firm. Dave starts going off, saying, “I just won this deal, you won’t believe this. Here’s what happened, this is what we did on the debt covenants. We didn’t step them down, we had the debt to EBITDA that didn’t step down for two quarters, we’re going to save 50 basis points on our interest. And we used pro forma adjusted trailing 12 months yesterday EBITDA times 365. Therefore we’re getting an extra quarter of return on debt and that’s going to help our…” and he’s going on and on.

And I’m thinking, Dave thinks he’s colonizing Mars, he’s so excited about this. In his head, he’s colonizing Mars and I’m thinking to myself two things. First, Dave is going to kick my ass because I don’t care at all about any of this stuff. And the other thing I realized is that this is what Dave had written his business school essay about. He was living it, he was doing the thing that he wanted to be doing. And you’re not going to win doing someone else’s dream, you can survive for a little while, but you’re not going to win.

Cal Newport ideas:

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

You can’t be busy and frenetic and bouncing off the walls with 100 projects if you’re obsessed about doing something really well. It’s incompatible with that. Now, doing something really well means you might have some really intense periods when you’re pulling something together, but it is incompatible with being busy.

The glue is quality first

Obsess over quality. Yes, because the other two principles are to do fewer things and work at a natural pace. However, if you’re only adhering to those two principles, you’ve set up a sort of adversarial relationship with work in general. It’s as if all you’re thinking about is how to do less. You see work as an adversary. You want more variety in your pacing. You’re just trying to reduce or change work. If that’s all you’re doing, you’re building up a negative attitude towards work, which I believe is one of the dominant reactions to burnout right now in, let’s say, elite culture. It’s an outright rejection of work itself.
Like, any drive to do things is a capitalist construction. And the real thing to do is to do nothing. But that doesn’t last. And the people who are telling you to do this are not doing nothing. They’re striving really hard to ensure that their substacks and books about doing nothing will have a large audience. They’re giving talks on it.
You can’t just focus on the doing less part. You need to obsess over quality. And that’s where you’re able to still fulfill that human drive to create. And that’s where you still build the leverage to control your life and make a living.

How do you figure out what to work on?

I think you have two options and you can do both. One option is to have a way of test driving ideas. Like with a newsletter or blog to test drive it. And the internet makes that easier than it was 20 years ago.
Then the other option, and this is what I think of as the MFA option, is you have to develop really good taste.
These MFA programs, which are creative writing graduate programs, they don’t really teach you. It’s not instructive. Like here’s how you do paragraphs or here’s techniques you didn’t know, but it increases your taste, meaning your ability to recognize what’s good and what’s not and what’s possible with good things.

All productivity advice is dominated by this one parable:

A young boy asks Mozart how to write a symphony. Mozart tells the boy, that he's too young and should study more first. The boy says, "But you were writing symphonies at age 10." Mozart replies, "But I wasn't asking people how to do it.”